A Place of Greater Safety (34 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
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That is Saturday, October 3: Versailles banqueting while Paris starves.
Five o’clock that evening, President Danton was roaring at his District Assembly, his doubled fist pounding the table. The Cordeliers citizens will placard the city, he said. They will revenge this insult to the patriots. They will save Paris from the royal threat. The battalion will call out its brothers-in-arms in every district, they will be the first on the road. They will hale the King to Paris, and have him under their eye. If all else fails it is clear that President Danton will march there himself, and drag Louis back singlehanded. I have finished with the King, said the King’s Councillor.
Stanislas Maillard, an officer of the Châtelet court, preached to the market women. He referred, needlessly, to their hungry children. A procession formed. Maillard was a long, gaunt figure, like Death in a picture book. On his right was a tinker woman, a tramp, known to the down-and-outs as the Queen of Hungary. On his left was a brain-damaged escapee from an asylum, clutching in his hand a bottle of the cheapest spirits. The liquor ran from his nerveless mouth down his chin, and in his flint-colored eyes there was no expression at all. Sunday.
Monday morning: “I suppose you think you are going somewhere?” Danton asked his clerks.
They had thought of a day at Versailles, actually.
“Is this a legal practice, or a field headquarters?”
“Danton has an important shipping case,” Pare told Camille, later in the morning. “He is not to be disturbed. You weren’t really thinking of going there yourself, were you?”
“It was just that he gave the impression, at the District Assembly—well, no, I wasn’t, not really. By the way, is this the same shipping case he had when the Bastille was taken?”
“The appeal,” Danton said, from behind his bolted door.
 
 
S
anterre, a National Guard battalion commander, leads an assault on City Hall; some money is stolen and papers are torn up. The market
women run through the streets, sweeping up the women they meet, exhorting and threatening them. In the Place de Grève the crowd is collecting arms. They want the National Guard to go to Versailles with them, Lafayette at their head. From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. the Marquis argues with them. A young man tells him, “The government is deceiving us—we’ve got to go and bring the King to Paris. If, as they say, he’s an imbecile, then we’ll have his son for King, you’ll be Regent, everything will be better.”
At 11 a.m., Lafayette goes to argue with the Police Committee. All afternoon he is barricaded in, gets the news only in snatches. But by five o’clock he is on the road to Versailles, at the head of fifteen thousand National Guardsmen. The number of the mob is uncounted. It is raining.
An advance party of women has already invaded the Assembly. They are sitting on the deputies’ benches, with sodden skirts hitched up and legs spread out, jostling the deputies and making jokes, calling for Mirabeau. A small delegation of the women is admitted to the King’s presence, and he promises them all the bread that can be found. Bread or blood? Théroigne is outside, talking to soldiers. She wears a scarlet riding habit. She is in possession of a saber. The rain is spoiling the plumes on her hat.
A message to General Lafayette, on the road: the King has decided after all to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Oh really? To the general, weary and dispirited, his hands frozen on the harness and rain running down his pointed nose, it is not the most relevant piece of news.
 
 
P
aris: Fabre talking round the cafés, making opinion. “The point is,” he said, “one initiates something like this, one should take the credit. Who can deny that the initiative was seized by President Danton and his district? As for the march itself, who better than the women of Paris to undertake it? They won’t fire on women.”
Fabre felt no disappointment that Danton had stayed at home; he felt relief. He began to sense dimly the drift of events. Camille was right; in public, before his appropriate audience, Danton had the aura of great ness about him. From now on, Fabre would always urge him to think of his physical safety.
 
 
N
ight. Still raining. Lafayette’s men waiting in the darkness, while he is interrogated by the Assembly. What is the reason for this unseemly military demonstration?
In his pocket Lafayette has a desperate note from the president of this same Assembly, begging him to march his men to Versailles and rescue the King. He would like to put his hand in his pocket, to be sure that the message is not a dream, but he cannot do that in front of the Assembly; they would think he was being disrespectful. What would Washington do? he asks himself: without result. So he stands, mud-spattered up to his shoulders, and answers these strange questions as best he can, pleading with the Assembly in an increasingly husky voice—could the King, to save a lot of trouble, be persuaded to make a short speech in favor of the new national colors?
A little later, exhausted, he is assisted into the presence of the King and, still covered in mud, addresses himself to His Majesty, His Majesty’s brother the Comte de Provence, the Archbishop of Bordeaux and M. Necker. “Well,” the King says, “I suppose you’ve done what you could.”
Becoming semi-articulate, the general clasps his hands to his breast in an attitude he has hitherto seen only in paintings, and pledges his life as surety for the King’s—he is also the devoted servant of the constitution, and someone, someone, he says, has been paying out a great deal of money.
The Queen stood in the shadows, looking at him with dislike.
He went out, fixed patrols about the palace and the town, watched from a window the low burning of torches and heard drunken singing on the night wind. Ballads, no doubt, relating to Court life. Melancholy swept him, a sort of nostalgia for heroism. He checked his patrols, visited the royal apartments once more. He was not admitted; they had retired for the night.
Towards dawn, he threw himself down fully clothed and shut his eyes. General Morpheus, they called him later.
Sunrise. Drumbeats. One small gate is left unguarded, by negligence or treachery; shooting breaks out, the Bodyguard are overwhelmed, and within minutes there are heads on pikes. The mob are in the palace. Women armed with knives and clubs are sprinting through the galleries towards their victims.
The general awake. Move, and at the double. Before he arrives, the mob have reached the door of the Œuil de Boeuf, and the National Guardsmen have driven them back. “Give me the Queen’s liver,” a woman screams. “I want it for a fricassee.” Lafayette—on foot, no time to wait for a horse to be saddled——is not yet inside the chateau, for he is caught up in a screaming mob who have already got nooses round the necks of members of the Bodyguard. The royal family are safe—just—inside the salon. The royal children are crying. The Queen is barefoot. She has escaped death by the thickness of a door.
Lafayette arrives. He meets the eyes of the barefoot woman—the woman who drove him from Court, who once ridiculed his manners and laughed at his dancing. Now she requires of him more than a courtier’s skills. The mob seethes beneath the windows. Lafayette indicates the balcony. “It is necessary,” he says.
The King steps out. The people shout, “To Paris.” They wave pikes and level guns. They call for the Queen.
Inside the room, the general makes a gesture of invitation to her. “Don’t you hear what they are shouting?” she says. “Have you seen the gestures they make?”
“Yes.” Lafayette draws his finger across his throat. “But either you go to them, or they come for you. Step out, Madame.”
Her face frozen, she takes her children by the hands, steps out onto the balcony. “No children!” the mob call. The Queen drops the Dauphin’s hand; he and his sister are drawn back inside the room.
Antoinette stands alone. Lafayette’s mind is racing to consequences—all hell will be let loose, there will be total war by nightfall. He steps out beside her, hoping to shield her with his body if the worst … and the people howl … and then—O perfect courtier!—he takes the Queen’s hand, he raises it, he bows low, he kisses her fingertips.
Immediately, the mood swings around. “
Vive Lafayette!
” He shivers at their fickleness; shivers inside. And “
Vive la reine
,” someone calls.
“Vive la reine!
” That cry has not been heard in a decade. Her fists unclench, her mouth opens a little; he feels her lean against him, floppy with relief. A Bodyguard steps out to assist her, a tricolor cockade in his hat. The crowd cheer. The Queen is handed back inside. The King declares he will go to Paris.
This takes all day.
On the way to Paris, Lafayette rides by the King’s carriage, and speaks hardly a word. There will be no bodyguards after this, he thinks, except those I provide. I have the nation to protect from the King, and now the King to protect from the nation. I saved her life, he thinks. He sees again the white face, the bare feet, feels her sag against him as the crowd cheer. She will never forgive him, he knows. The armed forces are now at my disposal, he thinks, my position should be unassailable … but slouching along in the half-dark, the anonymous many, the People. “
Here we have them
,” they cry, “
the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s little apprentice
.” The National Guardsmen and the Bodyguards exchange hats, and thus make themselves look ridiculous: but more ridiculous still are the bloody defaced heads that bob, league upon league, before the royal carriage.
That was October.
 
 
T
he assembly followed the King to Paris, and took up temporary lodgings in the archbishop’s palace. The Breton Club resumed its meetings in the refectory of an empty convectual building in the rue Saint-Jacques. The former tenants, Dominicans, were always called by the people “Jacobins,” and the name stuck to the deputies and journalists and men of affairs who debated there like a second Assembly. They moved, as their numbers grew, into the library; and finally into the old chapel, which had a gallery for the public.
In November the Assembly moved to the premises of what had formerly been an indoor riding school. The hall was cramped and badly lit, an inconvenient shape, difficult to speak in. Members faced each other across a gangway. One side of the room was broken by the president’s seat and the secretaries’ table, the other by the speaker’s rostrum. The stricter upholders of royal power sat on the right of the gangway; the patriots, as they often called themselves, sat on the left.
Heat was provided by a stove in the middle of the floor, and ventilation was poor. At Dr. Guillotin’s suggestion, vinegar and herbs were sprinkled twice daily. The public galleries were cramped, too, and the three hundred spectators they held could be organized and policed—not necessarily by the authorities.
From now on the Parisians never called the Assembly anything but “the Riding School.”
 
 
R
ue Condé: towards the end of the year, Claude permitted a thaw in relations. Annette gave a party. His daughters asked their friends, and the friends asked their friends. Annette looked around: “Suppose a fire were to break out?” she said. “So much of the Revolution would go up in smoke.”
There had been, before the guests arrived, the usual row with Lucile; nothing was accomplished nowadays without one. “Let me put your hair up,” Annette wheedled. “Like I used to? With flowers?”
Lucile said vehemently that she would rather die. She didn’t want pins, ribbons, blossoms, devices. She wanted a mane that she could toss about, and if she was willing to torture a few curls into it, Annette thought, that was only for greater verisimilitude. “Oh really,” she said crossly, “if you’re going to impersonate Camille, at least get it right. If you go on like that you’ll get a crick in your neck.” Adèle put her hand over her mouth, and snorted with mirth. “You’ve got to do it like this,” Annette said, demonstrating. “You don’t
simultaneously
toss your head
back and shake the hair out of your eyes. The movements are actually quite separate.”
Lucile tried it, smirking. “You could be right. Adèle, you have a go. Stand up, you have to stand up to get the effect.”
The three women jostled for the mirror. They began to splutter with laughter, then to shriek and wail. “Then there’s this one,” Lucile said. “Out of my way, minions, while I show you.” She wiped the smile from her face, stared into the mirror in a rapture of wide-eyed narcissism and removed an imaginary tendril of hair with a delicate flick.
“Imbecile,” her mother said. “Your wrist’s at quite the wrong angle. Haven’t you eyes to see?”
Lucile opened her eyes very wide and gave her a Camille-look. “I was only born yesterday,” she said pitifully.
Adèle and her mother staggered around the room. Adèle fell onto Annette’s bed and sobbed into the pillow. “Oh, stop it, stop it,” Annette said. Her hair had fallen down and tears were running through her rouge. Lucile subsided to the floor and beat the carpet with her fist. “I think I’ll die,” she said.
Oh, the relief of it! When for months now, the three of them had hardly spoken! They got to their feet, tried to compose themselves; but as they reached for powder and scent, great gouts of laughter burst from one or the other. All evening they’re not safe: “Maître Danton, you know Maximilien Robespierre, don’t you?” Annette said, and turned away because tears were beginning to well up in her eyes and her lips were twitching and another scream of laughter was about to be born. Maître Danton had this exceedingly aggressive habit of planting a fist on his hip and frowning, while he was talking about the weather or something equally routine. Deputy Maximilien Robespierre had the most curious way of not blinking, and a way of insinuating himself around the furniture; it would be marvelous to see him spring on a mouse. She left them to their self-importance, guffawing inside.

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