Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

The Guillotine

Paris, 1794

When the mob had finally come for him, Edmond Dantès hadn't fought them. He'd let them drag him from his house, and he hadn't raised a finger against them, even when they shoved him and kicked him and spat on him.

Now, he was sitting on the floor of a cell in the Conciergerie, once a medieval royal palace, now considered the most fearsome prison in Paris, where aristocrats and anyone else accused of being an enemy of the Revolution awaited the day they would be taken to the guillotine.

Some wealthier prisoners bought their way into better cells, so they could at least have some comfort in their final days.

Edmond did not.

His cell was a gloomy, grimy little thing, shared with five other people and more rats than he could count. The floor was laid with damp straw that reeked of human sewage, and someone was always crying.

Closing his eyes, Edmond rested his head on the stone wall behind him.

He'd been a peasant once. It was so long ago, and he'd come so far since then, that he'd almost forgotten, and he felt that shame like a blast of fire.

More than anyone else in the aristocracy, he knew what it felt like to have nothing. He knew how it felt to be homeless, to never know where the next meal was coming from, and he'd forgotten it all because he was rich now, because he could afford anything he'd ever wanted. He'd turned his back on everything he'd used to be, everything he'd used to know, on the people he once would have called his own.

He'd become blind to the suffering of the French peasants, and even when the Revolution arrived, even after the storming of the Bastille, even after the September Massacres, even after people were slaughtered in the streets, he'd still somehow thought it wouldn't happen to him.

It wasn't until the king and queen lost their heads that Edmond finally realised what was happening, and by then it was too late.

Now he was in prison, counting down the days until the guillotine would take his head.

He hadn't thought it would end like this.

On the other side of the cell, a middle-aged man in filthy rags suddenly vomited, and the stench of it added to the vile smell of shit and piss already saturating the corner.

Edmond desperately pitied the people imprisoned with him. He was a murderer – he deserved to be here. But these people weren't aristocrats.

What had started as a means of overthrowing a desperately unequal class system had become the Terror, in which anyone could accuse anyone of being a royalist or aristo sympathiser, and the accused would likely lose their head for it.

Unless they were massacred in the street first.

Edmond had lost track of how many days he'd been in here, and the thought of his death no longer filled him with anything but a grim resignation, but some nights, when he listened to the other prisoners sobbing in their sleep, when he heard people being moved to adjacent cells so they could begin their final journey to that terrible blade, he found himself thinking of Ysanne.

He hoped with everything he had that she had fled the city, that she was safe somewhere, away from all the death and horror.

If only he could have seen her once more.

Two days later it was time for him to leave the prison.

He'd barely moved from his corner of the cell the whole time, not even killing the rats when they scampered over him, and his legs almost buckled when he was roughly grabbed and hauled to his feet.