Exasperation at midday: “We might as well not have bothered sitting up all night over those lists,” Fabre says. “I’m sure the wrong people are being killed.”
Camille thinks of what Marat said: either we control it ourselves or it happens outside and beyond our control. It seems, as the unspeakable news comes in, hour by hour, that we have got the worst of both worlds. We will never, now, know an hour free from guilt; we will never, now, recover such reputation as we possessed; yet we neither planned nor willed the whole of it, the half of it. We simply turned away, we washed our hands, we made a list and we followed an agenda, we went home to sleep while the people did their worst and the people (Camille thinks) were translated from heroes to scavengers, to savages, to cannibals.
In the early stages at least, there was some attempt at order, some pretense, however risible, of legality. A group of sansculottes, red-capped, armed, behind the largest table they can find, the suspect before them: outside, the courtyard where the executioners wait, with cutlasses, axes, pikes. They set half of the suspects free—for a reason, or out of sentimentality, or because a mistake of identity has been found out just in time. The whole question of identification becomes more muddled as the day wears on, people claiming to have lost their papers or to have had them stolen; but anyone in prison must be there for a reason, isn’t that so, and that reason must be against the public good, and as one man said, all aristos look the same to me, I can’t tell their faces apart.
Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal—“Use your heads, give us a bloody chance, can’t you? We can’t keep up.” So the prisoners are waved away airily by their judges—“Go, you’re free.” Outside the door a steady man waits to fell them. Freedom is the last thing they know.
Mid-afternoon: Prudhomme, the journalist, waited for Danton’s meeting to break up. He did not know that Danton had laughed at the representations of the Supervisor of Prisons, or that he had sworn at Roland’s private secretary. Since that day in ’91, when a pack of National Guardsmen had thought he was Camille and nearly killed him, Prudhomme had felt himself entitled to take an interest in Danton and his friends.
Danton’s eyes took him in: somewhat blankly. “The prisoners are being massacred,” Prudhomme said to him.
“Fuck the prisoners. They must look after themselves.” He strode away. Camille looked closely at Prudhomme, failing, as he always did, to transpose Prudhomme’s fading scars onto his own face.
“It’s all right,” he said. He looked nervously guilty; it was the effect of Prudhomme, rather than the larger situation. He brushed one of Prudhomme’s clenched hands with his own. “It’s all organized. No one who is innocent will be touched. If his Section vouch for a prisoner, he’ll be set free. It’s—”
“Camille.” Danton stopped, turned around and bellowed at him. “For God’s sake, come here, hurry up.”
He would have liked to hit him. Or hit Prudhomme. His official attitude was: I don’t know anything about this.
The Princesse de Lamballe was murdered at La Force prison. Possibly she was raped. When the mob had torn out most of her internal organs and stuck them on pikes, they cut off her head and carried it to a hairdresser. At knife point they forced the nauseated man to curl and dress the Princesse’s pretty fair hair. Then they marched in procession to the Temple, where the Capet family were locked up. They put the head on a pike and hoisted it up to sway outside the high windows. “Come and say hallo to your friend,” they exhorted the woman inside.
Voltaire: “Reason must first be established in the minds of the leaders then gradually it descends and at length rules the people, who are unaware of its existence, but who, perceiving the moderation of their rulers, learn to imitate them.”
Nine ways by which one may share in the guilt of another’s sin:
By counsel
By command
By consent
By provocation
By praise or flattery
By concealment
By being a partner in the sin
By silence
By defending the ill deed.
When Robespierre spoke, the members of the Commune’s Watch Committee put down their pens and looked straight at him. They did not fidget with their papers, blow their noses or allow their eyes to wander. If they had coughs, they suppressed them. They squared their shoulders and put conscientious expressions on their faces. He expected their attention, so he got it.
There was a plot, Robespierre told them, to put the Duke of Brunswick on the throne of France. Incredible as it might seem—he looked around the room, and no one allowed incredulity to show on his face—the allied commander had such ambitions, and Frenchmen were furthering them. He named Brissot.
Billaud-Varennes, Danton’s former clerk, spoke at once to back him up. Whined rather, Max thought; he did not like Billaud. The man claimed a startling ability: he said he could recognize a conspirator by looking him straight in the eye.
The officials of the Commune drew up warrants for the immediate arrest of Brissot and Roland. Robespierre went home.
Eléonore Duplay caught him as he crossed the courtyard. “Is it true that everyone in the prisons is being killed?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Aghast: “But you’d have to know, they can’t do anything without asking you.”
He put out a hand and pulled her to his side, not in intimacy, but because he wanted to influence the expression on her face. “Supposing it were true, my dear Eléonore, my dear Cornélia, would you cry about it? If you think of the people the Austrians are killing now, driving them out of their farms, burning their roofs over their heads—well, which would you cry for?”
“I don’t question it,” she said. “You couldn’t be wrong.”
“Well, which would you cry for?” He answered himself. “Both.”
Danton sifted through the papers on the Public Prosecutor’s desk. He allowed himself this much familiarity with everyone’s business. In the end it all came back to him.
When he saw the two warrants, he lifted them, and dropped them again. Brissot. Roland. He let them lie, and stared at them, and as his mind moved, slowly, he began to shake from head to foot, as he had on the morning when he was told of the death of his first child. Who had been at the Commune all day? Robespierre. Whose word was law there? His, and Robespierre’s. Who had caused these warrants to be issued? Robespierre. One could call for the minutes, no doubt, one could read and judge the exact words that had brought it to this, one could apportion blame. But it was no more possible that the Commune had done this without Robespierre than that Roland and Brissot should be arrested and survive the night. I must move, he told himself; I must move from this spot.
It was Louvet, Manon Roland’s fair frail novelist friend, who touched his elbow. “Danton,” he said, “Robespierre denounced Brissot by name …”
“So I see.” He picked up the warrants. He turned on Louvet, his voice savage. “Jesus, how could you be such fools? How could I?” He pushed the papers under the man’s nose. “For God’s sake, man, go and hide yourself somewhere.”
He folded the warrants, slipped them into an inside pocket of his coat. “Now then. The little fellow will have to knock me down if he wants these back.”
Color had rushed into Louvet’s face. “There’s another war on now,” he said. “Either we will kill Robespierre, or he will kill us.”
“Don’t ask me to save you.” Danton’s hand in his chest skidded him across the room. “I have my own hide to think of, and the bloody Germans too.”
Pétion picked up the warrants and dropped them, just as Danton had done. “Robespierre authorized them?” Well, he kept saying, well; and again, well. “Danton, does he know? Can he know? That they would be killed?”
“Of course he knows.” Danton sat down and put his head in his hands. “By tomorrow there w
ould have been no government. God knows what he thought he could pull out of it. Has he lost his mind, since I saw him yesterday, or was it intended, calculated—and in that case he is setting himself up as some sort of power, and since ’89 he has been lying to us, not outright, I grant you, but by implication—Pétion, which is it?”
Pétion seemed to be talking to himself, in his rising panic. “I think … that he is better than most of us, yes, certainly better, but now with the pressure of events …” He stopped. He himself was called Brissot’s friend; his natural antipathy to the man had not stopped people sticking the label on him. Since August 10, the Brissotins had governed on sufferance. The pretense was that they had invited Danton into the government; the truth was that he had given them their posts back, and that it was he who imposed his will at every cabinet meeting, sprawling in the great chair once occupied by Capet’s softer bulk. “Danton,” Pétion said, “does Robespierre want my life too?” Danton shrugged; he did not know. Pétion looked away; he seemed ashamed of his thoughts. “Manon said this morning, ‘Robespierre and Danton hold the big knife over us all.’”
“And what answer did you give to the dear woman?”
“We said, after all, Citizeness, Robespierre is only a little clerk.” Danton stood up. “I don’t hold a knife over you. You can tell her that. But there is a knife. And I’m not going to put my neck under it.”
“I don’t see what we did to deserve this,” Pétion said.
“I do. I mean, if I were Robespierre, I would see. You people have studied your own political advantage for so long that you’ve forgotten what you ever wanted the power for. Look, I’ll not defend you—not in public. Camille has been working on me for months about Brissot. So has Marat, in his different way. And Robespierre—oh yes, he’s talked. We thought talking was all he ever did.”
“Robespierre must find out—that you have blocked him.”
“He’s not a dictator.”
Pétion’s affable features were still blank with shock. “Would he be grateful to you, do you think, for saving him from the consequences of an ill-considered action? A moment of wrath?”
“Wrath? He’s never had a moment of wrath. I was wrong to say he must be going mad. You could lock him up in a dungeon for fifty years and he wouldn’t go mad. He’s got everything he needs inside his head.” For a moment he put an outstretched hand on Pétion’s shoulder. “I bet he lives longer than we do.”
When Danton entered his own apartment, massive inside his scarlet coat, his wife gave him one swollen glance of beaten betrayal; she pulled away from his outstretched hands and crossed her arms over her body, as if to hide from him the shape of the child she was carrying.
“You, Gabrielle?” he said. “If only you knew. If only you knew how many people I’ve saved.”
“Get away from me,” she said. “I can hardly bear to be in the same room.
He rang for one of the maids. “Attend to her,” he said.
He crashed his way into the Desmoulins’s apartment. There was only Lucile, sitting quietly with her cat curled up in her lap. Everything had come to the Place des Piques: baby, cat, piano. “I wanted to find Camille—” he said. “No, no, it doesn’t matter.” He dropped to a knee beside her chair. The cat cleared the opposite arm, in one neat, fearful leap. He thought, I’ve seen that cat approach Robespierre, purring: animals can’t know much.
Lucile put out a delicate hand: she touched his cheek, stroked his forehead, so gently that he hardly felt it.
“Lucile,” he said, “let me take you to bed.” God knows, it was not what he meant to say.
She shook her head. “I’d be frightened of you, Georges. And besides, would it be your bed, or ours? The beds themselves are so intimidating. You have the coronet, but we have such a number of gilt cherubim to cope with. We’re always falling foul of their little gilt fists and feet.”
“Lucile, I beg of you. I need you.”
“No, I don’t think you’d like the break with routine. You ask politely, I say no—isn’t that the way it is? Today is not the day. Afterwards you’d confuse it all in your mind with Robespierre. You’d hate me, which I really couldn’t bear.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t.” His tone changed abruptly. “What do you know about Robespierre?”
“It’s surprising what you find out if you just sit still and listen.”
“Camille knew then—he knew, he must have known what Robespierre was going to do?”
Again she touched his face; that touch, and the softness of her voice, were almost reverential. “Don’t ask, Georges. Better not to ask.”
“Don’t you mind? Don’t you mind what we’ve done?”
“Perhaps I mind—but I know I’m part of it. Gabrielle, you see she can’t bear it—she thinks you’ve damned your soul and hers too. But for myself—I think possibly that when I first saw Camille, I was twelve then, twelve or thirteen—I thought, oh, here comes hell. It doesn’t become me to start squealing now. Gabrielle married a nice young lawyer. I didn’t.”
“You can’t persuade me of that—you can’t say you knew what you were getting.”
“One can know. And not know.”
He took her hand, her wrist, gripped it hard. “Lolotte, this cannot go on for much longer. I am not Fréron, I am not Dillon, I am not a man you flirt with, I will not allow you to enjoy yourself at my expense.”
“So, then?”
“And I do mean to have you, you know.”
“Georges, are you threatening me?”
He nodded. “I suppose I am,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose I must be.” He stood up.
“Well, this is quite a new phase of my existence,” she said. She looked up at him, with a sweet, confident smile. “But you have neglected all the orthodox arts of persuasion, Georges. Is this the best you can do by way of seduction? All you do is glare at me and make the occasional grab. Why don’t you languish? Why don’t you sigh? Why don’t you write me a sonnet?”
“Because I’ve seen where it gets your other beaux,” he said. “Oh, dammit all, girl, this is ridiculous.”
He thought, she wants me really, the bitch. She thought, it takes his mind off things.
He picked up his papers, and went back to his own suite. The cat crept back, and jumped onto her knee and curled up; Lucile stared into the hearth, like an old spinster lady.
Perhaps fourteen hundred people are dead. Compared to the average battlefield, it is a trifle. But think (Lucile does): one life is everything to its possessor, one life is all we have.
The elections for the National Convention were conducted by the usual two-tier system, and, as the nine hundred second-stage Electors walked to their meeting in the hall of the Jacobins, they passed heaps of fresh corpses piled in the street.
There were repeated ballots, until a candidate got an absolute majority. It took a long time. A candidate could offer himself for election in more than one part of the country. It was not necessary to be a French citizen. The variety of candidates was so great that the Electors might have become confused, but Robespierre was always ready to offer guidance. He embraced Danton, tentatively, when Danton was returned with a 91 percent poll in his favor; at least, if you could not say he embraced him, you could say he patted his sleeve. He relished the applause when he himself defeated Pétion in a direct contest, and forced him to seek a provincial seat; it was important to him that the Paris deputies form a solid anti-Brissotin bloc. He was both pleased and anxious when the Paris electors returned his younger brother Augustin; he worried a little in case his family name carried undue influence, but after all, Augustin had worked hard for the revolution in Arras, and it was time for him to make the move to the capital. Help and support for me, he thought. He managed a dazzled smile at the way things were going. He looked younger, for a minute or two.
The journalist Hébert did not receive more than six votes in any one ballot; again Robespierre’s face seemed to open, the tense muscles of his jaw relaxed. Hébert has a certai
n sansculotte following, although he is known to keep a carriage; Hébert in propria persona is not so important as the image he shelters behind, and thankfully, Père Duchesne the furnace maker will not be puffing his democratic pipe on the Convention’s benches.
But not everything went smoothly … . The English scientist Priestley seemed to be gathering support, in an elector’s rebellion against Marat. “The need now is not for exceptional talent,” Robespierre advised, “and not for foreign talent. It is for men who have hidden in cellars for the sake of the Revolution. And,” he added, “for butchers even.”
He intended no irony. Legendre was safely elected next day. So was Marat.
His protégé Antoine Saint-Just would be in Paris at last, and the Duke of Orléans would be sitting beside the men he had once paid and patronized. Having cast about for a surname, the Duke had adopted the one the people had stuck on him, half in mockery; he was now Philippe Égalité.
A hint of trouble on September 8: “Some jumped-up Brissotin intellectual,” Legendre said, “this Kersaint, has polled enough votes to stop Camille coming through on the first ballot. What are we going to do about it?”
“Don’t upset yourself,” Danton said soothingly. “Better the jumped-up intellectual you know, eh?” He had quite expected the Electors to resist handing the nation’s affairs over to Camille. Kersaint wasn’t, anyway, what he called an intellectual; he was a naval officer from Brittany, had sat in the last Assembly.
Robespierre said, “Citizen Legendre, if there is a conspiracy to stop Camille’s election, I shall quash it.”
“Now wait a minute …” Legendre said. His objection tailed off, but he looked uneasy. He hadn’t mentioned a conspiracy; but Citizen Robespierre has this hair-trigger mechanism. “What will you do?” he asked.