A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  What will Adèle’s life be like? Robespierre gets letters, too, but they’re not the same as the ones Camille gets. They come from all over the city; they’re letters from little people, who have fallen foul of the authorities or got themselves into some form of trouble, and they think he can take up their case and put everything right. He has to get up at 5 a.m. to answer these letters. Somehow I think his standards of domestic comfort are rather low. His requirements for recreation, amusement, diversion seem to be nil. Now, ask yourself—will that suit Adèle?

  Robespierre: It’s not just Paris he must consider. Letters come from all over the country. Provincial towns have set up their Jacobin Clubs, and the Correspondence Committe of the Paris club sends them news, assessments, directives; back come their letters, distinguishing among the Paris brethren the deputy Robespierre, marking him out for their praise and thanks. This is something, after the vilification of the royalists. Inside his copy of The Social Contract he keeps a letter from a young Picard, an enthusiast called Antoine Saint-Just: “I know you, Robespierre, as I know God, by your works.” When he suffers, as he does increasingly, from a distressing tightness of the chest and shortness of breath, and when his eyes seem too tired to focus on the printed page, the thought of the letter urges the weak flesh to more Works.

  Every day he attends the Assembly, and every evening the Jacobin Club. He calls when he can at the Duplessis house, dines occasionally with Pétion—working dinner. He goes to the theater perhaps twice in the season, with no great pleasure and regret at the time lost. People wait to see him outside the Riding School, outside the club, outside the door of his lodgings.

  Each night he is exhausted. He sleeps as soon as his head touches the pillow. His sleep is dreamless, a plummeting into blackness: like falling into a well. The night world is real, he often feels; the mornings, with their light and air, are populated by shadows, ghosts. He rises before dawn, to have the advantage of them.

  William Augustus Miles, observing the situation on behalf of His (English) Majesty’s government:

  The man held of least account in the National Assembly … will soon be of the first consideration. He is a stern man, rigid in his principles, plain, unaffected in his manners, no foppery in his dress, certainly above corruption, despising wealth and with nothing of the volatility of a Frenchman in his character. Nothing the King could bestow … could warp this man from his purpose. I watch him closely every night. He is really a character to be contemplated; he is growing every hour into consequence, and strange to relate, the whole National Assembly hold him cheap, consider him insignificant; when I said he would be the man of sway in a short time, and govern the million, I was laughed at.

  Early in the year, Lucile was taken to meet Mirabeau. She would never forget the man, standing squarely on a good Persian rug in a room decorated in appalling taste. He was thin-lipped, scarred and massive. He looked her over. “I believe your father’s a civil servant,” he said. He thrust his face forward and leered at her. “Do you come in duplicate?”

  Mirabeau, in a room, seemed to use up all the available air. He seemed, too, to use up all Camille’s brains. It was extraordinary, the set of delusions Camille could entertain; no, of course Mirabeau was not in the pay of the Court, that was slander. Of course Mirabeau was the perfect patriot. Come the day Camille can no longer sustain these eccentric beliefs, he is practically suicidal. There is almost no newspaper that week.

  “Max warned him,” Adèle said. “He wouldn’t listen. Mirabeau has called that half-educated Austrian baggage ‘a great and noble woman.’ And yet, to the people in the streets, Mirabeau is a god still. It shows how easily they can be misled.”

  Claude put his head in his hands. “Must we have this every hour, every hour of the day and night, this blasphemy and sedition from the mouths of young women? In our own house?”

  “I was thinking,” Lucile said, “that Mirabeau must have his own reasons for talking to the Court. But he has lost his credit with the patriots now.”

  “His reason? Money is his reason, and greed for power. He wants to save the monarchy so that they will be grateful to him and bound to him forever more.”

  “Save the monarchy?” Claude said. “From what? From whom?”

  “Father, the King has asked the Assembly for a civil list of twenty-five million, and the groveling fools have granted it. You know the state of the nation. They want to drain its blood. Consider, can this last?”

  He looked at his daughters to discern, if he could, the children they had once been. He felt impelled to plead with them. “But if you had not the King, or Lafayette, or Mirabeau, or the ministers—and I have heard you speak against them all—who would there be left to rule the nation?”

  They exchanged glances. “Our friends,”, the sisters said.

  Camille attacked Mirabeau in print, with a savagery he had not known himself to command. He did command it; abuse moves in the bloodstream, anger is better than food. For a time Mirabeau continued to speak out for him, defending him against the Right when they tried to silence him. “My poor Camille,” he called him. In time, he would pass over to the ranks of his enemies. “I am truly Christian,” Camille said. “I love my enemies.” And indeed, his enemies gave him definition. He could read his purpose in their eyes.

  Moving away from Mirabeau, he became closer to Robespierre. This made for a different life—evenings spent pushing papers across a desk, silence broken only by the odd murmur of consultation, the scratching of quills, the ticking of a clock. To be with Robespierre, Camille had to put on gravity like a winter cloak. “He is all I should be,” he told Lucile. “Max doesn’t care for failure or success, it all evens out in his mind. He doesn’t care what other people say about him, or what opinion they hold of his actions. As long as what he does feels right, inside, that’s enough for him, that’s his guide. He’s one of the few men, the very few men, to whom only the witness of their own conscience is necessary.”

  Yet just the day before, Danton had said to her, “Ah, young Maximilien, he’s too good to be true, that one. I can’t work him out.”

  But after all, Robespierre. had been quite right about Mirabeau. Whatever you thought about him, you had to admit that he was almost always right.

  In May, Théroigne left Paris. She had no money, and she was tired of the royalist papers calling her a prostitute. One by one, the murky layers of the past had been peeled away. Her time in London with a penniless milord. Her more profitable relationship with the Marquis de Persan. Her sojourn in Genoa with an Italian singer. A silly few weeks, when she was new in Paris, when she introduced herself to people as the Comtesse de Campinado, a great lady fallen on hard times. Nothing criminal, or madly hyperbolic: just the sort of thing we’ve all done when necessity has pressed. It left her open, though, to ridicule and insult. Whose life, she asked as she did her packing, would stand up to the sort of scrutiny mine has received? She meant to be back in a few months. The press will have moved on to new targets, she thought.

  She left a gap, of course. She’d been a familiar figure at the Riding School, lounging in the public gallery in a scarlet coat, her claque around her; strolling through the Palais-Royal, with a pistol in her belt. News came that she’d disappeared from her home in Liege; her brothers thought she’d gone off with some man, but before long rumors seeped through that she’d been abducted, that the Austrians had got her.

  Hope they keep her, Lucile said. She was jealous of Théroigne. What gave her the right to be a pseudo-man, turning up at the Cordeliers and demanding the rostrum? It made Danton mad. It was funny to see what a rage it put him into. The kind of woman he liked was the kind he met at the Duke’s dinner table: Agnès de Buffon, who gave him the most ridiculous languishing looks, and the blonde Englishwoman, Grace Elliot, with her mysterious political connections and her mechanical, eye-flashing flirtatiousness. Lucile had been to the Duke’s house; she had watched Danton there. She supposed he knew what was happening; he knew that Laclos was se
tting him up, danging these women under his nose. The procuress, Félicité, he left to Camille. Camille didn’t mind having to have intelligent conversations with women. He seemed to enjoy them. One of his perversions, Danton said.

  That summer Camille’s old school enemy, Louis Suleau, came to Paris. He came from Picardy under arrest, charged with seditious, anti-constitutional writings. He had a different brand of sedition from Camille, being more royalist than the King. Louis was acquitted; on the night of his release he and Camille sat up and argued until dawn. It was a very good argument—very articulate, very erudite, and its patron saint was Voltaire. “I have to keep Louis away from Robespierre,” Camille said to Lucile. “Louis is one of the best people in the world, but I’m afraid Max doesn’t understand that.”

  Louis was a gentleman, Lucile thought. He had dash, he had flair, he had presence. Soon he had a platform too; he joined the editorial board of a royalist scandal sheet called the Acts of the Apostles. The deputies who sat on the left were fond of calling themselves “the apostles of liberty,” and Louis thought such pomposity ought to be punished. Who were the contributors? A cabal of exhausted roués and defrocked priests, said the patriots whose noses were out of joint. How did it get written at all? The Acts held “evangelical dinners” at the Restaurant du Mais and at Brinvillier’s, where they’d exchange gossip and plot the next edition. They would invite their opponents and ply them with drink, to see what they’d say. Camille understood the principle: a tidbit here, a trade-off there, a screamingly good time at the expense of the fools and bores who tried to occupy the middle ground. Often a witticism for which the Révolutions had no use would find its home in the Acts. “Dear Camille,” Louis said, “if only you would throw in your lot with us. One day we are sure to see eye-to-eye. Never mind this ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ rot. Do you know our manifesto? ‘Liberty, Gaiety, Royal Democracy.’ When it comes down to it, we both want the same—we want people to be happy. What’s the use of your Revolution if it breeds long faces? What’s the use of a revolution run by miserable little men in miserable little rooms?”

  Liberty, Gaiety, Royal Democracy. The Duplessis women give orders to their dressmakers for the autumn of 1790. Black silks with scarlet sashes and cutaway coats piped with the tricolor take them to first nights, supper parties, private views. Take them to meet new people …

  It was still summer, though, when Antoine Saint-Just came to Paris. Not to stay, just to visit; Lucile was avid to get a sight of him. She’d heard the stories, about how he’d absconded with the family silver and had run through the money in a fortnight. She was highly prepared to like him.

  He was twenty-two now. The episode with the silver was three years ago. Had Camille perhaps made it up? It was hard to believe a person could change so much. She looked up at Saint-Just—he was tall—and noted the awesome neutrality of his expression. Introductions were made, and he looked at her as if he were not interested in her at all. He was with Robespierre; it seemed they’d exchanged letters. It was quite strange, she thought—most men seemed to fall over themselves in their eagerness to get more out of her than her normal workaday affability. Not that she held it against him: it made a change.

  Saint-Just was handsome. He had velvet eyes and a sleepy smile; he moved his fine body carefully, as big men sometimes do. He had a fair skin and dark brown hair—if there was any fault in his face, it was that his chin was too large, too long. It saved him from prettiness, she thought, but seen from certain angles his face had an oddly overbalanced look.

  Camille was with her, of course. He was in one of those precarious moods; teasing, but quite ready for a fight. “Done any more poems?” he asked. Last year, Saint-Just had published an epic, and sent it for his opinion; it was interminable, violent, faintly salacious.

  “Why? Would you read them?” Saint-Just looked hopeful.

  Camille slowly shook his head. “Torture has been abolished,” he said.

  Saint-Just’s lip curled. “I suppose it offended you, my poem. I suppose you thought it was pornographic.”

  “Nothing so good,” Camille said, laughing.

  Their eyes met. Saint-Just said, “My poem had a serious point. Do you think I would waste my time?”

  “I don’t know,” Camille said, “whether you would or not.”

  Lucile’s mouth went dry. She watched the two men try to face each other down: Saint-Just waxen, passive, waiting for results, and Camille nervously aggressive, his eyes bright. This is nothing to do with a poem, she thought. Robespierre, too, looked faintly alarmed. “You’re a little severe, Camille,” he said. “Surely the work had some merit?”

  “None, none,” Camille said. “But if you like, Antoine, I could bring you some specimens of my own early efforts, and let you mock them at your leisure. You are probably a better poet than I was, and you will certainly be a better politician. Because look at you, you have self-control. You would like to hit me, but you aren’t going to.”

  Saint-Just’s expression had deepened; it was not fathomable.

  “Have I really offended you?” Camille tried to sound sorry.

  “Oh, deeply.” Saint-Just smiled. “I am wounded to the core of my being. Because isn’t it obvious that you are the one human being whose good opinion I crave? You without whom no aristocrat’s dinner party is complete?”

  Saint-Just turned his back to speak to Robespierre. “Why couldn’t you be kind?” Lucile whispered.

  Camille shrugged. “As a friend, I’d have been kind. But he was talking to an editor, not to a friend. He wanted me to put a piece in the paper crying up his talents. He didn’t want my personal opinion, he wanted my professional opinion. So he got it.”

  “What’s happened? I thought you liked him?”

  “He was all right. He’s changed. He used to be always thinking up mad schemes and getting into difficulties with women. But look at him, he’s become so solemn. I wish Louis Suleau could see him, he’s a fine example of a miserable revolutionary. He’s a republican, he says. I wouldn’t like to live in his republic.”

  “Perhaps he wouldn’t let you.”

  Later she heard Saint-Just tell Robespierre, “He is frivolous.”

  She contemplated the word. She associated it with giggly summer picnics, or gossipy theater suppers with champagne: the rustling hot still-painted actresses sitting down beside her and saying, I see you are much in love, he is beautiful, I hope you will be happy. She had never before heard it uttered as an indictment, charged with menace and contempt.

  That year the Assembly made bishops and priests into public officials, salaried by the state and subject to election, and in time also required of them an oath of loyalty to the new constitution. To some it seemed a mistake to force the priests to a stark choice; to refuse was to be counted disloyal, and dangerous. Everybody agreed (at her mother’s little afternoon salons) that religious conflict was the most dangerous force that could be unleashed in a nation.

  From time to time her mother would sigh over the new developments. “Life will be so prosaic,” she complained. “The constitution, and the high-mindedness, and the Quaker hats.”

  “What would you have, my dear?” Danton asked her. “Plumes and grand passions at the Riding School? Mayhem among the Municipality? Love and death?”

  “Oh, don’t laugh. Our romantic aspirations have received a shock. Here is the Revolution, the spirit of Rousseau made flesh, we thought—”

  “And it is only M. Robespierre, with defective eyesight and a provincial accent.”

  “It is only a lot of people discussing their bank balances.”

  “Who has been gossiping to you about my affairs?”

  “The walls and gateposts talk of you, M. Danton.” She paused, touched his arm. “Tell me something, will you? Do you dislike Max?”

  “Dislike him?” he seemed surprised. “I don’t think so. He makes me a bit uneasy, that’s all. He does seem to set everyone very high standards. Will you be able to scrape up to them with
you’re his mother-in-law?”

  “Oh, that’s—not settled yet.”

  “Can’t Adèle make up her mind?”

  “It’s more that the question hasn’t been asked.”

  “Then it’s what they call an understanding,” Danton said.

  “I’m not sure whether Max thinks he has asked her—well, no, I must decline to comment. You need not raise your eyebrows in that way. How can a mere woman say what a deputy understands?”

  “Oh, we don’t have ‘mere women’ anymore. Last week your two prospective sons-in-law defeated me in argument. I am told that women are in every respect the equal of men. They only want opportunity.”

  “Yes,” she said. “All this is set in motion by that opinionated little creature Louise Robert, who doesn’t know what she’s starting. I don’t see why men should spend their time arguing that women are their equals. It seems against their interests.”

  “Robespierre is disinterested, you see. As always. And Camille tells me we shall have to give women the vote. We shall have them at the Riding School soon, wearing black hats and lugging document cases about and droning on about the taxation system.”

  “Life will be even more prosaic.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We may yet have our grubby little tragedies.”

  So has this revolution a philosophy, Lucile wanted to know, has it a future?

  She dared not ask Robespierre, or he would lecture her for the afternoon on the General Will; or Camille, for fear of a thoughtful and coherent two hours on the development of the Roman republic. So she asked Danton.

  “Oh, I think it has a philosophy,” he said seriously. “Grab what you can, and get out while the going’s good.”