On the other side, as the fighting broke out around the camp, Captain Fran?ois, who was stationed in the town of Bacourt, first had several die-hard members of the Royalist Party quietly removed, then marched his men over to surrender their weapons to Captain Hoche’s incoming cavalry battalion.

  “If all goes as expected, by tomorrow at noon, Captain Hoche’s troops will have secretly taken the bandits’ main base,” Penduvas went on. “Under the original plan, two days after tha,t Lieutenant Macdonald will replace Captain Hoche and take over as commander of the newly reconstituted Ardennes guerrillas.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Also, Fran?ois and his family will set out tonight, heading down the Marne to board a merchant ship.”

  Rebuilding and controlling the Ardennes guerrillas was not only about securing the smuggling routes. It was also a way to put pressure on the Ardennes communal council and push the future influence of the Champagne Composite Brigade northward into the southern Netherlands—the Belgian lands. Reims and the whole Champagne region needed vast quantities of grain from the Massif Central, as well as cheap raw materials from overseas—above all sugar, coffee and indigo. And as early as next year, the frontier of the southern Netherlands would see the first shots of France’s national drive to conquer the European continent.

  “Excellent. Very well done, Second Lieutenant,” André said with genuine satisfaction.

  The one hundred thousand livres the intelligence office had spent had been worth every coin. Without Captain Fran?ois’s defection, there would have been no such easy victory: not only annihilating the raiding force, but also seizing the Ardennes guerrilla camp to use for themselves.

  At this point, the colonel glanced at his breakfast, untouched in front of him, then signalled that the intelligence officer was dismissed. But Penduvas did not leave. His face took on a hesitant look, making it clear he had more to say.

  “What is it?” André asked, puzzled.

  “My apologies, sir. Early this morning, Lieutenant Colonel Berthier sent a messenger, asking for permission to come to the gendarmerie headquarters in Reims and be received before you go back to Chalons-en-Champagne,” the second lieutenant replied at once.

  As Deputy Chief Prosecutor of the Marne, André had to go to the provincial capital, Chalons-en-Champagne, some fifty kilometres away, once a month to attend meetings of the Marne communal general committee. The next session was in a week’s time.

  André shook his head and refused bluntly. “Send the chief of staff my answer directly: I am very busy, and I will not have a free moment before May.”

  Inspector Javert had already reported in full what Berthier had done in Paris. Even if his chief of staff had not intended to betray him personally, the fact that Berthier had privately agreed to a request from the Bourbon court and was preparing to help Louis XVI’s two aunts flee to the Kingdom of Sardinia on the Italian peninsula was something André could not overlook.

  He did not intend to expose the matter, however. With his clear view of how cruel the Revolution could be, his instinct, from a humanitarian standpoint, was to allow—even to quietly encourage—the women of the Bourbon family to slip out of France and away from danger. But that sympathy did not mean he approved of his chief of staff’s rash behaviour.

  Berthier was a professional soldier; he should have known how to keep clear of political entanglements. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have handed the matter over to his superior, André, to handle.

  Had Berthier not been Lafayette’s appointed choice for chief of staff—and had André himself not been in a political alliance, a honeymoon phase, with that “hero of two worlds”—the colonel would already have found a way to sweep Berthier out of the regiment. As things stood, merely allowing him to keep the posts of chief of staff and principal instructor at the military school was already a mark of André’s exceptional indulgence.

  Soon afterwards, André did give an instruction concerning him. “Go back and tell the chief of staff that I will make time to read a letter,” he said to Penduvas.

  Once Penduvas left the office, André’s aide-de-camp Dumas came running in, beaming, with a large, tightly wrapped box in his arms. The moment he crossed the threshol,d the Black guard was shouting, “Sir, the wooden blocks you wanted are ready!”

  André nodded. As usual, he dressed with care in front of the full-length mirror, picked up his soft-cornered officer’s hat from the table, and went out.

  …

  On the southern outskirts of Reims, at the Demo? marquisate.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Half an hour earlier, a large detachment of gendarmes, acting on orders, had surrounded the noble estate. The soldiers, with deliberately rough voices, ordered all the servants, gardeners, stewards, and cooks to stay in their rooms and not to step outside without permission, on pain of severe consequences.

  Seeing what was happening, the Marquis de Demo?, only just recovered from illness, hurried downstairs, ready to berate the Black officer in command, but his wife clung to his arm and stopped him.

  “Don’t say anything,” the Marquise whispered urgently. “Since last week’s attempted assassination, André has purged several noble families in Reims and executed dozens of people. He gave me his word that today he is only here to see the children. As long as we don’t provoke him, he will do nothing else.”

  The marquis let out a long sigh and forced down the surge of anger in his chest. He gestured to his wife to go downstairs to the nursery and stay with the children, afraid that André might suddenly go back on his word and have his illegitimate sons taken from the estate.

  His fears, as it turned out, were unnecessary. André kept his promise. All the while, he simply stood under the veranda, looking through the spotless windowpanes at the twins sitting on the carpet, absorbed in a kind of new toy the eighteenth century had never known: building blocks.

  At first, he had considered presenting the children with a pair of adorable Labrador puppies from Canada as a first gift. But André soon vetoed that idea himself: rabies and tetanus vaccines did not yet exist, and even the gentlest Labrador retriever could bite.

  He had racked his brains over the question. In some respects, he had devoted more thought to choosing the children’s present than to the entire mopping-up operation that had just ended. At last, memories from his own childhood surfaced: the building blocks that had been his favourite educational toy. He remembered them as solid wooden or plastic pieces, mostly cubes, painted in different colours, some marked with letters or pictures, others cut into rectangular prisms, cylinders, cones, and other shapes that could be combined into patterns or constructions.

  In real history, the modern building block had first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, invented by the German educator Friedrich Fr?bel, later hailed as the “father of kindergarten”. The Germans had devised this set of educational toys for teaching: the blocks trained children’s hand–eye coordination, fostered their creativity and stirred their imaginations. The set now in front of the boys, however, existed only because André had sketched it from memory and commissioned a carpenter in Reims to make it from softwood from the Massif Central, a task that had taken five days.

  The two blond little boys had immediately abandoned the stiff, boring wooden dolls they had played with to death and fallen in love with the new blocks. Under the patient guidance of the nurse André had hired, three-year-old Louis and Pierre laughed and chattered as they arranged the different shapes into patterns: animals like rabbits and dogs, then furniture such as sofas and chairs. They were so engrossed that they entirely forgot their mother calling from outside the door.

  “Marquise.” André walked straight over to her, swung the nursery door shut behind him, and addressed the bewildered noblewoman. “Please tell the Marquis de Demo? that from today onwards he is to cease all secret correspondence with the Marquis de Bouillé in Metz or with the Tuileries. Out of regard for Marguerite and for the children, I am willing to overlook his first offence—and now his second. There will not be a third.”

  As he spoke, he raised his hand in a signal, and Second Lieutenant Dumas at once led two soldiers to storm a servant’s room. After a crash of furniture they dragged out a middle-aged man dressed as a gardener, bound him hand and foot, marched him out into the villa’s rear garden, and forced him to his knees on the grass.

  The burly Black guard stood behind the “gardener” and cast a challenging glance up at the study window on the second floor. Then he drew the knife at his belt and slashed it hard across the man’s throat. The keen blade sliced through with no resistance. A jet of bright blood burst out like a fountain…

  From his vantage point at the window, the Marquis de Demo? saw the entire bloody scene and, pampered noble that he was, could not help doubling over as a violent cramp twisted his stomach; bile surged up, and he began to retch uncontrollably. The gendarmerie had obviously long since discovered the gardener’s true identity: he was Marquis de Bouillé’s secret liaison man planted in the Demo? estate. In fact, several days earlier, André had publicly warned the people of Reims to report any agents in secret contact with the bandits. The marquis’s wilful deafness was what had led to this grisly lesson.

  If it had not been for Reverend Mother’s repeated appeals, and for the sake of the children’s dead mother, André would already have ordered the Demo? family, with all its ill intent, expelled from Reims and the entire Marne.

  The purge in Reims and the annihilation of the Ardennes guerrillas had pushed André’s conflict with Marquis de Bouillé, far away in Metz, beyond any hope of reconciliation. In a straightforward military confrontation, the marquis’s 30,000-strong German mercenary corps could crush the whole Champagne region, let alone a single little Champagne Composite Regiment.

  Yet war was ultimately only the continuation of politics by other means.

  Militarily, the Champagne Composite Regiment was undeniably the weaker side. But André’s great advantage lay in politics: he enjoyed the dual support of the National Constituent Assembly and the Marne commune. Marquis de Bouillé, for all his gifts as a professional soldier, had a congenital weakness in the political arena. His ruthless suppression of the Nancy mutiny had left both him and his German Legion with a foul reputation.

  Without an open mandate from the Tuileries, the marquis, loyal as he was to Louis XVI, could not raise the banner of revolt and brand himself a traitor to the kingdom of France. For now, he could only swallow his anger. He was even obliged to send a “congratulatory message”, loudly praising Deputy Chief Prosecutor André for his calm and capable leadership in decisively annihilating the wicked Ardennes rebels and safeguarding the lives and property of the people of Reims.