A Place of Greater Safety (115 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
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Camille Desmoulins, my son, is a republican in his heart, in his principles and, as it were, by instinct. He was a republican in heart and in choice before July 14, 1789, and has been so in reality and in deed ever since … .
Citizen, I ask you only one thing: investigate, and cause an examining jury to investigate, the conduct of my son.
Health and fraternity from your compatriot and fellow citizen, who has the honor to be the father of the first and most unhesitating of republicans—
Desmoulins
 
 
“H
ey, Lacroix. If I left my legs to Couthon, and my balls to Robespierre, the Committee would have a new lease on life.”
Day Four.
The interrogation of the brothers Frei proceeds. Ten, eleven o’clock. Hermann keeps the decree of the Convention under his hand. He watches the prisoners, the prisoners watch him. The signs of the night they have passed are written on their faces. And Hermann has seen the text of a letter to hearten him, from the Committee to the commander of the National Guard:
“Do not—we emphasize, do not—arrest either the Public Prosecutor or the President of the Tribunal.”
 
 
A
s noon approaches, Fouquier addresses Danton and Lacroix. “I have a great number of witnesses available to testify against both of you. However, I shall not be calling them. You will be judged solely on documentary evidence.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lacroix demands. “What documents? Where are they?”
He receives no answer. Danton stands up.
“Since yesterday, we may no longer expect observance of the proper forms of law. But you promised me that I might resume my defense. That is my right.”
“Your rights, Danton, are in abeyance.” Hermann turns to the jury. “Have you heard enough?”
“Yes: we have heard enough.”
“Then the trial is closed.”
“Closed? What do you mean, closed? You haven’t read our statements. You haven’t called a single one of our witnesses. The trial hasn’t even begun.”
Camille stands up beside him. Hérault reaches forward to take hold of him, but he sidesteps and evades his grasp. He takes two paces forward towards the judges. He holds up the papers. “I insist on speaking. Through these whole proceedings you have denied my right to speak. You cannot condemn people without hearing their defense. I demand to read out my statement.”
“You may not read it.”
Camille crumples the papers in his two hands, and throws them with amazing accuracy at the president’s head. Ignominiously, Hermann ducks. Fouquier is on his feet: “The prisoners have insulted the national justice. Under the terms of the decree, they may now be removed from the court. The jury will retire to consider its verdict.”
Behind the barrier, the crowd is already drifting away, to take its place along the death route and by the scaffold. Last night Fouquier issued an order for three tumbrels: three tumbrels, mid-afternoon.
Two officers hurry forward to help Fabre.
“We must take you below, Citizens, while the jury is out.”
“Take your hands off me, please,” Hérault says, with a dangerous politeness. “Come, Danton: no point in standing here. Come, Camille—I hope you’ll not make a fuss.”
Camille is going to make as much fuss as he can. An officer of the court stands before him. The man knows—it is an article of faith with him—that the condemned don’t fight back. “Please come with us,” he says. “Please come quietly. No one wants to hurt you, but if you don’t come quietly you’re going to get hurt.”
Danton and Lacroix begin to plead with Camille. He clings desperately to the bench. “I don’t want to hurt you,” the officer says abjectly. A section of the crowd has detached itself and come back to watch. Camille
sneers at the officer. The man tries without success to pull him away. Reinforcements arrive. Fouquier’s eyes rest unseeingly on his cousin. “For God’s sake, overpower him, carry him off,” Hermann shouts. He slams a book down in irritation. “Get them all out of here.”
One of the officers puts his hand into Camille’s long hair and jerks his head back violently. They hear the snap of bone and his gasp of pain. A moment later they have knocked him to the floor. Lacroix turns his face away in distaste. “I want Robespierre to know,” Camille says, as they drag him up from the marble floor. “I want him to remember this.”
“Well,” Hermann says to Fouquier, “half the Police Committee are in the jury room, so we may as well join them. If there is any more hesitation, show them the documents from the British Foreign Office.”
Just outside the courtroom, Fabre’s strength almost gives way. “Stop,” he gasps. The two officers assisting him put their hands under his elbows and lean him against the wall. He struggles for breath. Three men pass him, dragging Camille’s limp body. His eyes are closed and his mouth is bleeding. Fabre sees him; his face crumples, and suddenly he begins to cry. “You bastards, you bastards,” he says. “Oh, you bastards, you bastards, you bastards.”
 
 
F
ouquier looks around the members of the jury. Souberbielle avoids his eye. “I think that’s about it,” he says to Hermann. He nods to Vadier. “Satisfied?”
“I shall be satisfied when their heads are off.”
“The crowds are reported large but passive,” Fouquier says. “It is as Citizen Robespierre says; in the end, they have no allegiance. It is finished.”
“Are we to have them back in the courtroom, and go through all that again?”
“No, I think not,” Fouquier says. He hands a sheet of paper to one of the court officials. “Get them into the outer office. This is the death sentence. Read it to them while Sanson’s men are cutting their hair.” He takes out his watch. “It’s four o’clock. He’ll be ready.”
 
 
“I
don’t give a fuck for your sentence. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested in the verdict. The people will judge Danton, not you.”
Danton continues talking over the official’s voice, so that none of the men with him hear their death sentences being read. In the courtyard
beyond the prison’s outer office, Sanson’s assistants are joking and calling to each other.
Lacroix sits on a wooden stool. The executioner tips open the collar of his shirt and rapidly cuts off the hair that grows over the back of his neck. “One unconscious,” a guard calls out. “One unconscious.”
Behind the wooden grille that separates the prisoners from the courtyard, the master executioner raises his hand to show that he has understood. Chabot is covered by a blanket. His face is blue. He is slipping into a coma. Only his lips move.
“He ordered himself some arsenic,” the guard says. “Well, you can’t stop the prisoner’s requirements getting through.”
“Yes,” Hérault says to Danton. “I contemplated it. In the end I thought, to commit suicide under these circumstances is an admission of guilt, and if they insist on cutting your corpse’s head off, as they do, it is in questionable taste. One should set an example to this riff-raff, don’t you think? In any event, it is better to open a vein.” His attention is drawn to the opposite wall, where a savage scuffle is going on. “My dear Camille, what is the point?” Hérault asks.
“You are giving us a lot of trouble, you are,” one of the guards says. They have finally got Camille tied up very tightly. They have discussed whether to accidentally knock him unconscious, but if they do that Sanson will get testy and call them bloody amateurs. His shirt was torn off his back when they tried to hold him still to cut his hair, and the rags of it hang on his thin shoulders. A dark bruise is spreading visibly under his left cheekbone. Danton crouches by him.
“We must tie your hands, Citizen Danton.”
“Just one second.”
Danton reaches down, and takes from around Camille’s neck the locket that holds a twist of Lucile’s hair. He puts it into his bound hands, and feels Camille’s fingers close over it.
“You can go ahead now.”
Lacroix digs him in the ribs. “Those Belgian girls—it was worth it, yes?”
“It was worth it. But not for the Belgian girls.”
 
 
H
érault is a little pale as he steps into the first tumbrel. Otherwise, there is no change visible on his face. “I am glad I don’t have to travel with the thieves.”
“Only the best-quality revolutionaries in this tumbrel,” Danton says. “Are you going to make it, Fabre, or shall we bury you
en route?
Fabre lifts his head with an effort. “Danton. They took my papers, you know.”
“Yes, that is what they do.”
“I just wanted to finish
The Maltese Orange
, that was all. There were such beautiful verses in it. Now the Committee will get the manuscript, and that bastard Collot will pass it off as his own.” Danton tips back his head and begins to laugh. “They will put it on at the Italiens,” Fabre says, “under that blasted plagiarist’s name.”
Pont-Neuf, Quai de Louvre. The cart sways and jolts. He plants his feet apart to keep upright and to steady Camille’s sagging weight. Camille’s tears seep through the cloth of his shirt. He is not crying for himself but for Lucile: perhaps for their composite self, their eternity of letters, their repertoire of gestures and quirks and jokes, all lost now, vanished and for their child. “You are not meeting Hérault’s standards,” Danton says softly.
He scans the faces of the crowd. Silent, indifferent, they slow the progress of the carts. “Let us try to die with dignity,” Hérault suggests.
Camille looks up, snaps out of his coma of grief, “Oh, fuck off,” he says to Hérault, “stop being such a
ci-devant
.”
Quai de l’Ecole. Danton raises his eyes to the facade of the buildings. “Gabrielle,” he murmurs. He looks up as if he expects to see someone there: a face withdrawing behind a curtain, a hand raised in farewell.
Rue Honoré. The interminable street. At the end of it they shout curses at the shuttered facade of the Duplay house. Camille, though, tries to speak to the crowds. Henri Sanson glances over his shoulder apprehensively. Danton drops his head, whispers to him, “Be calm, now. Let that vile rabble alone.”
The sun is setting. It will be quite dark, Danton thinks, by the time we are all dead. At the tail of the cart, muffled in sansculotte garb, the Abbe Kéravenen recites silently the prayers for the dying. As the cart turns into the Place de la Revolution, he raises his hand in conditional absolution.
 
 
T
here is a point beyond which—convention and imagination dictate—we cannot go; perhaps it’s here, when the carts decant onto the scaffold their freight, now living and breathing flesh, soon to be dead meat. Danton imagines that, as the greatest of the condemned, he will be left until last, with Camille beside him. He thinks less of eternity than of how to keep his friend’s body and soul together for the fifteen minutes before the National Razor separates them.
But of course it is not like that. Why should it be as you imagine? They drag Hérault away first: rather, they touch him on the elbow, and conduct him to his end. “Good-bye, my friends,” Hérault says, just that; then immediately they have got their hands on Camille. It makes sense. Quickly dispose of anyone who might discomfit the crowds.
Camille is now, suddenly, calm. It is too late for Hérault to see how his example has been beneficial; but Camille nods his head towards Henri Sanson. “As Robespierre would say—you have to smile. This man’s father sued me for libel. Wouldn’t you think that I have the grievance now?”
He does smile. Danton’s stomach turns over: breathing flesh, dead meat. He sees Camille speak to Sanson: he sees the man take the locket from his bound hands. The locket is for Annette. He will not forget to deliver it; the last wishes are sacred, and he is of an honorable trade. For ten seconds Danton looks away. After that he watches everything, each bright efflorescence of life’s blood. He watches each death, until he is tutored to his own.
“Hey, Sanson?”
“Citizen Danton?”
“Show my head to the people. It’s worth the trouble.”
 
 
R
ue Honoré: One day, a long time ago, his mother sat by a window, making lace. The broad morning light streamed in on both of them. He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. “Show me how to do it,” he said. “I want to learn.”
“Boys don’t do it,” she said. Her face was composed; her work continued. His throat closed at the exclusion.
Now, whenever he looks at a piece of lace—even though his eyes are bad—he seems to see every thread in the work. At the Committee table, the image rises at the back of his mind, and forces him to look far, far back into his childhood. He sees the girl on the window seat, her body swollen, pregnant with death: he sees the light on her bent head; beneath her fingers the airy pattern, going nowhere, flying away.

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