On the night of the second day after his clash with Robespierre, good news came from Danton’s house: Gabrielle had borne the Titan another son (the previous child having died of acute pneumonia). André only received the news as he was leaving the Legislative Assembly building. He looked exhausted and wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep, for the workload of the Interior Affairs Committee was simply too heavy, and all of it had to be dealt with tonight.

  By Champagne custom, whenever a friend or relative has a child, one is expected to visit in person. Yet tomorrow André would return to the Marne to preside over the Northern Grain Yield Conference convened at Chalons-en-Champagne on December twentieth. So he had to force down his drowsiness, rouse his spirits, and make a trip to the Cour du Commerce Saint-André before going home to rest. After his relations with Robespierre fell into stalemate, André placed more of his political hopes in Danton; as for Pétion—that frivolous dandy who spent all day at dances and banquets—he truly could not be relied upon for anything great.

  Last night Paris, still mild, had seen a winter rain that was neither heavy nor light. Today the temperature had plunged below zero; the north wind howled, and the cold bit hard. In the middle of the night, frost filmed the edges of the windowpanes along both sides of the street; the cutting wind swept over the empty boulevard like Death swinging his great scythe. It poured through the cracks of the carriage and chilled General André until he could not stop shivering.

  Before entering the Cour du Commerce Saint-André, André happened to catch, through the carriage window, what looked like a familiar figure leaving Danton’s house—judging by the silhouette, a young woman. When she turned and climbed into her carriage, the weak, flickering light from the wall lamps on either side was enough for André to be certain: it was Lucile, Desmoulins’s wife.

  André decided to remain in his carriage for a few minutes more, to avoid an awkward encounter. In fact, the last time he returned to Paris, he had received a report compiled by Javert—an account of the private lives of many important figures in the city—which included Desmoulins’s illicit affair with a female client, and the clandestine relationship between Georges Danton and Lucile.

  Strictly speaking, none of this concerned André. To put it more plainly, André himself was hardly a model of private virtue. In Reims, in Paris, in Sedan, in Bordeaux—he had left affairs everywhere; he had several illegitimate children already. Recently, he had also been entangled with a Polish Comtesse named Julia Gabello.

  At first André never believed in Desmoulins and Lucile’s so-called love “for all time,” their vow of unwavering fidelity. In other people’s eyes they were still a very wealthy, energetic, affectionate young couple living a happy life; but once the door was shut and novelty wore off, each began to pursue their own amusements.

  From Fréron, to General Dillon, to Danton—Lucile had moved from one to the next; she had even tried to lure André, only to be refused outright. As for Desmoulins, he had more varieties still: from the cheap prostitutes of the Palais-Royal, to widows of the aristocracy, and even his own female clients—no one was spared.

  In any case, none of that was what André had come for. He only meant to offer Danton his congratulations, and then prepare tomorrow’s journey.

  The lights in the second-floor sitting room were still on, so when André knocked at the ground-floor door, Danton soon appeared—beaming.

  “My dear friend! I knew you would come,” the host exclaimed. He embraced André with force and kept thumping his guest’s arms and back, as though trying to pass his joy into André by sheer impact. Though André had known Danton for a long time, he still recoiled instinctively from such warmth.

  Because the mistress of the house and the infant were already asleep and must not be disturbed, André handed his cloak and hat to a maid and followed Danton upstairs to the receiving room. He waved away the cold Champagne Danton offered him, then nodded to the maid waiting at the door and ordered a large cup of hot coffee.

  “And remember—extra milk and extra white sugar,” André called after her.

  “Damn you, André—do you know the price of white sugar has risen by twenty percent this month? It’s more than five times what it was at the start of the year!” Danton exclaimed theatrically.

  André shot him a look and continued holding his nearly numb hands close to the roaring fire. After a moment he mocked the parvenu across from him. “Is that so? I seem to recall that in late August this year you bought 2,000 tons of white sugar on the Paris exchange, and you still have half of it stored in Arcy. And if I remember correctly, I was the one who tipped you off. The profit must be decent—60,000 or 80,000 livres? Perhaps I ought to charge you a fee. Hmm—30,000 livres will do.”

  “Damn you—you should be earning ten times what I earn—twenty times, thirty times, even more!”

  To be fair, Danton’s skin was as thick as André’s. He soon laughed the sugar talk away and veered to another subject. When the maid brought in the hot coffee, Danton, as the master of the house, casually pinched her backside—without the least embarrassment at the contempt in André’s eyes.

  “Come now, André—shall I tell you about your Polish Comtesse?” Danton said, grinning, his head cocked.

  “This morning she left for Warsaw with her prince fiancé,” André replied flatly.

  Danton started at once. He threw away his lewd curiosity and pressed, “Then the Legislative Assembly and the ministers have accepted the Russian ambassador’s protest—and refused to provide Poland with any military assistance?”

  André nodded, without speaking.

  Danton could not help but sigh. “Poor Poles. They’ll face the Russians’ mad assault alone again.”

  In 1790, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had deteriorated, in domestic and foreign affairs alike, to the point of helplessness. At home, the magnates of the Targowica Confederation completely broke with the patriotic nobles who supported constitutional reform; abroad, Poland foolishly allied itself with its enemy Prussia. The treaty signed in 1790 offered only the illusion of protection.

  At this time, the Constitution of 3 May supported by King Stanis?aw II granted political rights to the bourgeoisie, established a government with separation of powers, and sought to erase the pernicious influence of Repnin. Poland’s renewed reform—undertaken without Russia’s consent—enraged Empress Catherine II. St Petersburg demanded that Warsaw immediately abolish the Constitution of 3 May and suppress all social reforms, or Russia would settle the matter by force.

  Given this situation, acting under a secret commission from the Polish king, Comte de Grabowski visited Paris with his fiancée Julia Gabello, hoping to obtain some military assistance from France, Poland’s traditional ally, to resist Russia. Louis XVI, as a distant kinsman of the Polish king, was indeed willing to help, but the cabinet and the Legislative Assembly vetoed it together. This time, Queen Marie—an Austrian—also opposed it.

  André explained, “Unless we dispatch 100,000 French troops to fight directly, the Poles cannot withstand the ferocity of the Russian army. And if you add the ill-intentioned Prussians and the scheming Austrians—even 200,000 French troops in Poland would not save Stanis?aw II.

  “However, out of personal regard for the Comtesse, I have persuaded the ministers to allow us to sell Poland 7,000 old muskets and fifty guns by smuggling, and to send, in secret, a military delegation of a little over one hundred men to help train Polish soldiers. But whether weapons or men, nothing is free; the costs must be settled in gold—or in grain.”

  After more than half a year of running-in, the Reims armory had steadily increased its output. In muskets alone it could produce more than 2,000 per month. From October onward, domestically produced weapons would be issued in succession to the Champagne Composite Brigade and to the National Guards of the two provinces. The muskets and guns intended for Poland were old weapons already phased out; André had originally meant to sell them at a discount to the Strasbourg garrison, but now he had the chance to sell them to Poland at triple the price. As for the delegation to Poland, André would also send twenty non-commissioned officers and intelligence men among them.

  In sentiment, André did want to save France’s most reliable ally; but reality would not allow it. Apart from France’s own need to prepare for a foreign war and to be ready at any time to counter the danger of a Prusso–Austrian coalition, neither André nor the ministers wished to provoke Russia—who meant to swallow Poland whole.

  At first, the newly appointed Comte de Narbonne even refused Poland’s attempt to purchase arms; it was André who argued the case and convinced him to give the Polish Comtesse at least a token explanation. As for the exorbitant price, it was not solely André’s desire—besides the need to “grease” certain cabinet hands, the smugglers’ shipowners demanded ruinous freight charges, which could not be avoided; André trusted the Polish envoy would understand.

  “No, André—you are not helping Poland. You are sacrificing more Poles. That much I understand very clearly,” Danton said, his smile slowly fading. He named André’s darker intent with surgical precision.

  André did not deny it. His purpose was plain: to bolster Poland in secret and use the Poles to pin down the Russian army, so that Russia could not join the anti-French camp before victory on the western front was decided.

  Suddenly Danton recalled something. “By the way—why did you recommend General Dumouriez as commander of the Saint-Domingue expedition?”

  André answered with a question, smiling. “Brissot sent you to ask me, didn’t he?”

  Danton nodded.

  “You want the truth?” André asked.

  Danton nodded again.

  “Then the truth is this,” André said. “I dislike that two-faced fellow. A soldier by training, yet he spends his days in the Jacobin Club wearing a ridiculous little red cap, shouting about endless patriotic fervour for Mother France. Very well—I decided to give that hypocritical patriot his best chance: let him go to Saint-Domingue, land at Cap-Fran?ais, land at Port-au-Prince, and ‘pacify’ those 500,000 black slaves, so that Parisian sugar, coffee, cocoa, and indigo may all return to their prices of before June.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  In truth, there were two further reasons that truly pushed André to remove Dumouriez from Paris. First, as a soldier, Dumouriez was not upright like Lafayette; on the contrary, after he became famous he was treacherous and cunning. Intelligence from the Military Intelligence Office indicated that Dumouriez had perhaps already, at the start of the year, secretly attached himself to the Tuileries, sworn loyalty to Louis XVI and Queen Marie, and been planted as a piece within the republican revolutionary camp.

  Second, André meant to replace Dumouriez and inherit the latter’s “glorious moment” in the war of 1792. For that day André had prepared nearly three years. He had also, with calculation, mended relations with the Constitutionalists’ Comte de Narbonne (the Minister of War) and struck a backroom bargain—using the name of the French state to exile the man they both detested, General Dumouriez, to a far Caribbean colony.

  Danton naturally did not know these intentions in full; and even if he knew something of them, he would not offend André—who was at the height of his power—over an unimportant figure. After all, Dumouriez had not yet edged Narbonne out to become Minister of War; he had not yet commanded three elite armies of the North and defeated the Prusso–Austrian coalition under the Duc de Brunswick at Valmy; he had not yet…

  After a few more idle exchanges, André rose to take his leave, and as he stepped out he said, “Georges—the child’s monthly gift: I will have it sent from Reims.”

  The maid brought him his cloak and soft-crowned military cap. André turned back once more and called Danton over—Danton was still tugging playfully at the pretty maid, one furry arm even slipped into her bosom. André repeated his warning again and again: “Recently, over the foreign war, Robespierre and Brissot have locked horns. One word of advice: whoever comes to recruit you, do not involve yourself too deeply. Keep silent—stay neutral… Don’t look at me like that. Damn you—unless you can, like me, pull out of Paris at any moment and walk away from everything.”

  The next morning, André departed Paris by carriage, accompanied by a large retinue, wearing the dazzling aura of Executive Secretary (head) of the Legislative Assembly’s Interior Affairs Committee, and went far away to the Marne.

  Before the Legislative Assembly—more precisely, before André became a deputy—the National Assembly had confronted the cabinet appointed by the Tuileries as a single body. But after October 1791, this situation changed fundamentally. André Franck possessed, almost by his own strength alone, the power to overturn an aristocratic cabinet and subdue provincial forces.

  In the beginning, when André worked in the Diplomatic Committee, he introduced the hearing procedure in an innovative fashion. Within a few days, he forced the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lésart, to lose seven capable subordinates; Lésart then had to swallow his pride and, as the price of peace, surrender the appointment rights of four foreign envoys.

  During his time in the Interior (Administrative) Affairs Committee, André—joining hands with the Paris City Hall, and with the strong support of his allies, Mayor Pétion and Prosecutor Danton—prepared to squeeze out the Minister of the Interior, Cahier de Gerville. Fortunately, Comte de Gerville behaved with sufficient sense: in the name of the cabinet, he promptly supported the Interior (Administrative) Committee’s performance assessments of the provincial administrators of the fifteen northern departments.

  These “fifteen northern departments” were defined as those north of the line of the Marne River, Paris, and the Seine (the Department of Paris was temporarily excluded), covering most of the German-speaking regions within France. They included, among others, Seine-Inférieure, Oise, Aisne, Seine-et-Marne, Pas-de-Calais, Nord, Ardennes, Marne, Haute-Marne, Meuse, Moselle, Meurthe, Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, and Vosges.

  This three-in-one move by the cabinet, the Legislative Assembly, and the Paris City Hall shocked those departments at once; they protested in unison, invoking the sovereignty principle of 1789: had it not been agreed that departments would govern themselves? How had it become the Legislative Assembly’s brutal interference in departmental administration?

  In early December, the Palace of Justice—the body responsible for authoritative judicial interpretation—issued a declaration: the joint action of the cabinet, the Assembly, and the City Hall did not violate the spirit of the French Constitution of 1791, because Deputy André’s assessment targets were always limited to the departmental administrators, the Chief Provincial Prosecutors, and the principal departmental officials. Those officials, it declared, must submit to Paris’s competence inquiry.

  It was this seemingly casual move by André that drew back, after more than two years, the centralisation of France into Paris—though for the moment only across fifteen departments (out of eighty-three in metropolitan France). Yet it already delighted the cabinet under Constitutionalists’ control. What Lafayette and Barnave and their circle had strained with immense effort to achieve without success, André accomplished with a single administrative order: the administrators and prosecutors of the fifteen northern departments declared submission one after another, and even the taxes in arrears for more than two years were made good—nearly one third of them within a single month.

  Of course, the development of events was far from so simple.

  When the order was first issued, the administrator of Aisne, the Marquis de Bernard, refused to submit the work reports and self-assessments of his principal officials to the Interior Affairs Committee of the Legislative Assembly, and he also refused to make good the taxes his department owed the centre. The Marquis even tore André’s letter in public, threw it underfoot, and ground it into the dirt.

  Plainly, this administrator—an extremist of the Royalist Party—harboured deep hatred toward Deputy André. Their feud dated back to the Babeuf case of 1790; later, when André, acting on orders from the Assembly and General Lafayette, carried out the attempted arrest of the royal couple along the Marne frontier, the Marquis de Bernard—loyal to the Crown—was outraged to the point of frenzy, and deliberately defied the joint order issued by Paris’s three power centres.

  As for this volunteer target that had presented itself, André would show no courtesy. He needed the man’s head to establish authority and warn the rest. After obtaining a warrant from Justice Duranthon of the Palace of Justice, André ordered Colonel Santerre of the Paris National Guard to lead a cavalry detachment of fifty men to Laon, the capital of Aisne, by night, and arrest the suspect, the Marquis de Bernard, on the charge of opposing the Constitution, opposing the Revolution, and opposing liberty.

  Had André ordered other National Guard officers to arrest a Royalist Marquis in the provinces, they might well have refused openly—or sabotaged the mission in obedience on paper alone—so that the arrest would collapse in the end.

  But Colonel Santerre, a man who had risen from brewing, had a hatred for the Marquis de Bernard that ran to the bone. More than three years earlier, when Santerre’s beer caravan passed through Laon, he refused to pay various surtaxes; the Marquis de Bernard, then a tax official, ordered him arrested. Santerre spent two months in prison; all his goods were confiscated; and he was fined 10,000 livres.

  When he received the assignment, Santerre deliberately ignored the detail that the Minister of Justice ought to countersign the warrant. The boisterous Lieutenant Colonel of the National Guard made only one demand of André, and it was not excessive: “I want that man to be publicly humiliated.”

  André nodded, smiling. “Very well—but do not play him to death, and do not cripple him. I still need him to appear in court.” In truth, this was exactly the shock effect he wanted. Even if Santerre truly ruined the aristocrat, the executive secretary had countless ways to argue that the suspect had committed suicide out of fear of guilt.

  By the next evening, Colonel Santerre had brought the Marquis de Bernard back into Paris in secret from Laon. When the prison cart passed along the Tuileries street, countless sans-culottes and women—drawn by rumour—hurled rotten eggs and decayed vegetable leaves at the Marquis de Bernard, who was chained in irons. Santerre’s men had spread the story that the man opposed the Constitution, opposed the National Assembly, opposed every social change since 1789, and had even threatened to bring Austrian troops to massacre the revolutionary citizens of Paris…

  By the time Santerre handed the suspect to the auxiliary prison of the Chatelet tribunal, the Marquis de Bernard was barely alive—like a stinking dead dog—and could not utter a single word in his own defence.

  The act caused an uproar in Paris. At first, the Minister of Justice, Lacoste, voiced fierce opposition, declaring he would release the administrator of Aisne without charge and pursue the true culprit who had given the criminal orders. Yet soon the minister’s carriage was greeted with a storm of rotten eggs and decayed vegetable leaves. That very night, the minister’s residence was deliberately set on fire by multiple rioters—and afterward not a single person was arrested.

  Throughout the entire affair, both street patrolmen and the National Guard chose to stand aside.

  The next day, under the persuasion of many cabinet colleagues, Minister Lacoste finally countersigned the arrest warrant for the Marquis de Bernard. With the signatures of the Palace of Justice, the Legislative Assembly, and the Ministry of Justice, the anti-constitutional charge against the Marquis de Bernard was essentially established; the future trial would be no more than a formality.

  In the Legislative Assembly, the more than twenty deputies who had previously clamoured to impeach André and strip him of his seat fell silent and withdrew their motions. More than that, fearing André’s later reckoning, those shameless men turned their coats at once—like chameleons—and poured their full fire upon the unlucky administrator of Aisne.

  This major political episode made Paris—and officials and politicians from all over France—fully aware of the immense power held by Deputy André Franck. Departmental officials declared loyalty to the French Constitution of 1791, obedience to the National Assembly and the cabinet, and a willingness to defend the revolutionary achievements since 1789.

  It was not only the fifteen northern departments. Dozens more in central and southern France sent petitions as well, endorsing the National Assembly’s “correct decision.” Rich or poor, even if they had to borrow from Parisian financiers, fiscal officers across the country, within sixty days, collectively made good thirty percent of the taxes owed to the central treasury for years.

  The newly appointed Minister of Finance, Monsieur Beaulieu, was overjoyed. He all but wished André would transfer to the Finance Committee. He even lowered himself, as a cabinet minister, to say that he would comply with any decision or proposal of Deputy André—so long as they could collect the 200,000,000 livres of unpaid taxes owed by the departments and the customs houses.

  André, however, had little interest in the minister’s suggestion. He chose to stop while ahead and not pursue political terror any further. Thus, under the eager gaze of the crowd, André publicly announced that the punitive action against the administrator of Aisne had been terminated; it would not be expanded to other regions, still less extended into a campaign to collect old taxes…

  Soon Paris’s disciplinary action against Aisne drew close attention from foreign diplomats. In a memorial addressed to Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, the British ambassador in Paris, the Duke of Dorset, wrote: “London has long discussed the fact that the French have not established a cabinet premiership. But in my view, André Franck is, in fact, the Prime Minister of France. Not only does the Legislative Assembly obey him; the cabinet and the magistrates likewise acknowledge his authority. Even the local governments, once fragmented and drifting apart, now fear his might and submit to Paris…”

  Meanwhile, the Austrian plenipotentiary in Paris—the eighty-year-old Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg—wrote to Vienna to his prospective grandson-in-law, Klemens von Metternich: “When you stand where I stand, watch André closely. In the eyes of this young man—only twenty-six years old—I see the same surging ambition I saw fifty years ago in Frederick II (Frederick the Great of Prussia). It threatens not only France, but the Netherlands, the Rhine, and even the Holy Roman Empire that holds Germany and Italy…”

  Plainly, Paris’s politicians and envoys overestimated André’s political ambition at this moment. He had no interest at all in grasping supreme power alone. In truth, André understood that what he held was only a beautiful illusion: without 300,000 elite troops loyal to him, he would not impose any dictatorship in Paris. Therefore, once the departments declared submission and obedience to Paris, André gradually returned the various powers he had seized—back to the Legislative Assembly, the cabinet, the Paris City Hall, and the Palace of Justice.

  On December sixteenth, when André left Paris, everyone relaxed as though in unspoken agreement. Brissot and his friends held a celebration at the Jacobin Club, rejoicing that the Legislative Assembly had ultimately produced no dictator; Robespierre, Carnot, and Couthon also let out a long breath—thankfully they had not collided head-on with André. Otherwise, the former administrator of Aisne in the court prison might well have gained a few companions.

  The Constitutionalists among the nobility also claimed they had not misjudged the man; the Lameth brothers advised their friends to draw closer to André. Only Lafayette—resigned at home—saw André’s true face. After weighing the matter, the fool wrote to André, hoping he would voluntarily resign his seat in the Legislative Assembly and devote himself to the foreign war…

  In Reims, after André read the letter, he tossed it straight into the roaring fire of the hearth.