A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  Of course, she didn’t speak about this torture program. People would think she was foolish. Camille, these days, was almost knitting his weaknesses into strengths. Legendre reproached him for not speaking more in the Convention. “My dear Legendre,” he said, “everyone has not your lungs.” You are, his smile suggested, blundering, crass, self-important. His colleagues on the Mountain relied on him for interpreting the ravings of Marat, with whom only he and Fréron were on terms. (Marat has a new opponent, a loud-mouthed sansculotte ex-priest who calls himself Jacques Roux.)

  “You are two centuries ahead of your time,” Camille told him. Marat, more livid and reptilian by the day, blinked at him. It might have been appreciation.

  What Camille wanted now was a Convention without the Brissotins, and the King and Queen on trial. He went avid and bright-eyed into the winter of ’92. When he was at home, she was happy; she could work on her imitations, which (her mother and sister agree) now approach perfection. When he was not at home, she sat by the window and watched for him. She talked to everybody about him, in a very bored tone.

  No one was frightened of the allies, for this year at least: or only the quartermasters, supervising the issue of moldy bread and paper-soled boots, watching the peasants spit on the government’s bank notes and hold out their paws for gold. The Republic was younger than her child. This child, his view still largely supine, watched the world with round, obsidian eyes, and smiled indiscriminately. Robespierre called to see how his godson did, and her mother’s old friends came in the afternoons, and gave him their fingers to hold, and told pointless stories about their own children as babies. Camille carried him around and whispered to him, assuring him that his path in life should be made smooth, that his every whim should be attended to, that because of his evident natural wisdom he would never need to go away to any unspeakable school. Her mother fussed over the little thing, showed him the cat and the sky and the trees. But she felt, though she was ashamed of the feeling, that she didn’t want to furnish the baby’s mind; she was a tenant with a short lease.

  To reach the house where Marat lives, you walk through a narrow passage between two shops and across a small courtyard with a well in the corner. On the right is a stone staircase with an iron handrail. Go up to the first floor.

  After you have knocked, you must withstand the inspection of one, perhaps both of the Marat women. This will take time. Albertine, the sister from some unimaginable childhood, is a fierce, starved scrap of a woman. Simone Evrard has a serene oval face, brown hair, a grave and generous mouth. Today they are not suspicious of their visitor. The way is clear; the People’s Friend sits in his parlor. “I like the way you come running to me,” he says, meaning that he doesn’t like it at all.

  “I am not running,” Camille said. “I came here at a furtive slouch.”

  Marat at home. Simone, the common-law wife, put in front of them a pot of coffee, bitter and black. “If it is a matter of discussing the crimes of the Brissotins,” she said, “you will be here for some time. Let me know if you need a candle.”

  “Are you here on your own behalf,” Marat said, “or have you been sent?”

  “Anyone would think you didn’t like having visitors.”

  “I want to know whether Danton or Robespierre has sent you, or who.”

  “I think they’d both welcome your help with Brissot.”

  “Brissot makes me sick.” Marat always said this: such a person makes me sick. And they did, they had. “He’s always acted as if he ran the Revolution, as if it were something of his making—setting himself up as an expert on foreign affairs, just because he’s had to skip the country so many times to avoid the police. If it were a matter of that, I would be the expert.”

  “We have to attack Brissot on every front,” Camille said. “His life before the Revolution, his philosophy, his associates, his conduct in every patriotic crisis from May ’89 to last September—”

  “He cheated me, you know, over the English edition of my Chains of Slavery. He conspired with his publishers to pirate my work, and I never saw a penny.”

  Camille looked up. “Good God, you don’t want us to allege that against him?”

  “And ever since he made this trip to the United States—”

  “Yes, I know, personally he’s insufferable, but that’s not the point.”

  “For me it is. I suffer enough.”

  “He was a police spy, before the Revolution.”

  “Yes,” Marat said. “He was.”

  “Put your name on a pamphlet with me.”

  “No.”

  “Cooperate, for once.”

  “Geese go in flocks,” Marat said, precisely.

  “All right, I’ll do it by myself. I only want to know if he has anything on you, anything really destructive.”

  “My life has been conducted on the highest principles.”

  “You mean nobody knows anything about you.”

  “Try not to offend me,” Marat said. It was a plain, useful piece of advice.

  “Let’s get on,” Camille said. “We can hold up his actions before the Revolution, which were deliberate betrayals of old future comrades, his monarchist pronouncements, which I have newspaper cuttings to verify: his vacillation in July ’89—”

  “Which was?”

  “Well, he has that jumpy look about him all the time, someone will be sure to remember that he vacillated. Then his involvement with Lafayette, his part in the attempted escape of the Capet family and his secret communication afterwards with the Capet woman and the Emperor.”

  “Good, good,” Marat said. “Very good so far.”

  “His efforts to sabotage the Revolution of August 10 and his false accusation that certain patriots were involved in the killings in the prisons. His advocacy of destructive federalist policies. Remembering, of course, that in the early days he was closely involved with certain aristocrats—Mirabeau, for instance, and Orléans.”

  “You have a touching faith in the shortness of people’s memories. I dare say it is justified. However, though Mirabeau is dead, Orléans is still sitting beside us in the Convention.”

  “But I was thinking ahead, to next spring, say. Robespierre feels Philippe’s position is untenable. He recognizes that he has been of some service to the people, but he would rather that all the Bourbons were out of France. He would like Philippe to take his whole family to England. We could give them a pension, he says.”

  “What, we could give Philippe money? How novel!” Marat said. “But yes—next spring—you are right. Let the Brissotins run out their rope for another six months. Then—snap.” Marat looked satisfied.

  “I hope we will be able to accuse them all—Brissot, Roland, Vergniaud—of creating obstacles and delays to the King’s trial. Even perhaps of voting to keep him alive. Again, I’m thinking ahead.”

  “Of course, there might be other people who will wish delays, obstacles, what have you. In this matter of Louis Capet.”

  “I think we can get Robespierre over his horror of the death sentence.”

  “Yes, but I don’t mean Robespierre. I think you will find Danton absenting himself at that time. I think it entirely possible that the activities of General Dumouriez in Belgium will call him away.”

  “What activities, particularly?”

  “There is sure to be a crisis in Belgium soon. Are our troops liberating the country, or are they annexing it, or are they somehow doing both? Who is General Dumouriez making his conquests for? The Republic? Or the defunct monarchy? Or perhaps for himself? Someone will have to go and sort the situation out, and it will have to be someone with the ultimate personal authority. I can’t see Robespierre leaving his paperwork to go wallowing about in the mud with the armies. Much more Danton’s sort of thing—high-level skulduggery, loot, military bands, and all the women of an occupied territory.”

  The slow, wheezy drawl in which Marat articulated all this had a chilling effect of his own. “I’ll tell him,” Camille said.

/>   “You do that. As for Brissot—looked at in a certain way, it becomes obvious that he was conspiring against the Revolution all along. Yet he and his cronies, they have entrenched themselves—and it will need vigor to expel them from public life.”

  His habituation, now, to the current of Marat’s speech made him look up. “You do mean that, I suppose—expel them from public life? You don’t mean anything worse, do you?”

  “Just when one imagined you were beginning to face reality,” Marat said. “Or is this some hope of your two queasy masters? Robespierre knew in September what had to be done, in the crisis; but since then, oh, he has grown very nice.”

  Camille sat with his head resting on his hand. He twisted a curl of hair around his finger. “I’ve known Brissot a long time.”

  “We have known evil since the moment of our births,” Marat said, “but we do not tolerate it on that account.”

  “That is just phrase making.”

  “Yes. Cheapskate profundity.”

  “It is a pity. Kings have always killed their opponents, but we were supposed to reason with ours.”

  “At the front, people die for their mistakes. Why should politicians be more gently treated? They made the war. They deserve a dozen deaths, each of them. What can we try them for, except for treason, and how can you punish treason, except by death?”

  “Yes, I see.” Camille began drawing patterns with his fingernail on the dusty table before them, but stopped when he realized what he was doing.

  Marat smiled. “There was a time, Camille, when aristocrats flocked to my house, wanting my cure for the consumption. Their carriages sometimes blocked the streets. I kept a handsome equipage myself. My dress was immaculate, and I was known for the calm graciousness of my manner.”

  “Of course,” Camille said.

  “You were a schoolchild, you know nothing about it.”

  “Did you cure consumption?”

  “Sometimes. When there was enough faith. Tell me, do you people who began the Cordeliers ever go there now?”

  “Sometimes. Other people run it. That’s not a problem.”

  “The sansculottes have taken over.”

  “In effect.”

  “While you move in higher spheres.”

  “I know what you are saying. But we are still quite able to handle a street meeting. We aren’t drawing-room revolutionaries. One doesn’t have to live in squalor—”

  “Enough,” Marat said. “It is just that I am exercised about our sans-culottes.”

  “Jacques Roux, this priest—but that’s not really his name?”

  “Oh no—but then perhaps you think Marat is not mine?”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No. But idiots like Roux divert the minds of the people. When they should be thinking of purifying the Revolution, they encourage them to loot grocers’ shops.”

  “There is always someone ready to pose as the champion of the oppressed poor,” Camille said. “I don’t know what is the use of it. The situation of the poor does not change. It is just that the people who think it can change are admired by posterity.”

  “Just so. What they will not realize, what they will not accept, is that the poor are going to be driven like pack animals through this Revolution and every other. Where would we have been in ’89 if we had waited for the sansculottes? We made the Revolution in the cafés and took it out onto the streets. Now Roux wants to kick it into the gutter. And every one of them—Roux and all that mob—are agents of the allies.”

  “Knowingly, you mean?”

  “What does it matter if they serve the enemy interests because they’re wicked, or because they’re stupid? They do it. They sabotage the Revolution from within.”

  “Even Hébert is beginning to speak out against them. Enragés, people are calling them. Ultra-revolutionaries.”

  Marat spat on the floor. Camille jumped violently. “They are not ultra-revolutionaries. They are not revolutionaries at all. They are atavists. Their idea of social betterment is a god in the sky who throws down bread every day. But a fool like Hébert wouldn’t see that. No, I have no more affection for Père Duchesne than you have.”

  “Perhaps Hébert is a secret Brissotin?”

  Marat laughed sourly. “Camille, you progress, you progress. Hébert has defamed you, I think—and yes, you’ll have his head, when the time comes. But a few others will fall, before that one. Let’s, as the women say, let’s get Christmas over, and then we’ll see what we can do to put this Revolution on the right lines. I wonder if our masters realize what assets we are? You with your sweet smile, and me with my sharp knife.”

  Hébert, Le Père Duchesne, on the Rolands:

  Some days ago a half-dozen of the sansculottes went in deputation to the house of the old humbug Roland. Unfortunately they arrived just as dinner was being served … . Our sansculottes pass along the corridor and arrive in the antechamber of the virtuous Roland. They are unable to make their way through the crowd of lackeys that fill it. Twenty cooks bearing the finest fricassees cry, “Take care, clear the way, these are the virtuous Roland’s entrées.” Others carry the virtuous Roland’s hors d’oeuvres, others carry the virtuous Roland’s roasts, others again the virtuous Roland’s side dishes. “What do you want?” the virtuous Roland’s valet asks the deputation.

  “We want to speak with the virtuous Roland.”

  The valet goes to take the message to the virtuous Roland, who comes out, looking sulky, his mouth full, with a napkin over his arm. “The republic must surely be in danger,” says he, “for me to be obliged to leave my dinner like this.” … Louvet with his papier-mâché face and hollow eyes was casting lascivious glances at the virtuous Roland’s wife. One of the deputation tries to pass though the pantry without a light, and overturns the virtuous Roland’s dessert. At the news of the loss of the dessert, the virtuous Roland’s wife tears her false hair with rage.

  “Hébert is getting very silly,” Lucile said. “When I think of those notorious turnips that were served to Georges-Jacques!” She passed the newspaper to Camille. “Will the sansculottes believe this?”

  “Oh yes. They believe every word. They don’t know that Hébert keeps a carriage. They think he is Père Duchesne, that he smokes a pipe and makes furnaces.”

  “Can no one enlighten them?”

  “Hébert and I are supposed to be allies. Colleagues.” He shakes his head. He does not mention his afternoon with Marat. Mostly, he would not like his wife to know what is going on in his head.

  “So you must go?” Maurice Duplay said.

  “What can I do? She is my sister, she feels that we should have a home of our own.”

  “But this is your home.”

  “Charlotte doesn’t understand that.”

  “Mark my words, he’ll be back,” says Mme. Duplay.

  Condorcet, the Girondist, on Robespierre:

  One wonders why there are so many women who follow Robespierre. It is because the French Revolution is a religion, and Robespierre is a priest. It is obvious that his power is all on the distaff side. Robespierre preaches, Robespierre censures … He lives on nothing and has no physical needs. He has only one mission—to talk—and he talks almost all the time. He harangues the Jacobins when he can attract some disciples there, he keeps quiet when he might damage his authority … . He has given himself a reputation for austerity that borders on saintliness. He is followed by women and weak people, he soberly receives their adoration and their homage.

  ROBESPIERRE: We’ve had two revolutions now. In ’89 and last August. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference to people’s lives.

  DANTON: Roland and Brissot and Vergniaud are aristocrats.

  ROBESPIERRE: Well—

  DANTON: In the new sense of the word, I mean. Revolution is a great battlefield of semantics.

  ROBESPIERRE: Perhaps we need another revolution.

  DANTON: Not to pussyfoot about.

  ROBESPIERRE: Quite.

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nbsp; DANTON: But with your well-known views, your scruples about taking life …?

  ROBESPIERRE [without much hope]: Cannot change be profound without being violent?

  DANTON: I can’t see my way to it.

  ROBESPIERRE: Innocent people suffer. But then perhaps there are no innocent people. Possibly it’s just a cliché. It rolls off the tongue.

  DANTON: What about all these conspirators?

  ROBESPIERRE: They are the ones who should be suffering.

  DANTON: How do you tell a conspirator?

  ROBESPIERRE: Put them on trial.

  DANTON: What if you know they’re conspirators, but you haven’t enough evidence to convict them? What if you as a patriot just know?

  ROBESPIERRE: You ought to be able to make it stand up in court.

  DANTON: Suppose you can’t? You might not be able to use your strongest evidence. It might be state secrets.

  ROBESPIERRE: You’d have to let them go, in that case. But it would be unfortunate.

  DANTON: It would, wouldn’t it? If the Austrians were at the gates? And you were delivering the city over to them out of respect for the judicial process?

  ROBESPIERRE: Well, I suppose you’d … you’d have to alter the standard of proof in court. Or widen the definition of conspiracy.

  DANTON: You would, would you?

  ROBESPIERRE: Would that be an example of a lesser evil averting a greater one? I am not usually taken in by this simple, very comforting, very infantile notion—but I know that a successful conspiracy against the French people could lead to genocide.

  DANTON: Perverting justice is a very great evil in itself. It leaves no hope of amendment.

  ROBESPIERRE: Look, Danton, I don’t know, I’m not a theorist.

  DANTON: I know that. You’re a practitioner. I know all about the sneaky little slaughters you try to fix up behind my back.

  ROBESPIERRE: Why do you condone the death of a thousand, and balk at two politicians?