A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “Cynical,” Eléonore said.

  “No, it’s a viewpoint—the way he looks at it, you do have your general principles to guide you, but you have to make the best of each situation as it arises. Now Saint-Just, he thinks differently—in his opinion, you have to see in each particular circumstance a chance to make your principles operate. Everything, for him, is an opportunity to state the larger case.”

  “And where do you stand?”

  “Oh, I’m just”—he threw his hands out—“floundering. Only here, with this issue, I do know where I am. I will not have this intolerance, I will not have this bigotry, I will not have the lifetime’s faith of simple people pulled from under them by dilettantes with no idea of what faith means. They call the priests bigots, but they are the bigots, who want to stop Mass being said.”

  You “won’t have it,” she thought. That means the Tribunal, if they don’t back down. She herself was not inclined to believe in a God; or not in a beneficent one, anyway.

  Up in his room he wrote a letter to Danton. He read it over, corrected it minutely, as he corrected everything, scoring it over, refining his meaning, stating his case. He was not satisfied with it; he tore it up—into small pieces, because he was not too angry to be careful—and wrote another. He wanted to ask Danton to come to Paris and help him crush Hébert. He wanted to say that he needed help, but would not be patronized: needed an ally, but would not be dominated.

  Even the second draft was not satisfactory. Why didn’t he think of asking Camille to write it? Camille could put his case so simply, had put it so simply earlier that day: “We don’t need processions and rosaries and relics, but we do need, when things are very bad, the prospect of consolation—we do need, when things are even worse, the idea that in the long run there is someone who could manage to forgive us.”

  He sat with his head bowed. You have to smile; what would Father Bérardier say? Here we are, when all’s said and done, two good Catholic boys. Never mind that he hasn’t heard Mass in years, that Camille counts a week wasted if he hasn’t broken every Commandment in the book. Strange, really, how you find yourself back where you started. Or not, of course: he remembered Camille being slapped around the head by Father Proyart for taking Plutarch’s Lives to Mass. “I’d just got to an exciting bit …”he’d said. In those days Plutarch passed for excitement. No wonder Camille cut loose when he got away from the priests. They asked us to be something more than human. And I, I struggled on, trying to be what they wanted—though I didn’t know I was doing it, though I thought I was living by another creed entirely.

  His lighter mood didn’t last long. He addressed himself to a third draft. How does one write to Danton? He took out his DANTON notebook and read it over. He was no wiser when he finished, but much more depressed.

  Jean-Marie Roland was in hiding in Rouen. On the day—November 10—when the news of his wife’s execution reached him, he left the house where he was hiding and walked some three miles out of town. He carried his sword-stick in his hand. He stopped in a deserted lane, by an apple orchard, and sat down under one of the trees. This was the place; there was no point in walking any further.

  The ground was iron-hard, the trunk of the tree was cold to the touch; winter was in the air. He experimented; the first sight of his own blood dismayed him, turned him sick. But this was the place.

  The body was found sometime later, by a passerby who had at first taken him to be an elderly man asleep. It was impossible to say for how many hours he had been dead or whether, impaled by the slender blade, it had taken him very long to die.

  November 11, in pouring rain, Mayor Bailly was executed; by popular request, a guillotine was set up for the occasion on the Champs-de-Mars, where in ’91 Lafayette had fired on the people.

  “Camille,” Lucile said, “there’s a marquis to see you.” Camille looked up from The City of God, and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Impossible.”

  “Well then, a former marquis.”

  “Does he look respectable?”

  “Yes, very. All right? I’ll leave you then.”

  Suddenly, and after all these years, she has no appetite for politics. Vergniaud’s dying words keep running through her head: “The Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children.” It is becoming one of the slogans and pat phrases she seems to have lived by. (Does a father’s authority count for nothing? I don’t know why people complain they can’t make money nowadays, I have no trouble. They were my friends and my writings have killed them.) They run through her dreams every night, she finds them rising to her lips in conversation, the common currency of the last five years. (It’s all organized, no one who’s innocent will be touched. I loathe firm government. There’s nothing to worry about, M. Danton will look after us.) She no longer attends the debates of the Convention, sitting in the public gallery eating sweets with Louise Robert. She went once to the Tribunal, to hear Cousin Antoine bullying his victims; once was enough.

  “Some confusion over identity,” de Sade said to Camille. “I should have sent in my credentials as an official of the Section des Piques. My mind was wandering. That’s enough to get someone denounced as suspect.” He reached out one of his small, soft hands and took away Camille’s book. “Devotional reading,” he said. “My dear. This is nothing to do with … ?”

  “Fainting? Oh no. Just my usual diversion. I’m writing a work on the Church Fathers.”

  “Each to his own,” de Sade said. “We authors must look out for each other, don’t you think?”

  He was in his early fifties now, a small man, rather plump, with receding grayish blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had put on weight, but he still moved with elegance. He wore the dark clothes and tensely purposeful expression of the Terrorist politician, and he carried a folio of papers knotted with a flamboyant tricolor ribbon. “Obscene illustrations?” Camille inquired, indicating it.

  “Good God,” de Sade said, shocked. “You consider yourself my moral superior, don’t you, M. Lanterne Attorney?”

  “Well, I am most people’s moral superior. I know all the theory, and I have all the ethical scruples. It is only in my conduct that there is something wanting. Can I have Saint Augustine back, please?”

  De Sade looked round for a table, and laid the saint facedown. “You unnerve me,” he said. Camille looked pleased. “I thought you might like to tell me about these regrets you are having,” the Marquis said. He took a chair.

  Camille thought for a moment. “No … I don’t think I would. But you can tell me about yours, if you like.”

  “The Bastille,” de Sade said. “It’s all double-edged, isn’t it? Take the fall of the Bastille. It made you famous. And I congratulate you. It shows how the wicked prosper, and how even the semi-wicked have a distinct advantage. Also it was a great step forward for humanity, whoever they may be. For my part, I was moved out before the trouble started, and in such a hurry that I left the manuscript of my new novel behind. I got out of prison on Good Friday—after eleven years, Camille—and my papers were nowhere to be found. It was a great blow to me, I can tell you.”

  “What was it, your novel?”

  “120 Days of Sodom.”

  “Well, heavens,” Camille said, “it’s more than four years, haven’t you had time to get it together again?”

  “Not any 120 days,” the Marquis said. “It was a feat of imagination which in these attenuated times it is difficult to reproduce.”

  “What did you come for, Citizen? Not to talk about your novels, surely?”

  The Marquis sighed. “Just to air my views. About the times, you know. I loved what happened at Brissot’s trial. To think of you recovering your senses, such as they are, in the arms of all those strong men. So what do you think now—do you think it would have been possible not to kill Brissot’s people?”

  “I didn’t, but now I think—yes, we might have managed it.”

  “Even after Marat’s death?”

  “I suppose there is at least a chance
that the girl did it by herself. She claimed she did. But no one even listened to her. Brissot’s trial went on for days. They were allowed to speak. They called witnesses. It was all reported in the newspapers. It was only pressure from Hébert that stopped it, or we could have been arguing still.”

  “Just so,” de Sade said.

  “But in future defendants won’t have those rights. It is regarded as not expeditious, not republican. I am afraid of the consequences of cutting the trials short. I think that people are being killed who need not be. But the killings go on.”

  “And the judgements,” de Sade said. “The judgements in the courtroom. You see I approve the duel, the vendetta, the crime of passion. But this machinery of Terror operates with no passion at all.”

  “Forgive me—I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about.”

  “You know, your first writings were so entirely without pity, so completely devoid of the conventional mouthings—I had hopes for you. But now you’re beginning to retrace your steps. Repent. Aren’t you? You know, I was secretary of my Section committee in September. Not last September: the one past, when we killed the prisoners. There was something pure and revolutionary and absolutely fitting about the way the blood flowed—the speed, the fear. But now we have the jury’s verdict, the hair-cutting, the carts. We have the lawyers’ arguments before death. Nature should visit death; it should not be something you argue against.”

  “I am sure I do not see why you are visiting this rubbish on me.”

  “I suppose that to you—at least in your present frame of mind—it is only the legal process that makes it acceptable. More acceptable, if the trial is fair, and less acceptable if the witnesses are bullied and the trial is cut short. But to me it is all unacceptable, you see. The more they argue, the worse it is. I can’t go on any longer.” There was a pause. “Are you writing anything?” the Marquis asked. “I mean, besides your theological work?” Misunderstood again; his timid pale eyes were like those of an old hare, expecting traps.

  Camille hesitated. “I’m thinking of writing. I must see what support I have. It is difficult. We know there are conspiracies, our whole lives are eaten away by them. We dare not speak freely to our best friends, or trust our wives or parents or children. Does that sound melodramatic? It is like Rome in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.”

  “I don’t know,” de Sade said. “But if you say so, it probably is. I’ve been to Rome, you know? Waste of time. They’ve put up all these little chapels round the Colosseum, it ruins the place. Saw the Pope. Vulgarity incarnate. Still, I suppose Tiberius was worse.” He looked up. “What would you do with my opinions?”

  “About the Pope?”

  “About the Terror.”

  “I think I’d keep them to myself, if I were you.”

  “But I haven’t, you see. I’ve said at a meeting of my Section that the Terror must be stopped. I expect they’ll arrest me soon. Then we’ll see what we see. I tell you, dear Citizen Camille—it’s not the deaths I can’t stand. It’s the judgements, the judgements in the courtroom.”

  Danton arrived back on November 20. He had in his pocket letters from Robespierre, from Fabre, from Camille. Robespierre’s had a hysterical tinge, Fabre’s sounded tearful and Camille’s was merely strange. He resisted the temptation to fold them up small and wear them as phylacteries.

  They reinstalled themselves in the apartment. Louise looked up at him accusingly. “You’re thinking of going out.”

  “It’s not every day,” he said, “that Citizen Robespierre requests my company at his revels.”

  “All this time, you’ve been thinking about Paris. I believe you’ve been longing to get back.”

  “Look at me.” He took her hands. “I know I’m a fool. When I’m here, I want to be in Arcis. When I’m in Arcis, I want to be here. But I want you to understand that the Revolution isn’t a game, that I can leave when I choose.” His voice was very serious; he put a hand to her waist, drew her to him. God, how he loved her! “In Arcis we avoided speaking of this, we spoke of simpler things. But it’s not a game, and it isn’t something, either, that I engage in just for my own profit, or gratification.” His fingers touched her mouth, very softly, stopping what she was going to say. “Once it was, yes. But we have to think very carefully now, sweetheart. We have to think carefully about what will happen to the country. And to us.”

  “So that is what you have been doing. Thinking carefully.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are going to see Robespierre now?”

  “Not directly.” He lifted his chin. His mood was once again worldly, jocular; he was pulling away from her. “I need to be well informed before I see him. Robespierre, you know, hurls abuse at any fellow who doesn’t keep up with events.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Not much,” he said cheerfully. He kissed her. They were more on terms now, on terms of his choosing; though he felt—and it hurt him—that she was frightened of him. “Aren’t you even a little bit glad to be back?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Back in our own street. Georges, I couldn’t live with your mother. We’ll have to have our own house.”

  “Yes, we’ll do that.”

  “Will you start seeing about it? Because we don’t want to be in Paris for much longer, do we?”

  He didn’t answer. “I’ll not be long,” he said.

  In the minute it took him to walk around the corner, he managed to greet half a dozen people, slap a few backs, hurry on before anyone could stop him to talk. By nightfall it would be all over the city: he’s back. Just as he was about to go into the Desmoulinses’ building, he became aware of something new—some obtrusive detail, nagging at the corner of his eye. He stepped back, looked up. Cut into the stone above his head were the words RUE MARAT.

  For a moment he had the urge to turn back around the corner, climb the stairs, shout to the servants not to bother unpacking, they’d be returning to Arcis in the morning. He looked up to the lighted windows above his head. If I go up there, he thought, I’ll never be free again. If I go up there I commit myself to Max, to joining with him to finish Hébert, and perhaps to governing with him. I commit myself to fishing Fabre out of trouble—though God alone knows how that’s to be managed. I put myself once more under the threat of assassination; I recommence the blood feuds, the denunciations.

  His face hardened. You can’t stand in the street calling into question the last five years of your life, just because they’ve changed the street name; you can’t let it alter the future. No, he thought—and he saw it clearly, for the first time—it’s an illusion, about quitting, about going back to Arcis to farm. I’ve been lying to Louise: once in, never out.

  “Thank God,” Lucile said. “I was thinking of coming to get you.”

  Her lips brushed his cheek. He’d been preparing to interrogate her closely about Camille and Robespierre, but instead he said, “How beautiful you are. I believe I’d forgotten.”

  “In five weeks?”

  “I’d never really forget.” He put his arms around her. “That was very sweet of you, to be so eager for my presence. You should have come to Arcis, I would have liked it.”

  “Louise wouldn’t, or your mother.”

  “It would have given them something in common.”

  “I see. As bad as that?”

  “A disaster. Louise is too young, too citified and quite the wrong shape. And how are you?”

  “Oh Lord—mixed up.” She tried to pull away from him, but he held on to her, tightening his arms around her waist. How strong she was, full of fight; he believed she was afraid of nothing.

  “Not pregnant again, Lolotte?”

  She shook her head. “Thank God,” she added.

  “Do you want me to give you another son?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You have a nice wife of your own to take care of, I think.”

  “I can accommodate more than one woman in my life.”

  “I thought you
’d given me up.”

  “Absolutely not. Point of honor.”

  “But you had, before you left.”

  I’ve got my strength back now, he thought. “It’s no good trying to reform, is it? You can’t reform of loving somebody.”

  “You don’t love me. You just want to have me, and talk about it afterwards.”

  “Better than not having you and talking about it afterwards, like everybody else.”

  “Yes.” She leaned her forehead against his chest. “I’ve been silly, haven’t I?”

  “Very silly. Your situation’s irretrievable. Our wives will never believe any good of you now. Be honest for once, and go to bed with me.”

  “Is that what you came for?”

  “Not originally, but—”

  “I’m glad about that. I have no intention of complying, and besides, a little while ago Camille came in and flung himself down on our bed and is doing some savage brooding.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Look at me.” It was the same request, he remembered, that he had made to his wife thirty minutes earlier. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Everything’s wrong.”

  “I’ll fix it all.”

  “Please.”

  Camille lay with his head buried in his arms. “Lolotte?” he said, without looking up. Danton sat down beside him and stroked his hair. “Oh, Georges.”

  “Aren’t you surprised?”

  “Nothing surprises me,” Camille said wanly. “Don’t stop doing that, it’s the first nice thing that’s happened to me in a month.”

  “From the beginning then.”

  “You got my letter?”

  “It didn’t make much sense.”

  “No. No, probably not. I can quite see that.”

  He turned around and sat up. Danton was startled. In five weeks, the spurious maturity of the last five years had fallen away; the person who looked at him out of Camille’s eyes was the scared and shabby boy of ’88.