“You go then,” Camille said. “I’ll stay. I’ll hide for as long as I have to. When I think it’s safe, I’ll get word to you. Then I hope you’ll come back. I don’t know if you will, but if you say you will I’ll have to believe you. There’s no other way to do it. If you don’t come back, I suppose I’ll come to England. I have no intention of carrying on here without you.”
“I have a wife, and a child, and I—”
“Yes, I know. And another child soon.”
“She told you that?”
“No. Gabrielle and I are not on such terms.”
“Good. Because she didn’t tell me.”
Camille indicated the house. “I’ll go back in now and talk at that lot and make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves. They’ll whimper back to Paris tonight, you may be sure. They can form a diversion—it will give you a chance, and you’re the important one. I quite see that, I shouldn’t have said what I said just then. I’ll get Fabre to take Lucile to Bourg-la-Reine, and he can lurk there out of the way for a week or two.”
“I’m not sure I’d trust my wife to Fabre as an escort.”
“Who then? Rabbit? Our butcher brave and bold?”
They grinned at each other. Their eyes met. “You know what Mirabeau used to say,” Camille said. “‘We live at a time of great events and little men.’”
“Take care, then,” Danton said. “Oh, and do make your will anyway. And Camille, leave me your wife.”
Camille laughed. Danton turned his back. He didn’t want to see him go.
Robespierre had been crushed against a barrier when the fighting started. The shock had been greater than the pain. He had seen dead bodies; after the troops had pulled back, he had watched as the wounded were carried away, and he had noted the absurd detritus of the civilian battlefield: flowered hats, single shoes, dolls and spinning tops.
He began walking. Perhaps he had walked for hours. He was not sure of the route he had taken, but it seemed to him necessary to get back to the rue Saint-Honoré, to the Jacobins, to take possession of the ground. He had almost made it. But now someone was blocking his path.
He looked up. The man had a shirt torn open at the neck, a dusty bonnet and the remnants of a National Guardsman’s uniform.
What was strangest, he was laughing: his teeth were bared, like a dog’s.
He had a saber in his hand. There was a tricolor ribbon tied around the hilt.
Behind him were three other men. Two had bayonets.
Robespierre stood quite still. He had never carried a pistol, despite the number of times Camille had told him to. “Camille,” he’d said, “I’d never use it anyway. I’d never shoot anybody.”
Well, that was true. And it was too late now.
Would he die quickly or slowly? That was a question for someone else to decide; he could not influence it. His efforts were over.
In a moment, he thought, I shall rest. In a moment I shall sleep.
The dreadful calm in his heart invaded his face.
With a leisurely movement, the dog-man reached out. He took him by the front of his coat.
“Down on your knees,” he said.
Someone pushed him from behind. He was jerked off his feet.
He closed his eyes.
Like this, he thought.
In the public street.
Then he heard his name called: not across eternity, but in his very physical and temporal ear.
Two pairs of hands hauled him to his feet.
He heard the cloth of his coat tear. Then oaths, a scream, the contact of a fist with the precarious arrangements of the human face. But when he opened his eyes he saw the dog-man, blood streaming from his nose, and a woman, as tall as dog-man, with blood running from her mouth. She said, “Attack women, would you? Come on then, sonny, let’s see what I can cut off with these.” From her skirts she produced what looked like a pair of tailor’s shears. Another woman, behind her, had the kind of little axe you use for splitting kindling.
By the time he had drawn breath, a dozen more women had swarmed out of a doorway. One had a crowbar, one a pikestaff, and they all had knives. They were shouting “Robespierre” and people were running out of the shops and houses to see.
The men with bayonets had been beaten away. Dog-man spat; blood and saliva hit the face of the woman general, “Spit, aristocrat,” she yelled. “Show me Lafayette, I’ll slit his belly and have him stuffed with chestnuts. Robespierre,” she yelled. “If we’ve got to have a King, we’ll have him.”
“King Robespierre,” the women yelled. “King Robespierre.”
The man was tall and balding, with a clean calico apron and a hammer in his hand. He was flailing with his other arm as he forced himself through the crowd. “I’m for you,” he bawled. “My house is here.” The women dropped back: “The carpenter Duplay,” one said, “a good patriot, a good master.”
Duplay shook the hammer at the Guardsmen and the women cheered: “Scum,” he said to the men. “Get back, scum.” He took Robespierre by the arm. “My house is here,” he repeated, “here, good citizen, quickly. This way.”
The women parted their ranks, reaching out, touching Robespierre as he passed. He followed Duplay, stooping through a little door cut in a high solid gate. Bolts slammed home.
In the yard, workmen stood in a knot. Another minute, it was clear, and they would have joined their master in the street. “Back to work, my good lads,” Duplay said. “And put your shirts on. I’m not sure that you show respect.”
“Oh no.” He tried to catch Duplay’s eye. They must not alter things because he had come. A thrush sang in a scrubby bush by the gate. The air smelt sweetly of new wood. Over there was the house. He knew what he would find behind that door. The carpenter Duplay put out a hand. It gripped his shoulder. “You’re safe now, boy,” Duplay said. He did not pull away.
A tall, plain woman in a dark dress came out of the side door. “Father,” she said, “what is the matter, we heard shouting, is there some trouble in the street?”
“Eléonore,” he said, “go in, and tell your mother that Citizen Robespierre has come to stay with us at last.”
On July 18, a detachment of police marched down the rue des Cordeliers, with orders to close down the Révolutions de France. They did not find the editor, but they found an assistant of his, who produced a gun. Shots were exchanged. The editor’s assistant was overpowered, beaten up and thrown into prison.
When the police arrived at the Charpentiers’ house at Fontenay-sous-Bois, they found only one man who—being the right age—might have been Georges-Jacques Danton. He was Victor Charpentier, Gabrielle’s brother. He was lying injured in a pool of blood by the time they discovered their mistake, but these were not the days to stand on niceties of conduct. Warrants were issued for the arrest of one Danton, advocate; Desmoulins, journalist; Fréron, journalist; Legendre, master butcher.
Camille Desmoulins was in hiding near Versailles. In Arcis, Danton arranged his affairs. He had given his brother-in-law a power of attorney, authorizing him inter alia to sell his furniture and cancel the lease of his Paris apartment, if he deemed fit. He signed the deeds of purchase for a manor house by the river, and installed his mother in it, arranging for her at the same time a life annuity. In early August, he left for England.
Lord Gower, the British Ambassador, in dispatches:
Danton is fled, and M. Robespierre the great denunciateur and by office Accusateur Publique is about to be denoncé himself.
Révolutions de Paris: a newspaper:
What will become of liberty? Some say it is finished … .
PART FOUR
Camille Desmoulins:
“The King has aimed a pistol at the nation’s head; he has misfired, and it is the nation’s turn now.”
Lucile Desmoulins:
“We want to be free; but oh God, the cost of it.”
CHAPTER 1
A Lucky Hand
Manon Roland sat by the window, turning her cheek
to catch the fading warmth of the late October sun. Slowly, with deliberation, she dipped her needle through worn cloth. Even in our circumstances, there are domestic servants for such tasks. But nothing is ever done quite so well as when you do it yourself. Then again—she bent her head over the work—what could be more soothing, more ordinary than a linen sheet? In a fractious world? There will be more need to darn and patch, to mend and make do, now that, as her husband puts it, “the blow has fallen.”
What is it with these metaphors of domestic work? Does she resist them, or do they resist her? The center is frayed, worn, gone to threads; so, turn edges to middle. “ça Ira.” She smiles. She is not, she likes to think, without humor.
Her husband, late fifties now, ulcer, liver complaint, is prevented by her nursing and her strength of will from sinking into invalidity. He had been an Inspector of Manufactures; now under the new dispensation, September 1791, his post is abolished. They had applauded the death of the old regime; they were not self-interested people. But the applause must be muted, when you have no retirement pension, and nothing ahead but genteel poverty.
You have been ill, she thought, fevered and drained by the Paris summer, sickened by the blood of the Champs-de-Mars. “It has been too much for you, my dear; see how excitable you have become. We must leave everything and go home, because nothing is more important than your health, and at Le Clos you were always so serene.” Serene? She serene? Since ’89?
That was why they had come back to the run-down little estate in the Beaujolais hills, to the vegetable beds and faded hangings, and the poor women coming to the back door for advice and herb poultices. Here (she had read a great deal of Rousseau) one lived in harmony with nature and the seasons. But the nation was choking to death, and she wanted … she wanted …
Impatiently she hitched her chair away from the window. All her life she has been a spectator, an onlooker; the role has brought her nothing, not even the gift of philosophical detachment. And study has not brought it, nor self-analysis, nor even, she thought wryly, gardening. Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within—little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk. I am not passive in the face of life, and I do not think I ever will be, and—considering recent events—why should I be?
This latest misfortune, for instance; of course she will not lie down under it. They have just come from Paris; they must go back. Either they must obtain a pension, or a new position under the new order.
Roland did not look forward to the trip. But she thought, Paris calls me. I was born there.
Her father’s shop was on the Quai d’Horloge, near the Pont-Neuf. He was an engraver—fashionable trade, fashionable customers—and he had the manner shaped to go with it, assertive yet sufficiently obsequious, artist and artisan, both and neither
She had been baptized Marie-Jeanne, always called Manon. Her brothers and sisters all died. There must be some reason (she thought at eight or nine) why the good God spared me: some particular purpose? She looked narrowly at her parents, measuring with callous child’s eyes their limitations, their painstaking veneer of refinement. They were overcareful of her; held her, perhaps, a little in awe. She had a great number of music lessons.
When she was ten her father bought her several treatises on the education of the young, reasoning that any book with “education” in the title was the kind of thing she needed.
This clever child, this pretty child, this child for whom nothing was too good; what carelessness of theirs was it to leave her alone one day in the workshop? Yet the boy, the apprentice (fifteen, too tall for his age, raw-handed, freckled), had always seemed well mannered, harmless. It was evening, he was working under a lamp and she stood at his elbow to look at his work. She was not disturbed when he took her hand. He held it for a moment, playing with her fingers, smiling up at her, his head tilted; then forced it under the workbench.
There she touched strange flesh, a damp swollen spike of flesh, quivering with its own life. He tightened his grip on her wrist, then turned in the chair to face her. She saw what she had touched. “Don’t tell,” he whispered. She tore her hand away. Her eyebrows flew up to the curls bouncing on her forehead, and she strode away, slamming the door of the workroom behind her.
On the stairs she heard her mother calling her. There was some small errand or task to perform-she could never remember afterwards what exactly it had been. She carried out her mother’s request, her face dazed, her stomach churning. Said nothing. Did not know what to say.
But in the weeks that followed—and this was what, later, she found hard to understand, because she could not believe that she was a child of vicious inclination—she went back to the workshop. Yes: she took the occasion. She made little excuses to herself; it was as if she had decided, in those days, to walk around with eyes half-closed to her own nature. It was only curiosity, her grown-up self said: the natural curiosity of the over-protected child. But then her grown-up self would say, you made excuses then and you are making them now.
Each evening the boy ate with the family; because he was so young, and far away from his own people, her mother was anxious about him. She couldn’t afford to be different, in his presence; they would wonder about it, might ask questions. After all, if they do—I did nothing wrong, she would tell herself. But she began to wonder if life were fair; if people were not often blamed when they were not at fault. Of course, it was so in childhood; every day there were careless slaps and nursery injustices. Grown-up life, she’d thought, would be different, more rational—and she was on the verge of grown-up life now. The closer she came, the more risky it all looked, the less it seemed that people were amenable to reason. A nagging inner voice told her: you are not at fault, but you can be made to appear at fault.
Once he whispered to her: “I didn’t show you anything your mother hasn’t seen.” She flung her chin up, opened her mouth to quell his impertinence; but then her mother came in with a plate of bread and a bowl of salad, and there they were side by side, good children, shy children, eyes on the tablecloth, thanking God for salad and cheese and bread.
In the workshop, where she lurked around, there was tension between them, an invisible wire drawn tight. Had she perhaps tormented him a little, scampering in and out when the presence of other people protected her? She kept thinking of that strange flesh, blind and white and quivering, like something newborn.
One day they had of course found themselves alone. She kept a distance from him; she was not to be trapped in that way again. This time he had approached from behind her, while she stood looking out of the window. He slipped his hands up under her arms, then pulled her backwards onto his knees, folding into a chair strategically placed. Her skirt was rucked up; he touched her once, between her legs. Then his freckled arm, full of its scrawny nascent strength, was locked across her body; the hand formed a fist. She gazed down at that fist; he held her there like a doll, inanimate like a doll, her pretty lips parted, whilst he wheezed and puffed his way to satisfaction. Not that she knew it was satisfaction: only that some kind of climax to this activity had been reached, for he released her, and muttered a few distracted kindnesses, and never once (she thought later) did he look at her face, he had held her quite deliberately backwards so that he did not need to see whether she was pleased or horrified, whether she was laughing or whether she was too stunned to scream.
She ran; and soon after—at the first, rapid request to know what was wrong with her—she began to splutter out her story. Tears poured out of her eyes as she told it, and her legs felt weak, so she allowed herself to totter to a chair. Her mother’s face seemed to fly apart in horror. She reached for her, dragging her back to her feet; her mother’s hands gripped her arms with a crushing pressure. She had shaken her—her, the precious child—shrieking questions: what did he do, where did he touch you, tell me every word he said, every word, don’t be afraid, tel
l your mother (and all the time she was shaking, distorted face inches from her own), did he make you touch him, are you bleeding, Manon, tell me, tell me, tell.
Dragged along the street, she wailed like a three-year-old; inside the church her mother snatched at the bell pull that brings the priest quickly if you have done a murder or are dying, then the priest comes at once and he gives you absolution so that you won’t be damned. And he did come … . Her mother pushed her in the small of the back and left her alone in the dimness with the asthmatical breathing of the elderly man. Father listened, turning his one good ear, to the convulsive sobbing of what he took to be a violated child.
The curious thing was this: they did not dismiss the boy. They were afraid of scandal. They were afraid that should the business become known the mischief might be attributed to her. She had to see the boy every day, though he no longer ate with the family. She knew she was to blame now; it was not a question of what other people said or thought, it was a question of an inner reconciliation, and one that could not take place. It could, her mother said, have been very much worse; she was intact, her mother said, whatever that meant. Try not to think about it, her mother advised; one day, when you’re grown up and married, it won’t seem so bad. But however hard she tried—and perhaps trying so hard was part of the problem—she did think about it. She would blush and begin to shake inside, and she would jerk her head with a little involuntary movement, a flinching.
When she was twenty-two, her mother was dead; in the mornings she attended to the running of the household, in the afternoons she studied—mastering Italian and botany, rejecting the systems of Helvetius, progressing with her mathematics. In the evening she read classical history, and sat with closed eyes over the books, her hands still on the pages, dreaming of Liberty. She dwelled—forced herself to dwell—on what was great in Man, on progress and nobility of spirit, on brotherhood and self-sacrifice: on all the disembodied virtues.
A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Page 41