Read A Place of Greater Safety Online
Authors: Hilary Mantel
A Place of Greater Safety (95 page)
“What a way to end it,” a juryman said.
Vergniaud, his face still impassive, motioned to Dr. Lehardi, one of the accused. Lehardi knelt by the fallen body. He held up a long dagger, which was bloody to the hilt. The Public Prosecutor immediately removed it from his hand. “I shall have something to say about this,” Fouquier complained. “He might have used it on me.”
Brissot sat slumped forward, his chin on his chest. Now Valazé’s blood trailed scarlet over the black and white. A space was cleared. Valazé, looking small and very dead, was picked up by two gendarmes and borne away.
The drama was not over yet. Citizen Desmoulins, attempting to get out of the courtroom, had fallen over in a dead faint.
17
Brumaire: execution of Philippe, known as Citizen Egalite. At his last meal he consumed two cutlets, a quantity of oysters, the greater part
of a good bottle of Bordeaux. To attend the scaffold he wore a white pique waistcoat, a green frock coat and yellow buckskins: very English. “Well, my good man,” he said to Sanson, “let’s hurry it up, shall we?”
Brumaire: execution of Philippe, known as Citizen Egalite. At his last meal he consumed two cutlets, a quantity of oysters, the greater part
of a good bottle of Bordeaux. To attend the scaffold he wore a white pique waistcoat, a green frock coat and yellow buckskins: very English. “Well, my good man,” he said to Sanson, “let’s hurry it up, shall we?”
T
he executioner. His overheads have gone up shockingly since the Terror began. He has seven men to pay out of his own wages, and soon he will be hiring up to a dozen carts a day. Before, he managed with two assistants and one cart. The kind of money he can offer doesn’t attract people to the work. He has to pay for his own cord for binding the clients, and for the big wicker baskets to take the corpses away afterwards. At first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale. Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person? The blood ruins everything, rots things away, especially his clothes. People down there don’t realize, but he sometimes gets splashed right up to his knees.
he executioner. His overheads have gone up shockingly since the Terror began. He has seven men to pay out of his own wages, and soon he will be hiring up to a dozen carts a day. Before, he managed with two assistants and one cart. The kind of money he can offer doesn’t attract people to the work. He has to pay for his own cord for binding the clients, and for the big wicker baskets to take the corpses away afterwards. At first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale. Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person? The blood ruins everything, rots things away, especially his clothes. People down there don’t realize, but he sometimes gets splashed right up to his knees.
It’s heavy work. If you get someone who’s tried to do away with himself beforehand, he can be in a mess, maybe collapsed through poison or loss of blood, and you can strain your back trying to drag him into position under the blade. Recently Citizen Fouquier insisted they guillotine a corpse, which everybody thought was a lot of unnecessary work. Again, take someone who’s crippled or deformed; they can’t be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can’t see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he’d have fewer problems, but it’s surprising how few of them fall into all those categories. The citizens who live nearby complain that he doesn’t put down enough sawdust to soak up the blood, and the smell becomes offensive. The machine itself is quiet, efficient, reliable; but of course he has to pay the man who sharpens the knife.
He’s trying to make the operation as efficient as he can, get the speed up. Fouquier shouldn’t complain. Take the Brissotins; twenty-one, plus the corpse, in thirty-six minutes flat. He couldn’t spare a skilled man to time it, but he’d got a friendly spectator to stand by with his watch: just in case he heard any complaints.
In the old days the executioner was esteemed; he was looked up to. There was a special law to prevent people calling him rude names. He had a regular audience who came to see skilled work, and they appreciated any little troubles he took. People came to executions because they
wanted to; but some of these old women, knitting for the war effort, you can see they’ve been paid to sit there, and they can’t wait to get away and drink up the proceeds; and the National Guardsmen, who have to attend, are sickened off after a few days of it.
wanted to; but some of these old women, knitting for the war effort, you can see they’ve been paid to sit there, and they can’t wait to get away and drink up the proceeds; and the National Guardsmen, who have to attend, are sickened off after a few days of it.
Once the executioner had a special Mass said for the soul of the condemned; but you couldn’t do that now. They’re numbers on a list now. You feel that before this, death had distinction; for your clients it was a special, individual end. For them you had risen early and prayed and dressed in scarlet, composed a marmoreal face and cut a flower for your coat. But now they come in carts like calves, mouths sagging like calves’ and their eyes dull, stunned into passivity by the speed with which they’ve been herded from their judgement to their deaths; it is not an art any longer, it is more like working in a slaughterhouse.
“I
write these words to the sound of laughter in the next room … .”
write these words to the sound of laughter in the next room … .”
From the first day they took her to prison, Manon had been writing. She had to record a justification, a credo, an autobiography. After a time her wrist would ache, her fingers stiffen in the cold, and she would want to cry. Whenever she stopped writing and allowed her mind to dwell on the past itself, rather than on means of expressing it, she felt a great void of longing open inside her: “ … we have had nothing.” She would lie on her prison bed, staring up into the darkness, consciously fitting herself for heroism.
Every day she expected them to come and tell her that her husband had been captured, that he was being held in some provincial town, that he was on his way to Paris to stand trial with her. But what if François-Leonard were taken? Perhaps they would not tell her at all. This is the price of discretion, this is the prize for good conduct; they had been so discreet, and behaved so well, that even her closest friends would not think Buzot any personal concern of hers.
Her room in prison was bare and cold, but clean. Meals were sent in to her; nevertheless, she had decided to starve herself to death. Little by little she cut down her intake, until they took her away to another room that served as the prison hospital. The prospect was held out to her then that she would be allowed to testify at Brissot’s trial; for that she must be strong, and so she began to eat again.
Perhaps it had been a trick from the start? She didn’t know. While the trial was in progress she had been taken to the Palais de Justice and held in a side room, under guard. But she never saw the accused, never saw the judges or (such as they were) the jury. One of her keepers brought
her the news of Valazé’s suicide. One death breeds another. What was it Vergniaud had said, of the calm, smooth-skinned girl who had stabbed Marat? “She has killed us, but she has taught us how to die.”
her the news of Valazé’s suicide. One death breeds another. What was it Vergniaud had said, of the calm, smooth-skinned girl who had stabbed Marat? “She has killed us, but she has taught us how to die.”
They had delayed her own trial—perhaps because they hoped to capture Roland and stand them side by side. One could ask for mercy, of course; but her life was not worth the sacrifice of everything she had lived it for. Besides, there was no mercy to be got. From Danton? From Robespierre? Camille Desmoulins had been in some uncharacteristic mood at Brissot’s trial. He had said—a score of people had heard it, her keepers told her—“They were my friends, and my writings have killed them.” But no doubt he had repented of repentance, before Jacobin hands had scooped him up from the floor.
On the day she was moved to the Conciergerie, she realized that she would never see her child or her husband again. The cells were below the hall where the Tribunal sat; this was the last stage, and even if Roland were taken now she would be dead before he reached Paris. She appeared before the Tribunal on November 8—18 Brumaire, by the reckoning of that charlatan Fabre d’Églantine. She wore a white dress, her auburn hair down, gathering and accreting to itself the last rays of the afternoon light. Fouquier was efficient. She was bundled into a cart that same evening. The bitter wind whipped color into her cheeks, and she shivered inside her muslin. It was growing dark, but she saw the machine against the sky, the sinister geometry of the knife’s edge.
A
n eyewitness:
n eyewitness:
“Robespierre came forward slowly … . He wore spectacles which probably served to conceal the twitchings of his pallid face. His delivery was slow and measured. His phrases were so long that every time he stopped and raised his spectacles one thought that he had nothing more to say, but after looking slowly and searchingly over the audience in every part of the room, he would readjust his glasses and add a few more phrases to his sentences, which were already of inordinate length.”
Nowadays when he came up behind people they would jump, startled and guilty. It was as if the fear he often felt had communicated itself to them. Since he was not naturally heavy-footed, he wondered what he should do to warn them—cough, barge into the furniture? He knew that they thought he was there, listening, before they saw him, and all their self-doubts and mutinous half-thoughts came swarming to the surface of their skins.
At the meetings of the Committee he often sat in silence; he did not want to force his views on them, and yet when he abstained from comment he knew that they suspected him of watching them, of noting things down. And he did; he noted a great many things. Sometimes when he gave his opinion Carnot drily contradicted him; Robert Lindet looked very grave, as if he had reservations. He would snap at Carnot to reduce him to silence. What did the man think, that he had some sort of privilege, because he had known him before? His colleagues would exchange glances. Sometimes he would extract a few papers from Carnot’s portfolio, complaints from commanders whose men had dysentery or no shoes, or whose mounts were dying from lack of fodder. He would read them quickly and spread them out on the table like a gambler laying down his hand, his eyes engaging Camot’s; I wonder, he would say, if you think your appointment is working out for the best? Carnot sucked on his lower lip.
When his colleagues spoke, Robespierre sat with his narrow chin propped on thumb and forefinger, his face tilted to the ceiling. There was nothing they could tell him about day-to-day politics, about publicity good and bad, about handling the Convention and obtaining a majority. He remembered his school days, toiling in the shade of more flamboyant characters; he remembered Arras, where he was chivvied about by the claims of his family, slapped down by local magistrates, blackballed because of his politics by the local Bar’s dining club.
He’s not like Danton; he doesn’t want to go home. Here’s home: under the midnight lamps, and out in the rainy street. But sometimes while they’re talking he finds himself, for a moment, elsewhere; he thinks of those gray-green meadows and quiet town squares, the lines of poplars bending in an autumn wind.
20
Brumaire. A “Festival of Reason” is held in the public building formerly known as Notre Dame. The religious embellishments, as people like to call them, have been stripped from the building, and a cardboard Greek temple has been constructed in the nave. An actress from the Opera impersonates the Goddess of Reason, and is enthroned while the crowd sings the “Ça Ira.”
Brumaire. A “Festival of Reason” is held in the public building formerly known as Notre Dame. The religious embellishments, as people like to call them, have been stripped from the building, and a cardboard Greek temple has been constructed in the nave. An actress from the Opera impersonates the Goddess of Reason, and is enthroned while the crowd sings the “Ça Ira.”
Under pressure from the Hébertists, the Bishop of Paris appears before the Convention, and announces his militant atheism. Deputy Julien, who had once been a Protestant pastor, took the occasion to announce his at the same time.
Declared Deputy Clootz (a radical, a foreigner): “A religious man is
a depraved beast. He resembles those animals that are kept to be shorn and roasted for the benefit of merchants and butchers.”
a depraved beast. He resembles those animals that are kept to be shorn and roasted for the benefit of merchants and butchers.”
Robespierre came home from the Convention. His lips were pale, his eyes cold with fury. Someone is going to suffer, Eléonore thought.
“If there is no God,” he said, “if there is no Supreme Being, what are the people to think who live all their lives in hardship and want? Do these atheists think they can do away with poverty, do they think the Republic can be made into heaven on earth?”
Eléonore turned away from him. She knew better than to hope for a kiss. “Saint-Just rather thinks it,” she said.
“We cannot guarantee bread to people. We cannot guarantee justice. Are we also to take hope away?”
“It sounds as if you only want a God because he fills the gaps in your policies.”
He stared at her. “Perhaps,” he said slowly. “Perhaps you’re right. But Antoine, you see, he thinks everything can be achieved by wishing it—each individual makes himself over, becomes a better person, a person with more
vertu,
then as individuals change, society changes, and it takes—what? A generation? The problem is, Eléonore, that you lose sight of this when you’re bogged down in the detail, you are worrying all the time about supplying boots for the army, and you’re thinking,
every day I fail at something
—and it begins to look like one gigantic failure.”
vertu,
then as individuals change, society changes, and it takes—what? A generation? The problem is, Eléonore, that you lose sight of this when you’re bogged down in the detail, you are worrying all the time about supplying boots for the army, and you’re thinking,
every day I fail at something
—and it begins to look like one gigantic failure.”
She put her hand on his arm. “It’s not a failure, my darling. It’s the only success there’s ever been in the world.”
He shook his head. “I can’t always see it now in such absolute terms, I wish I could. I feel sometimes I’m losing my direction. Danton understands, he knows how to talk about this. He says, you make a few botches, you have a few successes, and that’s what politics is about.”
“Cynical,” Eléonore said.
“No, it’s a viewpoint—the way he looks at it, you do have your general principles to guide you, but you have to make the best of each situation as it arises. Now Saint-Just, he thinks differently—in his opinion, you have to see in each particular circumstance a chance to make your principles operate. Everything, for him, is an opportunity to state the larger case.”
“And where do you stand?”
“Oh, I’m just”—he threw his hands out—“floundering. Only here, with this issue, I do know where I am. I will not have this intolerance, I will not have this bigotry, I will not have the lifetime’s faith of simple people pulled from under them by dilettantes with no idea of what faith
means. They call the priests bigots, but they are the bigots, who want to stop Mass being said.”
means. They call the priests bigots, but they are the bigots, who want to stop Mass being said.”
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