Читать книгу A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel - Страница 19

NOTHING CHANGES. Nothing new. The same old dreary crisis atmosphere. The feeling that it can’t get much worse without something giving way. But nothing does. Ruin, collapse, the sinking ship of state: the point of no return, the shifting balance, the crumbling edifice and the sands of time. Only the cliché flourishes.

In Arras, Maximilien de Robespierre faces the New Year truculent and disheartened. He is at war with the local judiciary. He has no money. He has given up the literary society, because poetry is becoming an irrelevance. He is trying to restrict his social life, because he finds it difficult now to be even normally courteous to the self-satisfied, the place-seekers, the mealy-mouthed – and that is a fair description of polite society in Arras. More and more, casual conversations turn to the questions of the day, and he stifles his wish to smile and let things pass; that conciliatory streak, he is fighting hard to eradicate that. So every workaday disagreement becomes an affront, every point conceded in court becomes a defeat. There are laws against duelling, but not against duelling in the head. You can’t, he tells his brother Augustin, separate political views from the people who hold them; if you do, it shows you don’t take politics seriously.

Somehow his thoughts ought to show on his face – but he finds himself still on the guest lists, still in demand for country drives and evenings at the theatre. They will not see that he has not enough unction left to oil the wheels of social intercourse. The pressure of their expectations forces from him again and again a little tact, the soft answer; it’s so easy to behave, after all, like the nice boy you always were.

Aunt Henriette, Aunt Eulalie edge around with that stifling tact of their own, their desire always to do the very very best for you. Aunt Eulalie’s stepdaughter, Anaïs: so pretty, so fond of you: so why not? And why not make it soon? Because, he said with desperation, next year they might call the Estates, and who knows, who knows, I might be going away.

BY CHRISTMAS the Charpentiers were well settled in their new house at Fontenay-sous-Bois. They miss the café, but not the city mud, the noise, the rude people in the shops. The country air, they say, makes them feel ten years younger. Gabrielle and Georges-Jacques come out on Sundays. You can see they’re happy; it’s so gratifying. The baby will have enough shawls for seven infants and more attention than a dauphin. Georges-Jacques looks harassed, pale after the long winter. What he needs is a month at home in Arcis, but he can’t take the time off. He now has complete charge of the Board of Excise’s legal work, but he says he needs another source of income. He would like to buy some land, but he says he hasn’t the capital. He says there is a limit to what one man can do, but no doubt he is worrying needlessly. We are all very proud of Georges.

AT THE TREASURY, Claude Duplessis comports himself as cheerfully as he can, given the circumstances. Last year, during a period of five months, France had three Comptrollers in succession, all of them asking the same silly questions and requiring to be fed streams of useless information. He has to think quite hard when he wakes in the morning to recall who he works for. Soon no doubt M. Necker will be invited back, to treat us to more of his glib nostrums about public confidence. If the public at large want to think of Necker as some sort of Messiah, who are we, mere clerks, mere civil servants after all … No one at the Treasury thinks the situation can be retrieved.

Claude confides to a colleague that his lovely daughter wants to marry a little provincial lawyer who has a stutter and who hardly ever appears in court, and who seems in addition to have a bad moral character. He wonders why his colleague smirks so.

The deficit is one hundred and sixty million livres.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS was living in the rue Sainte-Anne, with a girl whose mother painted portraits. ‘Do go and see your family,’ she told him. ‘Just for the New Year.’ She looked at him appraisingly; she was thinking of going into her mother’s line of work. Camille’s not easy to put on paper; it’s easier to draw the men the taste of the age admires, florid fleshy men with their conscious poise and newly barbered heads. Camille moves too quickly for even a lightning sketch; she knows he is moving on, out of their lives, and she wants if she can to make things right for him before he goes.

So now the diligence, not worth the name, rumbled towards Guise over roads rutted and flooded by January rains. As he approached his home, Camille thought of his sister Henriette, of her long dying. Whole days, whole weeks had gone by when they had not seen Henriette, only his mother’s whey-face, and the doctor coming and going. He had gone off to school, to Cateau-Cambrésis, and sometimes he had woken in the night and thought, why isn’t she coughing? When he returned home he was taken into her room and allowed to sit for five minutes by the bed. She had transparent places under her eyes, where the skin shone blue; her bony shoulders were pushed forwards by the pillows. She had died the year he went to school in Paris, on a day when the rain fell steadily and coursed in brown channels through the streets of the town.

His father had given the priest and the doctor a glass of brandy – as if they were not habituated to death, as if they needed bracing. Himself, he sat in a corner inconspicuously, and awkwardly very awkwardly the men revolved the conversation around to him: Camille, how will you like going to Louis-le-Grand? I have made up my mind to like it, he said. Won’t you miss your mother and father? You must remember, he said, that they sent me to school three years ago when I was seven, so I will not miss them at all, and they will not miss me. He’s upset, the priest said hurriedly; but Camille your little sister’s in heaven. No, Father, he had said: we are compelled to believe that Henriette is in purgatory now, tasting torments. This is the consolation our religion allows us for our loss.

There would be brandy for him now when he arrived home, and his father would ask, as he had done for years, how was the journey? But he was used to the journey. Perhaps the horses might fall over, or you might be poisoned en route, or bored to death by a fellow traveller; that was the sum of the possibilities. Once he had said, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t speak to anyone, I thought evil thoughts all the way. All the way? And those were the days before the diligence. He must have had stamina, when he was sixteen.

Before leaving Paris he had read over his father’s recent letters. They were trenchant, unmagisterial, wounding. Between the lines lay the unspeakable fact that the Godards wish to break off his engagement to his cousin Rose-Fleur. It had been made when she was in her cradle; how were they to know how things would turn out?

It was Friday night when he arrived home. The next day there were calls to be paid around the town, gatherings he could not avoid. Rose-Fleur affected to be too shy to speak to him, but the pretence sat uneasily on her restless shoulders. She had darting eyes and the Godards’ heavy dark hair; she ran her eyes over him from time to time, making him feel that he had been coated with black treacle.

On Sunday he went to Mass with the family. In the narrow, sleet-blown streets he was an object of curiosity. In church people looked at him as if he had come from a warmer region than Paris.

‘They say you are an atheist,’ his mother whispered.

‘Is that what they say I am?’

Clément said, ‘Perhaps you will be like that diabolic Angevin who vanished at the consecration in a puff of smoke?’

‘It would be an event,’ Anne-Clothilde said. ‘Our social calendar has been so dull.’

Camille did not study the congregation; he was aware that they studied him. There was M. Saulce and his wife; there was the same physician, bewigged and tubby, who once assisted Henriette to her coffin.

‘There’s your old girlfriend,’ Clément said. ‘We’re not supposed to know, but we do.’

Sophie was a doubled-chinned matron now. She looked through him as if his bones were glass. He felt that perhaps they were; even stone seemed to crumble and melt in the scented ecclesiastical gloom. Six points of light on the altar guttered and flared; their shadows cross-hatched flesh and stone, wine and bread. The few communicants melted away into the darkness. It was the feast of the Epiphany; when they emerged, the blue daylight scoured the burgers’ skulls, icing out features and peeling them back to bone.

He went upstairs to his father’s study and sifted through his filed correspondence until he found the letter he wanted, the missive from his Godard uncle. His father came in as he was reading it. ‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t try to hide the letter. ‘That’s really going rather far,’ Jean-Nicolas said.

‘Yes.’ Camille smiled, turning the page. ‘But then you know I am ruthless and capable of great crimes.’ He carried the paper to the light. ‘Camille’s known instability’, he read, ‘and the dangers that may be apprehended to the happiness and durability of the union’. He put the letter down. His hand trembled. ‘Do they think I’m mad?’ he asked his father.

‘They think –’

‘What else can it mean, instability?’

‘Is it just their choice of words you’re quibbling about?’ Jean-Nicolas went over to the fireplace, rubbing his hands. ‘That bloody church is freezing,’ he said. ‘They could have come up with other terms, but of course they won’t commit them to writing. Something got back about a – relationship – you were having with a colleague whom I had always held in considerable –’

Camille stared at him. ‘That was years ago.’

‘I don’t find this particularly easy to talk about,’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘Would you like just to deny it, and then I can put people straight on the matter?’

The wind tossed handfuls of sleet against the windows, and rattled in the chimneys and eaves. Jean-Nicolas raised his eyes apprehensively. ‘We lost slates in November. What’s happening to the weather? It never used to be like this.’

Camille said, ‘Anything that happened was – oh, back in the days when the sun used to shine all the time. Six years ago. Minimum. None of it was my fault, anyway.’

‘So what are you claiming? That my friend Perrin, a family man, whom I have known for thirty-five years, a man highly respected in the Chancery division and a leading Freemason – are you claiming that one day out of the blue he ran up to you and knocked you unconscious and dragged you into his bed? Rubbish. Listen,’ he cried, ‘can you hear that strange tapping noise? Do you think it’s the guttering?’

‘Ask anyone,’ Camille said.

‘What?’

‘About Perrin. He had a reputation. I was just a child, I – oh well, you know what I’m like, I never do quite know how I get into these things.’

‘That won’t do for an excuse. You can’t expect that to do, for the Godards.’ He broke off, looked up. ‘I think it is the guttering, you know.’ He turned back to his son. ‘And I only bring this up, as one example of the sort of story that gets back.’

It had begun to snow properly now, from an opaque and sullen sky. The wind dropped suddenly. Camille put his forehead against the cold glass and watched the snow begin to drift and bank in the square below. He felt weak with shock. His breath misted the pane, the fire crackled behind him, gulls tossed screaming in the upper air. Clément came in. ‘What’s that funny noise, a sort of tapping?’ he said. ‘Is it the guttering, do you think? That’s funny, it seems to have stopped now.’ He looked across the room. ‘Camille, are you all right?’

‘I think so. Could you just tell the fatted calf it’s been reprieved again?’

Two days later he was back in Paris, in the rue Sainte-Anne. ‘I’m moving out,’ he told his mistress.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘If you must know, I really object to your carrying on with my mother behind my back. So perhaps it’s just as well.’

SO NOW CAMILLE woke up alone: which he hated. He touched his closed eyelids. His dreams did not bear discussion. His life is not really what people imagine, he thought. The long struggle for Annette had shredded his nerves. How he would like to be with Annette, and settled. He did not bear Claude any ill-will, but it would be neat if he could be just plucked out of existence. He did not want him to suffer; he tried to think of a precedent, in the Scriptures perhaps. Anything could happen; that was his experience.

He remembered – and he had to remember afresh every morning – that he was going to marry Annette’s daughter, that he had made her swear an oath about it. How complicated it all was. His father suggested that he wrecked people’s lives. He was at a loss to see this. He had not raped anybody, nor committed murder, and from anything else people ought to be able to pick themselves up and carry on, as he was always doing.

There was a letter from home. He didn’t want to open it. Then he thought, don’t be a fool, someone might have died. Inside was a banker’s draft, and a few words from his father, less of apology than of resignation. This had happened before; they had gone through this whole cycle, of name-calling and horror and flight and appeasement. At a certain point, his father would feel he had overstepped the mark. He had an impulse, a desire to have control; and if his son stopped writing, never came home again, he would have lost control. I should, Camille thought, send this draft back. But as usual. I need the money, and he knows it. Father, he thought, you have other children whom you could torment.

I’ll go round and see d’Anton, he thought. Georges-Jacques will talk to me, he doesn’t regard my vices, in fact perhaps he rather likes them. The day brightened.

They were busy at d’Anton’s offices. The King’s Councillor employed two clerks nowadays. One of them was a man called Jules Paré, whom he’d known at school, though d’Anton was younger by several years; it didn’t seem odd, that he employed his seniors these days. The other was a man called Deforgues, whom d’Anton also seemed to have known for ever. Then there was a hanger-on called Billaud-Varennes, who came in when he was wanted, to draft pleas and do the routine stuff, picking up the practice’s overflow. Billaud was in the office this morning, a spare, unprepossessing man with never a good word to say about anybody. When Camille came in, he was tapping papers together on Paré’s desk, and at the same time complaining that his wife was putting on weight. Camille saw that he was specially resentful this morning; for here he was, down-at-heel and seedy, and here was Georges-Jacques, with his good broadcloth coat nicely brushed and his plain cravat a dazzling white, with that general money-in-the-bank air of his and that loud posh voice … ‘Why are you complaining about Anna,’ Camille asked, ‘when you really want to complain about Maître d’Anton?’

Billaud looked up. ‘I’ve no complaints,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you lucky? You must be the only man in France with no complaints. Why is he lying?’

‘Go away, Camille.’ D’Anton picked up the papers Billaud had brought. ‘I’m working.’

‘When you were received into the College of Advocates, didn’t you have to go to your parish priest and ask him for a certificate to say that you were a good Catholic?’ D’Anton grunted, buried in his counter-claims. ‘Didn’t it stick in your throat?’

‘“Paris is worth a Mass,”’ d’Anton said.

‘Of course, this is why Maître Billaud-Varennes doesn’t advance himself from his present position. He also would be a King’s Councillor, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hates priests, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Billaud said. ‘As we’re quoting, I’ll quote for you – “I should like to see, and this will be the last and most ardent of my desires, I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.”’

A short pause. Camille looks Billaud over. He can’t stand him, hardly likes to be in the same room, Billaud makes his skin crawl with distaste and a sort of apprehension that he can’t fathom. But that’s just it – he has to be in the same room. He has to keep seeking out the company of people he can’t stand, it’s become a compulsion. He looks at certain people these days, and it’s as if he’s always known them, as if they belong to him in some way, as if they’re his relatives.

‘How’s your subversive pamphlet?’ he said to Billaud. ‘Have you found a printer for it yet?’

D’Anton looked up from his papers. ‘Why do you spend your time writing things that can never be published, Billaud? I’m not asking to needle you – I just want to know.’

Billaud’s face mottled. ‘Because I can’t compromise,’ he said.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ d’Anton said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better – no, we’ve had this conversation before. Perhaps you should try pamphleteering yourself, Camille. Try prose, instead of poetry.’

‘His pamphlet is called “A Last Blow against Prejudice and Superstition”,’ Camille said. ‘Doesn’t look as if it will be quite the last blow, does it? Looks as if it will be about as successful as all those dismal plays he wrote.’

‘The day when you –’ Billaud began.

D’Anton cut him off. ‘Let’s have some quiet.’ He pushed the pleadings at Billaud. ‘What is this rubbish?’

‘You teach me my business, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Why not, if you don’t know it?’ He tossed the papers down. ‘How was your cousin Rose-Fleur, Camille? No, don’t tell me now, I’m up to here.’ He indicated: chin height.

‘Is it hard to be respectable?’ Camille asked him. ‘I mean, is it really gruelling?’

‘Oh, this act of yours, Maître Desmoulins,’ Billaud said. ‘It makes me quite ill, year after year.’

‘You make me ill too, you ghoul. There must be some outlet for your talents, if the law fails. Groaning in vaults would suit you. And dancing on graves is always in request.’

Camille departed. ‘What would be an outlet for his talents?’ Jules Paré said. ‘We are too polite to conjecture.’

AT THE THÉÂTRE DES VARIÉTÉS the doorman said to Camille, ‘You’re late, love.’ He did not understand this. In the box-office two men were having a political argument, and one of them was damning the aristocracy to hell. He was a plump little man with no visible bones in his body, the kind that – in normal times – you see squeaking in defence of the status quo. ‘Hébert, Hébert,’ his opponent said without much heat, ‘you’ll be hanged, Hébert.’ Sedition must be in the air, Camille thought. ‘Hurry up,’ the doorman said. ‘He’s in a terrible mood. He’ll shout at you.’

Inside the theatre there was a hostile, shrouded dimness. Some disconsolate performers were hopping about trying to keep warm. Philippe Fabre d’Églantine stood before the stage and the singer he had just auditioned. ‘I think you need a holiday, Anne,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, my duck, it just won’t do. What have you been doing to your throat? Have you taken to smoking a pipe?’

The girl crossed her arms over her chest. She looked as if she might be about to burst into tears.

‘Just put me in the chorus, Fabre,’ she said. ‘Please.’

‘Sorry. Can’t do it. You sound as if you’re singing inside a burning building.’

‘You’re not sorry, are you?’ the girl said. ‘Bastard.’

Camille walked up to Fabre and said into his ear, ‘Are you married?’

Fabre jumped, whirled around. ‘What?’ he said. ‘No, never.’

‘Never,’ Camille said, impressed.

‘Well, yes, in a way,’ Fabre said.

‘It isn’t that I mean to blackmail you.’

‘All right. All right, I am then. She’s … touring. Listen, just wait for me a half hour, will you? I’ll be through as soon as I can. I hate this hack-work, Camille. My genius is being crushed. My time is being wasted.’ He waved an arm at the stage, the dancers, the theatre manager frowning in his box. ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

‘Everybody is disgruntled this morning. In your box-office they are having an argument about the composition of the Estates-General.’

‘Ah, René Hébert, what a fire-eater. What really irks him is that his triumphant destiny is to be in charge of the ticket returns.’

‘I saw Billaud this morning. He is disgruntled too.’

‘Don’t mention that cunt to me,’ Fabre said. ‘Trying to take the bread out of writers’ mouths. He’s got one trade, why doesn’t he stick to it? It’s different for you,’ he added kindly. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to write a play, because you’re such a complete and utter failure as a lawyer. I think, Camille dear, that you and I should collaborate on some project.’

‘I think I should like to collaborate on a violent and bloody revolution. Something that would give offence to my father.’

‘I was thinking more of something in the short-term, which would make money,’ Fabre said reprovingly.

Camille took himself into the shadows, and watched Fabre losing his temper. The singer came stalking towards him, threw herself into a seat. She dropped her head, swayed her chin from side to side to relax the muscles of her neck: then pulled tight around her upper arms a fringed silk shawl that had a certain fraying splendour about it. She seemed frayed herself; her expression was bad-tempered, her mouth set. She looked Camille over. ‘Do I know you?’

He looked her over in turn. She was about twenty-seven, he thought; small bones, darkish brown hair, snub nose. She was pretty enough, but there was something blurred about her features: as though at some time she’d been beaten, hit around the head, had almost recovered but would never quite. She repeated her question. ‘Admire the directness of your approach,’ Camille said.

The girl smiled. Tender bruised mouth. She put up a hand to massage her throat. ‘I thought I really did know you.’

‘I am afflicted by this, too. Lately I think I know everybody in Paris. It’s like a series of hallucinations.’

‘You do know Fabre, though. Can you do something for me there? Have a word, put him in a better temper?’ Then she shook her head. ‘No, forget it. He’s right, my voice has gone. I trained in England, would you believe? I had these big ideas. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’

‘Well – what have you ever done, between jobs?’

‘I used to sleep with a marquis.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘I get the impression that marquises aren’t so free with their money any more. And me, I’m not so free with my favours. Still – move on is the best thing. I think I’ll try Genoa, I’ve got contacts there.’

He liked her voice, her foreign accent; wanted to keep her talking. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Near Liège. I’ve – well – travelled a bit.’ She put her cheek on her hand. ‘My name is Anne Théroigne.’ She closed her eyes. ‘God, I’m so tired,’ she said. She moved thin shoulders inside the shawl, trying to ease the world off her back.

AT THE RUE CONDÉ, Claude was at home. ‘I’m surprised to see you,’ he said. He didn’t look it. ‘You’ve had your answer,’ he said. ‘Positively no. Never.’

‘Immortal, are you?’ Camille said. He felt just about ready for a fight.

‘I could almost believe you’re threatening me,’ Claude said.

‘Listen to me,’ Camille said. ‘Five years from now there will be none of this. There will be no Treasury officials, no aristocrats, people will be able to marry who they want, there will be no monarchy, no Parlements, and you won’t be able to tell me what I can’t do.’

He had never in his life spoken to anyone like this. It was quite releasing, he thought. I might become a thug for a career.

Annette, a room away, sat frozen in her chair. It was only once in six months that Claude came home early. It followed that Camille could not have prepared for him; this was all out of his head. He wants to marry my daughter, she thought, because someone is telling him he can’t. And she had for years nourished this rare and ferocious ego in her own drawing room, feeding it like some peculiar house-plant on mocha coffee and small confidences.

‘Lucile,’ she said, ‘sit in your chair, don’t dare leave this room. I will not condone your flouting your father’s authority.’

‘You mistake that for authority?’ Lucile said. Frightened, she walked out of the room. Camille was white with anger, his eyes opening like dark, slow stains. She stood in his path. ‘You must know,’ she said, to anyone it concerned, ‘I mean to have another life from the one they’ve worked out for me. Camille, I’m terrified of being ordinary. I’m terrified of being bored.’

His fingertips brushed the back of her hand. They were cold as ice. He turned on his heel. A door slammed. She had nothing left of him but the small chilled islands of skin. She heard her mother crying noisily out of sight, gasping and gagging. ‘Never,’ her father said, ‘never in twenty years has there been a word said out of place in this house, there have been none of these upsets, my daughters have never heard voices raised in anger.’

Adèle came out. ‘So now we are living in the real world,’ she said.

Claude wrung his hands. They had never seen anyone do it before.

THE D’ ANTONS’ son was a robust baby, with a brown skin, a full head of dark hair, and his father’s eyes, surprisingly light blue. The Charpentiers hung over the crib, pointing out resemblances and saying who he would be. Gabrielle was pleased with herself. She wanted to feed the baby herself, not send him off to a wet-nurse. ‘Ten years ago,’ her mother said, ‘that would have been quite unthinkable for a woman in your position. An advocate’s wife.’ She shook her head, disliking modern manners. Gabrielle said, perhaps some changes are for the better? But apart from this one, she could not think of any.

We are now in May 1788. The King has announced that he will abolish the Parlements. Some of their members are under arrest. Receipts are 503 million, expenditure is 629 million. Out in the street, one of the local pigs pursues a small child, and jumps on it under Gabrielle’s window. The incident makes her feel queasy. Since she gave birth, she does not wish to view life as a challenge.

So they moved on quarter day, to a first-floor apartment on the corner of the rue des Cordeliers and the Cour du Commerce. Her first thought was, we cannot afford this. They needed new furniture to fill it; it was the house of an established man. ‘Georges-Jacques has expensive tastes,’ her mother said.

‘I suppose the practice is doing well.’

‘This well? My dear, I’ve always enjoined obedience in you. But not imbecility.’

Gabrielle said to her husband, ‘Are we in debt?’

He said, ‘Let me worry about that, will you?’

Next day, at the front door of the new house, d’Anton stopped to admit before him a woman holding by the hand a little girl of nine or ten. They introduced themselves. She was Mme Gély, her husband Antoine was an official at the Châtelet court, M. d’Anton might know him? He did. And the baby, your first? And this is Louise – yes, I’ve just the one – and pray Louise, do not scowl, do you want your face to set like that? ‘Please tell Mme d’Anton that if she wishes any help, she has only to ask. Next week, when you are settled, do come to supper.’

The child Louise trailed after her as she walked upstairs. She gave d’Anton a backward glance.

He found Gabrielle sitting on a packing case, fitting together the halves of a dish. ‘This is all we’ve broken,’ she said. She jumped up and kissed him. ‘Our new cook is cooking. And I’ve engaged a maid this morning, her name’s Catherine Motin, she’s young and quite cheap.’

‘I’ve just met our upstairs neighbour. Very mincing and genteel. Got a little girl, about so high. Gave me a very suspicious look.’

Gabrielle reached up and joined her hands at the nape of his neck. ‘You’re not reassuring to look at, you know. Is the case over?’

‘Yes. And I won.’

‘You always win.’

‘Not always.’

‘I can pretend that you do.’

‘If you like.’

‘So you don’t mind if I adore you?’

‘It’s a question, I’m told, of whether you can bear the dead weight of a woman’s expectations. I’m told that you shouldn’t put yourself into the position with a woman where you have to be right all the time.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Camille, of course.’

The baby was crying. She pulled away. This day, this little conversation would come back to him, years on: the new-born wails, her breasts leaking milk, the sweet air of inconsequentiality the whole day wore. And the smell of polish and paint and the new carpet: a sheaf of bills on the bureau: summer in the new trees outside the window.

Price inflation 1785–1789:

Wheat	66%
Rye	71%
Meat	67%
Firewood	91%

STANISLAS FRÉRON was an old schoolfriend of Camille’s, a journalist. He lived around the corner and edited a literary periodical. He made waspish jokes and thought too much about his clothes, but Gabrielle found him tolerable because he was the godson of royalty.

‘I suppose you call this your salon, Mme d’Anton.’ He dropped into one of her new purple armchairs. ‘No, don’t look like that. Why shouldn’t the wife of a King’s Councillor have a salon?’

‘It’s not the way I think of myself.’

‘Oh, I see, it’s you that’s the problem, is it? I thought perhaps we were the problem. That you saw us as second-rate.’ She smiled politely. ‘Of course, some of us are second-rate. And Fabre, for instance, is third-rate.’ Fréron leaned forward and made a steeple out of his hands. ‘All those men,’ he said, ‘whom we admired when we were young, are now dead, or senile, or retired into private life on pensions that the Court has granted them to keep the fires of their wrath burning low – though I fear it was simulated wrath in the first place. You will remember the fuss there was when M. Beauharnais wanted to have his plays performed, and how our fat, semi-literate King banned them personally because he considered them subversive of the good order of the state; it proved, didn’t it, that M. Beauharnais’s ambition was to have the most opulent town-house in Paris, and now he is building it, within sight of the Bastille and within smell of some of the nastiest tenements of the city. Then again – but no, I could multiply examples. The ideas that were considered dangerous twenty years ago are now commonplaces of establishment discourse – yet people still die on the streets every winter, they still starve. And we, in our turn, are militant against the existing order only because of our personal failure to progress up its sordid ladder. If Fabre, for example, were elected to the Academy tomorrow, you would see his lust for social revolution turning overnight into the most douce and debonair conformity.’

‘Very nice speech, Rabbit,’ d’Anton said.

‘I wish Camille would not call me that,’ Fréron said with controlled exasperation. ‘Now everyone calls me that.’

D’Anton smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘About these people.’

‘Well then … have you met Brissot? He’s in America just now, I think, Camille had a letter. He is advising them on all their problems. A great theorist is Brissot, a great political philosopher, though with scarcely a shirt to his back. And all these professional Americans, professional Irishmen, professional Genevans – all the governments in exile, and the hacks, scribblers, failed lawyers – all those men who profess to hate what they most desire.’

‘You can afford to say it. Your family is favoured, your paper’s on the right side of the censors. A radical opinion is a luxury you may allow yourself.’

‘You denigrate me, d’Anton.’

‘You denigrate your friends.’

Fréron stretched his legs. ‘End of argument,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Do you know why he calls me Rabbit?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

Fréron turned back to Gabrielle. ‘So, Mme d’Anton, I still believe you have the makings of a salon. You have me, and François Robert and his wife – Louise Robert says she would write a novel about Annette Duplessis and the rue Condé débâcle, but she fears that as a character in fiction Camille would not be believed.’

The Roberts were newly married, soddenly infatuated with each other, and horribly impoverished. He was twenty-eight, a lecturer in law, burly and affable and open to suggestions. Louise had been Mlle de Kéralio before her marriage, brought up in Artois, daughter of a Royal Censor; her aristocratic father had vetoed the match, and she had defied him. The weight of the family displeasure left them with no money and all routes of advancement barred to François; and so they had rented a shop in the rue Condé and opened a delicatessen, specializing in food from the colonies. Now Louise Robert sat behind her till turning the hems of her dresses, her eyes on a volume of Rousseau, her ears open for customers and for rumours of a rise in the price of molasses. In the evening she cooked a meal for her husband and laboriously checked the day’s accounts, her haughty shoulders rigid as she added up the receipts. When she had finished she sat down and chatted calmly to François of Jansenism, the administration of justice, the structure of the modern novel; afterwards she lay awake in the darkness, her nose cold above the sheets, praying for infertility.

Georges-Jacques said, ‘I feel at home here.’ He took to walking about the district in the evening, doffing his hat to the women and getting into conversation with their husbands, returning on each occasion with some fresh item of news. Legendre the master butcher was a good fellow, and in a profitable line of business. The rough-looking man who lived opposite really was a marquis, the Marquis de Saint-Huruge, and he has a grudge against the regime; Fabre tells a tremendous story about it, all about a misalliance and a lettre de cachet.

It would be quieter here, Georges-Jacques had said, but the apartment was constantly full of people they half-knew; they never ate supper alone. The offices were on the premises now, installed in a small study and what would otherwise have been their dining room. During the day the clerks Paré and Deforgues would drift in to talk to her. And young men she had never seen before would come to the door and ask her if she knew where Camille lived now. Once she lost her temper and said, ‘As near as makes no difference, here.’

Her mother came over once or twice in the week, to cluck over the baby and criticize the servants and say, ‘You know me, Gabrielle, I’d never interfere.’ She did her own shopping, because she was particular about vegetables and liked to check her change. The child Louise Gély came with her, to pretend to help her carry her heavy bags, and Mme Gély came to advise her about the local shopkeepers and pass comments on the people they met in the streets. She liked the child Louise: open-faced, alert, wistful at times, with an only-child’s precocity.

‘Always so much noise from your place,’ the little girl said. ‘So many ladies and gentlemen coming and going. It’s all right, isn’t it, if I come down sometimes?’

‘As long as you’re good and sit quietly. And as long as I’m there.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of coming otherwise. I’m afraid of Maître d’Anton. He has such a countenance.’

‘He’s very kind really.’

The child looked dubious. Then her face brightened. ‘What I mean to do,’ she said, ‘is to get married myself as soon as someone asks me. I’m going to have packs of children, and give parties every night.’

Gabrielle laughed. ‘What’s the hurry? You’re only ten.’

Louise Gély looked sideways at her. ‘I don’t mean to wait until I’m old.’

ON 13 JULY there were hail-storms; to say this is to give no idea of how the hail fell – as if God’s contempt had frozen. There was every type of violence and unexplained accidents on the streets. The orchards were stripped and devastated, the crops flattened in the fields. All day it hammered on windows and doors, like nothing in living memory; on the night of the 13th to 14th, a cowed populace slept in apprehension. They woke to silence; it seemed so long before life flowed through the city; it was hot, and people seemed dazed by the splintered light, as if all France had been pushed under water.

One year to the cataclysm: Gabrielle stood before a mirror, twitching at her hat. She was going out to buy some lengths of good woollen stuff for Louise’s winter dresses. Mme Gély would not contemplate such a fool’s errand, but Louise liked her winter clothes in her wardrobe by the end of August; who knew what the weather would do next, she asked, and if it should suddenly turn chilly she would be stranded, because she had grown so much since last year. Not that I go anywhere in winter, she said, but perhaps you will take me to Fontenay to see your mother. Fontenay, she said, is the country.

There was someone at the door. ‘Come in, Louise,’ she called, but no one came. The maid Catherine was rocking the screaming baby. She ran to the door herself, hat in hand. A girl she didn’t know stood there. She looked at Gabrielle, at the hat, stepped back. ‘You’re going out.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

The girl glanced over her shoulder. ‘Can I come in for five minutes? I know this sounds unlikely, but I’m sure the servants have been told to follow me about.’

Gabrielle stepped aside. The girl walked in. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, shook out her dark hair. She wore a blue linen jacket, tight-fitting, which showed off her hand-span waist and the supple line of her body. She ran a hand back through her hair, lifted her jaw, rather self-conscious: caught sight of herself in the mirror. Gabrielle felt suddenly dumpy and badly dressed, a woman getting over a pregnancy. ‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that you must be Lucile.’

‘I came,’ Lucile said, ‘because things are so awful and I desperately need to talk to somebody, and Camille has told me all about you, and he’s told me what a kind and sympathetic person you are, and that I will love you.’

Gabrielle recoiled. She thought, what a low, mean, despicable trick: if he’s told her that about me, how can I possibly tell her what I think of him? She dropped her hat on a chair. ‘Catherine, run upstairs and say I’ll be delayed. Then fetch us some lemonade, will you? Warm today, isn’t it?’ Lucile looked back at her: eyes like midnight flowers. ‘Well, Mlle Duplessis – have you quarrelled with your parents?’

Lucile perched on a chair. ‘My father goes around our house saying, “Does a father’s authority count for nothing?” He intones it, like a dirge. My sister keeps saying it to me and making me laugh.’

‘Well, doesn’t it?’

‘I believe in the right to resist authority when it’s wrong-headed.’

‘What does your mother say now?’

‘Nothing much. She’s gone very quiet. She knows I get letters. She pretends not to know.’

‘That seems unwise of her.’

‘I leave them where she can read them.’

‘That makes neither of you any better.’

‘No. Worse.’

Gabrielle shook her head. ‘I can’t condone it. I would never have defied my parents. Or deceived them.’

Lucile said, with passion, ‘Don’t you think women should choose who they marry?’

‘Oh yes. Within reason. It just isn’t reasonable to marry Maître Desmoulins.’

‘Oh. You wouldn’t do it then?’ Lucile looked as if she were hesitating over a few yards of lace. She picked up an inch of her skirt, ran the material slowly between her fingers. ‘The thing is, Mme d’Anton, I’m in love with him.’

‘I doubt it. You’re just going through that phase, you want to be in love with somebody.’

Lucile looked at her with curiosity. ‘Before you met your husband, were you always falling in love with people?’

‘To be honest, no – I wasn’t that sort of girl.’

‘What makes you think I am, then? All this business of going through phases, it’s just a thing that older people say, they think they have the right to look at you from their mouldy perches and pass judgement on your life.’

‘My mother, who is a woman of some experience, would say it is an infatuation.’

‘Fancy having a mother with that sort of experience. Quite like mine.’

Gabrielle felt the first stirrings of dismay. Trouble, under her own roof. How can she make this little girl understand? Can she understand anything any more, or has common sense loosened its hold for good, or did it have a hold in the first place? ‘My mother tells me,’ she said, ‘never to criticize my husband’s choice of friends. But in this case – if I tell you that with one thing and another I don’t admire him …’

‘That becomes clear.’

Gabrielle had a mental picture of herself, in the months before the baby was born, waddling about the house. Her pregnancy, delightful in its results, had been in one way a trial and embarrassment. Even by the end of the third month she’d been quite big, and she could see people sizing her up, quite unashamedly; she knew that after the birth they would count on their fingers. As the weeks passed, Georges-Jacques treated her as interesting but alien. He talked to her even less about matters not strictly domestic. She missed the café, more than he could know; she missed that undemanding masculine company, the easy talk of the outside world.

So … what did it matter if Georges always brought his friends home? But Camille was always arriving or just about to leave. If he sat on a chair it was on the very edge, and if he remained there for more than thirty seconds it was because he was deeply fatigued. A note of panic in his veiled eyes struck a corresponding note in her heavy body. The baby was born, the heaviness dispersed; a rootless anxiety remained. ‘Camille is a cloud in my sky,’ she said. ‘He is a thorn in my flesh.’

‘Goodness, Mme d’Anton,’ Lucile said, ‘are those the metaphors you feel forced to employ?’

‘To begin … you know he has no money?’

‘Yes, but I have.’

‘He can’t just live on your money.’

‘Lots of men live on women’s money. It’s quite respectable, in some circles it’s always done.’

‘And this business of your mother, that they may have been having – I don’t know how to put it.’

‘I don’t either,’ Lucile said. ‘There are terms for it, but I’m not feeling robust this morning.’

‘You must find out the truth about it.’

‘My mother won’t talk to me. I could ask Camille. But why should I make him lie to me? So I dismiss it from my mind. I regard the subject as closed. You see, I think about him all day. I dream about him – I can’t be blamed for that. I write him letters and I tear them up. I imagine that I might meet him by chance in the street –’ Lucile broke off, raised a hand, and pushed back from her forehead an imaginary strand of hair. Gabrielle watched her with horror. This is obsession, she thought, this parody of gesture. Lucile felt herself do it; she saw herself in the glass; she thought, it is an evocation.

Catherine put her head around the door. ‘Monsieur is home early.’

Gabrielle leapt up. Lucile sat back in her chair. She allowed her arms to lie along the chair’s arms, and flexed her hands like a cat testing its claws. D’Anton walked in. As he was taking off his coat he was saying, ‘There’s a mob around the Law Courts, and here I am, you told me to stay away from trouble. They’re letting off fireworks and shouting for Orléans. The Guards aren’t interested in breaking it up –’ He saw Lucile. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘trouble has come home, I see. Camille is talking to Legendre, he will be here directly. Legendre,’ he added pointlessly, ‘is our butcher.’

When Camille appeared Lucile rose smoothly from her chair, crossed the room and kissed him on the mouth. She watched herself in the mirror, watched him. She saw him take her hands from his shoulders and return them to her gently, folded together as if in prayer. He saw how different she looked with her hair unpowdered, how dramatic were her strong features and perfect pallor. He saw Gabrielle’s hostility towards him melt a little. He saw how she watched her husband, watching Lucile. He saw d’Anton thinking, for once he did not lie, he did not exaggerate, he said Lucile was beautiful and she is. This took one second; Camille smiled. He knows that all his derelictions can be excused if he is deeply in love with Lucile; sentimental people will excuse him, and he knows how to encourage sentiment. He thinks that perhaps he is deeply in love; after all, what else is the name for the excited misery he sees on Lucile’s face, and which his own face, he feels sure, reflects?

What has put her into this state? It must be his letters. Suddenly, he remembers what Georges had said: ‘Try prose.’ At that, it might not be so futile. He has a good deal to say, and if he can reduce his complicated and painful feelings about the Duplessis household to a few telling and effective pages, it ought to be child’s play to analyse the state of the nation. Moreover, while his life is ridiculous and inept and designed to make people smile, his writing could be stylish and heartless, and produce weeping and gnashing of teeth.

For quite thirty seconds, Lucile had forgotten to look into the mirror. For the first time, she felt she had taken a hold upon her life; she had become embodied, she wasn’t a spectator any more. But how long would the feeling last? His actual physical presence, so much longed for, she now found too much to bear. She wished he would go away, so she could imagine him again, but she was unsure how to request this without appearing demented. Camille framed in his mind the first and last sentences of a political pamphlet, but his eyes did not shift from her face; as he was extremely shortsighted, his gaze gave the impression of an intensity of concentration that made her weak at the knees. Deeply at cross-purposes, they stood frozen, hypnotized, until – as moments do – the moment passed.

‘So this is the creature who oversets the household and suborns servants and clergyman,’ d’Anton said. ‘I wonder, my dear, do you know anything of the comedies of the English writer, Mr Sheridan?’

‘No.’

‘I wondered if you thought that Life ought to imitate Art?’

‘If it imitates life,’ Lucile said, ‘that’s quite exciting enough for me.’ She noticed the time on the clock. ‘I’ll be killed,’ she said.

She blew them all a kiss, swept up her feathered hat, ran out on to the stairs. In her haste she almost knocked over a small girl, who appeared to be listening at the door, and who, surprisingly, called out after her, ‘I like your jacket.’

In bed that night she thought, hm, that large ugly man, I seem to have made a conquest there.

ON 8 AUGUST the King fixed a date for the meeting of the Estates – 1 May 1789. A week later the Comptroller-General, Brienne, discovered (or so it was said) that the state’s coffers contained enough revenue for one-quarter of one day’s expenditure. He declared a suspension of all payments by the government. France was bankrupt. His Majesty continued to hunt, and if he did not kill he recorded the fact in his diary: Rien, rien, rien. Brienne was dismissed.

ROUTINE was so broken up these days, that Claude could be found in Paris when he should have been in Versailles. Mid-morning, he strolled out into the hot August air, made for the Café du Foy. Other years, August had found him sitting by an open window at his country place at Bourg-la-Reine.

‘Good morning, Maître d’Anton,’ he said. ‘Maître Desmoulins. I had no idea you knew each other.’ The idea seemed to be causing him pain. ‘Well, what do you think? Things can’t go on like this.’

‘I suppose we should take your word for it, M. Duplessis,’ Camille said. ‘How do you look forward to having M. Necker back?’

‘What does it matter?’ Claude said. ‘I think that even the Abbé Terray would have found the situation beyond him.’

‘Anything new from Versailles?’ d’Anton asked.

‘Someone told me,’ Camille said, ‘that when the King cannot hunt he goes up on the roofs at Versailles and takes pot-shots at the ladies’ cats. Do you think there’s anything in it?’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ Claude said.

‘It puzzles a lot of people to see how things have deteriorated since Necker was last in office. If you think back to ’81, to the public accounting, the books then showed a surplus –’

‘Cooked,’ Claude said dismally.

‘Really?’

‘Done to a turn.’

‘So much for Necker,’ d’Anton said.

‘But you know, it wasn’t such a crime,’ Camille suggested. ‘Not if he thought public confidence was the main thing.’

‘Jesuit,’ d’Anton said.

Claude turned to him. ‘I’m hearing things, d’Anton – straws in the wind. Your patron Barentin will be moving from the Board of Excise – he’s going to get the Ministry of Justice in the new government.’ He smiled. He looked very tired. ‘This is a sad day for me. I would have given anything to stop it coming to this. And it must give impetus to the wilder elements …’ His eye fell on Camille. He had been very civil this morning, very well-behaved, but that he was a wilder element Claude had no doubt. ‘Maître Desmoulins,’ he said, ‘I hope you aren’t still entertaining notions about marrying my daughter.’

‘I am, rather.’

‘If you could just see it from my point of view.’

‘No, I’m afraid I can see it only from my own.’

M. Duplessis turned away. D’Anton put a hand on his arm. ‘About Barentin – can you tell me something more?’

Claude held up a forefinger. ‘Least said, soonest mended. I hope I’ve not spoken out of turn. I expect I’ll be seeing you before long.’ He indicated Camille, hopelessly. ‘Him too.’

Camille looked after him. ‘“Straws in the wind”,’ he said savagely. ‘Have you ever heard such drivel? We ought to arrange him a cliché contest with Maître Vinot. Oh,’ he said suddenly, ‘I do see what he means. He means they’re going to offer you a job.’

UPON TAKING OFFICE, Necker began to negotiate a loan from abroad. The Parlements were reinstated. The price of bread rose two sous. On 29 August, a mob burned down the guard posts on the Pont-Neuf. The King found the money to move troops into the capital. Soldiers opened fire into a crowd of six hundred; seven or eight people were killed and an unknown number injured.

M. Barentin was appointed Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals. The mob made a straw doll in the likeness of his predecessor, and set fire to it on the Place de Grève, to the tune of hoots and jeers, the crack and whizz of fireworks and the drunken acquiescent singing of the French Guards, who were stationed permanently in the capital and who liked that sort of thing.

D’ANTON had given his reasons precisely, without heat but without equivocation; he had worked out beforehand what he would say, so that he would be perfectly clear. Barentin’s offer of a secretary’s post would quickly become common knowledge around City Hall and the ministries and beyond. Fabre suggested that he take Gabrielle some flowers and break it to her gently.

When he got home, Mme Charpentier was there, and Camille. They stopped talking when they saw him. The atmosphere was ill-humoured; but Angélique came over, beaming, and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Dear son Georges,’ she said, ‘our warmest congratulations.’

‘On what?’ he said. ‘My case didn’t come up. Really, the process of justice is moving like treacle nowadays.’

‘We understand,’ Gabrielle said, ‘that you have been offered a post in the government.’

‘Yes, but it’s of no consequence. I turned it down.’

‘I told you,’ Camille said.

Angélique stood up. ‘I’ll be off then.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ Gabrielle said, with extreme formality. Her face glowed. She got up; they went, and whispered outside the door.

‘Angélique will make her behave,’ d’Anton said. Camille sat and smiled at him. ‘You’re easily pleased. Come back in, calm yourself, shut the door,’ he said to his wife. ‘Please try to understand that I am acting for the best.’

‘When he said,’ she pointed to Camille, ‘that you’d turned it down, I said what kind of a fool did he suppose I was?’

‘This government won’t last a year. It doesn’t suit me, Gabrielle.’

She gaped at him. ‘So what are you going to do? Give up your practice because the state of the law doesn’t suit you? You were ambitious before, you used to say –’

‘Yes, and now he’s more ambitious,’ Camille cut in. ‘He’s far too good for a minor post under Barentin. Probably – oh, probably the Seal will be within his own gift one day.’

D’Anton laughed. ‘If it ever is,’ he said, ‘I’ll give it you. I promise.’

‘That’s probably treason,’ Gabrielle said. Her hair was slipping down, as it tended to do at points of crisis.

‘Don’t confuse the issue,’ Camille said. ‘Georges-Jacques is going to be a great man, however he is impeded.’

‘You’re mad,’ Gabrielle said. As she shook her head a shower of hairpins leapt out and slithered to the floor. ‘What I hate, Georges, is to see you trotting along in the wake of other people’s opinions.’

‘Me? You think I do that?’

‘No,’ Camille said hurriedly, ‘he doesn’t do that.’

‘He takes notice of you, and no notice of me whatsoever.’

‘That’s because –’ Camille stopped. He could not think of a tactful reason why it was. He turned to d’Anton. ‘Can I produce you to the Café du Foy tonight? You may be expected to make a short speech, you don’t mind, of course not.’

Gabrielle looked up from the floor, hairpin in hand. ‘Do I understand that this business has glorified you, somehow?’

‘I wouldn’t say “glory”.’ Camille looked modest. ‘But it’s a start.’

‘Would you mind?’ d’Anton said to her. ‘I’ll not be late. When I come home I’ll explain it better. Gabrielle, leave those, Catherine will pick them up.’

Gabrielle shook her head again. She would not be explained to, and if Catherine were asked to crawl around the floor after her hairpins, she would probably give notice; why did he not know this?

The men went downstairs. Camille said, ‘I’m afraid it’s just my existence that irks Gabrielle. Even when my desperate fiancée turns up at her door she still believes I’m trying to inveigle you into bed with me.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Time to think of higher things,’ Camille said. ‘Oh, I am so happy. Everybody says changes are coming, everyone says the country will be overturned. They say it, but you believe it. You act on it. You are seen to act on it.’

‘There was a pope – I forget which one – who told everyone that the world was going to end. They all put their estates on the market, and the pope bought them and became rich.’

‘That’s a nice story,’ Camille said. ‘You are not a pope, but never mind, I think you will do quite well for yourself.’

AS SOON AS THEY HEARD in Arras that there were going to be elections, Maximilien began to put his affairs in order. ‘How do you know you’ll be elected?’ his brother Augustin said. ‘They might form a cabal against you. It’s very likely.’

‘Then I’ll have to sing small between now and the election,’ he said grimly. ‘Here in the provinces almost everyone has a vote, not just the moneyed men.’ For that reason, ‘They won’t be able to keep me out,’ he said.

His sister Charlotte said, ‘They’ll be ungrateful beasts if they don’t elect you. After all you’ve done for the poor. You deserve it.’

‘It isn’t a prize.’

‘You’ve worked so hard, all for nothing, no money, no credit. There’s no need to pretend you don’t resent it. You’re not obliged to be saintly.’

He sighed. Charlotte has this way of cutting him to the bone. Hacking away, with the family knife.

‘I know what you think, Max,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe you’ll come back from Versailles in six months, or even a year. You think this will alter your life. Do you want them to have a revolution just to please you?’

I DON’T CARE what the Estates-General do,’ said Philippe d’Orléans, ‘as long as I am there when they deal with the liberty of the individual, so that I can use my voice and vote for a law after which I can be sure that, on a day when I have a fancy to sleep at Raincy, no one can send me against my will to Villers-Cotterêts.’

Towards the end of 1788 the Duke appointed a new private secretary. He liked to embarrass people, and this may have been a major reason for his choice. The addition to his entourage was an army officer named Laclos. He was in his late forties, a tall, angular man with fine features and cold blue eyes. He had joined the army at the age of eighteen, but had never seen active service. Once this had grieved him, but twenty years spent in provincial garrison towns had endowed him with an air of profound and philosophic indifference. To amuse himself, he had written some light verse, and the libretto of an opera that came off after one night. And he had watched people, recorded the details of their manoeuvres, their power-play. For twenty years there had been nothing else to do. He became familiar with that habit of mind which dispraises what it most envies and admires: with that habit of mind which desires only what it cannot have.

His first novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published in Paris in 1782. The first edition sold out within days. The publishers rubbed their hands and remarked that if this shocking and cynical book was what the public wanted, who were they to act as censors? The second edition was sold out. Matrons and bishops expressed outrage. A copy with a blank binding was ordered for the Queen’s private library. Doors were slammed in the author’s face. He had arrived.

It seemed his military career was over. In any case, his criticism of army traditions had made his position untenable. ‘It seems to me I could do with such a man,’ the Duke said. ‘Your every affectation is an open book to him.’ When Félicité de Genlis heard of the appointment, she threatened to resign her post as Governor of the Duke’s children. Laclos could think of bigger disasters.

It was a crucial time in the Duke’s affairs. If he was to take advantage of the unsettled times, he must have an organization, a power base. His easy popularity in Paris must be put to good use. Men must be secured to his service, their past lives probed and their futures planned for them. Loyalties must be explored. Money must change hands.

Laclos surveyed this situation, brought his cold intelligence to bear. He began to know writers who were known to the police. He made discreet inquiries among Frenchmen living abroad as to the reasons for their exile. He got himself a big map of Paris and marked with blue circles points that could be fortified. He sat up by lamplight combing through the pages of the pamphlets that had come that day from the Paris presses; the censorship had broken down. He was looking for writers who were bolder and more outspoken than the rest; then he would make overtures. Few of these fellows had ever had a bestseller.

Laclos was the Duke’s man now. Laconic in his statements, his air discouraging intimacy, he was the kind of man whose first name nobody ever knows. But still he watched men and women with a furtive professional interest, and scribbled down thoughts that came to him, on chance scraps of paper.

In December 1788, the Duke sold the contents of his magnificent Palais-Royal art gallery, and devoted the money to poor relief. It was announced in the press that he would distribute daily a thousand pounds of bread; that he would defray the lying-in expenses of indigent women (even, the wits said, those he had not impregnated); that he would forgo the tithes levied on grain on his estates, and repeal the game laws on all his lands.

This was Félicité’s programme. It was for the country’s good. It did Philippe a bit of good, too.

RUE CONDÉ. ‘Although the censorship has broken down,’ Lucile says, ‘there are still criminal sanctions.’

‘Fortunately,’ her father says.

Camille’s first pamphlet lies on the table, neat inside its paper cover. His second, in manuscript, lies beside it. The printers won’t touch it, not yet; we will have to wait until the situation takes a turn for the worse.

Lucile’s fingers caress it, paper, ink, tape:

IT WAS RESERVED for our days to behold the return of liberty among the French … for forty years, philosophy has been undermining the foundations of despotism, and as Rome before Caesar was already enslaved by her vices, so France before Necker was already enfranchised by her intelligence … Patriotism spreads day by day, with the devouring rapidity of a great conflagration. The young take fire; old men cease, for the first time, to regret the past. Now they blush for it.