Brissot: his contributors and his orators, his minutes and his memoranda, his fixers and his dupes.
Brissot: his ways and his means and his means to an end, his circumstances, his ploys, his faux pas and his bons mots; his past, his present, his world without end.
I establish it as a fact that the Right wing of the Convention, and principally their leaders, are almost all partisans of royalty and accomplices of Dumouriez; that they are directed by the agents of Pitt, Orléans and Prussia; that they wanted to divide France into twenty or thirty federative republics, that no Republic might exist. I maintain that history does not furnish an example of a conspiracy so clearly proved, by so many weighty probabilities, than the conspiracy of Brissot against the French Republic.
Camille Desmoulins, a pamphlet: “A Secret History of the Revolution.”
CHAPTER 7
Carnivores
At the top of the Queen’s Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in.
That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions. At this stage people call it the Danton Committee, wondering what he is doing in that green sanctum, green wallpaper, his elbows propped on the great oval table covered by a green cloth. He finds the color negative, disturbing. A crystal chandelier tinkles above his head; the mirrored walls reflect his bull neck and scarred face. Sometimes he looks out of the windows, over the gardens. In the Place Louis XV, now the Place de la Revolution, the guillotine is at work. From this room, as he negotiates for peace, he imagines he can hear Sanson making a living; hear the creak of the machine’s moving parts, the clump of the blade. Army officers, for the moment; at least they should know how to die.
In April there were seven executions; undramatically, the numbers will increase. The Section committees will be very ready to yelp for arrests, very quick with their accusations that such a one is a lukewarm patriot, aristo sympathizer, black marketeer or priest. House searches, food issue, recruiting, passports, denunciations: hard to know where the Section committees end and the good offices of the Commune begin. There was a day when the Palais-Royal was cordoned off by the police, and all the girls were herded together. Their identity cards were taken from them; for an hour or so, they stood barracking their captors in small flocks, their faces hard and hopeless under their paint; then the cards were handed back, they were told to go where they liked. The little Terror of Pierre Chaumette.
From here he has to watch the Austrians and the Prussians, the English and the Swedes; the Russians and the Turks and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; Lyon, Marseille, the Vendee and the public gallery; Marat at the Jacobin Club and Hébert at the Cordeliers; the Commune and the Section committees and the Tribunal and the press. Sometimes he sits and thinks of his dead wife. He cannot imagine the summer without her. He is very tired. He begins to stay away from the Jacobins and the evening meetings of the Committee. Danton is letting his reputation slide, some people say: he is letting go. Other people say he wouldn’t dare. Sometimes Robespierre comes to see him, panicked and asthmatical, twitching at the sleeves and collars of his very correct clothes. Robespierre is turning into a caricature of himself, Lucile remarks. When Danton is not at home, with little Louise skirting around him, he is with the Desmoulins, living with them practically, as Camille once lived with him.
His pursuit of Lucile is a formality now, a habit. He begins to see how different she is from the earnest, busy, simple women he requires for his domestic comfort. After a day poring over her Rousseau she would announce a scheme for a bucolic retirement from the capital, and drive into the country with her infant, screaming at being separated from his grandmother; there she would formulate plans for his education. Her hair streaming down her back and a large straw hat on her head, she would do a little dilettante weeding in the herb beds, by way of getting close to nature; she would read poetry in the afternoon, in a garden swing under an apple tree, and go to bed at nine o’clock.
Two days pass, and the bawling of Robespierre’s godchild would be driving her out of her mind; scattering orders about the sending after of fresh eggs and salad, she would charge back to the rue des Cordeliers, worrying all the way about missing her music lessons and whether her husband has left her. You look a complete wreck, she would say to him crossly; what have you been eating, whoever have you been sleeping with? Then for a week it will be parties and staying up all night; the baby departs to grandmother, nurse scuttling after.
In a different kind of mood, she takes up her station early, on the blue chaise-longue; she is wrapped so deeply in daydreams that no one dares to interrupt her, no one dares to say a word. One day she stirs from her reverie and says, do you know, Georges-Jacques, I sometimes think I may have fantasized the Revolution completely—it seems too unlikely to be true. And Camille—what if he is something I have simply fabricated, just a phantom I have called up out of the depth of my nature, a ghostly second self who works out my discontents?
He thinks of this, and then of his own creations: two dead children, and a woman killed—he believes—by unkindness; his plans for peace aborted, and now the Tribunal.
The Tribunal sits at the Palais de Justice, in a hall adjoining the prison of the Conciergerie: a gothic hall, marble-flagged. Its president, Montané, is a moderate man, but when necessary he will be replaced. Come next autumn, we will have the spectacle of Vice President Dumas, a red-faced, red-haired man, who is sometimes assisted to his place in an alcoholic daze. He presides with two loaded pistols on the table before him, and his apartment in the rue de Seine is like a fortress.
The Tribunal has a pool of jurors, proven patriots, chosen by the Convention. Souberbielle, Robespierre’s doctor, is one of them; he rushes distractedly between the courtroom, his hospital and his most important private patient. Maurice Duplay is also a juror. He dislikes the work and never talks about it at home. Another, Citizen Renaudin, is a violin maker by profession and responsible for a sudden flare-up of violence at the Jacobins one evening, one of the causeless, chilling incidents that are always happening these days; standing up to oppose Citizen Desmoulins, he despairs of logic, advances on him and knocks him clear across the room. Pounced on by the ushers, dragged out by brute force, his voice is heard even over the indignant bawling of the public galleries: “Next time I’ll kill you, next time I’ll kill you.”
The Public Prosecutor is Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, a quick, dark man, who takes up moral stances: not such a showy patriot as his cousin, but far more hardworking.
The Tribunal often acquits: in these early days, at least. Take Marat, for instance; he is indicted by the Gironde, Citizen Fouquier is perfunctory, the courtroom is packed with Maratists from the streets. The Tribunal throws the case out: a singing, chanting mob carries the accused shoulder-high to the Convention, through the streets and to the Jacobin Club, where they enthrone the grinning little demagogue in the president’s chair.
In May, the National Convention moves from the Riding School to the former theater of the Tuileries, which is refurbished for it. Entertain no notion of pink, dimpling Cupids, the crimson curve of boxes, powder and perfume, the rustle of silk. Think of this scenery: straight lines and right angles, plaster statues with plaster crowns; of plaster laurel and plaster oak. A square tribune for the speaker; behind it, hung almost horizontal, three immense tricolor flags; beside it, memento mori, the bust of Lepelletier. The deputies take their seats in a tiered semi-circle; they are without desks or tables, so that they have nowhere to write. The president has his handbell, his inkstand, his folio book; much they avail him, when
three thousand insurrectionists pour from the Faubourgs and mill about on the floor below him. Sunlight slides narrowly through the deep windows; on winter afternoons, faces loom, indistinct, from hostile benches. When the lamps are lit, the effect is ghastly; they deliberate in catacombs, and accusation drips from unseen mouths. In a greater dimness, the public galleries barrack and bay.
In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: “I’ll slaughter you!” “First,” says the deputy, “have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.” And one day a Brissotin stumbles, mounting the nine awkward steps to the tribune: “It’s like mounting the scaffold,” he complains. Delighted, the Left yells at him: make use of the rehearsal. A weary deputy puts his hand to his head, sees Robespierre watching him and withdraws it hurriedly: “No, no,” he says, “he will suppose I am thinking of something.”
As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats. While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.
The Section committees sit in disused churches. Republican slogans are scrawled in black paint on the walls. From these committees you obtain your card of citizenship, with a note of your address, employment, age and appearance: a copy is forwarded to City Hall.
Women hawkers go from door to door, with big baskets of linen for sale; under the linen are fresh eggs and butter, which are far more desirable. The men in the wood yards are always on strike for more pay, and firewood costs twice what it did in ’89. Poultry may be obtained, at midnight and for a price, in an alley at the back of the Café du Foy.
A child passed by the market, carrying a loaf; a woman who had the tricolor cockade in her hat threw him down, seized the bread, tore it into pieces and threw it away, saying that, since she had none, she did not want others to have any. The citizenesses of the market pointed out to her the stupidity of such an act; she screamed abuse at them, telling them that they were all aristocrats, and soon all women over thirty years of age would be guillotined.
Robespierre sat propped up on four pillows. Convalescent now, he looked young again. His curly red-brown hair was unpowdered. There were papers all over the bed. The room smelt faintly of orange peel.
“Dr. Souberbielle says, no, no, you must not eat oranges, Citizen. But I can’t eat anything else. He says, your addiction to citrus fruits is such that I cannot be responsible for you. Marat sent me a note—Cornélia, my dear, could you get me some more cold water? But very cold, I mean?”
“Of course.” She reached for the jug, bustled out.
“Well done,” Camille said.
“Yes, but I have to keep thinking of increasingly difficult things I want. I always told you that women were nothing but a damned nuisance.”
“Yes, but your experience was only academic then.”
“Bring your chair over here. I can’t raise my voice much. I don’t know what we’re going to do in the new hall, I know it was a theater but it’s no better. The only people we’ll be able to hear are Georges-Jacques and Legendre. It was bad enough at Versailles, and then the Riding School, and now this—I’ve had a sore throat for four years.”
“Don’t talk about it. I have to speak at the Jacobins tonight.”
His pamphlet against Brissot was already in the press, and the club—tonight—would vote to reprint and distribute it. But they wanted to see and hear him. Robespierre understood: one must be seen and heard. “I can’t afford to be ill,” he said. “What about Brissot, has he been seen around much?”
“No.”
“Vergniaud?”
“No.”
“If they’re so quiet they must be plotting something.”
“There’s your sister Charlotte arriving downstairs. Why can I hear everything today?”
“Maurice has stopped the men working. He thinks I have a headache. That’s good, anyway. Eléonore will have to stay downstairs to see that Charlotte doesn’t come up.”
“Poor Charlotte.”
“Yes, but poor Eléonore, too, I suppose. While I think about it, you might ask Danton not to be so rude about her. I know she’s rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven’t seen her. Danton keeps telling people. Ask him not to talk about her.”
“Send another messenger.”
“Tell me,” Robespierre said irritably, “why doesn’t he come to see me? Danton, I mean. Tell him from me that he’s got to make this Committee work. They’re all patriots, he must mobilize them. The only thing that will save us now is a strong central authority—the ministers are ciphers, the Convention is factious, so it must be the Committee.”
“Hush,” Camille said. “Think of your throat.”
“The Gironde are trying to make the country ungovernable by stirring up the provinces against us, and the Committee must keep a close watch—tell him the ministers mustn’t do anything without the Committee’s say-so. He must have a written report every day from every département—but what’s the matter, is that not a good idea?”
“Max, I know you’re frustrated because you want to make a speech—but you’re supposed to be taking a complete rest, aren’t you? Of course one doesn’t mind the Committee having such power, if it’s run by Danton. But the Committee is elective, isn’t it?”
“If he wants to stay elected, then he will. How is he, by the way? I mean, in himself?”
“Brooding.”
“He will think of marrying again, I suppose.”
Maurice Duplay opened the door. “Your water,” he whispered. “Sorry. Eléonore—I mean Cornélia—is downstairs entertaining your sister. You don’t want to see her, do you? No, of course you don’t. How’s your head?”
“I haven’t got a headache,” Robespierre said loudly.
“Shh. We have to get him back on his feet,” Duplay hissed at Camille. “It’s a pity he’ll miss hearing you tonight. I’ll be there.” Camille put his hands over his face. Duplay patted him on the shoulder and tiptoed out. “Don’t make him laugh,” he mouthed from the doorway.
“Oh, this is ludicrous,” Robespierre said, and began to laugh a little anyway.
“What were you saying about Marat? He sent you a note?”
“Yes, he is ill, too, he can’t leave his house. Did you hear about that girl, Anne Théroigne?”
“What’s she done now?”
“She was making a speech in the Tuileries gardens, and a group of women attacked her—rough women from the public gallery. She’s attached herself to Brissot and his faction, for some reason only she understands—I can’t believe Brissot is delighted. She found the wrong audience—I don’t know, but perhaps they thought she was some woman of fashion intruding on their patch. Marat was passing by, it seems.”
“So he joined in?”
“He rescued her. Charged in, told the women to desist—rare chivalry, for the doctor, wasn’t it? He believes they might have killed her.”
“I wish they had,” Camille said. “Excuse me for a moment from the necessity to do invalid talk, I can’t be temperate about this matter. I will never forgive the bitch for what she did on August 10.”
“Oh well, Louis Suleau—of course, we had known him for all those years, but he ended up on the wrong side, didn’t he?” Robespierre dropped his head back against the pillows.
“And then, so did she.”
“That is a callous thing to say.”
“It might happen to us. I mean, if we follow our judgements, our consciences, and if they lead us in certain directions, we may have to suffer for it. Brissot—after all—may be in good faith.”
“But I have just written this pamphlet—Brissot is a conspirator against the Republic—”
“So you have convinced yourself. So you’ll convince the Jacobins tonight. Certainly in power his people have been mistaken, stupid, criminally negligent, and we have to erase them from political life.”
“But Max, you wanted them killed in September. You tried to set it up.”
“I thought it was best to be rid of them before they did anymore damage. I thought of the lives that might be saved … .” He moved his legs, and some of the papers slithered to the floor. “It was a considered judgement. And Danton,” he smiled slightly, “has been wary of me since then. He thinks I am an unpredictable beast, with the key to my own cage.”
“And yet you say Brissot may be in good faith.”
“Camille, we’re judging by results, not intentions. Quite possibly he isn’t guilty of what you’ll charge him with tonight, but I’ll let you do it. I want them out of the Convention—but myself, I’d be happy if it went no further. The damage is done, we can’t recall the past by persecuting them. But the people won’t see things like that. They can’t be expected to.”
“You would save them. If you could.”
“No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won’t dispute it.”
Camille had walked away, turning his back, running his hand along the grain of the shelves that Maurice Duplay had built. Above them on the wall was a curious emblem he had carved: a great and splendid eagle with outstretched claws, like an eagle of the Romans.