HILARY MANTEL
A Place of Greater Safety

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Paperback edition first published by Harper Perennial 2007

First published in Great Britain by Viking 1992

Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1992

Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

PS section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2010

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Source ISBN 9780007250554

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007354849

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Praise

From the reviews of A Place of Greater Safety:

‘Crafty tensions, twists and high drama … a bravura display of her endlessly inventive, eerily observant style’

Times Literary Supplement

‘A formidably talented novelist … She has seen deeply into her characters and their involvements with one another, and makes them live for us, with vivid invented detail, day by day, as they are battered or seduced by public events’

London Review of Books

‘Much, much more than an historical novel, this is an addictive study of power, and the price that must be paid for it … a triumph’

Cosmopolitan

‘Intriguing … She has grasped what made these young revolutionaries – and with them the French Revolution – tick … This is the perfect complement to Simon Schama’s history of the French Revolution, Citizens’

Independent

‘Concentrating on the tortuously interwoven relationship between its three most important protagonists, Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins, Hilary Mantel has pulled off the apparently impossible … an ambitious, gripping epic … The host of minor characters and the swirling mob who form the necessary background to the story are never lost from sight, but are expertly marshalled on and off the bloodstained stage … a tour de force of the historical imagination’

Vogue

‘Mantel’s grasp both of detail and the complex sweep of events is quite remarkable …“her people” are firmly rooted in physical and historical reality … Little is known of the personal lives of most revolutionary leaders before 1789, and after they became famous, they lived constantly in the public eye. Yet Mantel has managed to get inside them by feeling her way through their writings, families and, quite brilliantly, their women’

Times Literary Supplement

Dedication

To Clare Boylan

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Author’s Note

Cast of Characters

Map of Revolutionary Paris

PART ONE

I. Life as a Battlefield (1763–1774)

II. Corpse-Candle (1774–1780)

III. At Maître Vinot’s (1780)

PART TWO

I. The Theory of Ambition (1784–1787)

II. Rue Condé: Thursday Afternoon (1787)

III. Maximilien: Life and Times (1787)

IV. A Wedding, a Riot, a Prince of the Blood (1787–1788)

V. A New Profession (1788)

VI. Last Days of Titonville (1789)

VII. Killing Time (1789)

PART THREE

I. Virgins (1789)

II. Liberty, Gaiety, Royal Democracy (1790)

III. Lady’s Pleasure (1791)

IV. More Acts of the Apostles (1791)

PART FOUR

I. A Lucky Hand (1791)

II. Danton: His Portrait Made (1791)

III. Three Blades, Two in Reserve (1791–1792)

IV. The Tactics of a Bull (1792)

V. Burning the Bodies (1792)

PART FIVE

I. Conspirators (1792)

II. Robespierricide (1792)

III. The Visible Exercise of Power (1792–1793)

IV. Blackmail (1793)

V. A Martyr, a King, a Child (1793)

VI. A Secret History (1793)

VII. Carnivores (1793)

VIII. Imperfect Contrition (1793)

IX. East Indians (1793)

X. The Marquis Calls (1793)

XI. The Old Cordeliers (1793–1794)

XII. Ambivalence (1794)

XIII. Conditional Absolution (1794)

Note

Keep Reading

Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …

About the author

A Kind of Alchemy

Life at a Glance

A Writing Life

Read on

Have You Read?

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

THIS IS A NOVEL about the French Revolution. Almost all the characters in it are real people and it is closely tied to historical facts – as far as those facts are agreed, which isn’t really very far. It is not an overview or a complete account of the Revolution. The story centres on Paris; what happens in the provinces is outside its scope, and so for the most part are military events.

My main characters were not famous until the Revolution made them so, and not much is known about their early lives. I have used what there is, and made educated guesses about the rest.

This is not, either, an impartial account. I have tried to see the world as my people saw it, and they had their own prejudices and opinions. Where I can, I have used their real words – from recorded speeches or preserved writings – and woven them into my own dialogue. I have been guided by a belief that what goes on to the record is often tried out earlier, off the record.

There is one character who may puzzle the reader, because he has a tangential, peculiar role in this book. Everyone knows this about Jean-Paul Marat: he was stabbed to death in his bath by a pretty girl. His death we can be sure of, but almost everything in his life is open to interpretation. Dr Marat was twenty years older than my main characters, and had a long and interesting pre-revolutionary career. I did not feel that I could deal with it without unbalancing the book, so I have made him the guest star, his appearances few but piquant. I hope to write about Dr Marat at some future date. Any such novel would subvert the view of history which I offer here. In the course of writing this book I have had many arguments with myself, about what history really is. But you must state a case, I think, before you can plead against it.

The events of the book are complicated, so the need to dramatize and the need to explain must be set against each other. Anyone who writes a novel of this type is vulnerable to the complaints of pedants. Three small points will illustrate how, without falsifying, I have tried to make life easier.

When I am describing pre-revolutionary Paris, I talk about ‘the police’. This is a simplification. There were several bodies charged with law enforcement. It would be tedious, though, to hold up the story every time there is a riot, to tell the reader which one is on the scene.

Again, why do I call the Hôtel de Ville ‘City Hall’? In Britain, the term ‘Town Hall’ conjures up a picture of comfortable aldermen patting their paunches and talking about Christmas decorations or litter bins. I wanted to convey a more vital, American idea; power resides at City Hall.

A smaller point still: my characters have their dinner and their supper at variable times. The fashionable Parisian dined between three and five in the afternoon, and took supper at ten or eleven o’clock. But if the latter meal is attended with a degree of formality, I’ve called it ‘dinner’. On the whole, the people in this book keep late hours. If they’re doing something at three o’clock, it’s usually three in the morning.

I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could. I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

Cast of Characters

PART I

In Guise:

Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins, a lawyer

Madeleine, his wife

Camille, his eldest son (b. 1760)

Elisabeth, his daughter

Henriette, his daughter (died aged nine)

Armand, his son

Anne-Clothilde, his daughter

Clément, his youngest son

Adrien de ViefvilleJean-Louis de Viefville

their snobbish relations

The Prince de Condé, premier nobleman of the district and a client of Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins

In Arcis-sur-Aube:

Marie-Madeleine Danton, a widow, who marries

Jean Recordain, an inventor

Georges-Jacques, her son (b. 1759)

Anne Madeleine, her daughter

Pierrette, her daughter

Marie-Cécile, her daughter, who becomes a nun

In Arras:

François de Robespierre, a lawyer

Maximilien, his son (b. 1758)

Charlotte, his daughter

Henriette, his daughter (died aged nineteen)

Augustin, his younger son

Jacqueline, his wife, née Carraut, who dies after giving birth to a fifth child

Grandfather Carraut, a brewer

Aunt EulalieAunt Henriette

François de Robespierre’s sisters

In Paris, at Louis-le-Grand:

Father Poignard, the principal – a liberal minded man

Father Proyart, the deputy principal – not at all a liberal-minded man

Father Herivaux, a teacher of classical languages

Louis Suleau, a student

Stanislas Fréron, a very well-connected student, known as ‘Rabbit’

In Troyes:

Fabre d’Églantine, an unemployed genius

PART II

In Paris:

Maître Vinot, a lawyer in whose chambers Georges-Jacques Danton is a pupil

Maître Perrin, a lawyer in whose chambers Camille Desmoulins is a pupil

Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles, a young nobleman and legal dignitary

François-Jérôme Charpentier, a café owner and Inspector of Taxes

Angélique (Angelica) his Italian wife

Gabrielle, his daughter

Françoise-Julie Duhauttoir, Georges-Jacques Danton’s mistress

At the rue Condé:

Claude Duplessis, a senior civil servant

Annette, his wife

AdèleLucile

his daughters

Abbé Laudréville, Annette’s confessor, a go-between

In Guise:

Rose-Fleur Godard, Camille Desmoulins’s fiancée

In Arras:

Joseph Fouché, a teacher, Charlotte de Robespierre’s beau

Lazare Carnot, a military engineer, a friend of Maximilien de Robespierre

Anaïs Deshorties, a nice girl whose relatives want her to marry Maximilien de Robespierre

Louise de Kéralio, a novelist: who goes to Paris, marries François Robert and edits a newspaper

Hermann, a lawyer, a friend of Maximilien de Robespierre

The Orléanists:

Philippe, Duke of Orléans, cousin of King Louis XVI

Félicité de Genlis, an author – his ex-mistress, now Governor of his children

Charles-Alexis Brulard de Sillery, Comte de Genlis – Félicité’s husband, a former naval officer, a gambler

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a novelist, the Duke’s secretary

Agnès de Buffon, the Duke’s mistress

Grace Elliot, the Duke’s ex-mistress, a spy for the British Foreign Office

Axel von Fersen, the Queen’s lover

At Danton’s chambers:

Jules Paré, his clerk

François Deforgues, his clerk

Billaud-Varennes, his part-time clerk, a man of sour temperament

At the Cour du Commerce:

Mme Gély, who lives upstairs from Georges-Jacques and Gabrielle Danton

Antoine, her husband

Louise, her daughter

Catherine Marie

the Dantons’ servants

Legendre, a master butcher, a neighbour of the Dantons

François Robert, a lecturer in law: marries Louise de Kéralio, opens a delicatessen, and later becomes a radical journalist

René Hébert, a theatre box-office clerk

Anne Théroigne, a singer

In the National Assembly:

Antoine Barnave, a deputy: at first a radical, later a royalist

Jérôme Pétion, a radical deputy, later called a ‘Brissotin’

Dr Guillotin, an expert on public health

Jean-Sylvain Bailly, an astronomer, later Mayor of Paris.

Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, a renegade aristocrat sitting for the Commons, or Third Estate

Teutch, Mirabeau’s valet

ClavièreDumontDuroveray

His ‘slaves’, Genevan politicians in exile

Jean-Pierre Brissot, a journalist

Momoro, a printer

Réveillon, owner of a wallpaper factory

Hanriot, owner of a saltpetre works

De Launay, Governor of the Bastille

PART III

M. Soulès, temporary Governor of the Bastille

The Marquis de Lafayette, Commander of the National Guard

Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist, editor of the People’s Friend

Arthur Dillon, Governor of Tobago and a general in the French army; a friend of Camille Desmoulins

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a well-known author

Collot d’Herbois, a playwright

Father Pancemont, a truculent priest

Father Bérardier, a gullible priest

Caroline Rémy, an actress

Père Duchesne, a furnace-maker: fictitious alter ego of René. Hébert, box-office clerk turned journalist

Antoine Saint-Just, a disaffected poet, acquainted with or related to Camille Desmoulins

Jean-Marie Roland, an elderly ex-civil servant

Manon Roland, his young wife, a writer

François-Léonard Buzot, a deputy, member of the Jacobin Club and friend of the Rolands

Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a novelist, Jacobin, friend of the Rolands

PART IV

At the rue Saint-Honoré:

Maurice Duplay, a master carpenter

Françoise Duplay, his wife

Eléonore, an art student, his eldest daughter

Victoire, his daughter

Elisabeth (Babette), his youngest daughter

Charles Dumouriez, a general, sometime Foreign Minister

Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, a lawyer; Camille Desmoulins’s cousin

Jeanette, the Desmoulins’s servant

PART V

Politicians described as ‘Brissotins’ or ‘Girondins’:

Jean-Pierre Brissot, a journalist

Jean-Marie and Manon Roland

Pierre Vergniaud, member of the National Convention, famous as an orator

Jérôme Pétion

François-Léonard Buzot

Jean-Baptiste Louvet

Charles Barbaroux, a lawyer from Marseille and many others

Albertine Marat, Marat’s sister

Simone Evrard, Marat’s common-law wife

Defermon, a deputy, sometime President of the National Convention

Jean-François Lacroix, a moderate deputy: goes ‘on mission’ to Belgium with Danton in 1792 and 1793

David, a painter

Charlotte Corday, an assassin

Claude Dupin, a young bureaucrat who proposes marriage to Louise Gély, Danton’s neighbour

Souberbielle, Robespierre’s doctor

Renaudin, a violin-maker, prone to violence

Father Kéravenen, an outlaw priest

Chauveau-Lagarde, a lawyer: defence council for Marie-Antoinette

Philippe Lebas, a left-wing deputy: later a member of the Committee of General Security, or Police Committee; marries Babette Duplay

Vadier, known as ‘the Inquisitor’, a member of the Police Committee

Implicated in the East India Company fraud:

Chabot, a deputy, ex-Capuchin friar

Julien, a deputy, former Protestant pastor

Proli, secretary to Hérault de Séchelles, and said to be an Austrian spy

Emmanuel Dobruska and Siegmund Gotleb, known as Emmanuel and Junius Frei: speculators

Guzman, a minor politician, Spanish-born

Diedrichsen, a Danish ‘businessman’

Abbé d’Espanac, a crooked army contractor

BasireDelaunay

deputies

Citizen de Sade, a writer, formerly a marquis

Pierre Philippeaux, a deputy: writes a pamphlet against the government during the Terror

Some members of the Committee of Public Safety:

Saint-André

Barère

Couthon, a paraplegic, a friend of Robespierre

Robert Lindet, a lawyer from Normandy, a friend of Danton

Etienne Panis, a left-wing deputy, a friend of Danton

At the trial of the Dantonists:

Hermann (once of Arras), President of the Revolutionary

Tribunal

Dumas, his deputy

Fouquier-Tinville, now Public Prosecutor

FleuriotLiendon

prosecution lawyers

Fabricius Pâris, Clerk of the Court

Laflotte, a prison informer

Henri Sanson, public executioner

Map of Revolutionary Paris

PART ONE

LOUIS XV is named the Well-Beloved. Ten years pass. The same people believe the Well-Beloved takes baths of human blood … Avoiding Paris, ever shut up at Versailles, he finds even there too many people, too much daylight. He wants a shadowy retreat …

In a year of scarcity (they were not uncommon then) he was hunting as usual in the Forest of Sénart. He met a peasant carrying a bier and inquired, ‘Whither he was conveying it?’ ‘To such a place.’ ‘For a man or a woman?’ ‘A man.’ ‘What did he die of?’ ‘Hunger.’

Jules Michelet

I. Life as a Battlefield
(1763–1774)

NOW THAT THE DUST has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. Now that the last red tile has been laid on the roof of the New House, now that the marriage contract is four years old. The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow. The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odour of family quarrels brewing.

Maître Desmoulins’s study is across the courtyard, in the Old House that fronts the street. If you stand in the Place des Armes and look up at the narrow white façade, you can often see him lurking behind the shutters on the first floor. He seems to stare down into the street; but he is miles away, observers say. This is true, and his location is very precise. Mentally, he is back in Paris.

Physically, at this moment, he is on his way upstairs. His three-year-old son is following him. As he expects the child to be under his feet for the next twenty years, it does not profit him to complain about this. Afternoon heat lies over the streets. The babies, Henriette and Elisabeth, are asleep in their cribs. Madeleine is insulting the laundry girl with a fluency and venom that belie her gravid state, her genteel education. He closes the door on them.

As soon as he sits down at his desk, a stray Paris thought slides around his mind. This happens often. He indulges himself a little: places himself on the steps of the Châtelet court with a hard-wrung acquittal and a knot of congratulatory colleagues. He gives his colleagues names and faces. Where is Perrin this afternoon? And Vinot? Now he goes up twice a year, and Vinot – who used to discuss his Life Plan with him when they were students – had walked right past him in the Place Dauphine, not knowing him at all.

That was last year, and now it is August, in the year of Grace 1763. It is Guise, Picardy; he is thirty-three years old, husband, father, advocate, town councillor, official of the bailiwick, a man with a large bill for a new roof.

He takes out his account books. It is only two months ago that Madeleine’s family came up with the final instalment of the dowry. They pretended – knowing that he could hardly disabuse them – that it was a kind of flattering oversight; that a man in his position, with steady work coming in, would hardly notice the last few hundred.

This was a typical de Viefville trick, and he could do nothing about it. They hammered him to the family mast while, quivering with embarrassment, he handed them the nails. He’d come home from Paris at their behest, to set things up for Madeleine. He hadn’t known that she’d be turned thirty before her family considered his situation even half-way satisfactory.

What de Viefvilles do, they run things: small towns, large legal practices. There are cousins all over the Laon district, all over Picardy: a bunch of nerveless crooks, always talking. One de Viefville is Mayor of Guise, another is a member of that august judicial body, the Parlement of Paris. De Viefvilles generally marry Godards; Madeleine is a Godard, on her father’s side. The Godards’ name lacks the coveted particle of nobility; for all that, they tend to get on in life, and when you attend in Guise and environs a musical evening or a funeral or a Bar Association dinner, there is always one present to whom you can genuflect.

The ladies of the family believe in annual production, and Madeleine’s late start hardly deters her. Hence the New House.

This child was his eldest, who now crossed the room and scrambled into the window-seat. His first reaction, when the newborn was presented: this is not mine. The explanation came at the christening, from the grinning uncles and cradle-witch aunts: aren’t you a little Godard then, isn’t he a little Godard to his fingertips? Three wishes, Jean-Nicolas thought sourly: become an alderman, marry your cousin, prosper like a pig in clover.

The child had a whole string of names, because the godparents could not agree. Jean-Nicolas spoke up with his own preference, whereupon the family united: you can call him Lucien if you like, but We shall call him Camille.

It seemed to Desmoulins that with the birth of this first child he had become like a man floundering around in a sucking swamp, with no glimmering of rescue. It was not that he was unwilling to assume responsibilities; he was simply overwhelmed by the perplexities of life, paralysed by the certainty that there was nothing constructive to be done in any given situation. The child particularly presented an insoluble problem. It seemed inaccessible to the processes of legal reasoning. He smiled at it, and it learned to smile back: not with the amicable toothless grin of most infants, but with what he took to be a flicker of amusement. Then again, he had always understood that the eyes of small babies did not focus properly, but this one – and no doubt it was entirely his imagination – seemed to look him over rather coolly. This made him uneasy. He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, ‘You prick.’

Standing on the window-seat now, his son leans out over the square, and gives him a commentary on who comes and goes. There is the curé, there is M. Saulce. Now comes a rat. Now comes M. Saulce’s dog; oh, poor rat.

‘Camille,’ he says, ‘get down from there, if you drop out on to the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. Though you might, at that; who would notice?’

Now, while he adds up the tradesmen’s bills, his son leans out of the window as far as he can, looking for further carnage. The curé recrosses the square, the dog falls asleep in the sun. A boy comes with a collar and chain, subdues the dog and leads it home. At last Jean-Nicolas looks up. ‘When I have paid for the roof,’ he says, ‘I shall be flat broke. Are you listening to me? While your uncles continue to withhold from me all but the dregs of the district’s legal work, I cannot get by from month to month without making inroads into your mother’s dowry, which is supposed to pay for your education. The girls will be all right, they can do needlework, perhaps people will marry them for their personal charms. We can hardly expect you to get on in the same way.’

‘Now comes the dog again,’ his son says.

‘Do as I tell you and come in from the window. And do not be childish.’

‘Why not?’ Camille says. ‘I’m a child, aren’t I?’

His father crosses the room and scoops him up, prising his fingers away from the window frame to which he clings. His eyes widen in astonishment at being carried off by this superior strength. Everything astonishes him: his father’s diatribes, the speckles on an eggshell, women’s hats, ducks on the pond.

Jean-Nicolas carries him across the room. When you are thirty, he thinks, you will sit at this desk and, turning from your account books to the piffling local business on which you are employed, you will draft, for perhaps the tenth time in your career, a deed of mortgage on the manor house at Wiège; and that will wipe the look of surprise off your face. When you are forty, and greying, and worried sick about your eldest son, I shall be seventy. I shall sit in the sunshine and watch the pears ripen on the wall, and M. Saulce and the curé will go by and touch their hats to me.

WHAT DO WE THINK about fathers? Important, or not? Here is what Rousseau says:

The oldest of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family, yet children remain tied to their father by nature only as long as they need him for their preservation … The family may perhaps be seen as the first model of political society. The head of the state bears the image of the father, the people the image of his children.

So here are some more family stories.

M. DANTON had four daughters: younger than these, one son. He had no attitude to this child, except perhaps relief at its gender. Aged forty, M. Danton died. His widow was pregnant, but lost the child.

In later life, the child Georges-Jacques thought he remembered his father. In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don’t come back, to quibble or correct.

M. Danton had been clerk to one of the local courts. There was a little money, some houses, some land. Madame found herself coping. She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out. Her sisters’ husbands came by every Sunday, and gave her advice.

Subsequently, the children ran wild. They broke people’s fences and chased sheep and committed various other rural nuisances. When accosted, they talked back. Children of other families they threw in the river.

‘That girls should be like that!’ said M. Camus, Madame’s brother.

‘It isn’t the girls,’ Madame said. ‘It’s Georges-Jacques. But look, they have to survive.’

‘But this is not some jungle,’ M. Camus said. ‘It is not Patagonia. It is Arcis-sur-Aube.’

Arcis is green; the land around is flat and yellow. Life goes on at a steady pace. M. Camus eyes the child, where outside the window he throws stones at the barn.

‘The boy is savage and quite unnecessarily large,’ he says. ‘Why has he got a bandage round his head?’

‘Why should I tell you? You’ll only bad-mouth him.’

Two days ago, one of the girls had brought him home in the early warm dusk. They had been in the bull’s field, she said, playing at Early Christians. This was perhaps the pious gloss Anne Madeleine put on the matter; it was possible of course that not all the Church’s martyrs agreed to be gored, and that some, like Georges-Jacques, went armed with pointed sticks. Half his face was ripped up from the bull’s horn. Panic-stricken, his mother had taken his head in her hands and shoved the flesh together and hoped against hope it would stick. She bandaged it tightly and put another bandage around his head to cover the bumps and cuts on his forehead. For two days, with a helmeted, aggressive air, he stayed in the house and moped. He complained that he had a headache. This was the third day.

Twenty-four hours after M. Camus had taken his leave, Mme Danton stood at the same window and watched – as if in a dazed, dreadful repeating dream – while her son’s remains were manhandled across the fields. A farm labourer carried the heavy body in his arms; she could see how his knees bent under the dead-weight. There were two dogs running after him with their tails between their legs; trailing behind came Anne Madeleine, bawling with rage and despair.

When she reached them she saw that the man had tears in his eyes. ‘That bloody bull will have to be slaughtered,’ he said. They went into the kitchen. There was blood everywhere. It was all over the man’s shirt, the dogs’ fur, Anne Madeleine’s apron and even her hair. It went all over the floor. She cast around for something – a blanket, a clean cloth – on which to lay the corpse of her only son. The labourer, exhausted, swayed against the wall, marking the plaster with a long rust-coloured streak.

‘Put him on the floor,’ she said.

When his cheek touched the cold tiles of the floor, the child moaned softly; only then did she realize he wasn’t dead. Anne Madeleine was repeating the De profundis in a monotone: ‘From the morning watch even until night: let Israel hope in the Lord.’ Her mother hit her across the ear to shut her up. Then a chicken flew in at the door and got on her foot.

‘Don’t strike the girl,’ the labourer said. ‘She pulled him out from under its feet.’

Georges-Jacques opened his eyes and vomited. They made him lie still, and felt his limbs for fractures. His nose was broken. He breathed bubbles of blood. ‘Don’t blow your nose,’ the man said, ‘or your brains will drop out.’

‘Lie still, Georges-Jacques,’ Anne Madeleine said. ‘You gave that bull something to think about. He’ll run and hide when he sees you again.’

His mother said, ‘I wish I had a husband.’

NO ONE HAD LOOKED at his nose much before the incident, so no one could say whether a noble feature had been impaired. But the place scarred badly where the bull’s horn had ripped up his face. The line of damage ran down the side of his cheek, and intruded a purple-brown spur into his upper lip.

The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.

When he was ten years old his mother married again. He was Jean Recordain, a merchant from the town; he was a widower, with one (quiet) boy to bring up. He had a few little eccentricities, but she thought they would do very well together. Georges went to school, a small local affair. He soon found that he could learn anything without the least trouble, so he did not allow school to impinge on his life. One day he was walked on by a herd of pigs. Cuts and bruises resulted, another scar or two hidden by his thick wiry hair.

‘That’s positively the last time I’ll be trampled on by any animal,’ he said. ‘Four-legged or two-legged.’

‘Please God it may be,’ his stepfather said piously.

A YEAR PASSED. One day he collapsed suddenly, with a burning fever, chattering teeth. He coughed sputum stained with blood, and a scraping, crackling noise came from his chest, quite audible to anyone in the room. ‘Lungs possibly not too good,’ the leech said. ‘All those ribs driven into them at frequent intervals. Sorry, my dear. Better fetch the priest.’

The priest came. He gave him the last rites. But the boy failed to die that night. Three days later he still clung to a comatose half-life. His sister Marie-Cécile organized a cycle of prayers; she took the hardest shift, two o’clock in the morning till dawn. The parlour filled up with relations, sitting around trying to say the right thing. There were yawning silences, broken by the desperate sound of everyone speaking at once. News of each breath was relayed from room to room.

On the fourth day he sat up, recognized his family. On the fifth day he cracked jokes, and demanded food in quantity.

He was pronounced out of danger.

They had planned to open the grave, and bury him beside his father. The coffin, which they had put in an outhouse, had to be sent back. Luckily, they had only put a deposit on it.

When Georges-Jacques was convalescent, his stepfather made an expedition to Troyes. Upon his return, he announced that he had found the boy a place in the minor seminary.

‘You dolt,’ his wife said. ‘Confess it, you just want him out of the house.’

‘How can I give my time to my inventions?’ Recordain asked reasonably. ‘I’m living on a battlefield. If it’s not stamping pigs it’s crackling lungs. Who else goes in the river in November? Who else goes in it at all? People in Arcis have no need to know how to swim. The boy’s above himself.’

‘Perhaps he could be a priest, after all,’ Madame said, conciliatory.

‘Oh yes,’ Uncle Camus said. ‘I can just see him ministering to his flock. Perhaps they’ll send him on a Crusade.’

‘I don’t know where he gets his brains from,’ Madame said. ‘There’s no brains in the family.’

‘Thanks,’ her brother said.

‘Of course, just because he goes to the seminary it doesn’t mean he has to be a priest. There’s the law. We’ve got law in the family.’

‘And if he disliked the verdict? The mind recoils.’

‘Anyway,’ Madame said, ‘let me keep him at home for a year or two, Jean. He’s my only son. He’s a comfort to me.’

‘Whatever makes you happy,’ Jean Recordain said. He was a mild, easy-going man who pleased his wife by doing exactly as she told him; much of his time nowadays he spent in an outlying farm building where he was inventing a machine for spinning cotton. He said it would change the world.

His stepson was fourteen years old when he removed his noisy and overgrown presence to the ancient cathedral city of Troyes. Troyes was an orderly town. The livestock had a sense of its lowly place in the universe, and the Fathers did not allow swimming. There seemed an outside chance that he would survive.

Later, when he looked back on his childhood, he always described it as extraordinarily happy.

IN A THINNER, greyer, more northerly light, a wedding is celebrated. It is 2 January, and the sparse, cold congregation are able to wish each other the compliments of the season.

Jacqueline Carraut’s love affair occupied the spring and summer of 1757, and by Michaelmas she knew she was pregnant. She never made mistakes. Or only big ones, she thought.

Because her lover had now cooled towards her, because her father was a choleric man, she let out the bodices of her dresses, and kept herself very quietly. When she sat at her father’s table and could not eat, she shovelled the food down to the terrier who sat by her skirts. Advent came.

‘If you had told me earlier,’ her lover said, ‘we would have only had the row about a brewer’s daughter marrying into the de Robespierre family. But now, the way you’re swelling up, we have a scandal as well.’

‘A love child,’ Jacqueline said. She was not romantic by nature, but she felt the posture forced upon her. She held up her chin as she stood at the altar, and looked the family in the eye all day. Her own family, that is; the de Robespierre family stayed at home.

François was twenty-six years old. He was the rising star of the local barrister’s association and one of the district’s most coveted bachelors. The de Robespierre family had been in the Arras district for three hundred years. They had no money, and they were very proud. Jacqueline was amazed by the household into which she was received. In her father’s house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. The de Robespierres were polite to each other, and ate thin soup.

Thinking of her, as they did, as a robust, common sort of girl, they ladled huge watery platefuls in her direction. They even offered her father’s beer. But Jacqueline was not robust. She was sick and frail. A good thing she had married into gentility, people said spitefully. There was no work to be got out of her. She was just a little china ornament, a piece of porcelain, her narrow shape distorted by the coming child.

François had stood before the priest and done his duty; but once he met her body between the sheets, he felt again the original, visceral passion. He was drawn to the new heart that beat in her side, to the primitive curve of her ribs. He was awed by her translucent skin, by the skin inside her wrists which showed greenish marble veins. He was drawn by her myopic green eyes, wide-open eyes that could soften or sharpen like the eyes of a cat. When she spoke, her phrases were like little claws, sinking in.

‘They have that salty soup in their veins,’ she said. ‘If you cut them, they would bleed good manners. Tomorrow, thank God, we shall be in our own house.’

It was an embarrassed, embattled winter. François’s two sisters hovered about, taking messages and being afraid of saying too much. Jacqueline’s child, a boy, was born on 6 May, at two in the morning. Later that day, the family met at the font. François’s father stood godparent, so the baby was named after him, Maximilien. It was a good, old, family name, he told Jacqueline’s mother; it was a good, old family to which her daughter now belonged.

There were three more children of this marriage within the next five years. The time came to Jacqueline when sickness, then fear, then pain, was her natural condition. She did not remember any other kind of life.

THAT DAY AUNT EULALIE read them a story. It was called ‘The Fox and the Cat’. She read very quickly, snapping the pages over. It is called not giving your full attention, he thought. If you were a child they would smack you for it. And this book was his favourite.

She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. Disregarded, he slid down on to the floor, and played with the bit of lace at her cuff. His mother could make lace.

He was full of foreboding; never was he allowed to sit on the floor (wearing out your good clothes).

His aunt broke off in the middle of sentences, to listen. Upstairs, Jacqueline was dying. Her children did not know this yet.

They had evicted the midwife, for she had done no good. She was in the kitchen now eating cheese, scraping the rind with relish, frightening the servant-girl with precedents. They had sent for the surgeon; at the top of the stairs, François argued with him. Aunt Eulalie sprang up and closed the door, but you could still hear them. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady’s hand to Augustin’s cradle, rocking, rocking.

‘I see no way to deliver her,’ the man said, ‘except by cutting.’ He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. ‘I might save the child.’

‘Save her,’ François said.

‘If I do nothing, they’ll both die.’

‘You can kill it, but save her.’

Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle, and Augustin cried at the jolt. Lucky Augustin, already born.

They were arguing now – the surgeon impatient at the layman’s slow comprehension. ‘Then I might as well fetch the butcher,’ François shouted.

Aunt Eulalie stood up, and the book slipped out of her fingers, slithered down her skirt, fell and opened itself on the floor. She ran up the stairs: ‘For Jesus’ sake. Your voices. The children.’

The pages fanned over – the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. Maximilien picked it up and straightened the bent corners of the pages. He put his sister’s fat hands on the cradle. ‘Like this,’ he said, rocking.

She raised her face, with its slack infant mouth. ‘Why?’

Aunt Eulalie passed him without seeing him, perspiration broken out along her upper lip. His feet pattered on the stairs. His father was folded into a chair, crying, his arm thrown over his eyes. The surgeon was looking in his bag. ‘My forceps,’ he said. ‘I shall make the attempt, at least. The technique is sometimes efficacious.’

The child pushed the door just a little, making a gap to slip in. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields. There was a good fire, and logs lay ready in a basket. The heat was close and visible. His mother’s body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. She turned to him just her eyes, not her head, and the threadbare remnants of a smile. The skin around her mouth was grey.

Soon, it seemed to say, you and I shall part.

When he had seen this he turned away. At the door he raised a hand to her, a feeble adult gesture of solidarity. Outside the door the surgeon had taken off his topcoat and stood with it over his arm, waiting for someone to take it away from him and hang it up. ‘If you had called me a few hours ago …’ the surgeon remarked, to no one in particular. François’s chair was empty. It seemed he had left the house.

The priest arrived. ‘If the head would emerge,’ he said, ‘I should baptise it.’

‘If the head would emerge our troubles would be over,’ the surgeon said.

‘Or any limb,’ the priest said hopefully. ‘The church countenances it.’

Eulalie passed back into the room. The heat billowed out as she opened the door. ‘Can it be good for her? There is no air.’

‘Chills are disastrous,’ the surgeon said. ‘Though anyway –’

‘Extreme Unction, then,’ the priest suggested. ‘I hope there is a convenient table.’

He took out of his bag a white altar cloth, and delved in again for his candles. The grace of God, portable, brought to your hearth and home.

The surgeon’s eyes roamed around the stairhead. ‘Get that child away,’ he said.

Eulalie gathered him into her arms: the love child. As she carried him downstairs the fabric of her dress chafed his cheek, made a tiny sound of rasping.

Eulalie lined them up by the front door. ‘Your gloves,’ she said. ‘Your hats.’

‘It’s warm,’ he said. ‘We don’t really need our gloves.’

‘Nevertheless,’ she insisted. Her face seemed to quiver.

The wet-nurse pushed past them, the baby Augustin tossed against her shoulder, held with one hand as if he were a sack. ‘Five in six years,’ she said to Eulalie, ‘what can you expect? Her luck’s run out, that’s all.’

They went to Grandfather Carraut’s. Later that day Aunt Eulalie came, and said that they must pray for their baby brother. Grandmother Carraut mouthed, ‘Christened?’ Aunt Eulalie shook her head. She cast an eye down at the children, a can’t-say-too-much look. She mouthed back at Grandmother: ‘Born dead.’

He shuddered. Aunt Eulalie bent down to kiss him. ‘When can I go home?’ he said.

Eulalie said, ‘You’ll be all right with Grandmother for a few days, till your mother’s feeling better.’

But he remembered the grey flesh around her mouth. He understood what her mouth had said to him: soon I shall be in my coffin and soon I shall be buried.

He wondered why they told lies in this way.

He counted the days. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette went to and fro. They said, aren’t you going to ask us how your mother is today? Aunt Henriette said to Grandmother, ‘Maximilien doesn’t ask how his mother is.’

Grandmother replied, ‘He’s a chilly little article.’

He counted the days until they decided to tell the truth. Nine days passed. It was breakfast time. When they were having their bread and milk, Grandmother came in.

‘You must be very brave,’ she said. ‘Your mother has gone to live with Jesus.’

Baby Jesus, he thought. He said, ‘I know.’

When this happened, he was six. A white curtain fluttered in the breeze from the open window, sparrows fussed on the sill; God the Father, trailing clouds of glory, looked down from a picture on the wall.

THEN IN A DAY OR TWO, sister Charlotte pointing to the coffin; his smaller sister Henriette grumbling in a corner, fractious and disregarded.

‘I will read to you,’ he told Charlotte. ‘But not that animal book. It is too childish for me.’

Later the grown-up Henriette, who was his aunt, lifted him up to look in the coffin before it was closed. She was shaking, and said over his head, ‘I didn’t want to show him, it was Grandfather Carraut who said it must be done.’ He understood very well that it was his mother, the hatchet-nosed corpse with its terrifying paper hands.

Aunt Eulalie ran out into the street. She said, ‘François, I beg of you.’ Maximilien ran after her, grabbing at her skirts; he saw how his father did not once turn back. François strode down the street, off into the town. Aunt Eulalie towed the child with her, back into the house. ‘He has to sign the death certificate,’ she said. ‘He says he won’t put his name to it. What are we going to do?’

Next day, François came back. He smelled of brandy and Grandfather Carraut said it was obvious he had been with a woman.

During the next few months François began to drink heavily. He neglected his clients, and they went elsewhere. He would disappear for days at a time; one day he packed a bag, and said he was going for good.

They said – Grandmother and Grandfather Carraut – that they had never liked him. They said, we have no quarrel with the de Robespierres, they are decent people, but him, he is not a decent person. At first they kept up the fiction that he was engaged in a lengthy and prestigious case in another city. He did return from time to time, drifting in, usually to borrow money. The elder de Robespierres – ‘at our time of life’ – did not feel they could give his children a home. Grandfather Carraut took the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette, who were unmarried, said they would take the little girls.

At some point during his childhood, Maximilien found out, or was told, that he had been conceived out of wedlock. Possibly he put the worst construction on his family circumstances, because during the rest of his life he never mentioned his parents at all.

IN 1768 FRANÇOIS de Robespierre turned up in Arras after an absence of two years. He said he had been abroad, but he did not say where, or how he had lived. He went over to Grandfather Carraut’s house, and asked to see his son. Maximilien stood in a passageway and heard them shouting from behind a closed door.

‘You say you have never got over it,’ Grandfather Carraut said. ‘But have you stopped to ask your son whether he has got over it? The child is her image, he’s not strong; she was not strong; you knew that when you forced yourself on her after each childbirth. It’s only thanks to me that they have any clothes to their backs and are growing up Christians.’

His father came out and found him and said, he’s thin, he’s small for his age. He spent a few minutes talking to him in a strained and embarrassed way. Leaving, he bent down to kiss him on the forehead. His breath was sour. The love child jerked his head back, with an adult expression of distaste. François seemed disappointed. Perhaps he wanted a hug, a kiss, to swing his son around in the air?

Afterwards the child, who had learned to measure out sparingly his stronger emotions, wondered if he ought to be sorry. He asked his grandfather, ‘Did my father come to see me?’

The old man grumbled as he moved away. ‘He came to borrow money again. Grow up.’

Maximilien gave his grandparents no trouble at all. You would hardly know he was in the house, they said. He was interested in reading and in keeping doves in a cote in the garden. The little girls were brought over on Sundays, and they played together. He let them stroke – very gently, with one finger – the doves’ quivering backs.

They begged for one of the doves, to take home and keep for themselves. I know you, he said, you’ll be tired of it within a day or two, you have to take care of them, they’re not dolls you know. They wouldn’t give up: Sunday after Sunday, bleating and whining. In the end he was persuaded. Aunt Eulalie bought a pretty gilt cage.

Within a few weeks the dove was dead. They had left the cage outside, there had been a storm. He imagined the little bird dashing itself in panic against the bars, its wings broken, the thunder rolling overhead. When Charlotte told him she hiccupped and sobbed with remorse; but in five minutes, he knew, she would run out into the sunshine and forget it. ‘We put the cage outside so he would feel free,’ she sniffed.

‘He was not a free bird. He was a bird that needed looking after. I told you. I was right.’

But his rightness gave him no pleasure. It left a bitter taste in his mouth.

His grandfather said that when he was old enough he would take him into the business. He escorted the child around the brewery, to look at the various operations and speak with the men. The boy took only a polite interest. His grandfather said that, as he was more bookish than practical, he might like to be a priest. ‘Augustin can go into the business,’ he said. ‘Or it can be sold. I’m not sentimental. There are other trades than brewing.’

When Maximilien was ten years old, the Abbot of Saint-Waast was induced to interest himself in the family. He interviewed Maximilien in person, and did not quite take to him. Despite his self-effacing manner, he seemed basically contemptuous of the Abbot’s opinions, as if he had his mind on higher things and plenty of tasks to engage him elsewhere. However, it seemed clear that he had a good brain going to waste. The Abbot went so far as to think that his misfortunes were not his fault. He was a child for whom one might do something; he had been three years at school in Arras, and his teachers were full of praise for his progress and industry.

The Abbot arranged a scholarship. When he said, ‘I will do something for you,’ he did not mean a mere trifle. It was to be Louis-le-Grand, the best school in the country, where the sons of the aristocracy were educated – a school that looked out for talent, too, and where a boy with no fortune might get on. So the Abbot said: moreover, he enjoined furious hard work, abject obedience, unfailing gratitude.

Maximilien said to his Aunt Henriette, ‘When I go away, you will have to write me letters.’

‘Of course.’

‘And Charlotte and Henriette are to write me letters, please.’

‘I’ll see they do.’

‘In Paris I shall have a lot of new friends, as well.’

‘I expect so.’

‘And when I am grown up I will be able to provide for my sisters and my brother. No one else will have to do it.’

‘What about your old aunts?’

‘You too. We’ll get a big house together. We won’t have any quarrels at all.’

Fat chance, she thought. She wondered: ought he to go? At twelve he was still such a small boy, so softly spoken and unobtrusive; she was afraid he would be overlooked altogether once he left his grandfather’s house.

But no – of course he had to go. These chances are few and far between; we have to get on in this world, no good to be done by clinging to women’s apron strings. He made her think of his mother, sometimes; he had those sea-coloured eyes, that seemed to trap and hold the light. I never disliked the girl, she thought. She had a feeling heart, Jacqueline.

During the summer of 1769 he studied to advance his Latin and Greek. He arranged about the care of the doves with a neighbour’s daughter, a little girl slightly older than himself. In October, he went away.

IN GUISE, under the de Viefville eye, Maître Desmoulins’s career had advanced. He became a magistrate. In the evenings after supper he and Madeleine sat looking at each other. Money was always short.

In 1767 – when Armand was able to walk, and Anne-Clothilde was the baby of the household – Jean-Nicolas said to his wife:

‘Camille ought to go away to school, you know.’

Camille was now seven years old. He continued to follow his father about the house, talking incessantly in a de Viefville fashion and rubbishing his opinions.

‘He had better go to Cateau-Cambrésis,’ Jean-Nicolas said, ‘and be with his little cousins. It’s not far away.’

Madeleine had a great deal to do. The eldest girl was persistently sick, servants took advantage and the household budget required time-consuming economies. Jean-Nicolas exacted all this from her; on top of it, he wanted her to pay attention to his feelings.

‘Isn’t he a bit young to be taking the weight of your unfulfilled ambitions?’ she inquired.

For the souring of Jean-Nicolas had begun. He had disciplined himself out of his daydreams. In a few years’ time, young hopefuls at the Guise Bar would ask him, why have you been content with such a confined stage for your undoubted talents, Monsieur? And he would snap at them that his own province was good enough for him, and ought to be good enough for them too.

THEY SENT CAMILLE to Cateau-Cambrésis in October. Just before Christmas they received an effusive letter from the principal describing the astonishing progress that Camille had made. Jean-Nicolas waved it at his wife. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he said. ‘I knew it was the right thing to do.’

But Madeleine was disturbed by the letter. ‘It is as if,’ she said, ‘they are saying, “How attractive and intelligent your child is, even though he has only one leg.”’

Jean-Nicolas took this to be a witticism. Only the day before Madeleine had told him that he had no imagination and no sense of humour.

A little later the child arrived home. He had developed an appalling speech impediment, and could hardly be persuaded to say anything at all. Madeleine locked herself in her room and had her meals sent up. Camille said that the Fathers had been very kind to him and opined that it was his own fault. His father said, to cheer him, that it was not a fault but an inconvenience. Camille insisted that he was obscurely blameworthy, and asked coldly on what date it would be possible to return to school, since at school they did not worry about it and did not discuss it all the time. Jean-Nicolas contacted Cateau-Cambrésis in a belligerent mood to ask why his son had developed a stutter. The priests said he came with it, and Jean-Nicolas said he assuredly did not leave home with it; and it was concluded that Camille’s fluency of speech lay discarded along the coach-route, like a valise or a pair of gloves that has gone astray. No one was to blame; it was one of those things that happen.

In the year 1770, when Camille was ten years old, the priests advised his father to remove him from the school, since they were unable to give him the attention his progress merited. Madeleine said, ‘Perhaps we could get him a private tutor. Someone really first-class.’

‘Are you mad?’ her husband shouted at her. ‘Do you think I’m a duke? Do you think I’m an English cotton baron? Do you think I have a coal mine? Do you think I have serfs?’

‘No,’ his wife said. ‘I know what you are. I’ve no illusions left.’

It was a de Viefville who provided the solution. ‘To be sure,’ he said, ‘it would be a pity to let your clever little boy come to nothing for the want of a little cash. After all,’ he said rudely, ‘you yourself are never going to set the world ablaze.’ He ruminated. ‘He’s a charming child. We suppose he’ll grow out of the stutter. We must think of scholarships. If we could get him into Louis-le-Grand the expense to the family would be trifling.’

‘They’d take him, would they?’

‘From what I hear, he’s extraordinarily bright. When he is called to the Bar, he will be quite an ornament to the family. Look, next time my brother’s in Paris, I’ll get him to exert himself on your behalf. Can I say more?’

LIFE EXPECTANCY in France has now increased to almost twenty-nine years.

THE COLLÈGE Louis-le-Grand was an old foundation. It had once been run by Jesuits, but when they were expelled from France it was taken over by the Oratorians, a more enlightened order. Its alumni were celebrated if diverse; Voltaire, now in honoured exile, had studied there and Monsieur the Marquis de Sade, now holed up in one of his châteaux while his wife worked for the commutation of a sentence passed on him recently for poisoning and buggery.

The Collège stood on the rue Saint-Jacques, cut off from the city by high solid walls and iron gates. It was not the custom to heat the place, unless ice formed on the holy water in the chapel font; so in winter it was usual to go out early to harvest some icicles and drop them in, and hope that the principal would stretch a point. The rooms were swept by piercing draughts, and by gusts of subdued chatter in dead languages.

Maximilien de Robespierre had been there for a year now.

When he had first arrived he had been told that he would want to work hard, for the Abbot’s sake, since it was to the Abbot he owed this great opportunity. He had been told that if he were homesick, it would pass. Upon his arrival he sat down to make a note of everything he had seen on the journey, because then he would have done his duty to it, and need not carry it around in his head. Verbs conjugated in Paris just as they did in Artois. If you kept your mind on the verbs, everything would fall into place around them. He followed every lesson with close attention. His teachers were quite kind to him. He made no friends.

One day a senior pupil approached him, propelling in front of him a small child. ‘Here, Thing,’ the boy said. (They had this affectation of forgetting his name.)

Maximilien stopped dead. He didn’t immediately turn around. ‘You want me?’ he said. Quite pleasant-offensive; he knew how to do that.

‘I want you to keep your eye on this infant they have unaccountably sent. He is from your part of the country – Guise, I believe.’

Maximilien thought: these ignorant Parisians think it is all the same. Quietly, he said, ‘Guise is in PICARDY. I come from ARRAS. ARRAS is in ARTOIS.’

‘Well, it’s of no consequence, is it? I hope you can take time from your reputedly very advanced studies to help him find his way about.’

‘All right,’ Maximilien said. He swung around to look at the so-called infant. He was a very pretty child, very dark.

‘Where is it you want to find your way to?’ he asked.

Just then Father Herivaux came shivering along the corridor. He stopped. ‘Ah, you have arrived, Camille Desmoulins,’ he said.

Father Herivaux was a distinguished classicist. He made a point of knowing everything. Scholarship didn’t keep the autumn chills out; and there was so much worse to come.

‘And I believe that you are only ten years old,’ Father said.

The child looked up at him and nodded.

‘And that altogether you are very advanced for your years?’

‘Yes,’ said the child. ‘That’s right.’

Father Herivaux bit his lip. He scurried on. Maximilien removed the spectacles he was obliged to wear, and rubbed the corners of his eyes. ‘Try “Yes, Father,”’ he suggested. ‘They expect it. Don’t nod at them, they tend to resent it. Also, when he asked you if you were clever, you should have been more modest about it. You know – “I try my best, Father.” That sort of thing.’

‘Groveller, are you, Thing?’ the little boy said.

‘Look, it’s just an idea. I’m only giving you the benefit of my experience.’ He put his glasses back on. The child’s large dark eyes swam into his. For a moment he thought of the dove, trapped in its cage. He had the feel of the feathers on his hands, soft and dead: the little bones without pulse. He brushed his hand down his coat.

The child had a stutter. It made him uneasy. In fact there was something about the whole situation that upset him. He felt that the modus vivendi he had achieved was under threat; that life would become more complicated, and that his affairs had taken a turn for the worse.

WHEN HE RETURNED to Arras for the summer holiday, Charlotte said, ‘You don’t grow much, do you?’

Same thing she said, year after year.

His teachers held him in esteem. No flair, they said; but he always tells the truth.

He was not quite sure what his fellow pupils thought of him. If you asked him what sort of a person he thought he was, he would tell you he was able, sensitive, patient and deficient in charm. But as for how this estimate might have differed from that of the people around him – well, how can you be sure that the thoughts in your head have ever been thought by anyone else?

He did not have many letters from home. Charlotte sent quite often a neat childish record of small concerns. He kept her letters for a day or two, read them twice; then, not knowing what to do with them, threw them away.

Camille Desmoulins had letters twice a week, huge letters; they became a public entertainment. He explained that he had first been sent away to school when he was seven years old, and as a consequence knew his family better on paper than he did in real life. The episodes were like chapters of a novel, and as he read them aloud for the general recreation, his friends began to think of his family as ‘characters’. Sometimes the whole group would be seized by pointless hilarity at some phrase such as ‘Your mother hopes you have been to confession’, and would repeat it to each other for days with tears of merriment in their eyes. Camille explained that his father was writing an Encyclopaedia of Law. He thought that the only purpose of the project was to excuse his father from conversing with his mother in the evenings. He ventured the suggestion that his father shut himself away with the Encyclopaedia, and then read what Father Proyart, the deputy principal, called ‘bad books’.

Camille replied to these letters in page after page of his formless handwriting. He was keeping the correspondence so that it could be published later.

‘Try to learn this truth, Maximilien,’ Father Herivaux said: ‘most people are lazy, and will take you at your own valuation. Make sure the valuation you put on yourself is high.’

For Camille this had never been a problem. He had the knack of getting himself into the company of the older, well-connected pupils, of making himself in some way fashionable. He was taken up by Stanislas Fréron, who was five years older, who was named after his godfather, the King of Poland. Fréron’s family was rich and learned, his uncle a noted foe of Voltaire. At six years old he had been taken to Versailles, where he had recited a poem for Mesdames Adelaide, Sophie and Victoire, the old King’s daughters; they had made a fuss of him and given him sweets. Fréron said to Camille, ‘When you are older I will take you about in society, and make your career.’

Was Camille grateful? Hardly at all. He poured scorn on Fréron’s ideas. He started to call him ‘Rabbit’. Fréron was incubating sensitivity. He would stand in front of a mirror to scrutinize his face, to see if his teeth stuck out or if he looked timid.

Then there was Louis Suleau, an ironical sort of boy, who smiled when the young aristocrats denigrated the status quo. It is an education, he said, to watch people mine the ground under their own feet. There will be a war in our lifetime, he told Camille, and you and I will be on different sides. So let us be fond of each other, while we may.

Camille said to Father Herivaux, ‘I will not go to confession any more. If you force me to go, I will pretend to be someone else. I will make up someone else’s sins and confess them.’

‘Be reasonable,’ Father Herivaux said. ‘When you’re sixteen, then you can throw over your faith. That’s the right age for doing it.’

But by the time he was sixteen Camille had a new set of derelictions. Maximilien de Robespierre endured small daily agonies of apprehension. ‘How do you get out?’ he asked.

‘It isn’t the Bastille, you know. Sometimes you can talk your way out. Or climb over the wall. Shall I show you where? No, you would rather not know.’

Inside the walls there is a reasoning intellectual community. Outside, beasts file past the iron gates. It is as if human beings have been caged, while outside wild animals range about and perform human occupations. The city stinks of wealth and corruption; beggars sit in roadside filth, the executioner carries out public tortures, there are beatings and robberies in broad daylight. What Camille finds outside the walls excites and appals him. It is a benighted city, he said, forgotten by God; a place of insidious spiritual depravity, with an Old Testament future. The society to which Fréron proposed to introduce him is some huge poisonous organism limping to its death; people like you, he said to Maximilien, are the only fit people to run a country.

Camille also said, ‘Wait until Father Proyart is appointed principal. Then we shall all be stamped into the ground.’ His eyes were alight at the prospect.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought: that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

BUT, AS IT HAPPENED, Father Proyart was passed over. The new principal was Father Poignard d’Enthienloye, a relaxed, liberal, talented man. He was alarmed at the spirit that had got about among his charges.

‘Father Proyart says you have a “set”,’ he told Maximilien. ‘He says you are all anarchists and puritans.’

‘Father Proyart doesn’t like me,’ Maximilien said. ‘And I think he overstates the case.’

‘Of course he overstates it. Must we plod? I have to read my office in half an hour.’

‘Are we puritans? He ought to be glad.’

‘If you talked about women all the time he would know what to do, but he says that all you talk about is politics.’

‘Yes,’ Maximilien said. He was willing to give reasonable consideration to the problems of his elders. ‘He is afraid that the high walls don’t keep American ideas out. He’s right, of course.’

‘Each generation has its passions. A schoolmaster sees them. At times I think our system is wholly ill-advised. We take away your childhoods, we force your ideas in this hothouse air; then we winter you in a climate of despotism.’ Delivered of this, the priest sighed; his metaphors depressed him.

Maximilien thought for a moment about running the brewery; very little classical education would be required. ‘You think it is better if people’s hopes are not raised?’ he said.

‘I think it is a pity that we bring on your talents, then say to you

’ the priest held his palm up – ‘this far, but no further. We cannot provide a boy like you with the privileges of birth and wealth.’

‘Yes, well.’ The boy smiled, a small but genuine smile. ‘This point had not escaped me.’

The principal could not understand Father Proyart’s prejudices against this boy. He was not aggressive, did not seem to want to get the better of you. ‘So what will you do, Maximilien? I mean, what do you intend?’ He knew that under the terms of his scholarship the boy must take his degree in medicine, theology or jurisprudence. ‘I gather it was thought you might go into the Church.’

‘Other people thought so.’ Maximilien’s tone was very respectful, the principal thought; he offers a due deference to the opinions of others, then takes no notice of them at all. ‘My father had a legal practice, once. I hope to pick it up. I have to go home. I am the eldest, you see.’

The priest knew this, of course; knew that unwilling relatives doled out a pittance for what the scholarship did not provide, so that the boy must always be acutely conscious of his social standing. Last year the bursar had to arrange for him to be bought a new topcoat. ‘A career in your own province,’ he said. ‘Will this be enough for you?’

‘Oh, I’ll move within my sphere.’ Sardonic? Perhaps. ‘But Father, you were worrying about the moral tone of the place. Don’t you want to have this conversation with Camille? He’s much more entertaining on the topic of moral tone.’

‘I deplore this convention of the single name,’ the priest said. ‘As if he were famous. Does he mean to go through life with only one name? I have no good opinion of your friend. And do not tell me you are not his keeper.’

‘I’m afraid I am, you see.’ He thought. ‘But come, Father, surely you do have a good opinion of him?’

The priest laughed. ‘Father Proyart says that you are not just puritans and anarchists, but strikers of poses too. Precious, self-conscious … this is the Suleau boy as well. But I see that you are not like that.’

‘You think I should just be myself?’

‘Why not?’

‘I usually feel some greater effort is called for.’ Later, putting down his breviary, the priest brooded over the interview. He thought, this child will just be unhappy. He will go back to his province, and he will never amount to anything.

THE YEAR NOW is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.

Camille Desmoulins, 1793: ‘They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer.’

Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: ‘History is fiction.’

II. Corpse-Candle
(1774–1780)

JUST AFTER EASTER, King Louis XV caught smallpox. From the cradle his life had been thronged by courtiers; his rising in the morning was a ceremony governed by complex and rigid etiquette, and when he dined he dined in public, hundreds filing past to gape at every mouthful. Each bowel movement, each sex act, each breath a matter for public comment: and then his death.

He had to break off the hunt, and was brought to the palace weak and feverish. He was sixty-four, and from the outset they rather thought he would die. When the rash appeared he lay shaking with fear, because he himself knew he would die and go to Hell.

The Dauphin and his wife stayed in their own rooms, afraid of contagion. When the blisters suppurated the windows and doors were flung wide open, but the stench was unbearable. The rotting body was turned over to the doctors and priests for the last hours. The carriage of Mme du Barry, the last of the Mistresses, rolled out of Versailles for ever, and only then, when she had gone and he felt quite alone, would the priests give him absolution. He sent for her, was told she had already left. ‘Already,’ he said.

The Court had assembled, to wait events, in the huge antechamber known as the Œil de Boeuf. On 10 May, at a quarter past three in the afternoon, a lighted taper in the window of the sickroom was snuffed out.

Then suddenly a noise exploded like thunder from a clear sky – the rush, the shuffle, the tramp of hundreds of feet. Of blank and single mind, the Court charged out of the Œil de Boeuf and through the Grand Galerie to find the new King.

THE NEW KING is nineteen years old; his consort, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, is a year younger. The King is a large, pious, conscientious boy, phlegmatic, devoted to hunting and the pleasures of the table; he is said to be incapable, by reason of a painfully tight foreskin, of indulging the pleasures of the flesh. The Queen is a selfish little girl, strong-willed and ill-educated. She is fair, fresh-complexioned, pretty because at eighteen almost all girls are pretty; but her large-chinned Hapsburg hauteur is already beginning to battle with the advantages conferred by silk, diamonds and ignorance.

Hopes for the new reign run high. On the statue of the great Henri IV, the hand of an unknown optimist writes ‘Resurrexit’.

WHEN THE LIEUTENANT of Police goes to his desk – today, last year, every year – the first piece of information he requires concerns the price of a loaf in the bakers’ shops of Paris. If Les Halles is well supplied with flour, then the bakers of the city and the faubourgs will satisfy their customers, and the thousand itinerant bakers will bring their bread in to the markets in the Marais, in Saint-Paul, in the Palais-Royal and in Les Halles itself.

In easy times, a loaf of brown bread costs eight or nine sous. A general labourer, who is paid by the day, can expect to earn twenty sous; a mason might get forty sous, a skilled locksmith or a joiner might get fifty. Items for the budget: rent money, candles, cooking fat, vegetables, wine. Meat is for special occasions. Bread is the main concern.

The supply lines are tight, precise, monitored. What the bakers have left over at the end of the day must be sold off cheap; the destitute do not eat till night falls on the markets.

All goes well; but then when the harvest fails – in 1770, say, or in 1772 or 1774 – an inexorable price rise begins; in the autumn of 1774, a four-pound loaf in Paris costs eleven sous, but by the following spring the price is up to fourteen. Wages do not rise. The building workers are always turbulent, so are the weavers, so are the bookbinders and (poor souls) the hatters, but strikes are seldom to procure a wage rise, usually to resist a cut. Not the strike but the bread riot is the most familiar resort of the urban working man, and thus the temperature and rainfall over some distant cornfield connects directly with the tension headaches of the Lieutenant of Police.

Whenever there is a shortage of grain, the people cry, ‘A famine pact!’ They blame speculators and stockpilers. The millers, they say, are conspiring to starve the locksmiths, the hatters, the bookbinders and their children. Now, in the seventies, the advocates of economic reform will introduce free trade in grain, so that the most deprived regions of the country will have to compete in the open market. But a little riot or two, and on go the controls again. In 1770, the Abbé Terray, the Comptroller-General of Finance, acted very quickly to reimpose price controls, levies, restrictions on the movement of grain. He sought no opinions, just acted by royal decree. ‘Despotism!’ cried those who had eaten that day.

Bread is the main thing to understand: the staple of speculation, the food for all theories about what happens next. Fifteen years from now, on the day the Bastille falls, the price of bread in Paris will be at its highest in sixty years. Twenty years from now (when it is all over), a woman of the capital will say: ‘Under Robespierre, blood flowed, but the people had bread. Perhaps in order to have bread, it is necessary to spill a little blood.’

THE KING CALLED to the ministry a man named Turgot, to be Comptroller-General of Finance. Turgot was forty-eight years old, a new man, a rationalist, a disciple of laissez-faire. He was energetic, bursting with ideas, full of the reforms he said must be made if the country was to survive. In his own opinion, he was the man of the hour. One of his first actions was to ask for cuts in expenditure at Versailles. The Court was shocked. Malesherbes, a member of the King’s Household, advised the minister to move with greater caution; he was making too many enemies. ‘The needs of the people are enormous,’ Turgot replied brusquely, ‘and in my family we die at fifty.’

In the spring of 1775 there was widespread rioting in market towns, especially in Picardy. At Versailles, eight thousand townspeople gathered at the palace and stood hopefully gazing up at the royal windows. As always, they thought that the personal intervention of the King could solve all their problems. The Governor of Versailles promised that the price of wheat in the town would be pegged. The new King was brought out to address the people from a balcony. They then dispersed without violence.

In Paris, mobs looted the bakers on the Left Bank. The police made a few arrests, playing the situation softly, avoiding clashes. There were 162 prosecutions. Two looters, one a boy of sixteen, were hanged in the Place de Grève. May 11, 3 p.m.; it served as an example.

IN JULY 1775, it was arranged that the young King and his lovely Queen would pay a visit to the Collège Louis-le-Grand. Such a visit was traditional after coronations; but they would not stay or linger, for they had more entertaining things to do. It was planned that they should be met, with their retinue, at the main gate, that they should descend from their carriage, and that the school’s most industrious and meritorious pupil would read them a loyal address. When the day came, the weather was not fine.

An hour and a half before the guests could reasonably be expected, the students and staff assembled at the rue Saint-Jacques gate. A posse of officials turned up on horseback, and pushed them back and rearranged them, none too gently. The scanty spots of rain became a steady drizzle. Then came the attendants and bodyguards and persons-in-waiting; by the time they had disposed themselves everyone was cold and wet, and had stopped jockeying for position. No one remembered the last coronation, so nobody had any idea that it was all going to take so long. The students huddled in miserable groups, and shifted their feet, and waited. If anyone stepped out of line for a moment the officials jumped forward and shoved him back, flourishing weapons.

Finally the royal carriage drew up. People now stood on their toes and craned their necks, and the younger ones complained that it wasn’t fair that they couldn’t see a thing after waiting all this time. Father Poignard, the principal, approached and bowed. He began to say a few words he had prepared, in the direction of the royal conveyance.

The scholarship boy’s mouth felt dry. His hand shook a little. But because of the Latin, no one would detect his provincial accent.

The Queen bobbed out her lovely head and bobbed it in again. The King waved, and muttered something to a man in livery, who conveyed it by a sneer down a line of officials, who conveyed it by dumb show to the waiting world. All became clear; they would not descend. The address must be read to Their Majesties as they sit snug in the coach.

Father Poignard’s head was whirling. He should have had carpets, he should have had canopies, he should have had some kind of temporary pavilion erected, perhaps bedecked with green boughs in the fashionable rustic style, perhaps with the royal arms on display, or the monarchs’ entwined monograms made out of flowers. His expression grew wild, repentant, remote. Luckily, Father Herivaux remembered to give the nod to the scholarship boy.

The boy began, his voice gathering strength after the first few nervous phrases. Father Herivaux relaxed; he had written it, coached the boy. And he was satisfied, it sounded well.

The Queen was seen to shiver. ‘Ah!’ went the world. ‘She shivered!’ A half-second later, she stifled a yawn. The King turned, attentive. And what was this? The coachman was gathering the reins! The whole ponderous entourage stirred and creaked forward. They were going – the welcome not acknowledged, the address not half-read.

The scholarship boy did not seem to notice what was happening. He just went on orating. His face was set and pale, he was looking straight ahead. Surely he must know that by now they are driving down the street?

The air was loud with unvoiced sentiment. All term we’ve been planning this … The crush moved, aimlessly, on the spot. The rain was coming down harder now. It seemed rude to break ranks and dash for cover, yet no ruder than what the King and Queen had done, driving off like that, leaving Thing talking in the middle of the street …

Father Poignard said, ‘It’s nothing personal. It’s nothing we did, surely? Her Majesty was tired …’

‘Might as well talk to her in Japanese, I suppose,’ said the student at his elbow.

Father Poignard said, ‘Camille, for once you are right.’

The scholarship boy was now concluding his speech. Without a smile, he bid a fond and loyal goodbye to the monarchs who were no longer in sight, and hoped that the school would have the honour, at some future time …

A consoling hand dropped on his shoulder. ‘Never mind, de Robespierre, it could have happened to anybody.’

Then, at last, the scholarship boy smiled.

THAT WAS PARIS, July 1775. In Troyes, Georges-Jacques Danton was about half-way through his life. His relatives did not know this, of course. He was doing well at school, though you could not describe him as settled. His future was the subject of family discussion.

SO: IN TROYES one day, near the cathedral, a man was drawing portraits. He was trying to sketch the passers-by, throwing occasional glances at the sky and humming to himself. It was a catchy, popular air.

No one wanted to be sketched; they pushed past and bustled on. He did not seem put out – it seemed to be his proper occupation, on a fine and pleasant afternoon. He was a stranger – rather dandified, with a Parisian air. Georges-Jacques Danton stood in front of him. In fact, he hovered conspicuously. He wanted to look at the man’s work and to get into conversation. He talked to everyone, especially to strangers. He liked to know all about people’s lives.

‘Are you at leisure to be portrayed?’ The man did not look up; he was putting a fresh sheet of paper on his board.

The boy hesitated.

The artist said, ‘You’re a student, you’ve no money, I know. But you do have that face – sweet Jesus, haven’t you had a busy time? Never seen a set of scars quite like it. Just stay still while I do you in charcoal a couple of times, then you can have one of them.’

Georges-Jacques stood still to be drawn. He watched the man out of the corner of his eye. ‘Don’t talk,’ the artist said. ‘Just do me that terrifying frown – yes, just so – and I’ll talk to you. My name is Fabre, Fabre d’Églantine. Funny name, you say. Why d’Églantine? you ask. Well, since you ask – in the literary competition of 1771, I was awarded a wreath of eglantine by the Academy of Toulouse. A signal, coveted, memorable honour – don’t you think? Yes, quite right, I’d rather have had a small gold bar, but what can you do? My friends pressed me to add the suffix ‘d’Églantine’ to my own homely appellation, in commemoration of the event. Turn your head a little. No, the other way. So – you say – if this fellow is feted for his literary efforts, what is he doing making sketches in the street?’

‘I suppose you must be versatile,’ Georges-Jacques said.

‘Some of your local dignitaries invited me to read my work,’ Fabre said. ‘Didn’t work out, did it? I quarrelled with my patrons. No doubt you’ve heard of artists doing something of that sort.’

Georges-Jacques observed him, as best he could without turning his head. Fabre was a man in his mid-twenties, not tall, with unpowdered dark hair cut short. His coat was well-brushed but shiny at the cuffs; his linen was worn. Everything he said was both serious and not serious. Various experimental expressions chased themselves across his face.

Fabre chose another pencil. ‘Little to the left,’ he said. ‘Now, you say versatile – I am in fact a playwright, director, portraitist – as you see – and landscape painter; a composer and musician, poet and choreographer. I am an essayist on all subjects of public interest, and speak several languages. I should like to try my hand at landscape gardening, but no one will commission me. I have to say it – the world doesn’t seem to be ready for me. Until last week I was a travelling actor, but I have mislaid my troupe.’

He had finished. He threw his pencil down, screwed up his eyes and looked at his drawings, holding them both out at arms’ length. ‘There you are,’ he said, deciding. ‘That’s the better one, you keep it.’

Danton’s unlovely face stared back at him: the long scar, the bashed-in nose, the thick hair springing back from his forehead.

‘When you’re famous,’ he said, ‘this could be worth money.’ He looked up. ‘What happened to the other actors? Were you going to put on a play?’

He would have looked forward to it. Life was quiet; life was dull.

Quite abruptly, Fabre rose from his stool and made an obscene gesture in the direction of Bar-sur-Seine. ‘Two of our most applauded thespians mouldering in some village dungeon on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. Our leading lady impregnated months ago by some dismal rural wight, and now fit only for the most vulgar of low comedy roles. We have disbanded. Temporarily.’ He sat down again. ‘Now you –’ his eyes lit up with interest – ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to run away from home and become an actor?’

‘I don’t think so. My relatives are expecting me to become a priest.’

‘Oh, you want to leave that alone,’ Fabre said. ‘Do you know how they pick bishops? On their pedigree. Have you a pedigree? Look at you. You’re a farm boy. What’s the point of entering a profession unless you can get to the top?’

‘Could I get to the top if I became a travelling actor?’

He asked civilly, as if he were prepared to consider anything.

Fabre laughed. ‘You could play the villains. You’d be well received. You’ve got a good voice there, potentially.’ He patted his chest. ‘Let it come from here.’ He pounded his fist below his diaphragm. ‘Breathe from here. Think of your breath as a river. Let it just flow, flow. The whole trick’s in the breathing. Just relax, you see, drop those shoulders back. You breathe from here –’ he stabbed at himself – ‘you can go on for hours.’

‘I can’t think why I’d need to,’ Danton said.

‘Oh, I know what you think. You think actors are the bottom of the heap, don’t you? You think actors are ambulant shit. Like Protestants. Like Jews. So tell me, boy, what makes your position so brilliant? We’re all worms, we’re all shit. Do you realize that you could be locked up tomorrow, for the rest of your natural life, if the King put his name to a piece of paper that he’s never even read?’

‘I don’t see why he should do that,’ Danton said. ‘I’ve hardly given him cause. All I do is go to school.’

‘Yeah,’ Fabre said. ‘Exactly. Just make sure to live the next forty years without drawing attention to yourself. He doesn’t have to know you, that’s the point, don’t you see, Jesus, what do they teach you at school these days? Anybody, anybody who is anybody, who doesn’t like you and wants you out of the way, can go to the King with their document – “Sign here, Your Moronship” – and that’s you in the Bastille, chained up fifty feet below the rue Saint-Antoine with a bunch of bones for company. No, you don’t get a cell to yourself, because they never bother to shift the old skeletons. You know, of course, they have a special breed of rat in there that eats the prisoners alive?’

‘What, bit by bit?’

‘Absolutely,’ Fabre said. ‘First a little finger. Then a tiny toe.’

He caught Danton’s eye, burst into laughter, balled up a spoiled piece of paper and tossed it over his shoulder. ‘Bugger me,’ he said, ‘it’s a body’s work educating you provincials. I don’t know why I don’t just go to Paris and make my fortune.’

Georges-Jacques said, ‘I hope to go to Paris myself, before too long.’ The good voice died in his throat; he had not known what he hoped, till he spoke. ‘Perhaps when I’m there I’ll meet you again.’

‘No perhaps about it,’ Fabre said. He held up his own sketch, the slightly flawed one. ‘I’ve got your face on file. I’ll be looking out for you.’

The boy held out his vast hand. ‘My name is Georges-Jacques Danton.’

Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Georges-Jacques – study law. Law is a weapon.’

ALL THAT WEEK he thought about Paris. The prizewinner gnawed at his thoughts. Maybe he was just ambulant shit – but at least he’d been somewhere, might go somewhere else. Breathe from here, he kept saying to himself. He tried it. Yes, it was all true. He felt he could keep talking for days.

WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE des Essarts went to Paris, he would call on his nephew at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, to see how he did. By now, he had reservations – grave ones – about the boy’s future. The speech impediment was no better, perhaps worse. When he talked to the boy, an anxious smile hovered about his lips. When the boy got stuck part-way through a sentence, it was embarrassing – sometimes desolating. You could dive in, help him out with what he was going to say. Except with Camille, you never knew quite where he was heading. His sentences might begin in the ordinary way, and end up anywhere at all.

He seemed, in some more important way, disabled for the life they had planned for him. He was so nervous you could almost hear his heart beating. Small-boned, slight and pallid, with a mass of dark hair, he looked at his relative from under his long eyelashes and flitted about the room as if his mind were only on getting out of it. His relative’s reaction was, poor little thing.

But when he got outside into the street, this sympathy evaporated. He would feel he had been verbally carved up. It was not fair. It was like being tripped in the gutter by a cripple. You wanted to complain, but when you saw the circumstances you felt you couldn’t.

Monsieur’s primary purpose in visiting the capital was to attend the Parlement of Paris. The Parlements of the realm were not elected bodies. The de Viefvilles had bought their membership, and would pass it to their heirs: to Camille, perhaps, if he behaves better. The Parlements heard cases; they sanctioned the edicts of the King. That is, they confirmed that they were the law.

Occasionally, the Parlements grew awkward. They drafted protests about the state of the nation – but only when they felt their interests threatened, or when they saw that their interests could be served. M. de Viefville belonged to that section of the middle classes that did not want to destroy the nobility, but rather hoped to merge with it. Offices, positions, monopolies – all have their price, and many carry a title with them.

The Parlementarians worried a great deal when the Crown began to assert itself, to issue decrees where it had never issued them before, to produce bright new ideas about how the country should be run. Occasionally they got on the wrong side of the monarch; since any resistance to authority was novel and risky, the Parlementarians managed the difficult feat of being both arch-conservatives and popular heroes.

In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée – a system of forced labour on roads and bridges. He thought that the roads would be better if they were built and maintained by private contractors, rather than by peasants dragged from their fields. But that would cost, wouldn’t it? So perhaps there could be a property tax? And every man of means would pay it – not just commoners, but the nobility too?

Parlement turned this scheme down flat. After another bitter argument, the King forced them to register the abolition of the corvée. Turgot was making enemies everywhere. The Queen and her circle stepped up their campaign against him. The King disliked asserting himself, and was vulnerable to the pressures of the moment. In May, he dismissed Turgot; forced labour was reinstated.

In this way, one minister was brought down; the trick bore repetition. Said the Comte d’Artois, to the back of the retreating economist: ‘Now at last we shall have some money to spend.’

When the King was not hunting, he liked to shut himself up in his workshop, doing metalwork and tinkering with locks. He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done.

After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. ‘You’re lucky,’ Louis said mournfully. ‘I wish I could resign.’

1776: A DECLARATION of the Parlement of Paris:

The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE arrived home, he would make his way through the narrow huddle of small-town streets, and through the narrow huddle of provincial hearts; and he would bring himself to call on Jean-Nicolas, in his tall white book-filled house on the Place des Armes. Maître Desmoulins had an obsession nowadays, and de Viefville dreaded meeting him, meeting his baffled eyes and being asked once again the question that no one could answer: what had happened to the good and beautiful child he had sent to Cateau-Cambrésis nine years earlier?

On Camille’s sixteenth birthday, his father was stamping about the house. ‘I sometimes think,’ he said, ‘that I have got on my hands a depraved little monster with no feelings and no sense.’ He has written to the priests in Paris, to ask what they teach his son; to ask why he looks so untidy, and why during his last visit home he has seduced the daughter of a town councillor, ‘a man,’ he says, ‘whom I see every day of my working life’.

Jean-Nicolas did not really expect answers to these questions. His real objections to his son were rather different. Why, he really wanted to know, was his son so emotional? Where did he get this capacity to infect others with emotion: to agitate them, discomfit them, shake them out of their ease? Ordinary conversations, in Camille’s presence, went off at peculiar tangents, or turned into blazing rows. Safe social conventions took on an air of danger. You couldn’t, Desmoulins thought, leave him alone with anybody.

It was no longer said that his son was a little Godard. Neither did the de Viefvilles rush to claim him. His brothers were thriving, his sisters blooming, but when Camille slipped in at the front door of the Old House, he looked as if he had come on a message from the Foundling Hospital.

Perhaps, when he is grown up, he will be one of those boys who you pay to stay away from home.

THERE ARE SOME noblemen in France who have discovered that their best friends are their lawyers. Now that revenue from land is falling steadily, and prices are rising, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting poorer too. It has become necessary to assert certain privileges that have been allowed to lapse over the years. Often, dues to which one is entitled have not been paid for a generation; that lax and charitable lordship must now cease. Again, one’s ancestors have allowed part of their estates to become known as ‘common land’ – an expression for which there is usually no legal foundation.

These were the golden days of Jean-Nicolas; if, privately, he had worries, at least professionally he was prospering. Maître Desmoulins was no bootlicker – he had a lively sense of his own dignity, and was moreover a liberal-minded man, an advocate of reform in most spheres of national life. He read Diderot after dinner, and subscribed to the Geneva reprint of the Encyclopédie, which he took in instalments. Nevertheless, he found himself much occupied with registers of rights and tracing of titles. A couple of old strongboxes were brought around and trundled up to his study, and when they were opened a faint musty smell crept out. Camille said, ‘So that is what tyranny smells like.’ His father swept his own work aside and delved into the boxes; very tenderly he held the old yellow papers up to the light. Clément, the youngest, thought he was looking for buried treasure.

The Prince de Condé, the district’s premier nobleman, called personally on Maître Desmoulins in the tall, white, book-filled, very very humble house on the Place des Armes. Normally he would have sent his land agent, but he was piqued by curiosity to know the man who was doing such good work for him. Besides, if honoured by a visit, the fellow would never dare to send in a bill.

It was late afternoon, autumn. Warming in his hand a glass of deep red wine, and mellow, aware of his condescension, the Prince lounged in a wash of candlelight; evening crept up around them, and painted shadows in the corners of the room.

‘What do you people want?’ he asked.

‘Well …’ Maître Desmoulins considered this large question. ‘People like me, men of the professional classes, we would like a little more say, I suppose – or let me put it this way, we would welcome the opportunity to serve.’ It is a fair point, he thinks; under the old King, noblemen were never ministers, but, increasingly, all the ministers are noblemen. ‘Civil equality,’ he said. ‘Fiscal equality.’

Condé raised his eyebrows. ‘You want the nobility to pay your taxes for you?’

‘No, Monseigneur, we want you to pay your own.’

‘I do pay tax,’ Condé said. ‘I pay my poll tax, don’t I? All this property-tax business is nonsense. And so, what else?’

Desmoulins made a gesture, which he hoped was eloquent. ‘An equal chance. That’s all. An equal chance at promotion in the army or the church …’ I’m explaining it as simply as I can, he thought: an ABC of aspiration.

‘An equal chance? It seems against nature.’

‘Other nations conduct themselves differently. Look at England. You can’t say it’s a human trait, to be oppressed.’

‘Oppressed? Is that what you think you are?’

‘I feel it; and if I feel it, how much more do the poor feel it?’

‘The poor feel nothing,’ the Prince said. ‘Do not be sentimental. They are not interested in the art of government. They only regard their stomachs.’

‘Even regarding just their stomachs –’

‘And you,’ Condé said, ‘are not interested in the poor – oh, except as they furnish you with arguments. You lawyers only want concessions for yourselves.’

‘It isn’t a question of concessions. It’s a question of human beings’ natural rights.’

‘Fine phrases. You use them very freely to me.’

‘Free thought, free speech – is that too much to ask?’

‘It’s a bloody great deal to ask, and you know it,’ Condé said glumly. ‘The pity of it is, I hear such stuff from my peers. Elegant ideas for a social re-ordering. Pleasing plans for a “community of reason”. And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear. It’ll end in revolution. And that’ll be no tea-party.’

‘But surely not?’ Jean-Nicolas said. A slight movement from the shadows caught his attention. ‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘what are you doing there?’

‘Eavesdropping,’ Camille said. ‘Well, you could have looked and seen that I was here.’

Maître Desmoulins turned red. ‘My son,’ he said. The Prince nodded. Camille edged into the candlelight. ‘Well,’ said the Prince, ‘have you learned something?’ It was clear from his tone that he took Camille for younger than he was. ‘How did you manage to keep still for so long?’

‘Perhaps you froze my blood,’ Camille said. He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. ‘Of course there will be a revolution,’ he said. ‘You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.’

‘He goes to school in Paris,’ Jean-Nicolas said wretchedly. ‘He has these ideas.’

‘And I suppose he thinks he is too young to be made to regret them,’ Condé said. He turned on the child. ‘Whatever is this?’

‘The climax of your visit, Monseigneur. You want to take a trip to see how your educated serfs live, and amuse yourself by trading platitudes with them.’ He began to shake – visibly, distressingly. ‘I detest you,’ he said.

‘I cannot stay to be abused,’ Condé muttered. ‘Desmoulins, keep this son of yours out of my way.’ He looked for somewhere to put his glass, and ended by thrusting it into his host’s hand. Maître Desmoulins followed him on to the stairs.

‘Monseigneur –’

‘I was wrong to condescend. I should have sent my agent.’

‘I am so sorry.’

‘No need to speak of it. I could not possibly be offended. It is not in me.’

‘May I continue your work?’

‘You may continue my work.’

‘You are really not offended?’

‘It would be ungracious of me to be offended at what cannot possibly be of any account.’

By the front door, his small entourage had quickly assembled. He looked back at Jean-Nicolas. ‘I say out of my way and I mean well out of my way.’

When the Prince had driven away, Jean-Nicolas mounted the stairs and re-entered his office. ‘Well, Camille?’ he said. A perverse calm had entered his voice, and he breathed deeply. The silence prolonged itself. The last of the light had faded now; a crescent moon hung in pale inquiry over the square. Camille had retired into the shadows again, as if he felt safer there.

‘That was a very stupid, fatuous conversation you were having,’ he said in the end. ‘Everybody knows those things. He isn’t mentally defective. They’re not: not all of them.’

‘Do you tell me? I live so out of society.’

‘I liked his phrase, “this son of yours”. As if it were eccentric of you, to have me.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘Were I a citizen of the ancient world, I should have taken one look at you and popped you out on some hillside, to prosper as best you might.’

‘Perhaps some passing she-wolf might have liked me,’ Camille said.

‘Camille – when you were talking to the Prince, you somehow lost your stutter.’

‘Mm. Don’t worry. It’s back.’

‘I thought he was going to hit you.’

‘Yes, so did I.’

‘I wish he had. If you go on like this,’ said Jean-Nicolas, ‘my heart will stop,’ he snapped his fingers, ‘like that.’

‘Oh, no,’ Camille smiled. ‘You’re quite strong really. Your only affliction is kidney-stones, the doctor said so.’

Jean-Nicolas had an urge to throw his arms around his child. It was an unreasonable impulse, quickly stifled.

‘You have caused offence,’ he said. ‘You have prejudiced our future. The worst thing about it was how you looked him up and down. The way you didn’t speak.’

‘Yes,’ Camille said remotely. ‘I’m good at dumb insolence. I practise: for obvious reasons.’ He sat down now in his father’s chair, composing himself for further dialogue, slowly pushing his hair out of his eyes.

Jean-Nicolas is conscious of himself as a man of icy dignity, an almost unapproachable stiffness and rectitude. He would like to scream and smash the windows: to jump out of them and die quickly in the street.

THE PRINCE WILL SOON forget all this in his hurry to get back to Versailles.

Just now, faro is the craze. The King forbids it because the losses are so high. But the King is a man of regular habits, who retires early, and when he goes the stakes are raised at the Queen’s table.

‘The poor man,’ she calls him.

The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses – about 150 each year – are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armoured trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington’s troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural – in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new – then moves elsewhere.

‘I am terrified of being bored,’ she says.

She has no child. Pamphlets distributed all over Paris accuse her of promiscuous relations with her male courtiers, of lesbian acts with her female favourites. In 1776, when she appears in her box at the Opéra, she is met by hostile silences. She does not understand this. It is said that she cries behind her bedroom doors: ‘What have I done to them? What have I done?’ Is it fair, she asks herself, if so much is really wrong, to harp on one woman’s trivial pleasures?

Her brother the Emperor writes from Vienna: ‘In the long run, things cannot go on as they are … The revolution will be a cruel one, and may be of your own making.’

IN 1778 VOLTAIRE returned to Paris, eighty-four years old, cadaverous and spitting blood. He traversed the city in a blue carriage covered with gold stars. The streets were lined with hysterical crowds chanting ‘Vive Voltaire.’ The old man remarked, ‘There would be just as many to see me executed.’ The Academy turned out to greet him: Franklin came, Diderot came. During the performance of his tragedy Irène the actors crowned his statue with laurel wreaths and the packed galleries rose to their feet and howled their delight and adoration.

In May, he died. Paris refused him a Christian burial, and it was feared that his enemies might desecrate his remains. So the corpse was taken from the city by night, propped upright in a coach: under a full moon, and looking alive.

A MAN CALLED NECKER, a Protestant, Swiss millionaire banker, was called to be Minister of Finance and Master of Miracles to the court. Necker alone could keep the ship of state afloat. The secret, he said, was to borrow. Higher taxation and cuts in expenditure showed Europe that you were on your knees. But if you borrowed you showed that you were forward-looking, go-getting, energetic; by demonstrating confidence, you created it. The more you borrowed, the more the effect was achieved. M. Necker was an optimist.

It even seemed to work. When, in May 1781, the usual reactionary, anti-Protestant cabal brought the minister down, the country felt nostalgia for a lost, prosperous age. But the King was relieved, and bought Antoinette some diamonds to celebrate.

Georges-Jacques Danton had already decided to go to Paris.

It had been so difficult to get away, initially; as if, Anne-Madeleine said, you were going to America, or the moon. First there had been the family councils, all the uncles calling with some ceremony to put their points of view. They had dropped the priest business. For a year or two he had been around the little law offices of his uncles and their friends. It was a modest family tradition. Nevertheless. If he was sure it was what he wanted …

His mother would miss him; but they had grown apart. She was a woman of no education, with an outlook that she had deliberately narrowed. The only industry of Arcis-sur-Aube was the manufacture of nightcaps; how could he explain to her that the fact had come to seem a personal affront?

In Paris he would receive a modest clerk’s allowance from the barrister in whose chambers he would study; later, he would need money to establish himself in practice. His stepfather’s inventions had eaten into the family money; his new weaving loom was especially disaster prone. Bemused by the clatter and the creak of the dancing shuttles, they stood in the barn and stared at his little machine, waiting for the thread to break again. There was a bit of money from M. Danton, dead these eighteen years, which had been set aside for when his son grew up. ‘You’ll need it for the inventions,’ Georges-Jacques said. ‘I’ll feel happier, really, to think I’m making a fresh start.’

That summer he visited the family. A pushy and energetic boy who went to Paris would never come back – except for visits, perhaps, as a distant and successful man. So it was proper to make these calls, to leave out no one, no distant cousin or great-uncle’s widow. In their cool, very similar farmhouses he had to stretch out his legs and outline to them what he wanted in life, to submit his plans to their good understanding. He spent long afternoons in the parlours of these widows and maiden aunts, with old ladies nodding in the attenuated sunlight, while the dust swirled purplish and haloed their bent heads. He was never at a loss for something to say to them; he was not that sort of person. But with each visit he felt that he was travelling, further and further away.

Then there was just one visit left: Marie-Cécile in her convent. He followed the straight back of the Mistress of Novices down a corridor of deathly quiet; he felt absurdly large, too much a man, doomed to apologise for himself. Nuns passed in a swish of dark garments, their eyes on the ground, their hands hidden in their sleeves. He had not wanted his sister to come here. I’d rather be dead, he thought, than be a woman.

The nun halted, gestured him through a door. ‘It is an inconvenience,’ she said, ‘that our parlour is so far within the building. We will have one built near the gate, when we get the funds.’

‘I thought your house was rich, Sister.’

‘Then you are misinformed.’ She sniffed. ‘Some of our postulants bring dowries that are barely sufficient to buy the cloth for their habits.’

Marie-Cécile was seated behind a grille. He could not touch or kiss her. She looked pale; either that, or the harsh white of the novice’s veil did not suit her. Her blue eyes were small and steady, very like his own.

They talked, found themselves shy and constrained. He told her the family news, explained his plans. ‘Will you come back,’ she asked, ‘for my clothing ceremony, for when I take my final vows?’

‘Yes,’ he said, lying. ‘If I can.’

‘Paris is a very big place. Won’t you be lonely?’

‘I doubt it.’

She looked at him earnestly. ‘What do you want out of life?’

‘To get on in it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I suppose it means I want to get a position, to have money, to make people respect me. I’m sorry, I see no point in being mealy-mouthed about it. I just want to be somebody.’

‘Everybody’s somebody. In God’s sight.’

‘This life has turned you pious.’

They laughed. Then: ‘Have you any thought for the salvation of your soul, in the plans you’ve made?’

‘Why should I have to think about my soul, when I’ve a great lazy sister a nun, with nothing to do but pray for me all day?’ He looked up. ‘What about you, are you – you know – happy?’

She sighed. ‘Think of the economics of it, Georges-Jacques. It costs money to marry. There are too many girls in our family. I think the others volunteered me, in a way. But now that I’m here – yes, I’m settled. It really does have its consolations, though I wouldn’t expect you to acknowledge them. I don’t think you, Georges-Jacques, were born for the calmer walks of life.’

He knew that there were farmers in the district who would have taken her for the meagre dowry she had brought to the convent, and who would have been glad of a wife of robust health and cheerful character. It would not have been impossible to find a man who would work hard and treat her decently, and give her some children. He thought all women ought to have children.

‘Could you still get out?’ he asked. ‘If I made money I could look after you, we could find you a husband or you could do without, I’d take care of you.’

She held up a hand. ‘I said, didn’t I – I’m happy. I’m content.’

‘It saddens me,’ he said gently, ‘to see that the colour has gone from your cheeks.’

She looked away. ‘Better go, before you make me sad. I often think, you know, of all the days we had in the fields. Well, that is over now. God keep you.’

‘And God keep you.’

You rely on it, he thought; I shan’t.

III. At Maître Vinot’s
(1780)

SIR FRANCIS BURDETT, British Ambassador, on Paris: ‘It is the most ill-contrived, ill-built, dirty stinking town that can possibly be imagined; as for the inhabitants, they are ten times more nasty than the inhabitants of Edinburgh.’

GEORGES-JACQUES came off the coach at the Cour des Messageries. The journey had been unexpectedly lively. There was a girl on board, Françoise-Julie; Françoise-Julie Duhauttoir, from Troyes. They hadn’t met before – he’d have recalled it – but he knew something of her; she was the kind of girl who made his sisters purse their lips. Naturally: she was good-looking, she was lively, she had money, no parents and spent six months of the year in Paris. On the road she amused him with imitations of her aunts: ‘Youth-doesn’t-last-for-ever, a-good-reputation-is-money-in-the-bank, don’t-you-think-it’s-time-you-settled-down-in-Troyes-where-all-your-relatives-are-and-found-yourself-a-husband-before-you-fall-apart?’ As if, Françoise-Julie said, there were going to be some sudden shortage of men.

He couldn’t see there ever would be, for a girl like her. She flirted with him as if he were just anybody; she didn’t seem to mind about the scar. She was like someone who has been gagged for months, let out of a gaol. Words tumbled out of her, as she tried to explain the city, tell him about her life, tell him about her friends. When the coach came to a halt she did not wait for him to help her down; she jumped.

The noise hit him at once. Two of the men who had come to see to the horses began to quarrel. That was the first thing he heard, a vicious stream of obscenity in the hard accent of the capital.

Her bags around her feet, Françoise-Julie stood and clung to his arm. She laughed, with sheer delight at being back. ‘What I like,’ she said, ‘is that it’s always changing. They’re always tearing something down and building something else.’

She had scrawled her address on a sheet of paper, tucked it into his pocket. ‘Can’t I help you?’ he said. ‘See you get to your apartment all right?’

‘Look, you take care of yourself,’ she said. ‘I live here, I’ll be fine.’ She spun away, gave some directions about her luggage, disbursed some coins. ‘Now, you know where you’re going, don’t you? I’ll expect to see you within a week. If you don’t turn up I’ll come hunting for you.’ She picked up her smallest bag; quite suddenly, she lunged at him, stretched up, planted a kiss on his cheek. Then she whirled away into the crowd.

He had brought only one valise, heavy with books. He hoisted it up, then put it down again while he fished in his pocket for the piece of paper in his stepfather’s handwriting:

The Black Horse

rue Geoffroy l’Asnier,

parish of Saint-Gervais.

All about him, church bells had begun to ring. He swore to himself. How many bells were there in this city, and how in the name of God was he to distinguish the bell of Saint-Gervais and its parish? He screwed the paper up and dropped it.

Half the passers-by were lost. You could tramp for ever in the alleyways and back courts; there were streets with no name, there were building sites strewn with rubble, there were people’s fireplaces standing in the streets. Old men coughed and spat, women hitched up skirts trailing yellow mud, children ran naked in it as if they were country children. It was like Troyes, and very unlike it. In his pocket he had a letter of introduction to an Île Saint-Louis attorney, Vinot by name. He would find somewhere to spend the night. Tomorrow, he would present himself.

A hawker, selling cures for toothache, collected a crowd that talked back to him. ‘Liar!’ a woman screamed. ‘Get them pulled out, that’s the only way.’ Before he walked away, he saw her wild, mad, urban eyes.

MAÎTRE VINOT was a rotund man, plump-pawed and pugnacious. He affected to be boisterous, like an elderly schoolboy.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we can but give you a try. We … can … but … give … you … a try.’

I can give it a try, Georges-Jacques thought.

‘One thing’s for sure, your handwriting is atrocious. What do they teach you nowadays? I hope your Latin’s up to scratch.’

‘Maître Vinot,’ Danton said, ‘I’ve clerked for two years, do you think I’ve come here to copy letters?’

Maître Vinot stared at him.

‘My Latin’s fine,’ he said. ‘My Greek’s fine, too. I also speak English fluently, and enough Italian to get by. If that interests you.’

‘Where did you learn?’

‘I taught myself.’

‘How extremely enterprising. Mind you, if we have any trouble with foreigners we get an interpreter in.’ He looked Danton over. ‘Like to travel, would you?’

‘Yes, I would, if I got the chance. I’d like to go to England.’

‘Admire the English, do you? Admire their institutions?’

‘A parliament’s what we need, don’t you think? I mean a properly representative one, not ruined by corruption like theirs. Oh, and a separation of the legislative and executive arms. They fall down there.’

‘Now listen to me,’ Maître Vinot said. ‘I shall say to you one word about all this, and I hope I shall not need to repeat it. I won’t interfere with your opinions – though I suppose you think they’re unique? Why,’ he said, spluttering slightly, ‘they’re the commonest thing, my coachman has those opinions. I don’t run around after my clerks inquiring after their morals and shepherding them off to Mass; but this city is no safe place. There are all kinds of books circulating without the censor’s stamp, and in some of the coffee houses – the smart ones, too – the gossip is near to treasonable. I don’t ask you to do the impossible, I don’t ask you to keep your mind off all that – but I do ask you to take care who you mix with. I won’t have sedition – not on my premises. Don’t ever consider that you speak in private, or in confidence, because for all you know somebody may be drawing you on, ready to report you to the authorities. Oh yes,’ he said, nodding to show that he had the measure of a doughty opponent: ‘oh yes, you learn a thing or two in our trade. Young men will have to learn to watch their tongues.’

‘Very well, Maître Vinot,’ Georges-Jacques said meekly.

A man put his head around the door. ‘Maître Perrin was asking,’ he said, ‘are you taking on Jean-Nicolas’s son, or what?’

‘Oh God,’ Maître Vinot groaned, ‘have you seen Jean-Nicolas’s son? I mean, have you had the pleasure of conversation with him?’

‘No,’ the man said, ‘I just thought, old friend’s boy, you know. They say he’s very bright, too.’

‘Do they? That’s not all they say. No, I’m taking on this cool customer here, this young fellow from Troyes. He reveals himself to be a loud-mouthed seditionary already, but what is that compared to the perils of a working day with the young Desmoulins?’

‘Not to worry. Perrin wants him anyway.’

‘That I can readily imagine. Didn’t Jean-Nicolas ever hear the gossip? No, he was always obtuse. That’s not my problem, let Perrin get on with it. Live and let live, I always say,’ Maître Vinot told Danton. ‘Maître Perrin’s an old colleague of mine, very sound on revenue law – they say he’s a sodomite, but is that my business?’

‘A private vice,’ Danton said.

‘Just so.’ He looked up at Danton. ‘Made my points, have I?’

‘Yes, Maître Vinot, I should say you’ve driven them well into my skull.’

‘Good. Now look, there’s no point in having you in the office if no one can read your handwriting, so you’d better start from the other end of the business – “cover the courts”, as we say. You’ll do a daily check on each case in which the office has an interest – you’ll get around that way, King’s Bench, Chancery division, Châtelet. Interested in ecclesiastical work? We don’t handle it, but we’ll farm you out to someone who does. My advice to you,’ he paused, ‘don’t be in too much of a hurry. Build slowly; anybody who works steadily can have a modest success, steadiness is all it takes. You need the right contacts, of course, and that’s what my office will give you. Try to work out for yourself a Life Plan. There’s plenty of work in your part of the country. Five years from now, you’ll be nicely on your way.’

‘I’d like to make a career in Paris.’

Maître Vinot smiled. ‘That’s what all the young men say. Oh well, get yourself out tomorrow, and have a look at it.’

They shook hands, rather formally, like Englishmen after all. Georges-Jacques clattered downstairs and out into the street. He kept thinking about Françoise-Julie. Every few minutes she flitted into his head. He had her address, the rue de la Tixanderie, wherever that was. Third floor, she’d said, it’s not grand but it’s mine. He wondered if she’d go to bed with him. It seemed quite likely. Presumably things that were impossible in Troyes were perfectly possible here.

ALL DAY, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police.

On the Pont-Neuf the public letter-writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat. He bought half a dozen for two sous each. Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market.

Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s labourer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were levelling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The labourers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs. What would Maître Vinot say? ‘Build slowly.’

There was a busker, a man with a strained, once-powerful baritone. He had a hideously destroyed face, one empty eye-socket overgrown with livid scar tissue. He had a placard that read HERO OF THE AMERICAN LIBERATION. He sang songs about the court; they described the Queen indulging in vices which no one had discovered in Arcis-sur-Aube. In the Luxembourg Gardens a beautiful blonde woman looked him up and down and dismissed him from her mind.

He went to Saint-Antoine. He stood below the Bastille, looked up at its eight towers. He had expected walls like sea-cliffs. The highest must be – what? Seventy-five, eighty feet?

‘The walls are eight feet thick, you know,’ a passer-by said to him.

‘I expected it to be bigger.’

‘Big enough,’ the man said sourly. ‘You wouldn’t like to be in there, would you? Men have gone in there and never come out.’

‘You a local?’

‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘We know all about it. There are cells under the ground, running with water, alive with rats.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard about the rats.’

‘And then the cells up under the roof – that’s no joke either. Boil in summer, freeze in winter. Still, that’s only the unlucky ones. Some get treated quite decent, depends who you are. They have beds with proper bed-curtains and they can take their own cat in to keep the vermin down.’

‘What do they get to eat?’

‘Varies, I suppose. Again, it’s according to who you are. You do see the odd side of beef going in. Neighbour of mine a few years back, he swears he saw them taking in a billiard table. It’s like anything else in life, I suppose,’ the man said. ‘Winners and losers, that’s all about it.’

Georges-Jacques looks up, and his eye is offended; it is impregnable, there is no doubt. These people go about their lives and work – brewing by the look of it, and upholstery – and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it’s there and not there. What really matters isn’t the height of the towers, it’s the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw. You can’t have your whole inner world rearranged by a man you meet in the street. Is nothing sacred? Stained from the dye-works, the river ran yellow, ran blue.

And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewellers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night’s hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Île Saint-Louis, in an empty office, Maître Desmoulins’s son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.

PART TWO

WE make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy – at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.

‘The Theory of Ambition’, an essay:

Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles

I. The Theory of Ambition
(1784–1787)

THE CAFÉ DU PARNASSE was known to its clients as the Café de l’École, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The café was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small-talk at the Café de l’École was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.

Monsieur’s wife Angélique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matron’s cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angélique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the café every day – perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. ‘I will read it later,’ she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.

Her daughter, Antoinette Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the café. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.

Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin – everybody said – like silk.

Mme Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the café so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maître d’Anton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband – not at all.

SOON AFTER Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 per cent. Georges-Jacques’s own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.

Maître Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. ‘Call yourself d’Anton,’ he advised. ‘It makes a better impression.’ On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. ‘So what if they all know it’s spurious?’ Maître Vinot said. ‘It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.’

When it was time to take his degree, Maître Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days’ residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maître Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldn’t come up with one. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but …’ His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrin’s chambers. D’Anton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.

After that he left the Île Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case – involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow. Did he take these cases to give himself time to think about other things? He was not, at this date, introspective. He was mildly surprised, then irritated, to find that the people around him were much less intelligent than himself. Bumblers like Vinot climbed to high office and prosperity. ‘Goodbye,’ they said. ‘Not a bad week. See you Tuesday.’ He watched them depart to spend their weekends in what with Parisians passed for the country. One day he’d buy himself a place – just a cottage would do, a couple of acres. It might take the edge off his restless moods.

He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coal-heaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practised it on Angelica, calling at the café each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a frisson at the backs of women’s necks. He remembered the prizewinner, took his advice; rolled the voice out from somewhere behind his ribs. It awaited perfection – a little extra vibrancy, a little more colour in the tone. But there it was – a professional asset.

Gabrielle thought, looks aren’t everything. She also thought, money isn’t everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of ’86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.

The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.

MAÎTRE DESMOULINS had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.

Today’s case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maître Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.

‘Come back!’ d’Anton shouted. He stopped, and turned. D’Anton drew level. ‘I can see you’re not used to winning. You’re supposed to commiserate with your opponent.’

‘Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, let’s walk – I don’t like to be around here.’

D’Anton did not like to let a point go. ‘It’s a piece of decent hypocrisy. It’s the rules.’

Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. ‘You mean, I may gloat?’

‘If you will.’

‘I may say, “So that’s what they learn in Maître Vinot’s chambers?”’

‘If you must. My first case,’ d’Anton said, ‘was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.’

‘But you’ve come on a bit since then.’

‘Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.’

Desmoulins stopped dead. ‘Do you really, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought – stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.’

‘Yes, but I don’t always. I’ve not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, d’Anton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?’

‘What do you mean, what would I think?’

‘If you were an impartial observer.’

‘How can I be that?’ Everybody knows you, he thought. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘you’d do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.’

‘Well, how gratifying,’ Camille said. ‘A neat, complete lecture. Maître Vinot couldn’t have delivered it better. Soon you’ll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.’

‘I’m right, though.’

‘There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who can’t afford to pay for them.’

‘Yes, but that’s a social problem, you’re not responsible for that state of affairs.’

‘You ought to help people.’

‘Ought you?’

‘Yes – at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose – yes.’

‘At your own expense?’

‘You’re not allowed to do it at anyone else’s.’

D’Anton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. ‘You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.’

‘A living? It’s not a living, it’s pillage, it’s loot, and you know it. Really, Maître d’Anton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.’

‘This revolution – will it be a living?’

‘We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.’

‘To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.’

‘He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, d’Anton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things,’ he said, ‘because I think I may die at any time.’

‘Where is your client?’

‘At the Châtelet.’

‘You do know you’re going the wrong way?’

Maître Desmoulins looked at him as if he had said something foolish. ‘I hadn’t thought, you see, to get there by any particular route.’ He hesitated. ‘D’Anton, why are you wasting time in this footling dialogue? Why aren’t you out and about, making a name for yourself?’

‘Perhaps I need a holiday from the system,’ d’Anton said. His colleague’s eyes, which were black and luminous, held the timidity of natural victims, the fatal exhaustion of easy prey. He leaned forward. ‘Camille, what has put you into this terrible state?’

Camille Desmoulins’s eyes were set further apart than is usual, and what d’Anton had taken for a revelation of character was in fact a quirk of anatomy. But it was many years before he noticed this.

AND THIS CONTINUED: one of those late-night conversations, with long pauses.

‘After all,’ d’Anton said, ‘what is it?’ After dark, and drink, he is often more disaffected. ‘Spending your life dancing attendance on the whims and caprices of some bloody fool like Vinot.’

‘Your Life Plan goes further, then?’

‘You have to get beyond all that, whatever you’re doing you have to get to the top.’

‘I do have some ambitions of my own,’ Camille said. ‘You know I went to this school where we were always freezing cold and the food was disgusting? It’s sort of become part of me, if I’m cold I just accept it, cold’s natural, and from day to day I hardly think of eating. But of course, if I do ever get warm, or someone feeds me well, I’m pathetically grateful, and I think, well, you know, this would be nice – to do it on a grand scale, to have great roaring fires and to go out to dinner every night. Of course, it’s only in my weaker moods I think this. Oh, and you know – to wake up every morning beside someone you like. Not clutching your head all the time and crying, my God, what happened last night, how did I get into this?’

‘It hardly seems much to want,’ Georges-Jacques said.

‘But when you finally achieve something, a disgust for it begins. At least, that’s the received wisdom. I’ve never achieved anything, so I can’t say.’

‘You ought to sort yourself out, Camille.’

‘My father wanted me home as soon as I qualified, he wanted me to go into his practice. Then again, he didn’t … They’ve arranged for me to marry my cousin, it’s been fixed up for years. We all marry our cousins, so the family money interbreeds.’

‘And you don’t want to?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. It doesn’t really matter who you marry.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ His thinking had been quite other.

‘But Rose-Fleur will have to come to Paris, I can’t go back there.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘I don’t know really, our paths so seldom cross. Oh, to look at, you mean? She’s quite pretty.’

‘When you say it doesn’t matter who you marry – don’t you expect to love someone?’

‘Yes, of course. But it would be a vast coincidence to be married to them as well.’

‘What about your parents? What are they like?’

‘Never seem to speak to each other these days. There’s a family tradition of marrying someone you find you can’t stand. My cousin Antoine, one of my Fouquier-Tinville cousins, is supposed to have murdered his first wife.’

‘What, you mean he was actually prosecuted for it?’

‘Only by the gossips at their various assizes. There wasn’t enough evidence to bring it to court. But then Antoine, he’s a lawyer too, so there wouldn’t be. I expect he’s good at fixing evidence. The business rather shook the family, and so I’ve always regarded him as, you know,’ he paused wistfully, ‘a sort of hero. Anyone who can give serious offence to the de Viefvilles is a hero of mine. Another case of that is Antoine Saint-Just, I know we are related but I can’t think how, they live in Noyon. He has recently run off with the family silver, and his mother, who’s a widow, actually got a lettre de cachet and had him shut up. When he gets out – they’ll have to let him out one of these days, I suppose – he’ll be so angry, he’ll never forgive them. He’s one of these boys, sort of big and solid and conceited, incredibly full of himself, he’s probably steaming about at this very minute working out how to get revenge. He’s only nineteen, so perhaps he’ll have a career of crime, and that will take the attention off me.’

‘I can’t think why you don’t write and encourage him.’

‘Yes, perhaps I shall. You see, I do agree that I can’t go on like this. I have had a little verse published – oh, nothing really, just a modest start. I’d rather write than anything – well, as you can imagine, with my disabilities it’s a relief not having to talk. I just want to live very quietly – preferably somewhere warm – and be left alone till I can write something worthwhile.’

Already, d’Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser. ‘Don’t you care for anyone respectable?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes – I care for my friend de Robespierre, but he lives in Arras, I never see him. And Maître Perrin has been kind.’

D’Anton stared at him. He did not see how he could sit there, saying ‘Maître Perrin has been kind.’

‘Don’t you mind?’ he demanded.

‘What people say? Well,’ Camille said softly, ‘I should prefer not to be an object of general odium, but I wouldn’t go so far as to let my preference alter my conduct.’

‘I’d just like to know,’ d’Anton said. ‘I mean, from my point of view. Whether there’s any truth in it.’

‘Oh, you mean, because the sun will be up in an hour, and you think I’ll run down to the Law Courts and tell everybody I spent the night with you?’

‘Somebody told me … that is, amongst other things they told me … that you were involved with a married woman.’

‘Yes: in a way.’

‘You do have an interesting variety of problems.’

Already, by the time the clock struck four, he felt he knew too much about Camille, and more than he was comfortable with. He looked at him through a mist of alcohol and fatigue, the climate of the years ahead.

‘I would tell you about Annette Duplessis,’ Camille said, ‘but life’s too short.’

‘Is it?’ D’Anton has never thought about it before. Creeping towards his future it sometimes seems long, long enough.

IN JULY 1786 a daughter was born to the King and Queen. ‘All well and good,’ said Angélique Charpentier, ‘but I expect she’ll be needing some more diamonds to console her for losing her figure.’

Her husband said, ‘How would we know if she’s losing her figure? We never see her. She never comes. She has something against Paris.’ It was a matter of regret to him. ‘She doesn’t trust us, I think. But of course she is not French. She is far from home.’

‘I am far from home,’ Angélique said heartlessly. ‘But I don’t run the nation into debt because of it.’

The Debt, the Deficit – these were the words on the lips of the café’s customers as they occupied themselves in trying to name a figure. Only a few people had the ability to imagine money on this scale, the café believed; they thought it was a special ability, and that M. Calonne, now the Comptroller-General, had not got it. M. Calonne was a perfect courtier, with his lace cuffs and lavender-water, his gold-topped cane and his well-attested greed for Perigord truffles. Like M. Necker, he was borrowing; the café thought that M. Necker’s borrowing had been considered, but that M. Calonne’s borrowing stemmed from a failure of imagination and a desire to keep up appearances.

In August 1786 the Comptroller-General presented to the King a package of proposed reforms. There was one weighty and pressing reason for action: one half of the next year’s revenues had already been spent. France was a rich country, M. Calonne told its sovereign; it could produce many times more revenue than at present. And could this fail to add to the glory and prestige of the monarchy? Louis seemed dubious. The glory and prestige were all very well, most agreeable, but he was anxious to do only what was right; and to produce this revenue would require substantial changes, would it not?

Indeed, his minister told him, from now on everybody – nobles, clergy, commons – must pay a land tax. The pernicious system of tax exemptions must be ended. There must be free trade, the internal customs dues must be abolished. And there must be some concessions to liberal opinion – the corvée must be done away with completely. The King frowned. He seemed to have been through all this before. It reminded him of M. Necker, he said. If he had thought, it would have reminded him of M. Turgot, but by now he was getting muddled.

The point is, he told his minister, that though he personally might favour such measures, the Parlements would never agree.

That, said M. Calonne, was a most cogent piece of reasoning. With his usual unerring accuracy, His Majesty had pinpointed the problem.

But if His Majesty felt these measures were necessary, should he allow himself to be baulked by the Parlements? Why not seize the initiative?

Mm, the King said. He moved restlessly in his chair, and looked out of the window to see what the weather was doing.

What he should do, Calonne said, was to call an Assembly of Notables. A what? said the King. Calonne pressed on. The Notables would at once be seized by a realization of the country’s economic plight, and throw their weight behind any measures the King deemed necessary. It would be a bold stroke, he assured the King, to create a body that was inherently superior to the Parlements, a body whose lead they would have to follow. It was the sort of thing, he said, that Henri IV would have done.

The King pondered. Henri IV was the most wise and popular of monarchs, and the very one that he, Louis, most desired to emulate.

The King put his head in his hands. It sounded a good idea, the way Calonne put it, but all his ministers were smooth talkers, and it was never quite as simple as they made out. Besides, the Queen and her set … He looked up. The Queen believed, he said, that the next time the Parlements got in his way they should simply be disbanded. The Parlements of Paris, all the provincial Parlements – chop, chop, went the King. All gone.

M. Calonne quaked when he heard this reasoning. What did it offer but a vista of acrimonious dealings, a decade of wrangling, of vendettas, of riots? We have to break out of this cycle, Your Majesty, he said. Believe me – please, you must believe me – things have never been this bad before.

GEORGES-JACQUES came to M. Charpentier, and he put his cards on the table. ‘I have a bastard,’ he said. ‘A son, four years old. I suppose I should have told you before.’

‘Why so?’ M. Charpentier gathered his wits. ‘Pleasant surprises should be saved up.’

‘I feel a hypocrite,’ d’Anton said. ‘I was just lecturing that little Camille.’

‘Do go on, Georges-Jacques. You have me riveted.’

They’d met on the coach, he said, on his first journey to Paris. She’d given him her address, he’d called on her a few days later. Things had gone on from there – well, M. Charpentier could imagine, perhaps. No, he was no longer involved with her, it was over. The boy was in the country with a nurse.

‘You offered her marriage, of course?’

D’Anton nodded.

‘And why wouldn’t she marry you?’

‘I expect she took a dislike to my face.’

In his mind’s eye he could see Françoise raging round her bedroom, aghast that she was subject to the same laws as other women: when I marry I want it to be worth my while, I don’t want some clerk, some nobody, and you with your passions and your self-conceit running after other women before the month’s out. Even when the baby was kicking inside her, it had seemed to him a remote contingency, might happen, might not. Babies were stillborn, they died in the first few days; he did not hope for this to happen, but he knew that it might.

But the baby grew, and was born. ‘Father unknown’, she put on the birth certificate. Now Françoise had found the man she wanted to marry – one Maître Huet de Paisy, a King’s Councillor. Maître Huet was thinking of selling his position – he had something else in mind, d’Anton did not inquire what. He was offering to sell it to d’Anton.

‘What’s the asking price?’

D’Anton told him. Having received his second big shock of the afternoon, Charpentier said, ‘That’s simply not possible.’

‘Yes, I know it’s vastly inflated, but it represents my settlement for the child. Maître Huet will acknowledge paternity, it will all be done in the correct legal form and the matter will be behind me.’

‘Her family should have made her marry you. What kind of people can they be?’ He paused. ‘In one sense the matter will be behind you, but what about your debts? I’m not sure how you can raise that amount in the first place.’ He pulled a piece of paper towards him. ‘This is what I can let you have – let’s call it a loan for now, but when the marriage contract is signed I waive the debt.’ D’Anton inclined his head. ‘I must have Gabrielle well set up, she’s my only daughter, I mean to do right by her. Now, your family can come up with – what? All right, but that’s little enough.’ He jotted down the figures. ‘How can we cover the shortfall?’

‘Borrow it. Well, that’s what Calonne would say.’

‘I see no other solution.’

‘I’m afraid there is another part to this deal. You won’t like it. The thing is, Françoise has offered to lend me the money herself. She’s well-off. We haven’t gone into the details, but I don’t suppose the interest rate will be in my favour.’

‘That’s iniquitous. Good God, what a bitch! Wouldn’t you like to strangle her?’

D’Anton smiled. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘I suppose you are quite sure the boy’s yours?’

‘She wouldn’t have lied to me. She wouldn’t dare.’

‘Men like to think that …’ He looked at d’Anton’s face. No, that was not the way out. So be it – the child was his. ‘It is a very serious sum of money,’ he said. ‘For one night’s work five years ago it seems disproportionate. It could dog you for years.’

‘She wants to wring what she can out of me. You can understand it, I suppose.’ After all, she had the pain, he thought, she had the disgrace. ‘I want to get it settled up within the next couple of months. I want to start off with Gabrielle with a clean slate.’

‘I wouldn’t call it a clean slate, exactly,’ Charpentier said gently. ‘That’s just what it isn’t. You’re mortgaging your whole future. Can’t you –’

‘No, I can’t fight her over it. I was fond of her, at one time. And I think of the boy. Well, ask yourself – if I took the other attitude, would I be the kind of person you’d want for a son-in-law?’

‘Yes, I see that, don’t mistake me, it’s just that I’m old and hard-boiled and I worry about you. When does this woman want the final payment?’

‘She said ’91, the first quarter day. Do you think I should tell Gabrielle about this?’

‘That’s for you to decide. Between now and your wedding, can you contrive to be careful?’

‘Look, I’ve got four years to pay this off. I’ll make a go of things.’

‘Certainly, you can make money as a King’s Councillor. I don’t deny that.’ M. Charpentier thought, he’s young, he’s raw, he has everything to do, and inside he cannot possibly be as sure as he sounds. He wanted to comfort him. ‘You know what Maître Vinot says, he says there are times of trouble ahead, and in times of trouble litigation always expands.’ He rolled his pieces of paper together, ready for filing away. ‘I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.’

MARCH 2 1787. It was Camille’s twenty-seventh birthday, and nobody had seen him for a week. He appeared to have changed his address again.

The Assembly of Notables had reached deadlock. The café was full, noisy and opinionated.

‘What is it that the Marquis de Lafayette has said?’

‘He has said that the Estates-General should be called.’

‘But the Estates is a relic. It hasn’t met since –’

‘1614.’

‘Thank you, d’Anton,’ Maître Perrin said. ‘How can it answer to our needs? We shall see the clergy debating in one chamber, the nobles in another and the commons in a third, and whatever the commons propose will be voted down two to one by the other Orders. So what progress –’

‘Listen,’ d’Anton broke in, ‘even an old institution can take on a new form. There’s no need to do what was done last time.’

The group gazed at him, solemn. ‘Lafayette is a young man,’ Maître Perrin said.

‘About your age, Georges.’

Yes, d’Anton thought, and while I was poring over the tomes in Vinot’s office, he was leading armies. Now I am a poor attorney, and he is the hero of France and America. Lafayette can aspire to be a leader of the nation, and I can aspire to scratch a living. And now this young man, of undistinguished appearance, spare, with pale sandy hair, had captured his audience, propounded an idea; and d’Anton, feeling an unreasoning antipathy for the fellow, was compelled to stand here and defend him. ‘The Estates is our only hope,’ he said. ‘It would have to give fair representation to us, the commons, the Third Estate. It’s quite clear that the nobility don’t have the King’s welfare at heart, so it’s stupid for him to continue to defend their interests. He must call the Estates and give real power to the Third – not just talk, not just consultation, the real power to do something.’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ Charpentier said.

‘It will never happen,’ Perrin said. ‘What interests me more is Lafayette’s proposal for an investigation into tax frauds.’

‘And shady underhand speculation,’ d’Anton said. ‘The dirty workings of the market as a whole.’

‘Always this vehemence,’ Perrin said, ‘among people who don’t hold bonds and wish they did.’

Something distracted M. Charpentier. He looked over d’Anton’s shoulder and smiled. ‘Here is a man who could clarify matters for us.’ He moved forward and held out his hands. ‘M. Duplessis, you’re a stranger, we never see you. You haven’t met my daughter’s fiancé. M. Duplessis is a very old friend of mine, he’s at the Treasury.’

‘For my sins,’ M. Duplessis said, with a sepulchral smile. He acknowledged d’Anton with a nod, as if perhaps he had heard his name. He was a tall man, fifty-ish, with vestigial good looks; he was carefully and plainly dressed. His gaze seemed to rest a little behind and beyond its object, as if his vision were unobstructed by the marble-topped tables and gilt chairs and the black limbs of city barristers.

‘So Gabrielle is to be married. When is the happy day?’

‘We’ve not named it. May or June.’

‘How time flies.’

He patted out his platitudes as children shape mud-pies; he smiled again, and you thought of the muscular effort involved.

M. Charpentier handed him a cup of coffee. ‘I was sorry to hear about your daughter’s husband.’

‘Yes, a bad business, most upsetting and unfortunate. My daughter Adèle,’ he said. ‘Married and widowed, and only a child.’ He addressed Charpentier, directing his gaze over his host’s left shoulder. ‘We shall keep Lucile at home for a while longer. Although she’s fifteen, sixteen. Quite a little lady. Daughters are a worry. Sons, too, though I haven’t any. Sons-in-law are a worry, dying as they do. Although not you, Maître d’Anton. I don’t intend it personally. You’re not a worry, I’m sure. You look quite healthy. In fact, excessively so.’

How can he be so dignified, d’Anton wondered, when his talk is so random and wild? Was he always like this, or had the situation made him so, and was it the Deficit that had unhinged him, or was it his domestic affairs?

‘And your dear wife?’ M. Charpentier inquired. ‘How is she?’

M. Duplessis brooded on this question; he looked as if he could not quite recall her face. At last he said, ‘Much the same.’

‘Won’t you come and have supper one evening? The girls too, of course, if they’d like to come?’

‘I would, you know … but the pressure of work … I’m a good deal at Versailles during the week now, it was only that today I had some business to attend to … sometimes I work through the weekend too.’ He turned to d’Anton. ‘I’ve been at the Treasury all my life. It’s been a rewarding career, but every day gets a little harder. If only the Abbé Terray …’

Charpentier stifled a yawn. He had heard it before; everyone had heard it. The Abbé Terray was Duplessis’s all-time Top Comptroller, his fiscal hero. ‘If Terray had stayed, he could have saved us; every scheme put forward in recent years, every solution, Terray had worked it out years ago.’ That had been when he was a younger man, and the girls were babies, and his work was something he looked forward to with a sense of the separate venture and progress of each day. But the Parlements had opposed the abbé; they had accused him of speculating in grain, and induced the silly people to burn him in effigy. ‘That was before the situation was so bad; the problems were manageable then. Since then I’ve seen them come along with the same old bright ideas –’ He made a gesture of despair. M. Duplessis cared most deeply about the state of the royal Treasury; and since the departure of the Abbé Terray his work had become a kind of daily official heartbreak.

M. Charpentier leaned forward to refill his cup. ‘No, I must be off,’ Duplessis said. ‘I’ve brought papers home. We’ll take you up on that invitation. Just as soon as the present crisis is over.’

M. Duplessis picked up his hat, bowed and nodded his way to the door. ‘When will it ever be over?’ Charpentier asked. ‘One can’t imagine.’

Angélique rustled up. ‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘You were distinctly grinning, when you asked him about his wife. And you,’ she slapped d’Anton lightly on the shoulder, ‘were turning quite blue trying not to laugh. What am I missing?’

‘Only gossip, my dear.’

‘Only gossip? What else is there in life?’

‘It concerns Georges’s gypsy friend, M. How-to-get-on-in-Society.’

‘What? Camille? You’re teasing me. You’re just saying this to test out my gullibility.’ She looked around at her smirking customers. ‘Annette Duplessis?’ she said. ‘Annette Duplessis?’

‘Listen carefully then,’ her husband said. ‘It’s complicated, it’s circumstantial, there’s no saying where it’s going to end. Some take season tickets to the Opéra; others enjoy the novels of Mr Fielding. Myself I enjoy a bit of home-grown entertainment, and I tell you, there’s nothing more entertaining than life at the rue Condé these days. For the connoisseur of human folly …’

‘Jesus-Maria! Get on with it,’ Angélique said.

II. Rue Condé: Thursday Afternoon
(1787)

ANNETTE DUPLESSIS was a woman of resource. The problem which now beset her she had handled elegantly for four years. This afternoon she was going to solve it. Since midday a chilly wind had blown up, draughts whistled through the apartment, finding out the keyholes and the cracks under the doors: fanning the nebulous banners of approaching crisis. Annette, thinking of her figure, took a glass of cider vinegar.

When she had married Claude Duplessis, a long time ago, he had been several years her senior; by now he was old enough to be her father. Why had she married him anyway? She often asked herself that. She could only conclude that she had been serious-minded as a girl, and had grown steadily more inclined to frivolity as the years passed.

At the time they met, Claude was working and worrying his way to the top of the civil service: through the different degrees and shades and variants of clerkdom, from clerk menial to clerk-of-some-parts, from intermediary clerk to clerk of a higher type, to clerk most senior, clerk confidential, clerk extraordinary, clerk in excelsis, clerk-to-end-all-clerks. His intelligence was the quality she noticed chiefly, and his steady, concerned application to the nation’s business. His father had been a blacksmith, and – although he was prosperous, and since before his son’s birth had not personally been anywhere near a forge – Claude’s professional success was a matter for admiration.

When his early struggles were over, and Claude was ready for marriage, he found himself awash in a dismaying sea of light-mindedness. She was the moneyed, sought-after girl on whom, for no reason one could see, he fixed his good opinion: on whom, at last, he settled his affection. The very disjunction between them seemed to say, here is some deep process at work; friends forecast a marriage that was out of the common run.

Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.

Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, ‘Claude, you are dull.’ She remembered the damp grass underfoot, and how she had shivered as she looked back at the lights of the house. She had sought marriage to be free from her parents’ constraints, but now she had given Claude her parole. You must never break gaol again, she told herself; it ends badly, dead bodies in muddy fields. She crept back inside, washed her feet; drank a warm tisane, to cure any lingering hopes.

Afterwards Claude had treated her with reserve and suspicion for some months. Even now, if she was unwell or whimsical, he would allude to the incident – explaining that he had learned to live with her unstable nature but that, when he was a young man, it had taken him quite by surprise.

After the girls were born there had been a small affair. He was a friend of her husband, a barrister, a square, blond man: last heard of in Toulouse, supporting a red-faced dropsical wife and five daughters at a convent school. She had not repeated the experiment. Claude had not found out about it. If he had, perhaps something would have had to change, but as he hadn’t – as he staunchly, wilfully, manfully hadn’t – there was no point in doing it again.

So then to hurry the years past – and to contemplate something that should not be thought of in the category of ‘an affair’ – Camille arrived in her life when he was twenty-two years old. Stanislas Fréron – her family knew his family – had brought him to the house. Camille looked perhaps seventeen. It was four years before he would be old enough to practise at the Bar. It was not a thing one could readily imagine. His conversation was a series of little sighs and hesitations, defections and demurs. Sometimes his hands shook. He had trouble looking anyone in the face.

He’s brilliant, Stanislas Fréron said. He’s going to be famous. Her presence, her household, seemed to terrify him. But he didn’t stay away.

RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING, Claude had invited him to supper. It was a well-chosen guest list, and for her husband a fine opportunity to expound his economic forecast for the next five years – grim – and to tell stories about the Abbé Terray. Camille sat in tense near-silence, occasionally asking in his soft voice for M. Duplessis to be more precise, to explain to him and to show him how he arrived at that figure. Claude called for pen, paper and ink. He pushed some plates aside and put his head down; at his end of the table, the meal came to a halt. The other guests looked down at them, nonplussed, and turned to each other with polite conversation. While Claude muttered and scribbled, Camille looked over his shoulder, disputing his simplifications, and asking questions that were longer and more cogent. Claude shut his eyes momentarily. Figures swooped and scattered from the end of his pen like starlings in the snow.

She had leaned across the table: ‘Darling, couldn’t you …’

‘One minute –’

‘If it’s so complicated –’

‘Here, you see, and here –’

‘ – talk about it afterwards?’

Claude flapped a balance sheet in the air. ‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘No more than vaguely. But then the comptrollers are vague, and it gives you an idea.’

Camille took it from him and ran a glance over it; then he looked up, meeting her eyes. She was startled, shocked by the – emotion, she could only call it. She took her eyes away and rested them on other guests, solicitous for their comfort. What he basically didn’t understand, Camille said – and probably he was being very stupid – was the relationship of one ministry to another and how they all got their funds. No, Claude said, not stupid at all: might he demonstrate?

Claude now thrust back his chair and rose from his place at the head of the table. Her guests looked up. ‘We might all learn much, I am sure,’ said an under-secretary. But he looked dubious, very dubious, as Claude crossed the room. As he passed her, Annette put out a hand, as if to restrain a child. ‘I only want the fruit bowl,’ Claude said: as if it were reasonable.

When he had secured it he returned to his place and set it in the middle of the table. An orange jumped down and circumambulated slowly, as if sentient and tropically bound. All the guests watched it. His eyes on Claude’s face, Camille put out a hand and detained it. He gave it a gentle push, and slowly it rolled towards her across the table: entranced, she reached for it. All the guests watched her; she blushed faintly, as if she were fifteen. Her husband retrieved from a side-table the soup tureen. He snatched a dish of vegetables from a servant who was taking it away. ‘Let the fruit bowl represent revenue,’ he said.

Claude was the cynosure now; chit-chat ceased. If … Camille said; and but. ‘And let the soup tureen represent the Minister of Justice, who is also, of course, Keeper of the Seals.’

‘Claude –’ she said.

He shushed her. Fascinated, paralysed, the guests followed the movement of the food about the table; deftly, from the under-secretary’s finger ends, Claude removed his wine glass. This functionary now appeared, hand extended, as one who mimes a harpist at charades; his expression darkened, but Claude failed to see it.

‘Let us say, this salt cellar is the minister’s secretary.’

‘So much smaller,’ Camille marvelled. ‘I never knew they were so low.’

‘And these spoons, Treasury warrants. Now …’

Yes, Camille said, but would he clarify, would he explain, and could he just go back to where he said – yes indeed, Claude allowed, you need to get it straight in your mind. He reached for a water jug, to rectify the proportions; his face shone.

‘It’s better than the puppet show with Mr Punch,’ someone whispered.

‘Perhaps the tureen will talk in a squeaky voice soon.’

Let him have mercy, Annette prayed, please let him stop asking questions; with a little flourish here and one there she saw him orchestrating Claude, while her guests sat open-mouthed at the disarrayed board, their glasses empty or snatched away, deprived of their cutlery, gone without dessert, exchanging glances, bottling their mirth; all over town it will be told, ministry to ministry and at the Law Courts too, and people will dine out on the story of my dinner party. Please let him stop, she said, please something make it stop; but what could stop it? Perhaps, she thought, a small fire.

All the while, as she grew flurried, cast about her, as she swallowed a glass of wine and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief, Camille’s incendiary eyes scorched her over the flower arrangement. Finally with a nod of apology, and a placating smile that took in the voyeurs, she swept from the table and left the room. She sat for ten minutes at her dressing-table, shaken by the trend of her own thoughts. She meant to retouch her face, but not to see the hollow and lost expression in her eyes. It was some years since she and Claude had slept together; what relevance has it, why is she stopping to calculate it, should she also call for paper and ink and tot up the Deficit of her own life? Claude says that if this goes on till ’89 the country will have gone to the dogs and so will we all. In the mirror she sees herself, large blue eyes now swimming with unaccountable tears, which she instantly dabs away as earlier she dabbed red wine from her lips; perhaps I have drunk too much, perhaps we have all drunk too much, except that viperous boy, and whatever else the years give me cause to forgive him for I shall never forgive him for wrecking my party and making a fool of Claude. Why am I clutching this orange, she wondered. She stared down at her hand, like Lady Macbeth. What, in our house?

When she returned to her guests – the perfumed blood under her nails – the performance was over. The guests toyed with petits fours. Claude glanced up at her as if to ask where she had been. He looked cheerful. Camille had ceased to contribute to the conversation. He sat with his eyes cast down to the table. His expression, in one of her daughters, she would have called demure. All other faces wore an expression of dislocation and strain. Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.

NEXT DAY CLAUDE referred to these events. He said what a stimulating occasion it had been, so much better than the usual supper-party trivia. If all their social life were like that, he wouldn’t mind it so much, and so would she ask again that young man whose name for the present escaped him? He was so charming, so interested, and a shame about his stutter, but was he perhaps a little slow on the uptake? He hoped he had not carried away any wrong impressions about the workings of the Treasury.

How torturing, she thought, is the situation of fools who know they are fools; and how pleasant is Claude’s state, by comparison.

THE NEXT TIME Camille called, he was more discreet in the way he looked at her. It was as if they had reached an agreement that nothing should be precipitated. Interesting, she thought. Interesting.

He told her he did not want a legal career: but what else? He was trapped by the terms of his scholarship. Like Voltaire, he said, he wanted no profession but that of man of letters. ‘Oh, Voltaire,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of the name. Men of letters will be a luxury, let me tell you, in the years to come. We shall all have to work hard, with no diversions. We shall all have to emulate Claude.’ Camille pushed his hair back a fraction. That was a gesture she liked: rather representative, useless but winning. ‘You’re only saying that. You don’t believe it, in your heart. In your heart you think that things will go on as they are.’

‘Allow me,’ she said, ‘to be the expert on my heart.’

As the afternoons passed, the general unsuitability of their friendship was borne in on her. It was not simply a matter of his age, but of his general direction. His friends were out-of-work actors, or they slid inkily from the offices of back-street printers. They had illegitimate children and subversive opinions; they went abroad when the police got on their trail. There was the drawing-room life; then there was this other life. She thought it was best not to ask questions about it.

HE CONTINUED to come to supper. There were no further incidents. Sometimes Claude asked him to spend the weekend with a party at Bourg-la-Reine, where they had some land and a comfortable farmhouse. The girls, she thought, had really taken to him.

FROM QUITE TWO YEARS ago, they had begun to see a great deal of each other. One of her friends, who was supposed to know about these things, had told her that he was a homosexual. She did not believe this, but kept it to hand as a defence, in case her husband complained. But why should he complain? He was just a young man who called at the house. There was nothing between them.

ONE DAY SHE ASKED HIM, ‘Do you know much about wild flowers?’

‘Not especially.’

‘It’s just that Lucile picked up a flower at Bourg-la-Reine and asked me what it was, I hadn’t the least idea, and I told her confidently that you knew everything, and I pressed it –’ she reached out – ‘inside my book, and I said I’d ask you.’

She moved to sit beside him, holding the large dictionary into which she would cram letters and shopping lists and anything she needed to keep safe. She opened the book – carefully, or its contents would have cascaded out. He examined the flower. Delicately with a fingernail he turned up the underside of its papery leaf. He frowned at it. ‘Probably some extremely common noxious weed,’ he said.

He put an arm around her and tried to kiss her. More out of astonishment than intention, she jumped away. She dropped the dictionary and everything fell out. It would have been quite in order to slap his face, but what a cliché, she thought, and besides she was off balance. She had always wanted to do it to someone, but would have preferred someone more robust; so, between one thing and another, the moment passed. She clutched the sofa and stood up, unsteadily.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That lacked finesse.’

He was trembling a little.

‘How could you?’

He raised a hand, palm upwards. ‘Oh, because, Annette, I want you.’

‘It’s out of the question,’ she said. She picked her feet out of the scattered papers. Some verses he had written lay on the carpet folded with a milliner’s bill she had found it necessary to conceal from Claude. Camille, she thought, would never in a thousand years ask questions about the price of a woman’s hats. It would be beyond him; beyond, and beneath. She found it necessary to stare out of the window (even though it was a bleak winter’s day as unpromising as this one) and to bite her lips to stop them from quivering.

This had been going on for a year now.

THEY TALKED about the theatre, about books and about people they knew; really though, they were only ever talking about one thing, and that was whether she would go to bed with him. She said the usual things. He said that her arguments were stale and that these were the things people always said, because they were afraid of themselves and afraid of trying to be happy in case God smote them and because they were choked up with puritanism and guilt.

She thought (privately) that he was more afraid of himself than anyone she had ever known: and that he had reason to be.

She said that she was not going to change her mind, but that the argument could be prolonged indefinitely. Not indefinitely, Camille said, not strictly speaking: but until they were both so old that they were no longer interested. The English do it, he said, in the House of Commons. She raised a shocked face. No, not what she had so clearly on her mind: but if someone proposes a measure you don’t like, you can just stand up and start spinning out the pros and cons until everybody goes home, or the session ends and there’s no more time. It’s called talking a measure out. It can go on for years. ‘Considered in one way,’ he said, ‘since I like talking to you, it might be a pleasant way to spend my life. But in fact I want you now.’

AFTER THAT FIRST OCCASION she had always been cool, fended him off rather expertly. Not that he had ever touched her again. He had seldom allowed her to touch him. If he had brushed against her, even accidentally, he had apologized. It was better like this, he said. Human nature being what it is, and the afternoons so long; the girls visiting friends, the streets deserted, no sound in the room except the ticking of clocks, the beating of hearts.

It had been her intention to end this non-affair smoothly, in her own good time; considered as a non-affair, it had had its moments. But then, obviously, Camille had started talking to somebody, or one of her husband’s friends had been observant: and everybody knew. Claude had a host of interested acquaintances. The question was contended for in robing rooms (scouted at the Châtelet but proposed in the civil courts as the scandal of the year, in the middle-class scandals division); it was circulated around the more select cafés, and mulled over at the ministry. In the gossips’ minds there were no debates, no delicately balanced temptations and counter-temptations, no moral anguish, no scruples. She was attractive, bored, not a girl any more. He was young and persistent. Of course they were – well, what would you think? Since when, is the question? And when will Duplessis decide to know?

Now Claude may be deaf, he may be blind, he may be dumb, but he is not a saint, he is not a martyr. Adultery is an ugly word. Time to end it, Annette thought; time to end what has never begun.

She remembered, for some reason, a couple of occasions when she’d thought she might be pregnant again, in the years before she and Claude had separate rooms. You thought you might be, you had those strange feelings, but then you bled and you knew you weren’t. A week, a fortnight out of your life had gone by, a certain life had been considered, a certain steady flow of love had begun, from the mind to the body and into the world and the years to come. Then it was over, or had never been: a miscarriage of love. The child went on in your mind. Would it have had blue eyes? What would its character have been?

AND NOW THE DAY HAD COME. Annette sat at her dressing-table. Her maid fussed about, tweaking and pulling at her hair. ‘Not like that,’ Annette said. ‘I don’t like it like that. Makes me look older.’

‘No!’ said the maid, with a pretence at horror. ‘Not a day over thirty-eight.’

‘I don’t like thirty-eight,’ Annette said. ‘I like a nice round number. Say, thirty-five.’

‘Forty’s a nice round number.’

Annette took a sip of her cider vinegar. She grimaced. ‘Your visitor’s here,’ the maid said.

The rain blew in gusts against the window.

IN ANOTHER ROOM, Annette’s daughter Lucile opened her new journal. Now for a fresh start. Red binding. White paper with a satin sheen. A ribbon to mark her place.

‘Anne Lucile Philippa Duplessis,’ she wrote. She was in the process of changing her handwriting again. ‘The Journal of Lucile Duplessis, born 1770, died? Volume III. The year 1786.’

‘At this time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I think a lot about what it would be like to be a Queen. Not our Queen; some more tragic one. I think about Mary Tudor: “When I am dead and opened they will find ‘Calais’ written on my heart.” If I, Lucile, were dead and opened, what they would find written is “Ennui.”

‘Actually, I prefer Maria Stuart. She is my favourite Queen by a long way. I think of her dazzling beauty among the barbarian Scots. I think of the walls of Fotheringay, closing in like the sides of a grave. It’s a pity really that she didn’t die young. It’s always better when people die young, they stay radiant, you don’t have to think of them getting rheumatics or growing stout.’

Lucile left a line. She took a breath, then began again.

‘She spent her last night writing letters. She sent a diamond to Mendoza, and one to the King of Spain. When all was under seal, she sat with open eyes while her women prayed.

‘At eight o’clock the Provost Marshal came for her. At her priedieu, she read in a calm voice the prayers for the dying. Members of her household knelt as she swept into the Great Hall, dressed all in black, an ivory crucifix in her ivory hand.

‘Three hundred people had assembled to watch her die. She entered through a small side door, surprising them; her face was composed. The scaffold was draped in black. There was a black cushion for her to kneel upon. But when her attendants stepped forward, and they slipped the black robe from her shoulders, it was seen that she was clothed entirely in scarlet. She had dressed in the colour of blood.’

Here Lucile put down her pen. She began to think of synonyms. Vermilion. Flame. Cardinal. Sanguine. Phrases occurred to her: caught red-handed. In the red. Red-letter day.

She picked up her pen again.

‘What did she think, as she rested her head on the block? As she waited: as the executioner took his stance? Seconds passed; and those seconds went by like years.

‘The first blow of the axe gashed the back of the Queen’s head. The second failed to sever her neck, but carpeted the stage with royal blood. The third blow rolled her head across the scaffold. The executioner retrieved it and held it up to the onlookers. It could be seen that the lips were moving; and they continued to move for a quarter of an hour.

‘Though who stood over the sodden relic with a fob-watch, I really could not say.’

ADÈLE, HER SISTER, came in. ‘Doing your diary? Can I read it?’

‘Yes; but you may not.’

‘Oh, Lucile,’ her sister said; and laughed.

Adèle dumped herself into a chair. With some difficulty, Lucile dragged her mind back into the present day, and brought her eyes around to focus on her sister’s face. She is regressing, Lucile thought. If I had been a married woman, however briefly, I would not be spending the afternoons in my parents’ house.

‘I’m lonely,’ Adèle said. ‘I’m bored. I can’t go out anywhere because it’s too soon and I have to wear this disgusting mourning.’

‘Here’s boring,’ Lucile said.

‘Here’s just as usual. Isn’t it?’

‘Except that Claude is at home less than ever. And this gives Annette more opportunity to be with her Friend.’

It was their impertinent habit, when they were alone, to call their parents by their Christian names.

‘And how is that Friend?’ Adèle inquired. ‘Does he still do your Latin for you?’

‘I don’t have to do Latin any more.’

‘What a shame. No more pretext to put your heads together, then.’

‘I hate you, Adèle.’

‘Of course you do,’ her sister said good-naturedly. ‘Think how grown-up I am. Think of all the lovely money my poor husband left me. Think of all the things I know, that you don’t. Think of all the fun I’m going to have, when I’m out of mourning. Think of all the men there are in the world! But no. You only think of one.’

‘I do not think of him,’ Lucile said.

‘Does Claude even suspect what’s germinating here, what with him and Annette, and him and you?’

‘There’s nothing germinating. Can’t you see? The whole point is that nothing’s going on.’

‘Well, maybe not in the crude technical sense,’ Adèle said. ‘But I can’t see Annette holding out for much longer, I mean, even through sheer fatigue. And you – you were twelve when you first saw him. I remember the occasion. Your piggy eyes lit up.’

‘I have not got piggy eyes. They did not light up.’

‘But he’s exactly what you want,’ Adèle said. ‘Admittedly, he’s not much like anything in the life of Maria Stuart. But he’s just what you need for casting in people’s teeth.’

‘He never looks at me anyway,’ Lucile said. ‘He thinks I’m a child. He doesn’t know I’m there.’

‘He knows,’ Adèle said. ‘Go through, why don’t you?’ She gestured in the direction of the drawing room, towards its closed doors. ‘Bring me a report. I dare you.’

‘I can’t just walk in.’

‘Why can’t you? If they’re only sitting around talking, they can’t object, can they? And if they’re not – well, that’s what we want to know, isn’t it?’

‘Why don’t you go then?’

Adèle looked at her as if she were simple-minded. ‘Because the more innocent assumption is the one that you could be expected to make.’

Lucile saw this; and she could never resist a dare. Adèle watched her go, her satin slippers noiseless on the carpets. Camille’s odd little face floated into her mind. If he’s not the death of us, she thought, I’ll smash my crystal ball and take up knitting.

CAMILLE WAS PUNCTUAL; come at two, she had said. On the offensive, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his afternoons. He did not think this worth a reply; but he sensed the drift of things.

Annette had decided to employ that aspect of herself her friends called a Splendid Woman. It involved sweeping about the room and smiling archly.

‘So,’ she said. ‘There are rules, and you won’t play by them. You’ve been talking about us to someone.’

‘Oh,’ Camille said, fiddling with his hair, ‘if only there were anything to say.’

‘Claude is going to find out.’

‘Oh, if only there were something for him to find out.’ He stared absently at the ceiling. ‘How is Claude?’ he said at last.

‘Cross,’ Annette said, distracted. ‘Terribly cross. He put a lot of money into the Périer brothers’ waterworks schemes, and now the Comte de Mirabeau has written a pamphlet against it and collapsed the stocks.’

‘But he must mean it for the public good. I admire Mirabeau.’

‘You would. Let a man be a bankrupt, let him be notoriously immoral – oh, don’t distract me, Camille, don’t.’

‘I thought you wanted distraction,’ he said sombrely.

She was keeping a careful distance between them, buttressing her resolve with occasional tables. ‘It has to stop,’ she said. ‘You have to stop coming here. People are talking, they’re making assumptions. And God knows, I’m sick of it. Whatever made you think in the first place that I would give up the security of my happy marriage for a hole-and-corner affair with you?’

‘I just think you would, that’s all.’

‘You think I’m in love with you, don’t you? Your self-conceit is so monstrous –’

‘Annette, let’s run away. Shall we? Tonight?’

She almost said, yes, all right then.

Camille stood up, as if he were going to suggest they start her packing. She stopped pacing, came to a halt before him. She rested her eyes on his face, one hand pointlessly smoothing her skirts. She raised the other hand, touched his shoulder.

He moved towards her, set his hands at either side of her waist. The length of their bodies touched. His heart was beating wildly. He’ll die, she thought, of a heart like that. She spent a moment looking into his eyes. Tentatively, their lips met. A few seconds passed. Annette drew her fingernails along the back of her lover’s neck and knotted them into his hair, pulling his head down towards her.

There was a sharp squeal from behind them. ‘Well,’ a breathy voice said, ‘so it is true after all. And, as Adèle puts it, “in the crude technical sense”.’

Annette plunged away from him and whirled around, the blood draining from her face. Camille regarded her daughter more with interest than surprise, but he blushed, very faintly indeed. And Lucile was shocked, no doubt about that; that was why her voice came out so high and frightened, and why she now appeared rooted to the spot.

‘There wasn’t anything crude about it,’ Camille said. ‘Do you think that, Lucile? That’s sad.’

Lucile turned and fled. Annette let out her breath. Another few minutes, she thought, and God knows. What a ridiculous, wild, stupid woman I am. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Camille, get out of my house. If you ever come within a mile of me again, I’ll arrange to have you arrested.’

Camille looked slightly overawed. He backed off slowly, as if he were leaving a royal audience. She wanted to shout at him ‘What are you thinking of now?’ But she was cowed, like him, by intimations of disaster.

‘IS THIS YOUR ULTIMATE INSANITY?’ d’Anton asked Camille. ‘Or is there more to come?’

Somehow – he does not know how – he has become Camille’s confidant. What he is being told now is unreal and dangerous and perhaps slightly – he relishes the word – depraved.

‘You said,’ Camille protested, ‘that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It’s true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation.’

‘Yes, all right, but that’s what people do. It’s a harmless, necessary, socially accepted convention. It is not like, it is a million miles from, what you are suggesting. Which is, as I understand it, that you start something up with the daughter as a way of getting to the mother.’

‘I don’t know about “start something up”,’ Camille said. ‘I think it would be better if I married her. More permanent, no? Make myself one of the family? Annette can’t have me arrested, not if I’m her son-in-law.’

‘But you ought to be arrested,’ d’Anton said humbly. ‘You ought to be locked up.’ He shook his head …

THE FOLLOWING DAY Lucile received a letter. She never knew how; it was brought up from the kitchen. It must have been given to one of the servants. Normally it would have been handed straight to Madame, but there was a new skivvy, a little girl, she didn’t know any better.

When she had read the letter she turned it over in her hand and smoothed out the pages. She worked through it again, methodically. Then she folded it and tucked it inside a volume of light pastoral verse. Immediately, she thought that she might have slighted it; she took it out again and placed it inside Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. So strange was it, that it might have come from Persia.

And then, as soon as the book was back on the shelf, she wanted the letter in her hand again. She wanted the feel of the paper, the sight of the looped black hand, to run her eye across the phrases – Camille writes beautifully, she thought, beautifully. There were phrases that made her hold her breath. Sentences that seemed to fly from the page. Whole paragraphs that held and then scattered the light: each word strung on a thread, each word a diamond.

Good Lord, she thought. She remembered her journals, with a sense of shame. And I thought I practised prose …

All this time, she was trying to avoid thinking about the content of the letter. She did not really believe it could apply to her, though logic told her that such a thing would not be misdirected.

No, it was she – her soul, her face, her body – that occasioned the prose. You could not examine your soul to see what the fuss was about; even the body and face were not easy. The mirrors in the apartment were all too high; her father, she supposed, had directed where to hang them. She could only see her head, which gave a curious disjointed effect. She had to stand on tiptoe to see some of her neck. She had been a pretty little girl, yes, she knew that. She and Adèle had both been pretty little girls, the kind that fathers dote on. Last year there had been this change.

She knew that for many women beauty was a matter of effort, a great exercise of patience and ingenuity. It required cunning and dedication, a curious honesty and absence of vanity. So, if not precisely a virtue, it might be called a merit.

But she could not claim this merit.

Sometimes she was irritated by the new dispensation – just as some people are irritated by their own laziness, or by the fact that they bite their nails. She would like to work at her looks – but there it is, they don’t require it. She felt herself drifting away from other people, into the realms of being judged by what she cannot help. A friend of her mother said (she was eavesdropping, as it happened): ‘Girls who look like that at her age are nothing by the time they’re twenty-five.’ The truth is, she can’t imagine twenty-five. She is sixteen now; beauty is as final as a birthmark.

Because her skin had a delicate pallor, like that of a woman in an ivory tower, Annette had persuaded her to powder her dark hair, and knot it up with ribbons and flowers to show the flawless bones of her face. It was as well her dark eyes could not be taken out and put back china blue. Or Annette would have done it, perhaps; she wanted to see her own doll’s face looking back. More than once, Lucile had imagined herself a china doll, left over from her mother’s childhood, wrapped up in silk on a high shelf: a doll too fragile and too valuable to be given to the rough, wild children of today.

Life for the most part was dull. She could remember a time when her greatest joy had been a picnic, an excursion to the country, a boat on the river on a hot afternoon. A day with no studies, when the regular hours were broken, and it was possible to forget which day of the week it was. She had looked forward to these days with an excitement very like dread, rising early to scan the sky and predict the weather. There were a few hours when you felt ‘Life is really like this’; you supposed this was happiness, and it was. You thought about it at the time, self-consciously. Then you came back, tired, in the evening, and things went on as before. You said, ‘Last week, when I went to the country, I was happy.’

Now she had outgrown Sunday treats; the river looked always the same, and if it rained, and you stayed indoors, that was no great disaster. After her childhood (after she said to herself, ‘my childhood is over’) events in her imagination became more interesting than anything that happened in the Duplessis household. When her imagination failed her, she wandered the rooms, listless and miserable, destructive thoughts going around in her head. She was glad when it was time for bed and reluctant to get up in the mornings. Life was like that. She would put aside her diaries, consumed with horror at her shapeless days, at the waste of time that stretched before her.

Or pick up her pen: Anne Lucile Philippa, Anne Lucile. How distressed I am to find myself writing like this, how distressed that a girl of your education and refinement can find nothing better to do, no music practice, no embroidery, no healthy afternoon walk, just these death-wishes, these fantasies of the morbid and the grandiose, these blood-wishes, these images, sweet Jesus, ropes, blades and her mother’s lover with his half-dead-already air and his sensual, bruised-looking mouth. Anne Lucile. Anne Lucile Duplessis. Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and worse for it’s much less dull than better. She looked herself in the eye; she smiled; she threw back her head, displaying to her advantage the long white throat that her mother deems will break her admirers’ hearts.

Yesterday Adèle had begun on that extraordinary conversation. Then she had walked into the drawing room and seen her mother slide her tongue between her lover’s teeth, knot her fingers into his hair, flush and tremble and decline into his thin and elegant hands. She remembered those hands, his forefinger touching paper, touching her handwriting: saying Lucile, my sweet, this should be in the ablative case, and I am afraid that Julius Caesar never imagined such things as your translation suggests.

Today, her mother’s lover offered her marriage. When something – blessed event, however strange – comes to shake us out of our monotony – then, she cried, things should happen in ones.

CLAUDE: ‘Of course I have said my last word on the matter. I hope he has the sense to accept it. I don’t know what can have led him to make the proposal in the first place. Do you, Annette? Once it might have been a different story. When I met him at first I took to him, I admit. Very intelligent … but what is intelligence, when someone has a bad moral character? Is basically unsound? He has the most extraordinary reputation … no, no, no. Can’t hear of it.’

‘No, I suppose you can’t,’ Annette said.

‘Frankly, that he has the nerve – I’m surprised.’

‘So am I.’

He had considered sending Lucile away to stay with relations. But then people might put the worst construction on it – might believe she had done something she shouldn’t have.

‘What if …?’

‘If?’ Annette said impatiently.

‘If I were to introduce her to one or two eligible young men?’

‘Sixteen is too young to marry. And her vanity is already great enough. Still, Claude, you must do as you feel. You are the head of the household. You are the girl’s father.’

ANNETTE sent for her daughter, having fortified herself with a large glass of brandy.

‘The letter.’ She clicked her fingers for it.

‘I don’t carry it on my person.’

‘Where then?’

‘Inside Persian Letters.’

An ill-advised merriment seized Annette. ‘Perhaps you would like to file it inside my copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.’

‘Didn’t know you had one. Can I read it?’

‘No indeed. I may follow the advice in the foreword, and give you a copy on your wedding night. When, in the course of time, your father and I find you someone to marry.’

Lucile made no comment. How well she hides, she thought – with the help of only a little brandy – a most mortifying blow to her pride. She would almost like to congratulate her.

‘He came to see your father,’ Annette said. ‘He said he had written to you. You won’t see him again. If there are any more letters, bring them straight to me.’

‘Does he accept the situation?’

‘That hardly matters.’

‘Did it not seem proper to my father that I be consulted?’

‘Why should you be consulted? You are a child.’

‘I might have to have a chat with my father. About certain things I saw.’

Annette smiled wanly. ‘Ruthless, aren’t you, my dear?’

‘It seems a fair exchange.’ Lucile’s throat was constricted. On the precipice of these new dealings, she was almost too frightened to speak. ‘You give me time to think. That’s all I’m asking for.’

‘And in return you promise me your infant discretion? What is it, Lucile, that you think you know?’

‘Well, after all, I’ve never seen my father kiss you like that. I’ve never seen anybody kiss anybody like that. It must have done something to brighten your week.’

‘It seems to have brightened yours.’ Annette rose from her chair. She trailed across the room, to where some hothouse flowers stood in a bowl. She swept them out, and began to replace them one by one. ‘You should have gone to a convent,’ she said. ‘It’s not too late to finish your education.’

‘You would have to let me out eventually.’

‘Oh yes, but while you were busy with your plain chant you wouldn’t be spying on people and practising the art of manipulation.’ She laughed – without merriment now. ‘I suppose you thought, until you came into the drawing room, how worldly-wise and sophisticated I was? That I never put a foot wrong?’

‘Oh no. Until then, I thought what a boring life you had.’

‘I’d like to ask you to forget what has happened in the last few days.’ Annette paused, a rose in her hand. ‘But you won’t, will you, because you’re stubborn and vain, and bent on seizing what you – quite wrongly – feel to be your advantage.’

‘I didn’t spy on you, you know.’ She wanted, very badly, to put this right. ‘Adèle dared me to walk in. What would happen if I said yes, I want to marry him?’

‘That’s unthinkable,’ her mother said. One flower, icy-white, escaped to the carpet.

‘Not really. The human brain’s a wonderful thing.’

Lucile retrieved the long-stemmed rose, handed it back to her mother. She sucked from her finger a bead of blood. I may do it, she thought, or I may not. In any event, there will be more letters. She will not use Montesquieu again, but will file them inside Mably’s disquisition of 1768: Doubts on the Natural Order of Societies. Those, she feels, have suddenly become considerable.

III. Maximilien: Life and Times
(1787)

MERCURE DE FRANCE, June 1783: ‘M. de Robespierre, a young barrister of great merit, deployed in this matter – which is in the cause of the arts and the sciences – an eloquence and wisdom that give the highest indications of his talents.’

‘I see the thorn that’s in the rose

In these bouquets you offer me …’

Maximilien de Robespierre, Poems

THE CUTTING was growing yellow now, worn from much handling. He had been trying to think how to preserve it and keep it clean, but the whole sheet was curling at the edges. He was certain that he knew it by heart, but if he simply repeated it to himself, it might have been something he had made up. But when you read it, held the paper in your hand, you could be sure that it was another person’s opinion, written by a Paris journalist, set up by the printers. You could not say that it had not happened.

There was quite a long report of the case. It was, of course, a matter of public interest. It had all begun when a M. de Vissery of Saint-Omer got himself a lightning conductor and put it up on his house, watched by a dour crowd of simpletons; when the work was finished they had clumped off to the Municipality and claimed that the thing actually attracted lightning, and must be taken down. Why would M. de Vissery want to attract lightning? Well, he was in league with the devil, wasn’t he?

So, to law over the subject’s right to have a lightning conductor. The aggrieved householder consulted Maître de Buissart, a leading figure at the Arras Bar, a man with a strong scientific bent. Maximilien was well in with de Buissart, at the time. His colleague got quite excited: ‘You see, there’s a principle at stake; there are people trying to block progress, to oppose the dissemination of the benefits of science – and we can’t, if we count ourselves enlightened men, stand idly by – so would you like to come in on this, write some letters for me? Do you think we should write to Benjamin Franklin?’

Suggestions, advice, scientific commentary poured in. Papers were spread all over the house. ‘This man Marat,’ de Buissart said, ‘it’s good of him to take so much trouble, but we won’t push his hypotheses too strongly. I hear he’s in bad odour with the scientists of the Academy.’ When, finally, the case went to the Council of Arras, de Buissart stood aside, let de Robespierre make the speeches. De Buissart hadn’t realized, when the case began, what a strain on his memory and organizational powers it would be. His colleague didn’t seem to feel the strain; de Buissart put it down to youth.

Afterwards, the winners gave a party. Letters of congratulation came – well, pouring in would be an exaggeration, but there was no doubt that the case had attracted attention. He still had all the papers, Dr Marat’s voluminous evidence, his own concluding speech with the last-minute emendations down the side. And for months when people came calling the Aunts would take out the newspaper and say, ‘Did you see about the lightning conductor, where it said Maximilien did so well?’

Max is quiet, calm and easy to live with; he has a neat build and wide, light eyes of a changeable blue-green. His mouth is not without humour, his complexion is pale; he takes care of his clothes and they fit him very well. His brown hair is always dressed and powdered; once he could not afford to keep up appearances, so now appearances are his only luxury.

This is a well-conducted household. He gets up at six, works on his papers till eight. At eight the barber comes. Then a light breakfast – fresh bread, a cup of milk. By ten o’clock he is usually in court. After the sitting he tries to avoid his colleagues and get home as soon as he can. His stomach still churning from the morning’s conflicts, he eats some fruit, takes a cup of coffee and a little red wine well diluted. How can they do it, tumble out of court roaring and backslapping, after a morning shouting each other down? Then back to their houses to drink and dine, to address themselves to slabs of red meat? He has never learned the trick.

After his meal he takes a walk, whether it is fine or not, because dog Brount does not care about the weather and makes trouble with his loping about if he is kept indoors. He lets Brount tow him through the streets, the woods, the fields; they come home looking not nearly so respectable as when they went out. Sister Charlotte says, ‘Don’t bring that muddy dog in here.’

Brount flops down outside the door of his room. He closes the door and works till seven or eight o’clock; longer, of course, if there is a big case next day. When finally he puts his papers away, he might chew his pen and try some verse for the next meeting of the literary society. It’s not poetry, he admits; it’s proficient, unserious stuff. Sometimes more unserious than others; consider, for example, his ‘Ode to Jam Tarts’.

He reads a good deal; then once a week there is the meeting of the Academy of Arras. Their ostensible purpose is to discuss history, literature, scientific topics, current affairs. They do all this, and also purvey gossip, arrange marriages, and start up small-town feuds.

On other evenings he writes letters. Frequently Charlotte insists on going over the household accounts. And the Aunts take offence if they are not visited once a week. They have separate houses now, so that takes up two evenings.

There had been many changes when he returned to Arras from Paris, with his new law degree and his carefully modulated hopes. In 1776, the year of the American war, Aunt Eulalie to the general amazement announced that she was getting married. There is hope for us all, said the spinsters of the parish. Aunt Henriette said Eulalie had taken leave of her senses: Robert Deshorties was a widower with several children, including a daughter, Anaïs, who was almost of marriageable age. But within six months, Aunt Henriette’s sour grapes had turned to secretive pink blushes and an amount of unbecoming fluttering and hint-dropping. The following year she married Gabriel du Rut, a noisy man, aged fifty-three. Maximilien was glad he was in Paris and could not get away.

For Aunt Henriette’s godchild, there was no marriage, no celebration. His sister Henriette had never been strong. She couldn’t get her breath, she didn’t eat; one of these impossible girls, destined to be shouted at, always with her nose in a book. One morning – this news came to him a week old, in a letter – they found her dead, her pillow soaked in blood. She had haemorrhaged, while downstairs the Aunts were playing cards with Charlotte; while they were enjoying a light supper, her heart had stopped. She was nineteen. He had loved her. He had hoped they might be friends.

Two years after the amazing marriages, Grandfather Carraut died. He left the brewery to Uncle Augustin Carraut, and a legacy to each of his surviving grandchildren – to Maximilien, to Charlotte and to Augustin.

By courtesy of the abbot, young Augustin had taken over his brother’s scholarship at Louis-le-Grand. He’d turned into a nice, unremarkable boy, reasonably conscientious but not particularly clever. Maximilien worried about him when he went to Paris – whether he would find the standard too exacting. He had always felt that someone from their background had little to recommend him unless he had brains. He assumed that Augustin was making the same discovery.

When he arrived back in Arras he had gone to lodge with Aunt Henriette and the noisy husband – who reminded him, before the week was out, that he owed them money. To be exact, it was his father François who owed the money – to Aunt Henriette, to Aunt Eulalie, to Grandfather Carraut’s estate – he dared not inquire further. The legacy from his grandfather went to pay his father’s debts. Why did they do this to him? It was tactless, it was grasping. They could have given him a year’s grace, until he had earned some money. He made no fuss, paid up; then moved out, to save embarrassment to Aunt Henriette.

If it had been the other way around, he’d not have asked for the money – not in a year, not anytime. And now they were always talking about François – your father was like this, he was like that, your father always did such-and-such at your age. For God’s sake, he thought, I am not my father. Then Augustin came back from Louis-le-Grand, suddenly and decisively grown-up. He had an incautious mouth, he wasted his time and he was an avid though inept chaser of women. The Aunts said – not without admiration – ‘He really is his father’s son.’

Now Charlotte came home from her convent school. They set up house together in the rue des Rapporteurs. Maximilien earned the money, Augustin lounged about, Charlotte did the housekeeping and thought up cutting remarks about them both.

During his vacations from Louis-le-Grand, he had never neglected his round of duty calls. A visit to the bishop, a visit to the abbot, a visit to the masters at his first school to tell them how he was getting on. It was not that he was enchanted with their company; it was that he knew how later he would need their good will. So when he returned home, his carefulness paid off. The family had one opinion, but the town had another. He was called to the Bar of the Council of Arras, and he was made as welcome as anyone could be. Because of course he was not his father and the world had moved on; he was sober, neat and punctilious; he was a credit to the town, a credit to the abbot, and a credit to the respected relatives who had brought him up.

If only that unspeakable du Rut would quit his reminiscing … If only you could order your own mind, so that certain conversations, certain allusions, certain thoughts even, did not make you nauseated. As if you were guilty of a crime. After all, you are not a criminal, but a judge.

IN HIS FIRST YEAR he had fifteen cases, which was considered better than average. Usually his papers would be prepared a clear week in advance, but on the eve of the first hearing he would work till midnight, till dawn if necessary. He would forget everything he had done so far, lay his papers aside; he would survey the facts again; he would build the case once more, painstakingly, from its foundations. He had a mind like a miser’s strongbox; once a fact went in, it stayed there. He knew he frightened his colleagues, but what could he do? Did they imagine that he was going to be less than a very very good lawyer indeed?

He began to advise his clients to settle out of court where they could. This brought little profit to himself or his opponent, but it saved clients a lot of time and expense. ‘Other people aren’t so scrupulous,’ Augustin said.

After four months of practice he was appointed to a part-time judicial position. It was an honour, coming so soon, but immediately he wondered if it were double-edged. In his first weeks he had seen things that were wrong, and said so, naturally; and M. Liborel, who had sponsored him in his introduction to the Bar, seemed to think he had made a series of gaffes. Liborel had said (they had all said), ‘Of course, we agree on the need for a certain degree of reform, but we in Artois would prefer things not to be rushed.’ In this way, misunderstandings began. God knows, he had not set out to ruffle anyone’s feelings, but he seemed to have managed it. And so whether this judicial position was because they thought he merited it, or whether it was a sop, a bribe, a device to blunt his judgement, or whether it was a prize, a favour, or even a piece of compensation … compensation for an injury not yet inflicted?

THAT DAY CAME: that day appointed, for him to give a judgement. He sat up, the shutters open, watching the progress of the night across the sky. Someone had put down a supper tray among his papers for the case. He got up and locked the door. He left the food untouched. He expected to see it rot before his eyes; he looked, as if it were putrescent, at the thin green skin of an apple on a plate.

If you died it might be, like his mother, in a way never discussed; but he remembered her face, when she sat propped against the bolsters waiting to be butchered, and he remembered how one of the servants had said afterwards that they were going to burn the sheets. You might die like Henriette: alone, your blood pumping out on to white linen, unable to call, unable to move, shocked to death, paralysed – while downstairs, people were making small talk and passing cakes around. You might die like Grandfather Carraut – palsied and decrepit and disgusting, memory gone, fretting about the will, chattering to his under-manager about the age of the wood for the barrels; breaking off, from time to time, to chide the family for faults committed thirty years before, and to curse his pretty dead daughter for her shameful swollen womb. That was not Grandfather’s fault. That was old age. But he couldn’t imagine old age. He couldn’t imagine approaching it.

And if you were hanged? He did not want to think about it. The workaday criminal death could take half an hour.

He tried praying: some beads to keep his mind ordered. But then slipping through his fingers they reminded him of a rope, and he dropped them gently on to the floor. He kept count: ‘Pater noster, qui es in coeli, Ave Maria, Ave Maria’, and that pious addendum, ‘Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, Amen’. The blessed syllables ran together. They made nonsense words, everted themselves, darted in and out of sense. Anyway, what is the sense? God is not going to tell him what to do. God is not going to help him. He does not believe in a God of that sort. He’s not an atheist, he tells himself: just an adult.

Dawn: he heard the clatter of wheels below the window, the leathery creak of the harness and the snort and whinny of the horse drawing a cart bringing vegetables for those who would still be alive at dinner-time. Priests were wiping their vessels for early Mass, and the household below was rising, washing, boiling water and lighting fires. At Louis-le-Grand, he would have been at his first class by now. Where were they, the children he had known? Where was Louis Suleau? Pursuing his sarcastic path. Where was Fréron? Cutting a swathe through society. And Camille would be sleeping still, this morning, gathered to the city’s dark heart: sleeping unconscious of his perhaps damned soul draped about in muscle and bone.

Brount whined at the door. Charlotte came, called him sharply to come away. Brount’s reluctant paws scrabbled down the stairs.

He unlocked the door to let the barber in. The man looked into the face of his regular, amiable client; he knew better than to try his morning chatter. The clock ticked without compunction towards ten.

It occurred to him at the last moment that he need not go; he could simply sit here and say, I’m not going into court today. They would wait for him for ten minutes, post a clerk to look along the road, and then they would send a message; and he would reply that he was not going into court today.

They could not drag him out, or carry him, could they? They could not force the sentence out of his throat?

But it was the law, he thought wearily, and if he could not carry it out he should have resigned: should have resigned yesterday.

THREE P.M.: the aftermath. He is going to be sick. Here, by the side of the road. He doubles up. Sweat breaks out along his back. He goes down on his knees and retches. His eyes mist over, his throat hurts. But there’s nothing in his stomach; he hasn’t eaten for twenty-four hours.

He puts out a hand, gets to his feet and steadies himself. He wishes for someone to take his hand, to stop him from shivering; but when you are ill, no one comes to help.

If there were anyone to watch his progress along the road they would see that he is staggering, lurching from foot to foot. He tries consciously to stand up straight and put some order in his steps, but his legs feel too far away. The whole despicable body is teaching him a lesson again: be true to yourself.

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.

A MAN SURVIVES: he comes through. Even here in Arras it was possible to find allies, if not friends. Joseph Fouché taught at the Oratorian College. He had thought of the priesthood but had grown away from the idea. He taught physics, and was interested in anything new. Fouché came to dinner quite often, invited by Charlotte. He seemed to have proposed to her – or at any rate, they had come to some understanding. Max was surprised that any girl would be attracted by Fouché, with his frail, stick-like limbs and almost lashless eyes. Still, who’s to know? He did not like Fouché at all, in point of fact, but Charlotte had her own life to lead.

Then there was Lazare Carnot, a captain of engineers at the garrison; a man older than himself, reserved, rather bitter about the lack of opportunities open to him, as a commoner in His Majesty’s forces. Carnot went for company to the Academy’s meetings, formulae revolving in his head while they discussed the sonnet form. Sometimes he treated them to a tirade about the deplorable state of the army. Members would exchange amused glances.

Only Maximilien listened earnestly – quite ignorant of military matters, and a little overawed.

When Mlle de Kéralio was voted in by the Academy – its first lady member – he made a speech in her honour about the genius of women, their role in literature and the arts. After this she’d said, ‘Why don’t you call me Louise?’ She wrote novels – thousands of words a week. He envied her facility. ‘Listen to this,’ she’d say, ‘and tell me what you think.’

He made sure not to – authors are touchy. Louise was pretty, and she never quite got the ink scrubbed off her little fingers. ‘I’m off to Paris,’ she said, ‘one can’t go on stagnating in this backwater, saving your presences.’ Her hand tapped a rolled sheaf of manuscript against a chair-back. ‘O solemn and wondrous Maximilien de Robespierre, why don’t you come to Paris too? No? Well, at least let’s take off for the afternoon with a picnic. Let’s start a rumour, shall we?’

Louise belonged to the real nobility. ‘Nothing to be thought of there,’ said the Aunts: ‘poor Maximilien.’

‘Noble or not,’ Charlotte said, ‘the girl’s a trollop. She wanted my brother to up and go to Paris with her, imagine.’ Yes, just imagine. Louise packed her bags and hurtled off into the future. He was dimly aware of a turning missed; one of those forks in the road, that you remember later when you are good and lost.

Still, there was Aunt Eulalie’s stepdaughter, Anaïs. Both the Aunts favoured her above all other candidates. They said she had nice manners.

ONE DAY BEFORE LONG the mother of a poor rope-maker turned up at his door with a story about her son who was in prison because the Benedictines at Anchin had accused him of theft. She said the accusation was false and malicious; the Abbey treasurer, Dom Brognard, was notoriously light-fingered, and had in addition tried to get the rope-maker’s sister into bed, and she wouldn’t by any means be the first girl …

Yes, he said. Calm down. Have a seat. Let’s start at the beginning.

This was the kind of client he was beginning to get. An ordinary man – or frequently a woman – who’d fallen foul of vested interests. Naturally, there was no hope of a fee.

The rope-maker’s tale sounded too bad to be true. Nevertheless, he said, we’ll let it see the light. Within a month, Dom Brognard was under investigation, and the rope-maker was sueing the abbey for damages. When the Benedictines wanted to retain a lawyer, who did they get? M. Liborel, his one-time sponsor. He said, gratitude does not bind me here, the truth is at stake.

Little hollow words, echoing through the town. Everyone takes sides, and most of the legal establishment takes Liborel’s. It turns into a dirty fight; and of course in the end they do what he imagined they would do – they offer the rope-maker more money than he earns in years to settle out of court and go away and keep quiet.

Obviously, things are not going to be the same after this. He’ll not forget how they got together, conspired against him, condemned him in the local press as an anti-clerical troublemaker. Him? The abbot’s protégé? The bishop’s golden boy? Very well. If that’s how they want to see him, he will not trouble from now on to make things easy for his colleagues, to be so very helpful and polite. It is a fault, that persistent itch to have people think well of him.

The Academy of Arras elected him president, but he bored them with his harangues about the rights of illegitimate children. You’d think there was no other issue in the universe, one of the members complained.

‘If your mother and your father had conducted themselves properly,’ Grandfather Carraut had said, ‘you would never have been born.’

CHARLOTTE would take out her account books and observe that the cost of his conscience grew higher by the month. ‘Of course it does,’ he said. ‘What did you expect?’

Every few weeks she would round on him and deliver these wounding blows, proving to him that he was not understood even in his own house.

‘This house,’ she said. ‘I can’t call it a home. We have never had a home. Some days you are so preoccupied that you hardly speak. I may as well not be here. I am a good housekeeper, what interest do you display in my arrangements? I am a fine cook, but you have no interest in food. I invite company, and when we take out the cards or prepare to make conversation you withdraw to the other side of the room and mark passages in books.’

He waited for her anger to subside. It was understandable; anger these days was her usual condition. Fouché had offered her marriage – or something – and then left her high and dry, looking a bit of a fool. He wondered vaguely if something ought to be done about it, but he was convinced she’d be better off without the man in the long run.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to be more sociable. It’s just that I’ve a lot of work on.’

‘Yes, but is it work you’ll be paid for?’ Charlotte said that in Arras he had got himself the reputation of being uninterested in money and soft-hearted, which surprised him, because he thought of himself as a man of principle and nobody’s fool. She would accuse him of alienating people who could have promoted his career, and he would begin again to explain why it was necessary to reject their help, where his duties lay, what he felt bound to do. She made too much of it, he thought. They could pay the bills, after all. There was food on the table.

Charlotte would go round and round the point, though. Sooner or later, she would work herself into a crying fit. Then out it would come, the thing that was really bothering her. ‘You’re going to marry Anaïs. You’re going to marry Anaïs, and leave me on my own.’

IN COURT he was now making what people called ‘political speeches’. How not? Everything’s politics. The system is corrupt. Justice is for sale.

JUNE 30 1787:

It is ordered that the language attacking the authority of justice and the law, and injurious to judges, published in the printed memoir signed ‘De Robespierre, Barrister-at-Law’, shall be suppressed; and this decree shall be posted in the town of ARRAS.

BY ORDER OF THE MAGISTRATES OF BÉTHUNE

EVERY SO OFTEN, a pinpoint of light in the general gloom: one day as he was coming out of court a young advocate called Hermann sidled up to him and said, ‘You know, de Robespierre, I’m beginning to think you’re right.’

‘About what?’

The young man looked surprised, ‘Oh, about everything.’

HE WROTE AN ESSAY for the Academy of Metz:

The mainspring of energy in a republic is vertu, the love of one’s laws and one’s country; and it follows from the very nature of these that all private interests and all personal relationships must give way to the general good … Every citizen has a share in the sovereign power … and therefore cannot acquit his dearest friend, if the safety of the state requires his punishment.

When he had written that, he put his pen down and stared at the passage and thought, this is all very well, it is easy for me to say that, I have no dearest friend. Then he thought, of course I have, I have Camille.

He searched for his last letter. It was rather muddled, written in Greek, some business about a married woman. By applying himself to the dead language, Camille was concealing from himself his misery, confusion and pain; by forcing the recipient to translate, he was saying, believe that my life to me is an élitist entertainment, something that only exists when it is written down and sent by the posts. Max let his palm rest on the letter. If only your life would come right, Camille. If only your head were cooler, your skin thicker, and if only I could see you again … If only all things would work together for good.

Now it is his daily work to particularize, item by item, the iniquities of the system, and the petty manifestations of tyranny here in Arras. God knows, he has tried to placate, to fit in. He has been sober and conformist, deferential to colleagues of experience. When he has spoken violently it has only been because he hoped to shame them into good actions; in no way is he a violent man. But he is asking the impossible – he is asking them to admit that the system they’ve laboured in all their lives is false, ill-founded and wicked.

Sometimes when he is faced with a mendacious opponent or a pompous magistrate, he fights the impulse to drive a fist into the man’s face; fights it so hard that his neck and shoulders ache. Every morning he opens his eyes and says, ‘Dear God, help me to bear this day.’ And he prays for something, anything, to happen, to deliver him from these endless polite long drawn-out recriminations, to save him from the dissipation of his youth and wit and courage. Max, you can’t afford to return that man’s fee. He’s poor, I must do it. Max, what would you like for dinner? I haven’t an idea. Max, have you named the happy day? He dreams of drowning, far far under the glassy sea.

He tries not to give offence. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.

IV. A Wedding, a Riot, a Prince of the Blood
(1787–1788)

LUCILE has not said yes. She’s not said no. She’s only said, she’ll think about it.

ANNETTE: her first reaction had been panic and her second rage; when the immediate crisis was over and she had not seen Camille for a month, she began to curtail her social engagements and to spend the evenings by herself, worrying the situation like a dog with a bone.

Bad enough to be deemed seduced. Worse to be deemed abandoned. And to be abandoned for one’s adolescent daughter? Dignity was at its nadir.

Since the King had dismissed his minister Calonne, Claude was at the office every evening, drafting memoranda.

On the first night, Annette had not slept. She had tossed and sweated into the small hours, plotting herself a revenge. She had thought that she would somehow force him to leave Paris. By four o’clock she could no longer bear to remain in her bed. She got up, pulled a wrap about her shoulders, walked through the apartment in the dark; walked barefoot, like a penitent, for the last thing she wanted was to make any noise at all, to wake her maid, to wake her daughter – who was sleeping, no doubt, the chaste and peaceful sleep of emotional despots. When dawn came she was shivering by an open window. Her resolution seemed a fantasy or nightmare, a monstrous baroque conceit dreamed by someone other than herself. Come now, it’s an incident, she said to herself: that’s all. She was left, then as now, with her grievance and her sense of loss.

Lucile looked at her warily these days, not knowing what was going on in her head. They had ceased to speak to each other, in any sense that mattered. When others were present they managed some vapid exchanges; alone together, they were mutually embarrassed.

LUCILE: she spent all the time she could alone. She re-read La Nouvelle Heloïse. A year ago, when she had first picked up the book, Camille had told her he had a friend, some odd name, began with an R, who thought it the masterpiece of the age. His friend was an arch-sentimentalist; they would get on well, were they to meet. She understood that he himself did not think much of the book and wished a little to sway her judgement. She remembered him talking to her mother of Rousseau’s Confessions, which was another of those books her father would not allow her to read. Camille said the author lacked all sense of delicacy and that some things were better not committed to paper; since then she had been careful what she wrote in her red diary. She recalled her mother laughing, saying you can do what you like I suppose as long as you retain a sense of delicacy? Camille had made some remark she barely heard, about the aesthetics of sin, and her mother had laughed again, and leaned towards him and touched his hair. She should have known then.

These days she was remembering incidents like that, turning them over, pulling them apart. Her mother seemed to be denying – as far as one could make out what she was saying at all – that she had ever been to bed with Camille. She thought her mother was probably lying.

Annette had been quite kind to her, she thought, considering the circumstances. She had once told her that time resolves most situations, without the particular need for action. It seemed a spineless way to approach life. Someone will be hurt, she thought, but every way I win. I am now a person of consequence; results trail after my actions.

She rehearsed that crucial scene. After the storm, a struggling beam of late sun had burnished a stray unpowdered hair on her mother’s neck. His hands had rested confidingly in the hollow of her waist. When Annette whirled around, her whole face had seemed to collapse, as if someone had hit her very hard. Camille had half-smiled; that was strange, she thought. For just a moment he had held on to her mother’s wrist, as if reserving her for another day.

And the shock, the terrible, heart-stopping shock: yet why should it have been a shock, when it was – give or take the details – just what she and Adèle had been hoping to see?

Her mother went out infrequently, and always in the carriage. Perhaps she was afraid she might run into Camille by accident. There was a tautness in her face, as if she had become older.

MAY CAME, the long light evenings and the short nights; more than once Claude worked right through them, trying to lay a veneer of novelty on the proposals of the new Comptroller-General. Parlement was not to be bamboozled; it was that land tax again. When the Parlement of Paris proved obdurate, the usual royal remedy was to exile it to the provinces. This year the King sent it to Troyes, each member ordered there by an individual lettre de cachet. Exciting for Troyes, Georges-Jacques d’Anton said.

On 14 June he married Gabrielle at the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. She was twenty-four years old; waiting patiently for her father and her fiancé to settle things up, she had spent her afternoons experimenting in the kitchen, and had eaten her creations; she had taken to chocolate and cream, and absently spooning sugar into her father’s good strong coffee. She giggled as her mother tugged her into her wedding dress, thinking of when her new husband would peel her out of it. She was moving on a stage in life. As she came out into the sunshine, hanging on to Georges’s arm harder than convention dictated, she thought, I am perfectly safe now, my life is before me and I know what it will be, and I would not change it, not even to be the Queen. She turned a little pink at the warm sentimentality of her own thoughts; those sweets have jellified my brain, she thought, smiling into the sun at her wedding guests, feeling the warmth of her body inside her tight dress. Especially, she would not like to be the Queen; she had seen her in procession in the streets, her face set with stupidity and helpless contempt, her hard-edged diamonds flashing around her like naked blades.

The apartment they had rented proved to be too near to Les Halles. ‘Oh, but I like it,’ she said. ‘The only thing that bothers me are those wild-looking pigs that run up and down the street.’ She grinned at him. ‘They’re nothing to you, I suppose.’

‘Very small pigs. Inconsiderable. But no, you’re right, we should have seen the disadvantages.’

‘But it’s lovely. It makes me happy; except for the pigs, and the mud, and the language that the market ladies use. We can always move when we’ve got more money – and with your new position as King’s Councillor, that won’t be very long.’

Of course, she had no idea about the debts. He’d thought he would tell her, once life settled down. But it didn’t settle, because she was pregnant – from the wedding night, it seemed – and she was quite silly, mindless, euphoric, dashing between the café and their own house, full of plans and prospects. Now he knew her better he knew that she was just as he’d thought, just as he’d wished: innocent, conventional, with a pious streak. It would have seemed hideous, criminal to allow anything to overshadow her happiness. The time when he might have told her came, passed, receded. The pregnancy suited her; her hair thickened, her skin glowed, she was lush, opulent, almost exotic, and frequently out of breath. A great sea of optimism buoyed them up, carried them along into midsummer.

‘MAÎTRE D’ANTON, may I detain you for a moment?’ They were just outside the Law Courts. D’Anton turned. Hérault de Séchelles, a judge, a man of his own age: a man seriously aristocratic, seriously rich. Well, Georges-Jacques thought: we are going up in the world.

‘I wanted to offer you my congratulations, on your reception into the King’s Bench. Very good speech you made.’ D’Anton inclined his head. ‘You’ve been in court this morning?’

D’Anton proffered a portfolio. ‘The case of the Marquis de Chayla. Proof of the Marquis’s right to bear that title.’

‘You seem to have proved it already, in your own mind,’ Camille muttered.

‘Oh, hallo,’ Hérault said. ‘I didn’t see you there, Maître Desmoulins.’

‘Of course you saw me. You just wish you hadn’t.’

‘Come, come,’ Hérault said. He laughed. He had perfectly even white teeth. What the hell do you want? d’Anton thought. But Hérault seemed quite composed and civil, just ready for some topical chat. ‘What do you think will happen,’ he asked, ‘now that the Parlement has been exiled?’

Why ask me? d’Anton thought. He considered his response, then said: ‘The King must have money. The Parlement has now said that only the Estates can grant him a subsidy, and I take it that having said this they mean to stick to it. So when he recalls them in the autumn, they will say the same thing again – and then at last, with his back to the wall, he will call the Estates.’

‘You applaud the Parlement’s victory?’

‘I don’t applaud at all,’ d’Anton said sharply. ‘I merely comment. Personally I believe that calling the Estates is the right thing for the King to do, but I am afraid that some of the nobles who are campaigning for it simply want to use the Estates to cut down the King’s power and increase their own.’

‘I believe you’re right,’ Hérault said.

‘You should know.’

‘Why should I know?’

‘You are said to be an habitué of the Queen’s circle.’

Hérault laughed again. ‘No need to play the surly democrat with me, d’Anton. I suspect we’re more in sympathy than you know. It’s true Her Majesty allows me the privilege of taking her money at her gracious card table. But the truth is, the Court is full of men of good will. There are more of them there than you will find in the Parlement.’

Makes speeches, d’Anton thought, at the drop of a hat. Well, who doesn’t? But so professionally charming. So professionally smooth.

‘They have good will towards their families,’ Camille cut in. ‘They like to see them awarded comfortable pensions. Is it 700,000 livres a year to the Polignac family? And aren’t you a Polignac? Tell me, why do you content yourself with one judicial position? Why don’t you just buy the entire legal system, and have done with it?’

Hérault de Séchelles was a connoisseur, a collector. He would travel the breadth of Europe for a carving, a clock, a first edition. He looked at Camille as if he had come a long way to see him, and found him a low-grade fake. He turned back to d’Anton. ‘What amazes me is this curious notion that is abroad among simple souls – that because the Parlement is opposing the King it somehow stands for the interests of the people. In fact, it is the King who is trying to impose an equitable taxation system –’

‘That doesn’t matter to me,’ Camille said. ‘I just like to see these people falling out amongst themselves, because the more they do that the quicker everything will collapse and the quicker we shall have the republic. If I take sides meanwhile, it’s only to help the conflict along.’

‘How eccentric your views are,’ Hérault said. ‘Not to mention dangerous.’ For a moment he looked bemused, tired, vague. ‘Well, things won’t go on as they are,’ he said. ‘And I shall be glad, really.’

‘Are you bored?’ d’Anton asked. A very direct question, but as soon as it popped into his head it had popped out of his mouth – which was not like him.

‘I suppose that might be it,’ Hérault said ruefully. ‘Though one would like to be – you know, more lofty. I mean, one likes to think there should be changes in the interest of France, not just because one’s at a loose end.’

Odd, really – within a few minutes, the whole tenor of the conversation had changed. Hérault had become confiding, dropped his voice, shed his oratorical airs; he was talking to them as if he knew them well. Even Camille was looking at him with the appearance of sympathy.

‘Ah, the burden of your wealth and titles,’ Camille said. ‘Maître d’Anton and I find it brings tears to our eyes.’

‘I always knew you for men of sensibility.’ Hérault gathered himself. ‘Must get off to Versailles, expected for supper. Goodbye for now, d’Anton. You’ve married, haven’t you? My compliments to your wife.’

D’Anton stood and looked after him. A speculative expression crossed his face.

THEY HAD STARTED to spend time at the Café du Foy, in the Palais-Royal. It had a different, less decorous atmosphere from M. Charpentier’s place; there was a different set of people. And one thing about it – there was no chance of bumping into Claude.

When they arrived, a man was standing on a chair declaiming verses. He made some sweeping gestures with a paper, then clutched his chest in an agony of stage-sincerity. D’Anton glanced at him without interest, and turned away.

‘They’re checking you out,’ Camille whispered. ‘The Court. To see if you could be any use to them. They’ll offer you a little post, Georges-Jacques. They’ll turn you into a functionary. If you take their money you’ll end up like Claude.’

‘Claude has done all right,’ d’Anton said. ‘Until you came into his life.’

‘Doing all right isn’t enough though, is it?’

‘Isn’t it? I don’t know.’ He looked at the actor to avoid Camille’s eyes. ‘Ah, he’s finished. It’s funny, I could swear –’

Instead of descending from his chair, the man looked hard and straight at them. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. He jumped down, wormed his way across the room, produced some cards from his pocket and thrust them at d’Anton. ‘Have some free tickets,’ he said. ‘How are you, Georges-Jacques?’ He laughed delightedly. ‘You can’t place me, can you? And by hell, you’ve grown!’

‘The prizewinner?’ d’Anton said.

‘The very same. Fabre d’Églantine, your humble servant. Well now, well now!’ He pounded d’Anton’s shoulder, with a stage-effect bunched fist. ‘You took my advice, didn’t you? You’re a lawyer. Either you’re doing quite well, or you’re living beyond your means, or you’re blackmailing your tailor. And you have a married look about you.’

D’Anton was amused. ‘Anything else?’

Fabre dug him in the belly. ‘You’re beginning to run to fat.’

‘Where’ve you been? What have you been up to?’

‘Around, you know. This new troupe I’m with – very successful season last year.’

‘Not here, though, was it? I’d have caught up with you, I’m always at the theatre.’

‘No. Not here. Nimes. All right then. Moderately successful. I’ve given up the landscape gardening. Mainly I’ve been writing plays and touring. And writing songs.’ He broke off and started to whistle something. People turned around and stared. ‘Everybody sings that song,’ he said. ‘I wrote it. Yes, sorry, I am an embarrassment at times. I wrote a lot of those songs that go around in your head, and much good it’s done me. Still, I made it to Paris. I like to come here, to this café I mean, and try out my first drafts. People do you the courtesy of listening, and they’ll give you an honest opinion – you’ve not asked for it, of course, but let that pass. The tickets are for Augusta. It’s at the Italiens. It’s a tragedy, in more ways than one. I think it will probably come off after this week. The critics are after my blood.’

‘I saw Men of Letters,’ Camille said. ‘That was yours, Fabre, wasn’t it?’

Fabre turned. He took out a lorgnette, and examined Camille. ‘The less said about Men of Letters the better. All that stony silence. And then, you know, the hissing.’

‘I suppose you must expect it, if you write a play about critics. But of course, Voltaire’s plays were often hissed. His first nights usually ended in some sort of riot.’

‘True,’ Fabre said. ‘But then Voltaire wasn’t always worried about where his next meal was coming from.’

‘I know your work,’ Camille insisted. ‘You’re a satirist. If you want to get on – well, try toadying to the Court a bit more.’

Fabre lowered his lorgnette. He was immensely, visibly gratified and flattered – just by that one sentence, ‘I know your work.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Sell out? I don’t think so. I do like an easy life, I admit. I try to turn a fast penny. But there are limits.’

D’Anton had found them a table. ‘What is it?’ Fabre said, seating himself. ‘Ten years? More? One says, “Oh, we’ll meet again,” not quite meaning it.’

‘All the right people are drifting together,’ Camille said. ‘You can pick them out, just as if they had crosses on their foreheads. For example, I saw Brissot last week.’ D’Anton did not ask who was Brissot. Camille had a multitude of shady acquaintances. ‘Then, of all people, Hérault just now. I always hated Hérault, but I have this feeling about him now, quite a different feeling. Against my better judgement, but there it is.’

‘Hérault is a Parlementary judge,’ d’Anton told Fabre. ‘He comes from an immensely rich and ancient family. He’s not more than thirty, his looks are impeccable, he’s well-travelled, he’s pursued by all the ladies at Court –’

‘How sick,’ Fabre muttered.

‘And we’re baffled because he’s just spent ten minutes talking to us. It’s said,’ d’Anton grinned, ‘that he fancies himself as a great orator and spends hours alone talking to himself in front of a mirror. Though how would anyone know, if he’s alone?’

‘Alone except for his servants,’ Camille said. ‘The aristocracy don’t consider their servants to be real people, so they’re quite prepared to indulge all their foibles in front of them.’

‘What is he practising for?’ Fabre asked. ‘For if they call the Estates?’

‘We presume so,’ d’Anton said. ‘He views himself as a leader of reform, perhaps. He has advanced ideas. So he seems to say.’

‘Oh well,’ Camille said. ‘“Their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord.” It’s all in the Book of Ezekiel, you see, it’s quite clear if you look at it in the Hebrew. About how the law shall perish from the priests and the council from the ancients. “And the King will mourn, and the Prince shall be clothed with sorrow …” – which I’m quite sure they will be, and quite rapidly too, if they go on as they do at present.’

Someone at the next table said, ‘You ought to keep your voice down. You’ll find the police attending your sermons.’

Fabre slammed his hand down on the table and shot to his feet. His thin face turned brick-red. ‘It isn’t an offence to quote the holy Scriptures,’ he said. ‘In any damn context whatsoever.’ Someone tittered. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ Fabre said vehemently to Camille, ‘but I’m going to get on with you.’

‘Oh God,’ d’Anton muttered. ‘Don’t encourage him.’ It was not possible, considering his size, to get out without being noticed, so he tried to look as if he were not with them. The last thing you need is encouragement, he thought, you make trouble because you can’t do anything else, you like to think of the destruction outside because of the destruction inside you. He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical, calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Claude. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be free. People deformed and people only disfigured, abandoned children sucking the thin milk of duty: crying to be taken in. There were courtiers: there was Hérault, dealing Antoinette a losing hand. There were prostitutes. There were wig-makers and clerks, freed slaves shivering in the squares, the men who took the tolls at the customs posts in the walls of Paris. There were men who had been gravediggers man and boy all their working lives. Whose thoughts ran to an alien current. Of whom nothing was known and nothing could be known. He looked across at Fabre. ‘My greatest work is yet to come,’ Fabre said. He sketched its dimensions in the air. Some confidence trick, d’Anton thought. Fabre was a ready man, wound up like a clockwork toy, and Camille watched him like a child who had been given an unexpected present. The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

LUCILE: inaction has its own subtle rewards, but now she thinks it is time to push a little. She had left those nursery days behind, of the china doll with the straw heart. They had dealt with her, Maître Desmoulins and her mother, as effectively as if they had smashed her china skull. Since that day, bodies had more reality – theirs, if not hers. They were solid all right, and substantial. Woundingly, she felt their superiority; and if she could ache, she must be taking on flesh.

Midsummer: Brienne, the Comptroller, borrowed twelve million livres from the municipality of Paris. ‘A drop in the ocean,’ M. Charpentier said. He put the café up for sale; he and Angélique meant to move out to the country. Annette did her duty to the fine weather, making forays to the Luxembourg Gardens. She had often walked there with the girls and Camille; this spring the blossom had smelt faintly sour, as if it had been used before.

Lucile had spent a lot of time writing her journal: working out the plot. That Friday, which began like any other, when my fate was brought up from the kitchen, superscribed to me, and put into my ignorant hand. How that night – Friday to Saturday – I took the letter from its hiding place and put it against the cold ruffled linen of my nightgown, approximately over my shaking heart: the crackling paper, the flickering candlelight, and oh, my poor little emotions. I knew that by September my life would be completely changed.

‘I’ve decided,’ she said. ‘I’m going to marry Maître Desmoulins after all.’ Clinically, she observed how ugly her mother became, when her clear complexion blotched red with anger and fear.

She has to practise for the conflicts the future holds. Her first clash with her father sends her up to her room in tears. The weeks wear on, and her sentiments become more savage: echoed by events in the streets.

THE DEMONSTRATION had started outside the Law Courts. The barristers collected their papers and debated the merits of staying put against those of trying to slip through the crowds. But there had been fatalities: one, perhaps two. They thought it would be safer to stay put until the area was completely cleared. D’Anton swore at his colleagues, and went out to pick his way across the battlefield.

An enormous number of people seemed to be injured. They were what you would call crush injuries, except for the few people who had fought hand-to-hand with the Guards. A respectably dressed man was walking around showing people the hole in his coat where it had been pierced by a bullet. A woman was sitting on the cobblestones saying, ‘Who opened fire, who ordered it, who told them to do it?’ demanding an explanation in a voice sharp with hysteria. Also there were several unexplained knifings.

He found Camille slumped on his knees by a wall scribbling down some sort of testimony. The man who was talking to him was lying on the ground, just his shoulders propped up. All the man’s clothes were in shreds and his face was black. D’Anton could not see where he was injured, but beneath the black his face looked numb, and his eyes were glazed with pain or surprise.

D’Anton said, ‘Camille.’

Camille looked sideways at his shoes, then his eyes travelled upwards. His face was chalk-white. He put down his paper and stopped trying to follow the man’s ramblings. He indicated a man standing a few yards away, his arms folded, his short legs planted apart, his eyes on the ground. Without tone or emphasis, Camille said, ‘See that? That’s Marat.’

D’Anton did not look up. Somebody pointed to Camille and said, ‘The French Guards threw him on the ground and kicked him in the ribs.’

Camille smiled miserably. ‘Must have been in their way, mustn’t I?’

D’Anton tried to get him to his feet. Camille said, ‘No, I can’t do it, leave me alone.’

D’Anton took him home to Gabrielle. He fell asleep on their bed, looking desperately ill.

‘WELL, THERE’S ONE THING,’ Gabrielle said, later that night. ‘If they’d kicked you in the ribs, their boots would have just bounced off.’

‘I told you,’ d’Anton said. ‘I was inside, in an office. Camille was outside, in the riot. I don’t go in for these silly games.’

‘It worries me, though.’

‘It was just a skirmish. Some soldiers panicked. Nobody even knows what it was about.’

Gabrielle was hard to console. She had made plans, settled them, for her house, for her babies, for the big success he was going to enjoy. She feared any kind of turmoil, civil or emotional: feared its stealthy remove from the street to the door to her heart.

When they had friends to dine, her husband spoke familiarly about people in the government, as if he knew them. When he spoke of the future, he would add, ‘if the present scheme of things continues’.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve told you, that I’ve had a lot of work recently from M. Barentin, the President of the Board of Excise. So naturally my work takes me into government offices. And when you’re meeting the people who’re running the country –’ he shook his head – ‘you start to make judgements about their competence. You can’t help making judgements.’

‘But they’re individuals.’ (Forgive me, she wanted to say, for intruding where I don’t understand.) ‘Is it necessary to question the system itself? Does it follow?’

‘There is really only one question,’ he said. ‘Can it last? The answer’s no. Twelve months from now, it seems to me, our lives will look very different.’

Then he closed his mouth resolutely, because he realized that he had been talking to her about matters that women were not interested in. And he did not want to bore her, or upset her.

PHILIPPE, the Duke of Orléans, is going bald. His friends – or those who wish to be his friends – have obliged him by shaving the hair off their foreheads, so that the Duke’s alopecia appears to be a fad, or whimsy. But no sycophancy can disguise the bald fact.

Duke Philippe is now forty years old. People say he is one of the richest men in Europe. The Orléans line is the junior branch of the royal family, and its princes have rarely seen eye-to-eye with their senior cousins. Duke Philippe cannot agree with King Louis, about anything.

Philippe’s life up to this point had not been auspicious. He had been so badly brought up, so badly turned out, that you might well think it had been done on purpose, to debauch him, to invalidate him, to disable him for any kind of political activity. When he married, and appeared with the new Duchess at the Opéra, the galleries were packed by the public prostitutes decked out in mourning.

Philippe is not a stupid man, but he is a susceptible one, a taker-up of fads and fancies. At this time he has a good deal to complain about. The King interferes all the time in his private life. His letters are opened, and he is followed about by policemen and the King’s spies. They try to ruin his friendship with the dear Prince of Wales, and to stop him visiting England, whence he has imported so many fine women and racehorses. He is continually defamed and calumniated by the Queen’s party, who aim to make him an object of ridicule. His crime is, of course, that he stands too near the throne. He finds it difficult to concentrate for any length of time, and you can’t expect him to read the nation’s destiny in a balance-sheet; but you don’t need to tell Philippe d’Orléans that there is no liberty in France.

Among the many women in his life, one stands out: not the Duchess. Félicité de Genlis had become his mistress in 1772, and to prove the character of his feelings for her the Duke had caused a device to be tattooed on his arm. Félicité is a woman of sweet and iron wilfulness, and she writes books. There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry. Impressed, astounded, enslaved, the Duke has placed her in charge of his children’s education. They have a daughter of their own, Pamela, a beautiful and talented child whom they pretend is an orphan.

From the Duke, as from his children, Félicité exacts respect, obedience, adoration: from the Duchess, a timid acquiescence to her status and her powers. Félicité has a husband, of course – Charles-Alexis Brulard de Sillery, Comte de Genlis, a handsome ex-naval officer with a brilliant service record. He is close to Philippe – one of his small, well-drilled army of fixers, organizers, hangers-on. People had once called their marriage a love-match; twenty-five years on, Charles-Alexis retains his good looks and his polish, and indulges daily and nightly his ruling passion – gambling.

Félicité has even reformed the Duke – moderated some of his wilder excesses, steered his money and his energy into worthwhile channels. Now in her well-preserved forties, she is a tall, slender woman with dark-blonde hair, arresting brown eyes, and a decisive aspect to her features. Her physical intimacy with the Duke has ceased, but now she chooses his mistresses for him and directs them how to behave. She is accustomed to be at the centre of things, to be consulted, to dispense advice. She has no love for the King’s wife, Antoinette.

The consuming frivolity of the Court has left a kind of hiatus, a want of a cultural centre for the nation. It is arranged by Félicité that Philippe and his court shall supply that lack. It is not that she has political ambitions for him – but it happens that so many intellectuals, so many artists and scholars, so many of the people one wishes to cultivate, are liberal-minded men, enlightened men, men who look forward to a new dispensation; and doesn’t the Duke have every sympathy? In this year, 1787, there are gathered about him a number of young men, aristocrats for the most part, all of them ambitious and all of them with a vague feeling that their ambitions have somehow been thwarted, that their lives have somehow become unsatisfactory. It is arranged that the Duke, who feels this more keenly than most, shall be a leader to them.

The Duke wishes to be a man of the people, especially of the people of Paris; he wishes to be in touch with their moods and concerns. He keeps court in the heart of the city, at the Palais-Royal. He has turned the gardens over to the public and leased out the buildings as shops and brothels and coffee houses and casinos: so that at the epicentre of the nation’s fornication, rumour-mongering, pickpocketing and street-fighting, there sits Philippe: Good Duke Philippe, the Father of His People. Only nobody shouts that; it has not been arranged yet.

Summer of ’87, Philippe is fitted out and launched for trial manoeuvres. In November the King decides to meet the obstructive Parlement in a Royal Session, to obtain registration of edicts sanctioning the raising of a loan for the state. If he cannot get his way, he will be forced to call the Estates-General. Philippe prepares to confront the royal authority – as de Sillery would have said – broadside on.

CAMILLE saw Lucile briefly outside Saint-Sulpice, where she had been attending Benediction. ‘Our carriage is just over there,’ she said. ‘Our man, Théodore, is generally on my side, but he will have to bring it across in a minute. So let’s make this quick.’

‘Your mother’s not in it, is she?’ He looked alarmed.

‘No, she’s skulking at home. By the way, I heard you were in a riot.’

‘How did you hear that?’

‘There’s this grapevine. Claude knows this man called Charpentier, yes? Well, you can imagine, Claude’s thrilled.’

‘You shouldn’t stand here,’ he said. ‘Awful day. You’re getting wet.’

She had the distinct impression that he would like to bundle her into the carriage, and have done with her. ‘Sometimes I dream,’ she said, ‘of living in a warm place. One where the sun shines every day. Italy would be nice. Then I think, no, stay at home and shiver a little. All this money that my father has set aside for my dowry, I don’t think I should let it slip through my fingers. It would be downright ungrateful to run away from it. We ought to be married here,’ she waved a hand, ‘at a time of our own choosing. We could go to Italy afterwards, for a holiday. We’ll need a holiday after we’ve fought them and won. We could retain some elephants, and go across the Alps.’

‘So you do mean to marry me then?’

‘Oh yes.’ She looked at him, astonished. How could it be that she had forgotten to let him know? When it was all she had been thinking about, for weeks? Perhaps she’d thought the grapevine would do that, too. But the fact that it hadn’t … Could it be that he had put it to the back of his mind in some way? ‘Camille …’ she said.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But if I’m to go bespeaking elephants, I can’t just do it on a promise. You’ll have to swear me a solemn oath. Say “By the bones of the Abbé Terray.”’

She giggled. ‘We’ve always taken the Abbé Terray very seriously.’

‘That’s what I mean, a serious oath.’

‘As you like. By the bones of the Abbé Terray, I swear I will marry you, whatever happens, whatever anyone says, and even if the sky falls in. I feel we should kiss but,’ she extended her hand, ‘this is the most I can manage. Otherwise Théodore will get a crisis of conscience, and come over right away.’

‘You might take your glove off,’ he said. ‘It would be a start.’

She took her glove off, and gave him her hand. She thought he might kiss her fingertips, but in fact he took those fingertips, turned her hand over rather forcefully, and held her palm for a second against his mouth. And just that; he didn’t kiss it; just held it there, still. She shivered. ‘You know a thing or two, don’t you?’ she said.

By now, her carriage had arrived. The horses breathed patiently, shifted their feet; Théodore positioned his back to them, and scanned the street with deep interest. ‘Now, listen,’ she said. ‘We come here because my mother has a tendresse for one of the clergy. She thinks him spiritually fine, elevated.’

Théodore turned now. He opened the door for her. She turned her back. ‘His name is Abbé Laudréville. He visits us as often as my mother needs to discuss her soul, which these days is at least three times a week. And he thinks my father a man of no sensibility at all. So write.’ The door slammed, and she spoke to him from the window. ‘I imagine you have a way with elderly priests. You write the letters and he’ll bring them. Come to evening Mass, and you’ll get replies.’ Théodore gathered the reins. She bobbed her head in. ‘Piety to some purpose,’ she muttered.

NOVEMBER: Camille at the Café du Foy, unable to get his words out fast enough. ‘My cousin de Viefville actually spoke to me in public, he was so anxious to tell someone what had happened. So: the King came in and slumped there half-asleep, as usual. The Keeper of the Seals spoke, and said that the Estates would be convoked, but not till ’92, which is a lifetime away –’

‘I blame the Queen.’

‘Shh.’

‘And this led to some protest, and then there was discussion of the edicts that the King wants them to register. As they were approaching the vote, the Keeper of the Seals went up to the King and spoke to him privately, and the King just cut the discussion short, and said the edicts were to be registered. Just ordered it to be done.’

‘But how can he –’

‘Shh.’

Camille looked around at his audience. He was aware that a singular event had occurred once again: his stutter had vanished. ‘Then Orléans got up, and everyone turned around and stared, and he was absolutely white, de Viefville said. And the Duke said, “You can’t do that. It’s illegal.” Then the King became flustered, and he shouted out “It is legal, because I wish it.”’

Camille stopped. There was an immediate buzz – of protest, of simulated horror, of speculation. At once he felt that hideous urge to destroy his own case; he was enough of a lawyer, perhaps, or perhaps, he wondered, am I just too honest? ‘Listen, everyone, please – this is what de Viefville says the King said. But I’m not sure if one can believe it – isn’t it too pat? I mean, if people wanted to engineer a constitutional crisis, isn’t that just what they’d hope for him to say? Actually, perhaps – because he’s not a bad man, is he, the King … I think he probably didn’t say that at all, he probably made some feeble joke.’

D’Anton noted this: that Camille did not stutter, and that he talked to every person in the crowded room as if he were speaking only to them. But someone said, ‘Well, get on, then!’

‘The edicts were registered. The King left. As soon as he was outside the door, the edicts were annulled and struck off the books. Two members of the Parlement are arrested on lettres de cachet. The Duke of Orléans is exiled to his estates at Villers-Cotterêts. Oh – and I am invited to dine with my esteemed cousin de Viefville.’

AUTUMN PASSED. It’s like, Annette said, if the roof fell in, you would scrabble in the debris for what valuables were left; you wouldn’t sit down among the falling masonry saying ‘why, oh why?’ The prospect of Camille, of what he was going to do to herself and her daughter, seemed too ghastly to resist. She accepted it as people become reconciled to the long course of a terminal illness; at times, she desired death.

V. A New Profession
(1788)

NOTHING CHANGES. Nothing new. The same old dreary crisis atmosphere. The feeling that it can’t get much worse without something giving way. But nothing does. Ruin, collapse, the sinking ship of state: the point of no return, the shifting balance, the crumbling edifice and the sands of time. Only the cliché flourishes.

In Arras, Maximilien de Robespierre faces the New Year truculent and disheartened. He is at war with the local judiciary. He has no money. He has given up the literary society, because poetry is becoming an irrelevance. He is trying to restrict his social life, because he finds it difficult now to be even normally courteous to the self-satisfied, the place-seekers, the mealy-mouthed – and that is a fair description of polite society in Arras. More and more, casual conversations turn to the questions of the day, and he stifles his wish to smile and let things pass; that conciliatory streak, he is fighting hard to eradicate that. So every workaday disagreement becomes an affront, every point conceded in court becomes a defeat. There are laws against duelling, but not against duelling in the head. You can’t, he tells his brother Augustin, separate political views from the people who hold them; if you do, it shows you don’t take politics seriously.

Somehow his thoughts ought to show on his face – but he finds himself still on the guest lists, still in demand for country drives and evenings at the theatre. They will not see that he has not enough unction left to oil the wheels of social intercourse. The pressure of their expectations forces from him again and again a little tact, the soft answer; it’s so easy to behave, after all, like the nice boy you always were.

Aunt Henriette, Aunt Eulalie edge around with that stifling tact of their own, their desire always to do the very very best for you. Aunt Eulalie’s stepdaughter, Anaïs: so pretty, so fond of you: so why not? And why not make it soon? Because, he said with desperation, next year they might call the Estates, and who knows, who knows, I might be going away.

BY CHRISTMAS the Charpentiers were well settled in their new house at Fontenay-sous-Bois. They miss the café, but not the city mud, the noise, the rude people in the shops. The country air, they say, makes them feel ten years younger. Gabrielle and Georges-Jacques come out on Sundays. You can see they’re happy; it’s so gratifying. The baby will have enough shawls for seven infants and more attention than a dauphin. Georges-Jacques looks harassed, pale after the long winter. What he needs is a month at home in Arcis, but he can’t take the time off. He now has complete charge of the Board of Excise’s legal work, but he says he needs another source of income. He would like to buy some land, but he says he hasn’t the capital. He says there is a limit to what one man can do, but no doubt he is worrying needlessly. We are all very proud of Georges.

AT THE TREASURY, Claude Duplessis comports himself as cheerfully as he can, given the circumstances. Last year, during a period of five months, France had three Comptrollers in succession, all of them asking the same silly questions and requiring to be fed streams of useless information. He has to think quite hard when he wakes in the morning to recall who he works for. Soon no doubt M. Necker will be invited back, to treat us to more of his glib nostrums about public confidence. If the public at large want to think of Necker as some sort of Messiah, who are we, mere clerks, mere civil servants after all … No one at the Treasury thinks the situation can be retrieved.

Claude confides to a colleague that his lovely daughter wants to marry a little provincial lawyer who has a stutter and who hardly ever appears in court, and who seems in addition to have a bad moral character. He wonders why his colleague smirks so.

The deficit is one hundred and sixty million livres.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS was living in the rue Sainte-Anne, with a girl whose mother painted portraits. ‘Do go and see your family,’ she told him. ‘Just for the New Year.’ She looked at him appraisingly; she was thinking of going into her mother’s line of work. Camille’s not easy to put on paper; it’s easier to draw the men the taste of the age admires, florid fleshy men with their conscious poise and newly barbered heads. Camille moves too quickly for even a lightning sketch; she knows he is moving on, out of their lives, and she wants if she can to make things right for him before he goes.

So now the diligence, not worth the name, rumbled towards Guise over roads rutted and flooded by January rains. As he approached his home, Camille thought of his sister Henriette, of her long dying. Whole days, whole weeks had gone by when they had not seen Henriette, only his mother’s whey-face, and the doctor coming and going. He had gone off to school, to Cateau-Cambrésis, and sometimes he had woken in the night and thought, why isn’t she coughing? When he returned home he was taken into her room and allowed to sit for five minutes by the bed. She had transparent places under her eyes, where the skin shone blue; her bony shoulders were pushed forwards by the pillows. She had died the year he went to school in Paris, on a day when the rain fell steadily and coursed in brown channels through the streets of the town.

His father had given the priest and the doctor a glass of brandy – as if they were not habituated to death, as if they needed bracing. Himself, he sat in a corner inconspicuously, and awkwardly very awkwardly the men revolved the conversation around to him: Camille, how will you like going to Louis-le-Grand? I have made up my mind to like it, he said. Won’t you miss your mother and father? You must remember, he said, that they sent me to school three years ago when I was seven, so I will not miss them at all, and they will not miss me. He’s upset, the priest said hurriedly; but Camille your little sister’s in heaven. No, Father, he had said: we are compelled to believe that Henriette is in purgatory now, tasting torments. This is the consolation our religion allows us for our loss.

There would be brandy for him now when he arrived home, and his father would ask, as he had done for years, how was the journey? But he was used to the journey. Perhaps the horses might fall over, or you might be poisoned en route, or bored to death by a fellow traveller; that was the sum of the possibilities. Once he had said, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t speak to anyone, I thought evil thoughts all the way. All the way? And those were the days before the diligence. He must have had stamina, when he was sixteen.

Before leaving Paris he had read over his father’s recent letters. They were trenchant, unmagisterial, wounding. Between the lines lay the unspeakable fact that the Godards wish to break off his engagement to his cousin Rose-Fleur. It had been made when she was in her cradle; how were they to know how things would turn out?

It was Friday night when he arrived home. The next day there were calls to be paid around the town, gatherings he could not avoid. Rose-Fleur affected to be too shy to speak to him, but the pretence sat uneasily on her restless shoulders. She had darting eyes and the Godards’ heavy dark hair; she ran her eyes over him from time to time, making him feel that he had been coated with black treacle.

On Sunday he went to Mass with the family. In the narrow, sleet-blown streets he was an object of curiosity. In church people looked at him as if he had come from a warmer region than Paris.

‘They say you are an atheist,’ his mother whispered.

‘Is that what they say I am?’

Clément said, ‘Perhaps you will be like that diabolic Angevin who vanished at the consecration in a puff of smoke?’

‘It would be an event,’ Anne-Clothilde said. ‘Our social calendar has been so dull.’

Camille did not study the congregation; he was aware that they studied him. There was M. Saulce and his wife; there was the same physician, bewigged and tubby, who once assisted Henriette to her coffin.

‘There’s your old girlfriend,’ Clément said. ‘We’re not supposed to know, but we do.’

Sophie was a doubled-chinned matron now. She looked through him as if his bones were glass. He felt that perhaps they were; even stone seemed to crumble and melt in the scented ecclesiastical gloom. Six points of light on the altar guttered and flared; their shadows cross-hatched flesh and stone, wine and bread. The few communicants melted away into the darkness. It was the feast of the Epiphany; when they emerged, the blue daylight scoured the burgers’ skulls, icing out features and peeling them back to bone.

He went upstairs to his father’s study and sifted through his filed correspondence until he found the letter he wanted, the missive from his Godard uncle. His father came in as he was reading it. ‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t try to hide the letter. ‘That’s really going rather far,’ Jean-Nicolas said.

‘Yes.’ Camille smiled, turning the page. ‘But then you know I am ruthless and capable of great crimes.’ He carried the paper to the light. ‘Camille’s known instability’, he read, ‘and the dangers that may be apprehended to the happiness and durability of the union’. He put the letter down. His hand trembled. ‘Do they think I’m mad?’ he asked his father.

‘They think –’

‘What else can it mean, instability?’

‘Is it just their choice of words you’re quibbling about?’ Jean-Nicolas went over to the fireplace, rubbing his hands. ‘That bloody church is freezing,’ he said. ‘They could have come up with other terms, but of course they won’t commit them to writing. Something got back about a – relationship – you were having with a colleague whom I had always held in considerable –’

Camille stared at him. ‘That was years ago.’

‘I don’t find this particularly easy to talk about,’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘Would you like just to deny it, and then I can put people straight on the matter?’

The wind tossed handfuls of sleet against the windows, and rattled in the chimneys and eaves. Jean-Nicolas raised his eyes apprehensively. ‘We lost slates in November. What’s happening to the weather? It never used to be like this.’

Camille said, ‘Anything that happened was – oh, back in the days when the sun used to shine all the time. Six years ago. Minimum. None of it was my fault, anyway.’

‘So what are you claiming? That my friend Perrin, a family man, whom I have known for thirty-five years, a man highly respected in the Chancery division and a leading Freemason – are you claiming that one day out of the blue he ran up to you and knocked you unconscious and dragged you into his bed? Rubbish. Listen,’ he cried, ‘can you hear that strange tapping noise? Do you think it’s the guttering?’

‘Ask anyone,’ Camille said.

‘What?’

‘About Perrin. He had a reputation. I was just a child, I – oh well, you know what I’m like, I never do quite know how I get into these things.’

‘That won’t do for an excuse. You can’t expect that to do, for the Godards.’ He broke off, looked up. ‘I think it is the guttering, you know.’ He turned back to his son. ‘And I only bring this up, as one example of the sort of story that gets back.’

It had begun to snow properly now, from an opaque and sullen sky. The wind dropped suddenly. Camille put his forehead against the cold glass and watched the snow begin to drift and bank in the square below. He felt weak with shock. His breath misted the pane, the fire crackled behind him, gulls tossed screaming in the upper air. Clément came in. ‘What’s that funny noise, a sort of tapping?’ he said. ‘Is it the guttering, do you think? That’s funny, it seems to have stopped now.’ He looked across the room. ‘Camille, are you all right?’

‘I think so. Could you just tell the fatted calf it’s been reprieved again?’

Two days later he was back in Paris, in the rue Sainte-Anne. ‘I’m moving out,’ he told his mistress.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘If you must know, I really object to your carrying on with my mother behind my back. So perhaps it’s just as well.’

SO NOW CAMILLE woke up alone: which he hated. He touched his closed eyelids. His dreams did not bear discussion. His life is not really what people imagine, he thought. The long struggle for Annette had shredded his nerves. How he would like to be with Annette, and settled. He did not bear Claude any ill-will, but it would be neat if he could be just plucked out of existence. He did not want him to suffer; he tried to think of a precedent, in the Scriptures perhaps. Anything could happen; that was his experience.

He remembered – and he had to remember afresh every morning – that he was going to marry Annette’s daughter, that he had made her swear an oath about it. How complicated it all was. His father suggested that he wrecked people’s lives. He was at a loss to see this. He had not raped anybody, nor committed murder, and from anything else people ought to be able to pick themselves up and carry on, as he was always doing.

There was a letter from home. He didn’t want to open it. Then he thought, don’t be a fool, someone might have died. Inside was a banker’s draft, and a few words from his father, less of apology than of resignation. This had happened before; they had gone through this whole cycle, of name-calling and horror and flight and appeasement. At a certain point, his father would feel he had overstepped the mark. He had an impulse, a desire to have control; and if his son stopped writing, never came home again, he would have lost control. I should, Camille thought, send this draft back. But as usual. I need the money, and he knows it. Father, he thought, you have other children whom you could torment.

I’ll go round and see d’Anton, he thought. Georges-Jacques will talk to me, he doesn’t regard my vices, in fact perhaps he rather likes them. The day brightened.

They were busy at d’Anton’s offices. The King’s Councillor employed two clerks nowadays. One of them was a man called Jules Paré, whom he’d known at school, though d’Anton was younger by several years; it didn’t seem odd, that he employed his seniors these days. The other was a man called Deforgues, whom d’Anton also seemed to have known for ever. Then there was a hanger-on called Billaud-Varennes, who came in when he was wanted, to draft pleas and do the routine stuff, picking up the practice’s overflow. Billaud was in the office this morning, a spare, unprepossessing man with never a good word to say about anybody. When Camille came in, he was tapping papers together on Paré’s desk, and at the same time complaining that his wife was putting on weight. Camille saw that he was specially resentful this morning; for here he was, down-at-heel and seedy, and here was Georges-Jacques, with his good broadcloth coat nicely brushed and his plain cravat a dazzling white, with that general money-in-the-bank air of his and that loud posh voice … ‘Why are you complaining about Anna,’ Camille asked, ‘when you really want to complain about Maître d’Anton?’

Billaud looked up. ‘I’ve no complaints,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you lucky? You must be the only man in France with no complaints. Why is he lying?’

‘Go away, Camille.’ D’Anton picked up the papers Billaud had brought. ‘I’m working.’

‘When you were received into the College of Advocates, didn’t you have to go to your parish priest and ask him for a certificate to say that you were a good Catholic?’ D’Anton grunted, buried in his counter-claims. ‘Didn’t it stick in your throat?’

‘“Paris is worth a Mass,”’ d’Anton said.

‘Of course, this is why Maître Billaud-Varennes doesn’t advance himself from his present position. He also would be a King’s Councillor, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hates priests, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Billaud said. ‘As we’re quoting, I’ll quote for you – “I should like to see, and this will be the last and most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.”’

A short pause. Camille looks Billaud over. He can’t stand him, hardly likes to be in the same room, Billaud makes his skin crawl with distaste and a sort of apprehension that he can’t fathom. But that’s just it – he has to be in the same room. He has to keep seeking out the company of people he can’t stand, it’s become a compulsion. He looks at certain people these days, and it’s as if he’s always known them, as if they belong to him in some way, as if they’re his relatives.

‘How’s your subversive pamphlet?’ he said to Billaud. ‘Have you found a printer for it yet?’

D’Anton looked up from his papers. ‘Why do you spend your time writing things that can never be published, Billaud? I’m not asking to needle you – I just want to know.’

Billaud’s face mottled. ‘Because I can’t compromise,’ he said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ d’Anton said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better – no, we’ve had this conversation before. Perhaps you should try pamphleteering yourself, Camille. Try prose, instead of poetry.’

‘His pamphlet is called “A Last Blow against Prejudice and Superstition”,’ Camille said. ‘Doesn’t look as if it will be quite the last blow, does it? Looks as if it will be about as successful as all those dismal plays he wrote.’

‘The day when you –’ Billaud began.

D’Anton cut him off. ‘Let’s have some quiet.’ He pushed the pleadings at Billaud. ‘What is this rubbish?’

‘You teach me my business, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Why not, if you don’t know it?’ He tossed the papers down. ‘How was your cousin Rose-Fleur, Camille? No, don’t tell me now, I’m up to here.’ He indicated: chin height.

‘Is it hard to be respectable?’ Camille asked him. ‘I mean, is it really gruelling?’

‘Oh, this act of yours, Maître Desmoulins,’ Billaud said. ‘It makes me quite ill, year after year.’

‘You make me ill too, you ghoul. There must be some outlet for your talents, if the law fails. Groaning in vaults would suit you. And dancing on graves is always in request.’

Camille departed. ‘What would be an outlet for his talents?’ Jules Paré said. ‘We are too polite to conjecture.’

AT THE THÉÂTRE DES VARIÉTÉS the doorman said to Camille, ‘You’re late, love.’ He did not understand this. In the box-office two men were having a political argument, and one of them was damning the aristocracy to hell. He was a plump little man with no visible bones in his body, the kind that – in normal times – you see squeaking in defence of the status quo. ‘Hébert, Hébert,’ his opponent said without much heat, ‘you’ll be hanged, Hébert.’ Sedition must be in the air, Camille thought. ‘Hurry up,’ the doorman said. ‘He’s in a terrible mood. He’ll shout at you.’

Inside the theatre there was a hostile, shrouded dimness. Some disconsolate performers were hopping about trying to keep warm. Philippe Fabre d’Églantine stood before the stage and the singer he had just auditioned. ‘I think you need a holiday, Anne,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, my duck, it just won’t do. What have you been doing to your throat? Have you taken to smoking a pipe?’

The girl crossed her arms over her chest. She looked as if she might be about to burst into tears.

‘Just put me in the chorus, Fabre,’ she said. ‘Please.’

‘Sorry. Can’t do it. You sound as if you’re singing inside a burning building.’

‘You’re not sorry, are you?’ the girl said. ‘Bastard.’

Camille walked up to Fabre and said into his ear, ‘Are you married?’

Fabre jumped, whirled around. ‘What?’ he said. ‘No, never.’

‘Never,’ Camille said, impressed.

‘Well, yes, in a way,’ Fabre said.

‘It isn’t that I mean to blackmail you.’

‘All right. All right, I am then. She’s … touring. Listen, just wait for me a half hour, will you? I’ll be through as soon as I can. I hate this hack-work, Camille. My genius is being crushed. My time is being wasted.’ He waved an arm at the stage, the dancers, the theatre manager frowning in his box. ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

‘Everybody is disgruntled this morning. In your box-office they are having an argument about the composition of the Estates-General.’

‘Ah, René Hébert, what a fire-eater. What really irks him is that his triumphant destiny is to be in charge of the ticket returns.’

‘I saw Billaud this morning. He is disgruntled too.’

‘Don’t mention that cunt to me,’ Fabre said. ‘Trying to take the bread out of writers’ mouths. He’s got one trade, why doesn’t he stick to it? It’s different for you,’ he added kindly. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to write a play, because you’re such a complete and utter failure as a lawyer. I think, Camille dear, that you and I should collaborate on some project.’

‘I think I should like to collaborate on a violent and bloody revolution. Something that would give offence to my father.’

‘I was thinking more of something in the short-term, which would make money,’ Fabre said reprovingly.

Camille took himself into the shadows, and watched Fabre losing his temper. The singer came stalking towards him, threw herself into a seat. She dropped her head, swayed her chin from side to side to relax the muscles of her neck: then pulled tight around her upper arms a fringed silk shawl that had a certain fraying splendour about it. She seemed frayed herself; her expression was bad-tempered, her mouth set. She looked Camille over. ‘Do I know you?’

He looked her over in turn. She was about twenty-seven, he thought; small bones, darkish brown hair, snub nose. She was pretty enough, but there was something blurred about her features: as though at some time she’d been beaten, hit around the head, had almost recovered but would never quite. She repeated her question. ‘Admire the directness of your approach,’ Camille said.

The girl smiled. Tender bruised mouth. She put up a hand to massage her throat. ‘I thought I really did know you.’

‘I am afflicted by this, too. Lately I think I know everybody in Paris. It’s like a series of hallucinations.’

‘You do know Fabre, though. Can you do something for me there? Have a word, put him in a better temper?’ Then she shook her head. ‘No, forget it. He’s right, my voice has gone. I trained in England, would you believe? I had these big ideas. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’

‘Well – what have you ever done, between jobs?’

‘I used to sleep with a marquis.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘I get the impression that marquises aren’t so free with their money any more. And me, I’m not so free with my favours. Still – move on is the best thing. I think I’ll try Genoa, I’ve got contacts there.’

He liked her voice, her foreign accent; wanted to keep her talking. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Near Liège. I’ve – well – travelled a bit.’ She put her cheek on her hand. ‘My name is Anne Théroigne.’ She closed her eyes. ‘God, I’m so tired,’ she said. She moved thin shoulders inside the shawl, trying to ease the world off her back.

AT THE RUE CONDÉ, Claude was at home. ‘I’m surprised to see you,’ he said. He didn’t look it. ‘You’ve had your answer,’ he said. ‘Positively no. Never.’

‘Immortal, are you?’ Camille said. He felt just about ready for a fight.

‘I could almost believe you’re threatening me,’ Claude said.

‘Listen to me,’ Camille said. ‘Five years from now there will be none of this. There will be no Treasury officials, no aristocrats, people will be able to marry who they want, there will be no monarchy, no Parlements, and you won’t be able to tell me what I can’t do.’

He had never in his life spoken to anyone like this. It was quite releasing, he thought. I might become a thug for a career.

Annette, a room away, sat frozen in her chair. It was only once in six months that Claude came home early. It followed that Camille could not have prepared for him; this was all out of his head. He wants to marry my daughter, she thought, because someone is telling him he can’t. And she had for years nourished this rare and ferocious ego in her own drawing room, feeding it like some peculiar house-plant on mocha coffee and small confidences.

‘Lucile,’ she said, ‘sit in your chair, don’t dare leave this room. I will not condone your flouting your father’s authority.’

‘You mistake that for authority?’ Lucile said. Frightened, she walked out of the room. Camille was white with anger, his eyes opening like dark, slow stains. She stood in his path. ‘You must know,’ she said, to anyone it concerned, ‘I mean to have another life from the one they’ve worked out for me. Camille, I’m terrified of being ordinary. I’m terrified of being bored.’

His fingertips brushed the back of her hand. They were cold as ice. He turned on his heel. A door slammed. She had nothing left of him but the small chilled islands of skin. She heard her mother crying noisily out of sight, gasping and gagging. ‘Never,’ her father said, ‘never in twenty years has there been a word said out of place in this house, there have been none of these upsets, my daughters have never heard voices raised in anger.’

Adèle came out. ‘So now we are living in the real world,’ she said.

Claude wrung his hands. They had never seen anyone do it before.

THE D’ ANTONS’ son was a robust baby, with a brown skin, a full head of dark hair, and his father’s eyes, surprisingly light blue. The Charpentiers hung over the crib, pointing out resemblances and saying who he would be. Gabrielle was pleased with herself. She wanted to feed the baby herself, not send him off to a wet-nurse. ‘Ten years ago,’ her mother said, ‘that would have been quite unthinkable for a woman in your position. An advocate’s wife.’ She shook her head, disliking modern manners. Gabrielle said, perhaps some changes are for the better? But apart from this one, she could not think of any.

We are now in May 1788. The King has announced that he will abolish the Parlements. Some of their members are under arrest. Receipts are 503 million, expenditure is 629 million. Out in the street, one of the local pigs pursues a small child, and jumps on it under Gabrielle’s window. The incident makes her feel queasy. Since she gave birth, she does not wish to view life as a challenge.

So they moved on quarter day, to a first-floor apartment on the corner of the rue des Cordeliers and the Cour du Commerce. Her first thought was, we cannot afford this. They needed new furniture to fill it; it was the house of an established man. ‘Georges-Jacques has expensive tastes,’ her mother said.

‘I suppose the practice is doing well.’

‘This well? My dear, I’ve always enjoined obedience in you. But not imbecility.’

Gabrielle said to her husband, ‘Are we in debt?’

He said, ‘Let me worry about that, will you?’

Next day, at the front door of the new house, d’Anton stopped to admit before him a woman holding by the hand a little girl of nine or ten. They introduced themselves. She was Mme Gély, her husband Antoine was an official at the Châtelet court, M. d’Anton might know him? He did. And the baby, your first? And this is Louise – yes, I’ve just the one – and pray Louise, do not scowl, do you want your face to set like that? ‘Please tell Mme d’Anton that if she wishes any help, she has only to ask. Next week, when you are settled, do come to supper.’

The child Louise trailed after her as she walked upstairs. She gave d’Anton a backward glance.

He found Gabrielle sitting on a packing case, fitting together the halves of a dish. ‘This is all we’ve broken,’ she said. She jumped up and kissed him. ‘Our new cook is cooking. And I’ve engaged a maid this morning, her name’s Catherine Motin, she’s young and quite cheap.’

‘I’ve just met our upstairs neighbour. Very mincing and genteel. Got a little girl, about so high. Gave me a very suspicious look.’

Gabrielle reached up and joined her hands at the nape of his neck. ‘You’re not reassuring to look at, you know. Is the case over?’

‘Yes. And I won.’

‘You always win.’

‘Not always.’

‘I can pretend that you do.’

‘If you like.’

‘So you don’t mind if I adore you?’

‘It’s a question, I’m told, of whether you can bear the dead weight of a woman’s expectations. I’m told that you shouldn’t put yourself into the position with a woman where you have to be right all the time.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Camille, of course.’

The baby was crying. She pulled away. This day, this little conversation would come back to him, years on: the new-born wails, her breasts leaking milk, the sweet air of inconsequentiality the whole day wore. And the smell of polish and paint and the new carpet: a sheaf of bills on the bureau: summer in the new trees outside the window.

Price inflation 1785–1789:

Wheat | 66%
Rye | 71%
Meat | 67%
Firewood | 91%

STANISLAS FRÉRON was an old schoolfriend of Camille’s, a journalist. He lived around the corner and edited a literary periodical. He made waspish jokes and thought too much about his clothes, but Gabrielle found him tolerable because he was the godson of royalty.

‘I suppose you call this your salon, Mme d’Anton.’ He dropped into one of her new purple armchairs. ‘No, don’t look like that. Why shouldn’t the wife of a King’s Councillor have a salon?’

‘It’s not the way I think of myself.’

‘Oh, I see, it’s you that’s the problem, is it? I thought perhaps we were the problem. That you saw us as second-rate.’ She smiled politely. ‘Of course, some of us are second-rate. And Fabre, for instance, is third-rate.’ Fréron leaned forward and made a steeple out of his hands. ‘All those men,’ he said, ‘whom we admired when we were young, are now dead, or senile, or retired into private life on pensions that the Court has granted them to keep the fires of their wrath burning low – though I fear it was simulated wrath in the first place. You will remember the fuss there was when M. Beauharnais wanted to have his plays performed, and how our fat, semi-literate King banned them personally because he considered them subversive of the good order of the state; it proved, didn’t it, that M. Beauharnais’s ambition was to have the most opulent town-house in Paris, and now he is building it, within sight of the Bastille and within smell of some of the nastiest tenements of the city. Then again – but no, I could multiply examples. The ideas that were considered dangerous twenty years ago are now commonplaces of establishment discourse – yet people still die on the streets every winter, they still starve. And we, in our turn, are militant against the existing order only because of our personal failure to progress up its sordid ladder. If Fabre, for example, were elected to the Academy tomorrow, you would see his lust for social revolution turning overnight into the most douce and debonair conformity.’

‘Very nice speech, Rabbit,’ d’Anton said.

‘I wish Camille would not call me that,’ Fréron said with controlled exasperation. ‘Now everyone calls me that.’

D’Anton smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘About these people.’

‘Well then … have you met Brissot? He’s in America just now, I think, Camille had a letter. He is advising them on all their problems. A great theorist is Brissot, a great political philosopher, though with scarcely a shirt to his back. And all these professional Americans, professional Irishmen, professional Genevans – all the governments in exile, and the hacks, scribblers, failed lawyers – all those men who profess to hate what they most desire.’

‘You can afford to say it. Your family is favoured, your paper’s on the right side of the censors. A radical opinion is a luxury you may allow yourself.’

‘You denigrate me, d’Anton.’

‘You denigrate your friends.’

Fréron stretched his legs. ‘End of argument,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Do you know why he calls me Rabbit?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

Fréron turned back to Gabrielle. ‘So, Mme d’Anton, I still believe you have the makings of a salon. You have me, and François Robert and his wife – Louise Robert says she would write a novel about Annette Duplessis and the rue Condé débâcle, but she fears that as a character in fiction Camille would not be believed.’

The Roberts were newly married, soddenly infatuated with each other, and horribly impoverished. He was twenty-eight, a lecturer in law, burly and affable and open to suggestions. Louise had been Mlle de Kéralio before her marriage, brought up in Artois, daughter of a Royal Censor; her aristocratic father had vetoed the match, and she had defied him. The weight of the family displeasure left them with no money and all routes of advancement barred to François; and so they had rented a shop in the rue Condé and opened a delicatessen, specializing in food from the colonies. Now Louise Robert sat behind her till turning the hems of her dresses, her eyes on a volume of Rousseau, her ears open for customers and for rumours of a rise in the price of molasses. In the evening she cooked a meal for her husband and laboriously checked the day’s accounts, her haughty shoulders rigid as she added up the receipts. When she had finished she sat down and chatted calmly to François of Jansenism, the administration of justice, the structure of the modern novel; afterwards she lay awake in the darkness, her nose cold above the sheets, praying for infertility.

Georges-Jacques said, ‘I feel at home here.’ He took to walking about the district in the evening, doffing his hat to the women and getting into conversation with their husbands, returning on each occasion with some fresh item of news. Legendre the master butcher was a good fellow, and in a profitable line of business. The rough-looking man who lived opposite really was a marquis, the Marquis de Saint-Huruge, and he has a grudge against the regime; Fabre tells a tremendous story about it, all about a misalliance and a lettre de cachet.

It would be quieter here, Georges-Jacques had said, but the apartment was constantly full of people they half-knew; they never ate supper alone. The offices were on the premises now, installed in a small study and what would otherwise have been their dining room. During the day the clerks Paré and Deforgues would drift in to talk to her. And young men she had never seen before would come to the door and ask her if she knew where Camille lived now. Once she lost her temper and said, ‘As near as makes no difference, here.’

Her mother came over once or twice in the week, to cluck over the baby and criticize the servants and say, ‘You know me, Gabrielle, I’d never interfere.’ She did her own shopping, because she was particular about vegetables and liked to check her change. The child Louise Gély came with her, to pretend to help her carry her heavy bags, and Mme Gély came to advise her about the local shopkeepers and pass comments on the people they met in the streets. She liked the child Louise: open-faced, alert, wistful at times, with an only-child’s precocity.

‘Always so much noise from your place,’ the little girl said. ‘So many ladies and gentlemen coming and going. It’s all right, isn’t it, if I come down sometimes?’

‘As long as you’re good and sit quietly. And as long as I’m there.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of coming otherwise. I’m afraid of Maître d’Anton. He has such a countenance.’

‘He’s very kind really.’

The child looked dubious. Then her face brightened. ‘What I mean to do,’ she said, ‘is to get married myself as soon as someone asks me. I’m going to have packs of children, and give parties every night.’

Gabrielle laughed. ‘What’s the hurry? You’re only ten.’

Louise Gély looked sideways at her. ‘I don’t mean to wait until I’m old.’

ON 13 JULY there were hail-storms; to say this is to give no idea of how the hail fell – as if God’s contempt had frozen. There was every type of violence and unexplained accidents on the streets. The orchards were stripped and devastated, the crops flattened in the fields. All day it hammered on windows and doors, like nothing in living memory; on the night of the 13th to 14th, a cowed populace slept in apprehension. They woke to silence; it seemed so long before life flowed through the city; it was hot, and people seemed dazed by the splintered light, as if all France had been pushed under water.

One year to the cataclysm: Gabrielle stood before a mirror, twitching at her hat. She was going out to buy some lengths of good woollen stuff for Louise’s winter dresses. Mme Gély would not contemplate such a fool’s errand, but Louise liked her winter clothes in her wardrobe by the end of August; who knew what the weather would do next, she asked, and if it should suddenly turn chilly she would be stranded, because she had grown so much since last year. Not that I go anywhere in winter, she said, but perhaps you will take me to Fontenay to see your mother. Fontenay, she said, is the country.

There was someone at the door. ‘Come in, Louise,’ she called, but no one came. The maid Catherine was rocking the screaming baby. She ran to the door herself, hat in hand. A girl she didn’t know stood there. She looked at Gabrielle, at the hat, stepped back. ‘You’re going out.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

The girl glanced over her shoulder. ‘Can I come in for five minutes? I know this sounds unlikely, but I’m sure the servants have been told to follow me about.’

Gabrielle stepped aside. The girl walked in. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, shook out her dark hair. She wore a blue linen jacket, tight-fitting, which showed off her hand-span waist and the supple line of her body. She ran a hand back through her hair, lifted her jaw, rather self-conscious: caught sight of herself in the mirror. Gabrielle felt suddenly dumpy and badly dressed, a woman getting over a pregnancy. ‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that you must be Lucile.’

‘I came,’ Lucile said, ‘because things are so awful and I desperately need to talk to somebody, and Camille has told me all about you, and he’s told me what a kind and sympathetic person you are, and that I will love you.’

Gabrielle recoiled. She thought, what a low, mean, despicable trick: if he’s told her that about me, how can I possibly tell her what I think of him? She dropped her hat on a chair. ‘Catherine, run upstairs and say I’ll be delayed. Then fetch us some lemonade, will you? Warm today, isn’t it?’ Lucile looked back at her: eyes like midnight flowers. ‘Well, Mlle Duplessis – have you quarrelled with your parents?’

Lucile perched on a chair. ‘My father goes around our house saying, “Does a father’s authority count for nothing?” He intones it, like a dirge. My sister keeps saying it to me and making me laugh.’

‘Well, doesn’t it?’

‘I believe in the right to resist authority when it’s wrong-headed.’

‘What does your mother say now?’

‘Nothing much. She’s gone very quiet. She knows I get letters. She pretends not to know.’

‘That seems unwise of her.’

‘I leave them where she can read them.’

‘That makes neither of you any better.’

‘No. Worse.’

Gabrielle shook her head. ‘I can’t condone it. I would never have defied my parents. Or deceived them.’

Lucile said, with passion, ‘Don’t you think women should choose who they marry?’

‘Oh yes. Within reason. It just isn’t reasonable to marry Maître Desmoulins.’

‘Oh. You wouldn’t do it then?’ Lucile looked as if she were hesitating over a few yards of lace. She picked up an inch of her skirt, ran the material slowly between her fingers. ‘The thing is, Mme d’Anton, I’m in love with him.’

‘I doubt it. You’re just going through that phase, you want to be in love with somebody.’

Lucile looked at her with curiosity. ‘Before you met your husband, were you always falling in love with people?’

‘To be honest, no – I wasn’t that sort of girl.’

‘What makes you think I am, then? All this business of going through phases, it’s just a thing that older people say, they think they have the right to look at you from their mouldy perches and pass judgement on your life.’

‘My mother, who is a woman of some experience, would say it is an infatuation.’

‘Fancy having a mother with that sort of experience. Quite like mine.’

Gabrielle felt the first stirrings of dismay. Trouble, under her own roof. How can she make this little girl understand? Can she understand anything any more, or has common sense loosened its hold for good, or did it have a hold in the first place? ‘My mother tells me,’ she said, ‘never to criticize my husband’s choice of friends. But in this case – if I tell you that with one thing and another I don’t admire him …’

‘That becomes clear.’

Gabrielle had a mental picture of herself, in the months before the baby was born, waddling about the house. Her pregnancy, delightful in its results, had been in one way a trial and embarrassment. Even by the end of the third month she’d been quite big, and she could see people sizing her up, quite unashamedly; she knew that after the birth they would count on their fingers. As the weeks passed, Georges-Jacques treated her as interesting but alien. He talked to her even less about matters not strictly domestic. She missed the café, more than he could know; she missed that undemanding masculine company, the easy talk of the outside world.

So … what did it matter if Georges always brought his friends home? But Camille was always arriving or just about to leave. If he sat on a chair it was on the very edge, and if he remained there for more than thirty seconds it was because he was deeply fatigued. A note of panic in his veiled eyes struck a corresponding note in her heavy body. The baby was born, the heaviness dispersed; a rootless anxiety remained. ‘Camille is a cloud in my sky,’ she said. ‘He is a thorn in my flesh.’

‘Goodness, Mme d’Anton,’ Lucile said, ‘are those the metaphors you feel forced to employ?’

‘To begin … you know he has no money?’

‘Yes, but I have.’

‘He can’t just live on your money.’

‘Lots of men live on women’s money. It’s quite respectable, in some circles it’s always done.’

‘And this business of your mother, that they may have been having – I don’t know how to put it.’

‘I don’t either,’ Lucile said. ‘There are terms for it, but I’m not feeling robust this morning.’

‘You must find out the truth about it.’

‘My mother won’t talk to me. I could ask Camille. But why should I make him lie to me? So I dismiss it from my mind. I regard the subject as closed. You see, I think about him all day. I dream about him – I can’t be blamed for that. I write him letters and I tear them up. I imagine that I might meet him by chance in the street –’ Lucile broke off, raised a hand, and pushed back from her forehead an imaginary strand of hair. Gabrielle watched her with horror. This is obsession, she thought, this parody of gesture. Lucile felt herself do it; she saw herself in the glass; she thought, it is an evocation.

Catherine put her head around the door. ‘Monsieur is home early.’

Gabrielle leapt up. Lucile sat back in her chair. She allowed her arms to lie along the chair’s arms, and flexed her hands like a cat testing its claws. D’Anton walked in. As he was taking off his coat he was saying, ‘There’s a mob around the Law Courts, and here I am, you told me to stay away from trouble. They’re letting off fireworks and shouting for Orléans. The Guards aren’t interested in breaking it up –’ He saw Lucile. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘trouble has come home, I see. Camille is talking to Legendre, he will be here directly. Legendre,’ he added pointlessly, ‘is our butcher.’

When Camille appeared Lucile rose smoothly from her chair, crossed the room and kissed him on the mouth. She watched herself in the mirror, watched him. She saw him take her hands from his shoulders and return them to her gently, folded together as if in prayer. He saw how different she looked with her hair unpowdered, how dramatic were her strong features and perfect pallor. He saw Gabrielle’s hostility towards him melt a little. He saw how she watched her husband, watching Lucile. He saw d’Anton thinking, for once he did not lie, he did not exaggerate, he said Lucile was beautiful and she is. This took one second; Camille smiled. He knows that all his derelictions can be excused if he is deeply in love with Lucile; sentimental people will excuse him, and he knows how to encourage sentiment. He thinks that perhaps he is deeply in love; after all, what else is the name for the excited misery he sees on Lucile’s face, and which his own face, he feels sure, reflects?

What has put her into this state? It must be his letters. Suddenly, he remembers what Georges had said: ‘Try prose.’ At that, it might not be so futile. He has a good deal to say, and if he can reduce his complicated and painful feelings about the Duplessis household to a few telling and effective pages, it ought to be child’s play to analyse the state of the nation. Moreover, while his life is ridiculous and inept and designed to make people smile, his writing could be stylish and heartless, and produce weeping and gnashing of teeth.

For quite thirty seconds, Lucile had forgotten to look into the mirror. For the first time, she felt she had taken a hold upon her life; she had become embodied, she wasn’t a spectator any more. But how long would the feeling last? His actual physical presence, so much longed for, she now found too much to bear. She wished he would go away, so she could imagine him again, but she was unsure how to request this without appearing demented. Camille framed in his mind the first and last sentences of a political pamphlet, but his eyes did not shift from her face; as he was extremely shortsighted, his gaze gave the impression of an intensity of concentration that made her weak at the knees. Deeply at cross-purposes, they stood frozen, hypnotized, until – as moments do – the moment passed.

‘So this is the creature who oversets the household and suborns servants and clergyman,’ d’Anton said. ‘I wonder, my dear, do you know anything of the comedies of the English writer, Mr Sheridan?’

‘No.’

‘I wondered if you thought that Life ought to imitate Art?’

‘If it imitates life,’ Lucile said, ‘that’s quite exciting enough for me.’ She noticed the time on the clock. ‘I’ll be killed,’ she said.

She blew them all a kiss, swept up her feathered hat, ran out on to the stairs. In her haste she almost knocked over a small girl, who appeared to be listening at the door, and who, surprisingly, called out after her, ‘I like your jacket.’

In bed that night she thought, hm, that large ugly man, I seem to have made a conquest there.

ON 8 AUGUST the King fixed a date for the meeting of the Estates – 1 May 1789. A week later the Comptroller-General, Brienne, discovered (or so it was said) that the state’s coffers contained enough revenue for one-quarter of one day’s expenditure. He declared a suspension of all payments by the government. France was bankrupt. His Majesty continued to hunt, and if he did not kill he recorded the fact in his diary: Rien, rien, rien. Brienne was dismissed.

ROUTINE was so broken up these days, that Claude could be found in Paris when he should have been in Versailles. Mid-morning, he strolled out into the hot August air, made for the Café du Foy. Other years, August had found him sitting by an open window at his country place at Bourg-la-Reine.

‘Good morning, Maître d’Anton,’ he said. ‘Maître Desmoulins. I had no idea you knew each other.’ The idea seemed to be causing him pain. ‘Well, what do you think? Things can’t go on like this.’

‘I suppose we should take your word for it, M. Duplessis,’ Camille said. ‘How do you look forward to having M. Necker back?’

‘What does it matter?’ Claude said. ‘I think that even the Abbé Terray would have found the situation beyond him.’

‘Anything new from Versailles?’ d’Anton asked.

‘Someone told me,’ Camille said, ‘that when the King cannot hunt he goes up on the roofs at Versailles and takes pot-shots at the ladies’ cats. Do you think there’s anything in it?’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ Claude said.

‘It puzzles a lot of people to see how things have deteriorated since Necker was last in office. If you think back to ’81, to the public accounting, the books then showed a surplus –’

‘Cooked,’ Claude said dismally.

‘Really?’

‘Done to a turn.’

‘So much for Necker,’ d’Anton said.

‘But you know, it wasn’t such a crime,’ Camille suggested. ‘Not if he thought public confidence was the main thing.’

‘Jesuit,’ d’Anton said.

Claude turned to him. ‘I’m hearing things, d’Anton – straws in the wind. Your patron Barentin will be moving from the Board of Excise – he’s going to get the Ministry of Justice in the new government.’ He smiled. He looked very tired. ‘This is a sad day for me. I would have given anything to stop it coming to this. And it must give impetus to the wilder elements …’ His eye fell on Camille. He had been very civil this morning, very well-behaved, but that he was a wilder element Claude had no doubt. ‘Maître Desmoulins,’ he said, ‘I hope you aren’t still entertaining notions about marrying my daughter.’

‘I am, rather.’

‘If you could just see it from my point of view.’

‘No, I’m afraid I can see it only from my own.’

M. Duplessis turned away. D’Anton put a hand on his arm. ‘About Barentin – can you tell me something more?’

Claude held up a forefinger. ‘Least said, soonest mended. I hope I’ve not spoken out of turn. I expect I’ll be seeing you before long.’ He indicated Camille, hopelessly. ‘Him too.’

Camille looked after him. ‘“Straws in the wind”,’ he said savagely. ‘Have you ever heard such drivel? We ought to arrange him a cliché contest with Maître Vinot. Oh,’ he said suddenly, ‘I do see what he means. He means they’re going to offer you a job.’

UPON TAKING OFFICE, Necker began to negotiate a loan from abroad. The Parlements were reinstated. The price of bread rose two sous. On 29 August, a mob burned down the guard posts on the Pont-Neuf. The King found the money to move troops into the capital. Soldiers opened fire into a crowd of six hundred; seven or eight people were killed and an unknown number injured.

M. Barentin was appointed Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals. The mob made a straw doll in the likeness of his predecessor, and set fire to it on the Place de Grève, to the tune of hoots and jeers, the crack and whizz of fireworks and the drunken acquiescent singing of the French Guards, who were stationed permanently in the capital and who liked that sort of thing.

D’ANTON had given his reasons precisely, without heat but without equivocation; he had worked out beforehand what he would say, so that he would be perfectly clear. Barentin’s offer of a secretary’s post would quickly become common knowledge around City Hall and the ministries and beyond. Fabre suggested that he take Gabrielle some flowers and break it to her gently.

When he got home, Mme Charpentier was there, and Camille. They stopped talking when they saw him. The atmosphere was ill-humoured; but Angélique came over, beaming, and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Dear son Georges,’ she said, ‘our warmest congratulations.’

‘On what?’ he said. ‘My case didn’t come up. Really, the process of justice is moving like treacle nowadays.’

‘We understand,’ Gabrielle said, ‘that you have been offered a post in the government.’

‘Yes, but it’s of no consequence. I turned it down.’

‘I told you,’ Camille said.

Angélique stood up. ‘I’ll be off then.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ Gabrielle said, with extreme formality. Her face glowed. She got up; they went, and whispered outside the door.

‘Angélique will make her behave,’ d’Anton said. Camille sat and smiled at him. ‘You’re easily pleased. Come back in, calm yourself, shut the door,’ he said to his wife. ‘Please try to understand that I am acting for the best.’

‘When he said,’ she pointed to Camille, ‘that you’d turned it down, I said what kind of a fool did he suppose I was?’

‘This government won’t last a year. It doesn’t suit me, Gabrielle.’

She gaped at him. ‘So what are you going to do? Give up your practice because the state of the law doesn’t suit you? You were ambitious before, you used to say –’

‘Yes, and now he’s more ambitious,’ Camille cut in. ‘He’s far too good for a minor post under Barentin. Probably – oh, probably the Seal will be within his own gift one day.’

D’Anton laughed. ‘If it ever is,’ he said, ‘I’ll give it you. I promise.’

‘That’s probably treason,’ Gabrielle said. Her hair was slipping down, as it tended to do at points of crisis.

‘Don’t confuse the issue,’ Camille said. ‘Georges-Jacques is going to be a great man, however he is impeded.’

‘You’re mad,’ Gabrielle said. As she shook her head a shower of hairpins leapt out and slithered to the floor. ‘What I hate, Georges, is to see you trotting along in the wake of other people’s opinions.’

‘Me? You think I do that?’

‘No,’ Camille said hurriedly, ‘he doesn’t do that.’

‘He takes notice of you, and no notice of me whatsoever.’

‘That’s because –’ Camille stopped. He could not think of a tactful reason why it was. He turned to d’Anton. ‘Can I produce you to the Café du Foy tonight? You may be expected to make a short speech, you don’t mind, of course not.’

Gabrielle looked up from the floor, hairpin in hand. ‘Do I understand that this business has glorified you, somehow?’

‘I wouldn’t say “glory”.’ Camille looked modest. ‘But it’s a start.’

‘Would you mind?’ d’Anton said to her. ‘I’ll not be late. When I come home I’ll explain it better. Gabrielle, leave those, Catherine will pick them up.’

Gabrielle shook her head again. She would not be explained to, and if Catherine were asked to crawl around the floor after her hairpins, she would probably give notice; why did he not know this?

The men went downstairs. Camille said, ‘I’m afraid it’s just my existence that irks Gabrielle. Even when my desperate fiancée turns up at her door she still believes I’m trying to inveigle you into bed with me.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Time to think of higher things,’ Camille said. ‘Oh, I am so happy. Everybody says changes are coming, everyone says the country will be overturned. They say it, but you believe it. You act on it. You are seen to act on it.’

‘There was a pope – I forget which one – who told everyone that the world was going to end. They all put their estates on the market, and the pope bought them and became rich.’

‘That’s a nice story,’ Camille said. ‘You are not a pope, but never mind, I think you will do quite well for yourself.’

AS SOON AS THEY HEARD in Arras that there were going to be elections, Maximilien began to put his affairs in order. ‘How do you know you’ll be elected?’ his brother Augustin said. ‘They might form a cabal against you. It’s very likely.’

‘Then I’ll have to sing small between now and the election,’ he said grimly. ‘Here in the provinces almost everyone has a vote, not just the moneyed men.’ For that reason, ‘They won’t be able to keep me out,’ he said.

His sister Charlotte said, ‘They’ll be ungrateful beasts if they don’t elect you. After all you’ve done for the poor. You deserve it.’

‘It isn’t a prize.’

‘You’ve worked so hard, all for nothing, no money, no credit. There’s no need to pretend you don’t resent it. You’re not obliged to be saintly.’

He sighed. Charlotte has this way of cutting him to the bone. Hacking away, with the family knife.

‘I know what you think, Max,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe you’ll come back from Versailles in six months, or even a year. You think this will alter your life. Do you want them to have a revolution just to please you?’

I DON’T CARE what the Estates-General do,’ said Philippe d’Orléans, ‘as long as I am there when they deal with the liberty of the individual, so that I can use my voice and vote for a law after which I can be sure that, on a day when I have a fancy to sleep at Raincy, no one can send me against my will to Villers-Cotterêts.’

Towards the end of 1788 the Duke appointed a new private secretary. He liked to embarrass people, and this may have been a major reason for his choice. The addition to his entourage was an army officer named Laclos. He was in his late forties, a tall, angular man with fine features and cold blue eyes. He had joined the army at the age of eighteen, but had never seen active service. Once this had grieved him, but twenty years spent in provincial garrison towns had endowed him with an air of profound and philosophic indifference. To amuse himself, he had written some light verse, and the libretto of an opera that came off after one night. And he had watched people, recorded the details of their manoeuvres, their power-play. For twenty years there had been nothing else to do. He became familiar with that habit of mind which dispraises what it most envies and admires: with that habit of mind which desires only what it cannot have.

His first novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published in Paris in 1782. The first edition sold out within days. The publishers rubbed their hands and remarked that if this shocking and cynical book was what the public wanted, who were they to act as censors? The second edition was sold out. Matrons and bishops expressed outrage. A copy with a blank binding was ordered for the Queen’s private library. Doors were slammed in the author’s face. He had arrived.

It seemed his military career was over. In any case, his criticism of army traditions had made his position untenable. ‘It seems to me I could do with such a man,’ the Duke said. ‘Your every affectation is an open book to him.’ When Félicité de Genlis heard of the appointment, she threatened to resign her post as Governor of the Duke’s children. Laclos could think of bigger disasters.

It was a crucial time in the Duke’s affairs. If he was to take advantage of the unsettled times, he must have an organization, a power base. His easy popularity in Paris must be put to good use. Men must be secured to his service, their past lives probed and their futures planned for them. Loyalties must be explored. Money must change hands.

Laclos surveyed this situation, brought his cold intelligence to bear. He began to know writers who were known to the police. He made discreet inquiries among Frenchmen living abroad as to the reasons for their exile. He got himself a big map of Paris and marked with blue circles points that could be fortified. He sat up by lamplight combing through the pages of the pamphlets that had come that day from the Paris presses; the censorship had broken down. He was looking for writers who were bolder and more outspoken than the rest; then he would make overtures. Few of these fellows had ever had a bestseller.

Laclos was the Duke’s man now. Laconic in his statements, his air discouraging intimacy, he was the kind of man whose first name nobody ever knows. But still he watched men and women with a furtive professional interest, and scribbled down thoughts that came to him, on chance scraps of paper.

In December 1788, the Duke sold the contents of his magnificent Palais-Royal art gallery, and devoted the money to poor relief. It was announced in the press that he would distribute daily a thousand pounds of bread; that he would defray the lying-in expenses of indigent women (even, the wits said, those he had not impregnated); that he would forgo the tithes levied on grain on his estates, and repeal the game laws on all his lands.

This was Félicité’s programme. It was for the country’s good. It did Philippe a bit of good, too.

RUE CONDÉ. ‘Although the censorship has broken down,’ Lucile says, ‘there are still criminal sanctions.’

‘Fortunately,’ her father says.

Camille’s first pamphlet lies on the table, neat inside its paper cover. His second, in manuscript, lies beside it. The printers won’t touch it, not yet; we will have to wait until the situation takes a turn for the worse.

Lucile’s fingers caress it, paper, ink, tape:

IT WAS RESERVED for our days to behold the return of liberty among the French … for forty years, philosophy has been undermining the foundations of despotism, and as Rome before Caesar was already enslaved by her vices, so France before Necker was already enfranchised by her intelligence … Patriotism spreads day by day, with the devouring rapidity of a great conflagration. The young take fire; old men cease, for the first time, to regret the past. Now they blush for it.

VI. Last Days of Titonville
(1789)

A DEPOSITION to the Estates-General:

The community of Chaillevois is composed of about two hundred persons. The most part of the inhabitants have no property at all, those who have any possess so little that it is not worth talking about. The ordinary food is bread steeped in salt water. As for meat, it is never tasted, except on Easter Sunday, Shrove Tuesday and the feast of the patron saint … A man may sometimes eat haricots, if the master does not forbid them to be grown among the vines … That is how the common people live under the best of Kings.

Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau:

My motto shall be this: get into the Estates at all costs.

NEW YEAR. You go out in the streets and you think it’s here: the crash at last, the collapse, the end of the world. It is colder now than any living person can remember. The river is a solid sheet of ice. The first morning, it was a novelty. Children ran and shouted, and dragged their complaining mothers out to see it. ‘One could skate,’ people said. After a week, they began to turn their heads from the sight, keep their children indoors. Under the bridges, by dim and precarious fires, the destitute wait for death. A loaf of bread is fourteen sous, for the New Year.

These people have left their insufficient shelters, their shacks, their caves, abandoned the rock-hard, snow-glazed fields where they cannot believe anything will ever grow again. Tying up in a square of sacking a few pieces of bread, perhaps chestnuts: cording a small bundle of firewood: saying no goodbyes, taking to the road. They move in droves for safety, sometimes men alone, sometimes families, always keeping with the people from their own district, whose language they speak. At first they sing and tell stories. After two days or so, they walk in silence. The procession that marched now straggles. With luck, one may find a shed or byre for the night. Old women are wakened with difficulty in the morning and are found to have lost their wits. Small children are abandoned in village doorways. Some die; some are found by the charitable, and grow up under other names.

Those who reach Paris with their strength intact begin to look for work. Men are being laid off, they’re told, our own people; there’s nothing doing for outsiders. Because the river is frozen up, goods do not come into the city: no cloth to be dyed, no skins to be tanned, no corn. Ships are impaled on the ice, with grain rotting in their holds.

The vagrants congregate in sheltered spots, not discussing the situation because there is nothing to discuss. At first they hang around the markets in the late afternoons, because at the close of the day’s trading any bread that remains is sold off cheaply or given away; the rough, fierce Paris wives get there first. Later, there is no bread after midday. They are told that the good Duke of Orléans gives away a thousand loaves of bread to people who are penniless, like them. But the Paris beggars leave them standing again, sharp-elbowed and callous, willing to give them malicious information and to walk on people who are knocked to the ground. They gather in back courts, in church porches, anywhere that is out of the knife of the wind. The very young and the very old are taken in by the hospitals. Harassed monks and nuns try to bespeak extra linen and a supply of fresh bread, only to find that they must make do with soiled linen and bread that is days old. They say that the Lord’s designs are wonderful, because if the weather warmed up there would be an epidemic. Women weep with dread when they give birth.

Even the rich experience a sense of dislocation. Alms-giving seems not enough; there are frozen corpses on fashionable streets. When people step down from their carriages, they pull their cloaks about their faces, to keep the stinging cold from their cheeks and the miserable sights from their eyes.

‘YOU’RE GOING HOME for the elections?’ Fabre said. ‘Camille, how can you leave me like this? With our great novel only half finished?’

‘Don’t fuss,’ Camille said. ‘It’s possible that when I get back we won’t have to resort to pornography to make a living. We might have other sources of income.’

Fabre grinned. ‘Camille thinks elections are as good as finding a gold-mine. I like you these days, you’re so frail and fierce, you talk like somebody in a book. Do you have a consumption by any chance? An incipient fever?’ He put his hand against Camille’s forehead. ‘Think you’ll last out till May?’

When Camille woke up, these mornings, he wanted to pull the sheets back over his head. He had a headache all the time, and did not seem to comprehend what people were saying.

Two things – the revolution and Lucile – seemed more distant than ever. He knew that one must draw on the other. He had not seen her for a week, and then only briefly, and she had seemed cool. She had said, ‘I don’t mean to seem cool, but I –’ she had smiled painfully – ‘I daren’t let the painful emotion show through.’

In his calmer moments he talked to everyone about peaceful reform, professed republicanism but said that he had nothing against Louis, that he believed him to be a good man. He talked the same way as everybody else. But d’Anton said, ‘I know you, you want violence, you’ve got the taste for it.’

He went to see Claude Duplessis and told him that his fortune was made. Even if Picardy did not send him as a deputy to the Estates (he pretended to think it likely) it would certainly send his father. Claude said, ‘I do not know what sort of man your father is, but if he is wise he will disassociate himself from you while he is in Versailles, to avoid being exposed to embarrassment.’ His gaze, fixed at a high point on the wall, descended to Camille’s face; he seemed to feel that it was a descent. ‘A hack writer, now,’ he said. ‘My daughter is a fanciful girl, idealistic, quite innocent. She doesn’t know the meaning of hardship or worry. She may think she knows what she wants, but she doesn’t, I know what she wants.’

He left Claude. They were not to meet again for some months. He stood in the rue Condé looking up at the first-floor windows, hoping that he might see Annette. But he saw no one. He went once more on a round of the publishers of whom he had hopes, as if – since last week – they might have become devil-may-care. The presses are busy day and night, and their owners are balancing the risk; inflammatory literature is in request, but no one can afford to see his presses impounded and his workmen marched off. ‘It’s quite simple – I publish this, I go to gaol,’ the printer Momoro said. ‘Can’t you tone it down?’

‘No,’ Camille said. No, I can’t compromise: just like Billaud-Varennes used to say. He shook his head. He had let his hair grow, so when he shook his head with any force its dark waves bounced around somewhat theatrically. He liked this effect. No wonder he had a headache.

The printer said, ‘How is the salacious novel with M. Fabre? Your heart not in it?’

‘When he’s gone,’ Fabre said gleefully to d’Anton, ‘I can revise the manuscript and make our heroine look just like Lucile Duplessis.’

If the Assembly of the Estates-General takes place, according to the promise of the King … there is little doubt but some revolution in the government will be effected. A constitution, probably somewhat similar to that of England, will be adopted, and limitations affixed to the power of the Crown.

J. C. Villiers, MP for Old Sarum

GABRIEL RIQUETTI, Comte de Mirabeau, forty years old today: happy birthday. In duty to the anniversary, he scrutinized himself in a long mirror. The scale and vivacity of the image seemed to ridicule the filigree frame.

Family story: on the day of his birth the accoucheur approached his father, the baby wrapped in a cloth. ‘Don’t be alarmed …’ he began.

He’s no beauty, now. He might be forty, but he looks fifty. One line for his undischarged bankruptcy: just the one, he’s never worried about money. One line for every agonizing month in the state prison at Vincennes. One line per bastard fathered. You’ve lived, he told himself; do you expect life not to leave a mark?

Forty’s a turning point, he told himself. Don’t look back. The early domestic hell: the screaming bloody quarrels, the days of tight-lipped, murderous silence. There was a day when he had stepped between his mother and his father; his mother had fired a pistol at his head. Only fourteen years old, and what did his father say of him? I have seen the nature of the beast. Then the army, a few routine duels, fits of lechery and blind, obstinate rage. Life on the run. Prison. Brother Boniface, getting roaring drunk every day of his life, his body blowing out to the proportions of a freak at a fair. Don’t look back. And almost incidentally, almost unnoticed, a bankruptcy and a marriage: tiny Émilie, the heiress, the little bundle of poison to whom he’d sworn to be true. Where, he wondered, is Émilie today?

Happy birthday, Mirabeau. Appraise the assets. He drew himself up. He was a tall man, powerful, deep-chested: capacious lungs. The face was a shocker: badly pock-marked, not that it seemed to put women off. He turned his head slightly so that he could study the aquiline curve of his nose. His mouth was thin, intimidating; it could be called a cruel mouth, he supposed. Take it all in all – it was a man’s face, full of vigour and high breeding. By a few embellishments to the truth he had made his family into one of the oldest and noblest in France. Who cared about the embellishments? Only pedants, genealogists. People take you at your own valuation, he said to himself.

But now the nobility, the second Estate of the Realm, had disowned him. He would have no seat. He would have no voice. Or so they thought.

It was all complicated by the fact that last summer there had appeared a scandalous book called A Secret History of the Court at Berlin. It dealt in some detail with the seamier side of the Prussian set-up and the sexual predilections of its prominent members. However strenuously he denied authorship, it was plain to everyone that the book was based on his observations during his time as a diplomat. (Diplomat, him? What a joke.) Strictly, he was not at fault: had he not given the manuscript to his secretary, with orders not to part with it to anyone, especially not to himself? How could he know that his current mistress, a publisher’s wife, was in the habit of picking locks and rifling his secretary’s desk? But that was not quite the sort of excuse that would satisfy the government. And besides, in August he had been very, very short of money.

The government should have been more understanding. If they had given him a job last year, instead of ignoring him – something worthy of his talents, say the Constantinople embassy, or Petersburg – then he would have burned A Secret History, or thrown it in a pond. If they had listened to his advice, he wouldn’t be getting ready, now, to teach them the hard way.

So the Nobility rejected him. Very well. Three days ago he had entered Aix-en-Provence as a candidate for the Commons, the Third Estate. What resulted? Scenes of wild enthusiasm. ‘Father of his Country’, they had called him; he was popular, locally. When he got to Paris those bells of Aix would still be ringing jubilee, the night sky of the south would still be criss-crossed by the golden scorch-trails of fireworks. Living fire. He would go to Marseille (taking no chances) and get a reception in no way less noisy and splendid. Just to ensure it, he would publish in the city an anonymous pamphlet in praise of his own character and attributes.

So what’s to be done with these worms at Versailles? Conciliate? Calumniate? Would they arrest you in the middle of a General Election?

A PAMPHLET by the Abbé Sieyès, 1789:

What is the Third Estate?

Everything.

What has it been, until now?

Nothing.

What does it want?

To become something.

THE FIRST Electoral Assembly of the Third Estate of Guise, in the district of Laon: 5 March 1789. Maître Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins presiding, as Lieutenant-General of the Bailiwick of Vermandois: assisted by M. Saulce, Procurator: M. Marriage as Secretary: 292 persons present.

In deference to the solemnity of the occasion, M. Desmoulins’s son had tied his hair back with a broad green ribbon. It had been a black ribbon earlier that morning, but he had remembered just in time that black was the colour of the Hapsburgs and of Antoinette, and that was not at all the kind of partisanship he wished to display. Green, however, was the colour of liberty and the colour of hope. His father waited for him by the front door, fuming at the delay and wearing a new hat. ‘I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue,’ Camille said. ‘It seems so self-serving.’

It was a raw, blustery day. On the rue Grand-Pont, Camille stopped and touched his father’s arm. ‘Come to Laon with me, to the district assembly. Speak for me. Please.’

‘You think I should stand aside for you?’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘The traits which the electors will prefer in me, are not the ones you have inherited. I am aware that there are certain persons in Laon making a noise on your behalf, saying you must know your way about and so on. Just let them meet you, that’s all I say. Just let them try to have a five-minute normal conversation with you. Just let them set eyes on you. No, Camille, in no way will I be party to foisting you on the electorate.’

Camille opened his mouth to reply. His father said, ‘Do you think it is a good idea to stand about arguing in the street?’

‘Yes, why not?’

Jean-Nicolas took his son’s arm. Not very dignified to drag him to the meeting, but he’d do it if necessary. He could feel the damp wind penetrating his clothes and stirring aches and pains in every part. ‘Come on,’ he snapped, ‘before they give us up for lost.’

‘Ah, at last,’ the de Viefville cousins said. Rose-Fleur’s father looked Camille over sourly. ‘I had rather hoped not to see you, but I suppose you are a member of the local Bar, and your father pointed out that we could not very well disenfranchise you. This may, after all, be your only chance to play any part in the nation’s affairs. I hear you’ve been writing,’ he said. ‘Pamphleteering. Not, if I may say so, a gentleman’s method of persuasion.’

Camille gave M. Godard his best, his sweetest smile. ‘Maître Perrin sends his regards,’ he said.

After the meeting nothing remained except for Jean-Nicolas to go to Laon to collect a formal endorsement. Adrien de Viefville, the Mayor of Guise, walked home with them. Jean-Nicolas seemed dazed by his easy victory; he’d have to start packing for Versailles. He stopped as they crossed the Place des Armes and stood looking up at his house. ‘What are you doing?’ his relative asked.

‘Inspecting the guttering,’ Jean-Nicolas explained.

By next morning everything had fallen apart. Maître Desmoulins did not appear for breakfast. Madeleine had anticipated the festive chink of coffee cups, congratulations all round, perhaps even a little laughter. But those children who remained at home all had colds, and were coddling themselves, and she was left to preside over one son, whom she did not know well enough to talk to, and who did not eat breakfast anyway.

‘Can he be sulking?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t think he’d sulk, today of all days. This comes of apeing royalty and having separate bedrooms. I never know what the bastard’s thinking.’

‘I could go and find him,’ Camille suggested.

‘No, don’t trouble. Have some more coffee. He’ll probably send me a note.’

Madeleine surveyed her eldest child. She put a piece of brioche into her mouth. To her surprise, it stuck there, like a lump of ash. ‘What has happened to us?’ she said. Tears welled into her eyes. ‘What has happened to you?’ She could have put her head down on the table, and howled.

Presently word came that Jean-Nicolas was unwell. He had a pain, he said. The doctor arrived, and confined him to bed. Messages were sent to the mayor’s house.

‘Is it my heart?’ Desmoulins inquired weakly. If it is, he was about to say, I blame Camille.

The doctor said, ‘I’ve told you often enough where your heart is, and where your kidneys are, and what is the state of each; and while your heart is perfectly sound, to set out for Versailles with kidneys like those is mere folly. You will be sixty in two years – if, and only if, you take life quietly. Moreover –’

‘Yes? While you’re about it?’

‘Events in Versailles are more likely to give you a heart attack than anything your son has ever done.’

Jean-Nicolas dropped his head back against the pillows. His face was yellow with pain and disappointment. The de Viefvilles gathered in the drawing room below, and the Godards, and all the electoral officials. Camille followed the doctor in. ‘Tell him it’s his duty to go to Versailles,’ he said. ‘Even if it kills him.’

‘You always were a heartless boy,’ said M. Saulce.

Camille turned to break into a clique of de Viefvilles. ‘Send me,’ he said.

Jean-Louis de Viefville des Essarts, advocate, Parlementaire, surveyed him through his pince-nez. ‘Camille,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t send you down to the market to fetch a lettuce.’

ARTOIS: the three Estates met separately, and the assemblies of the clergy and the nobility each indicated that in this time of national crisis they would be prepared to sacrifice some of their ancient privileges. The Third Estate began to propose an effusive vote of thanks.

A young man from Arras took the floor. He was short and slightly built, with a conspicuously well-cut coat and immaculate linen. His face was intelligent and earnest, with a narrow chin and wide blue eyes masked behind spectacles. His voice was unimpressive, and half-way through his speech it died momentarily in his throat; people had to lean forward and nudge their neighbours to know what he said. But it was not the manner of his delivery that caused them consternation. He said that the clergy and the nobility had done nothing praiseworthy, but had merely promised to amend where they had abused. Therefore, there was no need to thank them at all.

Among people who were not from Arras, and did not know him, there was some surprise when he was elected one of the eight deputies for the Third Estate of Artois. He seems locked into himself, somehow not amenable; and he has no orator’s tricks, no style, nothing about him at all.

‘I NOTICE you’ve paid off your tailor,’ his sister Charlotte said. ‘And your glove-maker. And you said he was such a good glove-maker too. I wish you wouldn’t go around town as if you’ve decided to leave for good.’

‘Would you prefer it if I climbed through the window one night with all my possessions done up in a spotted handkerchief? You could tell them I’d run away to sea.’

But Charlotte was not to be mollified: Charlotte, the family knife. ‘They’ll want you to settle things before you go.’

‘You mean about Anaïs?’ He looked up from the letter he was writing to an old schoolfriend. ‘She’s said she’s happy to wait.’

‘She’ll not wait. I know what girls are like. My advice to you is to forget her.’

‘I am always glad of your advice.’

She threw her head up and glared, suspecting sarcasm. But his face expressed only concern for her. He turned back to his letter:

Dearest Camille,

I flatter myself you won’t be very surprised to learn I’m on my way to Versailles. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward …

MAXIMILIEN de Robespierre, 1789, in the case of Dupond:

The reward of the virtuous man is his confidence that he has willed the good of his fellow man: after that comes the recognition of the nations, which surrounds his memory, and the honours given him by contemporaries … I should like to buy these rewards, at the price of a laborious life, even at the price of a premature death.

PARIS: on 1 April, d’Anton went out to vote at the church of the Franciscans, whom the Parisians called the Cordeliers. Legendre the master butcher walked down with him – a big, raw, self-educated man who was in the habit of agreeing with anything d’Anton said.

‘Now a man like you …’ Fréron had said, with careful flattery.

‘A man like me can’t afford to stand for election,’ d’Anton said. ‘They’re giving the deputies, what, an eighteen-franc allowance per session? And I’d have to live in Versailles. I’ve a family to support, I can’t let my practice lie fallow.’

‘But you’re disappointed,’ Fréron suggested.

‘Maybe.’

The voters didn’t go home; they stood in groups outside the Cordeliers’ church, gossiping and making predictions. Fabre didn’t have a vote because he didn’t pay enough taxes; the fact was making him spiteful. ‘Why couldn’t we have the same franchise as the provinces?’ he demanded. ‘I’ll tell you what it is, they regard Paris as a dangerous city, they’re afraid of what would happen if we all had votes.’ He engaged in seditious conversation with the truculent Marquis de Saint-Huruge. Louise Robert closed the shop and came out on François’s arm, wearing rouge and a frock left over from better days.

‘Think what would happen if women had votes,’ she said. She looked up at d’Anton. ‘Maître d’Anton believes women have a lot to contribute to political life, don’t you?’

‘I do not,’ he said mildly.

‘The whole district’s out,’ Legendre said. He was pleased. He had spent his youth at sea; now he liked to feel he belonged to a place.

Mid-afternoon, a surprise visitor: Hérault de Séchelles.

‘Thought I’d drop down to see how you Cordeliers wild men were voting,’ he said; but d’Anton had the impression he’d come to look for him. Hérault took a pinch of snuff from a little box with a picture of Voltaire on the lid. He turned the box in his fingers, appreciatively; proffered it to Legendre.

‘This is our butcher,’ d’Anton said, enjoying the effect.

‘Charmed,’ Hérault said, not a flicker of surprise on his amiable features; but afterwards d’Anton caught him surreptitiously checking his cuffs to see if they were free of ox-blood and offal. He turned to d’Anton: ‘Have you been to the Palais-Royal today?’

‘No, I hear there’s some trouble …’

‘That’s right, keep yourself in the clear,’ Louise Robert muttered.

‘So you’ve not seen Camille?’

‘He’s in Guise.’

‘No, he’s back. I saw him yesterday in the company of the ineffably verminous Jean-Paul Marat – oh, you don’t know the doctor? Not such a loss – the man has a criminal record in half the countries in Europe.’

‘Don’t hold that against a man,’ d’Anton said.

‘But he has, you know, a long history of imposing on people. He was physician to the Comte d’Artois’s household troops, and it’s said he was the lover of a marquise.’

‘Naturally, you don’t believe that.’

‘Look, I can’t help my birth,’ Hérault said, with a flash of irritation. ‘I try to atone for it – perhaps you think I should imitate Mlle de Kéralio and open a shop? Or your butcher might take me on to scrub the floors?’ He broke off. ‘Oh, really, one shouldn’t be talking like this, losing one’s temper. It must be the air in this district. Be careful, Marat will be wanting to move in.’

‘But why is this gentleman verminous? You mean it as a figure of speech?’

‘I mean it literally. This man abandoned his life, walked out, chooses to live as some sort of tramp.’ Hérault shuddered; the story had a horrible grip on his imagination.

‘What does he do?’

‘He appears to have dedicated himself to the overthrowing of everything.’

‘Ah, the overthrowing of everything. Lucrative business, that. Business to put your son into.’

‘What I am telling you is perfectly true – but look now, I’m getting diverted. I came to ask you to do something about Camille, as a matter of urgency –’

‘Oh, Camille,’ Legendre said. He added a phrase he had seldom used since his merchant navy days.

‘Well, quite,’ Hérault said. ‘But one doesn’t want to see him taken up by the police. The Palais-Royal is full of people standing on chairs making inflammatory speeches. I don’t know if he is there now, but he was there yesterday, and the day before –’

‘Camille is making a speech?’

This seemed unlikely: and yet, possible. A picture came into d’Anton’s mind. It was some weeks ago, late at night. Fabre had been drinking. They had all been drinking. Fabre said, we are going to be public men. He said, d’Anton, you know what I told you about your voice when we first met, when you were a boy? I told you, you’ve got to be able to speak for hours, you’ve got to fetch up your voice from here, from here – well, you’re good, but you’re not that good yet. Courtrooms are one thing, but we’re growing out of courtrooms.

Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d’Anton’s temples. ‘Put your fingers here,’ he said. ‘Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here.’ He jabbed at d’Anton’s face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. ‘I’ll teach you like an actor,’ he said. ‘This city is our stage.’

Camille said: ‘Book of Ezekiel. “This city is the cauldron, and we the flesh.”’

Fabre turned. ‘This stutter,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do it.’

Camille put his hands over his eyes. ‘Leave me alone;’ he said.

‘Even you.’ Fabre’s face was incandescent. ‘Even you, I am going to teach.’

He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. ‘You’re going to talk properly,’ Fabre said. ‘Even if it kills one of us.’

Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d’Anton was too tired to intervene.

Now, in bright sunlight, on an April morning, he wondered if this scene could really have occurred. Nevertheless, he began to walk.

THE GARDENS of the Palais-Royal were full to overflowing. It seemed to be hotter here than anywhere else, as if it were high summer. The shops in the arcades were all open, doing brisk business, and people were arguing, laughing, parading; the stockbrokers from the bourse had wrenched their cravats off and were drinking lemonade, and the patrons of the cafés had spilled into the gardens and were fanning themselves with their hats. Young girls had come out to take the air and show off their summer dresses and compare themselves with the prostitutes, who saw chances of midday trade and were out in force. Stray dogs ran about grinning; broadsheet sellers bawled. There was an air of holiday: dangerous holiday, holiday with an edge.

Camille stood on a chair, the light breeze fanning out his hair. He was holding a piece of paper, and was reading from what appeared to be a police file. When he had finished he held the piece of paper at arm’s length between finger and thumb and released it to let it flutter to the ground. The crowd hooted with laughter. Two men exchanged glances and melted away from the back of the crowd. ‘Informers,’ Fréron said. Then Camille spoke of the Queen with cordial contempt, and the crowd hissed and groaned; he spoke of delivering the King from evil advisers, and praised M. Necker, and the crowd clapped its hands. He spoke of Good Duke Philippe and his concern for the people, and the crowd threw its hat into the air and cheered.

‘They’ll arrest him,’ Hérault said.

‘What, in the face of this crowd?’ Fabre said.

‘They’ll pick him up afterwards.’

D’Anton looked very grave. The crowd was increasing. Camille’s voice reached out to them without a trace of hesitation. By accident or design he had developed a marked Parisian accent. People were drifting over from across the gardens. From the upper window of a jeweller’s shop, the Duke’s man Laclos gazed down dispassionately, sipping from time to time from a glass of water and jotting down notes for his files. Hot, getting hotter: Laclos alone was cool. Camille flicked his fingers across his forehead, brushing the sweat away. He launched into grain speculators. Laclos wrote, ‘The best this week.’

‘I’m glad you came to tell us, Hérault,’ d’Anton said. ‘But I don’t see any chance of stopping him now.’

‘It’s all my doing,’ Fabre said. His face shone with pleasure. ‘I told you, you have to take a firm line with Camille. You have to hit him.’

THAT EVENING, as Camille was leaving Fréron’s apartment, two gentlemen intercepted him and asked him politely to accompany them to the Duc de Biron’s house. A carriage was waiting. On the way, no one spoke.

Camille was glad of this. His throat hurt. His stutter had come back. Sometimes in court he had managed to lose it, when he was caught up in the excitement of a case. When he was angry it would go, when he was beside himself, possessed; but it would be back. And now it was back, and he must revert to his old tactics: he couldn’t get through a sentence without the need for his mind to dart ahead, four or five sentences ahead, to see words coming that he wouldn’t be able to pronounce. Then he must think of synonyms – the most bizarre ones, at times – or he must simply alter what he’s going to say … He remembered Fabre, banging his head rather painfully against the arm of a chair.

The Duc de Biron made only the briefest appearance; he accorded Camille a nod, and then he was whisked through a gallery, away, into the interior of the house. The air was close; sconces diffused the light. On walls of muffling tapestry, dim figures of goddesses, horses, men: woollen arms, woollen hooves, draperies exuding the scent of camphor and damp. The topic was the thrill of the chase; he saw hounds and spaniels with dripping jaws, dough-faced huntsmen in costumes antique: a cornered stag foundered in a stream. He stopped suddenly, gripped by panic, by an impulse to cut and run. One of his escorts took him – quite gently – by the arm and steered him on.

Laclos waited for him in a little room with walls of green silk. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me what was going through your mind when you got up there today.’ Self-contained, constrained, he could not imagine how anyone could parade his raw nerves to such effect.

The Duke’s friend de Sillery drifted in, and gave Camille some champagne. There was no gaming tonight, and he was bored: may as well talk to this extraordinary little agitator. ‘I suppose you have financial worries,’ Laclos said. ‘We could relieve you of those.’

When he had finished his questions he made an imperceptible signal, and the two silent gentlemen reappeared, and the process was reversed: the chill of marble underfoot, the murmur of voices behind closed doors, the sudden swell of laughter and music from unseen rooms. The tapestries had, he saw, borders of lilies, roses, blue pears. Outside the air was no cooler. A footman held up a flambeau. The carriage was back at the door.

Camille let his head drop back against the cushions. One of his escorts drew a velvet curtain, to shield their faces from the streets, Laclos declined supper and returned to his paperwork. The Duke is well-served by crowd-pleasers, he said, by unbalanced brats like that.

ON THE EVENING of 22 April, a Wednesday, Gabrielle’s year-old son refused his food, pushed the spoon away, lay whimpering and listless in his crib. She took him into her own bed, and he slept; but at dawn, she felt his forehead against her cheek, burning and dry.

Catherine ran for Dr Souberbielle. ‘Coughing?’ said the doctor. ‘Still not eaten? Well, don’t fuss. I don’t call this a healthy time of year.’ He patted her hand. ‘Try to get some rest yourself, my dear.’

By evening there was no improvement. Gabrielle slept for an hour or two, then came to relieve Catherine. She wedged herself into an upright chair, listening to the baby’s breathing. She could not stop herself touching him every few minutes – just a fingertip on cheek, a little pat to the sore chest.

By four o’clock he seemed better. His temperature had dropped, his fists unclenched, his eyelids drooped into a doze. She leaned back, relieved, her limbs turned to jelly with fatigue.

The next thing she heard was the clock striking five. Wrenched out of a dream, she jerked in her chair, almost fell. She stood up, sick and cold, steadying herself with a hand on the crib. She leaned over it. The baby lay belly-down, quite still. She knew without touching him that he was dead.

AT THE CROSSROADS of the rue Montreuil and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine there was a great house known to the people who lived there as Titonville. On the first floor were the (allegedly sumptuous) apartments occupied by one M. Réveillon. Below ground were vast cellars, where notable vintages appreciated in the dusk. On the ground floor was the source of M. Réveillon’s wealth – a wallpaper factory employing 350 people.

M. Réveillon had acquired Titonville after its original owner went bankrupt; he had built up a flourishing export trade. He was a rich man, and one of the largest employers in Paris, and it was natural that he should stand for the Estates-General. On 24 April he went with high hopes to the election meeting of the Sainte-Marguerite division, where his neighbours listened to him with deference. Good man, Réveillon. Knows his stuff.

M. Réveillon remarked that the price of bread was too high. There was a murmur of agreement and a little sycophantic applause: as if the observation were original. If the price of bread were to come down, M. Réveillon said, employers could cut wages; this would lead to a reduction in the price of manufactured articles. Otherwise, M. Réveillon said, where would it all end? Prices up, wages up, prices up, wages up …

M. Hanriot, who owned the saltpetre works, warmly seconded these observations. People lounged near the door, and handed out scraps of news to the unenfranchised, who stood outside in the gutter.

Only one part of M. Réveillon’s programme caught the public attention – his proposal to cut wages. Saint-Antoine came out on the streets.

De Crosne, the Lieutenant of Police, had already warned that there could be trouble in the district. It was teeming with migrant workers, unemployment was high, it was cramped, talkative, inflammable. News spread slowly across the city; but Saint-Marcel heard, and a group of demonstrators began a march towards the river. A drummer at their head set the pace, and they shouted for death:

Death to the rich

Death to the aristocrats

Death to the hoarders

Death to the priests.

They were carrying a gibbet knocked together in five minutes by a carpenter’s apprentice anxious to oblige: dangling from it were two eyeless straw dolls with their straw limbs pushed into old clothes and their names, Hanriot and Réveillon, chalked on their chests. Shopkeepers put up their shutters when they heard them coming. The dolls were executed with full ceremony in the Place de Grève.

All this is not so unusual. So far, the demonstrators have not even killed a cat. The mock executions are a ritual, they diffuse anger. The colonel of the French Guards sent fifty men to stand about near Titonville, in case anger was not quite diffused. But he neglected Hanriot’s house, and it was a simple matter for a group of the marchers to wheel up the rue Cotte, batter the doors down and start a fire. M. Hanriot got out unharmed. There were no casualties. M. Réveillon was elected a deputy.

But by Monday, the situation looked more serious. There were fresh crowds on the rue Saint-Antoine, and another incursion from Saint-Marcel. As the demonstrators marched along the embankments stevedores fell in with them, and the workers on the woodpiles, and the down-and-outs who slept under the bridges; the workers at the royal glass factory downed tools and came streaming out into the streets. Another two hundred French Guards were dispatched; they fell back in front of Titonville, commandeered carts and barricaded themselves in. It was at this point that their officers felt the stirrings of panic. There could be five thousand people beyond the barricades, or there could be ten thousand; there was no way of telling. There had been some sharp action these last few months; but this was different.

As it happened, that day there was a race-meeting at Vincennes. As the fashionable carriages crossed the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, nervous ladies and gentlemen dressed à l’Anglais were haled out on to the sewage and cobblestones. They were required to shout, ‘Down with the profiteers,’ then roughly assisted back into their seats. Many of the gentlemen parted with sums of money to ensure good will, and some of the ladies had to kiss lousy apprentices and stinking draymen, as a sign of solidarity. When the carriage of the Duke of Orléans appeared, there was cheering. The Duke got out, said a few soothing words, and emptied his purse among the crowd. The carriages behind were forced to halt. ‘The Duke is reviewing his troops,’ said one high, carrying aristocratic voice.

The guardsmen loaded their guns and waited. The crowd milled about, sometimes approaching the carts to talk to the soldiers, but showing no inclination to attack the barricades. Out at Vincennes the Anglophiles urged their favourites past the post. The afternoon went by.

Some attempt was made to divert the returning race-goers, but when the carriage of the Duchess of Orléans appeared the situation became difficult. Up there was where she wanted to go, the Duchess’s coachman said: past those barricades. The problem was explained. The reticent Duchess did not alter her orders. Etiquette confronted expediency. Etiquette prevailed. Soldiers and bystanders began to take down the barricades. The mood altered, swung about; the idleness of the afternoon dissipated, slogans were shouted, weapons reappeared. The crowd surged through, after the Duchess’s carriage. After a few minutes there was nothing left of Titonville worth burning, smashing or carrying away.

When the cavalry arrived the crowds were already looting the shops on the rue Montreuil. They pulled the cavalrymen off their horses. Infantry appeared, faces set; orders crackled through the air, there was the sudden, shocking explosion of gunfire. Blank cartridges: but before anyone had grasped that, an infantryman was grazed by a roof tile dropped from above, and as he turned his face up to see where the tile had come from the rioter who had picked him out as a target skimmed down another tile, which took out his eye.

Within a minute the mob had splintered doors and smashed locks, and they were up on the roofs of the rue Montreuil, tearing up the slates at their feet. The soldiers fell back under the barrage, hands to their faces and scalps, blood dripping between their fingers, tripping on the bodies of men who had been felled. They opened fire. It was 6.30 p.m.

By eight o’clock fresh troops had arrived. The rioters were pushed back. The walking wounded were helped away. Women appeared on the streets, shawls over their heads, hauling buckets of water to bathe wounds and give drinks to those who had lost blood. The shopfronts gaped, doors creaked off their hinges, houses were stripped to the brick; there were smashed tiles and broken glass to walk on, spilt blood tacky on the tiles, small fires running along charred wood. At Titonville the cellars had been ransacked, and the men and women who had breached the casks and smashed the necks of the bottles were lying half-conscious, choking on their vomit. The French Guards, out for revenge, bludgeoned their unresisting bodies where they lay. A little stream of claret ran across the cobbles. At nine o’clock the cavalry arrived at full strength. The Swiss Guard brought up eight cannon. The day was over. There were three hundred corpses to shovel up off the streets.

UNTIL THE DAY of the funeral, Gabrielle did not go out. Shut in her bedroom, she prayed for the little soul already burdened with sin, since it had shown itself intemperate, demanding, greedy for milk during its year’s stay in a body. Later she would go to church to light candles to the Holy Innocents. For now, huge slow tears rolled down her cheeks.

Louise Gély came from upstairs. She did what the maids had not sense to do; parcelled up the baby’s clothes and his blankets, scooped up his ball and his rag doll, carried them upstairs in an armful. Her small face was set, as if she were used to attending on the bereaved and knew she must not give way to their emotions. She sat beside Gabrielle, the woman’s plump hand in her bony child’s grasp.

‘That’s how it is,’ Maître d’Anton said. ‘You’re just getting your life set to rights, then the wisdom of the bloody Almighty –’ The woman and the girl raised their shocked faces. He frowned. ‘This religion has no consolation for me any more.’

After the baby was buried, Gabrielle’s parents came back to sit with her. ‘Look to the future,’ Angélique prompted. ‘You might have another ten children.’ Her son-in-law gazed miserably into space. M. Charpentier walked about sighing. He felt useless. He went to the window to look out into the street. Gabrielle was coaxed to eat.

Mid-afternoon, another mood got into the room: life must go on. ‘This is a poor situation for a man who used to know all the news,’ M. Charpentier said. He tried to signal to his son-in-law that the women would like to be left alone.

Georges-Jacques got up reluctantly. They put on their hats, and walked through the crowded and noisy streets to the Palais-Royal and the Café du Foy. M. Charpentier attempted to draw the boy into conversation, failed. His son-in-law stared straight ahead of him. The slaughter in the city was no concern of his; he looked after his own.

As they pushed their way into the café, Charpentier said, ‘I don’t know these people.’

D’Anton looked around. He was surprised at how many of them he did know. ‘This is where the Patriotic Society of the Palais-Royal holds its meetings.’

‘Who may they be?’

‘The usual bunch of time-wasters.’

Billaud-Varennes was threading his way towards them. It was some weeks since d’Anton had put any work his way; his yellow face had become an irritation, and you can’t keep going, his clerk Paré had told him, all the lazy malcontents in the district.

‘What do you think of all this?’ Billaud’s eyes, perpetually like small, sour fruits, showed signs of ripening into expectation. ‘Desmoulins has declared his interest at last, I see. Been with Orléans’s people. They’ve bought him.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Well, talk of the devil.’

Camille came in alone. He looked around warily. ‘Georges-Jacques, where have you been?’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for a week. What do you make of Réveillon?’

‘I’ll tell you what I make of it,’ Charpentier said. ‘Lies and distortion. Réveillon is the best master in this city. He paid his men right through the lay-offs last winter.’

‘Oh, so you think he is a philanthropist?’ Camille said. ‘Excuse me, I must speak to Brissot.’

D’Anton had not seen Brissot until now; unless he had seen him and overlooked him, which would have been easy enough. Brissot turned to Camille, nodded, turned again to his group to say, ‘No, no, no, purely legislative.’ He turned back, extended a hand to Camille. He was a thin man, meagre, mousy, with narrow shoulders hunched to the point of deformity. Ill-health and poverty made him look older than his thirty-five years, yet today his wan face and pale eyes were as hopeful as a child’s on its first day at school. ‘Camille,’ he said, ‘I mean to start a newspaper.’

‘You must be careful,’ d’Anton told him. ‘The police haven’t entirely let the situation go. You may find you can’t distribute it.’

Brissot’s eyes travelled across d’Anton’s frame, and upwards, across his scarred face. He did not ask to be introduced.

‘First I thought I’d begin on 1 April and publish twice weekly, then I thought no, wait till 20 April, make it four times weekly, then I thought, no, leave it till next week, when the Estates meet – that’s the time to make a splash. I want to get all the news from Versailles to Paris and out on to the streets – the police may pick me up, but what does it matter? I’ve been in the Bastille once, I can go again. I’ve not had a moment to spare, I’ve been helping with the elections in the Filles-Saint-Thomas district, they were desperate for my advice –’

‘People always are,’ Camille said. ‘Or so you tell me.’

‘Don’t be snide,’ Brissot said gently. There was impatience in the faint lines around his eyes. ‘I know you think I haven’t a chance of keeping a paper going, but we can’t spare ourselves now. Who would have thought, a month ago, that we’d have advanced this far?’

‘This man calls three hundred dead an advance,’ Charpentier said.

‘I think –’ Brissot broke off. ‘I’ll tell you in private all that I think. There might be police informers here.’

‘There’s you,’ a voice said behind him.

Brissot winced. He did not turn. He looked at Camille to see if he had caught the words. ‘Marat put that about,’ he muttered. ‘After all I’ve done to further that man’s career and bolster his reputation, all I get is smears and innuendos – the people I’ve called comrades have treated me worse than the police have ever done.’

Camille said, ‘Your trouble is, you’re backtracking. I heard you, saying the Estates would save the country. Two years ago you said nothing was possible unless we got rid of the monarchy first. Which is it, which is it to be? No, don’t answer. And will there be an inquiry into the cause of these riots? No. A few people will be hanged, that’s all. Why? Because nobody dares to ask what happened – not Louis, not Necker, not even the Duke himself. But we all know that Réveillon’s chief crime was to stand for the Estates against the candidate put up by the Duke of Orléans.’

There was a hush. ‘One should have guessed,’ Charpentier said.

‘One never anticipated the scale of it,’ Brissot whispered. ‘It was planned, yes, and people were paid – but not ten thousand people. Not even the Duke could pay ten thousand people. They acted for themselves.’

‘And that upsets your plans?’

‘They have to be directed.’ Brissot shook his head. ‘We don’t want anarchy. I shudder when I find myself in the presence of some of the people we have to use …’ He made a gesture in d’Anton’s direction; with M. Charpentier, he had walked away. ‘Look at that fellow. The way he’s dressed he might be any respectable citizen. But you can see he’d be happiest with a pike in his hand.’

Camille’s eyes widened. ‘But that is Maître d’Anton, the King’s Councillor. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Let me tell you, Maître d’Anton could be in government office. Except that he knows where his future lies. But anyway, Brissot – why so unnerved? Are you afraid of a man of the people?’

‘I am at one with the people,’ Brissot said reverently. ‘With their pure and elevated soul.’

‘Not really you aren’t. You look down on them because they smell and can’t read Greek.’ He slid across the room to d’Anton. ‘He took you for some cut-throat,’ he said happily. ‘Brissot,’ he told Charpentier, ‘married one Mlle Dupont, who used to work for Félicité de Genlis in some menial capacity. That’s how he got involved with Orléans. I respect him really. He’s spent years abroad, writing and, you know, talking about it. He deserves a revolution. He’s only a pastry-cook’s son, but he’s very learned, and he gives himself airs because he’s suffered so much.’

M. Charpentier was puzzled, angry. ‘You, Camille – you who are taking the Duke’s money – you admit to us that Réveillon has been victimized –’

‘Oh, Réveillon’s of no account now. If he didn’t say those things, he might have done. He might have been thinking them. The literal truth doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is what they think on the streets.’

‘God knows,’ Charpentier said, ‘I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours.’

‘Reform?’ Camille said. ‘I’m not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer.’

D’Anton felt sick, shaken by a spasm of grief. He wanted to draw Camille aside, tell him about the baby. That would stop him in his tracks. But he was so happy, arranging the forthcoming slaughter. D’Anton thought, who am I to spoil his week?

VERSAILLES: a great deal of hard thinking has gone into this procession. It isn’t just a matter of getting up and walking, you know.

The nation is expectant and hopeful. The long-awaited day is here. Twelve hundred deputies of the Estates walk in solemn procession to the Church of Saint-Louis, where Monseigneur de la Fare, Bishop of Nancy, will address them in a sermon and put God’s blessing on their enterprise.

The Clergy, the First Estate: optimistic light of early May glints on congregated mitres, coruscates over the jewel-colours of their robes. The Nobility follows: the same light flashes on three hundred sword-hilts, slithers blithely down three hundred silk-clad backs. Three hundred white hat plumes wave cheerfully in the breeze.

But before them comes the Commons, the Third Estate, commanded by the Master of Ceremonies into plain black cloaks; six hundred strong, like an immense black marching slug. Why not put them into smocks and order them to suck straws? But as they march, the humiliating business takes on a new aspect. These mourning coats are a badge of solidarity. They are called, after all, to attend on the demise of the old order, not to be guests at a costume ball. Above the plain cravats a certain pride shows in their starched faces. We are the men of purpose: goodbye to frippery.

Maximilien de Robespierre walked with a contingent from his own part of the country, between two farmers; if he turned his head he could see the embattled jaws of the Breton deputies. Shoulders trapped him, walled him in. He kept his eyes straight ahead, suppressed his desire to scan the ranks of the cheering crowds that lined the routes. There was no one here who knew him; no one cheering, specifically, for him.

In the crowd Camille had met the Abbé de Bourville. ‘You don’t recognize me,’ the abbé complained, pushing through. ‘We were at school together.’

‘Yes, but in those days you had a blue tinge, from the cold.’

‘I recognized you right away. You’ve not changed a bit, you look about nineteen.’

‘Are you pious now, de Bourville?’

‘Not noticeably. Do you ever see Louis Suleau?’

‘Never. But I expect he’ll turn up.’

They turned back to the procession. For a moment he was swept by an irrational certainty that he, Desmoulins, had arranged all this, that the Estates were marching at his behest, that all Paris and Versailles revolved around his own person.

‘There’s Orléans.’ De Bourville pulled at his arm. ‘Look, he’s insisting on walking with the Third Estate. Look at the Master of Ceremonies pleading with him. He’s broken out in a sweat. Look, that’s the Duc de Biron.’

‘Yes, I know him. I’ve been to his house.’

‘That’s Lafayette.’ America’s hero stepped out briskly in his silver waistcoat, his pale young face serious and a little abstracted, his peculiarly pointed head hidden under a tricorne hat à la Henri Quatre. ‘Do you know him too?’

‘Only by reputation,’ Camille muttered. ‘Washington pot-au-feu.’

Bourville laughed. ‘You must write that down.’

‘I have.’

At the Church of Saint-Louis, de Robespierre had a good seat by an aisle. A good seat, to fidget through the sermon, to be close to the procession of the great. So close; the billowing episcopal sea parted for a second, and between the violet robes and the lawn sleeves the King looked him full in the face without meaning to, the King, overweight in cloth-of-gold; and as the Queen turned her head (this close for the second time, Madame) the heron plumes in her hair seemed to beckon to him, civilly. The Holy Sacrament in its jewelled monstrance was a small sun, ablaze in a bishop’s hands; they took their seat on a dais, under a canopy of velvet embroidered with gold fleur-de-lis. Then the choir:

O salutaris hostia

If you could sell the Crown Jewels what could you buy for France?

Quae coeli pandis ostium,

The King looks half-asleep.

Bella premunt hostilia,

The Queen looks proud.

Da robur, fer auxilium.

She looks like a Hapsburg.

Uni trinoque Domino,

Madame Deficit.

Sit sempiterna gloria,

Outside, the women were shouting for Orléans.

Qui vitam sine termino,

There is no one here I know.

Nobis donet in patria.

Camille might be here somewhere. Somewhere.

Amen.

‘LOOK, LOOK,’ Camille said to de Bourville. ‘Maximilien.’

‘Well, so it is. Our dear Thing. I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised.’

‘I should be there. In that procession. De Robespierre is my intellectual inferior.’

‘What?’ The abbé turned, amazed. Laughter engulfed him. ‘Louis XVI by the grace of God is your intellectual inferior. So no doubt is our Holy Father the Pope. What else would you like to be, besides a deputy?’ Camille did not reply. ‘Dear, dear.’ The abbé affected to wipe his eyes.

‘There’s Mirabeau,’ Camille said. ‘He’s starting a newspaper. I’m going to write for it.’

‘How did you arrange that?’

‘I haven’t. Tomorrow I will.’

De Bourville looked sideways at him. Camille is a liar, he thinks, always was. No, that’s too harsh; let’s say, he romances. ‘Well, good luck to you,’ he said. ‘Did you see how the Queen was received? Nasty, wasn’t it? They cheered Orléans though. And Lafayette. And Mirabeau.’

And d’Anton, Camille said: under his breath, to try out the sound of it. D’Anton had a big case in hand, would not even come to watch. And Desmoulins, he added. They cheered Desmoulins most of all. He felt a dull ache of disappointment.

It had rained all night. At ten o’clock, when the procession began, the streets had been steaming under the early sun, but by midday the ground was quite hot and dry.

CAMILLE had arranged to spend the night in Versailles at his cousin’s apartment; he had made a point of asking this favour of the deputy when there were several people about, so that he could not with dignity refuse. It was well after midnight when he arrived.

‘Where on earth have you been till this time?’ de Viefville said.

‘With the Duc de Biron. And the Comte de Genlis,’ Camille murmured.

‘Oh I see,’ de Viefville said. He was annoyed, because he did not know whether to believe him or not. And there was a third party present, inhibiting the good row they might have had.

A young man rose from his quiet seat in the chimney corner. ‘I’ll leave you, M. de Viefville. But think over what I’ve said.’

De Viefville made no effort to effect introductions. The young man said to Camille, ‘I’m Barnave, you might have heard of me.’

‘Everyone has heard of you.’

‘Perhaps you think I am only a troublemaker. I do hope to show I’m something more. Good-night, Messieurs.’

He drew the door quietly behind him. Camille would have liked to run after him and ask him questions, try to cement their acquaintance; but his faculty of awe had been overworked that day. This Barnave was the man who in the Dauphiné had stirred up resistance to royal edicts. People called him Tiger – gentle mockery, Camille now saw, of a plain, pleasant, snub-nosed young lawyer.

‘What’s the matter?’ de Viefville inquired. ‘Disappointed? Not what you thought?’

‘What did he want?’

‘Support for his measures. He could only spare me fifteen minutes, and that in the small hours.’

‘So are you insulted?’

‘You’ll see them all tomorrow, jockeying for advantage. They’re all in it for what they can grab, if you ask me.’

‘Does nothing shake your tiny provincial convictions?’ Camille asked. ‘You’re worse than my father.’

‘Camille, if I’d been your father I’d have broken your silly little neck years ago.’

At the palace and across the town, the clocks began to strike one, mournfully concordant; de Viefville turned, walked out of the room, went to bed. Camille took out the draft of his pamphlet ‘La France Libre’. He read each page through, tore it once across and dropped it on the fire. It had failed to keep up with the situation. Next week, deo volente, next month, he would write it again. In the flames he could see the picture of himself writing, the ink skidding over the paper, his hand scooping the hair off his forehead. When the traffic stopped rumbling under the window he curled up in a chair and fell asleep by the dying fire. At five the light edged between the shutters and the first cart passed with its haul of dark sour bread for the Versailles market. He woke, and sat looking around the strange room, sick apprehension running through him like a slow, cold flame.

THE VALET – who was not like a valet, but like a bodyguard – said: ‘Did vou write this?’

In his hand he had a copy of Camille’s first pamphlet, ‘A Philosophy for the French People’. He flourished it, as if it were a writ.

Camille shrank back. Already at eight o’clock, Mirabeau’s antechamber was crowded. All Versailles wanted an interview, all Paris. He felt small, insignificant, completely flattened by the man’s aggression. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My name’s on the cover.’

‘Good God, the Comte’s been after you.’ The valet took him by the elbow. ‘Come with me.’

Nothing had been easy so far: he could not believe that this was going to be easy. The Comte de Mirabeau was wrapped in a crimson silk dressing-gown, which suggested some antique drapery: as if he waited on a party of sculptors. Unshaven, his face glistened a little with sweat; it was pock-marked, and the shade of putty.

‘So I have got the Philosopher,’ he said. ‘Teutch, give me coffee.’ He turned, deliberately. ‘Come here.’ Camille hesitated. He felt the lack of a net and trident. ‘I said come here,’ the Comte said sharply. ‘I am not dangerous.’ He yawned. ‘Not at this hour.’

The Comte’s scrutiny was like a physical mauling, and designed to overawe. ‘I meant to get around to waylaying you in some public place,’ he said, ‘and having you fetched here. Unfortunately I waste my time, waiting for the King to send for me.’

‘He should send for you, Monsieur.’

‘Oh, you are a partisan of mine?’

‘I have had the honour of arguing from your premises.’

‘Oh, I like that,’ Mirabeau said mockingly. ‘I dearly love a sycophant, Maître Desmoulins.’

Camille cannot understand this: the way Orléans people look at him, the way Mirabeau now looks at him: as if they had plans for him. Nobody has had plans for him, since the priests gave him up.

‘You must forgive my appearance,’ the Comte said smoothly. ‘My affairs keep me up at nights. Not always, I am bound to say, my political ones.’

This is nonsense, Camille sees at once. If it suited the Comte, he would receive his admirers shaven and sober. But nothing he does is without its calculated effect, and by his ease and carelessness, and by his careless apologies for it, he means to dominate and outface the careful and anxious men who wait on him. The Comte looked into the face of his impassive servant Teutch, and laughed uproariously, as if the man had made a joke; then broke off and said, ‘I like your writings, Maître Desmoulins. So much emotion, so much heart.’

‘I used to write poetry. I see now that I had no talent for it.’

‘There are enough constraints, without the metrical, I think.’

‘I did not mean to put my heart into it. I expect I meant it to be statesman-like.’

‘Leave that to the elderly.’ The Comte held up the pamphlet. ‘Can you do this again?’

‘Oh that – yes, of course.’ He had developed a contempt for the first pamphlet, which seemed for a moment to extend to anyone who admired it. ‘I can do that … like breathing. I don’t say like talking, for reasons which will be clear.’

‘But you do talk, Maître Desmoulins. You talk to the Palais-Royal.’

‘I force myself to do it.’

‘Nature framed me for a demogogue.’ The Comte turned his head, displaying his better profile. ‘How long have you had that stutter?’

He made it sound like some toy, or tasteful innovation. Camille said, ‘A very long time. Since I was seven. Since I first went away from home.’

‘Did it overset you so much, leaving your people?’

‘I don’t remember now. I suppose it must have done. Unless I was trying to articulate relief.’

‘Ah, that sort of home.’ Mirabeau smiled. ‘I myself am familiar with every variety of domestic difficulty, from short temper at the breakfast table to the consequences of incest.’ He put out a hand, drawing Camille into the room. ‘The King – the late King – used to say that there should be a Secretary of State with no other function but to arbitrate in my family’s quarrels. My family, you know, is very old. Very grand.’

‘Really? Mine just pretends to be.’

‘What is your father?’

‘A magistrate.’ Honesty compelled him to add. ‘I’m afraid I am a great disappointment to him.’

‘Don’t tell me. I shall never understand the middle classes. I wish you would sit down. I must know something of your biography. Tell me, where were you educated?’

‘At Louis-le-Grand. Did you think I was brought up by the local curé?’

Mirabeau put down his coffee cup. ‘De Sade was there.’

‘He’s not entirely typical.’

‘I had the bad luck to be incarcerated with de Sade once. I said to him, “Monsieur, I do not wish to associate with you; you cut up women into little pieces.” Forgive me, I am digressing.’ He sank into a chair, an unmannerly aristocrat who never sought forgiveness for anything. Camille watched him, monstrously vain and conceited, going on like a Great Man. When the Comte moved and spoke, he prowled and roared. When he reposed, he suggested some tatty stuffed lion in a museum of natural history: dead, but not so dead as he might be. ‘Continue,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Why am I bothering with you? Do you think I want to leave your little talents to the Duke’s pack of rascals? I am preparing to give you good advice. Does the Duke give you good advice?’

‘No. He has never spoken to me.’

‘How pathetically you say it. Of course he has not. But myself, I take an interest. I have men of genius in my employ. I call them my slaves. And I like everyone to be happy, down on the plantation. You know what I am of course?’

Camille remembers how Annette spoke of Mirabeau: a bankrupt, an immoralist. The thought of Annette seems out of place in this stuffy little room crowded with furniture, old hangings on the walls, clocks ticking away, the Comte scratching his chin. The room is strewn with evidence of good living: why do we say good living, he wonders, when we mean extravagance, gluttony and sloth? That the bankruptcy is not discharged does not seem to hinder the Comte from acquiring expensive objects – amongst which it seems he is now numbered. As for immorality, the Comte seems only too eager to admit to it. The wild-beast collection of his ambitions crouches in the corner, hungry for its breakfast and stinking at the end of its chain.

‘Well, you have had a nice pause for thought.’ The Comte rose in one easy movement, trailing his drapery. He put an arm around Camille’s shoulders and drew him into the sunlight that streamed in at the window. The sudden warmth seemed an effulgence of his own. There was liquor on his breath. ‘I ought to tell you,’ he said, ‘that I like to have about me men with complicated and sordid pasts. I am then at my ease. And you, Camille, with your impulses and emotions which you have been selling at the Palais-Royal like poisoned bouquets –’ He touched his hair. ‘And your interesting, faint but perceptible shadow of sexual ambivalence –’

‘Do you always take people apart in this way?’

‘I like you,’ Mirabeau said drily, ‘because you never deny anything.’ He moved away. ‘There is a handwritten text circulating, called “La France Libre”. Is it yours?’

‘Yes. You did not think that anodyne tract you have there was the whole of my output?’

‘No, Maître Desmoulins, I did not, and I see that you also have your slaves and your copyists. Tell me your politics – in one word.’

‘Republican.’

Mirabeau swore. ‘Monarchy is an article of faith with me,’ he said. ‘I need it, I mean to assert myself through it. Are there many of your underground acquaintances who think as you do?’

‘No, not more than half a dozen. That is, I don’t think you could find more than half a dozen republicans in the whole country.’

‘And why is that, do you suppose?’

‘I suppose it’s because people cannot bear too much reality. They think the King will whistle them from the gutter and make them ministers. But all that world is going to be destroyed.’

Mirabeau yelled for his valet. ‘Teutch, lay out my clothes. Something fairly splendid.’

‘Black,’ Teutch said, trundling in. ‘You’re a deputy, aren’t you.’

‘Dammit, I forgot.’ He nodded towards his anteroom. ‘It sounds as if they’re getting a bit restive out there. Yes, let them all in at once, it will be amusing. Ah, here comes the Genevan government in exile. Good morning, M. Duroveray, M. Dumont, M. Clavière. These are slaves,’ he said to Camille in a carrying whisper. ‘Clavière wants to be a Minister of Finance. Any country will do for him. Peculiar ambition, very.’

Brissot scuttled up. ‘I’ve been suppressed,’ he said. For once, he looked it.

‘How sad,’ Mirabeau said.

They began to fill the room, the Genevans in pale silk and the deputies in black with folios under their arms, and Brissot in his shabby brown coat, his thin, unpowdered hair cut straight across his forehead in a manner meant to recall the ancient world.

‘Pétion, a deputy? Good day to you,’ Mirabeau said. ‘From where? Chartres? Very good. Thank you for calling on me.’

He turned away; he was talking to three people at once. Either you held his interest, or you didn’t. Deputy Pétion didn’t. He was a big man, kind-looking and fleshily handsome, like a growing puppy. He looked around the room with a smile. Then his lazy blue eyes focused. ‘Ah, the infamous Camille.’

Camille jumped violently. He would have preferred it without the prefix. But it was a beginning.

‘I paid a flying visit to Paris,’ Pétion explained, ‘and I heard your name around the cafés. Then Deputy de Robespierre gave me such a description of you that when I saw you just now I knew you at once.’

‘You know de Robespierre?’

‘Rather well.’

I doubt that, Camille thought. ‘Was it a flattering description?’

‘Oh, he thinks the world of you.’ Pétion beamed at him. ‘Everyone does.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t look so sceptical.’

Mirabeau’s voice boomed across the room. ‘Brissot, how are they at the Palais-Royal today?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘Setting filthy intrigues afoot as usual, I suppose; all except Good Duke Philippe, he’s too simple for intrigues. Cunt, cunt, cunt, that’s all he thinks about.’

‘Please,’ Duroveray said. ‘My dear Comte, please.’

‘A thousand apologies,’ the Comte said, ‘I forget that you hale from the city of Calvin. It’s true though. Teutch has more notion of statesmanship. Far more.’

Brissot shifted from foot to foot. ‘Quiet about the Duke,’ he hissed. ‘Laclos is here.’

‘I swear I didn’t see you,’ the Comte said. ‘Shall you carry tales?’ His voice was silky. ‘How’s the dirty-book trade?’

‘What are you doing here?’ Brissot said to Camille, below the buzz of conversation. ‘How did you get on such terms with him?’

‘I hardly know.’

‘Gentlemen, I want your attention.’ Mirabeau pushed Camille in front of him and placed his large be-ringed hands on his shoulders. He was another kind of animal now: boisterously dangerous, a bear got out of the pit. ‘This is my new acquisition, M. Desmoulins.’

Deputy Pétion smiled at him amiably. Laclos caught his eye and turned away.

‘Now, gentlemen, if you would just give me a moment to dress, Teutch, the door for the gentlemen, and I will be with you directly.’ They filed out. ‘You stay,’ he said to Camille.

There was a sudden silence. The Comte passed his hand over his face. ‘What a farce,’ he said.

‘It seems a waste of time. But I don’t know how these things are conducted.’

‘You don’t know much at all, my dear, but that doesn’t stop you having your prim little opinions.’ He bounced across the room, arms outstretched. ‘The Rise and Rise of the Comte de Mirabeau. They have to see me, they have to see the ogre. Laclos comes here with his pointed nose twitching. Brissot ditto. He wears me out, that man Brissot, he never stays still. I don’t mean he runs around the room like you, I mean he fidgets. Incidentally, I presume you are taking money from Orléans? Quite right. One must live, and at other people’s expense if at all possible. Teutch,’ he said, ‘you may shave me, but do not put lather in my mouth, I want to talk.’

‘As if that were anything new,’ the man said. His employer leaned forward and punched him in the ribs. Teutch spilled a little hot water, but was not otherwise incommoded.

‘I’m in demand with the patriots,’ Mirabeau said. ‘Patriots! You notice how we can’t get through a paragraph without using that word? Your pamphlet will be got out, within a month or two.’

Camille sat and looked at him sombrely. He felt calm, as if he were drifting out to sea.

‘Publishers are a craven breed,’ the Comte said. ‘If I had the ordering and disposition of the Inferno, I would keep a special circle for them, where they would grill slowly on white-hot presses.’

Camille’s eyes flickered to Mirabeau’s face. He found in its temper and tensions some indication that he was not the devil’s only steady bet. ‘Are you married?’ the Comte asked suddenly.

‘No, but in a way I am engaged.’

‘Has she money?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘I warm to you with every admission.’ He waved Teutch away. ‘I think you had better move in here, at least when you are in Versailles. I’m not sure you’re fit to be at large.’ He pulled at his cravat. His mood had altered. ‘Do you know, Camille,’ he said softly, ‘you may wonder how you got here, but I wonder the same thing about myself … to be here, in Versailles, expecting daily a summons from the Palace, and this on the strength of my writings, my speeches, the support I command among the people … to be playing at last my natural role in this Kingdom … because the King must send, mustn’t he? When all the old solutions have been tried and have failed?’

‘I think so. But you must show him clearly how dangerous an opponent you can be.’

‘Yes … and that will be another gamble. Have you ever tried to kill yourself?’

‘It comes up as a possibility from time to time.’

‘Everything is a joke,’ the Comte snapped. ‘I hope you’re flippant when you’re in the dock for treason.’ He dropped his voice again. ‘Yes, I take your point, it’s been an option. You see, people say they’ve no regrets, they boast about it, but I, I tell you, I have regrets – the debts I’ve incurred and daily incur, the women I’ve ruined and let go, my own nature that I can’t curb, that I’ve never learned to curb, that’s never learned to wait and bide its time – yes, I can tell you, death would have been a reprieve, it would have given me time off from myself. But I was a fool. Now I want to be alive so –’ He broke off. He wanted to say that he had been made to suffer, had felt his face ground into his own errors, had been undermined, choked off, demeaned.

‘Well, why?’

Mirabeau grinned. ‘So I can give them hell,’ he said.

THE HALL of the Lesser Pleasures, it was called. Until now it had been used for storing scenery for palace theatricals. These two facts occasioned comment.

When the King decided that this hall was a suitable meeting place for the Estates-General, he called in carpenters and painters. They hung the place with velvet and tassels, knocked up some imitation columns and splashed around some gold paint. It was passably splendid, and it was cheap. There were seats to the right and left of the throne for the First and Second Estates; the Commons were to occupy an inadequate number of hard wooden benches at the back.

It began badly. After the King’s solemn entry, he surveyed them with a rather foolish smile, and removed his hat. Then he sat down, and put it on again. The brilliant robes and silk coats swept and rustled into their places. Three hundred plumes were raised and replaced on three hundred noble heads. But protocol dictates that in the presence of the monarch, commoners remain hatless and standing.

A moment later a red-faced man clamped his plain hat over his forehead and sat down with as much noise as he found he could make. With one accord, the Third Estate assumed its seat. The Comte de Mirabeau jostled on the benches with the rest.

Unruffled, His Majesty rose to make his speech. It was unreasonable, he had thought personally, to keep the poor men standing all afternoon, since they had already been waiting three hours to be let into the hall. Well, they had taken the initiative, he would not make a fuss. He began to speak. A moment later, the back rows leaned into the front rows. What? What did he say?

Immediately it is evident: only giants with brazen lungs will prosper in this hall. Being one such, Mirabeau smiled.

The King said – very little, really. He spoke of the debt burden of the American war. He said that the taxation system might be reformed. He did not say how. M. Barentin rose next: Minister of Justice, Keeper of the Seals. He warned against precipitate action, dangerous innovation; invited the Estates to meet separately the next day, to elect officers, draw up procedures. He sat down.

It is the earnest desire of the Commons that the Estates should meet as one body, and that the votes should be counted individually, by head. Otherwise, the churchmen and the nobles will combine against the Commons; the generous grant of double representation – their six hundred to the three hundred each of the Nobles and the Clergy – will avail them nothing. They might as well go home.

But not before Necker’s speech. The Comptroller of Finances rose, to an expectant hush; and Maximilien de Robespierre moved, imperceptibly, forward on his bench. Necker began. You could hear him better than Barentin. It was figures, figures, figures.

After ten minutes, Maximilien de Robespierre’s eyes followed the eyes of the other men in the hall. The ladies of the court were stacked on benches like crockery on a shelf, rigid and trapped inside their impossible gowns and stays and trains. Each one sat upright; then, when this exhausted her, leaned back for support against the knees of the lady behind. After ten minutes, those knees would twitch and flex; then the first lady would shoot upright again. Soon she would droop, stir, yawn, twitch, she would shift in the little space allowed, she would rustle and moan silently to herself, and pray for the torture to be over. How they longed to lean forward, drop their addled heads on to their knees! Pride kept them upright – more or less. Poor things, he thought. Poor little creatures. Their spines will break.

The first half hour passed. Necker must have been in here before, to test his voice in the hall, for he had been quite audible; it was just a shame that none of it made any sense. A lead was what we wanted, Max thought, we wanted some – fine phrases, I suppose. Inspiration, call it what you will. Necker was struggling now. His voice was fading. This, clearly, had been anticipated. He had a substitute by him. He passed his notes across. The substitute rose and began. He had a voice like a creaking drawbridge.

Now there was one woman Max watched: the Queen. When her husband spoke, there was some effort at a frowning concentration. When Barentin rose, she had dropped her eyes. Now she looked about her, quite frankly; she scanned the benches of the Commoners. She would watch them, watching her. She would glance down to her lap, move her fingers slightly, to catch the flash of diamonds in the light. She would raise her head, and again the stiff-jawed face would turn, turn. She seemed to be searching, searching. What was she searching for? For one face above the black coats … An enemy? A friend? Her fan jerked in her hand, like a live bird.

Three hours later, heads reeling, the deputies stumbled out into the sun. A large group gathered at once about Mirabeau, who was dissecting for their instruction the speech of M. Necker. ‘It is the speech, gentlemen, that one might expect from a banker’s clerk of some small ability … As for the deficit, it is our best friend. If the King didn’t need to raise money, would we be here?’

‘We may as well not be here,’ a deputy observed, ‘if we cannot have the voting by head.’ Mirabeau slapped the man on the shoulder, unbalancing him.

Max moved well out of range. He didn’t want to risk, even accidentally, being pounded on the back by Mirabeau; and the man was so free with his fists. At once, he felt a tap on his shoulder; it was no more than a tap. He turned. One of the Breton deputies. ‘Conference on tactics, tonight, my rooms, eight o’clock, all right?’

Max nodded. Strategy, he means, he thought: the art of imposing on the enemy the time, place and conditions for the fight.

Here was Deputy Pétion, bounding up. ‘Why lurk so modestly, de Robespierre? Look now – I’ve found you your friend.’ The Deputy dived bravely into the circle around Mirabeau, and in a moment re-emerged: and with him, Camille Desmoulins. Pétion was a sentimental man; gratified, he stood aside to watch the reunion. Mirabeau stumped off in animated conversation with Barnave. Camille put his hands into de Robespierre’s. De Robespierre’s hands were cool, steady, dry. Camille felt his heart slow. He glanced over his shoulder at the retreating Mirabeau. For a second, he saw the Comte in quite a different light: a tawdry grandee, in some noisy melodrama. He wished to leave the theatre.

ON 6 MAY the Clergy and the Nobility met separately, in the chambers allocated to them. But except for the Hall of the Lesser Pleasures, there was nowhere big enough for the Third Estate. They were allowed to stay where they were. ‘The King has made an error,’ de Robespierre said. ‘He has left us in possession of the ground.’ He surprised himself: perhaps he had learned something after all from his scraps of conversation with Lazare Carnot, the military engineer. One day soon he must undertake the nervous business of addressing this great assembly. Arras seems far, very far away.

The Third Estate cannot actually transact any business, of course. To do so would be to accept their status as a separate assembly. They don’t accept it. They ask the two other Estates to come back and join them. Nobility and Clergy refuse. Deadlock.

‘SO WHATEVER I SAY next, write it down.’

The Genevan slaves sat about with scraps of paper resting on books propped on their knees. The Comte’s papers covered every surface that might have been used as a writing desk. From time to time they exchanged glances, like the knowing veteran revolutionaries they were. The Comte strode about, gesturing with a sheaf of notes. He was wearing his crimson dressing-gown, and the rings on his big hairy hands caught the candlelight and flashed fire into the airless room. It was one a.m. Teutch came in.

TEUTCH: Monsieur –

MIRABEAU: Out.

[Teutch draws the door closed behind him.]

MIRABEAU: So, the Nobility don’t wish to join us. They have voted against our proposal – by a clear hundred votes. The Clergy don’t wish to join us, but their voting was, am I right, 133 to 114?

GENEVANS: You are right.

MIRABEAU: So that’s close. That tells us something.

[He begins to pace. The Genevans scribble. It is 2.15. Teutch comes in.]

TEUTCH: Monsieur, there is a man here with a very hard name who has been waiting to see you since eleven o’clock.

MIRABEAU: What do you mean, a hard name?

TEUTCH: I can’t understand what it is.

MIRABEAU: Well, get him to write it down on a piece of paper and bring it in, can’t you, imbecile?

[Teutch goes out.]

MIRABEAU [digressing]: Necker. What is Necker, in the Lord’s name? What are his qualifications for office? What in the name of God makes him look so good? I’ll tell you what it is – the fellow has no debts, and no mistresses. Can that be what the public wants these days – a Swiss pinch-penny, with no balls? No, Dumont, don’t write that down.

DUMONT: You make yourself sound envious of Necker, Mirabeau. Of his position as minister.

[2.45 a.m. Teutch comes in with a slip of paper. Mirabeau takes it from him in passing and puts it in his pocket.]

MIRABEAU: Forget Necker. Everybody will, anyway. Return to the point. It seems, then, that the Clergy are our best hope. If we can persuade them to join us …

[At. 3.15 he takes the slip of paper out of his pocket.]

MIRABEAU: De Robespierre. Yes, it is a peculiar name … Now, everything depends on those nineteen priests. I must have a speech that will not only invite them to join us, but will inspire them to join us – no commonplace speech, but a great speech. A speech that will set their interest and duty plainly before them.

DUROVERAY: And one that will cover the name of Mirabeau in eternal glory, just by the way.

MIRABEAU: There is that.

[Teutch comes in.]

MIRABEAU: Oh, good heavens, am I to endure you walking in and out and slamming the door every two minutes? Is M. de Robepierre still here?

TEUTCH: Yes, Monsieur.

MIRABEAU: How very patient he must be. I wish I had that kind of patience. Well, make the good deputy a cup of chocolate, Teutch, out of your Christian charity, and tell him I will see him soon.

[4.30 a.m. Mirabeau talks. Occasionally he pauses in front of a mirror to try out the effect of a gesture. M. Dumont has fallen asleep.]

MIRABEAU: M. de Robinpère still here?

[5.00 a.m. The leonine brow clears.]

MIRABEAU: My thanks, my thanks to you all. How can I ever thank you enough? The combination, my dear Duroveray, of your erudition, my dear Dumont, of your – snores – of all your singular talents, welded together by my own genius as an orator –

[Teutch sticks his head around the door.]

TEUTCH: Finished, have you? He’s still here, you know.

MIRABEAU: Our great work is concluded. Bring him in, bring him in.

[Dawn is breaking behind the head of the deputy from Arras as he steps into the stuffy little room. The tobacco smoke stings his eyes. He feels at a disadvantage, because his clothes are creased and his gloves are soiled; he should have gone home to change. Mirabeau, in greater disarray, examines him – young, anaemic, tired. De Robespierre has to concentrate to smile, holding out a small hand with bitten nails. Bypassing the hand, Mirabeau touches him lightly on the shoulder.]

MIRABEAU: My dear M. Robispère, take a seat. Oh – is there one?

DE ROBESPIERRE: That’s all right, I’ve been sitting for quite a time.

MIRABEAU: Yes, I’m sorry about that. The pressure of business …

DE ROBESPIERRE: That’s all right.

MIRABEAU: I’m sorry. I try to be available to any deputy who wants me.

DE ROBESPIERRE: I really won’t keep you long.

[Stop apologising, Mirabeau says to himself. He doesn’t mind; he’s just said he doesn’t mind.]

MIRABEAU: Is there anything in particular, M. de Robertspierre?

[The deputy takes some folded papers from his pocket. He hands them to Mirabeau.]

DE ROBESPIERRE: This is the text of a speech I hope to make tomorrow. I wondered if you’d look at it, give me your comments? Though it’s rather long, I know, and you probably want to go to bed …?

MIRABEAU: Of course I’ll look at it. It’s really no trouble. The subject of your speech, M. de Robespère?

DE ROBESPIERRE: My speech invites the Clergy to join the Third Estate.

[Mirabeau wheels round. His fist closes on the papers. Duroveray puts his head in his hands and groans unobtrusively. But when the Comte turns again to face de Robespierre, his features are composed and his voice is like satin.]

MIRABEAU: M. de Robinpère, I must congratulate you. You have fixed on the very point which should occupy us tomorrow. We must ensure the success of this proposal, must we not?

DE ROBESPIERRE: Certainly.

MIRABEAU: But does it occur to you that other members of our assembly might have fixed on the same point?

DE ROBESPIERRE: Well, yes, it would be odd if no one had. That’s why I came to see you, I imagined you knew the plans, we don’t want a stream of people all getting up and saying the same thing.

MIRABEAU: It may reassure you to know that I have myself been drafting a little speech which touches on the topic. [Mirabeau speaks; he also reads.] May I suggest that the question might be better propounded by some person well-known to our fellow-deputies, some orator of experience? The Clergy may be less inclined to listen to someone who has yet – what shall we say? – who has yet to reveal his remarkable talents.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Reveal? We’re not conjurers, Monsieur. We’re not here to pull rabbits out of hats.

MIRABEAU: Don’t be too sure.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Always supposing that one had remarkable talents, could there be a better time to reveal them?

MIRABEAU: I understand your viewpoint, but I suggest on this occasion you give way, for the common good. You see, I can be sure of carrying my audience with me. Sometimes when a famous name allies himself with a cause –

[Mirabeau stops abruptly. He can see on the young man’s delicate triangular face the pale traces of contempt. Yet his voice is still deferential.]

DE ROBESPIERRE: My speech is quite a good speech, it makes all the relevant points.

MIRABEAU: Yes, but it is the speaker – I tell you frankly, M. de Robertpère, that I have spent the whole night working on my speech, and I intend to deliver it, and in all possible cordiality and friendship I must ask you to find another occasion for your debut, or else to confine yourself to a few words in my support.

DE ROBESPIERRE: No, I’m not prepared to do that.

MIRABEAU: Oh, you aren’t prepared? [He sees with pleasure that the deputy flinches when he raises his voice.] It is I who carry weight at our meetings. You are unknown. They will not even suspend their private conversations to listen to you. Look at this speech, it is prolix, it is overblown, you will be howled down.

DE ROBESPIERRE: There’s no point trying to frighten me. [Not a boast. Mirabeau scrutinizes him. Experience has taught him he can frighten most people.] Look, I’m not trying to stop you making your speech. If you must, you make yours, then I’ll make mine.

MIRABEAU: But God damn you, man, they say exactly the same thing.

DE ROBESPIERRE: I know – but I thought that since you have a name as a demagogue, they might not quite trust you.

MIRABEAU: Demagogue?

DE ROBESPIERRE: Politician.

MIRABEAU: And what are you?

DE ROBESPIERRE: Just an ordinary person.

[The Comte’s face purples, and he runs a hand through his hair, making it stand up like a bush.]

MIRABEAU: You will make yourself a laughing-stock.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Let me worry about that.

MIRABEAU: You’re used to it, I suppose.

[He turns his back. Through the mirror, Duroveray wavers into life.]

DUROVERAY: May one suggest a compromise?

DE ROBESPIERRE: No. I offered him a compromise, and he rejected it.

[There is a silence. Into it, the Comte sighs heavily. Take hold of yourself, Mirabeau, he advises. Now. Conciliate.]

MIRABEAU: M. de Robinspère, this has all been a misunderstanding. We mustn’t quarrel.

[De Robespierre takes off his spectacles and puts a finger and thumb into the corners of his itching eyes. Mirabeau sees that his left eyelid flickers in a nervous spasm. Victory, he thinks.]

DE ROBESPIERRE: I must leave you. I’m sure you’d like to get to bed for an hour or two.

[Mirabeau smiles. De Robespierre looks down at the carpet, where the pages of his speech lie crumpled and torn.]

MIRABEAU: I’m sorry about that. A symptom of childish rage. [De Robespierre bends down and picks up the papers, in an easy movement that does not seem tired at all.] Shall I put them on the fire? [De Robespierre hands them over, docile. The Comte’s muscles visibly relax.] You must come to dinner sometime, de Robertpère.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Thank you, I’d like that. It doesn’t matter about the papers – I’ve got a draft copy I can read my speech from later today. I always keep my drafts.

[Out of the corner of his eye Mirabeau sees Duroveray rise, scraping his chair, and inconspicuously put his hand to his heart.]

MIRABEAU: Teutch.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Don’t trouble your man, I can see myself out. By the way, my name is Robespierre.

MIRABEAU: Oh. I thought it was ‘de Robespierre.’

ROBESPIERRE: No. Just the plain name.

D’ANTON went to hear Camille speak at the Palais-Royal. He hung to the back of the gathering and tried to find something to lean on, so that he could fold his arms and watch the proceedings with a detached smile. Camille said to him sharply, ‘You can’t spend all your life leering. It’s time you took up an attitude.’

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