Unlike the regiment’s unhurried march, Jacques de Cazalès raced north in a private, two-horse light carriage and, before dawn on the third day, reached a noble estate on Reims’s southern outskirts—the manor of the Marquis de Demo?.

  The Marquis’s residence was a massive assemblage of stones of every size: a stone courtyard, stone steps, stone balustrades, and every manner of stone statue—a Roman noble’s villa transposed. Yet the grounds were not all monotony: before the house stretched a French open garden in the Versailles style—trees and blooms arranged with cunning taste around a central fountain, the scene tranquil and restorative.

  There was no leisure today for appreciation. Vicomte de Cazalès leapt down, and, after less than two minutes in the courtyard, cast aside noble decorum and strode straight into the great hall, to the alarm of servants who hurried after him.

  As a footman moved to bar his way in the corridor, the Marquis de Demo? descended the stair. He rebuked the youth for his rudeness to an honored guest and waved him off.

  “Jacques, my dear friend—what brings you to Reims today?” The Marquis advanced to embrace his old schoolmate from the Collège Louis-le-Grand.

  The Marquis was splendidly dressed—softly curled hair, cheeks heavily powdered—a typical court noble of Versailles, lacking only a sword at the hip. Opposite him, the Vicomte de Cazalès was austerity itself: black coat, white stock, powdered wig with a small queue.

  Cazalès put out a hand to stop the embrace, his face set. “Do you think I rode day and night from Paris, caked in dust, merely for pleasantries?”

  Sensing the weather, the Marquis ushered him to a small salon and told a maid to bring steaming coffee.

  A cup revived some color in Cazalès’s tired, pale face; the Marquis poured a second and, carelessly needling, said, “Whom does your great Assembly censure now? Priests who refuse the oath—or nobles fled to Coblenz?”

  “As it may be—or smugglers,” Cazalès said, cupping the porcelain. “Especially those who run coffee and sugar up from Antwerp.” The reference was plain.

  The Marquis’s hand jerked; the pot nearly slipped. Cazalès caught it, saving the fine Persian carpet.

  “How could you know this?” the Marquis asked—an admission by another name.

  “Not only I,” Cazalès replied. “Your old acquaintance, the new Deputy Prosecutor of the Marne, knows as well. In fact, André informed me yesterday.”

  He glanced by habit toward the window: on the rear lawn two small sprites circled their young mother, waving ribbons and leaves, their laughter like bells.

  The Marquis strode over, yanked the curtains shut, and snarled, “Remember—no one speaks that man’s name in this house. No one.”

  Unmoved by the gust, Cazalès rolled the stiffness from his neck and explained evenly: “Say no more, then—but you cannot alter the fact: the orphan returns, and with troops. 1,500 trained soldiers, 400 horses, and fifteen guns. Who will resist—your Reims National Guard of fewer than 600? Unarmed shopkeepers? Or General, the Marquis de Bouillé’s German mercenaries far away at Metz?

  “Moreover, as acting Deputy Prosecutor of the Marne, he may indict any noble, official, merchant, or commoner in this city who refuses cooperation as a traitor to the nation. And in Paris, a majority of the Constituent Assembly—myself included—will support every lawful measure he undertakes in Reims.”

  The words quickened, the tone rose; by the last sentence he was all but shouting. The Marquis seized a vase, poised to smash it—then set it down and sagged into a sofa, spent.

  After a long moment, he spoke low: “When I took the Tuileries’ request—rode north to General, the Marquis de Bouillé, opened that trade—I knew this day might come. Will you hand me over as the King’s scapegoat?”

  Since spring, the Marquis had shifted funds quietly to the United Provinces and the German lands. If the King escaped the Tuileries, the Demo? family would follow the royal household to Metz or Coblenz, and there form a government-in-exile of nobles—awaiting Austrian or Prussian help to re-enter France. But four weeks ago the King abandoned the plan, and word leaked. A king has endless loyal shoulders for his blame; a country marquis retired to his acres has none—he would be thrown to the crowd.

  Cazalès shook his head. “No one intends that. He requires a whole Reims; I must defend the rule of the Capet house; you must protect family and estate. These needs are not at odds. And in Paris, he has shown no sign of aiming at you or yours.”

  He continued: “But Bishop de Talleyrand and the Church at Reims will scarcely be spared. Victors and troops require spoils; when heads must not fall, the Church’s assets must pay in their stead. From Paris to Reims, few will plead for that insatiable bishop.”

  So ran the bargain struck with André: the City Hall—Mayor Basile, Prosecutor Hubert, and Colonel Brice—would see all “political crimes” erased; but the Bishop’s palace and the convents would yield their holdings, accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the assignat, and enforce the Decree on the Clerical Oath.

  “My time in Reims is only thirty-six hours,” Cazalès concluded. “By dusk on December 4 I must deliver the result to that man.”

  André had not told him when the regiment would arrive, but a soldier could reckon the pace: from Versailles to Reims was 150 kilometers—three days quick, five days slow. He must win the city’s consent by the fourth day.

  “Very well,” said the Marquis. “After luncheon, I shall go into Reims myself. You shall have an answer this evening.”

  “No—I go with you,” Cazalès said, tossing back his cup.

  …

  In France—and across Europe—great cities rose around their churches. So Paris and Orléans; most of all, Reims.

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  Reims Cathedral—later called Notre-Dame at the order of Napoleon—was as weighty in French history as Notre-Dame de Paris, and of like Gothic form. There Clovis took baptism; from 1027 until the Revolution, nearly every French king was crowned there, most famously in 1429 when Jeanne d’Arc escorted Charles VII to his anointing.

  A broad square opened before the west front; the city had no tall buildings, so the cathedral rose all the more. Its structure was like a Bach cantata: flying buttresses lifting to a roof bristling with slender spires; the stone choir layered upward into the clouds. At sunset, the whole took on a golden wash; tracery and statuary glowed. The four standing figures to the right of the central portal were masterpieces of the High Gothic.

  The bishop of Reims was Bishop de Talleyrand. In Second Lieutenant Penduvas’s report, he appeared a small, withered man in his fifties, ghastly in aspect, his humanity and judgment long stunted, a great grafter corroding a holy church—an opinion colored by Abbé Charles de Marey, for few lower clergy in Reims loved the bishop. They joked he gathered wealth “for God,” who, being too high to come draw it, left the Bishop to do so in His stead.

  Strictly, Rome knows bishops and cardinals, not “archbishops”—the honor marks tenure or breadth of diocese. While village women went barefoot, the Bishop kept vestments in white, red, black, green, and purple—over 300 sets—housed in a special wardrobe at the palace. With purple the bishop’s color (and scarlet the cardinal’s), he wore a purple cassock as his habit, with purple sash and zucchetto.

  While half the town clacked in wooden sabots—many peasants had not even those—the Bishop owned over one hundred pairs of pointed calf-skin shoes. The tithe and fees for absolution alone—abolished among Protestants long since, but only forbidden by the Assembly in October 1789—brought him at least six hundred thousand livres yearly. With estates—vineyards and champagne houses—stipends for masses great and small for royals, nobles, and rich merchants, and “service fees” for selling abbacies, almshouse wardenships (including hospitals), and parish cures, his annual take reached perhaps 1.2 million livres.

  A local jest told of a pious couple whose cook, by mistake, fed them a tub of salted pork for tuna. Conscience-stricken, they sent their eldest to ask the Bishop how to atone—with a purse to aid holy works. The son never went—he spent it all at a tavern and came home radiant: “The sinners have been absolved. Amen.”

  After the Revolution began, decrees clipped the Church’s wings: tithe and absolution fees abolished; the Assembly took control of appointments, cutting “service fees”; worst of all, the Assembly and cabinet issued the assignat, pawning church lands to fill the treasury. Thus at the year’s start, when Reims City Hall and the National Guard chose the Tuileries and Louis XVI against the Marne Commune and the Assembly, the Bishop, for his own interest, stood with the conservatives.

  So church, city, and guard achieved a harsh unity; for nearly a year, neither the Marne Commune at Chalons nor the Assembly at Paris could prevail; expeditions failed; a semi-independent Reims was tacitly endured.

  In September, bad news came: a certain André Franck—once the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court, said to have grown up in a Reims orphanage—was authorized to form a Champagne Composite Regiment. Soon, the Marne Commune made him Deputy Prosecutor in charge of the Reims question. At first, the Bishop sneered at bluster. Two months later, it proved no bluff: 1,500 drilled men, 400 horses, and fifteen guns had moved into Versailles—only three to five days’ march away.

  With danger imminent, the Bishop wrote to his unruly nephew—Bishop Talleyrand-Périgord the younger—begging him to deal with André and avert settlement after the fact. Even with a twenty-thousand-livre “fee,” the slick nephew failed.

  The sole “offer” returned was intolerable: resign the Reims see, surrender all seized church property, and pay over half of the Bishop’s personal wealth, cash included.

  Thus, the Bishop made the worst plans. He ordered his treasurer to liquidate lands—especially vineyards and maisons. The treasurer replied that a new Marne decree required signatures of both prosecutors on any real-estate sale in the Reims district for the next three months; without them, no notary would pass title, and no buyer would dare purchase. Meanwhile, all banks in Reims received André’s order: freeze, for thirty days from receipt, all deposits and liquid funds tied to the Church; no transfers outward; violators would face triple penalties and criminal charges, and any monies traced would be clawed back.

  Had the order borne only the Marne Commune’s seal, bankers might have shrugged; all year, decrees from Chalons-en-Champagne had gone unenforced in Reims. But signed André Franck, it was another matter.

  After the great fermiers-généraux faction had broken in Bordeaux and Paris, few dared despise the will and power of this prosecutor. In Bordeaux, the wretched Savigny had nearly perished with his house; millions were squeezed out. Whisperers swore the bloody raid on the Saint-Louis-en-l’?le mansion had been André’s contrivance (a calumny!). He pressed the cabinet by impeachment in the Assembly and forced the tax-farmers to accept his terms.

  So when the Bishop’s treasurer tried to draw and move funds to Paris or abroad, the polite bankers of Reims refused as one, waving André’s order—even a fee at three to five times the usual could not tempt them. There is profit not worth the gallows. To the propertied, the saddest fate is to die before one can spend.

  …

  On December 4, three weeks before Christmas, Reims Cathedral held a grand mass. The nave was nearly full. On the high altar, a great painting showed an angel with a spear over the vanquished Satan; rows of clergy sat in brilliant robes and miters. The rose window poured light in colored fans that moved over the wall and pier and pew like hands of a clock.

  Bishop de Talleyrand wore a purple biretta, a pectoral cross on a green-corded strand, a purple cassock to the feet, a white rochet to the knee, and a purple mozzetta. He seemed to forget the week’s insults and misfortunes and thundered forth the Word; the faithful, mostly of middle and elder years, sat solemn in best clothes, answering with long “Amens.”

  Acolytes with red sashes swung censers; white smoke drifted through the nave. Suddenly, the organ sounded from the west gallery; the choir stood flanking the pipes; voices rose—clear trebles with rich middle parts, echoing in the vaults.

  Before the hymn was done, a priest hurried to the Bishop, whispered; the Bishop, his face iron, strode out, leaving Communion to his vicar. In the rear, he stripped the pontifical vestments for a plain black cassock with purple sash and went to his private salon.

  There sat the three powers of Reims: Mayor Basile of City Hall, Prosecutor Hubert, and Colonel Brice of the National Guard.

  The Bishop burst in, roaring, “Gentlemen, as I prepared to give Communion, you announce that Reims will fall and that we must accept André’s extortion? No. I will not accept it—never!”

  Awed by the Bishop’s force, and by the holy glow cast by the rose, the three faltered, lips moving, no words.

  Then a strange voice came from a side bench: “Your Excellency, we are here to inform you, not to seek your consent.”

  The Bishop wheeled and saw two others: the familiar Marquis de Demo?—and a stranger with a soldier’s bearing, doubtless the one who had just spoken out of turn.

  The Marquis stepped forward to introduce him. “This is Vicomte de Cazalès, deputy of the Constituent Assembly, who—”

  Cazalès cut him off and addressed the guard commander: “Colonel Brice, for Reims and for your family—do your duty. Now.”

  The afternoon before, the Marquis had brought Cazalès into Reims to meet secretly with Mayor Basile, Prosecutor Hubert, and Colonel Brice. In under twenty minutes, the three had agreed to Cazalès’s plan of self-preservation. Only Bishop de Talleyrand remained an obstacle; he stood to lose the most and swore to rally all the faithful of Reims to resist when the Champagne Composite Regiment entered.

  To the devout he was God’s nearest servant; to other powers, he was an insatiable, shameless old reed—better gone, and peace with him.

  Cazalès drew a pistol and leveled it at the Bishop’s brow. In a low voice, he said, “To live—or to die. Choose. If you would live, be silent at once. If you would die, call out—loud.”