A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “So where are you living now?” Danton inquired.

  “On the rue Saintonge in the Marais.”

  “Comfortable?”

  Robespierre didn’t reply. He couldn’t think what Danton’s standard of comfort might be, so anything he said wouldn’t mean much. Scruples like this were always tripping him up, in the simplest conversations. Luckily, Danton seemed not to want a reply. “Most of the deputies don’t seem very happy about moving to Paris.”

  “Most of them aren’t there half the time. When they are they don’t pay attention. They sit gossiping to each other about clarifying wine and fattening pigs.”

  “They’re thinking of home. After all, this is an interruption to their lives.”

  Robespierre smiled faintly. He was not supercilious, he just thought that was a peculiar way of looking at things. “But this is their life.”

  “But you can understand it—they think about the farm going to seed and the children growing up and the wife hopping into bed with all and sundry—they’re only human.”

  Robespierre flicked a glance up at him. “Really, Danton, the times being what they are, I think we could all do with being a bit more than that.”

  Annette moved amongst her guests, trying to discipline her grin to a social smile. Somehow it no longer seemed possible to see her male guests as they wished to be seen. Deputy Pétion (self-regarding smirk) seemed amiable; so did Brissot (a whole set of little tics and twitches). Danton was watching her across the room. Wonder what he’s thinking? She had a shrewd idea. She imagined Maître Danton’s drawl: “Not a bad-looking woman, considering her age.” Fréron stood alone, conspicuously alone; his eyes followed Lucile.

  Camille, as usual these days, had an audience. “All we really have to do is decide on a title,” he said. “And organize the provincial subscriptions. It’s going to come out every Saturday, though more often when events require it. It will be in octavo, with a gray paper cover. Brissot is going to write for us, and Fréron, and Marat. We shall invite correspondence from readers. We shall carry particularly scathing theater reviews. The universe and all its follies shall be comprehended in the pages of this hypercriticial journal.”

  “Will it make money?” Claude asked.

  “Oh, not at all.” Camille said happily. “I don’t even expect to cover costs. The idea is to keep the cover price as low as possible, so that nearly everybody will be able to afford it.”

  “How are you going to pay your printer, then?”

  Camille looked mysterious. “There are sources,” he said. “The idea really is to let people pay you to write what you were going to write anyway.”

  “You frighten me,” Claude said. “You appear to have no moral sense whatever.”

  “The end result will be good. I won’t have to spend more than a few columns paying compliments to my backers. The rest of the paper I can use to give some publicity to Deputy Robespierre.”

  Claude looked around fearfully. There was Deputy Robespierre, in conversation with his daughter Adèle. Their conversation seemed confidential—intimate almost. But then—he had to admit it—if you could separate Deputy Robespierre’s speeches at the Riding School from the deputy’s own person, there was nothing at all alarming about him. Quite the reverse really. He is a neat, quiet young man; he seems equable, mild, responsible. Adèle is always bringing his name into the conversation; she must, obviously, have feelings towards him. He has no money, but then, you can’t have everything. You have to be glad simply to have a son-in-law who isn’t physically violent.

  Adèle had found her way to Robespierre by easy conversational stages. What were they talking about? Lucile. “It’s fearful,” she was saying. “Today—well, today was different, actually we had a good laugh.” I won’t tell him what about, she decided. “But normally the atmosphere’s quite frightening. Lucile’s so strong-willed, she argues all the time. And she’s really made her mind up on him.”

  “I thought that, as he’d been asked here today, your father was softening a little.”

  “So did I. But now look at his face.” They glanced across the room at Claude, then turned back and nodded to each other gloomily. “Still,” Adèle said, “they’ll get their way in the end. They’re the kind of people who do. What worries me is, what will the marriage be like?”

  “The thing is,” Robespierre said, “that everyone seems to regard Camille as a problem. But he isn’t a problem to me. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  “Aren’t you nice to say so?” And yes, isn’t he, she thought. Who else would venture so artless a statement, in these complicated days? “Look,” she said. “Look over there. Camille and my mother are talking about us.”

  So they were; heads together, just like in the old days. “Matchmaking is the province of elderly spinsters,” Annette was saying.

  “Don’t you know one you could call in? I like things done correctly.”

  “But he’ll take her away. To Artois.”

  “So? One may travel there. Do you think there’s a steep cliff around Paris, and at Chaillot you drop off into hell? Besides, I don’t think he’ll ever go back home.”

  “But what about when the constitution’s made, and the Assembly dissolves?”

  “I don’t think it will work like that, you see.”

  Lucile watched. Oh, mother, she thought, can’t you get any closer? Why don’t you just grapple him to the carpet, and have done with it? The earlier bonhomie had evaporated, as far as she was concerned. She didn’t want to be in this room, with all these chattering people. She looked around for the quietest possible corner. Fréron followed her.

  She sat; managed a strained smile. He stretched a proprietorial arm along the back of her chair; lounging, making small talk, his eyes on the room and not on her. But from time to time his eyes flickered downwards. Finally, softly, insinuatingly, he said, “Still a virgin, Lucile?”

  Lucile blushed deeply. She bent her head. Not so far from the proper little miss, then? “Most emphatically,” she said.

  “This is not the Camille I know.”

  “He’s saving me till I’m married.”

  “That’s all very well for him, I suppose. He’s got—outlets, hasn’t he?”

  “I don’t want to know this,” she said.

  “Probably better not. But you’re a grown-up girl now. Don’t you find the delights of your maiden state begin to pall?”

  “What do you suggest I do about it, Rabbit? What opportunities do you think I have?”

  “Oh, I know you find ways to see him. I know you slip out now and again. I thought, at the Dantons’ place perhaps. He and Gabrielle are not excessively moral.”

  Lucile gave him a sideways glance, as devoid of expression as she could make it. She would not have taken part in this conversation—except that it was a painful relief to talk about her feelings to anyone, even a persecutor. Why must he slander Gabrielle? Rabbit will say anything, she decided. Even he realized he had gone too far—she could see it in his face. Just imagine, she thought—“Gabrielle, can we come round tomorrow and borrow your bed?” Gabrielle would die sooner.

  The thought of the Dantons’ bed gives her, she admits, a very strange feeling. An indescribable feeling, really. The thought crosses her mind that, when that day comes, Camille won’t hurt her but Danton will—and her heart bounds, she blushes again, more furiously, because she doesn’t know where the idea came from, she didn’t ask for it, she didn’t want to think that thought at all.

  “Has something upset you?” Fréron says.

  She snaps: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Still, she can’t erase the picture from her mind: that belligerent energy, those huge hard hands, that weight. A woman must thank God, she says to herself, that she has a limited imagination.

  The newspaper went through various changes of name. It began as the Courier du Brabant—they were having a revolution over the border, too, and Camille thought it worth a mention. It became the Révolutions de France e
t du Brabant, ended up simply as the Révolutions de France. Of course, Marat was the same, always changing his title, for various shady reasons. He had been the Paris Publicist, was now the People’s Friend. A title, they thought at the Révolutions, of risible naïveté; it sounded like a cure for the clap.

  Everyone is starting newspapers, including people who can’t write and who, says Camille, can’t even think. The Révolutions stands out; it makes a splash; it also imposes a routine. If the staff is small, temporary and a bit disorganized, this hardly matters; at a push, Camille can write a whole issue himself. What’s thirty-two pages (in octavo) to a man with so much to say for himself?

  Monday and Tuesday they were in the office early, working on the week’s edition. By Wednesday the greater part was ready for the printer. On Wednesday, also, the writs came in from the previous Saturday’s libels, though it had been known for the victims to drag their lawyers back from the country on a Sunday morning and get writs served by Tuesday. Challenges to duels came in sporadically, throughout the week.

  Thursday was press day. They made the last-minute corrections, then a menial would sprint around to the printer, M. Laffrey, whose premises were on the Quai des Augustins. Thursday midday brought Laffrey and the distributor, M. Garnery, both tearing their hair. Do you want to see the presses impounded, do you want us in gaol? Sit down, have a drink, Camille would say. He rarely agreed to changes; almost never. And they knew that the bigger the risk, the more copies they’d sell.

  René Hébert would come into the office: pink-skinned, unpleasant. He made snide jokes all the time about Camille’s private life; no sentence lacked its double entendre. Camille explained him to his assistants; he used to work in a theater box office, but he was sacked for stealing from the petty cash.

  “Why do you put up with him?” they said. “Next time he comes, shall we throw him out?”

  They were like that at the Révolutions; always hoping for a less sedentary occupation.

  “Ah, no, leave him alone,” Camille said. “He’s always been offensive. It’s his nature.”

  “I want my own newspaper,” Hébert said. “It will be different from this.”

  Brissot was in that day, perched on a desk, twitching. “Shouldn’t be too different,” he said. “This one is a pre-eminent success.”

  Brissot and Hébert didn’t like each other.

  “You and Camille write for the educated,” Hébert said. “So does Marat. I’m not going to do that.”

  “You are going to start a newspaper for the illiterate?” Camille asked him sweetly. “I wish you every success.”

  “I’m going to write for the people in the street. In the language they speak.”

  “Then every other word will be an obscenity,” Brissot said, sniffing.

  “Precisely,” Hébert said, tripping out.

  Brissot is the editor of the French Patriot (daily, four pages in quarto, boring). He is also a most generous, painstaking, endlessly inventive contributor to other people’s papers. He quivers into the office most mornings, his narrow, bony face shining with his latest good idea. I’ve spent all my life groveling to publishers, he would say; and tell how he had been cheated, how his ideas had been stolen and his manuscripts pirated. He didn’t seem to see that there was any connection between this sad record of his, and what he was doing now—11:30 in the morning, in another editor’s office, turning his dusty, Quaker-style hat in his hands and talking his substance away. “My family—you understand, Camille? —was very poor and ignorant. They wanted me to be a monk, that was the best life they could envisage. I lost my faith—well, in the end, I had to break it to them, didn’t I? Of course, they didn’t understand. How could they? It was as if we spoke different languages. Say, they were Swedes, and I was Italian—that’s how close I was to my family. So then they said, you could be a lawyer, we suppose. Now, I was walking along the street one day, and one of the neighbors said, ‘Oh, look, there’s M. Janvier on his way back from court.’ And he pointed to this lawyer, stupid-looking man with a paunch, trotting along with his evening’s work under his arm. And he said, ‘You work hard, you’ll be like that someday.’ And my heart sank. Oh, I know, that’s a figure of speech—but, do you know, I swear it did, it bunched itself up and thudded into my belly. I thought, no, any hardship—they can put me in gaol—but I don’t want to be like that. Now, of course, he wasn’t that stupid-looking, he had money, he was looked up to, didn’t oppress the poor or anything, and he’d just got married for the second time, to this very nice young woman … so why wasn’t I tempted? I might have thought—well, it’s a living, it’s not too bad. But—there you are—steady money, easy life—it’s never quite been enough, has it?”

  One of Camille’s volatile assistants put his head around the door. “Oh, Camille, here’s a woman after you. Just by way of a change.”

  Théroigne swept in. She wore a white dress, and a tricolor sash about her waist. A National Guardsman’s tunic, unbuttoned, was draped over her slim, square shoulders. Her brown hair was a breeze-blown waterfall of curls; she had employed one of those expensive hairdressers who make you look as if you’ve never been near a hairdresser in your life. “Hallo, how’s it going?” she said. Her manner was at variance with this democratic greeting; she radiated energy and a quasi-sexual excitement.

  Brissot hopped up from the desk, and considerately lifted the jacket from her shoulders, folded it carefully and laid it over a vacant chair. This reduced her to—what? A pretty-enough young woman in a white dress. She was displeased. There was a weight in the pocket of the tunic. “You carry firearms?” Brissot said, surprised.

  “I got my pistol when we raided the Invalides. Remember, Camille?” She swished across the room. “You’re not seen much on the streets, these last weeks.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t cut the figure,” Camille murmured. “Not like you.”

  Théroigne took his hand and turned it palm up. You could still just see the bayonet cut, not much thicker than a hair, that he had got on July 13. Théroigne, meditatively, drew her forefinger along it. Brissot’s mouth became slightly unhinged. “Look, am I in your way?”

  “Absolutely not.” The last thing he wanted was any rumors about Théroigne coming to Lucile’s ears. As far as he knew, Anne was leading a chaste and blameless life; the strange thing was, that she seemed dedicated to giving the contrary impression. The royalist scandal sheets were not slow to pick anything up; Théroigne was a gift from God, as far as they were concerned.

  “Can I write for you, my love?” she said.

  “You can try. But I have very high standards.”

  “Turn me down, would you?” she said.

  “I’m afraid I would. The fact is, there’s just too much on offer.”

  “As long as we know where we stand,” she said. She scooped up her jacket from the chair where Brissot had disposed it, and—out of some perverse form of charity—placed a kiss on his sunken cheek.

  When she’d gone, an odor trailed behind her—female sweat, lavender water. “Calonne,” Brissot said. “He used lavender water. Remember?”

  “I didn’t move in those circles.”

  “Well, he did.”

  Brissot would know. He would know everything, really. He believed in the Brotherhood of Man. He believed that all the enlightened men in Europe should come together to discuss good government and the development of the arts and sciences. He knew Jeremy Bentham and Joseph Priestley. He ran an anti-slavery society, and wrote about jurisprudence, the English parliamentary system and the Epistles of Saint Paul. He had arrived at his present cramped apartment on the rue de Grétry by way of Switzerland, the United States, a cell in the Bastille and a flat on Brompton Road. Tom Paine was a great friend of his (he said) and George Washington had more than once asked for his advice. Brissot was an optimist. He believed that common sense and love of liberty would always prevail. Towards Camille he was kind, helpful, faintly patronizing. He liked to talk about his past life, and congratulate hi
mself on the better days ahead.

  Now Théroigne’s visit—perhaps the kiss, particularly—put him into a regular fit of how-did-we-get-here and ain’t-life-strange. “I had a hard time,” he said. “My father died, and shortly afterwards my mother became violently insane.”

  Camille put his head down on his desk, and laughed and laughed, until they really thought he would make himself quite ill.

  On Fridays, Fréron would usually be in the office. Camille would go out to lunch for several hours. Then they would have a writ conference, to decide whether to apologize. Since Camille would not be entirely sober, they never apologized. The staff of the Révolutions was never off duty. They were committed to leaping out of bed in the small hours with some hair-raising bright idea; they were doomed to be spat at in the street. Each week, after the type was set, Camille would say, never again, this is the last edition, positively. But next Saturday the paper would be out again, because he could not bear anyone to think that THEY had frightened him, with their threats and insults and challenges, with their money and rapiers and friends at Court. When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon. Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people’s lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catch in the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.