Beasts of the Bastille - a Revolutionary Serial

Part 2

May 19, 2026

“This Won’t Last Forever” - meaning the oppression of the poor

The Story So Far - orphaned grown-up twins Joseph-Marie and Marie-Joseph are held in separate prisons and contrive a way to write to each other. They describe their lives after they were separated in childhood, Joseph drafted into the army as a boy-soldier and Marie wandering with a merchant who “adopted” her.

Marie continues…

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My Dearest,

How curious we both wandered, yet never crossed paths: were we meant to learn different lessons? Perhaps the demons who guide me were guiding you, too. I sense there is a purpose to all this suffering… Don’t lose hope, my twin.

You needn’t feel remorse for thinking me dead. In many senses I did die. The weak, senseless girl I was perished in the forest and I emerged as something other, something stronger, darker… hungrier. I’ve ensured the security of my communications, so I’ll be able to tell you my story freely. In response to your story, what can I say? We’ve traveled, both of us, you in the body, on the earth and in the flesh, and I in the astral realms where one meets strange beasts and fallen gods. It’s no small thing to say I am a little envious of the experiences you’ve had, meeting the people of the land and feeling the touch of lovers. But I do not regret my path.

For nearly two years I rode with the merchant. At night he slept either on a thin mattress in the wagon or in an inn if he could swindle enough money for drink and a whore. He afforded me a trunk with air holes and a locking lid. It did have a pillow, so I suppose it could have been worse. When I got my first blood he was overjoyed as he could save money and abuse me instead of the unfortunate girls in the inns.

I killed him shortly thereafter. I didn’t exactly mean to, but he made to touch me while the pot boiled over the fire and tipped it over on him. He was badly burned and died of infection. I took great satisfaction in watching him fester and swell and ooze. He smelled wretched before he died. I dumped his body in the woods and took the wagon to the next town where I sold everything, wagon, horse, and all for a very low price to a very lucky man. I learned from that merchant that I’m a fighter, that there is an animal in me that will do anything to survive.

From there I found work in the kitchen of a farmer. It was backbreaking labor, toiling from dark to dark with only a bit of straw near the fire for a bed at night. I was fed scraps, treated as an expendable resource. The master beat me frequently for daring to question his treatment of us servants. The mistress hated my pretty face. In truth, I hate it, too. It’s never caused me anything but trouble.

What I don’t understand is why they were so cruel. They were by no means wealthy, just tenant farmers scraping a living out of borrowed land. There were enough of us working that baron’s farms we could have killed him in the night and taken what we already owned through our toil. But that was not the lesson I was meant to learn. What I was meant to learn, I learned from the cook, a woman from Saint-Domingue. She’d been a plantation slave and escaped on a ship to Bordeaux.

“No better life. But at least I own myself.” She’d tell me about her home while we gutted chickens for supper. I gutted chickens for four long years.

She caught me staring at the sky one day, watching the crows whirl above me. She warned me about standing still. I’d get whipped if anyone saw. But I remember smiling as I told her that, in the wings of the birds, in their particular tilting and their occasional, languid flapping, I saw the ruin of our master some three days hence. She touched my face.

“Petite, you have the sight.”

In three days time the Baron stormed the farmhouse and had our master arrested for non-payment of the rents. The cook and I stole what we could and ran into the fields. We found our way to the forest and there, we found our salvation. A group of witches living together in a cave system. They took us in, they made us women. We learned the things for which I am now incarcerated. But those circumstances I’ll save for a later letter. Suffice it to say, I was never happier than all the years I spent with my coven. I’ll certainly tell you more about our activities, which were something more than knitting and brewing.

For now I must rest. My tormentor, the Father Lazare Mathis, is traveling and I am to be left alone when he is gone. He knows I will bend the wills of any of these weaker men who come near me. My letters go out by the boy who brings my food. He’s a darling orphan. I’d endeavor to be his mother if I weren’t the feral beast that I have become. The Father assumes the boy is too young and innocent to be swayed by me.

He is wrong.

But no more of that for now. I must rest.

Yours eternally,

Marie-Joseph

Sweet Sister,

Indeed you are mistaken when you imagine that I ever truly considered you dead, for there is some slender thread that connects me to you no matter how distant we may be. What happened was that I gave up on myself and so ceased to feel you actively in my heart as I do now. But I no more thought of you as dead than I would imagine my own head to be lost and I walking around headless, an absurd figure of impossibility.

Give up on myself, you say? This indeed was true when I joined - or was made to join - the army of the King. I started as a drummer boy in the company of Captain Brûle, a wretched militia detachment tasked with capturing and hanging foreigners in the realm. We roamed the land and looked for anyone who couldn’t speak good French or who simply looked wrong: the wrong color, the wrong look. Then it would be my task to roll the drums in a death tattoo as one of other of the company stretched out the neck of the vagabond on a roadside tree-limb. There was much show in it but little ceremony - it was enough to have the wretches hanging by the roadside to make the peasants feel that the King was their true master, to quell any thought of revolt in their simple breasts.

As time went on there was less and less ceremony involved, and we would string them up while we took a smoke break, relaxing on tree stumps and drinking good country wine as the man with the short straw did the heavy work of hoisting them into eternity. We joked and laughed as the poor ones dangled and danced. We were the King’s ghouls now, small imps of tyranny with no thought of what we were doing but to get from one day to the next and avoid the hangman and the sergeant’s scourge.

Then one day we caught a rogue, a strange rogue, snuffling up at the dangling corpses of an Arab family we’d hanged the day before. He seemed to be about to nibble at the toes of the youngest child, a girl of four, when he was challenged. A curious stench came off this man, who seemed large but in fact was quite short, with a skin that hung off him like an empty sack. He seemed old with lank colorless hair but in fact was very young, no more than seventeen. He seemed weak like a cripple but in fact was immensely strong. His stench was unusual, and while we were by no means roses ourselves, he smelled like something dead but more intense and - may I say like a ripe luscious fruit? - strangely alive too. Everything was wrong about him, as though his own being couldn’t reconcile his great appetite with his ability to exist. He should not have been, and yet he was.

The sergeant no sooner saw this monstrous man, and scented his insane stench, than he gave orders that he was to be run through with the bayonet. But the stranger protested in good French, said he was one of us, a soldier, and that he loved the King as well as us. We soldiers had no love for the king, but Captain Brûle could get a gold piece for every Frenchman of good standing whom he recruited into the army, so he called a halt to the summary execution and ordered that the strange-smelling man be given a white jacket and a musket. Now he was one of the King’s men.

And that was how we became comrades of common Private Tararre, the most grotesque soldier ever to take up arms, a monster indeed but in his own way blameless as a baby because there was no malice in him, only an endless hunger that never could be sated.

More soon, my sister, they are putting out torches and it’s time to send this letter with the last of my pocket change. Write me soon, sweet girl.

Your devoted brother

Joseph-Marie

My Little Bear,

Do you remember when I used to call you that? Even though you were always bigger than me, I’m smiling now to think of it. The two of us, curled up inside a log in the forest, hiding from that brute we called a father. I wanted to murder him for you. Our lives have always been hard. It’s understandable that you’d suffer such despair as to lose yourself and our connection. But you must be in a better place now, you feel just like the spirited, fighting bear I remember.

I’ll spare you the details of how I learned my craft. It was a long and often harrowing process. I have been many people, held the forms of many creatures, and I have seen lands beyond this one that should only exist in nightmares. There is one creature for which I held an affinity though, so I kept it within me, and I can feel it straining against this confinement. How long it will stay trapped within me? Within this cell? I don’t know. It’s getting difficult to control. Why do I control it? I’ve asked myself many times. I’m not certain of the answer except that there is a voice in my mind that tells me to keep it contained, let it get angrier and angrier. So this I do. Despite the agony its claws and teeth cause inside me.

I stayed with the coven in the caves for a few years. But this beast they gave me wanted to run. It wanted to taste the world, devour everything in its path, and so did I. We are very alike, this beast and I. So I left. It is not easy existing in the world as a poor, unwed woman. Rather like being a wandering heifer, ripe for branding and breeding. Can’t allow feral women to run loose after all, we might start to like it, eh? We might not take their abuse if we develop our own wild strength. They’ll see soon enough.

On the other hand, I didn’t like begging much.

I had two skills very few other women had, I could read and I could write. That I’d learned in the coven from a former nun. Thanks to this knowledge, I was able to find employment instead of entrapment. Or it seemed at first, nothing is ever as it seems. A critical mindset, not a lesson, but a way of thinking. Whatever you’re looking at, it isn’t what you see. So what is it? This is how your mind must function. How your eyes must fight deception.

I got a job writing correspondence for a nobleman. How did I manage such a feat, wandering into the city a waif with nothing on my back but rags? I did mention my pretty face, did I not? Well, I have a little more than that working in my favor. I have the wiles of the wolf. I was outside a shop, begging for alms. I’d made a sign with charcoal. I caught his eye, I let my beast speak to him on levels only the body understands. He asked me about my sign and before long I was riding to his manor house in a carriage. I was given clothes befitting my new station and I worked with his younger brother, who largely managed his estates. I was allowed in the parlor, I was allowed to sit with the ladies, although, the Comtesse did not like me, at first. On one late afternoon I heard her complain to one of her ladies that the Comte wanted to divorce on the grounds that she had not produced an heir. Having neither refining nor breeding I wasn’t aware that I shouldn’t speak, so I did. It was only a small mater of magic. I could help.

With her maids sworn to secrecy, we held the ritual in her chambers. I sacrificed a rabbit and drew a pomegranate on her belly with its blood. I bid her use a perfume of basil and petitgrain the next time her husband came to her. Within two months she was with child. While the child grew safely in her belly, I became the plaything of the Comte, and his brother. Meanwhile I stole things. I gave the some of the money to the poor in the town, but I hid much of the wealth I stole and I used it to leave shortly after I had seen the child born safely into the world. He will be quite the monster one day, if he isn’t already.

I found it simple to change my identity as I moved from place to place. Always careful not to climb socially, or to appear to want to. Always silently increasing my own wealth and sewing discord among the nobility wherever I could. I had no end goal. I was hungry and I wanted mischief. I wanted freedom and I wanted to hurt people who deserved it. I was very successful. I have money, hidden safely away for us if we ever get out of our separate Hells. I instigated scandals, I ruptured relationships, I ruined business dealings with a simple slip of the pen, I was a regular scourge of the nobility.

I was at a salon one evening. I shouldn’t have been there, it went against my own code of safety as it were, but the Baroness for whom I worked insisted. There was a man there she wanted me to meet. You see I never played the part of a cheerful young woman eager to please and be liked, no, I was… dour, dark, taciturn. I felt this persona was safer. But this woman, in her narrow-mindedness assumed that what I needed was a man. That only a husband could bring a smile to my face and laughter to my lips.

I had plenty of men.

All my smiles were wolfish and menacing.

I must end here. My tormentor, the wretched priest, has returned and is eager to punish me for having gone unpunished in his absence.

The wolf grows angrier.

But still the voice bids me, wait.

Yours always and ever,

Marie-Joseph

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