Page 28 of Souvenir Heart

“Gerard was my former husband,” she said, pulling a paper with an official seal from a packet she’d brought with her. “We were divorced in August 1792.”

The prosecutor, whom Marguerite was beginning to think of as ‘Antenna Brow,’ took the decree and skimmed it with a look of only the vaguest interest. He scribbled something else in the margins of the paper in front of him. Handing the paper back, he observed, “and yet you continued to live with him.”

“He died of influenza last December.” She resisted the urge to add, before you voted to execute the King. The last thing she needed was for them to question her views on that decision. “He fell ill in September. What sort of woman would refuse to nurse a dying man?”

There were murmurs of assent from the gallery.

“Your father was the former minister of finance, Amaury de Joley, Comte Verignac.” Antenna Brow added, “Unless you divorced him, too?”

The gallery’s murmurs turned to hoots and snickers.

“I have not spoken with or received word from my father in over two years.” She pulled another sheaf of papers from her packet. “My certificate of good citizenship. As you pointed out, I spent most of last year nursing my former husband. I also have a letter attesting to the fact that I haven’t left Paris in all that time. I have no idea where my father is,” she added, her heart beating faster.

“You consider yourself a loyal citizen of the new republic?” Antenna Brow asked, in a tone like a trap door sliding open.

“Yes, citizen, I do.”

Setting down his quill, he reached into the pile of papers and pulled out a book with green cover that looked far too much like the one she’d been searching for when she’d been arrested. “Is this yours, Citizeness Rouvroy?”

Mouth suddenly dry, she ventured, “I would have to examine it more closely…”

Opening it to a page bookmarked with a red ribbon, the prosecutor demanded sharply, “If you are so very loyal, Citizeness de Rouvroy, how do you explain this?”

Twenty

The prosecutor rose to his feet, holding her sketchbook over his head. Despite the nauseating suspicion that she knew exactly what page was on display, Marguerite, like everyone else in the courtroom, craned her neck for a better look.

Guttural sounds that might have been shock, outrage, efforts to choke back laughter, or some combination of all three, filled the courtroom. Clearest of all, however, were the shouts of, “Death!”

Because there it was. A sketch of Jean Paul Marat, firebrand publisher and leader of the ruling Jacobin party. Sitting in his tub with his lap desk, tapping his lips with his quill, as he contemplated his latest opus.

No. Not tapping his lips. Tapping his fish lips.

She’d drawn Marat with an enormous fish tail curling over the edge of the tub, a dorsal fin behind his head, and, Heaven help her, fish lips.

“Is this your art?” The justice asked in the same tone her father used to make it clear her work was as far from art as racehorses were from pigs.

“Death, death, death!” The call rose from both sides of the gallery.

It was art. A damned fine likeness of both a man and a fish. Also, a damning one.

“Would you care to tell us, Citizeness de Rouvroy, why you drew Citizen Marat, a leading member of the Legislative Assembly and a defender of the people, as a fish?”

Absolutely not. She’d been in the gallery of Salle du Manège, Louis XV’s former riding hall turned assembly hall, listening to Marat speak. It had been a long day, the gallery hot and crowded, and as his speech wandered off on a rambling tangent, she’d begun to sketch.

When she’d overheard someone behind her mention to his companion that Marat was increasingly working from his tub as a way of soothing his chronically itchy, scaly red skin, she’d looked down at the likeness she’d already captured, at the man’s protruding eyes and fleshy lips, and been unable to resist adding the finny features.

“Citizeness de Rouvroy, have you nothing to say for yourself?”

“Off with her head!” came a cry from the gallery.

“Off with her hands!” came another.

“Speak!” The prosecutor demanded.

There was so much she wanted to say that it was creating a carriage-crash traffic jam in her mouth: How did you get my sketchbook? Who gave it to you? Can’t you see it was a joke? A private joke. I would never have published it. And for the love of God, would you stop using ‘de’ to remind the court of my former titles.

“Have you nothing to say for yourself, Citizeness?”