A close shave with the national razor

When it is my turn, I go like a lamb.

A soldier steers me with the stock of a bayonet lodged into the small of my back, but after weeks in a dungeon, deprived of light, sleeping on straw, subsisting on morsels of stale bread, I am a leaf on the capricious wind of revolution.

Guards place me chest down on the bed of the machine, and I slip my neck into the waiting crescent. They fetter my body with two leather straps and close the pillory on my neck. Last night, the jailors cut my hair for this. A trim, to prepare for grooming by the national razor.

If not for the crowd’s insults - “Pig! Aristocrat! Traitor!” - I could doze off. Let this be done.

My arrest was sudden, a pounding on the door in the early morning, and I was thrust into a cell with no whisper of my crime. Then I was pulled before the judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal. No counsel or witnesses, and only two possible outcomes.

Gabriel Augustin, they asked, are you not the one in pay of the nobleman Montgolfier? Are you not employed in his paper mill? Do you not paint the designs on their hot air balloons? On multiple occasions did you not depict on them monarchist emblems, such as the abhorrent fleur-de-lis? How do you account for this apparent royalism, Gabriel Augustin?

I should have said that Louis was only a witness to the flight of our experimental vessel at Versailles, not our company’s patron. The spectacle was not for the court alone, but for all of Paris. Only after this success was the Montgolfier family of paper manufacturers elevated to the nobility and their mill given the commission Manufacturer Royal. This was a decade ago, before the National Assembly, the conquest of the Bastille, and the King’s execution. How could we have known the world would turn upside down? Now, with the Austrians and Prussians circling our nation like inquisitive vultures, the company has turned its attention to the war, and soon our balloons will look down on battlefields, and give France mastery of the air. That is what I should have said.

Instead, befuddled by confinement and the barrage of questions, I assented to the facts. That was enough for the tribunal. I would not be released. It will be the only other outcome, execution by guillotine.

We prisoners did not talk as the cobblestones jostled us on our final cart ride through the streets of Paris. A brief bucket of rain washed off some of the adventurous lice that joined us on the excursion. We did not get more than a bored glance from people on the streets, for the daily execution of traitors had lost savour with custom.

Not so the crowd at the Place de la Révolution. These are the connoisseurs of vengeance, tempers hotter than the flame in Montgolfier’s balloons, thirsty for blood. They even have pamphlets, treasured mementoes of the event, listing the order of executions and associated crimes. My name will be in today’s edition - Gabriel Augustin, condemned to death for painting the wrong flower on a balloon. I am not even the star, for a young confidant of Marie Antoinette is on the bill, and the mob loves to see the final terrors of a beautiful woman.

The detainees scheduled before me were processed with impressive efficiency. Taken to the scaffold, strapped in, chop, head falls in basket, body unbound and shoved off the platform. The full sequence for each candidate took less time than boiling water for coffee.

And now it is my turn. The blade will drop, and end the hunger churning in my stomach, and the roar of the crowd in my ears. It will be an end.

It is not.

Rather than oblivion, there is a squeal behind me. I cannot turn my head to look. The crowd falls silent. The executioner confers with the guards in the professional language of thoughtful mumbles. They decide the rain expanded the wood, causing this unprecedented issue.

The blade has jammed.

The executioner shakes the frame of the guillotine, hoping to dislodge the unruly scythe. I wobble with the edifice, rocked like a baby in its cot. The crowd laughs with affectionate understanding. These mishaps happen, and they will not let this one spoil a nourishing outing.

The gentle swaying could be soothing, if my gaze was not locked on the basket of severed heads.

The faces! Frozen moments of shock, anguish, regret, rage, even acceptance. A duchess’s languid jaw droops against the bushy eyebrows of a fat lawyer. A soldier’s eyes bulge at invisible enemies. A maid’s oily hair tickles the parrot nose of a priest. Two strangers have landed in the basket in an eternal kiss. Flies swoop and cavort at this banquet, sneaking furtive sips of red ambrosia.

One of the heads looks back, a gaunt but friendly face, full of sympathy and curiosity. It seems to study my features, and I tell myself this must be an illusion of my starved and exhausted mind. Then it blinks. I remember, with horror, that our scientists believe the head can live for precious moments without the body. My new friend understands what it is to fall in life, and offers consolation: access to varied and interesting company, as another pearl in this jumbled but egalitarian necklace of severed heads.

My body convulses as though struck by lightning. I graze my neck twisting against the collar that binds me, desperate to turn my face away from the nauseating basket. I struggle against the straps and the leather bites into me. A dozen hands seize my arms and legs, and press me hard into the coffin wood of this machine of death.

The crowd is delighted to at last see some spirit from one of the performers.

While I struggle, the executioner twists the trapped edge, trying to dislodge it and complete the operation. My life is measured in the moments it will take him to free the blade and hoist it to the pinnacle of the guillotine, where it will conclude this grim trespass against my liberty and life.

I summon the energy that torments my body into my lungs, and release it in a shout.

“Citizens! Hear one of your own!”

The crowd hushes. Even the guards falter, and slacken their grip on my emaciated limbs. My body trembles at the clarity and power of my voice, my purpose concentrated by this glimpse into the abyss.

I tell them of my life, a blissful childhood lost in the swaying yellow grain fields that feed us, and then interesting years travelling our great country as a journeyman painter, from the mossy tufts that sprout on the shimming Loire river, to the long and ominous steps of the towering island commune on Mont Saint-Michel, to the neat and vibrant green and brown furrows of the vineyards of Lorraine, all these travels mixed with unforgettable nights of comradeship in inns, draining tantalising bottles of wine and exchanging tall tales with other wayfarers. I know this country, and its people.

Then I tell them of painting balloons, and the wonder of riding in one, serene above the world. How my heart was full to see our world sprawled out from that extraordinary perch, houses and fields and livestock and people arrayed in miniature.

“From above, you see the hidden order of the world, our lives as witnessed by God. From this, I know we are all important, exquisite tiles in a mosaic not of our design. Is that not the purpose of this revolution? To do away with noble and peasant and bourgeois, and see ourselves again as brothers? Can you kill one of your own, innocent of any crime against you? Can you kill one who loves this country and its people?”

Just as the air in my voice begins to sag, I hear a deep and hollow sound above me. While I spoke, the executioner continued his patient work, and the blade is now latched in place.

Eternity ends and begins again while I wait for the crowd’s response to my desperate speech, on the terrifying cusp of both liberation and obliteration. Then the mob answers.

Cheers! Calls to free their brother! A miracle!

The guards shift around me, for not even they can halt the tide of the people.

One of the crowd approaches the scaffold, a fat and fierce man with a rakish red conical cap and a red, white and blue revolutionary cockade on his lapel that unfurls like a devouring wildflower. He pulls himself up halfway onto the scaffold, holds a goblet to my lips, and says, “A toast, then! Drink to the revolution!” The crowd joins his demand, insisting I drink, and thus prove my loyalty to the cause of the people.

I stretch out my lips, and begin to sip.

Blood. Copper and abomination on the tongue. Communion with Hell.

Yet I drink on, determined to establish myself as one of them, lustful for life and freedom, willing to devour my own heart to escape this moment of torture and madness.

The crowd roars, delighted, ecstatic, delirious, unstoppable – an echo of the invincible joy only the legendary furies know. Competing strains of the Marseillaise and Carmagnole burst out in barrel organ staccatos of patriotism and mayhem. “Give him to us,” they roar. “We shall take him to the Tuileries, to plead his case to the Committee of Public Safety! Give him to us!”

Freedom is sudden.

I fly into space, but do not land. I am caught by the man who proffered me the goblet. He tosses me into the air, and I see the grey sky and blood-splashed pavement blend together like a spiralling firework. I am caught by calloused hands, and I feel something enter my throat, pain vivid and incomprehensible. And I go up, up above the clamouring crowd, as though I am once again in a balloon, able to see the secret design of existence.

I am pointed to the scaffold, and look down on my body being unceremoniously pushed off the meagre proscenium. My executioner understood the request of his audience well.

Then I spin away, and I am eye level with a mother shielding its child’s eyes. They are in the window of the second story of a house

.

Through eyes I can no longer control, below me I glimpse the shaft of the object inserted into my neck. A soldier’s pike.

My thoughts begin to turn hazy, but I see the happiness of the people below, who have honoured me by elevating me to this unique vantage point. I would smile back, but my lips can only twitch acknowledgement. If only I could sing the Carmagnole with them, but the further we march, the more distant my lungs become. No matter. I will let them lead me, for I love my revolutionary brothers, and know I will be safe in their hands. Let us go visit our friends on the committee, where my still and stagnant eyes will speak of their extraordinary triumphs.

While we travel, I know I shall enjoy the view, for I see much.

I see us as God sees us.