Delphine de Castelmont’s execution is the turning point that leaves her twin sons to carry the paired cameos entrusted to her by Louis XVI. Reconstructed by Loïc from scattered historical records, the scene joins the Revolution’s public violence to the private inheritance that will shape the Castelmont family’s future.

Execution in Revolutionary Paris

After searching archives and piecing together fragments from old books and documents, Loïc imagines Place des Victoires on May 21, 1794, as if looking through a small aperture in time. Beneath a leaden sky, the guillotine stands at the center of the square. A noisy, drunken crowd gathers to watch the execution, turning the death of an aristocrat into a public spectacle.

Delphine remains dignified on the scaffold as the executioner, Sanson, prepares the mechanism. The blade falls; her head drops into the basket. Sanson lifts it by the hair, and the crowd answers with shouts, whistles, and applause, singing a revolutionary refrain against the aristocracy. The scene’s violence is both intimate and theatrical: Delphine’s composure meets the crowd’s exhilaration, while the guillotine makes the political reversal brutally physical.

The Cameos and the Sons’ Escape

The execution’s private stakes reach beyond the scaffold. Delphine’s arrest followed the massacre at Château de Barzac, where revolutionaries had killed her husband, her mother, and several of her children. Her twin sons, Louis and Charles de Castelmont, about twelve years old, had escaped with her to Paris. Her close childhood friendship with Louis XVI also made her suspect: the Committee of Public Safety had placed her on its execution list because of her ties to the former king.

The paired cameos linked that history to the boys’ uncertain future. The novel’s reconstruction traces their royal provenance to Louis XVI, who gave Delphine a cameo in connection with the twins’ birth in 1782 and later arranged for the second, Castor, to reach her through the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Delphine kept both jewels with her, then, sensing arrest was near, entrusted one to each son: Louis received Castor, Charles Pollux. She sewed them into the boys’ clothes and made them promise never to part with them. Their value was perilously double: depending on who held power, the royal objects could serve as a passport or as grounds for arrest.

The boys escaped the agents who came for their mother and went into hiding separately, divided by the fierce hostility that had long set them against one another. Delphine was arrested in March and executed two months later. Their paths then diverged into exile: Louis escaped to England aboard a ship shortly before Thermidor and eventually crossed to America, while Charles joined the émigrés in Germany. The execution thus leaves the cameos—and the promise attached to them—as a material inheritance carried into separate lives and a longer family history.

Exile and the Inheritance’s Long Reach

From Louisiana, Louis de Castelmont followed settlement westward, living for a time in Texas before establishing himself near Carthage, Missouri. He first survived by petty theft and a succession of makeshift occupations, then built a small trade that enabled him to acquire land shortly before Louisiana was transferred to the United States in 1802. The boy who had fled Paris with a royal cameo sewn into his clothes thus became a prosperous farmer on the expanding frontier; the novel’s historical reconstruction carries the consequences of Delphine’s execution into a new country and a radically altered life.

The account leaves the brothers’ futures on separate tracks: Louis’s migration and eventual prosperity are traced in detail, while Charles’s escape reaches only as far as his joining the émigrés in Germany. The asymmetry preserves the division that began in childhood and makes the paired jewels a lingering link between lives the narrative follows unequally. Delphine’s death ends her protection of her sons, but the promise she attached to the cameos continues beyond the scaffold, binding their separate exiles to the same inheritance.

The Limits of Historical Reconstruction

The account does not claim access to Delphine’s final thoughts. It introduces the possibility through a contemporary scientific claim that brain activity—or even the last thoughts of people who had been guillotined—might persist for several minutes after decapitation, then turns that claim into a series of unanswered questions. The narrative imagines Delphine’s mind returning to her murdered family, her escaped sons, the jewels she had entrusted to them, and her old friendship with Louis XVI, without presenting any of these as known facts about what she actually thought.

That uncertainty marks the boundary between Loïc’s archival reconstruction and the private experience the records cannot recover. The execution is documented as a public event, but its deepest consequence is intimate: a mother faces death after placing the means of her sons’ survival, and the burden of a promise, in their hands. The scene’s unanswered questions leave her consciousness inaccessible even as the narrative traces the inheritance that outlasts her.