Rebel Rose, page 3
“Only if you won’t be mad at me when I say you look ridiculous.” A curled white wig covered his beautiful chestnut hair, thick white powder coated his warm skin, and his outfit mirrored Bastien’s in its extravagance and quality. He wasn’t her Lio anymore—this Lio belonged to Versailles.
He approached her bashfully, joining her to stand before the mirror. “I don’t even recognize myself.”
But despite her misgivings, she could see how princely he looked, how easily he would be accepted by Versailles’s courtiers, and how different they really were, standing side by side.
Lio seemed to read the discord on her face. “It’s only temporary, Belle.” He pressed one hand to the small of her back and used the other to gesture at himself. “All of this will be gone as soon as I’m back in King Louis’s good graces, I swear to you.”
“It fits you so well, mon coeur,” she remarked.
He pulled on the lapels of his forest-green frock coat. “It would seem we are built the same, Bastien and I.”
“No, I mean the whole thing. You look like a prince.”
He raised a brow at her. “I was a prince before I put on a wig and powdered my face.”
“Yes, of course.” But she couldn’t shake the feeling that Lio was inching closer to the person he was supposed to be, and all the while she had been straying further from her true self.
Lio changed the subject. “Are you excited to explore Paris?”
She tried to shake her worries away. “Very.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to come with us to Versailles? Because I don’t care what Bastien thinks. If you want to come, you’re—”
“I promise you I don’t.” She reached for his hand. “It’s better this way.”
Now Lio wouldn’t have to be ashamed of his common, provincial wife, and Belle wouldn’t have to pretend she couldn’t hear whatever insults were lobbed her way. She was always going to be more comfortable in the streets and markets and gardens of Paris.
Bastien appeared in her doorway, freshly powdered and with a garish beauty mark painted on his cheek. “The carriage is ready.” His tone was ominous, and Belle couldn’t help but laugh at his severity.
Bastien gave her a questioning look, and she took a deep breath to suppress her laughter. “Oh, come, now. It’s Versailles, not prison.”
Bastien sniffed. “Oh, but the king’s court is its own kind of prison, Belle.” They began to descend the grand staircase. “France’s nobility is in chains, madame. They may be gilded, but they are chains nonetheless.”
Belle was quite sure any number of France’s working class would have happily been shackled by the gilded chains of the nobility, but she held her tongue as they exited the duc’s home. Bastien immediately ducked into the awaiting carriage while Lio paused, taking Belle’s hands in his.
“We shouldn’t be too long. King Louis must have matters to attend to that are more pressing than a wayward prince étranger.”
Bastien laughed coldly from within the carriage. “Don’t be so sure, Cousin. You may find that Louis has plans for you yet.”
Lio rolled his eyes and pulled Belle a bit closer. “To hell with the king and his plans,” he whispered in her ear. “We’ve got plans of our own.”
Bastien poked his head out of the carriage window. “Would you like us to drop you somewhere, Belle?”
The thought of spending time in an enclosed space with the duc was unappealing, to say the least. “No, thank you, Bastien. I’m happy to explore on foot.”
He looked her up and down. “Yes, I’d imagine you are.”
Belle made a face at him as he disappeared again. Lio squeezed the hand he hadn’t relinquished yet.
“Honestly, Lio. I’ll be fine. Look.” She pulled a book from the deep pocket of her dress. “If I find a garden and a patch of shade, my day will be made.”
Lio kissed her forehead. “Wish me luck with Louis.”
She opened her mouth to tell him he didn’t need it, but paused. The truth was, Lio would need a great deal of luck to make it through Versailles.
“Good luck,” she whispered, truly meaning it.
Lio grinned, but she could see the worry that hid behind his smile. He stepped into Bastien’s carriage, and the footman closed the door behind him. The horses started up, and soon the carriage was winding down Bastien’s laneway.
Belle’s heart hammered in her chest as she watched them go. Breaking the curse had tethered her to Lio in ways she didn’t yet understand. When she watched him die as the Beast, defeated by Gaston’s dagger and hatred for something he didn’t understand, a part of her died with him. And when she wept over his body, she whispered in his ear the truth she had been denying. He came back to her as Lio, his body whole and his mind sound, and that part of herself that she lost was similarly restored. They pieced each other back together, and now they were bound as one.
She felt sick when she thought of him facing the trials of Versailles alone. Not alone, she thought. He has his cousin with him.
But Belle still didn’t know what to think of the duc de Vincennes. She wasn’t sure if he would be an ally to Lio or if he had ulterior motives. She supposed it was best to assume that everyone in Louis’s court did. She certainly didn’t plan to make friends with any nobles now that she had married one.
The carriage disappeared from sight, and Belle tried to smother the worry that roiled in her gut. She was in Paris, a city that had lived on inside her heart since she left it, the place she had dreamed of when she felt the constraints of her provincial life most acutely.
It wasn’t as if there was anything she could do for Lio now.
• • •
A weight lifted from Belle’s shoulders as soon as she walked through Bastien’s gate. It was like stepping into another world. His courtyard was so insulated that the noises of Paris didn’t reach it, lending it a false sense of tranquility amid the chaos of the city. She hoped Lumière was enjoying his time to himself. She had a feeling he had more than a few past paramours to visit.
Despite the filth of the streets ruining her boots and hem, Belle felt more like herself than she had in weeks. Back home, she had become something larger than Belle. Whether they knew she broke the curse or not, the people of Aveyon viewed Belle as their savior. Some thought she had rescued them from an inattentive, reclusive prince; far fewer knew she had broken the curse that had been drowning the kingdom for a decade. Everyone wanted her to be their princess, to embrace her new role to the fullest extent.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do that, not yet at least.
This trip was to be a reprieve. Here she was anonymous, just someone going about their day. Her plain dress made her invisible. She could enjoy Paris the way she’d always imagined, before returning to her new life and hoping it fit her better after some time away from it.
She turned onto rue de l’Université and spotted the Seine in between buildings. She was heading to the Palais-Royal, armed with the piecemeal knowledge she had collected from travelers through Aveyon who told her Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, had opened the gardens to the public some years before. Belle had heard tell of the exchange of ideas that occurred there, and of the bookshops and cafés tucked into the covered arcades that surrounded the gardens. She had spent long nights imagining herself there, attending salons and taking part in lively debates with a more open-minded crowd than she could find in Aveyon. Each step she took was like walking through both a memory and a dream.
“Madame.” A woman stepped in her path, reaching a hand out in front of her. “Could you spare a sou? My children are hungry.” Her skin was a sickly pallor, and the dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes were deep. Two children hid among her skirts, hunger shrinking their forms. Belle couldn’t prevent the memories of her childhood from flooding into her mind. She had once known the ceaseless gnawing of an empty belly. When her mother was sick, Maurice had used every bit of money they had paying for physicians and tonics to no avail, since her illness took her anyway. Belle and her father went through a season of lean nights—sometimes sharing only a heel of bread and some watered-down broth—both feeling the pain of losing Belle’s mother more acutely than their hunger pangs. Spring came, and at last Maurice was able to bring one of his inventions to a nearby fair and sell it for half of what it was worth in order to fill their bellies.
She reached for her coin purse without hesitation and handed the woman a twelve-livre coin, enough for her to feed herself and her children for the days to come.
The woman’s eyes widened in disbelief, but she accepted the coin quickly. “Mon Dieu, thank you, madame, thank you.”
Belle wanted to say something, but the woman and her children vanished into the crowd like wisps of smoke, and she stood still for the first time since leaving Bastien’s home. The chaos of Paris continued to swirl around her, but beneath it, on the edges, she saw poverty unlike any she had seen before. Exhausted mothers and wailing babies, emaciated men, orphaned children, all collected on the seams and in the alleys of the city. Each of them wore their starvation plainly—in the number of ribs poking through thin tunics, in the shadowed clefts of skin pulled too tightly across collarbones, in the cheeks sunk deep into their skulls.
Without thinking, Belle wandered into the closest alley and began passing out the coins from her purse. She tried to talk to each person she met, but she was soon swarmed by children with outstretched hands. She was happy to press a coin into them, but she wished she could do more. Money was a temporary solution; these people needed long-term aid, work, shelter—things she couldn’t readily give to them. Guilt ate away at her. She was married to a prince and yet she had no power to end their suffering.
A shout echoed down the alley, scattering the children. Belle turned to see a group of soldiers armed with muskets nearly as long as they were tall. Their blue coats and red collars and cuffs with embroidered white braids marked them as Gardes françaises.
One of them stepped closer to her. “Madame, are you all right?”
She scoffed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He gave her a pitying look. “One can never be too careful with needy peasants.”
And then she realized that he thought her separate from them. She lived her whole life as a commoner, but since she’d married Lio, something about her marked her as different. She didn’t know if it was the shine of her hair, or the fullness of her cheeks, but just as Bastien knew she wasn’t noble, others now knew she wasn’t common. It left her torn between two worlds, neither of which she truly belonged to.
A sudden swell of loud voices snapped the soldiers’ attention back to the road behind them. Belle craned her neck to see what was causing the commotion. A large group of men were marching through the street toward the Palais-Royal, armed with nothing but their voices. She couldn’t make out what they were shouting, but what they lacked in intelligibility they made up for in passion.
Curious, Belle followed the soldiers out of the alley and found herself swept up into the crowd. She looked from person to person and could find no commonality among them; they didn’t all share a type of clothing that would mark their trade or their class. From what she could tell, they came from every stratum of Parisian society.
The sea of people crossed Pont Royal and spilled into the palace gardens on the other side with startling efficiency. Any soldiers who had followed them were stopped at the gates by red-coated Gardes suisses who turned them away brusquely. Belle slipped in past them, as much a part of the crowd as anyone else, and found herself in a place she had spent years only imagining.
The garden was a throng of people. Groups large and small clustered around tables, shouting over one another to have their voices heard. To her left stood a man on a makeshift pulpit, surrounded by a host of eager listeners. He wore the short-skirted coat and long pantalon of a working man, but he commanded the attention of the hundreds of people gathered around him like someone with authority. Perhaps he was a bourgeois, she thought, one of the wealthier members of the Third Estate. Belle fought her way to the front of the crowd and strained to hear what the man was saying.
“And King Louis hides away in Versailles, caring very little about our starving children, and then he has the audacity to ask us for more. He calls the Estates of France to his palace and pretends the Third Estate will have an equal voice, but we have never been equal! Not even on the foreign battlefields where France’s poorest sons fight and bleed and die for freedoms they themselves will never know.” He paused and waited for the crowd to settle once more. “We must be united in our opposition; we must not separate until France has a constitution!”
The crowd rippled to life around Belle, but a man next to her spat at the feet of the worker, stunning the people into silence. He looked out of place in his white wig and culottes.
“Canaille,” he hissed. Scum.
Only a few heartbeats elapsed before the crowd surged forward, united in anger. The man on the pulpit lifted his arms in the air.
“Calmez-vous,” he implored before looking directly at the wigged man. “When France is washed clean of la noblesse, it is the Third Estate scum that will survive, monsieur.”
Cheers drowned out the nobleman’s reply, but Belle caught bits of the threat spilling from his lips. The crowd was tipping toward chaos. All at once, the appeal of the Palais-Royal vanished. Belle wanted to be anywhere but there, trapped in a group of raucous, angry men. She pushed her way out of the center and hurried from the garden. A passing girl pressed a pamphlet in Belle’s hands before she reached the gate. Belle was back across the Seine when she glanced at the front page and realized it was a political pamphlet, not unlike the ones she had hoarded back in Aveyon that had been written by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émilie du Châtelet, Olympe de Gouges, and Nicolas de Condorcet. She hadn’t read this one before.
What is the Third Estate? Everything.
She recalled Bastien’s claims earlier that day, that the Third Estate were an annoyance to the king and nothing more. Merely rabble-rousers, he had assured them. She looked back to the pamphlet.
What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.
What does it ask? To be something.
From what Belle understood of French politics, it was a deceptively simple desire. In France, the power was concentrated in the hands of the clergy and the nobility. Peasants had nothing. It had been that way for centuries. But what if they could take some for themselves? What if the Third Estate became something?
It would change the world.
It was bold for so-called rabble-rousers, she thought. But Bastien had already told them that the Third Estate had transformed into something new: the National Assembly. And King Louis had thus far been unable to quash it. To Belle, that sounded like power.
On her walk home, she realized she had been wrong. Paris was nothing like she remembered it. The city was a powder keg, and the peasants shouting for revolution in the gardens of the Palais-Royal held matches in their hands.
Belle may have grown up a peasant, and she may not have taken the title that was afforded to her, but she didn’t think either fact would be enough to convince the people of Paris that she wasn’t like the nobles they reviled.
She was a girl married to a prince. She lived in a castle and wanted for nothing. In that moment, as she thought back to the woman who had begged for coin to feed her hungry children, Belle wasn’t sure she could convince herself of it either.
On the walk back to Bastien’s home, Belle was lost in contemplation.
She found herself agreeing with the pamphlet in her hands, written by Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès. She thought the Third Estate deserved equal representation and that their votes should be counted by heads, not by estates. Belle had read enough of the Enlightenment thinkers to know where she stood on matters such as equality and freedom for all members of society, not just noblemen. And yet, she was married to a prince, so a part of her felt like her voice didn’t matter or shouldn’t be counted at all.
On the other hand, she wasn’t foolish enough to think that the revolution they were calling for would be free of violence. France had been part of the bloody war for independence in America. The men shouting for revolution in the gardens of the Palais-Royal were not shouting for peaceful talks or bloodless transitions. She recalled the threat she had heard earlier: When France is washed clean of la noblesse, it is the Third Estate scum that will survive. She was not naive. Belle knew that the Third Estate was expecting violence, just as she knew the king would respond in kind. Once the embers of revolution were lit, nothing could stop it. Aveyon was not like the roiling city of Paris, but borders would not stop a fire such as that.
A guard peered at her dismissively from behind the duc’s gate, noting her dress and dirty boots. He was about to leave her there.
“Hello,” she called out to him. “I’m a guest of the duc’s.”
He looked at her incredulously and waved another man over, one she recognized from earlier. They conferred for a moment before the first man opened the gate.
“Apologies, madame,” he muttered as she walked through. She didn’t have the energy to care that he didn’t think she belonged at the duc’s manor, not when she didn’t think she belonged either.
The house was larger even than she remembered. She meant to walk back to her room but got lost along the way in Bastien’s labyrinth of a home. She wandered aimlessly until she found something familiar: the duc’s office. She walked in and sat on a plush divan, intending to wait for him and Lio to return rather than pester a poor servant to help her find her way.
It wasn’t long before Belle was perusing Bastien’s shelves. They were filled with the typical dull tomes one would expect to find in the home of an aristocrat—the recorded lineages of France’s noblesse, a pristine copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan that Belle was sure Bastien had never once cracked open, bound hymnals collecting dust—and she was unsurprised to learn that he was as boring as she had assumed. She abandoned the shelves. Her feet ached. She was unused to walking as much as she had that day. Her time in Lio’s castle had made her soft. She had the feet of a noblewoman now. She made a mental note to tell Lio of her wish to expand the castle gardens so she could tend to vegetables and pigs and chickens like she used to.
