Blue Bayou ~ Book II (Saga): Lions and Ramparts by Parris Afton Bonds

Author:Parris Afton Bonds [Bonds, Parris Afton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paradise Publishing
Published: 2014-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

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PART FOUR

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§ CHAPTER SEVENTEEN §

Blois, France

March 1794

While the revolutionary minds of eighteenth-century France were holding forth on the basic tenets of liberté, egalité, and fraternité, twelve-year-old Gabrielle Fabreville preferred a simpler philosophy of life, believing among other truths that the wise thing to do with mornings was to sleep through them.

She arched her back, stretched her arms above her head, and told her new governess, a starchy woman with a pointed nose, “I think, madame, that a sunrise is a marvelous thing to look at immediately before going to bed.”

“Not ‘madame.’ Citoyenne.” The middle-aged woman from a middle-class family pursed her lips and said, “The days of your ancien régime are over.”

Gabrielle shrugged shoulders still childishly bony. Privately, she thought that vinegar rather than blood must course through the governess’s veins.

The strict Carmelite nuns who had taught Gabrielle at St. Cyr had nonetheless been much more approachable. But then her father had withdrawn her from Paris’s elite school for young women on the day of the queen’s execution and hustled her off to Maison Bellecour.

With Marie Antoinette’s execution, the Reign of Terror, something that the nuns tried to shield their charges from, reached its peak. That same month, three of the nuns themselves rode to the guillotine scaffolds in one of the rickety tumbrels that rambled through the streets daily with their cargoes of the condemned. Most were innocent victims accused by the Committee of Public Safety of charges such as failing to sing La Marseillaise or equally trivial denunciations by jealous or vindictive neighbors.

Gabrielle’s mother had been one of the victims. Accused of madness, by whom Gabrielle knew not, her mother had been interred in La Salpétrière. During the September Massacres of 1792, Gabrielle had inadvertently seen her mother’s head paraded by on a pike; only by consciously blocking out that horror had she escaped madness herself.

She wormed out of her nightrail and subjected herself to the awful weekly bath that the fastidious governess had ordered. “C’est odieux!” the girl declared, but under the woman’s cold eye, she lowered herself into the bathtub, a curious portable contraption shaped like a stub-nosed, high-backed shoe, and commenced to scrub herself. Soapsuds moustached her upper lip, and her nose wrinkled in a futile effort to ward off a fit of sneezing.

The loud and indelicate ka-choos echoed simultaneously with the thunder of musket shots from the town that fanned out below the chateau. Following on the heels of her sneezing could be heard a mob shouting, “A la guillotine!" and “Death to the Royalists! Death to the aristocrats!”

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