A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “I also. But not from now on.”

  “You could be killed in an accident in the street. You might die. Your sister Henriette died of a consumption.” She scrutinized him as if she wanted to see the tissue beneath the skin, and provide against contingencies.

  He turned away; he didn’t feel he could bear it. He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament; or it might be something you learn when you’re a child, a kind of language, harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a good grasp on by the time you’re seven. What if you haven’t got that grasp? What if you’re in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind? It occurred to him that there are some people, ashamed of being illiterate, who always pretend to others that they can read. Sooner or later they get found out, of course. But it is always possible that while you are valiantly pretending, the principles of reading strike you for the first time, and you are saved. By analogy, it is possible that while you, the unhappy person, are trying out some basic expressions-the kind of thing you get in phrase books for travelers—the grammar and syntax of this neglected language are revealing themselves, somewhere at the back of your mind. That’s all very well, he thought, but the process could take years. He understood Lucile’s problem: how do you know you will live long enough to be fluent?

  The People’s Friend, No. 497, J.-P. Marat, editor:

  … name immediately a military tribunal, a supreme dictator … you are lost beyond hope if you continue to heed your present leaders, who will continue to flatter you and lull you until your enemies are at your walls … . Now is the time to have the heads of Mottié, of Bailly … of all the traitors in the National Assembly … within a few days Louis XVI will advance at the head of all the malcontents and the Austrian legions … . A hundred fiery mouths will threaten to destroy your town with red shot if you offer the least resistance … all the patriots will be arrested, the popular writers will be dragged away to dungeons … a few more days of indecision, and it will be too late to shake off your lethargy; death will overtake you in your sleep.

  Danton at Mirabeau’s house. “So how goes it?” the Comte said.

  Danton nodded.

  “I mean, I really want to know.” Mirabeau laughed. “Are you totally cynical, Danton, or do you harbor some guilty ideals? Where do you stand, really? Come, I’m taken with a passion to know. Which is it to be for King, Louis or Philippe?”

  Danton declined to answer.

  “Or perhaps neither. Are you a republican, Danton?”

  “Robespierre says that it is not a government’s descriptive label that matters, but its nature, the way it operates, whether it is government by the people. Cromwell’s republic, for instance, was not a popular government. I agree with him. It seems to me of little importance whether we call it a monarchy or a republic.”

  “You say its nature matters, but you do not say which nature you would prefer.”

  “My reticence is considered.”

  “I’m sure it is. You can hide a great deal behind slogans. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, indeed.”

  “I subscribe to that.”

  “I hear you invented it. But freedom comprehends—what?”

  “Do I have to define it for you? You should simply know.”

  “That is sentimentality,” Mirabeau said.

  “I know. Sentimentality has its place in politics, as in the bedroom.”

  The Comte looked up. “We’ll discuss bedrooms later. Let’s, shall we, descend to practicalities? The Commune is to be reshuffled, there will be elections. The office ranking below mayor will be that of administrator. There will be sixteen administrators. You wish to be one of them, you say. Why, Danton?”

  “I wish to serve the city.”

  “No doubt. I myself am assured of a place. Amongst your colleagues you may expect Siéyès and Talleyrand. I take it from the expression on your face that you think it a company of tergiversators in which you will be quite at home. But if I am to support you, I must have an assurance as to your moderate conduct.”

  “You have it.”

  “Your moderation. You understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fully?”

  “Yes.”

  “Danton, I know you. You are like myself. Why else have they started calling you the poor man’s Mirabeau, do you suppose? You haven’t an ounce of moderation in your body.”

  “I think our resemblances must be superficial.”

  “Oh, you think you are a moderate?”

  “I don’t know. I could be. Most things are possible.”

  “You may wish to conciliate, but it is against your nature. You don’t work with people, you work over them.”

  “Danton nodded. He conceded the point. “I drive them as I wish,” he said. “That could be towards moderation, or it could be towards the extremes.”

  “Yes, but the difficulty is, moderation looks like weakness, doesn’t it? Oh yes, I know, Danton, I have been here before you, crashing down this particular trail. And speaking of extremism, I do not care for the attacks on me made by your Cordeliers journalists.”

  “The press is free. I don’t dictate the output of the writers of my district.”

  “Not even the one who lives next door to you? I rather thought you did.”

  “Camille has to be running ahead of public opinion all the time.”

  “I can remember the days,” Mirabeau said, “when we didn’t have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.” He rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “Very well, Danton, consider yourself elected. I shall hold you to your promise of moderation, and I shall expect your support. Come now—tell me the gossip. How is the marriage?”

  Lucile looked at the carpet. It was a good carpet, and on balance she was glad she had spent the money on it. She did not particularly wish to admire the pattern now, but she could not trust the expression on her face.

  “Caro,” she said, “I really can’t think why you are telling me all this.”

  Caroline Rémy put her feet up on the blue chaise-Longue. She was a handsome young woman, an actress belonging to the Theatre Montansier company. She had two arrangements, one with Fabre d’Églantine and one with Hérault de Séchelles.

  “To protect you,” she said, “from being told all this by unsympathetic people. Who would delight in embarrassing you, and making fun of your naïveté.” Caroline put her head on one side, and wrapped a curl around her finger. “Let me see—how old are you now, Lucile?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Dear, dear,” Caroline said. “Twenty!” She couldn’t be much older herself, Lucile thought. But she had, not surprisingly, a rather well-used look about her. “I’m afraid, my dear, that you know nothing of the world.”

  “No. People keep telling me that, lately. I suppose they must be right.” (A guilty capitulation. Camille, last week, trying to educate her: “Lolotte, nothing gains truth by mere force of repetition.” But how to be polite, faced with such universal insistence?)

  “I’m surprised your mother didn’t see fit to warn you,” Caro said. “I’m sure she knows everything there is to know about Camille. But if I’d had the courage—and believe me I reproach myself—to come to you before Christmas, and tell you, just for instance, about Maitre Perrin, what would your reaction have been?”

  Lucile looked up. “Caro, I’d have been riveted.”

  It was not the answer Caro had expected. “You are a strange girl,” she said. Her expression said clearly, strangeness doesn’t pay. “You see, you have to be prepared for what lies ahead of you.”

  “I try to imagine,” Lucile said. She wished for the door to smash open, and one of Camille’s assistants to come flying in, and start firing off questions and rummaging for a piece of paper that had been mislaid. But the house was quiet for once: only Caro’s well-trained voice, with its tragedienne’s quaver, its suggestion of huskiness.

  “Infidelity you can endure,” she said. “In the circles in whic
h we move, these things are understood.” She made a gesture, elegant fingers spread, to indicate the laudable correctness, both aesthetic and social, of a little well-judged adultery. “One finds a modus vivendi. I have no fear of your not being able to amuse yourself. Other women one can cope with, provided they’re not too close to home—”

  “Just stop there. What does that mean?”

  Caro became a little round-eyed. “Camille is an attractive man,” she said. “I know whereof I speak.”

  “I don’t see what it has to do with anything,” Lucile muttered, “if you’ve been to bed with him. I could do without that bit of information.”

  “Please regard me as your friend,” Caro suggested. She bit her lip. At least she had found out that Lucile was not expecting a child. Whatever the reason for the hurry about the marriage, it was not that. It must be something even more interesting, if she could only make it out. She patted her curls back into place and slid from the chaise-longue. “Must go. Rehearsal.”

  I don’t think you need any rehearsal, Lucile said under her breath. I think you’re quite perfect.

  When Caro had gone, Lucile leaned back in her chair, and tried to take deep breaths, and tried to be calm. The housekeeper, Jeanette, came in, and looked her over. “Try a small omelette,” she advised.

  “Leave me alone,” Lucile said. “I don’t know why you think that food solves everything.”

  “I could step around and fetch your mother.”

  “I should just think,” Lucile said, “that I can do without my mother at my age.”

  She agreed to a glass of iced water. It made her hand ache, froze her deep inside. Camille came in at a quarter-past five, and ran around snatching up pen and ink. “I have to be at the Jacobins,” he said. That meant six o’clock. She stood over him watching his scruffy handwriting loop itself across the page. “No time ever to correct …” He scribbled. “Lolotte … what’s wrong?”

  She sat down and laughed feebly: nothing’s wrong.

  “You’re a terrible liar.” He was making deletions. “I mean, you’re no good at it.”

  “Caroline Rémy called.”

  “Oh.” His expression, in passing, was faintly contemptuous.

  “I want to ask you a question. I appreciate it might be rather difficult.”

  “Try.” He didn’t look up.

  “Have you had an affair with her?”

  He frowned at the paper. “That doesn’t sound right.” He sighed and wrote down the side of the page. “I’ve had an affair with everybody, don’t you know that by now?”

  “But I’d like to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why would you like to know?”

  “I can’t think why, really.”

  He tore the sheet once across and began immediately on another. “Not the most intelligent of conversations, this.” He wrote for a minute. “Did she say that I did?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “What gave you the idea then?” He looked up at the ceiling for a synonym, and as he tipped his head back, the flat, red winter light touched his hair.

  “She implied it.”

  “Perhaps you mistook her.”

  “Would you mind just denying it?”

  “I think it’s quite probable that at some time I spent a night with her, but I’ve no clear memory of it.” He had found the word, and reached for another sheet of paper.

  “How could you not have a clear memory? A person couldn’t just not remember.”

  “Why shouldn’t a person not remember? Not everybody thinks it’s the highest human activity, like you do.”

  “I suppose not remembering is the ultimate snub.”

  “I suppose so. Have you seen Brissot’s latest issue?”

  “There. You’ve got your paper on it.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What, you mean you really can’t remember?”

  “I’m very absentminded, anyone will tell you. It needn’t have been so much as a night. Could have been an afternoon. Or just a few minutes, or not at all. I might have thought she was someone else. My mind might have been on other things.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m not sure you ought to be amused. Perhaps you ought to be shocked.”

  “She thinks you very attractive.”

  “What heartening news. I was consumed with anxiety in case she didn’t. The page I want is missing. I must have thrown it on the fire in a rage. A literary jockey, Mirabeau calls Brissot. I’m not quite sure what that means but I expect he thinks it’s very insulting.”

  “She was telling me something about a barrister you once knew.”

  “Which of the five hundred?”

  But he was on the defensive now. She didn’t answer. He wiped his pen carefully, put it down. He looked at her sideways, cautiously, from under his eyelashes. He smiled, slightly.

  “Oh God, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “You look as if you’re going to tell me what a good time you had. Do people know?”

  “Some people, obviously.”

  “Does my mother know?”

  No answer.

  “Why didn’t I know?”

  “I can’t think. Possibly because you were about ten at the time. We hadn’t met. I can’t think how people would have broached the topic.”

  “Ah. She didn’t tell me it was so long ago.”

  “No, I’m sure she just told you exactly what suited her. Lolotte, does it matter so much?”

  “Not really. I suppose he must have been nice.”

  “Yes, he was.” Oh, the relief of saying so. “He was really extremely nice to me. And somehow, oh, you know, it didn’t seem much to do.”

  She stared at him. He’s quite unique, she thought. “But now—” and suddenly she felt she had the essence of it—“now you’re a public person. It matters to everybody what you do.”

  “And now I am married to you. And no one will ever have anything to reproach me with, except loving my wife too much and giving them nothing to talk about.” Camille pushed his chair back. “The Jacobins can wait. I don’t think I want to listen to speeches tonight. I should prefer to write a theater review. Yes? I like taking you to the theater. I like walking around in public with you. I get envied. Do you know what I really like? I like to see people looking at you, and forming ideas, and people saying, is she married?—yes—and their faces fall, but then they think, well, still, even so, and they say, to whom? And someone says, to the Lanterne Attorney, and they say, oh, and walk away with a glazed look in their eye.”

  She raced off to get dressed for the theater. When she looked back, she had to admire it, as a way of getting off the subject.

  A little woman—Roland’s wife—came out of the Riding School on Pétion’s arm. “Paris has changed greatly,” she said, “since I was here six years ago. I shall never forget that visit. We were night after night at the theater. I had the time of my life.”

  “Let’s hope we can do as well for you this time,” Pétion said, with gallantry. “And yet you are a Parisian, my friend Brissot tells me?”

  You’re overdoing the charm, Jérôme, his friend Brissot thought.

  “Yes, but my husband’s affairs have kept us so long in the provinces that I no longer lay claim to the title. I have so often wished to return—and now here I am, thanks to the affairs of the Municipality of Lyon.”

  Brissot thought, she talks like a novel.

  “I’m sure your husband is a most worthy representative,” Pétion said, “yet let us cherish a secret hope that he does not conclude Lyon’s business too quickly. We should hate to lose, so soon, the benefit of your advice—and the radiance of your person.”

  She glanced up at him and smiled. She was the type he liked—petite, a little plump, hazel eyes, dark auburn ringlets about an oval face—style perhaps a little bit young for her? What would she be, thirty-five? He pondered the possibility of burying his head in her opulent bosom—on some later occasion,
of course.

  “Brissot has often told me,” he said, “of his Lyon correspondent, his ‘Roman Lady’—and of course I have read all her articles and come to admire both her elegant turn of phrase and the noble cast of mind which inspires it; but never, I confess, did I look to see beauty and wit so perfectly united.”

  A slight rigidity in her ready smile showed that this was just a little too fulsome. Brissot was rolling his eyes in a rather obvious manner. “So what did you think of the National Assembly, Madame?” he asked her.

  “I think perhaps it has outlived its usefulness—that is the kindest thing one can say. And such a disorderly set of people! Today’s session can’t be typical?”

  “I’m afraid it was.”

  “They waste so much time—scrapping like schoolboys. I had hoped for a higher tone.”

  “The Jacobins pleased you better, I think. A more sober gathering.”

  “At least they seem concerned with the matter in hand. I am sure that there are patriots in the Assembly, but it shocks me that grown men can be so easily duped.” They could see the unwelcome conclusion darkening her eyes. “I’m afraid some of them must be willing dupes. Some of them, surely, have sold themselves to the Court. Otherwise our progress would not be so slow. Do they not understand that if there is to be any liberty in Europe we must rid ourselves of all monarchs?”

  Danton was walking by, in pursuit of the city’s business; he turned, raised an eyebrow, removed his hat and passed them with a laconic, “Good morning, Mme. Revolutionary, Messieurs.”

  “Good heavens. Who was that?”

  “That was M. Danton,” Pétion said smoothly. “One of the curiosities of the capital.”

  “Indeed.” Reluctantly she dragged her eyes from Danton’s retreating back. “How did he come by those scars?”

  “No one cares to speculate,” Brissot said.

  “What a brute he looks!”

  Pétion smiled. “He is a man of culture,” he said, “a barrister by profession, and a very staunch patriot. One of the City Administrators, in fact. His exterior belies him.”