A Place of Greater Safety (92 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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“I don’t see him,” Camille said.
“Our own Section, Camille. Oh, I should have left the Jacobins to Robespierre, and stayed on my own side of the river. I should have hung on to power in my own district. Who runs it now? Hébert. We old Cordeliers should have stuck together.”
They were silent for a moment. We old Cordeliers … It’s four years since the Bastille fell, four years and three months. It feels like twenty. Danton sits here, overweight, his brow permanently furrowed, God knows what going on amid his internal organs. Robespierre’s asthma is worse, and one can’t help noticing that his hairline is receding. Hérault’s fresh complexion is not so fresh as it used to be, and the double chin on which Lucile passed a damning judgement promises a jowly, disappointing middle age. Fabre has developed breathing difficulties; as for Camille, his headaches are worse, and he can hardly keep any flesh on his small bones. He looks up at Danton now: “Georges-Jacques, do you know a man called Comte? Just tell me yes or no.”
“Yes. I employed him as an agent in Normandy, on government business. Why?”
“Because he has turned up here in Paris and made a certain allegation. That you were in league with Brissot’s people, to put the Duke of York on our throne.”
“The Duke of York? Lord,” Danton said bitterly, “I thought only Robespierre could dream up anything so wholly fantastic as the Duke of York.”
“Robespierre was deeply disturbed.”
Danton looked up slowly. “He gave it credence?”
“No, of course not. He said it was a conspiracy to discredit a patriot. It is a good thing that we still have Hérault on the Committee, though. He had Comte arrested before he could do anymore damage. It was because of this that David called on you, on behalf of the Police Committee. Just a formality.”
“I see. ‘Morning, Danton—are you a traitor?’ ‘Certainly not, David—do run away back to your easel.’ ‘I’ll do that—left a daub half-finished. Get well soon!’ That sort of formality? And I suppose that for Robespierre, it’s fuel to his flames? It feeds his notions of gigantic conspiracies?”
“Yes. We suppose Comte must be a British agent. After all, we reason with ourselves—we stretch our imaginations to suppose that it might be
true—and then we reason with ourselves, how would this nonentity Comte, this servant, this menial, know anything of the plans of a man like Danton? That is how we reason, Robespierre and I.”
“I know what you mean, Camille,” Louise said warningly. “Why don’t you ask him straight out if there is anything in it?”
“Because it is absurd.” Camille lost his temper. “Because I have other loyalties, and if it is true, they will kill him.”
Louise stepped back. Her hand fluttered to her throat. Camille saw her difficulty at once: she wanted and didn’t want him dead.
“Louise, take no notice,” Danton said. “Go now and make sure our packing is done.” Tiredness crept back into his voice. “You must learn a little better to distinguish—it is a ridiculous story. It is as Robespierre says. It is a slander.”
She hesitated. “We’re still going to Arcis?”
“Of course. I have written to them to expect us.”
She left the room.
“I have to go,” Danton said. “I must recover my health. Without that, nothing.”
“Yes, of course you must go.” Camille averted his face. “You are avoiding the big trials, are you not?”
“Come here.” Danton put out a hand to him. Camille pretended not to see it. “I’m sick of the city,” Danton said. “I’m sick of people. Why don’t you come with me, get a change of air?” He thought, I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him to Robespierre and that rarefied climate of perpetual chill.
“I’ll write to you,” Camille said. He crossed the room, touched his lips to Danton’s cheekbone. It felt like the least that could be done.
 
 
I
t was late when they reached Arcis, and growing cold. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he felt the power draining from the sun, the soil losing its summer warmth. He put out an arm for Louise. “Here,” he said. “Here is where I was born.”
Pulling her traveling cape about her, she looked up wonderingly at the manor house, at the milky darkness rolling in from the river. “No, not here,” he said. “Not in this very house. But close by. Come now,” he said to the children. “You’ve come to your grandmother. You remember?”
Silly question. Somehow Georges always thinks his children are older than they are, he expects them to have long memories. François-Georges was a year old when his mother died; now, a big tough baby, he clung
to his stepmother and lashed his heels about her fragile rib cage. Antoine, limp and exhausted by the excitement, hung around his father’s neck like a child fetched up from a shipwreck.
Anne-Madeleine’s husband held a torch high. And there she was—it was Louise’s first sight of these alarming sisters—running and tripping over her feet, like some schoolgirl. “Georges, Georges, my brother Georges!” She hurled herself at him. His arm encircled her. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, kissed him on both cheeks, broke away and scooped up the nearest of her children and held up the little boy for inspection. This was Anne-Madeleine, who had pulled him out from under the bull’s feet.
And here was Marie-Cécile; her convent had dispersed, she was home, she was where she should be: didn’t he say he’d look after her? She still had her nun’s deportment; she tried to fold her hands away in the sleeves of a habit she no longer wore. And here was Pierrette, tall, smiling, full-faced, a spinster more matronly than most of the mothers of Paris. Anne-Madeleine’s latest baby dribbled onto her shoulder. They surrounded Louise and squeezed her; they felt, as they did so, the ghost promise of Gabrielle’s opulent flesh. “My little dove!” they said, laughing. “You are so young!”
They dived away, the sisters, into the kitchen. “Bleak little thing! So duty-ridden! No breasts at all!”
“Didn’t you think he’d bring that Lucile-thing? That black-eyed girl? That he’d detach her from her black-eyed husband?”
“No, that evil pair, they were born for each other.” The sisters fell about, laughing. The visit of the Desmoulinses had been one of the high points of their lives; they couldn’t wait for them to come back again, creating a similar metropolitan
frisson.
They began to play out the scene taking place between Georges-Jacques and their mother. “It’s a comfort,” croaked Marie-Cécile, “to see you again before I die.”
“Die?” Anne-Madeleine said. “You old fraud, you’ll not die. You’ll outlive me, I swear it.”
“And how Georges-Jacques does swear!” said Pierrette. “How he does! Do you think he’s fallen into bad company?”
In the parlor of the manor house, Mme. Recordain’s blue eyes were sparkling into the dusk. “Come in from the night air, daughter. Sit here by me.” Diagnostic fingers studded themselves into her waist. Two months! And not pregnant! The Italian girl, who was dead, did her duty by Georges-Jacques—now we have one of these skimpy Parisiennes on our hands.
As if fearing that this examination might be taking place, the sisters came surging out from somewhere in the depth of the house. They swarmed about their brother, proposing various kinds of food he might eat, patting his head and making family jokes-soft-bodied country-women, in their strange, dowdy, practical clothes.
 
 
“I
t might be better if you were the one to uncover it.” Fabre had not heard Lucile say this, but it was his own thought. On the day Danton left Paris he sat alone in his apartment, fighting his desire to shriek and smash and hammer the walls, like a bad child to whom promises have been broken. He took up again the brief, polite noncommittal note that Danton had sent around before his departure; he tore it into tiny strips and burned it shred by shred.
After a tiring and disputatious meeting of the Jacobin Club, he intercepted Robespierre and Saint-Just as they walked side by side from the hall. Saint-Just did not attend assiduously at the evening meetings; he thought the sessions pointless, though he did not say so, and to himself he called the members opinion mongers. He was not much interested in anyone’s opinions. In a few days he would be in Alsace, with the armies. He was looking forward to it.
“Citizens.” Fabre beckoned. “Word with you?”
The irritation on Saint-Just’s face deepened. Robespierre thought of the pretty new calendar, and fetched up a wintery smile.
“Please?” Fabre said. “Something of extreme importance. Would you grant me a private interview?”
“Is it a lengthy matter?” Robespierre asked politely.
“Now look, Fabre,” Saint-Just said, “we’re busy.” Robespierre had to smile again at young Antoine’s tone:
Max is my friend and we’re not playing with you.
He half-expected that Fabre would step back a pace and survey Saint-Just through his lorgnette. But that didn’t happen; pale, clumsily urgent, Fabre solicited his attention. Saint-Just’s rudeness had thrown him off balance. “I have to see the Committee,” he said. “This is business for them.”
“Then don’t shout about it.”
“Only conspirators whisper.” Seeing his chance, Fabre recovered suddenly into a grand resonance. “Soon the whole Republic must know my news.”
Saint-Just looked at him with distaste. “We are not on the stage,” he observed.
Robespierre darted a glance at Saint-Just, rather shocked. “You’re
right, Fabre. If your news concerns the Republic, it must be broadcast.” At the same time, he looked around swiftly to see who had heard.
“It is a matter of public safety.”
“Then he must come to the Committee.”
“No,” Saint-Just said. “Tonight’s agenda will keep us working till dawn. There is no single item that is not a matter of extreme urgency. There is nothing that can be postponed, and I, Citizen Fabre, have to be at my desk by nine tomorrow.”
Fabre ignored him, and took Robespierre by the arm. “I have to reveal a conspiracy.” Robespierre’s eyes widened. “However, it will not mature overnight—if we move with energy tomorrow, there will be time enough. Young Citizen Saint-Just needs his rest. He is not accustomed to watching late, like we elder patriots.”
It was a mistake. Robespierre looked at him icily. “I happen to be informed, Citizen Fabre, that most of your watching late is done in a gambling house whose existence is unknown to the patriots of the Commune, in the company of Citizen Desmoulins’s winning streak and several women of dubious reputation.”
“For the love of God,” Fabre said, “take me seriously.”
Robespierre considered him. “Is it a complicated conspiracy?”
“Its ramifications are enormous.”
“Very well. Citizen Saint-Just and myself meet tomorrow with the Committee of General Security.”
“I know.”
“Will that be suitable?”
“The Police Committee will be most suitable. It will expedite matters.”
“I see. We meet at—”
“I know.”
“I see. Good night.”
Saint-Just shifted from foot to foot. “Robespierre, you’re expected. The Committee will be waiting.”
“They will not, I hope,” Robespierre said. “They will be getting on with the business, I hope. No one should be waited for. No one is indispensable.” But he followed.
“The man is untrustworthy,” Saint-Just said. “He is theatrical. He is hysterical. I have no doubt that this conspiracy is a figment of his too-active imagination.”
“He is a friend of Danton’s and a proven patriot,” Robespierre corrected snappily. “He is a great poet.” He brooded as they walked. “I am inclined to credit what he says. He was very white in the face, and he had not his lorgnette.”
 
 
I
t seemed, it seemed all too credible. Taut, quiet, motionless, his hands palm down on the table, Robespierre took over the interrogation. He had moved from a corner of the table to a place directly opposite Fabre, and the committeemen, moving fast, had clumsily scraped their chairs out of his way; now they sat silent, skipping to the beat of his intuitions. He would ask sharply for Fabre to stop; he would make a note, and then wiping his pen and putting it aside deliberately he would spread out his fingers on the tabletop and glance up at Fabre to indicate that he should begin again.
Fabre slumped in his chair. “And when,” he said, “within a month, Chabot comes to you and says, there is a plot, I hope you will remember who first gave you these names.”
“You,” Robespierre said, “shall interrogate him.”
Fabre swallowed. “Citizen,” he said, “I am very sorry to be the agent of your disillusionment. You must have believed many of these people to be staunch patriots?”
“I?” Robespierre looked up with a small joyless smile. “I already have the names of these foreigners in my notebooks. Anyone may see them. That they were corrupt and dangerous I was well aware, but now you speak to me of systematic conspiracy, of money from Pitt—do you think I don’t see it clearly, and more clearly than any of you do? The economic sabotage, the extremist policies which they advocate at the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, the blasphemous, intolerant attacks on the Christian religion, which disturb the good people and turn them away from the new order—do you think I suppose these things are not related?”

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