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

Fabre turned. He took out a lorgnette, and examined Camille. ‘The less said about Men of Letters the better. All that stony silence. And then, you know, the hissing.’

‘I suppose you must expect it, if you write a play about critics. But of course, Voltaire’s plays were often hissed. His first nights usually ended in some sort of riot.’

‘True,’ Fabre said. ‘But then Voltaire wasn’t always worried about where his next meal was coming from.’

‘I know your work,’ Camille insisted. ‘You’re a satirist. If you want to get on – well, try toadying to the Court a bit more.’

Fabre lowered his lorgnette. He was immensely, visibly gratified and flattered – just by that one sentence, ‘I know your work.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Sell out? I don’t think so. I do like an easy life, I admit. I try to turn a fast penny. But there are limits.’

D’Anton had found them a table. ‘What is it?’ Fabre said, seating himself. ‘Ten years? More? One says, “Oh, we’ll meet again,” not quite meaning it.’

‘All the right people are drifting together,’ Camille said. ‘You can pick them out, just as if they had crosses on their foreheads. For example, I saw Brissot last week.’ D’Anton did not ask who was Brissot. Camille had a multitude of shady acquaintances. ‘Then, of all people, Hérault just now. I always hated Hérault, but I have this feeling about him now, quite a different feeling. Against my better judgement, but there it is.’

‘Hérault is a Parlementary judge,’ d’Anton told Fabre. ‘He comes from an immensely rich and ancient family. He’s not more than thirty, his looks are impeccable, he’s well-travelled, he’s pursued by all the ladies at Court – ’

‘How sick,’ Fabre muttered.

‘And we’re baffled because he’s just spent ten minutes talking to us. It’s said,’ d’Anton grinned, ‘that he fancies himself as a great orator and spends hours alone talking to himself in front of a mirror. Though how would anyone know, if he’s alone?’

‘Alone except for his servants,’ Camille said. ‘The aristocracy don’t consider their servants to be real people, so they’re quite prepared to indulge all their foibles in front of them.’

‘What is he practising for?’ Fabre asked. ‘For if they call the Estates?’

‘We presume so,’ d’Anton said. ‘He views himself as a leader of reform, perhaps. He has advanced ideas. So he seems to say.’

‘Oh well,’ Camille said. ‘“Their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord.” It’s all in the Book of Ezekiel, you see, it’s quite clear if you look at it in the Hebrew. About how the law shall perish from the priests and the council from the ancients. “And the King will mourn, and the Prince shall be clothed with sorrow…” – which I’m quite sure they will be, and quite rapidly too, if they go on as they do at present.’

Someone at the next table said, ‘You ought to keep your voice down. You’ll find the police attending your sermons.’

Fabre slammed his hand down on the table and shot to his feet. His thin face turned brick-red. ‘It isn’t an offence to quote the holy Scriptures,’ he said. ‘In any damn context whatsoever.’ Someone tittered. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ Fabre said vehemently to Camille, ‘but I’m going to get on with you.’

‘Oh God,’ d’Anton muttered. ‘Don’t encourage him.’ It was not possible, considering his size, to get out without being noticed, so he tried to look as if he were not with them. The last thing you need is encouragement, he thought, you make trouble because you can’t do anything else, you like to think of the destruction outside because of the destruction inside you. He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical, calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Claude. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be free. People deformed and people only disfigured, abandoned children sucking the thin milk of duty: crying to be taken in. There were courtiers: there was Hérault, dealing Antoinette a losing hand. There were prostitutes. There were wig-makers and clerks, freed slaves shivering in the squares, the men who took the tolls at the customs posts in the walls of Paris. There were men who had been gravediggers man and boy all their working lives. Whose thoughts ran to an alien current. Of whom nothing was known and nothing could be known. He looked across at Fabre. ‘My greatest work is yet to come,’ Fabre said. He sketched its dimensions in the air. Some confidence trick, d’Anton thought. Fabre was a ready man, wound up like a clockwork toy, and Camille watched him like a child who had been given an unexpected present. The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

LUCILE: inaction has its own subtle rewards, but now she thinks it is time to push a little. She had left those nursery days behind, of the china doll with the straw heart. They had dealt with her, Maître Desmoulins and her mother, as effectively as if they had smashed her china skull. Since that day, bodies had more reality – theirs, if not hers. They were solid all right, and substantial. Woundingly, she felt their superiority; and if she could ache, she must be taking on flesh.

Midsummer: Brienne, the Comptroller, borrowed twelve million livres from the municipality of Paris. ‘A drop in the ocean,’ M. Charpentier said. He put the café up for sale; he and Angélique meant to move out to the country. Annette did her duty to the fine weather, making forays to the Luxembourg Gardens. She had often walked there with the girls and Camille; this spring the blossom had smelt faintly sour, as if it had been used before.

Lucile had spent a lot of time writing her journal: working out the plot. That Friday, which began like any other, when my fate was brought up from the kitchen, superscribed to me, and put into my ignorant hand. How that night – Friday to Saturday – I took the letter from its hiding place and put it against the cold ruffled linen of my nightgown, approximately over my shaking heart: the crackling paper, the flickering candlelight, and oh, my poor little emotions. I knew that by September my life would be completely changed.

‘I’ve decided,’ she said. ‘I’m going to marry Maître Desmoulins after all.’ Clinically, she observed how ugly her mother became, when her clear complexion blotched red with anger and fear.

She has to practise for the conflicts the future holds. Her first clash with her father sends her up to her room in tears. The weeks wear on, and her sentiments become more savage: echoed by events in the streets.

THE DEMONSTRATION had started outside the Law Courts. The barristers collected their papers and debated the merits of staying put against those of trying to slip through the crowds. But there had been fatalities: one, perhaps two. They thought it would be safer to stay put until the area was completely cleared. D’Anton swore at his colleagues, and went out to pick his way across the battlefield.

An enormous number of people seemed to be injured. They were what you would call crush injuries, except for the few people who had fought hand-to-hand with the Guards. A respectably dressed man was walking around showing people the hole in his coat where it had been pierced by a bullet. A woman was sitting on the cobblestones saying, ‘Who opened fire, who ordered it, who told them to do it?’ demanding an explanation in a voice sharp with hysteria. Also there were several unexplained knifings.

He found Camille slumped on his knees by a wall scribbling down some sort of testimony. The man who was talking to him was lying on the ground, just his shoulders propped up. All the man’s clothes were in shreds and his face was black. D’Anton could not see where he was injured, but beneath the black his face looked numb, and his eyes were glazed with pain or surprise.

D’Anton said, ‘Camille.’

Camille looked sideways at his shoes, then his eyes travelled upwards. His face was chalk-white. He put down his paper and stopped trying to follow the man’s ramblings. He indicated a man standing a few yards away, his arms folded, his short legs planted apart, his eyes on the ground. Without tone or emphasis, Camille said, ‘See that? That’s Marat.’

D’Anton did not look up. Somebody pointed to Camille and said, ‘The French Guards threw him on the ground and kicked him in the ribs.’

Camille smiled miserably. ‘Must have been in their way, mustn’t I?’

D’Anton tried to get him to his feet. Camille said, ‘No, I can’t do it, leave me alone.’

D’Anton took him home to Gabrielle. He fell asleep on their bed, looking desperately ill.

‘WELL, THERE’S ONE THING,’ Gabrielle said, later that night. ‘If they’d kicked you in the ribs, their boots would have just bounced off.’

‘I told you,’ d’Anton said. ‘I was inside, in an office. Camille was outside, in the riot. I don’t go in for these silly games.’

‘It worries me, though.’

‘It was just a skirmish. Some soldiers panicked. Nobody even knows what it was about.’

Gabrielle was hard to console. She had made plans, settled them, for her house, for her babies, for the big success he was going to enjoy. She feared any kind of turmoil, civil or emotional: feared its stealthy remove from the street to the door to her heart.

When they had friends to dine, her husband spoke familiarly about people in the government, as if he knew them. When he spoke of the future, he would add, ‘if the present scheme of things continues’.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve told you, that I’ve had a lot of work recently from M. Barentin, the President of the Board of Excise. So naturally my work takes me into government offices. And when you’re meeting the people who’re running the country – ’ he shook his head – ‘you start to make judgements about their competence. You can’t help making judgements.’

‘But they’re individuals.’ (Forgive me, she wanted to say, for intruding where I don’t understand.) ‘Is it necessary to question the system itself? Does it follow?’

‘There is really only one question,’ he said. ‘Can it last? The answer’s no. Twelve months from now, it seems to me, our lives will look very different.’

Then he closed his mouth resolutely, because he realized that he had been talking to her about matters that women were not interested in. And he did not want to bore her, or upset her.

PHILIPPE, the Duke of Orléans, is going bald. His friends – or those who wish to be his friends – have obliged him by shaving the hair off their foreheads, so that the Duke’s alopecia appears to be a fad, or whimsy. But no sycophancy can disguise the bald fact.

Duke Philippe is now forty years old. People say he is one of the richest men in Europe. The Orléans line is the junior branch of the royal family, and its princes have rarely seen eye-to-eye with their senior cousins. Duke Philippe cannot agree with King Louis, about anything.

Philippe’s life up to this point had not been auspicious. He had been so badly brought up, so badly turned out, that you might well think it had been done on purpose, to debauch him, to invalidate him, to disable him for any kind of political activity. When he married, and appeared with the new Duchess at the Opéra, the galleries were packed by the public prostitutes decked out in mourning.

Philippe is not a stupid man, but he is a susceptible one, a taker-up of fads and fancies. At this time he has a good deal to complain about. The King interferes all the time in his private life. His letters are opened, and he is followed about by policemen and the King’s spies. They try to ruin his friendship with the dear Prince of Wales, and to stop him visiting England, whence he has imported so many fine women and racehorses. He is continually defamed and calumniated by the Queen’s party, who aim to make him an object of ridicule. His crime is, of course, that he stands too near the throne. He finds it difficult to concentrate for any length of time, and you can’t expect him to read the nation’s destiny in a balance-sheet; but you don’t need to tell Philippe d’Orléans that there is no liberty in France.

Among the many women in his life, one stands out: not the Duchess. Félicité de Genlis had become his mistress in 1772, and to prove the character of his feelings for her the Duke had caused a device to be tattooed on his arm. Félicité is a woman of sweet and iron wilfulness, and she writes books. There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry. Impressed, astounded, enslaved, the Duke has placed her in charge of his children’s education. They have a daughter of their own, Pamela, a beautiful and talented child whom they pretend is an orphan.

From the Duke, as from his children, Félicité exacts respect, obedience, adoration: from the Duchess, a timid acquiescence to her status and her powers. Félicité has a husband, of course – Charles-Alexis Brulard de Sillery, Comte de Genlis, a handsome ex-naval officer with a brilliant service record. He is close to Philippe – one of his small, well-drilled army of fixers, organizers, hangers-on. People had once called their marriage a love-match; twenty-five years on, Charles-Alexis retains his good looks and his polish, and indulges daily and nightly his ruling passion – gambling.

Félicité has even reformed the Duke – moderated some of his wilder excesses, steered his money and his energy into worthwhile channels. Now in her well-preserved forties, she is a tall, slender woman with dark-blonde hair, arresting brown eyes, and a decisive aspect to her features. Her physical intimacy with the Duke has ceased, but now she chooses his mistresses for him and directs them how to behave. She is accustomed to be at the centre of things, to be consulted, to dispense advice. She has no love for the King’s wife, Antoinette.

The consuming frivolity of the Court has left a kind of hiatus, a want of a cultural centre for the nation. It is arranged by Félicité that Philippe and his court shall supply that lack. It is not that she has political ambitions for him – but it happens that so many intellectuals, so many artists and scholars, so many of the people one wishes to cultivate, are liberal-minded men, enlightened men, men who look forward to a new dispensation; and doesn’t the Duke have every sympathy? In this year, 1787, there are gathered about him a number of young men, aristocrats for the most part, all of them ambitious and all of them with a vague feeling that their ambitions have somehow been thwarted, that their lives have somehow become unsatisfactory. It is arranged that the Duke, who feels this more keenly than most, shall be a leader to them.

The Duke wishes to be a man of the people, especially of the people of Paris; he wishes to be in touch with their moods and concerns. He keeps court in the heart of the city, at the Palais-Royal. He has turned the gardens over to the public and leased out the buildings as shops and brothels and coffee houses and casinos: so that at the epicentre of the nation’s fornication, rumourmongering, pickpocketing and street-fighti g, there sits Philippe: Good Duke Philippe, the Father of His People. Only nobody shouts that; it has not been arranged yet.