A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 2

Danton: His Portrait Made

Georges-Jacques Danton: “Reputation is a whore, and people who talk about posterity are hypocrites and fools.”

Now we have a problem. It wasn’t envisaged that he should have part of the narrative. But time is pressing; the issues are multiplying, and in a little over two years he will be dead.

Danton did not write. He may have gone into court with a sheaf of notes; we have represented such occasions, fictitious but probable. The records of these cases are lost. He kept no diaries, and wrote few letters: unless perhaps he wrote the kind of letters that are torn up on receipt. He distrusted the commitments he might make on paper, distrusted the permanent snare for his temporary opinions. He could lay down his line at the tricolor-draped committee tables; others kept the minutes. If there were points to press at the Jacobins, patriotic wrath to vent at the Cordeliers, the public would wait till Saturday for recapitulation, and find his invective, a good deal polished up, between the gray paper covers of Camille Desmoulins’s journal. In times of excitement—and there are many such times—extempore editions of the paper are thrown together, to appear twice weekly, sometimes daily. As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille’s character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

Since the massacre, of course, the paper no longer appears. Camille says he is sick of deadlines and printers’ tantrums and errors; his compulsion has gone freelance. This is no drawback, as long as he writes, every week, about as many words as Danton speaks. Between now and the end of his career, Danton will make scores of speeches, some of them hours long. He makes them up in his head, as he goes. Perhaps you can hear his voice.

I came back from England in September. The amnesty was the last act of the old National Assembly. We were supposed to inaugurate the new era in a spirit of reconciliation—or some such sanctimonious twaddle. You will see how that worked out.

The summer’s events had injured the patriots—literally, in many cases—and I returned to a royalist Paris. The King and his wife once more appeared in public, and were cheered. I saw no reason for pique; I am all for amiability. I need not tell you that my strong-minded friends at the Cordeliers felt differently. We have come a long way since ’88, when the only republicans I knew were Billaud-Varennes and my dear irrepressible Camille.

There was some jubilation—premature—about Lafayette’s departure from the capital. (I’m sorry, I can’t get used to calling him Mottié.) Had he emigrated, I would personally have ordained three days of fireworks and free love on our side of the river; but the man is now with the armies, and when we have war, which will be in six or nine months, we shall need to turn him into a national hero again.

In October our fulsome patriot Jérôme Pétion was elected Mayor of Paris. The other candidate was Lafayette. So deeply does the King’s wife detest the general, that she moved heaven and earth to secure Pétion’s election-Pétion, mark you, a republican. I hold it my best example yet of the political ineptitude of women.

It is just possible, of course, that Pétion is on some royalist payroll that I don’t know about. Who can keep track these days? He is still convinced that the King’s sister fell in love with him on their journey back from Varennes. He has made himself ridiculous over that. I am surprised that Robespierre, who countenances no antics, has not reproved him. The new popular slogan, by the way, is “Pétion or death!” Camille earned some filthy looks at the Jacobins by remarking audibly, “Not much of a choice.”

His sudden elevation has made Jérôme quite dizzy, and he erred when he received Robespierre in state and forced him to sit through a banquet. Recently Camille said to Robespierre, “Come to supper, we have this marvelous champagne.” Robespierre replied, “Champagne is the poison of liberty.” What a way to talk to your oldest friend!

My failure to gain election to the new Assembly disappointed me. It occurred—forgive me if I sound like Robespierre—because of the number of people working against me; and because of our failure to amend the restrictive franchise. If I sought a mandate from the man in the street, I could be King if I wanted to.

And I never make claims I can’t substantiate.

I was disappointed for myself, and also for my friends. They had worked hard for me—Camille, of course, and especially Fabre—I am, nowadays, the single channel for the genius that was to inundate our age. Poor Fabre: but he is useful, and able in his way. And dedicated to the advancement of Danton, which is the trait in him I prefer above others.

I wished, in my turn, to obtain office so that I could be of service to them. I mean, by that, that I could help them to fulfill their political ambitions and augment their incomes. Don’t pretend to be shocked, or not more than is necessary for form’s sake. I assure you, as our wives say, it is always done. No one will seek office, unless there are proper rewards.

After the elections I went to Arcis for a while. Gabrielle is expecting her baby in February, and was in need of rest. There is nothing to do in Arcis unless one is fond of agricultural labor, and to my certain knowledge she is not. It seemed a good time to be away. Robespierre was in Arras (recruiting his provincial accent, I presume) and I thought that if he could leave the pot unwatched I could do the same. Paris was not particularly pleasant. Brissot, who has a lot of friends in the new Assembly, was busy collecting support for a policy of war against the European powers—a policy so staggeringly dangerous and inept that I became quite incoherent when I tried to argue with him.

I have now, under my roof at Arcis, my mother and my stepfather, my unmarried sister Pierrette, my old nurse, my great aunt, my sister Anne-Madeleine, her husband Pierre and their five children. The arrangement is a noisy one, but it gives me satisfaction to think that I can provide for my people in this way. I have concluded five purchases of land, including some woodland; I have leased out one of my farms, and bought more livestock. When I am in Arcis, you know, I never want to see Paris again.

Very soon my friends in the city decided that I should seek public office. Precisely, they wanted me to stand for the post of First Deputy Public Prosecutor. It is not that the post is of great intrinsic importance. My candidature is a way of announcing myself: of saying, “Danton is back …”

To expound this plan to me, Camille and wife arrived in Arcis, with several weeks’ accumulated gossip and bags overflowing with newspaper cuttings, letters and pamphlets. Gabrielle greeted Lucile with something less than enthusiasm. She was then six months into her pregnancy, ungainly and easily tired. Lucile’s visit to the country had of course required a whole new wardrobe of very artful simplicity; she is becoming even more beautiful but, as Anne-Madeleine says, oh so thin.

The family, who regard Parisians as something akin to Red Indians, received them with guarded politeness. Then after a day or two, Anne-Madeleine simply added them to the number of her five children, who are fed on sight and conducted through the countryside on forced marches in an effort to subdue their spirits. After dinner one day Lucile remarked in conversation that she thought she might be pregnant. My mother slid her eyes round to Camille and said she would be surprised, very. I thought perhaps it was time to go back to Paris.

“When will you be home again?” Anne-Madeleine asked her brother.

“A few months—show you the baby.”

“I meant, for good.”

“Well, the state of the country—”

“What has that to do with us?”

“In Paris, you see, I have a certain position.”

“Georges-Jacques, you only told us that you were a lawyer.”

“Essentially, I am.”

“We thought that fees must be very high in Paris. We thought that you must be the top lawyer in the country.”

“Not quite that.”

“No, but you’re an important man. We didn’t realize what you did.”

“What do I do? If you’ve been talking to Camille, he exaggerates.”

“Aren’t you frightened?”

“What should I be frightened of?”

“You had to run away once. What happens next time things go wrong? People like us, we have our day—we might get to the top of the heap for a year or two, but it doesn’t last, it’s not in the nature of things that it should.”

“We are trying, you see, to alter the nature of things.”

“But couldn’t you come home now? You have land, you have what you want. Come back with your wife and let your children grow up with mine, as they ought, and bring that little girl and let her have her baby here—Georges, is it yours?”

“Her baby? Good heavens, no.”

“It’s just the way you look at her. Well, how am I to know what goes on in Paris?”

So I stood for election, and was beaten by a man named de Gerville. Within days, this de Gerville was appointed Minister of the Interior, and thus removed from my path. There were fresh elections. My opponent this time was Collot d’Herbois, the none-too-successful playwright, whom I suppose I must regard as a revolutionary comrade. The electors may question my fitness for office, but Collot has all the gravitas of a mad dog. My majority was very large.

Make of this what you will. My opponents made much of it, to my discredit. They said that “the Court had a hand in it.” Since Louis Capet retains the prerogative of ministerial appointment, it would be strange if it were otherwise.

Let me spell it out for you: they say I am “in the pay of the Court.” Now that is a very vague allegation, an imprecise charge, and unless you could be more definite about names, dates, amounts, I would not feel obliged to make any statement. But if you ask Robespierre, he will vouch for my integrity. Nowadays that is the highest guarantee; because he is afraid of money, he is known as “the Incorruptible.”

If you feel well disposed to me, regard de Gerville’s removal as a happy coincidence. If not, console yourself that my friend Legendre was recently offered a very large sum to slit my throat. However, he told me of it; he obviously sees some long-term advantage in turning down a good cash offer.

My new salary was useful, and status as a prominent public official does no harm. I thought that now we might be seen to spend a little money without incurring criticism (oh, I was wrong of course) and so I kept Gabrielle busy during the last tedious weeks in choosing carpets, china and silver for our apartment, which we have just had redecorated.

But I suppose you will not want to know about our new dining table—you will want to know who is sitting in the new Assembly. Lawyers, naturally. Propertied men, like myself. On the right, Lafayette’s supporters. In the center, a huge uncommitted many. On the left—now, this is what concerns us. My good friend Hérault de Séchelles is a deputy, and we have a few recruits for the Cordeliers Club. Brissot is amongst those elected for Paris, and many of his friends seem likely to lay claim to the public’s attention.

I must explain something about “Brissot’s friends”; it is a misnomer, as many of them can’t stand him. But to be “one of Brissot’s people” is a kind of tag, a label, one which we find useful. In the old Assembly, Mirabeau used to point to the Left and shout, “Silence, those thirty voices.” Robespierre said to me one day, it would be convenient if all “Brissot’s people” would sit together in the Jacobin Club, so that we could do the same.

Do we want them silent? I don’t know. If we could get over this absurd matter of war or peace—and it is a lot to get over—there wouldn’t be much to divide us. They’re just, somehow, not our sort—and don’t they let us know it! There are a number of outstanding men from the Gironde region, amongst them the leading lights of the Bordeaux Bar. Pierre Vergniaud is a polished orator, the best in the House—if you like that antique type of oratory, which is a bit different from the fire-eating style we affect on our side of the river.

“Brissot’s people” are of course outside the Assembly as well as in it. There is Pétion—now mayor, as I said—and Jean-Baptiste Louvet, the novelist, who now writes for the papers—and of course you’ll remember François-Léonard Buzot, the humorless young fellow who sat with Robespierre on the far Left of the old Assembly. They have several newspapers between them, and assorted positions of influence in the Commune and the Jacobin Club. Why they rally round Brissot I can never grasp, unless they need his nervous energy as a driving force. He is here, there, an instant opinion, a lightning analysis, an editorial in the blink of an eye. He is forever setting up a committee, launching a project; he is forever hatching a plan, blazing a trail, putting his machinery in motion. I saw Vergniaud, who is a large, calm man, regarding him from under his thick eyebrows; as Brissot chattered, a small sigh escaped him, and a look of pained exhaustion grew on his face. I understood. Camille can wear me out in the same way. But one thing you must say about Camille—even in the direst circumstances, he can make you laugh. He can even make the Incorruptible laugh. Yes, I have seen it with my own eyes and Fréron says he has seen it too—unseemly tears of mirth streaming down the Incorruptible’s face.

I don’t wish to suggest that Brissot’s people are anything so definite as a party. Yet they see a good deal of each other—salon life, you know. Last summer they used to meet at the apartment of an aging nonentity called Roland, a provincial married to a much younger woman. The wife would be passably attractive, if it were not for her incessant fervor. She is the type who always wants to surround herself with young men, and play them off against each other. She probably cuckolds the old husband, but I doubt if that is the point for her—it’s not her body that she wants to gratify. Well, so I suppose. To my relief, I don’t know her very well.

Robespierre used to go to supper there, so I gather they’re a high-minded lot. I asked him did he contribute much to the conversation; he said, “Not a word do I speak, I sit in a corner and bite my nails.” He has his moments, does Maximilien.

He called on me in early December, soon after he got back from Arras. “Am I distrubing you?” he asked—anxious as usual, peering into our drawing room to make sure there was no one he didn’t wish to meet. I waved him in airily. “Only, do you mind the dog?”

I hastily removed the hand I had placed on his shoulder.

“I don’t mean to take him everywhere,” he said, “but he will follow.”

The dog—which was the size of a small donkey—disposed itself at his feet, its head on its paws and its eyes on his face. It was a great brindled creature, and its name was Brount. “He is my dog at home,” he explained. “I thought I should bring him because—well, Maurice Duplay wants me to have a bodyguard, and I don’t like the idea of people following me about. I thought the dog—”

“I’m sure it will,” I said.

“He’s very well behaved. Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“Well, after all,” I said, “I have Legendre.”

“Yes.” He moved uneasily, causing the dog to twitch its ears. My wit is lost on Maximilien. “Is it true that there was an assassination plot against you?”

“More than one, I understand.”

“But you don’t let them intimidate you. Danton, I have great respect for you.”

I was nonplussed: I had not expected a testimonial. We talked a little about his visit to Arras. He told me about his sister Charlotte, who is his warmest supporter in public, but tiresome in private. It was the first time he had spoken to me about his personal life. What I know of him, I know from Camille. I suppose that, returning to find Paris full of new men running things, he looks on me as an old comrade-in-arms. I comforted myself that he had forgiven me for the jokes I made at his expense when he broke off his engagement to Adèle.

“So what do you make of the new Assembly?” I asked him.

“I suppose they’re an improvement on the last lot.” A lack of warmth in his tone.

“But?”

“These people from Bordeaux—they have a great opinion of themselves. I wonder about their motives, that’s all.” Then he began to talk about Lazare Camot, a military man he’s known for years, who is now a deputy; Carnot was the first soldier I heard him praise, and probably the only one. “And Couthon,” he said, “have you met him?”

I had. Couthon is a cripple, and has an attendant who wheels him about in a special chair; when there are steps, the attendant lifts him onto his back and carries him, his withered legs trailing. Some helpful person brings the chair up, the poor man is dropped back in and off they go. Despite being crippled he has enjoyed, like Robespierre, a sparkling career as a poor man’s lawyer. Couthon’s spine is diseased, he has constant pain. Robespierre says this does not embitter him. Only Robespierre could believe this.

He was worried, he said, about the warmongers—in other words, “Brissot’s people.”

“You’ve just come from England, Danton. Do they mean to fight us?”

I was able to assure him that only extreme provocation would bring them to it.

“Danton, war would be disastrous, wouldn’t it?”

“Beyond doubt. We have no money. Our army is led by aristocrats whose sympathy might well be with the enemy. Our navy’s a disgrace. We’ve political dissension at home.”

“Half our officers, perhaps more, have emigrated. If we have a war, it will have to be fought by peasants with pitchforks. Or pikes, if we can stand the expense.”

“It might benefit some people,” I said.

“Yes, the Court. Because they think that the chaos war brings will force us to turn back to the monarchy, and that when our Revolution is crippled and brought to its knees we’ll come crawling to them, begging them to help us forget that we were ever free. If that were attained, what would they care if Prussian troops burn our homes and slaughter our children? It would be meat and drink to them to see that day.”

“Robespierre—”

But he could not be stopped. “So the Court will support war, even if it is against Antoinette’s own people. And there are men who sit in the Assembly, calling themselves patriots, who will grasp any chance to distract attention from the real revolutionary struggle.”

“You mean Brissot’s people?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you suppose that they want to, as you put it, distract attention?”

“Because they’re afraid of the people. They want to contain the Revolution, hold it back, because they’re afraid of the real exercise of the people’s will. They want a revolution to suit their own ends. They want to line their pockets. I’ll tell you why people always want war—it’s because there’s easy money to be made out of it.”

I was amazed at this grim conclusion: not that I had not come to it, but that Robespierre should come to it, Robespierre of the clean mind and the noble motive.

“They talk,” I said, “of a crusade to bring liberty to Europe. Of how it’s our duty to spread the gospel of fraternity.”

“Spread the gospel? Well, ask yourself—who loves armed missionaries?”

“Who indeed?”

“They speak as if they had the interests of the people at heart, but the end of it will be military dictatorship.”

I nodded. I felt he was right, but I didn’t like the way he spoke; he spoke, if you follow me, as if it were beyond dispute. “Don’t you think,” I said, “that Brissot and his friends might be given credit for good intentions? They think a war would pull the country together and make the Revolution secure and get the rest of Europe off our backs.”

“Do you thing that?”

“Personally, no.”

“Are you a fool? Am I?”

“No.”

“Isn’t the reasoning clear? With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy. It could mean both, one after the other. After ten years not a single one of our achievements will remain, and to your son liberty will be an old man’s daydream. This is what will happen, Danton. No one can sincerely maintain the contrary. So if they do maintain it, they are not sincere, they are not patriots and their war policy is a conspiracy against the people.”

“You are saying, in effect, they are traitors.”

“In effect. Potentially. And so we must strengthen our own position against them.”

“If we could win the war, would you favor it?”

“I hate all war.” A forced smile. “I hate all unnecessary violence. I hate quarrels, even dissension among people, but I know I am doomed to live with that.” He made a small gesture, as if putting the controversy aside. “Tell me, Georges-Jacques—do I seem unreasonable?”

“No, what you say is logical …it’s just …” I couldn’t think how to finish my sentence.

“The Right try to present me as a fanatic. They’ll end up by making me one.”

He got up to go, and the dog jumped up and glared at me when I took his hand.

“I should like to talk to you, informally,” I said. “I’m tired of speaking at you in public places, of never getting to know you any better. Come to supper tonight?”

“Thank you, but,” he shook his head, “too much work. Come and see me at Maurice Duplay’s.”

So he went downstairs, the reasonable person, with his dog padding after him and growling at the shadows.

I felt depressed. When Robespierre says he dislikes the whole idea of war, it is an emotional reaction—and I am not immune to those. I share his distrust of soldiers; we are suspicious, envious perhaps, as only pen pushers can be. Day by day, the movement for war gains momentum. We must strike first, they say, before we are stricken. Once they begin to beat the big drum, there’s no reasoning with them. Now, if I have to stand against the tide, I would rather do it with Robespierre than anyone. I may make jokes at his expense—no, not “may,” I do—but I know his energy, and I know his honesty.

And yet … he feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says that the head part came first; and we believe him.

I did visit him at Duplay’s, but first I let Camille reconnoiter. The master carpenter had hidden him when he was in danger, and we all assumed that when things got back to normal, etcetera—but he stayed.

Once you shut the gate from the rue Saint-Honoré, the place seems quiet, almost rural. The yard is full of Duplay’s workmen, but the noise is muted and the air is fresh. He has a room on the first floor, plain but pleasant enough. I did not notice the furniture, I suppose it is not anything special. When I called on him he waved at a large bookcase, new and well finished if not stylish. “Maurice made that for me.” He was pleased with it. As if he were pleased someone would take the trouble.

I looked at his books. Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the yard; few other modern authors. Cicero, Tacitus, the usual: all well-thumbed. I wonder—if we go to war with England, will I have to hide my books of Shakespeare, and my Adam Smith? I guess that Robespierre reads no modern language but his own, which seems a pity. Camille, by the way, thinks modern languages beneath his notice; he is studying Hebrew, and looking for someone to teach him Sanskrit.

He had warned me what to expect of the Duplays. “There … are … these … dreadful … people,” he had said. But that day he was engaged in pretending to be Hérault de Séchelles, so I did not take him too seriously. “There is, first, the paterfamilias Maurice. He is fifty or fifty-five, balding and very, very earnest. He can bring out only the worst in our dear Robespierre. Madame is a homely sort, and can never have been even tolerably good-looking. There is a son, also called Maurice, and a nephew, Simon—these last both young, and apparently quite witless.”

“But tell me about the three daughters,” I said. “Are they worth calling on?”

Camille gave an aristocratic groan. “There is Victoire, who cannot easily be distinguished from the furniture. She never opened her mouth—”

“Not surprising, if you were in this mood,” Lucile said. (She was, however, vastly entertained.)

“There is the little one, Elisabeth—they call her Babette—who is tolerable, if you like goose-girls. And then the eldest—words fail me.”

They didn’t, of course. Eléonore, it appeared, was an unfortunate girl, plain, drab and pretentious; she was an art student under David, and preferred to her own perfectly adequate name the classical appellation “Cornélia”: this detail, I confess, I found risible.

To dispel any remaining illusions, he opined that the bed curtains in Robespierre’s room were made out of one of Madame’s old dresses, because they were just the kind of ghastly fabric she would choose for her personal adornment. Camille goes on like this for days on end, and it’s impossible to get any sense out of him.

They are good people, I suppose; have struggled to get to their present comfortable position. Duplay is a staunch patriot: goes in for plain speaking at the Jacobins, but is modest with it. Maximilien seems at home there. It probably, when I think of it, helps him financially to live with them. He gave up his post as Public Prosecutor as soon as he decently could, saying that it interfered with his “larger work.” So he has no office, no salary, and must be living on savings. I understand that wealthy but disinterested patriots send him drafts on their bankers. And what do you think? Yes, he writes polite notes and sends them back.

The daughters—the shy one is nothing worse than that, and Babette has a certain schoolroom appeal. Eléonore, I admit …

They do their best to make him comfortable: God knows, it’s time somebody did that. It is a rather spartan comfort, by our refurbished standards; I’m afraid it brings out the worst in us when we sneer at the Duplays, with what Camille calls their “good plain food and good plain daughters.”

Later, I became aware of something odd in the atmosphere of the house. Some of us began to jib when the family began to collect portraits of their new son to decorate their walls, and Fréron asked me if I did not think it was prodigiously vain of Robespierre to allow it. I suppose we have all had our portrait made: even I, at whom any artist might balk. But this was different; you sat with Robespierre in the little parlor where he sometimes received visitors, and found him meeting your eyes not just in person but in oils, in charcoal, three-dimensionally in terra-cotta. Every time I called—which perhaps was not often—there was a new one. It made me uneasy—not just the portraits and busts, but the way all the family looked at him. They’re grateful he turned up on their doorstep at all, but that’s no longer enough. They fasten their eyes on him, Father, Mother, young Maurice, and Simon, Victoire, Eléonore, Babette. In his place I should ask myself: what do these people really want? What will I lose if I give it them?

Any gloom we might have felt at the end of ’91 was dispelled by the continuing comedy of Camille’s return to the Bar.

They do contrive to spend a lot of money, he and Lucile—although, like most patriots, they avoid public censure by keeping few servants and no carriage. (I keep a carriage; I place personal comfort above the plaudits of the masses, I fear.) But where does anyone’s money go? They entertain, and Camille gambles, and Lolotte spends money on the things women do spend money on. But all in all, Camille’s venture was prompted less by shortage of cash than by the need of a new arena for self-advertisement.

In the old days, he claimed that his stutter was a complete obstacle to successful pleading. Of course, until one is used to it, it might discomfit, irritate or embarrass. But Hérault has pointed out that Camille has wrung some extraordinary verdicts from distraught judges. Certainly I have observed that Camille’s stutter comes and goes. It goes when he is angry or wishes forcibly to make a point; it comes when he feels put-upon, and when he wishes to show people that he is in fact a nice person who is really not quite able to cope. It says much for his natural optimism that after some eight years of acquaintance he sometimes assumes the latter pose with me and expects me to believe in it. Not entirely without success: there are days when I am so bemused by Camille’s helplessness that I go around opening doors for him.

All went smoothly until the New Year. Then he took on the defense of the couple concerned in the affair of the gambling house in the Passage Radziwill. Camille deplores the intervention of the state in what he sees as a matter of private morality; he not only published his opinion, but placarded it all over the city. Now Brissot—who is a man with a regrettable busybody tendency, both in his political philosophy and in his private life—was outraged by the whole affair. He attacked Camille verbally and set one of his hacks to assail him in the press. As a result, Camille said he would “ruin Brissot. I shall simply write his autobiography,” he said. “I shall not need to embroider the facts. He is a plagiarist and a spy, and if I have refrained so far from making these revelations it is out of sentimentality over the length of our acquaintance.”

“Nonsense,” I said, “it has been out of fear of what he might reveal about you.”

“When I have finished with him …” Camille said. It was at this point I felt I must intervene. We may not see eye-to-eye on the war question, but if we are to achieve any political power of the formal kind, our natural allies are Brissot and the men of the Gironde.

I wish I could cast more light for you on Camille’s private life. The long-promised fidelity to Lucile lasted, oh, all of three months—yet from his disconnected statements at various times I gather that he doesn’t care for anyone else and would go through the whole business again to get her. There is nothing about them of the ironical coldness of people who are bored with each other; in fact, they give a lively impression of a well-heeled young couple with a great deal of energy who are having a very good time. It amuses Lucile to try out her powers on any personable man—and even on those who, like me, could never be described as personable. She has Fréron on a string, and now Hérault too. And you remember General Dillon, that romantic Irishman who is so attached to Camille? Camille brings him home from wherever they have been playing cards that night—for the general shares that addiction—and presents him to Lucile as if he were bringing her the most wonderful present—which indeed he is, because Dillon, along with Hérault, is widely spoken of as the most handsome man in Paris, and is in addition quite wonderfully poised and polished and gallant, and all that rubbish. Quite apart from the gratification she gets from flirting, I imagine that someone—the minx Rémy perhaps—has advised her that one way to keep an errant husband is to make him jealous. If this is her idea, she is having a great failure. Witness a recent conversation:

LUCILE: Hérault tried to kiss me.

CAMILLE: Well, you have been raising his hopes. Did you let him?

LUCILE: No.

CAMILLE: Why not?

LUCILE: He has a double chin.

What are they then—just an amiable, cool, amoral pair who have decided to make life easy for each other? That is not what you would think if you lived on our street, not what you would think if you lived next door. They are playing for high stakes, it seems to me, and each of them is watching the other for a failure of nerve; each waits for the other to throw down the hand. The truth is, the more enmeshed Lucile becomes with her various beaux, the more Camille seems to enjoy himself. Why should this be? I’m afraid your imagination will have to supply the deficiencies of mine. After all, you know them well enough by now.

And I? Well, now, I suppose you like my wife, most people do. Our little actresses—Remy and her friends—are so accommodating, so pleasant and so easy for my Gabrielle to ignore. They never cross the threshold of this house; what would she have to say to them? They are not whores, these girls, far from it; they would be shocked if you offered them money. What they like are outings and treats and presents, and to be seen on the arms of the men whose names are in the papers. As my sister Anne-Madeleine says, people like us, we have our day; and when our day is over, and we are forgotten, they will be on the arms of other men. I like them, these girls. Because I like people who live without illusions.

I must get round to Rémy herself someday soon—if only as a gesture of fellowship to Fabre and Hérault and Camille.

I should say, in my defense, that I was faithful to Gabrielle for a long time; but these are not the days for fidelity. I think of all that has passed between us, the strong and sincere attachment I felt and do feel; I think of the kindness of her father and mother, and of the little child we buried. But I think, too, of her tone of cold disapproval, of her withdrawn silences. A man has his work in this world, and must do it as he sees fit, and (like the actresses) he must accommodate himself to the times in which he lives; Gabrielle does not see this. What irks me most is her downtrodden air. God knows, I never trod on her.

So I am seeing—oh, this girl and that girl—and from time to time the Duke’s ladies. Come now, you will say, surely not; this fellow is boasting again. With Mrs. Elliot, I would merely say that I have a business relationship. We discuss politics, English politics: English politics as applied to French affairs. But there is, nowadays, much warmth in Grace’s tone, in her eyes. She is an arch-dissimulator; I do believe she finds me perfectly loathsome.

Not so Agnès, I visit Agnès when the Duke is out of town. If the Duke thinks I might want to see Agnès, he is usually out of town. It works so smoothly that I would have credited Laclos with the arrangements, if that unfortunate had not disgraced himself by failure and slunk off into provincial oblivion. But why should the mistress of a Prince of the Blood—who might be a character in a novel, don’t you think?—bend herself to the conquest of a lawyer with an unsavory reputation, overweight and as ugly as sin?

Because the Duke foresees a future where he will need a friend; and I am the friend he will need.

But I find it hard, I tell you, to keep my thoughts away from Lucile. So much passion there, so much wit and flair. She is of course getting herself a reputation. It is widely believed already that she is my mistress, and soon of course she will be; unlike her other suitors, I am not a man to tease.

In a matter of weeks Gabrielle will give me another son. We shall celebrate, and be reconciled—which means that she will accept the situation. After Lucile’s child is born—by the way, it is her husband’s—Camille and I will arrive at an understanding, which will not be immensely difficult for us to do. I think perhaps 1792 is my year.

In January I took up my post as Deputy Public Prosecutor.

I shall be speaking to you again, no doubt.