A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  I don’t want to be here much longer, he thought. I shall turn into Claude. I don’t much want to speak to the Convention either, they won’t be able to hear me. Then again, he said to himself, it isn’t a question of what I want.

  It was more troubling to think that Danton himself wanted to leave office. Even now he hadn’t thrown over his dreams—his delusions—of getting out of Paris for good. In the small hours, Camille had found him solitary in a pool of yellow candlelight, poring over the deeds to his Arcis property, each boundary stone, watercourse, right of way. As he lifted his head Camille had seen in his eyes a picture of mellow buildings, fields, copses and streams.

  “Ah,” he had said, startled. “I thought my assassin had come at last.” He laid a hand, palm down, on the deeds. “To think of the Prussians here, perhaps.”

  Fabre had been evasive lately, Camille thought. Not that he was given to plain speaking. If Fabre had to choose, between money and revolutionary fame … No, he’d refuse to choose, he’d go on dizzily demanding both.

  “What interpretation are we to put on the removal of the Crown Jewels?” Camille asked Danton.

  What are we to think? Or—what are we to say? He watched Danton digest the ambiguity.

  “I think we must say that Roland’s carelessness is much to blame.”

  “Yes, he should have made better security arrangements, should he not? Fabre was with the Citizeness Roland the day after. He went at half-past ten and came back at one. Do you think he had been castigating her?”

  “How do I know?”

  Camille gave him an amused, sideways glance. “And after he left the Citizeness, she went straight to her husband and told him that the man who stole the Crown Jewels had just called.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Perhaps I’m making it up. Do you think I am?”

  “You could be,” Danton said unhappily.

  “Don’t trust Dumouriez.”

  “No. Robespierre says it. I am sick of him saying it.”

  “Robespierre is never wrong.”

  “Perhaps I should go to the front myself. See a few people. Get a few things straightened out.”

  So—perhaps when these pastoral moods came upon him, it was really a kind of fear. God knows he was vulnerable enough, though it seemed strange to apply the word to him. He was vulnerable to Dumouriez, and to supporters of the Bourbons, too, seeking fulfillment of promises made … . “There’s nothing to worry about. M. Danton will look after us.”

  Camille swept the thought away hastily, pushing his hair back in nervous agitation, as if someone were in the room with him. He seemed to hear Robespierre’s voice drifting across a cold spring day in 1790: “Once you bestow affection on a person, reason flies out of the window. Look at the Comte de Mirabeau—objectively, if you can, for a moment. The way he lives, his words, his actions, put me on my guard immediately—then I apply a little thought, and I discover that the man is wholly given over to self-aggrandizement. Now why can’t you come to this conclusion, because it’s plain enough? You don’t yield to your feelings in other respects, when they run counter to your larger aims; for instance, you’re frightened of speaking in public, but you don’t let it stop you. Then, like that—you have to be ruthless with your feelings.”

  Suppose he found that persistent unsparing voice at his elbow one day, claiming that Danton lacked probity; he had an answer, pat, not a logical one, but one sufficiently chilling to put logic in abeyance. To question Danton’s patriotism was to cast in doubt the whole Revolution. A tree is known by its fruits, and Danton made August 10. First he made the republic of the Cordeliers, then he made the Republic of France. If Danton is not a patriot, then we have been criminally negligent in the nation’s affairs. If Danton is not a patriot, we are not patriots either. If Danton is not a patriot, then the whole thing—from May ’89—must be done again.

  It was a thought to make even Robespierre tired.

  When the news of the victory at Valmy reached Paris, the city was delirious with relief and joy, and it was only later that a few people began to wonder why the French had not pursued their immediate advantage, chased up Brunswick and cut his retreat to pieces. The National Convention, meeting for the first time, had officially proclaimed the French Republic; it was the best of omens. Before long there will be no enemies on French soil—or no foreign enemies at least. The generals will push on to Mainz, Worms, Frankfurt; Belgium will be occupied, England, Holland and Spain will enter the war. In time defeats will occur, and betrayal, conspiracy and mere half-heartedness receive a ghastly reward; as the numbers of the Convention dwindle, one can seem to see every day on the empty benches a figure of Death, smiling, familiar and spry.

  For the moment the Convention’s most startling phenomenon was Danton’s voice; it was heard every day, on every question, but its arrogant power never ceased to surprise. Shunning the ministerial bench, he sat in the high tier of seats to the left of the chamber, with the other Paris deputies and the fiercer of the provincials. These seats, and by extension those who occupy them, will be called the Mountain. The Girondins, Brissotins—whatever you please to call them—drift to the right of the hall, and between them and the Mountain lies the area called the Plain, or the Swamp, in accordance with the quaking natures of those who sit there. Now that the split was visible, wide open, there seemed no reason for discretion or restraint. Day after day, Buzot poured out into the airless, stifling, sweating chamber Manon Roland’s suspicions of Paris: tyrant city, leech, necropolis. Sometimes she watched him from the public gallery, rigidly impersonal in her applause; in public they behaved like polite strangers, and in private, though less strange, they were not less polite. Louvet carried in his pocket a speech, kept for the right time, which he called a Robespierricide.

  Because of the crux of the matter—September, October, November—was the Brissotin attempt to rule; their private army of 16,000, brought from the provinces, singing in the streets, demanding the blood of would-be dictators—Marat, Danton, Robespierre—whom they called the Triumvirate. The War Minister shuttled that army to the front before there were pitched battles on the streets; but the battle-lines of the Convention were not within his jurisdiction.

  Marat sat alone, hunched over his bloody preoccupations. When he got up to speak, the Brissotins hurried out of the chamber, or stayed to stare with fascinated distaste, murmuring among themselves; but as time passed they stayed to listen, because his words concerned them intimately. He spoke with one arm crooked before him and resting on the tribune, his head flung back on his short, muscular neck, prefacing his remarks with the demonic chuckle he cultivated. He was ill, and no one knew the name of his disease.

  Robespierre met him—in passing, of course, he had always known him, but he had shrunk from closer contact. There was the danger that, if you talked with Marat, you would be blamed for him, accused of dictating his writings and fanning his ambition. And yet, one can’t pick and choose; in the present climate one must count up one’s friends. Perhaps from this point of view the meeting was not wholly successful, serving only to show how the patriots were divided. Robespierre’s body, young and compact, had a neat, feline tension inside his well-cut clothes; his emotions, or those emotions that might be worn on his face, were buried with the victims of September. Marat twitched at him across a table, coughing, a dirty kerchief wrapped around his head. He spluttered with passion, his grubby fist pumped, frustration blotched and mottled his skin. “Robespierre, you don’t understand me.”

  Robespierre watched him dispassionately, his head tilted a little to one side. “That is possible.”

  October 10: two months since the coup. Under Robespierre’s eyes (he spoke there every night) the Jacobin Club “purged” itself. Brissot and his colleagues were expelled; they were cast out from the body of patriotism, as filthy waste matter. October 29: the Convention, Roland on his feet. His supporters clapped and cheered him; but the old man seemed a bloodless marionette, duty and habit jerking
the strings. Robespierre, he suggested, would like to see the September massacres over again. At the name of Robespierre, the Gironde broke out into groans and cries.

  Robespierre rose from his place on the Mountain. He made for the rostrum, his small head lowered in a way that suggested belligerence. Gaudet, the Girondist who was president of the Convention, tried to stop him speaking. Danton’s voice was audible above the uproar. “Let him speak. And I demand to speak, when he’s done. It’s time a few things were put straight around here.”

  VERGNIAUD [his eyes on Danton]: I was afraid of this … of their alliance. I have feared it for some time.

  GAUDET [beside him]: One can deal with Danton.

  VERGNIAUD: Up to a point.

  GAUDET: Where the money runs out.

  VERGNIAUD: It’s more complicated than that. God help you if you can’t see it’s more complicated than that.

  GAUDET: Robespierre has the rostrum.

  VERGNIAUD: As usual. [He closes his eyes; his pale heavy face settles into attentive folds.] The man cannot speak.

  GAUDET: Not in your sense.

  VERGNIAUD: There is no show.

  GAUDET: The people like it well enough. His style.

  VERGNIAUD: Oh yes, the people. The People.

  Robespierre was unusually angry. It was the insult of Roland as an opponent, this dotard with his trollop of a wife and his incessant, obsessive muttering about the accounts of Danton’s ministry. That, and the gnat bites of their insinuations, whispers behind hands, stray voices in the street that call “September” and pass on. Danton has heard them too. It sometime shows in his face.

  Robespierre’s voice, above the low muttering which filled the body of the hall, was dripping with contempt: “Not one of you dares accuse me to my face.”

  There was a pause, a little silence for the Gironde to contemplate their cowardice.

  “I accuse you.”

  Louvet walked forward, fumbling inside his coat for the pages of the Robespierricide. “Ah, the pornographer,” Philippe Égalité said. The Duke’s voice rolled down, from the height of the Mountain. There was an outbreak of sniggering. Then the silence welled back.

  Robespierre stepped aside, and yielded Louvet the rostrum. He wore a patient, hesitant smile; he glanced up towards the Paris deputies, then took a seat, in Louvet’s line of sight, and waited for him to begin his tirade.

  “I accuse you of persistently slandering the finest patriots. Of having spread your slanders in the first week of September, when rumors were death blows. I accuse you of having degraded and proscribed the representatives of the nation.” He paused—the Mountain were yelling, baying at him—it was difficult to continue—Robespierre twisted his head, looked up at them, and the noise subsided, dwindled, tailed off, into another silence.

  In it, Louvet resumed; but his voice, pitched for opposition, for a shouting match, had the wrong timbre now, and as he heard it—as he heard what was wrong, as he said to himself, this will not do—his voice shook a little. To brace himself, he put his hands on the rostrum; he found he could not take a grip, because his palms were slippery with sweat.

  His quarry’s head was turned to him; but the light struck across his face, so that he was eyeless behind his tinted lenses. He seemed to wear no expression at all. Louvet launched himself forward, physically, as if he were going to jump: “I accuse you of having set yourself up as an object of idolatry: of having allowed people to name you in your presence as the only man who could save the nation—and of having said it yourself. I accuse you of aiming at being the supreme power.”

  Whether he had finished, or he had simply paused—whatever the truth, the Mountain were yelling again, redoubling their volume, and he saw Danton shoot upwards from his seat and start forward as if to stride down the hall and settle the matter with his fists; he saw Danton’s friends on their feet, and Fabre holding his chief back in a theatrical parade of restraint. Louvet stepped down from the tribune. His shoulders had bowed, he had developed a sort of consumptive stoop; Robespierre was on his feet lightly, bouncily. He was back at the tribune, indicating by his manner that he’d not detain them; in his cool, even voice, he asked the House for time to prepare his defense. Danton would have strode to the rostrum, struck terror into them, torn the case to pieces, there and then; this was not Robespierre’s method. He made a sign to Danton, an inclination of the head, almost a bow; then left the chamber, a knot of Montagnards clustering about him, his brother Augustin clutching at his arm and saying the Gironde would murder him.

  “A bad moment,” Legendre said. “Who would have expected it? I would not.”

  Danton was very pale. The scar stood out on his face. “They are baiting me,” he said.

  “Baiting you, Danton?”

  “Yes, me. If they strike at Robespierre they strike at me, if they take him on they must take me on too. Tell them this. Tell Brissot.”

  They told Vergniaud, later. “I am not Brissot,” he said. “I am not a Brissotin. At least, I think not. They fling the word about like largesse to the poor. Still—we have not been kind to Danton. We have resented his power in the ministry, we have been rude about his friends. Some of us have allowed our wives to make personal remarks. We have demanded to see his accounts, which naturally makes him nervous. We have, take it all in all, failed to bang our foreheads on the floor. Yet I hardly thought he bore us a grudge. How dangerously naïve.” He spread his hands. “But surely, in private, he and Robespierre have an antipathy for each other? Does that matter? Oh yes, it will matter, in the end.”

  And Louvet: that was his big moment, and he met it damp with fright, trailing the Duke’s plaudits like a bad memory. He was just Louvet the novelist after all, lightweight, inconsiderable, the little tiger’s practice prey. Now they will be wondering why they let him do it, his friends who are vehement against Robespierre. The Plain saw only how Robespierre stepped aside, how he took his seat, how he signaled silence: no despot, that. But only I, Louvet thought, will know that I ended before I began, at the foot of the tribune—held in a look that turned my stomach above the sweet, encouraging, Judas smile.

  “We regard him,” Mme. Duplay said, “as our son.”

  “But in point of fact,” Charlotte Robespierre said, “he is my brother. Which is why, I am afraid, my claim on him takes precedence over any that you and your daughters imagine yourself to have.”

  Mme. Duplay—mother of so many—could claim that she understood girls. She understood her mortally shy Victoire, her serious and awkward Eléonore and her pretty child-like Babette. She also understood Charlotte Robespierre. But she didn’t know what to do with her.

  When Maximilien had said that his brother Augustin would be coming to Paris, he had asked her advice on the matter of his sister. At least, that’s what she thought he had done. He seemed to find it difficult to talk about the girl.

  “What is she like?” She had been so curious, naturally. He never talked about his family. “Is she quiet, like you? What shall I expect?”

  “Not too much,” he said, looking worried.

  Maurice Duplay had insisted that the house had space for them all. And, indeed, there were two rooms unfurnished at present, never used. “Could we let your brother and sister go to strangers?” Maurice said. “No, we should all be together, as one family.”

  The day came. They arrived at the gate. Augustin made a good first impression—a pleasant, capable boy, Madame thought, and he clearly couldn’t wait to see his brother. She opened her arms to receive the sweet-faced, lissom young thing that Max’s sister would be. Charlotte’s cold stare stabbed her with deadly equality. Her arms dropped.

  “Perhaps we might go straight to our rooms,” Charlotte said. “We’re tired.”

  The older woman’s cheeks burned as she led the way. Neither proud nor exacting, she was still used to deference—from her daughters, from her husband’s workmen. Charlotte had taken with her the tone used to an underservant.

  She turned on the threshold.
“Everything is very simple. Ours is a simple house.”

  “So I see,” Charlotte said.

  The floor was polished, the curtains were new, dear little Babette had arranged a vase of flowers. Mme. Duplay stood back, allowing Charlotte to walk in before her. “If there is any way in which we can make you more comfortable, please tell me.”

  You could make me more comfortable, Charlotte’s face said, by dropping dead.

  Maurice Duplay filled his pipe and addressed himself to the aroma of the tobacco. When Citizen Robespierre was in the house, or likely to come home soon, he never smoked, out of respect for his patriotic lungs. However, Augustin didn’t mind.

  “Of course,” Duplay said at length, “she’s your sister. I shouldn’t criticize.”

  “You can if you want,” Augustin said. “I suppose I ought to try to explain Charlotte to you. Max never will. He’s too good. He’s always trying to avoid thinking ill of people.”

  “Is that so?” Duplay was mildly surprised, put it down to a proper fraternal blindness. Citizen Robespierre was open, just, equitable—but charity—no, that was not his strong point.

  “I don’t remember our mother at all,” Augustin said. “Max does, but he never seemed to want to talk about her.”

  “Your mother’s dead? I had no notion that your mother was dead.”

  Augustin was taken aback. “He never told you about our family?” He shook his head. “How odd.”

  “We presumed, you know, a quarrel. A serious quarrel. We didn’t want to pry.”

  “She died when I was a baby. Our father went away. We don’t know if he’s dead or alive. I wonder, now—if he’s alive, would he have heard of Max?”