A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  Then suddenly he stopped, sat down or rather fell into a chair. “What am I doing? Saint-Just and I are supposed to be on the same side. We are Jacobins, we are republicans …”

  “I’ll find it for you,” Lucile said quietly.

  “Perhaps better not.”

  For he had begun to see visions: visions of that saint, France’s patron, who had walked for several leagues with his severed head in his hands. He first saw Denis in the Place de Grève, picking his way over the cobbles. He was neatly truncated, there was no gore; but the head swinging almost casually from his left wrist was Camille’s own. He saw him again going stealthily into the Duplay house, for a private meeting with Robespierre; he saw him waiting outside the entrance to the Jacobin Club—a newly arrived patriot, modest and provincial, wanting an introduction to the great world.

  After a day or two it came to him that the only thing to do was to take the initiative. It would be quite easy to kill Saint-Just. He could see him alone, any time, at a convenient place; then a pistol shot, or (not to advertise the incident) a knife. He could see the pain brimming in Saint-Just’s velvet eyes.

  And then, he would need a Plot: Saint-Just’s conspiracy against the Republic, which he had detected with the instinct of the impeccable and tested patriot. I am the Revolution. Who would fail to believe that he had slaughtered Saint-Just in an outburst of patriotic rage? He was not known for containing his temper. To avoid awkward questions it would have to be a small knife, the kind you would hardly know that you were carrying.

  Don’t be stupid, he said to himself. Saint-Just isn’t going to kill you, any more than you’re going to kill him. Or even less.

  He attended the Committee of War, of which he was secretary, and from its rooms wrote a sensible and chatty letter home, asking his father not to mention Rose-Fleur so much in their correspondence, as Lucile was mad with jealousy.

  But still, the fantasy had moved into his brain, it had taken up occupation, he could not evict it. He thought of the hole in Lepelletier’s side, the wound made by a butcher’s killing knife, the wound he took the whole night to die of. He would have to be quick; it would have to be one true, telling blow; Saint-Just was a good deal bigger and stronger than he was, and he would have just one chance. At the Jacobins, when he heard the young man’s sonorous voice, he would smile to himself. He would dream of his plan in the Convention, when Saint-Just was at the tribune, his left hand making brief chopping motions in the air.

  July 13: “A person from Caen,” Danton said. “Pétion and Barbaroux are believed to have been there these last weeks. It is a Girondist conspiracy. Let me assure you, it was not I who arranged it.”

  Camille said, “I heard someone in the street, shouting assassination … I was afraid that I … in a moment of … no, nothing, never mind.”

  Danton stared at him for a second. “Anyway,” he said, “this finishes the Gironde. Murderers and cowards. They sent a woman.”

  There was a crowd in the narrow street, a near-silent and stolid mass, its eyes riveted in fascination on two brightly lit windows of Marat’s apartment. It was an hour after midnight, strangely light, the heat subtropical. Camille waved away the sansculotte who guarded the bottom of the iron-railed steps. The man did not move—not right away.

  “Never seen you close up,” he said. His eyes measured Camille. “How’s Danton taking it?”

  “He is shocked.”

  “I’ll bet. And you’ll be telling me next he’s sorry.”

  Camille was used to the crowd calling out his name. This was a different, more unpleasant, kind of familiarity.

  “Some are saying that Danton and Robespierre have put him where he’ll be quiet,” the man said. “Then again, some are saying it’s the royalists, some are saying it’s Brissot.”

  “I know you,” Camille said. “I’ve seen you running behind Hébert, haven’t I? What are you doing here?”

  He knew: squabbling over the legacy already.

  “Ah,” the man said, “Père Duchesne has his interests. The People will need a new Friend. It won’t be any of you—”

  “Jacques Roux, perhaps?”

  “You with that filthy swine Dillon—”

  Camille pushed past him. Legendre was already in the house, his tricolor sash knotted untidily about his blustering, bulging person: taking charge. The ground seemed to shiver beneath his feet, as if the women’s screams were still rattling the windows; but all was quiet now, except for some stifled sobbing from behind a closed door. You have not eaten much today, Camille said to himself; that is why the walls seem liquid, why the air is disturbed.

  The assassin sat in the parlor. Her hands were tied tightly, and behind her chair were two men with pikes. Before her was a small table covered with a scruffy white cloth, and on it were her assassin’s possessions: a gold watch, a thimble, a reel of white thread, a few loose coins. A passport, a birth certificate; a handkerchief edged with lace; the cardboard sheath of a kitchen knife. On the dusty rug by her feet was a black hat with three brilliant green ribbons.

  He stood against the wall, watching her. She had that kind of thin, translucent skin that reddens and marks easily, catches every nuance of the light. A healthy full-breasted girl, fed on fresh farm butter and the cream of the milk: the kind of girl who smiles at you in church, beribboned and flower-scented on the Sundays after Easter. I know you well, he thought; I remember you from when I was a child. The remains of an elaborate coiffure hung about her face: the kind of hairdo a girl from the provinces would have before she went out to commit a murder.

  “Yes, make her blush,” Legendre said, “you can easily make her blush. But blush for her crime, she won’t blush for that. I thank Providence that I am alive, because she was at my house earlier today. She denies it, but she was there. They were suspicious, wouldn’t let her in. Oh, she denies it, but I was her first choice.”

  “Congratulations,” Camille said. He knew that the girl was in pain because of the way they had tied her hands.

  “She won’t blush,” Legendre said, “for assassinating our greatest patriot.”

  “If that was what she had in mind, she would hardly have wasted her time on you.”

  Simone Evrard was outside the door where they had the body. She had collapsed against the wall, wracked, tear-stained, hardly able to keep her feet. “So much blood, Camille,” she said. “How will we ever get the blood off the floor and the walls?”

  As he opened the door she made a feeble motion to stop him. Dr. Deschamps looked swiftly over his shoulder. One of his assistants stepped forward with an outstretched arm to bar Camille’s way. “I have to know for sure …” Camille whipered. Deschamps turned his head again. “I beg your pardon, Citizen Camille. I didn’t know it was you. Be warned, it’s not pleasant. We are embalming the body, but in this heat … with the condition of the corpse after four, five hours,” the doctor wiped his hands on a towel, “it’s as if he were decaying while he was still alive.”

  He believes, Camille thought, that I am here from the Convention, on some question of protocol. He looked down. Dr. Deschamps put a hand under his elbow. “It was instantaneous,” he said. “Or almost so. He had just time to cry out. He can’t have felt anything. This is where the knife went.” He indicated. “Into the right lung, through the artery, piercing the heart. We couldn’t close his mouth, so we had to cut out the tongue. All right? You see, he’s still quite identifiable. Now, let me get you out of here. I’m burning the strongest aromatics I can find, but it is not a smell for the layman.”

  Outside Simone was still propped against the wall. Her breath rasped. “I told them to give this woman an opiate,” Deschamps said crossly. “Do you want me to sign anything? No, I see. Look, I assume you have an official escort? I don’t know what this nonsense is, everyone knows that Marat is dead. I’ve already had someone from the Jacobins throwing up over my assistants. You look like the fainting type, so I should get outside as soon as you can. Order something done about the wife, o
r whoever she is, will you?”

  The door clocked shut. Simone slumped into his arms. From the next room came voices raised in curt questioning. “I was his wife,” Simone moaned. “He didn’t marry me in church, he didn’t take me to City Hall, but he swore by all the gods in creation that I was his wife.”

  What is it, Camille thought, does she want me to advise her on her rights? “You will be recognized as his relict,” he said. “No one these days pays much attention to the formalities. It’s all yours now, the printing press and the paper for the next edition. Be careful with it. I should think the state will be paying for the funeral.”

  Outside in the street he looked back once, to the windows where the busy shadows of Deschamps and his assistants moved against the light. Rain began to fall, big warm drops. There was thunder somewhere in the distance—over Versailles perhaps. The crowd stood, patient, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for what would happen next.

  David took charge of arrangements. The body was to be sealed in a coffin of lead, and enclosed in a larger sarcophagus of purple porphyry, taken from the Collection of Antiquities at the Louvre. But for the funeral procession, it was desired to carry the deceased on a bier, swathed in a tricolor (the cloth drenched in spirits). One bare arm, sewn on from a better class of corpse, bore a laurel wreath; young girls dressed in white and bearing cypress branches surrounded the bier.

  After them the Convention, the Clubs, the People. The procession began at five in the afternoon; it ended at midnight, by the light of torches. He was to be buried as he had preferred to live, underground, the cellar-like tomb overhung with blocks of stone and fenced about by iron.

  The heart, embalmed separately, was placed in an urn; the patriots of the Cordeliers Club bore it away, to keep it on their premises forever and ever, till the last day of the world. “Sacred heart of Marat,” the people wailed.

  HERE LIES MARAT

  THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND

  KILLED BY THE PEOPLE’S ENEMIES

  13 JULY 1793

  The demeanor of Robespierre in the funeral procession was remarked upon by one observer. He looked, the witness said, as if he were conducting the corpse to a rubbish tip.

  CHAPTER 9

  East Indians

  July 25: Danton threw his weight back in his chair, threw his head back, laughed uproariously. Louise flinched; she was always worrying about the furniture, and he was always assuring her that there was plenty of money for replacing it. “The day I parted company with the Committee,” he said, “I saw something I thought I’d never see—I saw Fabre d’Eglantine deprived of speech.” Danton was slightly tipsy; every so often he would lean across the table to squeeze the hand of his new wife. “So, Fabre, still struck dumb, are you?”

  “No, no,” Fabre said uncertainly. “It’s true, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, sitting on a committee with Saint-Just. And it’s true, as you say, that Robert Lindet’s elected, and he’s a solid patriot who we can trust. And Hérault’s elected, and he’s our friend …”

  “You’re not convinced. Look, Fabre, I am Danton, can you get that through your skull? The Committee may need me, but I don’t need the Committee. Now, allow me to propose a toast to myself, since no one else has the grace to do it. To me—the newly elected president of the Convention.” He raised his glass to Lucile. “Now more toasts,” he demanded. “To my friend General Westermann, may he prosper against the rebels in the Vendée.”

  He was lucky, Lucile thought, to get Westermann his command back, after that last defeat; Westermann is lucky to be at large. “To the Sacred Heart of Marat,” Danton said. Louise gave him a sharp look. “I’m sorry, my love, I don’t mean to blaspheme, I’m just repeating what is said by the poor deluded rabble on the streets. Why did the Gironde go after Marat? He was half-dead anyway. Then again, if the bitch was acting on her own initiative, as she claimed, doesn’t it just prove what I’ve always said, that women have no political sense? She should have gone for Robespierre, or me.”

  Oh, don’t say that, Louise begged him; at the same time she found it difficult to imagine a kitchen knife slicing through those solid layers of muscle and fat. Danton looked down the table. “Camille,” he said, “one drop of ink disposed by you is worth all the blood in Marat’s body.”

  He refilled glasses. He will drink another bottle, Louise thought, and then perhaps he will fall asleep right away. “And to Liberty,” he said. “Raise your glass, General.”

  “To Liberty,” said General Dillon, feelingly. “Long may we, if you know what I mean, be at liberty to enjoy it.”

  July 26: Robespierre sat with his head bowed, his hands knotted together between his knees; he was the picture of misery. “Do you see?” he asked. “I have always resisted such involvement, I have always refused office.”

  “Yes,” Camille said. He had a headache, from last night. “The situation changes.”

  “Now, you see—” Robespierre had developed a minute facial tic, distressing to him; every so often he would break off what he was saying and press his hand against his cheek. “It’s clear that a firm central authority … with the enemy advancing on every front … You know I have always defended the Committee, always seen the need for it … .

  “Yes. Stop apologizing. You’ve won an election, not committed a crime.”

  “And there are factions—shall I say Hébert, shall I say Jacques Roux—who wish France to have no strong government. They take advantage of the natural discontents of the man in the street, exploit them and make all the trouble they can. They put forward measures that can only be called ultra-revolutionary, measures that seem disgusting and threatening to decent people. They bring the Revolution into disrepute. They try to kill it by excess. That is why I call them agents of the enemy.” He put his hand to his face again. “If only,” he said, “Danton were not so chronically careless.”

  “Clearly he doesn’t think the Committee as important as you do.”

  “Put it on record,” Robespierre said, “that I didn’t seek the office. Citizen Gasparin fell ill, it was thrust upon me. I do hope they won’t start calling it the Robespierre Committee. I shall be just one among many …”

  One best friend off the Committee. The other best friend on. Camille is used to being the experimental audience for speeches Robespierre is rehearsing; it has been like this since ‘89. Ever since that charged, emotional moment at the Duplays’ house—“you were always in my heart”—he has felt that more is expected of him. Robespierre is becoming one of those people in whose company it is impossible to relax for a moment.

  Two days later the Committee of Public Safety is given the power to issue warrants for arrest.

  Jacques Roux, whose following grows, announced that the new author of his news sheet was “the ghost of Marat.” Hébert advised the Jacobins that if Marat needed a successor—and the aristocrats another victim—he was ready. “That talentless little man,” Robespierre said. “How dare he?”

  On August 8, Simone Evrard appeared at the Bar of the Convention, and made an impassioned denunciation of certain persons who were leading the sansculottes to perdition. All her views, she said, were those expressed by the martyr, her husband, in his last hours. It was a fluent, confident tirade; just occasionally she paused to peer more closely at her notes, to puzzle out Citizen Robespierre’s tiny, uneven handwriting.

  A week later there is another addition to the Committee of Public Safety: Lazare Camot, the military engineer whom Robespierre had first met at the Academy of Arras. “I don’t particularly get on with military men,” Robespierre said. “They seem to be full of personal ambition, and to have a strange set of priorities. But they are a necessary evil. Camot always,” he added distantly, “seemed to know what he was talking about.”

  Thus Carnot, later to be known as the Organizer of Victory; Robespierre, the Organizer of Carnot.

  When the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal was arrested (suspected of mishandling the trial of Marat’s assassin) his replacement was Cit
izen Hermann, late of the Arras Bar. Hadn’t he, all those years ago, been the only one to recognize that Robespierre was talking sense? “I knew him,” he said to Mme. Duplay, “when I was a young man.”

  “What do you think you are now?” she asked him.

  The outgoing president was taken away by gendarmes while the Tribunal was actually in session. Fouquier-Tinville liked a drama; his cousin had no monopoly.

  When the Minister of the Interior resigned, the two rivals for the post were Hébert and Jules Pare, now a lawyer of note. The latter was appointed. “We all know why, of course,” said Hébert. “He was once Danton’s managing clerk. We get so big for our boots that we don’t actually do any work ourselves, we just let our minions exercise power on our behalf. He has his other clerk, Desforgues, at the Foreign Office. Pare and Danton are as thick as thieves. Just as,” he added, “Danton was with Dumouriez.”

  “Odious runt,” Danton said. “Isn’t it enough for him to have his creatures all over the War Office, and his so-called newspaper distributed to the troops?”

  He asserted himself at the Jacobin Club; won some applause. As he quit the rostrum, Robespierre rose to speak. “No one,” he told the club, “has the right to voice the least breath of criticism against Danton. Anyone who seeks to discredit him must first prove a match for him in energy, forcefulness and patriotic zeal.”

  More applause; some members rose to their feet. Danton was cheered; sprawled on the bench, sans cravat and badly shaven, he inclined his head. Robespierre was cheered; patting his cuffs into place—a gesture like some ersatz Sign of the Cross—he bobbed his head to his admirers and gave the club his diffident smile. Then—presumably for simply existing—Citizen Camille was applauded. This is what he likes, isn’t it? He was back center stage, the sweetheart of the Revolution, the enfant terrible whose whims will always be indulged. Presumably somewhere on the benches skulked Renaudin the violin maker, with his memorable right hook; but for the moment the only danger was the enthusiasm of the patriots, ambushing him with bear hugs. For the second time, he found himself crushed against Maurice Duplay’s shoulder. He thought of the first time, when he had his precarious escape from Babette.