A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  The powers, however, have their own ideas. These revolutionaries are dangerous, beyond doubt; they menace us all in the most horrible fashion. But Louis is not dead, nor deposed; though the furnishings and appointments at the Tuileries may not measure up to those at Versailles, he is not even seriously inconvenienced. In better times, when the revolution is over, he may be inclined to admit that the sharp lesson has done him good. Meanwhile it is a secret, unholy pleasure to watch a rich neighbor struggle on with taxes uncollected, a fine army rent by mutiny, Messieurs the Democrats making themselves ridiculous. The order established by God must be maintained in Europe; but there is no need, just at present, to re-gild the Bourbon lilies.

  As for Louis himself, the émigrés advise him to begin a campaign of passive resistance. As the months pass, they begin to despair of him. They remind each other of the maxim of the Comte de Provence: “When you can hold together a number of oiled ivory balls, you may do something with the King.” It infuriates them to find that Louis’s every pronouncement bows to the new order—until they receive his secret assurance that everything he says means the exact opposite. They cannot understand that some of those monsters, those blackguards, those barbarians of the National Assembly, have the King’s interests at heart. Neither can the Queen comprehend it:

  “If I see them, or have any relations with them, it is only to make use of them; they inspire me with a horror too great for me to ever become involved with them.” So much for you, Mirabeau. It is possible that Lafayette is penetrated with a clearer idea of the lady’s worth. He has told her to her face (they say) that he intends to prove her guilty of adultery and pack her off home to Austria. To this end, he leaves every night a little door unguarded, to admit her supposed lover, Axel von Fersen. “Conciliation is no longer possible,” she writes. “Only armed force can repair the damage done.”

  Catherine, the Tsarina: “I am doing my utmost to spur on the courts of Vienna and Berlin to become entangled in French affairs so that I can have my hands free.” Catherine’s hands are free, as usual, for choking Poland. She will make her counter-revolution in Warsaw, she says, and let the Germans make one in Paris. Leopold, in Austria, is occupied with the affairs of Poland, Belgium, Turkey; William Pitt is thinking of India, and financial reforms. They wait and watch France weakening herself (as they think) by strife and division so that she is no longer a threat to their schemes.

  Frederick William of Prussia thinks a little differently; when war breaks out with France, as he knows it will, he intends to come out best. He has agents in Paris, directed to stir up hatred of Antoinette and the Austrians: to urge the use of force, to unbalance the situation and tilt it to violent conclusions. The real enthusiast for counter-revolution is Gustavus of. Sweden, Gustavus who is going to wipe Paris off the face of the earth: Gustavus who was paid one and a half million livres per annum under the old regime, Gustavus and his imaginary army. And from Madrid, the fevered reactionary sentiments of an imbecile king.

  These revolutionaries, they say, are the scourge of mankind. I will move against them—if you will.

  From Paris the future looks precarious. Marat sees conspirators everywhere, treason on the breeze drifting the new tricolor flag outside the King’s windows. Behind that facade, patroled by National Guardsmen, the King eats, drinks, grows stout, is seldom out of countenance. “My greatest fault,” he had once written, “is a sluggishness of mind which makes all my mental efforts wearisome and painful.”

  In the left-wing press, Lafayette is now referred to not by his title, but by his family name of Mottié. The King is referred to as Louis Capet. The Queen is called “the King’s wife.”

  There is religious dissension. About one-half of the cures of France agree to take the constitutional oath. The rest we call refractory priests. Only seven bishops support the new order. In Paris, nuns are attacked by fishwives. At Saint-Sulpice, where Father Pancemont is obdurate, a mob tramps through the nave singing that wholesome ditty: “Ça ira, ça ira, les aristocrats á la Lanterne,” The King’s aunts, Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire, leave secretly for Rome. The patriots have to be assured that the two old ladies have not packed the Dauphin in their luggage. The Pope pronounces the civil constitution schismatic. The head of a policeman is thrown into the carriage of the Papal Nuncio.

  In a booth at the Palais-Royal, a male and female “savage” exhibit themselves naked. They eat stones, babble in an unknown tongue and for a few small coins will copulate.

  Barnave, summer: “One further step towards liberty must destroy the monarchy, one further step towards equality must destroy private property.”

  Desmoulins, autumn: “Our revolution of 1789 was a piece of business arranged between the English government and a minority of the nobility, prepared by some in the hopes of turning out the Versailles aristocracy, and taking possession of their castles, houses and offices: by others to saddle us with a new master: and by all, to give us two Houses, and a constitution like that of England.”

  ’91: eighteen months of revolution, and securely under the heel of a new tyranny.

  “That man is a liar,” Robespierre says, “who claims I have ever advocated disobedience to the laws.”

  January at Bourg-la-Reine. Annette Duplessis stood at the window, gazing into the branches of the walnut tree that shaded the courtyard. From here, you could not see the foundations of the new cottage; just as well, for they were as melancholy as ruins. She sighed in exasperation at the silence welling from the room behind her. All of them would be beseeching her, inwardly, to turn and make some remark. If she were to leave the room, she would come back to find it alive with tension. Taking chocolate together mid-morning: surely that should not be too much of a strain?

  Claude was reading The Town and Court Journal, a right-wing scandal sheet. He had a faintly defiant air. Camille was gazing at his wife, as he often did. (Two days married, she discovered with a sense of shock that the black soul-eating eyes were short-sighted. “Perhaps you should wear spectacles.” “Too vain.”) Lucile was reading Clarissa, in translation and with scant attention. Every few minutes her eyes would flit from the page to her husband’s face.

  Annette wondered if this was what had plunged Claude so deeply into disagreeableness—the girl’s air of sexual triumph, the high color in her cheeks when they met in the mornings. You wish she were nine years old, she thought, kept happy with her dolls. She studied her husband’s bent head, the strands of gray neatly dressed and powdered; rural interludes wrung no concessions from Claude. Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.

  Claude let his paper fall. Camille snapped out of his reverie and turned his head. “What now? I told you, if you read that thing you must expect to be shocked.”

  Claude seemed unable to articulate. He pointed to the page; Annette thought he whimpered. Camille reached forward for it; Claude clasped it to his chest. “Don’t be silly, Claude,” Annette said, as one does to a baby. “Give the paper to Camille.”

  Camille ran his eyes down the page. “Oh, you’ll enjoy this. Lolotte, will you go away for a minute?”

  “No.”

  Where did she get this pet name? Annette had some feeling that Danton had given it to her. A little too intimate, she thought; and now Camille uses it. “Do as you’re told,” she said.

  Lucile didn’t move. I’m married now, she thought; don’t have to do what anybody says.

  “Stay then,” Camille said. “I was only thinking to spare your feelings. According to this, you’re not your father’s daughter.”

  “Oh, don’t say it,” Claude said. “Burn the paper.”

  “You know what Rousseau said.” Annette looked grim. “‘Burning isn’t answering.’”

  “Whose daughter am I?” Lucile asked. “Am I my mother’s daughter, or am I a foundling?”
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  “You’re certainly your mother’s daughter, and your father’s the abbé Terray.”

  Lucile giggled. “Lucile, I am not beyond slapping you,” her mother said.

  “Hence the money for the dowry,” Camille said, “comes from the abbé’s speculation in grain at times of famine.”

  “The abbé did not speculate in grain.” Claude held Camille in a red-faced inimical stare.

  “I do not suggest he did. I am paraphrasing the newspaper.”

  “Yes … of course.” Claude looked away miserably.

  “Did you ever meet Terray?” Camille asked his mother-in-law.

  “Once, I think. We exchanged about three words.”

  “You know,” Camille said to Claude, “Terray did have a reputation with women.”

  “It wasn’t his fault.” Claude flared up again. “He never wanted to be a priest. His family forced him into it.”

  “Do calm yourself,” Annette suggested.

  Claude hunched forward, hands pressed together between his knees. “Terray was our best hope. He worked hard. He had energy. People were afraid of him.” He stopped, seeming to realize that for the first time in years he had added a new statement, a coda.

  “Were you afraid of him?” Camille asked: not scoring a point, simply curious.

  Claude considered. “I might have been.”

  “I’m quite often afraid of people,” Camille said. “It’s a terrible admission, isn’t it?”

  “Like who?” Lucile said.

  “Well, principally I’m afraid of Fabre. If he hears me stutter, he shakes me and takes me by the hair and bangs my head against the wall.”

  “Annette,” Claude said, “there have been other imputations. In other newspapers.” He looked covertly at Camille. “I have contrived to dismiss them from my mind.”

  Annette made no comment. Camille hurled The Town and Court Journal across the room. “I’ll sue them,” he said.

  Claude looked up. “You’ll do what?”

  “I’ll sue them for libel.”

  Claude stood up. “You’ll sue them,” he said. “You. You’ll sue someone for libel.” He walked out of the room, and they could hear his hollow laughter as he climbed the stairs.

  February, Lucile was furnishing her apartment. They were to have pink silk cushions; Camille wondered how they would look a few months on, when grimy Cordeliers had mauled them. But he confined himself to an unspoken expletive when he saw her new set of engravings of the Life and Death of Maria Stuart. He did not like to look at these pictures at all. Bothwell had a ruthless, martial expression in his eye that reminded him of Antoine Saint-Just. Bulky retainers in bizarre plaids waved broadswords; kilted gentlemen, showing plump knees, helped the distressed Queen of Scots into a rowing boat. At her execution Maria was dressed to show off her figure, and looked all of twenty-three. “Crushingly romantic,” Lucile said. “Isn’t it?”

  Since they had moved, it was possible to run the Révolutions from home. Inky men, short-tempered and of a robust turn of phrase, stamped up and down the stairs with questions to which they expected her to know the answers. Uncorrected proofs tangled about table legs. Writ servers sat around the street door, sometimes playing cards and dice to pass the time. It was just like the Danton house, which was in the same building round the corner—complete strangers tramping in and out at all hours, the dining room colonized by men scribbling, their bedroom an overflow sitting room and general thoroughfare.

  “We must order more bookcases made,” she said. “You can’t have things in little piles all over the floor, I skid around when I get out of bed in the morning. Do you need all these old newspapers, Camille?”

  “Oh yes. They’re for searching out the inconsistencies of my opponents. So that I can persecute them when they change their opinions.”

  He lifted one from a pile. “Hébert’s,” she said. “That is dismal trash.”

  René Hébert was peddling his opinions now through the persona of a bluff, pipe-smoking man of the people, a fictitious furnace maker called Père Duchesne. The paper was vulgar, in every sense—simple-minded prose studded with obscenity. “Père Duchesne is a great royalist, isn’t he?” Camille swiftly marked a passage. “I may have to hold that one against you, Hébert.”

  “Is Hébert really like Père Duchesne? Does he really smoke a pipe and swear?”

  “Not at all. He’s an effete little man. He has peculiar hands that flutter about. They look like things that live under stones. Listen, Lolotte—are you happy?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Are you sure? Do you like the apartment? Do you want to move?”

  “No, I don’t want to move. I like the apartment. I like everything. I am very happy.” Her emotions now seemed to lie just below the surface, scratching at her delicate skin to be hatched. “Only I’m afraid something will happen.”

  “What could happen?” (He knew what could happen.)

  “The Austrians might come and you’d be shot. The Court might have you assassinated. You could be abducted and shut up in prison somewhere, and I’d never know where you were.”

  She put up her hand to her mouth, as if she could stop the fears spilling out.

  “I’m not that important,” he said. “They have more to do than arrange assassins for me.”

  “I saw one of those letters, threatening to kill you.”

  “That’s what comes of reading other people’s mail. You find out things you’d rather not know.”

  “Who obliges us to live like this?” Her voice muffled against his shoulder. “Someday soon we’ll have to live in cellars, like Marat.”

  “Dry your tears. Someone is here.”

  Robespierre hovered, looking embarrassed. “Your housekeeper said I should come through,” he said.

  “That’s all right.” Lucile gestured around her. “Not exactly a love nest, as you see. Sit on the bed. Sit in the bed, feel free. Half of Paris was in here this morning while I was trying to get dressed.”

  “I can’t find anything since I moved,” Camille complained. “And you’ve no idea how time-consuming it is, being married. You have to make decisions about the most baffling things—like whether to have the ceilings painted. I always supposed the paint just grew on them, didn’t you?”

  Robespierre declined to sit. “I won’t stay—I came to see if you’d written that piece you promised, about my pamphlet on the National Guard. I expected to see it in your last issue.”

  “Oh Christ,” Camille said. “It could be anywhere. Your pamphlet, I mean. Have you another copy with you? Look, why don’t you just write the piece yourself? It would be quicker.”

  “But Camille, it’s all very well for me to give your readers a digest of my ideas, but I expected something more—you could say whether you thought my ideas were cogent, whether they were logical, whether they were well expressed. I can’t write a piece praising myself, can I?”

  “I don’t see the difficulty.”

  “Don’t be flippant. I haven’t time to waste.”

  “I’m sorry.” Camille swept his hair back and smiled. “But you’re our editorial policy, didn’t you know? You’re our hero.” He crossed the room, and touched Robespierre on the shoulder, very lightly, with just the tip of his middle finger. “We admire your principles in general, support your actions and writings in particular—and will therefore never fail to give you good publicity.”

  “Yet you have failed, haven’t you?” Robespierre stepped back. He was exasperated. “You must try to keep to the task in hand. You are so heedless, you are unreliable.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  She felt a needlepoint of irritation.

  “Max, he isn’t a schoolchild.”

  “I’ll write it this afternoon,” Camille said.

  “And be at the Jacobins this evening.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You are terribly dictatorial,” she said.

  “Oh no, Lucile.” Robespierre looked at her earnestly.
His voice suddenly softened. “It’s just that one has to use exhortation with Camille, he’s such a dreamer. I’m sure”—he dropped his eyes—“if I had just been married to you, Lucile, I’d be tempted to spend time with you and I wouldn’t give such attention to my work as I ought. And Camille is no use at fighting temptation on his own, he never has been. But I’m not dictatorial, don’t say that.”

  “All right,” she said, “you have the license of long acquaintance. But your tone. Your manner. You should save that for berating the Right. Go and make them flinch.”

  His face tightened: defensive, distressed. She saw why Camille preferred always to apologize. “Oh,” he said. “Camille quite likes being pushed around. It’s something in his character. So Danton says. Good-bye. Write it this afternoon, won’t you?” he added gently.

  “Well,” she said. They exchanged glances. “That was pointed, wasn’t it? What does he mean?”

  “Nothing. He was just shaken because you criticized him.”

  “Must he not be criticized?”

  “No. He takes things to heart, it undermines him. Besides, he was right. I should have remembered about the pamphlet. You mustn’t be hard on him. It’s shyness that makes him abrupt.”

  “He ought to have got over it. Other people don’t get allowances made for them. Besides, once you said he had no weaknesses.”

  “Day to day he has weaknesses. In the end he has no weaknesses.”

  “You might leave me,” she said suddenly. “For someone else.”

  “What makes you imagine that?”

  “Today I keep thinking. I keep thinking of what could happen. Because I never supposed that one could be so happy, that everything could come right.”

  “Do you think you have had an unhappy life?”

  Appearances were against her; but truthfully she answered, “Yes.”