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Chapter One
Early summer, 1792
Lisette could see the crowd from her bedroom window, marching towards the château, pulling a tumbril containing a tree decorated with flowers and ribbons in red, white and blue, and although they were singing and laughing and banging drums, she did not think they were coming in a spirit of friendship. Since the King had been forced by the National Assembly to accept the new constitution, the peasantry seemed to think they were no longer required to pay taxes and they were insisting that the seigneurs, among them her own father the Comte, should remit those already paid, not only for this year, nor even for the period since the beginning of the Revolution, but for many years previously. Naturally her father had refused. He had his own taxes to pay and many of the privileges he had enjoyed before the Revolution had been abolished. Times were hard for everyone.
She left the window and hurried downstairs to alert her father, who was working on papers in his library, though he could not have failed to hear the noise. ‘Go out of the back way and fetch help from the maréchaussée,’ she urged him. ‘I’ll try to delay them.’
‘I will not be driven from my home by a mob,’ he said and set his jaw in a rigid line of obstinacy. ‘And I will not give in to demands.’
Comte Gervais Giradet was a third-generation aristocrat. His grandfather had become very rich through colonial trade and bought his title and lands in the village of Villarive close by Honfleur in Normandy for 60,000 livres, an enormous sum, enough to keep two hundred working families alive for a whole year. The village was part of the Giradet estate. It had a village green with a fountain from which the women drew their water, one church, two inns, a leather worker who made the harnesses for the horses and the shoes for the villagers, a blacksmith and a vendor of comestibles and candles, although most of the shopping was done in Honfleur. The village showed no sign of prosperity—except, perhaps, the surrounding apple orchards which provided most of the inhabitants with their living and the Comte with his wealth, though that was declining.
Until the Revolution Gervais had lived quietly in his château, an autocratic but benign seigneur, minding his own business farming and growing apples to be made into cider and Calvados, and not interfering in anyone else’s. Now everything was in turmoil. The aristocrats were the people’s enemy. Hundreds of them had already fled the country, mainly to go to England.
‘But you cannot stand up to a mob like that, Papa,’ Lisette protested. ‘They will lynch you.’
‘Do not be so foolish, Lisette; they will not harm me. I shall speak to them. After all, we are all equal now—or so they say.’
The crowd had reached the courtyard and had set up the tree in the middle of it. There was a traditional belief that if a May Tree was put up in the lord’s courtyard and hung with small sacks of grain and chicken feathers, the peasants were telling their seigneur they thought his dues excessive and if it was kept standing for a year and a day, they would be free of their dues to him. Lately the May Tree had become the Liberty Tree and now it symbolised the freedom given to the people by the new Constitution and their contempt of the lords of the manor.
They were calling on the Comte to show himself and Lisette repeated her plea that he should leave. ‘You can come back when they have gone away again.’
He smiled, adjusted the lace frills of his shirt sleeves and straightened his shoulders to go and meet them. On the way out he passed a gilded mirror and stopped to straighten his wig and give a tweak to his neckcloth, settling the diamond pin more securely in its folds. Then he nodded to a footman who opened the door for him.
His appearance at the top of the steps seemed to inflame the mob. They all began shouting at once. ‘Give us back what is due to us,’ one man yelled. ‘You have been bleeding us dry for years, you and the rest of your aristocratic friends. You are rich and we are poor and that situation has been denounced by the new government. Even King Louis thinks it is wrong. The rich can afford to pay, we can’t…’
‘I have to pay taxes too.’ The Comte attempted to make himself heard, but they were in no mood to listen.
‘You have no right to our taxes.’ The speaker was a big man, dressed in a faded black suit and wearing the red cap of the Revolutionaries. Lisette knew him as Henri Canard, a lawyer and ardent Revolutionary who led the local peasants, rousing them from their apathy to take part in demonstrations against the nobility. ‘You have no title to the land you hold.’
‘I certainly have. My grandfather bought it…’
‘Obtained by trickery,’ Canard said, taking a step or two towards the Comte, his dark eyes gleaming, a threat in every gesture. ‘We demand restitution.’
