A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, is going bald. His friends—or those who wish to be his friends—have obliged him by shaving the hair off their foreheads, so that the Duke’s alopecia appears to be a fad, or whimsy. But no sycophancy can disguise the bald fact.

  Duke Philippe is now forty years old. People say he is one of the richest men in Europe. The Orléans line is the junior branch of the royal family, and its princes have rarely seen eye-to-eye with their senior cousins. Duke Philippe cannot agree with King Louis, about anything.

  Philippe’s life up to this point had not been auspicious. He had been so badly brought up, so badly turned out, that you might well think it had been done on purpose, to debauch him, to invalidate him, to disable him for any kind of political activity. When he married, and appeared with the new Duchess at the Opera, the galleries were packed by the public prostitutes decked out in mourning.

  Philippe is not a stupid man, but he is a susceptible one, a taker-up of fads and fancies. At this time he has a good deal to complain about. The King interferes all the time in his private life. His letters are opened, and he is followed about by policemen and the King’s spies. They try to ruin his friendship with the dear Prince of Wales, and to stop him visiting England, whence he has imported so many fine women and racehorses. He is continually defamed and calumniated by the Queen’s party, who aim to make him an object of ridicule. His crime is, of course, that he stands too near the throne. He finds it difficult to concentrate for any length of time, and you can’t expect him to read the nation’s destiny in a balance sheet; but you don’t need to tell Philippe d’Orléans that there is no liberty in France.

  Among the many women in his life, one stands out: not the Duchess. Félicité de Genlis had become his mistress in 1772, and to prove the character of his feelings for her the Duke had caused a device to be tattooed on his arm. Félicité is a woman of sweet and iron willfulness, and she writes books. There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry. Impressed, astounded, enslaved, the Duke has placed her in charge of his children’s education. They have a daughter of their own, Pamela, a beautiful and talented child whom they pretend is an orphan.

  From the Duke, as from his children, Félicité exacts respect, obedience, adoration: from the Duchess, a timid acquiescence to her status and her powers. Félicité has a husband, of course—Charles-Alexis Brulard de Sillery, Comte de Genlis, a handsome ex-naval officer with a brilliant service record. He is close to Philippe—one of his small well-drilled army of fixers, organizers, hangers-on. People had once called their marriage a love match; twenty-five years on, Charles-Alexis retains his good looks and his polish, and indulges daily and nightly his ruling passion—gambling.

  Félicité has even reformed the Duke—moderated some of his wilder excesses, steered his money and his energy into worthwhile channels. Now in her well-preserved forties, she is a tall, slender woman with dark blonde hair, arresting brown eyes and a decisive aspect to her features. Her physical intimacy with the Duke has ceased, but now she chooses his mistresses for him and directs them how to behave. She is accustomed to be at the center of things, to be consulted, to dispense advice. She has no love for the King’s wife, Antoinette.

  The consuming frivolity of the Court has left a kind of hiatus, a want of a cultural center for the nation. It is arranged by Félicité that Philippe and his court shall supply that lack. It is not that she has political ambitions for him—but it happens that so many intellectuals, so many artists and scholars, so many of the people one wishes to cultivate, are liberal-minded men, enlightened men, men who look forward to a new dispensation; and doesn’t the Duke have every sympathy? In this year, 1787, there are gathered about him a number of young men, aristocrats for the most part, all of them ambitious and all of them with a vague feeling that their ambitions have somehow been thwarted, that their lives have somehow become unsatisfactory. It is arranged that the Duke, who feels this more keenly than most, shall be a leader to them.

  The Duke wishes to be a man of the people, especially of the people of Paris; he wishes to be in touch with their moods and concerns. He keeps court in the heart of the city, at the Palais-Royal. He has turned the gardens over to the public and leased out the buildings as shops and brothels and coffeehouses and casinos: so that at the epicenter of the nation’s fornication, rumor-mongering, pickpocketing and street-fighting, there sits Philippe: Good Duke Philippe, the Father of His People. Only nobody shouts that; it has not been arranged yet.

  Summer of ’87, Philippe is fitted out and launched for trial maneuvers. In November the King decides to meet the obstructive Parlement in a Royal Session, to obtain registration of edicts sanctioning the raising of a loan for the state. If he cannot get his way, he will be forced to call the Estates-General. Philippe prepares to confront the royal authority—as de Sillery would have said—broadside on.

  Camille saw Lucile briefly outside Saint-Sulpice, where she had been attending benediction. “Our carriage is just over there,” she said. “Our man, Théodore, is generally on my side, but he will have to bring it across in a minute. So let’s make this quick.”

  “Your mother’s not in it, is she?” He looked alarmed.

  “No, she’s skulking at home. By the way, I heard you were in a riot.”

  “How did you hear that?”

  “There’s this grapevine. Claude knows this man called Charpentier, yes? Well, you can imagine, Claude’s thrilled.”

  “You shouldn’t stand here,” he said. “Awful day. You’re getting wet.”

  She had the distinct impression that he would like to bundle her into the carriage, and have done with her. “Sometimes I dream,” she said, “of living in a warm place. One where the sun shines every day. Italy would be nice. Then I think, no, stay at home and shiver a little. All this money that my father has set aside for my dowry, I don’t think I should let it slip through my fingers. It would be downright ungrateful to run away from it. We ought to be married here,” she waved a hand, “at a time of our own choosing. We could go to Italy afterwards, for a holiday. We’ll need a holiday after we’ve fought them and won. We could retain some elephants, and go across the Alps.”

  “So you do mean to marry me then?”

  “Oh yes.” She looked at him, astonished. How could it be that she had forgotten to let him know? When it was all she had been thinking about, for weeks? Perhaps she’d thought the grapevine would do that too. But the fact that it hadn’t … Could it be that he had put it to the back of his mind in some way? “Camille …” she said.

  “Very well,” he said. “But if I’m to go bespeaking elephants, I can’t just do it on a promise. You’ll have to swear me a solemn oath. Say ‘By the bones of the Abbé Terray.’”

  She giggled. “We’ve always taken the Abbé Terray very seriously.”

  “That’s what I mean, a serious oath.”

  “As you like. By the bones of the Abbé Terray, I swear I will marry you, whatever happens, whatever anyone says, and even if the sky falls in. I feel we should kiss but,” she extended her hand, “this is the most I can manage. Otherwise Théodore will get a crisis of conscience, and come over right away.”

  “You might take your glove off,” he said. “It would be a start.”

  She took her glove off, and gave him her hand. She thought he might kiss her fingertips, but in fact he took those fingertips, turned her hand over rather forcefully and held her palm for a second against his mouth. And just that; he didn’t kiss it; just held it there, still. She shivered. “You know a thing or two, don’t you?” she said.

  By now, her carriage had arrived. The horses breathed patiently, shifted their feet; Théodore positioned his back to them, and scanned the street with deep interest. “Now, listen,” she said. “We come here because my mother has a tendresse for one of the clergy. She thinks him spiritually fine, elevated.”

  Théodore turned now. He opened the door for her. She turned her bac
k. “His name is Abbé Laudréville. He visits us as often as my mother needs to discuss her soul, which these days is at least three times a week. And he thinks my father a man of no sensibility at all. So write.” The door slammed, and she spoke to him from the window. “I imagine you have a way with elderly priests. You write the letters and he’ll bring them. Come to evening mass, and you’ll get replies.” Théodore gathered the reins. She bobbed her head in. “Piety to some purpose,” she muttered.

  November: Camille at the Café du Foy, unable to get his words out fast enough. “My cousin de Viefville actually spoke to me in public, he was so anxious to tell someone what had happened. So: the King came in and slumped there half-asleep, as usual. The Keeper of the Seals spoke, and said that the Estates would be convoked, but not till ’92, which is a lifetime away—”

  “I blame the Queen.”

  “Shh.”

  “And this led to some protest, and then there was discussion of the edicts that the King wants them to register. As they were approaching the vote, the Keeper of the Seals went up to the King and spoke to him privately, and the King just cut the discussion short, and said the edicts were to be registered. Just ordered it to be done.”

  “But how can he—”

  “Shh.”

  Camille looked around at his audience. He was aware that a singular event had occurred once again: his stutter had vanished. “Then Orléans got up, and everyone turned around and stared, and he was absolutely white, de Viefville said. And the Duke said, ‘You can’t do that. It’s illegal.’ Then the King became flustered, and he shouted out, ‘It is legal, because I wish it.’”

  Camille stopped. There was an immediate buzz—of protest, of simulated horror, of speculation. At once he felt that hideous urge to destroy his own case; he was enough of a lawyer, perhaps, or perhaps, he wondered, am I just too honest? “Listen, everyone, please—this is what de Viefville says the King said. But I’m not sure if one can believe it—isn’t it too pat? I mean, if people wanted to engineer a constitutional crisis, isn’t that just what they’d hope for him to say? Actually, perhaps—because he’s not a bad man, is he, the King … I think he probably didn’t say that at all, he probably made some feeble joke.”

  D’Anton noted this: that Camille did not stutter, and that he talked to every person in the crowded room as if he were speaking only to them. But someone said, “Well, get on, then!”

  “The edicts were registered. The King left. As soon as he was outside the door, the edicts were annuled and struck off the books. Two members of the Parlement are arrested on lettres de cachet. The Duke of Orléans is exiled to his estates at Villers-Cotterêts. Oh—and I am invited to dine with my esteemed cousin de Viefville.”

  Autumn passed. It’s like, Annette said, if the roof fell in, you would scrabble in the debris for what valuables were left; you wouldn’t sit down among the falling masonry saying “why, oh why?” The prospect of Camille, of what he was going to do to herself and her daughter, seemed too ghastly to resist. She accepted it as people become reconciled to the long course of an illness; at times, she desired death.

  CHAPTER 5

  A New Profession

  Nothing. changes. Nothing new. The same old dreary crisis atmosphere. The feeling that it can’t get much worse without something giving way. But nothing does. Ruin, collapse, the sinking ship of state: the point of no return, the shifting balance, the crumbling edifice and the sands of time. Only the cliché flourishes.

  In Arras, Maximilien de Robespierre faces the New Year truculent and disheartened. He is at war with the local judiciary. He has no money. He has given up the literary society, because poetry is becoming an irrelevance. He is trying to restrict his social life, because he finds it difficult now to be even normally courteous to the self-satisfied, the place-seekers, the mealy-mouthed—and that is a fair description of polite society in Arras. More and more, casual conversations turn to the questions of the day, and he stifles his wish to smile and let things pass; that conciliatory streak, he is fighting hard to eradicate that. So every workaday disagreement becomes an affront, every point conceded in court becomes a defeat. There are laws against dueling, but not against dueling in the head. You can’t, he tells his brother Augustin, separate political views from the people who hold them; if you do, it shows you don’t take politics seriously.

  Somehow his thoughts ought to show on his face—but he finds himself still on the guest lists, still in demand for country drives and evenings at the theater. They will not see that he has not enough unction left to oil the wheels of social intercourse. The pressure of their expectations forces from him again and again a little tact, the soft answer; it’s so easy to behave, after all, like the nice boy you always were.

  Aunt Henriette, Aunt Eulalie edge around with that stifling tact of their own, their desire always to do the very very best for you. Aunt Eulalie’s stepdaughter, Anaïs: so pretty, so fond of you: so why not? And why not make it soon? Because, he said with desperation, next year they might call the Estates, and who knows, who knows, I might be going away.

  By Christmas the Charpentiers are well settled in their new house at Fontenay-sous-Bois. They miss the café, but not the city mud, the noise, the rude people in the shops. The country air, they say, makes them feel ten years younger. Gabrielle and Georges-Jacques come out on Sundays. You can see they’re happy; it’s so gratifying. The baby will have enough shawls for seven infants and more attention than a dauphin. Georges-Jacques looks harassed, pale after the long winter. What he needs is a month at home in Arcis, but he can’t take the time off. He now has complete charge of the Board of Excise’s legal work, but he says he needs another source of income. He would like to buy some land, but he says he hasn’t the capital. He says there is a limit to what one man can do, but no doubt he is worrying needlessly. We are all very proud of Georges.

  At the Treasury, Claude Duplessis comports himself as cheerfully as he can, given the circumstances. Last year, during a period of five months, France had three Comptrollers in succession, all of them asking the same silly questions and requiring to be fed streams of useless information. He has to think quite hard when he wakes in the morning to recall whom he works for. Soon no doubt M. Necker will be invited back, to treat us to more of his glib nostrums about public confidence. If the public at large want to think of Necker as some sort of Messiah, who are we, mere clerks, mere civil servants after all … . No one at the Treasury thinks the situation can be retrieved.

  Claude confides to a colleague that his lovely daughter wants to marry a little provincial lawyer who has a stutter and who hardly ever appears in court, and who seems in addition to have a bad moral character. He wonders why his colleague smirks so.

  The deficit is one hundred and sixty million livres.

  Camille Desmoulins was living in the rue Sainte-Anne, with a girl whose mother painted portraits. “Do go and see your family,” she told him. “Just for the New Year.” She looked at him appraisingly, she was thinking of going into her mother’s line of work. Camille’s not easy to put on paper; it’s easier to draw the men the taste of the age admires, florid fleshy men with their conscious poise and newly barbered heads. Camille moves too quickly for even a lightning sketch; she knows he is moving on, out of their lives, and she wants if she can to make things right for him before he goes.

  So now the diligence, not worth the name, rumbled towards Guise over roads rutted and flooded by January rains. As he approached his home, Camille thought of his sister Henriette, of her long dying. Whole days, whole weeks had gone by when they had not seen Henriette, only his mother’s whey-face, and the doctor coming and going. He had gone off to school, to Cateau-Cambrésis, and sometimes he had woken in the night and thought, why isn’t she coughing? When he returned home he was taken into her room and allowed to sit for five minutes by the bed. She had transparent places under her eyes, where the skin shone blue; her bony shoulders were pushed forward by the pillows. She had died the year he went to s
chool in Paris, on a day when the rain fell steadily and coursed in brown channels through the streets of the town.

  His father had given the priest and the doctor a glass of brandy—as if they were not habituated to death, as if they needed bracing. Himself, he sat in a corner inconspicuously, and awkwardly very awkwardly the men revolved the conversation around to him: Camille, how will you like going to Louis-le-Grand? I have made up my mind to like it, he said. Won’t you miss your mother and father? You must remember, he said, that they sent me to school three years ago when I was seven, so I will not miss them at all, and they will not miss me. He’s upset, the priest said hurriedly; but Camille, your little sister’s in heaven. No, Father, he had said: we are compelled to believe that Henriette is in purgatory now, tasting torments. This is the consolation our religion allows us for our loss.

  There would be brandy for him now when he arrived home, and his father would ask, as he had done for years, how was the journey? But he was used to the journey. Perhaps the horses might fall over, or you might be poisoned en route, or bored to death by a fellow traveler; that was the sum of the possibilities. Once he had said, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t speak to anyone, I thought evil thoughts all the way. All the way? And those were the days before the diligence. He must have had stamina, when he was sixteen.

  Before leaving Paris he had read over his father’s recent letters. They were trenchant, unmagisterial, wounding. Between the lines lay the unspeakable fact that the Godards wished to break off his engagement to his cousin Rose-Fleur. It had been made when she was in her cradle; how were they to know how things would turn out?

  It was Friday night when he arrived home. The next day there were calls to be paid around the town, gatherings he could not avoid. Rose-Fleur affected to be too shy to speak to him, but the pretense sat uneasily on her restless shoulders. She had darting eyes and the Godards’ heavy dark hair; she ran her eyes over him from time to time, making him feel that he had been coated with black treacle.