The City in the Autumn Stars Read online

  I had so thoroughly committed myself to the Revolution that even when I came to understand the evil we had created with our miserably naïve philosophies I continued to deceive myself of Robespierre’s humanistic claims. I appealed for the abolition of the death penalty: let it not punish either the weakest peasant or Marie Antoinette Capet, the Queen. Those who had never before known power, I reasoned, were the first to fear the loss of it and suspect all of trying to steal it. Given the moral superiority of our Cause, we should not descend to the methods of our predecessors but must show the world we returned to our stated moral purpose. (This plea was resisted by the self-same gentlemen who very soon would impose fresh tyrannies upon the people in the name of that corrupt Directorate!) Thus my departure was no hasty dash from danger. I saw no joy in martyrdom, nor satisfaction in last speeches from the scaffold. My plan for escape had been exactly drawn.

  Mirenburg was to be my final destination. In that tolerant city I had money and old friends. There was no lovelier city in which to weather out a social storm. Like Venice in her singularity, Mirenburg moreover had an enlightened Prince; but to reach her I would have to cross half the rest of belligerent Europe. I had no other reasonable choice. I was unwelcome in Saxony, wanted for treason in Russia, had bad debts in Vienna, was branded libertine in Genoa and excommunicated in Rome (as a Protestant born I was not unduly alarmed by this), and as a known Jacobin, an intimate of Robespierre, I could not expect to enjoy a leisurely and uninterrupted journey.

  Thus I rode with many a wary glance and at what I prayed was an unremarkable pace, into streets which were now rife with random violence.

  Ghastly fog gave Paris an appearance of spectral unreality, as if she herself had become a bloodless cadaver, greatest and final victim of the Terror.

  In time, cold morning sunshine dispersed the fog and sharpened the texture of the stones, revealing the filth and verminous rubble which Égalité left untreated and which Fraternité ignored. I was glad to find the iron gates standing open, my way unchallenged by three drunken National Guardsmen who wished me a cheerful ‘Bonjour, citoyen!’ with a hiccup and a yawn. Without pausing, I waved passport and travelling documents (none fully ordered and some bearing only poor facsimiles of the proper seals) and entered the ill-tended highway with its thin snow and black, etiolated trees.

  As Parisian cobbles gave way to the Dijon Road’s frost-hardened ruts, I could at last spur to a smarter trot, more in keeping with my heart’s rhythm. I had known terror and danger before (most notably when the Empress Catherine exiled me to Siberia whence I escaped, spending two years with wild Tatars, learning their martial skills and daily forced to prove me as good a savage as themselves), yet that bloodthirsty democracy was the cruellest sport that ever Christians performed.

  I had lost all hope for the perfectibility of our world. My time in America, where I served with von Stauben, Lafayette and Wayne, had shown me how soon the fire-eaters become the fire-men: as quick to dampen the Spirit of Liberty when it threatened their interests as they were to ignite it when it served them best. Since my departure, events in that first great modern Republic had proven more melancholy still, with half the leading spirits dead, in jail or exiled. I heard they planned to choose a monarch and General Washington was proposed! Were they bent merely upon replacing one King George with another? If so, the Tyranny of Autocracy would at least be given an honest name!

  My horse, an old country hunter, sniffed at the air and grew almost lively as we left the city’s stink, but I enjoyed only the mildest sense of release. Louis himself had reached the Belgian border before being caught and brought back. The King, moreover, had the advantage of aid from my acquaintance, the Baron de Korff, Russian ambassador to France, whereas I remained a wanted criminal by the Muscovites, on their suspicion of my involvement in a murder plot against Catherine. With every friend in France either dead, emigrated, imprisoned or too prudent to associate with a suspected Royalist (I had begged, with Paine and a few others, that the Queen be exiled rather than beheaded) I had only my own poor wits for an ally.

  The Parisian fashion for wholesale slaughter had spread by now to the provinces so I could not count myself safe from Democracy until I had at least a country or two at my back. I began to regret my earlier decision to wear beneath homespun and tarred leather my fine shirt, silk breeches and (within my boots) elegant shoes. Born into an age which regarded it as no minor heresy to go about improperly adorned, I was deuced uncomfortable. I had dressed well and presented a good figure throughout the turmoil and shared this quality (if no other) with Robespierre whose coat was always impeccably cut even as he lifted a lace wrist to urge on his tide of barefoot arsonists and whores-turned-harpy.

  Paris faded into mist. My few fragments of illusion faded with her.

  Rousseau, Voltaire, Descartes, even Paine himself, by now seemed little more than foolish, over-hopeful prattlers, whose notions bore no relation to the world as she really was.

  All I retained of Rousseau was his warning that blind following of his theories must inevitably lead to the substitution of the tyranny of dictators for a tyranny of kings.

  Louis had ruled merely by the Will of God. Robespierre chose to believe he ruled by the Will of the People. This moral conviction allowed him to condone, participate in and initiate deeds for which no Biblical justification existed. Like a good many fierce revolutionaries who failed to influence reality as thoroughly as they had dreamed, he had a knack for calling old pots by new names and proclaiming the result a triumph of the Enlightenment.

  To abolish God, I thought, was one thing – but to replace Him with oneself was quite another! I could only guess at the heresies, blasphemies and distortions of nature yet to come. No longer did I see the decline of the Romans merely as the result of ancient ignorance. That decline now seemed proof of a lasting human desire for slavery.

  To shape, therefore, my new direction, my discarding of a moral wardrobe gone rotten, I fostered a determination to follow our old von Bek family motto to Do you the Devil’s Work, handed down from father to son through generations of our people.

  At last I had the interpretation which in the past had always baffled me. Now I knew it meant I should indulge myself in all those impulses which hitherto I had dismissed as base or ignoble. If Rome must be the model of our modern world, then I would turn from that narrow Stoic philosophy which had brought me to my present pass.

  I had my well-developed taste for fine clothing, and had always enjoyed good food and wine, as well as lechery. But to my hedonism I would marry a new loyalty – to my own person alone.

  Renouncing my quest for justice and human dignity, I would seek instead the comfort of Riches: gold was both a reliable mistress and a tangible friend.

  A few years in Mirenburg, I reasoned, enjoying her various delights while increasing my fortune by fair means or foul, and I would return to my own Saxon estates, purchase my respectability and retrieve from my father my birthright. I would not go cap in hand to Bek. I would buy her back, enrich her, installing model farms and dwellings so that at least my own people should be happy.

  Once rich, moreover, I should again travel easily about Europe, for while in the public eye a poor radical is a dangerous rogue, a rich radical is merely an eccentric gentleman!

  The loyalty I had given to liberty would now be set to work in the cultivation of Mammon. I had a little money with my friend, the Helvetian philosopher Frederic-Caesar de La Harpe of Vaud, whom I had met in St Petersburg while performing my office as secretary to the Saxon ambassador. Lausanne was therefore my first destination, but to reach that city I must navigate wild mountainous country whose brigands were reputedly so poor they would murder a traveller for the hair on his head. However, even before I began that stage of my journey I must pass through the village of Sainte-Croix where there was usually a strong garrison of the National Guard, primed to expect the likes of me.

  As the miles passed I found my disguise to have been well chosen; the on
ly close attention it drew was fearful or respectful. I had learned during my sojourn in Muscovy and Tatary that the art of achieving congruity with one’s surroundings lies not in dressing exactly as the common man, nor yet as one of his superiors; ’tis best to be one who communes between the two.

  An unimaginative, carping Civil Servant, a scribe, courier or what have you? – all would be in the mould of those for whom the vulgar people go in awe but which the aristocracy treats as invisible or as a despised necessity. If one swims towards the middle of the human stream one may fairly be expected to be carried on a current of preconception and insensible habit. Thus with my inferiors I showed impatience and a condescending self-importance, while to any superior met on the high road (military commander, important provincial communard and so forth) I saluted with servile cheer and obedient respect, earning their immediate contempt which was always to my advantage: one never looks closely at that which one neither fears nor admires.

  So I crossed France.

  At inns remote from any town I was most easily able to wave my sheaf of forgeries and requisition my needs from folk who blushed to hear my accusatory snarls of ‘Royalist!’ and who served me their inadequate best with trembling hands.

  My name was ‘Citizen Didot’ and my business, I instructed them, was Secret or Important: enough to impress them without informing them. Should I share a table with a priest I glared, while a lieutenant would receive my camaraderie and dislike me for it. A captain, it need scarcely be said, received my cringing admiration.

  Winter made bad roads worse and the going was slow, but the seeming absence of pursuit consoled me. Perhaps France was so taken up with her foreign wars and fears of invasion she showed little concern for one Saxon traitor running for freedom. I now regretted deeply my decision to accept French citizenship during those early euphoric days. Agents of the revolution were in every country, furthering Cloots’s avowed ambition to take Liberty abroad in the form of a conquering French army which would free all from their chains. Cloots himself would soon be guillotined with the other Hébertist radicals, but his logic of international liberation would provide the impetus for an Imperial France to embark upon the rape of Europe. (Thus one generation’s idealist provides useful rhetoric for the next generation’s greedy pragmatist!) I shall not say I foresaw the rise of Napoleon while I rode for Switzerland but my family’s reputation for second sight is famous throughout Germany and my own gloom was enough to impart a certain accuracy to my prophecies.

  Switzerland drew near. Villages came fewer and lodgings were scarce.

  Close to Sainte-Croix I found shelter at last in a noxious farmhouse-turned-hostelry on a truckle bed set over boards through which I observed and heard the constant movement and noisy outpourings of three thin cows, my own horse, two dray mares and a pig, as well as a stable lad with a woman of uncertain age who set upon him halfway through the night and enjoyed him while he groaned and she grunted. It soon became impossible to determine if they retained their duet or if the pig had joined them.

  The mingled stench of all these beasts became so overwhelming I believe it was this which at last set me off to sleep.

  The next morning was blowing cold rain. My innkeeper, picking lice from beneath his belt, guessed the nearby river must surely flood by noon. He suggested I go by another road than that which led directly through Sainte-Croix. I, however, grew steadily troubled at the prospect of another day in France and did not wish to risk suspicion by avoiding the garrison. I told him I would take my chances with the ford.

  He shrugged. There was heavy ice in it, he said, and if the current ran hard I stood a fair chance of being knocked from my horse.

  Ignoring him, I signed a paper in the name of the Committee, assured him the State would settle as soon as he presented himself with the paper in Paris, and set off, head down, into the stinging wind which, carrying frozen rain, threatened to lacerate both nag and self.

  The wind increased. The branches of bare elms waved like the limbs of drowning starvelings.

  I searched the sky in hope of an interlude; but the grey clouds raced on to be replaced by others.

  I shivered in my greatcoat and tried to spur the reluctant beast to greater speed. If her circulation stopped I feared she would freeze, a statue, in her tracks. We went by a creaking windmill of ancient black wood and whitewashed stones. The sails complained and shrieked as they slowly turned, though they ground no corn.

  By about eleven o’clock we passed through Sainte-Croix, a pretty little village of stone and slate and carved wood where, to my surprise, the garrison consisted of two or three dozing soldiers. I guessed the rest had been called upon other errands and I congratulated myself on my good fortune. I showed my papers and explained how I was on government business, keeping a rendezvous with a Swiss agent of ours. They innocently accepted all I told them and wished me luck in my work. The Swiss border was only a mile or two on the other side of the river.

  Now snowy alpine foothills with their evergreens offered a modicum of shelter from the weather until I came at last to the ford.

  As foretold, slabs of ice tumbled and clapped, rushing in a foaming torrent all but obscuring the narrow causeway I must cross.

  With considerable cursing and some hesitation, I urged my poor steed knee-deep into the chilly tide.

  Water clawed my boots like the fingers of some furious Arctic troll and I was halfway across, using scabbarded sword to push away larger slabs of ice, before I heard a cry from the bank ahead.

  Peering through spray, rain and mist, I made out a group of mounted men amongst the pines. My attention was distracted long enough for a block of glowing ice to rake against my horse’s chest, causing her to whinny and skitter in the water and almost lose her footing on the causeway.

  ‘Hold, gentlemen, I pray you!’ cried I above the wailing rain. I feared they would begin to cross before I had reached their side and thus risk all our lives. ‘I shall soon have reached your bank, then you can ford. But if you startle my horse or your own, likely none of us will get to our destination!’

  Either they heard me and fell silent or they had no more to communicate. They did, however, seem content to wait for me.

  My horse remained in her agitated condition and I was soon obliged to dismount, lest we both fall. Though the foam threatened to drown me I nonetheless plunged into the deeps, then eventually found shallower waters which came only to my breast.

  With relief I struggled at last into the calmer reaches and stood, gasping and quaking, beside the muddy, root-knotted bank.

  I felt sure my breath must freeze in the air or turn solid in my lungs. Both my horse and I were shivering. It was a minute or two before I could give an eye to the dark figures who, seated upon the backs of big horses, regarded me with impassive concentration.

  They were soldiers by the look of them. Renegades were frequently found between borders when countries disputed by lifting the Law against Murder and dignifying its commission as a necessity of War.

  I put hand to pocket and clasped the damp butt of a barker. The pistol was useless.

  If these horsemen were indeed thieves, my sword was my only defence.

  They continued to be patient. Several more minutes went by as if they waited for me to catch my breath and straighten my back.

  I, naturally, became watchful, yet tried to seem unwary and not a bit concerned by them, speaking aloud to myself and to them, commenting on the foulness of the weather and the need of a bridge over the river. Still they did not reply.

  It was only when I made to remount my horse that one of the riders broke away from the rest and advanced down the bank, keeping his huge horse to a calculated walk.

  This man had handsome aquiline features, pale under a broad forehead and thick, black brows. His long hair hung in pigtails about his face and he wore a large bicorne on the back of his head, brim pinned so it would not lose its shape in the rain. From the gullies so formed water poured upon the shoulders of his leathern ca
pe wrapping his body to the knees. From the cape protruded a dark sleeve and a white gauntlet gripping reins and pommel. His boots, too, were black, the tops turned over to reveal soft brown inner leather.

  The rider’s thin lips pursed as he drew his horse in before me and looked me up and down.

  ‘Good morning, citizen,’ I called with false good cheer. ‘D’ye plan to ford here? ’Tis, as you have seen, just possible.’

  ‘We’ve already crossed, Sir,’ said the pale one, ‘and proceed towards Nyon. Yourself?’

  ‘On State business, citizen.’ I gave him my habitual reply.

  ‘Then we share an honour,’ he said. He appeared to be quietly amused.

  Meanwhile, as this exchange took place, his men moved forward, positioning their horses so that they formed a barrier across the muddy road.

  I listened to the pines creaking and dripping. The air was full of their scent mingled with the lushness of the forest mould, the warm stink of damp horseflesh.

  ‘Citizen,’ said I, ignoring all these alarming signs, ‘I thank ye for your courtesy in waiting to see that I crossed safely.’ I was reaching the conclusion that I had found Sainte-Croix’s garrison. Reins in hand I trudged up the bank, my nag snorting as she tried to shake her mane free of water. The river crashed and howled behind me. As I approached him, the pale man dismounted. He came stalking to offer me a hand for my final step up to the road. His eyes were black as the devil’s and full of that secret amusement either denoting superior intelligence or chronic short-sightedness. ‘Your name, citizen?’ His tone was friendly enough.

  ‘Didot,’ said I. ‘Carrying orders from the Committee.’

  ‘Indeed? Then we’re comrades. My name is Montsorbier.’

  Now I placed him! We had met thrice before – once in Metz during some benighted Clootsian conference designed to bring revolution to Prussia and Belgium, then most recently in Paris when Danton had arranged for deputies to question officers of the National Guard. He was famous for his zeal at sniffing out royalists. But our earliest meeting he was less likely to recall for it had not taken place in France. It had been in Munich, before either of us was a declared servant of the people. Both incognito, members of the same secret metaphysical brotherhood, we had been dedicated to scientific enquiry, the evolution of Man’s natural equality, rather than to the unpleasant practicalities of turning the world upside-down. His name had been the Vicomte Robert de Montsorbier then. Mine had been Manfred, Ritter von Bek.