Camille said, “Georges-Jacques, you said you weren’t ready, but you must be ready now.”
Manon out of office. A phrase of Danton’s kept coming back to her: “France’s natural frontiers.” She spent hours these days poring over the maps of the Low Countries, the Rhine. Properly: had she not been one of the foremost advocates of the war policy? Less easy to find the natural frontiers of a human being …
They blamed her, of course, the feather-brained patriots; they said it was because of her letter that Louis had dismissed the ministry. It was nonsense: Louis just wanted a pretext, that was all. She had to brace herself against their accusations, accusations that she had interfered, that she had meddled, that she dictated policy to Roland. It was so unfair; they had always worked together, she and her husband, pooling their talents and energy; she knew his thoughts before he knew them himself. “Roland loses nothing,” she said, “by being interpreted through me.” Glances were exchanged. Always, glances exchanged. She would have liked to slap their complacent male faces.
Buzot alone seemed to understand. He took her hand, pressed it. “Don’t regard them, Manon,” he whispered. “True patriots know your worth.”
They would regain office; this was her opinion. But they would have to fight for it. June 20, the so-called “invasion” of the Tuileries—it had been a fiasco, it had been a joke. It had been mismanaged from start to finish; and mismanagement seemed to be the rule.
Afternoons, these days, she was in the public gallery at the Riding School, listening with gritted teeth to the debate. One day a young woman strode in, wearing a scarlet riding habit, a pistol stuck in her belt. Alarmed, Manon looked around for the usher; but no one except herself took the spectacle amiss. The young woman was laughing; she was surrounded by a pack of supporters; she disposed herself on a bench, proprietorially, and ran her hand back through brown curls cropped short like a man’s. Her claque applauded Vergniaud; they called out his name; they called out to other deputies, and then they tossed apples along the rows and ate them and threw down the cores.
Vergniaud came up to speak to her and she congratulated him on his speech, but in reserved tones; he got too much praise. To the strange, scarlet girl, he merely inclined his head. “That is Théroigne,” he said. “Can it be that you have not seen her before? She spoke to the Jacobins in spring, telling of her ordeal among the Austrians. They yielded the tribune to her. Not many women can say the same.”
He stopped then, with the air of a man who had talked himself into a corner. A hunted, vaguely mutinous expression crossed his face. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Manon murmured. “I shall not ask you to arrange it. I am not one of these viragos.”
“What are they, after all?” Vergniaud said. “Street girls.”
She could, of course, have punched him on the jaw. But look what he was offering—a sweet readmission to the conspiracy, a reinstatement. She smiled. “Street girls,” she said.
Lucile’s baby had taken a lurch to the left, and was kicking her with vigor. She could hardly push herself into an approximately upright position, let alone be civil to a visitor. “Hell,” she said, staring at Théroigne’s outfit. “Aren’t you hot in that scarlet attire? Isn’t it time you put it into honorable retirement?” She could see, in fact, that the hem was frayed, that the dust of the streets was upon it, that even the red was not so red as it used to be.
“Camille’s avoiding me,” Théroigne complained. She paced the room. “He’s hardly exchanged two words with me since I came back to Paris.”
“He’s busy,” Lucile said.
“Oh yes, I’m sure he’s busy. Busy playing cards at the Palais-Royal, busy dining with aristocrats. How can anyone think of passing the time of day with an old friend when there’s so much champagne to be drunk and so many silly, empty-headed bitches to be screwed?”
“Including you,” Lucile murmured.
“No, not including me.” Théroigne stopped pacing. “Never including me. I have never slept with Camille, or with Jérôme Pétion, or with any of the other two dozen men the newspapers have named.”
“The papers will print anything,” Lucile said. “Sit down, please. You’re making me wild and frantic with your red pacing.”
Théroigne didn’t sit. “Louis Suleau will print anything,” she said. “This filthy Acts of the Apostles. Why is Suleau at large, that’s what I want to know? Why isn’t he dead?”
Lucile thought, perhaps I can pretend to go into labor. She essayed a small moan. Théroigne took no notice. “Why is it,” she said, “that Camille can get away with anything? When Suleau laughed at me he just laughed with him, they had their heads together making up more libels, inventing more lovers for me, plotting to expose me to derision and scorn—but no one says to Camille, look, you hang around with Suleau, so how can you be a patriot? Tell me, Lucile, how does it happen?”
“I don’t know.” Lucile shook her head. “It’s a mystery. I suppose—you know how in families there’s usually one child who gets away with more than the others? Well, perhaps it’s like that in revolutions as well.”
“But I’ve suffered, Lucile. I’ve been a prisoner. Does no one understand that?”
Oh Lord, Lucile thought, it looks as if Théroigne has set in for the afternoon. She tottered to her feet. She could see that Théroigne was about to cry. She made clucking noises, laid a hand upon her upper arm, pressed her gently to the blue chaise-longue. “Jeanette,” she called, “have we some ice? Bring me something cool, bring me something sweet.” Inside the scarlet cloth the girl’s skin was hot and damp. “Are you ill?” Lucile asked her. “Dear little Anne, what have they done to you?” As she pressed a folded handkerchief against the girl’s temples, she saw herself, as if from an angel’s height, and thought, what a saintly young woman I am, mopping up this liar.
Théroigne said, “I tried to speak to Pétion yesterday, and he pretended not to have seen me. I want to give Brissot’s people my support, but they pretend I don’t exist. I do exist.”
“Of course,” Lucile said. “Of course you do.”
Théroigne dropped her head. The tears dried on her cheeks. “When will your baby be born?”
“Next week, the doctor says.”
“I had a child.”
“What? Did you? When?”
“She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She would have been—oh, I don’t know. The years go by. You lose track. She died the spring before the Bastille. No, that’s not right—’88, she died, I never saw her, hardly ever. I left her with a foster mother, I paid every month, I sent money for her from wherever I was, Italy, England. But it doesn’t mean I’m hard, Lucile, it doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. I did. She was my little girl.”
Lucile eased herself back into her chair. She rested her hands on the writhing, hidden form of her own baby. Her face showed strain. Something in Théroigne’s tone—something very hard to place—suggested that she might be making this up. “What was your little girl’s name?” she asked.
“Françoise-Louise.” Théroigne looked down at her hands. “One day I would have come for her.”
“I know you would,” Lucile said. A silence. “Do you want to tell me about the Austrians? Is that it?”
“Oh, the Austrians. They were strange.” Théroigne threw back her head. She laughed, her laugh uncertain, forced; alarming, how she snapped from topic to topic, from mood to mood. “They wanted to know the course of my life, my whole life from the time I was born. Where were you on such a date, month, year?—I can’t remember, I’d say—then, ‘Allow us to assist your memory, Mademoiselle,’ and out would come some piece of paper, some little chit I’d signed, some receipt, some laundry list or some pawnbroker’s ticket. They frightened me, those bits of paper; it was as if all my life, from the time I learned to write, these blessed Austrians had set spies to follow me about.”
Lucile thought: if half of this is fact, what do they know about Camille? Or Georges-Jacques? Sh
e said, “Well, you know that can’t be true.”
“How do you account for it then? They had a piece of paper from England, a contract I’d signed with this Italian singing teacher, this man who said he’d promote me. And yes, I had to agree with them, that’s my handwriting—I remembered signing it—the idea was, he’d give me lessons, to improve my technique, then I’d pay him back out of my concert fees. Now, I signed that paper, Lucile, on a foggy afternoon, in London, in Soho, in my teacher’s house on Dean Street. So tell me, tell me, if you can work it out at all—how did that piece of paper get from Dean Street, Soho, onto the desk of the commandant of the prison at Kufstein? How can it have got there, unless someone has been following me all these years?” Suddenly she laughed again, that disturbing, stupid giggle. “On this paper, you know, I’d signed my name, and underneath it said “Anne Théroigne, Spinster.” The Austrians said, “Who is he, this Englishman, this Mr. Spinster? Did you make a secret marriage to him?”
“So there you are,” Lucile said. “They don’t know all about you, do they? This Kufstein, what was it like?”
“It grows out of the rocks,” Théroigne said. Her mood had swung again; she spoke softly, calmly, like a nun looking back on her life. “From the windows of my room I could see the mountains. I had a white table and a white chair.” She frowned, as if trying to recollect. “When they shut me up at first I sang. I sang every song I knew, every aria, every little ditty. When I came to the end of them I started again.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“Oh no. Nothing like that. They were polite, they were … tender. Each day they brought me food, they asked me what I’d like to eat.”
“But what did they want from you, Anne?” She wanted to add, “because you aren’t important.”
“They said I organized the October days, and they wanted to know who paid me to do it. They said I rode to Versailles astride a cannon, and that I led the women into the palace and that I had a sword in my hand. It’s not true, you know. I was there already, in Versailles. I’d rented a room, so I could go to the National Assembly every day and listen to the debates. Yes, I went out and talked to the women, I talked to the National Guard. But when they broke into the palace I was in my bed, asleep.”
“I suppose someone could testify to that,” Lucile said. Théroigne stared at her, uncomprehending. “Never mind,” Lucile said. “I was making a joke. The thing is, Anne—you must have realized by now—since the Bastille fell, it doesn’t matter what you actually did, it’s what people say you did. You can’t pick the past apart in this way, it doesn’t avail you. Once you start to live in the public eye people attribute actions and words to you, and you have to live with that. If they say you rode astride a cannon, then I’m afraid you did.”
Théroigne looked up at her. “Did I? I did.”
“No, I mean—” Oh, curse God, Lucile thought, she’s not very bright, is she? “No, you didn’t—oh, can’t you understand?”
Théroigne shook her head. “They asked me about the Jacobin Club. Asked who was paid to say what. I don’t know anything about the Jacobins. But there it is. They didn’t like my answers.”
“Some of us thought, you know, that we would never see you again.”
“People say that I ought to write a book about it. But I’ve no education, Lucile, I could no more write a book than I could land on the moon. Do you think Camille would write it for me?”
“Why did the Austrians let you go, Anne?”
“They took me to Vienna. I saw the chancellor, the Emperor’s chief minister, in his private rooms.”
“Yes, but you are not answering my question.”
“Then they took me back to Liege. To where I was born. I thought I was used to traveling, but they were hell, these journeys—oh, they tried to be kind to me, but I wanted to lie by the roadside and die. When we got to Liege they gave me some money, they said I could go where I liked. I said, even Paris? They said, yes, of course.”
“We knew this,” Lucile said. “It was reported in Le Moniteur, last December. We kept the paper, I have it somewhere. We said, ‘So, she’s on her way home.’ We were surprised. There were rumors, from time to time, that the Austrians had hanged you. But instead of that, they let you go, gave you money, didn’t they? Do you wonder Camille keeps away from you now?”
A good lawyer, she has closed her case. And yet it is hard to believe that—as everyone thinks but doesn’t say—the girl has agreed to act as a spy. Take away the firearms, strip the scarlet away, and she seems harmless, hopeless, not even quite sane. “Anne,” she said. “You ought to think of getting out of Paris. Somewhere quiet. Till you get your health back.”
Théroigne looked up at her quickly. “You forget, Lucile. I once let the journalists drive me out, I let Louis Suleau kick me out of Paris. Then what happened? I had a room at an inn, Lucile, miles from anywhere, the birds singing, just what you need to recuperate. I ate well, and I slept so soundly, those nights. Then one night I woke up, and there were men in my room, and they were men I didn’t know, and they dragged me out, into the dark.”
“I think you should go now,” Lucile said. Fear touched the base of her throat; fear touched the pit of her stomach, and laid its cold finger on her child.
“Lafayette is in Paris,” Fabre said.
“So I hear.”
“You knew, Danton?”
“I know everything, Fabre.”
“So when are you going to tear him in little pieces?”
“Restrain yourself, Fabre.”
“But you said—”
“A bit of bombast has its uses. It encourages others. I am thinking of visiting my in-laws in Fontenay for a day or two.”
“I see.”
“The general has plans. For marching on the Jacobins, closing them down. Reprisals for June 20. He hopes to carry the National Guard with him. In the event, no one can prove that I had anything to do with June 20—”
“Mm,” Camille said.
“—but I prefer to avoid inconvenience. It will come to nothing.”
“But surely this is serious.”
Danton was patient. “It isn’t serious, as we know his plans.”
“How do we know?”
“Pétion told me.”
“Who told Pétion?”
“Antoinette.”
“Dear God.”
“Yes, stupid, aren’t they? When Lafayette is the only person still willing to do anything for them. It makes you wonder about the wisdom of dealing with them at all.”
Camille looked up. “Dealing with them?”
“Dealing with them, child. Grabbing what you can.”
“You don’t mean it. You don’t deal with them.”
“Fabre, do I mean it?”
“Yes, you mean it.”
“Now, does it worry you, Fabre?”
“Not in the sense of having scruples. I think it frightens me. Worrying about the possible complications.”
“Not in the sense of having scruples,” Danton repeated. “Frightens him. Scruples. What a beautiful concept. Mention this conversation to Robespierre, Camille, and I’m finished with you. My God,” he said. He went away, shaking his head vigorously.
“Mention what?” Camille said.
Lafayette’s plan: a grand review of the National Guard, at which the general will inspect the troops and the King himself will be present to take the salute. The King will withdraw, Lafayette will harangue the battalions; for is he not their first, most glorious commander, does he not have the natural authority to take control again? Then in the name of the constitution, in the name of the monarchy, in the name of public order, General Lafayette will proceed to put the capital to rights. Not that he has the King’s enthusiastic backing; for Louis is afraid of failure, afraid of the consequences of it, and the Queen says coldly that she would rather be murdered than be saved by Lafayette.
Pétion can move quickly, when he likes. An hour before the review is due to begin, he simply cancel
s it: leaving the arrangements to cannon into each other, and relying on natural confusion to undo any larger schemes. The general is left to trail through the streets with his aides, cheered on by patriots of the old-fashioned sort. He is left to assess his situation; to take the road out of Paris to his army command on the frontier. At the Jacobins, Deputy Couthon is wheeled to the tribune, to denounce the general as a “great scoundrel”; Maximilien Robespierre calls him “an enemy of the Fatherland”; Messieurs Brissot and Desmoulins vie with each other in heaping the hero with abuse. The Cordeliers come back from the short holiday many of them had found it wise to take, and burn the general in effigy, coining slogans for the future above the cracking and spitting of the uniformed doll.
Annette said, “If she survives this, will you be good?” July morning, sunshine, a fresh breeze. Camille looked out of the window, saw the rue des Cordeliers, his neighbors busying about, life going on in its achingly usual way; heard the printing presses at work in the Cour du Commerce, saw women stopping to chat on the corner, tried hard to imagine any other kind of life or any kind of death. “I’ve stopped striking bargains with God,” he said. “So don’t you try to wring a bargain from me, Annette.”
He looked, Annette thought, utterly wretched; pale, shaky, quite unable to come to terms with the fact that his wife must give birth and that it was going to hurt her. It’s remarkable, really, how many quite ordinary things Camille can’t or won’t come to terms with. I’ll put the knife in just a bit, Annette thought, just as inch or two; not often that you have him at a disadvantage these days. “You’re just playing at marriage,” she said. “Both of you. This is the bit that isn’t a game.” She waited.
“I would die,” Camille said, “if anything happened to her.”
“Yes.” Annette got up wearily from her chair. She had gone to bed at midnight, but been roused at two o’clock. “Yes, I almost believe you would.”
A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Page 48
