A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 3

The Visible Exercise of Power

Danton thought: ambassadors give me a headache. For part of the day, every day, he had stared mutely at maps, turning the continent over in his mind, Turkey, Sweden, England, Venice … . Keep England out of this war. Beg and pray neutrality. Keep the English fleet out of it … and yet with English agents everywhere, talk of sabotage and forgery … . Yes, of course Robespierre is right, England is fundamentally hostile. But if we get into that sort of war, will we get out, within our natural lifetimes? Not, he thinks sourly, that we expect to have those.

Since he left office, some of this is no longer his direct concern. But there is enough to occupy him: the pressure for the King’s trial, the stupidity and divisiveness of the Brissotins. Even after the Robespierricide, he clings to a half-faith in their good intentions. He had not wanted to be pulled into the struggle; but they have taken all his choices away.

Soon, perhaps within a year, he hopes to be out of Paris. Perhaps he is deluding himself, but he hopes to leave it all in the hands of other people. With the Prussians driven out, those houses and farms are secured to him. And the children—Antoine is growing up sturdily, and François-Georges is a fat, contented baby, he’s not going to die. Also the new child. In Arcis, Gabrielle will begin to understand him better. Whatever he has done, whatever their differences of opinion, he is committed to her, he feels. In the country, they are going to be ordinary people again.

It is when he’s had too much to drink that he imagines this simple future for himself. It is a pity that it is so often Camille who is around at these times to disabuse him of his dreams, leaving him lachrymose, or raging against the trap of power he thinks he has fallen into. Whether at other times he believes in this future … He can hardly understand his pursuit of Lucile, because of the complications it makes. Yet it continues …

“I don’t like palaces. I’m glad to be home.” So Gabrielle says. Some version of the feeling seems to be general. Camille is glad to be parting from his staff, and his staff are glad to be parting from Camille. As Danton says, now we can find a lot of other things to worry about. Lucile does not entirely share the general feeling. She has enjoyed sweeping down grand staircases, the visible exercise of power.

At least in returning home she is relieved of Gabrielle’s company, and of Louise Robert’s. In recent weeks Louise has been applying her novelist’s imagination to their ménage—and what a lot of imagination novelists have! “Observe,” she says, “the expression of pleasure and interest Camille wears when Danton deigns to maul his wife about in his presence! Why don’t you three set up house together when you leave here? Isn’t that what it’s coming to?”

“And,” said Fabre, “may I come to breakfast?”

“I’m sick,” Louise said, “of this drama you’re playing out, man falls in love with best friend’s wife, how tragic, etc., how terrible to be human. Tragic? You can hardly keep the grins off your faces.”

Yes, it was true; they hardly could, and that included Danton. Luckily Gabrielle had been elsewhere for the gifted writer’s outburst. Gabrielle had been kind to her, in the past; but in the present, she is relentlessly morose. She’s put on a lot of weight, with this pregnancy; she moves slowly, says she can’t breathe, says the city stifles her. Luckily, Gabrielle’s parents have just sold their house at Fontenay and moved to Sèvres, bought two properties set in parkland. One house they’ll live in; one is for their daughter and son-in-law to use when they like. The Charpentiers have never been poor, but the likelihood is that Georges-Jacques has put up the money; he just doesn’t want people to know how much cash he’s laying out these days.

So, Lucile thinks, Gabrielle has the prospect of escape; but in her apartment at the rue des Cordeliers, she sits still and silent, in the conscious postures of pregnant women. Sometimes she cries; this chit Louise Gély trips down the stairs to join her in a few sniffles. Gabrielle is crying for her marriage, her soul and her king; Louise is crying, she supposes, for a broken doll or a kitten run over in the street. Can’t stand it, she thinks. Men are better company.

Fréron was safely home from his mission in Metz. You would never know, from his journalism, that Rabbit had once been a gentleman. He was a good writer—the trade was in his blood—but his opinions grew steadily more violent, as if it was a contest and he badly wanted to win; at times you couldn’t distinguish his work from Marat’s. Despite his new ferocity, her other beaux considered him the one from whom they had nothing to fear. Yet she had been heard to ask him once, earnestly: “Will you always be there, in case I need you?” He had replied that he would be there for time and eternity: things like that. The problem—week to week—was that he had the status of Old Family Friend. So at weekends he could come out to the farm at Bourg-la-République. There he would follow her around, and try to get her alone. Poor Rabbit. His chances were nil.

It was difficult, sometimes, to remember that there was a Mme. Fréron, and a Mme. Hérault de Séchelles.

Hérault called in the evenings, when the Jacobins were in session. Bores, he called them, dreadful bores. In fact politics fascinated him; but he did not suppose it could fascinate her, and so he set out to strike a sympathetic chord. “They are discussing economic controls,” he would say, “and how to quiet these ludicrous sansculotte agitators, with their continual whine about the price of bread and candles. Hébert does not know whether to ridicule them or take them up.”

“Hébert is prospering,” she would suggest sweetly, and he would say, “Yes, at the Commune, Hébert and Chaumette are such a force—” and then he would break off, feeling foolish, realizing he’d been sidetracked again.

Hérault was Danton’s friend, he sat with the Mountain, but he could not mend a single aristocratic way. “It is not just your speech, your manner, but your whole way of thinking that is profoundly aristocratic,” she told him.

“Oh, no, no. Surely not. Very modern. Very republican.”

“Your attitude to me, for instance. You can’t put it out of your mind that before the Revolution I would have fallen flat on my back in simulated adoration if you had even glanced in my direction. If I hadn’t, my family would have given me a push. And at that, it might not have been simulated. The way women thought then.”

“If that’s true,” he said, “and of course it is true, how does it affect our situation today?” (He thinks, women don’t change.) “I’m not trying to exercise any prerogative over you. I simply want to see you have some pleasure in your life.”

She folded her hands over her heart. “Altruism!”

“Dear Lucile. The worst thing your husband has done to you is to make you sarcastic.”

“I was always sarcastic.”

“I find it to hard to believe. Camille manipulates people.”

“Oh, so do I.”

“He is always trying to convince people that he is harmless, so that the stab in the back will be a greater shock to them. Saint-Just, whom I do not unreservedly admire—”

“Oh, change the subject. I don’t like Saint-Just.”

“Why is that, I wonder?”

“I don’t think I like his politics. And he frightens me.”

“But his politics are Robespierre’s—which means they are your husband’s, and Danton’s.”

“We shall have to see about that. Saint-Just’s main aim seems to be to improve people, along the lines of some plan that he has in his head, and which—I must say—he has difficulty articulating to the rest of us. Now, you cannot accuse Camille and Georges-Jacques of trying to improve people. In fact quite the opposite, most of the time.”

Hérault looked thoughtful. “You’re not stupid, are you, Lucile?”

“Well, I used to be. But intelligence rubs off.”

“The trouble is, with Saint-Just, Camille sets out to antagonize him.”

“Of course he does—and on every level. We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles.”

“Oh dear,” Hérault said. “I was planning a seduction, tonight. We seem to have got sidetracked.”

“You might as well have gone to the Jacobins.” She gave him a nice smile. Hérault looked depressed.

Whenever he was in Paris, General Dillon called. It was a pleasure to see him, with his splendid height and his chestnut head and his knack of looking younger and younger. Valmy did him good, no doubt; there’s nothing like Victory to perk a man up. Dillon never talked about the war. He’d call in the afternoons, when the Convention was in session. His approach was so interesting that it had to be elevated to a strategy; she was moved to discuss it with Camille, and he agreed that it was marvelously oblique. For whereas Rabbit dropped mournful hints about Camille’s infidelities, and Hérault raged at her that she must be unhappy and he could change that, the general simply sat and told her stories, about life in Martinique, or about the splendid silliness of Court life before the Revolution; he told her how his little daughter, Lucile’s age exactly, had been advised never to stand in a strong light, in case her glowing complexion made the fading Queen spiteful. He told her the history of his mad, distinguished Franco-Irish family. He retailed the idiosyncracies of his second wife, Laure, and of various pretty, vacuous mistresses from the past. He described the fauna of the West Indies, the heat, the blue of the sea, the green tangled hillsides that tumbled into the sea, the flowers that blew and rotted in the bud; he described the imbecile ceremonial that attended the Governor of Tobago, alias himself. In sum, he told her how pleasant life had been for a member of an old and distinguished family who had never worried about money or anything else and who was extremely good-looking and polished and in addition highly adaptable.

From there he would go on to tell her what a truly special young man she had married. He could quote at admiring length from Camille’s writings: with some accuracy. He explained to her—to her—that sensitive people like Camille should be allowed to do exactly as they liked, provided it was not criminal, or not too criminal at any rate.

Then, every so often, he would put an arm round her and try to kiss her, and say to her, dear little Lucile, let me make love to you properly. When she said no, he would look incredulous, and ask her why she didn’t enjoy life more. Surely she didn’t think Camille would mind?

What they did not know, these gentlemen, what they did not understand, was—well, anything about her, really. They did not know about the exquisite torture she had devised for herself, the rack upon which her days and weeks were stretched. Quite coldly, she puts herself to the question, and the question is this: what if anything happened to Camille? What if—not to put too fine a point on it—someone assassinated him? (God knows, if she were an assassin, she’d be tempted.) Of course, she has asked herself this before, since ’89 it has been her preoccupation; but now she is more obsessed with him, not less. Nothing had prepared her for this; the received wisdom about a love match is that, after a year’s delirium, the emotions settle down. Nobody had even hinted to her that you could go on falling in love and falling in love, till you felt quite ill with it, spiritually sick and depleted, as if you were losing your essence day by day. If Camille were not here—if he were permanently not here—what would lie before her would be a sort of semi-demi-half-life, dragged out for duty, sick and cold and stumbling towards death; the important part of her would be dead already. If anything happened to him I’d kill myself, she thought; I’d make it official, so at least they could bury me. My mother would look after the baby.

Of course, she didn’t speak about this torture program. People would think she was foolish. Camille, these days, was almost knitting his weaknesses into strengths. Legendre reproached him for not speaking more in the Convention. “My dear Legendre,” he said, “everyone has not your lungs.” You are, his smile suggested, blundering, crass, self-important. His colleagues on the Mountain relied on him for interpreting the ravings of Marat, with whom only he and Fréron were on terms. (Marat has a new opponent, a loud-mouthed sansculotte ex-priest who calls himself Jacques Roux.)

“You are two centuries ahead of your time,” Camille told him. Marat, more livid and reptilian by the day, blinked at him. It might have been appreciation.

What Camille wanted now was a Convention without the Brissotins, and the King and Queen on trial. He went avid and bright-eyed into the winter of ’92. When he was at home, she was happy; she could work on her imitations, which (her mother and sister agree) now approach perfection. When he was not at home, she sat by the window and watched for him. She talked to everybody about him, in a very bored tone.

No one was frightened of the allies, for this year at least: or only the quartermasters, supervising the issue of moldy bread and paper-soled boots, watching the peasants spit on the government’s bank notes and hold out their paws for gold. The Republic was younger than her child. This child, his view still largely supine, watched the world with round, obsidian eyes, and smiled indiscriminately. Robespierre called to see how his godson did, and her mother’s old friends came in the afternoons, and gave him their fingers to hold, and told pointless stories about their own children as babies. Camille carried him around and whispered to him, assuring him that his path in life should be made smooth, that his every whim should be attended to, that because of his evident natural wisdom he would never need to go away to any unspeakable school. Her mother fussed over the little thing, showed him the cat and the sky and the trees. But she felt, though she was ashamed of the feeling, that she didn’t want to furnish the baby’s mind; she was a tenant with a short lease.

To reach the house where Marat lives, you walk through a narrow passage between two shops and across a small courtyard with a well in the corner. On the right is a stone staircase with an iron handrail. Go up to the first floor.

After you have knocked, you must withstand the inspection of one, perhaps both of the Marat women. This will take time. Albertine, the sister from some unimaginable childhood, is a fierce, starved scrap of a woman. Simone Evrard has a serene oval face, brown hair, a grave and generous mouth. Today they are not suspicious of their visitor. The way is clear; the People’s Friend sits in his parlor. “I like the way you come running to me,” he says, meaning that he doesn’t like it at all.

“I am not running,” Camille said. “I came here at a furtive slouch.”

Marat at home. Simone, the common-law wife, put in front of them a pot of coffee, bitter and black. “If it is a matter of discussing the crimes of the Brissotins,” she said, “you will be here for some time. Let me know if you need a candle.”

“Are you here on your own behalf,” Marat said, “or have you been sent?”

“Anyone would think you didn’t like having visitors.”

“I want to know whether Danton or Robespierre has sent you, or who.”

“I think they’d both welcome your help with Brissot.”

“Brissot makes me sick.” Marat always said this: such a person makes me sick. And they did, they had. “He’s always acted as if he ran the Revolution, as if it were something of his making—setting himself up as an expert on foreign affairs, just because he’s had to skip the country so many times to avoid the police. If it were a matter of that, I would be the expert.”

“We have to attack Brissot on every front,” Camille said. “His life before the Revolution, his philosophy, his associates, his conduct in every patriotic crisis from May ’89 to last September—”

“He cheated me, you know, over the English edition of my Chains of Slavery. He conspired with his publishers to pirate my work, and I never saw a penny.”

Camille looked up. “Good God, you don’t want us to allege that against him?”

“And ever since he made this trip to the United States—”

“Yes, I know, personally he’s insufferable, but that’s not the point.”

“For me it is. I suffer enough.”

“He was a police spy, before the Revolution.”

“Yes,” Marat said. “He was.”

“Put your name on a pamphlet with me.”

“No.”

“Cooperate, for once.”

“Geese go in flocks,” Marat said, precisely.

“All right, I’ll do it by myself. I only want to know if he has anything on you, anything really destructive.”

“My life has been conducted on the highest principles.”

“You mean nobody knows anything about you.”

“Try not to offend me,” Marat said. It was a plain, useful piece of advice.

“Let’s get on,” Camille said. “We can hold up his actions before the Revolution, which were deliberate betrayals of old future comrades, his monarchist pronouncements, which I have newspaper cuttings to verify: his vacillation in July ’89—”

“Which was?”

“Well, he has that jumpy look about him all the time, someone will be sure to remember that he vacillated. Then his involvement with Lafayette, his part in the attempted escape of the Capet family and his secret communication afterwards with the Capet woman and the Emperor.”

“Good, good,” Marat said. “Very good so far.”

“His efforts to sabotage the Revolution of August 10 and his false accusation that certain patriots were involved in the killings in the prisons. His advocacy of destructive federalist policies. Remembering, of course, that in the early days he was closely involved with certain aristocrats—Mirabeau, for instance, and Orléans.”

“You have a touching faith in the shortness of people’s memories. I dare say it is justified. However, though Mirabeau is dead, Orléans is still sitting beside us in the Convention.”

“But I was thinking ahead, to next spring, say. Robespierre feels Philippe’s position is untenable. He recognizes that he has been of some service to the people, but he would rather that all the Bourbons were out of France. He would like Philippe to take his whole family to England. We could give them a pension, he says.”

“What, we could give Philippe money? How novel!” Marat said. “But yes—next spring—you are right. Let the Brissotins run out their rope for another six months. Then—snap.” Marat looked satisfied.

“I hope we will be able to accuse them all—Brissot, Roland, Vergniaud—of creating obstacles and delays to the King’s trial. Even perhaps of voting to keep him alive. Again, I’m thinking ahead.”

“Of course, there might be other people who will wish delays, obstacles, what have you. In this matter of Louis Capet.”

“I think we can get Robespierre over his horror of the death sentence.”

“Yes, but I don’t mean Robespierre. I think you will find Danton absenting himself at that time. I think it entirely possible that the activities of General Dumouriez in Belgium will call him away.”

“What activities, particularly?”

“There is sure to be a crisis in Belgium soon. Are our troops liberating the country, or are they annexing it, or are they somehow doing both? Who is General Dumouriez making his conquests for? The Republic? Or the defunct monarchy? Or perhaps for himself? Someone will have to go and sort the situation out, and it will have to be someone with the ultimate personal authority. I can’t see Robespierre leaving his paperwork to go wallowing about in the mud with the armies. Much more Danton’s sort of thing—high-level skulduggery, loot, military bands, and all the women of an occupied territory.”

The slow, wheezy drawl in which Marat articulated all this had a chilling effect of his own. “I’ll tell him,” Camille said.

“You do that. As for Brissot—looked at in a certain way, it becomes obvious that he was conspiring against the Revolution all along. Yet he and his cronies, they have entrenched themselves—and it will need vigor to expel them from public life.”

His habituation, now, to the current of Marat’s speech made him look up. “You do mean that, I suppose—expel them from public life? You don’t mean anything worse, do you?”

“Just when one imagined you were beginning to face reality,” Marat said. “Or is this some hope of your two queasy masters? Robespierre knew in September what had to be done, in the crisis; but since then, oh, he has grown very nice.”

Camille sat with his head resting on his hand. He twisted a curl of hair around his finger. “I’ve known Brissot a long time.”

“We have known evil since the moment of our births,” Marat said, “but we do not tolerate it on that account.”

“That is just phrase making.”

“Yes. Cheapskate profundity.”

“It is a pity. Kings have always killed their opponents, but we were supposed to reason with ours.”

“At the front, people die for their mistakes. Why should politicians be more gently treated? They made the war. They deserve a dozen deaths, each of them. What can we try them for, except for treason, and how can you punish treason, except by death?”

“Yes, I see.” Camille began drawing patterns with his fingernail on the dusty table before them, but stopped when he realized what he was doing.

Marat smiled. “There was a time, Camille, when aristocrats flocked to my house, wanting my cure for the consumption. Their carriages sometimes blocked the streets. I kept a handsome equipage myself. My dress was immaculate, and I was known for the calm graciousness of my manner.”

“Of course,” Camille said.

“You were a schoolchild, you know nothing about it.”

“Did you cure consumption?”

“Sometimes. When there was enough faith. Tell me, do you people who began the Cordeliers ever go there now?”

“Sometimes. Other people run it. That’s not a problem.”

“The sansculottes have taken over.”

“In effect.”

“While you move in higher spheres.”

“I know what you are saying. But we are still quite able to handle a street meeting. We aren’t drawing-room revolutionaries. One doesn’t have to live in squalor—”

“Enough,” Marat said. “It is just that I am exercised about our sans-culottes.”

“Jacques Roux, this priest—but that’s not really his name?”

“Oh no—but then perhaps you think Marat is not mine?”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No. But idiots like Roux divert the minds of the people. When they should be thinking of purifying the Revolution, they encourage them to loot grocers’ shops.”

“There is always someone ready to pose as the champion of the oppressed poor,” Camille said. “I don’t know what is the use of it. The situation of the poor does not change. It is just that the people who think it can change are admired by posterity.”

“Just so. What they will not realize, what they will not accept, is that the poor are going to be driven like pack animals through this Revolution and every other. Where would we have been in ’89 if we had waited for the sansculottes? We made the Revolution in the cafés and took it out onto the streets. Now Roux wants to kick it into the gutter. And every one of them—Roux and all that mob—are agents of the allies.”

“Knowingly, you mean?”

“What does it matter if they serve the enemy interests because they’re wicked, or because they’re stupid? They do it. They sabotage the Revolution from within.”

“Even Hébert is beginning to speak out against them. Enragés, people are calling them. Ultra-revolutionaries.”

Marat spat on the floor. Camille jumped violently. “They are not ultra-revolutionaries. They are not revolutionaries at all. They are atavists. Their idea of social betterment is a god in the sky who throws down bread every day. But a fool like Hébert wouldn’t see that. No, I have no more affection for Père Duchesne than you have.”

“Perhaps Hébert is a secret Brissotin?”

Marat laughed sourly. “Camille, you progress, you progress. Hébert has defamed you, I think—and yes, you’ll have his head, when the time comes. But a few others will fall, before that one. Let’s, as the women say, let’s get Christmas over, and then we’ll see what we can do to put this Revolution on the right lines. I wonder if our masters realize what assets we are? You with your sweet smile, and me with my sharp knife.”

Hébert, Le Père Duchesne, on the Rolands:

Some days ago a half-dozen of the sansculottes went in deputation to the house of the old humbug Roland. Unfortunately they arrived just as dinner was being served … . Our sansculottes pass along the corridor and arrive in the antechamber of the virtuous Roland. They are unable to make their way through the crowd of lackeys that fill it. Twenty cooks bearing the finest fricassees cry, “Take care, clear the way, these are the virtuous Roland’s entrées.” Others carry the virtuous Roland’s hors d’oeuvres, others carry the virtuous Roland’s roasts, others again the virtuous Roland’s side dishes. “What do you want?” the virtuous Roland’s valet asks the deputation.

“We want to speak with the virtuous Roland.”

The valet goes to take the message to the virtuous Roland, who comes out, looking sulky, his mouth full, with a napkin over his arm. “The republic must surely be in danger,” says he, “for me to be obliged to leave my dinner like this.” … Louvet with his papier-mâché face and hollow eyes was casting lascivious glances at the virtuous Roland’s wife. One of the deputation tries to pass though the pantry without a light, and overturns the virtuous Roland’s dessert. At the news of the loss of the dessert, the virtuous Roland’s wife tears her false hair with rage.

“Hébert is getting very silly,” Lucile said. “When I think of those notorious turnips that were served to Georges-Jacques!” She passed the newspaper to Camille. “Will the sansculottes believe this?”

“Oh yes. They believe every word. They don’t know that Hébert keeps a carriage. They think he is Père Duchesne, that he smokes a pipe and makes furnaces.”

“Can no one enlighten them?”

“Hébert and I are supposed to be allies. Colleagues.” He shakes his head. He does not mention his afternoon with Marat. Mostly, he would not like his wife to know what is going on in his head.

“So you must go?” Maurice Duplay said.

“What can I do? She is my sister, she feels that we should have a home of our own.”

“But this is your home.”

“Charlotte doesn’t understand that.”

“Mark my words, he’ll be back,” says Mme. Duplay.

Condorcet, the Girondist, on Robespierre:

One wonders why there are so many women who follow Robespierre. It is because the French Revolution is a religion, and Robespierre is a priest. It is obvious that his power is all on the distaff side. Robespierre preaches, Robespierre censures … He lives on nothing and has no physical needs. He has only one mission—to talk—and he talks almost all the time. He harangues the Jacobins when he can attract some disciples there, he keeps quiet when he might damage his authority … . He has given himself a reputation for austerity that borders on saintliness. He is followed by women and weak people, he soberly receives their adoration and their homage.

ROBESPIERRE: We’ve had two revolutions now. In ’89 and last August. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference to people’s lives.

DANTON: Roland and Brissot and Vergniaud are aristocrats.

ROBESPIERRE: Well—

DANTON: In the new sense of the word, I mean. Revolution is a great battlefield of semantics.

ROBESPIERRE: Perhaps we need another revolution.

DANTON: Not to pussyfoot about.

ROBESPIERRE: Quite.

DANTON: But with your well-known views, your scruples about taking life …?

ROBESPIERRE [without much hope]: Cannot change be profound without being violent?

DANTON: I can’t see my way to it.

ROBESPIERRE: Innocent people suffer. But then perhaps there are no innocent people. Possibly it’s just a cliché. It rolls off the tongue.

DANTON: What about all these conspirators?

ROBESPIERRE: They are the ones who should be suffering.

DANTON: How do you tell a conspirator?

ROBESPIERRE: Put them on trial.

DANTON: What if you know they’re conspirators, but you haven’t enough evidence to convict them? What if you as a patriot just know?

ROBESPIERRE: You ought to be able to make it stand up in court.

DANTON: Suppose you can’t? You might not be able to use your strongest evidence. It might be state secrets.

ROBESPIERRE: You’d have to let them go, in that case. But it would be unfortunate.

DANTON: It would, wouldn’t it? If the Austrians were at the gates? And you were delivering the city over to them out of respect for the judicial process?

ROBESPIERRE: Well, I suppose you’d … you’d have to alter the standard of proof in court. Or widen the definition of conspiracy.

DANTON: You would, would you?

ROBESPIERRE: Would that be an example of a lesser evil averting a greater one? I am not usually taken in by this simple, very comforting, very infantile notion—but I know that a successful conspiracy against the French people could lead to genocide.

DANTON: Perverting justice is a very great evil in itself. It leaves no hope of amendment.

ROBESPIERRE: Look, Danton, I don’t know, I’m not a theorist.

DANTON: I know that. You’re a practitioner. I know all about the sneaky little slaughters you try to fix up behind my back.

ROBESPIERRE: Why do you condone the death of a thousand, and balk at two politicians?

DANTON: Because I know them, I suppose, Roland and Brissot. I don’t know the thousand. Call it a failure of imagination.

ROBESPIERRE: If you couldn’t prove things in court, I suppose you could detain your suspects without trial.

DANTON: Could you indeed? It’s you idealists who make the best tyrants.

ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I’ve had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year.

A few days later Robespierre was back at the Duplays’: his head throbbing from three sleepless nights in a row, a giant hand wringing his intestines. Chalk-white and shaky, he sat with Mme. Duplay in the small room filled with his portraits. He didn’t much resemble any of them; he didn’t think he’d ever look healthy again.

“Everything is as you left it,” she said. “Dr. Souberbielle has been sent for. You are under a great strain, and you can’t tolerate any disturbance in your life.” She covered his hand with her own. “We have been like people bereaved. Eléonore has hardly eaten, and I’ve not been able to get two words out of her. You must never go away again.”

Charlotte came, but they told her that he had taken a sleeping draught, and that she should please lower her voice. They would let her know, they said, when he was well enough for visitors.

Sèvres, the last day of November: Gabrielle had lit the lamps. They were alone; the children at her mother’s house, the circus left behind in the rue des Cordeliers. “You’re going to Belgium?” she said. This is why he has turned up tonight; to give her this news, and then go.

“You remember Westermann, don’t you? General Westermann?”

“Yes. The man who Fabre says is a crook. You brought him home with you on August 10.”

“I don’t know why he says that. Anyway, whatever Westermann has been, he’s an important man now, and he’s come back from the front himself as a messenger from Dumouriez. That will tell you how urgent it is.”

“Wouldn’t a government courier have been as fast? Has he wings on his heels as a result of his promotion?”

“He has come himself to impress on us the gravity of the situation. I think that Dumouriez would have come in person, if he could have been spared.”

“That tells us something. Westermann can be spared.”

“It’s like talking to Camille,” he grumbled.

“Is it? Do you know you have collected some of his mannerisms yourself? When I knew you at first you never used to wave your hands around so much. They say that if you keep a pet dog, after a while you grow to look like it. It must be something the same.”

She got up and moved to the window, looking out over the lawns crisp with frost; a small November moon showed to her a lost drifting face. “August, September, October, November,” she said. “It seems a lifetime.”

“You like the new house? You are comfortable here?”

“Oh, yes. But I didn’t think I’d be alone here so much.”

“You’d prefer to go back to Paris? It’s warmer at the apartment. I’ll take you tonight.”

She shook her head. “I’m fine here. I’ve got my parents.” She looked up at him. “I will miss you, though, Georges.”

“I’m sorry. It’s unavoidable.”

Darkness was gathering in the corners of the room. The fire blazed up; shadows leapt and plunged across his dark scarred face. Carefully he kept his hands still, left fist in right palm, his body hunched forward to the warmth, his elbows on his knees. “We’ve known for a long time that Dumouriez had problems. He can’t get supplies, and the English have flooded the country with counterfeit money. Dumouriez is quarreling with the War Office—he doesn’t like people safe in Paris querying what he does in the field. And the Convention doesn’t expect to see him propping up the existing order as he does—they expect the Revolution to be propagated. It is a complicated situation, Gabrielle.” He reached forward to put another log on the fire. “Beechwood,” he said. “It burns well.” An owl hooted from the copse. The watchdog grumbled under the window. “Not like Brount,” he said. “Brount just watches, he doesn’t make a noise.”

“So there is an emergency? Dumouriez wants someone to come and see his problems on the spot?”

“Two of the commission have set out already. Deputy Lacroix and I are to go tomorrow.”

“Who is Lacroix?”

“He’s … well … a lawyer.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Jean-François.”

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know—forty?”

“Is he married?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“What does he look like?”

Danton thought. “Nothing much. Look, he’ll probably tell me his life story on the journey. If he does, I’ll tell it to you when I get back.”

She sat down, hitched her chair around, to protect her cheek from the heat of the blaze. Face half in shadow, she said, “How long will you be away?”

“It’s hard to say. I might even be back in a week. You can be sure we’ll not waste any time, with Louis’s trial going forward here.”

“Are you really so anxious to be in at the kill, Georges?”

“Is that what you think of me?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said wearily. “I am sure that, like Belgium and General Dumouriez and everything else, it is much more complicated than I know. But I know it will end with the King’s death, unless someone with your influence takes his part. The whole Convention is to try him, you say—and I know you can sway the Convention. I understand your power.”

“But what you don’t understand is the consequence of exercising it. Let’s drop the subject, shall we? I have only an hour.”

“Is Robespierre better?”

“He is—at least, he spoke in the Convention today.”

“And he’s staying with the Duplays now?”

“Yes.” Danton sat back in his chair. “They’re keeping Charlotte away from him. What I hear is, she sent her servant round with some jam, and Mme. Duplay wouldn’t let the girl in. She sent a message back that she didn’t want him poisoned.”

“Poor old Charlotte.” Gabrielle half-smiled. His face showed relief. She was diverted to the trivial, the domestic: to where he preferred her.

“It is only two months now. And perhaps a week.” To the birth of the child, she meant. She pushed herself from her chair, crossed the room; she drew the heavy curtains against the night. “You will at least be back to see the new year in with me?”

“I’ll try my best.”

When he had gone, she put her head back against a cushion and fell into a doze. The clock ticked on towards the small hours, and embers rustled into the grate. Outside the owl’s wings beat the cold air, and small animals screamed in the undergrowth. She dreamt she was a child again, at morning, in the sun. Then the sounds of the pursuit entered her dreams, and she became, by turns, the hunter and the prey.

Robespierre to the Convention, January:

There is no case to plead here. Louis is not a defendant, you are not judges. If Louis can be tried, Louis can be acquitted; he may be innocent. But if Louis can be acquitted, if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the Revolution? … You have no verdict to give for or against a man, but a measure of public safety to adopt, an act of Providence to carry out … . Louis must die so that the nation can live.