A Place of Greater Safety

  “They quarrel.”

  “What about?”

  “Politics.”

  “I didn’t think she was that sort of woman.”

  “It isn’t an abstract argument. It’s a matter of the way we live our lives now.”

  “I don’t want to lecture you, Camille—”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Very well, then, I do. Stop gambling. Try to get Danton to stop. Stay at home more. Make your wife behave respectably. If you must have a mistress, pick someone discreet, and make a proper arrangement.”

  “But I don’t want a mistress.”

  “That’s all to the good then. The way you’ve been living is in some sense a reproach to our ideals.”

  “Stop there. I never volunteered for these ideals.”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen, Max. For as long as we’ve known each other you’ve been trying to keep me out of trouble. But you’ve known better than to exercise your pompous side with me. A few months ago, you wouldn’t have been talking about ‘a reproach to our ideals.’ You looked the other way. You have a great capacity for ignoring what doesn’t suit you. But now you want to make an issue of it. Or rather, I know who does. Saint-Just.”

  “What is going on in your head about Saint-Just?”

  “I have to fight him now, while it can do me some good. He called me a liability. So I deduce he wants to get rid of me.”

  “Get rid?”

  “Yes, get rid of me, disable me, pack me off to Guise, Oh my God, where fierce indignation can no longer tear his heart at the sound of my silly little stutter.”

  They almost halted for a moment, to look into each other’s faces. “There’s very little I can do about your personal disagreements. Is there?”

  “Except not take his side.”

  “I don’t want to take a side. I don’t need to. I have a high regard for both of you, personally, politically—don’t the streets look shabby now?”

  “Yes. Where are we going?”

  “Will you come and see my sister?”

  “Will Eléonore be at home?”

  “She’ll be at her drawing class. I know she doesn’t like you.”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  “I don’t know. How can I? She’s jealous of my friends, of my occupations.”

  “Won’t you have to marry her?”

  “Eventually, perhaps.”

  “Also—no, never mind.”

  Very often, he had come close to telling Robespierre what had happened with Babette on the morning his son was born. But Max was so fond of the girl, so much more at ease with her than with most people, and it seemed cruel to hunt out trust from where he had reposed it. And it would be horrible to be disbelieved; he might be disbelieved. Again, how to retell exactly what had been said and done, without putting your own interpretation on it, and submit it to another judgement? It wasn’t possible. So at the Duplay house he was very polite to everybody—except Eléonore—and very careful; and still the incident preyed upon his mind. He had once begun to tell Danton, then abandoned the subject; Danton would certainly say he was making it up, and tease him about his fantasy life.

  Beside him, Robespierre’s voice was running on: “ … and I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a hero—a sort of effacement of oneself from history. The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the people. The real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants, and it is in the nature of tyranny not only to kill those who oppose it but to wipe their names out of the record, to obliterate them, so that resistance seems impossible.”

  A passerby hesitated, stared. “Excuse me—” he said. “Good citizen—are you Robespierre?”

  Robespierre didn’t look at the man. “Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.”

  “Good citizen, forgive me,” the patriot said doggedly.

  Eyes rested on him briefly. “Yes, I’m Robespierre,” he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulins’s arm. “Camille, history is fiction.”

  ROBESPIERRE: … You see, you can’t understand how things were for me then. For the first two years at school I wasn’t exactly miserable, I was happy in a way, but I was cut off from people, sealed off by myself in a cell—then Camille came—do you think I’m being sentimental?

  SAINT-JUST: I do rather.

  ROBESPIERRE: You don’t understand how it was.

  SAINT-JUST: Why all this preoccupation with the past? Why not look to the future?

  ROBESPIERRE: A lot of us would like to forget the past, but you can’t, well, you can’t put it out of your head entirely. You’re younger than I am, naturally you think about the future. You haven’t got any past.

  SAINT-JUST: A little.

  ROBESPIERRE: Before the Revolution, you were a student, you were preparing for your life. You’ve never had any other job. You’re a professional revolutionary. You’re an entirely new breed.

  SAINT-JUST: I had thought of that.

  ROBESPIERRE: If I can explain—when Camille came—I myself, I find it difficult to get along with people sometimes, people don’t take to me so easily. I didn’t understand why Camille bothered with me, but I was glad. He was like a magnet to people. He was just the same as he is now. When he was ten years old he had that sort of—black radiance.

  SAINT-JUST: You are fanciful.

  ROBESPIERRE: It made things easier for me. Camille’s always complained that his family doesn’t care about him. I could never see that. And I couldn’t see how it mattered, when other people love him so much.

  SAINT-JUST: So what are you saying—that because of some association in your past life, everything he does is all right?

  ROBESPIERRE: Oh no. I’m just saying, he’s an extremely complicated person, and whatever he gets up to, the fact remains, we’re very close. Camille’s clever, you know. He’s also a very good journalist.

  SAINT-JUST: I have doubts about the value of journalists.

  ROBESPIERRE: You just don’t like him, really, do you?

  CHAPTER 3

  The Visible Exercise of Power

  Danton thought: ambassadors give me a headache. For part of the day, every day, he had stared mutely at maps, turning the continent over in his mind, Turkey, Sweden, England, Venice … . Keep England out of this war. Beg and pray neutrality. Keep the English fleet out of it … and yet with English agents everywhere, talk of sabotage and forgery … . Yes, of course Robespierre is right, England is fundamentally hostile. But if we get into that sort of war, will we get out, within our natural lifetimes? Not, he thinks sourly, that we expect to have those.

  Since he left office, some of this is no longer his direct concern. But there is enough to occupy him: the pressure for the King’s trial, the stupidity and divisiveness of the Brissotins. Even after the Robespierricide, he clings to a half-faith in their good intentions. He had not wanted to be pulled into the struggle; but they have taken all his choices away.

  Soon, perhaps within a year, he hopes to be out of Paris. Perhaps he is deluding himself, but he hopes to leave it all in the hands of other people. With the Prussians driven out, those houses and farms are secured to him. And the children—Antoine is growing up sturdily, and François-Georges is a fat, contented baby, he’s not going to die. Also the new child. In Arcis, Gabrielle will begin to understand him better. Whatever he has done, whatever their differences of opinion, he is committed to her, he feels. In the country, they are going to be ordinary people again.

  It is when he’s had too much to drink that he imagines this simple future for himself. It is a pity that it is so often Camille who is around at these times t
o disabuse him of his dreams, leaving him lachrymose, or raging against the trap of power he thinks he has fallen into. Whether at other times he believes in this future … He can hardly understand his pursuit of Lucile, because of the complications it makes. Yet it continues …

  “I don’t like palaces. I’m glad to be home.” So Gabrielle says. Some version of the feeling seems to be general. Camille is glad to be parting from his staff, and his staff are glad to be parting from Camille. As Danton says, now we can find a lot of other things to worry about. Lucile does not entirely share the general feeling. She has enjoyed sweeping down grand staircases, the visible exercise of power.

  At least in returning home she is relieved of Gabrielle’s company, and of Louise Robert’s. In recent weeks Louise has been applying her novelist’s imagination to their ménage—and what a lot of imagination novelists have! “Observe,” she says, “the expression of pleasure and interest Camille wears when Danton deigns to maul his wife about in his presence! Why don’t you three set up house together when you leave here? Isn’t that what it’s coming to?”

  “And,” said Fabre, “may I come to breakfast?”

  “I’m sick,” Louise said, “of this drama you’re playing out, man falls in love with best friend’s wife, how tragic, etc., how terrible to be human. Tragic? You can hardly keep the grins off your faces.”

  Yes, it was true; they hardly could, and that included Danton. Luckily Gabrielle had been elsewhere for the gifted writer’s outburst. Gabrielle had been kind to her, in the past; but in the present, she is relentlessly morose. She’s put on a lot of weight, with this pregnancy; she moves slowly, says she can’t breathe, says the city stifles her. Luckily, Gabrielle’s parents have just sold their house at Fontenay and moved to Sèvres, bought two properties set in parkland. One house they’ll live in; one is for their daughter and son-in-law to use when they like. The Charpentiers have never been poor, but the likelihood is that Georges-Jacques has put up the money; he just doesn’t want people to know how much cash he’s laying out these days.

  So, Lucile thinks, Gabrielle has the prospect of escape; but in her apartment at the rue des Cordeliers, she sits still and silent, in the conscious postures of pregnant women. Sometimes she cries; this chit Louise Gély trips down the stairs to join her in a few sniffles. Gabrielle is crying for her marriage, her soul and her king; Louise is crying, she supposes, for a broken doll or a kitten run over in the street. Can’t stand it, she thinks. Men are better company.

  Fréron was safely home from his mission in Metz. You would never know, from his journalism, that Rabbit had once been a gentleman. He was a good writer—the trade was in his blood—but his opinions grew steadily more violent, as if it was a contest and he badly wanted to win; at times you couldn’t distinguish his work from Marat’s. Despite his new ferocity, her other beaux considered him the one from whom they had nothing to fear. Yet she had been heard to ask him once, earnestly: “Will you always be there, in case I need you?” He had replied that he would be there for time and eternity: things like that. The problem—week to week—was that he had the status of Old Family Friend. So at weekends he could come out to the farm at Bourg-la-République. There he would follow her around, and try to get her alone. Poor Rabbit. His chances were nil.

  It was difficult, sometimes, to remember that there was a Mme. Fréron, and a Mme. Hérault de Séchelles.

  Hérault called in the evenings, when the Jacobins were in session. Bores, he called them, dreadful bores. In fact politics fascinated him; but he did not suppose it could fascinate her, and so he set out to strike a sympathetic chord. “They are discussing economic controls,” he would say, “and how to quiet these ludicrous sansculotte agitators, with their continual whine about the price of bread and candles. Hébert does not know whether to ridicule them or take them up.”

  “Hébert is prospering,” she would suggest sweetly, and he would say, “Yes, at the Commune, Hébert and Chaumette are such a force—” and then he would break off, feeling foolish, realizing he’d been sidetracked again.

  Hérault was Danton’s friend, he sat with the Mountain, but he could not mend a single aristocratic way. “It is not just your speech, your manner, but your whole way of thinking that is profoundly aristocratic,” she told him.

  “Oh, no, no. Surely not. Very modern. Very republican.”

  “Your attitude to me, for instance. You can’t put it out of your mind that before the Revolution I would have fallen flat on my back in simulated adoration if you had even glanced in my direction. If I hadn’t, my family would have given me a push. And at that, it might not have been simulated. The way women thought then.”

  “If that’s true,” he said, “and of course it is true, how does it affect our situation today?” (He thinks, women don’t change.) “I’m not trying to exercise any prerogative over you. I simply want to see you have some pleasure in your life.”

  She folded her hands over her heart. “Altruism!”

  “Dear Lucile. The worst thing your husband has done to you is to make you sarcastic.”

  “I was always sarcastic.”

  “I find it to hard to believe. Camille manipulates people.”

  “Oh, so do I.”

  “He is always trying to convince people that he is harmless, so that the stab in the back will be a greater shock to them. Saint-Just, whom I do not unreservedly admire—”

  “Oh, change the subject. I don’t like Saint-Just.”

  “Why is that, I wonder?”

  “I don’t think I like his politics. And he frightens me.”

  “But his politics are Robespierre’s—which means they are your husband’s, and Danton’s.”

  “We shall have to see about that. Saint-Just’s main aim seems to be to improve people, along the lines of some plan that he has in his head, and which—I must say—he has difficulty articulating to the rest of us. Now, you cannot accuse Camille and Georges-Jacques of trying to improve people. In fact quite the opposite, most of the time.”

  Hérault looked thoughtful. “You’re not stupid, are you, Lucile?”

  “Well, I used to be. But intelligence rubs off.”

  “The trouble is, with Saint-Just, Camille sets out to antagonize him.”

  “Of course he does—and on every level. We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles.”

  “Oh dear,” Hérault said. “I was planning a seduction, tonight. We seem to have got sidetracked.”

  “You might as well have gone to the Jacobins.” She gave him a nice smile. Hérault looked depressed.

  Whenever he was in Paris, General Dillon called. It was a pleasure to see him, with his splendid height and his chestnut head and his knack of looking younger and younger. Valmy did him good, no doubt; there’s nothing like Victory to perk a man up. Dillon never talked about the war. He’d call in the afternoons, when the Convention was in session. His approach was so interesting that it had to be elevated to a strategy; she was moved to discuss it with Camille, and he agreed that it was marvelously oblique. For whereas Rabbit dropped mournful hints about Camille’s infidelities, and Hérault raged at her that she must be unhappy and he could change that, the general simply sat and told her stories, about life in Martinique, or about the splendid silliness of Court life before the Revolution; he told her how his little daughter, Lucile’s age exactly, had been advised never to stand in a strong light, in case her glowing complexion made the fading Queen spiteful. He told her the history of his mad, distinguished Franco-Irish family. He retailed the idiosyncracies of his second wife, Laure, and of various pretty, vacuous mistresses from the past. He described the fauna of the West Indies, the heat, the blue of the sea, the green tangled hillsides that tumbled into the sea, the flowers that blew and rotted in the bud; he described the imbecile ceremonial that attended the Governor of Tobago, alias himself. In sum, he told her how pleasant life had been for a member of an old and distinguished family who had n
ever worried about money or anything else and who was extremely good-looking and polished and in addition highly adaptable.

  From there he would go on to tell her what a truly special young man she had married. He could quote at admiring length from Camille’s writings: with some accuracy. He explained to her—to her—that sensitive people like Camille should be allowed to do exactly as they liked, provided it was not criminal, or not too criminal at any rate.

  Then, every so often, he would put an arm round her and try to kiss her, and say to her, dear little Lucile, let me make love to you properly. When she said no, he would look incredulous, and ask her why she didn’t enjoy life more. Surely she didn’t think Camille would mind?

  What they did not know, these gentlemen, what they did not understand, was—well, anything about her, really. They did not know about the exquisite torture she had devised for herself, the rack upon which her days and weeks were stretched. Quite coldly, she puts herself to the question, and the question is this: what if anything happened to Camille? What if—not to put too fine a point on it—someone assassinated him? (God knows, if she were an assassin, she’d be tempted.) Of course, she has asked herself this before, since ’89 it has been her preoccupation; but now she is more obsessed with him, not less. Nothing had prepared her for this; the received wisdom about a love match is that, after a year’s delirium, the emotions settle down. Nobody had even hinted to her that you could go on falling in love and falling in love, till you felt quite ill with it, spiritually sick and depleted, as if you were losing your essence day by day. If Camille were not here—if he were permanently not here—what would lie before her would be a sort of semi-demi-half-life, dragged out for duty, sick and cold and stumbling towards death; the important part of her would be dead already. If anything happened to him I’d kill myself, she thought; I’d make it official, so at least they could bury me. My mother would look after the baby.