He was now at a dizzying height above the crowd. A fetid breeze drifted across the gardens. Another fifteen seconds had passed. He was able to identify certain faces, and surprise at this made him blink: ONE WORD, he thought. There were the police, and there were their spies and informers, men who have been watching him for weeks, the colleagues and accomplices of the men who only a few days before had been cornered and beaten by the crowds and half-drowned in the fountains. But now it is killing time; there were armed men behind them. In sheer fright, he began.
He indicated the policemen, identified them for the crowd. He defied them, he said: either to approach any further, to shoot him down, to try to take him alive. What he is suggesting to the crowd, what he is purveying, is an armed insurrection, the conversion of the city to a battlefield. Already (3:04) he is guilty of a long list of capital offenses and if the crowd let the police take him he is finished, except for whatever penalty the law provides. Therefore if they do make the attempt he will certainly shoot one policeman, and he will certainly shoot himself, and hope that he dies quickly: and then the Revolution will be here. This decision takes one half-second, plaited between the phrases he is making. It is five past three. The exact form of the phrases does not matter now. Something is happening underneath his feet; the earth is breaking up. What does the crowd want? To roar. Its wider objectives? No coherent answer. Ask it: it roars. Who are these people? No names. The crowd just wants to grow, to embrace, to weld together, to gather in, to melt, to bay from one throat. If he were not standing here he would be dying anyway, dying between the pages of his letters. If he survives this—death as a reprieve—he will have to write it down, the life that feeds the writing that feeds the life to come, and already he fears he cannot describe the heat, the green leaves of the chestnut trees, the choking dust and the smell of blood and the blithe savagery of his auditors; it will be a voyage into hyperbole, an odyssey of bad tase. Cries and moans and bloody promises circle his head, a scarlet cloud, a new thin pure element in which he floats. For a second he puts his hand to his face and feels at the corner of his mouth the place caught that morning by the Comte’s ring; only that tells him, and nothing else, that he inhabits the same body and owns the same flesh.
The police have received a check. A few days ago, on this spot, he said, “The beast is in the snare: finish it off.” He meant the animal of the old regime, the dispensation he had lived under all his life. But now he sees another beast: the mob. A mob has no soul, it has no conscience, just paws and claws and teeth. He remembers M. Saulce’s dog in the Place des Armes, slipped out to riot in the sleepy afternoon; three years old, he leans from the window of the Old House and sees the dog toss a rat into the air and snap its neck. No one will pull him away from this spectacle. No one will chain this dog, no one will lead it home. Suitably he addressed it, leaning out towards the mob, one hand extended, palm upwards, charming it and coaxing it and drawing it on. He has lost one of the pistols, he does not know where, it does not matter. The blood has set like marble in his veins. He means to live forever.
By now the crowd was hoarse and spinning with folly. He jumped down into it. A hundred hands reached for clothes and hair and skin and flesh. People were crying, cursing, making slogans. His name was in their mouths; they knew him. The noise was some horror from the Book of Revelations, hell released and all its companies scouring the streets. Although the quarter-hour has struck, no one knows this. People weep. They pick him up and carry him round the gardens on their shoulders. A voice screams that pikes are to be had, and smoke drifts among the trees. Somewhere a drum begins to beat: not deep, not resonant, but a hard, dry, ferocious note.
Camille Desmoulins to Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins, at Guise:
You made an error when you would not come to Laon to recommend me to the people who would have had me nominated. But it doesn’t matter now. I have written my name on our Revolution in letters larger than those of all our deputies from Picardy.
As the evening drew on, M. Duplessis walked out with a couple of friends who wished to satisfy their curiosity. He took a stout cane, with which he intended to repel working-class bullyboys. Mme. Duplessis asked him not to go.
Annette’s face was pinched with anxiety. The servants had brought in disgusting rumors, and she was afraid there might be substance to them. Lucile seemed sure there was. She sat conspicuously quietly and modestly, like a lottery winner.
Adèle was at home. She usually was now, unless she was at Versailles paying calls and picking up gossip. She knew deputies’ wives and deputies, and all the café talk, and all the voting strategies in the National Assembly.
Lucile went to her room. She took pen and ink, and a piece of paper, and on the paper she wrote, “Adèle is in love with Maximilien Robespierre.” She tore the strip off the sheet, and crumpled it in her palm.
She picked up some embroidery. She worked slowly, paying close attention to what she was doing. Later she intended to show people the meticulous work she had done that afternoon between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. She thought of practicing some scales. When I am married, she thought, I will have a piano: and there will be other innovations.
When Claude got home, he walked straight into his study, coat, cane and all, and slammed the door. Annette understood that he might need a short time to recover himself. “I’m afraid your father may have received some bad news,” she said.
“How could he,” Adèle said, “just by going out to see what’s happening? I mean, it’s not anyone’s personal bad news, is it?”
Annette tapped at the door. The girls stood at her elbows. “Come out,” she said. “Or shall we come in?”
Claude said, “The minister has been made a pretext.”
“Necker,” Adèle corrected. “He’s not the minister anymore.”
“No.” Claude was torn between his loyalty to his departmental chief and his desire to have his thoughts out in the open. “You know I never cared for the man. He is a charlatan. But he deserves bettter than to be made a pretext.”
“My dear,” Annette said, “there are three women here in considerable agony of mind. Do you think you could bring yourself to be a little more particular in your description of events?”
“They are rioting,” Claude said simply. “The dismissal of M. Necker has caused a furor. We are plunged into a state of anarchy, and anarchy is not a word I use.”
“Sit down, my dear,” Annette said.
Claude sat, and passed a hand over his eyes. From the wall the old King surveyed them; the present Queen in a cheap print, feathers in her hair and her chin flattered into insignificance; a plaster bust of Louis, looking like a wheelwright’s mate; the Abbé Terray, both full-face and in profile.
“There is a state of insurrection,” he said. “They are setting the customs barriers on fire. They have closed the theaters and broken into the waxworks.”
“Broken into the waxworks?” Annette was conscious of the idiot grin growing on her face. “What did they want to do that for?”
“How do I know?” Claude raised his voice. “How should I know what they are doing things for? There are five thousand people, six thousand people, marching on the Tuileries. That is just one procession and there are others coming up to join them. They are destroying the city.”
“But where are the soldiers?”
“Where are they? The King himself would like to know, I’m sure. They might as well be lining the route and cheering, for all the use they are. I thank God the King and Queen are at Versailles, for who knows what might not happen, as at the head of these mobs there is—” Words failed him. “There is that person.”
“I don’t believe you.” Annette’s voice was matter-of-fact. She only said it in courtesy to form; she knew it was true.
“Please yourself. You can read it in the morning paper-if there is one. It appears that he made a speech at the Palais-Royal and that it had a certain effect and that he has now become some sort of hero to these people. To the
mob, I should say. The police moved in to arrest him and he unwisely held them off at gunpoint.”
“I’m not sure it was unwise,” Adele said, “given the result it seems to have produced.”
“Oh, I should have taken measures,” Claude said. “I should have sent you both away. I ask what I have done to deserve it, one daughter hobnobbing with radicals and the other planning to plight herself to a criminal.”
“Criminal?” Lucile sounded surprised.
“Yes. He has broken the law.”
“The law will be altered.”
“My God,” Claude said, “do you tell me? The troops will flatten them.”
“You seem to think that all this is accidental,” Lucile said. “No, Father, let me speak, I have a right to speak, since I know better than you what is going on. You say there are thousands of rioters, how many thousands you are not sure, but the French Guards will not attack their own people, and most of them indeed are on our side. If they are properly organized they will soon have enough arms to engage the rest of the troops. The Royal Allemand troops will be swamped by sheer force of numbers.”
Claude stared at her. “Any measures you might have taken are too late,” his wife said in a low voice. Lucile cleared her throat. It was almost a speech she was making, a pale drawing-room imitation. Her hands shook. She wondered if he had been very frightened: if pushed and driven by the crowds he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the living heart of all the close designs.
“All this was planned,” she said. “I know there are reinforcements, but they have to cross the river.” She walked to the window. “Look. No moon tonight. How long will it take them to cross in the dark, with their commanders falling out amongst themselves? They only know how to fight on battlefields, they don’t know how to fight in the streets. By tomorrow morning—if they can be held now at the Place Louis XV—the troops will be cleared out of the city center. And the Paris Electors will have their militia on the streets; they can ask for arms from City Hall. There are guns at the Invalides, forty thousand muskets—”
“Battlefield?” Claude said. “Reinforcements? How do you know all this? Where did you learn it?”
“Where do you suppose?” she said coolly.
“Electors? Militia? Muskets? Do you happen to know,” he asked, with hysterical sarcasm, “where they will get the powder and shot?”
“Oh yes,” Lucile said. “At the Bastille.”
Green was the color they had picked for identification—green, the color of hope. In the Palais-Royal a girl had given Camille a bit of green ribbon, and since then the people had raided the shops for it and yards and yards of sage green and apple and emerald and lime stretched over the dusty streets and trailed in the gutters. In the Palais-Royal they had pulled down leaves from the chestnut trees, and now wore them sad and wilting in their hats and buttonholes. The torn, sweet vegetable smell lay in clouds over the afternoon.
By evening they were an army, marching behind their own banners. Though darkness fell, the heat did not abate; and sometime during the night the storm broke, and the crack of thunder overhead vied with the sting and rumble of gunfire and the crash of splintering glass; people sang, orders were bawled into the darkness, all night long there was the thud of boots on cobblestones and the ring of steel. Jagged flashes from the sky lit the devastated streets, and smoke billowed on the winds from the burning barriers. At midnight a drunken grenadier said to Camille, “I’ve seen your face somewhere before.”
At dawn, in the rain, he met Hérault de Séchelles; but then he was beyond surprise by now, and would not have passed any comment if he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with Mme. du Barry. The judge’s face was dirty, his coat was ripped half off his back. In one hand he had a very fine dueling pistol, one of a valuable pair made for Maurice de Saxe: and in the other a meat cleaver.
“But the waste, the irresponsibility,” Hérault said. “They’ve plundered the Saint-Lazare monastery. All that fine furniture, my God, and the silver. Yes, they’ve raided the cellars, they’re lying in the streets vomiting now. What’s that you say? Versailles? Did you say ‘finish it off’ or ‘finish them off’? If so I’d better get a change of clothes, I’d hate to turn up at the palace looking like this. Oh yes,” he said, and he gripped the cleaver and charged back into the crowds, “it beats filing writs, doesn’t it?” He had never been so happy: never, never before.
Duke Philippe had spent the 12th at his château of Raincy, in the forest of Bondy. On hearing of the events in Paris, he expressed himself “much surprised and shocked.” “Which,” says his ex-mistress Mrs. Elliot, “I really thought he was.”
At the King’s levee on the morning of the 13th, Philippe was first ignored; then asked by His Majesty (rudely) what he wanted; then told, “Get back where you came from.” Philippe set off for his house at Mousseaux in a very bad temper, and swore (according to Mrs. Elliot) “that he would never go near them again.”
In the afternoon Camille went back to the Cordeliers district. The drunken grenadier was still dogging his footsteps saying, “I know you from somewhere.” There were four murderous but sober French Guardsmen who were under threat of lynching if anything happened to him; there were several escaped prisoners from La Force. There was a raucous market wife with a striped skirt, a woolen bonnet, a broad-bladed kitchen knife and a foul tongue; I’ve taken a fancy to you, she kept saying, you aren’t going anywhere from now on without me. There was a pretty young woman with a pistol in the belt of her riding habit, and her brown hair tied back with a red ribbon and a blue one.
“What happened to the green?” he asked her.
“Somebody remembered that green is the Comte d’Artois’s color. We can’t have that—so now it’s the Paris colors, red and blue.” She smiled at him with what seemed like old affection. “Anne Théroigne,” she said. “We met at one of Fabre’s auditions. Remember?”
Her face seemed luminous in the watery light. Now he saw that she was very cold, drenched and shivering. “The weather has broken,” she said. “And so much else.”
At the Cour du Commerce the concierge had the doors barred, so he talked to Gabrielle through a window. She was pasty-faced and her hair was in a mess. “Georges went out with our neighbor, M. Gély,” she said, “to recruit for the citizens’ militia. A few minutes ago Maitre Lavaux came by—you know him, he lives across the way?—and he said, ‘I’m very worried about Georges, he’s standing on a table yelling his head off about protecting our homes from the military and the brigands.’” She gaped at the people standing behind him. “Who are these? Are they with you?”
Louise Gély appeared, her face bobbing at Gabrielle’s shoulder. “Hallo,” she said. “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand in the street?”
Gabrielle put an arm around her and held her tight. “I’ve got her mother in here having the vapors. Georges said to Maitre Lavaux, ‘Come and join us, you’ve lost your position anyway, the monarchy’s finished.’ Why, why, why did he say that?” Her distraught hand clutched the sill. “When will he be back? What shall I do?”
“Because it’s true,” he said. “He’ll not be long, not Georges. Keep the door locked.”
The drunken grenadier dug him in the ribs. “That your wife, then?”
He stepped back and looked at the man in amazement. At that point something seemed to snap very loudly inside his head, and they had to prop him against a wall and pour brandy into him, so that soon after that nothing made much sense at all.
Another night on the streets: at five o’clock, the tocsin and the alarm cannon. “Now it begins in earnest,” Anne Théroigne said. She pulled the ribbons from her hair, and looped them into the buttonhole of his coat. Red and blue. “Red for blood,” she said. “Blue for heaven.” The colors of Paris: blood-heaven.
At six, they were at the Invalides barracks, negotiating for arms. Someone turned him around gently and pointed out to him where the rays of the early sun blaze
d on fixed bayonets on the Champs-de-Mars. “They’ll not come,” he said, and they didn’t. He heard his own voice saying calming, sensible things, as he looked upwards into the mouths of the cannon, where soldiers stood with lighted tapers in their hands. He was not frightened. Then the negotiation was over, and there was running and shouting. This is called storming the Invalides. For the first time he was frightened. When it was finished he leaned against the wall, and the brown-haired girl put a bayonet into his hands. He put his palm against the blade, and asked in simple curiosity, “Is it hard to do?”
“Easy,” the drunken grenadier said. “I’ve remembered you, you know. It was a matter of a little riot outside the Law Courts, couple of years back. Good day out. Sort of dropped you on the ground and kicked you in the ribs. Sorry about that. Just doing the job. Not done you any harm, by the look of it.”
Camille looked up at him steadily. The soldier was covered in blood, dripping with it, his clothes sodden, his hair matted, grinning through a film of gore. As he watched him he spun on his heels and executed a little dance, holding up his scarlet forearms.
“The Bastille, eh?” he sang. “Now for the Bastille, eh, the Bastille, the Bastille.”
De Launay, the governor of the Bastille, was a civilian, and he made his surrender wearing a gray frock coat. Shortly afterwards he tried to stab himself with his sword-stick, but was prevented.
The crowd who pressed around de Launay shouted, “Kill him.” Members of the French Guard attempted to protect him, shielding him with their bodies. But by the Church of Saint-Louis, some of the crowd tore him away from them, spat at him and clubbed and kicked him to the ground. When the Guards rescued him, his face was streaming blood, his hair had been torn out in handfuls and he was barely able to walk.
As they approached City Hall their path was blocked. There was an argument between those who wanted to put the man on trial before hanging him and those who wanted to finish him right away. Crushed and panic-striken, de Launay flung out his arms wide; they were grasped at both sides, so that he no longer had a free hand to wipe away the blood that ran from his scalp wounds into his eyes. Tormented, he struggled and lashed out with his foot. It made contact with the groin of a man named Desnot. Desnot—who was an unemployed cook—screamed in shock and agony. He fell to his knees, clutching himself.
A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Page 25