by H. G. Parry
“Part minotaur,” Camille had decided one night as the Jacobins assembled. “That has to be it. He ought to be living in the catacombs somewhere.”
“There’s no such thing as a minotaur,” Robespierre had scoffed. “They don’t exist.”
“Danton!” Camille had called immediately across the room. “Robespierre thinks you don’t exist.”
“I don’t,” he called back, drowning out half a dozen other conversations in the process. “I am a figment of his imagination. You can only see me because you’re seated close to him right now.”
“I will never leave his side,” Camille vowed.
Robespierre had stiffened at the teasing, but smiled reluctantly. It was hard not to smile at Camille, even when he also wanted to strangle him. “You’d better not.”
In fact, the three of them had become very closely allied as the political wheel in Paris continued to turn. They were an oddly matched set, but they complemented each other: one bull-like and daring, one lightning fast and playful, one tightly wound and meticulous. All three had been consigned to pulling strings behind the scenes with the advent of the new government, but all three did it very well. When they pulled together, they could shift mountains.
The summer after the Assembly declared war on Austria, Lucile Desmoulins went into labor with the couple’s first child. Robespierre and Danton talked the military threat over as they waited in the Desmoulinses’ villa, trying with increasing futility to distract Camille from the muffled cries and voices coming from upstairs. Robespierre had come from the Jacobins to see if he could help and had found Danton already there; it was well into the small hours of the morning, and the candles were burning low.
“This is exactly what the king wants,” Robespierre said, over the sound of footsteps overhead. “He’s urged the Assembly to make war because he thinks we’ll lose. He wants France to be defeated, and Austria to reinstate him. I told them this at the time. They’re just all too blinded with the idea of increasing France’s wealth and territory to listen.”
“To be fair,” Danton said, “the essay in which you told them was twenty pages long. I didn’t get through all of it either.”
Robespierre ignored this remark. “I have nothing personal against Brissot—we used to be very good friends, and I know he’s a fervent Republican ideologically. But he hasn’t been one in practice lately.”
“I have something personal against Brissot,” Camille retorted, to Robespierre’s relief. He hadn’t been sure Camille was even listening. His friend hadn’t stood still since Robespierre had come in; sitting was apparently out of the question. “And he was one of the chief witnesses at my wedding. He said I only call myself a patriot to insult patriotism.”
“You said far worse about him.”
“I did,” Camille said, not without pride. The article in question had taken Paris by storm with its savage humor. “And I meant it. It’s Brissot’s people who are to blame for the fact that we still don’t have freedom of magic, too. I can’t believe they still call themselves the Assembly of Magicians. There’s hardly a magician among them. They’re afraid of us. They say they want free magic, but what they really mean is that they want to limit the powers of the Knights Templar. They don’t want us to actually use it.”
Danton laughed. “When has anyone stopped you from using magic in the last three years?”
“It’s a matter of time, as long as the bracelets are still on. The only reason they’ve left it so long is because not having officially declared magic illegal again is useful on the battlefield—and because they’re afraid of what we can rouse if they came out and bespelled us again. They don’t want another Champ de Mars.”
“This isn’t what the Revolution was meant to be about,” Robespierre said. A sharp cry came from upstairs; he raised his voice determinedly. “We’re supposed to be liberators.”
“For that matter,” Danton said, “there was a point where we were meant to be a republic. Camille, for God’s sake, will you stop hovering uselessly at the door? You look like you’re threatening to take flight.”
“Leave him alone,” Robespierre said—reflexively, as he had to far less sympathetic bullies during their schooldays.
“I might, in fact, be about to take flight,” Camille said. His usually sun-browned face was white as milk. “Or burn up. Or fall apart. God. I can’t be a father. Why didn’t one of you stop me?”
“I hate to disappoint you, Camille,” Danton said, “but neither of us was there at the crucial time.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You? You weren’t thinking. Your brain does remarkable things, Camille, but nobody ever calls it thinking.”
“What do they call it?”
“They don’t. People have better things to talk about than your brain. There’s a revolution in progress.”
“I don’t believe, for you, your brain has anything to with it,” Robespierre said thoughtfully. It wasn’t the moment, but the notion had come to him. “I believe you think with your nerves. Or with your magic.”
“Certainly,” Danton said, “your brain had nothing to do with it nine months ago.”
“Oh, don’t be coarse,” said Camille, who said far worse things several times a day and sometimes in Latin. “Why do people think it’s so amusing when your wife is having a baby?”
“My wife has had three,” Danton said. He was only a year older than Camille—a year younger than Robespierre—yet always seemed to have lived twice as long. “I know it’s not amusing. Nothing about the situation is amusing, apart from you, and that’s not situational.”
“Can’t you find another wild bull to annoy instead?” Camille said, but he was smiling faintly. Robespierre couldn’t help but feel a stab of jealousy. Danton’s teasing, after all, had helped. Robespierre had known Camille so much longer, and yet all that came to his own tongue were unhelpful commonplaces.
“All will be well,” he said, awkwardly. “You’ll see.”
“Thank you,” Camille said. He ran a distracted hand through his hair and sighed. “This door isn’t working anymore. I need to momentarily hover by the stairs. Nothing personal. Please continue to talk amongst yourselves.”
Uneasiness descended over the room when Camille left. The truth was, Robespierre wasn’t entirely sure of Danton, and he knew the other man felt the same about him. They were too different: Danton’s pleasure-loving pragmatism was entirely alien to him, as he suspected his own quiet asceticism was to Danton. The gulfs of understanding between them were too vast without Camille to help traverse them.
“How long does this usually take?” he heard himself ask, and mentally kicked himself. Danton already thought he had far too little experience with the realities of life. But he’d been awake for a very long time; his mental energies were flagging. He found this sort of thing more draining than a thousand political arguments.
Fortunately, Danton’s thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. “Oh, hours. Days, sometimes. But I don’t think Camille will have so long to wait. You were right, you know.”
Robespierre tilted his head. “About?”
“This war playing into the king’s hands. I’m not so certain that Louis is mentally capable of that kind of deception, but some of his generals are. It would be all too easy for them to turn on us and let Austria in.”
“It’s a matter of time,” Robespierre agreed immediately. He sat forward in his chair. “We need to put a stop to it.”
“The war?”
“The war. Brissot’s domination of the Assembly. The king’s influence on government.”
“The king’s relatively harmless now.”
“It’s not about the king as an individual. It’s about the monarchy as an institution. And in that light, the king and his supporters are hardly harmless.” He wondered briefly why that sounded familiar. He had so many hours of political discussion every day now, and had for so many years. “They aren’t harmless for exactly the same reason the bracelets ar
en’t harmless. Because as long as they’re still there, we haven’t shrugged them off. We aren’t free of them. They’re waiting, until the wheel turns and people relax their guard, and then they’ll tighten their grip again.”
“I can’t imagine you ever relax your guard,” Danton said. “Look at you. It’s almost dawn, you’ve been arguing ideology all night, there’s a child being born upstairs, and you look as if you’ve just been starched, cleaned, and pressed.”
Robespierre ignored this. “It all went wrong after the king’s flight. After the Champ de Mars massacre. The wrong people came to power and made all the wrong concessions.”
“And what do you propose we do about that?”
Robespierre said nothing. The truth was, he’d been told what to do about that. He was still told, every night.
“I agree with what you’re saying,” Danton said into the silence. He leaned his bulk back against the cushions and put his feet up on the cold grate. “But we’re already arguing until we’re hoarse every night of the week. I don’t see what more there is, short of storming the palace.”
It was hard to explain what came to him then—whether something stirred in his head, or the idea simply presented itself too perfectly to ignore, or whether he was just tired and ready, for once, to compromise. But mesmerism kindled in his chest unexpectedly. It was the first time it had awakened of its own volition. His necromancy was often alive in his veins; even with his benefactor’s help, his mesmerism always needed to be drawn on deliberately, and lately it had been a reluctant child dragging its heels at being put to work. Slowly, he removed his spectacles and met Danton’s gaze.
“Someone could do that,” he said. And for the first time in months his benefactor’s magic joined with his own and infused the words with all the force of a command.
“Someone could do what?” Danton asked. He was looking at Robespierre very closely.
“Take the palace by force. It could be done. It would just take the right person, at the right moment.”
“I can’t imagine you’re speaking of yourself.”
“Of course not. I don’t want to seize power. I’m not speaking of anyone at all, really. But I suppose it would be someone capable of rallying a crowd and leading a charge. Someone used to being heard.”
Danton’s periwinkle eyes, surprisingly light and clear in such a ruined face, held Robespierre’s. Robespierre looked back at him. He was no longer tired or uncertain. Mesmerism was a tongue of flame licking through his blood. It was exhilarating.
“They’d have to take control of the Hôtel de Ville as well,” Danton said slowly. “If they were to have any bargaining power.”
“They would,” Robespierre agreed. “And from that position, with the king gone, they would be perfectly placed to institute any form of government they so chose. As long as the king was out of the negotiations.”
It wasn’t as though Danton hadn’t thought of it himself—or, if he hadn’t yet, he certainly would have soon. It wasn’t as though Robespierre had told him to actually kill the king. For that matter, it wasn’t as though Danton was entirely under his power: he was far too strong for that. But words unsaid hovered between them like a fog. From upstairs, there came the thin, bewildered wail of a baby crying.
Danton and Robespierre were still considering each other when Camille burst into the room.
“I have a son,” he said without preamble. “Horace Camille Desmoulins. You have a godson, Maximilien, but I think you’ll forgive me the greater claim to immediate inebriation. You hardly drink anyway.”
Robespierre blinked, his attention diverted. “A godson?”
“Didn’t I ask if you wanted to be godfather? I was supposed to. If Lucile asks, you accepted last month. You do accept, don’t you?”
“I—yes. Yes, of course.” A warmth very different from mesmerism blossomed in his chest. For a moment, he forgot all about the king. “It would be an honor. Congratulations.”
“Yes, congratulations,” Danton added sincerely. The teasing had gone from his voice. “It’s wonderful news. I assume Lucile’s well?”
“She’s well. The baby’s well. Everything is completely wonderful. Apart from, you know, politics and war, but we’ll fix that.” He sank down onto the couch, quite suddenly. “My God. I’m exhausted. I think I’m crying a little too, but there you are. What time is it?”
“Almost dawn,” Robespierre said. The air coming in from the open window promised a long, hot summer’s day. He didn’t look at Danton, and Danton didn’t look at him.
It never even occurred to anyone that Robespierre might want to help orchestrate an act of mob violence. Nobody remembered, now, that he had been at the Bastille; if Camille did, he was astute enough not to mention it while Robespierre was clearly choosing to conceal it himself. And Robespierre, after careful consideration, did choose to conceal it. His role in the fall of the Bastille was too dangerous to be revealed, in his opinion, even as he praised those involved to the heavens. He had flooded a crowd with mesmerism on that day. He had raised the dead. That was, after all, still illegal, and he was the Incorruptible.
And so over the next few weeks, as Danton and Camille began to spend more and more time in discussion away from Robespierre, and whispers began to pile up in corners, Robespierre both listened and didn’t listen. He heard the shapes of plans without asking for the specifics. He knew without knowing what he had set in motion. This was nothing new. His friendship with Camille had always been dependent on not asking for details that Camille would cheerfully have supplied but knew better than to volunteer. It wasn’t hypocrisy, or he didn’t think it was. It was just another way of staying clean.
Perhaps Danton understood this better than Robespierre gave him credit for. At the very least, on the evening of 9 August, when the two of them met by chance on the street, his cheerful voice held a trace of condescension.
“There should be a few bells ringing tonight,” he said. “If I were you, I’d bolt the doors and stay inside. It might get dirty out here.”
As night fell that evening, the bells from the churches began to ring.
Robespierre heard them as he sat at the dinner table with the Duplays; he looked up sharply and saw Éléonore, opposite him, do the same. Maurice set down his fork and got to his feet.
“Is that—?”
“Yes,” Robespierre said. He spoke calmly, but his chest tightened. “It’s starting.”
The bells rang throughout the night, a slow, rhythmic, all-consuming call to battle. At the Dantons’ house, Lucile Desmoulins walked her infant son up and down, jiggling him comfortingly as he bewailed the constant noise. Her own tears probably did little to help. Only that evening, she had been filled with high spirits, knowing that if she didn’t laugh, she would cry. She couldn’t laugh anymore, and so she was crying. It all seemed too real, suddenly, and too impossible.
The parlor swarmed with revolutionaries: Danton, Camille, and others, who had named themselves the Insurrectionary Commune. With the exception of Danton, they all wore bracelets; many, Camille included, were already showering the air with practice bursts of magic in a state of nervous bravado. They also, more practically, all wore pistols. Gunfire tended to outweigh most abilities, unless the Inheritance was exceptionally strong. Danton’s wife, Gabrielle, sat watching in quiet misery. Lucile knew her well and generally liked her, though she found her lacking in imagination. Normally she would go to her, but this time she held back. It struck her suddenly that she didn’t know whether she should comfort her or be comforted. She had never been good at the former and wasn’t sure if she could bear the latter. She felt faint and sick.
The Tuileries was not like the Bastille. Louis XVI, however weakened, however vulnerable, had armies loyal to him: the Swiss Guard made up the bulk of the defense, but he had a small personal guard, and a number of the National Guard would fight for him rather than the insurrectionists when it came to it. He would not go down without a fight. There was going to be death on both
sides.
“Not many on the street yet,” Camille said to Danton.
“Give them time,” Danton said. “They can all hear. They all know what it means. And all of Paris is with us. They’ll start coming out soon.” He yawned. “I might get some sleep for an hour or so before it starts. It’s going to be a long night.”
Lucile waited for him to go, then quietly took Camille aside. “I don’t want you to die,” she said. Even put so bluntly, it sounded artificial to her. She had read too many romance novels, and now tonight everything she said was an echo of a book rather than real life.
To anyone else, Camille might have declared, like a romance hero, that he was happy to die in the service of the Revolution. He didn’t say so to her. He had been saying such things less and less of late, since their marriage, since the birth of their child.
“I won’t,” he said instead. He looked white and strained, and utterly alive. “I’m not going to die. If it makes you feel better, I promise I won’t leave Danton’s side. We’ll look after each other.”
That shouldn’t have been reassuring, given that Danton’s side was likely to be in the heart of the danger. But Danton was so solid, so sensible, and so cheerfully interested in his own self-preservation that somehow it was.
“Madame Robert says that if her husband dies, she’ll kill Danton,” Lucile said, lowering her voice further as she looked sideways at the wife of one of the other revolutionaries. “I won’t let her; I’ll protect Danton and his family at all costs. But if you die, I think I’ll probably kill someone.”