Archive of Our Own

Lying on his straw mattress, eyes fixed the cracks on the limestone wall, Louis-Antoine waited.

Indeed, he was merely Louis-Antoine still, and not Monsieur de Saint-Just, this had been thoroughly proven. One did not treat a Monsieur this way, a Monsieur could go and paint Paris red without a whiff of reprimand, without a disapproving glance even, accompanied by the conniving smiles of country noblemen, who understood, come on, they’d been young as well. Louis-Antoine was neither a Monsieur, nor a nobleman, nor even of their country. He was but a son, and he still hadn’t written to his mother. In the morning, when he had ink and paper brought his first letter was always to d’Evry, the good man who thought himself the keeper of his conscience, and whom he allowed to think himself so, half out of interest, half for fun. Plus, he liked pretending to have a father. In this letter, he always swore to the good knight that he would write, he would tell Maman he did not resent her, that he regretted the sorrow he had caused her. And at that moment, in the serenity of the morning in which the smell of warm milk and the freshness of the stones still lingered, he meant it. But when he’d reached the end of his letter, he had no more ink, no more paper, and needed to wait for the evening to get more; and when the evening came, the evening with its stench of foul water floating from the Seine to the stale air of his room, the evening with its piercing cold rising from the damp floorboards and through his plain socks to every bone, then, he resented her, and he did not regret a thing. And when all was said and done, he’d rather be indelicate than dishonest.

No redemption for him, then. No pardon either, the apple of his blasted stubbornness not, perhaps, having fallen not far from the tree. Two armies on the move, provoking each other from either side of a field, knowing damn well the first to make its move would probably be the first to fall. But in the end the field must be crossed, no matter by whom. It was only a matter of time. So, Louis-Antoine waited.

Marie de Saint-Colombe was but a girl of fifteen when, one morning in the summer of 1744, the rumour that the King, who had come to survey the western front, had fallen ill, blew through the entire town. Powerless, the physicians paraded by his bedrest, every church rang out its bells to lead the nation's prayer. Marie woke every day at five, even earlier than her mother or her five elder sisters, and walked alone to Saint-Etienne to light a candle for the ruler. The sisters of the Visitation were endlessly moved by such devotion, just as they were sure to have detected a future companion for their convent in the skinny little thing. However, the King’s health still declined. The priest who rushed to his side only agreed to administer last rites for the price of a confession – and soon the whole town whispered that the list of the monarch’s sins was nothing short of incredible for a man of barely thirty. A popular tune started circulating, which went thus: Good ol’ King Louis XV, arrived ‘fore Saint Peter / Not missing a beat put his crown on the fair cloud / “Hold this for me” he said like he would his mait’ d’hôtel / “And show me how to go back down for a short spell / Cuz I fear I forgot a few, I must amend / Lest the archbishop leave without knowing the end”.

Marie, however, continued faithfully burning candles in Saint-Etienne. Her parents, already bled dry by her sisters’ dowry, rejoiced at the promise of a vocation which had the upside of being economical. But one evening it was announced the King had survived his ailment, thanks to the care of a physician from the Alsace regiment. Bad blood and mockery were fast forgotten to make way for outpourings of joy in the streets. The next morning, Marie lit two candles in the Cathedral: one for the King, and one for the future church he’d promised to build if he recovered. A few days after the mass of thanksgiving which filled Notre-Dame of the Assumption with songs for an entire day, Marie was running some errands in the Jewish quarter and was surprised to find the shabby streets garlanded ornately. She questioned the beignet seller, who pointed her to a shack half sunk in a ditch : “It’s our good doctor Ullman who gave the money to fix the Holy Arch in our temple, we’re celebrating him”. “Where did he find the money?” Marie asked. “Why, by healing the King, of course” answered the woman. Indeed, seeing the King on Death’s doorstep, the ministers had asked for the best physician in town. They were told that he was Jewish. They’d asked for the second best. They were told that he, too, was Jewish. Having arrived at the sixth-best before finding a physician worthy of plunging his hands in the guts of the Most Christian King, these noble gentlemen unanimously decided that saving the Crown of France made it well worth breathing the same air as a Jew, as long as it was only for a few hours. They went back to their first pick, who took only fifteen minutes to diagnose Louis the Beloved with dysentery, and about a week more to get him back on his feet. The good doctor was discreetly sent back to his ghetto with a generous donation for his heretical rituals, as the cabinet busied itself with searching for a colleague gifted with irreproachable Christianity to take credit for the miraculous healing.

Out of this event, young Marie drew two lessons: first, that you were much better off keeping for a Jewish doctor the money that you were saving on candles, and secondly, that there was much to be gained from offering sinners redemption as early and often as possible. If she never wed, this was to be the only concession she made to the Virgins of the Visitation and the life they were offering her. Arriving in Paris a few years later with a small nest-egg earned by dusting every altar in Moselle, she started a business with a usurer, serving as intermediary, figurehead and good Christian face in the negotiations he conducted. Their little enterprise flourished, and soon it was that, with the blessing of the Archdiocese, she acquired a large building attached to a little chapel on the rue de Picpus, on the door of which she could proudly affix a placard bearing the inscription “Reformatory of Sainte-Colombe, Christian Esablishment”. Though it never came to rival Saint-Lazare, nonetheless the boarding house built, in less than a year, a reputation as the prison of choice for prodigal sons and family disappointments of all kinds. The average number of deaths within its walls was in any case remarkably low for this type of business, and this may have had to do with the fact that, despite what was proclaimed on the sign on the door, the physician Dame Marie called in case of illness always came from the Pletzl.

When Louis-Antoine first passed through its doors in October 1786, the Sainte-Colombe house was readying for its second winter. Window frames were padded, the cellar was filled with provisions, hallways were covered with straw. The Christ in the chapel was polished 'til it shone, which didn’t have anything to do with winter, but couldn’t hurt. Louis-Antoine, like everyone else, was quickly put to good use; unlike Parisian pensioners, at least he knew how to salt the meat and sift flour – although he did not know if he owed these abilities to his childhood in the countryside or to the rigour of the Oratorians, whose stinginess when it came to food encouraged creativity among students. This meagre set of skills positioned him from the outset as one of the most precious pensioners around. This earned him a regular supply of ink and paper, which he put to good use in order to occupy his days as soon as it appeared that his punishment would mainly consist of wondering what to do with those long hours of confinement. Atonement, he realized a little more accutely every day, was a predominantly passive activity. He kept to himself, avoided conversations and game circles, and simply hoped to leave the place as discreetly as he had entered.

“Let’s be friends.”

Louis-Antoine halted the motion of the spoon to his lips, spilling a few drops of the whitish soup around his plate, in order to stare at the individual sitting to his left, a young man of about his age, albeit considerably aged by the bags under his eyes, which contrasted with his joyous expression, and by his black hair - although its colour was more of a guessing matter, given how short it had been crudely cut. Despite this rough appearance, his outfit was clean, his shirt and jacket well-made. Louis-Antoine put down his spoon, which floated for a few seconds on the surface of the bowl before being swallowed by its swampy contents.

“I do not know you.”

Not taken back in the least, the other youth slid his right hand off the wooden table and onto Louis-Antoine’s hip, patting the muscle slightly, as if he was testing his reflexes. Louis-Antoine stiffened, just enough to signal that the contact wasn’t welcome, but did not move. An audacious smile danced upon the other’s lips.

“Let’s get to know each other, then.”

Louis-Antoine maintained his gaze, refusing to be the first to shift his eyes.

“Hands above the table, Marc” the rolling voice of the guard in the path. “And silence during supper!”

The light, offending hand went back up so quickly Louis-Antoine had to glance at his lap to make sure it was gone. He dared another at the boy’s face, but the latter seemed to have exhausted the entertainment that Louis-Antoine constituted, and was now focusing on his bowl with such exaggerated intensity that one might have believed he had just discovered the Scriptures in his soup. Louis-Antoine picked up his spoon.

When the world seemed to tilt just like a falling coin oscillates on its edge, carried over by its own weight, one way, then the other, until one feels like screaming to have it finally fall flat, Louis-Antoine thought of Thérèse.

Thérèse, her plump, white arms and her freckles – look everywhere, Léon, if you find twin ones, you’ll owe me a kiss – Thérèse who was as chubby and tender as he was cutting and dry, Thérèse: you couldn’t contemplate her without thinking of the smell of bread and crushed blackberries, Thérèse and her perpetual perfume of childhood, a dreamy nostalgia for a past he’d barely left behind. Thérèse the bastard child, Thérèse and her laugh which flew across the brook's mirroring surface, a laugh at nothing, a laugh at living, as precious and insignificant as the interlaced patterns on a dragonfly’s wing.

Then, almost naturally, almost against his will – almost – the thought became clearer: Thérèse hopping on one foot along the ruins of a wall in Coucy, her hand tense in his as she attempted to walk the whole way in spite of the uneven stones, her other hand holding her skirts up – only to fail, again and again, falling off with an exaggerated cry of surprise, maybe just for the simple pleasure of letting him catch her, laughing and fluttering in his arms as he put her back safely on the ground. Another coin roll, faster now, and there was Thérèse, her skirts even higher, lying in the shadow of the wall, her ashen hair lost in the hemlock flowers bent under them, the first time he had taken her – the only one, really, before his last departure for the Oratorians. That vision, his own modesty erased quickly, to fade into the next: Thérèse, the moment after, pinching her shirt over and over to remove the burrs caught in the cloth; he, still lying on his back, an arm over his forehead and his sleeve get moistening with the sweat beading there, following the hypnotic motion of her hand on the white linen – she hadn’t bled, and this had concerned him though he hadn’t dared speak honestly to her about it, petrified that he had somehow done it wrong. They didn’t talk, having not known what to expect and therefore not knowing if they should be disappointed, whether that was all there was to love, or whether that was already a lot. Thérèse and her bitten nails, her fingers frantic now, as she turned to him with a question on her lips that sounded more like a prayer: “If I get pregnant, you’ll marry me, Léon, say, you’ll marry me?” He had loved her in that moment, of this he was sure, probably even more than he had the moment before, during their carnal embrace, because she had asked not before, not as a condition, but after, when neither spoils nor trophy could be seized anymore – when all she was offering him was the chance to prove himself a man of honour. He had sworn an oath to her, obviously; and maybe this was what, more than anything else, had ignited his hatred against Gellé: he had made it so Louis-Antoine could never fulfil his promise, had made him renege on his word. One last tinkling, and finally the coin fell flat with a thud: Thérèse gone, Thérèse who had vanished, for the first time since their childhood, just as he had come back from Soissons, he barely having time to unpack before his mother had asked to talk to him in private with something that looked like compassion on her frozen features.

Gellé, Gellé who had dragged his feet 'til the last second before acknowledging his daughter. Gellé who, as rumour said, had barely paid a tenth of the dowry he’d so fiercely negotiated, who had gifted the newlyweds with a two-week, all expenses paid honeymoon in lands that the Count of Lauragais, his employer, owned in the Poitou. An unknown part of Louis-Antoine swelled with some sort of pride to have managed to frighten the dignitary that he was willing to spend sending his daughter away from him what he hadn’t deigned to pay to bring her closer to her husband. Or maybe it was just that the old miser couldn’t let a wedding happen without flaunting around that there were things he alone could afford – unlike the other rich landowners of Blérancourt. Unlike Louis-Antoine.

The first things he bought after arriving in Paris, before even looking for lodgings, were ink and paper. Sitting at a café, he had made the quill spew the same venom spilling from his mouth, as he congratulated the groom and his father-in-law : “Louis-Antoine Léon de Saint-Just sends you all his congratulations for this fortunate union, and hopes to hear soon of another joyous event, with which he might have more to do than this one.” He had stared at the paper, his own callousness making him almost dizzy, all for a cheap shot which might scratch Gellé, but only after piercing Thérèse’s heart. He called the garcon to bring a candle – a peculiar request, given the sun high in the September sky – since simply crumpling such a monument of cruelty and indignity would not have been enough. He had watched attentively as the edges of the paper first singed, then curled upwards, the words vanishing in a grey cloud of dust, which he had blown away like a priest would with consecrated incense.

“That’s not my name, you know.”

Louis-Antoine looked up from his book without really needing to. Once he’d heard a voice, he never forgot it. The other youth’s lips opened in a slightly nervous smile, uncovering the small space between his two front teeth.

“Marc: that’s not my name.”

“Your name is of no concern to me.”

“When the signatory doesn’t want people to know he sent someone to the pen, the masters of the house give them a borrowed name for the register. In most places, it’s apostles’ names, depending on the day of the week. You arrive on Sunday, you’re Simon. On Monday, Marc. On Tuesday, Thomas, and so on.

“What happens if someone arrives on Wednesday or Friday? There are no apostles with such initials.”

“They didn’t press the idea that far, I guess.”

The young man leant back against the wall and slid down to sit on the ground next to him, his arms resting on his knees, with a satisfied grunt. Immediately, Louis-Antoine felt the guard’s gaze focus on them from the other side of the narrow, windswept courtyard.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you gonna ask me my real name ?”

“In here, you are Marc. If need be, that is how I will address you.”

“Ouch. You know, the others say you’re as cold as a viper. But vipers hibernate when the cold comes. They pile up and twist around one another to keep themselves warm. One time when I was a lad, in the Royans, I was running in the grass and my foot was caught in a burrow. Went all the way through the vipers’ knot. There were perhaps four or five wriggling around my ankle. None bit me, they were more shocked than I, the poor things.”

“Why are you telling me this ?”

“Me, I quite like vipers. When winter comes, the venom freezes in their fangs and they only think of finding heat.”

The young man got up on his feet, dusted off some invisible speck on his drawers, and walked away. When Louis-Antoine went back to his page, he found out he didn’t feel like reading anymore.

He could not say whether it was the noise that woke him, or if it blended so well with his dreams that his mind brought him back from them naturally while trying to chase them. He blinked a few times, eyelids heavy – he could not have slept more than an hour or two, he estimated – and when the world around him shifted into focus, the light bathing the room was at the same time both darker and brighter than any he’d known. Orange hues coloured the pale walls, large stains of a moving watercolour, sliding from bronzed coral to the deepest wine-red, from the floor to the ceiling, an unending river with edges so dark they robbed the space of all its depth. Frozen on his mattress, as though wary of scaring away this mystery before he could explain it, Louis-Antoine followed the billows from the wall to his sleeve, and raised his hand to his eyes only to see it tinted with the same living dusk. Then, he could not say what he heard first – the bells or the screams. The bells, more peculiar, more melodic, reached his mind first, piercing through the voices the distance disarticulated: ringing, too brief, too high to be the Angelus – and in any case, it was too early. The sound did not seem to want to end, and despite how far away it came from, it was deafening, as close as if the bell had been in that very room. While covering his ear with his hand, Louis-Antoine reflexively turned his head in the direction of the noise, and for the first time saw the window. The minuscule skylight, crossed with bars, was but a reddish and blinding rectangle. Behind the bars, far away, something blazed.

He jumped on his feet, barely wincing when his bare feet touched the frozen floor, and ran to his window. His room looked over the courtyard; half his view was barred by the black mass of the building directly opposite. Above, the sky was on fire. A thick smoke rose, infinite, as if tarnishing the night sky with charcoal. The tocsin filled the air, heavy to the point of becaming tangible. It almost prevented him from breathing – or maybe it was the smoke that had penetrated the room between the gaps in the stones of the old façade. His forehead against the glass, as Louis-Antoine felt his breathing turn into fast, superficial gulps of air that left his breast wanting, he saw a thousand pictures melt into the one before him; the storms of the Soissonais, its vengeful lightning, as though the gods needed to strike the earth precisely where it was most blessed, to remind peasants that it was but a mortal earth. He had seen it, that divine fire, ravage an entire year's harvest by striking a barn, wreck a street with a single spark blown onto a straw roof. He remembered the first Spring in Blérancourt, his father's gigantic hand grabbing his in the middle of dinner to bring him outside, and his long and bony finger pointing the dark pillar of smoke cutting the sky : “Look, Antoine, this is the spear of the Almighty. That’s where he strikes, in our Soissonais. Our land crowns kings, He crowns our land. There’s nothing to do but accept it; tomorrow, everything will have burned. We will have to rebuild, that’s all.”

Louis-Antoine promptly got away from the window, walking backwards. The back of his calf hit the wooden bedframe, almost making him fall over on his mattress. He was not afraid of fire; 'afraid' would imply that his fear was greater than the actual danger a fire represented. Staring intently at the glass, he tried to estimate how far away the fire might be, and how fast it might spread through the narrow streets and wooden shacks piling from courtyard to courtyard in this faubourg of woodworkers. The tocsin was loud, but far away – Sainte-Maguerite, maybe. But the screams – the screams were oh, so close.

First, it was a thud he heard. As if someone had thrown himself against the wall in the neighbouring room. Then, footsteps. Then, again, the sound, half-soft, half-hard, of a body against the stones. Then it was above him : footsteps, again, in a circle, but too loud, way too loud, as if someone was hopping above his head. Then, voices. Voices like an enormous stream submerging him; in that second he realized their presence, like someone who suddenly remembers to listen to the waves rather than the dock bell. Somewhere in the building, cries. Elsewhere, screams. He ran again to the window. In the opposite building, several pensioners locked in their rooms were knocking on their windows, appearing grotesque and distorted behind the thick glass. Below, in the courtyard, two guards pinned a frantically moving form to the ground. What he recognized as legs beat the air in vain, before suddenly falling still ; the guards let go, then, each grabbing a shoulder, dragged the unmoving silhouette under the porch and out of sight.

“What is happening…?” he finally murmured.

The fire. And those screams that wouldn’t end. What if the fire had reached the pension? What if…

“Open up ! Open up right now !”

He had started banging on the door before he realized it. Purposeful bangs: first with the palm of his hand, then with his fist; faster, a nagging pain spreading through his wrist. His own voice joined the screams.

In the hallway outside his room, footsteps. The peephole slid open, and an open eye met his gaze, startling him. Louis-Antoine took a step back as he heard the jingling of keys on the other side of the door. When it finally opened, a warden with an annoyed look on his face was looking at him, solidly camped on his legs as if ready to jump.

“Quiet in the rooms” he grunted, with a jaded tone that baffled Louis-Antoine.

Still, he managed to stutter :

“We have to get everyone out. The fire…”

“The fire is far away. Near the Bastille. And anyway, it’s almost put out.”

“But the screams…”

The other scratched his head.

“It’s the night that’s no good, is all. Agitates them, that lot. You get used to it, you’ll see. Go back to bed”, he added, a bit softer. “And don’t bang anymore. The rule is, if I have to come back, I have to tie you up.”

With his head, his indicated the bedframe, around which were tied several straps that disappeared under the mattress. Louis-Antoine was still staring at them when the door closed and the peephole slid shut with a brisk sound.

The scrap of bread fell in-between the thin pages, rolling down the binder, leaving behind a trail of crumbs which would be hard to get out. After a quick glance around to make sure that no one in the chapel was paying attention to them, Louis-Antoine darted a questioning gaze at the culprit.

“Rough night ?” the young man asked, low but not so low that Louis-Antoine would be unable to hear it over the sermon. He pointed discreetly to the bags under his own eyes in case he wasn’t understood.

“The racket” Louis-Antoine confirmed, as he tried not to lose track of the psalm they were on, an exercise he used to excel at when at the Oratoriens.

“Your first full moon ? That’s right, you arrived in October.”

“What does the moon have to do with all this ?”

“Apparently it’s no good for us” Marc replied, making a face. "Us, the crazy, the lowlives. Selene unveils herself and so do we. Trouble is our true nature.”

“Superstition. Back home, farmers’ wives go dance naked in the fields under the harvest moon. To my knowledge, it never did anything to prevent a bad crop.”

“Oh, I don’t know about your farmers’ wives, but here, the more we hear of the fury that will possess us at full moon, the more it feels like we’d disappoint if we didn’t give them a run for their money.”

With his chin, Marc pointed at the piece of bread still nested between the pages of Louis-Antoine’s bible.

“Take it. I didn’t steal it, it’s mine from yesterday’s supper. Well, if you ended up here, it shouldn’t make that big a difference for you anyway.”

“I don't need it. And I am not a thief.”

“Oh, that I believe” the other replied with a hint of condescension. “Thieves only ever take what they need. And if you’re here, rather than at the Bicêtre, then it’s because you’ve never needed for anything.”

They stared each other down a moment more. Then, with a quick slide of hand, Louis-Antoine snuck the bread into his pocket.

Two letters were waiting for him on his desk when he returned to his room after the morning prayers. The one from d’Evry, which he gave a cursory read, didn’t contain anything more than the usual admonishments, complete with the tone of gruff indulgence that the noble knight no doubt associated with rustic paternity. The other bore Louise’s signature ; his younger sister spoke so rarely in her own name instead of their mother’s that he first believed it to be a mistake on her part. He unfolded the letter, which the wardens had apparently taken upon themselves to unseal without his consent, and read the first lines, which he didn’t understand. As he continued reading, he felt his heart bang in his chest and had to sit down, for fear he might crumble.

When the guard halted his shift before the cell door and gave the peephole a quick glance, he did not see anything special. What he heard, however, made him immediately find his belt with his hand to fumble for his keys. Slamming the door open, expecting the now familiar vision of a body dangling from a wooden beam, he only found a young man sitting on the edge of his bed, his head between his knees, his hands lost in his thick curls, his breathing so wild that the guard had mistaken it for choking. If the man could read, he would have looked for the reason behind this situation in the paper laying on the ground. But as it was, he merely grabbed the boy’s head by its curls to bring it up and, upon finding his eyes empty and focused on an unknown point, he promptly slapped him once on each cheek. The young man’s chest immediately ceased its erratic movements, his pupils returned to the guard in front of him. After a few deep breaths, he nodded, then got up, picked up the paper on the floor and went back to sit at the desk, apparently without a thought for the man still kneeling in front of the mattress. He barely deigned to turn his head when the latter asked, his voice shakier than it should have been :

“We calling for the physician, lad ?”

“It won’t be necessary. I thank you for your assistance. Leave me be. I have letters to write.”

The guard waited a few moments more, but when it became evident that he would receive no other consideration than the sound of the nib scratching the paper, he got up and exited the room, sparing a glance through the peephole for the focused and absolutely unreadable face of the boy.

“Tell me about her.”

“About whom?”

“Your Thérèse. What’s she like ?”

All at once, winter had settled everywhere, including the very souls of the pensioners. Those who still had the strength to brave the cold in order to enjoy the pre-dinner recess time in the courtyard were but twenty strong, and among those, only a handful existed who were not so divorced from the world that they would not have come out even under murderous hail. Under the remaining foliage of the courtyard’s only tree, a middle-aged man named Henri Labouret, who occupied the room next to his walked around the trunk with slow and measured steps, half-whispering some popular balled. Louis-Antoine absentmindedly thumbed the binding of the book on his lap, which he hadn’t opened.

“I don’t know. Pretty, I suppose.”

“Feel the passion ! And it’s for her you ended up buried in this hole ?”

“Wherever I may have been buried, what does it matter to her now ?”

“I dunno. Women like grand gestures. Or maybe it’s men who like doing them.”

… We were a band o’ thieves, twenty or thirty strong…

“She does not know where I am. My mother would never let it get out, no matter how much it pleases her to collect sympathies.”

“Who for, then ?”

“For no one. For myself.”

“In my experience, in such affairs there’s always one who punishes and the other who is punished. If you’re not the victim, are you punishing her, or yourself ?”

“What about you ? Who punished you, and saw fit to punish me as well ?”

… The first thieving I did in my life…

Marc snorted, a bit embarrassed.

“It’s my particular friend, a nobleman of my country. We had a fight.”

“And for this, he locked you up ?”

“It was a big fight. And you know, the Sainte-Colombe is a palace. He’s paying, otherwise I would have ended up in the Bicêtre.”

“What happened ?”

“I bit him.”

“Bit him ?!”

“Bit him, yeah. Somewhere quite painful.”

… They sentenced me to hang, to hang and choke…

Louis-Antoine tried to contain his laughter, and only half-succeeded. When he turned back to Marc, the other man was observing him with a playful tenderness in his eyes.

“Are those fights… frequent ?”

“Quite, yeah. I’m collecting the apostles. I have them all, except for Thomas. Can’t seem to manage to get jailed on a Tuesday. Oh well, there will be occasions. My particular friend is as quick to forgive as he is to sentence, when he misses me too much.”

“They say that to love in the Italian fashion is an aristocratic vice.”

“Bullshit. If it’s a vice, it’s the best shared vice in the world. My father was a roofer.”

The young man took out a small pipe of rough wood which he filled with a brownish matter, then waved to a guard walking the courtyard. Louis-Antoine stayed quiet as the guard felt in his coat, looking for a match and a piece of tinder. As soon as the herbs in the small bowl of the pipe caught fire, a sticky odour of burnt soil filled the air. Marc thanked the guard with a nod as the latter walked away, and after a few satisfied puffs held the pipe out to him. He turned him down with a wave of the hand.

“Did you love her ? Thérèse ?”

“What leads you to believe I do not love her anymore ?”

… Standing on the gallows, I looked at France…

“I don’t believe you’re the kind of man who loves in vain. You’re too proud for that. Well ?”

“… I loved who I was with her. I loved to love her, eventually. Before, I wasn’t sure.”

“Why so ?”

“Don’t you think half of those who preach love as the supreme virtue confuse it with carnal desire, and the other half with some homely tenderness ? Isn’t love, true love, without limits, without frontiers, so that one can give themself to the object of their love entirely, without losing anything of themself, so that it feeds them, to the point that anything else becomes superfluous, and that one can only build one's life out of this love ?”

Marc scratched his head, a habit he had taken up since his hair had grown back and begun to itch more often.

“I don’t know if there’s a being that could survive the kind of love you’re speaking of. Love wears people out, and being in love even more so. It would take a great being indeed to receive such a love without being drowned by it.”

“Ha. What do you know ? The kind of love you’re preaching only seems to hurt you.”

“Isn’t that the lesser evil, as long as it only hurts me, rather than someone else ? Rather than the one I love ?”

“Are you insinuating I hurt Thérèse ?”

“Not at all, I only meant… Hey, wait up !”

A breeze swept the courtyard as Louis-Antoine walked to the porch with long strides, followed by Marc’s baffled calls and his smell of tobacco. Farther away, around the tree, Henri Labouret kept walking his infinite round, lost in a world that belonged to him alone.

… Brothers in poverty, go and tell my mother, she won’t see me no more, I’m a lost, hear me out… She won’t see me no more, I’m a lost child…

He was dreaming. He knew he was dreaming, because the fortress of Coucy, on the horizon, was no longer a ruin, but restored to all its splendour: its stones shining as he’d never seen before, the dungeon still high and unbroken in the sky. He could have woken up, aware as he of being asleep, but he decided to walk in the direction of the castle, and as soon as he conceived of the idea, he found himself inside it, on the sentry walk, at the foot of the immense tower that obscured his view. Even more surprising, the empty field below him, in which he’d stood only a second before, now teemed with indistinct beings, clamouring with the noise of pulleys and wheels: a sea of black and grey specked here and there with the bright colours of banners. He squinted in order to see the tents and metal-clad men walking the field. He knew, in the deepest core of his being, although he could not tell how he knew, that those were the troops of Jean de Bourgogne, and behind him, the terrifying Henry V of England, come to lay siege to Coucy, and that it was up to him, and him alone, to defend the fortress. Running along the rampart, he consulted with aides borne out of thin air, he tried to assess the level of the stronghold's provisions – he knew he had asked a long time ago for a report on the matter, although at the same time he knew he had arrived only moments ago. No one seemed to know where this particular report had gone, and he asked for it again and again, and all this time he heard the army rustling behind the wall. This soldier recommended they try to break the siege, that one was partial to asking the Armagnacs for help – and how would the messenger make it past the siege ? – and Louis-Antoine demanded, again and again, to know the level of their provisions. In the end, as he felt anger and panic overwhelm him, he started descending, below these infinite ramparts, below the tower and the oubliettes, until suddenly he found himself going down a narrow staircase, which became a ladder leading to the castle’s caves. There, he lit a torch, and swept the large arched room ; everywhere, on the ground, teemed black rats feasting on gutted bags of wheat.

The premature cold of 1786, which fell onto the capital as early as the end of October, hadn’t taken long to catch up with the reserves and the poor harvest of summer, and difficulties of supply in the beginning of December became impossible to ignore. Paris was hungry, and as always when Paris was hungry, Paris rumbled. In the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where a riot was but an empty bakery away, the racket from the day only receded in order to make way for the ruckus of the night, and soon not a day went by without the sound of the drums of the Gardes-françaises' resonating in some part of the faubourg. At the Sainte-Colombe, if echoes of such turmoil did not make it past the thick wall, the same could not be said of their cause. The bread and milk of the mornings soon turned into the same leaf-and-root broth they had to call supper. On Sundays, pensioners were gifted a single orange, which Lady Marie herself brought in large wicker baskets, escorted by the two biggest wardens in the house. She made the rounds amongst the tables, venerable and affable beneath the wrinkles of her forehead and the small veil pinned to her bonnet, which apparently she never took off. She stopped in front of each pensioner, selected an orange from the basket, and held it out to him with an approachable smile – the receiver, however, was understood to have to take the gift without his impure hand touching the old patroness. “From the Good Lord himself, he loves you like his children” she said each time, echoed by the “Thank you, Lady Marie” which even the most absent-minded of the pensioners had learned to mumble. Louis-Antoine, however, could not resist such an opportunity, and when his turn came for the first time, he replied, looking her right in the eyes : “Thank the Good Lord, then.” Lady Marie had barely frowned, yet, from this day on, the oranges she’d select for Louis-Antoine every Sunday had a pronounced tendency to be either slightly too ripe, or not ripe enough.

With the cold also came, more discreetly (and perhaps also insidiously), idleness and boredom. Since it was not possible anymore to walk the courtyard, covered as it was, more often than not, with a thick layer of snow, pensioners spent the majority of their time alone in their rooms ; and while the bylaws seemed to slacken a bit on their own during the winter months, allowing the pensioners to circulate in relative freedom through the hallways and even visit each other a few hours a day in lieu of a stroll, it wasn’t long until the consequences of claustrophobia and overcrowding were deeply felt. With the delinquent and the profligate, it meant a proliferation of clandestine gambling circles to which some lost everything up to their shirt, which led to an upsurge in thefts and assaults among pensioners. With the demented, when they didn’t serve as easy prey for the former, the lack of entertainment and the acrid atmosphere in those months- more suited for harsh individualism- generally worsened their predicament. The bells hanging at the end of every corridor – which Louis-Antoine had noticed upon first arriving, but to which he hadn’t given thought – soon started ringing at least once a week, when a warden or even a pensioner rushed to one of them to warn of an attack or a suicide attempt.

Bad food, glacial temperatures and vitiated air made quick work of them all. A number of pensioners took ill, and part of the communal dining room had to be converted into an extension of the infirmary: several large white sheets being hung in from the ceiling beams in the middle of the room to separate the healthy from the sick. Gifted with a solid constitution, Louis-Antoine went through the epidemic with nary a cold. However, three times a day, he still received a reminder of the near yet invisible danger when, only a few feet from tables silent apart from the sound of spoons scraping against bowls, and behind the precarious curtain, there came the moans and rustlings of the sick on their makeshift mattresses.

It was one of those evenings that Jalabert, one of the most impenitent gamblers of the pension, who held a gambling circle in his room that was rumoured to be so rigged the dice could just as easily have had only one side, was sent to the cell. Cells in Sainte-Colombe were only ever called “rooms”, and their occupants were to be “pensioners” rather than inmates. There was, however, one cell in the house which went by that name, some kind of hole under the stairs leading to the cellar, which Louis-Antoine had never seen but only heard of from the pension’s regulars who spoke of it with fear and reverence, as if it were the oubliette of some medieval citadel. Like any good threat, the cell was used sparingly, and Louis-Antoine hadn’t seen anyone sent to be locked there since he’d arrived.

This changed in the middle of that supper, the day before Christmas Eve. Louis-Antoine was sitting in his usual spot at the table on the far left of the room, in-between Marc (who had managed to find, god knew where, a holly bough that he had promptly gifted Louis-Antoine for his room), and Labouret (who when you actually made the effort of talking to him, revealed himself to be, like most of the insane of Saint-Colombe a likeable and discreet man). The rattle of one of the convalescents on the other side of the curtain punctuated the quiet dinner. Since he had his back to the rest of the room, Louis-Antoine did not see how the incident began. He only knew something had started when the sound of something breaking, deafening in this muted temple, resonated behind him. On the other side of the room, the soup bowl in front of Jalabert was nothing but a mess of shattered pottery on the floor. The latter knelt to grab a large, sharp piece, and leapt at his neighbour. The whole thing happened so fast that even the seasoned guards remained fixed in place for a second before they reacted. The one closest grabbed Jalabert’s arm just as the tip of his improvised weapon was about to pierce the right eye of his target. The warden dragged Jalabert, who struggled with all his might, backwards as the two other guards joined them. The three of them tackled Jalabert to the ground, on his stomach, while ordering him to calm down. Crude insults were the only answer.

“Boy, you stop right now or you’re going to the cell !” one of the guards barked as he lost patience.

“Go fuck yourself ! Mongrel !”

“Alright that’s it, collar this one” one warden said to the others.

They grabbed him by the shoulders to drag him up and started to walk toward the wooden door barring the way to the stairs. Jalabert was screaming. His feet struggled in vain to try and grip the floor behind him. As the third guard was looking for the right key, Jalabert jolted his blond head upright, his eyes aflame, a bit of spit drooling from the corner of his mouth, and stared at the room in challenge :

“And all of you, that’s right, all of you just sittin’ there, you’re even more of a pack of mongrels than the others ! Just sittin’ there like a band of w… waiting to be screwed, you think they won’t come for you ? And you just watch ! That’s all you’re good for, watchin’ ! Ah, how I’ll laugh when they’ll come for you ! How I’ll laugh ! You band of w… ! »

The door opened, and Jalabert was dragged on the other side, dishevelled and still braying. Then the door slammed.

For a moment, the room was as silent as a tomb. One after the other, pensioners overcame their hesitation, and little by little spoons started clinking against the bowls again. Louis-Antoine was about to do the same, when something – he didn’t immediately understand what – caught his attention. The moaning from the other side of the sheet, which had been regular since they’d sat down, had stopped. On that side of the room, there was only silence. Then there was something like a breath, a cough, something that rasped the throat that was trying to push it out. Then, a greasy, wet sound, like a splatter. Then, nothing. Louis-Antoine glanced at his two neighbours, who seemed not to have noticed, then all around the room ; he realized there was no warden in sight, all three being busy with Jalabert. Dropping his spoon, he stretched out his neck to stare fixedly at the sheet, though he didn’t know what he hoped to see or hear. A very light breeze stirred the rough cloth, coming from who knew where. After yet a few more moments of hesitation, Louis-Antoine started to rise from the bench. A hand to his left caught his wrist. He looked down to see Marc concernedly looking at him.

“Antoine” he whispered, shaking his head.

Louis-Antoine briskly broke free of his grip, got to his feet and started walking toward the sheet. He walked slowly, vaguely aware of Marc quietly calling his name, then of the pairs of eyes which one by one darted toward his back - as if hypnotised by the white fabric, he could see nothing else. As he stood in front of it, then knelt to raise it with one arm to crawl under it. There was neither guard nor nurse on this side, only a dozen straw mattresses a few feet from one another, most occupied by a feverish pensioner or one fallen prey to a painful slumber. On the far right of that space, one of these mattresses was home to a body that was all angles, unmoving, whose features he could not make out. He walked closer, his breath quickening. When he was only a few feet away, he saw the red streaks that, starting from the bed, ran drop by drop toward his feet. On the sick man’s face, on his clothes, on his sheets, all around him, was but a red and sticky stain spread like a wreath around his mouth – his mouth, a gaping hole from which the same crimson substance gurgled.

Louis-Antoine turned around so fast that he almost tripped, crossed the curtain's barrier once again and, with nary a glance to the baffled inhabitants of the tables, ran to the wooden door. It wasn’t locked – the guard must have forgotten when they’d last crossed it. He ran down the darkened stairwell until he almost smacked his face against one of the warden’s, who was walking up.

“What are you doing here…?”

“One of the sick ones, in the dining hall” he cut without even thinking twice, “he needs help, he coughed blood, and he’s not moving.”

The warden looked him over, then, as though he’d ascertained his sincerity, pointed to the bottom of the stairs :

“Go tell the others. I’ll take care of it.”

Louis-Antoine made his nod to nothing but empty space as the guard climbed past him up the stairs, the sound of his steps getting farther away in the darkness. Without even thinking about it, as if his mind were empty, he started walking up instead of down, and did not stop on the ground floor, instead walking all the way up to the third floor where he had his room – his eyes foggy, his mouth agape, like a stringless puppet. He entered his cell, threw a dazed look all around him. When his gaze fell to his hands, he saw that he was shivering. His breathing was loud in his ears, to the point that a muddled buzzing echoed all around him, making him dizzy. A noise from the door managed to pierce this invisible veil. Marc stood looking at him from the doorway, worry stamped upon his face.

“Antoine” he murmured, with a shake of his head, “what’s going one ?”

The way the other youth stared at his face was painted with such turmoil that Louis-Antoine raised his hand to it. His cheek was wet.

“Antoine…”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Marc stared at him for a few moments more, but added nothing. Nodding and with an air of infinite compassion on his face, he finally walked up to him and put his arms around his shoulders, holding him with all his might. Louis-Antoine heard the sound of his own sobs, but was aware of nothing else as he let his eyes close and his head fall gently on the other man’s shoulder.

“It’s winter” the other was murmuring. "It’s just winter,” he repeated as he caressed the auburn curls. “It will pass.”

My dear brother,

I write to tell you of a peculiar story that happened to our neighbours, the Thorins. No doubt it will not look so peculiar on first glance, but I am sure you, and you alone, will be able to see it for all its interest.

As you know, Emmanuel Thorin came last summer in possession of a ewe which Master Gellé had decided to give away, despite the pronounced interest you made no mystery of in this chattel. Everyone in the village knows the poor creature was not happy at the Thorins, even if you will be relieved to know Master Thorin treats her well enough. Anyway, two nights ago, Victoire and I came to hear screams from the house next to ours, and as we came down to see what was going on, we saw Michelle Vrenant, who as you know knows quite a bit about all things medicinal. She asked us to come with her, as she needed more pairs of hands since the Thorin’s maid had fainted because of the blood. We walked into the pen to find the ewe I was telling you about in considerable pain. The poor creature, despite no one noticing because she hid it well under her fleece, was a few months pregnant. Some wrong motion or bad digestion must have provoked a miscarriage, and she was bleeding profusely. There was no doubt, the woman Vrenant told us, that the lamb was lost, but it was absolutely necessary to calve the body so it would not poison the mother. We helped as best we could, however we spent part of the night not knowing whether the poor creature would survive, as she kept bleeding. The physician from the Feuillants convent happened to have left for Laon the day before for a congress and it would have taken much too long to bring him back, so it was but us and the woman Vrenant. Finally, we managed to remove the lamb and bandage the ewe so she would live through the night. Still, she was in a great deal of pain and kept moaning. This was the moment Thorin came into the pen as well – he had stayed far from the event, as custom dictates to men – but was worried with how long this was taking. As soon as he entered, his wife who, I forgot to say, was there with us this entire time, and despite being quite weak since she had spent the night awake as well, immediately got up and screamed at her husband to get out at once, and forbid him to approach the mother. Thorin did so anyway, and his wife, as if gone mad, spit on him, scratched him with her weakened hands, and ordered him once more to get out, screaming that what happened there had nothing to do with him, that he had no business with this ewe’s pregnancy, that she was already with child when he had bought her, and that it should have been another there tonight in his stead. Thorin, who as you know is of a placid albeit vindictive disposition, did not press the matter and immediately left. His wife started crying, and she cried the rest of the night while holding the lifeless body of the lamb – it was so small. The woman Vrenant left at dawn after instructing us to stay with the mother to make sure that the bleeding has stopped. I sent Victoire, whose eyelids were shutting on their own, to bed, and I stayed alone with the woman Thorin, who did not say a word more until the moment I left her yesterday after noon. Then, she asked me if it would be possible to bury the body on our land, at the edge of some field, as, said she, she could not bear to see it buried on the Thorins’ land, where it would recall to her too many painful memories of this night. I told her I had to ask Mother, though I knew she would refuse. But she insisted and insisted so that I agreed to take care of the body. It hadn’t received last rites, as it would have been absurd for such a creature, so I saw no reason not to bury it on unconsecrated grounds. I discreetly asked Simon, our tenant, who always cared for you like his own son, if you recall, to help me dig a hole where it would be easier and most discreet. He advised me to dig somewhere under the bower, so that’s what we did – I will show you the precise spot when you come home if it is of some interest to you. The mother is healing well, I went to visit her again today. Nonetheless she remained quite saddened and refuses to eat. The woman Vrenant, who came to see her just now, worries that with all the blood she lost, the ewe might not be able to give birth again without risking her life, but she is not certain. The last time I saw the woman Thorin, she confided in me that the woman Vrenant had told her the lamb was female, and that she would have liked to give it a name before burying it. I told her she could still give it a name and she replied she would have liked your opinion on this matter, as you were always so good at finding original names. I told her she could always pick one amongst the ones you’d already invented. The decided on the name you’d found for an imaginary forest princess from your games when you were little. She wrote it on a paper and she had me swear to bury it where we had laid the she-lamb. I do not know if you still recall said name.

I owed it to you to tell you this story which, you’ll agree, is quite peculiar. I hope you will find some solace hearing it from me, as Mother would probably have forbidden me from telling you, since she is of the mind that you should focus on your penance instead of some silly tale. I embrace you, my dear brother, and hope to see you soon.
Louise.

“You write ?”

Lying on his bed, nestled in Marc’s arms, whose rhythmic breaths upon the nape of his neck were slowly lulling him to sleep, Louis-Antoine opened his eyes and tilted his head to meet the other’s gaze, focused on the mess of papers on the desk.

“A bit. It’s not very good.”

“It’s good nonetheless. Creating, even just words, it’s already a bit of life.”

“You write as well ?”

“I don’t read so well. I do some drawing. But I’m not allowed a quill here anymore.”

“Why ?”

A hesitation, then Marc untangled their fingers to raise his wrist before Louis-Antoine’s eyes, giving silent permission. Slowly, Louis-Antoine slipped a finger inside the sleeve to drag it up the young man’s arm. He couldn’t repress a shiver when, under the linen, he saw upon the skin chiselled by the Southern sun, traversed by green veins, the queue of deep and relentlessly parallel scars which seemed to go up to the elbow.

“Insane. You’re insane, too. Just like them.”

“You’d rather I be a criminal ?” Marc replied, with a tinge of irony.

Louis-Antoine remained motionless for a few moments, then shook his head. With the tip of his index finger, he started tracing the lines of each cut, one after the other.

“Why ?”

He felt Marc shrug against his back.

“Maybe so I don’t do worse.

Louis-Antoine’s hand moved up the arm, till he came to tangle their fingers again.

“Does it hurt ?”

“No. It feels good. I’m happy.”

“I’m not.”

“Maybe your happiness is harder to reach. Some cannot be happy on their own.

“I would have been content with an ordinary happiness. A wife, a farm, children for my heart.

“Then maybe it is that you’re necessary to someone else’s happiness. Someone extraordinary. You should sleep now. If they find us like this, I’m going to lose my hair again. And as for yours… that would be a crime.”

Louis-Antoine settled more comfortably against the other man’s torso, their interlocked fingers falling back on the sheet.

“You’ve been good to me since I arrived. Why ?”

“Why not ? I would be good to everyone if I could.”

“Why me, then ?”

“Maybe I thought that someday, you’d be good to me. Also…”

“Also ?”

“Also, as soon as I saw you, I wanted you to kiss me.”

“… Why didn’t you kiss me, then ?”

“Kissing someone is easy. Making it so someone wants to kiss you, on the other hand, that means something. Rest now. I’ll stay until you fall asleep.”

With his free hand, Marc gathered the curls to clear the nape of his neck and settled so his breath caressed it slowly. Louis-Antoine felt his eyelids close.

When the supper bell woke him, he was alone in his room ; and for a moment, he did not know whether he was disappointed.

The stirrings of the New Year only reached Sainte-Colombe as though through a mirror, through heavier packages, more joyous singing from the wardens, through the smell of roasted chestnuts that no wall could stop. Marc, whose mountain roots rendered him a bit more resistant to the frozen cold, frequently went out to the snowy courtyard wearing no more than his jacket, just for the simple pleasure of breathing in the air filled with Winter's odours. On the dinner table, there was still nothing but leaf-and- roots brews, but as a Christmas gift to her pensioners, Lady Marie acquired a handful of nutmeg from the Isle de France, whose delicate aroma came to spice up the soup. This lasted five days before the supply was depleted.

One January morning, as he was working on his writing under the weak light of a window dimmed by condensation, Louis-Antoine was disturbed by Labouret, who emerged from the next room to offer to share with him chocolate he had received from his wife for the New Year. Louis-Antoine put up a token refusal before graciously accepting, after Labouret’s insistence that such goods would be stolen anyway if he kept them too long. In exchange for a cup of the precious brew, a guard agreed to go down to the kitchens to find and heat up some milk. His return was announced by the delicious smell which filled the corridor and immediately lured out the other pensioners, who were curtly sent back to their rooms by the guard. Nonetheless, as the three men settled as best they could in Labouret’s little cell, the continuing sound of back-and-forth in the hallway gave some credit to the latter’s fear that such a gift would not remain safe for long.

Labouret’s room was better furnished than his, with a carpet, an additional chair and some toiletries aside from a water bowl and a few pomades – commodities Madame de Saint-Just had apparently decided he could do without. The interior was filled with an almost homely atmosphere, which led Louis-Antoine to wonder how long Labouret had stayed at the pension. The guard, a colossus of a man going by the deceptive name of Petiot, who often bragged about being a former little Savoyard who had managed to make it in Paris after he’d hit his growth spurt, sank into one of the chairs with a satisfied sigh.

“It’s gonna be hard this year too. The notables Assembly being summoned, that means new taxes, and new taxes means not a penny for us. Lucky jails don’t know recession.”

Louis-Antoine frowned, questioning the propriety of the remark given the company the warden was in. Labouret, however, did not seem to mind.

“I have to get out of here soon. My wife, she’s alone with our children. It’s not proper for a woman to have to make it alone. No, not proper.”

“From what I’ve heard, his woman is better off with him in here rather than out, Petiot whispered to Louis-Antoine, once Labouret was a few steps away, filling up his cup. "Three times he tried to jump from a window, the bugger. And when he’s not trying to steal, he’s bleeding money and right. If you ask me, she’s in no hurry to see him again, the Lady Labouret.”

“I heard the de la Motte woman escaped from the Salpêtrière” Labouret said, too loud for the narrow room.”

“That was quick” Petiot grumbled. “With the Austrian’s help, no doubt.”

“Is that true” Labouret asked, “that they branded her on her breast on the day of the ordeal ?”

“That’s what I heard. But then again, she put up too much of a struggle, the wench.”

“Hardly a valid reproach” Louis-Antoine murmured, his gaze lost to the window.

“No, probably not” Petiot admitted.

“I was at the trial” Labouret boasted.

“Right ! Tied to your bed, rather.”

“I was” Labouret insisted.

“How was it ?” Louis-Antoine asked with renewed interest, his eyes finally landing on his host.

“Noisy. There was always something happening, it was like the Comédie. When they called forth the sorcerer, I swear to god, the entire gallery shivered. He was staring at the Tribunal, without ever blinking. It lasted for hours. One of the judges, he kept mocking him, telling him that if he’d been that great of a mage, he’d known this story would lead him to the scaffold. When he said that, the other seemed struck by lightning, he looked him square in the eyes and said : “You, the scaffold will take you before me”. And the next day, that judge wasn’t there, and we heard that a bag of sand fell from a scaffold and broke his neck. Some said it wasn’t true, of course. But we knew better. The people know better."

“And de la Motte ? »

“Damn! A lioness. And the queen told me to do this, and the cardinal ordered me that, she plead guilty to nothing. Her lawyer did nothing, and nobody listened.”

“Truth needs only silence to be heard” Louis-Antoine murmured. “In speech, it is lost to flamboyance. She should have kept quiet.”

“She certainly won’t keep quiet now” Petiot remarked. She’s said to be in England, working on her memoirs with a publisher.”

“Distractions” Louis-Antoine hissed. "We’re chasing the spectre of one turpitude when there is one by the hour in Versailles. It’s the head of the snake that needs stomping, not its tail.”

“Such verve ! Are those the kind of speeches I see you write every day through the peephole ?”

“You’re watching me ?”

“I’m watchin’ everybody” Petiot shrugged.

“… Excuse me.”

Louis-Antoine hastily put down his half-fanished cup on the desk, and quietly exited the room. Labouret and Petiot remained silent for a moment, perplexed, looking at the empty chair.

“A strange one, that one” Petiot remarked.

“Young” Labouret quipped. “They live between two worlds, ours and theirs. I like him.”

“Still, this one is stranger than the others. Lads like that, lemme tell you, they end up either famous, on the scaffold, or both.”

“Still, I like him” Labouret said, before draining his cup.

The now familiar sight of Marc barging into his room after lunch did not even make him look up from his desk. As he opened his mouth, no doubt to explain the reason for his intrusion, Louis-Antoine just made his usual gesture with his left hand toward the door. Marc remained open-mouthed one second before complying ; he walked out and closed the door again behind him, knocked three times, waited for the “come in” from Louis-Antoine before walking in the room again.

“One day, you’re going to play that trick on a guard, and then I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

“Some manners would not hurt them” Louis-Antoine sighed, finally turning to the other, albeit without standing from his chair.

Instead of going to lounge on the bed to launch into some babbling, as was his habit, Marc had remained in place. This intrigued Louis-Antoine, who examined the other, his gaze landing on the paper in his hand. He raised an eyebrow.

“Did you need something ?”

“Ah. Yes. Actually…”

Marc scratched his head, before waving the page.

“He received this. It’s from my particular friend, I recognized the signature.”

“Well, isn’t that good news ? Perhaps he forgave you.”

“Perhaps, yes. But it’s weird. Marie opens the pensioners’ correspondence, so usually he doesn’t write. Could you… Could you read it to me ?”

“Your private business…”

“Given the situation, it will either be known by you, or by someone else. I’d rather it be you. So, will you read it ?”

Marc was holding the paper out to him with such anxiety in his eyes that Louis-Antoine did not have the heart to refuse. Turning his chair to the inside of the room to face the other man, who had started walking back and forth from the window to the door (which, given the dimensions of the room, did not take him more than a couple steps each time), Louis-Antoine squinted to decipher the elegant handwriting :

“My dear E…”

He immediately stopped, staring down his guest. The latter simply raised his palms :

“You only had to ask. Three months. Three months since you’ve known me.”

“My dear E” he continued while ignoring the remark, “you will probably be surprised with the tone of this letter, as you no doubt expected some serenade from an enamoured suitor, the variety of which you trained our father to write you.”

He had another glance for Marc, who had stopped dead in his tracks.

“But our father, contrary to what you managed to convince the poor man of, and mayhap even yourself, is no braying donkey that you can shake to make gold fall until there is nothing left for he and his unfortunate family. Our name has suffered enough with all those years in which some con artist of perverted mores, who is half our age, spent insinuating himself into our ancestral domain, corrupting an old man in the very bed he shared with our poor deceased mother."

"Marc, do you really want me to…”

“Yes, yes. Read. Please.”

“Those years are long gone now, and so is the fortune you may have pushed our father to squander on vice. But since he finally seems to have to come back to his senses and sent you far enough away to allow us to reach his soul once more, it is with great pleasure that we can inform you in his name that you are no longer welcome in the county, and that any document to your benefit that you might have coerced our poor father into signing will be destroyed as soon as it is found. You will find his signature at the bottom of this letter to prove this the truth. If there remains, from the depth of your corruption and your insanity, some measure of good sense and charity, you will heed this order and remain in Paris to find yourself some bourgeois to share his purse and bed with. But if not, know that we have contacted the Mayor of G…, who stands at the ready to have you arrested if you were to take one step into town. And this time, it will not be the cosy rooms of a pension for you. Your stay at Sainte-Colombe is paid until the end of February, and your release has been ordered on the first of March. In his great generosity, our father insisted that a purse be given to you through the masters of the house at that time. You should be able to live on it 'til the end of the cold season. Beyond that, may God have mercy on you, and most of all, may He forgive you your crimes and welcome your sinful soul into His house. Farewell, and it’s signed, Ambroise, putative viscount of R…, and his two younger brothers Raymond and Jean of R…, and their father, viscount of R…”

He let his hands fall back on his knees, his fingers still clutching the edges of the paper, with a deep sigh. He silently watched Marc, who had not moved an inch, and stood stiffly in the middle of the room. Finally, the young man exhaled, halfway between a contemptuous laugh and a sob. He resumed walking back and forth, some manner of smile on his face.

“Should have seen it coming” he exclaimed. “Everytime I turn my back, they try something like this. They don’t even live on the domain, they’re always in Italy doing hell knows what. They only come see him when they hear we had a fight. Otherwise, they seem content to forget he even exists.”

Still motionless on the uncomfortable chair, Louis-Antoine followed the frantic back and forth of the other across the room. Marc walked a few more before stopping near the window to turn again to Louis-Antoine, his face outraged.

“And that’s a lie, what they say, you know, about the money. I never pushed him to buy anything. All I said, is that those investments in royal bonds and maritime companies they always want him to make are really not as safe as they seem. Everyone in France knows that, except for nobles. All I said was that he should put some money away on the side for himself, not just for his children. That’s all they think about: the inheritance. They’re pissing themselves at the idea that he’d leave it all to me. While I told him a hundred times that I didn’t give a shit about the inheritance, that I didn’t want to be in his will. He’s the one who insisted.”

Louis-Antoine slid silently from the chair to the edge of the bed before Marc started walking yet another diagonal, only to stop again a few circuits later :

“And by the way, why do they care what he does with his money ? It’s still his. When I met him, he hadn’t dined out once since his wife’s death. He was rotting in boredom and loneliness in that crumbling old castle. You know what made them crawl out of the wood the first time ? When a maid warned them that their father had the living room windows replaced. That’s it. That’s the fortune I had him squander to vice. God forbid we ate in a room where the wine didn’t freeze in the glass.”

As he was about to resume his walking, Marc seemed to realize something and looked incredulously at Louis-Antoine.

“Well ? No acid comment ? No bite ? No criticism of my boorish and obtuse vision of love ?”

This time, Louis-Antoine could not stifle a laugh, collecting yet another offended look.

“Marc, stop talking and come lie down.”

Marc watched him a few moments, before chuckling as well. He shook his head.

“Three months, and you’re now the wiser of us both. What a bad influence I am indeed. Make some room for me, will you?”

Louis-Antoine let himself fall backward, his head landing on the pillow, one arm above his head and resting against the bedframe, as Marc settled by his side, his head on his chest, rising slowly with each of his friend's deep breaths.

“He’s not even that old” he mumbled still, his voice stifled by the torso on which he lay. “As if once you’re done with children and marriage, life has to stop. As if you can’t enjoy anything, desire anyone. That’s not true. When you’re free, that’s when life begins.”

“Shut up” Louis-Antoine repeated, without even opening his eyes.

He did not get an answer, but a hand came to find his, and held it tenderly.

It was the absence that awoke him, the cold invading along his sides where a few moments before the soft and reassuring warmth of a body against his had reigned. His still-blurred gaze swept the room bathed in the crude light of the low winter sun, expecting to find it empty ; he almost started backwards when he distinguished Marc’s figure on the chair. He had his back to him, leaning on the desk, apparently quite busy. The light rustle of feather barbs in the air, the peculiar squeaking of the tip on the paper, almost lulled him back into semi-consciousness ; something, however, held him back. Another absence : as Marc’s hand went back and forth on the desk – Marc favoured his left hand, he absentmindedly noted – probably from ink to paper, then from paper to ink, the familiar chiming of the nib against the edge of the metal inkwell was nowhere to be heard. There was only some kind of dull, wet sound. Then the quill went back, to slide across the paper again: often, too often.

Louis-Antoine jumped out of bed, took the two steps to the desk, and seized the wrist above the hand that held the quill, forcing the other to turn to him, revealing the flat expanse of the desk. His right arm laid bare, palm up, cuts all the way up – three of them near the crease of the elbow, still fresh and gaping, dripping with the same blood that reddened tip of the quill, spreading it in every direction and carrying it along onto the paper where it turned into something like the delicate line of a mountain range, bathed in the sunset light now covering the page. Louis-Antoine watched the young man’s face, speechless. He did not struggle, watching him back with some sort of curiosity, as if he awaiting his reaction.

“… Don’t do that” Louis-Antoine finally said, his tone flatter than he would have liked.

“Why ?” Marc replied, while slightly tilting his head.

“It’s my quill, you will damage it,” came the answer, though he was barely aware of forming those words.

A beat, then Marc nodded, as if to signify that this was a valid enough reason. Gently dragging Louis-Antoine’s hand, still tight around his wrist, above the edge of the desk, he dropped the quill. He watched him a few seconds more.

“Alright, let go of me now” he finally say, almost inaudibly.

Louis-Antoine did so. The pulp of his thumb followed for a moment the raised line of the bone in the crease of the thin wrist. The palm of his hand pressing on the desk, Marc stood up, his eyes never leaving him, a crimson drop rolling down his right arm. Nothing else in the room moved. Louis-Antoine watched it hit the desk without a sound, tainting the thick paper with a red and deformed sun. The air was heavy with a metallic scent.

“Marc ?”

“Yes ?”

“Do you still want me to kiss you ?”

“Yes.”

Their mingled breaths, Marc’s hand flying to his curls the very second Louis-Antoine took his lips. His other hand descended to hold his waist, the bare arm smearing the white shirt with a wide, red trail he felt along his sides. Louis-Antoine lost himself in the kiss, in the simple warmth he felt he was returning to after a long winter, like the fire of the hearth after a walk in the snow. Before he could sink into its torpor, Marc held him tight against him and pushed them back, almost fiercely, so they tumbled together on the bed – in the blind spot of the peephole, Louis-Antoine realized. Facing each other on the pillow, forehead against forehead, they looked at each other in silence. Then Marc, almost hesitantly, raised his hand to trace his jawline with the tip of his finger.

“What do you want ?” he finally asked, his voice low and tender.

“A bit of life.”

Marc smiled, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkling into visibility.

“Mine ? Or yours ?”

“Let’s share.”

Marc nodded slowly and opened his hand, calling for his. Louis-Antoine wove their fingers together, kissing the back of the olive-coloured hand, before sliding them both between their thighs with a sigh.

“What now ? What will you do ?”

The thin sheet bundled at their waists was taking on the colour of dusk, a portent of this February afternoon's ending. His open shirt revealing his torso and left shoulder, where Marc’s fingers traced and retraced invisibles tracks on his pale skin, Louis-Antoine was once more fighting the temptation of sleep. Every time his eyelids felt heavy, his gaze fell on the open sleeve of his friend and the fresh cuts that the process of coagulation had underlined with a thin red stripe of tiny crystals. Marc shrugged.

“Don’t know. Go back to him, I suppose. The purse should be enough for the journey. I need to talk to him face to face. Maybe the letter isn’t even genuine, who knows. They could very well have gotten his signature on any scrap of paper to deceive me. It’s what they’re accusing me of, after all, which means they’re not above the idea.”

“And if the letter’s genuine ?”

“I don’t know. We’ll talk. I have to believe in us, otherwise who will ?”

“… I wrote to my mother.”

Marc stopped the movement of his fingers and smiled.

“I thought you didn’t want to lose to her ?”

“I have already lost. Now my sister tells me Mother is sick. She would be capable of dying simply so as not to cave in first. I meant to hurt her, I did. She meant to hurt me, she did. Let’s stop there. There are other battles.

“She sounds like an exceptional woman.”

“She’s my mother.”

From the end of the hallway, the sound of footsteps echoing in the staircase reached them. Marc absentmindedly readjusted Louis-Antoine’s shirt on his shoulder.

“Vesper round” Marc remarked. “We have to make ourselves decent before they come.”

“Let them find us thus, I haven’t a care. At least, the cell will make me pass the time after you’re gone.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t confuse your own suffering for a manifesto. You can do more than that.”

“Not yet.”

“Someday.”

Marc slid down from the bed, readjusted his jacket over his shirt and fastened his drawers. Louis-Antoine, still lazily lying there, a hand lost in his hair, followed the quick movement of his fingers.

“You once said you thought I would be good to you. How is that possible, when I am not even certain to see you again someday ?”

“I said nothing of knowing more about it than that: we’ll see. I have a sixth sense, for this sort of things.”

“Snake charmer and soothsayer. Are you sure you were not switched in the cradle with some fey child ?”

“If that was the case, and I didn’t say it wasn’t, would I reveal the deception to a human ?”

Marc finished adjusting the sleeves of his shirt and looked at him with a smile. Nimbly, he leaned down to give his lips a playful kiss.

“Come on we all have a bit of magic in us when we’re twenty years old. And if a few weeks from now, I’m not chained up in some dinghy’s hole in Toulon, I’ll have time for a spell or two. As for you… God knows what you’ll be able to do.

“What is it that you see in me that I cannot see myself ?”

“I’m not sure. Something else. That’s already a lot.”

The peephole slid open a few seconds after Marc had sat down at the desk and grabbed the quill to pantomime drawing. Louis-Antoine had dragged the sheet up to his chin and feigned a deep sleep. Two sonorous knocks echoed on the door.

“Chapel, lads !”

“Coming” Marc grumbled, as if he’d just been interrupted in his task.

Marc leant against the doorframe to let Louis-Antoine pass. The latter exited the room, brushing his fingers against the other man’s.

The tapping of the rain against the window made him forget the world, his regular breathing feeling immense and deep in the darkened room. The quill slid silently across the paper, as if driven by his very soul. Under his right elbow, he knew there was the brownish trace of the drop of Marc’s blood on the desk ; it had never completely gone away. Arriving at the bottom of the page, he took a few second to reread, then, satisfied, slid the paper onto the pile at his side and closed the sides of the briefcase. Down in the courtyard, the lapping of water under the porch seemed to redouble. In the hallway, footsteps. He got up, his briefcase in hand, and turned around to grab the meagre set of luggage neatly prepared on the bed. As he stood back up, the clinking of a key echoed in the keyhole.

“Ah, you’re already ready, very good” Petiot said.

He exited to the hallway and waited for Petiot to lock behind him. They started walking, passing by the door to the neighbouring room, which was wide open. Inside, someone was fitting clean sheets on the bed.

“You are opening it back up ?”

“Didn’t have a choice. We have three pensioners arriving tomorrow. And one week empty, that’s enough to deal with when it comes to the gossip.

“Do we know more about the way it happened ?”

“Not really, no. His wife refused to let the physicians cut him open to determine the cause. You have to sympathize. As it is, you can think it an accident. If it turns out he did it to himself… it’s gonna be complicated to have him buried.”

They were walking down the main stairway, with its creaking stairs, its windows like arrowslits, to the dining hall door, which was locked as well. Before crossing it, he gave one last look up, observing the geometrical spiral formed by the stairs. Marc’s footsteps, a month prior, still echoed there, as he hastily walked up a few stairs to hold him in his arms hidden from the guard’s gaze, and gave him one light kiss – for good luck, Antoine, let’s see if I’m really magic – before running down the steps to catch up, his laugher bouncing up and down on the stones around.

He crossed the dining hall, his neck rigid, without a glance. The sheets had been removed about ten days ago, when the arrival of spring had once and for all signed the end of the epidemic. Petiot opened a door to a corridor he hadn’t walked for six months.

“You had a coat and a hat, right ? Wait here.”

Petiot disappeared a few moments in a small adjoining room, to emerge with a frock coat more fit for autumn and a wide-brimmed felt hat. The clothes had a musty smell to them, but they were clean. When he was finished adjusting the ensemble, they walked the rest of the corridor and Petiot unlocked the last door.

“Right, that’s how far I go. Just cross the parlour, it’s open. Your father is on the other side.”

“He is not my father. »

“Is that so ? Well in any case he’s waiting on the other side. Good luck, lad.”

He hesitated an instant before briefly shaking the held out hand. He turned the doorknob and walked into the next room. This side of the grid was deserted, save for an empty chair and a cup on the edge facing it, which someone must have forgotten to clean up. The door on the right of the crosspiece was ajar. He crossed the doorframe. On the other side, a middle-aged man who had settled on the chair promptly got up.

“Louis-Antoine, there you are.”

“Lord d’Evry” he replied, bowing deeply.

The knight seemed to look for something to say. He did not try to help him.

“Let me take your luggage” he finally settled on, with some relief.

“Do not trouble yourself. I can carry them.”

“Oh… Very well.”

D’Evry pushed one of the heavy doors of the jail to let him through. Outside, the streets were shiny with mud. Rain fell in heavy drops on the rim of his hat. He tipped it to feel one hurtle down his face and vanish down his neck.

“What weather, isn’t it ?” d’Evry laughed while motioning for him to follow. “Enough to make you miss the cosy room of the pension. Right ?”

When no answer came, he hid his falling smile behind some semblance of cough.

“Well, you will be warmed up at your mother’s soon enough. She is better, your sister writes. No doubt your letters did much to appease her heart. You can care for each other from now on. The coach house is right around the corner. We will take the eleven o’clock coach.”

Without waiting for his elder, he walked the distance which separated him from the porch of the coach house and put down his luggage of the dry cobblestones. He turned to the knight.

“Do you have other business to conduct in Paris ?”

“… I might” d’Evry answered, dumbfounded.

“I would abhor having you make such a journey for my sole benefit. You would do me a great favour by staying where you ought to be. I have here the sum Mother sent me for the journey. I can do it very well on my own. After all, I already did it once.”

“But that’s… I promised your sister…”

“Louise worries too much, as women are wont to do. You mustn’t trouble yourself. I will write to you as soon as I reach Blérancourt. You have already done so much for me that I could not beat to weigh down further what I owe you.”

He barely gave the good knight enough time to nod before bowing once more. He grabbed his luggage and spun on his heels, taking advantage of someone exiting the building in order to enter it himself. Inside smelt of wet hay and burnt wood. He walked straight to the counter and laid down the money he had prepared in front of a middle-aged man in a used jacket, with a wig sitting atop his bald head.

“What’ll it be, sir ?”

“The eleven o’clock coach, for Nampcel.”

“Name ?” the man asked, taking a register out of a drawer.

“Saint-Just.”