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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
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Camille stood up and brushed himself down a little.
“You terrify me,” Robespierre said. He turned away and sat down at the table where he had been writing the letter. He took off his spectacles, rested his elbows on the table and covered his closed eyes with his fingertips. “Metaphors are good,” he said. “I like metaphors. Metaphors don’t kill people.”
“They’re killing me. If I hear another mention of rising tides or crumbling
edifices I shall throw myself out of the window. I can’t listen to this talk anymore. I saw Laclos the other day. I was so disgusted, finally, I thought I shall have to do something by myself.”
Robespierre picked up his pen and added a phrase to his letter. “I am afraid of civil disorder,” he said.
“Afraid of it? I hope for it. Mirabeau—he has his own interests—but if we had a leader whose name is absolutely clean—”
“I don’t know if there’s such a man in the Assembly.”
“There’s you,” Camille said.
“Oh yes?” He applied himself to the next sentence. “They call Mirabeau ‘The Torch of Provence.’ And do you know what they call me? ‘The Candle of Arras.’”
“But in time, Max—”
“Yes, in time. They think I should hang around viscounts and cultivate rhetorical flourishes. No.
In time
, perhaps, they might respect me. But I don’t want them ever to approve of me, because if they approve of me I’m finished. I want no kickbacks, no promises, no caucus and no blood on my hands. I’m not their man of destiny, I’m afraid.”
“But are you the man of destiny, inside your own head?”
Robespierre looked down at his letter again. He contemplated a postscript. He reached for his pen. “No more than you are.”
 
 
S
unday, July 12: 5 a.m. D’Anton said, “Camille, there are no answers to these questions.”
“No?”
“No. But look. Dawn has broken. It’s another day. You’ve made it.” Camille’s questions: suppose I do get Lucile, how shall I go on without Annette? Why have I never achieved anything, not one damn thing? Why won’t they publish my pamphlet? Why does my father hate me?
“All right,” d’Anton said. “Short answers are best. Why should you go on without Annette? Get into both their beds, you’re quite capable of it, I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the world.”
Camille looked at him wonderingly. “Nothing shocks you these days, does it?”
“May I continue? You’ve never achieved anything because you’re always bloody horizontal. I mean, you’re supposed to be at some place, right, and you’re not, and people say, God, he’s so absentminded—but I know the truth—you started the day with very good intentions, you might even have been on the way to where you’re supposed to be going,
and then you just run into somebody, and what’s the next thing? You’re in bed with them.”
“And that’s the day gone,” Camille said. “Yes, you’re right, you’re right.”
“So what sort of a foundation for any career—oh, never mind. What was I saying? They won’t publish your pamphlet till the situation gives way a bit. As for your father—he doesn’t hate you, he probably cares too much, as I do and a very large number of other people. And Christ, you wear me out.”
D’Anton had been in court all day Friday, and had spent Saturday working solidly. His face was creased with exhaustion. “Do me a favor.” He got up and walked stiffly to the window. “If you’re going to commit suicide, would you leave it till about Wednesday, when my shipping case is over?”
“I shall go back to Versailles now.” Camille said. “I have to go and talk to Mirabeau.”
“Poor sod.” D’Anton slept momentarily on his feet. “It’s going to be hotter than ever today.” He swung open the shutter. The glare leapt into the room.
 
 
C
amille’s difficulty was not staying awake; it was catching up with his personal effects. It was some time since he had been of fixed address. He wondered, really, if d’Anton could enter into his difficulties. When you turn up unexpectedly at somewhere you used to live, it’s very difficult to say to people, “Take your hands off me, I only came for a clean shirt.” They don’t believe you. They think it’s a pretext.
And again, he is always in transit. It can easily take three hours to get from Paris to Versailles. Despite his difficulties, he is at Mirabeau’s house for the hour when normal people have their breakfast; he has shaved, changed, brushed his hair, he is every inch (he thinks) the modest young advocate waiting on the great man.
Teutch rolled his eyes and pushed him in at the door. “There’s a new cabinet,” he said. “And it doesn’t include
him
.”
Mirabeau was pacing about the room, a vein distended in his temple. He checked his stride for a moment. “Oh, there you are. Been with fucking Philippe?”
The room was packed: angry faces, faces drawn with anxiety. Deputy Pétion dropped a perspiring hand on his shoulder. “Well, looking so good, Camille,” he said. “Me, I’ve been up all night. You know they sacked Necker? The new cabinet meets this morning, if they can find a
Minister of Finance. Three people have already turned it down. Necker’s popular—they’ve really done it this time.”
“Is it Antoinette’s fault?”
“They say so. There are deputies here who expected to be arrested, last night.”
“There’s time, for arrests.”
“I think,” Pétion said sensibly, “that some of us ought to go to Paris—Mirabeau, don’t you think so?”
Mirabeau glared at him. He thinks a lot of himself, he thought, to interrupt me. “Why don’t you do that?” he growled. He pretended to have forgotten Pétion’s name.
As soon as this reaches the Palais-Royal, Camille thought … He slid across the room to the Comte’s elbow. “Gabriel, I have to leave now.”
Mirabeau pulled him to his side, sneering-at what, was unclear. He held on to him, and with one large hand swept Camille’s hair back from his face. One of Mirabeau’s rings caught the corner of his mouth. “Maître Desmoulins feels he would like to attend a little riot. Sunday morning, Camille: why aren’t you at Mass?”
He pulled away. He left the room. He ran down the stairs. He was already in the street when Teutch came pounding after him. He stopped. Teutch stared at him without speaking.
“Does the Comte send me some advice?”
“He does, but I forget what it is now.” He thought. “Oh yes.” His brow cleared. “Don’t get killed.”
 
 
I
t is mid-afternoon, almost three o’clock, when the news about Necker’s dismissal reaches the Palais-Royal. The reputation of the mild Swiss financier has been built up with great assiduity—and never more so than in this last week, when his fall has seemed imminent.
The whole populace seems to be out in the open: churning through the streets and heaving through the squares in the blistering heat to the public gardens with their avenues of chestnut trees and their Orléanist connections. The price of bread has just risen. Foreign troops are camped outside the city. Order is a memory, law has a tenuous hold. The French Guards have deserted their posts and returned to their working-men’s interests, and all the backroom skulkers are out in the daylight. Their closed and anemic faces are marked by nocturnal fancies of hanging, of other public agonies and final solutions; and above this the sun is a wound, a boiling tropical eye.
Under this eye, drink is spilled, tempers flash and flare. Wigmakers and clerks, apprentices of all descriptions and scene shifters, small shopkeepers, brewers, drapers, tanners and porters, knife grinders, coachmen and public prostitutes; these are the remnants of Titonville. The crowd moves backwards and forwards, scoured by rumor and dangerous unease, always back to the same place: and as this occurs the clock begins to strike.
Until now this has been a joke, a blood sport, a bare-knuckle contest. The crowd is full of women and children. The streets stink. Why should the court wait on the political process? Through these alleys the populace can be driven like pigs and massacred in back courts by Germans on horseback. Are they to wait for this to happen? Will the King profane Sunday? Tomorrow is a holiday, the people can die on their own time. The clocks finish striking. This is crucifixion hour, as we all know. It is expedient that one man shall die for the people, and in 1757, before we were born, a man called Damiens dealt the old King a glancing blow with a pocketknife. His execution is still talked of, a day of screaming entertainment, a fiesta of torment. Thirty-two years have passed: and now here are the executioner’s pupils, ready for some bloody jubilee.
Camille’s precipitate entry into history came about in this fashion. He was standing in the doorway of the Café du Foy, hot, elated, slightly frightened by the press of people. Someone behind him had said that he might try to address the crowds and so a table had been pushed into the café doorway. For a moment he felt faint. He leaned against this table, bodies hemming him in. He wondered if d’Anton had a hangover. What had possessed him to want to stay up all night? He wished he were in a quiet dark room, alone but, as d’Anton said, bloody horizontal. His heart raced. He wondered if he had eaten anything that day. He supposed not. He felt he would drown in the acrid miasma of sweat, misery and fear.
Three young men, walking abreast, came carving a way through the crowd. Their faces were set, their arms were linked, they were trying to get a bit of something going, and by now he had been present at enough of these street games to understand their mood and its consequences in terms of casualties. Of these men, he recognized two, but the third man he did not know. The third man cried, “To arms!” The others cried the same.
“What arms?” Camille said. He detached a strand of hair that was sticking to his face and threw out a hand in inquiry. Somebody slapped a pistol into it.
He looked at it as if it had dropped from heaven. “Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.” Somebody gave him another pistol. The shock was so great that if the man had not closed his fingers over the handle he would have dropped it. This is the consequence of intellectual rigor, of not letting people get away with a cheap slogan. The man said, “For God’s sake keep it steady, that kind are liable to go off in your face.”
It will certainly be tonight, he thought: the troops will come out of the Champs-de-Mars, there will be arrests, roundups, exemplary dealings. Suddenly he understood how far the situation had moved on from last week, from yesterday—how far it had moved in the last half hour. It will certainly be tonight, he thought, and they had better know it; we have run out to the end of our rope.
He had so often rehearsed this moment in his mind that his actions now were automatic; they were fluid and perfectly timed, like the actions of a dream. He had spoken many times from the café doorway. He had to get the first phrase out, the first sentence, then he could get beside himself and do it, and he knew that he could do it better than anyone else: because this is the scrap that God has saved up for him, like the last morsel on a plate.
He put one knee onto the table and scrambled up on to it. He scooped up the firearms. Already he was ringed about by his audience, like the crowds in an amphitheater. Now he understood the meaning of the phrase “a sea of faces”; it was a living sea, where panic-striken faces nosed for air before the current pulled them under. But people were hanging out of the upstairs windows of the café and of the buildings around, and the crowd was growing all the time. He was not high enough, or conspicuous. Nobody seemed to be able to see what he needed, and until he began to speak properly he would not be able to make himself heard. He transferred both the pistols to one hand, bundling them against his body, so that if they go off he will be a terrible mess; but he felt uncurably reluctant to part with them for an instant. With his left arm he waved to someone inside the café. A chair was passed out, and planted on the table beside him. “Will you hold it?” he said. He transferred one of the pistols back to his left hand. It was now two minutes past three.
As he stepped onto the chair he felt it slide a little. He thought it would be amazing if he fell off the chair, but people would say it was typical of him. He felt it being gripped by the back, steadied. It was an ordinary straw-bottomed chair. What if he were Georges-Jacques? He would go straight through it.
He was now at a dizzying height above the crowd. A fetid breeze drifted across the gardens. Another fifteen seconds had passed. He was able to identify certain faces, and surprise at this made him blink: ONE
WORD, he thought. There were the police, and there were their spies and informers, men who have been watching him for weeks, the colleagues and accomplices of the men who only a few days before had been cornered and beaten by the crowds and half-drowned in the fountains. But now it is killing time; there were armed men behind them. In sheer fright, he began.
He indicated the policemen, identified them for the crowd. He defied them, he said: either to approach any further, to shoot him down, to try to take him alive. What he is suggesting to the crowd, what he is purveying, is an armed insurrection, the conversion of the city to a battlefield. Already (3:04) he is guilty of a long list of capital offenses and if the crowd let the police take him he is finished, except for whatever penalty the law provides. Therefore if they do make the attempt he will certainly shoot one policeman, and he will certainly shoot himself, and hope that he dies quickly: and then the Revolution will be here. This decision takes one half-second, plaited between the phrases he is making. It is five past three. The exact form of the phrases does not matter now. Something is happening underneath his feet; the earth is breaking up. What does the crowd want? To roar. Its wider objectives? No coherent answer. Ask it: it roars. Who are these people? No names. The crowd just wants to grow, to embrace, to weld together, to gather in, to melt, to bay from one throat. If he were not standing here he would be dying anyway, dying between the pages of his letters. If he survives this—death as a reprieve—he will have to write it down, the life that feeds the writing that feeds the life to come, and already he fears he cannot describe the heat, the green leaves of the chestnut trees, the choking dust and the smell of blood and the blithe savagery of his auditors; it will be a voyage into hyperbole, an odyssey of bad tase. Cries and moans and bloody promises circle his head, a scarlet cloud, a new thin pure element in which he floats. For a second he puts his hand to his face and feels at the corner of his mouth the place caught that morning by the Comte’s ring; only that tells him, and nothing else, that he inhabits the same body and owns the same flesh.

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