Chapter Text
Year II of the French Republic, the 14th day of Thermidor, Quartidi.
————
Marianne couldn’t recall if it was a Thursday or a Friday in the old calendar. She’d kept a perpetual one in the studio but had stopped moving it forward in the weeks following the execution of Citizen Louis Capet.
That seemed a long time ago now.
Her attachment to the old method of marking the days was less about any kind of sentimentality. She was sentimental for sure, and at once still committed to whatever methods of measuring time, distances or weights were to govern this new world.
For the most part, this novel way of telling time celebrated both nature and reason, and she’d convinced herself that that was logic enough for her. But Marianne had become lousy at keeping time in general, and the ten (or was it eleven) months of this new system she’d endured so far—with its rhyming, excessively florid names and ten-day weeks—had tried her patience.
She was back to using their former names, and it was a hot day in August by any reckoning. She wasn’t about to venture outside to ask her friend the book-binder for one of his smuggled calendars from England or America. There will be time enough for that.
The pressing concern now was to find a way to keep all the sweet butter that Hélöise brought with her from spoiling. Even in the coolest place in the house, the oil in the pot had begun to separate, and it wasn’t even eight in the morning. Its faint odor conflated with the smells of the suppurating cheese in another cupboard, and the vapors from the many paints and solvents in the atelier.
Indeed, the whole floor and even the attic above was in thrall to an alien miasma. Not that it mattered to Hélöise. She was sound asleep in their bed, unperturbed by Marianne puttering about, and remarkably unaffected by the rising heat.
Until she wasn’t.
“What is with all this noise?”
“I’m trying to summon something, like breakfast.”
“Does it usually involve all this slamming and moving about?”
“Well, yes.”
“Adagio. E domattina, please?”
“A Dio piacendo.” God willing.
“What does Robespierre call Him, 'The Supreme Being?'”
“Did call Him. Did. My sweet.”
“Oh. How could I forget.”
It seemed rather strange then that the violence and dislocations of the last few months would find the two of them in a state of domestic quiet. More or less.
They had even settled on a kind of routine. Which was all the more extraordinary when you consider that they had both witnessed—but at some remove—the beheading of four of the most powerful men in the country, the mayor of Paris, and what remained of their camp-followers on the Place Louis XV not five days before.
The city was again on a knife’s edge. The menfolk and quite a few market women were again engaged in their favorite pastime of settling political and personal scores, in the usual sanguinary manner, and often.
Hélöise had arrived the night before in her trousers and a striped purple coat. Not that there were many sans-culottes around anymore. Marianne advised her footman to remove the cockade from Heloise’s apron, all the better to blend in with the roving bands that radiated out of the Place des Vosges from the east, and the Hôtel de Ville to the west, that had been hunting Jacobin supporters for days now.
She bellows a yawn that Marianne can hear clear across the room.
“A novitiate at the convent, Marie-Fabienne, once told me a story.”
“Oh?”
“She liked me a lot. Quite a lot.”
“Am I going to like this story?”
“Come here, my not-so-little painter, and you will soon find out.”