A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 4

The Tactics of a Bull

Gabrielle: You see, I can only say what I’ve heard, what people have told me. I can only be sure about the people I know, and not so very sure about them. Looking back over the summer—what can I say to you that won’t seem ridiculously naive?

You can grow up, not what you would call a person of iron conviction; but you think there are things about you that won’t change, beliefs you will always hold, things happening that will go on happening: a world that will do you for as long as you need it. Don’t be deceived.

I must go back to when our new baby was born. The birth was easier than the first two—quicker, anyway. It was another boy; healthy, bonny, with good lungs and the same head of thick dark hair that Antoine had, and the little one I lost. We called him François-Georges. My husband kept buying me things—flowers and china and jewelry, lace and scent and books that I never read. So one day this made me cry. I shouted at him, it’s not as if I’ve done anything clever, anyone can have a baby, stop trying to buy me off. A kind of storm of crying overtook me, and when it was over I was left with stinging eyes and a heaving chest and an aching throat. My memory seemed to have been wiped clean; if Catherine my maid had not told me that I said such things I wouldn’t have believed it.

Next day Dr. Souberbielle came. He said, “Your husband tells me you’re not very well.” I was simply tired, he said. Childbearing was a great strain. Soon I would feel much better. But no, doctor, I said to him, very politely, I don’t think I’ll ever feel better again.

Whenever I put my baby to my breast, whenever I felt the flow of milk, I felt tears begin to leak out of my eyes; and my mother came, looking business-like and serious, and said that he should be put out to nurse, becasue we were making each other unhappy. It is better for children to be out of Paris, she said, and not to be crying at night and waking their fathers.

Of course, she said, when you get married, you live your first year or two in another world. As long as you’ve got a good man, a man you like, you feel so smug and pleased with yourself. You manage to keep all your problems at bay for that year or two—you think you’re not subject to the rules that govern other people.

“Why should there be rules?” I said. I sounded just like Lucile. That’s what she’d say—why should there be rules?

“And she will have her baby,” I said. “And then what?”

My mother didn’t need to ask for clarification. She just patted my arm. She said I was not the sort of girl to make a fuss. I had to be told that often these days—or who knows, I might have forgotten, and made one? My mother patted me once more—my hand this time—and said things about girls today. Girls today are romantic, she reckons. They have these strange illusions that when a man takes his marriage vows he means them. In her day, girls understood what was what. You had to come to a practical arrangement.

She found the wet nurse herself, a pleasant, careful woman out at l’Isle-Adam. Pleasant she may be, careful she may be, but I didn’t like to leave my baby. Lucile came with me, to meet the woman, to see if she would do for her own child; and yes, she would. What a neat arrangement! How practical! Lucile has only weeks to go now. How they fuss over her; you’ve never seen such a fuss. No question, though, of her feeding the mite herself. Her husband and her mother have forbidden it. She has sterner duties; there are parties to go to, after all. And General Dillon will prefer her bosom a discreet, agreeable size.

I don’t really blame Lucile, though I may sound as if I do. It isn’t true that she is Fréron’s mistress, though he has this slow, dragging obsession with her that makes him miserable and makes everybody else miserable too. With Hérault, as far as I can see, she simply goes through the usual social routine—leading him on, then pulling away. Hérault looks slightly weary sometimes, as though he has had rather too much experience of this sort of thing—I suppose he got it at Court. And part of the reason Lucile has fixed on him is that she wants to get back at Caroline Rémy, who made her so confused when she was just married and hadn’t learned all the tricks. Oh, I was relieved when I knew that Lucile was pregnant! I thought, this at least postpones things. But I didn’t hope for more than a postponement. I watch Georges. I watch his eyes following her. I wouldn’t expect anyone to refuse him. If you think that’s an impossible attitude for me to take, then it just shows that you don’t know him well enough. Perhaps you’ve only heard him making a speech once. Or passed him in the street.

Only once I did blunder in, talking to Lucile’s mother, trying to ease the situation because I thought it needed easing. “Does she—” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Does she have a very hard time with Camille?”

Madame Duplessis raised her eyebrows in that way she has, that makes her seem clever. “No harder than she wants,” she said.

But then, just as I was turning away, feeling rather sick about it all and apprehensive about what my future was to be, Mme. Duplessis put out her little be-ringed hand and took me by the sleeve—I remember this, it was like a little pinch, cloth not skin—and said to me one of the few real things that this artificial woman has ever said. “You do believe, I hope, that all this now is out of my control?”

I wanted to say, Madame, you have brought up a monster, but it would not have been fair to her. Instead I said, “It is as well she is pregnant.”

Mme. Duplessis murmured, “Reculer pour mieux sauter.”

All this summer, as in the summers since ’88, our apartment was full of people coming and going; strange names, strange faces, some of them becoming less strange as the weeks went on, and some of them, frankly, more. Georges was out a good deal, keeping odd hours; he gave dinners at the Palais-Royal, at restaurants as well as at home. We entertained the people they call Brissotins, though not often Brissot himself. There was a lot of uncharitable talk about the wife of the Minister of the Interior, whom they call “Queen Coco”—some joke that Fabre started off. Other people came late at night, after the meetings of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers. There was René Hébert—Pére Duchesne, people call him, from the name of his foul news sheet. Georges said, “We have to put up with these people.” There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind. They talked of the need to arm the whole city, against the Austrians and against the royalists. “When the time comes,” Georges said.

I thought, he talks like a man who has circumstance by the throat, but really he is making his calculations, he is carefully weighing the odds. He has only once made a mistake—last summer, when we had to run away. You will say, what was it, after all? A few weeks skulking out of Paris, and then an amnesty, and things go on as before. But picture me, that summer night at Fontenay, saying good-bye, trying to keep my self-control and put a good face on things, knowing that he was going to England and fearing that he might never come back. It just shows, doesn’t it, how much worse things can get when you think you’ve hit rock-bottom? Life has more complications in store than you can ever formulate or imagine. There are many ways of losing a husband. You can do it on several levels, the figurative and the actual. I operate on all of them, it seems.

Faces come and go … Billaud-Varennes, who was once Georges’s part-time clerk, has met up with this actor Collot, whom Camille calls “much the worst person in the world.” (He says that about a lot of people these days.) A well-suited pair they are, wearing their identical dyspeptic expressions. Robespierre avoids Hébert, is cool to Pétion, just civil to Vergniaud. Brissot twitters, “We must try to avoid personalities.” Chaumette will not speak to Hérault, which Hérault declares no loss. Fabre examines everyone through his lorgnette. Fréron talks about Lucile. Legendre, our butcher, says he makes nothing of the Brissotins. “I have no education,” he says, “and I am as good a patriot as you could find.” François Robert is agreeable to everybody, thinking that he has a career to make; all the fight has gone out of him since last summer, when he was thrown into gaol.

M. Roland never comes. Neither does Marat.

The second week in June, there was a crisis in the government. The King was not cooperating with the ministers, he was holding out against them, and Roland’s wife wrote him a terrible letter, lecturing him on his duty. I don’t say anything about the rights and wrongs of it—not my place, is it?—but one can see, surely, that there are insults that a King can’t accept, lie down under, without no longer being King. Louis must have thought so, because he dismissed the ministry.

My husband’s friends talked about the Patriotic Ministry. They said it was a national calamity. They have a way of turning calamities to their own account.

General Dumouriez was not dismissed. We understood he was on rather different terms with the Court. But he called on us. I was ashamed. Georges strode about and shouted at him. He said that he was going to put the fear of God into the Court, and that the King must divorce the Queen and pack her off back to Austria. When the general left he was white to the lips. The day after this he resigned, and went back to the armies. Georges was a good deal more frightening than the Austrians, Camille said.

Then came the letter from Lafayette to the Assembly, telling them to suppress the clubs, close down the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, or else … or else what? He would march his army on Paris? “Let him show his face,” Georges said. “I’ll tear him in little pieces and dump the remains in the Queen’s bedroom.”

The Assembly would not dare to act against the clubs—but, even for the suggestion, I knew that the patriots would have some revenge. There seems to be a pattern to these crises. Louise Gély said to my husband, “Is there going to be a ‘day,’ M. Danton?”

“Well, what do you think?” He seemed amused. “Perhaps we should have a second Revolution?”

She turned to me with a mock-shudder. “Does your husband want to be King?”

The comings and goings in our apartment had to be worked out carefully, so that Chaumette never met Vergniaud, Hébert’s path never crossed Legendre’s. It is a trial to me; it is a trial to the servants. I became aware of the tension in the air that says, tomorrow, or the day after … Robespierre came; sat making general conversation. He looked as ever, like a tailor’s model taken out of a box, so formal, so well barbered, so polite. But he wore, besides his striped olive-green coat, a little smile that never seems to leave his face now; it’s full of tension, it’s his way (Camille says) of stopping himself swearing at people. He asked after the baby; he began to tell Antoine a story, and said he’d finish it in a day or two. So that’s not too bad, I thought, we are going to survive … . What is strange, in such a clean, precise man, is how much M. Robespierre likes children, and cats, and dogs. It’s only the rest of us that put this worrying smile on his face.

It was quite late now. Pétion was the last to leave. I was keeping out of the way. I heard the study door open. My husband slapped him on the shoulder. “Timing,” he said.

“Don’t be afraid I’ll nip anything in the bud,” the mayor said. “I’ll show my face, but not too early. There’ll be time for events to take their natural course.”

He’s alone now, I thought, they’ve gone. But as I approached the study door—closed again—I heard Camille’s voice: “I thought you were going to adopt the tactics of a bull. The tactics of a lion. That’s what you said.”

“Yes, I am. But only when I’m ready.”

“You don’t hear bulls saying, when I’m ready.”

“Hey you—I’m the expert on bulls. You don’t hear them saying anything, that’s why they’re so successful.”

“Don’t they bellow a bit?”

“Not the really successful ones.”

There was a pause. Then Camille said: “But you don’t leave it to chance. If you want someone killed, you don’t leave it to chance.”

“What business is it of mine to want the King killed? If the district of Saint-Antoine wants him killed, the district will do it. Tomorrow, or at some future date.”

“Or not at all. All this sudden fatalism. Events can be controlled.” Camille sounded calm and very tired.

“I prefer not to rush things,” Georges said. “I’d like to settle matters with Lafayette. I don’t want to have to fight on all fronts at once.”

“But we can’t let this chance go.”

Georges yawned. “If they kill him,” he said, “they kill him.”

I walked away. My courage failed. I didn’t want to listen. I opened a window. I never remember the summers being so hot. There was some noise on the street, nothing you don’t get every night. A patrol of National Guardsmen swung up the street. They slowed down as they approached. One of them said quite clearly, “Danton’s place.” There must be somebody new, that they were pointing it out. I pulled my head back, and heard them march away.

I went back to the door of Georges’s study and pushed it open. He and Camille were sitting at either side of the empty fireplace, not speaking, just staring into each other’s faces.

“Am I interrupting you?”

“No,” Camille said, “we were just staring into each other’s faces. I hope you weren’t discomfitted by what you heard when you were listening at the door just now?”

Georges laughed. “Was she? I didn’t know.”

“It is like Lucile. She opens my letters, then gets into a terrible state. It is my poor cousin, Rose-Fleur Godard, who causes problems at the moment. She writes every week from Guise. Her marriage is not happy. She now wishes she were married to me.”

“I think I’d advise her to be reconciled to her lot,” I said. We laughed: surprising, how one can. The tension was broken. I looked at Georges. I never see the face that horrifies people. To me it is really a kind face. Camille looked no different from the boy Georges had brought to the café six years before. He stood up, leaned forward quickly, kissed my cheek. I have misheard, I thought, I have misunderstood. There is a distance between a politician and a killer. But then, “Think of the poor fools,” Georges said to him in parting.

“Yes,” Camille replied. “Sitting there, waiting to be murdered.”

The day of the riot I did not go out, and neither did Georges. No one came until the middle of the evening. Then I heard the stories the day had produced.

The people from Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel, led by agitators from the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, had entered the Tuileries, armed and in their thousands. Legendre was one of the leaders; he insulted the King to his face, and came back here to sit in my drawing room and boast about it. Perhaps the King and Queen should have died under their staves and pikes, but it didn’t happen like that. I was told that they stood for hours in a window embrasure, with the little Dauphin and his sister, and the King’s own sister Mme. Elisabeth. The crowd filed past them and laughed at them, as if they were the freaks at a country fair. They made the King put on a “cap of liberty.” These people—people out of the gutter—passed the King cheap wine and made him drink from the bottle to the health of the nation. This went on for hours.

At the end of it they were still alive. A merciful God protected them; and as for the man who should have protected them—Pétion, I mean, the Mayor of Paris—he didn’t show his face until the evening. When he could not decently wait any longer, he went to the Tuileries with a group of deputies and got the mob out of the palace. “And then, do you know what?” Vergniaud said. I handed him a glass of cold white wine. It was 10 p.m. “When they had all gone, the King snatched the red cap off his head, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.” He nodded his thanks to me, urbanely. “The curious thing is that the King’s wife behaved with what can only be called dignity. It is unfortunate, but the people are not so opposed to her as they were before.”

Georges was in a rage. It is a spectacle to comtemplate, his rage. He tore off his cravat, strode about the room, his throat and chest glistening with sweat, his voice shaking the windows. “This bloody so-called Revolution has been a waste of time. What have the patriots got out of it? Nothing.” He glared around the room. He looked as if he would hit anyone who contradicted him. Outside there was some far-off shouting, from the direction of the river.

“If that’s true—” Camille said. But he couldn’t manage it, he couldn’t get his words out. “If this one’s done for—and I think it always was done for—” He put his face into his hands, exasperated with himself.

“Come on, Camille,” Georges said, “there’s no time to wait around for you. Fabre, please bang his head against the wall.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say, Georges-Jacques. We have no more time left.” I don’t know whether it was the threat, or because he suddenly saw the future, that Camille recovered his voice: but he began to speak in short, simple sentences. “We must begin again. We must stage a coup. We must depose Louis. We must take control. We must declare the republic. We must do it before the summer ends.”

Vergniaud looked uneasy. He ran his finger along the arm of his chair. He looked from face to face.

Camille said, “Georges-Jacques, you said you weren’t ready, but you must be ready now.”

Manon out of office. A phrase of Danton’s kept coming back to her: “France’s natural frontiers.” She spent hours these days poring over the maps of the Low Countries, the Rhine. Properly: had she not been one of the foremost advocates of the war policy? Less easy to find the natural frontiers of a human being …

They blamed her, of course, the feather-brained patriots; they said it was because of her letter that Louis had dismissed the ministry. It was nonsense: Louis just wanted a pretext, that was all. She had to brace herself against their accusations, accusations that she had interfered, that she had meddled, that she dictated policy to Roland. It was so unfair; they had always worked together, she and her husband, pooling their talents and energy; she knew his thoughts before he knew them himself. “Roland loses nothing,” she said, “by being interpreted through me.” Glances were exchanged. Always, glances exchanged. She would have liked to slap their complacent male faces.

Buzot alone seemed to understand. He took her hand, pressed it. “Don’t regard them, Manon,” he whispered. “True patriots know your worth.”

They would regain office; this was her opinion. But they would have to fight for it. June 20, the so-called “invasion” of the Tuileries—it had been a fiasco, it had been a joke. It had been mismanaged from start to finish; and mismanagement seemed to be the rule.

Afternoons, these days, she was in the public gallery at the Riding School, listening with gritted teeth to the debate. One day a young woman strode in, wearing a scarlet riding habit, a pistol stuck in her belt. Alarmed, Manon looked around for the usher; but no one except herself took the spectacle amiss. The young woman was laughing; she was surrounded by a pack of supporters; she disposed herself on a bench, proprietorially, and ran her hand back through brown curls cropped short like a man’s. Her claque applauded Vergniaud; they called out his name; they called out to other deputies, and then they tossed apples along the rows and ate them and threw down the cores.

Vergniaud came up to speak to her and she congratulated him on his speech, but in reserved tones; he got too much praise. To the strange, scarlet girl, he merely inclined his head. “That is Théroigne,” he said. “Can it be that you have not seen her before? She spoke to the Jacobins in spring, telling of her ordeal among the Austrians. They yielded the tribune to her. Not many women can say the same.”

He stopped then, with the air of a man who had talked himself into a corner. A hunted, vaguely mutinous expression crossed his face. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Manon murmured. “I shall not ask you to arrange it. I am not one of these viragos.”

“What are they, after all?” Vergniaud said. “Street girls.”

She could, of course, have punched him on the jaw. But look what he was offering—a sweet readmission to the conspiracy, a reinstatement. She smiled. “Street girls,” she said.

Lucile’s baby had taken a lurch to the left, and was kicking her with vigor. She could hardly push herself into an approximately upright position, let alone be civil to a visitor. “Hell,” she said, staring at Théroigne’s outfit. “Aren’t you hot in that scarlet attire? Isn’t it time you put it into honorable retirement?” She could see, in fact, that the hem was frayed, that the dust of the streets was upon it, that even the red was not so red as it used to be.

“Camille’s avoiding me,” Théroigne complained. She paced the room. “He’s hardly exchanged two words with me since I came back to Paris.”

“He’s busy,” Lucile said.

“Oh yes, I’m sure he’s busy. Busy playing cards at the Palais-Royal, busy dining with aristocrats. How can anyone think of passing the time of day with an old friend when there’s so much champagne to be drunk and so many silly, empty-headed bitches to be screwed?”

“Including you,” Lucile murmured.

“No, not including me.” Théroigne stopped pacing. “Never including me. I have never slept with Camille, or with Jérôme Pétion, or with any of the other two dozen men the newspapers have named.”

“The papers will print anything,” Lucile said. “Sit down, please. You’re making me wild and frantic with your red pacing.”

Théroigne didn’t sit. “Louis Suleau will print anything,” she said. “This filthy Acts of the Apostles. Why is Suleau at large, that’s what I want to know? Why isn’t he dead?”

Lucile thought, perhaps I can pretend to go into labor. She essayed a small moan. Théroigne took no notice. “Why is it,” she said, “that Camille can get away with anything? When Suleau laughed at me he just laughed with him, they had their heads together making up more libels, inventing more lovers for me, plotting to expose me to derision and scorn—but no one says to Camille, look, you hang around with Suleau, so how can you be a patriot? Tell me, Lucile, how does it happen?”

“I don’t know.” Lucile shook her head. “It’s a mystery. I suppose—you know how in families there’s usually one child who gets away with more than the others? Well, perhaps it’s like that in revolutions as well.”

“But I’ve suffered, Lucile. I’ve been a prisoner. Does no one understand that?”

Oh Lord, Lucile thought, it looks as if Théroigne has set in for the afternoon. She tottered to her feet. She could see that Théroigne was about to cry. She made clucking noises, laid a hand upon her upper arm, pressed her gently to the blue chaise-longue. “Jeanette,” she called, “have we some ice? Bring me something cool, bring me something sweet.” Inside the scarlet cloth the girl’s skin was hot and damp. “Are you ill?” Lucile asked her. “Dear little Anne, what have they done to you?” As she pressed a folded handkerchief against the girl’s temples, she saw herself, as if from an angel’s height, and thought, what a saintly young woman I am, mopping up this liar.

Théroigne said, “I tried to speak to Pétion yesterday, and he pretended not to have seen me. I want to give Brissot’s people my support, but they pretend I don’t exist. I do exist.”

“Of course,” Lucile said. “Of course you do.”

Théroigne dropped her head. The tears dried on her cheeks. “When will your baby be born?”

“Next week, the doctor says.”

“I had a child.”

“What? Did you? When?”

“She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She would have been—oh, I don’t know. The years go by. You lose track. She died the spring before the Bastille. No, that’s not right—’88, she died, I never saw her, hardly ever. I left her with a foster mother, I paid every month, I sent money for her from wherever I was, Italy, England. But it doesn’t mean I’m hard, Lucile, it doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. I did. She was my little girl.”

Lucile eased herself back into her chair. She rested her hands on the writhing, hidden form of her own baby. Her face showed strain. Something in Théroigne’s tone—something very hard to place—suggested that she might be making this up. “What was your little girl’s name?” she asked.

“Françoise-Louise.” Théroigne looked down at her hands. “One day I would have come for her.”

“I know you would,” Lucile said. A silence. “Do you want to tell me about the Austrians? Is that it?”

“Oh, the Austrians. They were strange.” Théroigne threw back her head. She laughed, her laugh uncertain, forced; alarming, how she snapped from topic to topic, from mood to mood. “They wanted to know the course of my life, my whole life from the time I was born. Where were you on such a date, month, year?—I can’t remember, I’d say—then, ‘Allow us to assist your memory, Mademoiselle,’ and out would come some piece of paper, some little chit I’d signed, some receipt, some laundry list or some pawnbroker’s ticket. They frightened me, those bits of paper; it was as if all my life, from the time I learned to write, these blessed Austrians had set spies to follow me about.”

Lucile thought: if half of this is fact, what do they know about Camille? Or Georges-Jacques? She said, “Well, you know that can’t be true.”

“How do you account for it then? They had a piece of paper from England, a contract I’d signed with this Italian singing teacher, this man who said he’d promote me. And yes, I had to agree with them, that’s my handwriting—I remembered signing it—the idea was, he’d give me lessons, to improve my technique, then I’d pay him back out of my concert fees. Now, I signed that paper, Lucile, on a foggy afternoon, in London, in Soho, in my teacher’s house on Dean Street. So tell me, tell me, if you can work it out at all—how did that piece of paper get from Dean Street, Soho, onto the desk of the commandant of the prison at Kufstein? How can it have got there, unless someone has been following me all these years?” Suddenly she laughed again, that disturbing, stupid giggle. “On this paper, you know, I’d signed my name, and underneath it said “Anne Théroigne, Spinster.” The Austrians said, “Who is he, this Englishman, this Mr. Spinster? Did you make a secret marriage to him?”

“So there you are,” Lucile said. “They don’t know all about you, do they? This Kufstein, what was it like?”

“It grows out of the rocks,” Théroigne said. Her mood had swung again; she spoke softly, calmly, like a nun looking back on her life. “From the windows of my room I could see the mountains. I had a white table and a white chair.” She frowned, as if trying to recollect. “When they shut me up at first I sang. I sang every song I knew, every aria, every little ditty. When I came to the end of them I started again.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Oh no. Nothing like that. They were polite, they were … tender. Each day they brought me food, they asked me what I’d like to eat.”

“But what did they want from you, Anne?” She wanted to add, “because you aren’t important.”

“They said I organized the October days, and they wanted to know who paid me to do it. They said I rode to Versailles astride a cannon, and that I led the women into the palace and that I had a sword in my hand. It’s not true, you know. I was there already, in Versailles. I’d rented a room, so I could go to the National Assembly every day and listen to the debates. Yes, I went out and talked to the women, I talked to the National Guard. But when they broke into the palace I was in my bed, asleep.”

“I suppose someone could testify to that,” Lucile said. Théroigne stared at her, uncomprehending. “Never mind,” Lucile said. “I was making a joke. The thing is, Anne—you must have realized by now—since the Bastille fell, it doesn’t matter what you actually did, it’s what people say you did. You can’t pick the past apart in this way, it doesn’t avail you. Once you start to live in the public eye people attribute actions and words to you, and you have to live with that. If they say you rode astride a cannon, then I’m afraid you did.”

Théroigne looked up at her. “Did I? I did.”

“No, I mean—” Oh, curse God, Lucile thought, she’s not very bright, is she? “No, you didn’t—oh, can’t you understand?”

Théroigne shook her head. “They asked me about the Jacobin Club. Asked who was paid to say what. I don’t know anything about the Jacobins. But there it is. They didn’t like my answers.”

“Some of us thought, you know, that we would never see you again.”

“People say that I ought to write a book about it. But I’ve no education, Lucile, I could no more write a book than I could land on the moon. Do you think Camille would write it for me?”

“Why did the Austrians let you go, Anne?”

“They took me to Vienna. I saw the chancellor, the Emperor’s chief minister, in his private rooms.”

“Yes, but you are not answering my question.”

“Then they took me back to Liege. To where I was born. I thought I was used to traveling, but they were hell, these journeys—oh, they tried to be kind to me, but I wanted to lie by the roadside and die. When we got to Liege they gave me some money, they said I could go where I liked. I said, even Paris? They said, yes, of course.”

“We knew this,” Lucile said. “It was reported in Le Moniteur, last December. We kept the paper, I have it somewhere. We said, ‘So, she’s on her way home.’ We were surprised. There were rumors, from time to time, that the Austrians had hanged you. But instead of that, they let you go, gave you money, didn’t they? Do you wonder Camille keeps away from you now?”

A good lawyer, she has closed her case. And yet it is hard to believe that—as everyone thinks but doesn’t say—the girl has agreed to act as a spy. Take away the firearms, strip the scarlet away, and she seems harmless, hopeless, not even quite sane. “Anne,” she said. “You ought to think of getting out of Paris. Somewhere quiet. Till you get your health back.”

Théroigne looked up at her quickly. “You forget, Lucile. I once let the journalists drive me out, I let Louis Suleau kick me out of Paris. Then what happened? I had a room at an inn, Lucile, miles from anywhere, the birds singing, just what you need to recuperate. I ate well, and I slept so soundly, those nights. Then one night I woke up, and there were men in my room, and they were men I didn’t know, and they dragged me out, into the dark.”

“I think you should go now,” Lucile said. Fear touched the base of her throat; fear touched the pit of her stomach, and laid its cold finger on her child.

“Lafayette is in Paris,” Fabre said.

“So I hear.”

“You knew, Danton?”

“I know everything, Fabre.”

“So when are you going to tear him in little pieces?”

“Restrain yourself, Fabre.”

“But you said—”

“A bit of bombast has its uses. It encourages others. I am thinking of visiting my in-laws in Fontenay for a day or two.”

“I see.”

“The general has plans. For marching on the Jacobins, closing them down. Reprisals for June 20. He hopes to carry the National Guard with him. In the event, no one can prove that I had anything to do with June 20—”

“Mm,” Camille said.

“—but I prefer to avoid inconvenience. It will come to nothing.”

“But surely this is serious.”

Danton was patient. “It isn’t serious, as we know his plans.”

“How do we know?”

“Pétion told me.”

“Who told Pétion?”

“Antoinette.”

“Dear God.”

“Yes, stupid, aren’t they? When Lafayette is the only person still willing to do anything for them. It makes you wonder about the wisdom of dealing with them at all.”

Camille looked up. “Dealing with them?”

“Dealing with them, child. Grabbing what you can.”

“You don’t mean it. You don’t deal with them.”

“Fabre, do I mean it?”

“Yes, you mean it.”

“Now, does it worry you, Fabre?”

“Not in the sense of having scruples. I think it frightens me. Worrying about the possible complications.”

“Not in the sense of having scruples,” Danton repeated. “Frightens him. Scruples. What a beautiful concept. Mention this conversation to Robespierre, Camille, and I’m finished with you. My God,” he said. He went away, shaking his head vigorously.

“Mention what?” Camille said.

Lafayette’s plan: a grand review of the National Guard, at which the general will inspect the troops and the King himself will be present to take the salute. The King will withdraw, Lafayette will harangue the battalions; for is he not their first, most glorious commander, does he not have the natural authority to take control again? Then in the name of the constitution, in the name of the monarchy, in the name of public order, General Lafayette will proceed to put the capital to rights. Not that he has the King’s enthusiastic backing; for Louis is afraid of failure, afraid of the consequences of it, and the Queen says coldly that she would rather be murdered than be saved by Lafayette.

Pétion can move quickly, when he likes. An hour before the review is due to begin, he simply cancels it: leaving the arrangements to cannon into each other, and relying on natural confusion to undo any larger schemes. The general is left to trail through the streets with his aides, cheered on by patriots of the old-fashioned sort. He is left to assess his situation; to take the road out of Paris to his army command on the frontier. At the Jacobins, Deputy Couthon is wheeled to the tribune, to denounce the general as a “great scoundrel”; Maximilien Robespierre calls him “an enemy of the Fatherland”; Messieurs Brissot and Desmoulins vie with each other in heaping the hero with abuse. The Cordeliers come back from the short holiday many of them had found it wise to take, and burn the general in effigy, coining slogans for the future above the cracking and spitting of the uniformed doll.

Annette said, “If she survives this, will you be good?” July morning, sunshine, a fresh breeze. Camille looked out of the window, saw the rue des Cordeliers, his neighbors busying about, life going on in its achingly usual way; heard the printing presses at work in the Cour du Commerce, saw women stopping to chat on the corner, tried hard to imagine any other kind of life or any kind of death. “I’ve stopped striking bargains with God,” he said. “So don’t you try to wring a bargain from me, Annette.”

He looked, Annette thought, utterly wretched; pale, shaky, quite unable to come to terms with the fact that his wife must give birth and that it was going to hurt her. It’s remarkable, really, how many quite ordinary things Camille can’t or won’t come to terms with. I’ll put the knife in just a bit, Annette thought, just as inch or two; not often that you have him at a disadvantage these days. “You’re just playing at marriage,” she said. “Both of you. This is the bit that isn’t a game.” She waited.

“I would die,” Camille said, “if anything happened to her.”

“Yes.” Annette got up wearily from her chair. She had gone to bed at midnight, but been roused at two o’clock. “Yes, I almost believe you would.”

She would go back to her daughter now. Lucile was still quite cheerful; that was because she didn’t know how bad it was going to get. She thought, could I have saved her from this? Of course she could. She could have followed her inclinations seven years ago; in that case, she would now be remembered by Camille, if he ever thought of her at all, as just a woman in his past, a woman he’d had to work extra hard for; and he would no longer be part of her life, he would be someone she read about in the newspapers. Instead, she had clung to her precious virtue, her daughter was married to the Lanteme Attorney and was now in labor, and she was observing daily—shuttling between the rue Condé and the rue des Cordeliers—the sort of sickeningly destructive love affair that you only read about in books. Of course, people could call it different things, but she called it a love affair. And she thought she had lived long enough to know what she was talking about.

“We must have you out of here,” she said. “Go for a walk. Get some fresh air. Why don’t you go and see Max? He’s full of reassuring good sense and homely wisdom.”

“Mm.” Camille looked ill with tension. “Bachelors always are. Send to me immediately, won’t you? The very minute?”

“Annette said I must go away, she said I disseminated panic. I hope you don’t mind my arriving at this hour.”

“I expected it,” Robespierre said. “We should be together, you and me. I have to go and get the day under way, but I’ll be back in an hour or two. The family will look after you. Would you like to go down and talk to one of the girls?”

“Oh no,” Camille said. “I’ve given up talking to girls. Look what it leads to.”

It was hard for Robespierre to smile. He reached forward and squeezed Camille’s hand. Odd, that; he usually avoided touching people. Camille divined that some kind of psychic emergency was taking place. “Max,” he said, “you’re almost in a worse state than I am. If I am disseminating panic, you are communicating disaster.”

“It will be all right,” Robespierre said, in a tone deeply unconvinced. “Yes, yes, it will be, I feel it. She’s a healthy girl, she’s strong, there’s no reason to believe, is there, that anything could go wrong?”

“Desperate, isn’t it?” Camille said. “Can’t even pray for her.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I don’t believe God listens to those sorts of prayers. They’re selfserving, aren’t they?”

“God accepts all kinds of prayers.”

They looked at each other, vaguely alarmed. “We are here under Providence,” Robespierre said. “I am sure of that.”

“I couldn’t say that I’m sure of it. Though I do find the idea consoling.”

“But if we are not under Providence, what is everything for?” Robespierre now looked wildly alarmed. “What is the Revolution for?”

For Georges-Jacques to make money out of, Camille thought. Robespierre answered himself. “Surely it is to bring us to the kind of society that God intends? To bring us to justice and equality, to full humanity?”

Oh good heavens, Camille thought. This Max, he believes every word he says. “I wouldn’t presume to know what kind of society God intends. It sounds to me as if you’ve gone to a tailor to order your God. Or had him knitted, or something.”

“A knitted God.” Robespierre shook his head, amazed. “Camille, you are a fount of original notions.” He put his hands on Camille’s shoulders. In a cautious way, they hugged each other. “Under Providence, we shall go on being silly,” Robespierre said. “I will be back in two hours, and then I will sit with you and we will discuss theology and whatever else will while away the time. If anything happens, get a message to me.”

Camille was left alone. Conversations do take the most amazing turn, he thought. He looked around Robespierre’s room. It was plain, quite small, with an insomniac’s hard bed and a plain whitewood table that served as Robespierre’s very tidy desk. There was only one book on it—a small copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract—and he recognized it as the one that Robespierre always carried with him, in the inside pocket of his coat. Today he had forgotten it. His routine was broken; he had been overset.

He picked up the book and looked at it closely. It had some special magic, which had communicated itself to Robespierre; this volume and no other will do. An idea struck him. He flourished the book before an imaginary audience. He said, In Robespierre’s Artesian accent: “Victim of an assassin’s musket ball, this copy of the Social Contract saved my life. Remark, fellow patriots, how the fatal bullet was deflected by the immortal cheap cloth binding of the immortal words of the immortal Jean-Jacques. Under Providence—” He was going to go on to speak about the plots that menaced the nation, plots, plots, plots, plots, plots, but he felt suddenly weak and jittery and knew that he ought to sit down. He pulled up to the table a straw-bottomed chair. It was exactly like the chair he had stood on when he spoke to the mob at the Palais-Royal. I don’t think I could live with such a chair, he thought. It frightens me too much.

He had a speech to write. What stupendous self-control, he thought, if I could write any of it, but I don’t suppose I will. He got up and looked out of the window for a while. Maurice Duplay’s workmen were fetching and carrying in the yard below. Seeing him watching them, they raised hands in greeting. He could go down and talk to them, but he might meet Eléonore. Or he might meet Mme. Duplay, and she would trap him in that drawing room of hers, and expect him to make conversation, and eat things. He had a dread of that room, with its vast articles—you could only call them that—of mahogany furniture, and its dark red draperies of Utrecht velvet, with its old-fashioned hangings and its enameled stove that gave off a fume-laden heat. It was a room for hopes to die in; he imagined picking up a crimson cushion, and placing it decisively over Eléonore’s face.

He wrote. He tried a paragraph. He deleted it. He began again. Time passed, he supposed. Then a little scratch at the door: “Camille, can I come in?”

“You may.”

Oh, why be like that? On edge.

Elisabeth Duplay. “Are you busy?”

He put the pen down. “I’m supposed to be writing a speech, but I’m not concentrating. My wife—”

“I know.” She closed the door softly. Babette. The goose-girl. “So would you like it if I stayed and talked to you?”

“That,” Camille said, “would be very nice.”

She laughed. “Oh, Camille, you are sour. You don’t really think it would be very nice, you think it would be a bore.”

“If I thought it would be a bore, I would say so.”

“You have such a reputation for charm, but we don’t see much of it in this house. You’re never charming to my sister Eléonore, Although—I must admit—I’d often like to be rude to Eléonore myself, but I’m the youngest, and in our family we’ve been brought up to be polite to our elders.”

“Quite right,” Camille said. He was perfectly serious. He couldn’t understand why she kept laughing. Then suddenly he could. When she laughed she was quite pretty. She was quite pretty anyway. An improvement on her sisters.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Max talks about you a lot,” she said. “It would be lovely to know you better. I think you’re the person in the world he cares about most. And yet you’re very different—so why do you think that is?”

“It must be my charm,” Camille said. “Obvious, isn’t it?”

“He’s very nice to us, you know. He’s like a brother. He stands up to our father for us. Our father’s a tyrant.”

“All children think that.” He was struck by what he had said. How would he treat this child of his, when it grew a will of its own? The child in its teens, he in middle age: there seemed something unlikely about it. He thought, I wonder what my father did while my mother was having me? I bet he worked on the Encyclopedia of Law. I bet he did a bit of indexing while my mother screamed in agony.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He couldn’t suppress a smile. How well was she suggesting she might get to know him? Women had a special time for that question, usually after the sexual act; but he supposed they had to rehearse it, even as schoolgirls. “Oh, nothing,” he said. (She may as well get used to the usual reply.) He felt uneasy. “Elisabeth, does your mother know you’re up here?”

“You should call me Babette. That’s my pet name.”

“Does she, though?”

“I don’t know whether she knows or not. I think she’s gone out for the bread.” She ran a hand over her skirt, sat further back on the bed. “Does it matter?”

“People might wonder where you are.”

“They could call out, if they wanted me.”

A pause. She watched him steadily. “Your wife is very beautiful,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Did she like being pregnant?”

“She liked it at first, but then she found it was tedious.”

“I expect you found it was tedious too.”

He closed his eyes. He was almost sure he was right. He opened them again. He wanted to be sure that she didn’t move. “I think I must go now,” he said.

“But Camille.” Her eyes became round. “If you leave, a message might come about the baby. You’d want to know right away, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes. Then perhaps we ought not to stay here.”

“Why not?”

Because I think you are trying to seduce me. Short of taking your clothes off, you couldn’t be much more plain about it. And you will probably do that in a minute. “You know damn well why not,” he said.

“People can have conversations in bedrooms. People can have whole parties in bedrooms. Whole conferences.”

“Yes, of course they can.” I should be gone by now.

“But you’re afraid of doing something wrong? You find me attractive?” You can’t say, I didn’t say that. She might weep, become permanently diffident, die a spinster. All right, you can’t say that, but there are worse things that you can say. “Elisabeth, do you do this often?”

“I don’t come up here often. Max is so busy.”

Oh, a neat wit, he thought. This is a sort of standard-bearer in the army of round-faced, middle-class virgins, the sort of girl you got into a lot of trouble over when you were sixteen. And might again.

“I don’t want you,” he said gently.

“That’s not the point.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that’s not the point.” She jumped from the bed and came towards him; her little slippered feet made no sound at all. Standing over him, she rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “You’re here. I’m here.” She put a hand up, pulled at her hair, releasing it from its pins and shaking it out. Mouse-brown hair, disheveled now. And color in her cheeks …“Want to go now?” she said. Because then she would crash downstairs after him, and there would be (he knew these awful assemblies) Eléonore and the nephew and Maurice Duplay—as he stood up he caught sight of his face in the mirror, and saw that it was irate, guilty and confused. She moved backwards and leaned against the door, laughing up into his face: no longer the least significant member of the household.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” he said. “This is incredible.”

She watched him narrowly. She had a poacher’s face, inspecting the early-morning traps.

“No romantic interlude you had in mind,” he said. “You just want to see the blood.”

“Ah,” she said, “then have we nothing in common?”

She was a little girl, but she was built on solid lines; she made herself into deadweight resistance. As he pulled her away from the door, the fichu that covered her shoulders slipped and unknotted and floated to the floor. I wonder, he thought, what Mme. Duplay’s dressmaker thought she was about. Such a quantity of white swelling adolescent bosom. “Look,” she said, “at the state I’m in.” She caught his hand and held it at the base of her bared throat. He could feel the pulse quiver beneath her skin. “You’ve touched me now,” she said. Her face invited violence. He wanted to hit her. Then she would scream. Dear God, I must warn people about her, he thought. He made a mental list of the people he must warn.

“You might as well, now,” she said. “We’re quite safe. There’s a lock on the door. Might as well go a little bit further.”

He scooped up the fichu from the floor, slid it around her shoulders, held her tight while he did it, his fingers digging into her arm above the elbow. “I shall call your sisters,” he said. “Perhaps you are not well.”

She gaped at him. “You’re hurting me,” she said faintly.

“No, I’m not. Pin your hair up.”

Strange, the expression he had time to notice on her face—not hesitation or anger, but disgruntlement. She tore herself out of his grip and lunged towards the window. Her face was flushed and she was taking deep breaths, great gulps of air. He came up behind her, shaking her a little: “Stop it. You’ll make yourself ill, you’ll faint.”

“Yes, then you explain that. Or I could call out now. No one would believe you.”

In the yard below them, the sound of sawing had stopped, and the men were looking up at the house. Their faces were a blur to Camille, but he could imagine every furrow on their brows. Maurice Duplay was walking slowly towards the house, and a second later he heard a woman’s voice raised, sharply questioning: Duplay’s voice, muffled but urgent: a sharp little feminine cry: the advance of footsteps, footsteps climbing the stairs.

He went cold. She can say what she likes, he thought, they’ll believe her. Below the window now, something like a small crowd. All of them Duplay’s people, and all looking up; and their faces, he thought, were expectant.

The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt-sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.”

A sea of smiles in the doorway. Camille stood fighting down his fright. You need not speak, a voice said inside, they will think you are too pleased and surprised to speak. Elisabeth had turned her back to them. With deft unobtrusive movements, she was straightening her clothes. “Congratulations,” she said lightly. “What an achievement for you.”

“Maximilien has a godchild,” Madame Duplay said, beaming. “Please God one day he will have a fine son of his own.”

Maurice Duplay locked his arms about Camille. It was a horrible, brisk, patriotic hug, Jacobin to Jacobin, Camille’s face pressed to the beefy flesh of Duplay’s shoulder. He rehearsed this sentiment, to the dampish white skin barely veiled by coarse linen: your youngest daughter’s a practicing rapist. No, he thought. It really won’t do. The best thing to do is not to mention it to anybody, they’ll only laugh. The best thing to do is to get home to Lucile and after this be very very careful and very very good.

The first consolation was that it had taken less time than people feared—twelve hours from when it began; the second consolation was this tiny, black-haired child, lying along her arm. She felt such an access, such a purity of love that she could hardly speak; they warn you of all sorts of things, she thought, but no one ever warns you of this. She could hardly speak anyway; she was weary, deadly weary, hardly able to hold up her head.

What different opinions people had! Through each contraction her mother had held her hands, wincing at the strength of her grip saying, be a brave girl, Lucile, be brave. The midwife had said, you have a good scream, flower, you scream the ceiling down if you feel like it, I’m sure your husband can afford the plaster. You can’t please everybody. Every time she’d thought of trying a scream, the next crashing pain had knocked the breath right out of her. Gabrielle Danton had leaned over her, saying something—something sensible, no doubt—and surely at one point Angélique had been there, too, muttering spells in Italian? But for minutes at a time—whole strings of seconds, anyway—she had not known who was there. She had been living in another world: an unyielding world, with crimson walls.

Deliberately, consciously, Camille set the morning’s other events to the back of his mind. Holding the fragile scrap of being against his shoulder, he breathed promises: I shall be very very nice to you; whatever strange or stupid sorts of things you want to do will be all right by me. Claude peered at the baby, hoping that Camille would not offer to hand him over. “I wonder who he will look like,” he said.

Camille said. “There’s a lot of money on that.”

Claude closed his mouth on the heartfelt congratulations he had been about to offer his son-in-law.

“Why don’t we overthrow Louis on July 14?” inquired the ci-devant Duke of Orléans.

“Oh-hum,” said the ci-devant Comte de Genlis. “You’re so fond of the sentimental gesture. I’ll speak to Camille and see if he could trouble to arrange it.”

The Duke did not spot sarcasm easily. He groaned. “Every time you speak to Camille these days it costs me a small fortune.”

“You don’t know where rapacity begins. How much have you given Danton, over these last three years?”

“I couldn’t say. But if we fail this time, even a small riot will be beyond my means. When Louis falls—you don’t think, do you, that they’ll cheat me out of the throne this time?”

De Sillery would have liked to point out that he had thrown away his chance once already (by listening, he would have said, to my wife Félicité, the procuress); but Félicité and her daughter Pamela had left for England last autumn, seen safely across the channel by the ever-useful, ever-obliging Jérôme Pétion. “Let me think,” he said. “Have you bought up the Brissotins, the Rolandins, the Girondins?”

“Aren’t they all the same?” Philippe looked alarmed. “I thought they were.”

“Are you quite sure that you can offer Georges Danton more than the Court can? More than he stands to make out of a republic?”

“Has it come to that?” The Duke sounded disgusted; he quite forgot for a moment his own part in bringing it there.

“I don’t mean to be discouraging. I understand though that Danton thinks we should wait for the volunteers from Marseille.”

They are hand-picked, staunch patriots, these Marseille men, marching to the capital for the Bastille celebrations; they march singing their new patriotic song, and their minds and jaws are set. A neat spearhead for the Sections, when the day comes.

“The Marseille men … who do I pay in their case?”

“Young local politician called Charles Barbaroux.”

“How much will he want? Can we secure him?”

“Oh, dammit all.” De Sillery closed his eyes. He felt tired. “He’s been in Paris since February 11. He had a meeting with the Rolands on March 24.” Laclos would have had a little file on Barbaroux’s burgeoning self-importance, would have tabulated him in his “womanizer” column, with a little star for emphasis. “Do you ever wonder if it’s worth it?” de Sillery said.

It was a question Philippe couldn’t get his mind around. Anything had been worthwhile, any connivance, any shame, any slaughter, if at the end of it you were King of France. Then Félicité had come along and muddled him—and truly she was right, for it wasn’t worthwhile to be King and rapidly dead. But for years now he had been set on a course by the people around him; he had been chivvied and steered, willing or unwilling. There was no time to set another; and he was nearly bankrupt.

“But damn Danton,” he said, “I even let him have Agnès.”

“No one ‘lets’ him have anything,” Charles-Alexis said. “Danton just takes.”

“But he must give too,” Philippe said. “The people will want something from him. What will he give them?”

“He’ll give them one man, one vote. That’s something they’ve never had before.”

“They’ll like that, I suppose. They’ll come out on the streets for that.” The Duke sighed. “All the same, the 14th would have been nice.” When he looked back on ’89, he thought, those were my halcyon days. He voiced the thought.

“Your salad days,” Charles-Alexis said.

July 10, a state of emergency was declared. All over the city there were military bands, and recruiting booths decked with tricolor bunting. From the window of her bedroom Lucile could hear Danton pursuing his own recruiting drive, the noisiest for miles. The first clear expression she saw on the baby’s face looked very like exasperation. When she was well enough to travel she went out to the farm at Bourg-la-Reine. Camille came at the weekend and wrote a very long speech.

The General Council of the Commune met on July 24 to hear it. It was Danton’s manifesto—universal suffrage and universal reponsibility, the citizens of every Section empowered to assemble at any hour, to arm themselves, to mobilize themselves against subversion and imminent attack. When Camille predicted that the monarchy would fall within days, Danton folded his arms, exchanged glances with his nearest colleagues and affected surprise.

“Thank you,” said Pierre Chaumette. “That was what we wanted to hear.”

René Hébert nodded to him. He rubbed his fat white hands together, expressing satisfaction with the way things were going.

Outside City Hall there was a big crowd. It cheered deafeningly when Camille came out. Danton dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder, believing that such popularity should be shared around. “This is different from a year ago,” Camille said, “when we were on the run.” He waved to his well-wishers and blew them a kiss. The crowd laughed and jostled and pushed forward to touch him, as if he were lucky, a lucky charm. They threw up their red caps and began to sing the “Ça Ira” in one of its bloodier versions. Then they sang this new song, the “Marseillaise.”

“Strange beasts,” Danton said mildly. “Let’s hope they perform in a week or two.”

The Duke of Brunswick, the commander-in-chief of the allies, issued a document, a manifesto, a statement of intent. He called upon the French people to lay down their arms and offer no resistance to the invading forces, which came to restore proper authority. Any city that resisted would be laid waste. Every deputy, every National Guardsman and every public official in Paris should consider themselves personally responsible for the safety of the King and Queen. If any violence were offered to the royal family, all such persons would be court-martialed as soon as the allies entered Paris—and they need not hope for pardon. If June’s attack on the Tuileries were repeated, the city of Paris would be utterly destroyed, and its inhabitants exterminated by firing squads.

Danton stood with Caroline Rémy at an upper window at the Palais-Royal. Below, Camille was reading the allies’ declaration to the crowd. “Isn’t he good?” Caroline said. “I must say, Fabre has done a marvelous job there.”

“Brunswick has given us what we needed,” Danton said. “Tell people that they’re to be shot in mass executions, tell people that the Germans are going to pitch them into mass graves—then what have they got to lose?”

He slipped a hand around Caroline’s waist, and she stroked the back of it with her fingers. Below, the people began to shout, chanting their decision at Europe, wave after wave of hilarity and defiance and rage.

(Zoppi’s, on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain. One day in the long history of coffeehouse conspiracy.)

DANTON: I think you all know each other.

LEGENDRE: Get on with it. ’Tisn’t a dinner party.

DANTON: If anyone was in doubt, this is Legendre. This large gentleman’s name is Westermann. He comes from Alsace originally, and we have been acquainted for some time. He is a former army officer.

FABRE [to Camille]: Long time since he was in the army. Small-time Palais-Royal crook.

CAMILLE: Just our sort.

DANTON: This is Antoine Fouquier-Tinville.

LEGENDRE: You remind me of somebody.

DANTON: Fouquier-Tinville is Camille’s cousin.

LEGENDRE: Maybe a very slight resemblance.

FABRE: I don’t see it myself.

HÉRAULT: Perhaps they’re very distant cousins.

FABRE: You don’t have to look like your relations.

HÉRAULT: Perhaps he can speak.

FABRE: Perhaps you have an opinion to offer, Camille’s cousin?

FOUQUIER: Fouquier.

HÉRAULT: Good heavens, you don’t expect us to learn your name? We shall always call you “Camille’s cousin.” It will be easy for us, and humiliating for you.

FRÉRON [to Fouquier]: Your cousin’s weird.

FABRE: He’s a mass murderer.

FRÉRON: He’s a satanist.

FABRE: He’s learning poisoning.

HÉRAULT: And Hebrew.

FRÉRON: He commits adultery.

HÉRAULT: He’s a bloody disgrace.

[Pause. ]

FABRE: See? He hasn’t a spark of cousinly feeling.

FRÉRON: Where’s your family pride?

FOUQUIER [indifferently]: It might all be true. I haven’t seen Camille for a long time.

FRÉRON: Some of it is true. The adultery, and the Hebrew.

FABRE: He might be a satanist. I saw him talking to de Sade once.

HÉRAULT: De Sade isn’t a satanist.

FABRE: Oh, I thought he was.

HÉRAULT: Why are you learning Hebrew, Camille?

CAMILLE: It has to do with my work on the Church Fathers.

DANTON: Oh God.

CAMILLE [whispering to Hérault]: Notice how close together his eyes are. His first wife died in mysterious circumstances.

HÉRAULT [whispering]: Is that true?

CAMILLE: I never make things up.

DANTON: M. Fouquier expresses himself ready to do anything.

HÉRAULT: He’s definitely related to Camille.

LEGENDRE: Can we get on with the planning? [To Fouquier] They treat me like an imbecile. It’s because I’ve got no formal education. Your cousin makes snide remarks about me in foreign languages.

FOUQUIER: Ones you don’t speak?

LEGENDRE: Yes.

FOUQUIER: How do you know then?

LEGENDRE: Are you a lawyer?

FOUQUIER: Yes.

DANTON: I’d say about a week now.

Mousseaux, the residence of the Duke of Orléans: a lack of conviviality, not to say a bleakness, at the Duke’s supper table. Charles-Alexis looked discomfitted—whether because of the pate, or royalist intimidation, the Duke could not say. His unhappy eyes traveled over the pigeon breasts, boned, stuffed with asparagus and morels; they traveled over his guests, and alighted on Robespierre. He looked much as he had in ’89, the Duke thought: same impeccably cut coat (same coat in fact), same correctly powdered hair. It must be rather different, Philippe thought, from the carpenter’s dinner table. Did he sit so upright there, did he eat so little, did he make mental notes? By his glass of wine there was a glass of water. The Duke leaned forward almost timidly, and touched his arm.

PHILIPPE: I feel … perhaps things have gone wrong … the royalists are very strong … the danger is immediate. I mean to leave for England, I beg you to come with me.

DANTON: I’ll cut the throat of any bastard that pulls out now. The fucking thing’s organized. We’re going through with it.

PÉTION: My dear Danton, there are certain problems.

DANTON: And you’re one. Your people just want the King to give them their ministries back, then they’ll be happy. That’s as far as they’re interested in going.

PÉTION: I don’t know what you mean by “my people.” I am not a member of any faction. Factons and parties are injurious to democracy.

DANTON: Tell Brissot. Don’t tell me.

PÉTION: The defense of the palace is being organized right now. There are three hundred gentlemen ready to defend it.

DANTON: Gentlemen? I’m terrified.

PÉTION: I’m just telling you.

DANTON: The more the merrier. They’ll be tripping over each other when they faint.

PÉION: We haven’t enough cartridges.

DANTON: I’ll get you some from the police.

PÉTION: What, officially?

DANTON: I am First Deputy Public Prosecutor. I can manage a simple thing like cartridges, for God’s sake.

PÉTION: There are nine hundred Swiss Guard at the palace, and I’m told they’re very good fighting men and loyal to Capet and that they won’t give up.

DANTON: Make sure they’re not allowed to stock up on ammunition. Come on, Pétion, these are just technicalities.

PÉTION: There is the problem of the National Guard. We know that many individual Guardsmen support us, but they won’t just break ranks, they have to act under orders, or we’re in a totally unpredictable situation. We made a mistake when we allowed the Marquis de Mandat to take over as commander. He’s an out-and-out royalist.

[Philippe thinks, we’ll have to stop using the word in that condemnatory sense, when I become King. ]

PÉTION: We’ll have to remove Mandat.

DANTON: What do you mean, remove him? Kill him, man, kill him. The dead can’t come back.

[Silence]

DANTON: Technicalities.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies.

MME. ELISABETH: There’s nothing to worry about. M. Danton will look after us.