Читать книгу Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien - Hilary Mantel - Страница 25

JULY 3 1789: de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, to Monsieur de Villedeuil, Minister of State:

I have the honour to inform you that being obliged by current circumstances to suspend taking exercise on the towers, which privilege you were kind enough to grant the Marquis de Sade, yesterday at noon he went to his window and at the top of his voice, so that he could be heard by passers-by and the whole neighbourhood, he yelled that he was being slaughtered, that the Bastille prisoners were being murdered, and would people come to their aid…It is out of the question to allow him exercise on the towers, the cannon are loaded and it would be most dangerous. The whole staff would be obliged if you would accede to their wish to have the Marquis de Sade transferred elsewhere without delay.

(signed) De Launay

P.S. He threatens to shout again.

IN THE FIRST WEEK of July Laclos went out on a foray. There were just a few names to be added to the payroll at this last minute.

On the very day he had heard Camille Desmoulins speak at the Palais-Royal, a copy of his unpublished pamphlet, circulating in manuscript, had come into the Duke’s hands. The Duke declared it made his eyes ache, but said, ‘This man, the one who wrote this, he might be useful to us, eh?’

‘I know him,’ Laclos said.

‘Oh, good man. Look him up, will you?’

Laclos could not imagine why the Duke thought Desmoulins must be some old acquaintance of his.

At the Café du Foy Fabre d’Églantine was reading aloud from his latest work. It didn’t sound promising. Laclos marked him down as a man who would soon need more money. He had a low opinion of Fabre, but then, he thought, there are some jobs for which you need a fool.

Camille came up to him inconspicuously, willing to be steered aside. ‘Will it be the 12th?’ he asked.

Laclos was appalled by his directness: as if he did not see the infinite patience, the infinite complexity… ‘The 12th is no longer possible. We plan for the 15th.’

‘Mirabeau says that by the 13th the Swiss and German troops will be here.’

‘We must take a chance on that. Communications are what worry me. You could be massacring the entire population in one district, and half a mile away they wouldn’t know anything about it.’ He took a sip of coffee. ‘There is talk, you know, of forming a citizen militia.’

‘Mirabeau says the shopkeepers are more worried about the brigands than the troops, and that’s why they want a militia.’

‘Will you stop,’ Laclos said with a flash of irritation, ‘will you stop quoting Mirabeau at me? I don’t need his opinions secondhand when I can hear the man himself shouting his mouth off every day in the Assembly. The trouble with you is that you get these obsessions with people.’

Laclos has only known him a matter of weeks; already he is launched on ‘the trouble with you…’ Is there no end to it? ‘You’re only angry,’ Camille said, ‘because you haven’t been able to buy Mirabeau for the Duke.’

‘I’m sure we will soon agree on an amount. Anyway, there’s talk of asking Lafayette – Washington pot-au-feu, as you so aptly call him – to take charge of this citizen militia. I need hardly point out to you that this will not do at all.’

‘No indeed. Lafayette is so rich that he could buy the Duke.’

‘That is not for you to concern yourself with,’ Laclos said coldly. ‘I want you to tell me about Robespierre.’

‘Forget it,’ Camille said.

‘Oh, he may have his uses in the Assembly. I agree he’s not the most stylish performer as yet. They laugh at him, but he improves, he improves.’

‘I’m not questioning that he’s of use. I’m saying you won’t be able to buy him. And he won’t come with you for love of the Duke. He’s not interested in factions.’

‘Then what is he interested in? If you tell me, I will arrange it. What are the man’s weaknesses, that’s all I require to know. What are his vices?’

‘He has no weaknesses, as far as I can see. And he certainly has no vices.’

Laclos was perturbed. ‘Everyone has some.’

‘In your novel, perhaps.’

‘Well, this is certainly stranger than fiction,’ Laclos said. ‘Are you telling me the man is not in want of funds? Of a job? Of a woman?’

‘I don’t know anything about his bank account. If he wants a woman, I should think he can get one for himself.’

‘Or perhaps – well now, you’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t you? He isn’t perhaps otherwise inclined?’

‘Oh no. Good God.’ Camille put his cup down. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Yes, I agree it’s difficult to imagine,’ Laclos said. He frowned. He was good at imagining what went on in other people’s beds – after all, it was his stock-in-trade. Yet the deputy from Artois had a curious innocence about him. Laclos could only imagine that when he was in bed, he slept. ‘Leave it for now,’ he said. ‘It sounds as if M. Robespierre is more trouble than he’s worth. Tell me about Legendre, this butcher – they tell me the man will say anything, and has a formidable pair of lungs.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought he was in the Duke’s class. He must be desperate.’

Laclos pictured the Duke’s bland, perpetually inattentive face. ‘Desperate times, my dear,’ he said with a smile.

‘If you want someone in the Cordeliers district, there is someone much much better than Legendre. Someone with a trained pair of lungs.’

‘You mean Georges d’Anton. Yes, I have him on file. He is the King’s Councillor who refused a good post under Barentin last year. Strange that you should recommend to me someone who recommends himself to Barentin. He turned down another offer later – oh, didn’t he tell you? You should be omniscient, like me. Well – what about him?’

‘He knows everybody in the district. He is an extremely articulate man, he has a very forceful personality. His opinions are – not extreme. He could be persuaded to channel them.’

Laclos looked up. ‘You do think well of him, I see.’

Camille blushed as if he had been detected in a petty deception. Laclos looked at him with his knowing blue eyes, his head tilted to one side. ‘I recollect d’Anton. Great ugly brute of a man. A sort of poor man’s Mirabeau, isn’t he? Really, Camille, why do you have such peculiar taste?’

‘I can’t answer all your questions at once, Laclos. Maître d’Anton is in debt.’

Laclos smiled a simple pleased smile, as if a weight had been taken off his mind. It was one of his operating principles that a man in debt could be seduced by quite small amounts, while a man who was comfortably-off must be tempted by sums that gave his avarice a new dimension. The Duke’s coffers were well-supplied, and indeed he had recently been offered a token of good will by the Prussian Ambassador, whose King was always anxious to upset a French reigning monarch. Still, his cash was not inexhaustible; it amused Laclos to make small economies. He considered d’Anton with guarded interest. ‘How much for his good will?’

‘I’ll negotiate for you,’ Camille said with alacrity. ‘Most people would want a commission, but in this case I’ll forgo it as a mark of my esteem for the Duke.’

‘You’re very cocksure,’ Laclos said, needled. ‘I’m not paying out unless I know he’s safe.’

‘But we’re all corruptible, aren’t we? Or so you say. Listen, Laclos, move now, before the situation is taken out of your hands. If the court comes to its senses and starts to pay out, your friends will desert you by the score.’

‘Let me say,’ Laclos remarked, ‘that it does appear that you are less than wholly devoted to the Duke’s interests yourself.’

‘Some of us were discussing what plans you might have, afterwards, for the less-than-wholly-devoted.’

Camille waited. Laclos thought, how about a one-way ticket to Pennsylvania? You’d enjoy life among the Quakers. Alternatively, how about a nice dip in the Seine? He said, ‘You stick with the Duke, my boy. I promise you’ll do well out of it.’

‘Oh, you can be sure I’ll do well out of it.’ Camille leaned back in his chair. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Laclos, that you might be helping me to my revolution, and not vice versa? It might be like one of those novels where the characters take over and leave the author behind.’

Laclos brought his fist down on the table and raised his voice. ‘You always want to push it, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You always want to have the last word?’

‘Laclos,’ Camille said, ‘everyone is looking at you.’ It was now impossible to go on. Laclos apologized as they parted. He was annoyed with himself for having lost his temper with a cheap pamphleteer, and the apology was his penance. As he walked he composed his face to its usual urbanity. Camille watched him go. This won’t do, he thought. If this goes on I’ll have no soul to sell when someone makes me a really fair offer. He hurried away, to break to d’Anton the excellent news that he was about to be offered a bribe.

JULY 11: Camille turned up at Robespierre’s lodgings at Versailles. ‘Mirabeau has told the King to pull his troops out of Paris,’ he said. ‘Louis won’t; but those troops are not to be relied on. The Queen’s cabal is trying to get M. Necker sacked. And now the King says he will send the Assembly to the provinces.’

Robespierre was writing a letter to Augustin and Charlotte. He looked up. ‘The Estates-General is what he still calls it.’

‘Yes. So I came to see if you were packing your bags.’

‘Far from it. I’m just settling in.’

Camille wandered about the room. ‘You’re very calm.’

‘I’m learning patience through listening to the Assembly’s daily ration of drivel.’

‘Oh, you don’t think much of your colleagues. Mirabeau – you hate him.’

‘Don’t overstate my case for me.’ Robespierre put his pen down. ‘Camille, come here, let me look at you.’

‘No, why?’ Camille said nervously. ‘Max, tell me what I should do. My opinions will go soft. The republic – the Comte laughs at it. He makes me write, he tells me what to write, and he hardly lets me out of his sight. I sit beside him each night at dinner. The food is good, so is the wine, so is the conversation.’ He threw his hands out. ‘He’s corrupting me.’

‘Don’t be such a prig,’ Robespierre said unexpectedly. ‘He can get you on in the world, and that’s what you need at the moment. You should be there, not here. I can’t give you what he can.’

Robespierre knows – he almost always knows – exactly what will happen. Camille is sharp and clever, but he gives no evidence of any ideas about self-preservation. He has seen Mirabeau with him in public, one arm draped around his shoulders, as if he were some tart he’d picked up at the Palais-Royal. All this is distasteful; and the Comte’s larger motives, his wider ambitions, are as clear as if Dr Guillotin had him on a dissecting table. For the moment, Camille is enjoying himself. The Comte is bringing on his talents. He enjoys the flattery and fuss; then he comes for absolution. Their relationship has fallen back into its old pattern, as if the last decade were the flick of an eyelid. He knows all about the disillusionment that Camille will suffer one day, but there’s no point in trying to tell him: let him live through it. It’s like disappointments in love. Everyone must have them. Or so he is told.

‘Did I tell you about Anaïs, this girl I’m supposed to be engaged to? Augustin tells me I suddenly have rivals.’

‘What, since you left?’

‘So it seems. Hardly repining, is she?’

‘Do you feel hurt?’

He considered. ‘Oh, well, you know, I have always been vastly full of amour propre, haven’t I? No…’ He smiled. ‘She’s a nice girl, Anaïs, but she’s not over-bright. The truth is, it was all set up by other people anyway.’

‘Why did you go along with it?’

‘For the sake of a quiet life.’

Camille wandered across the room. He opened the window a little wider, and leaned out. ‘What’s going to happen?’ he asked. ‘Revolution is inevitable.’

‘Oh yes. But God works through men.’

‘And so?’

‘Somebody must break the deadlock between the Assembly and the King.’

‘But in the real world, of real actions?’

‘And it must be Mirabeau, I suppose. All right, nobody trusts him, but if he gave the signal – ’

‘Deadlock. Signal.’ Camille slammed the window shut. He crossed the room. Robespierre removed the ink from the path of his ire. ‘Is a signal something you give by waving your arms?’ He fell to his knees. Robespierre took his arms and tried to pull him to his feet. ‘Good, this is real,’ Camille said. ‘I am kneeling on the floor, you are trying to get me on my feet. Not metaphorically, but actually. Look,’ he said, hurling himself out of his friend’s grasp, ‘now I have fallen straight over on my face. This is action,’ Camille said to the carpet. ‘Now, can you distinguish what has just happened from what happens when somebody says “the country is on its knees”?’

‘Of course I can. Please get up.’

Camille stood up and brushed himself down a little.

‘You terrify me,’ Robespierre said. He turned away and sat down at the table where he had been writing the letter. He took off his spectacles, rested his elbows on the table and covered his closed eyes with his fingertips. ‘Metaphors are good,’ he said. ‘I like metaphors. Metaphors don’t kill people.’

‘They’re killing me. If I hear another mention of rising tides or crumbling edifices I shall throw myself out of the window. I can’t listen to this talk any more. I saw Laclos the other day. I was so disgusted, finally, I thought I shall have to do something by myself.’

Robespierre picked up his pen and added a phrase to his letter. ‘I am afraid of civil disorder,’ he said.

‘Afraid of it? I hope for it. Mirabeau – he has his own interests – but if we had a leader whose name is absolutely clean – ’

‘I don’t know if there’s such a man in the Assembly.’

‘There’s you,’ Camille said.

‘Oh yes?’ He applied himself to the next sentence. ‘They call Mirabeau “The Torch of Provence”. And do you know what they call me? “The Candle of Arras”. ’

‘But in time, Max – ’

‘Yes, in time. They think I should hang around viscounts and cultivate rhetorical flourishes. No. In time, perhaps, they might respect me. But I don’t want them ever to approve of me because if they approve of me I’m finished. I want no kickbacks, no promises, no caucus and no blood on my hands. I’m not their man of destiny, I’m afraid.’

‘But are you the man of destiny, inside your own head?’

Robespierre looked down at his letter again. He contemplated a postscript. He reached for his pen. ‘No more than you are.’

SUNDAY, 12 JULY: five a.m. D’Anton said, ‘Camille, there are no answers to these questions.’

‘No?’

‘No. But look. Dawn has broken. It’s another day. You’ve made it.’

Camille’s questions: suppose I do get Lucile, how shall I go on without Annette? Why have I never achieved anything, not one damn thing? Why won’t they publish my pamphlet? Why does my father hate me?

‘All right,’ d’Anton said. ‘Short answers are best. Why should you go on without Annette? Get into both their beds, you’re quite capable of it, I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the world.’

Camille looked at him wonderingly. ‘Nothing shocks you these days, does it?’

‘May I continue? You’ve never achieved anything because you’re always bloody horizontal. I mean, you’re supposed to be at some place, right, and you’re not, and people say, God, he’s so absentminded – but I know the truth – you started the day with very good intentions, you might even have been on the way to where you’re supposed to be going, and then you just run into somebody, and what’s the next thing? You’re in bed with them.’

‘And that’s the day gone,’ Camille said. ‘Yes, you’re right, you’re right.’

‘So what sort of a foundation for any career – oh, never mind. What was I saying? They won’t publish your pamphlet till the situation gives way a bit. As for your father – he doesn’t hate you, he probably cares too much, as I do and a very large number of other people. And Christ, you wear me out.’

D’Anton had been in court all day on Friday, and had spent Saturday working solidly. His face was creased with exhaustion. ‘Do me a favour.’ He got up and walked stiffly to the window. ‘If you’re going to commit suicide, would you leave it till about Wednesday, when my shipping case is over?’

‘I shall go back to Versailles now,’ Camille said. ‘I have to go and talk to Mirabeau.’

‘Poor sod.’ D’Anton slept momentarily on his feet. ‘It’s going to be hotter than ever today.’ He swung open the shutter. The glare leapt into the room.

CAMILLE’S DIFFICULTY was not staying awake; it was catching up with his personal effects. It was some time since he had been of fixed address. He wondered, really, if d’Anton could enter into his difficulties. When you turn up unexpectedly at somewhere you used to live, it’s very difficult to say to people, ‘Take your hands off me, I only came for a clean shirt.’ They don’t believe you. They think it’s a pretext.

And again, he is always in transit. It can easily take three hours to get from Paris to Versailles. Despite his difficulties, he is at Mirabeau’s house for the hour when normal people have their breakfast; he has shaved, changed, brushed his hair, he is every inch (he thinks) the modest young advocate waiting on the great man.

Teutch rolled his eyes and pushed him in at the door. ‘There’s a new cabinet,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t include HIM.’

Mirabeau was pacing about the room, a vein distended in his temple. He checked his stride for a moment. ‘Oh, there you are. Been with fucking Philippe?’

The room was packed: angry faces, faces drawn with anxiety. Deputy Pétion dropped a perspiring hand on his shoulder. ‘Well, looking so good, Camille,’ he said. ‘Me, I’ve been up all night. You know they sacked Necker? The new cabinet meets this morning, if they can find a Minister of Finance. Three people have already turned it down. Necker’s popular – they’ve really done it this time.’

‘Is it Antoinette’s fault?’

‘They say so. There are deputies here who expected to be arrested, last night.’

‘There’s time, for arrests.’

‘I think,’ Pétion said sensibly, ‘that some of us ought to go to Paris – Mirabeau, don’t you think so?’

Mirabeau glared at him. He thinks a lot of himself, he thought, to interrupt me. ‘Why don’t you do that?’ he growled. He pretended to have forgotten Pétion’s name.

As soon as this reaches the Palais-Royal, Camille thought…He slid across the room to the Comte’s elbow. ‘Gabriel, I have to leave now.’

Mirabeau pulled him to his side, sneering – at what, was unclear. He held on to him, and with one large hand swept Camille’s hair back from his face. One of Mirabeau’s rings caught the corner of his mouth. ‘Maître Desmoulins feels he would like to attend a little riot. Sunday morning, Camille: why aren’t you at Mass?’

He pulled away. He left the room. He ran down the stairs. He was already in the street when Teutch came pounding after him. He stopped. Teutch stared at him without speaking.

‘Does the Comte send me some advice?’

‘He does, but I forget what it is now.’ He thought. ‘Oh yes.’ His brow cleared. ‘Don’t get killed.’

IT IS MID-AFTERNOON, almost three o’clock, when the news about Necker’s dismissal reaches the Palais-Royal. The reputation of the mild Swiss financier has been built up with great assiduity – and never more so than in this last week, when his fall has seemed imminent.

The whole populace seems to be out in the open: churning through the streets and heaving through the squares in the blistering heat to the public gardens with their avenues of chestnut trees and their Orléanist connections. The price of bread has just risen. Foreign troops are camped outside the city. Order is a memory, law has a tenuous hold. The French Guards have deserted their posts and returned to their working-men’s interests, and all the backroom skulkers are out in the daylight. Their closed and anaemic faces are marked by nocturnal fancies of hanging, of other public agonies and final solutions; and above this the sun is a wound, a boiling tropical eye.

Under this eye drink is spilled, tempers flash and flare. Wig-makers and clerks, apprentices of all descriptions and scene-shifters, small shopkeepers, brewers, drapers, tanners and porters, knife-grinders, coachmen and public prostitutes; these are the remnants of Titonville. The crowd moves backwards and forwards, scoured by rumour and dangerous unease, always back to the same place: and as this occurs the clock begins to strike.

Until now this has been a joke, a blood sport, a bare-knuckle contest. The crowd is full of women and chidren. The streets stink. Why should the court wait on the political process? Through these alleys the populace can be driven like pigs and massacred in back courts by Germans on horseback. Are they to wait for this to happen? Will the King profane Sunday? Tomorrow is a holiday, the people can die on their own time. The clocks finish striking. This is crucifixion hour, as we all know. It is expedient that one man shall die for the people, and in 1757, before we were born, a man called Damiens dealt the old King a glancing blow with a pocket-knife. His execution is still talked of, a day of screaming entertainment, a fiesta of torment. Thirty-two years have passed: and now here are the executioner’s pupils, ready for some bloody jubilee.

Camille’s precipitate entry into history came about in this fashion. He was standing in the doorway of the Café du Foy, hot, elated, slightly frightened by the press of people. Someone behind him had said that he might try to address the crowds and so a table had been pushed into the café doorway. For a moment he felt faint. He leaned against this table, bodies hemming him in. He wondered if d’Anton had a hangover. What had possessed him to want to stay up all night? He wished he were in a quiet dark room, alone but, as d’Anton said, bloody horizontal. His heart raced. He wondered if he had eaten anything that day. He supposed not. He felt he would drown in the acrid miasma of sweat, misery and fear.

Three young men, walking abreast, came carving a way through the crowd. Their faces were set, their arms were linked, they were trying to get a bit of something going, and by now he had been present at enough of these street games to understand their mood and its consequences in terms of casualties. Of these men, he recognized two, but the third man he did not know. The third man cried, ‘To arms!’ The others cried the same.

‘What arms?’ Camille said. He detached a strand of hair that was sticking to his face and threw out a hand in inquiry. Somebody slapped a pistol into it.

He looked at it as if it had dropped from heaven. ‘Is it loaded?’

‘Of course it is.’ Somebody gave him another pistol. The shock was so great that if the man had not closed his fingers over the handle he would have dropped it. This is the consequence of intellectual rigour, of not letting people get away with a cheap slogan. The man said, ‘For God’s sake keep it steady, that kind are liable to go off in your face.’

It will certainly be tonight, he thought: the troops will come out of the Champs-de-Mars, there will be arrests, round-ups, exemplary dealings. Suddenly he understood how far the situation had moved on from last week, from yesterday – how far it had moved in the last half-hour. It will certainly be tonight, he thought, and they had better know it; we have run out to the end of our rope.

He had so often rehearsed this moment in his mind that his actions now were automatic; they were fluid and perfectly timed, like the actions of a dream. He had spoken many times from the café doorway. He had to get the first phrase out, the first sentence, then he could get beside himself and do it, and he knew that he could do it better than anyone else: because this is the scrap that God has saved up for him, like the last morsel on a plate.

He put one knee on to the table and scrambled up on to it. He scooped up the firearms. Already he was ringed about by his audience, like the crowds in an amphitheatre. Now he understood the meaning of the phrase ‘a sea of faces’; it was a living sea, where panic-striken faces nosed for air before the current pulled them under. But people were hanging out of the upstairs windows of the café and of the buildings around, and the crowd was growing all the time. He was not high enough, or conspicuous. Nobody seemed to be able to see what he needed, and until he began to speak properly he would not be able to make himself heard. He transferred both the pistols to one hand, bundling them against his body, so that if they go off he will be a terrible mess; but he feels uncurably reluctant to part with them for an instant. With his left arm he waved to someone inside the café. A chair was passed out, and planted on the table beside him. ‘Will you hold it?’ he said. He transferred one of the pistols back to his left hand. It is now two minutes past three.

As he stepped on to the chair he felt it slide a little. He thought it would be amazing if he fell off the chair, but people would say it was typical of him. He felt it being gripped by the back, steadied. It was an ordinary straw-bottomed chair. What if he were Georges-Jacques? He would go straight through it.

He was now at a dizzying height above the crowd. A fetid breeze drifted across the gardens. Another fifteen seconds had passed. He was able to identify certain faces, and surprise at this made him blink: ONE WORD, he thought. There were the police, and there were their spies and informers, men who have been watching him for weeks, the colleagues and accomplices of the men who only a few days before had been cornered and beaten by the crowds and half-drowned in the fountains. But now it is killing time; there were armed men behind them. In sheer fright, he began.

He indicated the policemen, identified them for the crowd. He defied them, he said: either to approach any further, to shoot him down, to try to take him alive. What he is suggesting to the crowd, what he is purveying, is an armed insurrection, the conversion of the city to a battlefield. Already (3.04) he is guilty of a long list of capital offences and if the crowd let the police take him he is finished, except for whatever penalty the law provides. Therefore if they do make the attempt he will certainly shoot one policeman, and he will certainly shoot himself, and hope that he dies quickly: and then the Revolution will be here. This decision takes one half-second, plaited between the phrases he is making. It is five past three. The exact form of the phrases does not matter now. Something is happening underneath his feet; the earth is breaking up. What does the crowd want? To roar. Its wider objectives? No coherent answer. Ask it: it roars. Who are these people? No names. The crowd just wants to grow, to embrace, to weld together, to gather in, to melt, to bay from one throat. If he were not standing here he would be dying anyway, dying between the pages of his letters. If he survives this – death as a reprieve – he will have to write it down, the life that feeds the writing that feeds the life to come, and already he fears he cannot describe the heat, the green leaves of the chestnut trees, the choking dust and the smell of blood and the blithe savagery of his auditors; it will be a voyage into hyperbole, an odyssey of bad taste. Cries and moans and bloody promises circle his head, a scarlet cloud, a new thin pure element in which he floats. For a second he puts his hand to his face and feels at the corner of his mouth the place caught that morning by the Comte’s ring; only that tells him, and nothing else, that he inhabits the same body and owns the same flesh.

The police have received a check. A few days ago, on this spot, he said, ‘The beast is in the snare: finish it off.’ He meant the animal of the old regime, the dispensation he had lived under all his life. But now he sees another beast: the mob. A mob has no soul, it has no conscience, just paws and claws and teeth. He remembers M. Saulce’s dog in the Place des Armes, slipped out to riot in the sleepy afternoon; three years old, he leans from the window of the Old House and sees the dog toss a rat into the air and snap its neck. No one will pull him away from this spectacle. No one will chain this dog, no one will lead it home. Suitably he addressed it, leaning out towards the mob, one hand extended, palm upwards, charming it and coaxing it and drawing it on. He has lost one of the pistols, he does not know where, it does not matter. The blood has set like marble in his veins. He means to live forever.

By now the crowd was hoarse and spinning with folly. He jumped down into it. A hundred hands reached for clothes and hair and skin and flesh. People were crying, cursing, making slogans. His name was in their mouths; they knew him. The noise was some horror from the Book of Revelations, hell released and all its companies scouring the streets. Although the quarter-hour has struck, no one knows this. People weep. They pick him up and carry him round the gardens on their shoulders. A voice screams that pikes are to be had, and smoke drifts among the trees. Somewhere a drum begins to beat: not deep, not resonant, but a hard, dry, ferocious note.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS to Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins, at Guise:

You made an error when you would not come to Laon to recommend me to the people who would have had me nominated. But it doesn’t matter now. I have written my name on our Revolution in letters larger than those of all our deputies from Picardy.

AS THE EVENING DREW ON, M. Duplessis walked out with a couple of friends who wished to satisfy their curiosity. He took a stout cane, with which he intended to repel working-class bullyboys. Mme Duplessis asked him not to go.

Annette’s face was pinched with anxiety. The servants had brought in disgusting rumours, and she was afraid there might be substance to them. Lucile seemed sure there was. She sat conspicuously quietly and modestly, like a lottery winner.

Adèle was at home. She usually was now, unless she was at Versailles paying calls and picking up gossip. She knew deputies’ wives and deputies, and all the café talk, and all the voting strategies in the National Assembly.

Lucile went to her room. She took pen and ink, and a piece of paper, and on the paper she wrote, ‘Adèle is in love with Maximilien Robespierre.’ She tore the strip off the sheet, and crumpled it in her palm.

She picked up some embroidery. She worked slowly, paying close attention to what she was doing. Later she intended to show people the meticulous work she had done that afternoon between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. She thought of practising some scales. When I am married, she thought, I will have a piano: and there will be other innovations.

When Claude got home, he walked straight into his study, coat, cane and all, and slammed the door. Annette understood that he might need a short time to recover himself. ‘I’m afraid your father may have received some bad news,’ she said.

‘How could he,’ Adèle said, ‘just by going out to see what’s happening? I mean, it’s not anyone’s personal bad news, is it?’

Annette tapped at the door. The girls stood at her elbows. ‘Come out,’ she said. ‘Or shall we come in?’

Claude said, ‘The minister has been made a pretext.’

‘Necker,’ Adèle corrected. ‘He’s not the minister any more.’

‘No.’ Claude was torn between his loyalty to his departmental chief and his desire to have his thoughts out in the open. ‘You know I never cared for the man. He is a charlatan. But he deserves better than to be made a pretext.’

‘My dear,’ Annette said, ‘there are three women here in considerable agony of mind. Do you think you could bring yourself to be a little more particular in your description of events?’

‘They are rioting,’ Claude said simply. ‘The dismissal of M. Necker has caused a furore. We are plunged into a state of anarchy, and anarchy is not a word I use.’

‘Sit down, my dear,’ Annette said.

Claude sat, and passed a hand over his eyes. From the wall the old King surveyed them: the present Queen in a cheap print, feathers in her hair and her chin flattered into insignificance: a plaster bust of Louis, looking like a wheelwright’s mate: the Abbé Terray, both full-face and in profile.

‘There is a state of insurrection,’ he said. ‘They are setting the customs barriers on fire. They have closed the theatres and broken into the waxworks.’

‘Broken into the waxworks?’ Annette was conscious of the idiot grin growing on her face. ‘What did they want to do that for?’

‘How do I know?’ Claude raised his voice. ‘How should I know what they are doing things for? There are five thousand people, six thousand people, marching on the Tuileries. That is just one procession and there are others coming up to join them. They are destroying the city.’

‘But where are the soldiers?’

‘Where are they? The King himself would like to know, I’m sure. They might as well be lining the route and cheering, for all the use they are. I thank God the King and Queen are at Versailles, for who knows what might not happen, as at the head of these mobs there is – ’ Words failed him. ‘There is that person.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Annette’s voice was matter-of-fact. She only said it in courtesy to form; she knew it was true.

‘Please yourself. You can read it in the morning paper – if there is one. It appears that he made a speech at the Palais-Royal and that it had a certain effect and that he has now become some sort of hero to these people. To the mob, I should say. The police moved in to arrest him and he unwisely held them off at gunpoint.’

‘I’m not sure it was unwise,’ Adèle said, ‘given the result it seems to have produced.’

‘Oh, I should have taken measures,’ Claude said. ‘I should have sent you both away. I ask what I have done to deserve it, one daughter hobnobbing with radicals and the other planning to plight herself to a criminal.’

‘Criminal?’ Lucile sounded surprised.

‘Yes. He has broken the law.’

‘The law will be altered.’

‘My God,’ Claude said, ‘do you tell me? The troops will flatten them.’

‘You seem to think that all this is accidental,’ Lucile said. ‘No, Father, let me speak, I have a right to speak, since I know better than you what is going on. You say there are thousands of rioters, how many thousands you are not sure, but the French Guards will not attack their own people, and most of them indeed are on our side. If they are properly organized they will soon have enough arms to engage the rest of the troops. The Royal Allemand troops will be swamped by sheer force of numbers.’

Claude stared at her. ‘Any measures you might have taken are too late,’ his wife said in a low voice. Lucile cleared her throat. It was almost a speech she was making, a pale drawing-room imitation. Her hands shook. She wondered if he had been very frightened: if pushed and driven by the crowds he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the living heart of all the close designs.

‘All this was planned,’ she said. ‘I know there are reinforcements, but they have to cross the river.’ She walked to the window. ‘Look. No moon tonight. How long will it take them to cross in the dark, with their commanders falling out amongst themselves? They only know how to fight on battlefields, they don’t know how to fight in the streets. By tomorrow morning – if they can be held now at the Place Louis XV – the troops will be cleared out of the city centre. And the Paris Electors will have their militia on the streets; they can ask for arms from City Hall. There are guns at the Invalides, forty thousand muskets – ’

‘Battlefield?’ Claude said. ‘Reinforcements? How do you know all this? Where did you learn it?’

‘Where do you suppose?’ she said coolly.

‘Electors? Militia? Muskets? Do you happen to know,’ he asked, with hysterical sarcasm, ‘where they will get the powder and shot?’

‘Oh yes,’ Lucile said. ‘At the Bastille.’

GREEN WAS THE COLOUR they had picked for identification – green, the colour of hope. In the Palais-Royal a girl had given Camille a bit of green ribbon, and since then the people had raided the shops for it and yards and yards of sage-green and apple and emerald and lime stretched over the dusty streets and trailed in the gutters. In the Palais-Royal they had pulled down leaves from the chestnut trees, and now wore them sad and wilting in their hats and buttonholes. The torn, sweet vegetable smell lay in clouds over the afternoon.

By evening they were an army, marching behind their own banners. Though darkness fell, the heat did not abate; and sometime during the night the storm broke, and the crack of thunder overhead vied with the sting and rumble of gunfire and the crash of splintering glass; people sang, orders were bawled into the darkness, all night long there was the thud of boots on cobblestones and the ring of steel. Jagged flashes from the sky lit the devastated streets, and smoke billowed on the winds from the burning barriers. At midnight a drunken grenadier said to Camille, ‘I’ve seen your face somewhere before.’

At dawn, in the rain, he met Hérault de Séchelles; but then he was beyond surprise by now, and would not have passed any comment if he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with Mme du Barry. The judge’s face was dirty, his coat was ripped half off his back. In one hand he had a very fine duelling pistol, one of a valuable pair made for Maurice de Saxe: and in the other a meat-cleaver.

‘But the waste, the irresponsibility,’ Hérault said. ‘They’ve plundered the Saint-Lazare monastery. All that fine furniture, my God, and the silver. Yes, they’ve raided the cellars, they’re lying in the streets vomiting now. What’s that you say? Versailles? Did you say “finish it off” or “finish them off”? If so I’d better get a change of clothes, I’d hate to turn up at the palace looking like this. Oh yes,’ he said, and he gripped the cleaver and charged back into the crowds, ‘it beats filing writs, doesn’t it?’ He had never been so happy: never, never before.

DUKE PHILIPPE had spent the 12th at his château of Raincy, in the forest of Bondy. On hearing of the events in Paris, he expressed himself ‘much surprised and shocked’. ‘Which,’ says his ex-mistress Mrs Elliot, ‘I really thought he was.’

At the King’s levee on the morning of the 13th, Philippe was first ignored; then asked by His Majesty (rudely) what he wanted; then told, ‘Get back where you came from.’ Philippe set off for his house at Mousseaux in a very bad temper, and swore (according to Mrs Elliot) ‘that he would never go near them again’.

IN THE AFTERNOON Camille went back to the Cordeliers district. The drunken grenadier was still dogging his footsteps saying, ‘I know you from somewhere.’ There were four murderous but sober French Guardsmen who were under threat of lynching if anything happened to him; there were several escaped prisoners from La Force. There was a raucous market-wife with a striped skirt, a woollen bonnet, a broad-bladed kitchen knife and a foul tongue; I’ve taken a fancy to you, she kept saying, you aren’t going anywhere from now on without me. There was a pretty young woman with a pistol in the belt of her riding-habit, and her brown hair tied back with a red ribbon and a blue one.

‘What happened to the green?’ he asked her.

‘Somebody remembered that green is the Comte d’Artois’s colour. We can’t have that – so now it’s the Paris colours, red and blue.’ She smiled at him with what seemed like old affection. ‘Anne Théroigne,’ she said. ‘We met at one of Fabre’s auditions. Remember?’

Her face seemed luminous in the watery light. Now he saw that she was very cold, drenched and shivering. ‘The weather has broken,’ she said. ‘And so much else.’

At the Cour du Commerce the concierge had the doors barred, so he talked to Gabrielle through a window. She was pasty-faced and her hair was in a mess. ‘Georges went out with our neighbour, M. Gély,’ she said, ‘to recruit for the citizens’ militia. A few minutes ago Maître Lavaux came by – you know him, he lives across the way? – and he said, “I’m very worried about Georges, he’s standing on a table yelling his head off about protecting our homes from the military and the brigands.”’ She gaped at the people standing behind him. ‘Who are these? Are they with you?’

Louise Gély appeared, her face bobbing at Gabrielle’s shoulder. ‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand in the street?’

Gabrielle put an arm around her and held her tight. ‘I’ve got her mother in here having the vapours. Georges said to Maître Lavaux, “Come and join us, you’ve lost your position anyway, the monarchy’s finished.” Why, why, why did he say that?’ Her distraught hand clutched the sill. ‘When will he be back? What shall I do?’

‘Because it’s true,’ he said. ‘He’ll not be long, not Georges. Keep the door locked.’

The drunken grenadier dug him in the ribs. ‘That your wife, then?’

He stepped back and looked at the man in amazement. At that point something seemed to snap very loudly inside his head, and they had to prop him against a wall and pour brandy into him, so that soon after that nothing made much sense at all.

Another night on the streets: at five o’clock, the tocsin and the alarm cannon. ‘Now it begins in earnest,’ Anne Théroigne said. She pulled the ribbons from her hair, and looped them into the buttonhole of his coat. Red and blue. ‘Red for blood,’ she said. ‘Blue for heaven.’ The colours of Paris: blood-heaven.

At six, they were at the Invalides barracks, negotiating for arms. Someone turned him around gently and pointed out to him where the rays of the early sun blazed on fixed bayonets on the Champs-de-Mars. ‘They’ll not come,’ he said, and they didn’t. He heard his own voice saying calming, sensible things, as he looked upwards into the mouths of the cannon, where soldiers stood with lighted tapers in their hands. He was not frightened. Then the negotiation was over, and there was running and shouting. This is called storming the Invalides. For the first time he was frightened. When it was finished he leaned against the wall, and the brown-haired girl put a bayonet into his hands. He put his palm against the blade, and asked in simple curiosity, ‘Is it hard to do?’

‘Easy,’ the drunken grenadier said. ‘I’ve remembered you, you know. It was a matter of a little riot outside the Law Courts, couple of years back. Good day out. Sort of dropped you on the ground and kicked you in the ribs. Sorry about that. Just doing the job. Not done you any harm, by the look of it.’

Camille looked up at him steadily. The soldier was covered in blood, dripping with it, his clothes sodden, his hair matted, grinning through a film of gore. As he watched him he spun on his heels and executed a little dance, holding up his scarlet forearms.

‘The Bastille, eh?’ he sang. ‘Now for the Bastille, eh, the Bastille, the Bastille.’

DE LAUNAY, the governor of the Bastille, was a civilian, and he made his surrender wearing a grey frock-coat. Shortly afterwards he tried to stab himself with his sword-stick, but was prevented.

The crowd who pressed around de Launay shouted, ‘Kill him.’ Members of the French Guard attempted to protect him, shielding him with their bodies. But by the Church of Saint-Louis, some of the crowd tore him away from them, spat at him, and clubbed and kicked him to the ground. When the Guards rescued him, his face was streaming blood, his hair had been torn out in handfuls, and he was barely able to walk.

As they approached City Hall their path was blocked. There was an argument between those who wanted to put the man on trial before hanging him and those who wanted to finish him right away. Crushed and panic-striken, de Launay flung out his arms wide; they were grasped at both sides, so that he no longer had a free hand to wipe away the blood that ran from his scalp wounds into his eyes. Tormented, he struggled and lashed out with his foot. It made contact with the groin of a man named Desnot. Desnot – who was an unemployed cook – screamed in shock and agony. He fell to his knees, clutching himself.

An unknown man stepped from behind him and eyed the prisoner. After one second’s hesitation, he took a pace forward and pushed his bayonet into de Launay’s stomach. As it was withdrawn, de Launay stumbled forward on to the points of six more weapons. Someone hammered repeatedly at the back of his head with a big piece of wood. His protectors stepped back as he was dragged into the gutter, where he died. Several shots were fired into his smashed and twitching body. Desnot hobbled forward and pushed his way to the front. Somebody said, ‘Yours.’ He fished in his pocket, his face still twisted in pain, and knelt down by the body. Threading his fingers into the remaining strands of de Launay’s hair, he flicked open a small knife, and straining back the corpse’s head began to hack away at the throat. Someone offered him a sword, but he was not confident of his ability to manage it; his face betrayed little more than his own discomfort, and he continued digging with his pocket-knife until de Launay’s head was quite severed.

CAMILLE SLEPT. His dreams were green, rural, full of clear water. Only at the end the waters ran dark and sticky, the open sewers and the gashed throats. ‘Oh, Christ,’ a woman’s voice said. Choked with tears. His head was held against a not very maternal bosom. ‘I am in the grip of strong emotions,’ Louise Robert said.

‘You’ve been crying,’ he said. He stated the obvious. How long had he slept? An hour, or half a day? He could not understand how he came to be lying on the Roberts’ bed. He did not remember how he had got there. ‘What time is it?’ he asked her.

‘Sit up,’ she said. ‘Sit up and listen to me.’ She was a little girl, pallid, with tiny bones. She walked about the room. ‘This is not our revolution. This is not ours, or Brissot’s or Robespierre’s.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘I knew Robespierre,’ she said. ‘I suppose I might have been Mme Candle of Arras, if I’d taken trouble. Would that have been a good thing for me?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘This is Lafayette’s revolution,’ she said. ‘And Bailly’s, and fucking Philippe’s. But it’s a start.’ She considered him, both hands at her throat. ‘You of all people,’ she said.

‘Come back.’ He held out a hand to her. He felt that he had drifted out on a sea of ice, far far beyond human contact. She sat down beside him, arranging her skirts. ‘I have put the shutters of the shop up. No one is interested in delicacies from the colonies. No one has done any shopping for two days.’

‘Perhaps there will be no colonies. No slaves.’

She laughed. ‘In a while. Don’t divert me. I have my job to do. I have to stop you going anywhere near the Bastille, in case your luck runs out.’

‘It’s not luck.’ Barely awake, he is working on his story.

‘You may think not,’ Louise said.

‘If I went to the Bastille, and I were killed, they’d put me in books, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him oddly. ‘But you’re not going anywhere to be killed.’

‘Unless your husband comes home and kills me,’ he said, with reference to their situation.

‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled grimly, eyes elsewhere. ‘Actually, I mean to be faithful to François. I think we have a future together.’

We all have a future now. It was not an accident, he thinks, it was not luck. He sees his body, tiny and flat, his hands groping for handholds against the blinding white chalk face of the future, feels his face pressed against the rock, and the giddy lurch of vertigo inside; he has always been climbing. Louise held him tightly. He sagged against her, wanting to sleep. ‘Such a coup de théâtre,’ she whispered. She stroked his hair.

She brought him some coffee. Stay quite, quite still, she said. He watched it go cold. The air around him was electric. He examined the palm of his right hand. Her finger traced the cut, thin as a hair. ‘How would you think I got that? I don’t remember, but in the context it seems, with people being crushed to death and trampled on – ’

‘I think you lead a charmed life,’ she said. ‘Though I never suspected it until now.’

François Robert came home. He stood in the doorway of the room and kissed his wife on the mouth. He took off his coat and gave it to her. Then deliberately he stood in front of a mirror and combed his curly black hair, while Louise waited by him, her head not quite up to his shoulder. When he finished he said, ‘The Bastille has been taken.’ He crossed the room and looked down at Camille. ‘Despite the fact that you were here, you were also there. Eyewitnesses saw you, one of the mainstays of the action. The second man inside was Hérault de Séchelles.’ He moved away. ‘Is there some more of that coffee?’ He sat down. ‘All normal life has stopped,’ he said, as if to an idiot or small child. He pulled off his boots. ‘Everything will be quite different from now on.’

You think that, Camille said tiredly. He could not entirely take in what was said to him. Gravity has not been abolished, the ground below has been spiked. Even at the top of the cliff there are passes and precipices, blank defiles with sides like the sides of the grave. ‘I dreamt I was dead,’ he said. ‘I dreamt I had been buried.’ There is a narrow path to the heart of the mountains, stony, ambivalent, the slow-going tedious country of the mind. Still your lies, he says to himself. I did not dream that, I dreamt of water; I dreamt that I was bleeding on the streets. ‘You would think that my stutter might have vanished,’ he said. ‘But life is not as charmed as that. Can you let me have some paper? I ought to write to my father.’

‘All right, Camille,’ François said. ‘Tell him you’re famous now.’