The Reign of Terrible

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, chapter 6. So what happened?

I have to hand it to Linda Berdoll in some respects: she is attempting to create something approaching a story, here. In the latest chapter, we meet one Juliette Clisson, and learn enough of her personal history and are given little enough in the way of resolution to surmise that we’ll be seeing her again.

Juliette is the daughter of minor French nobility, who after losing her home in the revolution makes her way to Paris as a teenager. There she becomes the mistress of another minor nobleman, only to be sentenced to die with him at the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. The reasons for this are a little foggy, but hey, it was the Reign of Terror: people got beheaded for looking at the wrong guy funny. They were beheading nuns! Most of the people killed were unlucky peasants! It was a bad time.

Juliette, her minor nobleman, and a few saintly Carmelite nuns are shorn of their hair and taken to their doom. The minor nobleman is so fat that his neck breaks the guillotine, causing the oddly-inexperienced-considering-they-were-executing-hundreds-of-people-a-week “Lord High Executioner” to faint dead away. Juliette, apparently knowing an opportunity when she sees it, makes an escape attempt in the ensuing chaos, is thrown on top of the “Lord High Executioner,” instantly charms him with her beauty, and is saved from execution.

If you’re wondering just what this has to do with Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, I would be too!

Inaccuracies: what was obviously wrong here?

I won’t pretend to be an expert on Revolutionary France, and there were enough ordinary people killed by the guillotine that I think it’s ok to add a few fictional ones. What’s a little trickier is when you go fictionalizing a real person, one whom we actually know quite a bit about.

Charles-Henri Sanson was executioner during the Terror, and by the time it arrived he had held his post for over 40 years. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father had all held the position before him. Sanson was the Royal Executioner of France during the reign of King Louis XVI, and manned the guillotine himself when Louis was finally executed. He was an avid supporter of the adoption of the guillotine, testifying as to its efficiency before the French Assembly, and personally leading the first official inspection of the prototype. His argument was straightforward: there was public interest in killing as many people as possible as quickly as possible. No other machine would get the job done.

Sanson personally executed almost 3000 people over the course of his career. All of the executions in Paris during the Reign of Terror were carried out by him, or one of his assistants - several of whom were his sons. If it is possible to be the world expert in killing people in public, Charles-Henri Sanson was it.

Which makes the following a little strange:

...the Marquis’ affection for drink was exceeded only by his affinity for food, this brace of indiscriminate habits rendering his an exceedingly corpulent neck. Upon its release, the guillotine blade fell soundly (acceleration, velocity, and force). But when it encountered the Marquis’ apoplectic neck (mass) the blade merely wedged itself, denying the doomed man immediate deccolation. The Lord High Executioner gaped at the sight in disbelief and then looked at his deputy in bewilderment. In all their beheadings, this had happened not once.

Now. First of all.

This isn’t the Mikado, and there was no such thing as a “Lord High Executioner.” There was Charles-Henri Sanson, the High Executioner of the First French Republic. This was, as we have noted, post-revolution France. This was the Reign of Terror, and the sans-culottes still held considerable influence. Nobody who wanted to live went around calling himself “Lord” anything.

More substantially - I’ve looked through my books, and I can’t find any indication that such a mishap could have happened with the guillotine. It happened all the time with axes and swords: it’s easy to forget now, but early proponents of the guillotine recommended it as more humane for this very reason. It didn’t take a few tries like an ax; it didn’t leave one in agony for minutes like hanging. I’m not saying there couldn’t have been someone whose neck was too thick for the instrument, but if it ever happened it was rare.

But that’s beside the point; it’s in Berdoll’s text that they hadn’t seen it before. Fine, but then you see the real inaccuracy: even if it never happened with the guillotine, it happened. Remember, Sanson was around executions for his entire life, long before the guillotine was adopted. He saw it all. He was often the one who had to take a few extra whacks at a thick neck. The idea of this phasing him is ludicrous.

Even more ludicrous: the “Deputy Lord High Executioner” proceeds to jump on the guillotine blade until it gives way and the execution is successful. His boss faints dead away, the newly decapitated head is held aloft by the hair, only to drop to the crowd as the hair was a wig (this is also inaccurate. All of their hair would have been shorn, and wigs would have been taken. Hair was very political at the time: nothing changed men’s fashion quite like the French Revolution.) There is very unclear mayhem, and the “Lord High Executioner” only has to come to face to face with Juliette’s breasts before he is happy to allow her clemency.

I don’t mind fictionalizing real people. And I don’t mind making dark comedy out of executions (though Kate Beaton is better at it). But if you’re going to use the Reign of Terror it should be the Reign of Terror: it was terrible because there was so much death. There were something like 16,000 deaths by execution alone, which doesn’t account for all of the extra-legal murder which took place with impunity. And even if he wasn’t Charles-Henri Sanson, professional death merchant from a long line of death merchants, any executioner of that time and place would have been used to people dying in disgusting ways. He wouldn’t have fainted.

Purple Prose: what’s the worst written line in the chapter?

There’s a lot of competition here, and so many words used incorrectly that I won’t even bother to list them. One of the things I’m noticing is that Berdoll uses vocabulary almost correctly: it smacks of heavy thesaurus using. For example: “The newly impoverished Juilette realized quite with dispatch that being poor lay not amongst her proclivities.” This use of “proclivities” is just slightly off; “proclivity” really refers to a general tendency towards choosing to do something. “Proclivity” isn’t necessarily something you really like or want; it’s something you tend to be in favor of doing most of the time. The United States has a proclivity towards keeping Black men in jail. Berdoll seems to be referring to something more like taste, which is subtly different.

Again, I think this is a subtle distinction, and may be pedantic on my part. It is, though, part of a tendency in this book (you might even say a proclivity) towards sacrificing clarity on the altar of wordiness. In that vein, the worst lines in this chapter aren’t particularly florid, but they do tangle the syntax such that it’s almost impossible to understand what’s actually being said:

Her daughter Juliette was cast in her image. By reason of that resemblance, one might have expected her father to look upon Juliette with increased favor after his beloved wife’s death, not, in his grief, refuse to look upon her at all. But he did not.

There’s nothing technically wrong here, but it’s bad. Is “he did not” referring to “refuse to look” or is it referring to “look upon Juliette?” Again, it’s possible in context to work out what’s meant, but there are ways to make this better. “But he did refuse” would have been better.

Asshole Award: who acts the most like a jerk, or the least like themselves?

We don’t know Juliette enough to know what’s she’s supposed to be like, as she is not a pod version of an Austen character but an original creation. This award will then have to go to the entirely fictional “Lord High Executioner,” who, even if he’s not an alternate-universe version of Charles-Henri Sanson, would surely be experienced enough by the end of the Reign of Terror not to faint at an execution.

Hey Look, a Lower Class Person: how are class differences portrayed in this chapter?

I’ll just note this:

The goatherd, his wife, and seven children appropriated the two-sided windbreak used to house milking does, oblivious to the odour and the goats’ inconsolable bleating at the intrusion.

Like nearly all of the working class characters in this novel: voiceless, dirty, and endlessly reproducing.

The only others we see are the barbaric crowds before the guillotine.

Hey Look, a Plot: does anything in this chapter move the story forward?

Sort of. Juliette ends up indirectly sowing pointless discord between the Darcys, and is involved in the ridiculous climax of the novel. We didn’t really need a backstory for any of this, however.