A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “Don’t you believe it?”

  “Yes, but I’ve got used to believing it by myself. It’s been such a long time. And the greatest obstacle has been Danton himself.”

  “What is he expecting?”

  “He isn’t expecting anything. He’s asleep.”

  “Now listen. I intend to address the Assembly. It would be an advantage if the rabble were removed.”

  “They were the sovereign people until they put you into power this afternoon. Now they’re the rabble.”

  “There are petitioners here asking for the suspension of the Monarchy. The Assembly will decree it. And the calling of a National Convention, to draw up a constitution for the republic. I think now you can go and get some sleep.”

  “No, not until I hear it for myself. If I went away now everything might fall apart.”

  “Life takes on a persecutory aspect,” Vergniaud murmured. “Let us try to remain rational.”

  “It isn’t rational.”

  “It will be,” Vergniaud said smoothly. “My colleagues intend to remove government from the sphere of chance and prejudice and make it into a reasoned process.”

  Camille shook his head.

  “I assure you,” Vergniaud said. He broke off. “There’s a horrible smell. What is it?”

  “I think—” Camille hesitated—“I think they’re burning the bodies.”

  “Long live the republic,” Vergniaud said. He began to walk towards the president’s dais.

  PART FIVE

  Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, stern and inflexible; it is not so much a particular principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most urgent needs of our country … . The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against the tyrants.

  MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE

  In a word, during these reigns, the natural death of a famous man was so rare that it was gazetted as an event and handed down to posterity by the historians. Under one consulate, says the annalist, there was a Pontiff called Pisonius, who died in his bed; this was regarded as a marvel.

  CAMILLE DESMOULINS

  CHAPTER 1

  Conspirators

  “Father-in-law!” Camille gives a cry of delight. He points to Claude. “You see,” he invites the company, “never throw anything away. Any object, however outworn and old-fashioned, may prove to have its uses. Now, Citizen Duplessis, tell me, in short simple sentences, or verse, or comic song, how to run a ministry.”

  “This is beyond my nightmares,” Claude says.

  “Oh, they haven’t given me my own ministry—not quite yet—there will have to be a few more catastrophes before that happens. The news is this—Danton is Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals, and Fabre and I are his secretaries.”

  “An actor.” Claude says. “And you. I do not like Danton. But I am sorry for him.”

  “Danton is leader of the Provisional Government, so I must try to run the ministry for him, Fabre will not bother. Oh, I must write and tell my father, give me some paper quick. No, wait, I’ll write to him from the ministry, I’ll sit behind my big desk and send it under seal.”

  “Claude,” Annette says, “where are your manners? Say congratulations.”

  Claude shudders. “One point. A technicality. The Minister of Justice is also Keeper of the Seals, but he is only one person. He has always had the one secretary. Always.”

  “Cheeseparing!” Camille says. “Georges-Jacques is above it! We shall be moving to the Place Vendôme! We shall be living in a palace!”

  “Dear Father, don’t take it so badly,” Lucile begs.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Claude tells her. “He has arrived now, he is the Establishment. Anyone who wants to make a revolution has to make it against him.”

  Claude’s sense of dislocation is more acute than on the day the Bastille fell. So is Camille’s, when he thinks about what Claude has said. “No, that’s not true at all. There are plenty of good battles ahead. There’s Brissot’s people.”

  “You like a good battle, don’t you?” Claude says. Briefly, he imagines an alternative world; into café conversation he drops the phrase “my son-in-law, the secretary.” The reality is, however, that his life has been wasted; thirty years of diligence have never made him intimate with a secretary, but now he is forced into intimacy by his mad womenfolk and the way they have decided to run their lives. Look at them all, rushing to give the secretary a kiss. He could, he supposes, cross the room and pat the secretary on the head; has he not seen the secretary sit, neck bent, while the minister-elect, discoursing on some patriotic theme, runs distrait strangler’s fingers through his curls? Will the minister do this in front of his civil servants? Claude takes an easy decision against any such display of affection. He glares at his son-in-law. Look at him—couldn’t you just commit violence? There he sits, lashes lowered, eyes on the carpet. What is he thinking? Is it anything a secretary should be thinking, at all?

  Camille regards the carpet, but imagines Guise. The letter that he means to write is, in his mind, already written. Invisible, he floats across the Place des Armes. He melts through the closed front door of the narrow white house. He insinuates his presence into his father’s study. There, on the desk, lies the Encyclopedia of Law; by now, surely, we are in the lower reaches of the alphabet?

  Yes, indeed—this is Vol. VI. On top of it lies a letter from Paris. In whose handwriting? In his own! In the handwriting his publishers complain of, in his own inimitable script! The door opens. In comes his father. How does he look? He looks as when Camille last saw him: he looks spare, gray, severe and remote.

  He sees the letter. But wait, stop—how did it get there, how did it come to be lying on top of the Encyclopedia of Law? Implausible, this—unless he is to imagine a whole scene of the letter’s arrival, his mother or Clement or whoever carrying it up and managing not to slide their fingers and eyes into it.

  All right, start again.

  Jean-Nicolas climbs the stairs. Camille (in ghost form) drifts up behind him. Jean-Nicolas has a letter in his hand. He peers at it; it is the familiar, semi-legible handwriting of his eldest son.

  Does he want to read it? No—not especially. But the rest of the household is calling up the stairs, what’s the news from Paris?

  He unfolds it. With a little difficulty, he reads—but he will not mind the difficulty, when he comes to the news his son has to impart.

  Amazement, glory! My son’s best friend (well, one of his two best friends) is made a Minister! My son is to be his secretary! He is to live in a palace!

  Jean-Nicolas clasps the letter to his shirt front—an inch above his waistcoat, and to the left, above his heart. We have misjudged the boy! After all, he was a genius! I will run at once, tell everyone in town—they will be sick with spleen, they will look green, and puke with unadorned jealousy. Rose-Fleur’s father will be ill with grief. Just think, she might now be the secretary’s wife.

  But no, no, Camille thinks—this is not at all how it will be. Will Jean-Nicolas seize his pen, dash off his congratulations? Will he toss his hat upon his severe gray locks, and dash out to waylay the neighbors? The hell he will. He’ll stare at the letter—going, oh no, oh no! He’ll think, what unimaginable form of behavior has procured this favor for my son? And pride? He’ll not feel pride. He’ll just feel suspicious, aggrieved. He’ll get a vague nagging pain in his lower back, and take to his bed.

  “Camille, what are you thinking?” Lucile says.

  Camille looks up. “I was thinking there’s no pleasing some people.”

  The women give Claude poison-dart glances, and gather around and adore Camille.

  “If I had failed,” Danton said, “I would have been treated as a criminal.”

  It was twelve hours since Camille and Fabre had woken him up and told him to take charge of the nation. Dragged out of a disjointed dream of rooms and rooms, of doors and doors opening into other rooms, he had clutched Camille in incoher
ent gratitude—though perhaps it wasn’t the thing, perhaps a touch of nolo episcopari was in order? A touch of humility in the face of destiny? No—he was too tired to pretend reluctance. He commanded France, and this was a natural thing.

  Across the river the urgent problem was the disposal of the bodies, both living and dead, of the Swiss Guard. Fires still smoked in the gutted palace.

  “Keep the Seals?” Gabrielle had said. “Do you now what you’re doing? Camille couldn’t keep two white rabbits in a coop.”

  Here Robespierre sat, very new, as if he had been taken out of a box and placed unruffled in a velvet armchair in Danton’s apartment. Danton called out to admit no one—“no one but my Secretaries of State”—and prepared to defer to the opinions of this necessary man.

  “I hope you’ll help me out?” he said.

  “Of course I will, Georges-Jacques.”

  Very serious, Robespierre, very attentive; superlatively himself this morning when everyone should have woken up different. “Good,” Georges-Jacques said. “So you’ll take a post at the ministry?”

  “Sorry. I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t? I need you. Very well, you’ve got the Jacobins to run, you’ve a seat on the new Commune, but we’ve all got to—” The new minister broke off, and made a consolidating, squeezing gesture with his huge fists.

  “If you want a Head of Civil Service, François Robert would do the job very well for you.”

  “I’m sure he would.” Did you imagine, Danton thought, that I wanted to make you into a functionary? Of course I didn’t; I wanted to attach you in some highly paid but highly unofficial capacity, as my political adviser, my third eye, my third ear. So what’s the problem? Perhaps you are one of those people who’s made for opposition, not for government. Is that it? Or is it that you don’t want to work under me?

  Robespierre looked up; light eyes, just touching his would-be master’s. “Let me off?” He smiled.

  “As you wish.” So often he’s aware, these days, of his pseudo-refined barrister’s drawl, of the expressions that go with it; and of his other voice, his street voice, just as much the product of cultivation. Robespierre has only one voice, rather flat, unemphatic, ordinary; he’s never in his life seen the need to pretend. “But now, at the Commune, you’ll be taking hold of things there?” He tried to soften the tone to one of suggestion. “Fabre is a member, you should consider him at your orders.”

  Robespierre seemed amused. “I’m not sure I’ve your taste for giving them.”

  “Your first problem is the Capet family. Where are you going to keep them?”

  Robespierre inspected his fingernails. “There was some suggestion that they should be kept under guard at the Minister of Justice’s palace.”

  “Oh yes? And I suppose they’ll give me some attic, or perhaps a broom cupboard, to transact affairs of state from?”

  “I said you wouldn’t like it.” Robespierre seemed interested to have his suspicions confirmed.

  “They should be shut up in the old Temple tower.”

  “Yes, that’s the view of the Commune. It’s a bit grim for the children, after what they’ve been used to.” Maximilien, Danton thought, were you once a child? “I’m told they’ll be made comfortable. They’ll be able to walk in the gardens. Perhaps the children would like to have a little dog they could take out?”

  “Don’t ask me what they’d like,” Danton said. “How the hell would I know? Anyway, there are more pressing matters than the Capets. We have to put the city on a war footing. We have to take search powers, requisition powers. We have to round up any royalists who are still armed. The prisons are filling up.”

  “That’s inevitable. The people who opposed us, this last week—we now define them as criminals, I suppose? They must have some status, we must define them somehow. And if they are defendants, we must offer them a trial—but it is rather puzzling this, because I am not sure what the crime would be.”

  “The crime is being left behind by events,” Danton said. “And, of course, I am not some jurisprudential simpleton, I see that the ordinary courts will not do. I favor a special tribunal. You’ll sit as a judge? We’ll settle it later today. Now, we have to let the provinces know what’s happening. Any thoughts?”

  “The Jacobins want to issue an agreed—”

  “Version?”

  “Is that your choice of word? Of course … People need to know what has happened. Camille will write it. The club will publish and distribute it to the nation.”

  “Camille is good at versions,” Danton said.

  “And then we must think ahead to the new elections. As things stand I don’t see how we can stop Brissot’s people being returned.”

  His tone made Danton look up. “You don’t think we can work with them?”

  “I think it would be criminal to try. Look, Danton, you must see where their policies tend. They are for the provinces and against Paris—they are federalists. They want to split the nation into little parts. If that happens, if they get their way, what chance have the French people against the rest of Europe?”

  “A greatly reduced chance. None.”

  “Just so. Therefore their policies tend to the destruction of the nation. They are treasonable. They conduce to the success of the enemy. Perhaps—who knows—perhaps the enemy has inspired them?”

  Danton raised a finger. “Stop there. You’re saying, first they start a war, then they make sure we lose it? If you want me to believe that Pétion and Brissot and Vergniaud are agents of the Austrians, you’ll have to bring me proper proofs, legal proofs.” And even then, he thought, I won’t believe you.

  “I’ll do my best,” Robespierre said: earnest schoolboy, pitting himself at the task. “Meanwhile, what are we going to do about the Duke?”

  “Poor old Philippe,” Danton said. “He deserves something, after all his hard work. I think we should encourage the Parisians to elect him to the new Assembly.”

  “National Convention,” Robespierre corrected. “Well, if we must.”

  “And then there’s Marat.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t ask anything, not for himself—I simply mean that he’s someone we must come to terms with. He has an enormous following among the people.”

  “I accept that,” Robespierre said.

  “You will have him with you at the Commune.”

  “And the Convention? People will say Marat’s too extreme, Camille, too—but we must have them.”

  “Extreme?” Danton said. “The times are extreme. Armies are extreme. This is a crisis point.”

  “I don’t doubt it. God is with us. We have that comfort.”

  Danton rolled around in his mind this astonishing statement. “Unfortunately,” he said at last, “God has not yet furnished us with any pikes.”

  Robespierre turned his face away. It is like playing with a hedgehog, Danton thought, you just touch its nose and in it goes and all you’ve got to negotiate with is spikes. “I didn’t want this war,” Robespierre said.

  “Unfortunately, we’ve got it, and we can’t keep insisting it belongs to somebody else.”

  “Do you trust General Dumouriez?”

  “He’s given us no reason not to.”

  Robespierre’s mouth set in a wry line. “That’s not enough, is it? What has he done to convince us he’s a patriot?”

  “He’s a soldier, there’s a presumption of loyalty to the government of the day.”

  “That presumption was ill-founded in ’89, when the French Guards came over to the people. They followed their natural interests. Dumouriez and all our other dashing aristocratic officers will soon follow theirs. I wonder about Dillon, Camille’s friend.”

  “I didn’t say the loyalty of the officers is assured, I said that the government takes it for granted till they show otherwise. On any other terms, it would be impossible to have an army.”

  “May I give you a word of advice?” Robespierre’s eyes
were fixed on Danton’s face, and Danton thought, this is not advice I shall like. “You begin to talk too much of ‘the government.’ You are a revolutionary, the Revolution made you, and in revolution the old presumptions do not hold good. In times of stability and peace it may be possible for a state to deal with its enemies by ignoring them, but in times such as these we have to identify them and take them on, tackle them.”

  Tackle them how? Danton wondered. Reason with them? Convert them? Kill them? But you won’t have killing, will you, Max? You don’t hold with it. Out loud, he said, “Diplomacy can limit the war. While I’m in office I shall do what I can to keep England out. But when I’m not in office—”

  “You know what Marat would say? He’d say, why should you ever be out of office?”

  “But I intend to sit in the Convention. That’s my stage, that’s where I’ll be effective—you can’t mean to tie me to a desk. And as you know quite well, a deputy can’t be a minister.”

  “Listen.” Robespierre eased out of a pocket his little volume of The Social Contract.

  “Oh good, story time,” Danton said.

  Robespierre opened it at a marked page. “Listen to this. ‘The inflexibility of the laws can in some circumstances make them dangerous and cause the ruin of a state in a crisis … if the danger is such that the machinery of the laws is an obstacle, then a dictator is appointed, who silences the laws.’” He closed the book, raised his eyes questioningly.

  “Is that a statement of fact,” Danton inquired, “or is it prescriptive?”

  Robespierre said nothing.

  “I am afraid I am not impressed by that, just because you have read it out of a book. Even out of Jean-Jacques.”

  “I want to prepare you for the arguments that people will throw at you.”

  “You had the passage marked, I see. In future, don’t bother to draw the conversation round. Just ask me straight off what you want to know.”

  “I didn’t come here to tempt you. I marked the passage because I have been giving the matter much thought.”