Three Glorious Days

On the July Revolution of 1830, a Composer Locked in a Room, and the Fire That Made an American Disappear

13 September ~ 5 min read

For three days at the end of July 1830, Paris stopped being a city and became an argument. On the 26th the king, Charles X, published four ordinances that shut down the opposition press, dissolved the chamber he had just lost, and cut most of the electorate out of the next election. On the 27th the printers who had just been put out of work went into the streets. On the 28th there were barricades — paving stones, overturned carts, felled trees — across the narrow streets of the old city, and the tricolor, banned for fifteen years, was flying over Notre-Dame. By the 29th the royal troops had lost the Louvre and the Tuileries, and by the first week of August the king was on his way to exile and his cousin Louis-Philippe was being called, carefully, not King of France but King of the French.

The French still call those three days les Trois Glorieuses. Delacroix painted them that autumn: a bare-breasted Liberty over the barricade, a street boy with two pistols beside her.

I did not put the revolution in The Anatomy of Shadows because it is famous. I put it in because of where Hector Berlioz was while it happened.

He tells the story himself in his Memoirs, and it is one of the best things in them. He was twenty-six and competing, for the fourth time, for the Prix de Rome — the scholarship that would send him to Italy and, more importantly, prove to his father that music was a profession. The rules of the competition locked the candidates into cells at the Institut to write a cantata on an assigned text, and Berlioz was still inside, finishing the last pages of his Sardanapale, when the shooting started. He describes writing the final bars with bullets rattling against the shutters, then bolting into the street with a pistol and no idea what to do with it, and then, a few days later, standing in a crowd of thousands as they sang the Marseillaise — the anthem he was about to arrange for chorus and orchestra, with an instruction on the score that everyone with a voice and a heart should join in. He won the prize that August. The year that changed his life had a revolution in the middle of it, and he spent the decisive days of it locked in a room writing music.

That is the historical Berlioz. My novel moves his competition to November, so that the prize and the symphony can land in the same fortnight as the murders in the Rue Morgue — a liberty I confess in the Historical Note, and one I would not have taken if the July he actually lived were not already in the book. The revolution stays where it happened. What I added was an American standing in it.

Edgar Allan Poe was raised in Richmond, Virginia, in a household and a class that had a settled horror of the crowd. A mob, to a Southern gentleman of 1830, was the thing that ended civilization. So I wanted to know what such a young man would feel if he were standing outside the Palais-Royal on the 28th of July, watching a crowd end a monarchy in three days without ending anything else — watching it work. In the novel he weeps, and does not know why, and a market woman pins a cockade (ribbon) on his coat. It is the first time in the book that Paris claims him.

And then the city takes something back. In the chaos of those days, fires burned in and around the offices of the old regime, and papers were lost. In the novel, one of the files that goes into the fire is the residency record of a foreigner traveling under a false name. On paper, from the 29th of July, Edgar Allan Poe no longer exists in France — which is a small, invented detail with a very long shadow, because everything that happens to him in December depends on it. The revolution that made him feel, for the first time, that he belonged to the city is the same revolution that quietly erased his right to be there.

That is why I had to restore July when I rebuilt the book. It is not scenery. It is the hinge. Berlioz walks out of his locked room into a new France and a new life; Poe walks into the crowd and comes out invisible. Everything in the second half of the novel — the raven, the ledger, the locked room, the ship on New Year’s Eve — is the consequence of those three days.

History gave one of my two young men a revolution to write music through. I gave the other one a revolution to disappear in.

~ Liam