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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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“Do you trust General Dumouriez?”
“He’s given us no reason not to.”
Robespierre’s mouth set in a wry line. “That’s not enough, is it? What has he done to convince us he’s a patriot?”
“He’s a soldier, there’s a presumption of loyalty to the government of the day.”
“That presumption was ill-founded in ’89, when the French Guards came over to the people. They followed their natural interests. Dumouriez and all our other dashing aristocratic officers will soon follow theirs. I wonder about Dillon, Camille’s friend.”
“I didn’t say the loyalty of the officers is assured, I said that the government takes it for granted till they show otherwise. On any other terms, it would be impossible to have an army.”
“May I give you a word of advice?” Robespierre’s eyes were fixed on
Danton’s face, and Danton thought, this is not advice I shall like. “You begin to talk too much of ‘the government.’ You are a revolutionary, the Revolution made you, and in revolution the old presumptions do not hold good. In times of stability and peace it may be possible for a state to deal with its enemies by ignoring them, but in times such as these we have to identify them and take them on, tackle them.”
Tackle them how? Danton wondered. Reason with them? Convert them? Kill them? But you won’t have killing, will you, Max? You don’t hold with it. Out loud, he said, “Diplomacy can limit the war. While I’m in office I shall do what I can to keep England out. But when I’m not in office—”
“You know what Marat would say? He’d say, why should you ever be out of office?”
“But I intend to sit in the Convention. That’s my stage, that’s where I’ll be effective—you can’t mean to tie me to a desk. And as you know quite well, a deputy can’t be a minister.”
“Listen.” Robespierre eased out of a pocket his little volume of
The Social Contract
.
“Oh good, story time,” Danton said.
Robespierre opened it at a marked page. “Listen to this. ‘The inflexibility of the laws can in some circumstances make them dangerous and cause the ruin of a state in a crisis … if the danger is such that the machinery of the laws is an obstacle, then a dictator is appointed, who silences the laws.’” He closed the book, raised his eyes questioningly.
“Is that a statement of fact,” Danton inquired, “or is it prescriptive?”
Robespierre said nothing.
“I am afraid I am not impressed by that, just because you have read it out of a book. Even out of Jean-Jacques.”
“I want to prepare you for the arguments that people will throw at you.”
“You had the passage marked, I see. In future, don’t bother to draw the conversation round. Just ask me straight off what you want to know.”
“I didn’t come here to tempt you. I marked the passage because I have been giving the matter much thought.”
Danton stared at him blankly. “And your conclusion?”
“I like …” Robespierre hesitated. “I like to think around all the possible circumstances. We mustn’t be doctrinaire. But then, pragmatism can so easily degenerate into lack of principle.”
“They kill dictators,” Danton said. “In the end.”
“But if, before that happens, you have saved your country? ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the people.’”
“Forget it. I’ve no desire to be a martyr. Have you?”
“It’s all hypothetical anyway. But you and I, Danton … You and I,” he said thoughfully, “are not alike.”
 
 
“I
wonder what Robespierre really thinks of me?” Danton said to Camille.
“Oh, he thinks you’re wonderful.” Camille smiled as best he could in his rather nervous and distracted state. “He can’t praise you too highly.”
“I’d like to know how Danton really regards me,” Robespierre said.
“Oh, he can’t praise you too highly.” Camille’s smile was a little strained. “He thinks you’re wonderful.”
 
 
L
ife’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now.
Everything you disapprove of you’ll call “aristocratic.” This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.
If “Liberty” was the watchword of the first Revolution, “Equality” is that of the second. “Fraternity” is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.
All persons are now plain “Citizen” or “Citizeness.” The Place Louis XV will become the Place de la Revolution, and the scientific beheading machine will be set up there; it will become known as the “guillotine,” in tribute to Dr. Guillotin the noted public-health expert. The rue Monsieur-de-Prince will become the rue Liberté, the Place de la Croix-Rouge will become the Place de la Bonnet-Rouge. Notre Dame will become the Temple of Reason. Bourg-la-Reine will become Bourg-la-République. And in the fullness of time, the rue des Cordeliers will become the rue Marat.
Divorce will be very easy.
For a time, Annette Duplessis will continue to walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. A cannon factory will be set up there; the patriotic din and stench will be beyond belief, and the patriotic waste products will be tipped into the Seine.
The Luxembourg Section will become the Section Mutius Scaevola. The Romans are very fashionable. So are the Spartans. The Athenians less so.
In at least one provincial town, Beaumarchais’s
Marriage of Figaro
will
be banned, just as the King once banned it. It depicts a style of life now outlawed; also, it requires the wearing of aristocratic costumes.
“Sansculottes,” the working men call themselves, because they wear trousers not breeches. With them, a calico waistcoat with broad tricolor stripes: a hip-length jacket of coarse wool, called a
carmagnole
. On the sansculotte head, the red bonnet, the “cap of liberty.” Why liberty is thought to require headgear is a mystery.
For the rich and powerful, the aim is to be accepted as sansculotte in spirit, without assuming the ridiculous uniform. But only Robespierre and a handful of others keep hope alive for the unemployed hairdressers of France. Many members of the new Convention will wear their hair brushed forward and cut straight across their foreheads, like the statues of heroes of antiquity. Riding boots are worn on all occasions, even at harp recitals. Gentlemen have the air of being ready to run down a Prussian column after dinner, any day of the week.
Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
There will be economic controls, price maximums imposed by the government. There will be coffee riots and sugar riots. One month there will be no firewood, then it will be no soap, or no candles. The black market will be a flourishing but desperate business, with the death penalty for hoarders and traffickers.
There will be persistent rumors about
ci-devant
lords and ladies, returned
émigrés.
Someone has seen a marquis working as a bootblack, his wife taking in sewing. A duke is employed as a footman in his own house, which now belongs to a Jewish banker. Some people like to think these things are true.
In the National Assembly there were deplorable occasions when overwrought gentlemen placed hands on rapier hilts. In the Convention and the Jacobin Club, fist and knife fights will be quite common. Dueling will be replaced by assassination.
For the rich—the new rich, that is—it is possible to live as well as one would have liked to under the old regime. Camille Desmoulins, in semi-private conversation at the Jacobins, one evening in ’93: “I don’t know why people complain about not being able to make money nowadays. I have no trouble.”
Churches will be despoiled, statues disfigured. Stone-eyed saints raise stumps of fingers in truncated benediction. If you want to save a statue
of the Virgin, you put a red cap on her head and turn her into a Goddess of Liberty. And that’s the way all the virgins save themselves; who wants these ferocious political women?
Because of the changes in the street names, it will become impossible to direct people around the city. The calendar will be changed too; January is abolished, good-bye to aristocratic June. People will ask each other, “What’s today in real days?”
’92, ’93 ’94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.
 
 
D
anton’s first action at the Ministry of Justice was to call together his senior civil servants. He surveyed them. A grin split his broken face. “I advise you gentlemen,” he said, “to take up the option of early retirement.”
 
 
“I
’ll miss you terribly,” Louise Gély said to Gabrielle. “Shall I come and see you at the Place Vendôme?”
“The Place des Piques,” Gabrielle corrected. She smiled: a very small smile. “Yes, of course you must come. And we will be back soon, because Georges has only taken office for the Emergency, and when the Emergency is over—” She bit the words back. Tempting fate, she called it.
“You shouldn’t be frightened,” Louise said, hugging her gently. “You should have a look in your eyes which says, I know that while my husband is in the city the enemy cannot come.”
“Well, Louise … you are brave.”
“Danton believes it.”
“But can one man do so much by himself?”
“It’s not a question of one man.” She moved away. Hard sometimes not to be irritated by Gabrielle. “It’s a question of many men with the best leader.”
“I didn’t think you liked my husband.”
Louise raised her eyebrows. “When did I say I did? All the same, it is good of him to do something for my father.”
M. Gély had a new post at the Ministry of Marine.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Gabrielle said. “He’s found places for all the people who used to be his clerks, and—oh, everybody really. Even Collot d’Herbois, whom we don’t like.”
“And are they duly grateful?” Probably not, Louise thought. “People he likes, people he doesn’t like, people of no importance whatever—I
think he’d give the whole city a job, if he could. It’s interesting. I was wondering why he has sent Citizen Fréron off to Metz?”
“Oh,” she said uneasily, “it’s to do with the Executive Council there—they need some help running their revolution, I suppose.”
“Metz is on the frontier.”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if he’d done it as a favor to Citizeness Desmoulins. Fréron was always following her around, wasn’t he? And giving her soulful glances, and paying her compliments. Danton doesn’t like it. It will make life easier for him, now that Fréron’s away.”
Gabrielle wouldn’t, out of choice, be having this conversation. Even this child notices, she thinks, even this child of fourteen knows all about it.
 
 
W
hen the news of the coup of August 10 reached his military headquarters, General Lafayette tried to organize his armies to march on Paris and bring down the Provisional Government. Only a handful of officers were prepared to back him. On August 19 he crossed the border near Sedan, and was promptly taken prisoner by the Austrians.
 
 
T
he Ministry of Justice had taken to having breakfast together, to work out the plan for the day. Danton greeted everyone except his wife, but after all, he had seen her before that morning. This would have been the time to make the change to separate rooms, they both thought; but neither had the heart to mention it first. Consequently, the usual conjugal arrangements were made; they woke up beneath a coronet and a canopy, stifled by velvet bed curtains thicker than Turkey carpets.
Lucile was wearing gray this morning. Dove-gray: piquantly puritanical, Danton thought. He imagined leaning across and kissing her savagely on the mouth.
Nothing affected Danton’s appetite—not a sudden seizure of lust, not the national emergency, not the historic dust of the state bed curtains. Lucile ate nothing. She was starving herself, trying to get back pre-pregnancy angles. “You’ll fade away, girl,” Danton told her.
“She’s trying to look like her husband,” Fabre explained. “She will not admit to it, but for some reason best known to herself that is what she is doing.”
Camille sipped a small cup of black coffee. His wife watched him covertly as he opened their letters—nasty little slits with a paperknife,
and his long elegant fingers. “Where are François and Louise?” Fabre asked. “Something must be detaining them. How quaint they are, always waking up side by side and always in the bed they started off in.”
“Enough!” Danton said. “We shall have a rule, no lubricious gossip before breakfast.”

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