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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The abbé did not speculate in grain.’ Claude held Camille in a red-faced inimical stare.

‘I do not suggest he did. I am paraphrasing the newspaper.’

‘Yes…of course.’ Claude looked away miserably.

‘Did you ever meet Terray?’ Camille asked his mother-in-law.

‘Once, I think. We exchanged about three words.’

‘You know,’ Camille said to Claude, ‘Terray did have a reputation with women.’

‘It wasn’t his fault.’ Claude flared up again. ‘He never wanted to be a priest. His family forced him into it.’

‘Do calm yourself,’ Annette suggested.

Claude hunched forward, hands pressed together between his knees. ‘Terray was our best hope. He worked hard. He had energy. People were afraid of him.’ He stopped, seeming to realize that for the first time in years he had added a new statement, a coda.

‘Were you afraid of him?’ Camille asked: not scoring a point, simply curious.

Claude considered. ‘I might have been.’

‘I’m quite often afraid of people,’ Camille said. ‘It’s a terrible admission, isn’t it?’

‘Like who?’ Lucile said.

‘Well, principally I’m afraid of Fabre. If he hears me stutter, he shakes me and takes me by the hair and bangs my head against the wall.’

‘Annette,’ Claude said, ‘there have been other imputations. In other newspapers.’ He looked covertly at Camille. ‘I have contrived to dismiss them from my mind.’

Annette made no comment. Camille hurled the Town and Court Journal across the room. ‘I’ll sue them,’ he said.

Claude looked up. ‘You’ll do what?’

‘I’ll sue them for libel.’

Claude stood up. ‘You’ll sue them,’ he said. ‘You. You’ll sue someone for libel.’ He walked out of the room, and they could hear his hollow laughter as he climbed the stairs.

FEBRUARY, Lucile was furnishing her apartment. They were to have pink silk cushions; Camille wondered how they would look a few months on, when grimy Cordeliers had mauled them. But he confined himself to an unspoken expletive when he saw her new set of engravings of the Life and Death of Maria Stuart. He did not like to look at these pictures at all. Bothwell had a ruthless, martial expression in his eye that reminded him of Antoine Saint-Just. Bulky retainers in bizarre plaids waved broadswords; kilted gentlemen, showing plump knees, helped the distressed Queen of Scots into a rowing boat. At her execution Maria was dressed to show off her figure, and looked all of twenty-three. ‘Crushingly romantic,’ Lucile said. ‘Isn’t it?’

Since they had moved, it was possible to run the Révolutions from home. Inky men, short-tempered and of a robust turn of phrase, stamped up and down the stairs with questions to which they expected her to know the answers. Uncorrected proofs tangled about table legs. Writ-servers sat around the street door, sometimes playing cards and dice to pass the time. It was just like the Danton house, which was in the same building round the corner – complete strangers tramping in and out at all hours, the dining room colonized by men scribbling, their bedroom an overflow sitting room and general thoroughfare.

‘We must order more bookcases made,’ she said. ‘You can’t have things in little piles all over the floor, I skid around when I get out of bed in the morning. Do you need all these old newspapers, Camille?’

‘Oh yes. They’re for searching out the inconsistencies of my opponents. So that I can persecute them when they change their opinions.’

He lifted one from a pile. ‘Hébert’s,’ she said. ‘That is dismal trash.’

René Hébert was peddling his opinions now through the persona of a bluff, pipe-smoking man of the people, a fictitious furnace-maker called Père Duchesne. The paper was vulgar, in every sense – simple-minded prose studded with obscenity. ‘Père Duchesne is a great royalist, isn’t he?’ Camille swiftly marked a passage. ‘I may have to hold that one against you, Hébert.’

‘Is Hébert really like Père Duchesne? Does he really smoke a pipe and swear?’

‘Not at all. He’s an effete little man. He has peculiar hands that flutter about. They look like things that live under stones. Listen, Lolotte – are you happy?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Are you sure? Do you like the apartment? Do you want to move?’

‘No, I don’t want to move. I like the apartment. I like everything. I am very happy.’ Her emotions now seemed to lie just below the surface, scratching at her delicate skin to be hatched. ‘Only I’m afraid something will happen.’

‘What could happen?’ (He knew what could happen.)

‘The Austrians might come and you’d be shot. The Court might have you assassinated. You could be abducted and shut up in prison somewhere, and I’d never know where you were.’

She put up her hand to her mouth, as if she could stop the fears spilling out.

‘I’m not that important,’ he said. ‘They have more to do than arrange assassins for me.’

‘I saw one of those letters, threatening to kill you.’

‘That’s what comes of reading other people’s mail. You find out things you’d rather not know.’

‘Who obliges us to live like this?’ Her voice muffled against his shoulder. ‘Someday soon we’ll have to live in cellars, like Marat.’

‘Dry your tears. Someone is here.’

Robespierre hovered, looking embarrassed. ‘Your housekeeper said I should come through,’ he said.

‘That’s all right,’ Lucile gestured around her. ‘Not exactly a love-nest, as you see. Sit on the bed. Sit in the bed, feel free. Half of Paris was in here this morning while I was trying to get dressed.’

‘I can’t find anything since I moved,’ Camille complained. ‘And you’ve no idea how time-consuming it is, being married. You have to take decisions about the most baffling things – like whether to have the ceilings painted. I always supposed the paint just grew on them, didn’t you?’

Robespierre declined to sit. ‘I won’t stay – I came to see if you’d written that piece you promised, about my pamphlet on the National Guard. I expected to see it in your last issue.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Camille said. ‘It could be anywhere. Your pamphlet, I mean. Have you another copy with you? Look, why don’t you just write the piece yourself? It would be quicker.’

‘But Camille, it’s all very well for me to give your readers a digest of my ideas, but I expected something more – you could say whether you thought my ideas were cogent, whether they were logical, whether they were well-expressed. I can’t write a piece praising myself, can I?’

‘I don’t see the difficulty.’

‘Don’t be flippant. I haven’t time to waste.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Camille swept his hair back and smiled. ‘But you’re our editorial policy, didn’t you know? You’re our hero.’ He crossed the room, and touched Robespierre on the shoulder, very lightly, with just the tip of his middle finger. ‘We admire your principles in general, support your actions and writings in particular – and will therefore never fail to give you good publicity.’

‘Yet you have failed, haven’t you?’ Robespierre stepped back. He was exasperated. ‘You must try to keep to the task in hand. You are so heedless, you are unreliable.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

She felt a needlepoint of irritation.

‘Max, he isn’t a schoolchild.’

‘I’ll write it this afternoon,’ Camille said.

‘And be at the Jacobins this evening.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You are terribly dictatorial,’ she said.

‘Oh, no, Lucile.’ Robespierre looked at her earnestly. His voice suddenly softened. ‘It’s just that one has to use exhortation with Camille, he’s such a dreamer. I’m sure,’ he dropped his eyes, ‘if I had just been married to you, Lucile, I’d be tempted to spend time with you and I wouldn’t give such attention to my work as I ought. And Camille is no use at fighting temptation on his own, he never has been. But I’m not dictatorial, don’t say that.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘you have the licence of long acquaintance. But your tone. Your manner. You should save that for berating the Right. Go and make them flinch.’

His face tightened: defensive, distressed. She saw why Camille preferred always to apologize. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Camille quite likes being pushed around. It’s something in his character. So Danton says. Goodbye. Write it this afternoon, won’t you?’ he added gently.

‘Well,’ she said. They exchanged glances. ‘That was pointed, wasn’t it? What does he mean?’

‘Nothing. He was just shaken because you criticized him.’

‘Must he not be criticized?’

‘No. He takes things to heart, it undermines him. Besides, he was right. I should have remembered about the pamphlet. You mustn’t be hard on him. It’s shyness that makes him abrupt.’

‘He ought to have got over it. Other people don’t get allowances made for them. Besides, once you said he had no weaknesses.’

‘Day to day he has weaknesses. In the end he has no weaknesses.’

‘You might leave me,’ she said suddenly. ‘For someone else.’

‘What makes you imagine that?’

‘Today I keep thinking. I keep thinking of what could happen. Because I never supposed that one could be so happy, that everything could come right.’

‘Do you think you have had an unhappy life?’

Appearances were against her; but truthfully she answered, ‘Yes.’

‘I also. But not from now on.’

‘You could be killed in an accident in the street. You might die. Your sister Henriette died of a consumption.’ She scrutinized him as if she wanted to see the tissue beneath the skin, and provide against contingencies.

He turned away; he didn’t feel he could bear it. He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament; or it might be something you learn when you’re a child, a kind of language, harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a good grasp on by the time you’re seven. What if you haven’t got that grasp? What if you’re in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind? It occurred to him that there are some people, ashamed of being illiterate, who always pretend to others that they can read. Sooner or later they get found out, of course. But it is always possible that while you are valiantly pretending, the principles of reading strike you for the first time, and you are saved. By analogy, it is possible that while you, the unhappy person, are trying out some basic expressions – the kind of thing you get in phrasebooks for travellers – the grammar and syntax of this neglected language are revealing themselves, somewhere at the back of your mind. That’s all very well, he thought, but the process could take years. He understood Lucile’s problem: how do you know you will live long enough to be fluent?

THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND, No. 497, J.-P. Marat, editor:

…name immediately a military tribunal, a supreme dictator…you are lost beyond hope if you continue to heed your present leaders, who will continue to flatter you and lull you until your enemies are at your walls…Now is the time to have the heads of Mottié, of Bailly…of all the traitors in the National Assembly…within a few days Louis XVI will advance at the head of all the malcontents and the Austrian legions…A hundred fiery mouths will threaten to destroy your town with red shot if you offer the least resistance…all the patriots will be arrested, the popular writers will be dragged away to dungeons…a few more days of indecision, and it will be too late to shake off your lethargy; death will overtake you in your sleep.

DANTON at Mirabeau’s house.

‘So how goes it?’ the Comte said.

Danton nodded.

‘I mean, I really want to know.’ Mirabeau laughed. ‘Are you totally cynical, Danton, or do you harbour some guilty ideals? Where do you stand, really? Come, I’m taken with a passion to know. Which is it to be for King, Louis or Philippe?’

Danton declined to answer.

‘Or perhaps neither. Are you a republican, Danton?’

‘Robespierre says that it is not a government’s descriptive label that matters, but its nature, the way it operates, whether it is government by the people. Cromwell’s republic, for instance, was not a popular government. I agree with him. It seems to me of little importance whether we call it a monarchy or a republic.’

‘You say its nature matters, but you do not say which nature you would prefer.’

‘My reticence is considered.’

‘I’m sure it is. You can hide a great deal behind slogans. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, indeed.’

‘I subscribe to that.’

‘I hear you invented it. But freedom comprehends – what?’

‘Do I have to define it for you? You should simply know.’

‘That is sentimentality,’ Mirabeau said.

‘I know. Sentimentality has its place in politics, as in the bedroom.’

The Comte looked up. ‘We’ll discuss bedrooms later. Let’s, shall we, descend to practicalities? The Commune is to be reshuffled, there will be elections. The office ranking below mayor will be that of administrator. There will be sixteen administrators. You wish to be one of them, you say. Why, Danton?’

‘I wish to serve the city.’

‘No doubt. I myself am assured of a place. Amongst your colleagues you may expect Sieyès and Talleyrand. I take it from the expression on your face that you think it a company of tergiversators in which you will be quite at home. But if I am to support you, I must have an assurance as to your moderate conduct.’

‘You have it.’

‘Your moderation. You understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fully?’

‘Yes.’

‘Danton, I know you. You are like myself. Why else have they started calling you the poor man’s Mirabeau, do you suppose? You haven’t an ounce of moderation in your body.’

‘I think our resemblances must be superficial.’

‘Oh, you think you are a moderate?’

‘I don’t know. I could be. Most things are possible.’

‘You may wish to conciliate, but it is against your nature. You don’t work with people, you work over them.’

Danton nodded. He conceded the point. ‘I drive them as I wish,’ he said. ‘That could be towards moderation, or it could be towards the extremes.’

‘Yes, but the difficulty is, moderation looks like weakness, doesn’t it? Oh yes, I know, Danton, I have been here before you, crashing down this particular trail. And speaking of extremism, I do not care for the attacks on me made by your Cordeliers journalists.’

‘The press is free. I don’t dictate the output of the writers of my district.’

‘Not even the one who lives next door to you? I rather thought you did.’

‘Camille has to be running ahead of public opinion all the time.’

‘I can remember the days,’ Mirabeau said, ‘when we didn’t have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.’ He rubbed his chin, deep in thought. ‘Very well, Danton, consider yourself elected. I shall hold you to your promise of moderation, and I shall expect your support. Come now – tell me the gossip. How is the marriage?’

LUCILE looked at the carpet. It was a good carpet, and on balance she was glad she had spent the money on it. She did not particularly wish to admire the pattern now, but she could not trust the expression on her face.

‘Caro,’ she said, ‘I really can’t think why you are telling me all this.’

Caroline Rémy put her feet up on the blue chaise-longue. She was a handsome young woman, an actress belonging to the Théâtre Montansier company. She had two arrangements, one with Fabre d’Églantine and one with Hérault de Séchelles.

‘To protect you,’ she said, ‘from being told all this by unsympathetic people. Who would delight in embarrassing you, and making fun of your naïveté.’ Caroline put her head on one side, and wrapped a curl around her finger. ‘Let me see – how old are you now, Lucile?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Dear, dear,’ Caroline said. ‘Twenty!’ She couldn’t be much older herself, Lucile thought. But she had, not surprisingly, a rather well-used look about her. ‘I’m afraid, my dear, that you know nothing of the world.’

‘No. People keep telling me that, lately. I suppose they must be right.’ (A guilty capitulation. Camille, last week, trying to educate her: ‘Lolotte, nothing gains truth by mere force of repetition.’ But how to be polite, faced with such universal insistence?)

‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t see fit to warn you,’ Caro said. ‘I’m sure she knows everything there is to know about Camille. But if I’d had the courage – and believe me I reproach myself – to come to you before Christmas, and tell you, just for instance, about Maître Perrin, what would your reaction have been?’

Lucile looked up. ‘Caro, I’d have been riveted,’

It was not the answer Caro had expected. ‘You are a strange girl,’ she said. Her expression said clearly, strangeness doesn’t pay. ‘You see, you have to be prepared for what lies ahead of you.’

‘I try to imagine,’ Lucile said. She wished for the door to smash open, and one of Camille’s assistants to come flying in, and start firing off questions and rummaging for a piece of paper that had been mislaid. But the house was quiet for once: only Caro’s well-trained voice, with its tragedienne’s quaver, its suggestion of huskiness.

‘Infidelity you can endure,’ she said. ‘In the circles in which we move, these things are understood.’ She made a gesture, elegant fingers spread, to indicate the laudable correctness, both aesthetic and social, of a little well-judged adultery. ‘One finds a modus vivendi. I have no fear of your not being able to amuse yourself. Other women one can cope with, provided they’re not too close to home – ’

‘Just stop there. What does that mean?’

Caro became a little round-eyed. ‘Camille is an attractive man,’ she said. ‘I know whereof I speak.’

‘I don’t see what it has to do with anything,’ Lucile muttered, ‘if you’ve been to bed with him. I could do without that bit of information.’

‘Please regard me as your friend,’ Caro suggested. She bit her lip. At least she had found out that Lucile was not expecting a child. Whatever the reason for the hurry about the marriage, it was not that. It must be something even more interesting, if she could only make it out. She patted her curls back into place and slid from the chaise-longue. ‘Must go. Rehearsal.’

I don’t think you need any rehearsal, Lucile said under her breath. I think you’re quite perfect.

WHEN CARO had gone, Lucile leaned back in her chair, and tried to take deep breaths, and tried to be calm. The housekeeper, Jeanette, came in, and looked her over. ‘Try a small omelette,’ she advised.

‘Leave me alone,’ Lucile said. ‘I don’t know why you think that food solves everything.’

‘I could step around and fetch your mother.’

‘I should just think,’ Lucile said, ‘that I can do without my mother at my age.’

She agreed to a glass of iced water. It made her hand ache, froze her deep inside. Camille came in at a quarter-past five, and ran around snatching up pen and ink. ‘I have to be at the Jacobins,’ he said. That meant six o’clock. She stood over him watching his scruffy handwriting loop itself across the page. ‘No time ever to correct…’ He scribbled. ‘Lolotte…what’s wrong?’

She sat down and laughed feebly: nothing’s wrong.

‘You’re a terrible liar.’ He was making deletions. ‘I mean, you’re no good at it.’

‘Caroline Rémy called.’

‘Oh.’ His expression, in passing, was faintly contemptuous.

‘I want to ask you a question. I appreciate it might be rather difficult.’

‘Try.’ He didn’t look up.

‘Have you had an affair with her?’

He frowned at the paper. ‘That doesn’t sound right.’ He sighed and wrote down the side of the page. ‘I’ve had an affair with everybody, don’t you know that by now?’

‘But I’d like to know.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’

‘Why would you like to know?’

‘I can’t think why, really.’

He tore the sheet once across and began immediately on another. ‘Not the most intelligent of conversations, this.’ He wrote for a minute. ‘Did she say that I did?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘What gave you the idea then?’ He looked up at the ceiling for a synonym, and as he tipped his head back the flat, red winter light touched his hair.

‘She implied it.’

‘Perhaps you mistook her.’

‘Would you mind just denying it?’

‘I think it’s quite probable that at some time I spent a night with her, but I’ve no clear memory of it.’ He had found the word, and reached for another sheet of paper.

‘How could you not have a clear memory? A person couldn’t just not remember.’

‘Why shouldn’t a person not remember? Not everybody thinks it’s the highest human activity, like you do.’

‘I suppose not remembering is the ultimate snub.’

‘I suppose so. Have you seen Brissot’s latest issue?’

‘There. You’ve got your paper on it.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What, you mean you really can’t remember?’

‘I’m very absent-minded, anyone will tell you. It needn’t have been so much as a night. Could have been an afternoon. Or just a few minutes, or not at all. I might have thought she was someone else. My mind might have been on other things.’

She laughed.

‘I’m not sure you ought to be amused. Perhaps you ought to be shocked.’

‘She thinks you very attractive.’

‘What heartening news. I was consumed with anxiety in case she didn’t. The page I want is missing. I must have thrown it on the fire in a rage. A literary jockey, Mirabeau calls Brissot. I’m not quite sure what that means but I expect he thinks it’s very insulting.’

‘She was telling me something, about a barrister you once knew.’

‘Which of the five hundred?’

But he was on the defensive now. She didn’t answer. He wiped his pen carefully, put it down. He looked at her sideways, cautiously, from under his eyelashes. He smiled, slightly.

‘Oh God, don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘You look as if you’re going to tell me what a good time you had. Do people know?’

‘Some people, obviously.’

‘Does my mother know?’

No answer.

‘Why didn’t I know?’

‘I can’t think. Possibly because you were about ten at the time. We hadn’t met. I can’t think how people would have broached the topic.’

‘Ah. She didn’t tell me it was so long ago.’

‘No, I’m sure she just told you exactly what suited her. Lolotte, does it matter so much?’

‘Not really. I suppose he must have been nice.’

‘Yes, he was.’ Oh, the relief of saying so. ‘He was really extremely nice to me. And somehow, oh, you know, it didn’t seem much to do.’

She stared at him. He’s quite unique, she thought. ‘But now – ’ and suddenly she felt she had the essence of it – ‘now you’re a public person. It matters to everybody what you do.’

‘And now I am married to you. And no one will ever have anything to reproach me with, except loving my wife too much and giving them nothing to talk about.’ Camille pushed his chair back. ‘The Jacobins can wait. I don’t think I want to listen to speeches tonight. I should prefer to write a theatre review. Yes? I like taking you to the theatre. I like walking around in public with you. I get envied. Do you know what I really like? I like to see people looking at you, and forming ideas, and people saying, is she married? – yes – and their faces fall, but then they think, well, still, even so, and they say, to whom? And someone says, to the Lanterne Attorney, and they say oh, and walk away with a glazed look in their eye.’

She raced off to get dressed for the theatre. When she looked back, she had to admire it, as a way of getting off the subject.

A LITTLE WOMAN – Roland’s wife – came out of the Riding-School on Pétion’s arm. ‘Paris has changed greatly,’ she said, ‘since I was here six years ago. I shall never forget that visit. We were night after night at the theatre. I had the time of my life.’

‘Let’s hope we can do as well for you this time,’ Pétion said, with gallantry. ‘And yet you are a Parisian, my friend Brissot tells me?’

You’re overdoing the charm, Jérôme, his friend Brissot thought.

‘Yes, but my husband’s affairs have kept us so long in the provinces that I no longer lay claim to the title. I have so often wished to return – and now here I am, thanks to the affairs of the Municipality of Lyon.’

Brissot thought, she talks like a novel.

‘I’m sure your husband is a most worthy representative,’ Pétion said, ‘yet let us cherish a secret hope that he does not conclude Lyon’s business too quickly. We should hate to lose, so soon, the benefit of your advice – and the radiance of your person.’

She glanced up at him and smiled. She was the type he liked – petite, a little plump, hazel eyes, dark auburn ringlets about an oval face – style perhaps a little bit young for her? What would she be, thirty-five? He pondered the possibility of burying his head in her opulent bosom – on some later occasion, of course.

‘Brissot has often told me,’ he said, ‘of his Lyon correspondent, his “Roman Lady” – and of course I have read all her articles and come to admire both her elegant turn of phrase and the noble cast of mind which inspires it; but never, I confess, did I look to see beauty and wit so perfectly united.’