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

‘I mean, to arrest him would be too dangerous. The Cordeliers section, you know. He’s moved in.’

‘With respect, M. Bailly, I say this writing is treasonable.’

‘I can only say, General, that it came pretty near the bone last month when the Marquis de Saint-Huruge sent me an open letter telling me to oppose the King’s veto or be lynched. As you’re aware, when we arrested the man the Cordeliers made so much trouble I thought it best to let him go again. I don’t like it, but there you are. That whole district is spoiling for a fight. Do you know this man Danton, the Cordeliers’ president?’

‘Yes,’ Lafayette said. ‘I do indeed.’

Bailly shook his head. ‘We must exercise caution. We can’t handle any more riots. We mustn’t make martyrs, you see.’

‘I’m compelled to admit,’ Lafayette said, ‘that there’s sense in what you say. If all the people Desmoulins threatens were strung up tomorrow, it would hardly be a Massacre of the Innocents. So we do nothing. But then our position becomes impossible, because we shall be accused of countenancing mob law.’

‘So what would you like to do?’

‘Oh, I would like…’ Lafayette closed his eyes. ‘I would like to send three or four stout fellows across the river with instructions to reduce My Lord Prosecutor to a little red stain on the wall.’

‘My dear Marquis!’

‘You know I don’t mean it,’ Lafayette said regretfully. ‘But sometimes I wish I were not such an Honourable Gentleman. I often wonder how civilized methods will answer, in dealing with these people.’

‘You are the most honourable gentleman in France,’ the mayor said stiffly. ‘That is generally known.’ Universally, he would have said, had he not been an astronomer.

‘Why do you think we have such trouble with the Cordeliers section?’ Lafayette asked. ‘There’s this man Danton, and that abortion Marat, and this – ’ he indicated the paper. ‘By the way, when this is at Versailles it stays with Mirabeau, which may tell us something about Mirabeau.’

‘I will make a note of it. You know,’ the mayor said mildly, ‘considered as literature, the pamphlet is admirable.’

‘Don’t tell me about literature,’ Lafayette said. He was thinking of Berthier’s corpse, the bowels trailing from the gashed abdomen. He leaned forward and flicked up the pamphlet with his fingertips. ‘Do you know Camille Desmoulins?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen him? He’s one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paperknife.’ He shook his head wonderingly. ‘Where do they come from, these people? They’re virgins. They’ve never been to war. They’ve never been on the hunting field. They’ve never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they’re such enthusiasts for murder.’

‘As long as they don’t have to do it themselves, I suppose,’ the mayor said. He remembered the dissected heart on his desk, a shivering lump of butcher’s meat.

IN GUISE: ‘How am I to hold my head up on the street?’ Jean-Nicolas asked rhetorically. ‘The worse of it is, he thinks I should be proud of him. He’s known everywhere, he says. He dines with aristocrats every day.’

‘As long as he’s eating,’ Mme Desmoulins said. Proceeding out of her own mouth, the comment surprised her. She had never been one for taking a maternal interest. And equally, Camille had never been one to eat.

‘I don’t know how I’m to face the Godards. They’ll all have read it. There’s one thing, though – I bet Rose-Fleur’s glad now that they made her break it off.’

‘How little you understand women!’ his wife said.

Rose-Fleur Godard kept the pamphlet on her sewing-table and quoted it in and out of season, to annoy M. Tarrieux de Tailland, her new fiancé.

D’ANTON had read the pamphlet and given it to Gabrielle to read. ‘You’d better,’ he said. ‘Everybody will be talking about it.’

Gabrielle read half, then left it aside. Her reasoning was this: she had, in a manner of speaking, to live with Camille, and she would therefore prefer not to know too much of his opinions. She was quiet now; feeling her way from day to day, like a blind woman in a new house. She never asked Georges what had happened at the meetings of the District Assembly. When new faces appeared at the supper table she simply laid extra places, and tried to keep the conversation light. She was pregnant again. No one expected much of her. No one expected her to bother her head about the state of the nation.

THE FAMOUS WRITER, Mercier, introduced Camille into the salons of Paris and Versailles. ‘In twenty years time,’ Mercier predicted, ‘he will be our foremost man of letters.’ Twenty years? Camille can’t wait twenty minutes.

His mood, at these gatherings, would swing violently, from moment to moment. He would feel exhilarated; then he would feel he was there under false pretences. Society hostesses, who had taken such pains to get him, often felt obliged to pretend not to know who he was. The idea was that his identity should seep and creep out, gradually, so that if anyone wanted to walk out they could do it without making a scene. But the hostesses must have him; they must have the frisson, the shock-value. A party isn’t a party…

His headache had come back; too much hair-tossing, perhaps. The one constant, at these parties, was that he didn’t have to say anything. Other people did the talking, around him. About him.

Friday evening, late, the Comtesse de Beauharnais’s house: full of young poets to flatter her, and interesting rich Creoles. The airy rooms shimmered: silver, palest blue. Fanny de Beauharnais took his arm: a proprietorial gesture, so different from when no one wanted to own him.

‘Arthur Dillon,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve not met? Son of the eleventh Viscount Dillon? Sits in the Assembly for Martinique?’ A touch, a whisper, a rustle of silk: ‘General Dillon? Here is something to pique your curiosity.’

Dillon turned. He was forty years old, a man of singular and refined good looks; almost a caricature aristocrat, with his thin beak of a nose and his small red mouth. ‘The Lanterne Attorney,’ Fanny whispered. ‘Don’t tell everybody. Not all at once.’

Dillon looked him over. ‘Damned if you’re what I expected.’ Fanny glided away, a little cloud of perfume billowing in her wake. Dillon’s gaze had become fixed, fascinated. ‘The times change, and we with them,’ he remarked in Latin. He slid a hand on to Camille’s shoulder, took him into custody. ‘Come and meet my wife.’

Laure Dillon occupied a chaise-longue. She wore a white muslin dress spangled with silver; her hair was caught up in a turban of white-and-silver silk gauze. Reclining, Laure was exercising her foible: she carried round with her the stump of a wax candle and, when unoccupied, nibbled it.

‘My dear,’ Dillon said, ‘here’s the Lanterne Attorney.’

Laure stirred a little crossly: ‘Who?’

‘The one who started the riots before the Bastille fell. The one who has people strung up and their heads cut off and so forth.’

‘Oh,’ Laure looked up. The silver hoops of her earrings shivered in the light. Her beautiful eyes wandered over him. ‘Sweet,’ she said.

Arthur laughed a little. ‘Not much on politics, my wife.’

Laure unglued from her soft lips the warm piece of wax. She sighed; absent-mindedly she fondled the ribbon at the neck of her dress. ‘Come to dinner,’ she said.

As Dillon steered him back across the room, Camille caught sight of himself: his wan, dark, sharp face. The clocks tinkled eleven. ‘Almost time for supper,’ Dillon said. He turned, and saw on the Lanterne Attorney’s face a look of the most heart-rending bewilderment. ‘Don’t look like that,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s power, you see. You’ve got it now. It changes things.’

‘I know. I can’t get used to it.’

Everywhere he went there was this covert scrutiny, the dropped voices, the glances over shoulders. Who? That? Really?

The general observed him, only minutes later, in the centre of a crowd of women. It seemed that his identity was now known. There was colour in their cheeks, their mouths were slightly ajar, their pulses fluttered at proximity merely. An unedifying spectacle, the general thought: but that’s women for you. Three months ago, they’d not have given the boy a second glance.

The general was a kind man. He had undertaken to worry and wonder about Camille, and from that night on – at intervals, over the next five years – he would remember to do so. When he thought about Camille he wanted – stupid as it might seem – to protect him.

SHOULD KING LOUIS have the power to veto the actions of the National Assembly?

‘Mme Veto’ was the Queen’s new name, on the streets.

If there were no veto, Mirabeau said obscurely, one might as well live at Constantinople. But since the people of Paris were solidly opposed to the veto (by and large they thought it was a new tax) Mirabeau cobbled together for the Assembly a speech which was all things to all men, less the work of a statesman than of a country-fair contortionist. In the end, a compromise emerged: the King was left with the power not to block but to delay legislation. Nobody was happy.

Public confusion deepened. Paris, a street-corner orator: ‘Only last week the aristocrats were given these Suspensive Vetoes, and already they’re using them to buy up all the corn and send it out of the country. That’s why we’re short of bread.’

OCTOBER: no one quite knew whether the King was contemplating resistance, or flight. In any event, there were new regiments at Versailles, and when the Flanders Regiment arrived the King’s Bodyguard gave a banquet for them at the palace.

It was a conspicuous affair, lacking in tact: though the pamphleteers would have bawled Bacchanalia at a packed lunch in the grounds.

When the King appeared, with his wife and the little Dauphin, he was cheered to the echo by inebriated military voices. The child was lifted on to the tables, and walked down them, laughing. Glasses were raised to the confusion of rebels. The tricolour cockade was thrown to the floor and ground under the gentlemen’s heels.

That is Saturday, 3 October: Versailles banqueting while Paris starves.

Five o’clock that evening, President Danton was roaring at his District Assembly, his doubled fist pounding the table. The Cordeliers citizens will placard the city, he said. They will revenge this insult to the patriots. They will save Paris from the royal threat. The battalion will call out its brothers-in-arms in every district, they will be the first on the road. They will hale the King to Paris, and have him under their eye. If all else fails it is clear that President Danton will march there himself, and drag Louis back single-handed. I have finished with the King, said the King’s Councillor.