Across the world, the architecture of justice is divided into two great traditions.
The first—the Common Law—took root in the British Isles and spread through the dominions of the Empire, from Canada to India, from Australia to the United States.
The second, known as the Civil Law, was born in France.
It was here, in the late eighteenth century, amid the turbulence of revolution, that modern continental jurisprudence took shape—its foundations laid upon the constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795.
When, in July 1789, the Estates-General dissolved itself into the National Constituent Assembly, the entire judicial structure of France was quietly torn down and rebuilt.
The committee charged with drafting the new constitution worked eighteen hours a day without pause; and across the Seine, the Palais de Justice, nerve centre of the nation's courts, matched its fevered pace.
The Palais stood upon the Île de la Cité near the Pont Neuf—a cluster of grey roofs and spires, part fortress, part cathedral, part bureaucratic labyrinth.
Within its walls were housed the Court of Cassation, the Court of Appeal, the Tribunal of Grande Instance, and the national Judicial Archives.
Since the Age of Enlightenment, this citadel of law—long dominated by the noblesse de robe, the "robed nobles" who had purchased their titles—had served as the front line against both the noblesse d'épée, the hereditary warriors of the sword, and the absolute authority of the crown.
It was no coincidence that so many of the Revolution's leaders, those destined to unmake a monarchy, first sharpened their intellects within these very chambers.
As always, when André Franck crossed the threshold, he found the palace in a state of perpetual motion: judges and prosecutors in black robes, their wigs powdered and their square caps slightly askew, hurried along the corridors in clouds of dust and voices.
Clerks shouted orders at errand boys; petty vendors hawking sweets and pamphlets were being shooed from the stairwells by weary attendants.
The noise and crowding seemed endless, and yet within this chaos, lawyers of every title and persuasion debated freely, argued in clusters, gestured grandly, and shouted without restraint—as though freedom of speech were the only law left unbroken.
André had just set foot upon the marble steps leading to the second floor when a familiar clerk called out to him.
"Hey, the man from Reims! Judge Vinault was summoned to the Riding School this morning—National Assembly business. He won't be back today. He left a message for you: take this letter to the Café Procope on Rue des Théâtres, and deliver it by hand to a gentleman named Bolze. Must be there before ten."
André inclined his head, took the envelope, and examined it with care.
He checked the wax seal, the private signature impressed upon it, and the watermark of the judge's stamp.
Satisfied that nothing had been tampered with, he slipped the letter into the brown leather portfolio pressed beneath his arm.
As one of Judge Vinault's assistants, André's duties ranged from copying legal manuscripts to carrying sealed correspondence across the city.
Few envied his position.
Messengers were poorly paid, perpetually in motion, and—worst of all—expected to cover their own expenses in advance, including the cost of carriages and ferries.
France's finances were collapsing.
After decades of continental wars, the Bourbon court's habitual extravagance, and the ruinous generosity of Louis XVI, who had poured 1.6 billion livres into the cause of American independence, the Treasury stood hollow.
The Americans, grateful but insolvent, had sent in return two ships of wheat, half of it mouldering in the hold.
By 1789 the deficit had swollen past one hundred million livres and continued to rise by over a hundred million each year.
Small wonder that a civil servant of the Palais could wait months for reimbursement of a single fare.
But André minded none of it.
If he had to pay his own way, he did so gladly—for the privilege of carrying the judge's seal granted him a kind of invisible passport through the capital's circles of influence.
It opened doors, not only to the ministries and courts, but at times to the very palace of the King himself.
He had seen Louis XVI at close distance: a large, soft-faced man whose gentleness seemed at odds with his crown, and beside him, the radiant yet ill-fated Marie Antoinette.
There was also the haughty and overpraised Marquis de Lafayette, whose ambition exceeded his wisdom, and two young officers whom few yet noticed—Louis-Lazare Hoche and François Lefebvre.
One would become a general of the Republic, the other a marshal of the Empire.
Both were soldiers to the marrow: men who obeyed orders without question and asked little of politics.
As a permanent courier of the Palais de Justice, André moved freely between the courts and the Assembly.
He often slipped into the galleries of the National Constituent Assembly, where the orator Mirabeau thundered from the rostrum like a general upon the field.
His eyes burned like coals, his voice rose in waves, his arm struck the desk with a violence that made his opponents tremble.
When he spoke, even the cynics among the crowd felt their hearts quicken.
André admired him beyond measure.
That power—the ability to rouse men's spirits, to lift words until they burned like banners—was the one gift a traveller from another century could never bring with him.
He knew his own limits.
His triumph in the case of the widow Blair owed little to eloquence.
It was, rather, a matter of timing and circumstance—a political compromise between the will of the court, the pressure of the government, and the hunger of the streets.
Behind the verdict lay the hidden hand of the Tuileries, the ministries, and the Assembly itself.
All had quietly advised leniency.
A conviction might have provoked fresh riots, another surge of blood and fire.
Even had the jury condemned her, the King or his Minister of Justice would likely have signed a pardon within the hour.
Yet André's long training in two worlds—years of study and practice in both modern and ancient law—had given him a memory sharpened to a blade's edge.
He could recite statutes as others quoted scripture.
Still, he understood that in a courtroom, intellect alone was not enough.
Tone, gesture, and the art of emotion were weapons as decisive as reason.
Thus, whenever Mirabeau mounted the podium, André watched him intently, memorising every word, every sweep of his arm.
And there, upon the high benches of the Mountain faction, he soon noticed another observer doing the same:
a slight, pale man with delicate features, a trace of shyness in his manner, and a pair of green spectacles that glimmered under the chandeliers—Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre.
He looked nothing like a revolutionary; yet something in his stillness carried its own kind of gravity.
From the Palais de Justice to the Café Procope was a short distance: across the Pont Neuf, through the Rue Dauphine, and ten minutes' walk to the Rue des Théâtres.
The rain had ceased in the night, leaving the air cold and clear.
The cobblestones still shone with damp, but they were firm beneath the foot.
André's purse was light, and so he walked.
The bridges of Paris were always the same—narrow, crowded, alive with quarrels.
Coaches jostled against drays; carts laden with coal scraped against those filled with bread.
Servants clung to the backs of carriages, shouting abuse at the coalmen who cursed back in kind.
Police officers stood idle, intervening only when blood was drawn.
Before long the bridge became a tangle of wheels and hooves, motionless but deafening.
André turned sideways, squeezing between a wagon and a barrow.
He removed the powdered wig from his head and tucked it into his case before the coal dust could stain it—forgetting that the muddy wheels had already spattered his white stockings with brown flecks.
At the far end of the bridge, the street widened into the Rue Dauphine, and the air felt suddenly lighter.
He passed bookstalls stacked with pamphlets and broadsheets.
At one, a headline caught his eye—Camille Desmoulins' France et Brabant Révolutionnaire had published a new issue, announcing the foundation of the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man—better known as the Cordeliers Club—on the eleventh of the month.
"One sou, monsieur!" the bookseller called, rolling the paper into a neat tube.
As André reached for his coin, the man leaned closer and whispered,
"Monsieur Franck—the People's Friend, Paul Marat, wishes to see you."
André froze for an instant.
Marat? He had thought the doctor still exiled in Britain, beyond the reach of Parisian warrants.
How long had he been back—and why seek him now?
But two lives had tempered André's nerves.
He nodded slightly and asked, "When, and where?"
"At your house, if it pleases you. The hour is yours to choose."
The bookseller's eyes darted about, wary of listeners.
André drew his silver watch from his pocket, considered, and said quietly,
"One o'clock. Tell the People's Friend I shall expect him for lunch."
The meeting arranged, he resumed his errand.
Why Marat wanted him, he neither knew nor much cared.
For now—he thought—the man was little more than an angry pamphlet in human form.
In eighteenth-century Paris, few places carried the same charm, the same whisper of cultivated leisure, as the Café Procope.
Founded in 1686 and said to be the oldest restaurant in the city, it had long been a gathering place for philosophers and statesmen alike.
Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson, and Condorcet had all taken their coffee beneath its chandeliers; the air itself seemed steeped in the residue of reason.
By 1790, the café still stood proud on the Left Bank, its English red walls trimmed with mirrors and Bohemian crystal lamps.
Vases of flowers scented the stairwell; portraits of great men hung upon the panelled walls—faces half lost in candlelight.
To André, the scene was almost uncanny.
He had seen it before—two centuries hence, in a Paris of electric lamps and museum guides.
Nothing had changed, save that Napoleon's hat had not yet been pledged to settle his bill.
At the door, André gave the name "Monsieur Bolze."
A waiter in livery led him up a narrow staircase to a small dining room on the second floor.
Four long tables stood there, but only one was occupied—a lady, elegantly dressed, who lifted her gaze the moment he entered.
"Monsieur or Madame Bolze?" André asked, uncertain.
The woman smiled faintly but did not rise.
Her gown was of white silk, trimmed with lace that caught the light like frost; a blue sash bound her waist, and her powdered curls were piled high in the latest style of Parisian grace.
For a moment he could not shake the sense of familiarity.
He had seen her somewhere—or at least her likeness—perhaps in David's portrait of some noble couple he had admired long ago in the Louvre.
"Good day," she said. "Monsieur Bolze is my father. He was called away at short notice.
You are the messenger from Judge Vinault, I presume?
Then you may hand the letter to me."
Her tone was clipped, her gaze appraising.
André followed the movement of her eyes as they travelled over him—from the tangle of his hastily removed wig, still bearing a stray leaf, to the coal stains marring his coat and stockings.
He looked every inch the provincial clerk, not the gentleman of law he was.
He gave a small shrug and smiled.
"Madame… Lavoisier, perhaps?" he ventured.
She frowned but did not answer.
Instead, she rose abruptly, stepped forward, and snatched the letter from his hand.
"Your duty is done," she said. "As a courtesy from the Palais de Justice, you may dine here at the house's expense—fifty livres' worth, food and wine included. Do not be modest."
With that, she turned and swept from the room, leaving the door half-open behind her.
Her arrogance stung more than he expected.
For a moment André stood motionless, watching the swing of the door, then slowly let out a breath.
He began to count on his fingers—a small, deliberate rhythm that steadied his temper.
A thought, bitter and sharp, came unbidden:
If the Lavoisiers treat the poor with such contempt, then perhaps the crowd will not be wrong to demand their heads. A Republic may revere its scientists, but no just government can build its triumph upon the misery of its own people.
His anger cooled into reflection.
France had no shortage of genius—Laplace, Monge, Lagrange, Ampère, Coulomb, Poisson, Fourier, Fresnel—the names of men who would one day light the heavens.
But knowledge untempered by compassion was a cruel god; to make joy out of another's deprivation was a sin no Republic should permit.
He smiled ruefully.
In his former life, he had studied law not out of faith in justice, but out of vengeance.
A corrupt rival—once the partner of his father—had ruined their business, driven his parents to despair, and fled to Reims to hide in a vineyard.
André had followed, silent and patient, weaving his retribution like a web.
Over five years he destroyed the man's fortune, scattered his family, and at last stood beside his deathbed, watching the light go out of his eyes.
Pride would have urged him to reject the lady's charity.
A man of honour, affronted so, should have bowed coldly and departed.
But André was no man of empty pride.
He was a disciple of Machiavelli, a believer in the supremacy of utility over sentiment.
And besides—his purse was nearly empty, and he had a guest to entertain.
He called the waiter back.
"Bring me the menu," he said, his tone light.
He studied it briefly, then ordered with the careful confidence of a man accustomed to good tables:
a bottle of Burgundy, a dish of veal in cream, two loaves of fresh bread, a platter of oysters, and dessert enough for two.
He added, almost casually, "Have it all sent to 156 Rue Saint-Jacques at precisely eleven-fifty. Tell them it is for Monsieur Franck."
The waiter hesitated. "And the payment, monsieur?"
André signed the note that Madame Lavoisier had left behind and pressed a few coins into the man's palm.
"The remainder—five livres—is for you. Consider it a small gratuity."
The servant's face brightened. "Merci, monsieur."
André watched him leave, a faint smile touching his lips.
It was easy to be generous with another's money.
Outside, the city moved toward noon.
The bells of Saint-Sulpice tolled faintly over the rooftops; the streets, washed clean by rain, gleamed like polished steel.
For a moment, standing in the window's light, André felt again the strange doubleness of his existence—lawyer, messenger, intruder in time.
He belonged to this world and yet not to it, as though fate had placed him between the old order and the one that would devour it.
At one o'clock, he would dine with Paul Marat, the People's Friend.
The thought made him smile again—half amusement, half curiosity.
He doubted that Marat, for all his fury and his pen, yet grasped what revolutions truly devoured first: their own architects.
But then, perhaps that too was part of the experiment.
He took his hat, straightened his coat, and stepped once more into the light of the street—
a man out of time, walking toward his next negotiation with history.