Read A Place of Greater Safety Online

Authors: Hilary Mantel

A Place of Greater Safety (29 page)

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
3.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
The police have received a check. A few days ago, on this spot, he said, “The beast is in the snare: finish it off.” He meant the animal of the old regime, the dispensation he had lived under all his life. But now he sees another beast: the mob. A mob has no soul, it has no conscience, just paws and claws and teeth. He remembers M. Saulce’s dog in the Place des Armes, slipped out to riot in the sleepy afternoon; three years old, he leans from the window of the Old House and sees the dog toss a rat into the air and snap its neck. No one will pull him away from this
spectacle. No one will chain this dog, no one will lead it home. Suitably he addressed it, leaning out towards the mob, one hand extended, palm upwards, charming it and coaxing it and drawing it on. He has lost one of the pistols, he does not know where, it does not matter. The blood has set like marble in his veins. He means to live forever.
By now the crowd was hoarse and spinning with folly. He jumped down into it. A hundred hands reached for clothes and hair and skin and flesh. People were crying, cursing, making slogans. His name was in their mouths; they knew him. The noise was some horror from the Book of Revelations, hell released and all its companies scouring the streets. Although the quarter-hour has struck, no one knows this. People weep. They pick him up and carry him round the gardens on their shoulders. A voice screams that pikes are to be had, and smoke drifts among the trees. Somewhere a drum begins to beat: not deep, not resonant, but a hard, dry, ferocious note.
 
 
C
amille Desmoulins to Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins, at Guise:
You made an error when you would not come to Laon to recommend me to the people who would have had me nominated. But it doesn’t matter now. I have written my name on our Revolution in letters larger than those of all our deputies from Picardy.
A
s the evening drew on, M. Duplessis walked out with a couple of friends who wished to satisfy their curiosity. He took a stout cane, with which he intended to repel working-class bullyboys. Mme. Duplessis asked him not to go.
Annette’s face was pinched with anxiety. The servants had brought in disgusting rumors, and she was afraid there might be substance to them. Lucile seemed sure there was. She sat conspicuously quietly and modestly, like a lottery winner.
Adèle was at home. She usually was now, unless she was at Versailles paying calls and picking up gossip. She knew deputies’ wives and deputies, and all the café talk, and all the voting strategies in the National Assembly.
Lucile went to her room. She took pen and ink, and a piece of paper, and on the paper she wrote, “Adèle is in love with Maximilien Robespierre.” She tore the strip off the sheet, and crumpled it in her palm.
She picked up some embroidery. She worked slowly, paying close
attention to what she was doing. Later she intended to show people the meticulous work she had done that afternoon between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. She thought of practicing some scales. When I am married, she thought, I will have a piano: and there will be other innovations.
When Claude got home, he walked straight into his study, coat, cane and all, and slammed the door. Annette understood that he might need a short time to recover himself. “I’m afraid your father may have received some bad news,” she said.
“How could he,” Adèle said, “just by going out to see what’s happening? I mean, it’s not anyone’s personal bad news, is it?”
Annette tapped at the door. The girls stood at her elbows. “Come out,” she said. “Or shall we come in?”
Claude said, “The minister has been made a pretext.”
“Necker,” Adèle corrected. “He’s not the minister anymore.”
“No.” Claude was torn between his loyalty to his departmental chief and his desire to have his thoughts out in the open. “You know I never cared for the man. He is a charlatan. But he deserves bettter than to be made a pretext.”
“My dear,” Annette said, “there are three women here in considerable agony of mind. Do you think you could bring yourself to be a little more particular in your description of events?”
“They are rioting,” Claude said simply. “The dismissal of M. Necker has caused a furor. We are plunged into a state of anarchy, and anarchy is not a word I use.”
“Sit down, my dear,” Annette said.
Claude sat, and passed a hand over his eyes. From the wall the old King surveyed them; the present Queen in a cheap print, feathers in her hair and her chin flattered into insignificance; a plaster bust of Louis, looking like a wheelwright’s mate; the Abbé Terray, both full-face and in profile.
“There is a state of insurrection,” he said. “They are setting the customs barriers on fire. They have closed the theaters and broken into the waxworks.”
“Broken into the waxworks?” Annette was conscious of the idiot grin growing on her face. “What did they want to do that for?”
“How do I know?” Claude raised his voice. “How should I know what they are doing things for? There are five thousand people, six thousand people, marching on the Tuileries. That is just one procession and there are others coming up to join them. They are destroying the city.”
“But where are the soldiers?”
“Where are they? The King himself would like to know, I’m sure. They might as well be lining the route and cheering, for all the use they are. I thank God the King and Queen are at Versailles, for who knows what might not happen, as at the head of these mobs there is—” Words failed him. “There is that person.”
“I don’t believe you.” Annette’s voice was matter-of-fact. She only said it in courtesy to form; she knew it was true.
“Please yourself. You can read it in the morning paper-if there is one. It appears that he made a speech at the Palais-Royal and that it had a certain effect and that he has now become some sort of hero to these people. To the mob, I should say. The police moved in to arrest him and he unwisely held them off at gunpoint.”
“I’m not sure it was unwise,” Adele said, “given the result it seems to have produced.”
“Oh, I should have taken measures,” Claude said. “I should have sent you both away. I ask what I have done to deserve it, one daughter hobnobbing with radicals and the other planning to plight herself to a criminal.”
“Criminal?” Lucile sounded surprised.
“Yes. He has broken the law.”
“The law will be altered.”
“My God,” Claude said, “do you tell me? The troops will flatten them.”
“You seem to think that all this is accidental,” Lucile said. “No, Father, let me speak, I have a right to speak, since I know better than you what is going on. You say there are thousands of rioters, how many thousands you are not sure, but the French Guards will not attack their own people, and most of them indeed are on our side. If they are properly organized they will soon have enough arms to engage the rest of the troops. The Royal Allemand troops will be swamped by sheer force of numbers.”
Claude stared at her. “Any measures you might have taken are too late,” his wife said in a low voice. Lucile cleared her throat. It was almost a speech she was making, a pale drawing-room imitation. Her hands shook. She wondered if he had been very frightened: if pushed and driven by the crowds he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the living heart of all the close designs.
“All this was planned,” she said. “I know there are reinforcements, but they have to cross the river.” She walked to the window. “Look. No moon tonight. How long will it take them to cross in the dark, with their commanders falling out amongst themselves? They only know how to fight on battlefields, they don’t know how to fight in the streets. By
tomorrow morning—if they can be held now at the Place Louis XV—the troops will be cleared out of the city center. And the Paris Electors will have their militia on the streets; they can ask for arms from City Hall. There are guns at the Invalides, forty thousand muskets—”
“Battlefield?” Claude said. “Reinforcements? How do you know all this? Where did you learn it?”
“Where do you suppose?” she said coolly.
“Electors? Militia? Muskets? Do you happen to know,” he asked, with hysterical sarcasm, “where they will get the powder and shot?”
“Oh yes,” Lucile said. “At the Bastille.”
 
 
G
reen was the color they had picked for identification—green, the color of hope. In the Palais-Royal a girl had given Camille a bit of green ribbon, and since then the people had raided the shops for it and yards and yards of sage green and apple and emerald and lime stretched over the dusty streets and trailed in the gutters. In the Palais-Royal they had pulled down leaves from the chestnut trees, and now wore them sad and wilting in their hats and buttonholes. The torn, sweet vegetable smell lay in clouds over the afternoon.
By evening they were an army, marching behind their own banners. Though darkness fell, the heat did not abate; and sometime during the night the storm broke, and the crack of thunder overhead vied with the sting and rumble of gunfire and the crash of splintering glass; people sang, orders were bawled into the darkness, all night long there was the thud of boots on cobblestones and the ring of steel. Jagged flashes from the sky lit the devastated streets, and smoke billowed on the winds from the burning barriers. At midnight a drunken grenadier said to Camille, “I’ve seen your face somewhere before.”
At dawn, in the rain, he met Hérault de Séchelles; but then he was beyond surprise by now, and would not have passed any comment if he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with Mme. du Barry. The judge’s face was dirty, his coat was ripped half off his back. In one hand he had a very fine dueling pistol, one of a valuable pair made for Maurice de Saxe: and in the other a meat cleaver.
“But the waste, the irresponsibility,” Hérault said. “They’ve plundered the Saint-Lazare monastery. All that fine furniture, my God, and the silver. Yes, they’ve raided the cellars, they’re lying in the streets vomiting now. What’s that you say? Versailles? Did you say ‘finish it off’ or ‘finish them off’? If so I’d better get a change of clothes, I’d hate to turn up at the palace looking like this. Oh yes,” he said, and he gripped the cleaver
and charged back into the crowds, “it beats filing writs, doesn’t it?” He had never been so happy: never, never before.
 
 
D
uke Philippe had spent the 12th at his château of Raincy, in the forest of Bondy. On hearing of the events in Paris, he expressed himself “much surprised and shocked.” “Which,” says his ex-mistress Mrs. Elliot, “I really thought he was.”
At the King’s levee on the morning of the 13th, Philippe was first ignored; then asked by His Majesty (rudely) what he wanted; then told, “Get back where you came from.” Philippe set off for his house at Mousseaux in a very bad temper, and swore (according to Mrs. Elliot) “that he would never go near them again.”
 
 
I
n the afternoon Camille went back to the Cordeliers district. The drunken grenadier was still dogging his footsteps saying, “I know you from somewhere.” There were four murderous but sober French Guardsmen who were under threat of lynching if anything happened to him; there were several escaped prisoners from La Force. There was a raucous market wife with a striped skirt, a woolen bonnet, a broad-bladed kitchen knife and a foul tongue; I’ve taken a fancy to you, she kept saying, you aren’t going anywhere from now on without me. There was a pretty young woman with a pistol in the belt of her riding habit, and her brown hair tied back with a red ribbon and a blue one.
“What happened to the green?” he asked her.
“Somebody remembered that green is the Comte d’Artois’s color. We can’t have that—so now it’s the Paris colors, red and blue.” She smiled at him with what seemed like old affection. “Anne Théroigne,” she said. “We met at one of Fabre’s auditions. Remember?”
Her face seemed luminous in the watery light. Now he saw that she was very cold, drenched and shivering. “The weather has broken,” she said. “And so much else.”
At the Cour du Commerce the concierge had the doors barred, so he talked to Gabrielle through a window. She was pasty-faced and her hair was in a mess. “Georges went out with our neighbor, M. Gély,” she said, “to recruit for the citizens’ militia. A few minutes ago Maitre Lavaux came by—you know him, he lives across the way?—and he said, ‘I’m very worried about Georges, he’s standing on a table yelling his head off about protecting our homes from the military and the brigands.’” She
gaped at the people standing behind him. “Who are these? Are they with you?”
Louise Gély appeared, her face bobbing at Gabrielle’s shoulder. “Hallo,” she said. “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand in the street?”
Gabrielle put an arm around her and held her tight. “I’ve got her mother in here having the vapors. Georges said to Maitre Lavaux, ‘Come and join us, you’ve lost your position anyway, the monarchy’s finished.’ Why, why, why did he say that?” Her distraught hand clutched the sill. “When will he be back? What shall I do?”
“Because it’s true,” he said. “He’ll not be long, not Georges. Keep the door locked.”
BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
3.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

A Soldier's Journey by Patricia Potter
A Bone to Pick by Gina McMurchy-Barber
Starlight by Anne Douglas
Icon by Genevieve Valentine
The Inquisitor's Key by Jefferson Bass
The Goodbye Girl by Angela Verdenius