To Be Remembered as Time of Love Allow...

The Muse of Revolution-continued...

The Muse of Revolution-continued…

{“In my opinion a kind of influence, which none of their plans of reform take into account, will elude them all; I mean the influence of women in the government. The manners of the nation allow them to visit, alone, all persons in office, to sollicit the affairs of the husband, family, or friends, and their sollicitations bid defiance to laws and regulations.”}  --Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, Paris, 4 December 1788

                                                                                ~~

Paris-L’ Fiege’s apartments, Ile de la Cite, November 1787

Flashback-the Ambsley’s Tavern, and following sequence of events, October 1787

~~

Beauty.

In the lamplight, Thomas’ gaze fixed on the delicate slither of ice draped in his fingers.  

Following that fateful episode in the Ambsley’s public house four weeks before, he had brought Caroline back to L’Fiege’s apartments. The same lodgings he now occupied, a solitary form, propped elbows on his desk before the single flame of an oil-lamp.

Ruby and ebony erupted in a tantalizing glitter from the shards embedded across the silver-coated rose petal. 

Enticement.

The picture Caroline painted that night in the Ambsley’s tavern, an enticement of revolution crossing her lips, brazen and reckless, righteous and intent. 

Her eyes, her eyes were like those ebony fragments, shimmering when inspired with such fervor, compelling.

And later, he recalled against his will, how her eyes had glistened with an altogether different light, scorn, fear, desire, and in the end, a quiet grief.

She had been like that, the little doctress, something brilliant and burning, that night in the Ambsely’s tavern. 

Caroline Eleanor Graham was a lone, singular form, a slight-boned woman, half-shadowed in the smoke and firelight of the tavern hall.  A conductor of her own orchestra, the eager audience, rapt musicians watched, engrossed as she rounded the central enclosure of the pub, holding aloft a flask of bubbling, yellowish liquid grasped in iron chemist-tongs. 

“You can see,” she explained to the gathered spectators, “how the dissolved element becomes volatile with the heat.” A bodiless aura of flame hovered above the liquid’s boiling surface casting a ghastly phosphorescent glow across the doctress’ visage, the soberly colored attire, her slim-fingered hand positioned, not quite touching, beneath fire-charred base of the flask. 

“As the acid burns off, the element transmutes into two varied forms. One,” she gestured with her free hand, gradually coming into Thomas’ proximity, “a gas, which stains the linen, and is only detectable as a waxen residue—“, lifting a thin strip of un-dyed cloth placed at the flask’s narrow-necked flue. 

In her circuit about the hall, she didn’t notice his presence, nor that of his companion seated to his right, her attention completely absorbed by the demonstration.

“Both colorless and odorless--,” she explained, letting a group of engaged spectators seated on a pair of carelessly arranged stools toward the front of the audience handle the linen, “—when vaporized, the element is otherwise not obvious to our humble senses,” taking the wax-stained strip back from a young man and woman, each of them nodding, thoughtful, in consideration of her precise description.