A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 8

Imperfect Contrition

“I think we were somewhat—er—infirm of purpose,” Danton said. “House arrest proved not to be very effective. We must remember that for the future. I know we have the little lady secure, but I would rather have had her husband, and Buzot, and some of the others who are now on their way to cozy provincial bolt holes.”

“Exile,” Robespierre said. “Outlawry. I wouldn’t call the condition of a fugitive comfortable. Anyway, they’re gone.”

“To stir up trouble.”

“The troublemakers in the provinces are mostly making royalist trouble.” Robespierre began to cough. “Damn.” He dabbed his lips with his handkerchief. “Most of our Girondist absconders are regicides. Still, I’m sure they’ll try their best.”

Danton was discomfitted. Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you’ll find that you’ve fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you’ll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you’ll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday’s conviction, and today you’ll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved.

Brissot was on his way to Chartres, his hometown; from there to the south. Pétion and Barbaroux were headed for Caen, in Normandy.

“This attic you live in …” Danton said to the priest. He was dismayed. In his experience priests always attended to their comfort.

“It’s not too bad now the winter’s over. Better than prison, anyway.”

“Oh, you’ve been in prison?” The priest didn’t answer. “I wonder, Father, why you dress like a banker’s clerk, or a respectable shopkeeper? Should you not be sansculotte?”

“In the places where I go, I am less conspicuous dressed like this.”

“You minister to the middle classes?”

“Not exclusively.”

“And you find that they cling to the old order? That surprises me.”

“The working people are very much afraid of authority, M. Danton, whoever represents it. And are much occupied, as always, with getting together the necessities of life.”

“And in consequence are spiritually degraded, you mean?”

“Monsieur, you did not come to argue politics with a priest. You know my function. I render to Caesar, otherwise I do not concern myself.”

“But you don’t think I’m Caesar, do you? You can’t claim to be above politics but pick and choose your Caesar.”

“Monsieur, you came so that I could hear your confession, before your marriage to a daughter of the church. Please don’t argue, because in this matter you can’t win or lose. The case is unfamiliar to you, I know.”

“May I know your name?”

“I am Father Keravenen. Once of Saint-Sulpice. Would you care for us to begin?”

“It must be half a lifetime since I did this. It taxes the memory, half a lifetime.”

“But you are a young man still.”

“Ah yes. But the years have been crowded with incident.”

“When you were a child you were taught to examine your conscience each night. Have you left off that practice?”

“A man must sleep.”

The priest smiled sadly. “Perhaps I can help you. You are a son of the church, you have had no dealings I suppose with one heresy or the other—you have been lax perhaps, but you recognize that the church is the one true church, that it is the route to salvation?”

“If there is salvation, I can’t see any other route to it.”

“You do believe in God, Monsieur?”

Danton thought. “Yes. But … I would add a list of qualifications to that.”

“Let the one word stand, would be my advice. It is not for us to add qualifications. Your own worship, your obligations as a Catholic—you have performed them, or neglected them?”

“Refused them.”

“But those in your care—you have provided for their spiritual welfare?”

“My children are baptized.”

“Good.” The priest seemed easily encouraged. He looked up. The keenness of his eyes took Danton by surprise.

“Shall we survey the field of your possible derelictions? Murder?”

“Not as such.”

“You can say this in full confidence?”

“This is a sacrament of the church, is it not? It is not a debate in the National Convention.”

“Point taken,” said the priest. “And the sins of the flesh?”

“Yes, most of those. The common ones, you know. Adultery.”

“How many times?”

“I don’t keep a diary, Father, like some lovesick girl.”

“You are sorry for it?”

“The sin? Yes.”

“Because you see how it offends God?”

“Because my wife is dead.”

“What you express is imperfect contrition—that which arises from our human apprehension of punishment and pain—rather than that perfect contrition which arises from the love of God. Nevertheless, it is all that the church requires.”

“I know the theory, Father.”

“And you have a firm purpose of amendment?”

“I intend to be faithful to my second wife.”

“I might now come to other matters—to envy, perhaps, to anger, pride …”

“Ah, the Deadly Sins. Put me down for the whole seven. No, leave out sloth. Put in rather that I have been too diligent. A bit more sloth, and I might not have been so sinful in other directions.”

“And then, calumny—”

“That’s the politician’s stock-in-trade, Father.”

“Again, Monsieur, when you were a child you were taught of the two sins against the Holy Ghost: presumption and despair.”

“My tendency these days is more towards despair.”

“You know I don’t speak of mundane matters—I speak of spiritual despair. Despair of salvation.”

“No, I don’t despair of it. Who knows? God’s mercy is very strange. That’s what I say to myself.”

“Monsieur, it is to your credit that you have come here today. You have set your foot upon the path.”

“And what’s at the end of it?”

“At the end of the path is the face of the crucified Christ.”

Danton shuddered. “So you will give me absolution?”

The priest inclined his head.

“I’m not much of a penitent.”

“God is willing to stretch a point.” The priest raised his hand. He inscribed a cross on the air; he murmured the formula. “It is a beginning, M. Danton,” he said. “I told you I had been in prison—I was so fortunate as to escape, last September.”

“Where have you been since?”

“Never mind that. Only know that I shall be there when you need me.”

“At the Jacobins last night—”

“Don’t tell me, Camille.”

“They said, where is Danton? Missing again!”

“I am occupied with the Committee.”

“Mm. Sometimes. Not often enough.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of the Committee.”

“I approve of you.”

“And?”

“And if you go on as you do now you’ll not be re-elected.”

“Doesn’t this remind you of anything? When you were first married, and you wanted a bit of time to yourself? And Robespierre used to come round and nag you and hector you and lecture you on your public duties? Look, I think you should be the first to know. I’m going to marry Gély’s daughter.”

“Imagine!” Camille said.

“We plan to sign the marriage contract in four days’ time. Will you glance over it for me? In my allegedly giddy and irresponsible frame of mind, I might have put the words in the wrong order. And, you know, a mistake could be expensive.”

“Why—is there something unusual about the settlement?”

“I’m turning over my property to her. The whole of it. I shall manage it during my lifetime.”

There was a long silence. Danton broke it. “You never know. I might meet with an accident. At the hands of the state. If I lose my head, there’s no reason why I should also lose my land. Now, why are you exhibiting symptoms of rage?”

“Get another lawyer,” Camille shouted at him. “I refuse to be party to your decline and fall.”

He slammed out of the room.

Louise came down from the apartment above. She looked up into his face, very solemn; put her child’s hands in his. “Where has Camille gone?”

“Oh, to see Robespierre, I expect. He always goes to Robespierre, when we have a row.”

Perhaps, Louise thought, one day he’ll not come back. She didn’t voice this; her husband-to-be was, she realized, in many ways a vulnerable man. “You know each other very well, you and Camille,” she said.

“Intolerably well. So my love, I have a thing to say to you—no, nothing to do with politics at all, just a specific word of warning. If I ever come into a room and find you alone with Camille, I’ll kill you.”

“If you ever find me alone with Camille, one of us will be dead.”

“I wish you every happiness, Danton,” Robespierre said. “Camille says you’ve gone mad but, good heavens, I suppose you know your own mind. There’s just one thing I would say—if you will pardon me—that your attitude to your public duties in the last two months has not been all that the Republic is entitled to expect.”

“What about your increasingly frequent illnesses, Robespierre?”

“I can’t help those.”

“I can’t help getting married. I must have women.”

“We see you must,” Robespierre murmured, “but need they occupy so much of your time? Can’t you satisfy yourself and then get back to work?”

“Satisfy myself! Christ, you have a low opinion of me! I meant I must have a home—I must have a wife, my children around me, my house running smoothly—I thought that you more than anyone would understand that.”

“Really? I should have thought that, as a bachelor, I was the last person who could be expected to understand.”

“That’s up to you. I thought you valued family life—that was my impression. Anyway, whatever you understand or don’t understand—I resent this implication that everything I do is public property.”

“There’s no need to get angry.”

“Sometimes I think I’ll just pack and go, go tomorrow, get out of this city, go back where I belong, farm my land—”

“Sentimental,” Robespierre said. “You can be, Danton, you know. Well, if you must you must, we’d prefer to have you with us but no one’s indispensable. Come and see me before you go, won’t you? We can have a few drinks or something.”

Robespierre resisted the temptation to look back, to where Danton stood gaping after him. He can be such fun to torment, he thought, with those big, blundering, uncouth emotions of his. No wonder Camille has spent ten years at it.

Camille lay on Robespierre’s bed looking up at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. Robespierre sat at his desk. “Seems a peculiar business,” he said.

“Yes. There were dozens of women he could have married. She’s not that pretty, and she won’t bring him any money. He’s besotted with her, he’s lost his sense of proportion. And her family are royalists and possessed by religious mania.”

“No, I’m sorry, I was harking back to what we said earlier, about the Dumouriez business. Still, go on.”

“Oh, it’s just—she’s putting all sorts of ideas into his head.”

“I shouldn’t have thought a little girl like that could put ideas into Danton’s head.”

“At the moment he’s susceptible.”

“You mean, royalist ideas?”

“Not quite that, but he’s softening up. He said to me that he didn’t want Antoinette brought to trial. Of course he rationalizes it, says that she’s our last bargaining counter, that her relatives in Europe are more likely to listen to peace terms if she’s still alive.”

“Her relatives don’t give a damn about her. If she doesn’t go on trial the existence of the Tribunal is a farce. She has given our military plans to the Austrians, she’s a traitor.”

“Then he says, what’s the point of hounding down Brissot’s people, now they’re out of the Convention—though you did say that yourself.”

“Only strictly in private, Camille. Remember, it was just a personal view, it was not a recommendation to the nation.”

“My public views and my private views are the same. They will go on trial, if I have my way.”

“And if Dr. Marat has his.” Robespierre turned a few papers over. “Danton’s peace initiatives don’t seem to be conspicuously successful, do they?”

“No. He’s wasted four million, I should say, in Russia and Spain. Soon it will be peace at any price. That’s one whole aspect of him. People don’t know. Peace and quiet.”

“Does he still see this Englishman, Mr. Miles?”

“Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“Did you now! I think they have dinner together from time to time.”

Robespierre picked up his little volume of Rousseau. He began to work through it absentmindedly, just flicking the pages with his thumb. “Tell me, Camille—be entirely honest with me—do you think Georges-Jacques has behaved quite scrupulously with regard to army contracts?”

“How am I to answer that? You know how he finances himself.”

“Cut-ins, kickbacks—yes, we have to take him with all his faults and failings, don’t we, though I can hardly imagine what Saint-Just would say if he heard me voice that sentiment. I suppose he’d say I was conniving at corruption, which is really just another way of being corrupt oneself … . Tell me, do you think we could save Danton from himself? Scoop up some of the small fry?”

“No.” Camille turned onto his side and looked at Robespierre, propping his head on his hand. “Small fry lead to bigger fry, whatever they are. Danton’s too valuable to be put into difficult positions.”

“I should hate to see him lose his value. About this marriage settlement—this worries me. Of course, it means only one thing—that at some point in the future he fears he might find himself on trial.”

“You said almost the same thing yourself. That at some point you might, despite yourself, become an obstacle to the Revolution. That you were prepared.”

“Oh, mentally prepared—1 mean, a little humility is a good thing for us all, but I wouldn’t settle my affairs in anticipation. What we must do—we must do our best to steer Danton away from dangerous involvements.”

“I don’t see any prospect of an immediate divorce.”

Robespierre smiled. “Where are they today?”

“At Sèvres with Gabrielle’s parents. All the best of friends, terribly cozy. And they are to get a cottage, where they can be absolutely alone together, and none of us are to know where it is.”

“Why did he mention it then?”

“He didn’t. It was Louise who made a point of telling me.” Camille sat up. “I must go. I have a dinner engagement. Not with Mr. Miles.”

“But with?”

“No one you know. I mean to have a very good time. You’ll be able to read all about it in Hébert’s scandal sheet. No doubt he’s inventing the menu this very minute.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Hébert? No, I like to see him pulled down by the accumulated weight of his pettiness.”

“No, I mean—when you spoke in the Convention last, some fool shouted, ‘You dine with aristocrats.’ In itself it means nothing, but—”

“They call everyone an aristo who’s intelligent. Anyone with good taste.”

“You know that these people, these ci-devants, they’re only interested in you for the power you hold.”

“Oh yes. Well, not Arthur Dillon—he likes me. But after all, since ‘89 people have been interested in me only for the power I hold. Before ’89, no one was interested in me at all.”

“All the people who counted were.” An intense moment; Robespierre’s eyes, with their fugitive blue-green light, rest on him. “You were always in my heart.”

Camille smiles. Sentimentality; after all, it is the fashion of the era. It occurs to him that it is, anyway, more soothing than being yelled at by Georges-Jacques. Robespierre breaks the moment, gives him a good-tempered dismissive wave. But after Camille has gone, he sits and thinks. Virtue is the word that springs to his mind—or rather vertu, meaning strength, honesty, purity of intent. Does Camille understand these words? Sometimes he seems to comprehend them very well; no one has more vertu. The trouble is, he thinks he’s an exception to every rule. He’s been saying things, today, that he’ll wish he hadn’t said. That doesn’t mean I’m not obliged to take notice of them. If he hadn’t told me, I’d never have known about Georges-Jacques’s marriage settlement. Danton must be feeling very anxious about something. A man like that doesn’t worry over trifles. A man like that doesn’t give away that he’s worried. A man like that feels in danger only when there’s some huge guilt pressing on his mind, or a great accumulation of threats and fears … .

Guilt, of course: there must be. He abused the good young woman’s trust; and she was the mother of his little sons. When she died I imagined him so hurt that he would never recover, and I wrote to console him, I opened my mind and heart, laying aside all reservations, suspicions, doubts—“you and I are one.” I grant you, the sentiment was overblown. I should have guarded my pen, but I felt so raw … . No doubt he smiled at it. No doubt he thought (no doubt he said, aloud, to smirking people), what is it with this little man? How dare he claim to be one with me? How could Robespierre—the bachelor, who has only the most skulking attachments, and those he denies—how could Robespierre presume to know what I feel?

And now he says to himself, hands resting on his desk: Danton is a patriot. Nothing more is necessary; it doesn’t matter if his manners displease me. Danton is a patriot.

He rises from his desk, eases open a drawer, takes out a notebook. One of those little notebooks he uses: a fresh one. He opens the first page. He seats himself, dips his pen, writes DANTON. He would like to add something: don’t read this, it’s my private book. Yet, though he doesn’t claim to know much about people, he knows this: such a plea would drive them on, sniffing and ferreting, reading in excited gulps. He frowned. So, let them read … . or he could perhaps carry this book with him, all the time? Not liking himself very much, he began to record what he could remember of his conversation with Camille.

Maximilien Robespierre:

In our country we want to substitute morality for egotism, probity for the code of personal honor, principles for conventions, public duties for social obligations, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of misfortune, love of glory for love of money, good people for good society, merit for intrigue, the greatness of Man for the pettiness of the Great, a magnanimous, powerful and happy people for a frivolous and miserable one: in other words, all the virtues and miracles of the republic for all the ridiculous vices of the monarchy.

Camille Desmoulins:

Till our day it has been thought, with the lawgivers of old, that Virtues were the necessary basis of a republic; the eternal glory of the Jacobin Club will be to have founded one on vices.

All June, disasters in the Vendee. At different times the rebels have Angers, Saumur, Chinon; are narrowly defeated in the battle for Nantes, where off the coast the British navy waits to support them. The Danton Committee is not winning the war, nor can it promise a peace. If by autumn there is no relief from the news of disaster and defeat, the sansculottes will take the law into their own hands, turning on the government and their elected leaders. That at least is the feeling (Danton present or absent) in the chamber of the Committee of Public Safety, whose proceedings are secret. Beneath the black tricorn hat which is the badge of his office, Citizen Fouquier becomes more haggard each day, peering over the files of papers stacked on his desk, planning diversions for the days ahead: acquiring a lean and hungry look which he shares with the Republic herself.

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a half-dozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?

They had made a conspiracy that Claude’s health required walks, long walks, every day. His physician had joined it, on the grounds that no amount of gentle exercise does any harm, and if one of the nastiest members of the Convention wanted to have an affair with his mother-in-law, it did not behoove him to stand in his way.

Annette, in fact, found her life less exciting than was generally believed. Each morning she occupied herself with the provincial press; she scanned the papers, took cuttings, made extracts. She would sit beside her son-in-law, they would open his letters, she would scribble on them what was to be done, or sent, or said, whether she could reply, whether he should do it, whether the letter could be consigned straight to the drawing-room fire. Who’d have thought, she’d say, that I’d end up your secretary? It’s almost ten years now since we haven’t been sleeping together and cruelly deceiving the rest of the family. They tried to remember the exact date—it would be sometime in ’84—when Fréron had bowed himself into Annette’s drawing room with Camille in tow. She wasn’t, in those days, diligent about writing things down.

If they could remember it, they thought, they could give a party. Any excuse for a party! Annette said. They fell silent for a moment, thinking of the last ten years. Then they went back to discussing the Commune.

And here’s Lucile, walking in unexpected and unannounced: “Really!” her mother said. “To walk in like this, when we are having an intimate discussion of Hébert—”

Lucile didn’t laugh. She started talking. At first he thought she was saying Dillon was dead, killed in action; a miserable blankness descended on his mind, and he went to sit quietly at the desk by the fireplace, looking at the grain of the wood. It was a minute or two before he took in the message: Dillon’s here, he’s in prison, what are we going to do?

The morning’s joie de vivre seemed to drain out of Annette. “This is a complication,” she said. Immediately she thought, I can’t see the end of this. Who’s behind it? Is it one of the damned committees? The Committee of General Security, which everybody calls the Police Committee ? Is it really directed against Arthur Dillon, or is it directed at Camille?

Lucile said, “You have to get him out, you know. If he’s convicted”—her face showed she knew what conviction meant—“they’ll look at you and say, see how hard he pushed Dillon’s career. And you did—you have.”

“Convicted?” Camille was on his feet now. “There will be no conviction because there won’t be a trial. I’ll break my cousin’s fucking neck.”

“No, you won’t,” Annette said. “Moderate your language, sit down again, have a nice soothing think.”

No hope of that. Camille was outraged—and it’s not the cold simulated outrage of the politician, it’s the real thing, the kind of outrage that says Do you know who I am? “There’s your name through the mud again,” Annette murmured to her daughter. Outrage will go to the Convention; but first it will go to Marat’s house.

The cook let him in. Why does Marat employ a cook? It’s not as if he gives dinner parties. Probably this title, “cook,” conceals some more energetic, revolutionary pastime. “Don’t trip over the newspapers,” the woman said. They lay in great bales, in a dingy half-lit passage. Having issued her warning, she rejoined her employers, who were sitting in a semi-circle like people preparing for a seance. Why don’t they clean the place up, he wondered irritably. But Marat’s women are unacquainted with the domestic arts. Simone Evrard was there, and her sister Catherine; Marat’s sister Albertine had gone on a trip to Switzerland, they said, to visit the family. Marat has a family? I mean a mother and a father and the usual things? The ordinary arrangement, the cook said. Odd really, I never thought of Marat having a beginning, I thought he was thousands and thousands of years old, like Cagliostro. Can I see him?

“He’s not well,” Catherine said. “He’s taking one of his special baths.”

“I really need to see him urgently.”

Doe-eyed Simone: “Dillon?” She got up. “Yes, come with me. He was laughing about it.”

Marat was encased in a slipper bath in a hot little room, a towel around his shoulders and a cloth wrapped around his head. There was a heavy, medicinal smell. His face had bloated; beneath its ordinary yellow tinge there was something worse, something blue. There was a board balanced across the bath to act as a desk.

Simone indicated a straw-bottomed chair, giving it a gracious kick.

Marat looked up from the proofs he was correcting. “The chair is for sitting on, Camille. Do not stand on it and make a speech.”

Camille sat. He tried to avoid looking at Marat. “Yes, aesthetic, aren’t I?” Marat said. “A work of art. I ought to be in an exhibition. The number of people who come tramping through, I feel like an exhibit anyway.”

“I’m glad you’ve found something to make you laugh. In your condition I should not be cheerful.”

“Oh, Dillon. I can spare you five minutes on that topic. Inasmuch as Dillon is an aristocrat by birth, he should be guillotined—”

“He can’t help his birth.”

“There are certain defects in you that you can’t help, but we can’t go on making allowances forever. Inasmuch as Dillon is your wife’s lover, you only demonstrate your perverse temperament if you try to do anything for him. Inasmuch as committees have done this—go for them, and bless you my child.” Marat bounced his clenched fist on his writing board. “Do some damage,” he said.

“I am afraid that if Dillon goes before the Tribunal on these ludicrous charges—if he goes before the Tribunal, totally innocent, as he is—he may still be condemned. Is it possible, do you think?”

“Yes. He has enemies, very powerful ones. So what do you expect? The Tribunal is a political instrument.”

“The Tribunal was set up to replace mob law.”

“So Danton claimed. But it will go beyond that. There are some rare fights coming up, you know.” Marat looked up. “As for you, if you make the welfare of these ci-devants your concern, something nasty will happen to you.”

“And you?” Camille said dispassionately. “Are you worse? Are you going to die?”

Marat tapped the side of the bath. “No … like this … drag on, and on.”

Scenes in the National Convention. Danton’s friend Desmoulins and Danton’s friend Lacroix shouted at each other across the benches, as if it were a street meeting. Danton’s friend Desmoulins attacked the Danton Committee. Standing at the tribune, he was bawled out from both sides of the House. From the Mountain, Deputy Billaud-Varennes screamed, “It is a scandal, he must be stopped, he is disgracing his own name.”

Another walkout. It was becoming familiar. Fabre followed him. “Write it down,” he said.

“I will.” Already the letter that Dillon had sent to him from prison was made public, he had read it out to the deputies. I have done nothing, Dillon said, that is not for my country’s good. “A pamphlet,” Camille said. “What shall I call it?”

“Just call it ‘A Letter to Arthur Dillon.’ People like reading other people’s letters.” Fabre nodded in the direction of the Convention’s hall. “Settle a few scores, while you’re about it. Launch a few campaigns.”

Fabre thought, what am I doing, what am I doing? The last thing he needed was to get dragged into the Dillon business.

“What did Billaud mean, I am disgracing my own name? Am I some sort of institution?”

He knew the answer: yes. He is the Revolution. Now, apparently, they thought the Revolution had to be protected from itself.

An elderly, grave deputy approached him, defied his murderous expression, drew him aside and suggested they have a cup of coffee somewhere. Do you know Dillon well? the man asked him. Yes, very well. And do you know, the man said—look, I don’t want to upset you, but you ought to know—about Dillon and your wife? Camille nodded. He was writing a paragraph in his head. You don’t deserve this, the deputy said. You deserve better, Camille. It is the old story, I suppose—you are occupied with public affairs, the girl is bored, she is fickle, and you don’t have Dillon’s looks.

So there is kindness in the world—this strained, patient man, stumbling into a situation he didn’t understand, catching the tail-end of the lurid gossip, wanting to put a young man’s life right; betrayed himself twenty years ago, who knows? Camille was touched. Thank you, he said politely. As he left the café and headed home to his desk, he felt that singular fluid running in his veins; it was like the old days on the Révolutions, the power of words moving through his bloodstream like a drug. For the next couple of weeks he would be slightly out of his mind. When he was not writing, or engaged in a shouting match, the life seemed to drain out of him; he felt passive, a husk, a ghost. Strange fantasies possessed him; the language of public debate took a violent, unexpected turn.

“After Legendre,” he wrote, “the member of the National Convention who has the highest opinion of himself is Saint-Just. One can see by his bearing that he feels his head to be the cornerstone of the Revolution; he carries it as if it were the Holy Sacrament.”

Saint-Just looked down at the passage, which some helpful person had underscored in green ink. There was very little expression in his face; he did not sneer, as people do in novelettes. “Like the Holy Sacrament,” he says. “I will make him carry his like Saint Denis.”

“Oh that’s quite good,” Camille said, when it was relayed. ‘For Antoine, that’s quite witty. I wonder if he is going to be clever when he grows up?”

Soon he was rummaging through the bookshelves: “Lucile, where is Saint-Just’s disgusting poem, the epic poem in twenty books? There was a verse beginning, ‘If I were God.’ Let us see how it continued, I’m sure it will provide the occasion for mockery.”

Then suddenly he stopped, sat down or rather fell into a chair. “What am I doing? Saint-Just and I are supposed to be on the same side. We are Jacobins, we are republicans …”

“I’ll find it for you,” Lucile said quietly.

“Perhaps better not.”

For he had begun to see visions: visions of that saint, France’s patron, who had walked for several leagues with his severed head in his hands. He first saw Denis in the Place de Grève, picking his way over the cobbles. He was neatly truncated, there was no gore; but the head swinging almost casually from his left wrist was Camille’s own. He saw him again going stealthily into the Duplay house, for a private meeting with Robespierre; he saw him waiting outside the entrance to the Jacobin Club—a newly arrived patriot, modest and provincial, wanting an introduction to the great world.

After a day or two it came to him that the only thing to do was to take the initiative. It would be quite easy to kill Saint-Just. He could see him alone, any time, at a convenient place; then a pistol shot, or (not to advertise the incident) a knife. He could see the pain brimming in Saint-Just’s velvet eyes.

And then, he would need a Plot: Saint-Just’s conspiracy against the Republic, which he had detected with the instinct of the impeccable and tested patriot. I am the Revolution. Who would fail to believe that he had slaughtered Saint-Just in an outburst of patriotic rage? He was not known for containing his temper. To avoid awkward questions it would have to be a small knife, the kind you would hardly know that you were carrying.

Don’t be stupid, he said to himself. Saint-Just isn’t going to kill you, any more than you’re going to kill him. Or even less.

He attended the Committee of War, of which he was secretary, and from its rooms wrote a sensible and chatty letter home, asking his father not to mention Rose-Fleur so much in their correspondence, as Lucile was mad with jealousy.

But still, the fantasy had moved into his brain, it had taken up occupation, he could not evict it. He thought of the hole in Lepelletier’s side, the wound made by a butcher’s killing knife, the wound he took the whole night to die of. He would have to be quick; it would have to be one true, telling blow; Saint-Just was a good deal bigger and stronger than he was, and he would have just one chance. At the Jacobins, when he heard the young man’s sonorous voice, he would smile to himself. He would dream of his plan in the Convention, when Saint-Just was at the tribune, his left hand making brief chopping motions in the air.

July 13: “A person from Caen,” Danton said. “Pétion and Barbaroux are believed to have been there these last weeks. It is a Girondist conspiracy. Let me assure you, it was not I who arranged it.”

Camille said, “I heard someone in the street, shouting assassination … I was afraid that I … in a moment of … no, nothing, never mind.”

Danton stared at him for a second. “Anyway,” he said, “this finishes the Gironde. Murderers and cowards. They sent a woman.”

There was a crowd in the narrow street, a near-silent and stolid mass, its eyes riveted in fascination on two brightly lit windows of Marat’s apartment. It was an hour after midnight, strangely light, the heat subtropical. Camille waved away the sansculotte who guarded the bottom of the iron-railed steps. The man did not move—not right away.

“Never seen you close up,” he said. His eyes measured Camille. “How’s Danton taking it?”

“He is shocked.”

“I’ll bet. And you’ll be telling me next he’s sorry.”

Camille was used to the crowd calling out his name. This was a different, more unpleasant, kind of familiarity.

“Some are saying that Danton and Robespierre have put him where he’ll be quiet,” the man said. “Then again, some are saying it’s the royalists, some are saying it’s Brissot.”

“I know you,” Camille said. “I’ve seen you running behind Hébert, haven’t I? What are you doing here?”

He knew: squabbling over the legacy already.

“Ah,” the man said, “Père Duchesne has his interests. The People will need a new Friend. It won’t be any of you—”

“Jacques Roux, perhaps?”

“You with that filthy swine Dillon—”

Camille pushed past him. Legendre was already in the house, his tricolor sash knotted untidily about his blustering, bulging person: taking charge. The ground seemed to shiver beneath his feet, as if the women’s screams were still rattling the windows; but all was quiet now, except for some stifled sobbing from behind a closed door. You have not eaten much today, Camille said to himself; that is why the walls seem liquid, why the air is disturbed.

The assassin sat in the parlor. Her hands were tied tightly, and behind her chair were two men with pikes. Before her was a small table covered with a scruffy white cloth, and on it were her assassin’s possessions: a gold watch, a thimble, a reel of white thread, a few loose coins. A passport, a birth certificate; a handkerchief edged with lace; the cardboard sheath of a kitchen knife. On the dusty rug by her feet was a black hat with three brilliant green ribbons.

He stood against the wall, watching her. She had that kind of thin, translucent skin that reddens and marks easily, catches every nuance of the light. A healthy full-breasted girl, fed on fresh farm butter and the cream of the milk: the kind of girl who smiles at you in church, beribboned and flower-scented on the Sundays after Easter. I know you well, he thought; I remember you from when I was a child. The remains of an elaborate coiffure hung about her face: the kind of hairdo a girl from the provinces would have before she went out to commit a murder.

“Yes, make her blush,” Legendre said, “you can easily make her blush. But blush for her crime, she won’t blush for that. I thank Providence that I am alive, because she was at my house earlier today. She denies it, but she was there. They were suspicious, wouldn’t let her in. Oh, she denies it, but I was her first choice.”

“Congratulations,” Camille said. He knew that the girl was in pain because of the way they had tied her hands.

“She won’t blush,” Legendre said, “for assassinating our greatest patriot.”

“If that was what she had in mind, she would hardly have wasted her time on you.”

Simone Evrard was outside the door where they had the body. She had collapsed against the wall, wracked, tear-stained, hardly able to keep her feet. “So much blood, Camille,” she said. “How will we ever get the blood off the floor and the walls?”

As he opened the door she made a feeble motion to stop him. Dr. Deschamps looked swiftly over his shoulder. One of his assistants stepped forward with an outstretched arm to bar Camille’s way. “I have to know for sure …” Camille whipered. Deschamps turned his head again. “I beg your pardon, Citizen Camille. I didn’t know it was you. Be warned, it’s not pleasant. We are embalming the body, but in this heat … with the condition of the corpse after four, five hours,” the doctor wiped his hands on a towel, “it’s as if he were decaying while he was still alive.”

He believes, Camille thought, that I am here from the Convention, on some question of protocol. He looked down. Dr. Deschamps put a hand under his elbow. “It was instantaneous,” he said. “Or almost so. He had just time to cry out. He can’t have felt anything. This is where the knife went.” He indicated. “Into the right lung, through the artery, piercing the heart. We couldn’t close his mouth, so we had to cut out the tongue. All right? You see, he’s still quite identifiable. Now, let me get you out of here. I’m burning the strongest aromatics I can find, but it is not a smell for the layman.”

Outside Simone was still propped against the wall. Her breath rasped. “I told them to give this woman an opiate,” Deschamps said crossly. “Do you want me to sign anything? No, I see. Look, I assume you have an official escort? I don’t know what this nonsense is, everyone knows that Marat is dead. I’ve already had someone from the Jacobins throwing up over my assistants. You look like the fainting type, so I should get outside as soon as you can. Order something done about the wife, or whoever she is, will you?”

The door clocked shut. Simone slumped into his arms. From the next room came voices raised in curt questioning. “I was his wife,” Simone moaned. “He didn’t marry me in church, he didn’t take me to City Hall, but he swore by all the gods in creation that I was his wife.”

What is it, Camille thought, does she want me to advise her on her rights? “You will be recognized as his relict,” he said. “No one these days pays much attention to the formalities. It’s all yours now, the printing press and the paper for the next edition. Be careful with it. I should think the state will be paying for the funeral.”

Outside in the street he looked back once, to the windows where the busy shadows of Deschamps and his assistants moved against the light. Rain began to fall, big warm drops. There was thunder somewhere in the distance—over Versailles perhaps. The crowd stood, patient, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for what would happen next.

David took charge of arrangements. The body was to be sealed in a coffin of lead, and enclosed in a larger sarcophagus of purple porphyry, taken from the Collection of Antiquities at the Louvre. But for the funeral procession, it was desired to carry the deceased on a bier, swathed in a tricolor (the cloth drenched in spirits). One bare arm, sewn on from a better class of corpse, bore a laurel wreath; young girls dressed in white and bearing cypress branches surrounded the bier.

After them the Convention, the Clubs, the People. The procession began at five in the afternoon; it ended at midnight, by the light of torches. He was to be buried as he had preferred to live, underground, the cellar-like tomb overhung with blocks of stone and fenced about by iron.

The heart, embalmed separately, was placed in an urn; the patriots of the Cordeliers Club bore it away, to keep it on their premises forever and ever, till the last day of the world. “Sacred heart of Marat,” the people wailed.

HERE LIES MARAT

THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND

KILLED BY THE PEOPLE’S ENEMIES

13 JULY 1793

The demeanor of Robespierre in the funeral procession was remarked upon by one observer. He looked, the witness said, as if he were conducting the corpse to a rubbish tip.