Danton stared at him blankly. “And your conclusion?”
“I like …” Robespierre hesitated. “I like to think around all the possible circumstances. We mustn’t be doctrinaire. But then, pragmatism can so easily degenerate into lack of principle.”
“They kill dictators,” Danton said. “In the end.”
“But if, before that happens, you have saved your country? ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the people.’”
“Forget it. I’ve no desire to be a martyr. Have you?”
“It’s all hypothetical anyway. But you and I, Danton … You and I,” he said thoughfully, “are not alike.”
“I wonder what Robespierre really thinks of me?” Danton said to Camille.
“Oh, he thinks you’re wonderful.” Camille smiled as best he could in his rather nervous and distracted state. “He can’t praise you too highly.”
“I’d like to know how Danton really regards me,” Robespierre said.
“Oh, he can’t praise you too highly.” Camille’s smile was a little strained. “He thinks you’re wonderful.”
Life’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now.
Everything you disapprove of you’ll call “aristocratic.” This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.
If “Liberty” was the watchword of the first Revolution, “Equality” is that of the second. “Fraternity” is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.
All persons are now plain “Citizen” or “Citizeness.” The Place Louis XV will become the Place de la Revolution, and the scientific beheading machine will be set up there; it will become known as the “guillotine,” in tribute to Dr. Guillotin the noted public-health expert. The rue Monsieur-de-Prince will become the rue Liberté, the Place de la Croix-Rouge will become the Place de la Bonnet-Rouge. Notre Dame will become the Temple of Reason. Bourg-la-Reine will become Bourg-la-République. And in the fullness of time, the rue des Cordeliers will become the rue Marat.
Divorce will be very easy.
For a time, Annette Duplessis will continue to walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. A cannon factory will be set up there; the patriotic din and stench will be beyond belief, and the patriotic waste products will be tipped into the Seine.
The Luxembourg Section will become the Section Mutius Scaevola. The Romans are very fashionable. So are the Spartans. The Athenians less so.
In at least one provincial town, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro will be banned, just as the King once banned it. It depicts a style of life now outlawed; also, it requires the wearing of aristocratic costumes.
“Sansculottes,” the working men call themselves, because they wear trousers not breeches. With them, a calico waistcoat with broad tricolor stripes: a hip-length jacket of coarse wool, called a carmagnole. On the sansculotte head, the red bonnet, the “cap of liberty.” Why liberty is thought to require headgear is a mystery.
For the rich and powerful, the aim is to be accepted as sansculotte in spirit, without assuming the ridiculous uniform. But only Robespierre and a handful of others keep hope alive for the unemployed hairdressers of France. Many members of the new Convention will wear their hair brushed forward and cut straight across their foreheads, like the statues of heroes of antiquity. Riding boots are worn on all occasions, even at harp recitals. Gentlemen have the air of being ready to run down a Prussian column after dinner, any day of the week.
Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
There will be economic controls, price maximums imposed by the government. There will be coffee riots and sugar riots. One month there will be no firewood, then it will be no soap, or no candles. The black market will be a flourishing but desperate business, with the death penalty for hoarders and traffickers.
There will be persistent rumors about ci-devant lords and ladies, returned émigrés. Someone has seen a marquis working as a bootblack, his wife taking in sewing. A duke is employed as a footman in his own house, which now belongs to a Jewish banker. Some people like to think these things are true.
In the National Assembly there were deplorable occasions when overwrought gentlemen placed hands on rapier hilts. In the Convention and the Jacobin Club, fist and knife fights will be quite common. Dueling will be replaced by assassination.
For the rich—the new rich, that is—it is possible to live as well as one would have liked to under the old regime. Camille Desmoulins, in semi-private conversation at the Jacobins, one evening in ’93: “I don’t know why people complain about not being able to make money nowadays. I have no trouble.”
Churches will be despoiled, statues disfigured. Stone-eyed saints raise stumps of fingers in truncated benediction. If you want to save a statue of the Virgin, you put a red cap on her head and turn her into a Goddess of Liberty. And that’s the way all the virgins save themselves; who wants these ferocious political women?
Because of the changes in the street names, it will become impossible to direct people around the city. The calendar will be changed too; January is abolished, good-bye to aristocratic June. People will ask each other, “What’s today in real days?”
’92, ’93 ’94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.
Danton’s first action at the Ministry of Justice was to call together his senior civil servants. He surveyed them. A grin split his broken face. “I advise you gentlemen,” he said, “to take up the option of early retirement.”
“I’ll miss you terribly,” Louise Gély said to Gabrielle. “Shall I come and see you at the Place Vendôme?”
“The Place des Piques,” Gabrielle corrected. She smiled: a very small smile. “Yes, of course you must come. And we will be back soon, because Georges has only taken office for the Emergency, and when the Emergency is over—” She bit the words back. Tempting fate, she called it.
“You shouldn’t be frightened,” Louise said, hugging her gently. “You should have a look in your eyes which says, I know that while my husband is in the city the enemy cannot come.”
“Well, Louise … you are brave.”
“Danton believes it.”
“But can one man do so much by himself?”
“It’s not a question of one man.” She moved away. Hard sometimes not to be irritated by Gabrielle. “It’s a question of many men with the best leader.”
“I didn’t think you liked my husband.”
Louise raised her eyebrows. “When did I say I did? All the same, it is good of him to do something for my father.”
M. Gély had a new post at the Ministry of Marine.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Gabrielle said. “He’s found places for all the people who used to be his clerks, and—oh, everybody really. Even Collot d’Herbois, whom we don’t like.”
“And are they duly grateful?” Probably not, Louise thought. “People he likes, people he doesn’t like, people of no importance whatever—I think he’d give the whole city a job, if he could. It’s interesting. I was wondering why he has sent Citizen Fréron off to Metz?”
“Oh,” she said uneasily, “it’s to do with the Executive Council there—they need some help running their revolution, I suppose.”
“Metz is on the frontier.”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if he’d done it as a favor to Citizeness Desmoulins. Fréron was always following her around, wasn’t he? And giving her soulful glances, and paying her compliments. Danton doesn’t like it. It will make life easier for him, now that Fréron’s away.”
Gabrielle wouldn’t, out of choice, be having this conversation. Even this child notices
, she thinks, even this child of fourteen knows all about it.
When the news of the coup of August 10 reached his military headquarters, General Lafayette tried to organize his armies to march on Paris and bring down the Provisional Government. Only a handful of officers were prepared to back him. On August 19 he crossed the border near Sedan, and was promptly taken prisoner by the Austrians.
The Ministry of Justice had taken to having breakfast together, to work out the plan for the day. Danton greeted everyone except his wife, but after all, he had seen her before that morning. This would have been the time to make the change to separate rooms, they both thought; but neither had the heart to mention it first. Consequently, the usual conjugal arrangements were made; they woke up beneath a coronet and a canopy, stifled by velvet bed curtains thicker than Turkey carpets.
Lucile was wearing gray this morning. Dove-gray: piquantly puritanical, Danton thought. He imagined leaning across and kissing her savagely on the mouth.
Nothing affected Danton’s appetite—not a sudden seizure of lust, not the national emergency, not the historic dust of the state bed curtains. Lucile ate nothing. She was starving herself, trying to get back pre-pregnancy angles. “You’ll fade away, girl,” Danton told her.
“She’s trying to look like her husband,” Fabre explained. “She will not admit to it, but for some reason best known to herself that is what she is doing.”
Camille sipped a small cup of black coffee. His wife watched him covertly as he opened their letters—nasty little slits with a paperknife, and his long elegant fingers. “Where are François and Louise?” Fabre asked. “Something must be detaining them. How quaint they are, always waking up side by side and always in the bed they started off in.”
“Enough!” Danton said. “We shall have a rule, no lubricious gossip before breakfast.”
Camille put down his coffee cup. “For you it may be before breakfast, but some of us are anxious to begin on our daily ration of scandal, backbiting and malice.”
“We must hope the gracious atmosphere of the place will seep into us in time. Even into Fabre.” Danton turned to him. “It won’t be like living among the Cordeliers, with your every little depravity applauded as soon as you step out of doors.”
“I’m not depraved,” Fabre complained. “Camille’s depraved. Incidentally, I suppose it will be all right for Caroline Rémy to move in?”
“No,” Danton said. “It won’t be all right at all.”
“Why not? Hérault won’t mind, he can call round.”
“I don’t give a damn whether he minds or not. Do you think you’re going to turn the place into a brothel?”
“Are you serious?” Fabre demanded. He looked at Camille for support, but Camille was reading his letters.
“Divorce your Nicole, marry Caroline, and she’ll be welcome.”
“Marry her?” Fabre said. “You’re certainly not serious.”
“Well, if it’s so unthinkable, she shouldn’t be in the company of our wives.”
“Oh, I see.” Fabre was belligerent. Quite right too; he can’t believe what he’s hearing. The minister and his colleague the other secretary have both availed themselves of Caro quite frequently, this summer. “There’s one law for you,” he says, “and quite another for me.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Am I proposing to keep a mistress on the premises?”
“Yes,” Fabre muttered.
Camille laughed out loud.
“Please realize,” Danton said, “that if you move Caro in here, the ministries and the Assembly will know about it in an hour, and it will bring down on us—on me—some very severe and justified criticism.”
“Very well,” Fabre said resentfully. “Change the subject. Do you want to hear what Condorcet has to say about your elevation, Minister, in today’s paper?”
“I hope you won’t edify us with Brissotin ramblings every morning,” Lucile said. “However. Go on.”
Fabre unfolded the sheet. “‘The Chief Minister had to be someone who possessed the confidence of the agitators lately responsible for overthrowing the monarchy. He had to be a man with sufficient personal authority to control this most advantageous, glorious and necessary Revolution’s most contemptible instruments.’ That’s us, Camille. ‘He had to be a man of such eloquence, spirit and character that he would demean neither the office he held nor those members of the National Assembly called upon to have dealings with him. Danton only combined these qualities. I voted for him, and I do not regret my decision.’” Fabre leaned over to Gabrielle. “There now—aren’t you impressed by that?”
“Something grudging in the middle,” Camille said.
“Patronizing.” Lucile reached out to take the paper from Fabre. “‘Called upon to have dealings with him.’ It sounds as if you’d be in a cage and they’d poke you with a long stick through the bars. And their teeth would chatter.”
“As if it mattered,” Camille said, “whether Condorcet regretted his decision. As if he had a choice, in the first place. As if Brissotin opinion mattered to anyone.”
“You will find it matters when the National Convention is elected,” Danton said.
“I like that bit about your character,” Fabre said. “What if he’d seen you dragging Mandat through City Hall?”
“Let’s try and forget that,” Danton said.
“Oh—and I thought it was one of your better moments, Georges-Jacques.”
Camille had sorted his letters into little piles. “Nothing from Guise,” he said.
“Perhaps they’re overawed by the new address.”
“I think they simply don’t believe me. They think it’s one of my elaborate lies.”
“Don’t they get the newspapers?”
“Yes, but they know better than to believe what they read in the newspapers, thank goodness. Now that I write for them. You know, my father thinks I shall be hanged.”
“You may be yet,” Danton said, jocular.
“This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville.” Camille cast an eye over his relative’s best handwriting. “Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm squirm squirm … ‘the election of the Patriot Ministers … I know them all by reputation, but I am not so happy as to be known by them—’”
“He’s known by me,” Danton said. “Useful fellow. Does as he’s told.”
“‘I flatter myself that you will put forward my interests to the Minister of Justice to procure me a situation … you know I am the father of a large family and not well-off … .’ There.” He dropped the letter in front of Danton. “I put forward the interest of my humble and obedient servant Antoine Fouquier-Tinville. He is spoken of in the family as a perfectly competent lawyer. Employ him if you choose.”
Danton picked up the letter. He laughed. “The servility, Camille! Just think—three years ago this spring, would he have given you the time of day?”
“Absolutely not. Wouldn’t have been related to me even remotely, until the Bastille fell.”
“Still,” Danton said, reading the letter, “your cousin might be useful for our special tribunal that we are setting up to try the losers. Leave it with me, I’ll find him something to do.”
“What are those?” Lucile indicated the other pile of letters.
“Those were ingratiating.” Camille waved a hand. “These are obscene.” Her attention fastened on the hand; it looked almost transparent. “You know, I used to give such correspondence to Mirabeau. He kept a file.”
“Can I see?” Fabre asked.
“Later,” Danton said. “Does Robespierre get these things?”
“Yes, a few. Maurice Duplay sifts them out. Of course, the household is wonderful prey for the avid imagination. All those daughters, and the two young boys. Maurice gets very cross. I’m often mentioned, it seems. He complains to me. As if I could do anything about it.”
“Robespierre should get married,” Fabre said.
“It doesn’t seem
to help.” Danton turned to his wife, mock-uxurious. “What are you going to do today, my love?” Gabrielle didn’t reply. “Your zest for life is unbounded, isn’t it?”
“I miss my home,” Gabrielle said. She looked down at the tablecloth. She did not care to have her private life in public.
“Why don’t you go and spend some money?” her husband suggested. “Take your mind off it. Go to the dressmakers, or whatever it is you do.”
“I’m three months pregnant. I’m not interested in dresses.”
“Don’t be horrible to her, Georges-Jacques,” Lucile said softly.
Gabrielle threw back her head and glared at her. “I don’t need your protection, you little slut.” She got up from the table. “Excuse me, please.” They watched her go.
“Forget about it, Lolotte,” Danton said. “She’s not herself.”
“Gabrielle has the temperament of these letter writers,” Fabre said. “She views everything in the worst possible light.”
Danton pushed the letters towards Fabre. “Quench your burning curiosity. But take them away.”
Fabre made Lucile an extravagant bow, and left the room with alacrity.
“He won’t like them,” Danton said. “Not even Fabre will like them.”
“Max has marriage proposals,” Camille said unexpectedly. “He gets two or three a week. He keeps them in his room, tied up with tape. He files everything, you know.”
“This is one of your fantasies,” Danton said.
“No, I assure you. He keeps them under his mattress.”
“How do you know?” Danton said narrowly.
They began to laugh. “Don’t go spreading this story,” Camille said, “because Max will know where it comes from.”
Gabrielle reappeared, standing in the doorway, sullen and tense. “When you are finished, I’d like to speak to my husband, just for one moment. If you can spare him?”
Danton got up. “You can be Minister of Justice today,” he said to Camille, “and I shall deal with what Gabrielle calls ‘the foreign business.’ Yes, my love, what was it you wanted?”
A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Page 55
