Free Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

There’s something in it. Something small and dark. I can’t take my eyes off it. “What is that?” I ask.
    G looks at what I’m holding. “A moving sight, no?” he says. “It’s not often we may look upon the heart of a king.”

12
    I didn’t hear him right. I can’t have.
    A king’s heart? Kings have big hearts. Mighty hearts. How else can they fight wars and go on crusades? But this heart doesn’t look big. It looks small and sad.
    “We don’t know it’s a king’s heart, G,” Dad says. “If we did, I wouldn’t be here. Its physical characteristics tell us it’s a human heart. Its size indicates that it belonged to a child. That’s all we know.”
    “No mere child,” G says. “This is the heart of Louis-Charles, son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. The lost king of France.”
    “You think, ” Dad says.
    “In my bones, I know,” G says.
    “Your bones don’t count. The mother’s would, though, if we could get them,” Dad says.
    “If?” I say. “You can’t?”
    G shakes his head. “No. After her execution, Marie-Antoinette’s remains were thrown into a common grave. A servant later fished out what she thought might be the queen’s leg bones. They’re in a coffin at St-Denis, but”—G shrugs—“who knows.”
    “So what will you use?” I ask.
    “A few years ago, tests were run on strands of a lock of Marie-Antoinette’s hair that had been cut off before her death and preserved as a memento. The results were good and clean, so we’ll use them.”
    “Guillaume, Lewis’s glass is empty. Pour him more wine,” Lili says, putting a basket of bread on the table.
    G pours for himself and my father. He offers me a glass but I shake my head no.
    “Where did the heart come from?” I ask him, still staring at the photograph. “I mean, how did it get in the jar?”
    G looks at my father. “Have you not told her about it?”
    “I did. Just now. I gave her the essentials. What we know to be true.”
    “Which is what? That it’s a heart?”
    “Yes.”
    “Lewis, Lewis, Lewis,” G sighs. “Come, Andi. Sit,” he says, pulling out the chair next to him. “It’s a fascinating story. I will tell it to you.”
    “G, I don’t think Andi wants to know—” my father starts to say.
    “Yes, I do,” I say, annoyed that he’s speaking for me.
    He gives me a pained look, then nods. “Fine,” he says. “But no stories, G. Give her the facts. Background and speculation are irrelevant.”
    G leans back in his chair. “So my work and that of Aulard, Lefebvre, Schama, and Carlyle, and countless other historians … it’s all stories?” he says hotly. “The contemporary accounts? The letters and depositions, the prison records? Nothing but background and speculation?”
    My father takes the photos from me. He moves them to the far end of the table. “A human heart isn’t made of stories,” he says.
    “Every heart is made of stories,” G says.
    “A heart is made of proteins built by amino acids, animated by electrical impulses.”
    G snorts. “Your pretty, young girlfriend, Minna—you love her with all your heart, or some random combination of amino acids?”
    Dad flushes. He blusters. Because his pretty—and pregnant—new girlfriend is twenty-five years old. “There’s nothing random about amino acids,” he says huffily, “and love—or any emotion—as much as we want to glorify it, is merely a series of chemical reactions.”
    G laughs. He nudges me. “That is exactly why I recruited him!” he says. “Because the man has not one shred of fancy in him. He is exact and impartial and the world knows it.”
    “What nonsense, Guillaume,” Lili says, putting a casserole dish on the table. “You recruited him because he is a famous Nobel Prize-winning scientist and all the papers will take his picture and there is nothing you love more than publicity.”
    “I need publicity, my dear. There is a difference.”
    “And I need to get the dinner on the table. Perhaps you