A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  When Camille appeared Lucile rose smoothly from her chair, crossed the room and kissed him on the mouth. She watched herself in the mirror, watched him. She saw him take her hands from his shoulders and return them to her gently, folded together as if in prayer. He saw how different she looked with her hair unpowdered, how dramatic were her strong features and perfect pallor. He saw Gabrielle’s hostility towards him melt a little. He sawhow she watched her husband, watching Lucile. He saw d’Anton thinking, for once he did not lie, he did not exaggerate, he said Lucile was beautiful and she is. This took one second; Camille smiled. He knows that all his derelictions can be excused if he is deeply in love with Lucile; sentimental people will excuse him, and he knows how to encourage sentiment. He thinks that perhaps he is deeply in love; after all, what else is the name for the excited misery he sees on Lucile’s face, and which his own face, he feels sure, reflects?

  What has put her into this state? It must be his letters. Suddenly, he remembers what Georges had said: “Try prose.” At that, it might not be so futile. He has a good deal to say, and if he can reduce his complicated and painful feelings about the Duplessis household to a few telling and effective pages, it ought to be child’s play to analyze the state of the nation. Moreover, while his life is ridiculous and inept and designed to make people smile, his writing could be stylish and heartless, and produce weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  For quite thirty seconds, Lucile had forgotten to look into the mirror. For the first time, she felt she had taken a hold upon her life; she had become embodied, she wasn’t a spectator anymore. But how long would the feeling last? His actual physical presence, so much longed for, she now found too much to bear. She wished he would go away, so she could imagine him again, but she was unsure how to request this without appearing demented. Camille framed in his mind the first and last sentences of a political pamphlet, but his eyes did not shift from her face; as he was extremely shortsighted, his gaze gave the impression of an intensity of concentration that made her weak at the knees. Deeply at cross-purposes, they stood frozen, hypnotized, until—as moments do—the moment passed.

  “So this is the creature who oversets the household and suborns servants and clergyman,” d’Anton said. “I wonder, my dear, do you know anything of the comedies of the English writer Mr. Sheridan?”

  “No.”

  “I wondered if you thought that Life ought to imitate Art?”

  “If it imitates life,” Lucile said, “that’s quite exciting enough for me.” She noticed the time on the clock. “I’ll be killed,” she said.

  She blew them all a kiss, swept up her feathered hat, ran out onto the stairs. In her haste she almost knocked over a small girl, who appeared to be listening at the door, and who, surprisingly, called out after her, “I like your jacket.”

  In bed that night she thought, hm, that large ugly man, I seem to have made a conquest there.

  On August 8 the King fixed a date for the meeting of the Estates—May 1, 1789. A week later the Comptroller General, Brienne, discovered (or so it was said) that the state’s coffers contained enough revenue for one-quarter of one day’s expenditure. He declared a suspension of all payments by the government. France was bankrupt. His Majesty continued to hunt, and if he did not kill he recorded the fact in his diary: rien, rien, rien. Brienne was dismissed.

  Routine was so broken up these days, that Claude could be found in Paris when he should have been in Versailles. Mid-morning, he strolled out into the hot August air, made for the Café du Foy. Other years, August had found him sitting by an open window at his country place at Bourg-la-Reine.

  “Good morning, Maître d’Anton,” he said. “Maître Desmoulins. I had no idea you knew each other.” The idea seemed to be causing him pain. “Well, what do you think? Things can’t go on like this.”

  “I suppose we should take your word for it, M. Duplessis,” Camille said. “How do you look forward to having M. Necker back?”

  “What does it matter?” Claude said. “I think that even the Abbé Terray would have found the situation beyond him.”

  “Anything new from Versailles?” d’Anton asked.

  “Someone told me,” Camille said, “that when the king cannot hunt he goes up on the roofs at Versailles and takes potshots at the ladies’ cats. Do you think there’s anything in it?”

  “Shouldn’t be surprised,” Claude said.

  “It puzzles a lot of people to see how things have deteriorated since Necker was last in office. If you think back to ’81, to the public accounting, the books then showed a surplus—”

  “Cooked,” Claude said dismally.

  “Really?”

  “Done to a turn.”

  “So much for Necker,” d’Anton said.

  “But you know, it wasn’t such a crime,” Camille suggested. “Not if he thought public confidence was the main thing.”

  “Jesuit,” d’Anton said.

  Claude turned to him. “I’m hearing things, d’Anton—straws in the wind. Your patron Barentin will be moving from the Board of Excise—he’s going to get the Ministry of Justice in the new government.” He smiled. He looked very tired. “This is a sad day for me. I would have given anything to stop it coming to this. And it must give impetus to the wilder elements … .” His eye fell on Camille. He had been very civil this morning, very well-behaved, but that he was a wilder element Claude had no doubt. “Maître Desmoulins,” he said, “I hope you aren’t still entertaining notions about marrying my daughter.”

  “I am, rather.”

  “If you could just see it from my point of view.”

  “No, I’m afraid I can see it only from my own.”

  M. Duplessis turned away. D’Anton put a hand on his arm. “About Barentin—can you tell me something more?”

  Claude held up a forefinger. “Least said, soonest mended. I hope I’ve not spoken out of turn. I expect I’ll be seeing you before long.” He indicated Camille, hopelessly. “Him too.”

  Camille looked after him. “‘Straws in the wind,’” he said savagely. “Have you ever heard such drivel? We ought to arrange him a cliché contest with Maître Vinot. Oh,” he said suddenly, “I do see what he means. He means they’re going to offer you a job.”

  Upon taking office, Necker began to negotiate a loan from abroad. The Parlements were reinstated. The price of bread rose two sous. On August 29, a mob burned down the guard posts on the Pont-Neuf. The King found the money to move troops into the capital. Soldiers opened fire into a crowd of six hundred; seven or eight people were killed and an unknown number injured.

  M. Barentin was appointed Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals. The mob made a straw doll in the likeness of his predecessor, and set fire to it on the Place de Grève, to the tune of hoots and jeers, the crack and whizz of fireworks and the drunken acquiescent singing of the French Guards, who were stationed permanently in the capital and who liked that sort of thing.

  D’Anton had given his reasons precisely, without heat but without equivocation; he had worked out beforehand what he would say, so that he would be perfectly clear. Barentin’s offer of a secretary’s post would quickly become common knowledge around City Hall and the ministries and beyond. Fabre suggested that he take Gabrielle some flowers and break it to her gently.

  When he got home, Mme. Charpentier was there, and Camille. They stopped talking when they saw him. The atmosphere was ill-humored; but Angélique came over, beaming, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Dear son Georges,” she said, “our warmest congratulations.”

  “On what?” he said. “My case didn’t come up. Really, the process of justice is moving like treacle nowadays.”

  “We understand,” Gabrielle said, “that you have been offered a post in the government.”

  “Yes, but it’s of no consequence. I turned it down.”

  “I told you,” Camille said.

  Angélique stood up. “I’ll be off then.”

  “I’ll see you out,” Gabrielle said, with e
xtreme formality. Her face glowed. She got up; they went, and whispered outside the door.

  “Angélique will make her behave,” d’Anton said. Camille sat and smiled at him. “You’re easily pleased. Come back in, calm yourself, shut the door,” he said to his wife. “Please try to understand that I am acting for the best.”

  “When he said,” she pointed to Camille, “that you’d turned it down, I said what kind of a fool did he suppose I was?”

  “This government won’t last a year. It doesn’t suit me, Gabrielle.” She gaped at him. “So what are you going to do? Give up your practice because the state of the law doesn’t suit you? You were ambitious before, you used to say—”

  “Yes, and now he’s more ambitious,” Camille cut in. “He’s far too good for a minor post under Barentin. Probably—oh, probably the Seal will be within his own gift one day.”

  D’Anton laughed. “If it ever is,” he said, “I’ll give it to you. I promise.”

  “That’s probably treason,” Gabrielle said. Her hair was slipping down, as it tended to do at points of crisis.

  “Don’t confuse the issue,” Camille said. “Georges-Jacques is going to be a great man, however he is impeded.”

  “You’re mad,” Gabrielle said. As she shook her head a shower of hairpins leapt out and slithered to the floor. “What I hate, Georges, is to see you trotting along in the wake of other people’s opinions.”

  “Me? You think I do that?”

  “No,” Camille said hurriedly, “he doesn’t do that.”

  “He takes notice of you, and no notice of me whatsoever.”

  “That’s because—” Camille stopped. He could not think of a tactful reason why it was. He turned to d’Anton. “Can I produce you to the Café du Foy tonight? You may be expected to make a short speech, you don’t mind, of course not.”

  Gabrielle looked up from the floor, hairpin in hand. “Do I understand that this business has glorified you, somehow?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘glory.’” Camille looked modest. “But it’s a start.”

  “Would you mind?” d’Anton said to her. “I’ll not be late. When I come home I’ll explain it better. Gabrielle, leave those, Catherine will pick them up.”

  Gabrielle shook her head again. She would not be explained to, and if Catherine were asked to crawl around the floor after her hairpins, she would probably give notice; why did he not know this?

  The men went downstairs. Camille said, “I’m afraid it’s just my existence that irks Gabrielle. Even when my desperate fiancée turns up at her door she still believes I’m trying to inveigle you into bed with me.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Time to think of higher things,” Camille said. “Oh, I am so happy. Everybody says changes are coming, everyone says the country will be overturned. They say it, but you believe it. You act on it. You are seen to act on it.”

  “There was a pope—I forget which one—who told everyone that the world was going to end. They all put their estates on the market, and the pope bought them and became rich.”

  “That’s a nice story,” Camille said. “You are not a pope, but never mind, I think you will do quite well for yourself.”

  As soon as they heard in Arras that there were going to be elections, Maximilien began to put his affairs in order. “How do you know you’ll be elected?” his brother Augustin said. “They might form a cabal against you. It’s very likely.”

  “Then I’ll have to sing small between now and the election,” he said grimly. Here in the provinces almost everyone has a vote, not just the moneyed men. For that reason, “They won’t be able to keep me out,” he said.

  His sister Charlotte said, “They’ll be ungrateful beasts if they don’t elect you. After all you’ve done for the poor. You deserve it.”

  “It isn’t a prize.”

  “You’ve worked so hard, all for nothing, no money, no credit. There’s no need to pretend you don’t resent it. You’re not obliged to be saintly.”

  He sighed. Charlotte has this way of cutting him to the bone. Hacking away, with the family knife.

  “I know what you think, Max,” she said. “You don’t believe you’ll come back from Versailles in six months, or even a year. You think this will alter your life. Do you want them to have a revolution just to please you?”

  “I don’t care what the Estates-General do,” said Philippe d’Orléans, “as long as I am there when they deal with the liberty of the individual, so that I can use my voice and vote for a law after which I can be sure that, on a day when I have a fancy to sleep at Raincy, no one can send me against my will to Villers-Cotterêts.”

  Towards the end of 1788 the Duke appointed a new private secretary. He liked to embarrass people, and this may have been a major reason for his choice. The addition to his entourage was an army officer named Laclos. He was in his late forties, a tall angular man with fine features and cold blue eyes. He had joined the army at the age of eighteen, but had never seen active service. Once this had grieved him, but twenty years spent in provincial garrison towns had endowed him with an air of profound and philosophic indifference. To amuse himself, he had written some light verse, and the libretto of an opera that came off after one night. And he had watched people, recorded the details of their maneuvers, their power play. For twenty years there had been nothing else to do. He became familiar with that habit of mind which dispraises what it most envies and admires: with that habit of mind which desires only what it cannot have.

  His first novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, was published in Paris in 1782. The first edition sold out within days. The publishers rubbed their hands and remarked that if this shocking and cynical book was what the public wanted, who were they to act as censors? The second edition was sold out. Matrons and bishops expressed outrage. A copy with a blank binding was ordered for the Queen’s private library. Doors were slammed in the author’s face. He had arrived.

  It seemed his military career was over. In any case, his criticism of army traditions had made his position untenable. “It seems to me I could do with such a man,” the Duke said. “Your every affectation is an open book to him.” When Félicité de Genlis heard of the appointment, she threatened to resign her post as Governor of the Duke’s children. Laclos could think of bigger disasters.

  It was a crucial time in the Duke’s affairs. If he was to take advantage of the unsettled times, he must have an organization, a power base. His easy popularity in Paris must be put to good use. Men must be secured to his service, their past lives probed and their futures planned for them. Loyalties must be explored. Money must change hands.

  Laclos surveyed this situation, brought his cold intelligence to bear. He began to know writers who were known to the police. He made discreet inquiries among Frenchmen living abroad as to the reasons for their exile. He got himself a big map of Paris and marked with blue circles points that could be fortified. He sat up by lamplight combing through the pages of the pamphlets that had come that day from the Paris presses; for the censorship had broken down. He was looking for writers who were bolder and more outspoken than the rest; then he would make overtures. Few of these fellows had ever had a bestseller.

  Laclos was the Duke’s man now. Laconic in his statements, his air discouraging intimacy, he was the kind of man whose first name nobody ever knows. But still he watched men and women with a furtive professional interest, and scribbled down thoughts that came to him, on chance scraps of paper.

  In December 1788, the Duke sold the contents of his magnificent Palais-Royal art gallery, and devoted the money to poor relief. It was announced in the press that he would distribute daily a thousand pounds of bread; that he would defray the lying-in expenses of indigent women (even, the wits said, those he had not impregnated); that he would forgo the tithes levied on grain on his estates, and repeal the game laws on all his lands.

  This was Félicité’s program. It was for the country’s good. It did Philippe a bit of good too.

  R
ue Condé. “Although the censorship has broken down,” Lucile says, “there are still criminal sanctions.”

  “Fortunately,” her father says.

  Camille’s first pamphlet lies on the table, neat inside its paper cover. His second, in manuscript, lies beside it. The printers won’t touch it, not yet; we will have to wait until the situation takes a turn for the worse.

  Lucile’s fingers caress it, paper, ink, tape:

  It was reserved for our days to behold the return of liberty among the French … for forty years, philospophy has been undermining the foundations of despotism, and as Rome before Caesar was already enslaved by her vices, so France before Necker was already enfranchised by her intelligence … . Patriotism spreads day by day, with the devouring rapidity of a great conflagration. The young take fire; old men cease, for the first time, to regret the past. Now they blush for it.

  CHAPTER 6

  Last Days of Titonville

  A deposition to the Estates-General:

  “The community of Chaillevois is composed of about two hundred persons. The most part of the inhabitants have no property at all, those who have any possess so little that it is not worth talking about. The ordinary food is bread steeped in saltwater. As for meat, it is never tasted, except on Easter Sunday, Shrove Tuesday and the feast of the patron saint … . A man may sometimes eat haricots, if the master does not forbid them to be grown among the vines … . That is how the common people live under the best of Kings.”

  Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau: