A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “Lanterne Attorney!” Vadier said. “I thought you’d repented of all that?”

  “Call it nostalgia,” Camille said. “Call it habit. Call it what you like, but do realize that you won’t get rid of me until I have some answers from you.”

  Vadier looked morose, and pulled his long Inquisitor’s nose. He swore by the limbs of the Supreme Being that he knew nothing of the affair. Yes, he admitted, it could be that the Section officials were out of control; it was possible, yes, that Hébert was acting out of personal malice; no, he had no knowledge of any evidence against Claude Duplessis, retired civil servant. He looked at Camille with frank detestation and considerable alarm. “Hebert is a fool,” he muttered as he hurried away, “to give Danton’s mob a chance to try their strength.”

  Robespierre appeared blinking and preoccupied from the Committee of Public Safety, summoned by an urgent message. He hurried forward and took Camille’s hands, dictated a rapid stream of orders to a secretary and signified his intention of seeing Père Duchesne in hell. The onlookers noted his tone, the haste, the handclasp above all. Hastily, they memorized the signs on his face, to puzzle over and interpret later; immediately, with the lift of an eyebrow, a glance held a second too long, the questioning twitch of a nostril sniffing the political wind—immediately, imperceptibly, allegiances began to drift. By midday, the expression on Hébert’s face had become less complacent; he was, in fact, on the run, and remained so in his own mind until well after Claude Duplessis’s release: until some weeks later, when he himself heard a patrol in the early morning, and found he had no friends.

  The new calender wasn’t working. Nivôse wasn’t snowy, and spring would be here before Germinal. It would arrive immoderately early, so that flower girls congregated on street corners and the seamstresses were busy with simple patriotic dresses for the summer of ’94.

  In the Luxembourg Gardens trees hung out unseasonable flags of green among the cannon foundries. Fabre d’Églantine watched the season change, from his prison room in the National Building that was once the Luxembourg Palace. The raw, bright, blustery days made the pain in his chest worse. Each morning he examined himself in the fine mirror he had sent home for, and noted that his face was thinner and his eyes suspiciously bright, with a brightness that had nothing to do with his prospects.

  He heard that Danton’s initiatives didn’t prosper, that Danton didn’t see Robespierre. Danton, see Robespierre, he demanded of his prison wall: bully, beg, deceive, demand. Sometimes he lay awake listening for the sound of the Dantonist mob roistering through the city; silence answered back. Camille is friends with Robespierre again, his gaoler told him; adding that he and his wife didn’t believe that Camille was an aristocrat, and that Citizen Robespierre was a true friend of the working man, his continued good health the only guarantee of sugar in the shops and firewood at reasonable prices.

  Fabre ran over in his mind all the things he had ever done for Camille; they were not many. He sent out for his complete set of the Encyclopédie, and for his small ivory telescope; with them for company he settled down to await either his natural or unnatural death.

  17 Pluviôse—it wasn’t raining—Robespierre spoke to the Convention, outlining the basis of his future policy, his plans for the Republic of Virtue. As he left the hall a rustle of consternation followed him. He seemed more tired than one could reasonably be, even after his hours at the tribune; his lips were bloodless, his eyes dark and hollow with exhaustion. Some of the survivors from those days mentioned Mirabeau’s sudden collapse. But he appeared punctually for the next session of the Committee; his eyes traveled from face to face, to see who was disappointed.

  22 Pluviôse, he woke in the night fighting for breath. In the intervals of panic he forced himself to his writing table. But he had forgotten what he wanted to write; a wave of nausea brought him to his hands and knees on the floor. You do not die, he said, as he fought to expel the air trapped in his lungs, you do not, he said with each aspiration, die. You have survived this before.

  When the attack passed he ordered himself up from the floor. I will not do it, his body said: you have finished me, killed me, I refuse to serve such a master.

  His head dropped. If I stay here, he thought, I shall stretch out and go to sleep on the floor, just where I am, I will then take a chill, everything will be finished.

  So, said the body, you should not have treated me as your slave, abusing me with fasting and chastity and broken sleep. What will you do now? Tell your intellect to get you off the floor, tell your mind to keep you on your feet tomorrow.

  He took hold of the leg of a chair, then its back. He watched his hand creep along the wood; he was falling asleep. His hand became infinitely distant. He dreamed of his grandfather’s household. There are no barrels for this week’s brewing, someone said; all the wood has been used for scaffolding. Scaffolding or scaffolds? Anxiously he felt in his pocket for a letter from Benjamin Franklin. The letter told him, “You are an electrical machine.”

  Eléonore found him at first light. She and her father stood guard over the door. Souberbielle arrived at eight o’clock. He spoke very slowly, very distinctly, as if to a deaf person: cannot answer for the consequences, he said, cannot answer for the consequences. He nodded to show that he understood. Souberbielle bent to catch his whisper. “Shall I make my will?”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” the doctor said cheerfully. “Have you much to bequeath, by the way?”

  He shook his head; let his eyes close, and smiled slightly.

  “There is never anything the matter with them,” Souberbielle said. “I mean, in the sense that it is this disease, or that disease. In September we thought we’d lost Danton. So many years of hard work and panics can reduce even a strong man like that to a wreck—and Citizen Robespierre is not strong. No, of course he is not dying. Nobody actually dies of the things that are wrong with him, they just have their lives made harder. How long? He needs to rest, that’s the thing, to be well out of everything. I’d say a month. If he leaves that room sooner, I’ll not be responsible.”

  Members of the Committee came. It took him a moment to work out their individual faces, but he knew at once it was the Committee. “Where is Saint-Just?” he whispered. By now he had got into the habit of whispering. Don’t struggle for breath, the doctor had said. The committeemen exchanged glances.

  “He has forgotten,” they said. “You have forgotten,” they told him. “He went to the frontier. He will be back in ten days.”

  “Couthon? Could he not be carried up the stairs?”

  “He’s ill,” they said. “Couthon is also ill.”

  “Is he dying?”

  “No. But his paralysis has become worse.”

  “Will he be back tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow.”

  Then who will rule the country? he asked himself. Saint-Just. “Danton—” he said. Don’t struggle for breath. If you don’t struggle for it, it will come, the doctor said. He put his hand to his chest in panic. He could not take that advice. It was not his experience of life.

  “Will you let Danton have my place?”

  They exchanged glances again. Robert Lindet leaned over him. “Do you wish it?”

  He shook his head vehemently. He hears Danton’s drawling voice: “unnatural acts among the affidavits … Do you ever ask yourself what God left out?” His eyes searched for the eyes of this solid Norman lawyer, a man without theories, without pretensions, a man unknown to the mob. “Not to have it,” he said at last. “Not to rule. No vertu.”

  Lindet’s face was expressionless.

  “For a little while I shall not be with you,” Robespierre said. “Then, again, I will be with you.”

  “Those are familiar words,” Collot said. “He can’t remember where he has heard them before. Don’t worry, we didn’t think it was time for your apotheosis yet.”

  Lindet said gently, “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Robespierre looked up at Collot. He is taking a
dvantage of my weakness, he thought. “Please give me some paper,” he whispered. He wanted to make a note: that as soon as he was well, Collot must be reduced.

  The members of the Committee spoke very politely to Eléonore. They did not necessarily believe Dr. Souberbielle, who said he would be better in a month; she understood that if by any chance he should die, she would be treated as the Widow Robespierre, as Simone Evrard was the Widow Marat.

  The days passed. Souberbielle gave him permission to have more visitors, to read, to write—but only his personal letters. He might receive the news of the day, if it were not agitating; but all the news was agitating.

  Saint-Just came back. We go on very well, in the Committee, he said. We are going to crush the factions. Does Danton still talk of negotiating a peace? he asked. Yes, Saint-Just said. But no one else does. Good republicans talk of victory.

  Saint-Just was now twenty-six years old. He was very handsome, very forceful. He spoke in short sentences. Speak of the future, Robespierre said. He talked then of his Spartan republic. In order to breed a new race of men, he said, children would be taken from their parents when they reached five years old, to be trained as farmers, soldiers or lawmakers. Little girls too? Robespierre asked. Oh no, they do not matter, they will stay at home with their mothers.

  Nervously, Robespierre’s hands moved across the bedcovers. He thought of his godson, one day old, his fluttering skull steadied by his father’s long fingers; his godson, a few weeks old, gripping his coat collar and making a speech. But he was too weak to argue. People said now that Saint-Just was attached to Henriette Lebas, the sister of Babette’s husband Philippe. But he didn’t believe this; he didn’t believe he was attached to anyone, anyone at all.

  He waited till Eléonore was out of the room. He was stronger now, could make his voice heard. He beckoned to Maurice Duplay. “I want to see Camille.”

  “Do you think that’s a good thing?”

  Duplay sent the message. Oddly enough, Eléonore seemed neither pleased nor displeased.

  When Camille came they did not talk about politics, or about recent years at all. Once, Camille mentioned Danton; he turned his head away, with his old gesture of rigid obstinacy. They talked of the past, their common past, with the forced cheerfulness that people assume when there is a dead body in the house.

  Left alone, he lay dreaming of the Republic of Virtue. Five days before he became ill, he had defined his terms. He meant a republic of justice, of community, of self-sacrifice. He saw a free people, gentle, bucolic and learned. The darkness of superstition had drained away from the people’s lives: brackish water, vanishing into soil. In its place flourished the rational, jocund, worship of the Supreme Being. These people were happy; their hearts were not wracked or their flesh tormented by questions without answers or desires without resolution. Men came with gravity and wit to matters of government; they instructed their children, and harvested plain and plentiful food from their own land. Dogs and cats, the animals in the field: all were respected, for their own natures. Garlanded girls, in soft robes of pale linen, moved sedately among colonnades of white marble. He saw the deep dark glint of olive groves, and the blue enamel sky.

  “Look at this,” Robert Lindet said. He unrolled the newspaper and shook out of it a piece of bread. “Feel,” he said, “go on, taste it.”

  It crumbled easily in his fingers. It had a sour musty smell. “I thought you might not know,” Lindet said, “if you were living on your usual diet of oranges. There’s plenty of the stuff at the moment, but you can see for yourself the quality. People can’t live on this. There is no milk either, and the poorer people use a lot of milk. As for meat, people are lucky to get a scrag-end for soup. The women start queueing outside the butchers’ at three in the morning. This week the National Guard has had to break up fights.”

  “If this goes on—I don’t know.” He passed a hand over his face. “People starved every year under the old regime. Lindet, where is it, where is all the food? The land still produces.”

  “Danton says we have frozen trade up with our regulations. He says—it’s true enough—that the peasants are afraid to bring their produce into the cities in case they get on the wrong side of some regulation and end up being lynched for profiteering. We requisition where we can, but they hide the stuff, they prefer to let it rot. Danton’s people say that if we took the controls off, supply would begin to move again.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “The agitators in the Sections support controls. They tell the people it is the only way to do things. It is an impossible situation.”

  “So …”

  “I await your guidance.”

  “What does Hébert say?”

  “Excuse me. Give me the newspaper.” He shook it out, and crumbs showered onto the floor. “There.”

  “‘The butchers who treat the sansculottes like dogs and give them nothing to gnaw upon but bones should be guillotined like all the enemies of the ordinary people.’”

  Robespierre’s lip curled. “Very constructive,” he said.

  “Unfortunately, the mass of the people has not gained much in wisdom since ’89. This sort of suggestion seems a solution, to them.”

  “Is there much unrest?”

  “Of a sort. They are not demanding liberty. They don’t seem to be interested in their rights now. Camille and the release of suspects were very popular, around Christmas. But now they only think about the food supply.”

  “Hébert will exploit this,” Robespierre said.

  “There’s a good deal of agitation, trouble, in the arms factories. We can’t afford strikes. The army is under-supplied as it is.”

  Robespierre lifted his head. “The agitators must be rounded up, in the streets, factories, wherever. I understand that the people have grievances, but we can’t let everything go now. People must sacrifice themselves for the nation. It will work out, in the long term.”

  “Saint-Just and Vadier on the Police Committee keep a tight hand on things. Unfortunately,” Lindet hesitated, “without a political decision at the highest level, we can’t move against the real troublemakers.”

  “Hébert.”

  “He will get up an insurrection if he can. The government will fall. Read the newspaper. There is a movement at the Cordeliers—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Robespierre said. “I know it all too well. The bombast to get your courage up, and the meetings in back rooms. It is only Hébert that balances out the influence of Danton. Here I am, helpless, and everything is falling apart. Won’t the people be loyal to the Committee, after we have saved them from invasion, and fed them as best we can?”

  “I’d hoped to spare you this,” Lindet said. He reached into a pocket and took out a piece of card, which he unfolded. It was an official notice, giving the hours and wage rates for government workshops. There was a ragged tear at each corner, where it had been ripped from the wall.

  Robespierre stretched out his hand for it. The notice bore the reproduced signatures of six members of the Committee of Public Safety. Underneath them, crudely scrawled in red, were the words:

  CANNIBALS. THIEVES. MURDERERS.

  Robespierre let it fall onto the bed. “Were the Capets abused like this?” He dropped his head against the pillows. “It is my duty to hunt out the men who have misled and betrayed these poor people and put these wicked thoughts into their heads. I swear to you, from now on I shall not let the Revolution out of my own hands.”

  After Lindet had gone he sat for a long time, propped up by pillows, watching the afternoon light change and flit across the ceiling. Dusk fell. Eléonore crept in with lights. She put a log on the fire, shuffled together the loose papers that lay about the room. She stacked up books and replaced them on the shelves, refilled his jug of water and drew the curtains. She stood over him and gently touched his face. He smiled at her.

  “You are feeling better?”

  “Much better.”

  Suddenly she sat down at the
foot of the bed, as if all the strength had left her; her shoulders slumped, she cradled her head in her hands. “Oh,” she said, “we thought at first you’d die. You looked like a corpse, when we found you on the floor. What would happen if you died? None of us could go on.”

  “I didn’t die,” he said. His tone was pleasant, decisive. “Also I’m more clear now about what has to be done. I shall be going to the Convention tomorrow.”

  The date was 21 Ventôse—March 11, old-style. It was thirty days since his withdrawal from public life. He felt as if all the years past he had been enclosed by a shell, penetrable to just a little light and sound; as if his illness had split it open, and the hand of God had plucked him out, pure and clean.

  March 12: “The mandate of the Committee was renewed by the Convention for a further month,” Robert Lindet said. “There was no opposition.” He said it very formally, as if he were a speaking gazette.

  “Mm,” Danton said.

  “There wouldn’t be, would there?” Camille leapt up to pace about the room. “There wouldn’t be any opposition. The members of the Convention stand up and sit down to the applause of the galleries. Which the Committee had packed, I imagine.”

  Lindet sighed. “You’re right. Nothing is left to chance.” His eyes followed Camille. “Will you be glad of Hébert’s death? I suppose you will.”

  “Is it a foregone conclusion?” Danton asked.

  “The Cordeliers Club calls for insurrection, for a day. So does Hébert in his newspaper. No government in five years has stood up to insurrection.”

  “But then,” Camille said, “Robespierre was never the government.”

  “Exactly. Either he’ll snuff it out before it begins, or smash it by force of arms.”

  “Man of action,” Danton said. He laughed.

  “You were, once,” Lindet said.

  Danton swept an arm out. “I am the Opposition.”

  “Robespierre threatened Collot. If Collot had shown the slightest leaning towards Hébert’s tactics, he would be in prison now.”