Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  I wasn’t leading, no; and I don’t know who was.

  The Hôtel de la Marine – du Garde-Meuble – really was the repository for royal furniture. And on the first Tuesday of every month, we used to be able to go and admire it. The furniture itself was ludicrous, but the fabrics . . . No single thing in our lives showed the richness – the luxury of texture – of those damasks. As we wandered through those chambers – each one as high as a house, dominated by the chandeliers that hovered at their very heart with candles as tall as a child, endless falls of curtain, every panel white framed with gold, purity and splendour – how were we supposed to react? Were we supposed to dream? Of course not: only little girls, perhaps, with their brittle desperations. Were we supposed to be reminded of the futility of dreaming?

  Our visits also gave us the opportunity to admire the Crown Jewels of France, laid out in the Meuble in glass case after glass case, like so many oysters on the slab.

  Testimony: did I know where we going? No, sir. No, not me. I mean, I guess I knew which street it was and where it leads, but I can’t say I noticed – it’s just the faces around you – that’s all you can see – someone’s shoulders right in front of you and faces left and right and everything’s orange and brown in the torchlight and I remember the sound of our feet – we weren’t exactly marching, but a lot of feet together makes a hell of a sound – and voices. Not particular voices – no one’s exactly saying anything – lots of voices together. I wasn’t leading, no; and I don’t know who was. Guess you’ve never been in a crowd, have you, sir? No one leads a crowd.

  If one is concerned for the Revolution, one must watch Danton. And if one is concerned for Danton?

  Fouché started south of the river, at the Club of the Cordeliers. Asking after Danton he got a couple of jokes and some third-hand ideas about where he might be, and realized that he’d only come to the Cordeliers because he assumed something extreme was happening. The pamphlet-seller Gaspard, handing out his last pages for free on the Theatines to get home for the night, thought he’d seen Danton. On the Pont Royal Fouché bumped into Bernadot, who asked after Nantes and his electioneering and thought he’d just seen Danton in the Tuileries gardens. Crossing fast onto the north bank of the Seine, Fouché saw one figure on the far side of the dozens of people drifting through the gardens and convinced himself it was Danton.

  There are two Dantons. The Danton of the people, who can only exist when he has another man to act on; or preferably a thousand men. And the Danton of his own head, who must have solitude to think and to plan. Such, anyway, has been Fouché’s preliminary attempt to understand the great figure of the age. If Danton is not in one of the Clubs, if Danton is indeed stalking through the Tuileries in the evening, then Danton’s mind is occupied.

  There was a moment when Fouché felt foolishness, chasing a shadow through the night. But Fouché is a fast learner, faster than anyone, and it is becoming clear that not only success but life can depend on anticipating the great moves of the Revolution just before they happen. And the greatest move will always be Danton’s. And today Danton has been preoccupied. So Fouché followed him – followed the idea of him – through the Paris night.

  Testimony: I was on duty at the corner of Place de la Révolution and the Champs – my regular station, sir, across from the Garde-Meuble – the Hôtel de la Marine – and obviously I hear the crowd coming. Voices – shouting – and then I see the torchlight reflected on the windows in the rue Royale and so I can tell that’s where it is. Honest with you, messieurs, I don’t want to desert my post, do I? but you don’t exactly know what to do. And the crowd’s coming nearer because I see the light changing and growing on the windows in Royale and then I see the people – like a big animal coming out into the square. And of course I respect the voice of the people, messieurs, and we are free now, but still, crowd marching towards you . . .

  ‘What the hell are we supposed to be doing here, Raph?’ Ned’s heavy murmur, and Benjamin winced. Then they both heard the crowd. Couldn’t place it quite: somewhere behind them, except that the stone – the arches – does funny things to sound. Getting louder; getting nearer. A crowd can be anonymity. But for two Englishmen in Paris, a crowd is a public and very dangerous place to be. Two faceless shadows stared at each other, and tried to push themselves back into the stone.

  In the rue St-Florentin, near the Garde-Meuble, Karl Arnim was waiting. He knew a small something of what had been promised tonight. And this is my sickness: that I cannot avoid the temptation to be near it. Dear Marinus would scold him for his arrogance. Bravado, he would say. And perhaps he would be surprised, that his so cold friend was drawn to put his hand in the flame. But I will not cower from these penmen and peasants. If this mad Prussian is to be in Paris, let him be in the very heart of it all.

  Arnim glanced up at the facade adjacent, blank and cold. I am alone here, and if they find me they will kill me. But I may be colder than that death, and greater than them all. He felt his jaw clamp tight, and stared ahead.

  Testimony: first the crowd was sticking together, but once they’re in the square they sort of spread out a bit. Natural. Like they want to fill it. Like they own it. And then the crowd just sort of mills around in the Place. Shouting, and torches, and I think some fights break out. And that was when the damage was done. Windows, mostly, as you saw, messieurs. Show a man a stone and a pane of glass and nature takes over, messieurs. Then eventually the crowd moves on. Off along the Quai. So I followed. No, sir, I couldn’t see who was leading.

  Even on the portico of the Hôtel de la Marine – its long public face – there are shadows: where the two wings of the building push forward slightly from the portico between them; beside, and behind, the columns; in and around the arches, of course.

  Now, behind one of the columns on the Hôtel’s mighty first storey, a figure steps out through a window, and looks around himself. Cautiously, he peers round the column into the Place de la Révolution. There’s little light in the square at night, and in the area behind the columns he’s well concealed. He moves a few paces to the end of the portico, and steps to the edge and takes an involuntary breath as he contemplates the drop to the ground. At his feet, tied to a piece of the ornamental ironwork on the nearest window sill, is a rope. He stoops, tugs hard at the knot, then stands, grabs the rope and licks his lips and leans backwards into space.

  Testimony: there was more trouble farther on, messieurs. Near the Pont Royal – sorry, messieurs, the l’Egalité – as you’ll know. Somehow there was a lot more shouting. We found afterwards they’d got themselves a barrel of wine and started on that, which can’t have helped. Shouting – more angry now – and a bit of scuffling on the edges and more windows gone. I heard someone got knifed, but you’ll know more about that, messieurs. No, sir, I didn’t see anyone stirring it up. How do these things ever start?

  In the darkness under the arches of the Hôtel de la Marine, Benjamin and Pinsent had relaxed a fraction as the sound of the crowd dwindled. Benjamin saw his companion’s shadow lean forwards, and knew he was about to murmur again. But something distracted the shadow: the head flicked to the side, the shoulders stiffened, and the murmur was an urgent ‘Raaphhh’. Benjamin, between two arches of the colonnade and looking towards the building, couldn’t see what Pinsent – back to the main body of the building, between two doors – clearly could. Pinsent’s shadow was still frozen. Then the head turned slowly, and even in the gloom Benjamin could see the insistent nod towards whatever it was.

  He checked the two paces between them: the ground was dark – shadowed – but he was trying to work out what the light through the arches was doing at waist and head height. A breath, and he took two steps and pressed himself back into stone next to his companion – hands flat against the wall for reassurance, fingers curling around the edge of the doorway – and already his head was straining to see what Ned had seen.

  It was rather obvious what Ned had seen. At the far end of the line of arches, standing half
visible in the first of them, was a man. ‘Came down a rope!’ Pinsent hissed. And as Benjamin worried about the noise, and kept on looking, a sack appeared in the air above the man and came lower, lower on the end of a rope, until the man caught at it and guided it to the ground.

  The river stank less at night, and particularly in the summer nights Lucie Gérard enjoyed the cool of it. She enjoyed the emptiness that suddenly opened in the middle of the city. In the middle of all the accumulated details of the city’s centuries of existence, layers of stone and shit and such an impossible concentration of tiny details of life crowded together into the biggest noisiest thing that anyone could imagine, suddenly there was a void. Nothing, like a strip of poisoned ground where nothing would grow. To her right there were the palace gardens, and she heard the noises of night from their shadows, the trees and hedges moaning and calling. Then the emptiness was behind her and the streets closed over her head.

  Near her now, in an upper room in the Jacobins Club, Fouché watched Danton. He was learning a new Danton: more anxious than he’d ever imagined possible; somehow more human. But still the mystery.

  Danton had been surprised at first, when Fouché had appeared in the doorway. But then civil, and for a moment almost genial. Neither, though, had wanted to talk and each was content to leave the other alone. Fouché sat on a sofa, pretending to read a pamphlet, his whole character in the narrow slits of eyes visible over the top of the pamphlet and flicking left and right to follow Danton.

  Danton walked. Backwards and forwards the length of the salon. Chest out, arms folded behind him, eyes lost, sometimes stopping and sometimes glancing out of the nearest window into the courtyard.

  Danton is thinking. Danton is waiting.

  ‘Looters!’ Benjamin hissed.

  ‘Enterprising fellows. Reckon they’ve left anything for us?’

  Benjamin glanced to the outline beside him. ‘After you up that damned rope, old lad.’ He’d forgotten his nervousness about their murmuring. As they watched from twenty paces away, along the patchwork of darkness and lighter spaces between the arches, they saw another man let himself down the rope to the ground. He was followed by another sack.

  ‘Is this what the rumours were about, d’you suppose?’ Another man.

  Benjamin hesitated. ‘I’d assumed it was the riot.’

  ‘Who’d predict a riot? How d’you control that sort of thing?’

  ‘Whole country’s a riot.’

  Pinsent murmured sombre agreement. ‘No chance we could pick off a straggler, I suppose?’

  ‘Mmm. Rather depends how they – ’

  Immediately beside them in the darkness, something clicked and a door started to open.

  Testimony: wasn’t a lot I could do at this point, messieurs. Found a mate and he said word’d been sent to the Hôtel de Ville and I thought: I know my duty, and so I trotted back to the Place de la Révolution. All quiet by now of course. But you know what they say, sir; Paris never sleeps, does she? Suppose the fact the Place was quiet made it easier to spot the goings-on.

  Sir Raphael Benjamin and Edward Pinsent, Englishmen of dubious character, in the middle of revolutionary Paris, on the edge of a riot, caught between a band of looters and the offices of the Ministry of the Navy. The door clicked and swung out towards them, the panes of glass turning the traces of light from the square under the arch and onto their faces, and a figure stepped silently into the night in front of them.

  Pinsent moved first, some unlikely brilliance or a last instinct to shut the stable door, lunging forwards and pushing the door closed. A gasp from the figure and the reflected light flashed across him and Benjamin’s pistol was following its own instinct and driving into the man’s stomach.

  The man was a gasping, gabbling shadow. His arms started forwards or upwards and he opened his mouth wider and was about – And Benjamin’s pistol pushed harder into his belly and he moaned and stumbled backwards. ‘Silent, damn you!’ Benjamin hissed. ‘Ta gueule ou ta vie!’ Practical French for the English gentleman abroad. The man shuddered, and very slowly reached into his jacket and Benjamin’s trigger finger was tensing but the man’s hand was out now clutching something. Benjamin could hear the roaring of the man’s breaths. His own breaths, maybe. He reached out and grabbed whatever it was – cloth – but hard inside.

  Now a voice and the suggestion of movement from the other end of the arcade, but Benjamin’s instinct to look went uncompleted. A slam beside him and Pinsent staggered into his arm and then away, driving back against the door, and it rattled shut again against whoever was pushing on the other side. ‘Damnit, man!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘The chase!’ And Benjamin had the package in a pocket and with the pistol clutched in his other fist swung it in a single straight punch into the head in front of him, and as the shadow dropped the pistol arm kept turning and he fired at one of the panes.

  The night exploded in glass and noise. ‘Fly!’ he roared, and they flew; shoulder by shoulder through the arch and into the square and immediately veering and making for the corner and wherever there was not light.

  Testimony: like something out of a dream, messieurs, something from the playhouse. The Meuble was . . . like it was covered in people. Not covered, obviously, but there was one coming down the wall and someone moving below and voices. Guess it took me a moment to grasp it. But naturally I know my duty, messieurs, and so I run across the square and I give a yell and then there’s another comrade beside me and we’re both running in. Well, the lad on the wall has reached the ground and he sees us and he’s away before we get there, but we keep going and as we get to the building another feller comes out. Like he doesn’t know we’re there – from the arches – and I knock him down almost before I’ve seen him. Then there’s shouting and now someone else runs out further along and my mate’s watching the man on the ground and I’m off along the arches and there’s two or three figures running ahead of me.

  Lucie was lost in the darkness, in the anonymity of the city. The gardens were behind her now, and grand buildings beside her and soaring high. She felt their scrutiny; felt her smallness. Then a side street off the Place de la Révolution and a carriage ahead, and she didn’t want to turn around so she kept walking, head down; keep walking and there might be a comment or two but she could keep going.

  But as she passed the carriage some animal curiosity made her glance up, at the window, and in the window was his face and she stumbled and gasped at the impossible coincidence of it. Then he’d seen her and pulled his head back and there was a shout – and more shouts now, and running – and the carriage was rattling away and she was staring after it and her teeth were clenched at the gut-turning tricks of her life.

  Testimony: they had too much of a head start on me, sir, and by the time I got to the corner most of the men had gone. There was a carriage rattling away down the street and maybe they’d got in that. Hard to say. But not all of them, sir, and I kept on going and I’m glad I did because I caught up with one of them – the girl. Across the street and I grabbed at her arm and warned her good and clear and she just stared at me, all surprised, and here she is now, sir.

  In a night of spectacular coups, the gendarme sounded like he’d got the prize.

  2

  The Fugitives in the Forest

  IN WHICH M. FOUCHÉ’S EXPLORATIONS BRING HIM CONFUSION RATHER THAN CLARITY, AND SEVERAL PERSONS EXPERIENCE THE DISCOMFORT OF SUSPICION OR PURSUIT

  The Memoirs of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  (extract from unpublished annex)

  In early September of 1792, I had left Paris for England. Formally my mission was one of diplomacy, entrusted to use for the Revolution the great skills I had used for the King, to avoid a war with the British. And perhaps they hoped I would stir a little sedition. Already you may see the contrast between the clear thinking of some of the men at the head of the Revolution (ah, poor Danton . . . !), and the passions of the mob, which those men thought they led but which had overrun them.

>   For, naturally, my own mission was rather different. You may call it undignified, and yet is not the greatest skill of the diplomatist to preserve for more valuable use tomorrow that which may be given cheaply today? The record of the subsequent decades of my service to French – indeed to European – diplomacy shows how valuable was my tomorrow. And consequently it shows how absurd would have been the loss of my services in those wretched blood-soaked todays. I confess it freely: I fled, like a cut-purse or a petty philanderer, and I am proud of it. How much greater the vanity, to stay, as many of my acquaintance did, proclaiming their importance and defending their dignity, and only realizing the loss of both as the guillotine’s blade dropped?

  Persons of distinction were being dragged into the street and slaughtered. Our dream of justice had been abducted and defiled, turned into the basest instincts of the envious rabble: by their reasoning, a name or a scrap of lace condemned a man or woman to immediate death; judicial process meant a crude spasm in the mind of a beast. We had promised the world the triumph of Reason: had not I contributed to the Declaration of the Rights of Man? Did not I write the Report on Public Instruction? The enfranchisement of disciplined brilliance might have created a new Utopie; the unleashing of the public passions created an inferno.