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

WE make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy – at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.

‘The Theory of Ambition’, an essay:

Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles

I. The Theory of Ambition (1784–1787)

THE CAFÉ DU PARNASSE was known to its clients as the Café de l’École, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The café was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small-talk at the Café de l’École was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.

Monsieur’s wife Angélique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matron’s cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angélique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the café every day – perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. ‘I will read it later,’ she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.

Her daughter, Antoinette Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the café. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.

Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin – everybody said – like silk.

Mme Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the café so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maître d’Anton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband – not at all.

SOON AFTER Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 per cent. Georges-Jacques’s own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.

Maître Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. ‘Call yourself d’Anton,’ he advised. ‘It makes a better impression.’ On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. ‘So what if they all know it’s spurious?’ Maître Vinot said. ‘It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.’

When it was time to take his degree, Maître Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days’ residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maître Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldn’t come up with one. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but…’ His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrin’s chambers. D’Anton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.

After that he left the Île Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case – involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow. Did he take these cases to give himself time to think about other things? He was not, at this date, introspective. He was mildly surprised, then irritated, to find that the people around him were much less intelligent than himself. Bumblers like Vinot climbed to high office and prosperity. ‘Goodbye,’ they said. ‘Not a bad week. See you Tuesday.’ He watched them depart to spend their weekends in what with Parisians passed for the country. One day he’d buy himself a place – just a cottage would do, a couple of acres. It might take the edge off his restless moods.

He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coal-heaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practised it on Angelica, calling at the café each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a frisson at the backs of women’s necks. He remembered the prizewinner, took his advice; rolled the voice out from somewhere behind his ribs. It awaited perfection – a little extra vibrancy, a little more colour in the tone. But there it was – a professional asset.

Gabrielle thought, looks aren’t everything. She also thought, money isn’t everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of ’86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.

The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.

MAÎTRE DESMOULINS had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.

Today’s case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maître Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.

‘Come back!’ d’Anton shouted. He stopped, and turned. D’Anton drew level. ‘I can see you’re not used to winning. You’re supposed to commiserate with your opponent.’

‘Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, let’s walk – I don’t like to be around here.’

D’Anton did not like to let a point go. ‘It’s a piece of decent hypocrisy. It’s the rules.’

Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. ‘You mean, I may gloat?’

‘If you will.’

‘I may say, “So that’s what they learn in Maître Vinot’s chambers?”’

‘If you must. My first case,’ d’Anton said, ‘was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.’

‘But you’ve come on a bit since then.’

‘Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.’

Desmoulins stopped dead. ‘Do you really, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought – stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.’

‘Yes, but I don’t always. I’ve not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, d’Anton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?’

‘What do you mean, what would I think?’

‘If you were an impartial observer.’

‘How can I be that?’ Everybody knows you, he thought. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘you’d do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.’

‘Well, how gratifying,’ Camille said. ‘A neat, complete lecture. Maître Vinot couldn’t have delivered it better. Soon you’ll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.’

‘I’m right, though.’

‘There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who can’t afford to pay for them.’

‘Yes, but that’s a social problem, you’re not responsible for that state of affairs.’

‘You ought to help people.’

‘Ought you?’

‘Yes – at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose – yes.’

‘At your own expense?’

‘You’re not allowed to do it at anyone else’s.’

D’Anton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. ‘You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.’

‘A living? It’s not a living, it’s pillage, it’s loot, and you know it. Really, Maître d’Anton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.’

‘This revolution – will it be a living?’

‘We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.’

‘To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.’

‘He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, d’Anton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things,’ he said, ‘because I think I may die at any time.’