April 1794

Her skirt is a vial of light. The gathered organza swings, it clings to her form, as she crosses the room
swiftly, lifting the pearl-grey hemline clear of the ground. She takes the shackled hands, presses them
to her lips, sinks to the floor. As she does so, the dress streams out around her. Its metallic threads trap
and refract the firelight, stirring a rare notion of comfort in the cold dawn. The year is 1794 and they
are man and wife, he Camille Desmoulins, she, Lucile Desmoulins, née Laridon-Duplessis. She has
come here at his final request to say goodbye, and, despite all that has happened between them, in
this, their last hour, they assert their deep, unbreakable bond.
The interlinked chains of his handcuffs. The interlinked threads of her silk gown. The force that links
one atom to another in the crystal matrix. Like these, they are bound. And even death, which will
come to him first, will not separate them.
The guard is impatient; Camille has followed his wife and is now kneeling. The guard tries to haul
him up. The choreography is awkward, uncertain. They are not in synchrony. He rises. She rises. He
is ahead of her then behind, she seems to be the first one standing, but no, he is.
The lives of the Desmoulins were tempestuous, their deaths, brutal. Yet, when I imagine this meeting,
it's not in their lives and deaths that I find the connection. It's in the way I see their bodies moving in
those last moments together. In that stumbling fall and rise, those fumbled attempts to hold hands, in
the way that they are out of step yet attuned, motivated by faith not reason is the image of the love
that enabled us to come through.