by A. N. Wilson
—He won’t discuss the exchange of prisoners unless we show compassion to a couple of shopkeepers?
M. LeBon looked at George with incredulity.
—We have four hundred English prisoners. They have – a few hundred of ours? They won’t discuss – because of a baker’s widow?
—Scent-maker’s . . .
—Does it not strike you as odd, citizen, that an English Major, a gentilhomme who prides himself in his aristocratic friends, should care so much for a shopkeeper’s widow? An old lady?
—Not really.
The negotiations started the next week. The parfumier’s widow, her sister and the Kent brewer were safely aboard their packet and bobbing on the waves of La Manche by the time Major Manson saw George next.
Walls have ears – that was what Guénot had said, afraid that their murmured conversation in the House of Dutch Patriots in the rue des Moulins might be overheard by the surely reliable Clothilde? Sure enough, George knew the postilions, ostlers, brushers, waiters, beggars, tramps have ears. He doubted his own suitability for espionage, though he had guessed, when he first saw Major Manson in the coffee-room of the Lion d’Or, that the man’s interest in his newspaper was too intense to be feigned.
George had been entrusted by Citizen Robespierre with the task of negotiating an exchange of prisoners in Robespierre’s home town. He knew that commissions from Robespierre were deadly and double-edged gifts. He had been entrusted with a task, but this did not mean that he, personally, was trusted. Superficially, all that the Committee of Public Safety required of Citizen Forster was to negotiate an exchange of prisoners between the Republic and the British. Were he successful in this aim, it might, just might, be enough to satisfy the Committee; then again, as he had realized from his first moment of receiving the commission and being dispatched to Arras, there was danger. The war with England, conducted at the same time as the war with Holland, Austria, Prussia, the Holy See and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, was imposing insufferable burdens upon the Republic, whose money and manpower were insufficient to sustain war on so many fronts. Many Englishmen supported the aims of the Revolution – as witnessed by the election of Mr Paine to the Assembly, the presence of Miss Wollstonecraft in Paris and the Christies, who had told them that in Warrington the old Dissenting school was watched constantly by the police who believed Mr Wedgwood to be a Jacobin agent. But the Christies had left, and Citizen Robespierre had made clear that the adherence of these British madcaps was not always as slavish as the Republic might have liked. (Since George came to Arras, Paine had fallen from grace, and both he and Miss Wollstonecraft were in Paris prisons.)
George had been entrusted with a simple negotiation, but he was also – though the word ‘truce’ could not be used by LeBon – entrusted, by a nod and a wink, to see if the British were agreeable to a peace settlement.
—Your English, said Major Manson on their next meeting, it is too perfect to have been learnt in a French school.
—You are very kind. I assure you, I am a Frenchman.
—Ah yes, M. Argan. Un français imaginaire, peut-être. I think we all know that it was the death of the King which was what shocked the conscience of Europe.
—Yet we all know, said George, France was not the first country in Europe to behead its King. Yet France did not, I think, declare war on England when Charles I lost his head.
There was a silence. No need to fill it with reminiscences of a family in Yorkshire, named Forster, dispossessed for their loyalty to the Royal Martyr, fleeing into an exile which, in that moment one hundred and fifty years later, seemed to George as if it were eternal, like the expulsion of our first parents from Paradise. At the beginning of the silence, the Major had been the suppliant for the return of his prisoners. Now, mysteriously, the balance of the conversation shifted.
—The beheading in Whitehall was followed by shocked silence, said Major Manson. The beheading in the Place de la Révolution was followed by whoops of mass hysteria and a public bloodletting without parallel in history. You know that, sir.
The Major came so close to George’s face across the table that his thick bushy eyebrows almost touched George’s brow.
—I once read an account, he said, of the longest sea-voyage ever undertaken by European man, M. Argan. I’ve concluded that the European who contemplated the life of the savages ‘will acknowledge with a thankful heart, that incomprehensible goodness which has given him a distinguished superiority over so many of his fellow-creatures’. I wonder, M. Argan, if the young man who wrote these words were to visit France today, whether he would consider the barbarous murders which defile every town, the travesties of justice which splatter every court-room with blood, would not make him revise his judgement that we Europeans are always so superior to the race of savages.
George blushed, at the smugness of his own words aged twenty-three, and at the fact that, all along, Mr Manson had known his identity.
—Forgive me, I . . . I do not know what to say.
—The boy who sailed with Cook, the Captain’s blue-eyed boy, arriving in Arras as the lickspittle of Robespierre? No doubt you were an idealistic fellow, believed in the whole bag of tricks, the brotherhood of this and equality of that. Look at where it has got you, man! Your wife in Neufchâtel . . . oh yes, don’t look surprised . . . you here . . . and wanting, no doubt, the chance to visit her? Beg her to return to you?
—How do you know?
—We could get you all out. Get you to England. We would ask very little in return. A few addresses, a few names in Paris, that is all. Perhaps a very little attempt at burglary the next time you visit the Préfecture.
—You think I would risk my neck . . . for a British officer . . . forgive me, Major, whom I do not know.
—You have already risked your neck. Work with us and the secret of ‘Mr Godfrey’ and his friends is safe with us. Refuse us, and M. LeBon might be disappointed to remember how vociferously you argued with him. It was just a matter of humanity for you, wasn’t it, M. Argan? That shows you in a very amiable light to me, but I fear the Revolution takes a much sterner view of things. You see, simple kindness made you question M. LeBon’s view that there was something suspicious in my zeal, as a British officer, to rescue a Kentish brewer and some French shopkeepers before I would even begin negotiations. If you co-operate with us, M. Argan . . . come on, man, you’re practically British. No one but you need ever be informed, what you must have already guessed – Mr Godfrey the brewer – oh he is a brewer, but also happens to be one of our finest agents in the field. His French wife—
—I met her.
—I think not.
Major Manson smiled.
—Mr Godfrey’s wife is indeed a Frenchwoman, but she remains safe at home in Faversham. The homely little body to whom you were so courteous in the Lion d’Or is not his wife. ‘She’ is the Archbishop of Arras. And the parfumier’s widow, rescued purely, monsieur, because of your compassionate heart, was the Marquise de Liencourt. You have done good work, M. Argan, and, I do assure you, my dear fellow, your secret is safe. I know you to be a good fellow. Friend of Banks.
—Indeed, sir.
—He sends his best to you. Oh, and . . .
—Sir?
—I do very much admire your Voyage book.
*
Their final meeting took place in a grubby little boarding house in the village of Travers on the Swiss border. He had come by post-chaise, put down in the village square, entered the inn, and been told that the young ‘Madame’, with her husband and two children, were over-yonder in the boarding house. So it was, there had been no noise of wheels to disturb their conversation when he walked through the front door, that moist, cold November day in ’93. Therese’s voice was saying,
—because he has been manipulating me all year – trying to – trying to make me agree to this absurd idea.
There was a murmur from Huber.
—You know it is absurd. It’s not as it was when we wer
e all in the flat at Mainz. It’s not!
Her voice rose.
—Don’t you see how this is calculated to make me weaken. That he should offer us so much? He says he will allow a divorce so long as we allow him to live with us and the girls. That he will become our lodger.
More murmuring.
—Of course it is an absurd idea. Don’t you see, the most manipulative thing about George is his stripped candour, his lack of defences. That is why I should never have agreed to his coming to see us.
Murmur.
—Yes, they are his children, but he has not seen them in TEN MONTHS.
Rosechen, seven years old, ran out to meet him in the hall, and tears came to his eyes. Clara, not quite four, hung back, clinging to Therese’s skirt. Rosechen had leapt up and he hugged her, while she put her arms round his neck and her legs round his waist.
—Oh, Daddy! Daddy! We were afraid you would not come. How did you come? Did you come on a horse?
George wanted to answer all the remarks he had overheard. He wanted to say, Therese, you know full well that I never intended to be apart from the children for more than a few weeks. It was you who ran away from me. The French said I’d be in Paris three weeks and they have kept me eight months.
He said none of these things.
He pushed open the door of the small parlour to see them there: Therese silhouetted against the window, through which could be seen larch trees, squirrels, a grey, pearly sky; and Huber, still in his travelling-cloak, looking so young, like a clumsy boy. With her elbow on the back of an upright chair and her tall hair-arrangement, brushed and combed, as it were sculpted into a ziggurat on top of her cranium. Therese looked poised, almost posed. George stepped forward into the room and, uncertain what his movement presaged, she drew the chair closer to her body as if to ward off an unwanted kiss, or act of violence.
A painful three days followed. George put up at the inn, and could not sleep for shivering cold. She and Huber stayed in the boarding house, with the children.
Therese had agreed to the meeting. Nevertheless she could make no secret of hating him for putting them all through the pathos of it. He must know she would never come back to him? He could have left them to make their new lives in Neufchâtel. He knew that if they came together again, they would destroy one another.
A week later, when she had returned to Neufchâtel with Huber and the children, she found a small heap of furious letters, denunciations by her father – denunciations of her intemperance, immorality, recklessness, lack of concern for his, the Hofrat’s, reputation in Göttingen. She replied shortly that the meeting in Travers had been between three people who ‘still honoured and loved one another’. She wrote the words because she wanted her father to believe them; or perhaps, more generally, because they looked good.
The three days at Travers developed a routine. While the children were awake, she left them with George, and with the maid, Ursula, while she and Huber took their watercolour boxes and their volumes of Schiller up misted autumnal mountain paths. George played pencil and paper games with the girls, and a simplified version of Skat, which little Clara could master but Ursula found baffling. He told them stories and they drew pictures.
The common table at the inn was the only place where the grown-ups could eat. The three of them could scarcely risk tears or raised voices in such a setting. To the relief of Therese and Huber, the intolerable situation between the three of them went undiscussed. Huber asked George about his continued interest in Indian literature. George asked Therese about her novel and received non-committal replies. George – naming no names – spoke of his time at Arras: about the possibility of returning there, even, of going to Calais.
Regardless of the other diners at the table – two pedlars, a man in black who might or might not have been a Protestant pastor – George began to whisper intently.
—I think there is a chance of my being able, of our being able, to escape to England. We could live in London. I could make a living, writing in London. We could be together.
Arctic silence from Therese and Huber.
—Please, he repeated. Please consider it.
Later, she wondered whether the dishevelment of his appearance, his skeletal thinness, the oiliness of his unwashed hair, the greyness of the scurvy-scarred face, the brown sponginess of a more or less toothless mouth, the fraying of the cuffs, the holes in his stockings, the tears which spouted so often from his exhausted sleepless eyes were all part of his campaign to worm his way back into her life.
Next day, at breakfast, Rosechen said,
—Daddy, you smell.
Of course, Therese and Huber took the children back to Neufchâtel. Of course, though the squirming children allowed themselves to be kissed by his smelly mouth, he embraced neither his wife nor his friend. The heavy cold turned to flu on the first stage of his journey back to Paris. By the time he reached the city, and the Maison des Patriots Hollandais in the rue des Moulins, he had pneumonia.
Much correspondence awaited him. He had begun a series of essays or articles called Parisian Outlines – Voss, his Berlin publisher, wrote to say he was interested. He wanted to find out if there was any of his acquaintance left in Paris who had not either fled, or gone to prison, who could help him with it.
Sick as he was, he paced the unforgiving, ice-windy, sleety grey streets of the French capital. The cough had destroyed his appetite, but he would occasionally turn into tap-houses or bars for hot marc with lemon. Paris was a city of death, epicentre of a land of death. His ‘aunt Cecile’ wrote to him from Arras – George knew the aunt to be of the bushy-eyebrowed, male, English military variety – that Arras was now a scene of unrestrained butchery, hundreds of people in the departments of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais having been decapitated in the presence of LeBon who, said Tante Cecile, imitated the convulsions of victims as they were dragged to the guillotine.
In Paris, that merciful instrument was in constant use. Philippe Egalité, Marie-Jeanne Phlippon Roland, sublime with her waist-length hair, Bailly, first Mayor of Paris, were only a few of the thousands who were trundled that month to the guillotine. The Revolution which had begun with the storming of a prison, the Bastille, had made prisons out of the Luxembourg Palace, the Chantilly Palace . . . Twelve new prisons existed in Paris, forty-four thousand in France. In the churches, where vestments and treasuries had been burnt and plundered, strange mumbo-jumbo in the place of the old mumbo-jumbo was enacted: actresses posing as Reason before debauched, moustachioed, brandy-soaked buffoons.
Some of it George saw, some he heard of – he himself was drinking heavily and pneumonia creates its own intoxication. Impressions became ever fuzzier as the date of the former went. Christmas, now unobserved in Notre Dame, went unobserved; so did the Feast of Circumcision. Where was the Sacred Foreskin, which had so fascinated Nally, and which had once reposed in a reliquary in La Sainte-Chapelle? George was apparently asking the question when Clothilde said,
—Monsieur is not well. Monsieur should be in his bed.
And now Monsieur was in his bed. For something like a week in the year which he still regarded as 1794, though to the Revolution it was Year Three, he tossed and turned. Clothilde was in constant attendance. She put her red, coarse cheeks near his and he could see her very blue eyes as she said,
—We’ll get you out of here. You’ll be well. We’ll get you to England.
—You are English, Clothilde?
—I am Dutch, monsieur.
Friends came and went. He recognized their names, but not their faces. One of them, leaning over him eagerly was surely . . . but no! Joy almost broke his heart as he said,
—Vati! But how did . . .
—Forster. It is I.
—But, Vati . . .
Clothilde’s voice said, to the strange doctor, who was not his father,
—It is the fever, monsieur, the fever. His mind plays tricks.
—Do not go away. Clothilde . . . Clothilde.
—Yes, monsieur.
—Hold my hand.
She did so.
—Do you know the Our Father?
—In French, monsieur? No.
—In Dutch, then. You say it in Dutch to me. I’ll . . .
His voice was weak, but as she said her very similar words, his lips mouthed,
—dein Reich Komme, dein Wille geschehe . . .
Someone else was speaking French, something about bleeding him, but he had weighed anchor. It was the firm Yorkshire voice of the Captain who bellowed out to the wind,
—O send thy word of command to rebuke the raging winds, and the roaring sea . . .
III
1775
—AND THE ROARING SEA, BELLOWED THE CAPTAIN, THAT WE, being delivered from this distress, may live to serve thee and to glorify thy Name all the days of our life.
Everyone shouted AMEN, but the wind was louder than over a hundred human voices, as the little Resolution rose up and was hurled down again. The day before, they had seen the last of the Azores, and now, in late July, the ship had encountered a terrible swell from the west and the wind raged mightily. Shearwaters, albatrosses and great skuas were blown across the sails and above the masts like pieces of newspaper escaped in a gusty alley. After three years of it, half those aboard were still unable to endure such squalls and swells without vomiting, so that the swabbing of the decks was all the more vigilant for a couple of days.
The breeze continued fresh, but seasickness became rarer, in bright weather. George, sketching a shearwater which had alighted on a coil of rope in the corner of the main deck, reflected sadly that by the time this sketch-block was filled up, he would be drawing land-birds.
—So what I was thinking, Nally was saying, was that you could do with a hand about the house. The valeting of your clothes, sir. I mean, if you are going so much to court.
