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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
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René Hébert was peddling his opinions now through the persona of a bluff, pipe-smoking man of the people, a fictitious furnace maker called Père Duchesne. The paper was vulgar, in every sense—simple-minded prose studded with obscenity. “Père Duchesne is a great royalist, isn’t he?” Camille swiftly marked a passage. “I may have to hold that one against you, Hébert.”
“Is Hébert really like Père Duchesne? Does he really smoke a pipe and swear?”
“Not at all. He’s an effete little man. He has peculiar hands that flutter about. They look like things that live under stones. Listen, Lolotte—are you happy?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you sure? Do you like the apartment? Do you want to move?”
“No, I don’t want to move. I like the apartment. I like everything.
I am very happy.” Her emotions now seemed to lie just below the surface, scratching at her delicate skin to be hatched. “Only I’m afraid something will happen.”
“What could happen?” (He knew what could happen.)
“The Austrians might come and you’d be shot. The Court might have you assassinated. You could be abducted and shut up in prison somewhere, and I’d never know where you were.”
She put up her hand to her mouth, as if she could stop the fears spilling out.
“I’m not that important,” he said. “They have more to do than arrange assassins for me.”
“I saw one of those letters, threatening to kill you.”
“That’s what comes of reading other people’s mail. You find out things you’d rather not know.”
“Who obliges us to live like this?” Her voice muffled against his shoulder. “Someday soon we’ll have to live in cellars, like Marat.”
“Dry your tears. Someone is here.”
Robespierre hovered, looking embarrassed. “Your housekeeper said I should come through,” he said.
“That’s all right.” Lucile gestured around her. “Not exactly a love nest, as you see. Sit on the bed. Sit in the bed, feel free. Half of Paris was in here this morning while I was trying to get dressed.”
“I can’t find anything since I moved,” Camille complained. “And you’ve no idea how time-consuming it is, being married. You have to make decisions about the most baffling things—like whether to have the ceilings painted. I always supposed the paint just grew on them, didn’t you?”
Robespierre declined to sit. “I won’t stay—I came to see if you’d written that piece you promised, about my pamphlet on the National Guard. I expected to see it in your last issue.”
“Oh Christ,” Camille said. “It could be anywhere. Your pamphlet, I mean. Have you another copy with you? Look, why don’t you just write the piece yourself? It would be quicker.”
“But Camille, it’s all very well for me to give your readers a digest of my ideas, but I expected something more—you could say whether you thought my ideas were cogent, whether they were logical, whether they were well expressed. I can’t write a piece praising myself, can I?”
“I don’t see the difficulty.”
“Don’t be flippant. I haven’t time to waste.”
“I’m sorry.” Camille swept his hair back and smiled. “But you’re our editorial policy, didn’t you know? You’re our hero.” He crossed the room,
and touched Robespierre on the shoulder, very lightly, with just the tip of his middle finger. “We admire your principles in general, support your actions and writings in particular—and will therefore never fail to give you good publicity.”
“Yet you have failed, haven’t you?” Robespierre stepped back. He was exasperated. “You must try to keep to the task in hand. You are so heedless, you are unreliable.”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
She felt a needlepoint of irritation.
“Max, he isn’t a schoolchild.”
“I’ll write it this afternoon,” Camille said.
“And be at the Jacobins this evening.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You are terribly dictatorial,” she said.
“Oh no, Lucile.” Robespierre looked at her earnestly. His voice suddenly softened. “It’s just that one has to use exhortation with Camille, he’s such a dreamer. I’m sure”—he dropped his eyes—“if I had just been married to you, Lucile, I’d be tempted to spend time with you and I wouldn’t give such attention to my work as I ought. And Camille is no use at fighting temptation on his own, he never has been. But I’m not dictatorial, don’t say that.”
“All right,” she said, “you have the license of long acquaintance. But your tone. Your manner. You should save that for berating the Right. Go and make them flinch.”
His face tightened: defensive, distressed. She saw why Camille preferred always to apologize. “Oh,” he said. “Camille quite likes being pushed around. It’s something in his character. So Danton says. Good-bye. Write it this afternoon, won’t you?” he added gently.
“Well,” she said. They exchanged glances. “That was pointed, wasn’t it? What does he mean?”
“Nothing. He was just shaken because you criticized him.”
“Must he not be criticized?”
“No. He takes things to heart, it undermines him. Besides, he was right. I should have remembered about the pamphlet. You mustn’t be hard on him. It’s shyness that makes him abrupt.”
“He ought to have got over it. Other people don’t get allowances made for them. Besides, once you said he had no weaknesses.”
“Day to day he has weaknesses. In the end he has no weaknesses.”
“You might leave me,” she said suddenly. “For someone else.”
“What makes you imagine that?”
“Today I keep thinking. I keep thinking of what could happen. Because
I never supposed that one could be so happy, that everything could come right.”
“Do you think you have had an unhappy life?”
Appearances were against her; but truthfully she answered, “Yes.”
“I also. But not from now on.”
“You could be killed in an accident in the street. You might die. Your sister Henriette died of a consumption.” She scrutinized him as if she wanted to see the tissue beneath the skin, and provide against contingencies.
He turned away; he didn’t feel he could bear it. He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament; or it might be something you learn when you’re a child, a kind of language, harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a good grasp on by the time you’re seven. What if you haven’t got that grasp? What if you’re in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind? It occurred to him that there are some people, ashamed of being illiterate, who always pretend to others that they can read. Sooner or later they get found out, of course. But it is always possible that while you are valiantly pretending, the principles of reading strike you for the first time, and you are saved. By analogy, it is possible that while you, the unhappy person, are trying out some basic expressions-the kind of thing you get in phrase books for travelers—the grammar and syntax of this neglected language are revealing themselves, somewhere at the back of your mind. That’s all very well, he thought, but the process could take years. He understood Lucile’s problem: how do you know you will live long enough to be fluent?
 
 
T
he People’s Friend, No. 497, J.-P. Marat, editor:
… name immediately a military tribunal, a supreme dictator … you are lost beyond hope if you continue to heed your present leaders, who will continue to flatter you and lull you until your enemies are at your walls … . Now is the time to have the heads of Mottié, of Bailly … of all the traitors in the National Assembly … within a few days Louis XVI will advance at the head of all the malcontents and the Austrian legions … . A hundred fiery mouths will threaten to destroy your town with red shot if you offer the least resistance … all the patriots will be arrested, the popular writers will be dragged away to dungeons … a few more days of indecision, and it will be too late to shake off your lethargy; death will overtake you in your sleep.
D
anton at Mirabeau’s house. “So how goes it?” the Comte said.
Danton nodded.
“I mean, I really want to know.” Mirabeau laughed. “Are you totally cynical, Danton, or do you harbor some guilty ideals? Where do you stand, really? Come, I’m taken with a passion to know. Which is it to be for King, Louis or Philippe?”
Danton declined to answer.
“Or perhaps neither. Are you a republican, Danton?”
“Robespierre says that it is not a government’s descriptive label that matters, but its nature, the way it operates, whether it is government by the people. Cromwell’s republic, for instance, was not a popular government. I agree with him. It seems to me of little importance whether we call it a monarchy or a republic.”
“You say its nature matters, but you do not say which nature you would prefer.”
“My reticence is considered.”
“I’m sure it is. You can hide a great deal behind slogans. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, indeed.”
“I subscribe to that.”
“I hear you invented it. But freedom comprehends—what?”
“Do I have to define it for you? You should simply know.”
“That is sentimentality,” Mirabeau said.
“I know. Sentimentality has its place in politics, as in the bedroom.”
The Comte looked up. “We’ll discuss bedrooms later. Let’s, shall we, descend to practicalities? The Commune is to be reshuffled, there will be elections. The office ranking below mayor will be that of administrator. There will be sixteen administrators. You wish to be one of them, you say. Why, Danton?”
“I wish to serve the city.”
“No doubt. I myself am assured of a place. Amongst your colleagues you may expect Siéyès and Talleyrand. I take it from the expression on your face that you think it a company of tergiversators in which you will be quite at home. But if I am to support you, I must have an assurance as to your moderate conduct.”
“You have it.”
“Your moderation. You understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Fully?”
“Yes.”
“Danton, I know you. You are like myself. Why else have they started calling you the poor man’s Mirabeau, do you suppose? You haven’t an ounce of moderation in your body.”
“I think our resemblances must be superficial.”
“Oh, you think you are a moderate?”
“I don’t know. I could be. Most things are possible.”
“You may wish to conciliate, but it is against your nature. You don’t work with people, you work
over
them.”
“Danton nodded. He conceded the point. “I drive them as I wish,” he said. “That could be towards moderation, or it could be towards the extremes.”
“Yes, but the difficulty is, moderation looks like weakness, doesn’t it? Oh yes, I know, Danton, I have been here before you, crashing down this particular trail. And speaking of extremism, I do not care for the attacks on me made by your Cordeliers journalists.”
“The press is free. I don’t dictate the output of the writers of my district.”
“Not even the one who lives next door to you? I rather thought you did.”
“Camille has to be running ahead of public opinion all the time.”
“I can remember the days,” Mirabeau said, “when we didn’t have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.” He rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “Very well, Danton, consider yourself elected. I shall hold you to your promise of moderation, and I shall expect your support. Come now—tell me the gossip. How is the marriage?”
 
 
L
ucile looked at the carpet. It was a good carpet, and on balance she was glad she had spent the money on it. She did not particularly wish to admire the pattern now, but she could not trust the expression on her face.
“Caro,” she said, “I really can’t think why you are telling me all this.”
Caroline Rémy put her feet up on the blue
chaise-Longue.
She was a handsome young woman, an actress belonging to the Theatre Montansier company. She had two arrangements, one with Fabre d’Églantine and one with Hérault de Séchelles.
“To protect you,” she said, “from being told all this by unsympathetic people. Who would delight in embarrassing you, and making fun of your
naïveté.”
Caroline put her head on one side, and wrapped a curl around her finger. “Let me see—how old are you now, Lucile?”
“Twenty.”
“Dear, dear,” Caroline said. “Twenty!” She couldn’t be much older herself, Lucile thought. But she had, not surprisingly, a rather well-used look about her. “I’m afraid, my dear, that you know nothing of the world.”
“No. People keep telling me that, lately. I suppose they must be right.” (A guilty capitulation. Camille, last week, trying to educate her: “Lolotte, nothing gains truth by mere force of repetition.” But how to be polite, faced with such universal insistence?)

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