A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  CITIZEN ROBESPIERRE: D’Eglantine! Stay there.

  JACOBIN: Robespierre has something to say to you.

  CITIZEN FABRE D’ÉGLANTINE: I can justify myself—

  MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY: Guillotine him! Guillotine him!

  Lucile Desmoulins to Stanislas Fréron:

  23 Nivôse, Year II

  … Come back, come back quickly. There is no time to lose. Bring with you all the old Cordeliers you can find, we need them badly. [Robespierre] has seen that when he doesn’t think and act in accordance with the views of certain people, he is not all-powerful. [Danton] is becoming weak, he is losing his nerve. D’Églantine is arrested and in the Luxembourg; they are bringing very serious charges … .

  I don’t laugh anymore: I don’t play at being a cat; I never touch my piano; I have no dreams; I am nothing but a machine now.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ambivalence

  This is our situation now. Danton has asked the Convention to give Fabre a hearing, and they have refused. So? Danton says. He is unwilling to admit that for the moment he is not the Convention’s master, and that Hé bert disposes of the power in the Sections. “So? I’m not like Robespierre, wringing my hands over a single defeat. I’ve come through this whole thing winning, losing, winning again. There was a time,” he tells Lucile, “when he had nothing but defeats.”

  “No doubt that is why he is prejudiced against them.”

  “Never mind his prejudices,” he says. “That damned Committee is looking over their shoulder at me now. One mistake and they’re out and I’m in.”

  Fighting talk. And yet, this is not the man she knows. Some people say Danton has not fully recovered his health, but he seems fit enough to her. Others say the evident happiness of the second marriage has softened him; but she knows the value of such romantic hogwash. To her mind, it’s the first marriage that is affecting him. Since Gabrielle’s death he lacks something: some final ruthlessness. It’s hard to put into words, and she hopes, of course, that she’s wrong. She believes ruthlessness will be needed.

  This, too, is our situation: Robespierre has had Camille reinstated at the Jacobins. At a price: the price of breaking down at the tribune, almost weeping in the face of the bemused Society. Hébert rants in his newspaper about the “one misguided man” who is protecting Camille—for his own personal and unfathomable reasons. Privately, he goes around sniggering.

  The Cordeliers Club is seeking an injunction to stop Camille using their name for his pamphlets. Not that it matters, since Desenne refuses to print any further issues, and no other publishers, much as they would like the sale, dare touch it.

  “Come and see Robespierre with me,” Danton says to Lucile. “Come on. Pick your baby up and let’s go round there now and have a big emotional scene. A reconciliation. We’ll drag Camille along and make him apologize nicely, and you will strike your Republican Family pose, and Maximilien will be duly edified. I shall be conciliatory in all sorts of practical ways and remember not to slap him on the back in the hearty man-to-man fashion he finds so terrifying.”

  She shakes her head. “Camille won’t come. He’s too busy writing.”

  “Writing what?”

  “The true history of the Revolution, he says. The secret ‘Secret History.’”

  “What does he mean to do with it?”

  “Burn it, probably. What else would it be fit for?”

  “Unfortunately, everything I say seems to make things worse.”

  “I don’t know why you should say that, Danton.” Robespierre had been reading—his Rousseau, unfortunately—and now he removed his spectacles. “I don’t see how your saying anything at this point …” The phrase trailed off, in his usual style. For a moment his face seemed naked and desperately harassed; then he replaced his spectacles, and his expression became once more intractable and opaque. “I have really only one thing to say to you. Cut off your contacts with Fabre, repudiate him. If not, I can have nothing more to do with you. But if you will—then we can begin to talk. Accept in all matters the guidance of the Committee, and I will personally guarantee your safety.”

  “Christ,” Danton said. “My safety? Are you threatening me?”

  Robespierre looked at him speculatively. “Vadier,” he suggested. “Collot. Hébert. Saint-Just.”

  “I’d prefer to guarantee my own safety, Robespierre, by my own methods.”

  “Your methods are likely to ruin you.” Robespierre closed his book. “Just make sure they don’t ruin Camille.”

  Danton was suddenly angry. “Be careful,” he said, “that Camille doesn’t ruin you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hébert is going round talking about Camille, giggling, and saying this is no ordinary friendship, I’m sure.”

  “Of course it is no ordinary friendship.”

  Is he not understanding, or is he refusing to understand? This is one of his weapons, this professional, cultivated obtuseness. “Hébert is instituting further inquiries into Camille’s private life.”

  Robespierre flung out a hand, palm towards Danton; so theatrical, the gesture, that Fabre might have coached him.

  “They ought to make a statue of you,” Danton said, “in that position. Come on, you know what I’m talking about. I know you weren’t around in the Annette days, but I can tell you, he furnished us with some entertainment, your friend—afternoons languishing semi-respectably in Annette’s drawing room, and evenings over at the Île de la Cite, committing unnatural acts among the affidavits. You never met Maître Perrin, did you? There were others, of course.” Danton laughed. “Take that look off your face—nobody thinks Camille’s taste would run to you. He likes men who are very large, very ugly and devoted to women. He just wants what he can’t have. Well, that’s the way I see it, anyway.”

  Robespierre reached out a hand for his pen. Then he seemed to change his mind. He let it lie. “Have you been drinking, Danton?” he said.

  “No. Well, not more than my usual intake for this time of day. Why?”

  “I thought you might have been. I was looking for an excuse for you.” Behind the concealing blue-tinted lenses, his eyes flickered to Danton’s face and away again. The sudden absence of emotion seemed to have pared away his face to the bone; his features were so thin that they seemed etched on air. “I think you’ve strayed from the point,” he said. “Fabre, I think, was the issue.” Again his hand crept towards the pen; he did not seem able to help himself.

  (Robespierre, private notebooks: “Danton spoke contemptuously of Camille Desmoulins, attributing to him a secret and shameful vice.”)

  “Well, have you made a decision?” His voice was empty of inflection, like God speaking within a rock.

  “What am I to say? What do you expect me to do? I can’t repudiate him, what a stupid word.”

  “It is true that he’s been your close associate. It is not easy to disentangle yourself.”

  “He’s been my friend.”

  “Oh, your friend.” Robespierre smiled faintly. “I know how you value your friends—but then I dare say he has not Camille’s defects. The safety of the country is at issue, Danton. A patriot should be eager to put the safety of the country above his wife or child or friend. There is no place for individual sentiment now.”

  Danton gasped, and tears sprang into his eyes. He rubbed at his face and held up his wet fingers. He tried to speak, but found it difficult.

  (Maximilien Robespierre, private notebooks: “Danton made himself ridiculous, producing theatrical tears … at Robespierre’s house.”)

  “This is unnecessary,” Robespierre said. “And useless.”

  “You are a cripple,” Danton said at last. His voice was weary, flat. “It’s not Couthon who’s a cripple, it’s you. Don’t you know, Robespierre, don’t you know there’s something wrong with you? Do you ever ask yourself what God left out, when he made you? I used to make jokes at your expense, I used to say you were impotent, but it’s more than balls you’re missi
ng. I wonder if you’re real, I see you walk and talk, but where’s the life in you?”

  “I do live.” Robespierre looked down. He touched his fingertips together, like a nervous witness. “I do live. In my fashion.”

  “What happened, Danton?”

  “Nothing happened. We don’t see eye-to-eye about Fabre. The interview had,” he put one fist reflectively into the other palm, “no result.”

  Five-thirty a.m., the rue Condé; there was a hammering at the doors below, and Annette pulled the covers over her head and didn’t want to know. The next moment she sat up, shocked into wakefulness. She flung herself out of bed: what’s happened, what’s happened now?

  Someone was shouting in the street. She reached for her wrap. She heard Claude’s voice, and the voice of her maid, Elise, raised in alarm. Elise was a lard-faced Breton girl, superstitious, familiar and clumsy, with an imperfect grasp of French; she stuck her head round the door now and said, “It’s people from the Section. They want to know if you’ve got your lover there, they say, come on, don’t tell them lies, they weren’t born yesterday.”

  “My lover? You mean they’re looking for Camille?”

  “Well, you said it, Madame,” Elise smirked.

  The girl was in her shift. In one hand she had a smoking stump of tallow candle. Annette struck out at her as she pushed past, so that the light spun out of her hand and expired on the floor. The girl’s complaint pursued her: “That was my candle end, not yours.”

  In black darkness, Annette collided with someone. A hand shot out and took her by the wrist. She could smell last night’s wine on the man’s breath. “What have we here?” the man said. She tried to pull away and he tightened his grip. “Here we have milady, with hardly any clothes on.”

  “Enough, Jeannot,” another voice said. “Hurry up, we need some lights.”

  Someone opened the shutters. Torchlight from the street clawed across the walls. Elise had produced more candles. Jeannot stood back and leered. He wore the coarse, baggy clothes of the practicing sansculotte; a red cap with a knitted tricolor cockade was pulled down to his eyebrows. He looked such an oaf that—in other circumstances—she would have laughed. Now a half-dozen men jostled into the room, staring around them, rubbing their cold hands, cursing. The People, she thought. Max’s beloved People.

  The man who had called off Jeannot stepped forward. He was a mousefaced boy in a shabby black coat. He had a wad of papers in his hands.

  “Health and Fraternity, Citizeness. We are the representatives of the Section Mutius Scaevola.” He flicked the top sheet of paper at her; “Section Luxembourg” was crossed out, and the new name inked in beside it. “I have here,” he pawed through the documents, “a warrant for the arrest of Claude Duplessis, retired civil servant, resident at this address.”

  “This is imbecilic,” Annette said. “There is a mistake. Arrest on what charges?”

  “Conspiracy, Citizeness. We have orders to search the premises, and impound any suspicious papers.”

  “How dare you come here, at this hour—”

  “When Père Duchesne has one of his great cholers,” one of the men said, “you don’t wait for the sun to come up.”

  “Père Duchesne? I see. You mean that Hébert dare not strike at Camille, so he sends you and your rabble to terrorize his family. Give me those papers, let me see your warrant.”

  She snatched at them. The clerk stepped back defensively. One of the sansculottes caught her outstretched hand, and with his other hand pulled her wrap aside, half-exposing her breasts. With all her strength she dragged herself away from him. She gathered up her wrap to her throat. She was shaking, but—and she hoped they knew this—much more with fury than with fear. “Are you Duplessis?” the clerk said, looking over her shoulder.

  Claude had managed to get dressed. He seemed dazed, but a faint smell of burning crept out from the room behind him. “You are inquiring for me?” His voice shook a little.

  The clerk waved the warrant. “Hurry up. We can’t keep standing about. These citizens want to get the search over and home for their breakfasts.”

  “They deserve their breakfast, expeditiously,” Claude said. “Why, they have had the trouble of waking up a peaceful household, and terrifying my wife and my servants. Where were you thinking of taking me?”

  “Pack a bag,” the clerk said. “Quick about it.”

  Claude gave him a measured nod. He turned.

  “Claude!” Annette called after him. “Claude, remember I love you.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and gave her a grim nod. A chorus of ribaldry followed him to his room; but the diversion had been effective, because while they were jeering he slammed his door, and she heard the key turn in the lock, and the grunts of effort as they put their shoulders to the door.

  She turned to the clerk. “What’s your name?”

  “It is of no importance.”

  “I’m sure it’s not, but I’ll find out. You’ll suffer. Begin your search. You’ll find nothing to interest you.”

  “What sort of people are they?” she heard one of the men ask Elise.

  “Godless, Monsieur, and very stuck-up.”

  “Is she really, you know, with Camille?”

  “Everybody knows it,” Elise said. “They spend hours locked away. Reading the newspapers, she says.”

  “What does the old man do about it?”

  “Fuck-all,” Elise said.

  The men laughed. “We might have to get you down to the Section,” one of them said. “Ask you a few questions. I bet you’ve got some very pretty answers.” He put out his hand, fingered the cloth of her shift, pinched one of her nipples. She gave a little shriek: mock-horror, mock-pain.

  As if, Annette thought, there were not enough of the real thing. She took the clerk by the arm. “Get these people under control. Do they also have a warrant to molest my domestic staff?”

  “She talks like the Capet woman’s sister,” Jeannot remarked.

  “This is an outrage, and you may be sure that within hours it will be discussed in the Convention.”

  Jeannot spat at the fireplace, with a pitiful lack of accuracy. “Pack of lawyers,” he said. “Revolution? This? Not till the buggers are all dead.”

  “At the present rate,” the clerk said, “it won’t be long.”

  Claude was back, with two of the sansculottes on his heels. He had put on his greatcoat and was drawing on his new gloves, very carefully, very smoothly. “Imagine,” he said, “they accused me of burning papers. Stranger still, they insisted on interposing themselves between my person and the window. There is a citizen beneath it with a pike. As if a person of my years would leap through a first-floor casement, and deprive myself of the pleasure of their company.” One of the men took his arm. Claude shook him off. “I’ll walk by myself,” he said. “Now, please allow me to say good-bye to my wife.”

  He took her hand in his gloved hand and raised her fingertips to his lips. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, my Annette. Get a message to Camille.”

  Across the street a shiny new carriage was drawn up. A pair of eyes peered out; the blind was cautiously lowered.

  “How thoroughly displeasing,” said Père Duchesne the furnace maker. “We picked the wrong night, or did we pick the wrong rumor? There are many other rumors, as good or better. It would have been worth rising early to drag Camille from his comfortable, incestuous bed and see if he could be provoked to violence. I was hoping that we could arrest him for a breach of the peace. Still, this will give him a fright. I wonder who he’ll run to hide behind this time?”

  Annette was at the rue Marat an hour later, distraught. “And they have torn the place apart,” she finished. “And Elise. Elise may be thoroughly unsatisfactory, but I will not stand by and see my menials pawed by ruffians off the streets. Lucile, give me a glass of brandy, will you? I need it.” As her daughter left the room, she whispered, “Oh Camille, Camille. Claude ran around burning papers. All your letters to me
have gone up in smoke. I think. Either that, or the Section committee has got them.”

  “I see,” Camille said. “Well, I expect they’re quite chaste.”

  “But I want them.” Tears in her eyes. “I can’t bear not having them.”

  He ran a fingertip down her cheek. “I’ll write you some more.”

  “I want those, those! How can I ask Claude if he burned them? If he burned them, he must have known where I kept them and what they were. Do you think he’d read them?”

  “No. Claude’s honorable. He’s not like you and me.” He smiled. “I’ll ask him, Annette. As soon as we get him home.”

  “You look quite cheerful, husband.” Lucile was back with the brandy.

  Annette glanced up at him. So he does, she thought: surely he’s indestructible? She drank her brandy in one gulp.

  Camille’s speech to the Convention was short, audible and alarming. There were murmurs that the relatives of politicians might be suspect as much as anyone else; but most of his audience looked as if it knew precisely what he was talking about when he described the invasion of the Duplessis household. They were lucky if it hadn’t happened to them, he said; soon, perhaps, it would.

  Looking around the half-empty benches, the deputies knew he was right. There was applause when he referred to the uncontrolled depredations of a former theater box-office attendant: a mutter of agreement when he deplored a system that could let such a loathsome object flourish. As he left, Danton was on his feet, calling for an end to the arrests.

  At the Tuileries, “Present my compliments to Citizen Vadier and tell him the Lanterne Attorney is here,” Camille said. Vadier was brought out of a session of the Policy Committee by his clerks. “Close down my paper and you get me in person,” Camille said, smiling kindly and giving Vadier a shove against the wall.