A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 4

More Acts of the Apostles

It is the end of Lent. The King decides that he does not wish, on Easter Sunday, to take holy communion from a “constitutional” priest. Nor does he wish to cause protest and outrage the patriots.

He decides therefore to spend Easter quietly at Saint-Cloud, away from the censorious eye of the city.

His plans become known.

Palm Sunday: City Hall.

“Lafayette.”

This was the voice the general now associated with calamity. Danton stood close when he spoke to him, forcing him to look up into the battered face.

“Lafayette, this morning a refractory priest, a Jesuit, said Mass at the Tuileries.”

“You are better informed than I,” Lafayette said. His mouth felt dry.

“We won’t have it,” Danton said. “The King has accepted the changes in the church. He has put his signature to them. If he cheats, there will be reprisals.”

“When the royal family leave for Saint-Cloud,” Lafayette said, “the National Guard will cordon off the area for their departure, and if necessary I shall give them an escort. Don’t get in the way, Danton.”

Danton took out of his coat—not a firearm, as Lafayette had half-feared—but a rolled piece of paper. “This is a wall poster drafted by the Cordeliers Battalion. Would you like to read it?”

Lafayette held out his hand. “Some of M. Desmoulins’s instant invective?”

Lafayette’s eyes swept over the paper. “You call upon the National Guard to prevent the King’s departure from the Tuileries.” His eyes now searched Danton’s face. “I shall order otherwise. Therefore, it is a kind of mutiny you are urging.”

“You could say that.”

Danton watched him steadily, waiting for a slight flush along the cheekbones to tell him that the general’s inner forces were in disarray. In a moment, the capillaries obliged. “I shouldn’t have thought religious intolerance was amongst your vices, Danton. What is it to you who ministers to the King’s spiritual needs? As he conceives of it, he has a soul to save. What is it to you?”

“It is something to me when the King breaks his promises and flouts the law. It is something that he leaves Paris for Saint-Cloud, and Saint-Cloud for the border, where he can put himself at the head of the émigrés.”

“Who told you that was his intention?”

“I can divine it.”

“You sound like Marat.”

“I am sorry if you think so.”

“I shall ask for an emergency meeting of the Commune. I shall ask for martial law to be declared.”

“Go ahead,” Danton said contemptuously. “Do you know what Camille Desmoulins calls you? The Don Quixote of the Capets.”

Emergency session. M. Danton obtained a majority against martial law, working on the peaceable and the pliable. Lafayette, in a passion, offered Mayor Bailly his resignation. M. Danton pointed out that the mayor was not competent to accept it; if the general wanted to resign, he would have to visit each of the forty-eight Sections in turn and tell them.

Further, M. Danton called General Lafayette a coward.

The Tuileries, Monday of Holy Week, 11:30 a.m.

“It is a piece of folly,” Mayor Bailly said, “to have the Cordeliers Battalion here.”

“You mean Battalion No. 3,” said Lafayette. He closed his eyes. He had a small tight pain behind them.

The royal family were allowed to enter their coach, and there they stayed. The National Guard were disobeying orders. They would not allow the gates to be opened. The crowd would not allow the carriage to proceed. The National Guard would not disperse the crowd. The “C Ira” was sung. The First Gentleman of the Bedchamber was assaulted. The Dauphin burst into tears. Last year, or the year before, it might have aroused some compunction. But if they didn’t want to subject the child to the ordeal, they should have taken him back into the palace.

Lafayette swore at his men. He was quivering with fury as he sat on his white horse, and the animal twitched restively and shifted its feet.

The Mayor appealed for order. He was shouted down. Inside the carriage, the royal couple gazed into each other’s faces.

“You pig,” a man shouted at the King. “We pay you twenty-five million a year, so do what we tell you.”

“Proclaim martial law,” Lafayette told Bailly.

Bailly did not look him in the face.

“Do it.”

“I cannot.”

Now patience was required. An hour and three-quarters, and the King and Queen had had enough. As they re-entered the Tuileries, the Queen turned to speak to Lafayette above the jeers of the mob. “At least you must admit that we are no longer free.”

It was 1:15 p.m.

Ephraim, an agent in the service of Frederick William of Prussia, to Laclos, in the service of the Duke of Orleans:

For some hours our position was brilliant. I even thought your dear employer was about to replace his cousin on the throne; but now my expectations have altered. The only thing that gives me pleasure in all this is that we have ruined Lafayette, which is a great deal achieved. Our 500,000 livres have been spent more or less for nothing, which is what I find so unfortunate; we shall not have such sums at our disposal every day, and the King of Prussia will get tired of paying out.

On a fine day in June, Philippe was on the Vincennes road, driving Agnès de Buffon in his English dog cart. Bearing down on him pretty fast was a smart, very large, very new equipage of the type known as a “berlin.”

The Duke flagged it down with a flourish of his whip. “Hallo there, Fersen. Trying to break your neck, old chap?”

The Queen’s lover, the thin-faced, supple Swedish count: “Trying out my new traveling carriage, my lord.”

“Really?” Philippe noted the elegant lemon wheels, the dark-green coachwork and the walnut fittings. “Going on a trip, are you? Bit big, isn’t it? Are you taking all the girls from the Opera chorus?”

“No, my lord.” Fersen inclined his head respectfully. “I leave them all for you.”

The Duke looked after the carriage as it gathered speed along the road. “I wonder,” he said to Agnès. “It would be just like Louis to choose a getup like that for a quick sprint to the border.”

Agnès turned away with an uncomfortable half-smile; it made her afraid to think that Philippe might soon be King.

“And you can keep that damned pious expression off your face, Fersen,” the Duke announced to the dust on the road. “We all know how you spend your time when you’re not at the Tuileries. His latest woman is a circus acrobat, if you please. Not that I’d wish that Austrian scrag-end to be any man’s sole consolation.” He gathered up the reins.

The baby, Antoine, woke up at six o’clock and lay watching the sunlight filter through the shutters. When this bored him, he yelled for his mother.

In a few moments Gabrielle stood over him. Her face was soft with sleep. “Tyrant child,” she whispered. He put up his arms to be lifted. Shushing him, a finger over his lips, she carried him to the big bedroom. A curtained alcove sheltered twin beds, marked off their private territory from the patriotic circus that their bedroom had become. Lucile had this problem, she said. Perhaps we should move, get somewhere bigger? But no, everybody knows Danton’s house, he’ll not want to move. And such an upheaval it would be.

She climbed into her bed, settled down with the warm little body against hers. In the other bed, his father slept with his face pushed into the pillow.

Seven o’clock, the doorbell jangled. Her heart jolted with apprehension. It’s too early for it to be anything good. She heard Catherine, protesting; then the bedroom door was flung open. “Fabre!” she said. “My God, what’s happened? Are the Austrians here?”

Fabre pounced on her husband, pummeled him into life. “Danton, they’ve gone in the night. The King, his wife, his sister, the Dauphin, the whole bloody bunch.”

Danton stirred, sat up. Immediately, he was wide awake; perhaps he had never been asleep? “Lafayette was in charge of security. Either he’s sold out to the Court, betrayed us, or he’s an incompetent dolt.” He punched Fabre’s shoulder. “I’ve got him where I want him. Organize me some clothes, girl, would you?”

“Where to?”

“The Cordeliers first—find Legendre, tell him to get people together. Then City Hall, then the Riding School.”

“What if they’re not caught?” Fabre said.

Danton drew his hand across his chin. “Does it matter? As long as enough people see them running away.”

Very ready, his answers; very neat. Fabre said, “Did you know this was going to happen? Did you want it to happen?”

“Anyway, they will be caught. They’ll be dragged back within the week. Louis messes everything up. Poor devil,” he said ruminatively. “I feel sorry for him at times.”

Grace Elliot: “I have no doubt that Lafayette was privy to the attempt, and afterwards, through fear, betrayed them.”

Georges-Jacques Danton, to the Cordeliers Club: “By upholding a hereditary monarchy, the National Assembly has reduced France to slavery. Let us abolish, once and for all, the name and function of King; let us turn this kingdom into a republic.”

Alexandre de Beauhamais, President of the Assembly: “Gentlemen, the King has fled in the night. Let us proceed to the Order of the Day.”

When Danton arrived at the Riding School, with a small military escort, the packed, rumor-ridden crowd cheered him. “Long live our father, Danton,” someone called. He was momentarily astonished.

Later that day, M. Laclos arrived at the rue des Cordeliers. He looked Gabrielle over carefully—not with lecherous intent, but as if he were assessing her suitability for something. She flushed slightly, and twitched away from his gaze. She thought, these days, that everyone was noticing that she had put on weight. A small sigh escaped Laclos. “Warm weather we’re having, Mme. Danton.” He stood in the drawing room and removed his gloves, easing them off finger by finger, raising his eyes to Danton’s. “There are things we must discuss,” he said pleasantly.

Three hours later he replaced his gloves by a similar careful process, and left.

Paris without the King. Some wit hung a placard on the railing of the Tuileries: PREMISES TO LET. All over town, Danton talked about the republic. At the Jacobins, Robespierre rose to reply to him, adjusting his cravat minutely with his small fingers with the bitten nails. “What is a republic?” he asked.

Danton must define his terms, he sees. Maximilien Robespierre takes nothing on trust.

The Duke brought his fist down hard on a fragile table, inlaid with a pattern of roses, ribbons and violins.

“Don’t talk to me as if I were a three-year-old,” he snarled.

Felicite de Genlis was a patient woman. She smiled faintly. She was prepared to argue, if necessary, all day.

“The Assembly have asked you to accept the throne, should it become vacant,” she said.

“There you are,” the Duke bellowed. “You’re doing it again. We’ve established that, haven’t we? We all know that. You are a tiresome woman.”

“Don’t bluster, dear. Firstly, may I point out that it is unlikely that the throne will become vacant? I hear that your cousin’s journey has been interrupted. He is on his way back to Paris.”

“Yes,” the Duke said with relish. “The booby. Let himself get caught. They’ve sent Barnave and Pétion to fetch them back. I hope Deputy Pétion is bloody rude to them all the way.”

Félicité did not doubt that he would be. “You know,” she went on, “that now the Assembly has the new constitution framed and ready for the King’s signature, it—I mean the Assembly—is most anxious for stability. Change has gone so far and so fast, and I believe people are aching for a return to good order. It is possible that a month from now Louis will be replaced firmly on the throne. It will be as if all this had never happened.”

“But dammit, he ran away. He’s supposed to be King of this country, and he was running away from it.”

“The Assembly may not put that construction on his actions.”

“What other is there? Forgive me, I’m a simple man—”

“They aren’t. They’re really quite ingenious. Lawyers, mostly.”

“Don’t trust ’em,” Philippe said. “As a breed.”

“Think then, my dear—if Louis is restored—think how it will antagonize him if you appear so anxious to step into his shoes.”

“But I am, aren’t I?” Philippe gaped at her. What was she trying to do to him? Wasn’t this what all the fuss was about, over the last three years and more? Wasn’t it to be King that he had endured the company of people who weren’t gentlemen, who didn’t hunt, who didn’t know the nose of a racehorse from its tail? Wasn’t it in order to be King that he had allowed himself to be patronized by that fish-eyed Laclos? Wasn’t it to be King that he had endured that scar-faced thug Danton at his own dinner table, quite blatantly eyeing up his mistress Agnès and his ex-mistress Grace? Wasn’t it to be King that he had paid, paid, paid?

Félicité closed her eyes. Carefully, she thought. Speak carefully, but do speak: for the nation, for this man’s children, whom I have brought up. And for our lives.

“Think,” she said.

“Think!” The Duke exploded. “Very well, you don’t trust my supporters. Neither do I. I have their measure, I tell you.”

“I doubt it.”

“You think I’d let those low types push me around?”

“Philippe, you’re not the man to set limits to their ambition. They’ll swallow you up, you and your children—and everything, everybody that is close to your heart. Don’t you realize that the men who can destroy one King can destroy another? Do you think they’d have any scruple, if you didn’t do everything exactly as they wished? And you’d only be, at best, a stop gap for them—until they felt they could get along without you, till they felt they didn’t need any King at all.” She took a breath. “Think back, Philippe—think back to before the Bastille fell. Louis used to tell you, go here, go there—come back to Versailles, keep away from Versailles—you know how it was? Your life wasn’t your own, you used to say. You had no freedom. Now, from the moment you say, ‘Yes, I want to be King,’ you give your freedom away again. From that day on, you will be in prison. Oh, not a prison with bars and chains—but a pleasant gaol that M. Danton will make for you. A gaol with a civil list and protocol and precedent and the most charming social occasions, ballets and masked balls and, yes, even horse-racing.”

“Don’t like ballet,” the Duke said. “Bores me.”

Félicité smoothed her skirt, glanced down at her hands. A woman’s hands show her age, she thought; they give everything away. Once there’d been hope. Once there’d been the promise of a fairer, cleaner world; and no one had hoped harder, no one had worked for it more assiduously than she had. “A gaol,” she said. “They’ll trick you, amuse you, occupy you—while they carve up the country between them. That is their object.”

He looked up at her, this middle-aged child of hers. “You think they’re cleverer than me, do you?”

“Oh, much, my darling: much, much, much.”

He avoided her eye now. “I’ve always known my limitations.”

“Which makes you wiser than most men. And wiser than these manipulators give you credit for.”

That pleased him. It came to him vaguely that he might outsmart them. She had spoken so softly, as if the thought were his own. “What’s the best thing to do? Tell me, Félicité, please.”

“Disassociate yourself. Keep your name clear. Refuse to be their dupe.”

“So you want me”—he struggled—“to go to the Assembly, and say, no, I don’t want the throne, you may have thought I did but that was not what I meant at all?”

“Take this paper. Look. Sit here. Write as I dictate.”

She leaned against the back of his chair. The words were prepared, in her head. Precarious, she thought. This was a near thing. If I could shut him away from all counter-persuasion, all other influence—but that’s impossible. I was lucky to get him for an hour alone.

Quickly now—before he changed his mind. “Put your signature. There, it’s done.”

Philippe threw his pen down. Ink spattered the roses, the ribbons, the violins. He clapped a hand to his head. “Laclos will kill me,” he wailed.

Félicité made soothing noises, as if to a child with colic, and took the paper from Philippe to amend his punctuation.

When the Duke told Laclos of his decision, Laclos bowed imperceptibly from the shoulder. “As you wish, Milord,” he said, and withdrew. Why he had spoken in English he never afterwards understood. In his apartment he turned his face to the wall and drank a bottle of brandy with a thoughtful but murderous expression.

At Danton’s apartment he worked around to a comfortable chair, handing himself from one piece of furniture to the next in a manner faintly nautical. “Have patience,” he said. “Any moment now I shall deliver myself of a profound observation.”

“I shall go,” Camille said. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what Laclos had to say. He preferred not to know the finer details of Danton’s entanglements; and, though he knew they were supposed to regard Philippe only as a means to an end, it was very difficult when somebody had been so nice to you. Every time some Cordeliers oaf came tramping through his apartment, yelling from room to room, he thought of the Duke’s twelve-bedroomed wedding present. He could have wept.

“Sit down, Camille,” Danton said.

“You may stay,” Laclos said, “but keep confidences, or I shall kill you.”

“Yes, of course you will,” Danton said. “Now—go on.”

“My observations fall into three parts. One, Philippe is a pea-brained yellow-livered imbecile. Two, Félicité is a nasty, poxy, vomit-inducing whore.”

“All right,” Danton said. “And the third part of your observations?”

“A coup d’état,” Laclos said. He looked at Danton without lifting his head.

“Come now. Let’s not get over-excited.”

“Force Philippe’s hand. Make him see his duty. Put him in a position where—” Laclos’s right hand made languid chopping motions.

Danton stood over him. “What exactly is it you have in mind?”

“The Assembly will debate, decide to restore Louis. Because they need him to make their pretty constitution work. Because they’re King’s men, Danton, because bloody Barnave has been bought. Alliteration.” He hiccuped. “Or if he hadn’t, he has been by now, after his knee-to-knee trip back from the border with the Austrian slut. I tell you, even now they are working on the most risible set of fictions. You’ve seen the proclamation that Lafayette put out—‘the enemies of the Revolution have seized the person of the King.’ They are speaking of abduction”—he smashed the heel of his hand into the arm of his chair—“they are saying that the fat fool was carried to the border against his will. They will say anything, anything, to save their faces. Now tell me, Danton, when such lies are sold to the people, isn’t it time to spill a little blood?”

Laclos now looked at his feet. His manner became sober and discursive. “The Assembly should be influenced, must be influenced by the people’s will. The people will never forgive Louis for abandoning them. Therefore dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare that the Riding School should do what we tell them. Therefore we will make a petition. Some hack such as Brissot may draft it. It will ask for the deposition of Louis. The Cordeliers will sponsor it. The Jacobins might be persuaded to sign it, I say they might. The 17th of July, the whole city assembles on the Champs-de-Mars for the Bastille celebrations. We get our petition signed, thousands and thousands of names. We take it to the Assembly. If they refuse to act on it, the people invade the Assembly—in pursuance of their Sacred Will, all that. The doctrine behind the action we’ll work out when we have leisure.”

“You suggest that we employ armed force against the Assembly?”

“Yes.”

“Against our representatives?”

“Representatives nothing.”

“Bloodshed, possibly?”

“Damn you,” Laclos said. Scarlet flowed into his fine-boned face. “Have we come all this way to throw up our hands now, to turn into some sort of puling humanitarians—now, when everything’s ours for the taking?” He splayed out his fingers, palms upwards. “Can you have a revolution without blood?”

“I never said you could.”

“Well, then. Not even Robespierre thinks you could.”

“I just wanted to have your meaning clear.”

“Oh. I see.”

“And then, if we succeed in deposing Louis?”

“Then, Danton, divide the spoils.”

“And do we divide them with Philippe?”

“Right, he’s refused the throne once. But he will see his duty, if I have to strangle Félicité with my own hands—and that would be a thrill, I can tell you. Look, Danton, we’ll run the country between us. We’ll make Robespierre our Minister of Finance, he’s honest they say. We’ll repatriate Marat and let him give fleas to the Swiss. We’ll—”

“Laclos, this is not serious.”

“Oh, I know.” Laclos got unsteadily to his feet. “I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased—it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe’s heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M. Danton.”

“How your imagination runs away with you.”

“They do say that if you keep drinking you start to see snakes,” Laclos said. “Great serpent things, dragons and similar. Would you do it, Danton? Would you risk it with me?”

Danton didn’t answer.

“You would, you would.” Laclos stood up, swaying a little, and held out his arms. “Triumph and glory.” He dropped his arms to his side. “And then perhaps you’ll kill me. I’ll risk it. For a footnote in the history books. I dread obscurity, do you see? The meager and unrewarded old age, the piddling end of mediocrity, sans everything, as the English poet says. ‘There goes poor old Laclos, he wrote a book once, the title escapes me.’ I’m going away now,” he said with dignity. “All I ask is that you think it over.” He lurched towards the door, and met Gabrielle coming in. “Nice little woman,” he said under his breath. They heard him stumble on the stairs.

“I thought you’d want to know,” she said. “They’re back.”

“The Capet family?” Camille asked.

“The royal family. Yes.” She withdrew from the room, closing the door softly behind her. They listened. Heat and silence lay over the city.

“I like a crisis,” Camille said. A short pause. Danton looked not at him, but through him. “I’ll keep you to the spirit of your recent republican mouthings. I was thinking about it, when Laclos was ranting—and I’m sorry for it, but I think Philippe will have to go. You can use him and dispense with him later.”

“Oh, you are as cold-blooded—” Danton stopped. He couldn’t think what was as cold-blooded as Camille, pushing his hair back with a flick of his wrist and saying use him and dispense with him later. “Were you born with that gesture,” he asked, “or did you pick it up from some prostitute?”

“First get rid of Louis, then we can battle it out.”

“We might lose everything,” Danton said. But he had made his calculations: always, when he seemed to flare up for a moment into some unreasoning, sneering aggression, his mind was moving quite coldly, quite calmly, in a certain direction. Now his mind was made up. He was going to do it.

The royal party had been intercepted at Varennes; they had traveled 165 miles from inept beginning to blundering end. Six thousand people surrounded the two carriages on the first stage of their journey home. A day later the company was joined by three deputies of the National Assembly. Barnave and Pétion sat with the family inside the berlin. The Dauphin took a liking to Barnave. He chattered to him and played with the buttons on his coat, reading out the legend engraved there: “Live free, or die.” “We must show character,” the Queen repeated, over and over again.

By the end of the journey, the future for Deputy Barnave was plain. Mirabeau dead, he would replace him as secret adviser to the court. Pétion believed that the King’s plump little sister, Mme. Elisabeth, had fallen in love with him; it was true that, on the long road back, she had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder. Pétion burbled incessantly about it, for a month or two.

On a day of blazing heat, the King re-entered Paris. Vast silent crowds lined the routes. The berlin was filled with choking dust from the road, and there appeared at the window the lined, harried face of a gray-haired woman: Antoinette. They arrived at the Tuileries. When they were installed, Lafayette placed his guards and hurried to the King. “Your Majesty’s orders for the day?”

“It appears,” Louis said, “that I am more at your orders than you at mine.”

As they passed through the city, the ranks of soldiers lining the route had presented arms with the butts reversed, as if it were a funeral: which, in a manner of speaking, it was.

Camille Desmoulins, Révolutions de France, No. 83:

When Louis XVI re-entered his apartment at the Tuileries, he threw himself into an armchair, saying “It’s devilish hot,” then, “That was a ———journey. However, I have had it in my head to do it for a long time.” Afterwards, looking towards the National Guardsmen who were present, he said, “I have done a foolish thing, I admit. But must I not have my follies, like other people? Come along, bring me a chicken.” One of his valets came in. “Ah, there you are,” he said, “and here I am.” They brought the chicken, and Louis XVI ate and drank with an appetite that would have done honor to the King of Cockayne.

And Hébert has changed his royalist opinions:

We will stuff you into Charenton and your whore into the Hôpital. When you are finally walled up, both of you, and when you no longer have a civil list, put an axe in me if you get away.

Pére Duchesne, No. 61

From here, sprawled in this chair, Danton could see Louise Robert, arguing, wanting to cry and just managing not to. Her husband had been arrested, was in prison. “Demand his release,” she was saying. “Force it.”

He spoke to her across the room. “Not much of the big tough republican now, are you?”

She gave him a glance that surprised him by its intensity of dislike. “Let me think,” he said. “Just let me think.”

His eyes half-closed, he watched the room. Lucile sat fiddling with her wedding ring, signs of strain on her child’s face. He found her, these days, always on his mind; hers was the first face he saw when he came into a room. He spent time chiding himself; called it remarkable disloyalty to the mother of his children.

(FRÉRON: I’ve loved her for years.

DANTON: Rubbish.

FRÉRON: You may say so. What do you know?

DANTON: I know you.

FRÉRON: But you seem to entertain certain expectations yourself. At least, everybody remarks on it.

DANTON: Ah, well, I don’t tell her I love her. It might be something far more crude than that. I might be more honest than you.

FRÉRON: Would you, if you could—?

DANTON: Naturally.

FRÉRON: But Camille—

DANTON: I could keep Camille quiet. Look, you have to seize the opportunities to get what you want in life.

FRÉRON: I know.)

Fréron was now watching him, trying to read his face and anticipate him. It had gone wrong. Their plans were known at City Hall; Félicite, who always found out what was going on, had probably dropped a word in the ear of Lafayette. Lafayette was moving troops up to the Tuileries; the blond holy fool still had the men, the guns, the whip hand. He had thrown a cordon round the Riding School, to protect the deputies from any incursion; he had rung the tocsin, he had set a curfew. The Jacobins—parading their moderation, their timidity—had refused their support. Fréron would have liked to forget the whole thing, and that was why he was saying, “Danton, I don’t think we can pull back now.”

“Is it so hard to convince yourself, Rabbit? Do you have to keep making the point?” The whole room turned at the sound of his voice. They stiffened, shifted their positions. “Camille, go back to the Jacobins.”

“They won’t listen,” Camille said. “They say the law doesn’t allow them to support such a petition, they say the deposition of the King is a matter for the Assembly. So what’s the point? Robespierre is in the chair, but the place is packed with Lafayette’s supporters, so what can he do? Even if he wanted to support us, which is …” His voice tailed off. “Robespierre wants to work within the law.”

“And I have no particular relish for breaking it,” Danton said. Two days of close argument have come to nothing. The petition had been carried about between the Assembly and the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, it had been printed, amended (sometimes covertly) and printed again. They were waiting: the three women, and Fréron, Fabre, Legendre, Camille. He remembered Mirabeau at City Hall; you don’t work with people, Danton, you work over them. But how could he have known, he asked himself, that people would be so ready to take orders? Earlier in life, he had never suspected it.

“This time we’ll give you some support,” he said to Camille. “Fréron, get together a hundred men. They should be armed.”

“The citizens of this district are never far from their pikes.”

Danton glared at the interruption. Camille was embarrassed by the things Fréron said, his false bonhomie, his suspect eagerness.

“Pikes,” Fabre murmured. “I hope he intends it as a figure of speech. I am very far from my pike. I do not have a pike.”

“Do you think, Rabbit,” Camille asked him, “that we are going to skewer the Jacobins to their benches?”

“Call it a show of determination,” Danton said. “Don’t call it a show of force. We don’t want to upset Robespierre. But Rabbit—” Danton’s voice called him back from the door. “Give Camille fifteen minutes to try to persuade them. A decorous interval, you know.”

Around him the room eddied into activity. The women stood up, smoothing their skirts, their eyes forlorn and their lips pinched. Gabrielle tried to meet his eyes for a moment. Apprehension gives a yellow cast to her skin, he has observed. One day he noticed—as one notices rain clouds, or the time on the face of a clock—that he doesn’t love her now.

Evening, the National Guard cleared people off the streets. The volunteer battalions were out, but a lot of Lafayette’s regular companies were in evidence too. “You wonder,” Danton said. “There are patriots among the soldiers, but that old habit of blind obedience dies hard.” And we may need to count on the old habit, he thought, if the rest of Europe moves against us. He tried not to think of that; for now it was someone else’s problem. He had to narrow his thinking, to the next twenty-four hours.

Gabrielle went to bed after midnight. It was difficult to sleep. She heard the tread of horses in the streets. She heard the gate bell, in the Cour du Commerce, and the murmur of voices as people were let in and out. It might have been two o’clock, half-past two, when she gave up the unequal battle; sat up, lit a candle, looked across at Georges’s bed. It was empty and had not been disturbed. It was very hot still; her nightdress clung to her. She slid out of bed, stripped her nightdress off, washed in water that should have been cold but was lukewarm. She found a clean nightdress. She went to her dressing table, sat down, dabbed her temples and her throat with cologne. Her breasts ached. She pulled her long dark hair from its plait, combed out the rippling wave, re-plaited it. Her face seemed hollow, somber in the candlelight. She went to the window. Nothing: the rue des Cordeliers was empty. She pulled on her soft slippers, and left the bedroom for the dark dining room She opened the shutter. The light shone in from the Cour du Commerce below. Shadows seemed to move, behind her; the room was an octagon, paper-strewn, and the papers lifted a little in a merciful night breeze. She leaned out, to feel it on her face. There was no one to be seen, but she could hear a dull thump and clatter. It is Guillaume Brune’s printing press, she thought, or it is Marat’s. What are they doing at this hour? They live by words, she thought; they don’t need sleep.

She closed the shutter, made her way towards the bedroom in the dark. She heard her husband’s voice, from behind the closed door of his study. “Yes, I understand what you are saying. We try our strength, Lafayette tries his. He is the one with the guns.”

The other man spoke. She did not know his voice. “Just a warning,” he said. “Well intentioned. Well meant.”

Georges said, “Well, it’s three o’clock. I’m not going to scramble off now like a debtor on quarter day. We meet here at dawn. Then we’ll see.”

Three o’clock. François Robert was sunk into a miserable lethargy. It wasn’t the worst kind of cell—there was no evidence of rats, and at least it was cool—but he would rather have been elsewhere. He could not see why he was here—he had only been about the business of the petition. He and Louise had a broadsheet to publish; the Mercure Nationale must be on the streets, no matter what. Probably Camille would see if she needed help. She’d never ask for it.

God in heaven, what is this? Someone with steel-tipped boots must be kicking the door. Other boots, tramping; then a voice, startlingly loud. “Some of these shits have knives.” Then the tramp of feet again, and a flat and drunken voice singing a few bars of one of Fabre’s popular songs: forgetting the words, starting again. The steel-tipped boots on his door, then a few seconds of silence, then a slogan shouter: To the Lanterne.

François Robert shivered. Lanteme Attorney, you should be here, he thought.

“Death to the Austrian bitch,” said the drunken singer. “Hang up Louis Capet’s whore. Hang up the beast of Babylon, cut off her tits.”

A chilling cackle ran along the walls. A young voice laughed, high-pitched, tinged with hysteria. “Long live the People’s Friend.”

Then a voice he couldn’t make out; then a voice near at hand: “He says he’s got seventeen prisoners and nowhere to put them.”

“Well, well,” said the young voice. “A laugh a minute.”

A second later the cell was flooded by orange torchlight. He scrambled to his feet. A few heads appeared around the door; to his relief, they were still joined to bodies. “You can come out now.”

“Can I really go?”

“Yes, yes.” A sober, irritated voice. “I’ve more than a hundred persons to accommodate, persons on the street without lawful excuse. We can always pick you up again in a few days’ time.”

“What did you do anyway?” asked the high-pitched young man.

“A professor of law,” Steel Tips announced. He was also the drunk. “Aren’t you, professor? A big mate of mine.” He draped an arm around Robert’s shoulder and leaned on him, breathing sourly into his face. “What about Danton then? He’s the lad.”

“If you say so,” Robert said.

“I seen him,” Steel Tips told his colleagues. “He says to me, seeing as you know all about the prisons, when I get to be boss of this city I’m going to put you in charge of rounding up all the aristos and cutting off their heads. For which you’ll get a good wage, he says, because you’ll be doing a public service.”

“Go on,” the boy said. “Danton never spoke to you. You drunken old sot. M. Sanson’s the public executioner. His father was the executioner and his father before him. You going to put him out of a job, are you? Danton never said that to you.”

François Robert at home. The coffee cup wouldn’t stay still in his grasp; it was chinking and chinking against the saucer. “Who would have thought it would put me in this state?” He was trying to smile, but his face would only contort. “Being released was as bad as being arrested. Louise, we forget what the people are like, their ignorance, their violence, the way they jump to conclusions.”

She thought of Camille, two years ago; the Bastille heroes on the streets, the coffee going cold by their bed, the aftermath of panic in his chilling, wide-set eyes. “The Jacobins have split apart,” she said. “The Right has walked out. They’re going to form another club. All Lafayette’s friends have gone, all the people who used to support Mirabeau. Pétion remains, Buzot, Robespierre—a handful.”

“What does Robespierre say?”

“That he’s glad the divisions are out in the open. That he’ll start again, with patriots this time.”

She took the cup out of his hands and pulled his head into her waist, stroking his hair and the back of his neck. “Robespierre will go to the Champs-de-Mars,” she said. “He’ll show his face, you can be sure. But they, they won’t go. Danton’s lot.”

“Then who’s going to take the petition? Who’s going to represent the Cordeliers?”

Oh no, he thought.

Dawn, Danton was slapping him on the back. “Good boy,” he was saying. “Don’t worry, we’ll look after your wife. And François, the Cordeliers won’t forget this.”

At dawn they had met in Danton’s red-walled study. The servants were still asleep on the mezzanine floor. Sleeping their servant’s sleep, Gabrielle thought. She brought coffee to the men, avoiding their eyes. Danton handed Fabre a copy of the People’s Friend, stabbing at it with his forefinger. “It says—God knows with what foundation—that Lafayette intends to fire on the people. ‘Therefore,’ says Marat, ‘I intend to have the general assassinated.’ Now as it happens, in the night we have been tipped off—”

“Can’t you stop it?” Gabrielle said. “Can’t you stop the whole thing happening?”

“Send the crowds home? Too late. They’re out to celebrate. To them, the petition is only part of it. And I cannot answer for Lafayette.”

“Then are we to be ready to leave, Georges? I don’t mind, but just tell me what to do. Just tell me what’s happening.”

Danton looked shifty. His instinct said, today will go badly—so cut and run. He glanced around the room, for someone to serve as the voice of his instinct. Fabre was about to open his mouth, when Camille said, “You know, two years ago, Danton, it was all right for you to lock your door and work on your shipping case. But it’s a different matter now.”

Danton looked at him: considered, nodded. So they waited. It was fully light, another day beginning in sunshine and moving towards a sultry, growling, hardly bearable heat.

Champs-de-Mars, the day of celebration: a crowd of people in Sunday clothes. Women with parasols, pet dogs on leads. Sticky-fingered children pawing at their mothers; people who have bought coconuts and don’t know what to make of them. Then the glint of light on bayonets, people clutching hands, whirling children off their feet, pushing and calling out in alarm as they are separated from their families. Some mistake, there must be some mistake. The red flag of martial law is unfurled. What’s a flag, on a day of celebration? Then the horrors of the first volley. And back, losing footing, blood blossoming horribly on the grass, fingers under stampeding feet, the splinter of hoof on bone. It is over within minutes. An example has been made. A soldier slides from his saddle and vomits.

Mid-morning the news came; perhaps fifty dead, though this was the highest estimate. Whatever the tally, it’s hard to take in. The red-walled room seemed so small now, and close. There was the very bolt on the door, the one that was locked two years ago: the one that was locked when the women marched on Versailles.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Danton said, “it’s time we were elsewhere. When the National Guard realize what they have done, they will be looking for someone to blame. It will occur to them to blame the authors of the petition, and they,” he finished heavily, “and they, the authors, that’s us.” He looked up. “Did someone fire a shot from the crowd? Was that it? A panic?”

“No,” Camille said. “I believe Marat. I believe your tip-offs, I think this was planned.”

Danton shook his head. Still hard to take it in. All the phrasemaking, the trimming and teasing of clauses, the drafting and re-drafting of the petition, the to-ing and fro-ing to the Jacobins and the Assembly, to end in this—swift, stupid, bloody. He had thought, lawyer’s tactics can win this; violence maybe but only as a last resort. He’d played by the rules—mostly. He’d kept within the law, just. He’d expected Lafayette and Bailly to play by the rules; to contain the crowds, let them be. But we are moving, now, into a world where the rules are being redefined; it is as well to expect the worst.

Camille said, “The patriots saw the petition as an opportunity. So, it seems, did Lafayette. He saw it as an opportunity for a massacre.”

This, they knew, was a journalist talking. Real life is never so clear and crisp. But that would always be the word for it, in the years ahead: “The Massacre on the Champs-de-Mars.”

Danton felt a huge surge of anger. Next time, he thought, bull’s tactics, lion’s tactics; but for now the tactics of a rat in a run.

Late afternoon: Angélique Charpentier was in her garden at Fontenay-sous-Bois, a flower basket over her arm. She was trying to behave decorously; really she would have liked to dive to her knees in the salad beds and do some violence to the slugs. Hot weather, thunder in the air: we’re not ourselves.

“Angélique?” Slim black shape against the sun.

“Camille? What are you doing here?”

“Can we go into the house? There are several others who will be here within an hour. You may not thank Georges-Jacques, but he thought this would be a place of safety. There has been a massacre. Lafayette has fired on the people celebrating the Bastille.”

“Georges—he’s not hurt?”

“Of course not. You know Georges. But the National Guard are looking for us.”

“Won’t they come here?”

“Not for a few hours. The city is in confusion.”

Angélique took his arm. This is not, she thought, the life I meant to have; this is not the life I meant for Gabrielle.

As they hurried to the house, she pulled off the white linen square that she wore to keep the sun off the back of her neck. She tried to pat her hair into place. How many for dinner? she wondered; people have to be fed. The city might have been a thousand miles away. It was that time of the afternoon when the birds are silent; heavy, undisturbed scents lay over the gardens.

Here was her husband François hurrying out, his face alarmed. Despite the temperature he looked as he always used to—dapper, particular. He was in shirt-sleeves, but his cravat was knotted neatly; his round brown wig was on his head; you could almost imagine the napkin over his arm. “Camille?” he said.

For a moment Camille thought half a decade might roll away. He wished he were back at the Café de l’École, cool and echoing; the coffee strong, Angélique svelte, Maître Vinot boring on about his Life Plan. “Oh, fuck this,” he muttered. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

One by one they straggled in through the afternoon. Camille seemed somehow to have got the advantage of them; by the time Danton arrived, he was sitting on the terrace, reading the New Testament and drinking lemonade.

Fabre brought news that François Robert had been seen alive. Legendre had seen patrols swarming over the Cordeliers district, and printing presses smashed, and a quantity of carcasses carried away from his shop by the vultures who came in the wake of the patrols. “Do you know,” he said, “there are days when my love of the sovereign people abates a bit?” He had seen a young journalist, Prudhomme, beaten up by National Guardsmen, dragged off somewhere looking quite bad. “I’d have gone back for him,” he said. “But you told us not to risk it, didn’t you, Danton?” His eyes appealed, dog-like, for approval.

Danton nodded once, without comment. “What did they want Prudhomme for?”

“Because,” Fabre said, “heat of the moment, they thought they had Camille.”

“I’d have gone back for Camille,” Legendre said.

Camille looked up from Saint Matthew. “The hell you would.”

Gabrielle, looking sallow and scared, arrived with enough baggage to withstand a siege. “Into the kitchen,” Angélique said, ripping the bags from her hands. “There are vegetables to be prepared. Five minutes to clean yourself up and then report for active service.” Cruel to be kind, she said under her breath; keep her busy, make small talk.

But Gabrielle was not fit even to string beans. She sat down at the kitchen table, Antoine on her knees, and dissolved into tears. “Look, he’s safe,” her mother said. “He’s making plans right now. The worst is over.” Still tears ran out of Gabrielle’s eyes. “You’re pregnant again, aren’t you?” Angélique said. She held her daughter, hiccupping and sobbing, against her chest, smoothing her hair and feeling the skin of Gabrielle’s cheek burning beneath her hand, as if she had a fever. What a time to find out, she thought. The baby Antoine began to wail. She could hear the men laughing, out on the terrace.

Gallows humor, she supposed; except Georges, who could be relied on, none of them had much appetite. The duck went to waste; the sauce congealed; the vegetables went cold in their dishes. Fréron was the last to arrive; he was a wreck, bruised, trembling, incoherent. Alcohol was needed, before he could get his story straight. He had been caught on the Pont-Neuf, beaten to the ground. Some men from the Cordeliers’ Battalion had come by. They had recognized him, waded in, caused a diversion while he scrambled away. Otherwise, he said, he would have been dead.

“Has anyone seen Robespierre?” Camille asked. Heads were shaken. Camille picked up a table knife, and ran his finger round the edge of it reflectively. Lucile, he presumed, would be at the rue Condé; she would not have stayed in their apartment alone, for she was not without sense. Two days ago she had been saying, you know we really have to decide about this wallpaper, shall we have treillage? He’d said, Lucile, ask me a real question. He had a feeling that this was the real question, now. “I’m going back to Paris,” he said, and stood up.

There was a short silence. “Why don’t you just go in the kitchen and cut your own throat?” Fabre inquired. “We’ll bury you in the garden.”

“Now Camille,” Angélique said reproachfully. She leaned across the table and took him by the wrist.

“One speech,” he said. “To the Jacobins, what’s left of them. Just to lay down our line. Give us some sort of grasp on the situation. Besides, I have to find my wife, and I have to find Robespierre. I’ll be away again before anything goes wrong. I know Marat’s escape routes.”

They looked at him, dumbstruck, jaw-dropped. It is really hard for these people to remember—between crises—that he ever held the police at bay in the Palais-Royal, that he ever waved a pistol about and threatened to shoot himself. Even he finds it hard to comprehend—between crises. But there it is. He is the Lanteme Attorney now. He is locked into a role, he is cast in a part, he won’t stutter if he keeps to the script. Danton said, “A word with you, alone.” He nodded his head towards the door that led to the garden.

“Secrets among the brotherhood?” Fréron said archly.

No one answered. Silent, respectful of the gloom, Angélique began to gather the dishes towards her. Gabrielle muttered something and slipped from the room.

“Where will you go?” Camille said.

“Arcis.”

“They’ll come after you.”

“Yes.”

“So then?”

“England. As soon as—” Danton swore softly. “Let’s face it, possibly never. Don’t go back to Paris. Stay here tonight—we’ll have to risk it, because we need the sleep. Write to your father-in-law, tell him to put your affairs in order. Have you made your will?”

“No.”

“Well, make one now, and write to Lucile. Tomorrow at dawn we’ll leave for Arcis. We can hide out for a week or so, until it’s safe to make a dash for the coast.”

“My geography’s not up to much,” Camille said, “but wouldn’t it be better to dash from here?”

“I have things to see to, papers to sign.”

“If you’re not coming back, I can see you would have.”

“Now don’t waste time arguing with me. The women can come after us as soon as is practicable. You can even ship your mother-in-law over if you really feel you can’t do without her.”

“And do you think the English will be glad to see us? Do you think they’ll meet us at Dover with a civic banquet and a military band?”

“We have contacts.”

“So we have, but,” Camille said with mock bitterness, “where is Grace Elliot when you need her?”

“We don’t have to travel under our own names. I have papers already, I can get some for you. We’ll pretend to be businessmen—what I don’t know about cotton spinning isn’t worth knowing. Once in the country we can make contact with our sympathizers, look for somewhere to live—money shouldn’t be a problem—what’s the matter?”

“When did you work this out?”

“On the way here.”

“But it’s all settled in your mind—oh, for God’s sake, this has always been your idea, hasn’t it? Profit from the smooth patches and skip out as soon as it gets rough? Do you want to live in Hampshire as a gentleman-farmer? Is that the latest of your lofty ambitions?”

“What’s the alternative?” Danton had a headache, and Camille was making it worse. I knew you, he wanted to say: I knew you when you were shaking in your shoes.

“I can’t believe”—and Camille’s voice was shaking now—”that you would run away.”

“But if we go to England we can start again. Plan.”

Camille looked at him in sorrow. The expression was more complex than sorrow, but Danton could not analyze it, because he was so mentally weary at the thought of starting again.

“You go then,” Camille said. “I’ll stay. I’ll hide for as long as I have to. When I think it’s safe, I’ll get word to you. Then I hope you’ll come back. I don’t know if you will, but if you say you will I’ll have to believe you. There’s no other way to do it. If you don’t come back, I suppose I’ll come to England. I have no intention of carrying on here without you.”

“I have a wife, and a child, and I—”

“Yes, I know. And another child soon.”

“She told you that?”

“No. Gabrielle and I are not on such terms.”

“Good. Because she didn’t tell me.”

Camille indicated the house. “I’ll go back in now and talk at that lot and make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves. They’ll whimper back to Paris tonight, you may be sure. They can form a diversion—it will give you a chance, and you’re the important one. I quite see that, I shouldn’t have said what I said just then. I’ll get Fabre to take Lucile to Bourg-la-Reine, and he can lurk there out of the way for a week or two.”

“I’m not sure I’d trust my wife to Fabre as an escort.”

“Who then? Rabbit? Our butcher brave and bold?”

They grinned at each other. Their eyes met. “You know what Mirabeau used to say,” Camille said. “‘We live at a time of great events and little men.’”

“Take care, then,” Danton said. “Oh, and do make your will anyway. And Camille, leave me your wife.”

Camille laughed. Danton turned his back. He didn’t want to see him go.

Robespierre had been crushed against a barrier when the fighting started. The shock had been greater than the pain. He had seen dead bodies; after the troops had pulled back, he had watched as the wounded were carried away, and he had noted the absurd detritus of the civilian battlefield: flowered hats, single shoes, dolls and spinning tops.

He began walking. Perhaps he had walked for hours. He was not sure of the route he had taken, but it seemed to him necessary to get back to the rue Saint-Honoré, to the Jacobins, to take possession of the ground. He had almost made it. But now someone was blocking his path.

He looked up. The man had a shirt torn open at the neck, a dusty bonnet and the remnants of a National Guardsman’s uniform.

What was strangest, he was laughing: his teeth were bared, like a dog’s.

He had a saber in his hand. There was a tricolor ribbon tied around the hilt.

Behind him were three other men. Two had bayonets.

Robespierre stood quite still. He had never carried a pistol, despite the number of times Camille had told him to. “Camille,” he’d said, “I’d never use it anyway. I’d never shoot anybody.”

Well, that was true. And it was too late now.

Would he die quickly or slowly? That was a question for someone else to decide; he could not influence it. His efforts were over.

In a moment, he thought, I shall rest. In a moment I shall sleep.

The dreadful calm in his heart invaded his face.

With a leisurely movement, the dog-man reached out. He took him by the front of his coat.

“Down on your knees,” he said.

Someone pushed him from behind. He was jerked off his feet.

He closed his eyes.

Like this, he thought.

In the public street.

Then he heard his name called: not across eternity, but in his very physical and temporal ear.

Two pairs of hands hauled him to his feet.

He heard the cloth of his coat tear. Then oaths, a scream, the contact of a fist with the precarious arrangements of the human face. But when he opened his eyes he saw the dog-man, blood streaming from his nose, and a woman, as tall as dog-man, with blood running from her mouth. She said, “Attack women, would you? Come on then, sonny, let’s see what I can cut off with these.” From her skirts she produced what looked like a pair of tailor’s shears. Another woman, behind her, had the kind of little axe you use for splitting kindling.

By the time he had drawn breath, a dozen more women had swarmed out of a doorway. One had a crowbar, one a pikestaff, and they all had knives. They were shouting “Robespierre” and people were running out of the shops and houses to see.

The men with bayonets had been beaten away. Dog-man spat; blood and saliva hit the face of the woman general, “Spit, aristocrat,” she yelled. “Show me Lafayette, I’ll slit his belly and have him stuffed with chestnuts. Robespierre,” she yelled. “If we’ve got to have a King, we’ll have him.”

“King Robespierre,” the women yelled. “King Robespierre.”

The man was tall and balding, with a clean calico apron and a hammer in his hand. He was flailing with his other arm as he forced himself through the crowd. “I’m for you,” he bawled. “My house is here.” The women dropped back: “The carpenter Duplay,” one said, “a good patriot, a good master.”

Duplay shook the hammer at the Guardsmen and the women cheered: “Scum,” he said to the men. “Get back, scum.” He took Robespierre by the arm. “My house is here,” he repeated, “here, good citizen, quickly. This way.”

The women parted their ranks, reaching out, touching Robespierre as he passed. He followed Duplay, stooping through a little door cut in a high solid gate. Bolts slammed home.

In the yard, workmen stood in a knot. Another minute, it was clear, and they would have joined their master in the street. “Back to work, my good lads,” Duplay said. “And put your shirts on. I’m not sure that you show respect.”

“Oh no.” He tried to catch Duplay’s eye. They must not alter things because he had come. A thrush sang in a scrubby bush by the gate. The air smelt sweetly of new wood. Over there was the house. He knew what he would find behind that door. The carpenter Duplay put out a hand. It gripped his shoulder. “You’re safe now, boy,” Duplay said. He did not pull away.

A tall, plain woman in a dark dress came out of the side door. “Father,” she said, “what is the matter, we heard shouting, is there some trouble in the street?”

“Eléonore,” he said, “go in, and tell your mother that Citizen Robespierre has come to stay with us at last.”

On July 18, a detachment of police marched down the rue des Cordeliers, with orders to close down the Révolutions de France. They did not find the editor, but they found an assistant of his, who produced a gun. Shots were exchanged. The editor’s assistant was overpowered, beaten up and thrown into prison.

When the police arrived at the Charpentiers’ house at Fontenay-sous-Bois, they found only one man who—being the right age—might have been Georges-Jacques Danton. He was Victor Charpentier, Gabrielle’s brother. He was lying injured in a pool of blood by the time they discovered their mistake, but these were not the days to stand on niceties of conduct. Warrants were issued for the arrest of one Danton, advocate; Desmoulins, journalist; Fréron, journalist; Legendre, master butcher.

Camille Desmoulins was in hiding near Versailles. In Arcis, Danton arranged his affairs. He had given his brother-in-law a power of attorney, authorizing him inter alia to sell his furniture and cancel the lease of his Paris apartment, if he deemed fit. He signed the deeds of purchase for a manor house by the river, and installed his mother in it, arranging for her at the same time a life annuity. In early August, he left for England.

Lord Gower, the British Ambassador, in dispatches:

Danton is fled, and M. Robespierre the great denunciateur and by office Accusateur Publique is about to be denoncé himself.

Révolutions de Paris: a newspaper:

What will become of liberty? Some say it is finished … .