“My motto shall be this: get into the Estates at all costs.”
New year. You go out in the streets and you think it’s here: the crash at last, the collapse, the end of the world. It is colder now than any living person can remember. The river is a solid sheet of ice. The first morning, it was a novelty. Children ran and shouted, and dragged their complaining mothers out to see it. “One could skate,” people said. After a week, they began to turn their heads from the sight, keep their children indoors. Under the bridges, by dim and precarious fires, the destitute wait for death. A loaf of bread is fourteen sous, for the New Year.
These people have left their insufficient shelters, their shacks, their caves, abandoned the rock-hard, snow-glazed fields where they cannot believe anything will ever grow again. Tying up in a square of sacking a few pieces of bread, perhaps chestnuts: cording a small bundle of firewood: saying no good-byes, taking to the road. They move in droves for safety, sometimes men alone, sometimes families, always keeping with the people from their own district, whose language they speak. At first they sing and tell stories. After two days or so, they walk in silence. The procession that marched now straggles. With luck, one may find a shed or byre for the night. Old women are wakened with difficulty in the morning and are found to have lost their wits. Small children are abandoned in village doorways. Some die; some are found by the charitable, and grow up under other names.
Those who reach Paris with their strength intact begin to look for work. Men are being laid off, they’re told, our own people; there’s nothing doing for outsiders. Because the river is frozen up, goods do not come into the city: no cloth to be dyed, no skins to be tanned, no corn. Ships are impaled on the ice, with grain rotting in their holds.
The vagrants congregate in sheltered spots, not discussing the situation because there is nothing to discuss. At first they hang around the markets in the late afternoons, because at the close of the day’s trading any bread that remains is sold off cheaply or given away; the rough, fierce Paris wives get there first. Later, there is no bread after midday. They are told that the good Duke of Orléans gives away a thousand loaves of bread to people who are penniless like them. But the Paris beggers leave them standing again, sharp-elbowed and callous, willing to give them malicious information and to walk on people who are knocked to the ground. They gather in back courts, in church porches, anywhere that is out of the knife of the wind. The very young and the very old are taken in by the hospitals. Harassed monks and nuns try to bespeak extra linen and a supply of fresh bread, only to find that they must make do with soiled linen and bread that is days old. They say that the Lord’s designs are wonderful, because if the weather warmed up there would be an epidemic. Women weep with dread when they give birth.
Even the rich experience a sense of dislocation. Alms-giving seems not enough; there are frozen corpses on fashionable streets. When people step down from their carriages, they pull their cloaks about their faces, to keep the stinging cold from their cheeks and the miserable sights from their eyes.
“You’re going home for the elections?” Fabre said. “Camille, how can you leave me like this? With our great novel only half finished?”
“Don’t fuss,” Camille said. “It’s possible that when I get back we won’t have to resort to pornography to make a living. We might have other sources of income.”
Fabre grinned. “Camille thinks elections are as good as finding a gold mine. I like you these days, you’re so frail and fierce, you talk like somebody in a book. Do you have a consumption by any chance? An incipient fever?” He put his hand against Camille’s forehead. “Think you’ll last out till May?”
When Camille woke up, these mornings, he wanted to pull the sheets back over his head. He had a headache all the time, and did not seem to comprehend what people were saying.
Two things—the revolution and Lucile—seemed more distant than ever. He knew that one must draw on the other. He had not seen her for a week, and then only briefly, and she had seemed cool. She had said, “I don’t mean to seem cool, but I”—she had smiled painfully—“I daren’t let the painful emotion show through.”
In his calmer moments he talked to everyone about peaceful reform, professed republicanism but said that he had nothing against Louis, that he believed him to be a good man. He talked the same way as everybody else. But d’Anton said, “I know you, you want violence, you’ve got the taste for it.”
He went to see Claude Duplessis and told him that his fortune was made. Even if Picardy did not send him as a deputy to the Estates (he pretended to think it likely) it would certainly send his father. Claude said, “I do not know what sort of man your father is, but if he is wise he will disassociate himself from you while he is in Versailles, to avoid being exposed to embarrassment.” His gaze, fixed at a high point on the wall, descended to Camille’s face; he seemed to feel that it was a descent. “A hack writer, now,” he said. “My daughter is a fanciful girl, idealistic, quite innocent. She doesn’t know the meaning of hardship or worry. She may think she knows what she wants, but she doesn’t, I know what she wants.”
He left Claude. They were not to meet again for some months. He stood in the rue Condé looking up at the first-floor windows, hoping that he might see Annette. But he saw no one. He went once more on a round of the publishers of whom he had hopes, as if—since last week—they might have become devil-may-care. The presses are busy day and night, and their owners are balancing the risk; inflammatory literature is in request, but no one can afford to see his presses impounded and his workmen marched off. “It’s quite simple—I publish this, I go to gaol,” the printer Momoro said. “Can’t you tone it down?”
“No,” Camille said. No, I can’t compromise: just like Billaud-Varennes used to say. He shook his head. He had let his hair grow, so when he shook his head with any force its dark waves bounced around somewhat theatrically. He liked this effect. No wonder he had a headache.
The printer said, “How is the salacious novel with M. Fabre? Your heart not in it?”
“When he’s gone,” Fabre said gleefully to d’Anton, “I can revise the manuscript and make our heroine look just like Lucile Duplessis.”
If the Assembly of the Estates-General takes place, according to the promise of the King … there is little doubt but some revolution in the government will be effected. A constitution, probably somewhat similar to that of England, will be adopted, and limitations affixed to the power of the Crown.
J. C.Villiers, MP for Old Sarum
Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, forty years old today: happy birthday. In duty to the anniversary, he scrutinized himself in a long mirror. The scale and vivacity of the image seemed to ridicule the filigree frame.
Family story: on the day of his birth the accoucheur approached his father, the baby wrapped in a cloth. “Don’t be alarmed …” he began.
He’s no beauty, now. He might be forty, but he looks fifty. One line for his undischarged bankruptcy: just the one, he’s never worried about money. One line for every agonizing month in the state prison at Vincennes. One line per bastard fathered. You’ve lived, he told himself; do you expect life not to leave a mark?
Forty’s a turning point, he told himself. Don’t look back. The early domestic hell: the screaming bloody quarrels, the days of tight-lipped, murderous silence. There was a day when he had stepped between his mother and his father; his mother had fired a pistol at his head. Only fourteen years old, and what did his father say of him? I have seen the nature of the beast. Then the army, a few routine duels, fits of lechery and blind, obstinate rage. Life on the run. Prison. Brother Boniface, getting roaring drunk every day of his life, his body blowing out to the proportions of a freak at a fair. Don’t look back. And almost incidentally, almost unnoticed, a bankruptcy and a marriage: tiny Émilie, the heiress, the little bundle of poison to whom he’d sworn to be true. Where, he wondered, is Émilie today?
Happy birthday, Mirabeau. Appraise the assets. He drew himself up. He was a tall
man, powerful, deep-chested: capacious lungs. The face was a shocker: badly pockmarked, not that it seemed to put women off. He turned his head slightly so that he could study the aquiline curve of his nose. His mouth was thin, intimidating; it could be called a cruel mouth, he supposed. Take it all in all—it was a man’s face, full of vigor and high breeding. By a few embellishments to the truth he had made his family into one of the oldest and noblest in France. Who cared about the embellishments? Only pedants, genealogists. People take you at your own valuation, he said to himself. But now the nobility, the second Estate of the Realm, had disowned him. He would have no seat. He would have no voice. Or so they thought.
It was all complicated by the fact that last summer there had appeared a scandalous book called A Secret History of the Court at Berlin. It dealt in some detail with the seamier side of the Prussian set-up and the sexual predilections of its prominent members. However strenuously he denied authorship, it was plain to everyone that the book was based on his observations during his time as a diplomat. (Diplomat, him? What a joke.) Strictly, he was not at fault: had he not given the manuscript to his secretary, with orders not to part with it to anyone, especially not to himself? How could he know that his current mistress, a publisher’s wife, was in the habit of picking locks and rifling his secretary’s desk? But that was not quite the sort of excuse that would satisfy the government. And besides, in August he had been very very short of money.
The government should have been more understanding. If they had given him a job last year, instead of ignoring him—something worthy of his talents, say the Constantinople embassy, or Petersburg—then he would have burned A Secret History, or thrown it in a pond. If they had listened to his advice, he wouldn’t be getting ready, now, to teach them the hard way.
So the Nobility have rejected him. Very well. Three days ago he had entered Aix-en-Provence as a candidate for the Commons, the Third Estate. What resulted? Scenes of wild enthusiasm. “Father of his Country,” they had called him; he was popular, locally. When he got to Paris those bells of Aix would still be ringing jubilee, the night sky of the south would still be criss-crossed by the golden scorch-trails of fireworks. Living fire. He would go to Marseille (taking no chances) and get a reception in no way less noisy and splendid. Just to ensure it, he would publish in the city an anonymous pamphlet in praise of his own character and attributes.
So what’s to be done with these worms at Versailles? Conciliate? Calumniate? Would they arrest you in the middle of a General Election? A pamphlet by the Abbé Sieyès, 1789:
What is the Third Estate?
Everything.
What has it been, until now?
Nothing.
What does it want?
To become something.
The first Electoral Assembly of the Third Estate of Guise, in the district of Laon: 5 March 1789. Maître Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins presiding, as Lieutenant-General of the Bailiwick of Vermandois: assisted by M. Saulce, Procurator: M. Marriage as Secretary: 292 persons present.
In deference to the solemnity of the occasion, M. Desmoulins’s son had tied his hair back with a broad green ribbon. It had been a black ribbon earlier that morning, but he had remembered just in time that black was the color of the Hapsburgs and of Antoinette, and that was not at all the kind of partisanship he wished to display. Green, however, was the color of liberty and the color of hope. His father waited for him by the front door, fuming at the delay and wearing a new hat. “I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue,” Camille said. “It seems so selfserving.”
It was a raw, blustery day. On the rue Grand-Pont, Camille stopped and touched his father’s arm. “Come to Laon with me, to the district assembly. Speak for me. Please.”
“You think I should stand aside for you?” Jean-Nicolas said. “The traits which the electors will prefer in me are not the ones you have inherited. I am aware that there are certain persons in Laon making a noise on your behalf, saying you must know your way about and so on. Just let them meet you, that’s all I say. Just let them try to have a five-minute normal conversation with you. Just let them set eyes on you. No, Camille, in no way will I be party to foisting you on the electorate.”
Camille opened his mouth to reply. His father said, “Do you think it is a good idea to stand about arguing in the streets?”
“Yes, why not?”
Jean-Nicolas took his son’s arm. Not very dignified to drag him to the meeting, but he’d do it if necessary. He could feel the damp wind penetrating his clothes and stirring aches and pains in every part. “Come on,” he snapped, “before they give us up for lost.”
“Ah, at last,” the de Viefville cousins said. Rose-Fleur’s father looked Camille over sourly. “I had rather hoped not to see you, but I suppose you are a member of the local Bar, and your father pointed out that we could not very well disenfranchise you. This may, after all, be your only chance to play any part in the nation’s affairs. I hear you’ve been writing,” he said. “Pamphleteering. Not, if I may say so, a gentleman’s method of persuasion.”
Camille gave M. Godard his best, his sweetest smile. “Maître Perrin sends his regards,” he said.
After the meeting nothing remained except for Jean-Nicolas to go to Laon to collect a formal endorsement. Adrien de Viefville, the Mayor of Guise, walked home with them. Jean-Nicolas seemed dazed by his easy victory; he’d have to start packing for Versailles. He stopped as they crossed the Place des Armes and stood looking up at his house. “What are you doing?” his relative asked.
“Inspecting the guttering,” Jean-Nicolas explained.
By next morning everything had fallen apart. Maître Desmoulins did not appear for breakfast. Madeleine had anticipated the festive chink of coffee cups, congratulations all round, perhaps even a little laughter. But those children who remained at home all had colds, and were coddling themselves, and she was left to preside over one son, whom she did not know well enough to talk to, and who did not eat breakfast anyway.
“Can he be sulking?” she asked. “I didn’t think he’d sulk, today of all days. This comes of aping royalty and having separate bedrooms. I never know what the bastard’s thinking.”
“I could go and find him,” Camille suggested.
“No, don’t trouble. Have some more coffee. He’ll probably send me a note.”
Madeleine surveyed her eldest child. She put a piece of brioche into her mouth. To her surprise, it stuck there, like a lump of ash. “What has happened to us?” she said. Tears welled into her eyes. “What has happened to you?” She could have put her head down on the table, and howled.
Presently word came that Jean-Nicolas was unwell. He had a pain, he said. The doctor arrived, and confined him to bed. Messages were sent to the mayor’s house.
“Is it my heart?” Desmoulins inquired weakly. If it is, he was about to say, I blame Camille.
The doctor said, “I’ve told you often enough where your heart is, and where your kidneys are, and what is the state of each; and while your heart is perfectly sound, to set out for Versailles with kidneys like those is mere folly. You will be sixty in two years-if, and only if, you take life quietly. Moreover—”
“Yes? While you’re about it?”
“Events in Versailles are more likely to give you a heart attack than anything your son has ever done.”
Jean-Nicolas dropped his head back against the pillows. His face was yellow with pain and disappointment. The de Viefvilles gathered in the drawing room below, and the Godards, and all the electoral officials. Camille followed the doctor in. “Tell him it’s his duty to go to Versailles,” he said. “Even if it kills him.”
“You always were a heartless boy,” said M. Saulce.
Camille turned to break into a clique of de Viefvilles. “Send me,” he said.
Jean-Louis de Viefville des Essarts, advocate, Parlementaire, surveyed him through his pince-nez. “Camille,” he said, “I wouldn’t send you down to the market to fetch a lettuce.”
Artois: the three Estates met separately, and the assemblies of the clergy and the nobility each indicated that in this time of national crisis they would be prepared to sacrifice some of their ancient privileges. The Third Estate began to propose an effusive vote of thanks.
A young man from Arras took the floor. He was short and slightly built, with a conspicuously well-cut coat and immaculate linen. His face was intelligent and earnest, with a narrow chin and wide blue eyes masked behind spectacles. His voice was unimpressive, and halfway through his speech it died momentarily in his throat; people had to lean forward and nudge their neighbors to know what he said. But it was not the manner of his delivery that caused them consternation. He said that the clergy and the nobility had done nothing praiseworthy, but had merely promised to amend where they had abused. Therefore, there was no need to thank them at all.
Among people who were not from Arras, and did not know him, there was some surprise when he was elected one of the eight deputies for the Third Estate of Artois. He seems locked into himself, somehow not amenable; and he has no orator’s tricks, no style, nothing about him at all.
“I notice you’ve paid off your tailor,” his sister Charlotte said. “And your glove maker. And you said he was such a good glove maker too. I wish you wouldn’t go around town as if you’ve decided to leave for good.”
“Would you prefer it if I climbed through the window one night with all my possessions done up in a spotted handkerchief? You could tell them I’d run away to sea.”
But Charlotte was not to be mollified: Charlotte, the family knife. “They’ll want you to settle things before you go.”
“You mean about Anaïs?” He looked up from the letter he was writing to an old schoolfriend. “She’s said she’s happy to wait.”
“She’ll not wait. I know what girls are like. My advice to you is to forget her.”