A Place of Greater Safety

  On Sunday he went to Mass with the family. In the narrow, sleet-blown streets he was an object of curiosity. In church people looked at him as if he had come from a warmer region than Paris.

  “They say you are an atheist,” his mother whispered.

  “Is that what they say I am?”

  Clement said, “Perhaps you will be like that diabolic Angevin who vanished at the consecration in a puff of smoke?”

  “It would be an event,” Anne-Clothilde said. “Our social calender has been so dull.”

  Camille did not study the congregation; he was aware that they studied him. There was M. Saulce and his wife; there was the same physician, bewigged and tubby, who once assisted Henriette to her coffin.

  “There’s your old girlfriend,” Clement said. “We’re not supposed to know, but we do.”

  Sophie was a doubled-chinned matron now. She looked through him as if his bones were glass. He felt that perhaps they were; even stone seemed to crumble and melt in the scented ecclesiastical gloom. Six points of light on the altar guttered and flared; their shadows crosshatched flesh and stone, wine and bread. The few comunicants melted away into the darkness. It was the feast of the Epiphany; when they emerged, the blue daylight scoured the burghers’ skulls, icing out features and peeling them back to bone.

  He went upstairs to his father’s study and sifted through his filed correspondence until he found the letter he wanted, the missive from his Godard uncle. His father came in as he was reading it. “What are you doing?” He didn’t try to hide the letter. “That’s really going rather far,” Jean-Nicolas said.

  “Yes.” Camille smiled, turning the page. “But then you know I am ruthless and capable of great crimes.” He carried the paper to the light. “‘Camille’s known instability,’” he read, “‘and the dangers that may be apprehended to the happiness and durability of the union.’” He put the letter down. His hand trembled. “Do they think I’m mad?” he asked his father.

  “They think—”

  “What else can it mean, instability?”

  “Is it just their choice of words you’re quibbling about?” Jean-Nicolas went over to the fireplace, rubbing his hands. “That bloody church is freezing,” he said. “They could have come up with other terms, but of course they won’t commit them to writing. Something got back about a—relationship—you were having with a colleague whom I had always held in considerable—”

  Camille stared at him. “That was years ago.”

  “I don’t find this particularly easy to talk about,” Jean-Nicolas said. “Would you like just to deny it, and then I can put people straight on the matter?”

  The wind tossed handfuls of sleet against the windows, and rattled in the chimneys and eaves. Jean-Nicolas raised his eyes apprehensively. “We lost slates in November. What’s happening to the weather? It never used to be like this.”

  Camille said, “Anything that happened was—oh, back in the days when the sun used to shine all the time. Six years ago. Minimum. None of it was my fault, anyway.”

  “So what are you claiming? That my friend Perrin, a family man, whom I have known for thirty-five years, a man highly respected in the Chancery division and a leading Freemason—are you claiming that one day out of the blue he ran up to you and knocked you unconscious and dragged you into his bed? Rubbish. Listen,” he cried, “can you hear that strange tapping noise? Do you think it’s the guttering?”

  “Ask anyone,” Camille said.

  “What?”

  “About Perrin. He had a reputation. I was just a child, I—oh well, you know what I’m like, I never do quite know how I get into these things.”

  “That won’t do for an excuse. You can’t expect that to do, for the Godards—” He broke off, looked up. “I think it is the guttering, you know.” He turned back to his son. “And I only bring this up, as one example of the sort of story that gets back.”

  It had begun to snow properly now, from an opaque and sullen sky. The wind dropped suddenly. Camille put his forehead against the cold glass and watched the snow begin to drift and bank in the square below. He felt weak with shock. His breath misted the pane, the fire crackled behind him, gulls tossed screaming in the upper air. Clement came in. “What’s that funny noise, a sort of tapping?” he said. “Is it the guttering, do you think? That’s funny, it seems to have stopped now.” He looked across the room. “Camille, are you all right?”

  “I think so. Could you just tell the fatted calf it’s been reprieved again?”

  Two days later he was back in Paris, in the rue Sainte-Anne. “I’m moving out,” he told his mistress.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “If you must know, I really object to your carrying on with my mother behind my back. So perhaps it’s just as well.”

  So now Camille woke up alone: which he hated. He touched his closed eyelids. His dreams did not bear discussion. His life is not really what people imagine, he thought. The long struggle for Annette had shredded his nerves. How he would like to be with Annette, and settled. He did not bear Claude any ill will, but it would be neat if he could be just plucked out of existence. He did not want him to suffer; he tried to think of a precedent, in the Scriptures perhaps. Anything could happen; that was his experience.

  He remembered—and he had to remember afresh every morning—that he was going to marry Annette’s daughter, that he had made her swear an oath about it. How complicated it all was. His father suggested that he wrecked people’s lives. He was at a loss to see this. He had not raped anybody, nor committed murder, and from anything else people ought to be able to pick themselves up and carry on, as he was always doing.

  There was a letter from home. He didn’t want to open it. Then he thought, don’t be a fool, someone might have died. Inside was a banker’s draft, and a few words from his father, less of apology than of resignation. This had happened before; they had gone through this whole cycle, of name-calling and horror and flight and appeasement. At a certain point, his father would feel he had overstepped the mark. He had an impulse, a desire to have control; and if his son stopped writing, never came home again, he would have lost control. I should, Camille thought, send this draft back. But as usual I need the money, and he knows it. Father, he thought, you have other children whom you could torment.

  I’ll go round and see d’Anton, he thought. Georges-Jacques will talk to me, he doesn’t regard my vices, in fact perhaps he rather likes them. The day brightened.

  They were busy at d‘Anton’s offices. The King’s Councillor employed two clerks nowadays. One of them was a man called Jules Pare, whom he’d known at school, though d’Anton was younger by several years; it didn’t seem odd, that he employed his seniors these days. The other was a man called Desforgues, whom d‘Anton also seemed to have known forever. Then there was a hanger-on called Billaud-Varennes, who came in when he was wanted, to draft pleas and do the routine stuff, picking up the practice’s overflow. Billaud was in the office this morning, a spare, unprepossessing man with never a good word to say about anybody. When Camille came in, he was tapping papers together on Paré’s desk, and at the same time complaining that his wife was putting on weight. Camille saw that he was specially resentful this morning; for here he was, downat-heel and seedy, and here was Georges-Jacques, with his good broadcloth coat nicely brushed and his plain cravat a dazzling white, with that general money-in-the-bank air of his and that loud posh voice … “Why are you complaining about Anna,” Camille asked, “when you really want to complain about Maître d’Anton?”

  Billaud looked up. “I’ve no complaints,” he said.

  “Aren’t you lucky? You must be the only man in France with no complaints. Why is he lying?”

  “Go away, Camille.” D’Anton picked up the papers Billaud had brought. “I’m working.”

  “When you were received into the College of Advocates, didn’t you have to go to your parish priest and ask him for a certificate to say that you were a good Catholic?” D’Anton grunted, burie
d in his counterclaims. “Didn’t it stick in your throat?”

  “Paris is worth a Mass,” d’Anton said.

  “Of course, this is why Maître Billaud-Varennes doesn’t advance himself from his present position. He would also be a King’s Councillor, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hates priests, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Billaud said. “As we’re quoting, I’ll quote for you—‘I should like to see, and this will be the last and most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.’”

  A short pause. Camille looks Billaud over. He can’t stand him, hardly likes to be in the same room, Billaud makes his skin crawl with distaste and a sort of apprehension that he can’t fathom. But that’s just it—he has to be in the same room. He has to keep seeking out the company of people he can’t stand, it’s become a compulsion. He looks at certain people these days, and it’s as if he’s always known them, as if they belong to him in some way, as if they’re his relatives.

  “How’s your subversive pamphlet?” he said to Billaud. “Have you found a printer for it yet?”

  D’Anton looked up from his papers. “Why do you spend your time writing things that can never be published, Billaud? I’m not asking to needle you—I just want to know.”

  Billaud’s face mottled. “Because I can’t compromise,” he said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” d’Anton said. “Wouldn’t it be better—no, we’ve had this conversation before. Perhaps you should try pamphleteering yourself, Camille. Try prose, instead of poetry.”

  “His pamphlet is called ‘A Last Blow against Prejudice and Superstition,’” Camille said. “Doesn’t look as if it will be quite the last blow, does it? Looks as if it will be about as successful as all those dismal plays he wrote.”

  “The day when you—” Billaud began.

  D’Anton cut him off. “Let’s have some quiet.” He pushed the pleadings at Billaud. “What is this rubbish?”

  “You teach me my business, Maître d’Anton?”

  “Why not, if you don’t know it?” He tossed the papers down. “How was your cousin Rose-Fleur, Camille? No, don’t tell me now, I’m up to here.” He indicated: chin height.

  “Is it hard to be respectable?” Camille asked him. “I mean, is it really grueling?”

  “Oh, this act of yours, Maitre Desmoulins,” Billaud said. “It makes me quite ill, year after year.”

  “You make me ill too, you ghoul. There must be some outlet for your talents, if the law fails. Groaning in vaults would suit you. And dancing on graves is always in request.”

  Camille departed. “What would be an outlet for his talents?” Jules Pare said. “We are too polite to conjecture.”

  At the Théâtre des Variétés the doorman said to Camille, “You’re late, love.” He did not understand this. In the box office two men were having a political argument, and one of them was damning the aristocracy to hell. He was a plump little man with no visible bones in his body, the kind that—in normal times—you see squeaking in defense of the status quo. “Hébert, Hébert,” his opponent said without much heat, “you’ll be hanged, Hébert.” Sedition must be in the air, Camille thought. “Hurry up,” the doorman said. “He’s in a terrible mood. He’ll shout at you.”

  Inside the theater there was a hostile, shrouded dimness. Some disconsolate performers were hopping about trying to keep warm. Philippe Fabre d’Églantine stood before the stage and the singer he had just auditioned. “I think you need a holiday, Anne,” he said. “I’m sorry, my duck, it just won’t do. What have you been doing to your throat? Have you taken to smoking a pipe?”

  The girl crossed her arms over her chest. She looked as if she might be about to burst into tears.

  “Just put me in the chorus, Fabre,” she said. “Please.”

  “Sorry. Can’t do it. You sound as if you’re singing inside a burning building.”

  “You’re not sorry, are you?” the girl said. “Bastard.”

  Camille walked up to Fabre and said into his ear, “Are you married?”

  Fabre jumped, whirled around. “What?” he said. “No, never.”

  “Never,” Camille said, impressed.

  “Well, yes, in a way,” Fabre said.

  “It isn’t that I mean to blackmail you.”

  “All right. All right, I am then. She’s … touring. Listen, just wait for me a half hour, will you? I’ll be through as soon as I can. I hate this hackwork, Camille. My genius is being crushed. My time is being wasted.” He waved an arm at the stage, the dancers, the theater manager frowning in his box. “What did I do to deserve this?”

  “Everybody is disgruntled this morning. In your box office they are having an argument about the composition of the Estates-General.”

  “Ah, René Hébert, what a fire-eater. What really irks him is that his triumphant destiny is to be in charge of the ticket returns.”

  “I saw Billaud this morning. He is disgruntled too.”

  “Don’t mention that cunt to me,” Fabre said. “Trying to take the bread out of writers’ mouths. He’s got one trade, why doesn’t he stick to it? It’s different for you,” he added kindly. “I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to write a play, because you’re such a complete and utter failure as a lawyer. I think, Camille dear, that you and I should collaborate on some project.”

  “I think I should like to collaborate on a violent and bloody revolution. Something that would give offense to my father.”

  “I was thinking more of something in the short term, which would make money,” Fabre said reprovingly.

  Camille removed himself into the shadows, and watched Fabre losing his temper. The singer came stalking towards him, threw herself into a seat. She dropped her head, swayed her chin from side to side to relax the muscles of her neck; then pulled tight around her upper arms a fringed silk shawl that had a certain fraying splendor about it. She seemed frayed herself; her expression was bad-tempered, her mouth set. She looked Camille over. “Do I know you?”

  He looked her over in turn. She was about twenty-seven, he thought; small bones, darkish brown hair, snub nose. She was pretty enough, but there was something blurred about her features: as though at some time she’d been beaten, hit around the head, had almost recovered but would never quite. She repeated her question. “Admire the directness of your approach,” Camille said.

  The girl smiled. Tender bruised mouth. She put up a hand to massage her throat. “I thought I really did know you.”

  “I am afflicted by this too. Lately I think I know everybody in Paris. It’s like a series of hallucinations.”

  “You do know Fabre, though. Can you do something for me there? Have a word, put him in a better temper?” Then she shook her head. “No, forget it. He’s right, my voice has gone. I trained in England, would you believe? I had these big ideas. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

  “Well—what have you ever done, between jobs?”

  “I used to sleep with a marquis.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I get the impression that marquises aren’t so free with their money anymore. And me, I’m not so free with my favors. Still—move on is the best thing. I think I’ll try Genoa, I’ve got contacts there.”

  He liked her voice, her foreign accent; wanted to keep her talking. “Where are you from?”

  “Near Liège. I’ve—well—traveled a bit.” She put her cheek on her hand. “My name is Anne Theroigne.” She closed her eyes. “God, I’m so tired,” she said. She moved thin shoulders inside the shawl, trying to ease the world off her back.

  At the rue Condé, Claude was at home. “I’m surprised to see you,” he said. He didn’t look it. “You’ve had your answer,” he said. “Positively no. Never.”

  “Immortal, are you?” Camille said. He felt just about ready for a fight.

  “I could almost believe you’re threatening me,” Claude said.

  ??
?Listen to me,” Camille said. “Five years from now there will be none of this. There will be no Treasury officials, no aristocrats, people will be able to marry who they want, there will be no monarchy, no Parlements, and you won’t be able to tell me what I can’t do.”

  He had never in his life spoken to anyone like this. It was quite releasing, he thought. I might become a thug for a career.

  Annette, a room away, sat frozen in her chair. It was only once in six months that Claude came home early. It followed that Camille could not have prepared for him; this was all out of his head. He wants to marry my daughter, she thought, because someone is telling him he can’t. And she had for years nourished this rare and ferocious ego in her own drawing room, feeding it like some peculiar houseplant on mocha coffee and small confidences.

  “Lucile,” she said, “sit in your chair, don’t dare leave this room. I will not condone your flouting your father’s authority.”

  “You mistake that for authority?” Lucile said. Frightened, she walked out of the room. Camille was white with anger, his eyes opening like dark slow stains. She stood in his path. “You must know,” she said, to anyone it concerned, “I mean to have another life from the one they’ve worked out for me. Camille, I’m terrified of being ordinary. I’m terrified of being bored.”

  His fingertips brushed the back of her hand. They were cold as ice. He turned on his heel. A door slammed. She had nothing left of him but the small chilled islands of skin. She heard her mother crying noisily out of sight, gasping and gagging. “Never,” her father said, “never in twenty years has there been a word said out of place in this house, there have been none of these upsets, my daughters have never heard voices raised in anger.”

  Adèle came out. “So now we are living in the real world,” she said.