To Be Remembered as Time of Love Allow...

The Muse of Revolution...

The Muse of Revolution

Paris, November 1787

Hotel Dieu-Ile de la Cite, hours prior to meeting in L’Fiege’s apartments

“This world is going all to war.” --Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, Paris, 15 September 1787

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The Hotel Dieu never changed.Narrow glass panes, set into towers of stone, were capped by spiral turrets.Soaring one-hundred feet above the Ile de la Cite, they formed eternal shadows impaling the overcast skies, witness to a thousand years of sprawling, turbid humanity, condensed into the jungle of Paris’ narrow, mud-strewn streets.

“Repent!Repent!The Lord’s doom is upon us!” the Old Man’s prophecy, a cloud of mist precipitating into the damp autumn chill.

Cowering at the top of the stairs beneath a great carved pillar abutting the entrance to the hospital ward, the one-eyed beggar’s emaciated limbs were wrapped against his rag-covered form.He resembled an overgrown spider, bony head sunk into his protruding, wasted shoulders.

Caroline shied from the withered creature clamoring toward her like a legless insect.

“Shame!Shame to the immoral and corrupt!” he shrieked.“Shame upon all Sinners! Repent!”

The little doctress’ pace remained undeterred, striding beneath the vaulted entrance of the municipal hospital, en route to the yawning infirmary.

In the three seasons she had been rounding at the Dieu, Caroline often wondered, in her brighter, contemplative moments, if the beggar’s knotted hair, filmed with oil and dirt, filth of a beard, lent some mystical immunity against the putrid miasma of death and rot permeating, claiming, so many of the other patients sheltered in the stone-walled embrace of the municipal hospital.

The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Dr. Beaulieu’s perverse humor resonated from that first day she had been taken under the surgeon’s mentorship. Amid the scum of the dismal compound, the morbidly affectionate title was explained. He is rather like those crows crowding the gates to your Tower of London—an annoyance, but the vagrant has been around so long he’s likely outlived whoever originally knighted him. And were he to disappear one day, the surgeon laughed with grim delight, the nuns all believe the doom of the hospital would be imminent.

The little Scotch doctress was to learn, within minutes during that first day, three years ago, toiling along side the rest of assorted Sisters of Charity, physicians, surgeons, assistants, students and common orderlies, the charity hospital perpetually existed on the proverbial precipice of doom.

Those who faced the drudgery of the Dieu viewed the emaciated beggar’s proselytizing of hellfire and brimstone with the same stoic-faced tenacity, a fondness of martyrdom, which they tolerated the ravenous rodents, the mold creeping up cold stone walls, moth-eaten bandages, dead bodies decaying beside their nearly dead counterparts, sharing the same bed, pervasive aromas of spoiled flesh, excrement, and rotten disease.

The cries from God’s apocalyptic servant faded as the Scottish woman stepped beneath the bronze-cast entry.

An iron fist, her heart battered against her ribs, balking to catch herself against the heavy wooden door. Bombarded by the piercing din of the vast ward, Caroline struggled for breath, fighting down a sudden, choking panic.

Shouldn’t be here—too soon, assailed by images so immediate, they clouded her vision.

Demons of memory stirring from a long dark night, her dreams were cast into a hellish abyss, rending sanity, and her soul.