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‘And that upsets your plans?’
‘They have to be directed.’ Brissot shook his head. ‘We don’t want anarchy. I shudder when I find myself in the presence of some of the people we have to use …’ He made a gesture in d’Anton’s direction; with M. Charpentier, he had walked away. ‘Look at that fellow. The way he’s dressed he might be any respectable citizen. But you can see he’d be happiest with a pike in his hand.’
Camille’s eyes widened. ‘But that is Maître d’Anton, the King’s Councillor. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Let me tell you, Maître d’Anton could be in government office. Except that he knows where his future lies. But anyway, Brissot – why so unnerved? Are you afraid of a man of the people?’
‘I am at one with the people,’ Brissot said reverently. ‘With their pure and elevated soul.’
‘Not really you aren’t. You look down on them because they smell and can’t read Greek.’ He slid across the room to d’Anton. ‘He took you for some cut-throat,’ he said happily. ‘Brissot,’ he told Charpentier, ‘married one Mlle Dupont, who used to work for Félicité de Genlis in some menial capacity. That’s how he got involved with Orléans. I respect him really. He’s spent years abroad, writing and, you know, talking about it. He deserves a revolution. He’s only a pastry-cook’s son, but he’s very learned, and he gives himself airs because he’s suffered so much.’
M. Charpentier was puzzled, angry. ‘You, Camille – you who are taking the Duke’s money – you admit to us that Réveillon has been victimized –’
‘Oh, Réveillon’s of no account now. If he didn’t say those things, he might have done. He might have been thinking them. The literal truth doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is what they think on the streets.’
‘God knows,’ Charpentier said, ‘I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours.’
‘Reform?’ Camille said. ‘I’m not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer.’
D’Anton felt sick, shaken by a spasm of grief. He wanted to draw Camille aside, tell him about the baby. That would stop him in his tracks. But he was so happy, arranging the forthcoming slaughter. D’Anton thought, who am I to spoil his week?
VERSAILLES: a great deal of hard thinking has gone into this procession. It isn’t just a matter of getting up and walking, you know.
The nation is expectant and hopeful. The long-awaited day is here. Twelve hundred deputies of the Estates walk in solemn procession to the Church of Saint-Louis, where Monseigneur de la Fare, Bishop of Nancy, will address them in a sermon and put God’s blessing on their enterprise.
The Clergy, the First Estate: optimistic light of early May glints on congregated mitres, coruscates over the jewel-colours of their robes. The Nobility follows: the same light flashes on three hundred sword-hilts, slithers blithely down three hundred silk-clad backs. Three hundred white hat plumes wave cheerfully in the breeze.
But before them comes the Commons, the Third Estate, commanded by the Master of Ceremonies into plain black cloaks; six hundred strong, like an immense black marching slug. Why not put them into smocks and order them to suck straws? But as they march, the humiliating business takes on a new aspect. These mourning coats are a badge of solidarity. They are called, after all, to attend on the demise of the old order, not to be guests at a costume ball. Above the plain cravats a certain pride shows in their starched faces. We are the men of purpose: goodbye to frippery.
Maximilien de Robespierre walked with a contingent from his own part of the country, between two farmers; if he turned his head he could see the embattled jaws of the Breton deputies. Shoulders trapped him, walled him in. He kept his eyes straight ahead, suppressed his desire to scan the ranks of the cheering crowds that lined the routes. There was no one here who knew him; no one cheering, specifically, for him.
In the crowd Camille had met the Abbé de Bourville. ‘You don’t recognize me,’ the abbé complained, pushing through. ‘We were at school together.’
‘Yes, but in those days you had a blue tinge, from the cold.’
‘I recognized you right away. You’ve not changed a bit, you look about nineteen.’
‘Are you pious now, de Bourville?’
‘Not noticeably. Do you ever see Louis Suleau?’
‘Never. But I expect he’ll turn up.’
They turned back to the procession. For a moment he was swept by an irrational certainty that he, Desmoulins, had arranged all this, that the Estates were marching at his behest, that all Paris and Versailles revolved around his own person.
‘There’s Orléans.’ De Bourville pulled at his arm. ‘Look, he’s insisting on walking with the Third Estate. Look at the Master of Ceremonies pleading with him. He’s broken out in a sweat. Look, that’s the Duc de Biron.’
‘Yes, I know him. I’ve been to his house.’
‘That’s Lafayette.’ America’s hero stepped out briskly in his silver waistcoat, his pale young face serious and a little abstracted, his peculiarly pointed head hidden under a tricorne hat à la Henri Quatre. ‘Do you know him too?’
‘Only by reputation,’ Camille muttered. ‘Washington pot-au-feu.’
Bourville laughed. ‘You must write that down.’
‘I have.’
At the Church of Saint-Louis, de Robespierre had a good seat by an aisle. A good seat, to fidget through the sermon, to be close to the procession of the great. So close; the billowing episcopal sea parted for a second, and between the violet robes and the lawn sleeves the King looked him full in the face without meaning to, the King, overweight in cloth-of-gold; and as the Queen turned her head (this close for the second time, Madame) the heron plumes in her hair seemed to beckon to him, civilly. The Holy Sacrament in its jewelled monstrance was a small sun, ablaze in a bishop’s hands; they took their seat on a dais, under a canopy of velvet embroidered with gold fleur-de-lis. Then the choir:
O salutaris hostia
If you could sell the Crown Jewels what could you buy for France?
Quae coeli pandis ostium,
The King looks half-asleep.
Bella premunt hostilia,
The Queen looks proud.
Da robur, fer auxilium.
She looks like a Hapsburg.
Uni trinoque Domino,
Madame Deficit.
Sit sempiterna gloria,
Outside, the women were shouting for Orléans.
Qui vitam sine termino,
There is no one here I know.
Nobis donet in patria.
Camille might be here somewhere. Somewhere.
Amen.
‘LOOK, LOOK,’ Camille said to de Bourville. ‘Maximilien.’
‘Well, so it is. Our dear Thing. I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘I should be there. In that procession. De Robespierre is my intellectual inferior.’
‘What?’ The abbé turned, amazed. Laughter engulfed him. ‘Louis XVI by the grace of God is your intellectual inferior. So no doubt is our Holy Father the Pope. What else would you like to be, besides a deputy?’ Camille did not reply. ‘Dear, dear.’ The abbé affected to wipe his eyes.
‘There’s Mirabeau,’ Camille said. ‘He’s starting a newspaper. I’m going to write for it.’
‘How did you arrange that?’
‘I haven’t. Tomorrow I will.’
De Bourville looked sideways at him. Camille is a liar, he thinks, always was. No, that’s too harsh; let’s say, he romances. ‘Well, good luck to you,’ he said. ‘Did you see how the Queen was received? Nasty, wasn’t it? They cheered Orléans though. And Lafayette. And Mirabeau.’
And d’Anton, Camille said: under his breath, to try out the sound of it. D’Anton had a big case in hand, would not even come to watch. And Desmoulins, he added. They cheered Desmoulins most of all. He felt a dull ache of disappointment.
It had rained all night. At ten o’clock, when the procession began, the streets had been steaming under the early sun, but by midday the ground was quite hot and dry.
CAMILLE had arranged to spend the night in Versailles at his cousin’s apartment; he had made a point of asking this favour of the deputy when there were several people about, so that he could not with dignity refuse. It was well after midnight when he arrived.
‘Where on earth have you been till this time?’ de Viefville said.
‘With the Duc de Biron. And the Comte de Genlis,’ Camille murmured.
‘Oh I see,’ de Viefville said. He was annoyed, because he did not know whether to believe him or not. And there was a third party present, inhibiting the good row they might have had.
A young man rose from his quiet seat in the chimney corner. ‘I’ll leave you, M. de Viefville. But think over what I’ve said.’
De Viefville made no effort to effect introductions. The young man said to Camille, ‘I’m Barnave, you might have heard of me.’
‘Everyone has heard of you.’
‘Perhaps you think I am only a troublemaker. I do hope to show I’m something more. Good-night, Messieurs.’
He drew the door quietly behind him. Camille would have liked to run after him and ask him questions, try to cement their acquaintance; but his faculty of awe had been overworked that day. This Barnave was the man who in the Dauphiné had stirred up resistance to royal edicts. People called him Tiger – gentle mockery, Camille now saw, of a plain, pleasant, snub-nosed young lawyer.
‘What’s the matter?’ de Viefville inquired. ‘Disappointed? Not what you thought?’
‘What did he want?’
‘Support for his measures. He could only spare me fifteen minutes, and that in the small hours.’
‘So are you insulted?’
‘You’ll see them all tomorrow, jockeying for advantage. They’re all in it for what they can grab, if you ask me.’
‘Does nothing shake your tiny provincial convictions?’ Camille asked. ‘You’re worse than my father.’
‘Camille, if I’d been your father I’d have broken your silly little neck years ago.’
At the palace and across the town, the clocks began to strike one, mournfully concordant; de Viefville turned, walked out of the room, went to bed. Camille took out the draft of his pamphlet ‘La France Libre’. He read each page through, tore it once across and dropped it on the fire. It had failed to keep up with the situation. Next week, deo volente, next month, he would write it again. In the flames he could see the picture of himself writing, the ink skidding over the paper, his hand scooping the hair off his forehead. When the traffic stopped rumbling under the window he curled up in a chair and fell asleep by the dying fire. At five the light edged between the shutters and the first cart passed with its haul of dark sour bread for the Versailles market. He woke, and sat looking around the strange room, sick apprehension running through him like a slow, cold flame.
THE VALET – who was not like a valet, but like a bodyguard – said: ‘Did vou write this?’
In his hand he had a copy of Camille’s first pamphlet, ‘A Philosophy for the French People’. He flourished it, as if it were a writ.
Camille shrank back. Already at eight o’clock, Mirabeau’s antechamber was crowded. All Versailles wanted an interview, all Paris. He felt small, insignificant, completely flattened by the man’s aggression. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My name’s on the cover.’
‘Good God, the Comte’s been after you.’ The valet took him by the elbow. ‘Come with me.’
Nothing had been easy so far: he could not believe that this was going to be easy. The Comte de Mirabeau was wrapped in a crimson silk dressing-gown, which suggested some antique drapery: as if he waited on a party of sculptors. Unshaven, his face glistened a little with sweat; it was pock-marked, and the shade of putty.
‘So I have got the Philosopher,’ he said. ‘Teutch, give me coffee.’ He turned, deliberately. ‘Come here.’ Camille hesitated. He felt the lack of a net and trident. ‘I said come here,’ the Comte said sharply. ‘I am not dangerous.’ He yawned. ‘Not at this hour.’
The Comte’s scrutiny was like a physical mauling, and designed to overawe. ‘I meant to get around to waylaying you in some public place,’ he said, ‘and having you fetched here. Unfortunately I waste my time, waiting for the King to send for me.’
‘He should send for you, Monsieur.’
‘Oh, you are a partisan of mine?’
‘I have had the honour of arguing from your premises.’
‘Oh, I like that,’ Mirabeau said mockingly. ‘I dearly love a sycophant, Maître Desmoulins.’
Camille cannot understand this: the way Orléans people look at him, the way Mirabeau now looks at him: as if they had plans for him. Nobody has had plans for him, since the priests gave him up.
‘You must forgive my appearance,’ the Comte said smoothly. ‘My affairs keep me up at nights. Not always, I am bound to say, my political ones.’
This is nonsense, Camille sees at once. If it suited the Comte, he would receive his admirers shaven and sober. But nothing he does is without its calculated effect, and by his ease and carelessness, and by his careless apologies for it, he means to dominate and outface the careful and anxious men who wait on him. The Comte looked into the face of his impassive servant Teutch, and laughed uproariously, as if the man had made a joke; then broke off and said, ‘I like your writings, Maître Desmoulins. So much emotion, so much heart.’
‘I used to write poetry. I see now that I had no talent for it.’
‘There are enough constraints, without the metrical, I think.’
‘I did not mean to put my heart into it. I expect I meant it to be statesman-like.’
‘Leave that to the elderly.’ The Comte held up the pamphlet. ‘Can you do this again?’
‘Oh that – yes, of course.’ He had developed a contempt for the first pamphlet, which seemed for a moment to extend to anyone who admired it. ‘I can do that … like breathing. I don’t say like talking, for reasons which will be clear.’
‘But you do talk, Maître Desmoulins. You talk to the Palais-Royal.’
‘I force myself to do it.’
‘Nature framed me for a demogogue.’ The Comte turned his head, displaying his better profile. ‘How long have you had that stutter?’
He made it sound like some toy, or tasteful innovation. Camille said, ‘A very long time. Since I was seven. Since I first went away from home.’
‘Did it overset you so much, leaving your people?’
‘I don’t remember now. I suppose it must have done. Unless I was trying to articulate relief.’
‘Ah, that sort of home.’ Mirabeau smiled. ‘I myself am familiar with every variety of domestic difficulty, from short temper at the breakfast table to the consequences of incest.’ He put out a hand, drawing Camille into the room. ‘The King – the late King – used to say that there should be a Secretary of State with no other function but to arbitrate in my family’s quarrels. My family, you know, is very old. Very grand.’
‘Really? Mine just pretends to be.’
