A week earlier in Versailles, a nun had publicly denounced a priest who had taken the oath and refused to attend the Mass he was celebrating. Once the story spread, countless outraged townspeople stormed the convent. Without asking who was right or wrong, they seized all the nuns, dragged them to the market square, stripped them naked, and flogged them in public. Throughout the entire incident, the police and the National Guard stayed nearby, watching coldly from a distance.

  In the fourth month after the promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Louis XVI, under the overwhelming pressure of the Constituent Assembly and in spite of the papal envoy’s vehement opposition, finally signed the Decree on the Clerical Oath, giving it the force of law.

  Over the following two-plus months, amid heated debate, the Vatican finally abandoned its ambiguous attitude toward the reform of the French Catholic Church. In the eyes of the Pope in Rome and the cardinals of the Sacred College, France—the “eldest daughter of the Church”, the dutiful child of Catholicism—had become a land of ruin, and the government had sunk into the role of godless accomplice.

  News from Rome had confirmed (in fact, this was André drawing on his foreknowledge of the future) that Pope Pius VI would, in two weeks’ time—before Easter—publish a bull fiercely condemning the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Decree on the Clerical Oath, as well as denouncing the principles on which the French Constituent Assembly had based its legislation.

  The Pope would declare that the Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted by the French Assembly ran counter to divine revelation, for the absolute freedoms it proclaimed denied the rights of God and truth.

  André even went so far as to claim that, according to the intelligence he had, Pope Pius VI would likely call upon priests and bishops who had sworn loyalty to the Constituent Assembly to admit their errors publicly, and would forbid any bishop elected by the French people from exercising episcopal authority.

  “…Once the papal bull is issued,” André continued, “the French Church will be torn by a violent internal split. On one side will stand the ‘constitutional Church’ recognised by the state; on the other, the Church that remains faithful to Rome and refuses to submit. The political situation in France is extremely complex. Conditions vary from place to place and person to person, and dealing with this crisis will demand extraordinary wisdom and patient restraint from all parties….

  “But sadly, this is an age of revolution, when agitated passions rule. Radicalism and violence are far more popular than caution and compromise. Already in Paris, Orléans, Strasbourg, and other cities, people are shouting bloodthirsty slogans like: ‘Hang all non-juring priests’… In this struggle reeking of blood, I am the only one willing to do everything possible to limit the damage inflicted on the Catholic Church by anti-religious extremists—at least here in Reims and in Champagne.”

  André spoke quite bluntly to Reverend Mother: from now on, and for a long time to come, the Catholic Church would find itself in dire straits. Even if violence was not a daily occurrence, it would be subject to ceaseless political control and discrimination, systematic legal restrictions and interference—unless all priests and nuns, without hesitation, followed the political line laid down in Paris.

  For bishops and priests unwilling to bow to the Paris authorities and unwilling to swear loyalty to a constitution and a state that violated freedom of belief, there would be only two paths left: flight into exile or retreat into the underground. André concluded by saying he was willing to provide a political umbrella for the Catholic Church in the Reims region—but only on condition that monks and nuns obeyed his arrangements unconditionally and refrained from seeking trouble.

  Of the twenty-five condemned men hanged earlier, only two were clergymen. Their true crimes had nothing to do with any public political resistance to André’s rule. In fact, their deaths were simply self-inflicted. Both priests had wretched reputations; one was guilty of murder for gain, the other of long-term abuse of children. André had merely used them as sacrificial victims. As for the others still in custody, he gave Reverend Mother his word that, after a careful and “civilised” review, they would be released within five to seven days.

  André followed Reverend Mother’s slow steps through the garden, explaining his ideas and intentions in a tone of sincere earnestness. All the while, the old nun listened in silence. She neither rebuked nor argued with him, merely clasped the crucifix on her breast in both hands. From time to time, her lips moved ever so slightly.

  When the bells of Reims Cathedral rang out again, Reverend Mother stopped, turned, and looked long and deeply at André. Her face, already gaunt, seemed suddenly to have aged by many years.

  “Very well. Then remember what you have promised me today. May Almighty God forgive all the sins you have already committed.”

  That was the admonition Reverend Mother left with André before she took her leave.

  On the whole, the French Revolution was indeed a calamity from which the Catholic Church never fully recovered; yet it was also a great test and a purifying ordeal. To borrow a proverb from the East: “A loss may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.”

  After more than twenty years of trials like hell itself, the faith and inner strength of the French Church were refined and purified. Burdened with far fewer worldly entanglements, it could devote itself once more to its fundamental mission. From the nineteenth century onward, whether bishops of high status, respected parish priests, or ordinary clergy, most came from modest or even poor families.

  At the same time, the Church’s repeated compromises with secular authority allowed French scholars in the nineteenth century to cast off the intellectual fetters that the Church had long imposed on them. The humanities and social sciences flourished, and the country embraced the Industrial Revolution—symbolised by the steam engine—without serious obstruction. Across the Mediterranean, however, France’s ally, the Ottoman Empire, which refused any real religious reform, slid ever more deeply into the abyss.

  No one knew when Father Marey, who had been hiding inside gendarmerie headquarters, slipped around to André’s side in the garden. He cautiously asked:

  “Do you think Reverend Mother believes everything you just said?”

  André shrugged, smiled in a noncommittal way, and replied, “Perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn’t. That is not the main point. The point is that I have given my word that I will do my utmost to protect the Catholic Church in Reims from harm.”

  Then, as the superior, he changed the subject and asked the priest:

  “Any progress?”

  Father Marey shook his head helplessly. “How could it be so fast? The agents we planted in the orphanage have sent back nothing so far. Do you need me to contact them in person?”

  André immediately rejected the idea, his expression turning grave.

  “Not for the moment. I am worried Reverend Mother will grow suspicious. Besides, Father Michel you distrust has begun to show his true colours. Once we have dealt with the rebels, I shall choose the right moment to explain everything to Reverend Mother myself.”

  Father Marey looked up at André, still shaken, and muttered:

  “Ever since I started doing these wicked things with you, I have worried that when we die, we won’t go to heaven. We will only fall into hell and suffer there forever!”

  He crossed himself again and again as he spoke, silently confessing his sins to the God in his heart.

  André burst out laughing and replied carelessly:

  “Do not worry. I am Lucifer, brimful of dark power, a great God-Favoured one. Even if I fall into hell, I will lead the demons to conquer it and turn that place into a paradise on earth.”

  …

  A few days after Colonel André ordered twenty-five criminals to be hanged in the convent courtyard, seven or eight northern herdsmen in strange dress arrived in the little town of Bacourt. Since the Champagne Composite Regiment had taken up position nearby, the peaceful townsfolk had become accustomed to travellers stopping there to trade.

  From the outside, the herdsmen looked desperately poor. Their only garments were goatskin cloaks that covered them from throat to knee, and coarse white trousers. They wore battered tricornes or broad-brimmed felt hats, wrapped around with strands of coloured wool. Under their open coats, rough cloth waistcoats showed.

  Such poor herdsmen could not afford the town’s inn. After paying a small fee to the town constable, they were allowed to pitch camp on a stretch of grassland just outside Bacourt. Soon three of them returned to the town, bartering hides and skins for food and wine and exchanging a few casual words with local residents, while the rest quietly slipped away from the camp and drifted toward the army barracks. There they lurked around, observing the surroundings.

  From time to time, the scouts raised their heads and scrutinised the woods near the camp, the paths and the rocks lining the roads, like hounds sniffing the wind for the scent of prey.

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  Just after sunset, with night not yet fully fallen, another gentleman arrived in Bacourt—a civilised-looking traveller. He wore a round top hat and fancy turned-down boots; his carefully powdered hair was tied in a small queue at the back of his head, the precise finish of a man with a good education.

  The middle-aged gentleman politely declined an invitation to supper from the mayor of the town, who also owned the inn, saying that he had to press on to Reims. Curiously, however, his carriage halted as soon as it had left the town. Under the cover of darkness, the gentleman slipped into the rough tents of the northern herdsmen. Inside, only a single herdsman in his thirties sat waiting, his face heavy with sorrow.

  “Damn it. Why are you stopping here instead of under the walls of Reims? Has something happened?” the man with the little queue demanded.

  The herdsman nodded. “Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Véran. We have very bad news. A few days ago, Comte de Saizia tried to assassinate André and failed. The gendarmes killed him on the spot. Since then, the dictator of Reims has sealed all routes into and out of the city and set his men to hunting down all who oppose him. For the sake of safety, we had no choice but to make camp here and wait for your new orders.”

  The officer named Véran flew into a panic at once.

  “Captain Francis, how did it come to this? According to the plan, Comte de Saizia was supposed to wait until we reached Reims before he took action.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Véran and the herdsmen in the makeshift camp were all part of a band of rebels from the Ardennes—the guerrilla force. Their plan had been to cooperate with Comte de Saizia, lying low in Reims, to assassinate Colonel André, commander of the Champagne Composite Regiment, or to plunge Reims into chaos with a series of attacks. Clearly, the conspiracy had collapsed before it had even begun.

  Captain Fran?ois went on:

  “The word from Reims is that the Bishop of Arras was hiding in the Comte’s estate and someone betrayed his whereabouts. That is why the gendarmes struck so suddenly.”

  “And the Bishop of Arras? And the Comte’s younger son, Conot? Can we get them out?” Véran asked.

  The Bishop of Arras enjoyed great influence in the Royalist party in Koblenz and was particularly close to Comte d’Artois. Comte de Saizia’s elder son, Pirotto, was currently serving in the Royal German Legion as a major aide-de-camp to General Marquis de Bouillé. Now that the old Comte had been killed, doing everything possible to save his heir was, of course, the first duty of his comrades.

  The captain shook his head.

  “They say both are being held in the Deminé Convent, across from gendarmerie headquarters in Reims. There are more than 500 prisoners locked up there in all. The place is heavily guarded. As for the details, I am still waiting for news from Father Michel.”

  At that moment, hurried footsteps rustled across the grass outside the tent. A Reims merchant, acting as Father Michel’s special courier, came in to deliver more bad news to the two officers. Because of the failed plot to assassinate André, twenty-five suspects had already been hanged by a special military tribunal appointed by the “demon” André. As for the Bishop of Arras, he had been secretly sent to Paris the previous night to stand trial there.

  Conot, the Comte’s younger son, was on the list of condemned men, but the executioner had not yet laid hands on him. According to Father Michel’s information, he had been transferred to the gendarmerie headquarters for close confinement. André was likely keeping him as a bargaining chip for a future deal with Marquis de Bouillé.

  The merchant, acting as a spy, added a warning:

  “Father Michel told me to tell you that the demon André has set a trap in Reims. You must not walk into it and throw your lives away. The gendarmerie has been expanded to 500 men. Another light cavalry battalion and eight guns have been brought in from Bacourt camp. On top of that, the National Guard and the Reims police have gone entirely over to the demon’s side. Taken together, enemy forces in the city now exceed 3,000 men. André has also imposed a week-long state of siege in Reims, so our agents can hardly move.”

  After hearing all this, Captain Fran?ois, in a foul mood, sent the spy away to rest. Then he looked up at Lieutenant Colonel Véran.

  “Sir, what do we do now?”

  According to the original plan, the main guerrilla force was to emerge from the Ardennes at dawn the next day and slip south toward Reims. Given the current situation, however, whether they tried to kill André or to free their political comrades from prison, they would be walking to their deaths. The wisest course would be to abandon the operation and slip back to the safety of the Ardennes.

  Lieutenant Colonel Véran saw this too. He fell silent and sat down heavily on a threadbare blanket, brooding. To turn back without firing a shot would look far too craven, and he could hardly face Major Pirotto. The latter was not only Marquis de Bouillé’s aide-de-camp, but also the link between the Ardennes guerrillas and headquarters. One way or another, some account had to be given to the family of a Comte who had died such a death—even if that meant taking revenge on merchant convoys passing in and out of Reims.

  Just as Véran was about to give his orders, the scouts watching Bacourt camp returned to the temporary encampment. They brought the two officers an unexpected piece of good news—news that made the lieutenant colonel scrap his original revenge plan and resolve instead to launch a raid before nightfall the next day, aimed at…

  “Our field hospital, of course. They will use hostages to bargain for the prisoners in the convent—especially Conot, the Comte’s son.”

  In the regimental command post of the Champagne Composite Regiment, Major Moncey, acting as regimental commander, was explaining his operational plan to Lieutenant Colonel Berthier, the returning chief of staff.

  After more than three months of work, Bacourt camp had become a fortified stronghold. Along more than thirty kilometers of frontier they had laid double lines of barbed wire, dug trenches, planted minefields, built bunkers and improvised redoubts, and emplaced artillery. In André’s own words, if they added a few Maxim heavy machine-guns and some of the famous “Mademoiselle 75” guns, the defences of Bacourt camp would not have looked much inferior to those the French would build on the Marne front in the Great War.

  Once he heard that the Arden rebels were moving south to attack, André ordered Major Moncey and the others to do everything possible to annihilate them near Bacourt. To tempt the Arden rebels into an attack, André had pulled the entire mobile cavalry of the General Battalion and eight mobile guns into Reims under cover of the citywide state of siege.

  At that point, only a single infantry battalion and an artillery company remained in the camp as fighting troops. The intelligence service had also used the traitor Father Michel to leak the news that the Comte’s son was still alive, luring the enemy commander on. Finally, agents planted among the rebels had deliberately exposed what they painted as the Champagne Composite Regiment’s greatest weakness to Lieutenant Colonel Véran: the field hospital on the western side of the camp.

  The field hospital had been opened free of charge to the people of the town. That was part of the promise André had made to the locals when he first requisitioned their land. For this reason, the hospital was sited outside the western gate. With the cavalry battalion transferred to Reims, the only regular troops near the west gate were a few sentries; the nearest infantry company lay three or four kilometres away. For the safety of the traffic through that gate, no mines lay between the two fences of wire.

  Pointing at the map, Major Moncey continued his briefing:

  “If I were that rebel commander, I would certainly choose a night attack in order to surprise the hospital, seize army doctors or nurses as hostages, and use them as bargaining chips to exchange for the assassins in the convent, finishing the whole action in under thirty minutes before fleeing north. If, instead, the rebels let my infantry pin them down, they will have nowhere to run once Captain Hoche’s cavalry returns.”

  It was only a few days earlier that Moncey had received accurate figures from the intelligence service on the Arden rebels’ strength. They had brought three squadrons of cavalry into the field, each with 110–120 men, some 350 in all—very close to his own estimate. As for their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Véran, he was a conservative noble officer who had followed Comte d’Artois into exile in the German states in October 1789. His family had suffered certain injustices during the Revolution in Paris, and he hated the National Assembly and all its radical supporters with particular bitterness.

  In 1790, when he attacked the National Guard of the Marne, Lieutenant Colonel Véran had ordered the release of all captured “blue” soldiers, but had had five National Guard officers shot for refusing to join in verbal insults of the Constituent Assembly and the local commune. For that, Véran had been proclaimed an outlaw in both Paris and Chalons-en-Champagne, with a price of five thousand livres on his head—dead or alive.

  When Major Moncey finished his briefing, Lieutenant Colonel Berthier nodded mechanically and gave the routine reply:

  “Very good, Major. Colonel André and I look forward to this victory.”

  Colonel André regarded the two army doctors and the nurses’ detachment in the field hospital as precious assets. No doubt Moncey and the others had made thorough preparations to protect them. As for the innocent civilians of the town, they were the fish that would be caught in the net. For fear of alarming the rebels and spoiling the trap, the officers simply chose to ignore the townsfolk’s fate.

  When Berthier learned that Major Moncey had taken over as acting regimental commander, he showed little sign of disappointment. In truth, from the moment he set foot back in Bacourt, the lieutenant colonel had realised that almost all the officers avoided speaking to him in private. Even Second Lieutenant Suchet from his own staff had begun, consciously or unconsciously, to keep his distance.

  Berthier saw very clearly that from the moment it had been formed, the Champagne Composite Regiment had never truly belonged to King Louis XVI. Nor was it absolutely subject to orders from the National Assembly or the Paris National Guard. It was, through and through, a private army. From senior officers down to common soldiers, every man followed only the supreme orders of Colonel André.

  “It seems I will have to have an honest talk with André as soon as possible,” Berthier kept telling himself. Of course, this was not the time. He would have to wait until the Arden rebels had been wiped out. After Moncey’s briefing, the whole camp had effectively entered a covert state of readiness for war.

  …

  Every morning on waking, the thing Lieutenant Davout most disliked was straightening his uniform in front of the mirror. It made him feel as if his damned hairline had crept a little higher yet again. In the words of his outspoken brother-in-law Friant, Davout’s scalp would present a classic “Mediterranean coastline” before he turned twenty-five.

  A week earlier, he would not have minded having a haircut to rival any tonsured priest. But now his mother, Marie-Adéla?de, and his stepfather, Louis Tirlot, had written from their home in Ravières, in the Yonne, to tell him that the Seguenot family had agreed to his engagement to their beautiful daughter. The wedding would take place after Easter.

  Before joining the Champagne cavalry regiment, Davout had met Marie Seguenot in the provincial capital, Dijon. He had fallen in love with the young woman—two years his senior—at first sight. Afterwards, he had written to his mother to hint at his feelings for Mademoiselle Seguenot. Hence, now, his new concern for the line of his hair.

  There is loss, and there is gain; sadness for some, joy for others.

  That very morning, in an officers’ examination overseen by Chief of Staff Berthier, Davout had taken first place in both written and oral tests. This meant that his name would stand at the top of the list for the next round of promotions.

  Notes:

  papal bull: A formal, authoritative document issued by the Pope to proclaim a major decision, teaching, or condemnation.

  “blue” soldiers: A nickname for revolutionary-aligned troops, referring to the blue uniforms associated with the Revolution and its supporters.