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

It will certainly be tonight, he thought: the troops will come out of the Champs-de-Mars, there will be arrests, round-ups, exemplary dealings. Suddenly he understood how far the situation had moved on from last week, from yesterday – how far it had moved in the last half-hour. It will certainly be tonight, he thought, and they had better know it; we have run out to the end of our rope.

He had so often rehearsed this moment in his mind that his actions now were automatic; they were fluid and perfectly timed, like the actions of a dream. He had spoken many times from the café doorway. He had to get the first phrase out, the first sentence, then he could get beside himself and do it, and he knew that he could do it better than anyone else: because this is the scrap that God has saved up for him, like the last morsel on a plate.

He put one knee on to the table and scrambled up on to it. He scooped up the firearms. Already he was ringed about by his audience, like the crowds in an amphitheatre. Now he understood the meaning of the phrase ‘a sea of faces’; it was a living sea, where panic-striken faces nosed for air before the current pulled them under. But people were hanging out of the upstairs windows of the café and of the buildings around, and the crowd was growing all the time. He was not high enough, or conspicuous. Nobody seemed to be able to see what he needed, and until he began to speak properly he would not be able to make himself heard. He transferred both the pistols to one hand, bundling them against his body, so that if they go off he will be a terrible mess; but he feels uncurably reluctant to part with them for an instant. With his left arm he waved to someone inside the café. A chair was passed out, and planted on the table beside him. ‘Will you hold it?’ he said. He transferred one of the pistols back to his left hand. It is now two minutes past three.

As he stepped on to the chair he felt it slide a little. He thought it would be amazing if he fell off the chair, but people would say it was typical of him. He felt it being gripped by the back, steadied. It was an ordinary straw-bottomed chair. What if he were Georges-Jacques? He would go straight through it.

He was now at a dizzying height above the crowd. A fetid breeze drifted across the gardens. Another fifteen seconds had passed. He was able to identify certain faces, and surprise at this made him blink: ONE WORD, he thought. There were the police, and there were their spies and informers, men who have been watching him for weeks, the colleagues and accomplices of the men who only a few days before had been cornered and beaten by the crowds and half-drowned in the fountains. But now it is killing time; there were armed men behind them. In sheer fright, he began.

He indicated the policemen, identified them for the crowd. He defied them, he said: either to approach any further, to shoot him down, to try to take him alive. What he is suggesting to the crowd, what he is purveying, is an armed insurrection, the conversion of the city to a battlefield. Already (3.04) he is guilty of a long list of capital offences and if the crowd let the police take him he is finished, except for whatever penalty the law provides. Therefore if they do make the attempt he will certainly shoot one policeman, and he will certainly shoot himself, and hope that he dies quickly: and then the Revolution will be here. This decision takes one half-second, plaited between the phrases he is making. It is five past three. The exact form of the phrases does not matter now. Something is happening underneath his feet; the earth is breaking up. What does the crowd want? To roar. Its wider objectives? No coherent answer. Ask it: it roars. Who are these people? No names. The crowd just wants to grow, to embrace, to weld together, to gather in, to melt, to bay from one throat. If he were not standing here he would be dying anyway, dying between the pages of his letters. If he survives this – death as a reprieve – he will have to write it down, the life that feeds the writing that feeds the life to come, and already he fears he cannot describe the heat, the green leaves of the chestnut trees, the choking dust and the smell of blood and the blithe savagery of his auditors; it will be a voyage into hyperbole, an odyssey of bad taste. Cries and moans and bloody promises circle his head, a scarlet cloud, a new thin pure element in which he floats. For a second he puts his hand to his face and feels at the corner of his mouth the place caught that morning by the Comte’s ring; only that tells him, and nothing else, that he inhabits the same body and owns the same flesh.

The police have received a check. A few days ago, on this spot, he said, ‘The beast is in the snare: finish it off.’ He meant the animal of the old regime, the dispensation he had lived under all his life. But now he sees another beast: the mob. A mob has no soul, it has no conscience, just paws and claws and teeth. He remembers M. Saulce’s dog in the Place des Armes, slipped out to riot in the sleepy afternoon; three years old, he leans from the window of the Old House and sees the dog toss a rat into the air and snap its neck. No one will pull him away from this spectacle. No one will chain this dog, no one will lead it home. Suitably he addressed it, leaning out towards the mob, one hand extended, palm upwards, charming it and coaxing it and drawing it on. He has lost one of the pistols, he does not know where, it does not matter. The blood has set like marble in his veins. He means to live forever.

By now the crowd was hoarse and spinning with folly. He jumped down into it. A hundred hands reached for clothes and hair and skin and flesh. People were crying, cursing, making slogans. His name was in their mouths; they knew him. The noise was some horror from the Book of Revelations, hell released and all its companies scouring the streets. Although the quarter-hour has struck, no one knows this. People weep. They pick him up and carry him round the gardens on their shoulders. A voice screams that pikes are to be had, and smoke drifts among the trees. Somewhere a drum begins to beat: not deep, not resonant, but a hard, dry, ferocious note.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS to Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins, at Guise:

You made an error when you would not come to Laon to recommend me to the people who would have had me nominated. But it doesn’t matter now. I have written my name on our Revolution in letters larger than those of all our deputies from Picardy.

AS THE EVENING DREW ON, M. Duplessis walked out with a couple of friends who wished to satisfy their curiosity. He took a stout cane, with which he intended to repel working-class bullyboys. Mme Duplessis asked him not to go.

Annette’s face was pinched with anxiety. The servants had brought in disgusting rumours, and she was afraid there might be substance to them. Lucile seemed sure there was. She sat conspicuously quietly and modestly, like a lottery winner.

Adèle was at home. She usually was now, unless she was at Versailles paying calls and picking up gossip. She knew deputies’ wives and deputies, and all the café talk, and all the voting strategies in the National Assembly.

Lucile went to her room. She took pen and ink, and a piece of paper, and on the paper she wrote, ‘Adèle is in love with Maximilien Robespierre.’ She tore the strip off the sheet, and crumpled it in her palm.

She picked up some embroidery. She worked slowly, paying close attention to what she was doing. Later she intended to show people the meticulous work she had done that afternoon between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. She thought of practising some scales. When I am married, she thought, I will have a piano: and there will be other innovations.

When Claude got home, he walked straight into his study, coat, cane and all, and slammed the door. Annette understood that he might need a short time to recover himself. ‘I’m afraid your father may have received some bad news,’ she said.

‘How could he,’ Adèle said, ‘just by going out to see what’s happening? I mean, it’s not anyone’s personal bad news, is it?’

Annette tapped at the door. The girls stood at her elbows. ‘Come out,’ she said. ‘Or shall we come in?’

Claude said, ‘The minister has been made a pretext.’

‘Necker,’ Adèle corrected. ‘He’s not the minister any more.’

‘No.’ Claude was torn between his loyalty to his departmental chief and his desire to have his thoughts out in the open. ‘You know I never cared for the man. He is a charlatan. But he deserves better than to be made a pretext.’

‘My dear,’ Annette said, ‘there are three women here in considerable agony of mind. Do you think you could bring yourself to be a little more particular in your description of events?’

‘They are rioting,’ Claude said simply. ‘The dismissal of M. Necker has caused a furore. We are plunged into a state of anarchy, and anarchy is not a word I use.’

‘Sit down, my dear,’ Annette said.

Claude sat, and passed a hand over his eyes. From the wall the old King surveyed them: the present Queen in a cheap print, feathers in her hair and her chin flattered into insignificance: a plaster bust of Louis, looking like a wheelwright’s mate: the Abbé Terray, both full-face and in profile.

‘There is a state of insurrection,’ he said. ‘They are setting the customs barriers on fire. They have closed the theatres and broken into the waxworks.’

‘Broken into the waxworks?’ Annette was conscious of the idiot grin growing on her face. ‘What did they want to do that for?’

‘How do I know?’ Claude raised his voice. ‘How should I know what they are doing things for? There are five thousand people, six thousand people, marching on the Tuileries. That is just one procession and there are others coming up to join them. They are destroying the city.’

‘But where are the soldiers?’

‘Where are they? The King himself would like to know, I’m sure. They might as well be lining the route and cheering, for all the use they are. I thank God the King and Queen are at Versailles, for who knows what might not happen, as at the head of these mobs there is – ’ Words failed him. ‘There is that person.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Annette’s voice was matter-of-fact. She only said it in courtesy to form; she knew it was true.

‘Please yourself. You can read it in the morning paper – if there is one. It appears that he made a speech at the Palais-Royal and that it had a certain effect and that he has now become some sort of hero to these people. To the mob, I should say. The police moved in to arrest him and he unwisely held them off at gunpoint.’

‘I’m not sure it was unwise,’ Adèle said, ‘given the result it seems to have produced.’

‘Oh, I should have taken measures,’ Claude said. ‘I should have sent you both away. I ask what I have done to deserve it, one daughter hobnobbing with radicals and the other planning to plight herself to a criminal.’

‘Criminal?’ Lucile sounded surprised.

‘Yes. He has broken the law.’

‘The law will be altered.’

‘My God,’ Claude said, ‘do you tell me? The troops will flatten them.’

‘You seem to think that all this is accidental,’ Lucile said. ‘No, Father, let me speak, I have a right to speak, since I know better than you what is going on. You say there are thousands of rioters, how many thousands you are not sure, but the French Guards will not attack their own people, and most of them indeed are on our side. If they are properly organized they will soon have enough arms to engage the rest of the troops. The Royal Allemand troops will be swamped by sheer force of numbers.’

Claude stared at her. ‘Any measures you might have taken are too late,’ his wife said in a low voice. Lucile cleared her throat. It was almost a speech she was making, a pale drawing-room imitation. Her hands shook. She wondered if he had been very frightened: if pushed and driven by the crowds he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the living heart of all the close designs.

‘All this was planned,’ she said. ‘I know there are reinforcements, but they have to cross the river.’ She walked to the window. ‘Look. No moon tonight. How long will it take them to cross in the dark, with their commanders falling out amongst themselves? They only know how to fight on battlefields, they don’t know how to fight in the streets. By tomorrow morning – if they can be held now at the Place Louis XV – the troops will be cleared out of the city centre. And the Paris Electors will have their militia on the streets; they can ask for arms from City Hall. There are guns at the Invalides, forty thousand muskets – ’

‘Battlefield?’ Claude said. ‘Reinforcements? How do you know all this? Where did you learn it?’

‘Where do you suppose?’ she said coolly.

‘Electors? Militia? Muskets? Do you happen to know,’ he asked, with hysterical sarcasm, ‘where they will get the powder and shot?’

‘Oh yes,’ Lucile said. ‘At the Bastille.’

GREEN WAS THE COLOUR they had picked for identification – green, the colour of hope. In the Palais-Royal a girl had given Camille a bit of green ribbon, and since then the people had raided the shops for it and yards and yards of sage-green and apple and emerald and lime stretched over the dusty streets and trailed in the gutters. In the Palais-Royal they had pulled down leaves from the chestnut trees, and now wore them sad and wilting in their hats and buttonholes. The torn, sweet vegetable smell lay in clouds over the afternoon.

By evening they were an army, marching behind their own banners. Though darkness fell, the heat did not abate; and sometime during the night the storm broke, and the crack of thunder overhead vied with the sting and rumble of gunfire and the crash of splintering glass; people sang, orders were bawled into the darkness, all night long there was the thud of boots on cobblestones and the ring of steel. Jagged flashes from the sky lit the devastated streets, and smoke billowed on the winds from the burning barriers. At midnight a drunken grenadier said to Camille, ‘I’ve seen your face somewhere before.’

At dawn, in the rain, he met Hérault de Séchelles; but then he was beyond surprise by now, and would not have passed any comment if he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with Mme du Barry. The judge’s face was dirty, his coat was ripped half off his back. In one hand he had a very fine duelling pistol, one of a valuable pair made for Maurice de Saxe: and in the other a meat-cleaver.

‘But the waste, the irresponsibility,’ Hérault said. ‘They’ve plundered the Saint-Lazare monastery. All that fine furniture, my God, and the silver. Yes, they’ve raided the cellars, they’re lying in the streets vomiting now. What’s that you say? Versailles? Did you say “finish it off” or “finish them off”? If so I’d better get a change of clothes, I’d hate to turn up at the palace looking like this. Oh yes,’ he said, and he gripped the cleaver and charged back into the crowds, ‘it beats filing writs, doesn’t it?’ He had never been so happy: never, never before.

DUKE PHILIPPE had spent the 12th at his château of Raincy, in the forest of Bondy. On hearing of the events in Paris, he expressed himself ‘much surprised and shocked’. ‘Which,’ says his ex-mistress Mrs Elliot, ‘I really thought he was.’