Characters:
- Lepeletier — A nobleman of the robe, refined, luminous with the fever of the Enlightenment.
- The Worker — Anonymous, wrapped in a thin, greasy carmagnole, holding a pike like a cane for an old man.
Setting:
A damp alleyway near the Palais-Royal, Paris. January 20, 1793.
The air is biting. Tomorrow, the King’s head will fall.
Lepeletier walks toward his dinner at Février’s, unaware that a royalist’s saber waits for him in the shadows.
Lepeletier:
(Adjusting his cloak)
What a night, citizen! The very air feels electric, does it not? Tomorrow, when the blade drops, we do not merely kill a man; we kill the ancient darkness. We are inaugurating the Age of Reason. For the first time, la provvidenza is not a divine mystery but a human calculation. We have reorganized the stars themselves into a Republic.
The Worker:
(Spitting into the mud)
The stars haven’t moved an inch, Monsieur. I looked at them from the bread line at four this morning, and they looked just as cold and indifferent as they did when the Capet was still eating pheasant at Versailles. You talk of a “new era,” but the mud in this alley is the same age as the world.
Lepeletier:
You speak with the bitterness of the oppressed, which is precisely why we act! My Plan for National Education will ensure that no child is born into the prison of ignorance. We shall mold the soul of the people into a statue of Virtue. We are ending l’infelicità comune through the Social Contract. Is that not worth the chill of one winter night?
The Worker:
Virtue is a luxury of the full belly, Citizen. You speak of “molding souls” as if the soul weren’t just a tenant of the stomach. Whether a King sits on a throne or a Committee sits in a hall, my patimento — my suffering — remains a constant law. You have traded a “Sacred King” for a “Sacred Reason,” but both are just stories told to the dying. Liberty is a “pleasant error,” a new inganno to make us march into the cannons with a smile, believing our blood is “history” rather than spilled salt water.
Lepeletier:
(Disturbed)
You call the liberation of the human spirit an “error”? We are breaking the chains of a thousand years!
The Worker:
You are breaking iron chains to replace them with silk ones made of words. Nature is the only true Sovereign, Monsieur, and she is a Tyrant who never goes to the scaffold. She decrees that I must hunger, that my children must cough themselves to death in the damp, and that you must feel la noia — that elegant boredom of the rich — even while you play at being a God. Your Revolution is a change in the theater’s scenery, but the play is still the same tragedy.
Lepeletier:
(Looking at his pale, manicured hands)
I have sacrificed my rank, my fortune, and perhaps my life for this “scenery.” I voted for death today because I believed in the perfectibility of Man. If you are right — if the “Arid Truth” is that we are merely meat that suffers and dreams — then my vote was not a strike for justice, but a scream into a vacuum.
The Worker:
It was a whistle in the dark, Citizen. You are a wealthy man who is bored with the old world, so you have invented a new one to keep your mind busy. But look at the stones of this wall. They don’t know who Louis Capet is. They don’t care about your “Republic.” They only know the frost.
Lepeletier:
(A sudden shiver)
The wind has grown colder. It feels… skeletal. As if the universe were suddenly stripped of its clothes.
The Worker:
That is just the “Truth” touching you, Monsieur. It usually feels like a draft. Go to your dinner. Drink your wine. Tomorrow the King dies, and the day after, the sun will rise on a world exactly as cruel as it was yesterday.
Lepeletier:
(Quietly)
I feel a strange weight, as if the Republic I built is made of lead, and I am sinking with it.
The Worker:
Don’t worry. The earth is very good at catching things that fall.