Camille leaned over the gondola’s edge. Below, a plume of smoke drifted from a cannon mired in the mud. Shaking their fists at the balloon, the women surrounding the cannon loaded it again.
“They mean to shoot us down,” Camille screamed. “We must rise!”
Lazare was already kneeling by the brazier, stuffing it with straw to raise the temperature of the air in the balloon. “More fuel!” he shouted. Scrambling on her knees, Camille gathered as much as she could from where it was stacked around the edges of the gondola and pushed it into Lazare’s hands. More more more: the fire roared.
“Higher!” she shouted.
Another cracking boom echoed below them, followed by the scream of the cannonball. The gondola shuddered as the ball passed beneath it. Shouts erupted as steadily, the balloon rose.
The noise of the crowd grew dim. The smoke of the cannon faded. But her fear did not.
Camille sank to floor. She thought she might be sick. Had they been hit and plummeted to the earth, that alone would have ended their lives. But if by some miracle they’d survived the fall, they’d have their heads hacked off. Paraded around on pikes.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. Over Versailles, storm clouds gathered, and the wind that accompanied them blew the balloon east, toward Paris. Camille felt as if she were a dead leaf, a nothing, floating over the countryside. Her thoughts eddied and swirled. How could the people do this? Of course, they were hungry, their rights trampled underfoot for centuries, but to kill children? Shove heads on pikes? Is this what the revolution had become, a lust for blood?
Revolution had always meant change. But did it have to mean death?
She saw his legs again, bent as if running. “That little boy.”
“I know, mon âme.” Lazare pulled her close and she tucked her face against his chest. Under his coat, his heart beat slow and steady. “It is a terrible tragedy. I wish I could undo it. When I think of what he must have felt—” Gently, he ran his hand over her hair, tucking the loose strands back. “But you are safe now.”
It did not feel that way.
* * *
It was past midnight when they returned to Paris.
When they’d run out of fuel, they’d made a soft landing on the rain-slicked lawns of the palace of Saint-Cloud, on the Seine’s western banks. A gardener had found them a driver and a wagon to take them into the city.
When the cart rolled to a stop in front of the Hôtel Séguin, she said to Lazare, “I cannot say how sorry I am. I wish we had never gone.”
“Sorry for what? That we saw the truth of what’s happening?”
“If the truth is that people are being killed—the boy and the guards and perhaps others—I suppose I am glad I saw it. If that is what the revolution has become.”
“It is the old question,” Lazare mused. “Do the ends justify the means?”
Nothing could justify their deaths. “There can be no number of lives lost that is acceptable—can there?” Or was there some kind of dismal calculation that made that make sense?
He shook his head. “It would seem a hollow victory.”
“Am I doing enough?” she wondered aloud. “What should I do?”
“You’ll do what’s right,” he said as he helped her down from the wagon. In the midnight city’s gloom, the only light the lamp at the side of the gate, he turned to her. “Shall I stay with you?”
Everything in her wanted to say yes.
She imagined lying next to him in her bed, the curtains closed around them, shutting out the world. Listening to the even rise and fall of his breath until it lulled her to sleep where she would be safe from her thoughts. But she saw how exhaustion pulled at him and she remembered, with a stab of guilt, that he hadn’t been home since he’d returned from Lille. “I fear your parents will be worried.”
He frowned, as if he’d forgotten them, too. “I’ll come soon. Send a note, and I’ll come before that.”
It felt like hope, and she reached for it. “Come as soon as you can.”
He stooped and kissed her tenderly. “Until then.”
* * *
In the red salon, Sophie was pacing, anxiously waiting for her. After hearing Camille’s account—Sophie gripping the arm of the sofa so hard her knuckles went white—she told Camille the news that had come back to Paris ahead of them. The queen had been chased from her chambers by women and