A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  She closed the shutter, made her way towards the bedroom in the dark. She heard her husband’s voice, from behind the closed door of his study. “Yes, I understand what you are saying. We try our strength, Lafayette tries his. He is the one with the guns.”

  The other man spoke. She did not know his voice. “Just a warning,” he said. “Well intentioned. Well meant.”

  Georges said, “Well, it’s three o’clock. I’m not going to scramble off now like a debtor on quarter day. We meet here at dawn. Then we’ll see.”

  Three o’clock. François Robert was sunk into a miserable lethargy. It wasn’t the worst kind of cell—there was no evidence of rats, and at least it was cool—but he would rather have been elsewhere. He could not see why he was here—he had only been about the business of the petition. He and Louise had a broadsheet to publish; the Mercure Nationale must be on the streets, no matter what. Probably Camille would see if she needed help. She’d never ask for it.

  God in heaven, what is this? Someone with steel-tipped boots must be kicking the door. Other boots, tramping; then a voice, startlingly loud. “Some of these shits have knives.” Then the tramp of feet again, and a flat and drunken voice singing a few bars of one of Fabre’s popular songs: forgetting the words, starting again. The steel-tipped boots on his door, then a few seconds of silence, then a slogan shouter: To the Lanterne.

  François Robert shivered. Lanteme Attorney, you should be here, he thought.

  “Death to the Austrian bitch,” said the drunken singer. “Hang up Louis Capet’s whore. Hang up the beast of Babylon, cut off her tits.”

  A chilling cackle ran along the walls. A young voice laughed, high-pitched, tinged with hysteria. “Long live the People’s Friend.”

  Then a voice he couldn’t make out; then a voice near at hand: “He says he’s got seventeen prisoners and nowhere to put them.”

  “Well, well,” said the young voice. “A laugh a minute.”

  A second later the cell was flooded by orange torchlight. He scrambled to his feet. A few heads appeared around the door; to his relief, they were still joined to bodies. “You can come out now.”

  “Can I really go?”

  “Yes, yes.” A sober, irritated voice. “I’ve more than a hundred persons to accommodate, persons on the street without lawful excuse. We can always pick you up again in a few days’ time.”

  “What did you do anyway?” asked the high-pitched young man.

  “A professor of law,” Steel Tips announced. He was also the drunk. “Aren’t you, professor? A big mate of mine.” He draped an arm around Robert’s shoulder and leaned on him, breathing sourly into his face. “What about Danton then? He’s the lad.”

  “If you say so,” Robert said.

  “I seen him,” Steel Tips told his colleagues. “He says to me, seeing as you know all about the prisons, when I get to be boss of this city I’m going to put you in charge of rounding up all the aristos and cutting off their heads. For which you’ll get a good wage, he says, because you’ll be doing a public service.”

  “Go on,” the boy said. “Danton never spoke to you. You drunken old sot. M. Sanson’s the public executioner. His father was the executioner and his father before him. You going to put him out of a job, are you? Danton never said that to you.”

  François Robert at home. The coffee cup wouldn’t stay still in his grasp; it was chinking and chinking against the saucer. “Who would have thought it would put me in this state?” He was trying to smile, but his face would only contort. “Being released was as bad as being arrested. Louise, we forget what the people are like, their ignorance, their violence, the way they jump to conclusions.”

  She thought of Camille, two years ago; the Bastille heroes on the streets, the coffee going cold by their bed, the aftermath of panic in his chilling, wide-set eyes. “The Jacobins have split apart,” she said. “The Right has walked out. They’re going to form another club. All Lafayette’s friends have gone, all the people who used to support Mirabeau. Pétion remains, Buzot, Robespierre—a handful.”

  “What does Robespierre say?”

  “That he’s glad the divisions are out in the open. That he’ll start again, with patriots this time.”

  She took the cup out of his hands and pulled his head into her waist, stroking his hair and the back of his neck. “Robespierre will go to the Champs-de-Mars,” she said. “He’ll show his face, you can be sure. But they, they won’t go. Danton’s lot.”

  “Then who’s going to take the petition? Who’s going to represent the Cordeliers?”

  Oh no, he thought.

  Dawn, Danton was slapping him on the back. “Good boy,” he was saying. “Don’t worry, we’ll look after your wife. And François, the Cordeliers won’t forget this.”

  At dawn they had met in Danton’s red-walled study. The servants were still asleep on the mezzanine floor. Sleeping their servant’s sleep, Gabrielle thought. She brought coffee to the men, avoiding their eyes. Danton handed Fabre a copy of the People’s Friend, stabbing at it with his forefinger. “It says—God knows with what foundation—that Lafayette intends to fire on the people. ‘Therefore,’ says Marat, ‘I intend to have the general assassinated.’ Now as it happens, in the night we have been tipped off—”

  “Can’t you stop it?” Gabrielle said. “Can’t you stop the whole thing happening?”

  “Send the crowds home? Too late. They’re out to celebrate. To them, the petition is only part of it. And I cannot answer for Lafayette.”

  “Then are we to be ready to leave, Georges? I don’t mind, but just tell me what to do. Just tell me what’s happening.”

  Danton looked shifty. His instinct said, today will go badly—so cut and run. He glanced around the room, for someone to serve as the voice of his instinct. Fabre was about to open his mouth, when Camille said, “You know, two years ago, Danton, it was all right for you to lock your door and work on your shipping case. But it’s a different matter now.”

  Danton looked at him: considered, nodded. So they waited. It was fully light, another day beginning in sunshine and moving towards a sultry, growling, hardly bearable heat.

  Champs-de-Mars, the day of celebration: a crowd of people in Sunday clothes. Women with parasols, pet dogs on leads. Sticky-fingered children pawing at their mothers; people who have bought coconuts and don’t know what to make of them. Then the glint of light on bayonets, people clutching hands, whirling children off their feet, pushing and calling out in alarm as they are separated from their families. Some mistake, there must be some mistake. The red flag of martial law is unfurled. What’s a flag, on a day of celebration? Then the horrors of the first volley. And back, losing footing, blood blossoming horribly on the grass, fingers under stampeding feet, the splinter of hoof on bone. It is over within minutes. An example has been made. A soldier slides from his saddle and vomits.

  Mid-morning the news came; perhaps fifty dead, though this was the highest estimate. Whatever the tally, it’s hard to take in. The red-walled room seemed so small now, and close. There was the very bolt on the door, the one that was locked two years ago: the one that was locked when the women marched on Versailles.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Danton said, “it’s time we were elsewhere. When the National Guard realize what they have done, they will be looking for someone to blame. It will occur to them to blame the authors of the petition, and they,” he finished heavily, “and they, the authors, that’s us.” He looked up. “Did someone fire a shot from the crowd? Was that it? A panic?”

  “No,” Camille said. “I believe Marat. I believe your tip-offs, I think this was planned.”

  Danton shook his head. Still hard to take it in. All the phrasemaking, the trimming and teasing of clauses, the drafting and re-drafting of the petition, the to-ing and fro-ing to the Jacobins and the Assembly, to end in this—swift, stupid, bloody. He had thought, lawyer’s tactics can win this; violence maybe but only as a last resort. He’d played by the rules—mostl
y. He’d kept within the law, just. He’d expected Lafayette and Bailly to play by the rules; to contain the crowds, let them be. But we are moving, now, into a world where the rules are being redefined; it is as well to expect the worst.

  Camille said, “The patriots saw the petition as an opportunity. So, it seems, did Lafayette. He saw it as an opportunity for a massacre.”

  This, they knew, was a journalist talking. Real life is never so clear and crisp. But that would always be the word for it, in the years ahead: “The Massacre on the Champs-de-Mars.”

  Danton felt a huge surge of anger. Next time, he thought, bull’s tactics, lion’s tactics; but for now the tactics of a rat in a run.

  Late afternoon: Angélique Charpentier was in her garden at Fontenay-sous-Bois, a flower basket over her arm. She was trying to behave decorously; really she would have liked to dive to her knees in the salad beds and do some violence to the slugs. Hot weather, thunder in the air: we’re not ourselves.

  “Angélique?” Slim black shape against the sun.

  “Camille? What are you doing here?”

  “Can we go into the house? There are several others who will be here within an hour. You may not thank Georges-Jacques, but he thought this would be a place of safety. There has been a massacre. Lafayette has fired on the people celebrating the Bastille.”

  “Georges—he’s not hurt?”

  “Of course not. You know Georges. But the National Guard are looking for us.”

  “Won’t they come here?”

  “Not for a few hours. The city is in confusion.”

  Angélique took his arm. This is not, she thought, the life I meant to have; this is not the life I meant for Gabrielle.

  As they hurried to the house, she pulled off the white linen square that she wore to keep the sun off the back of her neck. She tried to pat her hair into place. How many for dinner? she wondered; people have to be fed. The city might have been a thousand miles away. It was that time of the afternoon when the birds are silent; heavy, undisturbed scents lay over the gardens.

  Here was her husband François hurrying out, his face alarmed. Despite the temperature he looked as he always used to—dapper, particular. He was in shirt-sleeves, but his cravat was knotted neatly; his round brown wig was on his head; you could almost imagine the napkin over his arm. “Camille?” he said.

  For a moment Camille thought half a decade might roll away. He wished he were back at the Café de l’École, cool and echoing; the coffee strong, Angélique svelte, Maître Vinot boring on about his Life Plan. “Oh, fuck this,” he muttered. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

  One by one they straggled in through the afternoon. Camille seemed somehow to have got the advantage of them; by the time Danton arrived, he was sitting on the terrace, reading the New Testament and drinking lemonade.

  Fabre brought news that François Robert had been seen alive. Legendre had seen patrols swarming over the Cordeliers district, and printing presses smashed, and a quantity of carcasses carried away from his shop by the vultures who came in the wake of the patrols. “Do you know,” he said, “there are days when my love of the sovereign people abates a bit?” He had seen a young journalist, Prudhomme, beaten up by National Guardsmen, dragged off somewhere looking quite bad. “I’d have gone back for him,” he said. “But you told us not to risk it, didn’t you, Danton?” His eyes appealed, dog-like, for approval.

  Danton nodded once, without comment. “What did they want Prudhomme for?”

  “Because,” Fabre said, “heat of the moment, they thought they had Camille.”

  “I’d have gone back for Camille,” Legendre said.

  Camille looked up from Saint Matthew. “The hell you would.”

  Gabrielle, looking sallow and scared, arrived with enough baggage to withstand a siege. “Into the kitchen,” Angélique said, ripping the bags from her hands. “There are vegetables to be prepared. Five minutes to clean yourself up and then report for active service.” Cruel to be kind, she said under her breath; keep her busy, make small talk.

  But Gabrielle was not fit even to string beans. She sat down at the kitchen table, Antoine on her knees, and dissolved into tears. “Look, he’s safe,” her mother said. “He’s making plans right now. The worst is over.” Still tears ran out of Gabrielle’s eyes. “You’re pregnant again, aren’t you?” Angélique said. She held her daughter, hiccupping and sobbing, against her chest, smoothing her hair and feeling the skin of Gabrielle’s cheek burning beneath her hand, as if she had a fever. What a time to find out, she thought. The baby Antoine began to wail. She could hear the men laughing, out on the terrace.

  Gallows humor, she supposed; except Georges, who could be relied on, none of them had much appetite. The duck went to waste; the sauce congealed; the vegetables went cold in their dishes. Fréron was the last to arrive; he was a wreck, bruised, trembling, incoherent. Alcohol was needed, before he could get his story straight. He had been caught on the Pont-Neuf, beaten to the ground. Some men from the Cordeliers’ Battalion had come by. They had recognized him, waded in, caused a diversion while he scrambled away. Otherwise, he said, he would have been dead.

  “Has anyone seen Robespierre?” Camille asked. Heads were shaken. Camille picked up a table knife, and ran his finger round the edge of it reflectively. Lucile, he presumed, would be at the rue Condé; she would not have stayed in their apartment alone, for she was not without sense. Two days ago she had been saying, you know we really have to decide about this wallpaper, shall we have treillage? He’d said, Lucile, ask me a real question. He had a feeling that this was the real question, now. “I’m going back to Paris,” he said, and stood up.

  There was a short silence. “Why don’t you just go in the kitchen and cut your own throat?” Fabre inquired. “We’ll bury you in the garden.”

  “Now Camille,” Angélique said reproachfully. She leaned across the table and took him by the wrist.

  “One speech,” he said. “To the Jacobins, what’s left of them. Just to lay down our line. Give us some sort of grasp on the situation. Besides, I have to find my wife, and I have to find Robespierre. I’ll be away again before anything goes wrong. I know Marat’s escape routes.”

  They looked at him, dumbstruck, jaw-dropped. It is really hard for these people to remember—between crises—that he ever held the police at bay in the Palais-Royal, that he ever waved a pistol about and threatened to shoot himself. Even he finds it hard to comprehend—between crises. But there it is. He is the Lanteme Attorney now. He is locked into a role, he is cast in a part, he won’t stutter if he keeps to the script. Danton said, “A word with you, alone.” He nodded his head towards the door that led to the garden.

  “Secrets among the brotherhood?” Fréron said archly.

  No one answered. Silent, respectful of the gloom, Angélique began to gather the dishes towards her. Gabrielle muttered something and slipped from the room.

  “Where will you go?” Camille said.

  “Arcis.”

  “They’ll come after you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So then?”

  “England. As soon as—” Danton swore softly. “Let’s face it, possibly never. Don’t go back to Paris. Stay here tonight—we’ll have to risk it, because we need the sleep. Write to your father-in-law, tell him to put your affairs in order. Have you made your will?”

  “No.”

  “Well, make one now, and write to Lucile. Tomorrow at dawn we’ll leave for Arcis. We can hide out for a week or so, until it’s safe to make a dash for the coast.”

  “My geography’s not up to much,” Camille said, “but wouldn’t it be better to dash from here?”

  “I have things to see to, papers to sign.”

  “If you’re not coming back, I can see you would have.”

  “Now don’t waste time arguing with me. The women can come after us as soon as is practicable. You can even ship your mother-in-law over if you really feel you can’t do without her.”


  “And do you think the English will be glad to see us? Do you think they’ll meet us at Dover with a civic banquet and a military band?”

  “We have contacts.”

  “So we have, but,” Camille said with mock bitterness, “where is Grace Elliot when you need her?”

  “We don’t have to travel under our own names. I have papers already, I can get some for you. We’ll pretend to be businessmen—what I don’t know about cotton spinning isn’t worth knowing. Once in the country we can make contact with our sympathizers, look for somewhere to live—money shouldn’t be a problem—what’s the matter?”

  “When did you work this out?”

  “On the way here.”

  “But it’s all settled in your mind—oh, for God’s sake, this has always been your idea, hasn’t it? Profit from the smooth patches and skip out as soon as it gets rough? Do you want to live in Hampshire as a gentleman-farmer? Is that the latest of your lofty ambitions?”

  “What’s the alternative?” Danton had a headache, and Camille was making it worse. I knew you, he wanted to say: I knew you when you were shaking in your shoes.

  “I can’t believe”—and Camille’s voice was shaking now—”that you would run away.”

  “But if we go to England we can start again. Plan.”

  Camille looked at him in sorrow. The expression was more complex than sorrow, but Danton could not analyze it, because he was so mentally weary at the thought of starting again.