A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “I don’t mean to be discouraging. I understand though that Danton thinks we should wait for the volunteers from Marseille.”

  They are hand-picked, staunch patriots, these Marseille men, marching to the capital for the Bastille celebrations; they march singing their new patriotic song, and their minds and jaws are set. A neat spearhead for the Sections, when the day comes.

  “The Marseille men … who do I pay in their case?”

  “Young local politician called Charles Barbaroux.”

  “How much will he want? Can we secure him?”

  “Oh, dammit all.” De Sillery closed his eyes. He felt tired. “He’s been in Paris since February 11. He had a meeting with the Rolands on March 24.” Laclos would have had a little file on Barbaroux’s burgeoning self-importance, would have tabulated him in his “womanizer” column, with a little star for emphasis. “Do you ever wonder if it’s worth it?” de Sillery said.

  It was a question Philippe couldn’t get his mind around. Anything had been worthwhile, any connivance, any shame, any slaughter, if at the end of it you were King of France. Then Félicité had come along and muddled him—and truly she was right, for it wasn’t worthwhile to be King and rapidly dead. But for years now he had been set on a course by the people around him; he had been chivvied and steered, willing or unwilling. There was no time to set another; and he was nearly bankrupt.

  “But damn Danton,” he said, “I even let him have Agnès.”

  “No one ‘lets’ him have anything,” Charles-Alexis said. “Danton just takes.”

  “But he must give too,” Philippe said. “The people will want something from him. What will he give them?”

  “He’ll give them one man, one vote. That’s something they’ve never had before.”

  “They’ll like that, I suppose. They’ll come out on the streets for that.” The Duke sighed. “All the same, the 14th would have been nice.” When he looked back on ’89, he thought, those were my halcyon days. He voiced the thought.

  “Your salad days,” Charles-Alexis said.

  July 10, a state of emergency was declared. All over the city there were military bands, and recruiting booths decked with tricolor bunting. From the window of her bedroom Lucile could hear Danton pursuing his own recruiting drive, the noisiest for miles. The first clear expression she saw on the baby’s face looked very like exasperation. When she was well enough to travel she went out to the farm at Bourg-la-Reine. Camille came at the weekend and wrote a very long speech.

  The General Council of the Commune met on July 24 to hear it. It was Danton’s manifesto—universal suffrage and universal reponsibility, the citizens of every Section empowered to assemble at any hour, to arm themselves, to mobilize themselves against subversion and imminent attack. When Camille predicted that the monarchy would fall within days, Danton folded his arms, exchanged glances with his nearest colleagues and affected surprise.

  “Thank you,” said Pierre Chaumette. “That was what we wanted to hear.”

  René Hébert nodded to him. He rubbed his fat white hands together, expressing satisfaction with the way things were going.

  Outside City Hall there was a big crowd. It cheered deafeningly when Camille came out. Danton dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder, believing that such popularity should be shared around. “This is different from a year ago,” Camille said, “when we were on the run.” He waved to his well-wishers and blew them a kiss. The crowd laughed and jostled and pushed forward to touch him, as if he were lucky, a lucky charm. They threw up their red caps and began to sing the “Ça Ira” in one of its bloodier versions. Then they sang this new song, the “Marseillaise.”

  “Strange beasts,” Danton said mildly. “Let’s hope they perform in a week or two.”

  The Duke of Brunswick, the commander-in-chief of the allies, issued a document, a manifesto, a statement of intent. He called upon the French people to lay down their arms and offer no resistance to the invading forces, which came to restore proper authority. Any city that resisted would be laid waste. Every deputy, every National Guardsman and every public official in Paris should consider themselves personally responsible for the safety of the King and Queen. If any violence were offered to the royal family, all such persons would be court-martialed as soon as the allies entered Paris—and they need not hope for pardon. If June’s attack on the Tuileries were repeated, the city of Paris would be utterly destroyed, and its inhabitants exterminated by firing squads.

  Danton stood with Caroline Rémy at an upper window at the Palais-Royal. Below, Camille was reading the allies’ declaration to the crowd. “Isn’t he good?” Caroline said. “I must say, Fabre has done a marvelous job there.”

  “Brunswick has given us what we needed,” Danton said. “Tell people that they’re to be shot in mass executions, tell people that the Germans are going to pitch them into mass graves—then what have they got to lose?”

  He slipped a hand around Caroline’s waist, and she stroked the back of it with her fingers. Below, the people began to shout, chanting their decision at Europe, wave after wave of hilarity and defiance and rage.

  (Zoppi’s, on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain. One day in the long history of coffeehouse conspiracy.)

  DANTON: I think you all know each other.

  LEGENDRE: Get on with it. ’Tisn’t a dinner party.

  DANTON: If anyone was in doubt, this is Legendre. This large gentleman’s name is Westermann. He comes from Alsace originally, and we have been acquainted for some time. He is a former army officer.

  FABRE [to Camille]: Long time since he was in the army. Small-time Palais-Royal crook.

  CAMILLE: Just our sort.

  DANTON: This is Antoine Fouquier-Tinville.

  LEGENDRE: You remind me of somebody.

  DANTON: Fouquier-Tinville is Camille’s cousin.

  LEGENDRE: Maybe a very slight resemblance.

  FABRE: I don’t see it myself.

  HÉRAULT: Perhaps they’re very distant cousins.

  FABRE: You don’t have to look like your relations.

  HÉRAULT: Perhaps he can speak.

  FABRE: Perhaps you have an opinion to offer, Camille’s cousin?

  FOUQUIER: Fouquier.

  HÉRAULT: Good heavens, you don’t expect us to learn your name? We shall always call you “Camille’s cousin.” It will be easy for us, and humiliating for you.

  FRÉRON [to Fouquier]: Your cousin’s weird.

  FABRE: He’s a mass murderer.

  FRÉRON: He’s a satanist.

  FABRE: He’s learning poisoning.

  HÉRAULT: And Hebrew.

  FRÉRON: He commits adultery.

  HÉRAULT: He’s a bloody disgrace.

  [Pause. ]

  FABRE: See? He hasn’t a spark of cousinly feeling.

  FRÉRON: Where’s your family pride?

  FOUQUIER [indifferently]: It might all be true. I haven’t seen Camille for a long time.

  FRÉRON: Some of it is true. The adultery, and the Hebrew.

  FABRE: He might be a satanist. I saw him talking to de Sade once.

  HÉRAULT: De Sade isn’t a satanist.

  FABRE: Oh, I thought he was.

  HÉRAULT: Why are you learning Hebrew, Camille?

  CAMILLE: It has to do with my work on the Church Fathers.

  DANTON: Oh God.

  CAMILLE [whispering to Hérault]: Notice how close together his eyes are. His first wife died in mysterious circumstances.

  HÉRAULT [whispering]: Is that true?

  CAMILLE: I never make things up.

  DANTON: M. Fouquier expresses himself ready to do anything.

  HÉRAULT: He’s definitely related to Camille.

  LEGENDRE: Can we get on with the planning? [To Fouquier] They treat me like an imbecile. It’s because I’ve got no formal education. Your cousin makes snide remarks about me in foreign languages.

  FOUQUIER: Ones you don’t speak?

  LEGENDRE: Yes.

  FOUQUIER: How do you
know then?

  LEGENDRE: Are you a lawyer?

  FOUQUIER: Yes.

  DANTON: I’d say about a week now.

  Mousseaux, the residence of the Duke of Orléans: a lack of conviviality, not to say a bleakness, at the Duke’s supper table. Charles-Alexis looked discomfitted—whether because of the pate, or royalist intimidation, the Duke could not say. His unhappy eyes traveled over the pigeon breasts, boned, stuffed with asparagus and morels; they traveled over his guests, and alighted on Robespierre. He looked much as he had in ’89, the Duke thought: same impeccably cut coat (same coat in fact), same correctly powdered hair. It must be rather different, Philippe thought, from the carpenter’s dinner table. Did he sit so upright there, did he eat so little, did he make mental notes? By his glass of wine there was a glass of water. The Duke leaned forward almost timidly, and touched his arm.

  PHILIPPE: I feel … perhaps things have gone wrong … the royalists are very strong … the danger is immediate. I mean to leave for England, I beg you to come with me.

  DANTON: I’ll cut the throat of any bastard that pulls out now. The fucking thing’s organized. We’re going through with it.

  PÉTION: My dear Danton, there are certain problems.

  DANTON: And you’re one. Your people just want the King to give them their ministries back, then they’ll be happy. That’s as far as they’re interested in going.

  PÉTION: I don’t know what you mean by “my people.” I am not a member of any faction. Factons and parties are injurious to democracy.

  DANTON: Tell Brissot. Don’t tell me.

  PÉTION: The defense of the palace is being organized right now. There are three hundred gentlemen ready to defend it.

  DANTON: Gentlemen? I’m terrified.

  PÉTION: I’m just telling you.

  DANTON: The more the merrier. They’ll be tripping over each other when they faint.

  PÉION: We haven’t enough cartridges.

  DANTON: I’ll get you some from the police.

  PÉTION: What, officially?

  DANTON: I am First Deputy Public Prosecutor. I can manage a simple thing like cartridges, for God’s sake.

  PÉTION: There are nine hundred Swiss Guard at the palace, and I’m told they’re very good fighting men and loyal to Capet and that they won’t give up.

  DANTON: Make sure they’re not allowed to stock up on ammunition. Come on, Pétion, these are just technicalities.

  PÉTION: There is the problem of the National Guard. We know that many individual Guardsmen support us, but they won’t just break ranks, they have to act under orders, or we’re in a totally unpredictable situation. We made a mistake when we allowed the Marquis de Mandat to take over as commander. He’s an out-and-out royalist.

  [Philippe thinks, we’ll have to stop using the word in that condemnatory sense, when I become King. ]

  PÉTION: We’ll have to remove Mandat.

  DANTON: What do you mean, remove him? Kill him, man, kill him. The dead can’t come back.

  [Silence]

  DANTON: Technicalities.

  CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies.

  MME. ELISABETH: There’s nothing to worry about. M. Danton will look after us.

  CHAPTER 5

  Burning the Bodies

  August 7: “Gone?” Fabre said. “Danton’s gone?”

  Catherine Motin rolled her eyes. “Listen to me once more, Monsieur. Mme. Danton has gone to Fontenay to her parents, and M. Danton has gone to Arcis. If you don’t believe me you can step around the corner and ask M. Desmoulins. Because I’ve already had the same conversation with him.”

  Fabre tore out of the street door and through the Cour du Commerce and onto the rue des Cordeliers, then into the other door of the same building and up the stairs. He thought, why don’t Georges-Jacques and Camille knock a hole through the wall? Really, it would be easier if we lived under one roof.

  Lucile was sitting with her feet up, reading a novel and eating an orange. “Here you are,” she said, offering him a segment.

  “Where is he?” Fabre demanded.

  “Georges-Jacques? Gone to Arcis.”

  “But why, why, why? Mother of God! Where’s Camille?”

  “He’s lying on our bed. I think he’s crying.”

  Fabre burst into the bedroom, stuffing the segment of orange into his mouth. He hurled himself at the bed and Camille. “No, please, don’t, please,” Camille said. He covered his head with his hands. “Don’t beat me up, Fabre, I feel ill. I can’t take this.”

  “What’s Danton up to? Come on, you must know.”

  “He’s gone to see his mother. His mother. I didn’t know till this morning. No message, no letter, nothing. I can’t cope.”

  “The fat bastard,” Fabre said. “I bet he’s planning to stay away.”

  “I’m going to kill myself,” Camille said.

  Fabre rolled from the bed. He propelled himself back into the drawing room. “I can’t get any sense out of him. He says he’s going to kill himself. What shall we do?”

  Lucile inserted her bookmark and laid her novel aside. It was clear that she would get no further with it. “Georges told me he would be back, and I have no reason to disbelieve him—but perhaps you’d like to sit down here and write him a letter? Tell him you can’t manage the thing without him, which is true. Tell him Robespierre says he can’t get along without him. And when you’re done, you might go and find Robespierre and ask him to call. He is such a steadying influence when Camille is killing himself.”

  Sure enough, August 9, 9 a.m., Danton is back. “No point in being in a temper with me. A man must settle his affairs. It’s a dangerous business, this.”

  “Your affairs have been settled more times than I can count,” Fabre said.

  “Well, you see, I keep on getting richer.”

  He kissed his wife on top of her head. “Will you unpack for me, Gabrielle?”

  “You have got that right?” Fabre said. “Unpack, not pack?”

  Camille said, “We thought you’d run out on us again.”

  “What do you mean, again?” He grabbed Camille by the wrist and pulled him across the room, scooped up his small son Antoine in one arm. “Oh, I have missed you, my loves,” he said. “It’s been all of two days. Why are you here, hm?” he asked the child. “You should be out of town.”

  “He cried to come home,” Gabrielle said. “I couldn’t settle him last night till I promised he’d see you today. My mother is coming to fetch him this afternoon.”

  “Splendid woman, splendid. Child-minding in the cannon’s mouth.”

  “Will you stop being so bloody hearty?” Camille asked. “You make me feel sick.”

  “Country air,” Danton said. “Got lots of energy now. You should get out of Paris more often. Poor Camille.” Danton pulled Camille’s head into his shoulder and stroked his hair. “He’s scared, scared, scared.”

  Twelve noon. “Only twelve hours now,” Danton said. “I give you my word.”

  Two p.m. Marat came. He looked dirtier than ever. As if in sympathy with his work, his skin had taken on the color of poor-quality newsprint.

  “There are other places we could have met,” Danton said. “I didn’t ask you here. I don’t want my wife and child given nightmares.”

  “You will be pleased to invite me, afterwards. Besides, who knows—I might clean myself up under the republic. Now,” he said briskly. (He always allowed a certain amount of time for personal abuse.) “Now. I suspect the Brissotins of trying to make a deal with the Court. They have been talking to Antoinette, and this I can prove. Nothing they do at this stage can harm us, but the question arises of what we do with them afterwards.”

  This word keeps intruding into conversations: afterwards.

  Danton shook his head. “I find it hard to believe. Roland’s wife wouldn’t be party to a deal. She got them kicked out of office, remember
? I can’t see her talking to Antoinette.”

  “Lying, am I?” Marat said.

  “I admit that some of them would be willing to negotiate. They want their positions back. It just goes to show that there’s no such thing as a Brissotin.”

  “Only when it suits us,” Marat said.

  Four p.m., the rue des Cordeliers: “But you can’t just say “Good-bye.” Camille was aghast. You can’t turn up in the middle of a sunny afternoon and say, I’ve enjoyed knowing you for twenty years, now I’m off to get killed.”

  “Well, you can,” Louis Suleau said, unsteadily. “It seems that you can.”

  ’He’d had a kind of luck, the chronicler of the Acts of the Apostles. In ‘89, ’90, the mobs might have killed him; they were the mobs the Lanterne Attorney had driven on. “Whenever I pass a lamp post,” he had written, “I see it stretch out towards me, covetously.”

  Camille looked at him in silence, stunned—though he must have known, must have expected it. Louis had been over the border, in the émigré camps; why would he be back in Paris now, if he were not bent on some suicidal gesture?

  “You have taken risks yourself,” Louis said. “I don’t need to tell you why one does it. I’ve given up trying to make you a royalist. At least we have that in common—we stick to our principles. I am prepared to die in the defense of the palace, but who knows, the King may have the best of it. We may have a victory yet.”

  “Your victory would be my death.”

  “I don’t want that,” Louis said.

  “You’re a hypocrite. You must want it. You can’t pursue a course and then disown the natural consequences of it.”

  “I’m not pursuing a course. I’m keeping faith.”

  “With that sad fat fool? Nobody who aspires to be taken seriously could be dying for Louis Capet. There’s something ludicrous about it.”

  Louis looked away. “I don’t know … perhaps in the end I agree with you. But it can’t be avoided any longer.”