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

THE WITNESSES to the marriage: Robespierre, Pétion, the writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and the Duke’s friend, the Marquis de Sillery. A diplomatically chosen selection, representing the left wing of the Assembly, the literary establishment and the Orléanist connection.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Camille said to Danton. ‘Really I wanted Lafayette, Louis Suleau, Marat and the public executioner.’

‘Of course I don’t mind.’ After all, he thought, I shall be a witness to everything else. ‘Are you going to be rich now?’

‘The dowry is a hundred thousand livres. And there’s some quite valuable silver. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve had to work for it.’

‘And are you going to be faithful to her?’

‘Of course.’ He looked shocked. ‘What a question. I love her.’

‘I only wondered. I thought it might be nice to have a statement of intent.’

THEY TOOK a first-floor apartment on the rue des Cordeliers, next door to the Dantons; and on 30 December they held their wedding breakfast for a hundred guests, the dark, icy day nuzzling in hostile curiosity at the lighted windows. At one o’clock in the morning they found themselves alone. Lucile was still in her pink wedding dress, now crumpled, and with a sticky patch where she had spilled a glass of champagne over herself some hours earlier. She sank down on to the blue chaise-longue, and kicked off her shoes. ‘Oh, what a day! Has there been anything like it in the annals of holy matrimony? My God, rows of people sniffing and groaning, and my mother crying, and my father crying, and then old Bérardier publically lecturing you like that, and you crying, and the half of Paris that wasn’t weeping in the pews standing outside in the streets shouting slogans and making lewd comments. And – ’ Her voice tailed off. The day’s sick excitement washed over her, wave on wave of it. Probably, she thought, this is what it’s like to be at sea. Camille seemed to be talking to her from a long way off:

‘…and I never thought that happiness like this could have anything to do with me, because two years ago I had nothing, and now I have you, and I’ve got the money to live well, and I’m famous…’

‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ Lucile said.

When she thought back on the ceremony, everything appeared to be a sort of haze, so that she felt that perhaps even by then she had had too much to drink, and she wondered in momentary panic, are we properly married? Is drunkenness an incapacity? What about last week, when we looked over the apartment – was I quite sober then? Where is the apartment?

‘I thought they’d never go,’ Camille said.

She looked up at him. All the things she’d been going to say, all the rehearsals she’d had for this moment, four years of rehearsals; and now, when it came to it, she could only manage a queasy smile. She forced her eyes open to stop the room spinning, and then closed them again, and let it spin. She rolled face down on the chaise-longue, drew up her knees comfortably, and gave a little grunt of contentment, like the dog at Saint-Sulpice. She slept. Some kind person slid a hand under her cheek, and then replaced the hand by a cushion.

‘LISTEN to what I will be,’ said the King, ‘if I do not uphold the constitutional oath on the poor bishops.’ He adjusted his spectacles and read:

‘…enemy of the public liberty, treacherous conspirator, most cowardly of perjurers, prince without honour, without shame, lowest of men…’ He broke off, put down the newspaper and blew his nose vigorously into a handkerchief embroidered with the royal arms – the last he had, of the old sort. ‘A happy new year to you too, Dr Marat,’ he said.

III. Lady’s Pleasure (1791)

’91: ‘LAFAYETTE,’ Mirabeau suggests to the Queen, ‘is walking more closely in the footsteps of Cromwell than becomes his natural modesty.’

We’re done for, Marat says, it’s all up with us; Antoinette’s gang are in league with Austria, the monarchs are betraying the nation. It is necessary to cut off 20,000 heads.

France is to be invaded from the Rhine. By June, the King’s brother Artois will have an army at Coblenz. Maître Desmoulins’s old client, the Prince de Condé, will command a force at Worms. A third, at Colmar, will be under the command of Mirabeau’s younger brother, who is known, because of his shape and proclivities, as Barrel Mirabeau.

The Barrel spent his last few months in France pursuing the Lanterne Attorney through the courts. He now hopes to pursue him, with an armed force, through the streets. The émigrés want the old regime back, not one jot or one tittle abated: and a firing squad for Lafayette. They call, as of right, for the support of the powers of Europe.

The powers, however, have their own ideas. These revolutionaries are dangerous, beyond doubt; they menace us all in the most horrible fashion. But Louis is not dead, nor deposed; though the furnishings and appointments at the Tuileries may not measure up to those at Versailles, he is not even seriously inconvenienced. In better times, when the revolution is over, he may be inclined to admit that the sharp lesson has done him good. Meanwhile it is a secret, unholy pleasure to watch a rich neighbour struggle on with taxes uncollected, a fine army rent by mutiny, Messieurs the Democrats making themselves ridiculous. The order established by God must be maintained in Europe; but there is no need, just at present, to re-gild the Bourbon lilies.

As for Louis himself, the émigrés advise him to begin a campaign of passive resistance. As the months pass, they begin to despair of him. They remind each other of the maxim of the Comte de Provence: ‘When you can hold together a number of oiled ivory balls, you may do something with the King.’ It infuriates them to find that Louis’s every pronouncement bows to the new order – until they receive his secret assurance that everything he says means the exact opposite. They cannot understand that some of those monsters, those blackguards, those barbarians of the National Assembly, have the King’s interests at heart. Neither can the Queen comprehend it:

‘If I see them, or have any relations with them, it is only to make use of them; they inspire me with a horror too great for me to ever become involved with them.’ So much for you, Mirabeau. It is possible that Lafayette is penetrated with a clearer idea of the lady’s worth. He has told her to her face (they say) that he intends to prove her guilty of adultery and pack her off home to Austria. To this end, he leaves every night a little door unguarded, to admit her supposed lover, Axel von Fersen. ‘Conciliation is no longer possible,’ she writes. ‘Only armed force can repair the damage done.’

Catherine, the Tsarina: ‘I am doing my utmost to spur on the courts of Vienna and Berlin to become entangled in French affairs so that I can have my hands free.’ Catherine’s hands are free, as usual, for choking Poland. She will make her counter-revolution in Warsaw, she says, and let the Germans make one in Paris. Leopold, in Austria, is occupied with the affairs of Poland, Belgium, Turkey; William Pitt is thinking of India, and financial reforms. They wait and watch France weakening herself (as they think) by strife and division so that she is no longer a threat to their schemes.

Frederick William of Prussia thinks a little differently; when war breaks out with France, as he knows it will, he intends to come out best. He has agents in Paris, directed to stir up hatred of Antoinette and the Austrians: to urge the use of force, to unbalance the situation, and tilt it to violent conclusions. The real enthusiast for counter-revolution is Gustavus of Sweden, Gustavus who is going to wipe Paris off the face of the earth: Gustavus who was paid one and a half million livres per annum under the old regime, Gustavus and his imaginary army. And from Madrid, the fevered reactionary sentiments of an imbecile King.

These revolutionaries, they say, are the scourge of mankind. I will move against them – if you will.

From Paris the future looks precarious. Marat sees conspirators everywhere, treason on the breeze drifting the new tricolour flag outside the King’s windows. Behind that façade, patrolled by National Guardsmen, the King eats, drinks, grows stout, is seldom out of countenance. ‘My greatest fault,’ he had once written, ‘is a sluggishness of mind which makes all my mental efforts wearisome and painful.’

In the left-wing press, Lafayette is now referred to not by his title, but by his family name of Mottie. The King is referred to as Louis Capet. The Queen is called ‘the King’s wife’.

There is religious dissension. About one-half of the cures of France agree to take the constitutional oath. The rest we call refractory priests. Only seven bishops support the new order. In Paris, nuns are attacked by fishwives. At Saint-Sulpice, where Father Pancemont is obdurate, a mob tramps through the nave singing that wholesome ditty: ‘Ça ira, ç ira, les aristocrats à la Lanterne’. The King’s aunts, Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire, leave secretly for Rome. The patriots have to be assured that the two old ladies have not packed the Dauphin in their luggage. The Pope pronounces the civil constitution schismatic. The head of a policeman is thrown into the carriage of the Papal Nuncio.

In a booth at the Palais-Royal, a male and female ‘savage’ exhibit themselves naked. They eat stones, babble in an unknown tongue and for a few small coins will copulate.

Barnave, summer: ‘One further step towards liberty must destroy the monarchy, one further step towards equality must destroy private property.’

Desmoulins, autumn: ‘Our revolution of 1789 was a piece of business arranged between the English government and a minority of the nobility, prepared by some in the hopes of turning out the Versailles aristocracy, and taking possession of their castles, houses and offices: by others to saddle us with a new master: and by all, to give us two Houses, and a constitution like that of England.’

’91: eighteen months of revolution, and securely under the heel of a new tyranny.

‘That man is a liar,’ Robespierre says, ‘who claims I have ever advocated disobedience to the laws.’

JANUARY AT BOURG-LA-REINE. Annette Duplessis stood at the window, gazing into the branches of the walnut tree that shaded the courtyard. From here, you could not see the foundations of the new cottage; just as well, for they were as melancholy as ruins. She sighed in exasperation at the silence welling from the room behind her. All of them would be beseeching her, inwardly, to turn and make some remark. If she were to leave the room, she would come back to find it alive with tension. Taking chocolate together mid-morning: surely that should not be too much of a strain?

Claude was reading the Town and Court Journal, a right-wing scandal-sheet. He had a faintly defiant air. Camille was gazing at his wife, as he often did. (Two days married, she discovered with a sense of shock that the black soul-eating eyes were short-sighted. ‘Perhaps you should wear spectacles.’ ‘Too vain.’) Lucile was reading Clarissa, in translation and with scant attention. Every few minutes her eyes would flit from the page to her husband’s face.

Annette wondered if this were what had plunged Claude so deeply into disagreeableness – the girl’s air of sexual triumph, the high colour in her cheeks when they met in the mornings. You wish she were nine years old, she thought, kept happy with her dolls. She studied her husband’s bent head, the strands of grey neatly dressed and powdered; rural interludes wrung no concessions from Claude. Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.

Claude let his paper fall. Camille snapped out of his reverie and turned his head. ‘What now? I told you, if you read that thing you must expect to be shocked.’

Claude seemed unable to articulate. He pointed to the page; Annette thought he whimpered. Camille reached forward for it; Claude clasped it to his chest. ‘Don’t be silly, Claude,’ Annette said, as one does to a baby. ‘Give the paper to Camille.’

Camille ran his eyes down the page. ‘Oh, you’ll enjoy this. Lolotte, will you go away for a minute?’

‘No.’

Where did she get this pet-name? Annette had some feeling that Danton had given it to her. A little too intimate, she thought; and now Camille uses it. ‘Do as you’re told,’ she said.

Lucile didn’t move. I’m married now, she thought; don’t have to do what anybody says.

‘Stay then,’ Camille said, ‘I was only thinking to spare your feelings. According to this, you’re not your father’s daughter.’

‘Oh, don’t say it,’ Claude said. ‘Burn the paper.’

‘You know what Rousseau said.’ Annette looked grim. ‘“Burning isn’t answering.”’

‘Whose daughter am I?’ Lucile asked. ‘Am I my mother’s daughter, or am I a foundling?’

‘You’re certainly your mother’s daughter, and your father’s the abbé Terray.’

Lucile giggled. ‘Lucile, I am not beyond slapping you,’ her mother said.

‘Hence the money for the dowry,’ Camille said, ‘comes from the abbé’s speculation in grain at times of famine.’