It was a beautiful July day, miraculously mild, and Lucrète beamed as she strolled towards the Champs de Mars. It was a fair distance from her home, but she certainly would not miss such an event! It seemed to her as though all of Paris was streaming towards the large field to attend the celebrations of the fall of the Bastille two years ago. How different things were now! Her first gleeful thought was that two years ago she would have had a husband to tell her not to attend such festivals. No more- and she approached the crowds with an extra spring in her step, the tricolor feathers in her hat waving gaily in the breeze. The Champs de Mars was swarming with all sorts of people, from ci-devant aristocrats, still fashionably dressed, to little beggar children running about, picking their pockets. A genteel young woman listened to a street musician while her children stuffed themselves with sweets from little bags tied with tricolor ribbon.
Lucrète looked with interest at a long line of people stretching on for some distance. This, she realized, must be the petition the Cordeliers section had organized. Although she had a bit more than a fashionable interest in politics, she had not come with any thoughts for the petition. Indeed, it had seemed so radical and the men from the Cordeliers seemed rather rough… And yet when she had heard the news of the royal family’s attempted flight- for who could believe the ridiculous “kidnapping” story?- something small and already fragile inside of her shattered. She had rejoiced at the leveling of privilege, she had watched with excitement as the old order was swept away, but she could not bring herself to mentally do away with the monarchy and embrace such an uncertain future… And then they fled. Her own King and The Austrian Woman had fled to the enemy to lead an army against their own people. Lucrète increasingly felt that an uncertain future was a small price to pay to remove these- the word still felt awkward- traitors.
As she thought she wandered through the crowds, scarcely noticing as the atmosphere around her changed, grew tense and violent. The rattle of muskets brought her back to reality. Foolishly, her inclination was to push her way through the thickening crowd towards the sound that surely could not be real. She did not notice the red flag of martial law, nor could she imagine why lines of bayonets glinted in the sun over the heads of the people in front of her. She stared at them, gaping, wondering what on earth they could be for, when the first volley rang out. Several people at the front of the crowd collapsed and the rest turned and began forcing themselves back through the mob, as a wave of realization and panic swept over the people. Lucrète screamed as another volley rang out and a young man standing beside her collapsed to the ground, gurgling and twitching in a dead spasm. Without thinking or looking she turned to flee, but tripped on the outstretched leg of the dead man and fell onto the cobblestones. She tried to raise herself, but the crowd was swarming over her, trampling the dead and living alike in an attempt to flee. A lady’s high-heeled shoe crushed her outstretched hand and she collapsed under the weight of a running man, who stepped on her back and continued as though she had not been there. Stunned, she gasped for breath, when she heard the thud of a man’s footstep beside her head and saw a flash of boot as he ran away- but just a flash, as it instantly collided with the side of her head, knocking it against the stones, and the world spun off into a whirl of pain and the sound of gunshots and screams.