A man survives: he comes through. Even here in Arras it was possible to find allies, if not friends. Joseph Fouché taught at the Oratorian College. He had thought of the priesthood, but had grown away from the idea. He taught physics, and was interested in anything new. Fouché came to dinner quite often, invited by Charlotte. He seemed to have proposed to her—or at any rate, they had come to some understanding. Max was surprised that any girl would be attracted by Fouché, with his frail, stick-like limbs and almost lashless eyes. Still, who’s to know? He did not like Fouché at all, in point of fact, but Charlotte had her own life to lead.
Then there was Lazare Carnot, a captain of engineers at the garrison; a man older than himself, reserved, rather bitter about the lack of opportunities open to him, as a commoner in His Majesty’s forces. Carnot went for company to the Academy’s meetings, formulae revolving in his head while they discussed the sonnet form. Sometimes he treated them to a tirade about the deplorable state of the army. Members would exchange amused glances.
Only Maximilien listened earnestly—quite ignorant of military matters, and a little overawed.
When Mlle. de Kéralio was voted in by the Academy—its first lady member—he made a speech in her honor about the genius of women, their role in literature and the arts. After this she’d said, “Why don’t you call me Louise?” She wrote novels—thousands of words a week. He envied her facility. “Listen to this,” she’d say, “and tell me what you think.”
He made sure not to—authors are touchy. Louise was pretty, and she never quite got the ink scrubbed off her little fingers. “I’m off to Paris,” she said, “one can’t go on stagnating in this backwater, saving your presences.” Her hand tapped a rolled sheaf of manuscript against a chair back. “O solemn and wondrous Maximilien de Robespierre, why don’t you come to Paris too? No? Well, at least let’s take off for the afternoon with a picnic. Let’s start a rumor, shall we?”
Louise belonged to the real nobility. “Nothing to be thought of there,” said the Aunts: “Poor Maximilien.”
“Noble or not,” Charlotte said, “the girl’s a trollop. She wanted my brother to up and go to Paris with her, imagine.” Yes, just imagine. Louise packed her bags and hurtled off into the future. He was dimly aware of a turning missed; one of those forks in the road, that you remember later when you are good and lost.
Still, there was Aunt Eulalie’s stepdaughter, Anais. Both the Aunts favored her above all the other candidates. They said she had nice manners.
One day before long the mother of a poor rope maker turned up at his door with a story about her son who was in prison because the Benedictines at Anchin had accused him of theft. She said the accusation was false and malicious; the Abbey treasurer, Dom Brognard, was notoriously light-fingered, and had in addition tried to get the rope maker’s sister into bed, and she wouldn’t by any means be the first girl … .
Yes, he said. Calm down. Have a seat. Let’s start at the beginning.
This was the kind of client he was beginning to get. An ordinary man—or frequently a woman—who’d fallen foul of vested interests. Naturally, there was no hope of a fee.
The rope maker’s tale sounded too bad to be true. Nevertheless, he said, we’ll let it see the light. Within a month, Dom Brognard was under investigation, and the rope maker was suing the abbey for damages. When the Benedictines wanted to retain a lawyer, who did they get? M. Liborel, his one-time sponsor. He said, gratitude does not bind me here, the truth is at stake.
Little hollow words, echoing through the town. Everyone takes sides, and most of the legal establishment takes Liborel’s. It turns into a dirty fight; and of course in the end they do what he imagined they would do—they offer the rope maker more money than he earns in years to settle out of court and go away and keep quiet.
Obviously, things are not going to be the same after this. He’ll not forget how they got together, conspired against him, condemned him in the local press as an anti-clerical troublemaker. Him? The abbot’s protégé? The Bishop’s golden boy? Very well. If that’s how they want to see him, he will not trouble from now on to make things easy for his colleagues, to be so very helpful and polite. It is a fault, that persistent itch to have people think well of him.
The Academy of Arras elected him prsident, but he bored them with his harangues about the rights of illegitimate childen. You’d think there was no other issue in the universe, one of the members complained.
“If your mother and your father had conducted themselves properly,” Grandfather Carraut had said, “you would never have been born.”
Charlotte would take out her account books and observe that the cost of his conscience grew higher by the month. “Of course it does,” he said. “What did you expect?”
Every few weeks she would round on him and deliver these wounding blows, proving to him that he was not understood even in his own house.
“This house,” she said. “I can’t call it a home. We have never had a home. Some days you are so preoccupied that you hardly speak. I may as well not be here. I am a good housekeeper, what interest do you display in my arrangements? I am a fine cook, but you have no interest in food. I invite company, and when we take out the cards or prepare to make conversation you withdraw to the other side of the room and mark passages in books.”
He waited for her anger to subside. It was understandable; anger these days was her usual condition. Fouché had offered her marriage—or something—and then left her high and dry, looking a bit of a fool. He wondered vaguely if something ought to be done about it, but he was convinced she’d be better off without the man in the long run.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be more sociable. It’s just that I’ve a lot of work on.”
“Yes, but is it work you’ll be paid for?” Charlotte said that in Arras he had got himself the reputation of being uninterested in money and soft-hearted, which surprised him, because he thought of himself as a man of principle and nobody’s fool. She would accuse him of alienating people who could have promoted his career, and he would begin again to explain why it was necessary to reject their help, where his duties lay, what he felt bound to do. She made too much of it, he thought. They could pay the bills, after all. There was food on the table.
Charlotte would go round and round the point, though. Sooner or later, she would work herself into a crying fit. Then out it would come, the thing that was really bothering her. “You’re going to marry Anaïs. You’re going to marry Anaïs, and leave me on my own.”
In court he was now making what people called “political speeches.” How not? Everything’s politics. The system is corrupt. Justice is for sale.
30 June 1787:
It is ordered that the language attacking the authority of justice and the law, and injurious to judges, published in the printed memoir signed “De Robespierre, barrister-at-law,” shall be suppressed; and this decree shall be posted in the town of ARRAS.
BY ORDER OF THE MAGISTRATES OF BÉTHUNE
Every so often, a pinpoint of light in the general gloom: one day as he was coming out of court a young advocate called Hermann sidled up to him and said, “You know, de Robespierre, I’m beginning to think you’re right.”
“About what?”
The young man looked surprised, “Oh, about everything.”
He wrote an essay for the Academy of Metz:
The mainspring of energy in a republic is vertu, the love of one’s laws and one’s country; and it follows from the very nature of these that all private interests and all personal relationships must give way to the general good … . Every citizen has a share in the sovereign power … and therefore cannot acquit his dearest friend, if the safety of the state requires his punishment.
When he had written that, he put his pen down and stared at the passage and thought, this is all very well, it is easy for me to say that, I have no dearest friend. Then he thought, of course I have. I have Camille.
He searched for his last letter. It was ra
ther muddled, written in Greek, some business about a married woman. By applying himself to the dead language, Camille was concealing from himself his misery, confusion and pain; by forcing the recipient to translate, he was saying, believe that my life to me is an elitist entertainment, something that only exists when it is written down and sent by the posts. Max let his palm rest on the letter. If only your life would come right, Camille. If only your head were cooler, your skin thicker, and if only I could see you again … If only all things would work together for good.
Now it is his daily work to particularize, item by item, the iniquities of the system, and the petty manifestations of tyranny here in Arras. God knows, he has tried to placate, to fit in. He has been sober and conformist, deferential to colleagues of experience. When he has spoken violently it has only been because he hoped to shame them into good actions; in no way is he a violent man. But he is asking the impossible—he is asking them to admit that the system they’ve labored in all their lives is false, ill-founded and wicked.
Sometimes when he is faced with a mendacious opponent or a pompous magistrate, he fights the impulse to drive a fist into the man’s face; fights it so hard that his neck and shoulders ache. Every morning he opens his eyes and says, “Dear God, help me to bear this day.” And he prays for something, anything, to happen, to deliver him from these endless, polite, long-drawn-out recriminations, to save him from the dissipation of his youth and wit and courage. Max, you can’t afford to return that man’s fee. He’s poor, I must do it. Max, what would you like for dinner? I haven’t an idea. Max, have you named the happy day? He dreams of drowning, far far under the glassy sea.
He tries not to give offense. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.
CHAPTER 4
A Wedding, A Riot, A Prince of the Blood
Lucile has not said yes. She’s not said no. She’s only said, she’ll think about it.
Annette: her first reaction had been panic and her second rage; when the immediate crisis was over and she had not seen Camille for a month, she began to curtail her social engagements and to spend the evenings by herself, worrying the situation like a dog with a bone.
Bad enough to be deemed seduced. Worse to be deemed abandoned. And to be abandoned for one’s adolescent daughter? Dignity was at its nadir.
Since the King had dismissed his minister Calonne, Claude was at the office every evening, drafting memoranda.
On the first night, Annette had not slept. She had tossed and sweated into the small hours, plotting herself a revenge. She had thought that she would somehow force him to leave Paris. By four o’clock she could no longer bear to remain in her bed. She got up, pulled a wrap about her shoulders, walked through the apartment in the dark; walked barefoot, like a penitent, for the last thing she wanted was to make any noise at all, to wake her maid, to wake her daughter—who was sleeping, no doubt, the chaste and peaceful sleep of emotional despots. When dawn came she was shivering by an open window. Her resolution seemed a fantasy or nightmare, a monstrous baroque conceit dreamed by someone other than herself. Come now, it’s an incident, she said to herself: that’s all. She was left, then as now, with her grievance and her sense of loss.
Lucile looked at her warily these days, not knowing what was going on in her head. They had ceased to speak to each other, in any sense that mattered. When others were present they managed some vapid exchanges; alone together, they were mutually embarrassed.
Lucile: she spent all the time she could alone. She re-read La Nouvelle Heloïse. A year ago, when she had first picked up the book, Camille had told her he had a friend, some odd name, began with an R, who thought it the masterpiece of the age. His friend was an arch-sentimentalist; they would get on well, were they to meet. She understood that he himself did not think much of the book and wished a little to sway her judgement. She remembered him talking to her mother of Rousseau’s Confessions, which was another of those books her father would not allow her to read. Camille said the author lacked all sense of delicacy and that some things were better not committed to paper; since then she had been careful what she wrote in her red diary. She recalled her mother laughing, saying you can do what you like I suppose as long as you retain a sense of delicacy. Camille had made some remark she barely heard, about the aesthetics of sin, and her mother had laughed again, and leaned towards him and touched his hair. She should have known then.
These days she was remembering incidents like that, turning them over, pulling them apart. Her mother seemed to be denying—as far as one could make out what she was saying at all—that she had ever been to bed with Camille. She thought her mother was probably lying.
Annette had been quite kind to her, she thought, considering the circumstances. She had once told her that time resolves most situations, without the particular need for action. It seemed a spineless way to approach life. Someone will be hurt, she thought, but every way I win. I am now a person of consequence; results trail after my actions.
She rehearsed that crucial scene. After the storm, a struggling beam of late sun had burnished a stray unpowdered hair on her mother’s neck. His hands had rested confidingly in the hollow of her waist. When Annette whirled around, her whole face had seemed to collapse, as if someone had hit her very hard. Camille had half-smiled; that was strange, she thought. For just a moment he had held on to her mother’s wrist, as if reserving her for another day.
And the shock, the terrible, heart-stopping shock: yet why should it have been a shock, when it was—give or take the details—just what she and Adèle had been hoping to see?
Her mother went out infrequently, and always in the carriage. Perhaps she was afraid she might run into Camille by accident. There was a tautness in her face, as if she had become older.
May came, the long light evenings and the short nights; more than once Claude worked right through them, trying to lay a veneer of novelty on the proposals of the new Comptroller-General. Parlement was not to be bamboozled; it was that and tax again. When the Parlement of Paris proved obdurate, the usual royal remedy was to exile it to the provinces. This year the King sent it to Troyes, each member ordered there by an individual lettre de cachet. Exciting for Troyes, Georges-Jacques d’Anton said.
On June 14 he married Gabrielle at the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. She was twenty-four years old; waiting patiently for her father and her fiance to settle things up, she had spent her afternoons experimenting in the kitchen, and had eaten her creations; she had taken to chocolate and cream, and absently spooning sugar into her father’s good strong coffee. She giggled as her mother tugged her into her wedding dress, thinking of when her new husband would peel her out of it. She was moving on a stage in life. As she came out into the sunshine, hanging onto Georges’s arm harder than convention dictated, she thought, I am perfectly safe now, my life is before me and I know what it will be, and I would not change it, not even to be the Queen. She turned a little pink at the warm sentimentality of her own thoughts; those sweets have jellified my brain, she thought, smiling into the sun at her wedding guests, feeling the warmth of her body inside her tight dress. Especially, she would not like to be the Queen; she had seen her in procession in the streets, her face set with stupidity and helpless contempt, her hardedged diamonds flashing around her like naked blades.
The apartment they had rented proved to be too near to Les Halles. “Oh, but I like it,” she said. “The only thing that bothers me are those wild-looking pigs that run up and down the street.” She grinned at him. “They’re nothing to you, I suppose.”
“Very small pigs. Inconsiderable. But no, you’re right,
we should have seen the disadvantages.”
“But it’s lovely. It makes me happy; except for the pigs, and the mud, and the language that the market ladies use. We can always move when we’ve got more money—and with your new position as King’s Councillor, that won’t be very long.”
Of course, she had no idea about the debts. He’d thought he would tell her, once life settled down. But it didn’t settle, because she was pregnant—from the wedding night, it seemed—and she was quite silly, mindless, euphoric, dashing between the café and their own house, full of plans and prospects. Now he knew her better he knew that she was just as he’d thought, just as he’d wished: innocent, conventional, with a pious streak. It would have seemed hideous, criminal to allow anything to overshadow her happiness. The time when he might have told her came, passed, receded. The pregnancy suited her; her hair thickened, her skin glowed, she was lush, opulent, almost exotic, and frequently out of breath. A great sea of optimism buoyed them up, carried them along into midsummer.
“Maître d‘Anton, may I detain you for a moment?” They were just outside the Law Courts. D’Anton turned. Hérault de Séchelles, a judge, a man of his own age: a man seriously aristocratic, seriously rich. Well, Georges-Jacques thought: we are going up in the world.
“I wanted to offer you my congratulations, on your reception into the King’s Bench. Very good speech you made.” D’Anton inclined his head. “You’ve been in court this morning?”
D’Anton profferred a portfolio. “The case of the Marquis de Chayla. Proof of the Marquis’s right to bear that title.”
“You seem to have proved it already, in your own mind,” Camille muttered.
A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Page 12