Authors: Hilary Mantel

A Place of Greater Safety (55 page)

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety

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Lucile excused herself, to go and speak with Jeanette.

“Horace-Camille,” Danton said speculatively. “Do you think it will bring him luck in life?”

Robespierre smiled his thin smile. He was conscious of the thinness of it. If he were remembered into the next generation, people would speak of his thin, cold smile, as they would speak of Danton’s girth, vitality, scarred face. He wanted, always, to be different—and especially with Danton. Perhaps the smile looked sarcastic, or patronizing or disapproving. But it was the only one available to his face.

“I think Horace …” he said. “A great poet, and a good republican. If one discounts the later verse, where I think he was probably forced to flatter Augustus.”

“Yes …” Danton said. “Camille’s writings flatter you—though probably I shouldn’t say
flatter,
I am choosing the wrong word.”

He had to grit his teeth; that is, he thought of gritting them, and the thought usually suffices.

“As I said, it is an honorable name.”

Danton sat back in his chair. He stretched out his long legs. He drawled. (It is a commonplace, but there is no other word for it, he drawled.) “I wonder what the honorable original is doing now.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Why, what do you imagine he is doing?”

“Probably something unthinkable in a whorehouse.”

“I don’t know what right you have to think that. I don’t know what you mean.”

“My dear Robespierre, I don’t expect you to know what I mean. I should be very shocked if you did know. Disillusioned.”

“Then why must you pursue the subject?”

“I really believe you haven’t any idea of half the things that Camille gets up to. Have you?” He sounded interested.

“It is a private concern.”

“You surprise me. Isn’t he a public concern? A public man?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Therefore he should be good. Virtuous. According to you. But he’s not.”

“I don’t want to know—”

“But I ought to insist on telling you. For the public welfare, you know. Camille—”

Lucile came back into the room. Danton laughed. “I promise you the details at another time, Maximilien. For your intimate consideration.”

[The Jacobin Club in session, M. Robespierre speaking.]

FROM THE FLOOR: Despot!

M. DANTON: [
president
]: Silence. Order. M. Robespierre has never exercised any despotism here but the despotism of pure reason.

FROM THE FLOOR: The demagogue’s awake!

M. DANTON: I am not a demagogue, and for a long time now I have kept silent with great difficulty. I shall unmask those who boast of having served the people. The time has come when there is a grave need to speak out against those who, for the past three months, have been impugning the courage of a man to whose bravery the whole Revolution bears witness …

R
obespierre to the Jacobins, May 10, 1792: “The more you isolate me, the more you cut off all my human contacts, the more justification I find in my own conscience, and in the justice of my cause.”

P
assages from the life of the Brissotin ministry:

General Dumouriez appeared at the Jacobin Club, of which he was a member. He had a proper soldierly bearing, and the workings of a questioning and restless mind showed in his otherwise unremarkable face. On hair lately powdered, he wore a red woolen bonnet, the Cap of Liberty. He had come to pay his respects at the shrine of patriotism (or some such flimsy metaphor) and he besought fraternal advice and guidance.

Ministers had never behaved like this before.

With anxiety, the patriots watched Robespierre’s face. It expressed contempt.

M. Roland, the Minister of the Interior, turned up at the Tuileries to be presented to the King. The courtiers fell back from him in horrified silence. He did not know what was the matter; his stockings had recently been mended. The Master of Ceremonies took Dumouriez aside and spoke in a chilling whisper: “How can he be presented? He has no buckles on his shoes.”

“No buckles?” said the general humorously. “Alas, Monsieur, then all is lost.”

“M
y dear Mme. Danton,” Hérault de Séchelles said, “such an excellent dinner. And now would it be unpardonable if we talked politics?”

“My wife is a realist,” Danton said. “She knows that politics pays for the dinners.”

“I am used to it,” Gabrielle said.

“Do you take an interest in public affairs, my dear? Or do you find they weary you?”

She could not think what to say, but she smiled to remove any provocation from the only answer she could give: “I make the best of it.”

“Which is what we all must do.” Hérault turned to Danton. “If Robespierre insists on making the worst of it, that’s his affair. These people—Brissotins, Rolandins, Girondins, call them what you will—are running things for the present. They have—what?—hardly cohesion.
Hardly a policy, except for the war—which has begun rather disastrously, they must agree.”

“They have zeal,” Danton said. “They are talented debaters. Have a certain lack of dogmatism. And that awful woman.”

“Ah, how has the little creature taken to celebrity?”

Danton snorted with disgust. “We dined. Must I be reminded?”

On the previous evening, he and Fabre had spent two painful hours over a wretched meal with the Minister of the Interior. Dumouriez had been there. From time to time he had muttered, “I should like a private word with you, Danton, you understand?” But he had not found opportunity. It was the minister’s wife who had orchestrated the occasion. The minister was propped in a chair at the head of the table; he ventured few remarks, and Danton had the impression that the real minister was scribbling at a desk elsewhere in the building, while a wax model sat before them, sewn into an ancient black coat. He was possessed by a temptation to lean over and stick a fork in him to see if he would scream, but he resisted it, and dragged his eyes back glumly to his plate. There was a nameless soup, at once both watery and floury; there was a meager portion of a tough fowl, and some turnips which, though small, were past their first youth.

Manon Roland walked now down grand marble staircases, caught the reflection of her plump and pretty person mirrored in walls of Venetian glass. But the dress she wore that Monday evening was three years old, and an ample fichu covered her shoulders. No surrender.

She had let it be known that she would retain the habits of a private person. The trappings of aristocracy were foreign to her. She would not dispense patronage, and her visitors (strictly by invitation) would observe her rules. The grand salons could stay shrouded, unlit, for she did not aspire to hold court there; she had set up for herself a neat, humble little study, quite near the minister’s office. There she would spend her days, at her desk, making herself useful to the minister; and if anyone wished to see the minister privately, without the nuisance of a crowd of civil servants and petitioners, nothing could be easier than for her to send a message, and for the minister to step through to her tiny sanctum, and confer there with his visitor while she sat unobtrusively, listening hard, her hands folded in her lap.

She had made her rules, the rules by which the ministry would be conducted. Dinner would be given twice weekly. The food would be simple and no alcohol would be served. Guests would leave by 9 p.m.—we’ll volunteer to start the exodus, Fabre whispered. No women would be received; with their chatter, their petty rivalries over their clothes,
they detracted from the high tone and purpose of Mme. Roland’s gatherings.

This particular Monday had been a difficult one. Robespierre had declined her invitation. Pierre Vergniaud had accepted it. She did not like the man, personally; and these days her personal likes counted for a good deal. She could find no political point on which she differed from him, but he was lazy, reserving his oratory for grand themes and grand occasions. That night his eyes were glazed with boredom. Dumouriez was lively enough—but he was not lively in the right direction. He had told at least one scandalous anecdote, and then begged her pardon. She accorded it with the merest movement of her head; and the general knew that his work tomorrow would be mysteriously obstructed. Soon and easily, she had slipped into the habits of power.

Fabre d’Eglantine had tried to draw the conversation round to the theater, but she had firmly returned it to its proper subject—the maneuvers, both military and political, of the
ci-devant
Marquis de Lafayette. She had seen Fabre catch Danton’s eye, and cast his own momentarily to the naked goddesses prancing across the ceiling. She had been glad of Jean-Baptiste Louvet, sitting beside her. It was true that she had once been suspicious of him, because of the novel he had written. But she understood what the position of patriots had been, under the old regime, and a great deal could be excused to such a promising journalist. His thinning blond hair flopped forward as he leaned over to listen to her. A partisan. A friend of Mme. Roland.

She talked to Louvet, but her eyes had been drawn, against her will, to Danton. It was Dumouriez who insisted she invite him: “He is a man we ought to cultivate. He has a following on the streets.”

“Among the mob,” she had said scornfully.

“Do you think we shall have no dealings with the mob?”

So here the man sat. He made her shudder. That air of joviality, that affectation of frankness and bonhomie: it covered—just barely—the man’s evident, monstrous ambition. Oh, he was just a good fellow, he was just a simple fellow, his heart was in the farmland of his province—oh was it? She glanced down at the confident hands resting on the cloth, the thick fingers outstretched. He could kill with those hands; he could snap a woman’s neck, or squeeze the breath from a man’s throat.

And that scar, faded to a dead white, slashed across his mouth; how did he get that scar? It twisted his lips, so that his smile was not really a smile, more a kind of sneer. What would it feel like to touch that scar? What would be the texture, under the fingertips? This man had a wife.
He had, they said, a bevy of mistresses. Some woman’s fingers had touched that scar, traced its course, its edges.

He caught her eyes resting on him. She looked away quickly, but then she couldn’t bear not to look up again, and spend the rest of the night wondering what he had thought. Cautiously, her glance crept back. Yes, take a good look, his face said; you have never in your safe little life seen a man like me.

A
nd on Tuesday morning, all Danton could say, with tired exasperation: “Well, which one of us is going to sleep with the bitch, because clearly that’s what she wants?”

“Why ask?” Fabre said. “She didn’t take her eyes off you for two hours.”

“Women are peculiar,” Danton said.

“And talking of peculiar women, I understand Théroigne is back. The Austrians have let her go. I can’t imagine why, unless they thought she was the sort to bring the Revolution into disrepute.”

“No such subtlety,” Danton said. “I expect they were afraid she’d cut off their balls.”

“But to return to the subject, Georges-Jacques—if Madame has her eye on you, you might as well, you really might as well. No point oiling around, ‘My dear Mme. Roland, how we all esteem your talents’—why don’t you offer her some solid evidence? Then she might bring all her gentlemen friends into line with our line. Do it, Georges-Jacques—she’ll be easy. I don’t suppose she gets much from that old husband of hers. He looks as if he’s going to die at any minute.”

“I think he probably died years ago,” Camille said. “I think she’s had him embalmed and stuffed, because at heart she’s sentimental. Also I think the whole Brissotin ministry is in the pay of the Court.”

“Robespierre,” Fabre said, nodding significantly.

“Robespierre does not think it,” Camille said.

“Don’t lose your temper.”

“He thinks they are fools and dupes and unintentional traitors. I think it is worse than that. I think we should have nothing to do with them.”

“They certainly think they should have nothing to do with you. Dumouriez said, ‘Where’s your little Camille tonight, why have you left him at home when he could be here sharing the excitement with us?’ Madame heaved her bosom and inhaled most disdainfully.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Danton said. They saw that he was very serious. “I don’t say anything about Dumouriez and the rest, but that
woman couldn’t be bought. That woman hates Louis and his wife as if they had done her some desperate injury.” He laughed sourly. “Marat thinks she has a monopoly on hate?”

“You trust them, then?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t think they’re bad people. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety

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