Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien

Georges-Jacques stood still to be drawn. He watched the man out of the corner of his eye. ‘Don’t talk,’ the artist said. ‘Just do me that terrifying frown – yes, just so – and I’ll talk to you. My name is Fabre, Fabre d’Églantine. Funny name, you say. Why d’Églantine? you ask. Well, since you ask – in the literary competition of 1771, I was awarded a wreath of eglantine by the Academy of Toulouse. A signal, coveted, memorable honour – don’t you think? Yes, quite right, I’d rather have had a small gold bar, but what can you do? My friends pressed me to add the suffix ‘d’Églantine’ to my own homely appellation, in commemoration of the event. Turn your head a little. No, the other way. So – you say – if this fellow is feted for his literary efforts, what, is he doing making sketches in the street?’

‘I suppose you must be versatile,’ Georges-Jacques said.

‘Some of your local dignitaries invited me to read my work,’ Fabre said. ‘Didn’t work out, did it? I quarrelled with my patrons. No doubt you’ve heard of artists doing something of that sort.’

Georges-Jacques observed him, as best he could without turning his head. Fabre was a man in his mid-twenties, not tall, with unpowdered dark hair cut short. His coat was well-brushed but shiny at the cuffs; his linen was worn. Everything he said was both serious and not serious. Various experimental expressions chased themselves across his face.

Fabre chose another pencil. ‘Little to the left,’ he said. ‘Now, you say versatile – I am in fact a playwright, director, portraitist – as you see – and landscape painter; a composer and musician, poet and choreographer. I am an essayist on all subjects of public interest, and speak several languages. I should like to try my hand at landscape gardening, but no one will commission me. I have to say it – the world doesn’t seem to be ready for me. Until last week I was a travelling actor, but I have mislaid my troupe.’

He had finished. He threw his pencil down, screwed up his eyes and looked at his drawings, holding them both out at arms’ length. ‘There you are,’ he said, deciding. ‘That’s the better one, you keep it.’

Danton’s unlovely face stared back at him: the long scar, the bashed-in nose, the thick hair springing back from his forehead.

‘When you’re famous,’ he said, ‘this could be worth money.’ He looked up. ‘What happened to the other actors? Were you going to put on a play?’

He would have looked forward to it. Life was quiet; life was dull.

Quite abruptly, Fabre rose from his stool and made an obscene gesture in the direction of Bar-sur-Seine. ‘Two of our most applauded thespians mouldering in some village dungeon on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. Our leading lady impregnated months ago by some dismal rural wight, and now fit only for the most vulgar of low comedy roles. We have disbanded. Temporarily.’ He sat down again. ‘Now you – ’ his eyes lit up with interest – ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to run away from home and become an actor?’

‘I don’t think so. My relatives are expecting me to become a priest.’

‘Oh, you want to leave that alone,’ Fabre said. ‘Do you know how they pick bishops? On their pedigree. Have you a pedigree? Look at you. You’re a farm boy. What’s the point of entering a profession unless you can get to the top?’

‘Could I get to the top if I became a travelling actor?’

He asked civilly, as if he were prepared to consider anything.

Fabre laughed. ‘You could play the villains. You’d be well received. You’ve got a good voice there, potentially.’ He patted his chest. ‘Let it come from here.’ He pounded his fist below his diaphragm. ‘Breathe from here. Think of your breath as a river. Let it just flow, flow. The whole trick’s in the breathing. Just relax, you see, drop those shoulders back. You breathe from here – ’ he stabbed at himself– ‘you can go on for hours.’

‘I can’t think why I’d need to,’ Danton said.

‘Oh, I know what you think. You think actors are the bottom of the heap, don’t you? You think actors are ambulant shit. Like Protestants. Like Jews. So tell me, boy, what makes your position so brilliant? We’re all worms, we’re all shit. Do you realize that you could be locked up tomorrow, for the rest of your natural life, if the King put his name to a piece of paper that he’s never even read?’

‘I don’t see why he should do that,’ Danton said. ‘I’ve hardly given him cause. All I do is go to school.’

‘Yeah,’ Fabre said. ‘Exactly. Just make sure to live the next forty years without drawing attention to yourself. He doesn’t have to know you, that’s the point, don’t you see, Jesus, what do they teach you at school these days? Anybody, anybody who is anybody, who doesn’t like you and wants you out of the way, can go to the King with their document – “Sign here, Your Moronship” – and that’s you in the Bastille, chained up fifty feet below the rue Saint-Antoine with a bunch of bones for company. No, you don’t get a cell to yourself, because they never bother to shift the old skeletons. You know, of course, they have a special breed of rat in there that eats the prisoners alive?’

‘What, bit by bit?’

‘Absolutely,’ Fabre said. ‘First a little finger. Then a tiny toe.’

He caught Danton’s eye, burst into laughter, balled up a spoiled piece of paper and tossed it over his shoulder. ‘Bugger me,’ he said, ‘it’s a body’s work educating you provincials. I don’t know why I don’t just go to Paris and make my fortune.’

Georges-Jacques said, ‘I hope to go to Paris myself, before too long.’ The good voice died in his throat; he had not known what he hoped, till he spoke. ‘Perhaps when I’m there I’ll meet you again.’

‘No perhaps about it,’ Fabre said. He held up his own sketch, the slightly flawed one. ‘I’ve got your face on file. I’ll be looking out for you.’

The boy held out his vast hand. ‘My name is Georges-Jacques Danton.’

Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Georges-Jacques – study law. Law is a weapon.’

ALL THAT WEEK he thought about Paris. The prizewinner gnawed at his thoughts. Maybe he was just ambulant shit – but at least he’d been somewhere, might go somewhere else. Breathe from here, he kept saying to himself. He tried it. Yes, it was all true. He felt he could keep talking for days.

WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE des Essarts went to Paris, he would call on his nephew at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, to see how he did. By now, he had reservations – grave ones – about the boy’s future. The speech impediment was no better, perhaps worse. When he talked to the boy, an anxious smile hovered about his lips. When the boy got stuck part-way through a sentence, it was embarrassing – sometimes desolating. You could dive in, help him out with what he was going to say. Except with Camille, you never knew quite where he was heading. His sentences might begin in the ordinary way, and end up anywhere at all.

He seemed, in some more important way, disabled for the life they had planned for him. He was so nervous you could almost hear his heart beating. Small-boned, slight and pallid, with a mass of dark hair, he looked at his relative from under his long eyelashes and flitted about the room as if his mind were only on getting out of it. His relative’s reaction was, poor little thing.

But when he got outside into the street, this sympathy evaporated. He would feel he had been verbally carved up. It was not fair. It was like being tripped in the gutter by a cripple. You wanted to complain, but when you saw the circumstances you felt you couldn’t.

Monsieur’s primary purpose in visiting the capital was to attend the Parlement of Paris. The Parlements of the realm were not elected bodies. The de Viefvilles had bought their membership, and would pass it to their heirs: to Camille, perhaps, if he behaves better. The Parlements heard cases; they sanctioned the edicts of the King. That is, they confirmed that they were the law.

Occasionally, the Parlements grew awkward. They drafted protests about the state of the nation – but only when they felt their interests threatened, or when they saw that their interests could be served. M. de Viefville belonged to that section of the middle classes that did not want to destroy the nobility, but rather hoped to merge with it. Offices, positions, monopolies – all have their price, and many carry a title with them.

The Parlementarians worried a great deal when the Crown began to assert itself, to issue decrees where it had never issued them before, to produce bright new ideas about how the country should be run. Occasionally they got on the wrong side of the monarch; since any resistance to authority was novel and risky, the Parlementarians managed the difficult feat of being both arch-conservatives and popular heroes.

In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée – a system of forced labour on roads and bridges. He thought that the roads would be better if they were built and maintained by private contractors, rather than by peasants dragged from their fields. But that would cost, wouldn’t it? So perhaps there could be a property tax? And every man of means would pay it – not just commoners, but the nobility too?

Parlement turned this scheme down flat. After another bitter argument, the King forced them to register the abolition of the corvée. Turgot was making enemies everywhere. The Queen and her circle stepped up their campaign against him. The King disliked asserting himself, and was vulnerable to the pressures of the moment. In May, he dismissed Turgot; forced labour was reinstated.

In this way, one minister was brought down; the trick bore repetition. Said the Comte d’Artois, to the back of the retreating economist: ‘Now at last we shall have some money to spend.’

When the King was not hunting, he liked to shut himself up in his workshop, doing metalwork and tinkering with locks. He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done.

After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. ‘You’re lucky,’ Louis said mournfully. ‘I wish I could resign.’

1776: A DECLARATION of the Parlement of Paris:

The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE arrived home, he would make his way through the narrow huddle of small-town streets, and through the narrow huddle of provincial hearts; and he would bring himself to call on Jean-Nicolas, in his tall white book-filled house on the Place des Armes. Maître Desmoulins had an obsession nowadays, and de Viefville dreaded meeting him, meeting his baffled eyes and being asked once again the question that no one could answer: what had happened to the good and beautiful child he had sent to Cateau-Cambrésis nine years earlier?

On Camille’s sixteenth birthday, his father was stamping about the house. ‘I sometimes think,’ he said, ‘that I have got on my hands a depraved little monster with no feelings and no sense.’ He has written to the priests in Paris, to ask what they teach his son; to ask why he looks so untidy, and why during his last visit home he has seduced the daughter of a town councillor, ‘a man,’ he says, ‘whom I see every day of my working life’.

Jean-Nicolas did not really expect answers to these questions. His real objections to his son were rather different. Why, he really wanted to know, was his son so emotional? Where did he get this capacity to infect others with emotion: to agitate them, discomfit them, shake them out of their ease? Ordinary conversations, in Camille’s presence, went off at peculiar tangents, or turned into blazing rows. Safe social conventions took on an air of danger. You couldn’t, Desmoulins thought, leave him alone with anybody.

It was no longer said that his son was a little Godard. Neither did the de Viefvilles rush to claim him. His brothers were thriving, his sisters blooming, but when Camille slipped in at the front door of the Old House, he looked as if he had come on a message from the Foundling Hospital.

Perhaps, when he is grown up, he will be one of those boys who you pay to stay away from home.

THERE ARE SOME noblemen in France who have discovered that their best friends are their lawyers. Now that revenue from land is falling steadily, and prices are rising, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting poorer too. It has become necessary to assert certain privileges that have been allowed to lapse over the years. Often, dues to which one is entitled have not been paid for a generation; that lax and charitable lordship must now cease. Again, one’s ancestors have allowed part of their estates to become known as ‘common land’ – an expression for which there is usually no legal foundation.

These were the golden days of Jean-Nicolas; if, privately, he had worries, at least professionally he was prospering. Maître Desmoulins was no bootlicker – he had a lively sense of his own dignity, and was moreover a liberal-minded man, an advocate of reform in most spheres of national life. He read Diderot after dinner, and subscribed to the Geneva reprint of the Encyclopédie, which he took in instalments. Nevertheless, he found himself much occupied with registers of rights and tracing of titles. A couple of old strongboxes were brought around and trundled up to his study, and when they were opened a faint musty smell crept out. Camille said, ‘So that is what tyranny smells like.’ His father swept his own work aside and delved into the boxes; very tenderly he held the old yellow papers up to the light. Clément, the youngest, thought he was looking for buried treasure.

The Prince de Condé, the district’s premier nobleman, called personally on Maître Desmoulins in the tall, white, book-filled, very very humble house on the Place des Armes. Normally he would have sent his land agent, but he was piqued by curiosity to know the man who was doing such good work for him. Besides, if honoured by a visit, the fellow would never dare to send in a bill.

It was late afternoon, autumn. Warming in his hand a glass of deep red wine, and mellow, aware of his condescension, the Prince lounged in a wash of candlelight; evening crept up around them, and painted shadows in the corners of the room.

‘What do you people want?’ he asked.