In the corridor leading to the kitchen, the incoherent Father Pansmon was matching the swine-butcher Legendre drink for drink. Disdaining the servers’ small goblets, they simply raised the bottles to their lips. Nearby, General Dillon shook his head and tossed a server a five-livre silver coin to keep watch over the two shiny-scalped drunkards.

  Lucile’s family remained together, chatting. Monsieur Claude kept urging his wife, Annelette, again and again to see that their dearest elder daughter, Adéla?de, be married off soon. Madame Anne-Fran?oise Boissière said nothing; she watched her daughter and son-in-law brazenly kissing in the bedroom. Adéla?de gazed longingly at Robespierre’s back, sincerely hoping he would honor the promise he had made to her six months earlier.

  In the afternoon, André entered the commercial courtyard and, before going upstairs, ran into Danton and Brune.

  Seeing André in a Colonel’s uniform, Captain Brune, likewise in uniform, drew himself up, tightened his abdomen, and gave a regulation salute. André returned it, though his manner felt decidedly irregular.

  Danton, half-squinting, gave André a once-over and quipped, “My dear deputy prosecutor, Colonel—there’s a General upstairs. Do remember to make that salute properly.”

  “Damn it, I’ll change and come back.” With that, André strode into a nearby tailor’s shop, to Danton’s roaring laughter. Brune, less free to indulge himself, only suppressed a grin with some pain.

  Seizing the moment, Danton turned to his follower with a grave face. “I’ve spoken to André about you. He agrees that once you finish your further course at the Paris military school next year, you can report to the Reims camp. Perhaps by then he’ll already be General of the Champagne Composite Brigade. But remember this: André is not that high-handed dullard Lafayette. He demands that every subordinate—from private to officer—obey without condition any order from a superior. So the radical stuff Marat and Hébert peddle must not enter the camp, Rousseau included. From what I hear, André has publicly executed several officers and men for spreading extremist ideas.”

  Brune nodded hard and held to his view. “Paris is too comfortable now—practically a grave for soldiers. In the Champagne Composite Regiment there may still be chances for merit.”

  Indeed, that lucky fellow Hoche had risen from a worthless private to a cavalry Captain in less than a year after following André. And Brune’s distant cousin in the Champagne Composite Regiment—Henri-Gratien Bertrand, who had transferred in from the Versailles National Guard—had written to recommend that Captain Brune serve under Colonel André: “The benefits here are enough to drive a man mad, and there are regular live-fire exercises.”

  Seeing Brune’s mind was set, Danton said no more. When André reappeared in a crisp black tailcoat, the three went upstairs together.

  In the hall, André offered a few words of congratulations and an expensive, slender gift to the newlyweds, the Desmoulins, then turned his attention toward Danton, Robespierre, Brissot, Pétion, and General Dillon.

  “My Champagne Composite Regiment moves for Reims tomorrow,” André said to his Paris allies without much concealment. “I will make every effort to enter the city peacefully, but I will not rule out force. I therefore hope our operations will have the understanding and support of the Constituent Assembly and the Paris Commune.”

  “I and the Commune have always stood with you.” Danton spoke first without hesitation, and Brissot and Fréron chimed in. Of the Commune’s nine members on its General Committee, three—Danton, Brissot, and Billaud-Varenne—were close to André; Fréron, though only an alternate without a vote, could, together with these four men’s influence, sway three more committee members, securing six votes to push the Commune to support any of André’s military actions at Reims.

  As a rising star at the Ministry of War, General Dillon, close to Danton and Desmoulins, cared little that two weeks earlier André had forced his own superior, the Minister of War, the Comte de Tour du Pin, to submit his resignation twice. In fact, should Tour du Pin be ousted, Dillon expected a fine post in the ministry; and André had promised that Church assets seized in Reims would be reserved for his many Paris allies. Dillon declared he would watch cabinet attitudes toward Reims and the Marne and pass word to André at once.

  “The only premise,” Robespierre stressed, “is that there be no mass civilian casualties.” André nodded. He knew the deputy’s threshold meant fewer than 300 deaths—a figure taken from early 1789’s bread riots in Paris, which Robespierre deemed a cruel massacre.

  “Suspects must stand before a court and receive the impartial judgment of the law,” added Pétion. He feared André might enlarge the list of crimes and, with his power, arrest opponents at will. Months earlier, merely as the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court, André had been able to control Bordeaux; now, as deputy prosecutor and volunteer Colonel, his power could let him do as he pleased in Reims, even the whole Marne.

  To his friends’ cautions, André had no objection. As fellow lawyers, they all knew the essence of law: it safeguards not abstract fairness or justice but the social order required by those in power. The vocabulary of justice is mere lip service—take it too seriously, and you lose.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Monsieur and Madame Duplessis, noting André and learning his identity from their son-in-law, urged by Annelette, considered presenting their elder daughter to the deputy prosecutor of the Marne. Desmoulins and Lucile hurried to stop them: leaving other matters aside, André’s amorous character—children scattered here and there—was something Adéla?de could never abide.

  André stayed only half an hour, then took leave of the Desmoulins and the others—his regiment was to march at dawn.

  …

  On the day the Champagne Composite Regiment left the Versailles camp, the conservative leader Cazalès, after requesting leave from the rotating president of the National Assembly, set out in the afternoon from Paris for Reims, 150 kilometers away.

  As before at Versailles, the regiment advanced neither fast nor slow, maintaining roughly ten hours and about forty kilometers of marching per day, making camp early to entrench when it rained. Unlike the Mediterranean’s mild damp, the north of France was colder: in December, temperatures ranged from 5°C at night to 12°C by day. On the advice of the two medical officers, André forbade marching in rain or snow until the men acclimatized to the cold, and had the quartermaster issue mulled red wine with ginger to reduce influenza in the ranks.

  Even so, on the third day out, Medical Officer Larrey reported twenty-five cases in the Composite Regiment—diarrhea and influenza still within control. Per plan, the sick were to be sent in stages to the Catholic hospital at the town of Oulchy-le-Chateau in the Aisne and kept in a new isolation ward for two or three weeks.

  A “Catholic hospital,” formally a hospice, was a charitable institute run by a convent. In Paris, the conditions were passable; in the provinces, a convent’s best might be a simple bed—two layers of straw over a plank. Even that “benefit” had been secured by Larrey’s promise to perform two free surgical operations daily for the convent’s other patients.

  To Colonel André’s eye, everything in the hospital was filthy, chaotic. Poor housing was tolerable; the sisters’ devotion admirable; but clean drinking water was not assured, and their fingernails were dirty—no concept of washing hands or body. Though Larrey had repeatedly instructed the sisters who assisted him, the results were meager.

  “We must establish a medical-nursing system directly under regimental headquarters, not continue relying on the convent,” André told Larrey after inspecting the squalor. Doctors had long emphasized cure over care; even when André had proposed a nursing system at Bordeaux, household servants pressed into service lacked training. As for the convent sisters, “married to God,” they would not accept the regiment’s hygiene precepts, which ran counter to Catholic notions.

  “But I am a doctor,” Larrey muttered—the work of tending the sick could hardly fall to him.

  “Then find me a head nurse who can do it—and do it well!” André barked, so loudly that soldiers and sisters nearby scattered in alarm.

  Noticing he had overstepped, André stepped to a young sister, said “I’m sorry,” and stooped to help her gather the patients’ clothing she had dropped.

  Handing the bundle back, André turned to Larrey. “Lieutenant, you have twenty-four hours. Be ready.” The lagging medical officer was to reach Fismes, thirty kilometers away, by tomorrow evening to attend the live-fire exercise.

  “Yes, sir,” the regiment’s second medical officer said, resigned.

  After André left, Larrey told the young sister—still frozen in place—to prepare the instruments for the morning’s surgeries. Her name was Charlotte-Lavel, just over twenty, from the town of Soissons, eighteen kilometers away. Likely well educated at home, she was among the few in the convent hospital able to accept the ideas of disinfection and microbes.

  Strictly, Charlotte was not “married to God”; her habit was a cover. She was the eldest daughter of the Baron de Soissons. Having survived smallpox in childhood, she bore many pockmarks on her right cheek, which blighted her chances of marriage.

  …

  Two years earlier, after being rejected repeatedly, the heartbroken Charlotte had left the warm family that had given her joy and shelter and entered the convent at Oulchy-le-Chateau, some five leagues away. The convent, built in the late fifteenth century—said to commemorate the Maid’s return escort of Charles VII to Reims for his coronation—had founded a charity hospital at its outset to aid the suffering.

  With its dense piety and strict rule, the convent hospital served as a shield against worldly slander, preserving both the nurses’ reputations and the convent itself intact through the storms of 1789 and the Great Fear.

  In eighteenth-century eyes, dealing with patients of any sort was filthy and dangerous. “Hospital” and “nursing” were words people avoided—frightful, shameful things. With poor medicine, chronic deficits, and frequent war, the eighteenth-century French church hospital was a byword for misfortune, squalor, and confusion.

  Charlotte, however, volunteered to be a probationer nurse rather than a professed sister. Unafraid of filth or hardship, she gave her time and heart to the patients. Seeing many lacked clothing and food, she secretly channeled medicines, money, provisions, sheets, blankets, and garments sent by her mother and sister to relieve the needy nearby.

  When all the sisters shrank from serving as assistant to the “demon surgeon” who split bellies open—Medical Officer Larrey—Charlotte stepped forward, living daily amid blood, mastering fears that would unman many a man. She had sensed that this young, handsome doctor, apart from his patients, was the first man not to despise her.

  Thus, when Colonel André harshly scolded Larrey, Charlotte cleverly dropped a stack of linen to draw the commander’s attention and defuse the scene. She meant also to help solve the next difficulty.

  The following morning, after the last operation, Charlotte sought out Larrey. She was willing to serve as matron of the regimental infirmary and had already contacted several probationer sisters wishing to leave the convent, along with older girls unable to afford a dowry.

  “I have only one request—that I may remain your first assistant,” said Mademoiselle Charlotte, now back in her chemise and youthful attire, with a blush.

  Note:

  The Great Fear was a wave of panic and rural unrest in France in the summer of 1789, driven by rumors of aristocratic plots and bandit attacks, and it helped accelerate revolutionary upheaval.