A Place of Greater Safety

  “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.

  The 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.

  In 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.”

  “Pity we knocked the Bastille down,” Camille said. “I suppose.”

  “And if they break out?” Marat said. “No, I am not being fanciful—the weapon of imprisonment, the whole notion of it, demands some assent from the victim, some cooperation. Suppose that cooperation is withdrawn? As our troops join battle, leaving the city to women and children and politicians, the aristocrats pour out of the prisons, locate their arms caches—”

  “Arms caches? Don’t be stupid. Why do you think the Commune has been making house-to-house searches?”

  “And can you swear to me that they’ve missed nothing?”

  Camille shook his head. “So what do you want us to do? Go into the prisons and kill them all?”

  “At last,” Marat said. “I thought we should never arrive.”

  “In cold blood?”

  “However you like.”

  “And you’ll organize this, will you, Marat?”

  “Oh no, it would just happen spontaneously. The people, you see, being in such terror, being so inflamed against their enemies—”

  “Spontaneously?” Camille said. “Oh, very likely.” And yet, he thought: we have a city that is in immediate peril, we have a populace that is enraged, we have a sea of futile unfocused hatred slapping at the institutions of state and washing through the public squares, and we have victims, we have the focus for that hate, we have traitors ready, to hand—yes, it became more likely, by the minute.

  “Oh, come on, man,” Marat said. “We both know how these things are done.”

  “We have already begun putting the royalists on trial,” he said.

  “Have we got a year or two, do you think? Have we got a month? Have we got a week?”

  “No. No, I see what you mean. But Marat, we’ve never—I mean, we never contracted ourselves for this sort of thing. It’s murder, whichever way you look at it.”

  “Take your hands away from your face. Hypocrite. What do you think we did in .’89? Murder made you. Murder took you out of the back streets and put you where you sit now. Murder! What is it? It’s a word.”

  “I shall tell Danton what you advise.”

  “Yes. You do that.”

  “But he will not connive at it.”

  “Let him suit himself. It will happen anyway. Either we control it as far as we can or it happens outside and beyond our control. Danton must be either master or servant—which will he be?”

  “He will lose his good name. His honor.”

  “Oh, Camille,” Marat said softly. “His honor!” He shook his head. “Oh, my poor Camille.”

  Camille threw himself back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, looked at the faces that lined the room; the ministers’ eyes were dull beneath their patina, the whites pickled by age. Had they wives, children? Had they feelings at all? Beneath their embroidered waistcoats, had the ribs moved, had the hearts ever beat? The portraits stared back at him; they made no sign. The officials had removed themselves from beyond the door. He could hear a clock, hear the minutes ticking away. “The people have no honor,” Marat said. “They have never been able to afford it. Honor is a luxury.”

  “Suppose the other ministers prevent it?”

&nb
sp; “Other ministers? Spare me that. What are the other ministers? Eunuchs.”

  “Danton will not like this.”

  “He doesn’t have to like it,” Marat said fiercely, “he has to see the necessity. That would be easy for him, I should think—a child can see the necessity. Like it? Do you think I like it?” Camille didn’t answer. Marat paused for thought. “Well, I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t mind it at all.”

  The preliminaries for elections to the Convention have already begun. It seems, then, that life is going forward. Bread is being baked for the next day, plays are in rehearsal.

  Lucile has her baby back; infant cries echo through the grand suites, under the painted ceilings, among the documents and the leather-bound law books, where no baby has ever cried before.

  Verdun falls on September 1. The enemy, if they choose now to advance on Paris, are two days’ march away.

  Robespierre: he kept thinking of Mirabeau now, of how that man had always said, with a great sweep of his arm, “Mirabeau will do this,” or, “the Comte de Mirabeau will answer …”: speaking of himself like a character in a play he was directing. He is conscious now of eyes upon him: Robespierre acts. Or, Robespierre does not act. Robespierre sits still and watches them watching him.

  He had refused to sit as a judge on Danton’s special tribunal. He caught the flash of annoyance on Danton’s face: “You are still against the death penalty then, my friend?” And yet, Danton himself had been merciful. There had been very little work for Citizen Sanson. An officer of the National Guard had been executed—by the new beheading machine—and so had the Secretary of the Civil List, but there was an aristo journalist whose death sentence had not been carried out. Camille had slid his hands onto Danton’s tired shoulders and said coaxingly that it was a bad precedent to execute journalists. Danton had laughed: “As you wish. You can’t rescind the verdict, so keep postponing the execution. We’ll lose the man in the system somewhere. Do what you think best, you have my signature stamp.”

  It was, in other words, arbitrary: the man’s life depending, Fabre said, on Camille remembering a victory in some exchange of insults with him in ’89, and so feeling magnanimous, and then putting on his cheap-tart act to amuse Danton and cajole him back into a good humor at the end of a hard day. (A secret, Fabre said, that Camille could profitably sell to Danton’s wife.) Fabre was sour about the incident: not, Robespierre thought, because he had a passion for justice, but because he had no similar means of getting his own way. Was he, Robespierre, alone in feeling that the law should not be used and abused like this? It caused a minute revulsion in him, an intellectual flinching. But this feeling came from the old days, before the Revolution. Justice was the servant of policy now; no other position was compatible with survival. Yet it would have sickened him to hear Danton bellowing for heads, like that devil Marat. If anything, Danton lacked energy: was susceptible to individual blandishments, and not just from Camille.

  Brissot. Vergniaud. Buzot. Condorcet. Roland. Roland, and Brissot again. In his dreams they wait, laughing, to catch him in a net. And Danton will not act …

  These are the conspirators: why, he asked (since he is a reasonable man), does he fear conspiracy where no one else does?

  And answered, well, I fear what I have past cause to fear. And these are the conspirators within: the heart that flutters, the head that aches, the gut that won’t digest, and eyes that, increasingly, cannot bear bright sunlight. Behind them is the master conspirator, the occult part of the mind; nightmares wake him at half-past four, and then there is nothing to do but lie in a hopeless parody of sleep until the day begins.

  To what end is this inner man conspiring? To take a night off and read a novel? To have more friends, to be liked a bit more? But people said, have you seen how Robespierre has taken to those tinted spectacles? It certainly gives him a sinister air.

  Danton wore a scarlet coat. He stood before the Assembly. People cheered; some wept. The noise from the galleries could be heard across the river.

  Huge resonant voice in easy command: breathing as Fabre taught him. Two trains of thought running quietly in his head: plans laid, armies deployed, diplomatic maneuvers set afoot; my generals can hold them for a fortnight, and after that (he said in his head), after that I do something else, after that I sell them the Queen if they would buy, or my mother, or I surrender, or I slit my throat.

  The second train of thought: actions are being manufactured out of speech. How can words save a country? Words make myths, it seems, and for their myths people fight to win. Louise Gély: “You have to direct them what to do. Once they know what attitude to take, how to face the situation, it is easy for them.” She is so right, the child … the situation is simple. Even a fourteen-year-old can grasp it. Simple words are needed. Few, and short. He draws himself up, puts out a hand to his audience. “Dare,” he says. “Always dare. And again, dare. In this way you will save France.”

  At that moment, someone wrote, that hideous man was beautiful.

  He felt then like a Roman emperor, present at his own deification. Living gods walk in the streets now: avatars load the cannon, icons load the dice.

  Legendre: “The enemy was at the gates of Paris. Danton came, and he saved the country.”

  It is very late. Marat’s face, in candlelight, looks livid, drowned. Fabre has found things to laugh at. He has a bottle of brandy at his elbow. At this stage there are perhaps a dozen people in the room. They had not greeted each other by name, and tried to avoid each other’s eyes. Perhaps a year from now they won’t be able to swear to who was there and who wasn’t. An affectedly plebeian Section leader sits by an open window, because the meeting doesn’t like the smell of his pipe.

  “It won’t be arbitrary,” a man from the Commune says. “We’ll have trusted patriots, men from the Sections, and we’ll equip them with the full lists. They’ll be able to interview each prisoner, release any innocent persons whom we’ve not already let go and pass sentence on the others. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s fine,” Marat says. “As long as there is only one possible sentence.”

  “Do you think it will do any good, this travesty?” Camille asks the man from the Commune. “Don’t you think you may as well just wade in and slaughter people indiscriminately?”

  Marat says, “No doubt that is what will happen in the end, anyway. We must have the semblance of form. But quickly, citizens, we have to move quickly. The people are hungry and thirsty for justice.”

  “Oh, Marat,” Camille says. “Let us have an end to your slogans.”

  The sansculotte with the pipe takes it out of his mouth. “You’re not really very good at this, Camille, are you? Why don’t you just go home?”

  Camille’s finger stabs at the papers on the table. “This is my business, it’s the minister’s business.”

  “Look, if it helps you,” the sansculotte says, “just think of it as an extension of what we did on August 10. On that day we started something; now we’re finishing it. What’s the point of founding a republic if you can’t take the action needed to maintain it?”

  “I tell him this and tell him this,” Marat says quietly. “I tell him and tell him. Stupid boy.”

  At the center of the table, like a prize, is the Minister of Justice’s signature stamp. This is all that is needed to release a man or a woman from prison. It’s true that Citizen Roland, as Minister of the Interior, should have some say in what happens in the gaols. But the feeling is that Roland neither knows nor cares; cares, but doesn’t know; knows, but doesn’t care; cares, but doesn’t dare do anything about it. What does Roland matter anyway? One more pressing decision might give him a heart attack.

  “To our lists,” says Citizen Hébert.

  The lists are very long. There are about two thousand people in the prisons, after all; it’s difficult to establish an exact number, there are a lot of people unaccounted for. Whoever is struck from the lists will be let out tonight; the others must take
their chances, stand before their impromptu judges.

  They come to a priest, one Bérardier. “I want him released,” Camille says.

  “A refractory priest, who has refused the oath to the constitution—”

  “Released,” Camille says fiercely. They shrug, stamp the order. Camille is unpredictable, it does not do to frustrate him too much; besides, there is always the possibility that a given person is a government agent, an undercover man. Danton has scribbled his own list of people to be released, and given it to Fabre. Camille asks to see it; Fabre refuses. Camille suggests that Fabre has altered it. Fabre asks what he is taken for. No one answers. Fabre insinuates that a middle-aged barrister whose release Camille has obtained had been one of his lovers in the early ’80s when he was very pretty and not very prosperous. Camille snaps back that it might be so but that is better than saving somebody’s life for a fat fee, which Fabre is probably doing. “Fascinating,” Hébert says. “Shall we go on to the next sheet?”

  Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after that. There is no sense of evil in the room, just tiredness and the aftertaste of petty squabbling. Camille drinks quite a lot of Fabre’s brandy. Towards daybreak, a kind of dismal camaraderie sets in.

  There had been, of course, the matter of who should do the killing, and it would obviously not be the men with the lists, not even the sansculotte with the pipe. It was thought advisable to recruit a number of butchers, and promise them a rate for the job. The intention was not mocking or macabre, but sound and humane.

  Unfortunately, as the rumors of an aristo plot spread panic through the city, enthusiastic beginners joined in. They lacked skill, and the butchers tut-tutted over their small knowledge of anatomy. Unless it was their intention to torture and mutilate.