Edvane Stories

In 1812, French artist Théodore Géricault painted ‘The Severed Heads’. With a reputation for macabre works and a morgue supplying him with subjects, this was just one of several. The pair were unknown, but France was in the turmoil of post-revolutionary governance, so who could this couple have been?

The bells of Nîmes rang for too long that summer, the city seemingly determined to outshout its own unease. From the shuttered balcony of his family’s townhouse, Étienne de Montferrand could hear the clangour roll over the tiled roofs and fade toward the dry hills. The Bourbon white cockades had reappeared in lapels and hatbands. Portraits of the King were lifted from trunks and rehung in salons, and men who had spoken cautiously of the Empire now declared that they had always prayed for its fall. In the evenings, torches moved along the narrow streets, and the names of suspected Bonapartists were whispered and written.

In the quietest hour before dusk, he would slip from the house and cross to the small garden behind the old convent wall, where the fig trees leaned close enough to hide two figures. Claire Arnaud waited there, but she did not greet him with her usual quick smile. Instead, she watched the street through the lattice and said that her brother had not come home the night before.

“He went to the club by the river,” she said, keeping her voice low, “and someone told him there would be trouble. They said the royalists had drawn up a list.”

Étienne answered that there were always lists, that names were scribbled in anger and forgotten in the morning, and that nothing would come of it now that the King was restored and order reasserted. He spoke with the calm he had shown in front of his father and in the small gatherings where men spoke of loyalty and purification. He told her that the circles he moved in were not a mob but a fraternity concerned with the soul of France. He did not name the Chevaliers de la Foi, though she knew well enough the company he kept.

Claire was not immediately convinced. “They say your friends have taken to carrying pistols,” she said. “They say they mean to cleanse the city.”

“They mean to prevent another rising,” he replied, feeling the inadequacy of the phrase even as he uttered it. “You know what happened in the Hundred Days. They will not allow that chaos again.”

She turned her face from him and brushed her fingers against the fig leaves. “My father wore the Emperor’s uniform,” she said. “He did not murder anyone. He believed in a France that did not bow its head to priests and old men.”

Étienne reached for her wrist and felt how thin it had grown. He wanted to say that belief was not a crime, that her name would never be spoken with malice while he could breathe. Instead, he found himself speaking of prudence, of waiting, of letting tempers cool. He told her that he would speak to certain men, that there were ways to temper zeal with reason. She withdrew her wrist from his grasp and asked whether reason had ever held back men who believed they were doing God’s work.

The first denunciation list was pasted near the cathedral. Étienne saw the names when he walked with two of his acquaintances beneath the colonnade. They spoke loudly of justice and memory, of those who had cheered Napoleon’s return from Elba and would have cheered again had he triumphed at Waterloo. Étienne pretended to read the list casually, his eye moving over familiar surnames. When he reached Arnaud his world stopped. Claire’s name was written beneath her brother’s, the ink darker.

He did not tear the paper down. He told himself that such a gesture would only draw attention, that discretion would serve her better than display. That evening, he attended a small meeting in a candlelit room above a merchant’s shop, where men spoke of restoring honour and purging treachery. When the list was mentioned, he said that some names might be the product of personal grudges, that caution would be advisable to avoid scandal. One of the older men regarded him with a smile that did not reach his eyes and replied that mercy had been tried for twenty years and had brought France to ruin. Étienne did not press the matter. He told himself that seeds of doubt had been planted and that moderation would prevail.

Claire learned of the list from a neighbour who came pale and trembling to her door. She went at once to the garden behind the convent and waited, but Étienne did not come that night. He had been detained by his father, who warned him that the city was in ferment and that young men were being watched for signs of wavering. The Montferrand name, his father said, had survived revolutions by bending without breaking. It would not now be stained by softness toward those who had embraced the usurper.

When Étienne reached the garden the following evening, Claire stood rigid beneath the fig tree. “You knew,” she said before he could speak. “You knew my name was there.”

He admitted that he had seen it and that he was working quietly to remove it. He spoke of influence, of patience, of the folly of public confrontation. She listened, and when he finished, she asked how long patience lasted when men were already dragged from their beds.

“They will not come for you,” he said, though he had heard that morning of two arrests in a nearby quarter. “I have given my word.”

“To whom?” she asked.

He hesitated, and in that pause, something in her expression altered. “You have given your word to them,” she said softly, “but not to me.”

He tried to protest, to insist that his silence in certain rooms was a shield, not surrender. He told her that if he spoke too loudly too soon, he would be cast out and lose any chance to help. She stepped back from him and said that she did not ask him to shout in the streets, only to then stand beside her when her name was spoken as though she were vermin.

Rumours increased as the days passed. The white cockades multiplied and houses marked as suspect were daubed with chalk. Étienne walked through streets where men he had known since childhood now carried clubs wrapped in cloth to hide their shape. The air felt charged, brittle, ready to shatter. He went again to the merchant’s upper room and spoke more firmly this time, naming Claire Arnaud and saying that her inclusion on the list was an error born of association, not action. The older man who had smiled before now looked at him with open scrutiny and asked whether his judgment was clouded by sentiment.

“Justice requires clarity,” Étienne replied, forcing steadiness into his voice.

“Justice requires loyalty,” the man answered. “And loyalty is tested when there is a cost to it.”

The word cost stayed with him long after the meeting ended. Étienne walked home through streets where windows were shuttered despite the heat. He thought of Claire’s face in the garden, and resolved that the next time her name was spoken publicly, he would rise and object, no matter the consequence. He rehearsed the words he would use, framing them in terms of honour and Christian charity, believing that such language might temper any wrath.

The next time came sooner than he expected. A crowd gathered before the cathedral at dusk, torches flaring against the stone. A man mounted the steps and read aloud a list of traitors who, he claimed, had conspired during the Hundred Days. The names were greeted with jeers and shouts of vengeance. When Claire Arnaud’s name was called, Étienne felt the rehearsed words surge to his lips. He pushed forward, elbowing through shoulders and backs, until he stood at the foot of the steps.

“She is no traitor,” he called, his voice swallowed at first by noise. He raised it again, speaking of innocence, of the danger of condemning without proof. Heads turned toward him, some in surprise, others in recognition. Someone shouted that Montferrand blood had grown thin. The man on the steps asked whether he vouched for the Arnaud family with his honour.

“I do,” Étienne answered, and felt in that declaration both relief and dread.

The crowd’s murmur curdled into something more sinister. A voice cried that if he vouched for them, he must share their guilt. Another said that Bonapartist poison had reached even the sons of loyal houses. The torches seemed to flare brighter, stinging Étienne’s eyes. He saw, at the edge of the square, Claire being pulled forward by two men, her shawl torn from her shoulders. She had come, perhaps believing that his promise would be kept, perhaps intending to speak for herself.

Their eyes met across the press of bodies. In them, he read the hard, quiet certainty of one who had foreseen this turn. He tried to reach her, but hands seized his arms. He heard himself protesting, insisting that he had only sought fairness, that frenzy dishonoured the King. The words sounded frail even to him.

They were dragged together toward the steps. Someone struck him across the face, and blood filled his mouth. Claire stumbled beside him, and he heard her say his name, not as a plea but as a recognition. “You waited,” she said, her voice low amid the din. “You waited too long.”

He wanted to tell her that he had believed in influence, in reason, in the power of quiet persuasion. He wanted to say that he had misjudged the hunger in the men’s hearts. Instead, he could say only that he had meant to save her. But now the crowd had surged beyond listening.

What followed unfolded with the compressed inevitability of a storm breaking over parched land. Accusations were shouted, oaths demanded and rejected. The city guard did not intervene; some among them wore white cockades. The torches cast violent shadows on the cathedral façade, elongating the gathered faces into masks. Étienne felt the rope bite his wrists and understood, with a clarity that was almost calm, that his interventions had dissolved into air.

They were led not far, only to a narrow stretch of ground beside the cathedral wall where others had already fallen that week. Claire did not struggle and walked with her chin lifted, though her hands were bound. Étienne tried once more to speak, to proclaim her innocence, but his voice was lost in the roar. A man he recognized from the merchant’s room approached and asked whether he renounced the Arnaud woman and affirmed his loyalty before God and King.

Étienne looked at Claire. Her face was pale, and he saw there no plea for recantation, only the final accounting of trust. In that moment, he understood that any renunciation would not save her and would condemn him in a manner more lasting than death. He shook his head.

The man sighed, disappointed but unsurprised, and stepped back. The crowd pressed closer. Claire turned slightly toward Étienne, and she whispered that she had loved him once for his caution, believing it a form of strength. Now she said she saw that caution could be another name for fear. He answered that fear had indeed governed him, not of death but of exile from his own house and name. He told her that he had chosen wrong. She closed her eyes and said that the choice had been made when he decided to wait.

The execution itself was swift, almost perfunctory, the mob seeking completion over spectacle. Étienne felt the world collapse to the rhythm of his own pulse and the roughness of the ground beneath his knees. There was no priest, no formal sentence, only the crude justice of men convinced of their righteousness. He heard Claire draw a breath beside him and wished, absurdly, that he could give her back the evenings in the fig garden when the world had seemed malleable.

When the blades fell, the noise of the crowd surged and then receded, like surf withdrawing from a shore it had just reshaped. Torches burned lower as men drifted away, their zeal satisfied for the night. The cathedral bells did not ring this time.

By morning, the square was nearly empty. A stray dog nosed at the edge of the ground before being driven off by a caretaker who muttered that such things were becoming too common. Two heads lay close together on the cooling earth, their hair darkened where blood had dried. The features were strangely composed, the violence that had severed them leaving no room for further expression. The woman’s face was peaceful, almost asleep, while the other held the remnant of doubts that had hardened into certainties.

They lay almost touching, as they had once stood beneath the fig trees, the distance between them measured in all that had not been said in time. The sun rose over Nîmes, and the city stirred to another day of reckoning, leaving behind the quiet testimony of two lives cut short by zeal and delay, their final closeness offering no absolution.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this story, then you may also enjoy The Ghosts of Godstow Abbey