But when he got outside into the street, this sympathy evaporated. He would feel he had been verbally carved up. It was not fair. It was like being tripped in the gutter by a cripple. You wanted to complain, but when you saw the circumstances you felt you couldn’t.
Monsieur’s primary purpose in visiting the capital was to attend the Parlement of Paris. The Parlements of the realm were not elected bodies. The de Viefvilles had bought their membership, and would pass it to their heirs: to Camille, perhaps, if he behaves better. The Parlements heard cases; they sanctioned the edicts of the King. That is, they confirmed that they were the law.
Occasionally, the Parlements grew awkward. They drafted protests about the state of the nation—but only when they felt their interests threatened, or when they saw that their interests could be served. M. de Viefville belonged to that section of the middle classes that did not want to destroy the nobility, but rather hoped to merge with it. Offices, positions, monopolies—all have their price, and many carry a title with them.
The Parlementarians worried a great deal when the Crown began to assert itself, to issue decrees where it had never issued them before, to produce bright new ideas about how the country should be run. Occasionally they got on the wrong side of the monarch; since any resistance to authority was novel and risky, the Parlementarians managed the difficult feat of being both arch-conservatives and popular heroes.
In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée—a system of forced labor on roads and bridges. He thought that the roads would be better if they were built and maintained by private contractors, rather than by peasants dragged from their fields. But that would cost, wouldn’t it? So perhaps there could be a property tax? And every man of means would pay it—not just commoners, but the nobility too?
Parlement turned this scheme down flat. After another bitter argument, the King forced them to register the abolition of the corvée. Turgot was making enemies everywhere. The Queen and her circle stepped up their campaign against him. The King disliked asserting, himself, and was vulnerable to the pressures of the moment. In May, he dismissed Turgot; forced labor was reinstated.
In this way, one minister was brought down; the trick bore repetition. Said the Comte d’Artois, to the back of the retreating economist: “Now at last we shall have some money to spend.”
When the King was not hunting, he liked to shut himself up in his workshop, doing metalwork and tinkering with locks. He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done.
After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. “You’re lucky,” Louis said mournfully. “I wish I could resign.”
1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:
The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.
When M. de Viefville arrived home, he would make his way through the narrow huddle of small-town streets, and through the narrow huddle of provincial hearts; and he would bring himself to call on Jean-Nicolas, in his tall, white, book-filled house on the Place des Armes. Maitre Desmoulins had an obsession nowadays, and de Viefville dreaded meeting him, meeting his baffled eyes and being asked once again the question that no one could answer: what had happened to the good and beautiful child he had sent to Cateau-Cambrésis nine years earlier?
On Camille’s sixteenth birthday, his father was stamping about the house. “I sometimes think,” he said, “that I have got on my hands a depraved little monster with no feelings and no sense.” He had written to the priests in Paris, to ask what they teach his son; to ask why he looks so untidy, and why during his last visit home he has seduced the daughter of a town councillor, “a man,” he says, “whom I see every day of my working life.”
Jean-Nicolas did not really expect answers to these questions. His real objections to his son were rather different. Why, he really wanted to know, was his son so emotional? Where did he get this capacity to infect others with emotion: to agitate them, discomfit them, shake them out of their ease? Ordinary conversations, in Camille’s presence, went off at peculiar tangents, or turned into blazing rows. Safe social conventions took on an air of danger. You couldn’t, Desmoulins thought, leave him alone with anybody.
It was no longer said that his son was a little Godard. Neither did the de Viefvilles rush to claim him. His brothers were thriving, his sisters blooming, but when Camille slipped in at the front door of the Old House, he looked as if he had come on a message from the Foundling Hospital.
Perhaps, when he is grown up, he will be one of those boys whom you pay to stay away from home.
There are some noblemen in France who have discovered that their best friends are their lawyers. Now that revenue from land is falling steadily, and prices are rising, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting poorer too. It has become necessary to assert certain privileges that have been allowed to lapse over the years. Often, dues to which one is entitled have not been paid for a generation; that lax and charitable lordship must now cease. Again, one’s ancestors have allowed part of their estates to become known as “common land”—an expression for which there is usually no legal foundation.
These were the golden days of Jean-Nicolas; if, privately, he had worries, at least professionally he was prospering. Maître Desmoulins was no bootlicker—he had a lively sense of his own dignity, and was moreover a liberal-minded man, an advocate of reform in most spheres of national life. He read Diderot after dinner, and subscribed to the Geneva reprint of the Encyclopédie, which he took in installments. Nevertheless, he found himself much occupied with registers of rights and tracing of titles. A couple of old strongboxes were brought around and trundled up to his study, and when they were opened a faint musty smell crept out. Camille said, “So that is what tyranny smells like.” His father swept his own work aside and delved into the boxes; very tenderly he held the old yellow papers up to the light. Clement, the youngest, thought he was looking for buried treasure.
The Prince de Condé, the district’s premier nobleman, called personally on Maitre Desmoulins in the tall, white, book-filled, very very humble house on the Place des Armes. Normally he would have sent his land agent, but he was piqued by curiosity to know the man who was doing such good work for him. Besides, if honored by a visit, the fellow would never dare to send in a bill.
It was late afternoon, autumn. Warming in his hand a glass of deep red wine, and mellow, aware of his condescension, the Prince lounged in a wash of candlelight; evening crept up around them, and painted shadows in the corners of the room.
“What do you people want?” he asked.
“Well …” Maître Desmoulins considered this large question. “People like me, men of the professional classes, we would like a little more say, I suppose—or let me put it this way, we would welcome the opportunity to serve.” It is a fair point, he thinks; under the old King, noblemen were never ministers, but, increasingly, all the ministers are noblemen. “Civil equality,” he said. “Fiscal equality.”
Condé raised his eyebrows. “You want the nobility to pay your taxes for you?”
“No, Monseigneur, we want you to pay your own.”
“I do pay tax,” Condé said. “I pay my poll tax, don’t I? All this property-tax business is nonsense. And so, what else?”
Desmoulins made a gesture, which he hoped was eloquent. “An equal chance. That’s all. An equal chance at promotion in the army or the church …” I’m explaining it as simply as I can, he thought: an ABC of aspiration.
“An equal chance? It seems against nature.”
“Other nations conduct themselves differently. Look at England. You can’t
say it’s a human trait, to be oppressed.”
“Oppressed? Is that what you think you are?”
“I feel it; and if I feel it, how much more do the poor feel it?”
“The poor feel nothing,” the Prince said. “Do not be sentimental. They are not interested in the art of government. They only regard their stomachs.”
“Even regarding just their stomachs—”
“And you,” Condé said, “are not interested in the poor—oh, except as they furnish you with arguments. You lawyers only want concessions for yourselves.”
“It isn’t a question of concessions. It’s a question of human beings’ natural rights.”
“Fine phrases. You use them very freely to me.”
“Free thought, free speech—is that too much to ask?”
“It’s a bloody great deal to ask, and you know it,” Condé said glumly.
“The pity of it is, I hear such stuff from my peers. Elegant ideas for a social re-ordering. Pleasing plans for a ‘community of reason.’ And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear. It’ll end in revolution. And that’ll be no tea party.”
“But surely not?” Jean-Nicolas said. A slight movement from the shadows caught his attention. “Good heavens,” he said, “what are you doing there?”
“Eavesdropping,” Camille said. “Well, you could have looked and seen that I was here.”
Maître Desmoulins turned red. “My son,” he said. The Prince nodded. Camille edged into the candlelight. “Well,” said the Prince, “have you learned something?” It was clear from his tone that he took Camille for younger than he was. “How did you manage to keep still for so long?”
“Perhaps you froze my blood,” Camille said. He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. “Of course there will be a revolution,” he said. “You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.”
“He goes to school in Paris,” Jean-Nicolas said wretchedly. “He has these ideas.”
“And I suppose he thinks he is too young to be made to regret them,” Condé said. He turned on the child. “Whatever is this?”
“The climax of your visit, Monseigneur. You want to take a trip to see how your educated serfs live, and amuse yourself by trading platitudes with them.” He began to shake—visibly, distressingly. “I detest you,” he said.
“I cannot stay to be abused,” Condé muttered. “Desmoulins, keep this son of yours out of my way.” He looked for somewhere to put his glass, and ended by thrusting it into his host’s hand. Maître Desmoulins followed him onto the stairs.
“Monseigneur—”
“I was wrong to condescend. I should have sent my agent.”
“I am so sorry.”
“No need to speak of it. I could not possibly be offended. It is not in me.”
“May I continue your work?”
“You may continue my work.”
“You are really not offended?”
“It would be ungracious of me to be offended at what cannot possibly be of any account.”
By the front door, his small entourage had quickly assembled. He looked back at Jean-Nicolas. “I say out of my way and I mean well out of my way.”
When the Prince had driven away, Jean-Nicolas mounted the stairs and re-entered his office. “Well, Camille?” he said. A perverse calm had entered his voice, and he breathed deeply. The silence prolonged itself. The last of the light had faded now; a crescent moon hung in pale inquiry over the square. Camille had retired into the shadows again, as if he felt safer there.
“That was a very stupid, fatuous conversation you were having,” he said in the end. “Everybody knows those things. He isn’t mentally defective. They’re not: not all of them.”
“Do you tell me? I live so out of society.”
“I liked his phrase, ‘this son of yours.’ As if it were eccentric of you, to have me.”
“Perhaps it is,” Jean-Nicolas said. “Were I a citizen of the ancient world, I should have taken one look at you and popped you out on some hillside, to prosper as best you might.”
“Perhaps some passing she-wolf might have liked me,” Camille said.
“Camille-when you were talking to the Prince, you somehow lost your stutter.”
“Mm. Don’t worry. It’s back.”
“I thought he was going to hit you.”
“Yes, so did I.”
“I wish he had. If you go on like this,” said Jean-Nicolas, “my heart will stop”—he snapped his fingers—“like that.”
“Oh, no.” Camille smiled. “You’re quite strong really. Your only affliction is kidney stones, the doctor said so.”
Jean-Nicolas had an urge to throw his arms around his child. It was an unreasonable impulse, quickly stifled.
“You have caused offense,” he said. “You have prejudiced our future. The worst thing about it was how you looked him up and down. The way you didn’t speak.”
“Yes,” Camille said remotely. “I’m good at dumb insolence. I practice: for obvious reasons.” He sat down now in his father’s chair, composing himself for further dialogue, slowly pushing his hair out of his eyes.
Jean-Nicolas is conscious of himself as a man of icy dignity, an almost unapproachable stiffness and rectitude. He would like to scream and smash the windows: to jump out of them and die quickly in the street.
The Prince will soon forget all this in his hurry to get back to Versailles.
Just now, faro is the craze. The King forbids it because the losses are so high. But the King is a man of regular habits, who retires early, and when he goes the stakes are raised at the Queen’s table.
“The poor man,” she calls him.
The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses—about 150 each year—are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armored trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington’s troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural—in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new—then moves elsewhere.
“I am terrified of being bored,” she says.
She has no child. Pamphlets distributed all over Paris accuse her of promiscuous relations with her male courtiers, of lesbian acts with female favorites. In 1776, when she appears in her box at the Opera, she is met by hostile silences. She does not understand this. It is said that she cries behind her bedroom doors: “What have I done to them? What have I done?” Is it fair, she asks herself, if so much is really wrong, to harp on one woman’s trivial pleasures?
Her brother the Emperor writes from Vienna: “In the long run, things cannot go on as they are … . The revolution will be a cruel one, and may be of your own making.”
In 1778 Voltaire returned to Paris, eighty-four years old, cadaverous and spitting blood. He traversed the city in a blue carriage covered with gold stars. The streets were lined with hysterical crowds chanting “Vive Voltaire.” The old man remarked, “There would be just as many to see me executed.” The Academy turned out to greet him: Franklin came, Diderot came. During the performance of his tragedy lrène the actors crowned his statue with laurel wreaths and the packed galleries rose to their feet
and howled their delight and adoration.
In May, he died. Paris refused him a Christian burial, and it was feared that his enemies might desecrate his remains. So the corpse was taken from the city by night, propped upright in a coach: under a full moon, and looking alive.
A man called Necker, a Protestant, Swiss millionaire banker, was called to be Minister of Finance and Master of Miracles to the court. Necker alone could keep the ship of state afloat. The secret, he said, was to borrow. Higher taxation and cuts in expenditure showed Europe that you were on your knees. But if you borrowed you showed that you were forward-looking, go-getting, energetic; by demonstrating confidence, you created it. The more you borrowed, the more the effect was achieved. M. Necker was an optimist.
It even seemed to work. When, in May 1781, the usual reactionary, anti-Protestant cabal brought the minister down, the country felt nostalgia for a lost, prosperous age. But the King was relieved, and bought Antoinette some diamonds to celebrate.
Georges-Jacques Danton had already decided to go to Paris.
It had been so difficult to get away, initially; as if, Anne-Madeleine said, you were going to America, or the moon. First there had been the family councils, all the uncles calling with some ceremony to put their points of view. They had dropped the priest business. For a year or two he had been around the little law offices of his uncles and their friends. It was a modest family tradition. Nevertheless. If he was sure it was what he wanted …
His mother would miss him; but they had grown apart. She was a woman of no education, with an outlook that she had deliberately narrowed. The only industry of Arcis-sur-Aube was the manufacture of nightcaps; how could he explain to her that the fact had come to seem a personal affront?
A Place of Greater Safety Page 5