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

DE ROBESPIERRE: Politician.

MIRABEAU: And what are you?

DE ROBESPIERRE: Just an ordinary person.

[The Comte’s face purples, and he runs a hand through his hair, making it stand up like a bush.]

MIRABEAU: You will make yourself a laughing-stock.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Let me worry about that.

MIRABEAU: You’re used to it, I suppose.

[He turns his back. Through the mirror, Duroveray wavers into life.]

DUROVERAY: May one suggest a compromise?

DE ROBESPIERRE: No. I offered him a compromise, and he rejected it.

[There is a silence. Into it, the Comte sighs heavily. Take hold of yourself, Mirabeau, he advises. Now. Conciliate.]

MIRABEAU: M. de Robinspère, this has all been a misunderstanding. We mustn’t quarrel.

[De Robespierre takes off his spectacles and puts a finger and thumb into the corners of his itching eyes. Mirabeau sees that his left eyelid flickers in a nervous spasm. Victory, he thinks.]

DE ROBESPIERRE: I must leave you. I’m sure you’d like to get to bed for an hour or two.

[Mirabeau smiles. De Robespierre looks down at the carpet, where the pages of his speech lie crumpled and torn.]

MIRABEAU: I’m sorry about that. A symptom of childish rage. [De Robespierre bends down and picks up the papers, in an easy movement that does not seem tired at all.] Shall I put them on the fire? [De Robespierre hands them over, docile. The Comte’s muscles visibly relax.] You must come to dinner sometime, de Robertpère.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Thank you, I’d like that. It doesn’t matter about the papers – I’ve got a draft copy I can read my speech from later today. I always keep my drafts.

[Out of the corner of his eye Mirabeau sees Duroveray rise, scraping his chair, and inconspicuously put his hand to his heart.]

MIRABEAU: Teutch.

DE ROBESPIERRE: Don’t trouble your man, I can see myself out. By the way, my name is Robespierre.

MIRABEAU: Oh. I thought it was ‘de Robespierre.’

ROBESPIERRE: No. Just the plain name.

D’ANTON went to hear Camille speak at the Palais-Royal. He hung to the back of the gathering and tried to find something to lean on, so that he could fold his arms and watch the proceedings with a detached smile. Camille said to him sharply, ‘You can’t spend all your life leering. It’s time you took up an attitude.’

D’Anton asked: ‘By that do you mean a pose?’

Camille was now constantly with Mirabeau. His cousin de Viefville would scarcely give him the time of day. At Versailles the deputies talked: as if there were some point in talking. When the Comte took the floor, disapproval rustled like autumn leaves. The court had not sent for him yet; in the evenings he needed much company, to keep his spirits up. The Comte had talks with Lafayette: bring over the liberal nobles, he begged. He told the Abbé Sieyès: work on the poor country curés, their hearts lie with the commoners, not with their bishops. The abbé put his fingertips together: he was a frail, still, wan man, who dropped words from his lips as though they were written in stone, who never joked, never argued: politics, he said, is a science I have made perfect.

Next the Comte pounded on the desk of M. Bailly, the Commoner’s chairman, putting his forcible suggestions. M. Bailly viewed him gravely: he was a famous astronomer, and his mind, as someone had said, was more on heavenly revolutions than this terrestrial one. Because ‘revolution’ was the word now: not just at the Palais-Royal, but here amid the tassels and gold paint. You could hear it on Deputy Pétion’s lips as he inclined his powdered head to Deputy Buzot, a personable young lawyer from Evreux. There were twenty or thirty men who always sat together, who kept up a disaffected murmur, and sometimes laughed. Deputy Robespierre’s maiden speech was ruled out of order on a technicality.

People wonder what he had done to upset Mirabeau, at this early stage. Mirabeau calls him ‘the rabid lamb’.

THE ARCHBISHOP OF AIX came to the Third Estate carrying a piece of stony black bread and weeping crocodile tears. He exhorted the deputies to waste no more time in futile debate. People were starving, and this was the sort of thing they were being given to eat. He held up the bread delicately, between finger and thumb, for inspection; he took out a handkerchief, embroidered with his coat of arms, and dusted from his hands the blue-and-white mould. Deputies said, disgusting. The best thing they could do, the archbishop said, was to forget the procedural wrangles and form a joint committee with the other two Estates, to discuss famine relief.

Robespierre stood up. He began to move towards the rostrum. He fancied that someone might try to stop him, saw them rising in their seats to be there first, so he put his small, neat head down like a bull’s and walked as if he meant to shake them off. If they join with the other Estates for one committee session, for one vote, the Third Estate has lost its case. This was a trick, and the archbishop had come to play it. Those few steps seemed like a field, and he was walking uphill in the mud, shouting ‘No, no’, his voice carried off by the wind. His heart seemed to have jumped up and hardened into his throat, the exact size of the piece of black bread the archbishop held in his hand. He turned, saw below him hundreds of white, blank, upturned faces, and heard his voice in the sudden hush, blistering and coherent:

‘Let them sell their carriages, and give the money to the poor…’

There is a moment of incomprehension. There is no applause, but a mutter, sharp and curious. People stand up to get a better view. He blushes faintly under their attention. Here everything begins: 1789, 6 June, three p.m.

JUNE 6, seven p.m., Lucile Duplessis’s diary:

Must we crawl forever? When shall we find the happiness we all seek? Man is easily dazzled when he forgets himself he thinks he is happy. No, there is no happiness on the earth, it is only a chimera. When the world no longer exists – but how can it be wiped out? They say there will be nothing any more. Nothing. The sun to lose its brightness, to shine no more. What will become of it. How will it set about becoming nothing?

Her pen hovers, about to underline nothing. But it doesn’t really need underlining, does it?

Her father says, ‘You’re not eating, Lucile. You’re fading away. What’s happening to my pretty girl?’

She’s fining down, Father. The angles of her body emerge, shoulder and wrist. There are shadows under her eyes. She refuses to put her hair up. Her eyes were once of the sharp, lively kind; but now she looks at people with a concentrated dark stare.

Her mother says: ‘Lucile, I wish you would stop fiddling with your hair. It reminds me – I mean, it irritates me.’

Go out of the room then, Mother: turn your eyes away.

Her heart must be stony, for it seems that it won’t break. Every morning she finds herself living, breathing, bodily present, and begins her day in the iron ring of their faces. Looking into her father’s eyes she sees the reflection of a happy young woman in her mid-twenties, with two or three pretty children gathered at her knee; in the background is a stalwart, honourable man with a well-pressed coat, a nebulous area where the face should be. She’ll not give them that satisfaction. She thinks of means of suicide. But that would be to make an end; and true passion, you know, is never consummated. Better to find a cloister, skewer that metaphysical lust under a starched coif. Or to walk out of the front door one day on a casual errand, into poverty and love and chance.

Miss Languish, d’Anton calls her. It is something to do with the English plays he reads.

ON 12 JUNE, three country curés come over to the Third Estate. By the 17th, sixteen more have joined them. The Third Estate now calls itself the ‘National Assembly’. On 20 June, the National Assembly finds itself locked out of its hall. Closed for refurbishment, they are told.

M. Bailly is solemn amid the sardonic laughter, summer rain running down his hat. Dr Guillotin, his fellow academician, is at his elbow. ‘What about that tennis court down the road?’

Those within earshot stared at him. ‘It’s not locked – I know it wouldn’t give us a lot of room but…Well, anybody got a better suggestion?’

At the tennis court they stand President Bailly on a table. They swear an oath, not to separate until they have given France a constitution. Overcome by emotion, the scientist assumes an antique pose. It is, altogether, a Roman moment. ‘We’ll see how they stick together when the troops move in,’ the Comte de Mirabeau says.

Three days later, when they are back in their own premises, the King turns up at their meeting. In an unsteady and hesitant voice he annuls their actions. He will give them a programme of reform, he alone. In silence before him, black coats, bleached cravats, faces of stone: men sitting for their own monuments. He orders them to disperse, and, gathering his sorry majesty, exits in procession.

Mirabeau is at once on his feet. Scrupulously attentive to his own legend, he looks around for the shorthand writers and the press. The Master of Ceremonies interrupts: will they kindly break up the meeting, as the King has ordered?

MIRABEAU: If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all await death; but he need not hope that we shall separate until we have made the constitution.

Audible only to his neighbour, he adds, ‘If they come, we bugger off, quick.’

For a moment all are silent – the cynics, the detractors the rakers-up of the past. The deputies applaud him to the echo. Later they will drop back to let him pass, staring at the invisible wreath of laurels that crowns his unruly hair.

‘THE ANSWER’S THE SAME, Camille,’ said Momoro the printer. ‘I publish this, and we both land in the Bastille. There’s no point in revising it, is there, if every version gets worse?’