by A. N. Wilson
—It would seem, Citizen Forster, as if your revolutionary fervour is not shared by all your friends.
—My father is entitled to his opinions, though they do not happen to be mine.
—Perhaps you would be so good as to translate this paragraph here. It contains Citizen Marat’s name.
—May I? George said, and, retrieving the letter decided to take a gamble.
—It is, I assume, the celebrated Citizen Marat to whom your correspondent refers?
—Let me see.
Reinhold’s words, wise some twenty years after the event, claimed to have seen something untrustworthy in the face of Dr Marat when he had come to take up his appointment as the languages master at Warrington. When Reinhold had been so fortuitously selected to replace Mr Banks as the naturalist aboard the Resolution in ’72, Mr Priestley and Mr Wedgwood had been warm in their congratulations, but somewhat at a loss as to how to find a replacement teacher at such short notice.
—To find a gentleman possessed of a scientific temper and who can help the brats wi’ their languages – their French and their German above all . . .
Mr Wedgwood’s voice had died, for the sentence, short of a miracle, could no more be finished than the right man be found. Then, on his way south from Edinburgh, the young French doctor, anxious to pick the brains of Priestley on his theories of dephlogisticated air, had paused at Warrington. Their meeting had been a success. Marat was almost absurdly overqualified to teach schoolboys language and science; but then, so had been his two predecessors, Reinhold and Priestley. He had needed the money, and he had stayed.
Luckily for George, his father, while excoriating Dr Marat’s extreme Jacobin views, had expressed an interest in news of the man.
—My father says—
—Oh, so you admit that this letter is from your father.
—Well, it cannot be denied. France itself is full of families divided politically.
—Is that so?
—Anyway, my father says he hopes that I shall find time, while in Paris, to discover M. Marat’s address, and to pay him a visit, for old times’ sake. M. Marat had many theories, as a young man – about electricity, aeronautics, optics. Mr Priestley, who ran the school at Warrington with which my father was also associated, is an eminent man of science. Your own M. Lavoisier owes much, I am told, to his theory of dephlogisticated air.
There was an awkward silence.
—Lavoisier is a traitor to the Republic.
—But the foremost chemist of the age.
—The Revolution has no need of chemistry, citizen. But it has a very definite need of Citizen Marat.
George had the opportunity to speak to Marat in the Lobby at the National Convention, which the German delegates were required to attend three times a week.
—You are scarcely recognizable, said the doctor coolly looking George up and down, and taking in his scrubby hair, near tooth-lessness and pock-marks. Time had not, however, been kind to Marat either. A pungent rotting smell came from his person, and his eyes and neck were covered with the suppurating blotches of psoriasis.
—I distinctly remember your father, said Marat, his book on British Insects.
—He subsequently sailed with Captain Cook, sir, and made many important additions to the taxonomy of Linnaeus.
Marat’s smile was unreadable. Had he misheard? Or was it inappropriate to praise a man who had sailed in a ship of the Royal Navy? France was now at war with England, the Netherlands, Spain, Sardinia, Naples, Portugal, the Holy See and the Holy Roman Empire.
—I live in the rue des Cordelières, said Marat. I work day and night. If I turn you away it will be because of busy-ness. I am glad to have made your acquaintance again.
Lux, George’s (increasingly unsympathetic) fellow Deputé from Mainz, expressed surprise.
—I thought that must have been Marat. I am shocked that you could speak to such a man.
—We’ve declared for the Revolution. I must believe it, said George.
—But they are killing citizens without fair trial, said Lux. Paris has become an abattoir and, now Marat has had all his Girondin opponents locked up, it is only a matter of time before he has them beheaded. In many of the French towns outside Paris there is revulsion against the Jacobins – in Toulon, Bordeaux, Lyon . . .
—Lux, the Revolution has to protect itself. The whole of Europe is at war with us. Consider what Mr Priestley has had to suffer in England – simply for defending the Revolution: his laboratories in Birmingham destroyed by the mob, his church burnt down and then, when he escaped to London, more riots, more looting.
—Looting by an ignorant mob is not to be compared with a sovereign government authorizing mass slaughter.
—Defensive violence is different from aggressive violence. Burke – Burke, save the mark! – has attacked Priestley and said that even his science is anarchy!
—The other day you told me that the mad policeman told you the Revolution has no need of chemistry!
—Well, touché. But Guénot is an oaf and Burke should know better. We would have been able to welcome the Priestleys to France . . .
—His son became a French citizen when the Revolution broke out.
—Indeed – but now England and France are at war, and Priestley’s son has become an alien in both countries. No wonder they have both gone to live in America. The war goes on!
—From what I read, Priestley has begun to preach that the world is coming to an end, that the Revolution heralds the second coming of Christ, said Lux with ponderous scepticism. I know which Revolution I should rather have, the law-based republicanism of the Girondins, rather than this bloodbath, this tyranny!
—The Girondins are traitors to the Republic, said George.
—You know that’s rubbish. Are you saying the citizens of Lyon, of Toulon, of Caen – who supported Mirabeau and all the ideals of ’89 – at the risk of their own lives – are traitors?
Some days later, before George had the chance to take up Citizen Marat’s offer of hospitality in the rue des Cordelières, the doctor received another visitor, a handsome young patriot from Caen by the name of Charlotte Corday: a woman who shared Lux’s view of the Jacobins. Marat was in his hip-bath, rigged up as a desk with a board across it. Here he had his daily soak to ease the pain and dissolve the odour of his disgusting dermatological condition. He was reluctant, at first, to be disturbed by his young visitor, but eventually acceded to her importunate requests for an interview, and her feigned offer to provide him with the names of ‘dangerous’ Girondins in Caen. The fanatic eagerly noted the names which she spoke – those of her friends. When he promised that they would all be beheaded in a fortnight, Corday produced the large sheath-knife (which she had bought for the purpose in the Palais Royal) and plunged it into Marat’s heart.
David was brought in to sanctify the Jacobin martyr, painting one of the most memorable icons of the Revolution. Corday behaved with unapologetic, classical dignity all the way to the guillotine; but she too had her artistic champion. Adam Lux wrote an Ode in her praise, comparing her to the noble Brutus who was prepared to stab Caesar in order to preserve the purity of the Republic. Citizen Robespierre and friends were not impressed.
George was thunderstruck. It was not a very good poem, but Lux had gone to a printer and had two hundred copies run off to distribute to anyone foolhardy enough, in that Paris riddled with soldiers and spies, to take one. It was impossible not to admire Lux’s pluck. After he’d read it, he felt, for the first time, a warmth for Lux.
They were both lodging at the rue des Moulins, housed at La Maison des Patriots Hollandais, between the Tuileries and the Palais Royal. It was a frowsty, draughty, smelly accommodation, with panelled walls which had, long ago, been painted the colour of mud. Their bedrooms were tiny. No one had changed the bedding since they arrived in March, and, in preference to laying their heads on the grey, moist pillows where, it would seem, many a Dutch patriot had already lain a dandruffy skull, they tended to
sit in the small coffee-room on the ground floor, the room in which meals were served, and round whose table there were a number of knobbly, uncomfortable chairs.
The table was covered with a cloth of the same degree of cleanliness as their bed-linen; a greyish linen, perhaps once white, heavily soiled with many a brown circle where coffee-pots had been slammed down, many a purplish-black splodge where sour wine had been spilled, many a greasy spot where soups and ragouts had slopped from their plates. The smell of rancid grease competed with the other smells – coffee, farts, cheese – competed and won. Lux and George conversed in low voices over a pot of coffee which had been brought them by a surprisingly amiable maid, an Ardennoise named Clothilde. The coffee was made largely with acorns, but because it had been skilfully made, it packed a certain punch.
—All I want is to return to my wife, my farm, my children, said Lux.
—I’ve burnt my boats. I have nowhere to go, said George.
—They told us we would be here for three weeks at the most – at the beginning of April. Three months have passed.
—Have you news from Germany?
Lux shrugged and there was something very eloquent about his smile.
—We are utterly routed, he eventually said.
He looked as though he would say more, but at that moment, two moustachioed sans-culottes entered the house, without ringing the bell. They peered into the darkness of the eating-room and sniffed.
—We are searching for Monsieur Lux.
—In that event, said Lux, your search is an easy one.
Never having addressed Adam Lux other than as ‘you’ and ‘Lux’, George suddenly said,
—Adam, my dear, thou needst not go with them.
—There is a warrant for Citizen Lux’s arrest, said one of the moustaches.
—No, said George.
—Whoever you may be, said a moustache.
—Citizen, come with us at once, said the other, with his hand on Lux’s shoulder.
—I’m coming with you, said George.
—There is no point in our both being killed, said Lux. I suppose I am dying for Charlotte Corday.
A strange smile lit up his face.
And they took him away. George obeyed him and did not follow him to the prison. After a summary ‘trial’ – in effect little more than a denunciation – Lux was given the punishment of sleeping in an overcrowded, shitty cell with some ten other prisoners. The next day his head was removed by a guillotine. News of the death reached the House of Dutch Patriots within the hour.
It was not a surprise to George, not quite. It was, however, shocking – the execution of a foreign visitor, simply for likening a girl, herself beheaded, to Brutus. George was – only the French word quite described it – bouleversé. He was shattered. He felt his whole personality fly into smithereens. All the events of the previous two or three years – the Revolution of ’89 which they had all – the Mainz intellectuals – greeted with joy, the collapse of his marriage, the journey with Humboldt, the discovery of Therese’s affair with Huber, the coming, and death, of two babies, the departure of his wife, and of his two beloved children. The disruption to his work, the French invasion, his wild enthusiasm, a revisiting of the mad Rosicrucian phase, his affair with Caroline, his journey to Paris – had all led . . . to what? To this seemingly pointless gesture of State violence against a decent-hearted, rather dull farmer of whom George, in the last week or so of his life, had suddenly grown strangely fond.
In the course of ‘normal life’, the multiplicity of our relationships, occupations, lines of intellectual inquiry, reading, lusts, thoughts and memories are held in a wonderful order – wonderful because there is no obvious reason why they should. Only when a body is seriously diseased does the patient become aware that blood, heart, liver, digestive organs, lungs are all interdependent and, with the absolute collapse of one, all others are affected. In similar fashion, when the shock of Lux’s death, the manner of his death, clanged its deafening tocsin in George’s skull, all the preoccupations of his soul came jangling to life, making him momentarily ‘out of his mind’.
It was a hot day. He had no need of hat or cloak. He paced out of the House of Dutch Patriots into Paris. All that he needed to do was to walk, and he did so without design or a decided direction. His last visit to Berlin, when he had met Reinhold and Sömmerring, had made him feel he was visiting a barracks, with every third figure one passed in uniform. That, however, was somewhat to be expected, so soon after the death of Frederick the Great. The military were orderly, unthreatening.
In Paris, that sweltering summer day in ’93, they said as many as a hundred thousand were under arms – horse, foot, artillery, bewhiskered sappers. The Tuileries were solid with soldiers. The Bois was a vast military encampment. The proclamation of Year One (otherwise known as 1793) in a new earth, a new chapter of history – the beginning of an age of Liberty – required a military presence larger than the population of most European cities. The new era of brotherhood required mechanical bloodletting on a scale without parallel. Squares, allées, cobbled yards smelling of urine, old courtyards thick with geraniums, locked churches – for Catholicism had been abolished – empty food shops – for every vegetable and cheese and sausage had been eaten by troops – passed him as he walked along. Sometimes he took conscious notice of what he saw – where once stood the statue of Louis XV in the Place de la Révolution, a giant statue, still of plaster, though it was intended to cast it in metal – the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch into the air. As if very drunk, though he had never been more sober, George saw the huge statue and felt her to be shaking her fist at him, threatening him. He even broke into a run to put her behind him, and as he hurried northwards he felt Liberty on his heels, threatening to pound him with her plaster torch.
And now he was on a bridge, the Pont St-Michel, thick with wobbly-gabled houses, some looking down at the cathedral where, so recently, an actress had been made a tableau vivant of Reason to replace the God of the Catholics. Again like an inebriate, but uninebriated, George saw it all in a haze – his eyes taking in some scrawny cats, an old woman shredding string beans, two boys joshing, on the verge of a fight, some moustachioed figures with tricolours in their hats quarrelling with a whore about her price – but though he took in these sights with his optic nerves, his mind was pounding, sometimes with different thoughts and worries – where was Therese? How were the children? Would he ever see Reinhold again? Was he, George, going to die in this madhouse like Lux? Sometimes – and at these times he had the terrifying sensation that he might indeed be losing his reason, descending into complete madness – all these thoughts and impressions came at once. His beloved daughters, Clara and Rosechen, waved to him from the mansard roofs of the old houses on the Pont St-Michel. Reinhold, borrowing Liberty’s plaster torch, came running after him, Lux’s last hours came thumping at the same time into his head, and Custine, wiping his moustaches on the back of his hand, and telling him he was to go to Paris, as the Mainz Revolutionary Deputé. (Custine had fallen foul of the system and been guillotined.)
Leaning on a parapet between two old wooden houses and looking down at the sludgy Seine, George took a deep breath and some of the more alarming symptoms of his brainstorm began to recede. He breathed deeply. Perhaps the association, while he slowly inhaled and exhaled, of looking downwards at the brown river awakened conscious memory of shipboard, but for whatever reason his mind found Captain Cook. At once, an immense calm descended. In his mind’s eye, he saw that large honest face, presumably descended from the Viking settlers of North Yorkshire.
Robespierre and Marat and their colleagues were intent upon ‘changing the world’ by ideas – by inventing new calendars and imposing upon the intractable nature of things their own version of the world. Cook, in every sense a humbler man, had been patient enough to discover the world as it is, and because of his discoveries he made the world a larger place for everybody. In the case of Cook, everything grew out of prac
tical intelligence and empirical knowledge. He had chosen to explore in small sloops, which could hug coastlines – ideal for the cartographer – rather than the hulking warships recommended by the Royal Navy. He had paid attention to every small detail – for example, naval wisdom strengthened planks with copper plates to prevent woodworm, but copper deters fish, the essential source of food on a long trip. So, Cook did not use copper nails but iron nails with big heads. Within a few weeks of wet weather, rust spread over the lower part of the woodwork of the Resolution and the Adventure, just as effective against woodworm as copper. The man who discovered New Zealand and Australia was not a dreamer. It was the coal-haulier, the practical man who knew how to pack a ship. Every storeroom on the Resolution was crammed with things – he personally supervised the packing: Cook and the stevedores at Sheerness made the voyages possible. Once the voyages had been made, the world became larger – it had more lands in it, a greater variety of men and women, birds and animals and plants than had ever been known. George’s friend Humboldt was alive to this and would embark on journeys equally stupendous. Breathing deeply and staring at the water, George saw with absolute clarity why Goethe, that evening at Mainz, had expressed contempt for the Revolution and its ‘ideas’.
Reinhold came into his son’s head as he stared at the murky summer Seine. Of the three Warrington schoolmasters – one had been stabbed in his bath, the other had had his laboratory destroyed by a baying mob – it looked as though Reinhold had done something right by becoming a Professor at Halle. I will arise . . . ich will mich aufmachen und zu meinem Vater gehen . . .
The dirty waters mocked him, called to him. George did not feel suicidal, so much as fatalistically aware that his own life had fallen out of control. Had he, a year ago, been asked the central purpose of his existence, he would have said simply, his work and his children. The unravelling of life’s ordinary daily complexion meant the one was impossible, the others were separated from him . . . His everlasting wanderings since childhood had now become a norm. Ich will mich aufmachen – the Prodigal Son in the parable, feeding the swine in a strange country, realized that if he were to return to his father, he would have a better life even if he were only a household servant. The figure who now stood on the Pont St-Michel, staring with panic, real fear, at the river-water, was in a more pitiful state than Werther; he was homesick but had no home to be sick for. Home was not Mainz any more: but nor was it his birthplace in East Prussia . . . He had no home. His links with his family were all but broken. His wife was in the bed of another man – and such a boring man at that.
