The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  I have expressed to you my sentiments because they are really those of ninety-nine in an hundred of our citizens. The feasts and rejoicings which have lately been had on account of the successes of the French showed the genuine effusions of their hearts. You have been wounded by the sufferings of your friends, and have by this circumstance been hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.

  And, Mr J did not shrink from adding, was extremely disrelished by the foremost of those countrymen, to wit the President, who had pretty much given up on young Mr Short as a consequence.

  How could TJ say such things? Did he have the faintest conception of just how much innocent blood had been shed in France and was still being shed, and how much bloodshed was yet to come? Would he really prefer to see half the earth desolate than that the cause should fail? Sitting on his little hilltop in Virginia, did Mr J have any concrete understanding of what desolation meant, or what misery would have to be plumbed to create such a tabula rasa for this new Adam and Eve to delight in their liberty?

  He did not reply. There was no profit in attempting to correct the incorrigible. But he knew there was worse to come. And he could at least shelter Rosalie. His years of patient dealing with Van Staphorst, Willink and Hubbard could now be turned to advantage. He told Rosalie to transfer as much of her personal property as she could into his name at the bankers. He was relieved, and flattered too, that she did not hesitate. In all, at least three million francs were transferred into his account, as a secret, interest-free loan. It was in contemplation of a forthcoming marriage between the two of them, he told the pig-eyed bankers to calm their suspicions of the subterfuge. That was in truth what he hoped for, but, marriage or no marriage, no regime that he had come across, however chaotic and bloodthirsty, ever dared to invade the private deposits of a Dutch banker.

  Duchesses, though, were fair game. Had not their sons and husbands and brothers already experienced the justice of the people? Why should the brood mares be exempt? Their cousins and parents were already condemned as émigrés. How could those who remained behind be anything other than subversive agents of a foreign power?

  In November, Rosalie and her grandmother were arrested. They were taken to the Convent of the English Augustinians in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor, which had been turned into a jail but continued to be run by the nuns, who were still known as the English nuns although the supply of English novices had dried up since the Revolution.

  William sat in his orange grove, the last of the season’s fruits now rotting on the sandy ground, writing minutes on the negotiations with the faraway Creek Indians. In his solitude and sorrow his mind unwound the whole ravelled record of his time in Europe, and in particular that first summer at La Roche-Guyon.

  How far scattered they all were now. Charles murdered; now the Duke murdered; the other Duke in exile, in Philadelphia apparently; his son Alex in the West Indies managing his wife’s plantations; François fighting on the other side for the Princes; Jefferson far away dreaming of his Adams and Eves; Lafayette in jail somewhere, Prussia was the latest report; and now Rosalie and her maman walled up in a convent from which they might never come out alive. Not one of that blithe, hopeful band left at liberty in France. Ah yes, there was one survivor: Monsieur de Condorcet. The only one of them not dead or disgraced, or in prison or exile.

  Condorcet was dog-tired, he had been suffering from shakes and shivers for months – only to be expected in these feverish times. He had been working flat out for days and nights on end, dashing off draft laws and proclamations and committee reports, not to mention editing the Chronique de Paris and writing most of it himself. He had become a writing machine, not unlike the automaton monarch that he had suggested should rule France. But unlike the machine he was wearing out fast. One of the deputies strolling into the legislation committee room found the great man fast asleep under the bench, perhaps the same bench that Charles had been found sleeping on top of. Most of the time there he was, sitting in the President’s chair, the angry sheep as white in the face now as an old mouton.

  Yet throughout all those bloody days when the Prussians were besieging Verdun and the mob was rampaging through Paris he was curiously silent. He did not intervene in the debates or launch any of his brilliant polemics, except to welcome the Assembly’s vote to allow divorce and ‘end the long centuries of servitude for the other half of the human race’, as he put it in the Chronique. But what did he have to say about the September massacres, when defenceless prisoners were being butchered in their hundreds? For the first twenty-four hours he said nothing at all and then he wrote in the Chronique, ‘We shall draw the curtain on events of which it would be too difficult at this moment to estimate the number and calculate the consequences. What an unfortunate and terrible situation it is when the character of a people who are naturally good and generous is constrained to commit such acts of vengeance.’

  So it wasn’t really their fault then. How his old hero Voltaire would have minced that line of argument. And what did Condorcet think of the murder of his old friend and patron in front of his wife and mother? That he blamed on the poisonous journalists who had whipped the mob into a frenzy (as though he himself had never been near a newspaper). And in a sense too, or so he explained in a long letter to Mr Jefferson, it was Lafayette’s fault as well, the vain and devious Lafayette who had led the poor simple Duke by the nose. Everyone’s fault except his – but was it not Condorcet who had boasted of bringing Danton to the helm, and was it not Danton’s thrilling exhortations that had unleashed the blood tide?

  And Condorcet himself was swimming in that tide, elected by no less than five departments to the new Convention (only one in ten electors dared to vote but the successful candidates cared little for that), and then elected vice-president and first secretary of the Convention.

  When it was all over, he did regret the slaughter in the Abbaye and claimed to Madame Suard that he had done everything a man could to have Charles released but these misfortunes were inseparable from the Revolution and such things were bound to happen in a nation at war. He remained passionately opposed to the death penalty and when he was called on that pale January morning to vote for the death of the King he refused. But this flicker of liberal principle aside, he was floating along with the current.

  Who knows, perhaps he would have succeeded in staying afloat if it had not been for one thing that cut him to the quick. At long last his beloved draft Constitution came before the Convention, that precious confection on which he had laboured so long, with its delicate balances and counter-balances, its sub-clauses, its appendices – it took all day to read the thing through.

  And they laughed at it, or rather they yawned at it. Instead, inside a week, some hack knocked out a cheap version a third the length and the Convention waved it through without reading even half of it.

  For Condorcet this rejection was unforgivable. Maddened, exhausted, humiliated, he launched into a fatal retaliation. In denouncing the gimcrack, puny so-called Constitution that the Convention was now being asked to approve, he denounced all those men who ceaselessly flattered the people, to lure them into acts of violence. Such demagogues defiled the freedom of the press with an audacity the old despotism never dreamed of. Then, reckless to the last, he tossed in the worst accusation of the lot: that with this appalling Constitution these demagogues were preparing the way for the return of the monarchy. He published this denunciation anonymously but everyone knew instantly who had written it and everyone knew who he was aiming at.

  It did not take long for Robespierre to hit back. There was not much quibbling about finding Condorcet guilty of conspiracy and issuing a decree of arrest against him. They were voting half a dozen such decrees a day now, the deputies were giddy with voting them, those few who dared to turn up and the even fewer who dared to vote, each fearing that it might be his turn next.

  And unlike the old regime they could move quickly too. An hour after the Comm
ittee of Public Safety had the order signed and sealed, the local commissars were knocking on the door of Condorcet’s Paris apartment, at 505 rue de Lille. The concierge told them that Condorcet was out at his country place at Auteuil. The commissars stopped the Paris earth by sealing up No. 505 and the adjoining flat inhabited by Condorcet’s secretary. Two other commissars were sent hotfoot to Auteuil, rousing the mayor, who was so deplorably leisurely about putting on his sash and breeches that by the time they reached the Condorcet house the alarm had clearly been raised. Madame Condorcet was there with her brother-in-law, that wily Dr Cabanis who also happened to be a municipal officer in Auteuil. The commissars were given to understand that Condorcet was at that minute over at his friend Debry’s. When they got to Debry’s lodgings, they were told that Debry was at home but that he was ill in bed. The local procureur, the only man there in the commissars’ opinion who was worthy of the people, insisted on going upstairs. The bed was made, no Debry. Back to Condorcet’s, where the gardener said his master had been a few minutes earlier. But Madame C said her husband was in Paris and she did not know whether he was returning that day or not.

  By this time Condorcet was well clear of Auteuil and was soon being hidden by two of Cabanis’s medical students in their lodgings with the widowed Madame Vernet near the Luxembourg Gardens, 21 rue des Fossoyeurs. And here a real heroine enters the story.

  When the medical students asked Madame Vernet: ‘Would you give shelter to a wanted man?’ she asked only one question: ‘Is he a good man?’ Yes, they said. Let him come, she said, and she took him in without asking his name. She did not think of changing her mind when the students told her who he was.

  From that frantic day of his flight in July to the end of March the following year, Condorcet never left No. 21 rue des Fossoyeurs.

  Madame Vernet lived by letting out rooms. She never accepted a penny from Condorcet or from Sophie. There were other lodgers, Madame Vernet’s cousin, a professor of geometry called Sarret with whom Condorcet practised Latin conversation, and an old professor of mathematics who also happened to be a deputy in the Convention, and one of extreme views too. None of them gave him away. In that narrow lodging house Condorcet often shivered from the cold and trembled for fear of discovery, but he never lacked for friends.

  And there, hidden away in the heart of Paris, pursued by Robespierre’s implacable fury, Condorcet found a strange freedom. His goods had been seized. Sophie was penniless and had begun to scrape a living painting miniatures in a room over a lingerie shop in the rue Saint-Honoré – everyone wanted miniatures now to remember their nearest and dearest in these times when the next day they might disappear for years or for ever. Condorcet’s own disappearance made people think that he too must have emigrated, perhaps to Switzerland. The plight of an émigré’s family was worse even than that of the family of a man who had an arrest warrant out against him.

  Condorcet was torn apart with guilt, worrying himself every time Sophie trudged from 352 rue Saint-Honoré to the rue des Fossoyeurs to bring him fresh linen and a few such luxuries as Paris still afforded. She dressed down as a peasant and took a different zigzag route each time, sometimes melting into the crowd who were off to see the guillotine (Dr Guillotin’s invaluable device had been transferred from the Tuileries, where its operation might upset the deputies, to the place de la Révolution, formerly place Louis XV, later place de la Concorde, where it gave nothing but pleasure). She wrote to him, too, as often as she could, imploring him not to think he was harming those whom he loved: Enjoy the little happiness I have been able to give you in return for what you have given me. I am sending stockings, shoes and trousers and I would like to send you also all the tender things your little Eliza says about your absence – she asks people who are leaving to please ask you to come and have supper with her. Adieu! Live for happiness.

  And he wrote back to her a cack-handed little ode to celebrate the seventh anniversary of their marriage:

  I served my land, your love deigns me to bless

  I shan’t have lived not tasting happiness.

  As the winter deepened, Sophie was driven to the extremest measure of all but the only one that offered any prospect of protecting her and little Eliza: divorce, though she could not bring herself to mention the word. ‘This apparent separation, while my attachment to you and the bonds which unite us are indissoluble, is for me the worst misery of all.’ Condorcet responded immediately and offered to put his consent to the divorce in writing. Then she changed her mind and would not accept it. But on 14 January 1794 (or 25 Nivose An II, as it said on the document) the divorce petition was lodged in Auteuil. When he had voted for divorce as a humane remedy for couples who had fallen out of love, Condorcet can scarcely have imagined that for him its use would be to save the lives of his wife and daughter.

  All through that winter he wrote his great work, the only work that anyone would remember him for, A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Spirit. It was Sophie’s doing really, Sophie with her heart still as full of love for the Republic and for her husband. She told him that he should not waste his energies in fruitless polemics and apologias, he must use this precious time of solitude and reflection to compose the book that would resound down the ages as a vade-mecum for the march of humanity.

  So he wrote it all out, with a flow and vivacity and confidence that no other human being had so far surpassed: stage by stage, he described how our species had raised itself out of the mud and slime, had passed through the ages of ignorance and despotism and had eventually stumbled, not without brutalities and backslidings, into the age of progress and perfection. Nobody had ever written anything quite like that before, nobody would muster the confidence to write anything so blithe again. And it was all done by a shivering, hunted man whose blood was freezing in his veins and who was shortly, by a decree of 13 March 1794 to be precise, to be declared an outlaw. And who better to frame such a decree than the ingenious, fiery young Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just who at half Condorcet’s age had himself written a glowing description of the ideal republic. Saint-Just who had noticed something nobody else had quite put into words: that happiness was a new idea in Europe, the new idea in fact. That, after all, was what united everyone: Condorcet and Sophie, Mr Jefferson and Mrs Cosway, William and Rosalie too. Le bonheur was the one thing worth having, the only cause worth striving for.

  But before the reign of universal happiness could begin, the ground had to be cleared and the work must not be shirked or skimped out of mistaken notions of charity. The beauty of Saint-Just’s decree was that it swept away any need to plough through the list of attainted citizens. Article VIII of the Decree of 13 March (23 Ventose An II) simply affirmed that ‘all those indicted with conspiracy against the Republic who have evaded judicial examination are hereby declared outlaws’. And Article XI stated that ‘anyone who conceals an outlaw at home or elsewhere shall hereby be considered and punished as their accomplice’. As soon as Condorcet’s identity was established he could be executed without trial. The same fate awaited Madame Vernet if he were caught.

  Already there were strange visitors to No. 21. On 24 March a man called, saying he was a dealer in saltpetre and wanted to see a room that was to let, repeating several times that if one had something precious one should take good care of it because visitors were not always people one could rely on. Condorcet overheard the conversation from the adjoining room. The next day he had word that the premises were going to be searched on suspicion that there were fugitives from the south hiding there.

  Madame Vernet would not let him go. He had already given her his last will and testament. Two months earlier he had sent Sophie his wishes for Eliza’s education. He wanted her to learn English. If she went to England, he commended her to Lord Stanhope; in America to Mr Jefferson and to Franklin’s grandson, Mr Bache. He wished also that Eliza should be brought up in the love of liberty and equality, and that she should be kept remote from any thought of personal vengeance. Tel
l her I never felt any myself.

  Then he put all his papers – his algebraic calculations, his notes for a universal philosophical language (the last thing he was working on) and the manuscript of his precious Sketch into a canvas sack and gave it to his fellow mathematician, Sarret, saying, ‘Here are some papers, do what you like with them.’

  He took no baggage with him, but he stuffed into his pockets his razor, a knife with a horn handle, a little pair of scissors, a silver pencil case, a pocket Horace (a present from Madame Suard) and a small purse containing two of his wife’s miniatures, and locks of her hair and Eliza’s.

  Then he went down to the ground floor to find Sarret. Madame Vernet was standing there, an anxious look on her round face.

  ‘Salve.’

  ‘Salve, domine.’

  ‘Imus subiter.’

  ‘Imus subiter,’ Sarret replied.

  Madame Vernet had no Latin.

  ‘Oh madame, could you be so kind as to fetch my tobacco pouch from my chamber. I have my hands full with these wretched papers.’

  Madame Vernet, always so quick and eager, was up the stairs in no time but could not find any pouch. She was down the stairs again in time to hear the cry of horror from her maid as Condorcet rushed out of the door followed by Sarret who slammed it behind him. By the time she had the door open again, they were round the corner and out of sight. With her quick mind she saw in a flash that to chase after them would only draw attention to all three of them. She closed the door quietly and collapsed into the maid’s arms.