Authors: Hilary Mantel

A Place of Greater Safety (39 page)

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety

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Louis was a gentleman, Lucile thought. He had dash, he had flair, he had presence. Soon he had a platform too; he joined the editorial board of a royalist scandal sheet called the
Acts of the Apostles.
The deputies who sat on the left were fond of calling themselves “the apostles of liberty,” and Louis thought such pomposity ought to be punished. Who were the contributors? A cabal of exhausted roués and defrocked priests, said the patriots whose noses were out of joint. How did it get written at all? The Acts held “evangelical dinners” at the Restaurant du Mais and at Brinvillier’s, where they’d exchange gossip and plot the next edition. They would invite their opponents and ply them with drink, to see what they’d say. Camille understood the principle: a tidbit here, a trade-off there, a screamingly good time at the expense of the fools and bores who tried to occupy the middle ground. Often a witticism for which the
Révolutions
had no use would find its home in the Acts. “Dear Camille,” Louis said, “if only you would throw in your lot with us. One day we are sure to see eye-to-eye. Never mind this ‘Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity’ rot. Do you know our manifesto? ‘Liberty, Gaiety, Royal Democracy.’ When it comes down to it, we both want the same—we want people to be happy. What’s the use of your Revolution if it breeds long faces? What’s the use of a revolution run by miserable little men in miserable little rooms?”

Liberty, Gaiety, Royal Democracy. The Duplessis women give orders to their dressmakers for the autumn of 1790. Black silks with scarlet sashes and cutaway coats piped with the tricolor take them to first nights, supper parties, private views. Take them to meet new people …

It was still summer, though, when Antoine Saint-Just came to Paris. Not to stay, just to visit; Lucile was avid to get a sight of him. She’d heard the stories, about how he’d absconded with the family silver and had run through the money in a fortnight. She was highly prepared to like him.

He was twenty-two now. The episode with the silver was three years ago. Had Camille perhaps made it up? It was hard to believe a person could change so much. She looked up at Saint-Just—he was tall—and noted the awesome neutrality of his expression. Introductions were made, and he looked at her as if he were not interested in her at all. He was with Robespierre; it seemed they’d exchanged letters. It was quite strange, she thought—most men seemed to fall over themselves in their eagerness to get more out of her than her normal workaday affability. Not that she held it against him: it made a change.

Saint-Just was handsome. He had velvet eyes and a sleepy smile; he moved his fine body carefully, as big men sometimes do. He had a fair skin and dark brown hair—if there was any fault in his face, it was that his chin was too large, too long. It saved him from prettiness, she thought, but seen from certain angles his face had an oddly overbalanced look.

Camille was with her, of course. He was in one of those precarious moods; teasing, but quite ready for a fight. “Done any more poems?” he asked. Last year, Saint-Just had published an epic, and sent it for his opinion; it was interminable, violent, faintly salacious.

“Why? Would you read them?” Saint-Just looked hopeful.

Camille slowly shook his head. “Torture has been abolished,” he said.

Saint-Just’s lip curled. “I suppose it offended you, my poem. I suppose you thought it was pornographic.”

“Nothing so good,” Camille said, laughing.

Their eyes met. Saint-Just said, “My poem had a serious point. Do you think I would waste my time?”

“I don’t know,” Camille said, “whether you would or not.”

Lucile’s mouth went dry. She watched the two men try to face each
other down: Saint-Just waxen, passive, waiting for results, and Camille nervously aggressive, his eyes bright. This is nothing to do with a poem, she thought. Robespierre, too, looked faintly alarmed. “You’re a little severe, Camille,” he said. “Surely the work had some merit?”

“None, none,” Camille said. “But if you like, Antoine, I could bring you some specimens of my own early efforts, and let you mock them at your leisure. You are probably a better poet than I was, and you will certainly be a better politician. Because look at you, you have self-control. You would like to hit me, but you aren’t going to.”

Saint-Just’s expression had deepened; it was not fathomable.

“Have I really offended you?” Camille tried to sound sorry.

“Oh, deeply.” Saint-Just smiled. “I am wounded to the core of my being. Because isn’t it obvious that you are the one human being whose good opinion I crave? You without whom no aristocrat’s dinner party is complete?”

Saint-Just turned his back to speak to Robespierre. “Why couldn’t you be kind?” Lucile whispered.

Camille shrugged. “As a friend, I’d have been kind. But he was talking to an editor, not to a friend. He wanted me to put a piece in the paper crying up his talents. He didn’t want my personal opinion, he wanted my professional opinion. So he got it.”

“What’s happened? I thought you liked him?”

“He was all right. He’s changed. He used to be always thinking up mad schemes and getting into difficulties with women. But look at him, he’s become so solemn. I wish Louis Suleau could see him, he’s a fine example of a miserable revolutionary. He’s a republican, he says. I wouldn’t like to live in his republic.”

“Perhaps he wouldn’t let you.”

Later she heard Saint-Just tell Robespierre, “He is frivolous.”

She contemplated the word. She associated it with giggly summer picnics, or gossipy theater suppers with champagne: the rustling hot still-painted actresses sitting down beside her and saying, I see you are much in love, he is beautiful, I hope you will be happy. She had never before heard it uttered as an indictment, charged with menace and contempt.

T
hat year the Assembly made bishops and priests into public officials, salaried by the state and subject to election, and in time also required of them an oath of loyalty to the new constitution. To some it seemed a mistake to force the priests to a stark choice; to refuse was to be counted
disloyal, and dangerous. Everybody agreed (at her mother’s little afternoon salons) that religious conflict was the most dangerous force that could be unleashed in a nation.

From time to time her mother would sigh over the new developments. “Life will be so prosaic,” she complained. “The constitution, and the high-mindedness, and the Quaker hats.”

“What would you have, my dear?” Danton asked her. “Plumes and grand passions at the Riding School? Mayhem among the Municipality? Love and death?”

“Oh, don’t laugh. Our romantic aspirations have received a shock. Here is the Revolution, the spirit of Rousseau made flesh, we thought—”

“And it is only M. Robespierre, with defective eyesight and a provincial accent.”

“It is only a lot of people discussing their bank balances.”

“Who has been gossiping to you about my affairs?”

“The walls and gateposts talk of you, M. Danton.” She paused, touched his arm. “Tell me something, will you? Do you dislike Max?”

“Dislike him?” he seemed surprised. “I don’t think so. He makes me a bit uneasy, that’s all. He does seem to set everyone very high standards. Will you be able to scrape up to them with you’re his mother-in-law?”

“Oh, that’s—not settled yet.”

“Can’t Adèle make up her mind?”

“It’s more that the question hasn’t been asked.”

“Then it’s what they call an understanding,” Danton said.

“I’m not sure whether Max thinks he has asked her—well, no, I must decline to comment. You need not raise your eyebrows in that way. How can a mere woman say what a deputy understands?”

“Oh, we don’t have ‘mere women’ anymore. Last week your two prospective sons-in-law defeated me in argument. I am told that women are in every respect the equal of men. They only want opportunity.”

“Yes,” she said. “All this is set in motion by that opinionated little creature Louise Robert, who doesn’t know what she’s starting. I don’t see why men should spend their time arguing that women are their equals. It seems against their interests.”

“Robespierre is disinterested, you see. As always. And Camille tells me we shall have to give women the vote. We shall have them at the Riding School soon, wearing black hats and lugging document cases about and droning on about the taxation system.”

“Life will be even more prosaic.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We may yet have our grubby little tragedies.”

S
o has this revolution a philosophy, Lucile wanted to know, has it a future?

She dared not ask Robespierre, or he would lecture her for the afternoon on the General Will; or Camille, for fear of a thoughtful and coherent two hours on the development of the Roman republic. So she asked Danton.

“Oh, I think it has a philosophy,” he said seriously. “Grab what you can, and get out while the going’s good.”

D
ecember 1790: Claude changed his mind. He changed it on an ominous December day, when iron-colored clouds, potbellied with snow, grazed among the city’s roofs and chimneys.

“I just can’t take it anymore,” he said. “Let them get married, before I die of the fatigue of it all. Threats, tears, promises, ultimata … I couldn’t take another year of it, I couldn’t take another week. I should have been much firmer, long ago—but it’s too late now. We’ll have to make the best of it, Annette.”

Annette went to her daughter’s room. Lucile was scribbling away at something. She looked up, startled and guilty, put her hand over her work. An ink blot grew on the page.

When Annette gave her the news, she stared into her mother’s face, her dark eyes wide, hardly comprehending. “So simple?” she whispered. “Claude simply changes his mind, and everything comes right? Somehow I’d started thinking it was very much more complicated than that.” She turned her head. She began to cry. She put her head down onto her diary and let tears flow over the forbidden words: let them salt her paragraphs, let them turn the letters liquid. “Oh, it’s relief,” she said. “It’s relief.”

Her mother stood behind her, took her by the shoulders, gave her an incidental but vindictive pinch. “So, you’ve got what you wanted. Let’s have no more of your nonsense with M. Danton, either. You behave yourself, now.”

“I’ll be a paragon.” She sat upright. “Let’s get organized then.” She scrubbed the back of her hand across her cheeks. “We’ll be married right away.”

“Right away? But think what people will say! And besides, it’s Advent. You can’t get married in Advent.”

“We’ll get a dispensation. As for what people will say, that is a matter for them. I shall not be worrying about it. It is beyond my control.”

Lucile leapt up. She seemed no longer able to contain herself within
civilized bounds. She ran through the house, laughing and crying at the same time, slamming the doors. Camille arrived. He seemed mystified. “Why has she got ink on her forehead?” he asked.

“I suppose you might see it as a second baptism,” Annette said. “Or the republican equivalent of anointing with holy oil. After all, my dear, there’s so much ink in your lives.”

There was in fact a spot of it on Camille’s cuff. He had very much the air of a man who has just written an editorial, and is worrying about what the typesetter will do to it. There was the time he’d referred to Marat as “an apostle of liberty” and it had come out as “an apostate of liberty.” Marat had arrived in the office, foaming with rage … .

“Look. M. Duplessis, are you sure about this?” Camille said. “Good things like this don’t happen to me. Could it be some mistake? A sort of printing error?”

Annette couldn’t stop the images—didn’t want them, but couldn’t stop them. The swish of her skirts as she strode about this room, telling Camille to get out of her life. The rain pattering against the windows. And that kiss, that ten-second kiss that would have ended, if Lucile had not walked in, with a locked door and some undignified gratification on the
chaise-longue.
She cast her eye on it, the same item of furniture, upholstered in fading blue velvet. “Annette,” Claude said, “why are you looking so angry?”

“I’m not angry, dear,” Annette said. “I’m having a lovely day.”

“Really? If you say so. Ah, women!” he said fondly, looking at Camille for complicity. Camille gave him a cool glance; said the wrong thing again, Claude thought, forgotten his Views. “Lucile seems equally confused about her feelings. I hope—” He approached Camille. He seemed to be about to put a hand on his shoulder, but it wavered in the air and dropped loosely at his side. “Well, I hope you’ll be happy.”

Annette said, “Camille, dear, your apartment is very nice, but I expect you’ll be moving to somewhere bigger? You’ll need some more furniture—would you like the
chaise-longue?
I know you’ve always admired it.”

Camille dropped his eyes. “Admired it? Annette, I’ve dreamt of it.”

“I could get it re-upholstered.”

BOOK: A Place of Greater Safety

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