A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “Such heroism,” Camille said slowly, “and in a nightshirt too. Policy is the servant of reason. It is a sort of blasphemy to make human reason contradict itself and advise in the name of policy what it forbids in the name of morality.”

  “You say that,” Robespierre said tiredly, “yet you are corrupted.”

  “What, by money?”

  “No. There are more ways than that of being corrupted. You can be corrupted by friendship. Your attachments are too … too vehement. Your hatreds are too sudden, too strong.”

  “You mean Mirabeau, don’t you? You’ll never let that topic go. I know he used me, and he used me to propagate sentiments in which—it turned out—he didn’t believe. But now you—it turns out—are just the same. You don’t believe a word of what you ‘let’ me say. I find this hard to accept.”

  “In a way,” Robespierre said patiently, “if we want to rise above being like Suleau, and the girl, we have to avoid the snares of what we personally believe, hope for—and see ourselves just as instruments of a destiny that has been worked out already. You know, there would have been a Revolution, even if we had never been born.”

  “I don’t think I believe that,” Camille said. “I think it injures my place in the universe to believe that.” He started picking up the papers from the floor. “If you really want to annoy Eléonore, I mean Comélia,” he said, “you can keep throwing them on the floor and asking for them again, like the baby does. Lolotte gets out of the way when she sees that trick starting.”

  “Thank you, I’ll try.” A spasm of coughing.

  “Has Saint-Just been to see you?”

  “No. He has no patience with illness.”

  Under Robespierre’s eyes there were deep purple stains against the skin. Camille remembered his sister, in the months before her death. He pushed the thought aside; refused to have it. “It’s all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you’re an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don’t you take a holiday?”

  “Well, still, our individual fate is some concern of ours. If I took a holiday, Brissot and Roland and Vergniaud would start planning to cut off my head.”

  “You said you wouldn’t mind. You’d sort of take it in your stride.”

  “Yes, but there are things I want to do first. And it wouldn’t be a very pleasant vacation, thinking about it, would it?”

  “Saints don’t take holidays,” Camille said. “And I prefer to think that although we are instruments of destiny, no one else will do, because we are like saints, agents of a divine purpose, and filled with the grace of God.”

  Charlotte was on her way out too. She was getting worse than she deserved, he thought. They stood on the rue Honore and tears spilled out of her eyes and down her pert, feline face. “He wouldn’t treat me like this if he knew how I felt,” she said. “Those monstrous women are turning him into something that none of us will recognize. They make him smug, they make him think about himself all the time, how wonderful he is. Yes, he is wonderful, but he doesn’t need telling. Oh, he has no common sense, he has no sense of proportion.

  He took her back to the rue des Cordeliers. Annette was there. She looked Charlotte over very carefully, and listened to her problems. She always looked, these days, like a person who could give advice but never did.

  Everyone was coming that evening to sit in reserved places in the gallery at the Jacobins. “It will be a triumph,” Lolotte said. As the afternoon wore on, panic began to fight inside him like cats in a sack.

  What kind of fear is it? He can take any number of fights with violin makers: that isn’t a problem. What he hates is that creeping sense of the big occasion; the hour approaching, the minutes ticking away; that gathering up of papers and conspicuous walk to the tribune, with a perceptible swell and rustle of animosity detectable as soon as he leaves his place. Claude had said, “You are the Establishment now”; but that is not quite true. Most of the deputies of the Center and Right think he should not be a member of the Convention, that his extreme views and his advocacy of violence should exclude him; when he gets up to speak they shout, “Lanteme Attorney” and “septembriseur.” Some days this gives him a jaunty feeling, feeds his arrogance; other days it makes him feel sick and cold. How could you know in advance which sort of day it was going to be?

  The day the Gironde brought in their indictment against Marat—that had been one of the bad ones. They had packed the benches with their supporters; when you looked up at the Mountain, it was surprising how many people had stayed away. Who will speak up for Marat, mad and poisonous and repellent? He will. And they must have expected it, for the noise was orchestrated; we will put Marat on trial, they yelled, and you with him. Much more, in the usual vein: blood drinker. Get down from the tribune, they yell, before we drag you down; four years of revolution, and he is as much under threat as he ever was at the Palais-Royal, when the police closed in.

  He had stood his ground for as long as he could, but the president was helpless, indicated by a gesture of his hands that there was nothing to be done. What the deputies felt for Marat was an extremity of loathing and dread, and they had transferred those feelings to him, and he was aware—one must always be aware—that the deputies do not attend sittings unarmed. Danton would have faced them out, he would have dominated them, forced their taunts back down their throats; but he did not have those abilities. He stopped trying to speak, contented himself with one long glance over the howling benches: nodded to the president, pushed back his hair, said to himself, “Well, Dr. Marat, first blood to them.”

  When he walked shakily back to the Mountain’s benches, Danton was not there, Robespierre was not there; they wanted no involvement in this matter. François Robert, who was afraid of Marat and detested him, looked away. Fabre glanced towards him, raised one eyebrow, bit his lip. Antoine Saint-Just gave him a half-smile. “That cost you an effort, didn’t it?” Camille had said fiercely. He’d wished desperately to be outside, to breathe less hostile air, but if he had walked out at once, the Right would have added that to their list of triumphs: not only did we silence Marat’s chief supporter, but we also drove him out of our hall.

  After an interval, he was able to pick his way out, into the gardens of the Tuileries. Four years in stale and airless rooms; four years of contention and fright. Georges-Jacques thinks the Revolution is something to make money out of, but now the Revolution is exacting its own price. Most of his colleagues have taken to alcohol, some to opium; some of them have developed a repertoire of strange and sudden illnesses, others have a habit of bursting into unmanly tears in the middle of the day’s business. Marat is an insomniac; his cousin Fouquier, the Public Prosecutor, has confided in him that he is harassed every night by dreams of dead people trailing him in the street. He is, by the general standard, coping quite well; but he is not equipped for an upset like today’s.

  He had become aware, at this point, that two men were following him. Making his decision, he turned to face them. They were two of the soldiers who guarded the National Convention. They approached to within three paces. He put his hand to his heart. He was taken aback by the small flat tone of his own voice. “Of course, you’ve come to arrest me. I suppose the Convention has just decreed it.”

  “No, Citizen, it’s not that. If we’d come to arrest you there’d be more than two of us. It is only that we saw you walking here by yourself and we know these are evil times and we were mindful of the way the good Citizen Lepelletier was struck down and died.”

  “Yes, of course. Not that there would be much you could do. Unless you were minded to step heroically in the way?” he said hopefully.

  “We might catch somebody,” the soldier said. “An assassin. We’re always on the lookout for these conspirato
rs, you know, just as Citizen Robespierre tells us. Now—” He hesitated, turned to his colleague, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. “Oh yes—can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?”

  “The grave,” Camille said. “The grave.”

  “Only would you,” said the second soldier, “take your hand away from that pistol that you’ve got in your coat pocket? It’s making me nervous.”

  That day—and that second of freakish despair—was not a day he wished to remember. Tonight at the Jacobins he will be—for the most part—among friends. Danton will be there, and so he will sit in his usual place beside him. Danton will be deliberately silent, impassive, knowing that one cannot talk or joke his nervousness away. When the time comes he will make his way slowly towards the tribune, because patriots will step out of their places to embrace him, and from the dark parts of the gallery where the sansculottes gather there will be applause and coarse shouts of encouragement. Then silence; and as he begins, thinking carefully ahead so that he can control any tendency to stutter, so that he can circumvent words and pluck them out and slot in others, he will be thinking, no wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now; when we are dead and a few years have passed they will grow tired of trying to hear us, they will say, what does it matter? We have elected our own place in the silences of history, with our weak lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed for something else.

  COUR DU COMMERCE:

  GÉLY: Have pity on us, Monsieur.

  DANTON: Pity? What do you want pity for? Personally I’d have thought it was a stroke of good luck for you.

  GÉLY: We have only one child.

  MME. LY: He wants to kill her like he killed his first wife.

  GÉLY: Be quiet.

  DANTON: Oh, let her say it. Let her get it out of her system.

  GÉLY: We don’t understand why you want her.

  DANTON: I have a certain feeling for her.

  MME. GÉLY: You might at least have the grace to say you love her.

  DANTON: It seems to me that’s something you find out about a few years on.

  GÉLY: There are more suitable people.

  DANTON: That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?

  GÉLY: She’s fifteen.

  DANTON: I’m thirty-three. Marriages like that are made every day.

  GÉLY: We thought you were older than that.

  DANTON: She’s not marrying me for my looks.

  GÉLY: Why not a widow, someone experienced?

  DANTON: Experienced in what? You know, if you think I have this gigantic sexual appetite, it’s just a myth I put about, I’m quite normal really.

  MME. GÉLY: Please.

  DANTON: Perhaps after all you should send this female out of the room.

  GÉLY: I meant experienced in bringing up a family.

  DANTON: The children are attached to her. As she is, to them. Ask her. Also, I don’t want a middle-aged woman, I want more children. She knows how to run a household. My wife taught her.

  GÉLY: But you entertain, you receive important visitors. She wouldn’t know about all that.

  DANTON: Anything I decide on is good enough for them.

  MME. GÉLY: You are the most arrogant person alive. It’s beyond belief.

  DANTON: Well, if you do feel so sorry for my friends, you can always come down and advise her. If you feel qualified. Look, she can have an army of servants if she wants. We can move to a bigger place, that might be a good thing all round, I don’t know why I stay here, habit I suppose. I’m a rich man. All she has to do is to say what she wants and she can have it. Her children will inherit from me equally with the children of my first marriage.

  GÉLY: She isn’t for sale.

  DANTON: She can have a bloody private chapel and a priest of her own, if she wants. As long as he’s a priest loyal to the constitution.

  LOUISE: Monsieur, I’m not marrying you in a civil ceremony. I may as well tell you that now.

  DANTON: I beg your pardon, my love?

  LOUISE: What I mean is, all right, I’ll go through that silly business at City Hall. But there must be a real marriage, too, with a real priest who hasn’t taken the oath.

  DANTON: Why?

  LOUISE: It wouldn’t be a proper marriage otherwise. We’d be living in a state of sin, and our children would be illegitimate.

  DANTON: Little fool—don’t you know God’s a revolutionary?

  LOUISE: A proper priest.

  DANTON: Do you know what you’re asking?

  LOUISE: Or not at all.

  DANTON: You’d better think again.

  LOUISE: I’m trying to make you do the right thing.

  DANTON: I appreciate that, but when you’re my wife you’ll do as you’re told, and you can begin now.

  LOUISE: That’s the only condition I’m making.

  DANTON: Louise, I’m not used to having conditions made to me.

  LOUISE: This is a good start.

  Having failed in their offensive against Marat, the Girondist deputies set up a new committee, to investigate those persons who—they say—are prejudicing the authority of the National Convention. This committee arrests Hébert. Pressure from the Sections and the Commune forces his release. May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into “permanent session”—what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term! May 31, the tocsin rings at three in the morning. The city gates are closed.

  Robespierre: “I invite the people to demonstrate in the Convention itself and drive out the corrupt deputies … . I declare that, having received from the people the mission of defending their rights, I regard as my oppressor whoever interrupts me or refuses to let me speak, and I declare I will lead a revolt against the president and all the members who try to silence me. I declare that I will punish traitors myself, and I promise to look upon every conspirator as my personal enemy … .”

  Isnard, a Girondist, president of the Convention: “If there should be any attack made on the representatives of the nation, then I declare to you in the name of the whole country that Paris would be utterly destroyed—people would be searching along the banks of the Seine to find out whether Paris had ever existed.”

  “For the last few days people haven’t been sleeping at home,” Buzot said. “It isn’t safe. Have you thought of leaving now?”

  “No,” Manon said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You have a child.”

  She put her head back against a cushion, stretching her smooth white throat for him to notice. “That”—she closed her eyes—“can’t be allowed to influence my actions.”

  “It would, for most women.”

  “I’m not most women. You know that.” She opened her eyes. “Do you think I’m without feeling? That’s not it. But there is more at stake here than my feelings. I am not leaving Paris.”

  “The Sections are in insurrection.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I am ashamed. That it should come to this. After all we’ve worked and hoped for.”

  The moment of languor was gone; she sat up, her face alight. “Don’t give up! Why should you talk like this? We have the majority in the Convention. What does Robespierre think he can do against our numbers?”

  “You should never underestimate what Robespierre can do.”

  “To think that I offered him the shelter of my house, at the time of the Champs-de-Mars! I esteemed him. I thought him the citadel of everything that was logical and reasonable and decent.”

  “You aren’t the only person whose judgement he’s led astray,” he said. “Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn’t. You made the wrong choice, my love, you should have held out your hand to Danton.”

  “That blackguard repels me.”

  “I did not mean
in the literal sense.”

  “Shall I tell you what Danton thinks? None of you seems to know. In his eyes you, my husband, Brissot, all of you—you’re a collection of mild-mannered, played-out intellectuals. The men for him are cynics with strong stomachs, flatterers, carnivores—men who destroy for the love of destruction. That is why he treats you with contempt.”

  “No, Manon, that’s not true. He offered to negotiate. He offered a truce. We turned him down.”

  “So you say, but in fact you know it is not possible to negotiate with him. He lays down terms, and he expects you to fall in with them. In the end, he always gets his way.”

  “Yes, possibly you’re right. So there’s not much left, is there? And us, Manon—we’ve had nothing.”

  “The thing about nothing,” she said, “is that Danton can’t take it away.”

  Armed demonstrations outside the Convention. Inside, delegates from the Sections with the list of deputies they wanted ejected and proscribed. Still the majority wouldn’t crack. Robespierre was as white as the sheet of paper that slipped once from his hand; he clung for support to the tribune, and between each sentence there was a labored pause. Vergniaud called out, “Finish, then!” Robespierre’s head snapped back. “Yes, I’ll finish you.”

  Two days later, the Convention was surrounded by an immense crowd, mostly armed, which rapid estimates put at eighty thousand strong; in the front ranks were National Guardsmen, with fixed bayonets and cannon. The people’s demand was for the expulsion of twenty-nine deputies. Among them were Buzot, Vergniaud, Pétion, Louvet, Brissot. It seemed the Guardsmen and the sansculottes intended to imprison the deputies till they agreed. Hérault de Séchelles, who was president that day, led a crococile of deputies from the hall into the open air; this gesture, it was hoped, would defuse the mutual hostility. The gunners stood by their cannon. Their commandant glared down from his horse and harangued the president of the Convention. He was to understand that he, Hérault, was regarded as a patriot; but he was to understand that the people would not be thwarted.