A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 7

Carnivores

At the top of the Queen’s Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in.

That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions. At this stage people call it the Danton Committee, wondering what he is doing in that green sanctum, green wallpaper, his elbows propped on the great oval table covered by a green cloth. He finds the color negative, disturbing. A crystal chandelier tinkles above his head; the mirrored walls reflect his bull neck and scarred face. Sometimes he looks out of the windows, over the gardens. In the Place Louis XV, now the Place de la Revolution, the guillotine is at work. From this room, as he negotiates for peace, he imagines he can hear Sanson making a living; hear the creak of the machine’s moving parts, the clump of the blade. Army officers, for the moment; at least they should know how to die.

In April there were seven executions; undramatically, the numbers will increase. The Section committees will be very ready to yelp for arrests, very quick with their accusations that such a one is a lukewarm patriot, aristo sympathizer, black marketeer or priest. House searches, food issue, recruiting, passports, denunciations: hard to know where the Section committees end and the good offices of the Commune begin. There was a day when the Palais-Royal was cordoned off by the police, and all the girls were herded together. Their identity cards were taken from them; for an hour or so, they stood barracking their captors in small flocks, their faces hard and hopeless under their paint; then the cards were handed back, they were told to go where they liked. The little Terror of Pierre Chaumette.

From here he has to watch the Austrians and the Prussians, the English and the Swedes; the Russians and the Turks and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; Lyon, Marseille, the Vendee and the public gallery; Marat at the Jacobin Club and Hébert at the Cordeliers; the Commune and the Section committees and the Tribunal and the press. Sometimes he sits and thinks of his dead wife. He cannot imagine the summer without her. He is very tired. He begins to stay away from the Jacobins and the evening meetings of the Committee. Danton is letting his reputation slide, some people say: he is letting go. Other people say he wouldn’t dare. Sometimes Robespierre comes to see him, panicked and asthmatical, twitching at the sleeves and collars of his very correct clothes. Robespierre is turning into a caricature of himself, Lucile remarks. When Danton is not at home, with little Louise skirting around him, he is with the Desmoulins, living with them practically, as Camille once lived with him.

His pursuit of Lucile is a formality now, a habit. He begins to see how different she is from the earnest, busy, simple women he requires for his domestic comfort. After a day poring over her Rousseau she would announce a scheme for a bucolic retirement from the capital, and drive into the country with her infant, screaming at being separated from his grandmother; there she would formulate plans for his education. Her hair streaming down her back and a large straw hat on her head, she would do a little dilettante weeding in the herb beds, by way of getting close to nature; she would read poetry in the afternoon, in a garden swing under an apple tree, and go to bed at nine o’clock.

Two days pass, and the bawling of Robespierre’s godchild would be driving her out of her mind; scattering orders about the sending after of fresh eggs and salad, she would charge back to the rue des Cordeliers, worrying all the way about missing her music lessons and whether her husband has left her. You look a complete wreck, she would say to him crossly; what have you been eating, whoever have you been sleeping with? Then for a week it will be parties and staying up all night; the baby departs to grandmother, nurse scuttling after.

In a different kind of mood, she takes up her station early, on the blue chaise-longue; she is wrapped so deeply in daydreams that no one dares to interrupt her, no one dares to say a word. One day she stirs from her reverie and says, do you know, Georges-Jacques, I sometimes think I may have fantasized the Revolution completely—it seems too unlikely to be true. And Camille—what if he is something I have simply fabricated, just a phantom I have called up out of the depth of my nature, a ghostly second self who works out my discontents?

He thinks of this, and then of his own creations: two dead children, and a woman killed—he believes—by unkindness; his plans for peace aborted, and now the Tribunal.

The Tribunal sits at the Palais de Justice, in a hall adjoining the prison of the Conciergerie: a gothic hall, marble-flagged. Its president, Montané, is a moderate man, but when necessary he will be replaced. Come next autumn, we will have the spectacle of Vice President Dumas, a red-faced, red-haired man, who is sometimes assisted to his place in an alcoholic daze. He presides with two loaded pistols on the table before him, and his apartment in the rue de Seine is like a fortress.

The Tribunal has a pool of jurors, proven patriots, chosen by the Convention. Souberbielle, Robespierre’s doctor, is one of them; he rushes distractedly between the courtroom, his hospital and his most important private patient. Maurice Duplay is also a juror. He dislikes the work and never talks about it at home. Another, Citizen Renaudin, is a violin maker by profession and responsible for a sudden flare-up of violence at the Jacobins one evening, one of the causeless, chilling incidents that are always happening these days; standing up to oppose Citizen Desmoulins, he despairs of logic, advances on him and knocks him clear across the room. Pounced on by the ushers, dragged out by brute force, his voice is heard even over the indignant bawling of the public galleries: “Next time I’ll kill you, next time I’ll kill you.”

The Public Prosecutor is Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, a quick, dark man, who takes up moral stances: not such a showy patriot as his cousin, but far more hardworking.

The Tribunal often acquits: in these early days, at least. Take Marat, for instance; he is indicted by the Gironde, Citizen Fouquier is perfunctory, the courtroom is packed with Maratists from the streets. The Tribunal throws the case out: a singing, chanting mob carries the accused shoulder-high to the Convention, through the streets and to the Jacobin Club, where they enthrone the grinning little demagogue in the president’s chair.

In May, the National Convention moves from the Riding School to the former theater of the Tuileries, which is refurbished for it. Entertain no notion of pink, dimpling Cupids, the crimson curve of boxes, powder and perfume, the rustle of silk. Think of this scenery: straight lines and right angles, plaster statues with plaster crowns; of plaster laurel and plaster oak. A square tribune for the speaker; behind it, hung almost horizontal, three immense tricolor flags; beside it, memento mori, the bust of Lepelletier. The deputies take their seats in a tiered semi-circle; they are without desks or tables, so that they have nowhere to write. The president has his handbell, his inkstand, his folio book; much they avail him, when three thousand insurrectionists pour from the Faubourgs and mill about on the floor below him. Sunlight slides narrowly through the deep windows; on winter afternoons, faces loom, indistinct, from hostile benches. When the lamps are lit, the effect is ghastly; they deliberate in catacombs, and accusation drips from unseen mouths. In a greater dimness, the public galleries barrack and bay.

In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: “I’ll slaughter you!” “First,” says the deputy, “have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.” And one day a Brissotin stumbles, mounting the nine awkward steps to the tribune: “It’s like mounting the scaffold,” he complains. Delighted, the Left yells at him: make use of the rehearsal. A weary deputy puts his hand to his head, sees Robespierre watching him and withdraws it hurriedly: “No, no,” he says, “he will suppose I am thinking of something.”

As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats. While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.

The Section committees sit in disused churches. Republican slogans are scrawled in black paint on the walls. From these committees you obtain your card of citizenship, with a note of your address, employment, age and appearance: a copy is forwarded to City Hall.

Women hawkers go from door to door, with big baskets of linen for sale; under the linen are fresh eggs and butter, which are far more desirable. The men in the wood yards are always on strike for more pay, and firewood costs twice what it did in ’89. Poultry may be obtained, at midnight and for a price, in an alley at the back of the Café du Foy.

A child passed by the market, carrying a loaf; a woman who had the tricolor cockade in her hat threw him down, seized the bread, tore it into pieces and threw it away, saying that, since she had none, she did not want others to have any. The citizenesses of the market pointed out to her the stupidity of such an act; she screamed abuse at them, telling them that they were all aristocrats, and soon all women over thirty years of age would be guillotined.

Robespierre sat propped up on four pillows. Convalescent now, he looked young again. His curly red-brown hair was unpowdered. There were papers all over the bed. The room smelt faintly of orange peel.

“Dr. Souberbielle says, no, no, you must not eat oranges, Citizen. But I can’t eat anything else. He says, your addiction to citrus fruits is such that I cannot be responsible for you. Marat sent me a note—Cornélia, my dear, could you get me some more cold water? But very cold, I mean?”

“Of course.” She reached for the jug, bustled out.

“Well done,” Camille said.

“Yes, but I have to keep thinking of increasingly difficult things I want. I always told you that women were nothing but a damned nuisance.”

“Yes, but your experience was only academic then.”

“Bring your chair over here. I can’t raise my voice much. I don’t know what we’re going to do in the new hall, I know it was a theater but it’s no better. The only people we’ll be able to hear are Georges-Jacques and Legendre. It was bad enough at Versailles, and then the Riding School, and now this—I’ve had a sore throat for four years.”

“Don’t talk about it. I have to speak at the Jacobins tonight.”

His pamphlet against Brissot was already in the press, and the club—tonight—would vote to reprint and distribute it. But they wanted to see and hear him. Robespierre understood: one must be seen and heard. “I can’t afford to be ill,” he said. “What about Brissot, has he been seen around much?”

“No.”

“Vergniaud?”

“No.”

“If they’re so quiet they must be plotting something.”

“There’s your sister Charlotte arriving downstairs. Why can I hear everything today?”

“Maurice has stopped the men working. He thinks I have a headache. That’s good, anyway. Eléonore will have to stay downstairs to see that Charlotte doesn’t come up.”

“Poor Charlotte.”

“Yes, but poor Eléonore, too, I suppose. While I think about it, you might ask Danton not to be so rude about her. I know she’s rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven’t seen her. Danton keeps telling people. Ask him not to talk about her.”

“Send another messenger.”

“Tell me,” Robespierre said irritably, “why doesn’t he come to see me? Danton, I mean. Tell him from me that he’s got to make this Committee work. They’re all patriots, he must mobilize them. The only thing that will save us now is a strong central authority—the ministers are ciphers, the Convention is factious, so it must be the Committee.”

“Hush,” Camille said. “Think of your throat.”

“The Gironde are trying to make the country ungovernable by stirring up the provinces against us, and the Committee must keep a close watch—tell him the ministers mustn’t do anything without the Committee’s say-so. He must have a written report every day from every département—but what’s the matter, is that not a good idea?”

“Max, I know you’re frustrated because you want to make a speech—but you’re supposed to be taking a complete rest, aren’t you? Of course one doesn’t mind the Committee having such power, if it’s run by Danton. But the Committee is elective, isn’t it?”

“If he wants to stay elected, then he will. How is he, by the way? I mean, in himself?”

“Brooding.”

“He will think of marrying again, I suppose.”

Maurice Duplay opened the door. “Your water,” he whispered. “Sorry. Eléonore—I mean Cornélia—is downstairs entertaining your sister. You don’t want to see her, do you? No, of course you don’t. How’s your head?”

“I haven’t got a headache,” Robespierre said loudly.

“Shh. We have to get him back on his feet,” Duplay hissed at Camille. “It’s a pity he’ll miss hearing you tonight. I’ll be there.” Camille put his hands over his face. Duplay patted him on the shoulder and tiptoed out. “Don’t make him laugh,” he mouthed from the doorway.

“Oh, this is ludicrous,” Robespierre said, and began to laugh a little anyway.

“What were you saying about Marat? He sent you a note?”

“Yes, he is ill, too, he can’t leave his house. Did you hear about that girl, Anne Théroigne?”

“What’s she done now?”

“She was making a speech in the Tuileries gardens, and a group of women attacked her—rough women from the public gallery. She’s attached herself to Brissot and his faction, for some reason only she understands—I can’t believe Brissot is delighted. She found the wrong audience—I don’t know, but perhaps they thought she was some woman of fashion intruding on their patch. Marat was passing by, it seems.”

“So he joined in?”

“He rescued her. Charged in, told the women to desist—rare chivalry, for the doctor, wasn’t it? He believes they might have killed her.”

“I wish they had,” Camille said. “Excuse me for a moment from the necessity to do invalid talk, I can’t be temperate about this matter. I will never forgive the bitch for what she did on August 10.”

“Oh well, Louis Suleau—of course, we had known him for all those years, but he ended up on the wrong side, didn’t he?” Robespierre dropped his head back against the pillows. “And then, so did she.”

“That is a callous thing to say.”

“It might happen to us. I mean, if we follow our judgements, our consciences, and if they lead us in certain directions, we may have to suffer for it. Brissot—after all—may be in good faith.”

“But I have just written this pamphlet—Brissot is a conspirator against the Republic—”

“So you have convinced yourself. So you’ll convince the Jacobins tonight. Certainly in power his people have been mistaken, stupid, criminally negligent, and we have to erase them from political life.”

“But Max, you wanted them killed in September. You tried to set it up.”

“I thought it was best to be rid of them before they did anymore damage. I thought of the lives that might be saved … .” He moved his legs, and some of the papers slithered to the floor. “It was a considered judgement. And Danton,” he smiled slightly, “has been wary of me since then. He thinks I am an unpredictable beast, with the key to my own cage.”

“And yet you say Brissot may be in good faith.”

“Camille, we’re judging by results, not intentions. Quite possibly he isn’t guilty of what you’ll charge him with tonight, but I’ll let you do it. I want them out of the Convention—but myself, I’d be happy if it went no further. The damage is done, we can’t recall the past by persecuting them. But the people won’t see things like that. They can’t be expected to.”

“You would save them. If you could.”

“No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won’t dispute it.”

Camille had walked away, turning his back, running his hand along the grain of the shelves that Maurice Duplay had built. Above them on the wall was a curious emblem he had carved: a great and splendid eagle with outstretched claws, like an eagle of the Romans.

“Such heroism,” Camille said slowly, “and in a nightshirt too. Policy is the servant of reason. It is a sort of blasphemy to make human reason contradict itself and advise in the name of policy what it forbids in the name of morality.”

“You say that,” Robespierre said tiredly, “yet you are corrupted.”

“What, by money?”

“No. There are more ways than that of being corrupted. You can be corrupted by friendship. Your attachments are too … too vehement. Your hatreds are too sudden, too strong.”

“You mean Mirabeau, don’t you? You’ll never let that topic go. I know he used me, and he used me to propagate sentiments in which—it turned out—he didn’t believe. But now you—it turns out—are just the same. You don’t believe a word of what you ‘let’ me say. I find this hard to accept.”

“In a way,” Robespierre said patiently, “if we want to rise above being like Suleau, and the girl, we have to avoid the snares of what we personally believe, hope for—and see ourselves just as instruments of a destiny that has been worked out already. You know, there would have been a Revolution, even if we had never been born.”

“I don’t think I believe that,” Camille said. “I think it injures my place in the universe to believe that.” He started picking up the papers from the floor. “If you really want to annoy Eléonore, I mean Comélia,” he said, “you can keep throwing them on the floor and asking for them again, like the baby does. Lolotte gets out of the way when she sees that trick starting.”

“Thank you, I’ll try.” A spasm of coughing.

“Has Saint-Just been to see you?”

“No. He has no patience with illness.”

Under Robespierre’s eyes there were deep purple stains against the skin. Camille remembered his sister, in the months before her death. He pushed the thought aside; refused to have it. “It’s all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you’re an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don’t you take a holiday?”

“Well, still, our individual fate is some concern of ours. If I took a holiday, Brissot and Roland and Vergniaud would start planning to cut off my head.”

“You said you wouldn’t mind. You’d sort of take it in your stride.”

“Yes, but there are things I want to do first. And it wouldn’t be a very pleasant vacation, thinking about it, would it?”

“Saints don’t take holidays,” Camille said. “And I prefer to think that although we are instruments of destiny, no one else will do, because we are like saints, agents of a divine purpose, and filled with the grace of God.”

Charlotte was on her way out too. She was getting worse than she deserved, he thought. They stood on the rue Honore and tears spilled out of her eyes and down her pert, feline face. “He wouldn’t treat me like this if he knew how I felt,” she said. “Those monstrous women are turning him into something that none of us will recognize. They make him smug, they make him think about himself all the time, how wonderful he is. Yes, he is wonderful, but he doesn’t need telling. Oh, he has no common sense, he has no sense of proportion.

He took her back to the rue des Cordeliers. Annette was there. She looked Charlotte over very carefully, and listened to her problems. She always looked, these days, like a person who could give advice but never did.

Everyone was coming that evening to sit in reserved places in the gallery at the Jacobins. “It will be a triumph,” Lolotte said. As the afternoon wore on, panic began to fight inside him like cats in a sack.

What kind of fear is it? He can take any number of fights with violin makers: that isn’t a problem. What he hates is that creeping sense of the big occasion; the hour approaching, the minutes ticking away; that gathering up of papers and conspicuous walk to the tribune, with a perceptible swell and rustle of animosity detectable as soon as he leaves his place. Claude had said, “You are the Establishment now”; but that is not quite true. Most of the deputies of the Center and Right think he should not be a member of the Convention, that his extreme views and his advocacy of violence should exclude him; when he gets up to speak they shout, “Lanteme Attorney” and “septembriseur.” Some days this gives him a jaunty feeling, feeds his arrogance; other days it makes him feel sick and cold. How could you know in advance which sort of day it was going to be?

The day the Gironde brought in their indictment against Marat—that had been one of the bad ones. They had packed the benches with their supporters; when you looked up at the Mountain, it was surprising how many people had stayed away. Who will speak up for Marat, mad and poisonous and repellent? He will. And they must have expected it, for the noise was orchestrated; we will put Marat on trial, they yelled, and you with him. Much more, in the usual vein: blood drinker. Get down from the tribune, they yell, before we drag you down; four years of revolution, and he is as much under threat as he ever was at the Palais-Royal, when the police closed in.

He had stood his ground for as long as he could, but the president was helpless, indicated by a gesture of his hands that there was nothing to be done. What the deputies felt for Marat was an extremity of loathing and dread, and they had transferred those feelings to him, and he was aware—one must always be aware—that the deputies do not attend sittings unarmed. Danton would have faced them out, he would have dominated them, forced their taunts back down their throats; but he did not have those abilities. He stopped trying to speak, contented himself with one long glance over the howling benches: nodded to the president, pushed back his hair, said to himself, “Well, Dr. Marat, first blood to them.”

When he walked shakily back to the Mountain’s benches, Danton was not there, Robespierre was not there; they wanted no involvement in this matter. François Robert, who was afraid of Marat and detested him, looked away. Fabre glanced towards him, raised one eyebrow, bit his lip. Antoine Saint-Just gave him a half-smile. “That cost you an effort, didn’t it?” Camille had said fiercely. He’d wished desperately to be outside, to breathe less hostile air, but if he had walked out at once, the Right would have added that to their list of triumphs: not only did we silence Marat’s chief supporter, but we also drove him out of our hall.

After an interval, he was able to pick his way out, into the gardens of the Tuileries. Four years in stale and airless rooms; four years of contention and fright. Georges-Jacques thinks the Revolution is something to make money out of, but now the Revolution is exacting its own price. Most of his colleagues have taken to alcohol, some to opium; some of them have developed a repertoire of strange and sudden illnesses, others have a habit of bursting into unmanly tears in the middle of the day’s business. Marat is an insomniac; his cousin Fouquier, the Public Prosecutor, has confided in him that he is harassed every night by dreams of dead people trailing him in the street. He is, by the general standard, coping quite well; but he is not equipped for an upset like today’s.

He had become aware, at this point, that two men were following him. Making his decision, he turned to face them. They were two of the soldiers who guarded the National Convention. They approached to within three paces. He put his hand to his heart. He was taken aback by the small flat tone of his own voice. “Of course, you’ve come to arrest me. I suppose the Convention has just decreed it.”

“No, Citizen, it’s not that. If we’d come to arrest you there’d be more than two of us. It is only that we saw you walking here by yourself and we know these are evil times and we were mindful of the way the good Citizen Lepelletier was struck down and died.”

“Yes, of course. Not that there would be much you could do. Unless you were minded to step heroically in the way?” he said hopefully.

“We might catch somebody,” the soldier said. “An assassin. We’re always on the lookout for these conspirators, you know, just as Citizen Robespierre tells us. Now—” He hesitated, turned to his colleague, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. “Oh yes—can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?”

“The grave,” Camille said. “The grave.”

“Only would you,” said the second soldier, “take your hand away from that pistol that you’ve got in your coat pocket? It’s making me nervous.”

That day—and that second of freakish despair—was not a day he wished to remember. Tonight at the Jacobins he will be—for the most part—among friends. Danton will be there, and so he will sit in his usual place beside him. Danton will be deliberately silent, impassive, knowing that one cannot talk or joke his nervousness away. When the time comes he will make his way slowly towards the tribune, because patriots will step out of their places to embrace him, and from the dark parts of the gallery where the sansculottes gather there will be applause and coarse shouts of encouragement. Then silence; and as he begins, thinking carefully ahead so that he can control any tendency to stutter, so that he can circumvent words and pluck them out and slot in others, he will be thinking, no wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now; when we are dead and a few years have passed they will grow tired of trying to hear us, they will say, what does it matter? We have elected our own place in the silences of history, with our weak lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed for something else.

COUR DU COMMERCE:

GÉLY: Have pity on us, Monsieur.

DANTON: Pity? What do you want pity for? Personally I’d have thought it was a stroke of good luck for you.

GÉLY: We have only one child.

MME. LY: He wants to kill her like he killed his first wife.

GÉLY: Be quiet.

DANTON: Oh, let her say it. Let her get it out of her system.

GÉLY: We don’t understand why you want her.

DANTON: I have a certain feeling for her.

MME. GÉLY: You might at least have the grace to say you love her.

DANTON: It seems to me that’s something you find out about a few years on.

GÉLY: There are more suitable people.

DANTON: That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?

GÉLY: She’s fifteen.

DANTON: I’m thirty-three. Marriages like that are made every day.

GÉLY: We thought you were older than that.

DANTON: She’s not marrying me for my looks.

GÉLY: Why not a widow, someone experienced?

DANTON: Experienced in what? You know, if you think I have this gigantic sexual appetite, it’s just a myth I put about, I’m quite normal really.

MME. GÉLY: Please.

DANTON: Perhaps after all you should send this female out of the room.

GÉLY: I meant experienced in bringing up a family.

DANTON: The children are attached to her. As she is, to them. Ask her. Also, I don’t want a middle-aged woman, I want more children. She knows how to run a household. My wife taught her.

GÉLY: But you entertain, you receive important visitors. She wouldn’t know about all that.

DANTON: Anything I decide on is good enough for them.

MME. GÉLY: You are the most arrogant person alive. It’s beyond belief.

DANTON: Well, if you do feel so sorry for my friends, you can always come down and advise her. If you feel qualified. Look, she can have an army of servants if she wants. We can move to a bigger place, that might be a good thing all round, I don’t know why I stay here, habit I suppose. I’m a rich man. All she has to do is to say what she wants and she can have it. Her children will inherit from me equally with the children of my first marriage.

GÉLY: She isn’t for sale.

DANTON: She can have a bloody private chapel and a priest of her own, if she wants. As long as he’s a priest loyal to the constitution.

LOUISE: Monsieur, I’m not marrying you in a civil ceremony. I may as well tell you that now.

DANTON: I beg your pardon, my love?

LOUISE: What I mean is, all right, I’ll go through that silly business at City Hall. But there must be a real marriage, too, with a real priest who hasn’t taken the oath.

DANTON: Why?

LOUISE: It wouldn’t be a proper marriage otherwise. We’d be living in a state of sin, and our children would be illegitimate.

DANTON: Little fool—don’t you know God’s a revolutionary?

LOUISE: A proper priest.

DANTON: Do you know what you’re asking?

LOUISE: Or not at all.

DANTON: You’d better think again.

LOUISE: I’m trying to make you do the right thing.

DANTON: I appreciate that, but when you’re my wife you’ll do as you’re told, and you can begin now.

LOUISE: That’s the only condition I’m making.

DANTON: Louise, I’m not used to having conditions made to me.

LOUISE: This is a good start.

Having failed in their offensive against Marat, the Girondist deputies set up a new committee, to investigate those persons who—they say—are prejudicing the authority of the National Convention. This committee arrests Hébert. Pressure from the Sections and the Commune forces his release. May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into “permanent session”—what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term! May 31, the tocsin rings at three in the morning. The city gates are closed.

Robespierre: “I invite the people to demonstrate in the Convention itself and drive out the corrupt deputies … . I declare that, having received from the people the mission of defending their rights, I regard as my oppressor whoever interrupts me or refuses to let me speak, and I declare I will lead a revolt against the president and all the members who try to silence me. I declare that I will punish traitors myself, and I promise to look upon every conspirator as my personal enemy … .”

Isnard, a Girondist, president of the Convention: “If there should be any attack made on the representatives of the nation, then I declare to you in the name of the whole country that Paris would be utterly destroyed—people would be searching along the banks of the Seine to find out whether Paris had ever existed.”

“For the last few days people haven’t been sleeping at home,” Buzot said. “It isn’t safe. Have you thought of leaving now?”

“No,” Manon said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You have a child.”

She put her head back against a cushion, stretching her smooth white throat for him to notice. “That”—she closed her eyes—“can’t be allowed to influence my actions.”

“It would, for most women.”

“I’m not most women. You know that.” She opened her eyes. “Do you think I’m without feeling? That’s not it. But there is more at stake here than my feelings. I am not leaving Paris.”

“The Sections are in insurrection.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I am ashamed. That it should come to this. After all we’ve worked and hoped for.”

The moment of languor was gone; she sat up, her face alight. “Don’t give up! Why should you talk like this? We have the majority in the Convention. What does Robespierre think he can do against our numbers?”

“You should never underestimate what Robespierre can do.”

“To think that I offered him the shelter of my house, at the time of the Champs-de-Mars! I esteemed him. I thought him the citadel of everything that was logical and reasonable and decent.”

“You aren’t the only person whose judgement he’s led astray,” he said. “Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn’t. You made the wrong choice, my love, you should have held out your hand to Danton.”

“That blackguard repels me.”

“I did not mean in the literal sense.”

“Shall I tell you what Danton thinks? None of you seems to know. In his eyes you, my husband, Brissot, all of you—you’re a collection of mild-mannered, played-out intellectuals. The men for him are cynics with strong stomachs, flatterers, carnivores—men who destroy for the love of destruction. That is why he treats you with contempt.”

“No, Manon, that’s not true. He offered to negotiate. He offered a truce. We turned him down.”

“So you say, but in fact you know it is not possible to negotiate with him. He lays down terms, and he expects you to fall in with them. In the end, he always gets his way.”

“Yes, possibly you’re right. So there’s not much left, is there? And us, Manon—we’ve had nothing.”

“The thing about nothing,” she said, “is that Danton can’t take it away.”

Armed demonstrations outside the Convention. Inside, delegates from the Sections with the list of deputies they wanted ejected and proscribed. Still the majority wouldn’t crack. Robespierre was as white as the sheet of paper that slipped once from his hand; he clung for support to the tribune, and between each sentence there was a labored pause. Vergniaud called out, “Finish, then!” Robespierre’s head snapped back. “Yes, I’ll finish you.”

Two days later, the Convention was surrounded by an immense crowd, mostly armed, which rapid estimates put at eighty thousand strong; in the front ranks were National Guardsmen, with fixed bayonets and cannon. The people’s demand was for the expulsion of twenty-nine deputies. Among them were Buzot, Vergniaud, Pétion, Louvet, Brissot. It seemed the Guardsmen and the sansculottes intended to imprison the deputies till they agreed. Hérault de Séchelles, who was president that day, led a crococile of deputies from the hall into the open air; this gesture, it was hoped, would defuse the mutual hostility. The gunners stood by their cannon. Their commandant glared down from his horse and harangued the president of the Convention. He was to understand that he, Hérault, was regarded as a patriot; but he was to understand that the people would not be thwarted.

Hérault smiled, an abstracted smile. He and his colleagues were putting the final touch to the republican constitution, the document that would give France freedom forever: and here—“One perfectly grasps the situation,” he remarked, scarcely audible. Walking before the long procession, he led the trapped men back into the chamber. A number of good sansculottes were now lounging on the benches, exchanging compliments with those deputies of the Mountain who knew exactly what was going on and who had not troubled to stir.

Deputy Couthon, the saint in the wheelchair, had the floor: “Citizens, all members of the Convention should now be assured of their liberty. You have marched out to the People. You have found them everywhere good, generous and incapable of threatening the security of their delegates—but indignant against conspirators who wish to enslave them. Now that you recognize that you are free in your deliberations, I move a decree of accusation against the denounced members.”

Robespierre put his head in his hands. Given the unlikely nonsense that the saint had just spouted, perhaps he was laughing? Or perhaps he was feeling ill again? No one dared to ask. Each bout of sickness left him perversely strengthened, it seemed.

Manon Roland spent a day in the president’s antechamber, waiting, a black shawl over her head. Vergniaud brought her the bad news hour by hour. She had written an address to the Convention which she wished to read out, but each time the door opened a terrifying riot of noise washed over her. Vergniaud said, “You can see for yourself what the situation is. No one can address the deputies while the present tumult continues. You might, as a woman, receive a little more respect, but frankly—”He shook his head.

She waited. The next time he came in, he said, “An hour and a half, maybe, but I can’t promise that. Nor can I promise what sort of reception you’ll get.”

An hour and a half? She had already been away from home too long. She did not know where her husband was. Still—she had waited all day, she would stay a little longer, go through with it. “I’m not afraid, Vergniaud. Perhaps I can say things that you can’t say. Warn our friends,” she said. “Tell them to be ready to support me.”

“Most of them are not here, Manon.”

She gaped at him. “Where then?”

He shrugged. “Our friends have spirit. But I’m afraid they have no stamina.”

She left, took a cab to Louvet’s house. He wasn’t there. Another cab—home. The streets were crowded, the carriage moved at a walking pace. She called out to the driver to stop. She climbed down, paid him. She began to walk rapidly, then breathlessly, the dark cloth pulled about her face, like a guilty woman in a novel running to meet her lover.

At the gate of her house, the concierge took her by the arm; Monsieur has locked up and gone, he went to the landlord’s apartment, there at the back. She beat on the door. Roland had already left, they said. Where? A house down the street. “Madame, rest just a little, he is safe, take a glass of wine.”

She sat down before the empty grate; it was June after all, and the night was fine, still, warm. They brought her a glass of wine. “Not so strong,” she said. “Cut it with water.” All the same, her head swam.

He was not at the next house; but she found him at the one after that. She found him pacing the floor. She was surprised; she had imagined his long bony frame folded into a chair, coughing, coughing. “Manon,” he said to her, “we must go. Look, I have friends, I have plans. We leave this damn city tonight.”

She sat down. They brought her a cup of chocolate with cream floating on top. She said, “This is a nice thing to have.” The richness soothed her throat, the throat in which words had died.

“You understand?” he said. “There is no question of false heroics, of sitting the situation out. I am compelled to take steps to save myself in case at some future date it is necessary for me to resume office. I must preserve myself if I am to be of any use to the nation. You understand?”

“I understand. I myself, I must go back to the Convention tonight.”

“But Manon—think of your safety, think of our child’s safety—”

She put her cup down. “How strange,” she said. “It’s not late, and yet it feels as if it is.” Their lives were being rolled away around them. They were like the tenants of an empty house; when the removers have finished, you are left with the bare floors, the forgotten bit of cracked china, the dust you have disturbed. They were like the last diners in a café, when the clocks are chiming with menace and the waiters are clearing their throats; you must conclude your conversation now, you must split the bill, and go out into the cold street. Rising neatly, she crossed the room to him. He stood still. Reaching up, she kissed his cheek, feeling with her lips the bones of the skull beneath.

“Did you betray me?” he said. “Oh, did you betray me?”

She put her finger softly for a second against his lips, and then her cheek against his, catching for a second the faint mephitic odor of his diseased lungs. “Never,” she said. “Take great care now. Avoid spirits and any meat that is not well cooked. Do not touch milk unless you can get it from somewhere clean. Eat a little poached white fish. Drink an infusion of valerian if you feel agitated. Keep your chest and throat warm, don’t go out in the rain. Take a warm drink to help you sleep. Write to me.”

She closed the door softly behind her. She would never see him again.