VIII
Soot and Eggs
AT FIRST HE thought the clanking must come from the milk churns that woke him in the mornings. The carts trundled in from the dairies just before dawn and the churns chinked against each other as they went over the cobbles. But it was broad daylight now, ten o’clock, no, nearer eleven, much too late for milk. He got up to see what it was. The windows in his room were over the gloomy little garden, so he had to go to the landing and squint through the round window that looked out onto the street.
He saw below him a little procession of handcarts, the sort tradesmen employed to shift their wares about without the bother of harnessing up. It was the cans and buckets stowed in these that were clanking, less like churns, he thought now, more like cowbells when the cows were moving across a meadow. Every now and then the procession would stop and one of their number – who looked like a respectable bourgeois – would unload a long brush and dip it in one of the buckets, then go over to an inn sign or shopkeeper’s board or street sign and smear it with whatever was in the bucket, some sticky black stuff by the look of it.
The King had fled in the night and Wm was writing to tell Mr Jefferson, but even in the midst of such great events he could not tear his eyes from the procession. It moved along the street with a methodical dignity as though it were a time-honoured ritual. The letter to TJ could wait until they had reliable knowledge of where the King had gone. Wm went out into the sunny June morning and at once he understood. The sign outside the saddler’s where Vendôme took the harness to be repaired had said Sellerie du Roy in flowery script. Now it just said Sellerie. The Epicerie Louis XVI had been smeared into anonymity, the sooty muck still dripping from the board, the Boulangerie de la Reine was blacked out too, ditto the little wooden street sign for the rue du Dauphin. Down the side street two youths were trying to bring down a wine merchant’s sign which had the King’s ample profile cut out in painted gold. They were slamming at the shivering monarch with long wooden poles. Even this desecration was performed with some formality, as though they were beating the bounds according to ancient precedent.
If the King had decided to forget Paris, well then, Paris would lose no time in forgetting the King. Wm wondered how this extraordinary wiping out had come to pass. Nobody could have foreknown that at midnight the King would slip out of his palace dressed as the valet Durand, with the Queen disguised as the governess. It had happened by some spontaneous energy, some mysterious expression of the general will – perhaps their beloved Rousseau would have been able to explain it.
‘Soot and axle grease. Some of us is using oil, but I say the grease sticks better.’
‘What?’
‘I saw you was looking at my bucket. I started mixing her the minute I heard. The fat bastard, why couldn’t he see it out like the rest of us? But I’m not surprised, I always knew he’d hop the coop. He’ll be in Austria by now.’
The man with the brush was a quiet-looking fellow, in his early forties, with watery eyes. He spoke without venom, if anything in a tone of disappointment. Like the rest of them he seemed to be engaged not in an impassioned act of defilement but rather in the business of clearing something up.
In the side street the two youths had finally managed to detach the monarch’s profile from its rusty hinges and the sign fell to the pavement with a twanging clatter.
‘Take it inside to old Poix, lads,’ the man with the brush called out. ‘It’s his property, after all, though I don’t know what use it can be to him now.’
But the youths paid him no attention and started battering at the golden head with their poles, banging in time to a raucous chant which Wm soon recognised as Ca Ira. The noise sawed through his head (he had a headache anyway from the second bottle of Mr Jefferson’s wine he had punished at his solitary dinner the night before) and suddenly the scene took on a brutish, menacing aspect.
Ca ira, ça ira, les aristocrates à la lanterne,
Ca ira, ça ira, les aristocrates on les pendra.
Something had happened, something decisive, and everyone knew it. The King knew it, as they brought him back, and so did the silent, sullen crowds who refused to take off their hats to him. The grim politeness was almost the worst – those posters all along the route: ‘Anyone who applauds the king will be beaten, anyone who insults him will be hanged.’ It was like the instructions to visitors at animal menageries. That was, after all, just what the King was now, a caged beast, and in future the cage bars would need to be stronger.
The politicians too knew that something had changed, and changed for good, but none of them wanted to be the first to explain what it was. In particular, none of them wanted to be the first to use the word beginning with ‘R’. By his flight the King had thrown his crown into the gutter and fresh arrangements would have to be made, but for the moment a studied vagueness as to what those arrangements might be was the way to play the game. What, after all, was a Republic, mused Robespierre, gnawing at his fingernails with that smirk stuck on his face? Did not France already enjoy the best of both worlds under its new constitution, being in effect a Republic with a monarch?
But there was one public figure who lacked these arts of equivocation and blurring, a man who once he had an idea in his head, then out it popped like a cork out of a bottle: Condorcet. He might be a giant in geometry, an adornment to the differential calculus, but he was so poor a politician that he had ignominiously failed to get elected to the Constituent Assembly, when every third-rate lawyer and provincial hack had breezed in.
In these tremulous summer days when apprehension hangs so heavy in the air that you can feel it brush your cheek, what does Condorcet do? He gives a public lecture on why France needs a republic. There is the announcement bold as brass in La Bouche de Fer: ‘Next Friday, at the Cercle Social of the Amis de la Vérité, Condorcet will talk about the Republic.’
So on 8 July two thousand Friends of Truth – doctors, duchesses, journalists, all-purpose rabble-rousers, pickpockets, the usual Palais-Royal crowd – pile into the new subterranean circus at the Duke of Orléans’s palace of pleasure. That irrepressible showman has dug out this huge underground cavern beneath the lime avenues as a venue for equestrian displays. On a hot July evening the atmosphere is thick with the smell of horse. The venue is also inordinately long, as a classical circus has to be if the horses are to have room to prance and caracole without running full tilt into the pillared galleries that surround the arena.
So it may be that only the front few rows hear every word of Condorcet’s broaching of the great forbidden subject. His frail, rasping voice never carries far. He does not speak for long, not more than half an hour and his delivery is always slow. What he has to say is very simple. Even those who only hear half of it and are not asphyxiated by the ordure probably get the drift.
It is time, he says, to abandon this impious superstition, which transforms an ordinary mortal into a sort of god. If a republic in France should fail, there is no danger that a new Caesar would arise from its ruins, because a free France will never enslave other nations or permit itself to be enslaved. We should not be teaching the Dauphin how to be a good king, we should be teaching him how to want not to be a king at all.
They hear Condorcet in complete silence to the end, then he is drowned in applause. The Assembly instantly asks for a text and sends him a vote of thanks before they have even read it. The last of the Encyclopaedia men has spoken, the friend of Voltaire has pronounced, the Condor has left his perch and soared.
La Belle Grouchette’s eyes are wet with tears. Has she not helped her husband translate Tom Paine’s Rights of Man? What does she care, what does either of them care if he has kissed farewell to the Royal Mint and those five thousand livres per annum, to say nothing of his chances of being appointed tutor to the Dauphin, for which he is the hot favourite? What do they care if the Lafayettes and the La Rochefoucaulds never speak to them again? They are yesterday’s men. Friendship is too frail a plant to survive the tramp of hi
story. Omelettes cannot be made without – but we need not labour the point.
A few days later a modest crowd of patriots gathered on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition calling for the King to be put on trial. It was a steamy Sunday morning and a queue of patriotic men and women had formed up to the Altar of the Patrie. Alas, two low fellows had spotted an opening beneath the dazzling cloths that draped the Altar. If they squeezed in under, they might have a brilliant viewpoint for looking up patriotic skirts. In their excitement, though, they failed to calculate that their feet were sticking out and were instantly spotted by the sentries. The voyeurs were dragged out before they had glimpsed so much as a frilly garter and were slaughtered on the spot, not for their intended offence but on suspicion of planting mines to massacre the patriots. Even while their bleeding corpses still lay on the ground lately levelled by the spadework of His Most Christian Majesty, martial law was declared and Lafayette, escorted by the city council with Bailly the astronomer at their head, called out the National Guard. These were great days for the cause of the natural sciences. Who better to teach the nation the virtues of a republic than a mathematician? Who more suited to quell a riot than France’s leading stargazer?
By now the steamy clouds had cleared, there were blue skies along the Seine and the temperature had risen to twenty-one degrees, as the new revolutionary system computed it. So several thousand Sunday strollers had gathered, more to take the air than to sign up to the Republic, among them Sophie de Condorcet and the Condor chick, the enchanting Eliza, now aged fourteen months and taking, thank heavens, after her mother in looks.
The troops were greeted with jeers. Stones were thrown. A shot was fired, nobody knew by whom or at whom, and a dragoon was hit in the thigh, only a flesh wound. Or the crowd disobeyed Lafayette’s orders, or something else happened or did not happen. Anyway, the Guard opened fire and in a few minutes dozens of people lay dead on this martial field, which had only the year before been rededicated to peace. Or perhaps hundreds lay dead, but dozens were enough to be going on with. Enough, anyway, for Condorcet to speak ever after with scorn and loathing of Lafayette who had so nearly murdered his wife and daughter on their Sunday afternoon stroll.
There was a note waiting for him from Rosalie: ‘Come tomorrow. M. de La R. will be in Paris for seven or eight days. My grandmother expects you.’
He had thought that it would be just the three of them. La Roche-Guyon half asleep under its white cliff. The cuckoos in the woods above and the nightjars churring at dusk. The late butterflies fluttering up from the English garden and losing themselves in the cool arches of the loggia. Madame d’Enville sitting over the silver chocolate pot, smiling at them in that sly bright way of hers. And Rosalie.
But when he came past the musty old guardroom and climbed the winding stair to the salon, he was taken aback to hear male voices and surely, no, it could not be but yes it was, one voice in particular. There he was, Citizen Condorcet, no longer the marquis but otherwise not much changed, drawing his coat-tails round him and darting his beaky head out of his hunched shoulders as his harsh voice keened on remorselessly: ‘My dear lady, there can be no doubt of it, this is the logical moment. Even the most uninstructed in political science must see that if France does not adopt the republican form of government by the end of the year she is lost. I am on my way to my local assembly at Mantes to explain the matter to them in person, and I could not pass this way without calling in to present myself to my earliest friend and patronne.’
‘And the King? What is to become of the King?’
If the Condor was much the same as the first time Wm had heard him discourse on oysters and proportional representation – how long was it now? Five or six years – Madame d’Enville was utterly different. Her amused relaxed mien had gone. She sat hunched in her great chair, her frail hands clutching its tasselled arms, with an expression of dread and distaste on her face, quite unlike any time he had seen her before.
‘Oh, we shall have to make special arrangements,’ Condorcet said airily. ‘In the next Assembly, in which I hope to play a modest part, there will be some form of examination, a judicial process of sorts, the details remain to be agreed.’
‘A trial, you mean? You intend to try the King?’ Madame d’Enville enquired, trembling with fury.
‘Well, that will be for the new members to decide. As you know, the new Assembly is to contain none who were members of the old one. The fresh blood will take a much more intelligent view of the matter.’
‘Blood, you talk of blood,’ muttered the old Duchess, wilfully misunderstanding.
‘I fancy,’ continued Condorcet, paying no attention, ‘that the Constituent Assembly was too respectful of the mumbo-jumbo that surrounds royalty. The new legislators will be able to see the futility and wickedness of maintaining at the public expense these families whose heredity is no guarantee of either talent or virtue. They may even find some merit in the suggestion put forward by a young mechanic in the latest number of The Republican, that we should replace the flesh-and-blood royal family by a collection of automata, built on the model of Kempel’s automatic chess player. Such a mechanical monarch would be able to carry out all the functions that royalty at present exercises, it would pose no danger to liberty, it would cost much less and, if carefully repaired, I may add, it could last for ever.’
Since the ‘young mechanic’ was in fact Condorcet under a nom de plume, it was not surprising that he paused for a chuckle at the waggish brilliance of the notion.
A hiss of venomous intensity came from the neighbourhood of Madame d’Enville’s chair. Swivelling his gaze in that direction, Wm was taken aback to see the Duke standing by his mother with a look of unbounded loathing on his pale face. His long bony hand rested on her frail freckled wrist, to comfort her or to restrain her, Wm could not tell which.
‘If we seize this moment to plant the republic in good parliamentary soil, then it will grow straight and strong, if not—’
‘B-by the way, C-Condorcet,’ the Duke broke in, ‘my g-gardener has a new method of planting espaliers, for the p-pear trees in particular. I must show them to you. Monsieur l’Abbé, perhaps you too would find it of interest.’
And taking the tubby little Abbé by the arm – Morellet or Chalut was it, Wm could not remember though he had certainly seen him before – he guided him so that the two of them encircled Condorcet and propelled him towards the door as neatly as a press gang picking up an unwilling tar. Even after they were out of the salon and halfway down the stairs, Wm could still hear the two voices in counterpoint rather than harmony, the Duke stammering about pruning techniques while Condorcet continued to descant upon the iniquities of hereditary government.
‘I could not turn him out,’ the old Duchess said miserably after the babble had died down. ‘He has been coming here for twenty years, since he was a gawky young man and could barely open his mouth in company. I used to think of him as a second son and he, well, he has said many times that this is his second home, his only home come to that, at least it was until that silly girl turned his head. I blame her for a lot of this nonsense. I don’t mean that these are her ideas, she is not intelligent enough for that, but she eggs him on so. A bride should sometimes be a bridle on her husband’s tongue, do you not think so, Monsieur Short? Oh, I do wish he had not come. Rosalie will not stay in the same room with him any more. You must go and find her and tell her that the coast is clear. You know the way.’
He took his leave of her and hurried down the back stairs that led to the old part of the castle and the little corner room where they liked to watch the sun come over the chalk cliff and splash its morning light over the bend in the river.
‘Oh, I am so happy, really happy to see you. I thought I would die when the door opened and I thought it was you and that horrid monster came in. How can he say such things at such a time? I know the King is a weak man and he listened too much to his brothers and would never listen to my cousin Liancourt who was the only one who
knew what was happening. But even the King’s advisers would be better than Condorcet who thinks that politics is just like a quadratic equation and who is mostly interested in having the glory of solving it.’
‘Monsieur de La R. has taken him down to the orchard to show him how to graft pears.’
‘I am sorry I said that my husband would not be here but the old Assembly finished early and he rushed down here because he is as worried as I am about Maman. Oh, I have had my fill of politics, I only wish—’ then she stopped and looked at him and said, ‘Well, you know what I wish.’
‘Where …’
‘If they have gone down, then we must go up.’
She took his hand and led him out of the little coffee room down the dank passage that passed by the dusty chapel to where the staircase in the cliff began.
He was a little giddy before they started up, giddy with delight and desire, and they had not climbed beyond the first two or three turns before he panted ‘mercy, mercy’ and she stopped by the open bay window, and turned to him laughing and not the least out of breath herself. He took her in his arms and pressed her against the chalk wall. As he pulled up her skirts, he could see behind her the sun shining on the river far below. They did it as quickly and lightly as a couple of birds on a branch, and the little cry she gave at the finish was like the cheep of a wren in the hedge. And when he put his head down to her she ruffled his hair as birds do with each other’s feathers.
‘Oh yes, yes. I am out of breath too now,’ she murmured, ‘but it was not a fair way to make me, you know.’
‘It was the fairest way I could think of,’ he said.
There was a narrow stone ledge below the window. They sat there side by side and let the cool breeze dry the sweat off them. She brushed his shoulders with her hand to wipe off the chalk dust and he did the same to her.
‘We are like ghosts.’
‘Do ghosts make love?’
‘No, that is why they come back to haunt us, out of jealousy.’
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