A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  She read Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle; there were passages she felt forced to omit, and pages she turned quickly, because they contained information that she did not want.

  Seven or eight years after the boy had left her father’s employment, she met him again. He had just married; he was, she saw, a perfectly ordinary young man. It was a brief meeting, no time for private talk, not that she’d have wished it—but he whispered to her, “I hope you don’t still blame me. I did you no harm.”

  In 1776 her life altered. It was the year the Americans proclaimed their independence, and she brought her affections to be bound. There had been offers of marriage—from tradesmen mainly, in their twenties and early thirties. She had been polite to them but very, very discouraging. Marriage was something she avoided thinking about. The family began to despair.

  But in January that year, Jean-Marie Roland appeared on the scene. He was tall, well educated, well traveled, with the kindness of a father and the gravity of a teacher. He belonged to the minor nobility, but he was the youngest of five sons; he had a little land and the money he earned, nothing more. He was an administrator: to that estate born. In his capacity as inspector, he had traveled Europe. He knew about bleaching and dyeing and making lace and using peat for fuel: about the manufacture of gunpowder, the curing of pork and the grinding of lenses; about physics, free trade and ancient Greece. At once, he sensed her own voracity for knowledge—for a certain type of knowledge, at least. At first she did not notice his strange, dusty coats, his frayed linen, his shoes fastened not with buckles but with old scraps of ribbon; when she did, she thought how refreshing it was to meet a man quite without vanity. Their talk was earnest, full of a kind of quibbling, wary courtesy.

  He had kissed her fingertips, but that was politeness. He sat across the room from her. He attempted nothing. It would have been as if a statue of Saint Paul had leaned down and chucked you under the chin.

  They exchanged letters, long, absorbing letters that took half a day to compose and an hour to read. At first they penned judicious essays on subjects of general interest. After some months they wrote of marriage—its sacramental aspect, its social usefulness.

  He went to Italy for a year, and reported his travels in a published work of six volumes.

  In 1780, after four thoughtful and diffident years, they married.

  On the night of their wedding it had not been possible to communicate by letter. She did not know what she thought might happen; she would not allow herself to think of the apprentice and his fumbling, or to construct a theory about what, after all, had taken place behind her back. So she was unprepared for his body, for the hollow chest with its sparse, graying hair; she was unprepared for the haste with which he pulled her against that body, and for the pain of penetration. His breathing changed, and jerking her head up over his shoulder she asked, “Is that … ?” But he had already rolled away from her into sleep, his open mouth breathing in the darkness.

  The next day he had woken to lean over her with apology and concern: “Were you entirely ignorant? My poor dear Manon, had I known …”

  One child (both thought) justifies a marriage: Eudora, born October 4, 1781.

  She had an ability—she was proud of it—to grasp the essentials of a complicated matter within minutes. Name her a topic—the Punic Wars, let us say, or the manufacture of tallow candles—and within a day she will give you a satisfactory account of it; within a week she will be capable of setting up her own factory, or drawing up a battle plan for Scipio Africanus. She liked to help him in his work, it was a pleasure to her. She began on the humblest level, copying passages he wished to study. Then she tried her hand at indexing, proved careful and competent; then she applied her retentive memory and dogged curiosity to his research projects. Finally—since she wrote with such fluency and grace and ease—she began to help him out with his reports and letters. Oh, let me have that, she’d say, I’ll polish it off while you’re humming and hawing over the first paragraph. My dear, clever girl, he’d say, how did I ever manage without you?

  But I want, she thought, more than a meed of praise; I want a quiet life, and yet, I want to move on to a larger stage. Knowing the place allotted to a woman, and content, respecting it, I want the respect of men. I want their respect and their approbation; for I too make schemes, I reason, I have my ideas about the state of France. She wished she could feed them, by some imperceptible process, into the heads of the nation’s legislators: as she feeds them into her husband’s.

  She recalled a July day: flies clustering and buzzing about the casement of a sickroom, her husband’s yellow face above the white sheets, and her mother-in-law, a tyrant of eighty-five, nodding in a corner, breath whistling. She saw herself, in a gray dress: gray-minded by age and sickness and heat, creeping through the rooms with herb tea, the summer going obdurately on outside the windows.

  “Madame?”

  “Quietly. What is it?”

  “Madame, the news from Paris.”

  “Has someone fallen ill?”

  “Madame, the Bastille has fallen.”

  She dropped the cup at her feet and let it shatter. Later she thought: I did it on purpose. Startled from his doze, Roland lifted his head from the pillow. “Manon, has some dreadful calamity occurred?”

  In the corner the Old Regime woke up, clucking at the disturbance, and fixed with a baleful eye the intemperate joy of her son’s wife.

  She began to write for the press now: first for the Lyon Courier, then for Brissot’s paper the French Patriot. (Her husband and Brissot had corresponded at length, these two years.) She signed herself “A Lady from Lyon” or “A Roman Lady.” In June 1790 she received a charming if not very legible letter, seeking permission for the Revolutions de France to reprint one of her articles. She agreed at once: not knowing, then, the character of the paper’s editor.

  In Paris the great opportunity had come, and she had taken it; she had made herself useful to the patriots. Waking and sleeping, she had dreamed of such a chance; dreamed of it in her lonely hours of study, dreamed of it pregnant with Eudora, watching the grave diggers at work in an Amiens cemetery. The salon of Mme. Roland. So, perhaps in detail the dream had disappointed; the men were lightweight, frivolous, wrongheaded, and she had to bite her lips to keep from interventions that would cut them down to size. Yet, it was a beginning; and soon they would be on their way to Paris again.

  She had not divorced herself from the situation, these last months. In a locked drawer she kept letters from Brissot, from Robespierre, from that grave and prepossessing young deputy François-Léonard Buzot. From these letters she had learned of the aftermath of the Champs-de-Mars. They had told her (she would hate to be synoptic, but events press so fast) how Louis, restored to the throne, had sworn to uphold the constitution; how Lafayette, no longer commander of the National Guard, had left Paris for an army post. The new Legislative Assembly was called, former deputies barred from it; so Buzot had returned to his home in Evreux. Never mind; they could still exchange letters, and no doubt one day they’d meet again.

  Their friend Brissot was a deputy now: dear Brissot, who worked so hard. And Robespierre had not left for his hometown; he remained in Paris, rebuilding the Jacobin Club, bringing in the new deputies, inducting them into the rules and procedures of the debates that shadowed the Assembly’s own. A diligent man, Robespierre; but he had disappointed her all the same.

  On the day of the massacre she had sent a message to him, offering to hide him in their apartment. She got no answer; she heard later that he had been taken in by a tradesman’s family, and was living with them now. She felt flat, let-down, when the moment of danger never came. She saw herself out-facing a regiment; she saw herself talking down the National Guard.

  During this exile, also, she had followed with some interest the career of M. Danton and his friends. She had been relieved to learn that he was in England, and hoped he would stay there. Yet still, she sought information; and as soon as there was r
umor of an amnesty, M. Danton came bouncing back. He had the nerve to put himself up for the Legislative Assembly; and in the middle of one of the election meetings (she had heard) an officer had arrived with a warrant for his arrest. Abused verbally and physically by the mob that seemed to attend the lawyer in all his activities, the officer was carried off to the Abbaye prison, where he was shut up for three days in the cell reserved for Danton.

  The amnesty had been passed; but the Electors had seen through the lout’s pretensions. Rejected, Danton had retired to his province to brood; and now he had decided he would like to become Deputy Public Prosecutor. With luck, there too he would be thwarted; the time was far distant (she hoped) when France would be governed by thugs.

  For the future … It irked her to think that in Paris the silly people were once more cheering the King and Queen, simply because they had put their names to the constitution: as if they had forgotten the years of tyranny and rapacity, the betrayal on the road to Varennes. Louis was plotting with the foreign powers, that much was clear to her; there will be war, and we would be foolish not to strike the first blow. (She turned the cloth in her hands and caught a loop of thread with the needle to make a knot.) And we must fight as a republic, as Athens did and Sparta. (She reached for her scissors.) Louis must be deposed. Preferably, killed.

  Then the reign of the aristocrats would be over forever.

  And such a reign it had been …

  Once, long ago, her grandmother had taken her to a house in the Marais, to call on a noblewoman with whom she had some acquaintance. There was a footman to bow them in; on a sofa reclined an old woman, opulently gowned, with a stupid, rouged face. A small dog rose from among her draperies and yapped at them, bouncing on stiff legs; the noblewoman swatted at it, perfunctory, and motioned her grandmother to a low stool. For some reason, in this household, her grandmother was addressed by her maiden name.

  She herself was left to stand, hot and silent. Her scalp still burned from the tortures which her grandmother, early that morning, had inflicted on her hair. The old woman shifted on her cushions, rasping on in her dictatorial, oddly uncultivated voice. Urged forward, Manon had bobbed a curtsy inside her stiff best dress. Thirty years later she had not forgiven herself for that curtsy.

  Watery eyes regarded her. “Religious, is she?” the noblewoman said. The dog subsided, snuffled by her side; a discarded tapestry lay over the arm of the sofa. She had dropped her eyes, “I try to perform my duties.”

  Her grandmother shifted painfully on the stool. The old woman patted at her lace bonnet, as if she were before a mirror; then she turned her hard eyes on Manon again, and began to ask her questions, schoolbook questions. When she answered correctly, with studied politeness, the creature sneered. “Little scholar isn’t she? Do you think that’s what a man requires?”

  The catechism over—still standing, feeling faint in the airless room—she had to hear her merits and faults enumerated. A good figure already, the noblewoman said; as if to imply that when she was grown up she would be fat. Sallow complexion, the noblewoman said; might freshen up, in time. “Tell me, my darling,” she said, “have you ever bought a ticket in the lottery?”

  “No, Madame, I don’t believe in games of chance.”

  “What a prig she is,” the old creature drawled. A hand shot out; grasped her little wrist in a vice of bone. “I want her to buy a lottery ticket for me. I want her to pick the number, you understand, then bring it here to me and give it to me herself. I think she has a lucky hand.”

  In the street she gulped in God’s clean air. “Please, I needn’t go back, need I?” She wanted to race home, back to her books and the reasonable people inside them.

  Even now, when someone said the word “aristocrat”—when they spoke of “a noblewoman” or “a titled lady”—it called to her mind the picture of that malignant gambler. It was not just the lace cap, the hard eyes, or the crushing words. It was the pervasive odor of a heavy musk, it was the reek of scent which overlay (she knew) the sweetness of bodily decay.

  Lottery ticket, indeed. There would be no gambling under the republic, she thought; it would not be permitted.

  Paris: “Look,” said the judge to the Clerk of the Court, “I don’t care if they’re retaining John the Baptist. They’ve infringed the gaming laws and I’m giving them six months. Why do you suppose Desmoulins has come back to the Bar, anyway?”

  “Money,” said the clerk.

  “I thought Orléans paid well.”

  “Oh, the Duke is finished,” the clerk said cheerfully. “Mme. de Genlis is in England, Laclos has gone back to his regiment and the Mistresses are making up to Danton. Of course, they get money from the English.”

  “What, you think the English have bought Danton’s people?”

  “I think they are paying them, but that’s a different matter. They’re an unscrupulous lot. Time was in this country when you paid a man a bribe you could rely on his honesty.”

  The judge shifted uneasily in his chair. The clerk was becoming aphoristic; when that happened, they always got home late. “Still,” he said. “To the matter in hand.”

  “Ah yes, Maître Desmoulins. He took his father-in-law’s investment advice and went in for City of Paris bonds. And we all know what’s happened to them.”

  “Indeed,” said the judge feelingly.

  “And now the authorities have closed the newspaper he wants another source of income.”

  “He can hardly be poor.”

  “He has money, but wants more. In that, if in no other particular, he resembles the rest of us. I understand he’s playing the stock market. While he waits for that to pay off he intends to recoup his fortunes from the handsome fees he can now command at the Bar.”

  “I was told he hated the business.”

  “But it’s different now, isn’t it? Now if he gets in difficulties we have to sit and wait for him to finish his sentences. We’re a bit afraid—”

  “Not I,” said the judge stoutly.

  “And he is able.”

  “I don’t deny it.”

  “And when milords find the police interfering with their pleasures, how convenient for them to have one of their own to argue the case. Arthur Dillon, de Sillery, that lot, they’ve put him up to this.”

  “And he associates with them quite openly—you’d think the patriots—”

  “Will tolerate most things from him. After all, in a manner of speaking he is the Revolution. I believe there are mutterings, though. Yet after all—this is Paris, not Geneva.”

  “I take it you’re a gambling man yourself.”

  “That’s by the way,” the clerk said breezily. “Perhaps, like Maître Desmoulins, I am interested in limiting the interference of the state in the private life of the individual.”

  “You agree with him?” the judge said. “I shall see you soon with your boots up on the table, sansculotte in homespun trousers, a red cap on your reverend pate and a pike against the wall behind you.”

  “Every possibility,” said the clerk. “Such are the times.”

  “I shall tolerate much, but I shall not permit you to smoke a pipe, like Père Duchesne.”

  Camille made a small gesture to his clients, of rueful apology, then turned his smile on the judge. The man and woman looked at each other, allowing their shoulders to sag a little. “You will not escape imprisonment,” their counsel had told them, “so we may as well use your case to discuss some wider issues.”

  “I wish to ask the court—”

  “Stand up.”

  The lawyer hesitated, did so, wandered across to the judge to stare at him at close range. “I wish to ask for permission to publish my opinion.”

  The judge dropped his voice. “Are you intending to start some sort of public controversy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could do that without my permission.”

  “It’s a formality, isn’t it? I’m polite.”

  “Have you any quarrel with the verdict on
the facts?”

  “No.”

  “On the law?”

  “No.”

  “Then?”

  “I object to the use of the courts as instruments of the intrusive moralizing state.”

  “Really?” The judge leaned forward; he liked to argue generalities. “As you seem to have wiped the church out of the picture, who is going to make men what they ought to be, if the laws do not do it?”

  “Who is to say what men ought to be?”

  “If the people elect their lawmakers—which, nowadays, they do—don’t they depute that task to them?”

  “But if the people and their deputies were formed by a corrupt society, how are they to make good decisions? How are they to form a moral society when they have no experience of one?”

  “We really are going to get home late,” the judge said. “We shall be here for six months if we are to do justice to the question. You mean, how are we to become good when we’re bad?”

  “We used to do it through the agency of divine grace. But the new constitution doesn’t provide for that.”

  “How wrong can you be?” the judge said. “I thought all you fellows were on course for the moral regeneration of humankind. Doesn’t it worry you that you’re out of step with your friends?”

  “Since the Revolution you’re allowed to dissent, aren’t you?”

  He seemed to be waiting for an answer. The judge was disconcerted.

  CHAPTER 2

  Danton: His Portrait Made

  Georges-Jacques Danton: “Reputation is a whore, and people who talk about posterity are hypocrites and fools.”

  Now we have a problem. It wasn’t envisaged that he should have part of the narrative. But time is pressing; the issues are multiplying, and in a little over two years he will be dead.