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

Just now, faro is the craze. The King forbids it because the losses are so high. But the King is a man of regular habits, who retires early, and when he goes the stakes are raised at the Queen’s table.

‘The poor man,’ she calls him.

The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses – about 150 each year – are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armoured trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington’s troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural – in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new – then moves elsewhere.

‘I am terrified of being bored,’ she says.

She has no child. Pamphlets distributed all over Paris accuse her of promiscuous relations with her male courtiers, of lesbian acts with her female favourites. In 1776, when she appears in her box at the Opéra, she is met by hostile silences. She does not understand this. It is said that she cries behind her bedroom doors: ‘What have I done to them? What have I done?’ Is it fair, she asks herself, if so much is really wrong, to harp on one woman’s trivial pleasures?

Her brother the Emperor writes from Vienna: ‘In the long run, things cannot go on as they are…The revolution will be a cruel one, and may be of your own making.’

IN 1778 VOLTAIRE returned to Paris, eighty-four years old, cadaverous and spitting blood. He traversed the city in a blue carriage covered with gold stars. The streets were lined with hysterical crowds chanting ‘Vive Voltaire.’ The old man remarked, ‘There would be just as many to see me executed.’ The Academy turned out to greet him: Franklin came, Diderot came. During the performance of his tragedy Irène the actors crowned his statue with laurel wreaths and the packed galleries rose to their feet and howled their delight and adoration.

In May, he died. Paris refused him a Christian burial, and it was feared that his enemies might desecrate his remains. So the corpse was taken from the city by night, propped upright in a coach: under a full moon, and looking alive.

A MAN CALLED NECKER, a Protestant, Swiss millionaire banker, was called to be Minister of Finance and Master of Miracles to the court. Necker alone could keep the ship of state afloat. The secret, he said, was to borrow. Higher taxation and cuts in expenditure showed Europe that you were on your knees. But if you borrowed you showed that you were forward-looking, go-getting, energetic; by demonstrating confidence, you created it. The more you borrowed, the more the effect was achieved. M. Necker was an optimist.

It even seemed to work. When, in May 1781, the usual reactionary, anti-Protestant cabal brought the minister down, the country felt nostalgia for a lost, prosperous age. But the King was relieved, and bought Antoinette some diamonds to celebrate.

Georges-Jacques Danton had already decided to go to Paris.

It had been so difficult to get away, initially; as if, Anne-Madeleine said, you were going to America, or the moon. First there had been the family councils, all the uncles calling with some ceremony to put their points of view. They had dropped the priest business. For a year or two he had been around the little law offices of his uncles and their friends. It was a modest family tradition. Nevertheless. If he was sure it was what he wanted…

His mother would miss him; but they had grown apart. She was a woman of no education, with an outlook that she had deliberately narrowed. The only industry of Arcis-sur-Aube was the manufacture of nightcaps; how could he explain to her that the fact had come to seem a personal affront?

In Paris he would receive a modest clerk’s allowance from the barrister in whose chambers he would study; later, he would need money to establish himself in practice. His stepfather’s inventions had eaten into the family money; his new weaving loom was especially disaster prone. Bemused by the clatter and the creak of the dancing shuttles, they stood in the barn and stared at his little machine, waiting for the thread to break again. There was a bit of money from M. Danton, dead these eighteen years, which had been set aside for when his son grew up. ‘You’ll need it for the inventions,’ Georges-Jacques said. ‘I’ll feel happier, really, to think I’m making a fresh start.’

That summer he visited the family. A pushy and energetic boy who went to Paris would never come back – except for visits, perhaps, as a distant and sucessful man. So it was proper to make these calls, to leave out no one, no distant cousin or great-uncle’s widow. In their cool, very similar farmhouses he had to stretch out his legs and outline to them what he wanted in life, to submit his plans to their good understanding. He spent long afternoons in the parlours of these widows and maiden aunts, with old ladies nodding in the attenuated sunlight, while the dust swirled purplish and haloed their bent heads. He was never at a loss for something to say to them; he was not that sort of person. But with each visit he felt that he was travelling, further and further away.

Then there was just one visit left: Marie-Cécile in her convent. He followed the straight back of the Mistress of Novices down a corridor of deathly quiet; he felt absurdly large, too much a man, doomed to apologise for himself. Nuns passed in a swish of dark garments, their eyes on the ground, their hands hidden in their sleeves. He had not wanted his sister to come here. I’d rather be dead, he thought, than be a woman.

The nun halted, gestured him through a door. ‘It is an inconvenience,’ she said, ‘that our parlour is so far within the building. We will have one built near the gate, when we get the funds.’

‘I thought your house was rich, Sister.’

‘Then you are misinformed.’ She sniffed. ‘Some of our postulants bring dowries that are barely sufficient to buy the cloth for their habits.’

Marie-Cécile was seated behind a grille. He could not touch or kiss her. She looked pale; either that, or the harsh white of the novice’s veil did not suit her. Her blue eyes were small and steady, very like his own.

They talked, found themselves shy and constrained. He told her the family news, explained his plans. ‘Will you come back,’ she asked, ‘for my clothing ceremony, for when I take my final vows?’

‘Yes,’ he said, lying. ‘If I can.’

‘Paris is a very big place. Won’t you be lonely?’

‘I doubt it.’

She looked at him earnestly. ‘What do you want out of life?’

‘To get on in it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I suppose it means I want to get a position, to have money, to make people respect me. I’m sorry, I see no point in being mealy-mouthed about it. I just want to be somebody.’

‘Everybody’s somebody. In God’s sight.’

‘This life has turned you pious.’

They laughed. Then: ‘Have you any thought for the salvation of your soul, in the plans you’ve made?’

‘Why should I have to think about my soul, when I’ve a great lazy sister a nun, with nothing to do but pray for me all day?’ He looked up. ‘What about you, are you – you know – happy?’

She sighed. ‘Think of the economics of it, Georges-Jacques. It costs money to marry. There are too many girls in our family. I think the others volunteered me, in a way. But now that I’m here – yes, I’m settled. It really does have its consolations, though I wouldn’t expect you to acknowledge them. I don’t think you, Georges-Jacques, were born for the calmer walks of life.’

He knew that there were farmers in the district who would have taken her for the meagre dowry she had brought to the convent, and who would have been glad of a wife of robust health and cheerful character. It would not have been impossible to find a man who would work hard and treat her decently, and give her some children. He thought all women ought to have children.

‘Could you still get out?’ he asked. ‘If I made money I could look after you, we could find you a husband or you could do without, I’d take care of you.’

She held up a hand. ‘I said, didn’t I – I’m happy. I’m content.’

‘It saddens me,’ he said gently, ‘to see that the colour has gone from your cheeks.’

She looked away. ‘Better go, before you make me sad. I often think, you know, of all the days we had in the fields. Well, that is over now. God keep you.’

‘And God keep you.’

You rely on it, he thought; I shan’t.

III. At Maître Vinot’s (1780)

SIR FRANCIS BURDETT, British Ambassador, on Paris: ‘It is the most ill-contrived, ill-built, dirty stinking town that can possibly be imagined; as for the inhabitants, they are ten times more nasty than the inhabitants of Edinburgh.’

GEORGES-JACQUES came off the coach at the Cour des Messageries. The journey had been unexpectedly lively. There was a girl on board, Françoise-Julie; Françoise-Julie Duhauttoir, from Troyes. They hadn’t met before – he’d have recalled it – but he knew something of her; she was the kind of girl who made his sisters purse their lips. Naturally: she was good-looking, she was lively, she had money, no parents and spent six months of the year in Paris. On the road she amused him with imitations of her aunts: ‘Youth-doesn’t-last-for-ever, a-good-reputation-is-money-in-the-bank, don’t-you-think-it’s-time-you-settled-down-in-Troyes-where-all-your-relatives-are-and-found-yourself-a-husband-before-you-fall-apart?’ As if, Françoise-Julie said, there were going to be some sudden shortage of men.

He couldn’t see there ever would be, for a girl like her. She flirted with him as if he were just anybody; she didn’t seem to mind about the scar. She was like someone who has been gagged for months, let out of a gaol. Words tumbled out of her, as she tried to explain the city, tell him about her life, tell him about her friends. When the coach came to a halt she did not wait for him to help her down; she jumped.

The noise hit him at once. Two of the men who had come to see to the horses began to quarrel. That was the first thing he heard, a vicious stream of obscenity in the hard accent of the capital.

Her bags around her feet, Françoise-Julie stood and clung to his arm. She laughed, with sheer delight at being back. ‘What I like,’ she said, ‘is that it’s always changing. They’re always tearing something down and building something else.’

She had scrawled her address on a sheet of paper, tucked it into his pocket. ‘Can’t I help you?’ he said. ‘See you get to your apartment all right?’

‘Look, you take care of yourself,’ she said. ‘I live here, I’ll be fine.’ She spun away, gave some directions about her luggage, disbursed some coins. ‘Now, you know where you’re going, don’t you? I’ll expect to see you within a week. If you don’t turn up I’ll come hunting for you.’ She picked up her smallest bag; quite suddenly, she lunged at him, stretched up, planted a kiss on his cheek. Then she whirled away into the crowd.

He had brought only one valise, heavy with books. He hoisted it up, then put it down again while he fished in his pocket for the piece of paper in his stepfather’s handwriting:

The Black Horse