“But we’re all corruptible, aren’t we? Or so you say. Listen, Laclos, move now, before the situation is taken out of your hands. If the court comes to its senses and starts to pay out, your friends will desert you by the score.”
“Let me say,” Laclos remarked, “that it does appear that you are less than wholly devoted to the Duke’s interests yourself.”
“Some of us were discussing what plans you might have, afterwards, for the less-than-wholly-devoted.”
Camille waited. Laclos thought, how about a one-way ticket to Pennsylvania? You’d enjoy life among the Quakers. Alternatively, how about a nice dip in the Seine? He said, “You stick with the Duke, my boy. I promise you’ll do well out of it.”
“Oh, you can be sure I’ll do well out of it.” Camille leaned back in his chair. “Has it ever occurred to you, Laclos, that you might be helping me to my revolution, and not vice versa? It might be like one of those novels where the characters take over and leave the author behind.”
Laclos brought his fist down on the table and raised his voice. “You always want to push it, don’t you?” he said. “You always want to have the last word?”
“Laclos,” Camille said, “everyone is looking at you.” It was now impossible to go on. Laclos apologized as they parted. He was annoyed with himself for having lost his temper with a cheap pamphleteer, and the apology was his penance. As he walked he composed his face to its usual urbanity. Camille watched him go. This won’t do, he thought. If this goes on I’ll have no soul to sell when someone makes me a really fair offer. He hurried away, to break to d’Anton the excellent news that he was about to be offered a bribe.
July 11: Camille turned up at Robespierre’s lodgings at Versailles. “Mirabeau has told the King to pull his troops out of Paris,” he said. “Louis won’t; but those troops are not to be relied on. The Queen’s cabal is trying to get M. Necker sacked. And now the King says he will send the Assembly to the provinces.”
Robespierre was writing a letter to Augustin and Charlotte. He looked up. “The Estates-General, is what he still calls it.”
“Yes. So I came to see if you were packing your bags.”
“Far from it. I’m just settling in.”
Camille wandered about the room. “You’re very calm.”
“I’m learning patience through listening to the Assembly’s daily ration of drivel.”
“Oh, you don’t think much of your colleagues. Mirabeau—you hate him.”
“Don’t overstate my case for me.” Robespierre put his pen down. “Camille, come here, let me look at you.”
“No, why?” Camille said nervously. “Max, tell me what I should do. My opinions will go soft. The republic—the Comte laughs at it. He makes me write, he tells me what to write and he hardly lets me out of his sight. I sit beside him each night at dinner. The food is good, so is the wine, so is the conversation.” He threw his hands out. “He’s corrupting me.”
“Don’t be such a prig,” Robespierre said unexpectedly. “He can get you on in the world, and that’s what you need at the moment. You should be there, not here. I can’t give you what he can.”
Robespierre knows—he almost always knows—exactly what will happen. Camille is sharp and clever, but he gives no evidence of any ideas about self-preservation. He has seen Mirabeau with him in public, one arm draped around his shoulders, as if he were some tart he’d picked up at the Palais-Royal. All this is distasteful; and the Comte’s larger motives, his wider ambitions, are as clear as if Dr. Guillotin had him on a dissecting table. For the moment, Camille is enjoying himself. The Comte is bringing on his talents. He enjoys the flattery and fuss; then he comes for absolution. Their relationship has fallen back into its old pattern, as if the last decade were the flick of an eyelid. He knows all about the disillusionment that Camille will suffer one day, but there’s no point in trying to tell him: let him live through it. It’s like disappointments in love. Everyone must have them. Or so he is told.
“Did I tell you about Anaïs, this girl I’m supposed to be engaged to? Augustin tells me I suddenly have rivals.”
“What, since you left?”
“So it seems. Hardly repining, is she?”
“Do you feel hurt?”
He considered. “Oh, well, you know, I have always been vastly full of amour propre, haven’t I? No …” He smiled. “She’s a nice girl, Anaïs, but she’s not over-bright. The truth is, it was all set up by other people anyway.”
“Why did you go along with it?”
“For the sake of a quiet life.”
Camille wandered across the room. He opened the window a little wider, and leaned out. “What’s going to happen?” he asked. “Revolution is inevitable.”
“Oh yes. But God works through men.”
“And so?”
“Somebody must break the deadlock between the Assembly and the King.”
“But in the real world, of real actions?”
“And it must be Mirabeau, I suppose. All right, nobody trusts him, but if he gave the signal—”
“Deadlock. Signal.” Camille slammed the window shut. He crossed the room. Robespierre removed the ink from the path of his ire. “Is a signal something you give by waving your arms?” He fell to his knees. Robespierre took his arms and tried to pull him to his feet. “Good, this is real,” Camille said. “I am kneeling on the floor, you are trying to get me on my feet. Not metaphorically, but actually. Look,” he said, hurling himself out of his friend’s grasp, “now I have fallen straight over on my face. This is action,” Camille said to the carpet. “Now, can you distinguish what has just happened from what happens when somebody says, ‘the country is on its knees’?”
“Of course I can. Please get up.”
Camille stood up and brushed himself down a little.
“You terrify me,” Robespierre said. He turned away and sat down at the table where he had been writing the letter. He took off his spectacles, rested his elbows on the table and covered his closed eyes with his fingertips. “Metaphors are good,” he said. “I like metaphors. Metaphors don’t kill people.”
“They’re killing me. If I hear another mention of rising tides or crumbling edifices I shall throw myself out of the window. I can’t listen to this talk anymore. I saw Laclos the other day. I was so disgusted, finally, I thought I shall have to do something by myself.”
Robespierre picked up his pen and added a phrase to his letter. “I am afraid of civil disorder,” he said.
“Afraid of it? I hope for it. Mirabeau—he has his own interests—but if we had a leader whose name is absolutely clean—”
“I don’t know if there’s such a man in the Assembly.”
“There’s you,” Camille said.
“Oh yes?” He applied himself to the next sentence. “They call Mirabeau ‘The Torch of Provence.’ And do you know what they call me? ‘The Candle of Arras.’”
“But in time, Max—”
“Yes, in time. They think I should hang around viscounts and cultivate rhetorical flourishes. No. In time, perhaps, they might respect me. But I don’t want them ever to approve of me, because if they approve of me I’m finished. I want no kickbacks, no promises, no caucus and no blood on my hands. I’m not their man of destiny, I’m afraid.”
“But are you the man of destiny, inside your own head?”
Robespierre looked down at his letter again. He contemplated a postscript. He reached for his pen. “No more than you are.”
Sunday, July 12: 5 a.m. D’Anton said, “Camille, there are no answers to these questions.”
“No?”
“No. But look. Dawn has broken. It’s another day. You’ve made it.” Camille’s questions: suppose I do get Lucile, how shall I go on without Annette? Why have I never achieved anything, not one damn thing? Why won’t they publish my pamphlet? Why does my father hate me?
“All right,” d’Anton said. “Short answers are best. Why should you go on without Annette? Get into both their beds, you
’re quite capable of it, I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the world.”
Camille looked at him wonderingly. “Nothing shocks you these days, does it?”
“May I continue? You’ve never achieved anything because you’re always bloody horizontal. I mean, you’re supposed to be at some place, right, and you’re not, and people say, God, he’s so absentminded—but I know the truth—you started the day with very good intentions, you might even have been on the way to where you’re supposed to be going, and then you just run into somebody, and what’s the next thing? You’re in bed with them.”
“And that’s the day gone,” Camille said. “Yes, you’re right, you’re right.”
“So what sort of a foundation for any career—oh, never mind. What was I saying? They won’t publish your pamphlet till the situation gives way a bit. As for your father—he doesn’t hate you, he probably cares too much, as I do and a very large number of other people. And Christ, you wear me out.”
D’Anton had been in court all day Friday, and had spent Saturday working solidly. His face was creased with exhaustion. “Do me a favor.” He got up and walked stiffly to the window. “If you’re going to commit suicide, would you leave it till about Wednesday, when my shipping case is over?”
“I shall go back to Versailles now.” Camille said. “I have to go and talk to Mirabeau.”
“Poor sod.” D’Anton slept momentarily on his feet. “It’s going to be hotter than ever today.” He swung open the shutter. The glare leapt into the room.
Camille’s difficulty was not staying awake; it was catching up with his personal effects. It was some time since he had been of fixed address. He wondered, really, if d’Anton could enter into his difficulties. When you turn up unexpectedly at somewhere you used to live, it’s very difficult to say to people, “Take your hands off me, I only came for a clean shirt.” They don’t believe you. They think it’s a pretext.
And again, he is always in transit. It can easily take three hours to get from Paris to Versailles. Despite his difficulties, he is at Mirabeau’s house for the hour when normal people have their breakfast; he has shaved, changed, brushed his hair, he is every inch (he thinks) the modest young advocate waiting on the great man.
Teutch rolled his eyes and pushed him in at the door. “There’s a new cabinet,” he said. “And it doesn’t include him.”
Mirabeau was pacing about the room, a vein distended in his temple. He checked his stride for a moment. “Oh, there you are. Been with fucking Philippe?”
The room was packed: angry faces, faces drawn with anxiety. Deputy Pétion dropped a perspiring hand on his shoulder. “Well, looking so good, Camille,” he said. “Me, I’ve been up all night. You know they sacked Necker? The new cabinet meets this morning, if they can find a Minister of Finance. Three people have already turned it down. Necker’s popular—they’ve really done it this time.”
“Is it Antoinette’s fault?”
“They say so. There are deputies here who expected to be arrested, last night.”
“There’s time, for arrests.”
“I think,” Pétion said sensibly, “that some of us ought to go to Paris—Mirabeau, don’t you think so?”
Mirabeau glared at him. He thinks a lot of himself, he thought, to interrupt me. “Why don’t you do that?” he growled. He pretended to have forgotten Pétion’s name.
As soon as this reaches the Palais-Royal, Camille thought … He slid across the room to the Comte’s elbow. “Gabriel, I have to leave now.”
Mirabeau pulled him to his side, sneering-at what, was unclear. He held on to him, and with one large hand swept Camille’s hair back from his face. One of Mirabeau’s rings caught the corner of his mouth. “Maître Desmoulins feels he would like to attend a little riot. Sunday morning, Camille: why aren’t you at Mass?”
He pulled away. He left the room. He ran down the stairs. He was already in the street when Teutch came pounding after him. He stopped. Teutch stared at him without speaking.
“Does the Comte send me some advice?”
“He does, but I forget what it is now.” He thought. “Oh yes.” His brow cleared. “Don’t get killed.”
It is mid-afternoon, almost three o’clock, when the news about Necker’s dismissal reaches the Palais-Royal. The reputation of the mild Swiss financier has been built up with great assiduity—and never more so than in this last week, when his fall has seemed imminent.
The whole populace seems to be out in the open: churning through the streets and heaving through the squares in the blistering heat to the public gardens with their avenues of chestnut trees and their Orléanist connections. The price of bread has just risen. Foreign troops are camped outside the city. Order is a memory, law has a tenuous hold. The French Guards have deserted their posts and returned to their working-men’s interests, and all the backroom skulkers are out in the daylight. Their closed and anemic faces are marked by nocturnal fancies of hanging, of other public agonies and final solutions; and above this the sun is a wound, a boiling tropical eye.
Under this eye, drink is spilled, tempers flash and flare. Wigmakers and clerks, apprentices of all descriptions and scene shifters, small shopkeepers, brewers, drapers, tanners and porters, knife grinders, coachmen and public prostitutes; these are the remnants of Titonville. The crowd moves backwards and forwards, scoured by rumor and dangerous unease, always back to the same place: and as this occurs the clock begins to strike.
Until now this has been a joke, a blood sport, a bare-knuckle contest. The crowd is full of women and children. The streets stink. Why should the court wait on the political process? Through these alleys the populace can be driven like pigs and massacred in back courts by Germans on horseback. Are they to wait for this to happen? Will the King profane Sunday? Tomorrow is a holiday, the people can die on their own time. The clocks finish striking. This is crucifixion hour, as we all know. It is expedient that one man shall die for the people, and in 1757, before we were born, a man called Damiens dealt the old King a glancing blow with a pocketknife. His execution is still talked of, a day of screaming entertainment, a fiesta of torment. Thirty-two years have passed: and now here are the executioner’s pupils, ready for some bloody jubilee.
Camille’s precipitate entry into history came about in this fashion. He was standing in the doorway of the Café du Foy, hot, elated, slightly frightened by the press of people. Someone behind him had said that he might try to address the crowds and so a table had been pushed into the café doorway. For a moment he felt faint. He leaned against this table, bodies hemming him in. He wondered if d’Anton had a hangover. What had possessed him to want to stay up all night? He wished he were in a quiet dark room, alone but, as d’Anton said, bloody horizontal. His heart raced. He wondered if he had eaten anything that day. He supposed not. He felt he would drown in the acrid miasma of sweat, misery and fear.
Three young men, walking abreast, came carving a way through the crowd. Their faces were set, their arms were linked, they were trying to get a bit of something going, and by now he had been present at enough of these street games to understand their mood and its consequences in terms of casualties. Of these men, he recognized two, but the third man he did not know. The third man cried, “To arms!” The others cried the same.
“What arms?” Camille said. He detached a strand of hair that was sticking to his face and threw out a hand in inquiry. Somebody slapped a pistol into it.
He looked at it as if it had dropped from heaven. “Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.” Somebody gave him another pistol. The shock was so great that if the man had not closed his fingers over the handle he would have dropped it. This is the consequence of intellectual rigor, of not letting people get away with a cheap slogan. The man said, “For God’s sake keep it steady, that kind are liable to go off in your face.”
It will certainly be tonight, he thought: the troops will come out of the Champs-de-Mars, there will be arrests, roundup
s, exemplary dealings. Suddenly he understood how far the situation had moved on from last week, from yesterday—how far it had moved in the last half hour. It will certainly be tonight, he thought, and they had better know it; we have run out to the end of our rope.
He had so often rehearsed this moment in his mind that his actions now were automatic; they were fluid and perfectly timed, like the actions of a dream. He had spoken many times from the café doorway. He had to get the first phrase out, the first sentence, then he could get beside himself and do it, and he knew that he could do it better than anyone else: because this is the scrap that God has saved up for him, like the last morsel on a plate.
He put one knee onto the table and scrambled up on to it. He scooped up the firearms. Already he was ringed about by his audience, like the crowds in an amphitheater. Now he understood the meaning of the phrase “a sea of faces”; it was a living sea, where panic-striken faces nosed for air before the current pulled them under. But people were hanging out of the upstairs windows of the café and of the buildings around, and the crowd was growing all the time. He was not high enough, or conspicuous. Nobody seemed to be able to see what he needed, and until he began to speak properly he would not be able to make himself heard. He transferred both the pistols to one hand, bundling them against his body, so that if they go off he will be a terrible mess; but he felt uncurably reluctant to part with them for an instant. With his left arm he waved to someone inside the café. A chair was passed out, and planted on the table beside him. “Will you hold it?” he said. He transferred one of the pistols back to his left hand. It was now two minutes past three.
As he stepped onto the chair he felt it slide a little. He thought it would be amazing if he fell off the chair, but people would say it was typical of him. He felt it being gripped by the back, steadied. It was an ordinary straw-bottomed chair. What if he were Georges-Jacques? He would go straight through it.
A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Page 24
