The Sandman - Issue 29 - Fables and Reflections - Distant Mirrors - Thermidor

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

- Unknown

After the epic events in Season of Mists, we are given a moment to catch our breaths as Neil unveils a volume of standalone tales that is our journey through Fables and Reflections. Stories within stories, Fables and Reflections also contain a collection of tales called Distant Mirrors that will be scattered across the series like gems on a beach. As you Constant Reader will find, the stories of Distant Mirrors examine the nature of power and how it affects individuals. Some of these tales are chilling, others heartbreaking, while one of them makes me smile no matter how many times I read it.

The first ‘fable’ in Fables and Reflections is also the first volume of Distant Mirrors. Titled Thermidor, the story is set during the turbulent years of the French Revolution and reintroduces a fan-favourite character, not only in the comic book series but also in the Netflix adaptation. Johanna Constantine.

Our story begins on June 28th, 1794 at Wych Cross (foreshadowing!), where Lady Johanna Constantine receives a late-night visitor at her home. Morpheus, in period costume, appears before Johanna who does not recognise him at first until reminded of their earlier encounter during Issue #13's Men of Good Fortune. This time, Johanna displays better manners, having since learned Morpheus is not a demon but one of the Endless. To her surprise, Morpheus enlists her aid on a task he needs her to undertake, although he does not lie when asked if it’s dangerous. When they talk terms, Morpheus admits he can’t offer her gold or property since she already has these things in abundance. What he can give her is anything that’s within his power to provide.

Johanna accepts.

A month later, Johanna sneaks through the streets of Paris on 6th Thermidor. July 24, for those unfamiliar with the calendrier républicain adopted when Revolutionary France discarded the Gregorian calendar.

It is the height of The Terror, the period when the fervour of the revolutionary spirit led to widespread massacres and executions.

Dressed as a peasant, Johanna carries a sack while trying to sneak past two militiamen from the Sans-culottes army who enforced much of the policies and legislation of the period. Her efforts fail and the duo tries to extort her for whatever she’s carrying. With no choice but to comply, Johanna reveals her grisly booty, a man’s severed head. She lies, claiming it is the head of the aristocrat who violated her younger sister Anne-Claire and caused her suicide. She’s taking the head home to plant it on her sister’s grave so their mother can spit into the violator’s face.

Repulsed, the Sans-culottes wave her on, but not before cutting away the gold earring attached to the dead man’s ear. Once Johanna replaces the head in the sack, she slinks away into the night. She returns to the refuge of a rooming house and, once alone, removes the head and places it on a table. By candlelight, she cleans it and apologises for the earlier indignity and mutilation.

The severed head, not at all a corpse, speaks. What happened couldn’t be avoided, he says, and the earring taken by the san-culottes will return to him eventually, but not before causing its thief some hardship. What concerns him more than the loss of an earring is the intelligence they might bring to their superiors about Johanna and her mission in Paris. Unfortunately, with the city gates locked, Johanna explains nothing can be done until morning. If that is so, the headless man states, they need a new plan and they need one fast.

Johanna is confident that between herself and her charge, who is none other than Orpheus, they will come up with something.

This is just as well because sometime later, Johanna is captured by French soldiers who ransack her room in search of Orpheus’s severed head. Failing to find him, they threaten her with beatings and the guillotine to make her talk, but Johanna is made of sterner stuff than that. She remains silent even as the Captain intimidates her with vulgar words and promises to escalate her suffering if she does not yield.

Fortunately or unfortunately, before the Captain can make good his threat, he is interrupted by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, one of the chief architects of The Terror. Saint-Just stops the interrogation before the Captain can do his worst, exercising his raw power with threats of the guillotine for disobedience. He, too, wants Johanna to reveal the location of Orpheus, but he plans to do it in the presence of his master, Maximilien Robespierre. Properly cowed, the Captain steps aside and lets Saint-Just leave with Johanna.

As they make their way to Luxembourg Palace, we learn that Saint-Just knows Johanna as Jeanne and is aware she is no simple peasant girl. Robespierre has informed him that Jeanne is a thief and a spy and her seduction of Saint-Just allowed her to steal something valuable, though Saint-Just does not know what. Her punishment, however, is not in doubt. Under the Law of Prairial, she will either be acquitted or executed and since she will be unable to offer anything in her defence, there’s not much hope of survival. Johanna appeals to Saint-Just for her freedom and we learn that she seduced him to reach Orpheus, a slight he has not forgotten despite words to the contrary. He intends to deliver her to Robespierre or he might face the same fate.

At the palace, Johanna and Saint-Just encounter another prisoner, Thomas Paine, a founding father of the young United States of America. Paine asks if there is any word about his freedom and Saint-Just gleefully tells him America wants nothing to do with him. In anger, Paine calls out Saint-Just and Robespierre for their monstrous actions, sending thousands to their deaths. But like Robespierre, Saint-Just is a fanatic, and he repeats Paine’s own words about fighting tyranny and the hardships that must be suffered because of it. The greater the sacrifice, the sweeter the rewards. If lives must be sacrificed for freedom, then so be it.

Hearing his words repeated to him disheartens Paine, who never intended his writings to be so perverted. Saint-Just reminds Paine he’s not French and they do not need his meddling. But Paine intends to have the last word. Saint-Just is Robespierre’s lap dog who will be toppled like all tyrants before him. As Johanna is ushered to her audience with Robespierre, Paine wonders if they’ve met before, but thankfully he has no opportunity to give Johanna away. Leaving the prisoner behind, Saint-Just reveals that even though Paine spoke in favour of the revolution, he’s now a nuisance they do not need and will be soon executed.

Johanna questions if that’s the plan, to kill all the poets and dreamers. Saint-Just without any hesitation, admits it will be when they no longer serve their purpose. He delivers her to Robespierre, convinced they’ll never meet again, though he’ll not lose much sleep over it. Asshole.

Inside her cell, Johanna recounts in diary form how she arrived in this place. Men are so easily manipulated when it comes to their urges and she exploited this very weakness in Saint-Just to gain the knowledge to find Orpheus. Outside the window of her cell, she watches the ghastly theatre performed by the locals with the dead bodies of the executed. Having been to Palace Versaille and seeing its grandeur, knowing that while aristocrats were strolling about its gold-gilded halls, people were starving for morsels. I get their rage perfectly. Yet there’s something obscene in the revelry Neil displays so grotesquely here.

Robespierre arrives during this performance, armed with the knowledge of Johanna’s true identity. Not only is she known to him, he is aware of her family history, from her parents to the death of her twin sister. He lords his knowledge of her past exploits, her single status and the possibility her true father may be Sir Francis Dashwood. He even knows that she trained under Chevalier D’eon, a spymaster who taught Johanna her craft, which she used to good effect on numerous occasions. A slave scandal in Louisiana, a witchcraft accusation in Egypt and a theft at the Russian Imperial Court. Finally, he knows she’s come into possession of an artefact that belongs to France, an object of superstition and decadence he wants returned immediately.

Johanna admits to nothing.

Unsurprisingly, Robespierre dismisses her claims of innocence. The crypt in which Orpheus was kept in a box was broken into and his head removed. Saint-Just has told his master of the peasant girl asking questions and the report from the sans-culottes confirms she had a head in her possession. Johanna does not confess her guilt, asking instead what Robespierre intends to do with the head if he finds it. The fanatic wastes no time swearing to destroy it because the France he is building has no place for religion or monarchs. To create the perfect society dedicated to reason, he intends to excoriate it first, even at the expense of freedom.

Johanna is less charitable than Robespierre’s deluded description, exposing his willingness to sacrifice every man, woman and child for his purpose.

Robespierre leaves, but not before promising to find the head and threatening Johanna with punishments worse than death if she does not cooperate.

Once alone, Johanna falls asleep and is visited by Morpheus in her dreams. He is aware of her predicament but cannot help directly, which is why he enlisted her aid in the first place. Not eager to die, Johanna asks Morpheus to give her situation some thought because it’s looking very likely that she’s going to lose her head right alongside his son. Jessamy the Raven (damn you Alexander Burgess!) suggests that Orpheus isn’t exactly helpless. He can still sing. The reminder gives Morpheus an idea. The Lord Shaper dips his hand into the bloody waters of a nearby cascade and instructs Johanna to drink so she doesn’t forget what he’s about to tell her.

Back in the waking world, Robespierre deduces where Johanna has hidden Orpheus from a dream. (Morpheus displaying Desire levels of sneak here). After all, what better place to hide a decapitated head than in a pile of them? He escorts her to the dungeons where the corpses that have yet to be disposed of are stored. Inside the room, full of severed heads, he instructs Johanna to retrieve Orpheus. This time, Johanna doesn’t hesitate. She goes into the gruesome pile (depicted quite horrifically by penciler Stan Woch) and retrieves her charge.

She formally introduces to Robespierre, Orpheus, the son of Morpheus, torn apart by The Bacchante, the women of frenzy before being tossed into the Hebrus. The musician who called the name of his lost love, Eurydice, as he sailed to the sea, unable to die because he bested Hades.

Robespierre scoffs at all this, assuming Johanna is taking them all for fools and demands she bring him Orpheus. She is going to do nothing of the kind. Instead, she tells Orpheus to sing.

Orpheus sings an opera dedicated to the mob whose rage originated from a place of despair and anguish. Justified fury swept them away on a tide of violence and madness until they became the very thing they despised. As he sings the haunting melody, he is joined by a chorus of dead voices, given brief life to join his orchestra, whose song reaches beyond the walls of their prison. It is a lament against men elevated into positions of power through lies and manipulation, who stoke wounded sentiments into a murderous frenzy of vengeful slaughter.

It is a dirge about the dream of freedom and how that dream has died.

Johanna hears little of this because, as warned, she covered her ears when Orpheus began to sing. Yet she hears enough of it to be moved and comprehend what Orpheus soulfully is trying to teach his audience. Robespierre and his men are entranced, unable to do much once Orpheus has them in his musical grip. Taking the opportunity to escape, Johanna spirits the poet away, fleeing Paris after knocking out a guard and stealing his uniform.

History claims that Robespierre and Saint-Just, corrupt with power, massacred so many factions that not even the National Convention felt safe. On the 9th of Thermidor, their attempts to justify their actions before the Assembly resulted in the arrest of both, with Robespierre getting his jaw shattered (probably to shut him up) before their eventual execution. I liked to think that Orpheus was there in some fashion and that his song cooled the rage that gave The Terror its ferocious fire.

Whatever the truth, our tale comes to a close as Johanna returns Orpheus to his carers on the island of Naxos, where he lived for many years before being stolen. Orpheus is glad to be home and looks forward to the occasional visits by his mother, Calliope. He asks Johanna if she will see Morpheus again. After all, his father must care for him if he sent Johanna to his rescue, right? Sadly, we learn that Morpheus and his son have not seen each other in a long time, not even in dreams.

Johanna, who now considers Orpheus a friend, asks to visit from time to time, but Orpheus shoots down the idea, thinking it wouldn’t be wise.

Thermidor ends in the pages of Johanna’s diary where it is revealed she never sees him again but often thinks about the melody she barely heard, wishing she could sing it to those in Authority who really need to hear it.

NEXT - Issue 30 - August

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