Surrender to a Stranger Read Free Page A

charges laid against you, and hereby sentence you to death by the guillotine. This execution will take place immediately,” he added as he began to shuffle together the papers on his bench.
    The audience, which had been relatively quiet during Jacqueline’s speech, began to cheer and applaud the court’s decision. One of the court clerks laid down his pen and pulled out his watch to examine the time. He motioned to Fouquier-Tinville to come over to him. After exchanging a few words, the public prosecutor shrugged and turned to face the bench.
    “It would appear the last tumbril departed for the Place de la Revolution some half hour ago,” he informed the judge president.
    “Then Citizeness Doucette may be returned to her cell in the Conciergerie until tomorrow,” amended the judge. “But the sentence is to be carried out within twenty-four hours.”
    Four members of the National Guard stepped up to the dock to escort Jacqueline out of the courtroom. They surrounded her as she walked down the aisle. The crowd around them began to surge in, cursing and trying to grab at her clothes and her hair.
    “Pretty hair—too bad Sanson will have to cut it so the blade can find your neck—” sang out one toothless hag who shot her hand in between the guards and gave Jacqueline’s hair a yank. The pins came loose and the rough coiffure she had managed to fashion before she left her cell sagged down around her shoulders.
    “See how proudly the bitch walks,” commented a man with a face reddened by too much cheap wine. He spat at her. “Take that, bitch.”
    “Let’s see how proud she is tomorrow when she lies down and puts her head through the republican window,” said a skinny youth whose bony shoulders slumped forward at an unnatural angle as he laughed.
    “Or when the tart’s body is tossed headless into the pit,” added another with a sneer.
    Jacqueline kept her eyes straight ahead and used the comments to fuel her sudden hatred of these people. The soldiers closed ranks around her so no one else could touch her, and she was grateful for that. She had heard stories of atrocities committed against arrested people who never made it as far as the court, or even the prison, for that matter, and she supposed she was grateful that she had not been openly butchered by an angry mob. At least the guillotine was quick and, she hoped, painless.
    The new Republic of France, birthplace of Liberty, Equality, and Reason, was a world gone mad. The men who had wrested power from their king, insisting that even a monarch who ruled with divine right was answerable to his people, had quickly discovered they were no better equipped to feed or clothe millions of angry, starving peasants than Louis XVI had been. It was a sobering realization. They blamed the soaring inflation and lack of food on a royalist conspiracy, and removed Louis’s head. But then the wars against Great Britain, Holland, and Spain began, spiraling the national debt out of control, and the crops continued to fail. The people, now proudly called citizens, continued to starve. And so they removed the head of their former queen, Marie-Antoinette. And still they were freezing and miserable. Surely someone was to blame?
    The former noblesse, who for centuries had made their fortunes on the sweat and misery of others, were undoubtedly the cause of so much want. They were leeches, traitors, enemies of the revolution. True, they had already been stripped of their titles and their privileges. But now they must pay for their crimes with their blood. France must be purged of her enemies. And thanks to the new Law of Suspects, any loyal citizen could denounce another and cause their arrest without the slightest trace of evidence. The fifty-odd prisons of Paris swelled with elegant inmates who had no hope of escaping the razor-sharp justice of the guillotine. Their deaths did not feed the population, but somehow the constant river of blood that flowed out of the Place de la