A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  She stood behind his chair and slipped a hand onto his shoulder. She felt him stiffen. “Don’t touch me.”

  She removed her hand. “What have I done wrong?” She waited for an answer. “You’re being childish. You can’t sit here in the cold and dark.”

  No reply. She walked rapidly from the room, leaving the door ajar. She was back in a moment with a taper, which she touched to the wood and kindling laid ready in the grate. She knelt down by the hearth, tending the infant flames, her dark hair sliding over her shoulder.

  “I will not have lights,” he said.

  She leaned forward, placing another splinter of wood, fanning the blaze. “I know you’ll let it go right out if I don’t watch it,” she said. “You always do. I have only just got in from my class. Citizen David commended my work today. Would you like to see? I can run downstairs and get my folio.” She looked up at him, still kneeling, her hands spread out on her thighs.

  “Get up from there,” he said. “You are not a servant.”

  “No?” Her voice was cool. “What am I? It would be against your principles to speak to a servant as you speak to me.”

  “Five days ago,” he said, “I proposed to the Convention that we should set up a Committee of Justice to examine the verdicts of the Tribunal and to look into the cases of those imprisoned on suspicion. I thought this was what was needed; apparently not, though. I have just seen the fourth issue of the ‘Old Cordelier.’ Here.” He pushed the pamphlet across the desk. “Read it.”

  “I can’t, in this light.” She lit the candles, lifting one high to look into his face. “Your eyes are red. You have been crying. I didn’t think you cried when you were criticized in the press. I thought you were beyond that.”

  “It’s not criticism,” he said. “It’s not criticism that’s the problem, it’s quite other, it’s the claims, it’s the claims made on me. I am addressed by name. Look.” He pointed to the place on the page. “Eléonore, who has been more merciful than I have? Seventy-five of Brissot’s supporters are in prison. I have fought the committees and the Convention for these men’s lives. But this is not enough for Camille—it’s not nearly enough. He wants to force me into some—some kind of bullring. Read it.”

  She took the pamphlet, brought a chair up to his desk to get the light. “Robespierre, you are my old school comrade, and you remember the lesson history and philosophy taught us: that love is stronger and more enduring than fear.” Love is stronger and more enduring than fear; she glanced up at him, then down at the printed page. “You have come very close to this idea in the measure passed at your instance during the session of 30 Frimaire. What has been proposed is a Committee of Justice. Yet why should mercy be looked upon as a crime under the Republic?”

  Eléonore looked up. “The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.”

  “Release from prison the 200,000 citizens you call ‘Suspects.’ In the Declaration of the Rights of Man there is no provision for imprisonment on suspicion.

  “You seem determined to wipe out opposition by using the guillotine—but it is a senseless undertaking. When you destroy one opponent on the scaffold, you make ten more enemies among his family and friends. Look at the sort of people you have put behind bars—women, old men, bile-ridden egotists, the flotsam of the Revolution. Do you really believe they constitute a danger? The only enemies left in your midst are those who are too sick and too cowardly to fight; all the brave and able ones have fled abroad, or died at Lyon or in the Vendee. Those who are left do not merit your attention. Believe me—freedom would be more firmly established, and Europe brought to her knees, if you established a Committee of Mercy.”

  “Have you read enough?” he asked her.

  “Yes. They’re trying to force your hand.” She looked up. “Danton’s behind it, I suppose?”

  Robespierre didn’t speak, not at first. When he did it was in a whisper, and not to the point. “When we were children, you know, I said to him, Camille, you’re all right now, I am going to look after you. You should have seen us, Eléonore—you would have been quite sorry for us, I think. I don’t know what would have become of Camille, if it weren’t for me.” He buried his face in his hands. “Or of me, if it weren’t for him.”

  “But you’re not children now,” she said softly. “And this affection you speak of no longer exists. He’s gone over to Danton.”

  He looked up. His face is transparent, she thought; he would like the world transparent too. “Danton’s not my enemy,” he said. “He’s a patriot, and I’ve staked my reputation on it. But what’s he done, these last four weeks? A few speeches. Grand-sounding rhetoric that keeps him in the public eye and means nothing at all. He fancies himself as the elder statesman. He’s risked nothing. He has thrown my poor Camille into the furnace while he and his friends stand by warming their hands.”

  “Don’t be upset, it doesn’t help.” She averted her face. She was studying the pamphlet again. “He implies that the Committee has abused its powers. It seems clear that Danton and his friends see themselves as an alternative government.”

  “Yes.” He looked up, half-smiled. “Danton offered me a job once before. No doubt he’d do it again. They expect me to go along with them, you see.”

  “Go along with them? With that gang of swindlers? You’d go along with them as you’d go along with brigands who were holding you to ransom. All they want is to use your name, use your credit as an honest man.”

  “Do you know what I wish?” he said. “I wish Marat were alive. What a pass I’ve come to, when I wish that! But Camille would have listened to him.”

  “This is heresy,” Eléonore said. She bent her head over the page. She read, it seemed to him, with a tortured slowness; she seemed to weigh every word. “The Jacobins will expel him.”

  “I will prevent it.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I will prevent it.”

  She shook the paper at him. “They’ll blame you for this. Do you think you can protect him?”

  “Protect him? Oh Christ—I think at any time, at any time before now, I’d have died for him. But I feel, now—perhaps I have a duty to remain alive?”

  “A duty to whom?”

  “To the people. In case worse befalls them.”

  “I agree. You do have a duty to remain alive. Alive and in power.”

  He averted his head. “How easily the phrases fall from your lips. As if you had grown up with them, Eléonore. Collot is back from Lyon, did you know? He had finished his work, as he describes it. His path of righteousness is very clear and straight and broad. It’s so easy to be a good Jacobin. Collot hasn’t a doubt or scruple in his head—indeed, I doubt if he has much in it at all. Stop the Terror? He thinks we haven’t even begun.”

  “Saint-Just will be here next week. He won’t want to know about your school days, Max. He won’t accept excuses.”

  Robespierre lifted his chin, blindly and vicariously proud. “He’ll not be offered excuses. I know Camille. He’s stronger than you think, oh, not visibly, not evidently—but I do know him, you see. It’s a kind of iron-clad vanity he has—and why not, really? It all comes from July 12, from those days before the Bastille. He knows exactly what he did, exactly what risk he took. Would I have taken it? Of course not. It would have been meaningless—no one would even have looked at me. Would Danton have taken it? Of course not. He was a respectable fellow, a lawyer, a family man. You see, here we are, Eléonore, four years on—still in awe of what was done in a split second.”

  “Stupid,” she said.

  “Not really. Everything that’s important is decided in a split second, isn’t it? He stood up before those thousands of people, and his life turned on a hair. Everything after that, of course, has been an anticlimax.”

  Eléonore got up, moved away from him. “Will you go to see him?”

  “Now? No. Danton will be t
here. They will probably be having a party.”

  “Well, why not?” Eléonore said. “I know the reign of superstition is over, but it is Christmas day.”

  “It is incredible,” Danton said. He tipped his head back and tossed another glass down his throat. He did not look like an elder statesman. “There are demonstrators outside the Convention calling for a Committee of Mercy. They are standing six deep outside Desenne’s bookshop demanding another edition. The cover price was two sous and now they’re changing hands for twenty francs. Camille, you’re a one-man inflationary disaster.”

  “But I wish now I had warned Robespierre. About the content, I mean.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Danton was vast and brash and hearty, the popular leader of a new political force. “Somebody go and get Robespierre. Somebody go and drag him out. It’s time we got him drunk.” He reached across and dropped his hand on Camille’s shoulder. “It’s time this Revolution relaxed a little. The people are sick of the killings, and the reaction to your writings proves it.”

  “But we should have got the Committee changed this month. You should be on it now.”

  Around them, the buzz of conversation resumed. It was understood to have been one of Danton’s heartening pronouncements. “Let’s not push things,” Danton said. “Next month will do. We’re creating the mood for change. We don’t want to force the issue, we want people to come to our way of thinking of their own accord.” Camille glanced at Fabre. “Now why are you not happy?” Danton demanded. “You have just achieved the greatest success of your career. I order you in the name of the Republic to be happy.”

  Annette and Claude arrived soon afterwards. Annette looked wary and withdrawn, but Claude looked as if he were working up to a big speech. “Ah yes,” he said, addressing the air a foot above his son-in-law’s head. “I have not been lavishly complimentary, have I, in the past? But now I will congratulate you, from the heart. It is an act of great courage.”

  “Why do you say that? Do you think they will want to cut off my head?”

  A silence, sudden and complete and prolonged. No one spoke and no one moved. For the first time in years Claude found it possible to focus his gaze. “Oh, Camille,” he said, “who could want to hurt you?”

  “Plenty of people,” Camille said remotely. “Billaud, because I’ve always laughed at him. Saint-Just, because he has a rage for leadership and I won’t follow. All the members of the Jacobins who’ve been after my blood since I defended Dillon. Ten days ago they brought up the business of Brissot’s trial. What right had I to pass out without informing the club? And Barnave—they wanted to know how I dared to go to the Conciergerie to speak to a traitor.”

  “But Robespierre defended you,” Claude said.

  “Yes, he was very kind. He told them I was given to emotional outbursts. He said that he had known me since I was ten years old and I had always been the same. He nodded and smiled at me as he came down from the tribune. His eyes were very sharp. He had engraved a valuation on me like a goldsmith’s mark.”

  “Oh, there was more than that,” Lucile said. “He praised you very warmly.”

  “Of course. The club was touched, flattered. He had allowed them a little insight into his private life—you know, touching evidence of his human nature.”

  “What can you mean?” Claude said.

  “Well, I revert to my former conviction. Quite clearly he is Jesus Christ. He has even condescended to be adopted by a carpenter. I wonder what he will do at the next meeting, when they demand my expulsion?”

  “But nothing can happen to you while Robespierre is in power,” Claude said. “It’s not possible. Come now. It’s not possible.”

  “You mean I have protection. But it is irksome, to be protected.”

  “I won’t have this,” Danton said. He put down his glass, leaned foward. He was quite sober, though a few minutes earlier he had seemed not to be. “You know my policies, you know what I am trying to do. Now that the pamphlets have served their purpose, your job is to keep Robespierre in a good humor, and other than that keep your mouth shut. There is no need to take risks. Within two months, all moderate opposition will have crystalized around me. All I have to do is exist.”

  “But that is problematical, in my case,” Camille muttered.

  “You think I can’t protect my followers?”

  “I am sick of being protected,” Camille yelled at him. “I am tired of pleasing you and placating Robespierre and running between the two of you smoothing things over and ministering to your all-devouring egos and your monstrous, arrogant self-conceits. I have had enough of it.”

  “In that case,” Danton said, “your use for the future is very limited, very limited indeed.”

  The Committee of Justice which Robespierre had proposed fell victim next day to Billaud-Varennes’s revolutionary thoroughness. He told the Jacobins quite bluntly, in Robespierre’s presence, that it had been a stupid idea from the start.

  That night Robespierre didn’t sleep. It was not a defeat he brooded upon; it was a humiliation. He could not remember a time when his express wishes had been flouted; or rather, he could remember it, but like some dim intimation from a past incarnation. The Candle of Arras had illuminated another world.

  He sat alone at his window, up at the top of the house; watched the black angles of the rooftops, and the stars between. He would have liked to pray; but no words he could formulate seemed likely to move or even reach the blindly purposive deity that had taken his life in hand. Three times he got up to see if the door was barred, the bolt firmly drawn and the key turned in the lock. The darkness shifted, waned; the street below seemed peopled with shades. In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius … The ghosts of souls departed begged their admittance, with faces of clay; they trailed the covert, feral odors, the long, slinking shadows of circus beasts.

  Next day Camille went to the Duplay house. He asked after Eléonore’s health, and about her work. “Lucile was saying she would come and see you, but she doesn’t know when it would suit you, because of your classes. Why don’t you ever come and see us?”

  “I will,” she said, without conviction. “How’s the baby?”

  “Oh, he’s fine. Marvelous.”

  “He’s like you, Camille. He has a look of you.”

  “Oh, how sweet of you, Cornélia, you’re the first person in eighteen months to say so. May I go up?”

  “He’s not at home.”

  “Oh, Cornélia. You know that he is at home.”

  “He’s busy.”

  “Has he been telling you to keep people out, or just to keep me out?”

  “Look, he needs time to sort things out in his mind. He didn’t sleep last night. I’m worried about him.”

  “Is he very angry with me?”

  “No, he’s not angry, I think he’s—shocked. That you should hold him responsible for violence, that you should blame him in public.”

  “I told him I reserved the right to tell him when the country became a tyranny. Our consciences are public property, so how else should I tell him?”

  “He is alarmed, that you should put yourself in such a bad position.”

  “Go and tell him I’m here.”

  “He won’t see you.”

  “Go and tell him, Eléonore.”

  She quailed. “All right.”

  She left him standing, with a dragging ache in his throat. She paused when she was halfway up the stairs, to think; then she went on. She knocked. “Camille’s here.”

  She heard the scraping of the chair, a creak: no answer.

  “Are you there? Camille’s downstairs. He insists.”

  He pulled the door open. She knew he’d been standing right behind it. Absurd, she thought. He was sweating.

  “You mustn’t let him come up. I told you that. I told you. Why do you take no notice of me?” He was trying to speak very calmly.

  She shrugged. “Right.”

  Robespierre had rested one hand on the doorknob, sliding
it over the smooth surface; he swung the door back and to, in an arc of six inches.

  “I’ll tell him,” she said. She turned her head and looked down the stairs, as if she thought Camille might run up and shoulder her aside. “It’s another matter whether he accepts it.”

  “Dear God,” he said. “What does he think? What does he expect?”

  “Personally I don’t see the sense in keeping him out. You both know he’s put you in a very difficult position. You know you’re going to defend him, and I think he knows it too. It’s not a matter of whether you’ll smooth over your disagreements. Of course you will. You’ll risk your own reputation to vindicate him. Every principle you’ve ever had goes out of the window when you’re faced with Camille.”

  “That is not true, Eléonore,” he said softly. “That is not true and you are saying it out of twisted jealousy. It is not true and he must be made to realize it. He must be made to think. Listen,” the agitation crept back into his voice, “how does he look?”

  Tears had sprung into her eyes. “He looks as usual.”

  “Does he seem upset? He’s not ill?”

  “No, he looks as usual.”

  “Dear God,” he said. Wearily, softly, he took his perspiring hand from the doorknob, and wiped it, stiff-fingered, down the sleeve of his other arm. “I need to wash my hands,” he said.

  The door closed softly. Eléonore went downstairs, scrubbing at her face with her fist. “There,” she said. “I told you. He doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I suppose he thinks it’s for my own good?” Camille laughed nervously.

  “I think you can understand his feelings. You have tried to use his affection for you to trap him into supporting you when you put forward policies he disagrees with.”

  “He disagrees with them? Since when?”

  “Perhaps since his defeat yesterday. Well, that is for you to work out. He doesn’t confide in me, and I know nothing of politics.”