A Place of Greater Safety (84 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety
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“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.
“Such heroism,” Camille said slowly, “and in a nightshirt too. Policy is the servant of reason. It is a sort of blasphemy to make human reason contradict itself and advise in the name of policy what it forbids in the name of morality.”
“You say that,” Robespierre said tiredly, “yet you are corrupted.”
“What, by money?”
“No. There are more ways than that of being corrupted. You can be corrupted by friendship. Your attachments are too … too vehement. Your hatreds are too sudden, too strong.”
“You mean Mirabeau, don’t you? You’ll never let that topic go. I know he used me, and he used me to propagate sentiments in which—it turned out—he didn’t believe. But now you—it turns out—are just the same. You don’t believe a word of what you ‘let’ me say. I find this hard to accept.”
“In a way,” Robespierre said patiently, “if we want to rise above being like Suleau, and the girl, we have to avoid the snares of what we personally believe, hope for—and see ourselves just as instruments of a destiny that has been worked out already. You know, there would have been a Revolution, even if we had never been born.”
“I don’t think I believe that,” Camille said. “I think it injures my place in the universe to believe that.” He started picking up the papers from the floor. “If you really want to annoy Eléonore, I mean Comélia,” he said, “you can keep throwing them on the floor and asking for them again, like the baby does. Lolotte gets out of the way when she sees that trick starting.”
“Thank you, I’ll try.” A spasm of coughing.
“Has Saint-Just been to see you?”
“No. He has no patience with illness.”
Under Robespierre’s eyes there were deep purple stains against the skin. Camille remembered his sister, in the months before her death. He pushed the thought aside; refused to have it. “It’s all right for you,
you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you’re an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don’t you take a holiday?”
“Well, still, our individual fate is some concern of ours. If I took a holiday, Brissot and Roland and Vergniaud would start planning to cut off my head.”
“You said you wouldn’t mind. You’d sort of take it in your stride.”
“Yes, but there are things I want to do first. And it wouldn’t be a very pleasant vacation, thinking about it, would it?”
“Saints don’t take holidays,” Camille said. “And I prefer to think that although we are instruments of destiny, no one else will do, because we are like saints, agents of a divine purpose, and filled with the grace of God.”
Charlotte was on her way out too. She was getting worse than she deserved, he thought. They stood on the rue Honore and tears spilled out of her eyes and down her pert, feline face. “He wouldn’t treat me like this if he knew how I felt,” she said. “Those monstrous women are turning him into something that none of us will recognize. They make him smug, they make him think about himself all the time, how wonderful he is. Yes, he is wonderful, but he doesn’t need telling. Oh, he has no common sense, he has no sense of proportion.
He took her back to the rue des Cordeliers. Annette was there. She looked Charlotte over very carefully, and listened to her problems. She always looked, these days, like a person who could give advice but never did.
Everyone was coming that evening to sit in reserved places in the gallery at the Jacobins. “It will be a triumph,” Lolotte said. As the afternoon wore on, panic began to fight inside him like cats in a sack.
What kind of fear is it? He can take any number of fights with violin makers: that isn’t a problem. What he hates is that creeping sense of the big occasion; the hour approaching, the minutes ticking away; that gathering up of papers and conspicuous walk to the tribune, with a perceptible swell and rustle of animosity detectable as soon as he leaves his place. Claude had said, “You are the Establishment now”; but that is not quite true. Most of the deputies of the Center and Right think he should not be a member of the Convention, that his extreme views and his advocacy of violence should exclude him; when he gets up to speak they shout, “Lanteme Attorney” and “
septembriseur
.” Some days this
gives him a jaunty feeling, feeds his arrogance; other days it makes him feel sick and cold. How could you know in advance which sort of day it was going to be?
The day the Gironde brought in their indictment against Marat—that had been one of the bad ones. They had packed the benches with their supporters; when you looked up at the Mountain, it was surprising how many people had stayed away. Who will speak up for Marat, mad and poisonous and repellent? He will. And they must have expected it, for the noise was orchestrated; we will put Marat on trial, they yelled,
and you with him
. Much more, in the usual vein:
blood drinker
. Get down from the tribune, they yell, before we drag you down; four years of revolution, and he is as much under threat as he ever was at the Palais-Royal, when the police closed in.
He had stood his ground for as long as he could, but the president was helpless, indicated by a gesture of his hands that there was nothing to be done. What the deputies felt for Marat was an extremity of loathing and dread, and they had transferred those feelings to him, and he was aware—one must always be aware—that the deputies do not attend sittings unarmed. Danton would have faced them out, he would have dominated them, forced their taunts back down their throats; but he did not have those abilities. He stopped trying to speak, contented himself with one long glance over the howling benches: nodded to the president, pushed back his hair, said to himself, “Well, Dr. Marat, first blood to them.”
When he walked shakily back to the Mountain’s benches, Danton was not there, Robespierre was not there; they wanted no involvement in this matter. François Robert, who was afraid of Marat and detested him, looked away. Fabre glanced towards him, raised one eyebrow, bit his lip. Antoine Saint-Just gave him a half-smile. “That cost you an effort, didn’t it?” Camille had said fiercely. He’d wished desperately to be outside, to breathe less hostile air, but if he had walked out at once, the Right would have added that to their list of triumphs: not only did we silence Marat’s chief supporter, but we also drove him out of our hall.
After an interval, he was able to pick his way out, into the gardens of the Tuileries. Four years in stale and airless rooms; four years of contention and fright. Georges-Jacques thinks the Revolution is something to make money out of, but now the Revolution is exacting its own price. Most of his colleagues have taken to alcohol, some to opium; some of them have developed a repertoire of strange and sudden illnesses, others have a habit of bursting into unmanly tears in the middle of the
day’s business. Marat is an insomniac; his cousin Fouquier, the Public Prosecutor, has confided in him that he is harassed every night by dreams of dead people trailing him in the street. He is, by the general standard, coping quite well; but he is not equipped for an upset like today’s.
He had become aware, at this point, that two men were following him. Making his decision, he turned to face them. They were two of the soldiers who guarded the National Convention. They approached to within three paces. He put his hand to his heart. He was taken aback by the small flat tone of his own voice. “Of course, you’ve come to arrest me. I suppose the Convention has just decreed it.”
“No, Citizen, it’s not that. If we’d come to arrest you there’d be more than two of us. It is only that we saw you walking here by yourself and we know these are evil times and we were mindful of the way the good Citizen Lepelletier was struck down and died.”
“Yes, of course. Not that there would be much you could do. Unless you were minded to step heroically in the way?” he said hopefully.
“We might catch somebody,” the soldier said. “An assassin. We’re always on the lookout for these conspirators, you know, just as Citizen Robespierre tells us. Now—” He hesitated, turned to his colleague, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. “Oh yes—can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?”
“The grave,” Camille said. “The grave.”
“Only would you,” said the second soldier, “take your hand away from that pistol that you’ve got in your coat pocket? It’s making me nervous.”
That day—and that second of freakish despair—was not a day he wished to remember. Tonight at the Jacobins he will be—for the most part—among friends. Danton will be there, and so he will sit in his usual place beside him. Danton will be deliberately silent, impassive, knowing that one cannot talk or joke his nervousness away. When the time comes he will make his way slowly towards the tribune, because patriots will step out of their places to embrace him, and from the dark parts of the gallery where the sansculottes gather there will be applause and coarse shouts of encouragement. Then silence; and as he begins, thinking carefully ahead so that he can control any tendency to stutter, so that he can circumvent words and pluck them out and slot in others, he will be thinking, no wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now; when we are dead and a few years have passed they will grow tired of trying to hear us, they will say, what does it matter? We have elected our own place in the silences of history, with our weak
lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed for something else.

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