After October 1789, the National Guard was formally established in Paris. Its rank-and-file were all local “active citizens”: male citizens aged twenty-five or older who could show proof of paying taxes. As for the officers, about half were elected by their men (such as Captain Brune), a smaller number were appointed directly by senior commanders (for example, Colonel André was appointed by the commander-in-chief of the National Guard, Lafayette), and still others obtained commissions by donating a certain amount of property or money to the local National Guard. It was through this last route that Desmont had acquired his rank as lieutenant in the National Guard.

  “Your Excellency, Deputy Chief Prosecutor…”

  The honorific had barely left Desmont’s lips when André cut him off rather rudely.

  “I am not some pompous noble. You can simply call me André.”

  Unlike Father Marey, Desmont did not know André well. The assistant prosecutor, accustomed to deferential manners toward his superiors, flinched inwardly and immediately corrected himself.

  “André, you… ah, you are a party with a direct interest in this case. You cannot preside as judge over a military tribunal. The presiding officer must be a neutral third party with no connection to the matter.”

  André nodded, reasonably satisfied. At least this opportunist in front of him did not dare defy a direct order. Of course, his own decision to style himself presiding judge in this case was indeed untenable in law; the rules on recusal for interested parties had to be followed.

  “Very good. I will appoint Captain Chassé as presiding judge of the military tribunal. You will remain the prosecutor in this case. Over the next thirty minutes the two of you will complete the formalities. Just see that nothing goes wrong.”

  With that, André raised his voice and summoned the orderly outside, instructing Dumas to escort Prosecutor Desmont to Captain Chassé.

  As a lawyer, André still respected the unwritten rules of the judiciary—above all, the appearance of “fairness” and “impartiality” in legal procedure. Thus, before the twenty-five condemned men mounted the gallows, he made sure a prosecutor and a presiding judge were appointed to patch the proceedings into something resembling due process. As for defence counsel, a special military tribunal had no use for such luxuries. Eight months earlier, Marquis de Bouillé had used exactly the same arrangements to suppress the mutiny in Nancy and punish the rebel soldiers.

  Of the twenty-five prisoners André had condemned to death, only five had truly taken part—or were strongly suspected of taking part—in the plot to murder the deputy chief prosecutor. The remaining twenty were people who, since André’s occupation of Reims, had expressed varying degrees of hostility toward the city’s dictator in public: government officials, urban nobles, and clergymen. Once the opportunity arose—after he himself had “fallen victim to an assassination plot”—all these demons and monsters could be rounded up in one reckoning.

  After retaking Reims, André had always maintained a posture of internal tension and outward leniency. He instructed the gendarmerie and the intelligence service to monitor the resisters in secret, but always to “draw the net tight without yet closing it.” For more than three months, his spearhead had been directed chiefly against the Reims Church, which had become the target of public fury. By carving up church property he could please both the National Assembly in Paris and the Provincial Administration in Chalons-en-Champagne. Only once the situation at home and abroad had stabilised did the deputy chief prosecutor turn back to deal with the dissidents within Reims itself.

  His initial plan had been relatively mild: the “merciful” André would select one or two troublemakers and have them eliminated as an example. But his fury at being attacked, combined with an urgent report submitted by Second Lieutenant Penduvas, led him to expand the death list so as to kill two, three birds with one stone.

  The courtyard of the Deminé Convent was very large, easily able to hold more than a thousand people. Baroque buildings ringed the square, and in the middle there had once been an ancient fountain. A few days earlier, when André decided to turn this courtyard into an execution ground, the great fountain had been torn out. Over its foundations, more than twenty carpenters had erected a gallows more than two meters high, with a platform roughly half the size of a tennis court.

  After dawn, the last task on the scaffold was completed: twenty-five nooses hung ready. At that moment, the execution officer, Second Lieutenant Penduvas, took out his pocket-watch to check the time.

  “Seven ten. Thirty minutes to go.”

  The second lieutenant signalled to a sergeant beside him to bring the twenty-five condemned men to the scaffold to await the arrival of death. Then, glancing up at the statue of the Virgin under the convent’s semi-circular dome, he added:

  “Tell Father Michel the prisoners have only twenty minutes for their collective confession.”

  The prison block in the Deminé Convent had three levels. The twenty-five condemned men were held in the basement. Once, this had been the convent’s champagne cellar. Needless to say, no windows were to be found there, and no sunlight reached it in any season. A row of iron doors along one side of the corridor had turned it into a cage no one could escape. In Second Lieutenant Penduvas’ own words, it was the place closest to hell, a space where the damned could begin to grow accustomed to the torments awaiting them.

  Father Michel had served God for thirty years. He had once taught theology to Father Marey, and thanks to that connection had passed the gendarmerie’s scrutiny and obtained permission to come and go freely from the Deminé Convent–prison. He celebrated Mass there, heard prisoners’ confessions, and offered prayers on their behalf.

  The gendarmerie sergeant found Father Michel just as the black-robed priest finished a small Mass in the upstairs hall for a hundred or so family members of suspects. The hall still smelled of incense.

  When he heard why the sergeant had come, the priest’s face changed at once. He handed the censer to one of the guards and followed the sergeant, stumbling down to the ground floor at a half-run. Before they entered the basement, the sergeant lit his torch. Their footsteps echoed one after another along the narrow, uneven staircase.

  The paint on the basement walls had been there for decades, and damp darkness had covered them in mould. The lack of light filled the dungeon with a clammy, sinister air. Father Michel scarcely noticed. All he could think of was that he had been given less than twenty minutes.

  At the sergeant’s signal, the two guards on death-row duty opened the iron door. Father Michel took the torch the sergeant handed him, thanked him, then made another request.

  “I shall need the sacred vessels—the missal, the chalice, the censer, patens, an altar, a holy image, white candles and candlesticks.”

  The sergeant hesitated for a moment, then nodded his consent. He instructed the guards to lock the iron door once the priest was inside, and the three of them went back upstairs to look for the sacred objects needed for the prisoners’ last Mass.

  As the sound of their footsteps faded on the stairs, the priest, torch in hand, groped his way through the silent cellar as though searching for someone. The condemned men had been subjected to nearly ten hours of brutal interrogation by the gendarmes. They were exhausted, many covered in wounds, lying sprawled on heaps of straw, fast asleep. Father Michel searched among them, but never did find the one he was looking for: Conot, younger son of Comte de Saizia.

  Before long, the guards and the sergeant returned. Everything needed for the last rites had been prepared. A piece of fine green damask had been thrown over an old square table to serve as an altar. A large ebony crucifix depicting the Passion hung against the yellowing wall. Four slender white candles, fixed to the makeshift altar with sealing wax, cast a thin light that the walls barely managed to reflect.

  Awakened by Father Michel, the condemned men now all knew their final fate. After a brief moment of chaos, those present seemed to fall under the spell of the faint pure light from the four white candles on the altar. They forgot the shabby, chilling cellar, forgot the horrors about to befall them, forgot the pains in their bodies. Despite the damp stone floor, they knelt before the altar and joined the priest in the last prayer of their lives.

  In the eyes of these condemned men, perhaps God was no more exalted in the great nave of Saint Peter’s in Rome than He was in this poor refuge. The whole cellar fell silent. Only the priest’s voice, guiding his flock in prayer, echoed through the darkness like music from heaven. Tears welled in every eye, and soon heavy drops were sliding down rough cheeks to splash on the floor. At last, the priest spoke the final words of the prayer:

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  “And now let us enter together into the sanctuary. Amen.”

  As soon as the Mass ended, the waiting sergeant, already growing impatient, signalled the dozens of gendarmes who had assembled. They formed two ranks on either side. One by one, the condemned were brought out of the cell, black hoods pulled over their heads as symbols of death, and escorted between two soldiers each to the high gallows in the convent courtyard.

  Father Michel was the last to leave the cell. He intended to follow the twenty-five prisoners up to the surface and complete the final prayers on the scaffold, but the gendarmes stopped him.

  “Forgive me, Father Michel,” the sergeant explained. “Until the execution is over, you may not approach the prisoners again. In truth, your holy duties are already fulfilled.”

  As he spoke, a row of drummers gathered at the foot of the scaffold began a stirring roll. At the same moment, the twenty-five prisoners, their faces hidden by black hoods, felt the nooses slip tight around their necks. The execution officer raised his right hand; the pounding drumbeat stopped as if cut by a knife. Then the gendarmes serving as executioners kicked away the stools beneath each pair of feet, one after another.

  Seeing this, Father Michel could only turn toward the scaffold and sink slowly to his knees, silently completing the final prayers for the dying.

  A few minutes later, when all those on the gallows had stiffened into corpses, the priest of the Mass had already gone. Watching his black figure disappear through the convent gate, the sergeant smiled, walked over to Second Lieutenant Penduvas, and murmured:

  “Sir, it seems our bait has been taken.”

  Before André’s return to Reims, the most powerful of the city’s 2,000 clergymen had been the Bishop de Talleyrand. The person they revered most from the heart, however, was the Reverend Mother of the convent for women and orphans—Reverend Mother Sophia.

  The name Sophia comes from Greek and means “wisdom”. It is popular among Slavic women. Reverend Mother Sophia herself was a Pole, an Eastern Slav and a devout Catholic. During the War of the Polish Succession more than sixty years earlier, the Sophia family had supported Stanis?aw Leszczyński—father-in-law of French King Louis XV—in his bid for the Polish throne. When he failed, the Sophia family was forced into exile, scattering to France, Spain, and Austria. Her parents chose to settle in Reims, capital of the Grand Champagne region—the “city of kings”.

  In 1739, the youngest member of the family, Sophia, was born in Reims. At eight, she joined the church children’s choir, and even then she sensed her calling was to help the poor. At seventeen, she persuaded her parents to let her enter the Order of Saint Dominic. She trained as a Dominican missionary in Paris, Rome, and Vienna. By the time she was twenty-seven, Sister Sophia had returned to Reims to teach physics and Latin at the church school. At thirty-one, she became abbess of the Saint Mary Convent—and has held that office ever since.

  Now the once all-powerful Bishop de Talleyrand lay gravely ill, clinging to life on his sickbed and hovering daily between life and death. Reverend Mother Sophia, however, stood as firm as ever. Most of Reims’ clergy now clustered under her wings, hoping thereby to escape the merciless persecutions of the “demon from hell” named André.

  To the world at large, the small, frail-looking Reverend Mother Sophia appeared solemn, composed, and unshakable, having devoted nearly half a century to serving God with her whole heart. To the poor, she was a kindly angel come to earth, spending more than thirty years’ worth of donations—over a million livres in all—for their relief. To the orphans, she was a gentle, motherly figure. Thanks to her tireless efforts, hardly any unwanted infants had died of neglect in Reims or the wider Grand Champagne region in the thirty years since 1770.

  As for André, he had once described Reverend Mother thus: she was God’s servant, faithfully carrying the love of the Lord to the sick and the poor, allowing them to recover a sense of human dignity. She was an angel sent by God, the embodiment of love and beauty. By the purity of her heart and spirit she had transcended all ranks and boundaries, becoming a treasure shared by all who cherished goodness. She did not preach abstruse philosophy; she acted with simple, honest deeds to cure the diseases of the soul—selfishness, greed, indulgence, indifference, cruelty, exploitation—rooting instead a sense of justice and charity deep in the heart.

  So when Reverend Mother Sophia, wrapped in her black habit, came on foot to gendarmerie headquarters, André rushed downstairs to greet the woman he called his “old mother” in her sixties. What he received in return was a resounding slap.

  The crack of her hand across his face left André stunned. One hand to his cheek, he stood there motionless, as if someone had doused him in ice water, and fell silent. The air grew taut at once. The guards at the entrance, seeing the revered commander André publicly humiliated, rushed forward with rifles and bayonets fixed, eager to defend him—only to be driven back under a hail of curses from Colonel André once he came to his senses.

  The dictator of Reims drew a long breath, turned, forced an awkward smile, and said softly:

  “Reverend Mother, if I remember correctly, this is the second time you have slapped me.”

  More than ten years earlier, André and Marey had punished a Latin teacher suspected of abusing a fellow student—a tonsured priest in his forties. They had crept up on him during his midday nap and, in thick black ink, written “God spurns the sodomite” across his face. The disgraced teacher had been forced to leave his well-paid post at the Reims church school.

  When Reverend Mother later learned the truth, she used her authority to shield André and Marey from school punishment. Afterwards, however, she privately delivered a ringing slap to each troublemaker by way of chastisement. To protect them, she had been compelled to accept harsh conditions from Bishop de Talleyrand—most notably, a one-third cut in the orphanage’s budget.

  That consequence made André secretly resolve that from his very first salary onward, he would donate a full third of his income to the orphanage to make up for the harm he had done. From 1787 until now—forty-one months over more than three years—he had never once missed a payment.

  André himself might no longer remember the total he had given, but Reverend Mother had recorded each donation. From the first few sous in copper to a handful of silver livres and, later, to bank drafts worth thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of livres—the total had passed 1.2 million livres, more than ten times all other donations the orphanage had received in the previous decade.

  Beginning last year, the Reims orphanage had expanded on a grand scale. In the past ten months alone, the number of orphans aged zero to fourteen had grown from around 200 to more than 2,000. It was precisely André’s continuous stream of enormous donations that allowed God’s grace and blessing not only to shine on the unfortunate children of Champagne, but to reach as far as Alsace, Lorraine, Picardy, Burgundy, and even the French Netherlands.

  Clad head to toe in black, immaculate in dress and bearing, Reverend Mother Sophia was not one of those cloistered nuns who never left the convent grille, knowing nothing of the world and doing nothing but praying in isolation, so that in the face of revolution they could only respond with confusion and timidity. She followed André’s career and life closely, rejoicing in secret at his remarkable achievements and fretting over his wavering political positions and anti-clerical tendencies.

  It was only after André’s return to Reims and his persecutions of the Catholic Church and Bishop de Talleyrand that Reverend Mother found his behaviour impossible to tolerate or accept. She tried to cut off contact with him. Then, early that morning, Father Marey had hurried to the convent to report that André, seeking revenge for Comte de Saizia’s attempt on his life, had brought large forces into the city and was preparing to carry out a general slaughter in Reims.

  At first, Reverend Mother had been shaken by his words. Unable to master her anger, she rushed to the gendarmerie headquarters to confront André. Yet it was not the “demon from hell” she herself had raised who was awakened by that slap, but the Reverend Mother who had been blinded by rage.

  Near the Deminé Convent, the devout old nun met Father Michel hurrying in the opposite direction. A brief exchange revealed that only twenty-five people had just been executed, not the 500-plus souls Father Marey had claimed. When she turned to find Marey and confront him, the priest who had trailed at her heels all the way there had somehow slipped away without a trace—a clear sign of a guilty conscience.

  At that moment, Reverend Mother realised she had been deceived. It was the same old trick. When André and Marey, two exceptionally clever boys, had got into trouble a decade earlier, they would use such methods to hoodwink her and the convent sisters, hoping to escape adult punishment—and, time and again, they had succeeded.

  Remembering this, Reverend Mother’s mood calmed somewhat. Pious as ever, she at once offered a prayer of repentance to God for her earlier loss of composure. When her prayer was done, she still refused to enter the Deminé Convent—which now served as both prison and place of execution—and equally refused to enter City Hall or gendarmerie headquarters. To stay far from strife and keep her soul pure, she had always refused to take part in politics or to set foot in secular places not belonging to the Catholic Church.

  Thus, André could only accompany the old nun on a walk through the city garden that lay between the Deminé Convent and the gendarmerie headquarters. The garden had been laid out 180 years earlier by the Reims City Hall as a place of rest for Louis XIII during his coronation in the city. In fact, if one added together all the time spent there by the four French kings who came before and after Louis XIII, their total would still not exceed twenty minutes.

  Perhaps its designer had lacked imagination. The garden was little more than a scaled-down version of the Tuileries Garden 150 kilometers away. It used a similar symmetrical layout; patterned lawns spread across the ground like embroidered carpets, solemn yet lively, and beautiful statues and graceful paths were scattered around the lawns and fountains.

  “…You know I detest the powerful men of the Reims Church led by Bishop de Talleyrand and the deeds they have done,” André said. “But I have never hated the Church itself, nor opposed God. On the contrary, I have always treated it with care. My own upbringing owes everything to the Church’s charity. That is why, for years, I have supported the orphanage under God’s care and yours.”

  Here he shifted his tone and went on:

  “The great revolution that broke out in Paris the year before last turned the old elites into targets for the people and the Assembly to attack and destroy. As for the Catholic Church, on the one hand it controls vast properties; on the other, many bishops are drawn from the ranks of the high-born. As a result, the Church, like the old elites, very easily becomes the chief target of the revolutionary movement. The Church holds enormous wealth, but its reputation is in tatters and it has no means of defending itself. It is bound to suffer restriction, control, confiscation, oppression—even slaughter—at the hands of secular men.”

  This was no empty alarmism on André’s part. Decades of agitation by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau had led the French public and the fiery revolutionaries to regard monks and nuns—people who lived lives of ascetic hardship—as idlers. In truth, many of them were indeed nothing more than that. Their vows, the radicals said, violated human rights and had to be abolished. Monks and nuns were ordered to let their hair grow again and return to the lay state.