Cheverus patted him on his head and said he would be along shortly. If he returned to France, he would miss Mairtin. He felt bad he wouldn't be there to help establish the school, help guide the boy along the path to the priesthood. But if it was to be, then it would be. If not, nothing he could do or say would make the boy answer the calling.

The altar boy had been right--there were only a handful in attendance for a weekday Mass. Cheverus said the confiteor, striking his breast as he did so, then the kyrie, followed by the gloria. The Latin tasted dull and slightly tainted in his mouth, the words like meat gone bad. His sermon this morning was from Isaiah: Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed. To turn aside the needy from judgment and to take away the right from the poor of my people. Though he knew he must walk a fine line between being a voice for his people and an agitator, he couldn't simply ignore the day, could he? Pretend that nothing was happening? One of his communicants and another Catholic were being put on trial for murder today. He had to say something. Yet the passage from Isaiah was obscure, its meaning lost on those in attendance.

He could feel sweat running down his neck and dripping onto his chasuble. His face grew flushed. Was the fever upon him again? He was so tired. He wanted only to sleep. Perhaps he should have stayed in bed longer, gotten his strength back. At one point in his sermon, he paused, feeling light-headed, his hands beginning to tremble ever so slightly. He closed his eyes and grasped the lectern for support. A dark stillness seemed to descend upon him like a leaden net; the air grew thick and stale. Heavenly Father he prayed. Show me the way of Your light. A cough from a front pew interrupted his thoughts. He opened his eyes and, momentarily confused, gazed at those seated before him. For a second, he imagined that he was back in Mayenne, preaching to his former parish, his family sitting before him. But they were not there, of course. Instead, he saw strange faces, in them a look of mild consternation. With a handkerchief he wiped his forehead, hoping to cover the awkwardness of the moment. The smell of it recalled Finola Daley to him again.

"Dear friends," he said, looking out over the church. "We find ourselves in most difficult times. As you all have heard, two of our fellow Catholics, one a communicant of this very parish, are to stand trial today for murder." All eyes looked up at him, expectant, curious. There was a low but very definite murmur that rose from those in attendance. Except to ask for donations for the Daley family back in December, it was the first time he had said anything publicly about the trial. Although there were only a handful of the congregation present this day, he knew that what he said this morning would spread by word of mouth throughout the parish. By nightfall every Catholic in the city would know what he had said, and many of the Protestants as well. So he would need to choose his words with care.

"I cannot speak as to their innocence or guilt," he continued. "That is a matter for a court of law to decide. We can only hope and pray that justice will be done: that if guilty, they are punished according to the law; if innocent, they are allowed to go free and resume their lives without fear of retribution." As he said this, he glanced over at Mdirtin, whose expression seemed to acknowledge their earlier conversation. "But I beseech you not to take the law into your own hands. I counsel you and those you know against rash acts which will only make our lot and that of our brethren in Northampton worse. As a community of the faithful, we must not do or say anything which will provoke others to take action against us. We must ask the Lord for guidance. Let us pray," he said, bowing his head. When he finished, he added, "And let us pray for the soul of the victim, Mr. Lyon. As well, I ask that you pray for the two men whose fates are to be decided today, Dominic Daley and James Halligan. We humbly beseech Thee, O Lord, that You grant them Your blessing. That You help those entrusted with their fates to act with reason and fairness and in good conscience. That You forgive these men their trespasses, whatever they may be. Finally, we humbly ask you, O Lord, to comfort the loved ones of these men. Amen."

After Mass, he had a full schedule of appointments, various obligations that had earlier been canceled because of his illness. The day broke clear and cool with a light wind out of the northwest. Several new ships sat in the harbor, including a large barque from the West Indies and a whaler just returned from two years at sea. He first headed for Corn Court and the shop of Isaiah Thomas, a printer, to see about getting more missals as well as catechism books printed. Then he walked north, toward the almshouse out on Barton's Point where a number of his parishioners were in residence. Along the way he passed wagons loaded with wood or carrying milk to Faneuil Market. He was hailed by Liam Broderick, who owned the booksellers shop on Cornhill. "Good day, Father," said Broderick, a large, white-haired man with a soft red face. "I have some new French volumes just arrived." Cheverus said he would be sure to stop by, and continued on his way.

The long, Greek-style building that was the poorhouse was set off by itself on a boggy spit of land that jutted out into the Charles. The town fathers had transferred it from the fashionable area on Park Street, so as to "remove from the sight of gentlemen and ladies the disagreeable prospect of mendicants begging for their supper." He passed through the high iron gates surrounding it and proceeded through the front door. Inside, it smelled the way he imagined Purgatory smelling--the rank odor of despair and lost dreams. He spoke with several there, listened to their confessions, gave the sacrament to those who wished it. Before he left, he removed from the deep pockets of his cassock some onions and potatoes he'd taken from the rectory pantry, and gave them away to those who looked most in need. He didn't ask whether they were Catholic or not. And he always remembered the sugared plums for the children.

Next, he made two sick visits. One was to ancient Mr. O'Shaunnessey, who'd been trying to die forever without much success. He was nearly blind and stone deaf, and would place his fingertips on the priest's lips to make out what was being said to him. Cheverus had given him the last rites on three or four separate occasions but somehow he always managed to change his mind at the last moment. The other visit was to old Madame Jariel, like himself a French emigre. Once a well-to-do woman before the Revolution, she now lived modestly in a sunny set of rooms on Spring Street. Her window overlooked the Charles. Old and forgetful, she would sometimes refer to the river as the Seine and the West Boston Bridge as pont toumant. Though she liked to chatter nonstop, he enjoyed visiting with her as the two would speak French and reminisce of days gone by. She would pour him a glass of fine Bordeaux she had somehow managed to get despite the restrictions of the war, and she would talk of home.

"I was an intimate of Madame de Tourzel's, you understand," the woman would remind him nearly every visit. Madame de Tourzel was the governess of the royal children. "We used to drink cognac in a cafe on the Rue de la Madeline. A charming woman with the most beautiful hands. She adored those children like her own. Especially the little dauphin."

Cheverus was next going over to Cambridge, to pay a visit to a woman sick with childbirth fever. The day was slowly warming. Along Cambridge Street, he smelled the teasing odors of food cooking in ovens. Breads and pork pies and corncakes. He felt a sudden sharp pang in his stomach and realized he'd forgotten to eat that morning, so he stopped in a baker's shop. He bought a penny roll and left the shop, heading for the West Boston Bridge. He paid the tollman at the gate and started across. He saw the tangled masts of more ships at anchor along the wharves, and the long low sheds of the ropeworks and sail-duck factories. Across the Charles he spotted the Naval Shipyards, a flurry of activity. Halfway to Cambridge he sat on the bench along the railing and began to eat. He tore into the delicious roll, forgetting everything else. His own problems. Those of the Daleys. He forgot even to say grace. How strong were the needs of the flesh, he thought.

As he sat there eating, he recalled a meal he'd had up in the Maine woods once, on his first visit north after coming to America. He had canoed with his Indian guides several hard days' journey upriver to the Penobscot mission there. His body ached from the exertion, and he was wet and frozen and half starved from eating only jerked meat and the disgusting gruel the Indians called sagamite. And yet he joyfully accepted each trial God placed before him in this new land. He wanted to show himself worthy. When they reached the settlement, the Indians were eager to have him say Mass, which he did on a crude altar in a stinking, smoke-filled long house. He wondered how he would survive his stay there. Would he get used to the brutish accommodations, to the awful food, to the strangeness of the savages themselves? Only after Mass did they eat, the entire village dining from a large communal pot. He blessed the foul-smelling food. They didn't use utensils but ate with their fingers, wolfing the food, snapping at it like dogs. For plates they used sections of birch bark. They had served him first. A squaw had set before him something half cooked, gray and steaming. It turned out to be the boiled nose of a moose, a delicacy which the Indians had offered him as a sign of great respect. There was still hair and blood on the thing. He thought he would vomit. Yet, his strong repugnance at last overcome by his even stronger hunger, he had devoured it, finding it as sumptuous a meal as he'd ever eaten.

Sitting there now on the bridge, the sun lying drowsy on the back of his neck, he recalled another meal: a single sweet potato. He had gone into hiding to avoid being arrested by the Jacobins. He was lodged in a tiny garret room in the Saint-Eustache section of Paris. It was dangerous then for him. For all priests. The new government had just decreed that any clergy who hadn't signed the loyalty oath must leave the country or face ten years' imprisonment. The landlord, a man with obvious Jacobin sympathies, used to eye him suspiciously as he came and went, but an old peasant woman who lived in the room below his befriended him. Somehow she'd known he was a priest, perhaps by his voice or something in his manner. And though it was dangerous to be helping him, she would bring him whatever little she could spare--a piece of bread, a cup of milk, a boiled potato. Before returning to her room, he would listen to her confession and then serve communion to her. She would kiss his hand and, tears in her rheumy old eyes, say, "Merci, pere spirituel" Such a brave and decent woman, risking her life for him. The streets were dangerous, crowded with sansculottes and wild mobs of peasants, and he'd had little to eat for several days. He remembered her bringing him a sweet potato with a little salt and some milk. He could still recall the taste of the sugary flesh of the thing melting in his mouth. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying. This is my body which is given for you: This do in remembrance of me.

The sunlight off the water hurt his eyes, so he closed them. He would rest just for a moment, he thought. A moment, and then be off again. He could hear the water sliding under the bridge, slipping by the piers and out to sea. Or maybe it was his own blood he felt, coursing through his veins. He felt himself sliding, too, slipping slowly away. Downward. Downward as if into the depths of a deep ocean. After a while, out of the darkness, it came to him: the bright, fragrant courtyard garden. The garden of the martyrs.

Sixteen years earlier, in 1790, the twenty-two-year-old Cheverus had graduated from the major seminary of St. Magloire in Paris and went on to receive Holy Orders in what would prove to be the last public ordination in France for many years. It was the happiest day of his life. Eager to begin fulfilling his vows, Cheverus returned to his small hometown of Mayenne that December. There he assumed the duties of vicar of Notre Dame, the beautiful medieval cathedral which overlooked the river. It was the church at which his uncle Louis-Rene had been pastor, and in which he had once knelt in prayer beside his mother. He said his first Mass on Christmas of that year, to a congregation that included family, friends, neighbors. He looked forward to a long and auspicious tenure in his native city.

He had no inkling of what lay ahead, though perhaps he should have.

After all, the Revolution had begun the year before. The National Assembly had already taken the Tennis Court Oath. The Bastille had fallen. There were riots in the streets of Paris. The king's reluctant acceptance of the new constitution. Even before those obvious signs, the winds of change had already been blowing for years. There were the scattered peasant uprisings, the food riots, the growing discontent and suffering of the Third Estate. Though he was a priest, the young Cheverus actually favored a number of the changes being called for. He could not help being influenced by the same heady idealism sweeping across the land. He believed in the need to improve the lot of the poor, in making changes. In one of those small ironies of history, several of the most important revolutionary leaders--men like Robespierre and Desmoulins, Saint-Just and du Tertre--had gone to the same college as he, Louis le Grand, which was to become known as the "Seminary of the Revolution." While he had for the Bourbons the same unquestioning loyalty he had for the papacy, he thought it high time to redress the inequities, the injustices, the grinding poverty he saw all around him.

He hadn't even considered himself political. He had only wanted to serve, quietly and faithfully, his God, his king, his pope, the people of his parish. He was so naive, he hadn't even seen a contradiction in doing that. He had worked with the poor, so he was well aware of the appalling, squalid conditions most lived in. Equally, he was shamed by the lavish extravagances of the aristocracy, and in all too many cases, by his own fellow clergy. He was convinced that change was long overdue, both in the government as well as in the Church. He believed, as did many of his fellow clery of the First Estate, that the "movement" would lead to needed but relatively minor changes. It would be a slight revision to the social contract, one that would have little real consequence for the Church or for himself. Soon, he would come to realize that what the radicals--men like Marat and Danton and Robespierre--had in mind were not minor changes, a mere tinkering with a system that had some flaws, but rather, the total annihilation of a way of thinking. The new government would soon demand that all priests sign the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, declaring their loyalty to the new order. Those that refused to sign, to become jurored priests loyal to the new government, would be stripped of their authority, their parishes forcibly taken from them, and eventually arrested and thrown in jail.

But that would come later. At first, many in the clergy tried to go along with the new regime. They made concessions, minor compromises, small bargains. A brave few refused to compromise even then. There was, for instance, the shining example of Urbain-Rene Herce, Bishop of Dol, who refused to go along with the oath. Or Cheverus's old seminary friend, Father Legris-Duval. They had both been boursier students on scholarship at Louis le Grand. They used to walk along the Seine together, discussing esoteric points of theology and preparing each other for the weekly sermons they would have to give before their superiors. After the arrest of the king, his friend had risked coming out of seclusion to go to the aid of the imprisoned monarch. Father Legris-Duval had openly traveled to Paris without the proper papers and without signing the oath. There he had the audacity to confront the Republican authorities by proclaiming his offer to be the confessor to the imprisoned "Citizen Capet," the new name by which the king was scornfully referred to now. Such courage and conviction. Such sangfroid, Cheverus thought, with wonder and admiration for his friend, and not without an element of envy. For if the time came when he himself were called to act in a similar fashion, would he have the nerve?

Cheverus had tried at first to go quietly about his priestly duties in Mayenne, thinking the movement, after it had achieved some modest changes, would eventually die of its own weight. In any event, the movement wouldn't concern itself with him, an unimportant priest in a small parish two days' ride from Paris. Pope Pius soon issued a papal bull threatening those clergy who signed the Civil Constitution with excommunication. For a priest that was worse than death. The Church, like the country as a whole, was now split in two. Cheverus realized he would have to make a choice: to go along with the government as many priests did, or to take a stand and defend the autonomy of the Church. In the end, he felt compelled to refuse signing the loyalty oath. He certainly didn't consider himself a brave or daring man, but he thought it his duty to object on grounds of conscience. He was officially stripped of his authority, which meant he couldn't perform the sacraments. Nonetheless, Cheverus continued "unofficially" saying Mass in his church, as well as performing the rites for those loyal Catholics in his parish who called on his services. As had begun to happen throughout France, violence soon erupted in Mayenne, pitting those of the old order against those that supported the new government. A radical priest accompanied by several guards went about the town gathering up the children of the wealthy and baptizing them with names like "Liberte" and "Egalite."

As Cheverus walked the streets in his cassock, he was intimidated by radicals who taunted him and threw rotten eggs at him, who called him a supporter of the old regime, a calotin. Threats were made against his life. On two occasions an angry mob had surrounded him while he was celebrating Mass, and he was saved only by the last-minute intercession of those loyal to him. Finally, the authorities took his parish church by force. They smashed stained glass windows that dated from the Middle Ages and confiscated sacred gold vessels, to be sent to Paris where they would be melted down by the new government. Secretly, he arranged for the priceless statue of the Virgin and Child--Notre Dame des Miracles-- to be hidden so the Jacobins wouldn't destroy it. Despite the growing danger, he went on performing the sacraments, now in private homes, in barns and in cellars throughout Mayenne.

He was eventually arrested by the Jacobins and thrown into prison in Laval, where he spent several harrowing months. His cellmate was an old friend of the family, Father Urbain-RenPS Herce, Bishop of Dol. Republican guards would stroll through the jail poking the priests with their sabers and joking about whether they were fat enough yet for slaughter. One guard, a hugely obese man with a purple birthmark on his cheek, used to bring prostitutes and fornicate with them just outside their cell. Grunting like a dog in heat, he would yell out, "Will I go to hell, Father?" and laugh. Finally, through the intercession of his Uncle Julien, a lawyer and major of Mayenne, he was set free due to his frail health. Frightened and confused, he disguised himself as a merchant and fled to Paris. In fact, hundreds of priests made the same exodus to the city, hoping to hide out with relatives or friends while they waited for a passport. His brother, Louis, was a law student at Louis le Grand College, but Cheverus was too well known in that quarter of the city, so he went into hiding for several months in St. Eustache. While his Uncle Julien used his connections to secure a passport, Cheverus remained in his tiny room, hardly daring to leave, and when he did, only disguised in lay clothes. It was dangerous now for a priest opposed to the Jacobins to wear clerical garb openly. It was here that the old peasant woman would bring him food each day. Whenever his passport finally did come through, he wondered if he would actually go. Leaving his family, his colleagues, everything he'd known would be difficult. And yet, he did not know what would happen if he stayed.

While he waited in hiding, he found he couldn't turn his back on the hundreds of his fellow priests who had not been so lucky, who had been rounded up by the authorities and thrown in jail for refusing to sign the loyalty oath. Disguised as a student or common laborer, he would slip out of his room and visit his colleagues being held in the hastily converted prisons throughout Paris: the abbey at Saint-Germain des Pres, the seminary of Saint Firmin, the Convent of the Carmes. Since the murder of the Swiss guards in early August and the subsequent arrest of the king, travel about the city was perilous. As he made his way he stuck to the back streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares and the places where he knew revolutionary guards to be. Yet no part of Paris was safe any longer.

He kept his head low, his hood up despite the late summer heat, studiously avoiding the suspicious stares from the sansculottes who patrolled the city armed with sabers and pikes. He feared being stopped and searched, and having them find what he carried in his haversack: the breviaries and rosaries, holy water and hosts. The mere possession of those objects would certainly have landed him in jail--or worse. He brought the imprisoned clergy what food he could scrounge up, letters from relatives, forbidden newspapers, a book to take their minds off things. In the prisons, he chatted with friends and raised the spirits of those who had nearly given up hope. He read to them. He listened to their confessions. His fellow priests told him he shouldn't come, that it was growing too dangerous. Still, how could he not? So Cheverus returned again and again to his imprisoned colleagues, doing what he could to comfort them. This was where he belonged, he felt. Where God wanted him to be.

He especially liked to visit those clergy being held on the Left Bank, at the former Convent of the Carmes. Many of the prisoners there were his personal friends, several his former instructors from his school days. The Archbishop of Aries, Jean-Marie Dulau, was jailed in the convent, as were the two Rochefoucauld-Bayers brothers, the bishops of Beauvais and of Saintes. The king's personal confessor was there, along with the former head of Louis le Grand College, Father Berardier, and a few of Cheverus's old professors, too. There were priests and monks and brothers from all over France--those who had refused to sign the new government's loyalty oath. At the Carmes prison, Cheverus became close friends with a priest named Pierre Landry, a vicar from Niort. Only after bribing the guards with a few francs would he be allowed to enter. The grounds included a cloister and a small chapel, attached to a high-walled garden courtyard filled with flowers and finely trimmed shrubbery, chestnut and poplar trees, as well as a small orangery. Here and there were stone benches, and in a corner a grotto to the Virgin Mary. Daily, the clerics were forced out of their various prison cells and into the garden, at which time the guards would take a head count.

Cheverus happened to be there on the September day that would later become known as Black Sunday, the first of the September Massacres. The late summer day was warm, the air placid and still. A drowsy sunlight filtered through the leaves overhead and lay in broad swathes across the convent grounds. The fragrance of the late-summer flowers and the fruit from the trees hung heavy in the air, a lush, almost tropical scent. The high whitewashed walls of the courtyard seemed almost to be trying to keep at bay the growing anarchy that took place in the streets outside. Yet that day had been unusually still, he recalled. The silence almost overwhelming.

He was sitting on the ground in the garden beside his new friend Father Landry and another prisoner, August Berruyer, a Benedictine monk from Le Mans. They sat in the shade of an elm with their backs to the wall. Father Landry was a few years older than Cheverus, a tall, strikingly handsome fellow with thick dark hair and an engaging smile. He was well read, cultured, with the dignified bearing of a cardinal. He and Cheverus would talk about music and poetry and philosophy. Berruyer, on the other hand, was squat and heavily muscled, with the coarse features and plain speech of a peasant. His face was always greasy, and it possessed a surly expression. When talking of the revolutionary authorities, he would curl his lips and cry, "Ces betes!" and spit on the ground. He called Cheverus "mon pauvre petit"--my poor little chap.

As they sat there talking, the city's tocsin bell suddenly sounded in the distance. They wondered what it could mean this time. They had heard it often since that day three years earlier when the Bastille had been overrun. Just before this sound, they had been debating what was meant by the most recent decree of the revolutionary government, that disloyal priests would have a fortnight to get out of the country. Berruyer thought they were quite serious and said he would go in a heartbeat if they issued him a passport. Father Landry, on the other hand, held the belief that it wouldn't come to such an extreme, that it was just a means of scaring the priests into falling in line with those who had signed the new constitution. He said conditions would slowly begin to improve. An optimist, he was confident the worst of it was behind them. He mentioned talk of the Prussians' advance on the city, how the threat of an external army would force the Jacobins to come to their senses--to set the king free and sue for peace.

"The Prussians took Verdun," Father Landry had said. "They are not a hundred miles from Paris."

"Danton is calling everyone to arms," Berruyer countered. He was chewing on an overripe pear he had picked up on the ground, and the juice was running down his bearded chin. A bee flew about his mouth, after the sweetness. He didn't seem to notice. "The country is rallying around that madman."

"They can't declare war on all of Europe," Father Landry said. "What choice do they have but to free the king and call off this insanity?"

"They could put him on trial," Berruyer offered.

"The king? On trial!" Landry scoffed. "Are you insane, man?"

"I have heard rumors they intend to try him."

"Mon Dieu! They might as well put the pope on trial. No, that would be pure madness."

"Don't you understand? They are all mad," Berruyer interjected.

"No. They've made their point," Landry insisted. "Now they will listen to reason."

"Reason!" laughed Berruyer, throwing his great head back. "He talks of reason with mad dogs." Turning to Cheverus, he said, "And you, mon paurve petit. What are your thoughts?"

Cheverus wasn't sure. He, too, thought the Jacobins were madmen. But maybe they would come to their senses before it was too late. Even a mad dog cowers before a boot to its ribs. Instead he said only, "Let us hope that Pierre is right."

"Of course, I'm right."

And that's when the alarm sounded throughout Paris. They exchanged anxious looks but decided it meant nothing. They continued conversing for a while, and then Cheverus and Landry read the breviary that Cheverus brought each time. Finally it was time to leave. He had a long walk, and he certainly didn't want to be on the streets after dark. Slowly, they became aware of another sound, at first low and muffled, but growing, coming nearer and nearer. It grew to a thunderous din, of countless feet pounding on the cobblestones and the frenzied cries of "A mort! A mort!" A priest watching from a window of the cloister hollered down that a mob waving guns and sabers and clubs was rushing down the Rues Vaugirard and Cassette. The prisoners wondered what this could possibly mean. What was happening? Only much later would they learn--those that survived anyway--that the Terror that was to rock the city, the country, the world even, had finally begun. The prisoners at the Carmes did not know that some twenty priests being conveyed to the nearby prison of the abbey of St. Germain des Pres had been pulled from their carriages, attacked by the mob, and summarily executed in the street, hacked to death, while government troops stood by and watched.

The sansculotte mob smashed down the convent doors and came storming in, yelling and waving their weapons in the air. Some in the crowd were already covered with blood. One man even wore a butcher's bloody apron. There were shouts and commands. Cheverus recognized two of the leaders. One was the lawyer, Stanislas Maillard, who had helped to organize the attack on the Tuileries. The other he knew by his red Phrygian cap--it was the wild, Catholic-hating Anacharsis Clootz, the self-styled "Orator of the Human Race." Holding his saber aloft, he shouted orders that the priests were to move quickly into the chapel.

"What do you think this means?" Father Landry whispered as they moved toward the chapel.

"What do you think it means?" Berruyer replied.

"Surely they will merely count heads."

"Or make them roll," Berruyer scoffed, a cynical smile on his rough features.

Father Landry stared at Berruyer in disbelief, but he saw that his friend wasn't joking. "They would not dare." But Cheverus could see that his friend was shaken.

The priests murmured nervously as they were herded into the chapel, the guards prodding them from behind with sabers and pikes. When one elderly priest who had been kneeling giving his confession to another was slow getting to his feet, a guard struck him in the head with a rifle butt, and the old priest fell just outside the chapel. The priest who had been hearing his confession, Alexander Lenfant, tried to help the old priest up, but he was shoved back, told to get in line. When he went to help a second time, the guard turned his musket and, casually, as if he were spearing a piece of fruit, thrust his bayonet into Lenfant's chest. The priest fell dead on the spot, the first of the martyrs that day. Cheverus and the others watched in stunned horror.

Inside the chapel, Clootz announced in a booming voice that he'd come here to put all traitors to France on trial. The Archbishop of Aries, the frail, seventy-nine-year-old Jean-Marie Dulau, calmly approached Clootz, and tried to reason with him. He said the priests there were loyal citizens, that they had done nothing wrong.

"I will decide who is guilty, old man," Clootz screamed at him, his face reddening with anger. Clootz took a piece of paper from his coat pocket and waved it in front of the old priest. "Will you sign the oath or not?"

The Archbishop shook his head.

"Sign it or die."

Father Dulau said he would not sign.

Clootz raised his already bloody saber. "I ask you one last time, old man. Are you one of them--or one of us?"

The priest crossed himself and got down on his knees. Looking up at his soon-to-be executioner, he said with perfect equanimity, "I forgive you, my son."

This seemed to enrage Clootz even more. "I don't need your damn forgiveness. May Lucifer accept your soul," Clootz cried, dropping the saber on the Archbishop's neck. The old priest fell over, his head nearly severed, his blood spurting in torrents onto the floor of the chapel. He was the second to be martyred.

Clootz next turned to one of the Rochefoucauld brothers, the bishop of Beauvais. He repeated the question: "Are you one of them? Or one of us?" When the Bishop said he would not sign the oath, he, too, was struck down with a savage blow that disemboweled him. His guts spilled out of him onto the chapel floor. Now, even the facade of a trial was at an end. A pent-up orgy of violence seemed to be suddenly unleashed. Gunshots rang out, splintering the torpid air, and sabers and pikes and axes gleamed and flashed in the small chapel. Some of the priests tried to make their way to the altar at the front of the chapel, as if the cross there would save them. A few were quickly dispatched by bullets, while others were slowly hacked to death, their limbs littering the floor of the chapel or the ground just outside. Some were bludgeoned to death by clubs, their brains strewn about. Some had their throats cut, others were beheaded, their heads impaled on pikes. Some were slaughtered where they stood or knelt in prayer. A few tried to fight back or at least to protect themselves, to ward off the blows. Cheverus saw the burly August Berruyer grab one of the sanscubttes and throw him to the ground before a club crushed his skull. Others, having gained the courtyard, rushed headlong for the walls or the doors leading to the outside, hoping to save themselves. Most were shot trying to climb over the walls to freedom, or grabbed by their heels and pulled down, there to be bludgeoned or hacked to death. The whitewashed masonry of the wall was befouled by their blood. It looked like the insides of a slaughterhouse.

At the first outbreak of violence, Cheverus was overwhelmed. The unspeakable savagery had left him numbed, his limbs paralyzed. Somehow he managed to stagger outside the chapel. Standing behind a bush, he watched the hellish scene swirling around him, mesmerized by it, transfixed by such horror. He saw some of the priests aiding others, kneeling beside their fallen colleagues, praying, comforting those in their last agonies. Not far away, his friend Pierre Landry tended to one who'd been disembowled, his intestines lying strewn about the ground like those of a slaughtered pig. Father Landry gave him extreme unction and recited the prayer for a dead priest: "Deus qui inter apostolicos sacerdos familium tuum." Several of the assassins then fell upon him. He looked up at them, his eyes wide in terror but also with resignation. He started to say something but before the words were out of his mouth a saber descended upon his skull. Right before his eyes, his friend was hacked to pieces.

With Landry's death, something snapped in Cheverus. He seemed to wake from a terrible nightmare and into a reality even worse. He turned and fled across the garden, running right through the carnage, past the blood and gore, the severed limbs and heads, the steaming entrails, the cries and whimpers and death rattles of his colleagues. All the while bullets whizzed about him. Fellow priests dropped around him, bleeding, crying out in agony: Help me. Dear Lord, help me. He reached the wall and climbed a small pear tree. He scaled the blood-spattered wall, and flung himself over. He found himself in the Rue de Rennes, running, fleeing from the crazed mobs. He was not the only one. Of the one hundred and fifty priests in the Carmes that day, some forty managed to escape. Behind him he could hear the terrible screams and tormented cries of his dying brothers, as well as the shouts of the mob. "Get him," they yelled. "There he goes." He ran like a frightened animal, wildly, without plan or thought. His body took over, his heart pounding, his lungs burning, his brain hammering furiously. If he had one thought guiding him it was this: to live. Simply that. Everything else became unimportant. When Cheverus had managed to put some distance between himself and the Carmes, he stopped and vomited in the gutter. Then he ran on.

The sansculottes were everywhere now, roaming the streets, looking to kill any priest they saw. When, exhausted and out of breath, he could run no further, he tried to hide. He slunk furtively about the dingy alleys of Paris like a common criminal, knocking on the doors of houses only to be turned away by the terrified occupants: "Allez-vous-en!" they would cry. "Go away, priest!" He feared that any moment might be his last. "There's one of them " he heard someone scream. "Get him!"

He took off again, fleeing in the direction of his old school, hoping to make the safety of his brother Louis's lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques. Sticking to the back streets and narrow, fetid lanes, he soon found himself lost in an unfamiliar part of the city. He turned and ran into an alley that he realized only too late had no exit. It was hardly five feet across and darkened except for a thin band of light that fell from straight overhead, a sordid place where prostitutes plied their trade at night and thieves lurked. Several doors led onto the alley. These he pounded on, calling for help, pleading, but no one answered his cries. He turned back the way he had come, hoping to avoid being trapped, when he heard the shouts of the sanscubtte mob getting closer and closer. Finally, with nowhere to turn, he realized he was doomed. He knelt, closed his eyes, and began to pray, to pray as hard as he had ever prayed.

Is it my life You wish, O Lord, he asked. He thought of saying it was His, to do with as He wished, but his fear had so constricted his throat that no words came out of his mouth. He didn't hear God's voice, only the frantic pounding in his head. An icy hand seemed to grab hold of his heart, squeezing it. His soul trembled, quaking with a fear he'd never known before. He would die alone, he thought, in this sordid place. He should have stayed and died with his fellow clergy. If he had, it would all be over by now. At this very moment he would be sitting at God's right hand, a martyr like the others. Yet he had run, fled like a coward.

Before this moment, death--and especially a martyr's death--had been a mere abstraction to him, a lovely Botticelli painting framed by youthful notions of glory and splendid beatitude. If martyrdom were to come, he had always thought, it would be accompanied by bands of angels bearing him sweetly aloft to the glory of God. But this? This was pure horror. This was ugly and profane beyond words. He couldn't imagine heaven, and God seemed so far from this stinking alley. He took out his breviary and began to read from it, hoping that this would calm his soul. From memory, he recited the Twenty-third Psalm: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Yet he did fear evil. The world had become evil. At that moment, the only image that came to his mind was the hellish scene he had just escaped from. He saw the courtyard garden strewn with the bodies of his fellow priests. He saw severed heads and limbs still twitching. He saw mutilated corpses. He saw blood spattered on the white walls. He saw all this and he trembled. His heart rebelled against such an end. He wasn't ready to die. No. He had just become a priest. God had so much for him yet to accomplish. With tears streaming from his eyes, he prayed once more, asking not for absolution for his immortal soul nor for the courage to face his end with dignity, but merely for his life. Life at any cost, in any form. Dear God, he had prayed. 1 am afraid. Spare your humble servant, and I will serve you in any way you wish. He closed his breviary and heaved it into a corner of the filthy alley, so that it would not be found on him. Then the mob came rushing upon him.

"Vous etes I'un d'eux, nest-ce-pas?" demanded their leader, his voice that harsh, guttural accusation he would never forget, the voice that would follow him, haunt him, pursue him, for years, in dreams, in memories. "You are one of them, are you not?"

Cheverus remained silent, his head bowed, waiting for the blow that would send him to eternity. He didn't look up at them, because he knew he couldn't face what they were about to do to him. Or perhaps he didn't look up because he was afraid they would see their answer in his eyes-- that he was one of them, that he was a priest. So he kept his head down. Yet he could smell them, the raw stench of fresh blood on their clothes, like iron heated in a forge.

"Are you one of them?" the voice asked again, insistent. The sansculotte put the side of his saber beneath his chin and forced his head up. In the light from above, Cheverus couldn't make out the face of the man holding the saber. Just a ragged beard, a perverse halo of luminescence surrounding his head. And his voice. The voice of Death, he would always later think.

"Are you one of them?" the man repeated.

Please, dear Lord. Help me.

"He is," said another. "He is one of them."

"Are you?" the first demanded.

"Just kill him," cried another.

"We are wasting time," said a third. "He dies."

"Wait," said the leader, holding up a hand. "Are you one of them? Speak or die."

The movement of his head from side to side along the blade that held his chin aloft was so faint at first he wasn't sure he had done it at all. His hands, still folded in prayer, trembled, and the breath in his mouth tasted foul.

"Don't listen to him," said one of them.

"The dog lies," another cried. "I saw him in the garden with the others."

"Kill him. Kill the filthy calotin," several chanted at once.

"Death to all priests."

"Please," he implored them.

"Kill him! Kill him! Kill him," they all cried.

"Are you one of them?" the leader asked a final time, his voice now oddly softened. It was almost seductive, silky, like a voice oiled by liquor or passion. A lover's voice. "Do you want to live or not? Speak: Are you a priest?"

The silence stretched out and out, pounding in his ears, exploding in his skull like one of those gunshots in the courtyard. Where was God, he wondered. Where was He? Cheverus saw the image of the archbishop, his throat slashed. And of Father Landry, his bloody, mutilated body. Is this what God wanted for him, to die here like a dog? His carcass hacked to pieces, his blood mingling with the sewage in the street. Was that really God's wish?

Finally, his voice barely audible, he uttered, "No." As soon as he said it out loud, he felt his soul contract inside his body, turn hard as a frozen stone that would never thaw out, not even in the flames of hell.

"What," the leader's voice cried, the faintest trace of pleasure in it, the joy of torture.

"No, I am not a priest," he said, a little louder this time.

"He is lying," the others said. "Kill him."

"Yes. Put him to the blade. Death to all cabtins"

The leader, though, stayed their hands. "No. Leave him to his God,"

he said, and he laughed, a cynical sound Cheverus heard with a final sense of defeat. Then it was over. They turned, and, amazingly, left him kneeling there.

In a daze, he made it to his brother Louis's rooms, where he remained in hiding. There they would hear the reports of just how widespread the bloodshed of the September Massacres had become. Paris was now in complete chaos, fear reigned, its streets bathed in blood. The beast they would later call The Terror had begun in earnest. Having had a taste of blood, the creature went from prison to prison, slaying hundreds. At the abbey at Saint Germain des Pres alone there were more than three hundred martyred priests. At the Conciergerie, a hundred. Nearly as many at La Force, at Chatelet, at La Salpetriere. The slaughtered priests were stripped, their bloody clothes given to their executioners, their crosses and medallions confiscated to be melted down by the government, their naked, mutilated bodies tossed onto carts and conveyed to a mass grave. The severed heads of a few clergy along with those of aristocrats and suspected loyalists, including that of the queen's friend, Princess de Lambelle, were impaled on pikes and paraded about. Those unfortunate enough not to be slaughtered on the spot were later brought before sham courts, tried on vague charges of treason, and sentenced to the guillotine. Peering from the window of his brother's rooms, Cheverus would watch those being led to their deaths. Envious of them, their deaths seeming to mock him. He had, like Peter, denied his Lord, not once, but three times. Oh, how he wished he had been one of the lucky dead. To have perished before his fear had got the best of him. At night he would get down on his knees and pray to God to take his life. Please, O Lord, I am not worthy to be called Thy servant. Take me. Please take me.

Then one day he put on his cassock and draped his cross about his neck. He said to his brother, "I must go to those still in prison."

"What! You will be killed, Jean," Louis cried.

"If God wills. Whatever happens, my place is there."

"Perhaps God meant for you to live," his brother pleaded.

Cheverus wanted to tell Louis the truth, that it wasn't God's will but his own cowardice that permitted him to continue alive. But he didn't. He was too ashamed.

In the end though, he was, above all else, a man guided by reason and logic, and those elements in his nature proved stronger than his wish to die. His brother was right, he argued with himself. What good could he do either his fellow priests or his God in dying now? The time for martyrdom had come and gone. He'd missed his chance. He convinced himself it would be mere vanity to die in such a way now, a pointless suicide rather than a true martyr's death. So he stayed in hiding for several weeks until his false passport finally came through. He was to pretend to be a grain merchant. Disguised once again, he journeyed in a farmer's wagon to Calais. Within a few days he'd managed to board a vessel and slip across the Channel to England, as did hundreds of other PSmigrPS priests. He remained there for four long years, working tirelessly, praying daily, trying to atone for his betrayal. And then came the letter from Father Matignon inviting him to come to the new world. In his heart, he looked upon the letter as a sign from God. This would be his penance, his second chance. This would be his absolution. So he sailed again, this time for Boston.

He never told anyone his terrible secret, his denial of his Lord, his faith, his martyred brethren. As much as he would like to have told someone, anyone, he hadn't even the courage to admit his sin. Not to his brother Louis, nor his father, nor any of his fellow Emigre priests in England. Not even to his dear friend and confessor Father Matignon. Not to anyone. Only God knew of it. And He was silent.

Chapter Eight.