A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  There were fourteen at table. Tender beef bled onto the plates. Turbot’s slashed flesh breathed the scent of bay leaves and thyme. Blue-black shells of aubergines, seared on top, yielded creamy flesh to the probing knife.

  The Comte was living very well these days. It was hard to tell if he was just running up more debts or if he could suddenly afford it; if the latter, one wondered how. He had a secret correspondence with a variety of sources. His public utterances had an air both sonorous and cryptic, and he had bought a diamond on credit for his mistress, the publisher’s wife. And how pleasant he was, that evening, to young Robespierre. Why? Politeness costs nothing, he thought. But over these last weeks he had been watching the deputy, noting the frequent dryness of his tone, noting his (apparent) indifference to other people’s opinion of him, noting the flicker of ideas through the lawyer’s brain that is no doubt, he thought, sufficient unto the day.

  All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there’s not much difference between politics and sex; it’s all about power. He didn’t suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It’s a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can’t make ends meet—in other words, an absolute pushover—then Robespierre is a Carmelite, mind set on becoming Mother Superior. You can’t corrupt her; you can wave your cock under her nose, and she’s neither shocked nor interested: why should she be, when she hasn’t the remotest idea what it’s for?

  They talked about the King, and whether he should have a veto on the legislation passed by the Assembly. Robespierre thought no. Mirabeau thought yes—or thought he could think yes, if the price were right. They talked about how these things were managed in England; Robespierre corrected his facts in a hurried, half-amused way. He accepted the correction, softened him up; when he was rewarded by a precise triangular smile, he felt a most extraordinary flood of relief.

  Eleven o’clock: the rabid lamb excused himself, slipped out of the room. It’s something to know he’s mortal, that he has to piss like other men. Mirabeau felt strange, unwontedly sober, unwontedly cold. He looked across the table at one of his Genevans. “That young man will go far,” he said. “He believes everything he says.”

  Brulard de Sillery, Comte de Genlis, stood up, yawned, stretched. “Thanks, Mirabeau. Time to get down to the serious drinking now. Camille, you coming back with us?”

  The invitation seemed to be general. It excluded two people: the Candle of Arras (who was at that moment absent) and the Torch of Provence. The Genevans, self-excluded, stood up and bowed and said their good nights; they began to fold their napkins and pick up their hats, to adjust their cravats, to twitch at their stockings. Suddenly Mirabeau detested them. He detested their gray silk frock coats and their exactitude and their groveling attention to all his demands, he wanted to squash their hats over their eyes and roar out into the night, one comradely arm around his milliner and the other around a bestselling novelist. And this was odd, really; if there was anyone he couldn’t stand, it was Laclos, and if there was anyone he would have hated to get drunk with, it was Camille. These wild feelings could only be, he thought, the product of a well-mannered and abstemious evening spent cultivating Maximilien Robespierre.

  By the time Robespierre got back, the room would have emptied. They’d be left to exchange a dry little English handshake. Take care of yourself, Candle. Mind how you go, Torch.

  They had to get the cards out, of course; de Sillery would never go to bed at all if they didn’t. After he had indulged his losing streak, he sat back in his chair and started laughing. “How annoyed Mr. Miles and the Elliots would be, if they knew what I did with the King of England’s money.”

  “I imagine they have a pretty good idea what you do with it.” Laclos shuffled the pack. “They don’t suppose you devote it to charitable work.”

  “Who is Mr. Miles?” Camille asked.

  Laclos and de Sillery exchanged a glance. “I think you should tell him,” Laclos said. “Camille should not live like a careless king, in gross ignorance of where the money comes from.”

  “It’s very complicated.” Reluctantly, de Sillery laid his cards facedown on the table. “You know Mrs. Elliot, the charming Grace? No doubt you’ve seen her flitting around the town gathering the political gossip. She does this because she works for the English government. Her various liaisons, you see, have put her in such an interesting position. She was the Prince of Wales’s mistress before Philippe brought her to France. Now, of course, Agnès de Buffon is mistress—my wife Félicité arranges these things—but Grace and the Duke are still on the best of terms. Now,” he paused, and rubbed his forehead tiredly, “Mrs. Elliot has two brothers-in-law, Gilbert and Hugh. Hugh lives in Paris, Gilbert comes over every few weeks. And there is another Englishman with whom they associate, a Mr. Miles. They are all agents for the British Foreign Office. They are here to observe events, make reports and convey funds to us.”

  “Well done, Charles-Alexis,” Laclos said. “Admirably lucid. More claret?”

  Camille said, “Why?”

  “Because the English are deeply interested in our Revolution,” de Sillery said. “Yes, go on Laclos, push the bottle over. You may think they want us to enjoy the blessings of a Parliament and a constitution like theirs, but it is hardly that; they are interested in anything that undermines Louis’s position. As is Berlin. As is Vienna. It might be an excellent thing for the English if we dispensed with King Louis and replaced him by King Philippe.”

  Deputy Pétion looked up slowly. His large handsome face was creased with scruple. “Did you bring us here to burden us with this information?”

  “No,” Camille said. “He is telling us because he has had too much to drink.”

  “’Tisn’t a burden,” Charles-Alexis said. “It’s pretty well generally known. Ask Brissot.”

  “I have a great deal of respect for Brissot,” Deputy Pétion insisted.

  “Have you so?” Laclos murmured.

  “He doesn’t seem to me to be the type of man who would engage in this sort of deviousness.”

  “Dear Brissot,” Laclos said. “So unworldly is he that he thinks money appears in his pocket by spontaneous generation. Oh, he knows—but he doesn’t admit he knows. He takes care never to make inquiries. If you want to give him a fright, Camille, just walk up to him and say in his ear, ‘William Augustus Miles.’”

  “If I may make a point,” Pétion interposed, “Brissot has not the air of a man receiving money. I only ever see him in the one coat, and that is almost out at the elbows.”

  “Oh, we don’t pay him much,” Laclos said. “He wouldn’t know what to do with it. Unlike present company. Who have a taste for the finer things in life. You still don’t believe it, Pétion? Tell him, Camille.”

  “It’s probably true,” Camille said. “He used to take money from the police. Have casual chats with his friends and report on their political opinions.”

  “Now you shock me.” But no: Pétion’s tone was controlled.

  “How else was he to make a living?” Laclos asked.

  Charles-Alexis laughed. “All these writers and people, they have enough on each other to live by blackmail and get rich. Not so, Camille? They only desist out of fear of being blackmailed back.”

  “But you are drawing me into something …” For a moment Pétion looked sober. He rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “If I could only think straight about this.”

  “It doesn’t permit straight thinking,” Camille said. “Try some other kind.”

  Pétion said, “It will be so difficult to keep any kind of … integrity.”

  Laclos poured him another drink. Camille said, “I want to start a newspaper.”

  “And whom did you envisage as your backer?” Laclos said smoothly. He liked to hear people admit they needed the Duke’s money.

 
“The Duke’s lucky I’ll take his money,” Camille said, “when there are so many other sources. We may need the Duke, but how much more does the Duke need us?”

  “Collectively, he may need you,” Laclos said in the same tone. “Individually he does not need you at all. Individually you may all jump off the Pont-Neuf and drown your sorry selves. Individually, you can be replaced.”

  “Oh, you think so?”

  “Yes, Camille, I do think so. You have a prodigiously inflated idea of your own place in the scheme of things.”

  Charles-Alexis leaned forward, put a hand on Laclos’s arm. “Careful, old thing. Change of subject?” Laclos swallowed mutinously. He sat in silence, brightening only a little as de Sillery told stories of his wife. Félicité, he said, had kept stacks of notebooks under the marital bed. Sometimes she groped for them as you lay on top of her, laboring in pursuit of ecstasy. Did the Duke find this, he wondered, as off-putting as he always had?

  “Your wife’s a tiresome woman,” Laclos said. “And Mirabeau says he’s had her.”

  “Very likely, very likely,” de Sillery said. “He’s had everybody else. Still, she doesn’t do much these days. She’s happier organizing it for other people. When I think, my God, when I think back on my life …” He fell into a short reverie. “Could I ever have imagined I’d end up married to the best-read procuress in Europe?”

  “By the way, Camille,” Laclos said, “Agnès de Buffon was twittering on about your last pamphlet. The prose. She thinks she’s a judge. We must introduce you.”

  “And to Grace Elliot,” de Sillery said. He and Laclos laughed.

  “They’ll eat him alive,” Laclos said.

  At dawn Laclos opened a window and draped his elegant body out over the town, breathing in the King’s air in gasps. “No persons in Versailles,” he announced, “are so inebriated as we. Let me tell you, my pirate crew, every dog has his day, and Philippe’s is at hand, soon, soon, August, September, October.

  18th August 1789

  At Astley’s Amphitheatre, Westminster Bridge

  (after rope-dancing by Signior Spinacuta)

  An Entire New and Splendid Spectacle

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  From Sunday 12 July to Wednesday 15 July (inclusive)

  called

  Paris in an Uproar

  displaying one of the grandest and most extraordinary

  entertainments that ever appeared

  grounded on

  Authentic Fact

  BOX 3s., PIT 2s., GAL 1s., SIDE GAL 6d.

  The doors to be opened at half-past five, to begin at

  half-past six o’clock precisely.

  Camille’s new pamphlet came out in September. It bore the title “A Lecture to Parisians, by the Lanterne” and this epigraph from St. Matthew: “Qui male agit odit Lucem.” Loosely translated by the author: scoundrels abhor the Lanterne. The iron gibbet on the Place de Grève announced itself ready to bear further burdens. It suggested their names. The author’s name did not appear; he signed himself “My Lord Prosecutor to the Lanterne.”

  At Versailles, Antoinette read the first two pages only. “In the normal way of things,” she said to Louis, “this writer would be put in prison for a very long time.”

  The King was reading a geography book. He glanced up. “Then we must consult Lafayette, I suppose.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” his wife asked him coldly: they had developed, in these exigencies, a fairly ordinary manner of talking. “The Marquis is our sworn enemy. He pays creatures such as this to slander us.”

  “So does the Duke,” the King said in a low voice. He found it hard to pronounce Philippe’s name. “Our red cousin,” the Queen called him. “Which is the more dangerous?”

  They pondered. The Queen thought it was Lafayette.

  Lafayette read the pamphlet and hummed tunelessly under his breath. He took it to Mayor Bailly. “Too dangerous,” the mayor said.

  “I agree.”

  “I mean, to arrest him would be too dangerous. The Cordeliers section, you know. He’s moved in.”

  “With respect, M. Bailly, I say this writing is treasonable.”

  “I can only say, General, that it came pretty near the bone last month when the Marquis de Saint-Huruge sent me an open letter telling me to oppose the King’s veto or be lynched. As you’re aware, when we arrested the man, the Cordeliers made so much trouble I thought it best to let him go again. I don’t like it, but there you are. That whole district is spoiling for a fight. Do you know this man Danton, the Cordeliers’ president?”

  “Yes,” Lafayette said. “I do indeed.”

  Bailly shook his head. “We must exercise caution. We can’t handle any more riots. We mustn’t make martyrs, you see.”

  “I’m compelled to admit,” Lafayette said, “that there’s sense in what you say. If all the people Desmoulins threatens were strung up tomorrow, it would hardly be a Massacre of the Innocents. So we do nothing. But then our position becomes impossible, because we shall be accused of countenancing mob law.”

  “So what would you like to do?”

  “Oh, I would like …” Lafayette closed his eyes. “I would like to send three or four stout fellows across the river with instructions to reduce My Lord Prosecutor to a little red stain on the wall.”

  “My dear Marquis!”

  “You know I don’t mean it,” Lafayette said regretfully. “But sometimes I wish I were not such an Honorable Gentleman. I often wonder how civilized methods will answer, in dealing with these people.”

  “You are the most honorable gentleman in France,” the mayor said stiffly. “That is generally known.” Universally, he would have said, had he not been an astronomer.

  “Why do you think we have such trouble with the Cordeliers section?” Lafayette asked. “There’s this man Danton, and that abortion Marat, and this—” he indicated the paper. “By the way, when this is at Versailles it stays with Mirabeau, which may tell us something about Mirabeau.”

  “I will make a note of it. You know,” the mayor said mildly, “considered as literature, the pamphlet is admirable.”

  “Don’t tell me about literature,” Lafayette said. He was thinking of Berthier’s corpse, the bowels trailing from the gashed abdomen. He leaned forward and flicked up the pamphlet with his fingertips. “Do you know Camille Desmoulins?” he asked. “Have you seen him? He’s one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paper knife.” He shook his head wonderingly. “Where do they come from, these people? They’re virgins. They’ve never been to war. They’ve never been on the hunting field. They’ve never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they’re such enthusiasts for murder.”

  “As long as they don’t have to do it themselves, I suppose,” the mayor said. He remembered the dissected heart on his desk, a shivering lump of butcher’s meat.

  In Guise: “How am I to hold my head up on the street?” Jean-Nicolas asked rhetorically. “The worse of it is, he thinks I should be proud of him. He’s known everywhere, he says. He dines with aristocrats every day.”

  “As long as he’s eating,” Mme. Desmoulins said. Proceeding out of her own mouth, the comment surprised her. She had never been one for taking a maternal interest. And equally, Camille had never been one to eat.

  “I don’t know how I’m to face the Godards. They’ll all have read it. There’s one thing, though—1 bet Rose-Fleur’s glad now that they made her break it off.”

  “How little you understand women!” his wife said.

  Rose-Fleur Godard kept the pamphlet on her sewing table and quoted it in and out of season, to annoy M. Tarrieux de Tailland, her new fiance.

  Danton had read the pamphlet and given it to Gabrielle to read. “You’d better,” he said. “Everybody will be talking about it.”

  Gabrielle read half, then left it aside. Her reasoning was this: she had, in a manner of speaking, to live with Camille, and she would therefore prefer not to know too much of his opinio
ns. She was quiet now; feeling her way from day to day, like a blind woman in a new house. She never asked Georges what had happened at the meetings of the District Assembly. When new faces appeared at the supper table she simply laid extra places, and tried to keep the conversation light. She was pregnant again. No one expected much of her. No one expected her to bother her head about the state of the nation.

  The famous writer, Mercier, introduced Camille into the salons of Paris and Versailles. “In twenty years’ time,” Mercier predicted, “he will be our foremost man of letters.” Twenty years? Camille can’t wait twenty minutes.

  His mood, at these gatherings, would swing violently, from moment to moment. He would feel exhilarated; then he would feel he was there under false pretenses. Society hostesses, who had taken such pains to get him, often felt obliged to pretend not to know who he was. The idea was that his identity should seep and creep out, gradually, so that if anyone wanted to walk out they could do it without making a scene. But the hostesses must have him; they must have the frisson, the shock value. A party isn’t a party …

  His headache had come back; too much hair-tossing, perhaps. The one constant, at these parties, was that he didn’t have to say anything. Other people did the talking, around him. About him.