A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you suppose that they want to, as you put it, distract attention?”

  “Because they’re afraid of the people. They want to contain the Revolution, hold it back, because they’re afraid of the real exercise of the people’s will. They want a revolution to suit their own ends. They want to line their pockets. I’ll tell you why people always want war—it’s because there’s easy money to be made out of it.”

  I was amazed at this grim conclusion: not that I had not come to it, but that Robespierre should come to it, Robespierre of the clean mind and the noble motive.

  “They talk,” I said, “of a crusade to bring liberty to Europe. Of how it’s our duty to spread the gospel of fraternity.”

  “Spread the gospel? Well, ask yourself—who loves armed missionaries?”

  “Who indeed?”

  “They speak as if they had the interests of the people at heart, but the end of it will be military dictatorship.”

  I nodded. I felt he was right, but I didn’t like the way he spoke; he spoke, if you follow me, as if it were beyond dispute. “Don’t you think,” I said, “that Brissot and his friends might be given credit for good intentions? They think a war would pull the country together and make the Revolution secure and get the rest of Europe off our backs.”

  “Do you thing that?”

  “Personally, no.”

  “Are you a fool? Am I?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t the reasoning clear? With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy. It could mean both, one after the other. After ten years not a single one of our achievements will remain, and to your son liberty will be an old man’s daydream. This is what will happen, Danton. No one can sincerely maintain the contrary. So if they do maintain it, they are not sincere, they are not patriots and their war policy is a conspiracy against the people.”

  “You are saying, in effect, they are traitors.”

  “In effect. Potentially. And so we must strengthen our own position against them.”

  “If we could win the war, would you favor it?”

  “I hate all war.” A forced smile. “I hate all unnecessary violence. I hate quarrels, even dissension among people, but I know I am doomed to live with that.” He made a small gesture, as if putting the controversy aside. “Tell me, Georges-Jacques—do I seem unreasonable?”

  “No, what you say is logical …it’s just …” I couldn’t think how to finish my sentence.

  “The Right try to present me as a fanatic. They’ll end up by making me one.”

  He got up to go, and the dog jumped up and glared at me when I took his hand.

  “I should like to talk to you, informally,” I said. “I’m tired of speaking at you in public places, of never getting to know you any better. Come to supper tonight?”

  “Thank you, but,” he shook his head, “too much work. Come and see me at Maurice Duplay’s.”

  So he went downstairs, the reasonable person, with his dog padding after him and growling at the shadows.

  I felt depressed. When Robespierre says he dislikes the whole idea of war, it is an emotional reaction—and I am not immune to those. I share his distrust of soldiers; we are suspicious, envious perhaps, as only pen pushers can be. Day by day, the movement for war gains momentum. We must strike first, they say, before we are stricken. Once they begin to beat the big drum, there’s no reasoning with them. Now, if I have to stand against the tide, I would rather do it with Robespierre than anyone. I may make jokes at his expense—no, not “may,” I do—but I know his energy, and I know his honesty.

  And yet … he feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says that the head part came first; and we believe him.

  I did visit him at Duplay’s, but first I let Camille reconnoiter. The master carpenter had hidden him when he was in danger, and we all assumed that when things got back to normal, etcetera—but he stayed.

  Once you shut the gate from the rue Saint-Honoré, the place seems quiet, almost rural. The yard is full of Duplay’s workmen, but the noise is muted and the air is fresh. He has a room on the first floor, plain but pleasant enough. I did not notice the furniture, I suppose it is not anything special. When I called on him he waved at a large bookcase, new and well finished if not stylish. “Maurice made that for me.” He was pleased with it. As if he were pleased someone would take the trouble.

  I looked at his books. Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the yard; few other modern authors. Cicero, Tacitus, the usual: all well-thumbed. I wonder—if we go to war with England, will I have to hide my books of Shakespeare, and my Adam Smith? I guess that Robespierre reads no modern language but his own, which seems a pity. Camille, by the way, thinks modern languages beneath his notice; he is studying Hebrew, and looking for someone to teach him Sanskrit.

  He had warned me what to expect of the Duplays. “There … are … these … dreadful … people,” he had said. But that day he was engaged in pretending to be Hérault de Séchelles, so I did not take him too seriously. “There is, first, the paterfamilias Maurice. He is fifty or fifty-five, balding and very, very earnest. He can bring out only the worst in our dear Robespierre. Madame is a homely sort, and can never have been even tolerably good-looking. There is a son, also called Maurice, and a nephew, Simon—these last both young, and apparently quite witless.”

  “But tell me about the three daughters,” I said. “Are they worth calling on?”

  Camille gave an aristocratic groan. “There is Victoire, who cannot easily be distinguished from the furniture. She never opened her mouth—”

  “Not surprising, if you were in this mood,” Lucile said. (She was, however, vastly entertained.)

  “There is the little one, Elisabeth—they call her Babette—who is tolerable, if you like goose-girls. And then the eldest—words fail me.”

  They didn’t, of course. Eléonore, it appeared, was an unfortunate girl, plain, drab and pretentious; she was an art student under David, and preferred to her own perfectly adequate name the classical appellation “Cornélia”: this detail, I confess, I found risible.

  To dispel any remaining illusions, he opined that the bed curtains in Robespierre’s room were made out of one of Madame’s old dresses, because they were just the kind of ghastly fabric she would choose for her personal adornment. Camille goes on like this for days on end, and it’s impossible to get any sense out of him.

  They are good people, I suppose; have struggled to get to their present comfortable position. Duplay is a staunch patriot: goes in for plain speaking at the Jacobins, but is modest with it. Maximilien seems at home there. It probably, when I think of it, helps him financially to live with them. He gave up his post as Public Prosecutor as soon as he decently could, saying that it interfered with his “larger work.” So he has no office, no salary, and must be living on savings. I understand that wealthy but disinterested patriots send him drafts on their bankers. And what do you think? Yes, he writes polite notes and sends them back.

  The daughters—the shy one is nothing worse than that, and Babette has a certain schoolroom appeal. Eléonore, I admit …

  They do their best to make him comfortable: God knows, it’s time somebody did that. It is a rather spartan comfort, by our refurbished standards; I’m afraid it brings out the worst in us when we sneer at the Duplays, with what Camille calls their “good plain food and good plain daughters.”

  Later, I became aware of something odd in the atmosphere of the house. Some of us began to jib when the family began to collect portraits of their new son to decorate their walls, and Fréron asked me if I did not think it was prodigiously vain of Robespierre to allow it. I suppose we have all had our portrait made: even I, at whom any artist might balk. But this was different; you sat with Robespierre in the little parlor
where he sometimes received visitors, and found him meeting your eyes not just in person but in oils, in charcoal, three-dimensionally in terra-cotta. Every time I called—which perhaps was not often—there was a new one. It made me uneasy—not just the portraits and busts, but the way all the family looked at him. They’re grateful he turned up on their doorstep at all, but that’s no longer enough. They fasten their eyes on him, Father, Mother, young Maurice, and Simon, Victoire, Eléonore, Babette. In his place I should ask myself: what do these people really want? What will I lose if I give it them?

  Any gloom we might have felt at the end of ’91 was dispelled by the continuing comedy of Camille’s return to the Bar.

  They do contrive to spend a lot of money, he and Lucile—although, like most patriots, they avoid public censure by keeping few servants and no carriage. (I keep a carriage; I place personal comfort above the plaudits of the masses, I fear.) But where does anyone’s money go? They entertain, and Camille gambles, and Lolotte spends money on the things women do spend money on. But all in all, Camille’s venture was prompted less by shortage of cash than by the need of a new arena for self-advertisement.

  In the old days, he claimed that his stutter was a complete obstacle to successful pleading. Of course, until one is used to it, it might discomfit, irritate or embarrass. But Hérault has pointed out that Camille has wrung some extraordinary verdicts from distraught judges. Certainly I have observed that Camille’s stutter comes and goes. It goes when he is angry or wishes forcibly to make a point; it comes when he feels put-upon, and when he wishes to show people that he is in fact a nice person who is really not quite able to cope. It says much for his natural optimism that after some eight years of acquaintance he sometimes assumes the latter pose with me and expects me to believe in it. Not entirely without success: there are days when I am so bemused by Camille’s helplessness that I go around opening doors for him.

  All went smoothly until the New Year. Then he took on the defense of the couple concerned in the affair of the gambling house in the Passage Radziwill. Camille deplores the intervention of the state in what he sees as a matter of private morality; he not only published his opinion, but placarded it all over the city. Now Brissot—who is a man with a regrettable busybody tendency, both in his political philosophy and in his private life—was outraged by the whole affair. He attacked Camille verbally and set one of his hacks to assail him in the press. As a result, Camille said he would “ruin Brissot. I shall simply write his autobiography,” he said. “I shall not need to embroider the facts. He is a plagiarist and a spy, and if I have refrained so far from making these revelations it is out of sentimentality over the length of our acquaintance.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, “it has been out of fear of what he might reveal about you.”

  “When I have finished with him …” Camille said. It was at this point I felt I must intervene. We may not see eye-to-eye on the war question, but if we are to achieve any political power of the formal kind, our natural allies are Brissot and the men of the Gironde.

  I wish I could cast more light for you on Camille’s private life. The long-promised fidelity to Lucile lasted, oh, all of three months—yet from his disconnected statements at various times I gather that he doesn’t care for anyone else and would go through the whole business again to get her. There is nothing about them of the ironical coldness of people who are bored with each other; in fact, they give a lively impression of a well-heeled young couple with a great deal of energy who are having a very good time. It amuses Lucile to try out her powers on any personable man—and even on those who, like me, could never be described as personable. She has Fréron on a string, and now Hérault too. And you remember General Dillon, that romantic Irishman who is so attached to Camille? Camille brings him home from wherever they have been playing cards that night—for the general shares that addiction—and presents him to Lucile as if he were bringing her the most wonderful present—which indeed he is, because Dillon, along with Hérault, is widely spoken of as the most handsome man in Paris, and is in addition quite wonderfully poised and polished and gallant, and all that rubbish. Quite apart from the gratification she gets from flirting, I imagine that someone—the minx Rémy perhaps—has advised her that one way to keep an errant husband is to make him jealous. If this is her idea, she is having a great failure. Witness a recent conversation:

  LUCILE: Hérault tried to kiss me.

  CAMILLE: Well, you have been raising his hopes. Did you let him?

  LUCILE: No.

  CAMILLE: Why not?

  LUCILE: He has a double chin.

  What are they then—just an amiable, cool, amoral pair who have decided to make life easy for each other? That is not what you would think if you lived on our street, not what you would think if you lived next door. They are playing for high stakes, it seems to me, and each of them is watching the other for a failure of nerve; each waits for the other to throw down the hand. The truth is, the more enmeshed Lucile becomes with her various beaux, the more Camille seems to enjoy himself. Why should this be? I’m afraid your imagination will have to supply the deficiencies of mine. After all, you know them well enough by now.

  And I? Well, now, I suppose you like my wife, most people do. Our little actresses—Remy and her friends—are so accommodating, so pleasant and so easy for my Gabrielle to ignore. They never cross the threshold of this house; what would she have to say to them? They are not whores, these girls, far from it; they would be shocked if you offered them money. What they like are outings and treats and presents, and to be seen on the arms of the men whose names are in the papers. As my sister Anne-Madeleine says, people like us, we have our day; and when our day is over, and we are forgotten, they will be on the arms of other men. I like them, these girls. Because I like people who live without illusions.

  I must get round to Rémy herself someday soon—if only as a gesture of fellowship to Fabre and Hérault and Camille.

  I should say, in my defense, that I was faithful to Gabrielle for a long time; but these are not the days for fidelity. I think of all that has passed between us, the strong and sincere attachment I felt and do feel; I think of the kindness of her father and mother, and of the little child we buried. But I think, too, of her tone of cold disapproval, of her withdrawn silences. A man has his work in this world, and must do it as he sees fit, and (like the actresses) he must accommodate himself to the times in which he lives; Gabrielle does not see this. What irks me most is her downtrodden air. God knows, I never trod on her.

  So I am seeing—oh, this girl and that girl—and from time to time the Duke’s ladies. Come now, you will say, surely not; this fellow is boasting again. With Mrs. Elliot, I would merely say that I have a business relationship. We discuss politics, English politics: English politics as applied to French affairs. But there is, nowadays, much warmth in Grace’s tone, in her eyes. She is an arch-dissimulator; I do believe she finds me perfectly loathsome.

  Not so Agnès, I visit Agnès when the Duke is out of town. If the Duke thinks I might want to see Agnès, he is usually out of town. It works so smoothly that I would have credited Laclos with the arrangements, if that unfortunate had not disgraced himself by failure and slunk off into provincial oblivion. But why should the mistress of a Prince of the Blood—who might be a character in a novel, don’t you think?—bend herself to the conquest of a lawyer with an unsavory reputation, overweight and as ugly as sin?

  Because the Duke foresees a future where he will need a friend; and I am the friend he will need.

  But I find it hard, I tell you, to keep my thoughts away from Lucile. So much passion there, so much wit and flair. She is of course getting herself a reputation. It is widely believed already that she is my mistress, and soon of course she will be; unlike her other suitors, I am not a man to tease.

  In a matter of weeks Gabrielle will give me another son. We shall celebrate, and be reconciled—which means that she will accept the situation. After Lucile’s child is born—b
y the way, it is her husband’s—Camille and I will arrive at an understanding, which will not be immensely difficult for us to do. I think perhaps 1792 is my year.

  In January I took up my post as Deputy Public Prosecutor.

  I shall be speaking to you again, no doubt.

  CHAPTER 3

  Three Blades, Two in Reserve

  Louis XVI to Frederick William of Prussia: “Monsieur my brother … I have just written to the Emperor, the Empress of Russia, the Kings of Spain and Sweden, and proposed to them a congress of the major powers of Europe, supported by an armed force, as the best means of checking the factions here, of reestablishing a more desirable order of things and of preventing the evil which torments us from gaining hold on other states in Europe … . I hope that Your Majesty … will keep this step on my part in the most absolute secrecy …”

  J.-P. Brissot to the Jacobin Club, December 16, 1791: “A people which has just gained its liberty after twelve centuries of slavery needs a war to consolidate itself.”

  Marie-Antoinette to Axel von Fersen: “The fools. They do not see that it is in our interests.”

  Gabrielle’s pains began in the night, a week earlier than they had expected. He heard her lurch from her bed, and when he opened his eyes she stood over him. “It’s begun,” she said. “Call Catherine for me, would you? I don’t think it will be many hours this time.”

  He sat up, put his arms around her bulky body. Candlelight flickered wetly on her dark hair. She cradled his head against her. “Please, after this,” she whispered, “let it be all right.”

  How did it come to this? He doesn’t know.

  “You’re cold,” he said, “you’re very cold.” He eased her back into her bed, tucked the counterpane around her. Then he went into the drawing room, to put some wood on the embers of the fire.

  This was not the place for him now; this was the place for the surgeon and the midwife, for Angélique, for Mme. Gély from upstairs. He spoke to her once more, hovering at the door of the room. Louise Gély sat on the bed, braiding his wife’s hair tightly. He asked her mother in a low voice, was it suitable for the little girl to be here? But Louise heard him and looked up. “Well, M. Danton,” she said, “it is suitable. Or even if it is not, we all have to go through it, and I am fourteen now.”