La Mole's Servant

Jacques had served La Mole for three years before the massacre, in a working relationship he had come to value as considerably warmer and considerably more respectful than the ordinary master-servant arrangement his own more modest circumstances had generally afforded him across his working life. La Mole treated him, across those three years, with a casual, unaffected courtesy that Jacques had come to appreciate precisely because it seemed to cost his master nothing in particular effort, a natural extension of La Mole's own generally warm temperament rather than any performed consideration calculated for effect.

He survived the massacre through a combination of circumstance and calculated caution that he would spend considerable subsequent time turning over in his own private conscience, uncertain whether he ought to feel grateful for his own survival or guilty for surviving a night that claimed the master he had actually, if quietly, come to respect. He had been sent, hours before the violence began, on an ordinary errand that happened to keep him away from the household when the killing started, and he returned, once the initial chaos had begun to settle into its longer, grimmer aftermath, to find that his master had not survived the night's violence.

What occupied Jacques, in the difficult weeks following this discovery, was a question he found he could not easily resolve through any of the practical frameworks his working life had previously equipped him to apply to difficult circumstances: what, precisely, did a servant actually owe a dead master's memory, once formal service itself had been rendered permanently impossible by that master's death? He had no family connection to La Mole that might have created some ongoing formal obligation, no specific instruction left behind that might have clarified what conduct his master would have wanted from him in these unprecedented circumstances.

What he settled on, after considerable private deliberation, was a private, self-imposed obligation that drew less on any formal expectation than on his own real assessment of what he had valued about his years of service to La Mole: a determination to ensure, so far as his own modest means and modest standing allowed, that his master's memory was not simply erased by the massacre's chaotic aftermath, in which countless individual deaths were being absorbed into a broader historical narrative that showed little interest in preserving the particular, individual texture of any single victim's actual character and actual life.

He accomplished this modest private goal through means available to a man of his own limited standing: preserving, where he could, small personal effects that had belonged to his master and that Jacques judged might eventually matter to whatever family or friends survived to receive them; offering, when opportunity arose, his own firsthand account of La Mole's true character to people who had known his master only through the more sensationalized political narrative the massacre and its surrounding conspiracies had generated; maintaining, in his own private conduct, a kind of ongoing fidelity to the specific values he had observed and admired in his master's actual daily behavior, treating this fidelity as itself a form of memorial considerably more meaningful, in Jacques's own private assessment, than any more formal or more public commemoration his modest circumstances could have arranged.

He did not know, in the years that followed, whether this private, self-directed obligation actually accomplished anything of real lasting significance, in a historical moment that was busy generating far more dramatic and far more consequential narratives about the massacre's actual political meaning than any single servant's quiet fidelity to a single master's memory could meaningfully compete with. He understood, examining his own modest efforts with whatever clear-eyed honesty his own circumstances allowed him, that his private commemoration would likely remain exactly that: private, modest, and largely invisible to the broader historical record that was already, in these early years following the massacre, beginning to settle into its own larger, more impersonal shape. But he continued the effort regardless, understanding it as the one form of true agency his own limited circumstances afforded him in the face of a violence and a loss that had otherwise left him, like countless others who survived that particular catastrophic night, with remarkably little actual capacity to shape or influence anything beyond his own small, private, and quietly persistent fidelity to a memory he had decided, entirely on his own authority and for his own reasons, was worth the continued effort of preserving.