A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “They certainly think they should have nothing to do with you. Dumouriez said, ‘Where’s your little Camille tonight, why have you left him at home when he could be here sharing the excitement with us?’ Madame heaved her bosom and inhaled most disdainfully.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Danton said. They saw that he was very serious. “I don’t say anything about Dumouriez and the rest, but that woman couldn’t be bought. That woman hates Louis and his wife as if they had done her some desperate injury.” He laughed sourly. “Marat thinks she has a monopoly on hate?”

  “You trust them, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t think they’re bad people. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

  “What do you think Dumouriez wanted with you?”

  The question seemed to cheer Danton. “No doubt he wants me to do something, and is anxious to know my prices.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Tactics of a Bull

  Gabrielle: You see, I can only say what I’ve heard, what people have told me. I can only be sure about the people I know, and not so very sure about them. Looking back over the summer—what can I say to you that won’t seem ridiculously naive?

  You can grow up, not what you would call a person of iron conviction; but you think there are things about you that won’t change, beliefs you will always hold, things happening that will go on happening: a world that will do you for as long as you need it. Don’t be deceived.

  I must go back to when our new baby was born. The birth was easier than the first two—quicker, anyway. It was another boy; healthy, bonny, with good lungs and the same head of thick dark hair that Antoine had, and the little one I lost. We called him François-Georges. My husband kept buying me things—flowers and china and jewelry, lace and scent and books that I never read. So one day this made me cry. I shouted at him, it’s not as if I’ve done anything clever, anyone can have a baby, stop trying to buy me off. A kind of storm of crying overtook me, and when it was over I was left with stinging eyes and a heaving chest and an aching throat. My memory seemed to have been wiped clean; if Catherine my maid had not told me that I said such things I wouldn’t have believed it.

  Next day Dr. Souberbielle came. He said, “Your husband tells me you’re not very well.” I was simply tired, he said. Childbearing was a great strain. Soon I would feel much better. But no, doctor, I said to him, very politely, I don’t think I’ll ever feel better again.

  Whenever I put my baby to my breast, whenever I felt the flow of milk, I felt tears begin to leak out of my eyes; and my mother came, looking business-like and serious, and said that he should be put out to nurse, becasue we were making each other unhappy. It is better for children to be out of Paris, she said, and not to be crying at night and waking their fathers.

  Of course, she said, when you get married, you live your first year or two in another world. As long as you’ve got a good man, a man you like, you feel so smug and pleased with yourself. You manage to keep all your problems at bay for that year or two—you think you’re not subject to the rules that govern other people.

  “Why should there be rules?” I said. I sounded just like Lucile. That’s what she’d say—why should there be rules?

  “And she will have her baby,” I said. “And then what?”

  My mother didn’t need to ask for clarification. She just patted my arm. She said I was not the sort of girl to make a fuss. I had to be told that often these days—or who knows, I might have forgotten, and made one? My mother patted me once more—my hand this time—and said things about girls today. Girls today are romantic, she reckons. They have these strange illusions that when a man takes his marriage vows he means them. In her day, girls understood what was what. You had to come to a practical arrangement.

  She found the wet nurse herself, a pleasant, careful woman out at l’Isle-Adam. Pleasant she may be, careful she may be, but I didn’t like to leave my baby. Lucile came with me, to meet the woman, to see if she would do for her own child; and yes, she would. What a neat arrangement! How practical! Lucile has only weeks to go now. How they fuss over her; you’ve never seen such a fuss. No question, though, of her feeding the mite herself. Her husband and her mother have forbidden it. She has sterner duties; there are parties to go to, after all. And General Dillon will prefer her bosom a discreet, agreeable size.

  I don’t really blame Lucile, though I may sound as if I do. It isn’t true that she is Fréron’s mistress, though he has this slow, dragging obsession with her that makes him miserable and makes everybody else miserable too. With Hérault, as far as I can see, she simply goes through the usual social routine—leading him on, then pulling away. Hérault looks slightly weary sometimes, as though he has had rather too much experience of this sort of thing—I suppose he got it at Court. And part of the reason Lucile has fixed on him is that she wants to get back at Caroline Rémy, who made her so confused when she was just married and hadn’t learned all the tricks. Oh, I was relieved when I knew that Lucile was pregnant! I thought, this at least postpones things. But I didn’t hope for more than a postponement. I watch Georges. I watch his eyes following her. I wouldn’t expect anyone to refuse him. If you think that’s an impossible attitude for me to take, then it just shows that you don’t know him well enough. Perhaps you’ve only heard him making a speech once. Or passed him in the street.

  Only once I did blunder in, talking to Lucile’s mother, trying to ease the situation because I thought it needed easing. “Does she—” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Does she have a very hard time with Camille?”

  Madame Duplessis raised her eyebrows in that way she has, that makes her seem clever. “No harder than she wants,” she said.

  But then, just as I was turning away, feeling rather sick about it all and apprehensive about what my future was to be, Mme. Duplessis put out her little be-ringed hand and took me by the sleeve—I remember this, it was like a little pinch, cloth not skin—and said to me one of the few real things that this artificial woman has ever said. “You do believe, I hope, that all this now is out of my control?”

  I wanted to say, Madame, you have brought up a monster, but it would not have been fair to her. Instead I said, “It is as well she is pregnant.”

  Mme. Duplessis murmured, “Reculer pour mieux sauter.”

  All this summer, as in the summers since ’88, our apartment was full of people coming and going; strange names, strange faces, some of them becoming less strange as the weeks went on, and some of them, frankly, more. Georges was out a good deal, keeping odd hours; he gave dinners at the Palais-Royal, at restaurants as well as at home. We entertained the people they call Brissotins, though not often Brissot himself. There was a lot of uncharitable talk about the wife of the Minister of the Interior, whom they call “Queen Coco”—some joke that Fabre started off. Other people came late at night, after the meetings of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers. There was René Hébert—Pére Duchesne, people call him, from the name of his foul news sheet. Georges said, “We have to put up with these people.” There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind. They talked of the need to arm the whole city, against the Austrians and against the royalists. “When the time comes,” Georges said.

  I thought, he talks like a man who has circumstance by the throat, but really he is making his calculations, he is carefully weighing the odds. He has only once made a mistake—last summer, when we had to run away. You will say, what was it, after all? A few weeks skulking out of Paris, and then an amnesty, and things go on as before. But picture me, that summer night at Fontenay, saying good-bye, trying to keep my self-control and put a good face on things, knowing that he was going to England and fearing that he might never come back. It just shows, doesn’t it, how much worse things can get when you think you’ve hit rock-bottom? Life has more complications in store than you can ever formulate or imagine. There are
many ways of losing a husband. You can do it on several levels, the figurative and the actual. I operate on all of them, it seems.

  Faces come and go … Billaud-Varennes, who was once Georges’s part-time clerk, has met up with this actor Collot, whom Camille calls “much the worst person in the world.” (He says that about a lot of people these days.) A well-suited pair they are, wearing their identical dyspeptic expressions. Robespierre avoids Hébert, is cool to Pétion, just civil to Vergniaud. Brissot twitters, “We must try to avoid personalities.” Chaumette will not speak to Hérault, which Hérault declares no loss. Fabre examines everyone through his lorgnette. Fréron talks about Lucile. Legendre, our butcher, says he makes nothing of the Brissotins. “I have no education,” he says, “and I am as good a patriot as you could find.” François Robert is agreeable to everybody, thinking that he has a career to make; all the fight has gone out of him since last summer, when he was thrown into gaol.

  M. Roland never comes. Neither does Marat.

  The second week in June, there was a crisis in the government. The King was not cooperating with the ministers, he was holding out against them, and Roland’s wife wrote him a terrible letter, lecturing him on his duty. I don’t say anything about the rights and wrongs of it—not my place, is it?—but one can see, surely, that there are insults that a King can’t accept, lie down under, without no longer being King. Louis must have thought so, because he dismissed the ministry.

  My husband’s friends talked about the Patriotic Ministry. They said it was a national calamity. They have a way of turning calamities to their own account.

  General Dumouriez was not dismissed. We understood he was on rather different terms with the Court. But he called on us. I was ashamed. Georges strode about and shouted at him. He said that he was going to put the fear of God into the Court, and that the King must divorce the Queen and pack her off back to Austria. When the general left he was white to the lips. The day after this he resigned, and went back to the armies. Georges was a good deal more frightening than the Austrians, Camille said.

  Then came the letter from Lafayette to the Assembly, telling them to suppress the clubs, close down the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, or else … or else what? He would march his army on Paris? “Let him show his face,” Georges said. “I’ll tear him in little pieces and dump the remains in the Queen’s bedroom.”

  The Assembly would not dare to act against the clubs—but, even for the suggestion, I knew that the patriots would have some revenge. There seems to be a pattern to these crises. Louise Gély said to my husband, “Is there going to be a ‘day,’ M. Danton?”

  “Well, what do you think?” He seemed amused. “Perhaps we should have a second Revolution?”

  She turned to me with a mock-shudder. “Does your husband want to be King?”

  The comings and goings in our apartment had to be worked out carefully, so that Chaumette never met Vergniaud, Hébert’s path never crossed Legendre’s. It is a trial to me; it is a trial to the servants. I became aware of the tension in the air that says, tomorrow, or the day after … Robespierre came; sat making general conversation. He looked as ever, like a tailor’s model taken out of a box, so formal, so well barbered, so polite. But he wore, besides his striped olive-green coat, a little smile that never seems to leave his face now; it’s full of tension, it’s his way (Camille says) of stopping himself swearing at people. He asked after the baby; he began to tell Antoine a story, and said he’d finish it in a day or two. So that’s not too bad, I thought, we are going to survive … . What is strange, in such a clean, precise man, is how much M. Robespierre likes children, and cats, and dogs. It’s only the rest of us that put this worrying smile on his face.

  It was quite late now. Pétion was the last to leave. I was keeping out of the way. I heard the study door open. My husband slapped him on the shoulder. “Timing,” he said.

  “Don’t be afraid I’ll nip anything in the bud,” the mayor said. “I’ll show my face, but not too early. There’ll be time for events to take their natural course.”

  He’s alone now, I thought, they’ve gone. But as I approached the study door—closed again—I heard Camille’s voice: “I thought you were going to adopt the tactics of a bull. The tactics of a lion. That’s what you said.”

  “Yes, I am. But only when I’m ready.”

  “You don’t hear bulls saying, when I’m ready.”

  “Hey you—I’m the expert on bulls. You don’t hear them saying anything, that’s why they’re so successful.”

  “Don’t they bellow a bit?”

  “Not the really successful ones.”

  There was a pause. Then Camille said: “But you don’t leave it to chance. If you want someone killed, you don’t leave it to chance.”

  “What business is it of mine to want the King killed? If the district of Saint-Antoine wants him killed, the district will do it. Tomorrow, or at some future date.”

  “Or not at all. All this sudden fatalism. Events can be controlled.” Camille sounded calm and very tired.

  “I prefer not to rush things,” Georges said. “I’d like to settle matters with Lafayette. I don’t want to have to fight on all fronts at once.”

  “But we can’t let this chance go.”

  Georges yawned. “If they kill him,” he said, “they kill him.”

  I walked away. My courage failed. I didn’t want to listen. I opened a window. I never remember the summers being so hot. There was some noise on the street, nothing you don’t get every night. A patrol of National Guardsmen swung up the street. They slowed down as they approached. One of them said quite clearly, “Danton’s place.” There must be somebody new, that they were pointing it out. I pulled my head back, and heard them march away.

  I went back to the door of Georges’s study and pushed it open. He and Camille were sitting at either side of the empty fireplace, not speaking, just staring into each other’s faces.

  “Am I interrupting you?”

  “No,” Camille said, “we were just staring into each other’s faces. I hope you weren’t discomfitted by what you heard when you were listening at the door just now?”

  Georges laughed. “Was she? I didn’t know.”

  “It is like Lucile. She opens my letters, then gets into a terrible state. It is my poor cousin, Rose-Fleur Godard, who causes problems at the moment. She writes every week from Guise. Her marriage is not happy. She now wishes she were married to me.”

  “I think I’d advise her to be reconciled to her lot,” I said. We laughed: surprising, how one can. The tension was broken. I looked at Georges. I never see the face that horrifies people. To me it is really a kind face. Camille looked no different from the boy Georges had brought to the café six years before. He stood up, leaned forward quickly, kissed my cheek. I have misheard, I thought, I have misunderstood. There is a distance between a politician and a killer. But then, “Think of the poor fools,” Georges said to him in parting.

  “Yes,” Camille replied. “Sitting there, waiting to be murdered.”

  The day of the riot I did not go out, and neither did Georges. No one came until the middle of the evening. Then I heard the stories the day had produced.

  The people from Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel, led by agitators from the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, had entered the Tuileries, armed and in their thousands. Legendre was one of the leaders; he insulted the King to his face, and came back here to sit in my drawing room and boast about it. Perhaps the King and Queen should have died under their staves and pikes, but it didn’t happen like that. I was told that they stood for hours in a window embrasure, with the little Dauphin and his sister, and the King’s own sister Mme. Elisabeth. The crowd filed past them and laughed at them, as if they were the freaks at a country fair. They made the King put on a “cap of liberty.” These people—people out of the gutter—passed the King cheap wine and made him drink from the bottle to the health of the nation. This went on for hours.

  At the end of it they wer
e still alive. A merciful God protected them; and as for the man who should have protected them—Pétion, I mean, the Mayor of Paris—he didn’t show his face until the evening. When he could not decently wait any longer, he went to the Tuileries with a group of deputies and got the mob out of the palace. “And then, do you know what?” Vergniaud said. I handed him a glass of cold white wine. It was 10 p.m. “When they had all gone, the King snatched the red cap off his head, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.” He nodded his thanks to me, urbanely. “The curious thing is that the King’s wife behaved with what can only be called dignity. It is unfortunate, but the people are not so opposed to her as they were before.”

  Georges was in a rage. It is a spectacle to comtemplate, his rage. He tore off his cravat, strode about the room, his throat and chest glistening with sweat, his voice shaking the windows. “This bloody so-called Revolution has been a waste of time. What have the patriots got out of it? Nothing.” He glared around the room. He looked as if he would hit anyone who contradicted him. Outside there was some far-off shouting, from the direction of the river.

  “If that’s true—” Camille said. But he couldn’t manage it, he couldn’t get his words out. “If this one’s done for—and I think it always was done for—” He put his face into his hands, exasperated with himself.

  “Come on, Camille,” Georges said, “there’s no time to wait around for you. Fabre, please bang his head against the wall.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, Georges-Jacques. We have no more time left.” I don’t know whether it was the threat, or because he suddenly saw the future, that Camille recovered his voice: but he began to speak in short, simple sentences. “We must begin again. We must stage a coup. We must depose Louis. We must take control. We must declare the republic. We must do it before the summer ends.”

  Vergniaud looked uneasy. He ran his finger along the arm of his chair. He looked from face to face.