André asked in some surprise, “Since the Constituent Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris, hasn’t he been staying at home writing biographies?”

  Brissot shrugged, spreading his hands to show he was not quite sure either.

  For ordinary people, Guillaume-Chrétien de Malesherbes was almost unknown. Yet in France—especially in the legal world—he was a near-mythic figure. From the nineteenth century onward, under both republics and empires alike, Malesherbes’s statue stood in the hall of the nation’s highest court. In the twenty-first century, André had recalled countless times this legendary advocate who had defended the sanctity of justice with his life.

  Back in the present, however, André could not help grumbling to himself: “Has the old man taken leave of his senses? Why not enjoy his retirement at home, instead of stirring things up in the Assembly?”

  Taking in the scene before him, André felt things were getting tangled. His arrival seemed to have set the seating in motion.

  The Marquis de Condorcet, who had scarcely ever appeared at the Constituent Assembly, had gone over to the centrist benches opposite the Right; beside him sat Lavoisier. Though both had resigned their seats as deputies, their prestige and standing still allowed them to enter freely as spectators—they simply no longer had a vote.

  Duport and Mounier were absent for their own reasons, while the left-wing leaders Mirabeau, Barnave, Talleyrand, Lameth, and Sieyès had shifted to the middle benches and sunk into the Plain (Marais), as if yielding the Left to the former ultra-leftists—Prieur, Pétion, and Robespierre.

  “How amusing,” André could not help laughing, letting his thoughts wander. Since August this year, the Left-Center-Right configuration of the Constituent Assembly had been quietly shifting. The Constitutionalists such as Mirabeau and Barnave were attacking the conservatives far less; more and more debates seemed like staged performances for the benefit of Parisian revolutionaries. Meanwhile, conservatives would now and then go sit among the centrists.

  When Malesherbes, as presiding chairman on rotation, shook his small bell and signaled with his eyes that the spokesman for the Paris Commune might ascend to speak, he himself seemed absent-minded. Only when an impatient Brissot gave him several nudges did André come to himself.

  “Hah! The famed ‘God-Favoured’—is God calling you in for another private talk?” a deputy on the Right cried out, jeering at the daydreaming André and drawing general laughter, a mood of merriment filling the air.

  André rose at once. He drew himself up, face solemn, and with his resonant voice replied deadpan to the right-wing deputy: “Of course. God has instructed me to stand before the 25,000,000 representatives of the French nation and mourn the innocent dead at Nancy—and to spit upon you and your executioner-accomplice, General Marquis de Bouillé. Justice may be late, but it never fails to appear! Therefore today, I stand here…”

  The Left benches burst into thunderous applause. Prieur, Robespierre, and Pétion, together with Buzot and others, stood to cheer André’s words; the Right would not be outdone, whistling and booing in an effort to drown the other side; the centrists remained impassive, though many were weighing André’s final sentence, which sounded like a maxim.

  Hearing this flourish, Lafayette, seated among the guests, furrowed his brow; his earlier good mood vanished. The Marquis de Bouillé was not only his cousin; the order to suppress the Nancy mutiny had been issued jointly by Lafayette and the Minister of War, the Comte de La Tour du Pin.

  “Is this fellow going to drag me down as well, just because I refused to pay for the Champagne Composite Regiment?” Lafayette’s thoughts began to run wild—though he knew André was not aiming at him.

  André stood in the center of the hall, quite pleased with himself. Hands on hips, he looked about, appreciating the fierce quarrel his remarks had sparked between the two sides. For more than one year, he had dreamed of shouting a few fighting slogans, before the great stage that represented 25,000,000 French citizens, and winning a full ovation. Today, his wish had at last been granted.

  When the little bronze bell of the rotating chairman rang again and again, the hubbub gradually ebbed and order returned. A secretary beneath the dais reminded the spokesman of the Commune to mount the dedicated rostrum, but André shook his head. That lofty rostrum was like a stockade without bars; it felt far better to range freely about the debate floor.

  “Representative of the Paris Commune, do not use the courtroom lawyer’s stock tricks to inflame the house. Deputies are the people’s representatives, not members of a jury.” Personally, Malesherbes plainly did not care for André’s disorderly ways, and, taking sides, he began to warn the Commune’s spokesman.

  André was unmoved, grumbling inwardly: “A rotating chairman of the Constituent Assembly—powerless, a mere figurehead. You’re not the Speaker of the British House with a special veto.”

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  At first, André had intended to snap back. But he worried that the old gentleman, once head of the ministry, was advanced in years and might not bear the shock, so he swallowed all the sharp, caustic jibes that had risen to his throat.

  …

  Moving among his supporters on the Left, the prosecutor kept his habitual impassioned, indignant tone and again laid out the facts:

  “What exactly happened with the Nancy garrison?

  What crimes had those murdered soldiers committed?

  No—none at all!

  They merely demanded their meager arrears of pay. Their officers, on various unlawful pretexts, had been plundering them—month after month!”

  His voice was full, masculine, and ringing—charged with a peculiar force and impact. The deputies applauded again; whistles rose and fell. The prosecutor took the chance to come before the dais. To master his excitement, he rubbed his palms hard, again and again, and cast a provocative glance at Malesherbes and the conservatives to the right.

  “To tell the truth, I’d like to jump down there and thrash that scoundrel,” said Bertrand de Molleville, former Governor of Brittany, turning to Cazalès. No doubt many on the Right felt the same, itching to seize the prosecutor by the throat.

  “Then you would be playing into his hands. André Franck is a notorious brawling prosecutor,” Cazalès replied with a light laugh. “Look closely at the sword-bearing guards who keep order here. They’re all from the Paris Police Prefecture, and they completely ignore André’s provocations—even when his swinging arms and stabbing fingers nearly touch the Right’s noses. If you jump down there… well.”

  Cazalès, a retired light-cavalry captain and deputy for Champagne, was a principled conservative nobleman: he loathed feudal privilege and wished to abolish the exemptions of nobility and clergy, yet in practice staunchly upheld the monarchy and was loyal to Louis XVI.

  Bertrand de Molleville grumbled twice and said no more. He, too, could see that the prosecutor’s target was not the conservatives as such, but the tax-farmers and those who shielded them. At first sight, the prosecutor—spokesman for the sans-culottes—was odious; but his oratory was compelling and vivid. Where no direct interest was at stake, both Bertrand de Molleville and Cazalès found themselves half-won by André’s torrent of eloquence.

  Seizing the throat of the prosecutor was out of the question. His Roman cadence overwhelmed all opponents; he spoke on and on, his voice rolling through the hall.

  “…These so-called rebels were only refusing and opposing theft.

  In their hearts, they still kept faith that the Revolution would bring fairness and justice.

  Even when illegally condemned to death or lifelong hard labor, they did not give up.

  Before they fell, the martyrs cried, ‘Vive la France!’

  How bitter and heartbreaking that is!”

  Now the prosecutor’s moving tone slowed. Feeling overflowed into sudden tremor, as if he “wanted to weep but could not,” as though his throat were clogged with blood, choking off breath.

  He came to the foot of the dais, facing the Declaration of the Rights of Man hanging above, and bowed his head in silent mourning…

  At that moment, no one dared rebuke the prosecutor or his extreme words in public.

  Only after two minutes did André lift his head again. In his heart, the flames blazed anew; molten rock seemed ready to burst forth. Ranging through the center of the hall, he leveled his spearpoint.

  “I remember that one year ago, the women of Paris went in a ‘peaceful march’ to Versailles to petition the King (so-called ‘peaceful’; anyone who took it literally was being na?ve), asking for liberty and equality!

  What has changed since then?

  Nothing—nothing at all!

  The same abuses, the same tyranny!

  Why?

  Because the King is still surrounded by the same interest-clique, the same ministers!

  What are they doing?

  Concealing the truth and deceiving the people with every manner of lie—betraying the trust placed in them!

  Who are they?”

  Before he could go on, Robespierre was already on his feet applauding; the Left rose in support. The centrists hesitated a moment. They knew André was stating unanswerable facts—only someone had to lead. When Mirabeau, Barnave, Talleyrand, Lameth, and Sieyès got up one after another, the middle benches climbed out of the mire and stood to back André.

  “I still don’t much like him,” murmured Father Sieyès.

  Alexandre Lameth smiled. “Like him or not is beside the point. André is a clever man who knows when to advance and when to yield.”

  Mirabeau, Barnave, and Talleyrand nodded in agreement.

  When the little bell once again managed to quell the shouting, André moved over to the Right, waving both hands, crying out at full voice, a faintly provocative smile at his lips.

  “…Therefore, today I stand here to present the petition of the people of Paris and to answer their demand: that these men be dismissed!”

  Unfortunately, the prosecutor’s fervent speech was interrupted again—this time by an opposition bishop.

  “So you think you are Paris itself? Monsieur Prosecutor, is there only one Parisian—and that is you?” The indignant Bishop Prudrelat sprang up, thundering at the shameless usurper of public opinion.

  Before his allies among the Right could swarm in, the prosecutor shot back with fiery words: “Better than you, Prudrelat. I hear that when you were Bishop of the Rouergue, you proclaimed yourself an angel of God. Oh, come—let’s see the fine feathers on the angel’s back!”

  With that, he even traced the sign of the cross on his chest in mock solemnity, setting off another happy burst of laughter. The radical deputies, who loathed conservative clergy, joined in a chorus of hisses for the former Bishop of Rouergue, leaving Prudrelat abashed and discredited, wishing he could sink into the floor.

  After enjoying Prudrelat’s discomfiture, André straightened and returned to his indictment. Righteous anger in his chest, the prosecutor swung his right arm hard and pointed toward the four prim-faced cabinet ministers seated among the guests, and roared again:

  “…Now,

  the people of Paris demand the dismissal of the Minister of the Interior, the Comte de Saint-Priest;

  the dismissal of the Minister of War, the Comte de La Tour du Pin;

  the dismissal of the Minister of Justice, the Vicomte de Champien;

  and…”

  Note:

  The Plain (Marais) was the large bloc of centrist, often uncommitted deputies in the Constituent Assembly who usually voted with whichever side seemed most practical at the moment.