In 1790, the second year of the Revolution, that gale-driven frenzy seemed—at least in the streets and alleys of Paris—to be ebbing away.
On the quiet Right Bank of the Seine, Louis XVI had left the unimaginable luxury of Versailles and moved into his new Parisian residence; he would have to grow accustomed to the straitened routine of the Tuileries.
Almost every afternoon the King of France would step out from the Tuileries' dim and melancholy interiors onto a broad balcony near the riverside quay. Plump, pale, and good-natured, Louis wore a tricorn set with a cockade of red, white, and blue; he smiled and received the idle cheers of the sans-culottes—the "men in trousers," so called to distinguish them from the breeched nobility and the propertied classes—who gathered about the palace. At times the mild and gentle-tempered Louis even walked within the palace grounds; people could catch sight of him through the wrought-iron grille. If anyone called out to him, he might, with an officer of the Guard at his side, step beyond the walls and exchange a few words with the crowd.
For a moment it seemed to Parisians that they had rediscovered a father. The once-fierce revolutionary journals lowered their banners, moderated their tone towards the monarch, and began to report on the affairs of the King and his household with a certain respect—if not for affection, then for decorum.
Marie-Antoinette was the exception. The "Austrian woman" never did win Paris.
"The King's manners have become extraordinarily humble—hardly the natural posture of a Bourbon that has ruled unbridled for more than two centuries!" So wrote Lord Mornington, the British minister in Paris, in his dispatch to the young William Pitt. He described, with some astonishment:
"As for the rabble who loiter about the streets with nothing to do, once they have had their fill of the King's comical appearances, they drift in little knots to the Constituent Assembly at the Manège. There, at every hour, the air shakes with the sonorous passions of hundreds of deputies; the hall and the galleries reverberate with shouts and insults; and when fists follow words, with cries of pain… I now understand why the President changes every seven or ten days: his strength is consumed. A Paris deputy must work up to fifteen hours a day. The President's chief labour is to clap his hands to his ears, to shake his little bell, and to cry at the top of his lungs, 'Order! Order!' Alas, at the urging of the onlookers, few members heed him. He can only pound the desk and beat his breast until the next recess…"
…
On the morning of the sixth, a string of cold rains left Paris raw and damp; a dull dawn lowered over the city. Presently the bells of Notre-Dame tolled six—broken strokes, like a stray bird losing the way to its old nest and vanishing into the grey, a sound both desolate and monotonous.
At No. 156, Rue Saint-Jacques, on the Left Bank, in the garret of a house that looked upon the street, a young man named André would, as soon as the bells fell silent, fling his eyes open. In his dressing-gown, not pausing for a coat, he would leap from the bed, push up a window, thrust out his head, and strain his gaze towards the Champ-de-Mars.
"Damn it—the Eiffel Tower still refuses to rise!" André cursed inwardly.
Only when a knife of wind drove down his collar and set him sneezing again and again did he shut the pane and dive back beneath the blankets, still warm with sleep.
Yes—he was André, the mixed-race barrister wanted in the criminal courts of the twenty-first century. His Chinese father and French mother had compromised on a name that served in both tongues: André.
As to why he had been cast from the year 20XX into Paris more than two centuries earlier, André was utterly at a loss. He knew only this: the comrade who was meant to meet him on the riverbank that night had struck him from behind—murder to silence him, to keep him from arrest that might expose the entire laundering ring.
But God had shown pity, and the Buddha compassion. His body had died; the soul had not dispersed. He had slipped into Revolutionary Paris and come to dwell in the body of another André—André Franck—and by some sly coincidence they had read at the same university.
More exactly, his present name was André-Franck, native of Reims in the old province of Champagne. Church records stated that André-Franck had been abandoned as an infant at the door of a Catholic orphanage.
Perhaps by nature, he was quick and gentle; the Mother Superior favoured him. At fourteen, when his companions left the orphanage to fend for themselves, the handsome André-Franck, by the Mother's insistence, won a place at a church college that offered board and lodging.
Years later he entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Reims. After taking his bachelor's degree and serving two years as an assistant, his former tutor—Tullio, now the local prosecutor—recommended him to Judge Vinot at the High Court in Paris.
Thus, to the envy of many, André-Franck became a junior clerk—an apprentice lawyer—within the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité.
His luck turned soon after. At twenty-four, only months into his Parisian tenure, the great and restless city burst into revolution.
At first the storm was distant to him: the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789; the great panic among the peasantry that August when famine drove them half mad. These things touched him little.
But ill fortune keeps its own calendar.
In early October 1789, the hungry women of Paris were stirred to fury; linking arms beneath the beat of a military drum and the lash of pouring rain, they marched on Versailles.
Reaching the palace, those frantic women cried to the bystanders that they wanted nothing but bread; the "baker and his family must return to Paris!"—meaning that Louis XVI and his household must live again under the people's eyes.
At that very hour André-Franck was at Versailles, carrying the weekly brief from the Paris Parlement on Judge Vinot's instructions. At the palace railings a deranged middle-aged woman seized a pike and thrust it into the young clerk as he stepped from his carriage. The Guards came in time; with fixed bayonets they broke the mob and carried the wounded lawyer to safety.
The wound was not mortal. A surgeon cleaned and bandaged the gash in his abdomen; yet that night it festered, fever ran high, and soon he sank into a deep stupor.
On the morning of 6 October, when all had given him up for lost, André-Franck, to general amazement, revived at the chaplain's prayer. The fever fell; the wound began to heal.
Louis XVI was concluding his devotions in a chapel on the north wing when he heard of it. "A miracle! A miracle!" the timid king cried, again and again. Then—against the protests of his attendants—he brought the Queen, the princess, and the little Dauphin to visit the convalescent, and bestowed upon him four louis d'or, a reward for the four hours he had wrestled so bravely with death.
The former André-Franck would have wept for such grace, as did a Paris girl named Renault, who, for a few sacks of flour from the King's bounty, later tried to assassinate Robespierre—for the sake of the martyred royal family.
Fortunately for him, the man now in André-Franck's body was a traveller in time.
When the purse of four louis was laid by his pillow, his voice rasped with excitement, he muttered something inarticulate, and fainted again.
It was not gratitude. It was terror.
A terror that rose from the marrow.
Having lived more than ten years in twenty-first-century France, André knew what the years ahead would bring: from the outbreak of the Revolution onward, those who had kept intimacy with Louis XVI—whatever their rank or power—if they remained in France, would in due course mount the scaffold.
Once he had accepted, with difficulty, that he had fallen into 1789 and taken the place of the unlucky André-Franck, he had no desire to be sucked into the whirlpool of Terror and laid out as another sacrifice.
"I must save myself—and quickly." He resolved, and continued to feign unconsciousness.
At first he plotted to take the four louis and flee to some other European state, to keep clear of the storm that would break in three years' time. Four louis would be half the estate of a country squire in England.
He thought better of it.
He was no nobleman; a vagrant commoner enjoyed little liberty anywhere in eighteenth-century Europe outside Revolutionary France—intolerable to one accustomed to modern life. As for the wilds of America, or "Great Qing" under the Old Man of Ten Perfections—he never considered them.
Besides, in his heart he did not wish to squander the chance that history offered him. He believed that if he clung tightly to the knees of the giants, he would come through unharmed. If all else failed, he could make a discreet fortune and slip away—say, before September 1791.
A few days later, before his wound had fully healed, André ignored the kindly surgeon's advice and rattled back to Paris in a four-wheeled carriage.
At dawn on the fifteenth of October he crossed to the Châtelet criminal court on the Right Bank, opposite the Palais de Justice, in the company of a lawyer from the Palais. There he volunteered to defend, free of charge, the very woman who had wounded him—the virago Blair.
"…In truth," he pleaded, "this poor single mother is herself an innocent victim. Hunger overcame her, and the crying of her children for bread robbed her of reason.
"…If this court convicts her, three children will not merely be parted from their mother; they will lose their only support and face a future without hope.
"…I, André-Franck, counsel for the defence and the man injured in this affair, am an orphan. I know the desolation of losing one's parents. I cannot wish such desolation upon children who have done no wrong.
"…Therefore, in the sight of a merciful God, I beseech Your Honour the judge, the upright gentleman of the prosecution, and you, good citizens of the jury: acquit Madame Blair."
The courtroom and its approaches shook with applause. Many wept openly; people rose, waved their arms, and cried as one: "Acquittal! Acquittal!"
After repeated calls to order were ignored, the judge declared a recess, then summoned the prosecutor, the defence, and the foreman of the jury into his chamber.
Half an hour later the hearing resumed. The prosecutor moved to withdraw all charges; the jury concurred; the judge pronounced acquittal and immediate release.
Before leaving the court, André accepted the woman's wordless gratitude with a smile, then drew from his breast a purse of ten gold coins and placed it in the mother's hands, before the assembly.
"This is no alms," he said, with an honesty that brooked no doubt. "It is the homage of one who was once an unlucky orphan to a brave mother."
The crowd cheered again, pressing close, clapping till their hands burned, praising the good and upright Maître André.
The next day the radical Friend of the People printed a full account of the trial and, at the end, conferred upon André the title "Advocate of the People." Its proprietor was that same "Friend of the People," Jean-Paul Marat, a Swiss doctor (once a veterinarian, later a physician), who was said to write, edit, and publish the paper all by himself.
Having settled his affairs at court, André went on to the Tuileries and personally distributed the remaining four louis d'or among the eight men who had saved him that day—seven guardsmen and a surgeon. From a chance remark he learned two names among the soldiers: Louis-Lazare Hoche and François Lefebvre.
Thus relieved of those scorching coins, the "People's Advocate" became once more a gloriously penniless man. His pay at the Palais was fifteen livres a week; a third of it went to the orphanage at Reims. After rent and board he had almost nothing left; at times he could not afford a carriage to the courts.
Yet the laurel of "People's Advocate" won him a modest renown among Parisians, and with it came visitors—some wishing to offer small, "insignificant" assistance to the poor young lawyer.
Among them was a butcher named Legendre. He was in his late thirties, short, stout, balding, plain of face; but generous, and possessed of a sense of justice. Born at Versailles, Legendre had once refused a clerical post and come to Paris to build a tidy fortune. He owned several houses in the Cordeliers and Théâtre districts (joined into one in 1790), and drew ten thousand livres a year from butcheries and general stores across the Left Bank.
For all that, this property-owner had thrown himself into the Revolution: he had been at the Bastille in July; he had marched to Versailles in October.
André accepted his help for a practical reason: he knew that this seemingly rough, timid, kindly pork-dealer would keep his little craft afloat through the heaviest seas; that he would thunder in the Assembly at a plot to ruin Danton and yet escape the Terror's tribunals unscathed.
Legendre himself did not yet know the weight he would carry three years hence.
In November 1789, once his strength had returned, André moved into Legendre's property at No. 156, Rue Saint-Jacques: a three-storey house let to middle-class tenants from the provinces, with a Polish housekeeper who doubled as cook. The neighbourhood lay between the Rue des Théâtres and the Rue des Cordeliers, not far from the Palais de Justice; on clear days one could walk there in half an hour, saving the fare.
There was a small incident when he took up residence. The poor lawyer from Reims refused, politely but firmly, the comfortable suite on the second floor and chose the low garret beneath the roof. Legendre understood at once and said no more. He collected a nominal livre each week and instructed the housekeeper to provide André with breakfast and supper daily.
Though he had grown familiar with his new name, new life, and new work, André did not wholly surrender hope. He still dreamed that he might one morning wake to see the Eiffel Tower lancing the sky—the modern world restored to him; he would settle, if need be, for Haussmann's Paris.
But dreams, in the end, were done.
"Six months since I was reborn," he counted, not without a rueful smile. "Perhaps I must finally let go of the self of 20XX and be André from 1790 onward. If there is any privilege to being a traveller in time, should I not—after the bloodshed at the Champ-de-Mars—find occasion to remove the old Robespierre, Marat, and Danton together? Then I should be a panda—no, a national treasure. Fie, childish talk."
When the fog lifted from his thoughts, André was dressed and at his desk, bending over a letter to Inspector Javert—recently promoted—setting out his analysis of another murder that had shaken Paris.
Ten minutes later he summoned his messenger, Merda, the housekeeper's fifteen-year-old nephew. "Take this sealed note to Inspector Javert," he said. "Tell him I shall discuss criminal psychology with him tomorrow afternoon—the time and place as before."