A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  Anne-Madeleine’s husband held a torch high. And there she was—it was Louise’s first sight of these alarming sisters—running and tripping over her feet, like some schoolgirl. “Georges, Georges, my brother Georges!” She hurled herself at him. His arm encircled her. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, kissed him on both cheeks, broke away and scooped up the nearest of her children and held up the little boy for inspection. This was Anne-Madeleine, who had pulled him out from under the bull’s feet.

  And here was Marie-Cécile; her convent had dispersed, she was home, she was where she should be: didn’t he say he’d look after her? She still had her nun’s deportment; she tried to fold her hands away in the sleeves of a habit she no longer wore. And here was Pierrette, tall, smiling, full-faced, a spinster more matronly than most of the mothers of Paris. Anne-Madeleine’s latest baby dribbled onto her shoulder. They surrounded Louise and squeezed her; they felt, as they did so, the ghost promise of Gabrielle’s opulent flesh. “My little dove!” they said, laughing. “You are so young!”

  They dived away, the sisters, into the kitchen. “Bleak little thing! So duty-ridden! No breasts at all!”

  “Didn’t you think he’d bring that Lucile-thing? That black-eyed girl? That he’d detach her from her black-eyed husband?”

  “No, that evil pair, they were born for each other.” The sisters fell about, laughing. The visit of the Desmoulinses had been one of the high points of their lives; they couldn’t wait for them to come back again, creating a similar metropolitan frisson.

  They began to play out the scene taking place between Georges-Jacques and their mother. “It’s a comfort,” croaked Marie-Cécile, “to see you again before I die.”

  “Die?” Anne-Madeleine said. “You old fraud, you’ll not die. You’ll outlive me, I swear it.”

  “And how Georges-Jacques does swear!” said Pierrette. “How he does! Do you think he’s fallen into bad company?”

  In the parlor of the manor house, Mme. Recordain’s blue eyes were sparkling into the dusk. “Come in from the night air, daughter. Sit here by me.” Diagnostic fingers studded themselves into her waist. Two months! And not pregnant! The Italian girl, who was dead, did her duty by Georges-Jacques—now we have one of these skimpy Parisiennes on our hands.

  As if fearing that this examination might be taking place, the sisters came surging out from somewhere in the depth of the house. They swarmed about their brother, proposing various kinds of food he might eat, patting his head and making family jokes-soft-bodied country-women, in their strange, dowdy, practical clothes.

  “It might be better if you were the one to uncover it.” Fabre had not heard Lucile say this, but it was his own thought. On the day Danton left Paris he sat alone in his apartment, fighting his desire to shriek and smash and hammer the walls, like a bad child to whom promises have been broken. He took up again the brief, polite noncommittal note that Danton had sent around before his departure; he tore it into tiny strips and burned it shred by shred.

  After a tiring and disputatious meeting of the Jacobin Club, he intercepted Robespierre and Saint-Just as they walked side by side from the hall. Saint-Just did not attend assiduously at the evening meetings; he thought the sessions pointless, though he did not say so, and to himself he called the members opinion mongers. He was not much interested in anyone’s opinions. In a few days he would be in Alsace, with the armies. He was looking forward to it.

  “Citizens.” Fabre beckoned. “Word with you?”

  The irritation on Saint-Just’s face deepened. Robespierre thought of the pretty new calendar, and fetched up a wintery smile.

  “Please?” Fabre said. “Something of extreme importance. Would you grant me a private interview?”

  “Is it a lengthy matter?” Robespierre asked politely.

  “Now look, Fabre,” Saint-Just said, “we’re busy.” Robespierre had to smile again at young Antoine’s tone: Max is my friend and we’re not playing with you. He half-expected that Fabre would step back a pace and survey Saint-Just through his lorgnette. But that didn’t happen; pale, clumsily urgent, Fabre solicited his attention. Saint-Just’s rudeness had thrown him off balance. “I have to see the Committee,” he said. “This is business for them.”

  “Then don’t shout about it.”

  “Only conspirators whisper.” Seeing his chance, Fabre recovered suddenly into a grand resonance. “Soon the whole Republic must know my news.”

  Saint-Just looked at him with distaste. “We are not on the stage,” he observed.

  Robespierre darted a glance at Saint-Just, rather shocked. “You’re right, Fabre. If your news concerns the Republic, it must be broadcast.” At the same time, he looked around swiftly to see who had heard.

  “It is a matter of public safety.”

  “Then he must come to the Committee.”

  “No,” Saint-Just said. “Tonight’s agenda will keep us working till dawn. There is no single item that is not a matter of extreme urgency. There is nothing that can be postponed, and I, Citizen Fabre, have to be at my desk by nine tomorrow.”

  Fabre ignored him, and took Robespierre by the arm. “I have to reveal a conspiracy.” Robespierre’s eyes widened. “However, it will not mature overnight—if we move with energy tomorrow, there will be time enough. Young Citizen Saint-Just needs his rest. He is not accustomed to watching late, like we elder patriots.”

  It was a mistake. Robespierre looked at him icily. “I happen to be informed, Citizen Fabre, that most of your watching late is done in a gambling house whose existence is unknown to the patriots of the Commune, in the company of Citizen Desmoulins’s winning streak and several women of dubious reputation.”

  “For the love of God,” Fabre said, “take me seriously.”

  Robespierre considered him. “Is it a complicated conspiracy?”

  “Its ramifications are enormous.”

  “Very well. Citizen Saint-Just and myself meet tomorrow with the Committee of General Security.”

  “I know.”

  “Will that be suitable?”

  “The Police Committee will be most suitable. It will expedite matters.”

  “I see. We meet at—”

  “I know.”

  “I see. Good night.”

  Saint-Just shifted from foot to foot. “Robespierre, you’re expected. The Committee will be waiting.”

  “They will not, I hope,” Robespierre said. “They will be getting on with the business, I hope. No one should be waited for. No one is indispensable.” But he followed.

  “The man is untrustworthy,” Saint-Just said. “He is theatrical. He is hysterical. I have no doubt that this conspiracy is a figment of his too-active imagination.”

  “He is a friend of Danton’s and a proven patriot,” Robespierre corrected snappily. “He is a great poet.” He brooded as they walked. “I am inclined to credit what he says. He was very white in the face, and he had not his lorgnette.”

  It seemed, it seemed all too credible. Taut, quiet, motionless, his hands palm down on the table, Robespierre took over the interrogation. He had moved from a corner of the table to a place directly opposite Fabre, and the committeemen, moving fast, had clumsily scraped their chairs out of his way; now they sat silent, skipping to the beat of his intuitions. He would ask sharply for Fabre to stop; he would make a note, and then wiping his pen and putting it aside deliberately he would spread out his fingers on the tabletop and glance up at Fabre to indicate that he should begin again.

  Fabre slumped in his chair. “And when,” he said, “within a month, Chabot comes to you and says, there is a plot, I hope you will remember who first gave you these names.”

  “You,” Robespierre said, “shall interrogate him.”

  Fabre swallowed. “Citizen,” he said, “I am very sorry to be the agent of your disillusionment. You must have believed many of these people to be staunch patriots?”

  “I?” Robespierre looked up with a small joyless smile. “I already have the names of th
ese foreigners in my notebooks. Anyone may see them. That they were corrupt and dangerous I was well aware, but now you speak to me of systematic conspiracy, of money from Pitt—do you think I don’t see it clearly, and more clearly than any of you do? The economic sabotage, the extremist policies which they advocate at the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, the blasphemous, intolerant attacks on the Christian religion, which disturb the good people and turn them away from the new order—do you think I suppose these things are not related?”

  “No,” Fabre said. “No, I should have realized that you would make the connection for yourself. You intend to order arrests?”

  “I think not.” Robespierre looked around the table, expecting no contradiction. “As we are fully aware of their maneuvers now, we can afford to let them exhaust themselves in their labors for a week or two.” He glanced around again. “In that way we will discover all their accomplices. We will purify the Revolution once and for all. Have you heard enough?” One or two people nodded, their faces strained, at a loss. “I haven’t, but we won’t take up any more of your time.” He stood up, tapping his papers together with his fingertips. “Come,” he said to Fabre.

  “Come?” Fabre said stupidly.

  Robespierre motioned with his head towards the door. Fabre got up and followed him. He felt weak and shaky. Robespierre turned into a small room, barely furnished, rather like the one they had occupied on the day of the late riot.

  “Do you often work in here?”

  “As occasion demands. I like to have somewhere private. You can sit down, it’s not dusty.”

  Fabre saw an army of locksmiths, window cleaners, old women with brooms, scouring the attics and cellars of public buildings to make clean hiding places for Robespierre. “Leave the door open,” Robespierre said, “as a precaution against eavesdroppers.” He tossed his notes onto the table; Fabre thought, that’s an acquired gesture, he got that from Camille. “You seem nervous,” Robespierre commented.

  “What—I mean, what more would you like me to tell you?”

  “Just whatever you like.” Robespierre was accommodating. “Minor points we could clear up now. The real names of the brothers Frei.”

  “Emmanuel Dobruska. Siegmund Gotleb.”

  “I’m not surprised they changed them, are you?”

  “Why didn’t you ask me in front of the others?”

  Robespierre ignored him. “This man Proli, Hérault’s secretary, we see him at the Jacobins. Some people say that he is the natural son of Chancellor Kaunitz of Austria. Is that true?”

  “Yes. Well, quite possibly.”

  “Hérault is an anomaly. He’s an aristocrat by birth, yet he is never attacked by Hébert.” Hérault, Fabre thinks: and his mind drifts back—as it tends to, these days—to the Café du Foy. He’d been giving readings from his latest—Augusta was dying the death at the Italiens—and in came this huge, rough-looking boy, shoe-horned into a lawyer’s black suit, whom he’d made a sketch of in the street, ten years before. The boy had developed this upper-class drawl, and he’d talked about Hérault—“his looks are impeccable, he’s well traveled, he’s pursued by all the ladies at Court”—and beside Danton had been this fey wide-eyed egotist who had turned out to be half the city’s extramarital interest. The years pass … plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose … “Fabre, are you with me?” said Robespierre.

  “Oh, very much so.”

  Robespierre leaned forward and plaited his fingers together; and Fabre, dragged up from the deeps of ’87, ’88, began to sweat. He heard what Robespierre was saying, and it was enough to chill the blood. “As Hérault is never attacked by Hébert, I feel they must have a common allegiance. Hébert’s people are not just misguided fanatics—they are in touch with all these foreign elements you denounce. The object of their violent speeches and actions is to produce fear and disgust. They set out to make the Revolution appear ridiculous, and to destroy its credibility.”

  “Yes,” Fabre looked away. “I understand that.”

  “Hand in hand with this go the attempts to discredit great patriots. For example, the allegations against Danton.”

  “It is clear,” Fabre said.

  “One wonders why such conspirators should approach you.”

  Fabre shook his head: wonderingly, glumly. “They have already met with some success, in the very heart of the Mountain. I suppose it encourages them. Chabot, Julien … all trusted men. Naturally, when these are examined, they will claim I’m implicated.”

  “Our orders to you,” Robespierre put his fingertips together, “are to keep a careful eye on those people you’ve named—especially those you suspect of economic crimes.”

  “Yes,” Fabre said. “Er—whose orders?”

  Robespierre looked up, surprised. “The Committee’s.”

  “Of course. I should have known you spoke for all.” Fabre leaned forward. “Citizen, I beg you not to be taken in by anything Chabot says. He and his friends are very glib and plausible.”

  “You think I’m a complete fool, do you, Fabre?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You may go now.”

  “Thank you. Trust me. Over the next month you’ll see everything come to fruition”

  Robespierre dismissed him with a wave of his hand, as thoughtlessly peremptory as any anointed despot. Outside the door Fabre took out a silk handkerchief and dabbed his face. It had been the most unpleasant morning of his life—if you excepted the morning in 1777 when he’d been sentenced to hang—and yet in another way it had been easier than he’d expected. Robespierre had swallowed every suggestion, as if they merely confirmed conclusions he had already reached. “This foreign plot,” he’d kept saying. Clearly he was interested in the politics, and hardly at all in the East India Company. And will it, as he promised, come to fruition? Oh yes: because you can rely on Hébert to rant, on Chabot to cheat and lie and steal, on Chaumette to harass priests and close down churches—and now, every time they speak they’ll condemn themselves out of their own mouths; all these separate strands he sees as knotted together in conspiracy, and who knows, perhaps they are, perhaps they are. A pity he suspects Hérault. I could warn him, but what use? Life anyway is so precarious for the ci-devants, perhaps his days were already numbered.

  And the main thing is this—he trusts Danton. I’m Danton’s man. And so perhaps I’ve cleared myself. By telling him what he wants to hear.

  Saint-Just smiled when he saw him. I’m in favor, he thought. Then he noticed the expression in his eyes. “Is Robespierre in there?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve just come from him.”

  Saint-Just shouldered past. He had to flatten himself against the wall. “Leave the door open as a precaution against eavesdroppers,” he called. Saint-Just slammed it behind him. Fabre began to hum. He was working on a new play called The Maltese Orange, and it suddenly came to him that he might turn it into an operetta.

  Inside the room Robespierre looked up. “I thought you were getting ready for your trip to the frontier?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Of Fabre’s plot? It fits all your preconceived ideas. I wonder if he knows that?”

  Robespierre bridled. “You cast doubt on it?”

  “Any pretext,” Saint-Just said, “will do to rid us of foreigners and speculators and Hébertists. As long as you bear in mind that Fabre himself is unlikely to be free from blame.”

  “So you don’t trust him.”

  Saint-Just laughed; as much as he ever did laugh. “The man’s old in deception. You’re aware that he calls himself ‘d’Églantine’ in commemoration of a literary prize from the Academy of Toulouse?” Robespierre nodded. “In the year when he claims to have taken the prize, no prize was awarded.”

  “I see.” Robespierre looked away: a delicate, sly, sidelong glance. “You could not be mistaken?”

  Saint-Just flushed. “Of course not. I’ve inquired. I’ve checked the records.”

  “
No doubt,” Robespierre said meekly, “he thought he ought to have won the prize. No doubt he thought he had been cheated.”

  “The man’s founded his whole life on a lie!”

  “Perhaps more a self-delusion.” Robespierre smiled distantly. “After all, despite what I said, he’s not a great poet. Just a mediocre one. This is petty, Saint-Just. How much time have you wasted on it?” The satisfaction wiped itself out of Saint-Just’s face. “You know,” Robespierre went on, “I’d have liked to win one of those literary prizes myself—something distinguished, not local stuff—Toulouse or somewhere.”

  “But those prizes were institutions of the old regime.” Saint-Just sounded hurt. “That’s done with, finished. It’s from before the Revolution.”

  “There was such a time, you know.”

  “You are too much wedded to the manners and appearances of the old regime.”

  “That,” Robespierre said, “is a very serious accusation.”

  Saint-Just looked as if he would rather back down. Robespierre rose from his chair. He was the shorter by perhaps six inches. “Do you wish to replace me, with someone more thoroughly revolutionary?”

  “I have no such thought, I protest.”

  “I feel you wish to replace me.”

  “This is a mistake.”

  “If you attempt to replace me, I will look for your part in this plot and I will demand your head in the Convention.”

  Saint-Just raised his eyebrows. “You are deluded,” he said. “I am going to the armies.”

  Robespierre’s voice reached out to him as he crashed out of the room: “I’ve known about Fabre’s prize for years. Camille told me. We laughed about it. What does it matter? Am I the only one who knows what matters? Am I the only one with any sense of proportion at all?”

  Maximilien Robespierre: “Over the last two years, 100,000 men have been slain as a result of treason and weakness; it is our feeble attitude towards traitors that is our undoing.”