A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 5

A Martyr, a King, a Child

The king’s trial is over. The city gates have been closed. One cannot reign innocently, the Convention has decided. Merely to have been born condemns Louis to die? “That is the logic of the situation,” Saint-Just says calmly.

Five a.m. At a house in the Place Vendôme, all the lights are burning. They have sent for surgeons, the best the republic can offer; they have sent, too, for the artist David, so that he can see what a martyr looks like, so that he can watch moment by moment as death effaces the features and immortality sets them into a better mold. This is the republic’s first martyr, who now hears a babble of voices, some near, half-familiar, some fading and far away; whose senses fade, moment by moment, while his funeral is planned in the next room. He is Michel Lepelletier, once a nobleman, now a deputy. There is nothing to be done for him: not in this world, at any rate.

David takes out his pencils. Lepelletier is an ugly man, that cannot be helped. The features are softening already; an arm lies slack and naked, like the arm of Christ carried to the tomb. The clothes, cut from his body, are stiff and black with blood. David handles the shirt, mentally re-clothes the moribund figure on the bed.

A few hours before, Lepelletier had been dining out, at the Restaurant Feurier in the Jardin de l’Égalité (as we call the Palais-Royal these days). A man approached him—a stranger, but quite friendly—perhaps to congratulate him on his republican firmness in voting for Capet’s death. Affable, but weary after the many all-night sittings, the deputy leaned back in his chair; the stranger produced from his coat a butcher’s knife, and hacked into the deputy’s torso, on the right-hand side below the ribs.

Lepelletier is carried to his brother’s house, intestines torn, blood pumping over his attendants, possessed of a wound that you could put your fist into. “I am cold,” he whispers. “I am cold.” They heap covers on him. He whispers, “I am cold.”

Five a. m.: Robespierre is asleep in his room on the rue Saint-Honoré. His door is locked and double-bolted. Brount lies outside, his jaws gaping a little, his great dreaming paws twitching in pursuit of better days.

Five a. m.: Camille Desmoulins slides out of bed wide awake, as he used to do years before at Louis-le-Grand. Danton wants a speech, to try to force the resignation of Roland from the ministry. Lolotte turns, mutters something, stretches out a hand for him. He tucks the covers round her. “Go back to sleep,” he whispers. Danton will not use the speech. He will hold the pages crumpled in his fist, and make it up as he goes along … . Still, he is not doing this because he has to, but to keep in practice, and to pass the time till dawn.

The cold is like knives against his thin dark skin. He moves quietly, feeling his way across the room, splashing icy water onto his face. If he makes any noise Jeanette will be up to light a fire and to tell him he has a weak chest—which he hasn’t—and to ply him with food he can’t eat. First of all he writes a letter home … “Your son, the regicide.” He reaches for fresh sheets of paper, for the speech. Lolotte’s cat dabs a tentative paw at his pen, its eyes suspicious; he runs a hand over its arched back, watching a reluctant dawn creep up over the eastern suburbs. His candle gutters in a strong draught, and he flicks his head around, taut with apprehension; he is alone, with the black outlines of the furniture and the engravings on the walls. As gently as the cat, his cold fingers brush the barrel of the small pistol in the drawer of his desk. Freezing rain hisses into the mud of the streets.

Seven-thirty a. m.: crouching by a stove in a small room, a priest, and Louis the Last. “There dwells on high an incorruptible judge … you can hear the National Guard beginning to assemble … . What have I done to my cousin Orléans, that he should persecute me in this way? … I can endure everything … these people see daggers and poisons everywhere, they fear I shall destroy myself … . I am occupied, wait for me a few moments … give me your last benediction, and pray that it may please God to support me to the end … . Cléry, my valet, give him my watch and my clothes … .”

Ten-thirty a. m. The coat is snatched away from Sanson’s assistants, and cut up into snippets. Hot pies and gingerbread are for sale in the Place de la Revolution. People are swarming around the scaffold, soaking rags in the spilled blood.

Lepelletier, the martyr, lies in state.

Louis, the King, is quicklimed.

By the end of the first week of February, France is at war with England, Holland and Spain. The National Convention has promised armed support to any people who wish to rise against oppression: war to the châteaux, peace to the cottages. Cambon, of the Finance Committee: “The further we penetrate enemy territory, the more ruinously expensive the war becomes.”

At home there is a food shortage, soaring inflation. In Paris the Commune battles with the Girondist ministers and tries to placate the militants of the Sections; it controls bread prices at three sous, and Minister Roland never ceases to complain about such fecklessness with public money. In the Convention the Mountain is still no more than a vociferous minority.

Jacques Roux, sansculotte, at the Bar of the Convention: “There must be bread, for where there is no more bread there is no more law, no more freedom and no more republic.”

Riots in Lyon, in Orléans, Versailles, Rambouillet, Étampes, in Vendôme, in Courville and here, in the city itself.

Dutard, an employee of the Ministry of the Interior, on the Gironde: “They wish to establish an aristocracy of the rich, of merchants and of men of property … . If I had the choice I should prefer the old regime; the nobles and the priests had some virtues, and these men have none. What do the Jacobins say? It is necessary to put a check on these greedy and depraved men; under the old regime the nobles and the priests made a barrier that they could not pass. But under the new regime there is no limit to their ambitions; they would starve the people. It is necessary to put some barrier in their way, and the only thing to do is to call out the mob.”

Camille Desmoulins, on the Minister Roland: “The people are to you just the necessary means of insurrection; having served to effect a revolution, they are to return to the dust and be forgotten; they are to allow themselves to be led by those who are wiser than they, and who are willing to take the trouble of governing them. Your whole conduct is marked out on these criminal principles.”

Robespierre, on the Gironde: “They think they’re the gentlemen, the proper beneficiaries of the Revolution. We’re just the riff-raff.”

February 10, quite early in the morning, Louise Gély took Antoine to his Uncle Victor’s house. The two babies—the Desmoulins’s child, and François-Georges, who has just had his first birthday—will be shuttled about by their wet nurse, who will try, amid the day’s predicted events, to see that they do not get too hungry.

Louise sprinted back to the Cour du Commerce, and found Angélique in possession of the ground. Her mother said, “Mind, young lady, if it’s going to be tonight, we don’t want you under our feet.”

Angélique said to her, “Don’t sulk, child, it makes you plain.”

Next, Lucile Desmoulins arrived. Nothing would make her plain, Louise thought spitefully. Lucile wore a black wool skirt, an elegant waistcoat; her hair was tied up with a tricolor ribbon. “God above,” she said, throwing herself into a chair, stretching out her legs to admire the toes of her riding boots. “If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s an obstetric drama.”

“I suppose you’d pay somebody to have them for you if you could, my sweet,” Angélique said.

“I certainly would,” Lucile said. “I really think there ought to be some better way of managing about it.”

The women seemed to find things for Louise to do, shutting her out of the conversation. She heard Gabrielle say she was “very sweet, very helpful.” Her cheeks burned. They shouldn’t discuss her.

Then, when Lucile came to go, she turned to Mme. Gély: “Please, if you need me at all, you know I can be here in half a minute.” Lucile’s dark eyes were enormous. “To me, Gabrielle doesn’t seem herself. She says she is afraid. She wishes Georges-Jacques were here.”

“That can’t be helped,” Mme. Gély said harshly. “He has his business in Belgium, it seems, which cannot wait.”

“Stilt—send for me,” Lucile said.

Mme. Gély gave her a curt nod. In her eyes, Gabrielle was a good, pious girl who’d been badly wronged; Lucile was little better than a prostitute.

Gabrielle said she’d like to rest. Louise trailed back upstairs, to the cramped dowdiness of her parents’ apartment. Mid-afternoon, and dusk already. She sat and thought about Claude Dupin. If Lucile knew how serious he was about her—how very soon she might be a wife—would she dare to treat her as a little ninny?

Her mother had smiled, indulgently; but secretly, she was triumphant. Such a good catch! After your next birthday, she said, then we’ll begin to talk about it. Fifteen is too young. Only the aristocracy get married at fifteen.

Claude Dupin himself was only twenty-four, but he was (already, her father said) the secretary-general of the Seine département. She found it hard to get excited about that. But he was good-looking too.

She had taken him to meet Gabrielle a fortnight ago. She had thought him very polished, at his ease; not that Gabrielle would set out to intimidate anyone. She could read approval in Gabrielle’s eyes; she squirmed in pleasure to think that tomorrow she would be able to sit with Gabrielle and talk artlessly, casually, about Claude Dupin and say, didn’t you think he was this, didn’t you think he was that? If Gabrielle were really really in favor, if she liked him as much as she seemed to, then perhaps she’d have a word with her parents, and they’d say, well, you’ve always been grown-up for your age, perhaps fifteen is old enough? Why wait? Life’s too short.

But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully—in poured Citizen Danton and his crew. Introductions were made. “Ah, the infant prodigy,” Citizen Fabre said. “The famous child administrator, a wonder from his cradle. Now let us see what we see.”

And he had viewed Claude Dupin through his lorgnette.

Citizen Hérault had given Claude Dupin a sort of glassy stare, and seemed unable to comprehend who or what he was. “Gabrielle darling,” he had said, and kissed their hostess; he seated himself, poured himself a glass of Citizen Danton’s best cognac and proceeded to amuse in his loud drawly voice with anecdotes about Louis Capet, whom of course he’d known intimately. This was bad, but Citizen Camille was much the worst: “Claude Dupin, I have longed to meet you,” he sighed, “I have lived for this moment.” He curled up in a corner of the sofa, put his head on Gabrielle’s shoulder and fixed his eyes on Claude Dupin’s face: continuing, from time to time, to sigh.

Citizen Danton had subjected Claude Dupin to a sharp interrogation about the départment’s affairs; she did not blame him, it was the way he worked. Claude Dupin was on his mettle, and his replies were intelligent, assertive, she thought; only, when he said anything particularly to the point, Citizen Camille would close his eyes and shiver, as if it were too exciting for him. “So young, and so perfectly bureaucratic,” Fabre murmured. Louise did think that if Gabrielle had any regard for her she might induce Citizen Camille to take his head off her shoulder and stop being so satirical. But Gabrielle seemed to be consumed by merriment. She placed her traitorous arm around Citizen Camille, and looked sickeningly affectionate.

As soon as they had come into the room—she could not deny it—Claude Dupin had seemed to shrink. He looked plain, ordinary. Once Citizen Danton’s questions had been answered, he had lost interest in him. Thereafter, Claude Dupin experienced difficulty in wedging a word into the conversation. She decided it was time to go. She stood up. Claude Dupin stood up too. “Don’t go so soon!” Fabre cried. “You’ll break Camille’s little heart!”

Citizen Danton caught her eye. He made her look up into his unnerving face. He didn’t precisely smile.

She was foolish enough to tell her mother about this upset to her feelings. “I don’t know if he’s … quite what I want. Do you understand me?”

“No, I do not,” her mother said. “Last week on your knees begging me to order up the wedding breakfast, and this week telling me he’s a mere nothing by the side of that evil bunch of people you meet downstairs. We should have kept you at home, we should never have allowed you to mix with them.”

Very quietly, her father reminded her mother that he owed his living to Citizen Danton.

And now, downstairs (she ran up and down, every couple of minutes), Dr. Souberbielle had been in to see Gabrielle, and the midwife had arrived. Angélique Charpentier caught her at the door, shooed her out. “Look, my dear, you think you want to be here, but you don’t. Will you please believe me?” Mme. Charpentier looked, at this stage, quite collected. “Everything is going nicely, just according to time. Off to bed with you, now. In the morning we’ll have a lovely baby for you to play with.”

Upstairs again. She felt a furious resentment. She is my friend. I am her true, her best friend; I cannot help being fifteen, I should be with her, I am the one she wants beside her. She thought, I wonder where Citizen Danton is tonight: and with whom? I don’t, she thought, have as many illusions as they suppose I have.

Ten p.m.: her mother put her head around the door. “Louise, would you come down? Mme. Danton is asking for you.” Her face said, this is against my better judgement.

Vindication! She tripped over her feet in her haste. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “Are you prepared?”

“Of course I am.”

“I warn you, she isn’t well. The labor has not progressed. She has had—I hardly know—some kind of upset, convulsion. Things are not as they should be.”

She ran ahead of her mother. They met the midwife coming out of the room. “You’re not letting this child in?” the woman said. “Madame, I can’t answer …”

“I told her last week,” Louise cried, agonized. “I said I’d be with her. I said, if anything happened, I’d look after the children.”

“Did you? Then you’re a little fool, aren’t you? Making promises you can’t keep.” Her mother lifted her hand, and flicked her smartly on the side of the head.

At midnight, Louise went upstairs again, leaving Gabrielle’s apartment at her own request. She stretched out on her bed, half-dressed. The closed, solemn faces of the women appeared behind her eyelids. Lucile had been there, no longer making a joke about anything; she had sat on the floor, still in her riding boots, Gabrielle’s hand drooping into hers.

Louise slept. God forgive me, she thought later; but I did sleep, and all that had happened wiped itself from my mind, and I dreamed cheerfully, inconsequentially, and of nothing I would later care to report. The morning’s first traffic woke her. It was February 11. The building seemed quite silent. She got up, washed in a perfunctory way, pulled herself into her clothes. She opened the door into her parents’ bedroom, just a crack; looked in, saw her father snoring, saw that her mother’s side of the bed had not been disturbed. She drank half a glass of stale, flat water, quickly unplaited and combed out her hair. She ran downstairs. On the landing, she met Mme. Charpentier. “Madame—”she said.

Angélique was muffled into her cape, her shoulders drawn up, her eyes on the ground. She pushed past Louise. She didn’t seem to see her at all; her face was glazed, streaked, angry. Then at the head of the stairs she stopped. She turned back. She said nothing; but then she seemed to feel that she must speak. “We lost her,” she said. “She’s gone, my sweetheart. My little girl has gone.” She walked outside, into the rain.

Inside the apartment the fires had not been lit. On a footstool in the corner sat the nurse, Lucile Desmoulins’s baby fastened to her breast. She looked up when she saw Louise, and covered the baby’s face with her hand, protectively. “Run away now,” she said to her.

Louise said, “Tell me what has happened.”

Only then did the woman seem to realize that she had seen Louise before. “From upstairs?” she said. “Didn’t you know? Five o’clock. That poor lady, she was always good to me. Jesus grant her rest.”

“The baby?” Louise said. She had gone ice-cold. “Because I said I would take care of it …”

“A little boy. You can’t be sure, but I don’t think we’ll have him long. My friend was to take him, who lives by me. Mme. Charpentier says that will be all right.”

“Whatever,” Louise said. “If the arrangements were made. Where is François-Georges?”

“With Mme. Desmoulins.”

“I’ll go and get him.”

“He’s all right for an hour or two, I should leave him—”

Oh God, Louise thought. I made promises. She saw in a minute that the babies were not moral bonds, but physical beings, with fragile, impatient demands she could not fulfill.

“Mme. Danton’s husband will be coming home,” the woman said. “He will say what should be done and who should go where. You don’t need to worry your little head.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Louise said. “Madame said I was to look after them. Promises have to be kept.”

It took time for the message to get through. It was five days later, February 16, when Georges-Jacques turned up at home. His wife was buried, but there had not been time to tidy her away; and besides, they had waited on his wishes, as if they knew not to preempt him, as if they could predict the violence of his anger and guilt and grief.

Her dresses hung limp in a closet, like victims of torture. Under the old regime, women had been burned alive, and men broken on the wheel; had they suffered more than she had? He didn’t know. No one would tell him. No one wanted him to have any details. In this death house, drawers and chests exhaled a light flower scent. Cupboards were in order. She had kept an inventory of the china, he found. Two days before her death, she’d dropped a cup. At Sèvres just now they were designing a new demitasse. As you sip your mocha you may admire the dripping head of Capet—scattering golden drops of blood, and held in Sanson’s golden hand.

The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half-finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked.

And this is it.