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

Being asked if it was with this knife that he had mutilated the head of the Sieur de Launay, he answered that it was with a black knife, a smaller one; and when it was observed to him that it was impossible to cut off heads with so small and weak an instrument, he answered that, in his capacity as cook, he had learned how to handle meat.

18 August 1789

At Astley’s Amphitheatre, Westminster Bridge

(after rope-dancing by Signior Spinacuta)

An Entire New and Splendid Spectacle

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

From Sunday 12 July to Wednesday 15 July (inclusive)

called

PARIS IN AN UPROAR

displaying one of the grandest and most extraordinary

entertainments that ever appeared

grounded on

Authentic Fact

BOX 3s., PIT 2s., GAL 1s., SIDE GAL 6d.

The doors to be opened at half-past five, to begin at

half-past six o’clock precisely.

CAMILLE WAS NOW persona non grata at the rue Condé. He had to rely on Stanislas Fréron to come and go, bring him the news, convey his sentiments (and letters) to Lucile.

‘You see,’ Fréron told him, ‘if I grasp the situation, she loved you for your fine spiritual qualities. Because you were so sensitive, so elevated. Because – as she believed – you were on a different planet from us more coarse-grained mortals. But now what happens? You turn out to be the kind of man who goes storming round the streets covered in mud and blood, inciting butchery.’

D’Anton said that Fréron was ‘trying to clear the field for himself, one way or another’. His tone was cynical. He quoted the remark Voltaire had made about Rabbit’s father: ‘If a snake bit Fréron, the snake would die.’

The truth was – but Fréron was not about to mention this – Lucile was more besotted than ever. Claude Duplessis remained convinced that if he could introduce his daughter to the right man she’d get over her obsession. But he’d have a hard job finding anyone who remotely interested her; if he found them suitable, it followed she wouldn’t. Everything about Camille excited her: his unrespectability, his faux-naïf little mannerisms, his skittish intellect. Above all, the fact that he’d suddenly become famous.

Fréron – the old family friend – had seen the change in Lucile. A pretty curds-and-whey miss had become a dashing young woman, with a mouth full of political jargon and a knowing light in her eye. Be good in bed, Fréron thought, when she gets there. He himself had a wife, a stay-at-home who hardly counted in his scheme of things. Anything’s possible, these days, he thought.

Unfortunately, Lucile had taken up this ludicrous fashion for calling him ‘Rabbit’.

CAMILLE didn’t sleep much: no time. When he did, his dreams exhausted him. He dreamt, inter alia, that the whole world had gone to a party. The scene, variously, was the Place de Grève: Annette’s drawing room: the Hall of the Lesser Pleasures. Everyone in the world was at this party. Angélique Charpentier was talking to Hérault de Séchelles; they were comparing notes about him, exploding his fictions. Sophie from Guise, whom he had slept with when he was sixteen, was telling everything to Laclos; Laclos had his notebook out, and Maître Perrin was at his elbow, demanding attention in a lawyer’s bellow. The smirking, adhesive Deputy Pétion had linked arms with the dead governor of the Bastille; de Launay flopped about, useless without his head. His old schoolfriend, Louis Suleau, was arguing in the street with Anne Théroigne. Fabre and Robespierre were playing a children’s game; they froze like statues when the argument stopped.

He would have worried about these dreams, except that he was going out to dinner every night. He knew they contained a truth; all the people in his life were coming together now. He said to d’Anton, ‘What do you think of Robespierre?’

‘Max? Splendid little chap.’

‘Oh no, you mustn’t say that. He’s sensitive about his height. He used to be, anyway, when we were at school.’

‘Good God,’ d’Anton said. ‘Then just take it that he’s splendid. I haven’t time to pussyfoot around people’s vanities.’

‘And you accuse me of having no tact.’

‘Are you trying to start an argument?’

So he never found out what d’Anton thought of Robespierre.

He said to Robespierre, ‘What do you think of d’Anton?’ Robespierre took off his spectacles and polished them. He mulled over the question. ‘Very pleasant,’ he said at length.

‘But what do you think, really? You’re being evasive. I mean you don’t just think that someone is pleasant, and that’s all you think, surely?’

‘Oh, you do, Camille, you do,’ Robespierre said gently.

So he never found out what Robespierre thought of d’Anton, either.

THE EX-MINISTER FOULON had once remarked, in a time of famine, that if the people were hungry they could eat grass. Or so it was believed. That was why – and reason enough – on 22 July he was in the Place de Grève, with an audience.

He was under guard, but it seemed likely that the small but ugly crowd, who had plans for him, would tear him away. Lafayette arrived and spoke to them. He had no wish to stand in the way of the people’s justice; but at least Foulon should have a fair trial.

‘What’s the use of a trial,’ someone called out, ‘for a man who’s been convicted these thirty years?’

Foulon was old; it was many years since he had ventured his bon mot. To escape this fate he had hidden, and put about rumours of his own death. It was said that a funeral had been conducted over a coffin packed with stones. Tracked down, arrested, he now looked beseechingly at the general. From the narrow streets beyond City Hall, there came the low rumble which Paris now identified as marching feet.

‘They’re converging,’ an aide reported to the general. ‘From the Palais-Royal on one hand, and from Saint-Antoine on the other.’

‘I know,’ the general said. ‘I can hear on both sides of my head. How many?’

No one could estimate. Too many. He looked at Foulon without much sympathy. He had no forces on hand; if the city authorities wanted to protect Foulon, they would have to do it themselves. He glanced at his aide, gave a minute shrug.

They pelted Foulon with grass, tied a bunch of it on his back, stuffed his mouth with it. ‘Eat up the nice grass,’ they urged him. Gagging on the sharp stalks, he was dragged across the Place de Grève, where a rope was tossed over the iron projection of the Lanterne. For a few moments the old man swung where at dusk the great light would swing. Then the rope snapped; he plummeted into the crowd. Mauled and kicked, he was hoisted back into the air. Again the rope broke. The mob’s hands grasped him, careful not to deliver the coup de grace. A third noose was placed about the livid neck. This time the rope held. When he was dead, or nearly so, the mob cut off his head and speared it on a pike.

At the same time, Foulon’s son-in-law Berthier, the Intendant of Paris, had been arrested in Compiègne and conveyed, glassy-eyed with terror, to City Hall. He was bundled inside, through a crowd that peppered him with crusts of sour black bread. Shortly afterwards he was bundled out again, on his way to the Abbaye prison; shortly after that, he was bundled to his death – strangled perhaps, or finished with a musket-ball, for who knew the moment? And perhaps he was not dead either when a sword began to hack at his neck. His head in turn was stabbed on to a pike. The two processions met and the pikes swayed together, bringing the severed heads nose-to-nose. ‘Kiss Daddy!’ the mob called out. Berthier’s chest was sawn open, and the heart was wrenched out. It was skewered on to a sword, marched to City Hall, and flung down on Bailly’s desk. The mayor almost collapsed. The heart was then taken to the Palais-Royal. Blood was squeezed out of it into a glass, and people drank it. They sang:

A party isn’t a party

When the heart’s not in it.

THE NEWS OF THE LYNCHINGS at Paris caused consternation at Versailles, where the Assembly was absorbed in a debate on human rights. There was shock, outrage, protest: where was the militia while this was going on? It was generally believed that Foulon and his son-in-law had been speculators in grain, but the deputies, moving between the Hall of the Lesser Pleasures and the well-stocked larders of their lodgings, had lost touch with what is often called popular sentiment. Disgusted at their hypocrisy, Deputy Barnave asked them, ‘This blood that has been shed, was it so pure?’ Revolted, they shouted him down, marking him in their minds as dangerous. The debate would resume; they were intent on framing a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’. Some were heard to mutter that the Assembly should write the constitution first, since rights exist in virtue of laws; but jurisprudence is such a dull subject, and liberty so exciting.

Night of 4 August, the feudal system ceases to exist in France. The Vicomte de Noailles rises and, voice shaking with emotion, gives away all he possesses – not a great deal, as his nickname is ‘Lackland’. The National Assembly surges to its feet for a saturnalia of magnanimity; they slough off serfs, game laws, tithes in kind, seigneural courts – and tears of joy stream down their faces. A member passes a note to the President – ‘Close the session, they have lost control of themselves.’ But the hand of heaven can’t hold them back – they vie in the pandemonium to be each more patriotic than the last, they gabble to relinquish what belongs to them and with eagerness even greater what belongs to others. Next week, of course, they will try to backtrack; but it will be too late.

And Camille moves around Versailles spreading a scatter of crumpled paper, generating in the close silence of the summer nights the prose he no longer despises…

It is on that night, more so than on Holy Saturday, that we came forth from the wretched bondage of Egypt…That night restored to Frenchmen the rights of man, and declared all citizens equal, equally admissable to all offices, places and public employ; again, that night has snatched all civil offices, ecclesiastical and military from wealth, birth and royalty, to give them to the nation as a whole on the basis of merit. That night has taken from Mme d’Epr— her pension of 20,000 livres for having slept with a minister…Trade with the Indies is now open to everyone. He who wishes may open a shop. The master tailor, the master shoemaker, the master wig-maker will weep, but the journeymen will rejoice, and there will be lights in the attic windows…O night disastrous for the Grand Chamber, the clerks, the bailiffs, the lawyers, the valets, for the secretaries, for the under-secretaries, for all plunderers…But O wonderful night, vera beata nox, happy for everyone, since the barriers that excluded so many from honour and employment have been hurled down for ever, and today there no longer exist among the French any distinctions but those of virtue and talent.

A DARK CORNER, in a dark bar: Dr Marat hunched over a table. August 4 was a sick joke, he said.