Les Noyades

It's astonishing how many they managed to find. They raided boatsheds and harbours, dragged out flat-bottomed barges and old rowing boats and bare planks of wood. They even built a few: rough wooden things that wouldn't have lasted ten minutes, even without the trapdoors in the bottom and the boarded-over holes in the sides: but then, they didn't need to. 1

Up close they were nearly all very ugly, plain wood mostly, splintery and unpolished, half the time not even painted over. Ours was different, though. They came to drag us into one and I said, "We have our own," and went to get it. They let me. They weren't bad people really, just men doing their job, just men who didn't want to end up in boats themselves.2

So while everyone else climbed into tiny badly constructed little excuses for boats, sobbing or staring at the floor or screaming or holding still in silence, I stepped proudly into ours. It was green and white, and inside we'd left the wood unpainted so it was glossy and dark. There were silk-and-velvet green cushions with gold tassels laid out on the seats. It was small - only big enough for my husband and I -but it was very beautiful, very well made.3

The National Guardsman who had escorted us here climbed into a boat next to ours and aimed his musket at my husband's head. (Five years ago I wouldn't have known it was a musket. It would just have been a gun; I couldn't tell the difference between muskets and rifles and bayonets. But in these few years I have seen a lot of guns.) I thought maybe we should fight back anyway. If we struggled and he shot us wouldn't it still be a quicker death than the one they had planned for us? But I had no energy left to fight with. We had been fighting for so long.4

It had begun almost impulsively, when a couple of Parisian bastards showed up with a huge retinue of National Guard and announced that my husband and hundreds of others had to come and join their war. And we thought - why should we? We didn't know anything much about the war, but it wasn't ours; it wasn't anything to do with us. These people had raised taxes, they had murdered the King. Their soldiers had forced our priest to leave because he would not betray the Pope, and replaced him with a rich young Parisian who couldn't hear confessions because he couldn't understand our dialect. And now they wanted to take good men for a war that meant nothing to any of us.5

Somehow, collectively, all at the same time, we found we couldn't let them.6

I think I knew from the start that it would end like this. Not the details, not the boats - I had assumed it would be the guillotine, but I could only be impressed by the originality of Monsieur Carrier - but the death; I saw that coming. Anyone with any degree of common sense could see that we couldn't win: we were an untrained mass of confusion and bitterness, kicking at the wall in an effort to express ourselves. And they...they were the army and the National Guard and the slick Jacobin speakers who could make words do exactly what they wanted, and people too. We knew other people were fighting too, but we couldn't reach them. Nobody else seemed to see it, though: when I suggested to my husband that we might lose he was furious - he called me a traitor, and he was even angrier when I told him he sounded just like them. 7

Sitting in the boat now, I quite wanted to say I told you so, but because I didn't think it would be what he wanted to hear at that particular moment I said I love you instead, and put my head on his shoulder.8

He stroked my hair, and I sat up again and looked around. There were as many women and children as there were men, waiting in their boats to be tied up. Like us, none of them seemed to want to try and fight back. The soldiers had stripped a few priests too and tied them to women - "Republican Marriages," they called them. And our deaths, they were "Republican Baptisms." It's about purification, you see: cleansing the soul of the patrie. It's logical enough: we were beyond redemption, and so a conventional living baptism was not enough; the only viable form of purification was annihilation. 9

A second National Guardsman arrived, and as the first held his musket steady the second roped us tightly to the boat. Then stepped back, and pushed us out into the river. The other Guardsman floated with us and looked out to the bank, waiting for the signal.10

The signal came from a senior Guardsman: Monsieur Carrier had not arrived in person to oversee his grand scheme. Not surprising: it was early January, after all, and nearly midnight. When the water splashed over the edges of the boat it might as well have been ice. No one would want to be out in this cold if they could help it. 11

The new boats, of course, were easy: the Guardsmen simply pushed open the trapdoors or ripped the planks from the holes they covered and then kicked the boats away from their own safely solid ones and watched them disappear. The other boats weren't much more difficult: our friend beside us waited until we were far enough out, then aimed lower and shot the hull full of holes, and all I could think as we sank was how long it would take me to repair it.12

The water was even colder than I would have predicted from the occasional splashes that had leapt out at us as we waited. In those last panicked minutes I changed my mind, got my energy back, and I thrashed wildly in the ropes for a moment. Then my husband's hand managed to stretch far enough to find mine. I gripped it tight, and stopped struggling.13

A minute passed, and the water seemed to grow warmer. The panic settled into a hallucinatory calm. I closed my eyes.