A Place of Greater Safety (66 page)

Read A Place of Greater Safety Online

Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
5.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Camille put down his coffee cup. “For you it may be before breakfast, but some of us are anxious to begin on our daily ration of scandal, backbiting and malice.”
“We must hope the gracious atmosphere of the place will seep into us in time. Even into Fabre.” Danton turned to him. “It won’t be like living among the Cordeliers, with your every little depravity applauded as soon as you step out of doors.”
“I’m not depraved,” Fabre complained. “Camille’s depraved. Incidentally, I suppose it will be all right for Caroline Rémy to move in?”
“No,” Danton said. “It won’t be all right at all.”
“Why not? Hérault won’t mind, he can call round.”
“I don’t give a damn whether he minds or not. Do you think you’re going to turn the place into a brothel?”
“Are you serious?” Fabre demanded. He looked at Camille for support, but Camille was reading his letters.
“Divorce your Nicole, marry Caroline, and she’ll be welcome.”
“Marry her?” Fabre said. “You’re certainly not serious.”
“Well, if it’s so unthinkable, she shouldn’t be in the company of our wives.”
“Oh, I see.” Fabre was belligerent. Quite right too; he can’t believe what he’s hearing. The minister and his colleague the other secretary have both availed themselves of Caro quite frequently, this summer. “There’s one law for you,” he says, “and quite another for me.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Am I proposing to keep a mistress on the premises?”
“Yes,” Fabre muttered.
Camille laughed out loud.
“Please realize,” Danton said, “that if you move Caro in here, the ministries and the Assembly will know about it in an hour, and it will bring down on us—on me—some very severe and justified criticism.”
“Very well,” Fabre said resentfully. “Change the subject. Do you want to hear what Condorcet has to say about your elevation, Minister, in today’s paper?”
“I hope you won’t edify us with Brissotin ramblings every morning,” Lucile said. “However. Go on.”
Fabre unfolded the sheet. “‘The Chief Minister had to be someone
who possessed the confidence of the agitators lately responsible for overthrowing the monarchy. He had to be a man with sufficient personal authority to control this most advantageous, glorious and necessary Revolution’s most contemptible instruments.’ That’s us, Camille. ‘He had to be a man of such eloquence, spirit and character that he would demean neither the office he held nor those members of the National Assembly called upon to have dealings with him. Danton only combined these qualities. I voted for him, and I do not regret my decision.’” Fabre leaned over to Gabrielle. “There now—aren’t you impressed by that?”
“Something grudging in the middle,” Camille said.
“Patronizing.” Lucile reached out to take the paper from Fabre. “‘Called upon to have dealings with him.’ It sounds as if you’d be in a cage and they’d poke you with a long stick through the bars. And their teeth would chatter.”
“As if it mattered,” Camille said, “whether Condorcet regretted his decision. As if he had a choice, in the first place. As if Brissotin opinion mattered to anyone.”
“You will find it matters when the National Convention is elected,” Danton said.
“I like that bit about your character,” Fabre said. “What if he’d seen you dragging Mandat through City Hall?”
“Let’s try and forget that,” Danton said.
“Oh—and I thought it was one of your better moments, Georges-Jacques.”
Camille had sorted his letters into little piles. “Nothing from Guise,” he said.
“Perhaps they’re overawed by the new address.”
“I think they simply don’t believe me. They think it’s one of my elaborate lies.”
“Don’t they get the newspapers?”
“Yes, but they know better than to believe what they read in the newspapers, thank goodness. Now that I write for them. You know, my father thinks I shall be hanged.”
“You may be yet,” Danton said, jocular.
“This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville.” Camille cast an eye over his relative’s best handwriting. “Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm squirm squirm … ‘the election of the Patriot Ministers … I know them all by reputation, but I am not so happy as to be known by them—’”
“He’s known by me,” Danton said. “Useful fellow. Does as he’s told.”
“‘I flatter myself that you will put forward my interests to the Minister
of Justice to procure me a situation … you know I am the father of a large family and not well-off … .’ There.” He dropped the letter in front of Danton. “I put forward the interest of my humble and obedient servant Antoine Fouquier-Tinville. He is spoken of in the family as a perfectly competent lawyer. Employ him if you choose.”
Danton picked up the letter. He laughed. “The servility, Camille! Just think—three years ago this spring, would he have given you the time of day?”
“Absolutely not. Wouldn’t have been related to me even remotely, until the Bastille fell.”
“Still,” Danton said, reading the letter, “your cousin might be useful for our special tribunal that we are setting up to try the losers. Leave it with me, I’ll find him something to do.”
“What are those?” Lucile indicated the other pile of letters.
“Those were ingratiating.” Camille waved a hand. “These are obscene.” Her attention fastened on the hand; it looked almost transparent. “You know, I used to give such correspondence to Mirabeau. He kept a file.”
“Can I see?” Fabre asked.
“Later,” Danton said. “Does Robespierre get these things?”
“Yes, a few. Maurice Duplay sifts them out. Of course, the household is wonderful prey for the avid imagination. All those daughters, and the two young boys. Maurice gets very cross. I’m often mentioned, it seems. He complains to me. As if I could do anything about it.”
“Robespierre should get married,” Fabre said.
“It doesn’t seem to help.” Danton turned to his wife, mock-uxurious. “What are you going to do today, my love?” Gabrielle didn’t reply. “Your zest for life is unbounded, isn’t it?”
“I miss my home,” Gabrielle said. She looked down at the tablecloth. She did not care to have her private life in public.
“Why don’t you go and spend some money?” her husband suggested. “Take your mind off it. Go to the dressmakers, or whatever it is you do.”
“I’m three months pregnant. I’m not interested in dresses.”
“Don’t be horrible to her, Georges-Jacques,” Lucile said softly.
Gabrielle threw back her head and glared at her. “I don’t need your protection, you little slut.” She got up from the table. “Excuse me, please.” They watched her go.
“Forget about it, Lolotte,” Danton said. “She’s not herself.”
“Gabrielle has the temperament of these letter writers,” Fabre said. “She views everything in the worst possible light.”
Danton pushed the letters towards Fabre. “Quench your burning curiosity. But take them away.”
Fabre made Lucile an extravagant bow, and left the room with alacrity.
“He won’t like them,” Danton said. “Not even Fabre will like them.”
“Max has marriage proposals,” Camille said unexpectedly. “He gets two or three a week. He keeps them in his room, tied up with tape. He files everything, you know.”
“This is one of your fantasies,” Danton said.
“No, I assure you. He keeps them under his mattress.”
“How do you know?” Danton said narrowly.
They began to laugh. “Don’t go spreading this story,” Camille said, “because Max will know where it comes from.”
Gabrielle reappeared, standing in the doorway, sullen and tense. “When you are finished, I’d like to speak to my husband, just for one moment. If you can spare him?”
Danton got up. “You can be Minister of Justice today,” he said to Camille, “and I shall deal with what Gabrielle calls ‘the foreign business.’ Yes, my love, what was it you wanted?”
“Oh, hell,” Lucile said, when they’d gone. “Slut, am I?”
“She doesn’t mean anything. She’s very unhappy, she’s very confused.”
“We don’t help, do we?”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
Their hands touched, lightly. They were not going to give up the game.
 
 
T
he allies were on French soil. “Paris is so safe,” Danton told the Assembly, “that I have brought my infant sons and my aged mother to Paris, to my apartment in the Place des Piques.”
He met Citizen Roland in the Tuileries garden; they strolled among the trees. A green, dappled light fretted his colleague’s face. Citizen Roland’s voice shook. “Perhaps this is the time to go. The government must stay together, at all costs. If we were to move beyond the Loire, then perhaps, when Paris is taken—”
Danton turned on him ferociously. “Take care when you talk about running away, Roland—the people might hear you. Go on then, old man, you run. If you’ve no stomach for a fight you take yourself off. But I go nowhere, Roland, I stay here and govern. Paris taken? It’ll never be taken. We’ll burn it first.”
You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that,
by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread; he will stand at the center, and it can go out from him.
Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice’s palace. She sniffed.
They began digging trenches round the city walls.
 
 
I
n the first weeks of the ministry, Dr. Marat often called. He disdained to bathe for these occasions, and refused to make an appointment; hopping through the galleries with his nervous, contorted stride, he would enunciate, “The minister, the secretary,” with a sort of disgust, and physically grapple with anyone who tried to stop him.
This morning two senior officials were conferring outside Secretary Desmoulins’s door. Their faces were aggrieved, their tones indignant. They made no effort to stop Marat. He deserves you, their expressions said.
It was a large and splendid room, and Camille was the least conspicuous thing in it. The walls were lined with portraits, aged to the colors of tallow and smoke; the grave ministerial faces, under their wigs and powder, were all alike. They gazed without expression at the occupant of a desk which had once perhaps been theirs: it is all one to us, we are dead. It seemed to give them no trouble to overlook Camille, no trouble whatsoever.
“Longwy has fallen,” Marat said.
“Yes, they told me. There is a map over there, they gave it to me because I don’t know where anything is.”
“Verdun next,” Marat said. “Within the week.” He sat down opposite Camille. “What’s the problem with your civil servants? They’re standing out there muttering.”
“This place is stifling. I wish I were running a newspaper again.”
Marat was not, at this time, publishing his own newspaper in the ordinary way; instead, he was writing his opinions on wall posters, and posting them up through the city. It was not a style to encourage subtlety, close argument; it made a man, he said, economical with his sympathies. He surveyed Camille. “You and I, sunshine, are going to be shot.”
“That had occurred to me.”
“What will you do, do you think? Will you break down and beg for mercy?”
“I expect so,” Camille said realistically.
“But your life is worth something. Mine, too, though I wouldn’t expect many people to agree. We have a duty to the Revolution, at this point.
Brunswick is fully mobilized. What does Danton say? The position is desperate, not hopeless. He is not a fool, I take him to have some grounds for hope. But Camille, I am afraid. The enemy say they will devastate the city. People will suffer, you know, as perhaps they never have in all our history. Can you imagine the revenge the royalists will take?”
Camille shook his head, meaning, I try not to.
“Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.” Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. “It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.”
Camille put his elbows on the desk, and watched Marat. He could not imagine what Marat expected him to say.
“I don’t know how the enemy advance may be stopped,” Marat said. “I leave that to Danton and to the soldiers. It is this city that is my business, it is the traitors within, the subversives, the royalists packed into our prisons. These prisons are not secure—you know very well, we have people shut up in convents, in hospitals, we have not places enough for them, or any way of keeping them secure.”

Other books

Eden's Root by Rachel Fisher
The Strongest Steel by Scarlett Cole
Assignment to Hell by Timothy M. Gay
Hell's Belle by Marie Castle
Bad Attitude by K. A. Mitchell