A Place of Greater Safety (88 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
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“I’m glad you’ve found something to make you laugh. In your condition I should not be cheerful.”
“Oh, Dillon. I can spare you five minutes on that topic. Inasmuch as Dillon is an aristocrat by birth, he should be guillotined—”
“He can’t help his birth.”
“There are certain defects in you that you can’t help, but we can’t go on making allowances forever. Inasmuch as Dillon is your wife’s lover, you only demonstrate your perverse temperament if you try to do anything for him. Inasmuch as committees have done this—go for them, and bless you my child.” Marat bounced his clenched fist on his writing board. “Do some damage,” he said.
“I am afraid that if Dillon goes before the Tribunal on these ludicrous charges—if he goes before the Tribunal, totally innocent, as he is—he may still be condemned. Is it possible, do you think?”
“Yes. He has enemies, very powerful ones. So what do you expect? The Tribunal is a political instrument.”
“The Tribunal was set up to replace mob law.”
“So Danton claimed. But it will go beyond that. There are some rare fights coming up, you know.” Marat looked up. “As for you, if you make the welfare of these
ci-devants
your concern, something nasty will happen to you.”
“And you?” Camille said dispassionately. “Are you worse? Are you going to die?”
Marat tapped the side of the bath. “No … like this … drag on, and on.”
 
 
S
cenes in the National Convention. Danton’s friend Desmoulins and Danton’s friend Lacroix shouted at each other across the benches, as if it were a street meeting. Danton’s friend Desmoulins attacked the Danton Committee. Standing at the tribune, he was bawled out from both sides of the House. From the Mountain, Deputy Billaud-Varennes screamed, “It is a scandal, he must be stopped, he is disgracing his own name.”
Another walkout. It was becoming familiar. Fabre followed him. “Write it down,” he said.
“I will.” Already the letter that Dillon had sent to him from prison was made public, he had read it out to the deputies. I have done nothing, Dillon said, that is not for my country’s good. “A pamphlet,” Camille said. “What shall I call it?”
“Just call it ‘A Letter to Arthur Dillon.’ People like reading other people’s letters.” Fabre nodded in the direction of the Convention’s hall. “Settle a few scores, while you’re about it. Launch a few campaigns.”
Fabre thought, what am I doing, what am I doing? The last thing he needed was to get dragged into the Dillon business.
“What did Billaud mean, I am disgracing my own name? Am I some sort of institution?”
He knew the answer: yes. He is the Revolution. Now, apparently, they thought the Revolution had to be protected from itself.
An elderly, grave deputy approached him, defied his murderous expression, drew him aside and suggested they have a cup of coffee somewhere. Do you know Dillon well? the man asked him. Yes, very well. And do you know, the man said—look, I don’t want to upset you, but you ought to know—about Dillon and your wife? Camille nodded. He was writing a paragraph in his head. You don’t deserve this, the deputy said. You deserve better, Camille. It is the old story, I suppose—you are occupied with public affairs, the girl is bored, she is fickle, and you don’t have Dillon’s looks.
So there is kindness in the world—this strained, patient man, stumbling into a situation he didn’t understand, catching the tail-end of the lurid gossip, wanting to put a young man’s life right; betrayed himself twenty years ago, who knows? Camille was touched. Thank you, he said politely. As he left the café and headed home to his desk, he felt that singular fluid running in his veins; it was like the old days on the
Révolutions,
the power of words moving through his bloodstream like a drug. For the next couple of weeks he would be slightly out of his mind. When he was not writing, or engaged in a shouting match, the life seemed to drain out of him; he felt passive, a husk, a ghost. Strange fantasies
possessed him; the language of public debate took a violent, unexpected turn.
“After Legendre,” he wrote, “the member of the National Convention who has the highest opinion of himself is Saint-Just. One can see by his bearing that he feels his head to be the cornerstone of the Revolution; he carries it as if it were the Holy Sacrament.”
Saint-Just looked down at the passage, which some helpful person had underscored in green ink. There was very little expression in his face; he did not sneer, as people do in novelettes. “Like the Holy Sacrament,” he says. “I will make him carry his like Saint Denis.”
“Oh that’s quite good,” Camille said, when it was relayed. ‘For Antoine, that’s quite witty. I wonder if he is going to be clever when he grows up?”
Soon he was rummaging through the bookshelves: “Lucile, where is Saint-Just’s disgusting poem, the epic poem in twenty books? There was a verse beginning, ‘If I were God.’ Let us see how it continued, I’m sure it will provide the occasion for mockery.”
Then suddenly he stopped, sat down or rather fell into a chair. “What am I doing? Saint-Just and I are supposed to be on the same side. We are Jacobins, we are republicans …”
“I’ll find it for you,” Lucile said quietly.
“Perhaps better not.”
For he had begun to see visions: visions of that saint, France’s patron, who had walked for several leagues with his severed head in his hands. He first saw Denis in the Place de Grève, picking his way over the cobbles. He was neatly truncated, there was no gore; but the head swinging almost casually from his left wrist was Camille’s own. He saw him again going stealthily into the Duplay house, for a private meeting with Robespierre; he saw him waiting outside the entrance to the Jacobin Club—a newly arrived patriot, modest and provincial, wanting an introduction to the great world.
After a day or two it came to him that the only thing to do was to take the initiative. It would be quite easy to kill Saint-Just. He could see him alone, any time, at a convenient place; then a pistol shot, or (not to advertise the incident) a knife. He could see the pain brimming in Saint-Just’s velvet eyes.
And then, he would need a Plot: Saint-Just’s conspiracy against the Republic, which he had detected with the instinct of the impeccable and tested patriot. I
am the Revolution.
Who would fail to believe that he had slaughtered Saint-Just in an outburst of patriotic rage? He was not known for containing his temper. To avoid awkward questions it
would have to be a small knife, the kind you would hardly know that you were carrying.
Don’t be stupid, he said to himself. Saint-Just isn’t going to kill you, any more than you’re going to kill him. Or even less.
He attended the Committee of War, of which he was secretary, and from its rooms wrote a sensible and chatty letter home, asking his father not to mention Rose-Fleur so much in their correspondence, as Lucile was mad with jealousy.
But still, the fantasy had moved into his brain, it had taken up occupation, he could not evict it. He thought of the hole in Lepelletier’s side, the wound made by a butcher’s killing knife, the wound he took the whole night to die of. He would have to be quick; it would have to be one true, telling blow; Saint-Just was a good deal bigger and stronger than he was, and he would have just one chance. At the Jacobins, when he heard the young man’s sonorous voice, he would smile to himself. He would dream of his plan in the Convention, when Saint-Just was at the tribune, his left hand making brief chopping motions in the air.
 
 
J
uly 13: “A person from Caen,” Danton said. “Pétion and Barbaroux are believed to have been there these last weeks. It is a Girondist conspiracy. Let me assure you, it was not I who arranged it.”
Camille said, “I heard someone in the street, shouting assassination … I was afraid that I … in a moment of … no, nothing, never mind.”
Danton stared at him for a second. “Anyway,” he said, “this finishes the Gironde. Murderers and cowards. They sent a woman.”
 
 
T
here was a crowd in the narrow street, a near-silent and stolid mass, its eyes riveted in fascination on two brightly lit windows of Marat’s apartment. It was an hour after midnight, strangely light, the heat subtropical. Camille waved away the sansculotte who guarded the bottom of the iron-railed steps. The man did not move—not right away.
“Never seen you close up,” he said. His eyes measured Camille. “How’s Danton taking it?”
“He is shocked.”
“I’ll bet. And you’ll be telling me next he’s sorry.”
Camille was used to the crowd calling out his name. This was a different, more unpleasant, kind of familiarity.
“Some are saying that Danton and Robespierre have put him where he’ll be quiet,” the man said. “Then again, some are saying it’s the royalists, some are saying it’s Brissot.”
“I know you,” Camille said. “I’ve seen you running behind Hébert, haven’t I? What are you doing here?”
He knew: squabbling over the legacy already.
“Ah,” the man said, “Père Duchesne has his interests. The People will need a new Friend. It won’t be any of you—”
“Jacques Roux, perhaps?”
“You with that filthy swine Dillon—”
Camille pushed past him. Legendre was already in the house, his tricolor sash knotted untidily about his blustering, bulging person: taking charge. The ground seemed to shiver beneath his feet, as if the women’s screams were still rattling the windows; but all was quiet now, except for some stifled sobbing from behind a closed door. You have not eaten much today, Camille said to himself; that is why the walls seem liquid, why the air is disturbed.
The assassin sat in the parlor. Her hands were tied tightly, and behind her chair were two men with pikes. Before her was a small table covered with a scruffy white cloth, and on it were her assassin’s possessions: a gold watch, a thimble, a reel of white thread, a few loose coins. A passport, a birth certificate; a handkerchief edged with lace; the cardboard sheath of a kitchen knife. On the dusty rug by her feet was a black hat with three brilliant green ribbons.
He stood against the wall, watching her. She had that kind of thin, translucent skin that reddens and marks easily, catches every nuance of the light. A healthy full-breasted girl, fed on fresh farm butter and the cream of the milk: the kind of girl who smiles at you in church, beribboned and flower-scented on the Sundays after Easter. I know you well, he thought; I remember you from when I was a child. The remains of an elaborate coiffure hung about her face: the kind of hairdo a girl from the provinces would have before she went out to commit a murder.
“Yes, make her blush,” Legendre said, “you can easily make her blush. But blush for her crime, she won’t blush for that. I thank Providence that I am alive, because she was at my house earlier today. She denies it, but she was there. They were suspicious, wouldn’t let her in. Oh, she denies it, but I was her first choice.”
“Congratulations,” Camille said. He knew that the girl was in pain because of the way they had tied her hands.
“She won’t blush,” Legendre said, “for assassinating our greatest patriot.”
“If that was what she had in mind, she would hardly have wasted her time on you.”
Simone Evrard was outside the door where they had the body. She had collapsed against the wall, wracked, tear-stained, hardly able to keep her feet. “So much blood, Camille,” she said. “How will we ever get the blood off the floor and the walls?”
As he opened the door she made a feeble motion to stop him. Dr. Deschamps looked swiftly over his shoulder. One of his assistants stepped forward with an outstretched arm to bar Camille’s way. “I have to know for sure …” Camille whipered. Deschamps turned his head again. “I beg your pardon, Citizen Camille. I didn’t know it was you. Be warned, it’s not pleasant. We are embalming the body, but in this heat … with the condition of the corpse after four, five hours,” the doctor wiped his hands on a towel, “it’s as if he were decaying while he was still alive.”
He believes, Camille thought, that I am here from the Convention, on some question of protocol. He looked down. Dr. Deschamps put a hand under his elbow. “It was instantaneous,” he said. “Or almost so. He had just time to cry out. He can’t have felt anything. This is where the knife went.” He indicated. “Into the right lung, through the artery, piercing the heart. We couldn’t close his mouth, so we had to cut out the tongue. All right? You see, he’s still quite identifiable. Now, let me get you out of here. I’m burning the strongest aromatics I can find, but it is not a smell for the layman.”
Outside Simone was still propped against the wall. Her breath rasped. “I told them to give this woman an opiate,” Deschamps said crossly. “Do you want me to sign anything? No, I see. Look, I assume you have an official escort? I don’t know what this nonsense is, everyone knows that Marat is dead. I’ve already had someone from the Jacobins throwing up over my assistants. You look like the fainting type, so I should get outside as soon as you can. Order something done about the wife, or whoever she is, will you?”
The door clocked shut. Simone slumped into his arms. From the next room came voices raised in curt questioning. “I was his wife,” Simone moaned. “He didn’t marry me in church, he didn’t take me to City Hall, but he swore by all the gods in creation that I was his wife.”

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