The Knight of Maison-Rouge: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (Modern Library) - Hardcover

Dumas, Alexandre; Rose, Julie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679642986 ISBN 13: 9780679642985

Verlag: Random House Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

A major new translation of a forgotten classic

Paris, 1793, the onset of the Terror. Brave Republican Maurice rescues a mys-terious and beautiful woman from an angry mob and is unknowingly drawn into a secret Royalist plot—a plot revolving around the imprisoned Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and her enigmatic and fearless champion, the Knight of Maison-Rouge. Full of surprising twists, breakneck adventure, conspiracies, swordplay, romance, and heroism, The Knight of Maison-Rouge is an exhilarating tale of selflessness, love, and honor under the shadow of the guillotine. Dumas here is at the very height of his powers, and with this first and only modern translation, readers can once again ride with the Knight of Maison-Rouge.

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Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), one of the most popular writers of all time, is the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Muske-teers (both available as Modern Library Paperback Classics), along with dozens of other works of every genre. His remains were recently removed to the Pantheon, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a French writer.

Julie Rose’s many translations include an acclaimed version of Racine’s Phèdre, as well as works by Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Thomas, and many others. Rose was recently awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and the PEN medallion for translation.

Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of Street Boys and Sleepers, among other books. He lives in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

The Recruits

It was the night of the tenth of March, 1793. The bell at Notre-Dame had just struck ten, and each stroke rang out clear and distinct, one after the other, before flying off into the ether like a night bird soaring from some bronze nest, sad, monotonous, and resonant.

Night had descended on Paris. But it was not the usual noisy, stormy Paris night, punctuated by lightning yet cold and misty. Paris itself was not the Paris we know today, dazzling by night with its thousands of lights reflected in its golden mire, the Paris of busy promeneurs, jubilant whisperings, and deliciously sleazy outskirts where fierce feuds and reckless crimes flourish, a wildly roaring furnace. It was a shabby little dive, tremulous, beetling, whose rarely seen inhabitants would run whenever they had to cross a street and scuttle away into their alleyways or under their porte-cochères, the way feral creatures pursued by hunters sink into their burrows.

It was, in a word, the Paris of the tenth of March, 1793, as I think I might have said. But first let me tell you a little bit about the extreme situation that made the capital so different from what it is today, and then we can start on the events that are the whole point of this story.

With the death of Louis XVI, France cut its ties with the rest of Europe. The three enemies it had already defeated—Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,and Piedmont—were then joined by England, Holland, and Spain. Sweden and Denmark alone maintained their former neutrality, busy as they were watching Catherine II tear up Poland, as it happens.

The situation was alarming. Less looked down upon as a physical force, but also less esteemed as a moral one, since the September massacres and the execution of Louis XVI on the twenty-first of January, France was literally surrounded, like a mere town, by the whole of Europe. England was at the coast, Spain along the Pyrenees, Piedmont and Austria across the Alps, Holland and Prussia to the north of the Netherlands, and at one single point, at Escaut, along the Upper Rhine, two hundred fifty thousand combatants marched against the Republic.

Our generals were thrust back at every turn. Maczinski had been forced to abandon Aix-la-Chapelle and to withdraw to Liège. Steingel and Neuilly were pushed back to the Limburg; Miranda, who had been laying siege to Maastricht, fell back on Tongres. Valence and Dampierre, reduced to beating a hasty retreat, had let part of their supplies be spirited away. More than ten thousand deserters had already fled the army and scattered throughout the interior. Finally, the Convention, putting all its hopes in Dumouriez alone, had fired off letter after letter to the general ordering him to quit the banks of the Biesboos, where he was preparing a landing in Holland, and to return and take command of the army of the Meuse.

Vulnerable at the heart like a living body, France felt in its very heart—for that is what Paris was—every one of the blows that invasion, revolt, or treason leveled against its extremities. Every victory brought a riot of joy, every defeat an uprising of terror. It is not hard to imagine the tumult that broke out with the news of the successive defeats France had just suffered.

On the ninth of March, the day before, the meeting of the National Convention had been among the stormiest ever held; all officers had received the order to join their regiments at the same time. And Danton, that undaunted proposer of things that were impossible but that nevertheless somehow got done, Danton, taking the stand, cried out: “There are not enough soldiers, you say? Let’s give Paris a chance to save France! Let’s ask Paris for thirty thousand men and send them to Dumouriez, and then not only will France be saved, but Belgium will be in the bag and Holland will be ours.”

The proposal was greeted with cries of enthusiasm. Registers were opened in all the forty-eight sections of Paris, which were invited to meet that night. Theaters and cabarets were shut down so that there would be no distractions, and the black flag was hoisted at the Hôtel de Ville as a distress signal.

Before midnight, thirty-five thousand names had been entered in those same registers. Yet what happened that night was a repeat of what had already happened in the bloody days of September: in every section, wherever volunteers signed up, they demanded that all traitors be punished before they themselves left for the front.

Traitors were, in effect, any counterrevolutionaries and secret conspirators who threatened from within a Revolution that was clearly threatened from without. But as you can well imagine, the term was as flexible as the extremist parties then tearing France apart wanted it to be. Traitors were whoever was the weakest. It so happened that the Girondins were the weakest, so the Montagnards—the Mountain—decided the Girondins would be the traitors.

The next day—this particular next day being the tenth of March—all the Montagnard deputies made sure they turned up at the meeting of the Convention. The Jacobin came armed and had just filled the stands after chasing the women away when the mayor of Paris rose and presented himself alongside the council of the Commune.He confirmed the report of the commissioners of the Convention about the general dedication of the citizens and reiterated the wish, expressed unanimously the day before, for an extraordinary tribunal to be set up expressly to judge traitors.

Immediately the cry went up for a committee report, and immediately the committee met. Ten minutes later, Robert Lindet emerged to announce that a special tribunal composed of nine completely independent judges would be appointed and divided into two permanent sections, which would gain convictions by whatever means they chose and would pursue, either directly or at the request of the Convention, anyone and everyone attempting to lead the people astray.

As we know, the term “traitor” was most malleable, and the extension of these powers was far-reaching. The Girondins immediately understood that the whole point of the move was to make it easy to arrest them, and they rose as one.

“We’d rather die,” they cried, “than consent to the setting up of this Venetian Inquisition.”

In reply to this bit of invective, the Montagnards demanded the motion be put to the vote by a show of hands.

“Yes!” cried Féroud. “Yes, let’s vote and show the world who it is that seeks to assassinate innocence in the name of the law.”

A vote was in fact taken and, contrary to all expectations, the majority declared, first, that there would be juries; second, that these juries would be made up of equal numbers from all the departments of France; and, third, that they would be handpicked by the Convention.

The moment these three proposals were accepted, a great roar was heard. The Convention was in the habit of visits from the general public. When they asked what the racket was all about, they learned that a delegation of recruits had turned up, after dining at the wheat market, and was demanding to now parade before them.

The doors were promptly flung open and six hundred men, armed with swords, pistols, and pikes, appeared, half drunk and calling deafeningly for death to all traitors as they trotted round to the sound of wild applause.

“Yes!” Collot d’Herbois shouted back. “Yes, my friends, despite all the intrigues, we will save you, you—and liberty!”

With that he shot a deadly look at the Girondins, one that made it clear they were not out of the woods. Indeed, as soon as the meeting of the Convention was over, the Montagnards fanned out to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0679642986
• ISBN 13: 9780679642985
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 423
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Modern Library; https://www.randomhousebooks.com/imprint/modern-library/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forwander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar