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THE CAFÉ DU PARNASSE was known to its clients as the Café de l’École, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The café was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small-talk at the Café de l’École was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.

Monsieur’s wife Angélique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matron’s cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angélique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the café every day – perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. ‘I will read it later,’ she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.

Her daughter, Antoinette Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the café. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.

Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin – everybody said – like silk.

Mme Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the café so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maître d’Anton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband – not at all.

SOON AFTER Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 per cent. Georges-Jacques’s own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.

Maître Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. ‘Call yourself d’Anton,’ he advised. ‘It makes a better impression.’ On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. ‘So what if they all know it’s spurious?’ Maître Vinot said. ‘It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.’

When it was time to take his degree, Maître Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days’ residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maître Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldn’t come up with one. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but…’ His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrin’s chambers. D’Anton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.

After that he left the Île Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case – involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow. Did he take these cases to give himself time to think about other things? He was not, at this date, introspective. He was mildly surprised, then irritated, to find that the people around him were much less intelligent than himself. Bumblers like Vinot climbed to high office and prosperity. ‘Goodbye,’ they said. ‘Not a bad week. See you Tuesday.’ He watched them depart to spend their weekends in what with Parisians passed for the country. One day he’d buy himself a place – just a cottage would do, a couple of acres. It might take the edge off his restless moods.

He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coal-heaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practised it on Angelica, calling at the café each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a frisson at the backs of women’s necks. He remembered the prizewinner, took his advice; rolled the voice out from somewhere behind his ribs. It awaited perfection – a little extra vibrancy, a little more colour in the tone. But there it was – a professional asset.

Gabrielle thought, looks aren’t everything. She also thought, money isn’t everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of ’86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.

The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.

MAÎTRE DESMOULINS had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.

Today’s case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maître Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.

‘Come back!’ d’Anton shouted. He stopped, and turned. D’Anton drew level. ‘I can see you’re not used to winning. You’re supposed to commiserate with your opponent.’

‘Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, let’s walk – I don’t like to be around here.’

D’Anton did not like to let a point go. ‘It’s a piece of decent hypocrisy. It’s the rules.’

Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. ‘You mean, I may gloat?’

‘If you will.’

‘I may say, “So that’s what they learn in Maître Vinot’s chambers?”’

‘If you must. My first case,’ d’Anton said, ‘was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.’

‘But you’ve come on a bit since then.’

‘Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.’

Desmoulins stopped dead. ‘Do you really, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought – stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.’

‘Yes, but I don’t always. I’ve not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, d’Anton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?’

‘What do you mean, what would I think?’

‘If you were an impartial observer.’

‘How can I be that?’ Everybody knows you, he thought. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘you’d do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.’

‘Well, how gratifying,’ Camille said. ‘A neat, complete lecture. Maître Vinot couldn’t have delivered it better. Soon you’ll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.’

‘I’m right, though.’

‘There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who can’t afford to pay for them.’

‘Yes, but that’s a social problem, you’re not responsible for that state of affairs.’

‘You ought to help people.’

‘Ought you?’

‘Yes – at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose – yes.’

‘At your own expense?’

‘You’re not allowed to do it at anyone else’s.’

D’Anton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. ‘You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.’

‘A living? It’s not a living, it’s pillage, it’s loot, and you know it. Really, Maître d’Anton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.’

‘This revolution – will it be a living?’

‘We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.’

‘To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.’

‘He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, d’Anton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things,’ he said, ‘because I think I may die at any time.’

‘Where is your client?’

‘At the Châtelet.’

‘You do know you’re going the wrong way?’

Maître Desmoulins looked at him as if he had said something foolish. ‘I hadn’t thought, you see, to get there by any particular route.’ He hesitated. ‘D’Anton, why are you wasting time in this footling dialogue? Why aren’t you out and about, making a name for yourself?’

‘Perhaps I need a holiday from the system,’ d’Anton said. His colleague’s eyes, which were black and luminous, held the timidity of natural victims, the fatal exhaustion of easy prey. He leaned forward. ‘Camille, what has put you into this terrible state?’

Camille Desmoulins’s eyes were set further apart than is usual, and what d’Anton had taken for a revelation of character was in fact a quirk of anatomy. But it was many years before he noticed this.

AND THIS CONTINUED: one of those late-night conversations, with long pauses.

‘After all,’ d’Anton said, ‘what is it?’ After dark, and drink, he is often more disaffected. ‘Spending your life dancing attendance on the whims and caprices of some bloody fool like Vinot.’

‘Your Life Plan goes further, then?’

‘You have to get beyond all that, whatever you’re doing you have to get to the top.’

‘I do have some ambitions of my own,’ Camille said. ‘You know I went to this school where we were always freezing cold and the food was disgusting? It’s sort of become part of me, if I’m cold I just accept it, cold’s natural, and from day to day I hardly think of eating. But of course, if I do ever get warm, or someone feeds me well, I’m pathetically grateful, and I think, well, you know, this would be nice – to do it on a grand scale, to have great roaring fires and to go out to dinner every night. Of course, it’s only in my weaker moods I think this. Oh, and you know – to wake up every morning beside someone you like. Not clutching your head all the time and crying, my God, what happened last night, how did I get into this?’

‘It hardly seems much to want,’ Georges-Jacques said.

‘But when you finally achieve something, a disgust for it begins. At least, that’s the received wisdom. I’ve never achieved anything, so I can’t say.’

‘You ought to sort yourself out, Camille.’

‘My father wanted me home as soon as I qualified, he wanted me to go into his practice. Then again, he didn’t…They’ve arranged for me to marry my cousin, it’s been fixed up for years. We all marry our cousins, so the family money interbreeds.’

‘And you don’t want to?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. It doesn’t really matter who you marry.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ His thinking had been quite other.

‘But Rose-Fleur will have to come to Paris, I can’t go back there.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘I don’t know really, our paths so seldom cross. Oh, to look at, you mean? She’s quite pretty.’

‘When you say it doesn’t matter who you marry – don’t you expect to love someone?’

‘Yes, of course. But it would be a vast coincidence to be married to them as well.’

‘What about your parents? What are they like?’

‘Never seem to speak to each other these days. There’s a family tradition of marrying someone you find you can’t stand. My cousin Antoine, one of my Fouquier-Tinville cousins, is supposed to have murdered his first wife.’

‘What, you mean he was actually prosecuted for it?’

‘Only by the gossips at their various assizes. There wasn’t enough evidence to bring it to court. But then Antoine, he’s a lawyer too, so there wouldn’t be. I expect he’s good at fixing evidence. The business rather shook the family, and so I’ve always regarded him as, you know,’ he paused wistfully, ‘a sort of hero. Anyone who can give serious offence to the de Viefvilles is a hero of mine. Another case of that is Antoine Saint-Just, I know we are related but I can’t think how, they live in Noyon. He has recently run off with the family silver, and his mother, who’s a widow, actually got a lettre de cachet and had him shut up. When he gets out – they’ll have to let him out one of these days, I suppose – he’ll be so angry, he’ll never forgive them. He’s one of these boys, sort of big and solid and conceited, incredibly full of himself, he’s probably steaming about at this very minute working out how to get revenge. He’s only nineteen, so perhaps he’ll have a career of crime, and that will take the attention off me.’

‘I can’t think why you don’t write and encourage him.’

‘Yes, perhaps I shall. You see, I do agree that I can’t go on like this. I have had a little verse published – oh, nothing really, just a modest start. I’d rather write than anything – well, as you can imagine, with my disabilities it’s a relief not having to talk. I just want to live very quietly – preferably somewhere warm – and be left alone till I can write something worthwhile.’

Already, d’Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser. ‘Don’t you care for anyone respectable?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes – I care for my friend de Robespierre, but he lives in Arras, I never see him. And Maître Perrin has been kind.’

D’Anton stared at him. He did not see how he could sit there, saying ‘Maître Perrin has been kind.’

‘Don’t you mind?’ he demanded.

‘What people say? Well,’ Camille said softly, ‘I should prefer not to be an object of general odium, but I wouldn’t go so far as to let my preference alter my conduct.’

‘I’d just like to know,’ d’Anton said. ‘I mean, from my point of view. Whether there’s any truth in it.’

‘Oh, you mean, because the sun will be up in an hour, and you think I’ll run down to the Law Courts and tell everybody I spent the night with you?’

‘Somebody told me…that is, amongst other things they told me…that you were involved with a married woman.’

‘Yes: in a way.’

‘You do have an interesting variety of problems.’

Already, by the time the clock struck four, he felt he knew too much about Camille, and more than he was comfortable with. He looked at him through a mist of alcohol and fatigue, the climate of the years ahead.

‘I would tell you about Annette Duplessis,’ Camille said, ‘but life’s too short.’

‘Is it?’ D’Anton has never thought about it before. Creeping towards his future it sometimes seems long, long enough.

IN JULY 1786 a daughter was born to the King and Queen. ‘All well and good,’ said Angélique Charpentier, ‘but I expect she’ll be needing some more diamonds to console her for losing her figure.’

Her husband said, ‘How would we know if she’s losing her figure? We never see her. She never comes. She has something against Paris.’ It was a matter of regret to him. ‘She doesn’t trust us, I think. But of course she is not French. She is far from home.’

‘I am far from home,’ Angélique said heartlessly. ‘But I don’t run the nation into debt because of it.’

The Debt, the Deficit – these were the words on the lips of the café’s customers as they occupied themselves in trying to name a figure. Only a few people had the ability to imagine money on this scale, the café believed; they thought it was a special ability, and that M. Calonne, now the Comptroller-General, had not got it. M. Calonne was a perfect courtier, with his lace cuffs and lavender-water, his gold-topped cane and his well-attested greed for Perigord truffles. Like M. Necker, he was borrowing; the café thought that M. Necker’s borrowing had been considered, but that M. Calonne’s borrowing stemmed from a failure of imagination and a desire to keep up appearances.

In August 1786 the Comptroller-General presented to the King a package of proposed reforms. There was one weighty and pressing reason for action: one half of the next year’s revenues had already been spent. France was a rich country, M. Calonne told its sovereign; it could produce many times more revenue than at present. And could this fail to add to the glory and prestige of the monarchy? Louis seemed dubious. The glory and prestige were all very well, most agreeable, but he was anxious to do only what was right; and to produce this revenue would require substantial changes, would it not?

Indeed, his minister told him, from now on everybody – nobles, clergy, commons – must pay a land tax. The pernicious system of tax exemptions must be ended. There must be free trade, the internal customs dues must be abolished. And there must be some concessions to liberal opinion – the corvée must be done away with completely. The King frowned. He seemed to have been through all this before. It reminded him of M. Necker, he said. If he had thought, it would have reminded him of M. Turgot, but by now he was getting muddled.

The point is, he told his minister, that though he personally might favour such measures, the Parlements would never agree.

That, said M. Calonne, was a most cogent piece of reasoning. With his usual unerring accuracy, His Majesty had pinpointed the problem.

But if His Majesty felt these measures were necessary, should he allow himself to be baulked by the Parlements? Why not seize the initiative?

Mm, the King said. He moved restlessly in his chair, and looked out of the window to see what the weather was doing.

What he should do, Calonne said, was to call an Assembly of Notables. A what? said the King. Calonne pressed on. The Notables would at once be seized by a realization of the country’s economic plight, and throw their weight behind any measures the King deemed necessary. It would be a bold stroke, he assured the King, to create a body that was inherently superior to the Parlements, a body whose lead they would have to follow. It was the sort of thing, he said, that Henri IV would have done.

The King pondered. Henri IV was the most wise and popular of monarchs, and the very one that he, Louis, most desired to emulate.

The King put his head in his hands. It sounded a good idea, the way Calonne put it, but all his ministers were smooth talkers, and it was never quite as simple as they made out. Besides, the Queen and her set…He looked up. The Queen believed, he said, that the next time the Parlements got in his way they should simply be disbanded. The Parlements of Paris, all the provincial Parlements – chop, chop, went the King. All gone.

M. Calonne quaked when he heard this reasoning. What did it offer but a vista of acrimonious dealings, a decade of wrangling, of vendettas, of riots? We have to break out of this cycle, Your Majesty, he said. Believe me – please, you must believe me – things have never been this bad before.

GEORGES-JACQUES came to M. Charpentier, and he put his cards on the table. ‘I have a bastard,’ he said. ‘A son, four years old. I suppose I should have told you before.’

‘Why so?’ M. Charpentier gathered his wits. ‘Pleasant surprises should be saved up.’

‘I feel a hypocrite,’ d’Anton said. ‘I was just lecturing that little Camille.’

‘Do go on, Georges-Jacques. You have me riveted.’

They’d met on the coach, he said, on his first journey to Paris. She’d given him her address, he’d called on her a few days later. Things had gone on from there – well, M. Charpentier could imagine, perhaps. No, he was no longer involved with her, it was over. The boy was in the country with a nurse.

‘You offered her marriage, of course?’

D’Anton nodded.

‘And why wouldn’t she marry you?’

‘I expect she took a dislike to my face.’

In his mind’s eye he could see Françoise raging round her bedroom, aghast that she was subject to the same laws as other women: when I marry I want it to be worth my while, I don’t want some clerk, some nobody, and you with your passions and your self-conceit running after other women before the month’s out. Even when the baby was kicking inside her, it had seemed to him a remote contingency, might happen, might not. Babies were stillborn, they died in the first few days; he did not hope for this to happen, but he knew that it might.

But the baby grew, and was born. ‘Father unknown’, she put on the birth certificate. Now Françoise had found the man she wanted to marry – one Maître Huet de Paisy, a King’s Councillor. Maître Huet was thinking of selling his position – he had something else in mind, d’Anton did not inquire what. He was offering to sell it to d’Anton.

‘What’s the asking price?’

D’Anton told him. Having received his second big shock of the afternoon, Charpentier said, ‘That’s simply not possible.’

‘Yes, I know it’s vastly inflated, but it represents my settlement for the child. Maître Huet will acknowledge paternity, it will all be done in the correct legal form and the matter will be behind me.’

‘Her family should have made her marry you. What kind of people can they be?’ He paused. ‘In one sense the matter will be behind you, but what about your debts? I’m not sure how you can raise that amount in the first place.’ He pulled a piece of paper towards him. ‘This is what I can let you have – let’s call it a loan for now, but when the marriage contract is signed I waive the debt.’ D’Anton inclined his head. ‘I must have Gabrielle well set up, she’s my only daughter, I mean to do right by her. Now, your family can come up with – what? All right, but that’s little enough.’ He jotted down the figures. ‘How can we cover the shortfall?’

‘Borrow it. Well, that’s what Calonne would say.’

‘I see no other solution.’

‘I’m afraid there is another part to this deal. You won’t like it. The thing is, Françoise has offered to lend me the money herself. She’s well-off. We haven’t gone into the details, but I don’t suppose the interest rate will be in my favour.’

‘That’s iniquitous. Good God, what a bitch! Wouldn’t you like to strangle her?’

D’Anton smiled. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘I suppose you are quite sure the boy’s yours?’

‘She wouldn’t have lied to me. She wouldn’t dare.’

‘Men like to think that…’ He looked at d’Anton’s face. No, that was not the way out. So be it – the child was his. ‘It is a very serious sum of money,’ he said. ‘For one night’s work five years ago it seems disproportionate. It could dog you for years.’

‘She wants to wring what she can out of me. You can understand it, I suppose.’ After all, she had the pain, he thought, she had the disgrace. ‘I want to get it settled up within the next couple of months. I want to start off with Gabrielle with a clean slate.’

‘I wouldn’t call it a clean slate, exactly,’ Charpentier said gently. ‘That’s just what it isn’t. You’re mortgaging your whole future. Can’t you – ’

‘No, I can’t fight her over it. I was fond of her, at one time. And I think of the boy. Well, ask yourself – if I took the other attitude, would I be the kind of person you’d want for a son-in-law?’

‘Yes, I see that, don’t mistake me, it’s just that I’m old and hard-boiled and I worry about you. When does this woman want the final payment?’

‘She said ’91, the first quarter day. Do you think I should tell Gabrielle about this?’

‘That’s for you to decide. Between now and your wedding, can you contrive to be careful?’

‘Look, I’ve got four years to pay this off. I’ll make a go of things.’

‘Certainly, you can make money as a King’s Councillor. I don’t deny that.’ M. Charpentier thought, he’s young, he’s raw, he has everything to do, and inside he cannot possibly be as sure as he sounds. He wanted to comfort him. ‘You know what Maître Vinot says, he says there are times of trouble ahead, and in times of trouble litigation always expands.’ He rolled his pieces of paper together, ready for filing away. ‘I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.’

MARCH 2 1787. It was Camille’s twenty-seventh birthday, and nobody had seen him for a week. He appeared to have changed his address again.

The Assembly of Notables had reached deadlock. The café was full, noisy and opinionated.

‘What is it that the Marquis de Lafayette has said?’

‘He has said that the Estates-General should be called.’

‘But the Estates is a relic. It hasn’t met since – ’

‘1614.’

‘Thank you, d’Anton,’ Maître Perrin said. ‘How can it answer to our needs? We shall see the clergy debating in one chamber, the nobles in another and the commons in a third, and whatever the commons propose will be voted down two to one by the other Orders. So what progress – ’

‘Listen,’ d’Anton broke in, ‘even an old institution can take on a new form. There’s no need to do what was done last time.’

The group gazed at him, solemn. ‘Lafayette is a young man,’ Maître Perrin said.

‘About your age, Georges.’

Yes, d’Anton thought, and while I was poring over the tomes in Vinot’s office, he was leading armies. Now I am a poor attorney, and he is the hero of France and America. Lafayette can aspire to be a leader of the nation, and I can aspire to scratch a living. And now this young man, of undistinguished appearance, spare, with pale sandy hair, had captured his audience, propounded an idea; and d’Anton, feeling an unreasoning antipathy for the fellow, was compelled to stand here and defend him. ‘The Estates is our only hope,’ he said. ‘It would have to give fair representation to us, the commons, the Third Estate. It’s quite clear that the nobility don’t have the King’s welfare at heart, so it’s stupid for him to continue to defend their interests. He must call the Estates and give real power to the Third – not just talk, not just consultation, the real power to do something.’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ Charpentier said.

‘It will never happen,’ Perrin said. ‘What interests me more is Lafayette’s proposal for an investigation into tax frauds.’

‘And shady underhand speculation,’ d’Anton said. ‘The dirty workings of the market as a whole.’

‘Always this vehemence,’ Perrin said, ‘among people who don’t hold bonds and wish they did.’

Something distracted M. Charpentier. He looked over d’Anton’s shoulder and smiled. ‘Here is a man who could clarify matters for us.’ He moved forward and held out his hands. ‘M. Duplessis, you’re a stranger, we never see you. You haven’t met my daughter’s fiancé. M. Duplessis is a very old friend of mine, he’s at the Treasury.’

‘For my sins,’ M. Duplessis said, with a sepulchral smile. He acknowledged d’Anton with a nod, as if perhaps he had heard his name. He was a tall man, fifty-ish, with vestigial good looks; he was carefully and plainly dressed. His gaze seemed to rest a little behind and beyond its object, as if his vision were unobstructed by the marble-topped tables and gilt chairs and the black limbs of city barristers.

‘So Gabrielle is to be married. When is the happy day?’

‘We’ve not named it. May or June.’

‘How time flies.’

He patted out his platitudes as children shape mud-pies; he smiled again, and you thought of the muscular effort involved.

M. Charpentier handed him a cup of coffee. ‘I was sorry to hear about your daughter’s husband.’

‘Yes, a bad business, most upsetting and unfortunate. My daughter Adèle,’ he said. ‘Married and widowed, and only a child.’ He addressed Charpentier, directing his gaze over his host’s left shoulder. ‘We shall keep Lucile at home for a while longer. Although she’s fifteen, sixteen. Quite a little lady. Daughters are a worry. Sons, too, though I haven’t any. Sons-in-law are a worry, dying as they do. Although not you, Maître d’Anton. I don’t intend it personally. You’re not a worry, I’m sure. You look quite healthy. In fact, excessively so.’

How can he be so dignified, d’Anton wondered, when his talk is so random and wild? Was he always like this, or had the situation made him so, and was it the Deficit that had unhinged him, or was it his domestic affairs?

‘And your dear wife?’ M. Charpentier inquired. ‘How is she?’

M. Duplessis brooded on this question; he looked as if he could not quite recall her face. At last he said, ‘Much the same.’

‘Won’t you come and have supper one evening? The girls too, of course, if they’d like to come?’

‘I would, you know…but the pressure of work…I’m a good deal at Versailles during the week now, it was only that today I had some business to attend to…sometimes I work through the weekend too.’ He turned to d’Anton. ‘I’ve been at the Treasury all my life. It’s been a rewarding career, but every day gets a little harder. If only the Abbé Terray…’

Charpentier stifled a yawn. He had heard it before; everyone had heard it. The Abbé Terray was Duplessis’s all-time Top Comptroller, his fiscal hero. ‘If Terray had stayed, he could have saved us; every scheme put forward in recent years, every solution, Terray had worked it out years ago.’ That had been when he was a younger man, and the girls were babies, and his work was something he looked forward to with a sense of the separate venture and progress of each day. But the Parlements had opposed the abbé; they had accused him of speculating in grain, and induced the silly people to burn him in effigy. ‘That was before the situation was so bad; the problems were manageable then. Since then I’ve seen them come along with the same old bright ideas – ’ He made a gesture of despair. M. Duplessis cared most deeply about the state of the royal Treasury; and since the departure of the Abbé Terray his work had become a kind of daily official heartbreak.

M. Charpentier leaned forward to refill his cup. ‘No, I must be off,’ Duplessis said. ‘I’ve brought papers home. We’ll take you up on that invitation. Just as soon as the present crisis is over.’

M. Duplessis picked up his hat, bowed and nodded his way to the door. ‘When will it ever be over?’ Charpentier asked. ‘One can’t imagine.’

Angélique rustled up. ‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘You were distinctly grinning, when you asked him about his wife. And you,’ she slapped d’Anton lightly on the shoulder, ‘were turning quite blue trying not to laugh. What am I missing?’

‘Only gossip, my dear.’

‘Only gossip? What else is there in life?’

‘It concerns Georges’s gypsy friend, M. How-to-get-on-in-Society.’

‘What? Camille? You’re teasing me. You’re just saying this to test out my gullibility.’ She looked around at her smirking customers. ‘Annette Duplessis?’ she said. ‘Annette Duplessis?’

‘Listen carefully then,’ her husband said. ‘It’s complicated, it’s circumstantial, there’s no saying where it’s going to end. Some take season tickets to the Opéra; others enjoy the novels of Mr Fielding. Myself I enjoy a bit of home-grown entertainment, and I tell you, there’s nothing more entertaining than life at the rue Condé these days. For the connoisseur of human folly…’

‘Jesus-Maria! Get on with it,’ Angélique said.