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All about him, church bells had begun to ring. He swore to himself. How many bells were there in this city, and how in the name of God was he to distinguish the bell of Saint-Gervais and its parish? He screwed the paper up and dropped it.
Half the passers-by were lost. You could tramp for ever in the alleyways and back courts; there were streets with no name, there were building sites strewn with rubble, there were people’s fireplaces standing in the streets. Old men coughed and spat, women hitched up skirts trailing yellow mud, children ran naked in it as if they were country children. It was like Troyes, and very unlike it. In his pocket he had a letter of introduction to an Île Saint-Louis attorney, Vinot by name. He would find somewhere to spend the night. Tomorrow, he would present himself.
A hawker, selling cures for toothache, collected a crowd that talked back to him. ‘Liar!’ a woman screamed. ‘Get them pulled out, that’s the only way.’ Before he walked away, he saw her wild, mad, urban eyes.
MAÎTRE VINOT was a rotund man, plump-pawed and pugnacious. He affected to be boisterous, like an elderly schoolboy.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we can but give you a try. We … can … but … give … you … a try.’
I can give it a try, Georges-Jacques thought.
‘One thing’s for sure, your handwriting is atrocious. What do they teach you nowadays? I hope your Latin’s up to scratch.’
‘Maître Vinot,’ Danton said, ‘I’ve clerked for two years, do you think I’ve come here to copy letters?’
Maître Vinot stared at him.
‘My Latin’s fine,’ he said. ‘My Greek’s fine, too. I also speak English fluently, and enough Italian to get by. If that interests you.’
‘Where did you learn?’
‘I taught myself.’
‘How extremely enterprising. Mind you, if we have any trouble with foreigners we get an interpreter in.’ He looked Danton over. ‘Like to travel, would you?’
‘Yes, I would, if I got the chance. I’d like to go to England.’
‘Admire the English, do you? Admire their institutions?’
‘A parliament’s what we need, don’t you think? I mean a properly representative one, not ruined by corruption like theirs. Oh, and a separation of the legislative and executive arms. They fall down there.’
‘Now listen to me,’ Maître Vinot said. ‘I shall say to you one word about all this, and I hope I shall not need to repeat it. I won’t interfere with your opinions – though I suppose you think they’re unique? Why,’ he said, spluttering slightly, ‘they’re the commonest thing, my coachman has those opinions. I don’t run around after my clerks inquiring after their morals and shepherding them off to Mass; but this city is no safe place. There are all kinds of books circulating without the censor’s stamp, and in some of the coffee houses – the smart ones, too – the gossip is near to treasonable. I don’t ask you to do the impossible, I don’t ask you to keep your mind off all that – but I do ask you to take care who you mix with. I won’t have sedition – not on my premises. Don’t ever consider that you speak in private, or in confidence, because for all you know somebody may be drawing you on, ready to report you to the authorities. Oh yes,’ he said, nodding to show that he had the measure of a doughty opponent: ‘oh yes, you learn a thing or two in our trade. Young men will have to learn to watch their tongues.’
‘Very well, Maître Vinot,’ Georges-Jacques said meekly.
A man put his head around the door. ‘Maître Perrin was asking,’ he said, ‘are you taking on Jean-Nicolas’s son, or what?’
‘Oh God,’ Maître Vinot groaned, ‘have you seen Jean-Nicolas’s son? I mean, have you had the pleasure of conversation with him?’
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I just thought, old friend’s boy, you know. They say he’s very bright, too.’
‘Do they? That’s not all they say. No, I’m taking on this cool customer here, this young fellow from Troyes. He reveals himself to be a loud-mouthed seditionary already, but what is that compared to the perils of a working day with the young Desmoulins?’
‘Not to worry. Perrin wants him anyway.’
‘That I can readily imagine. Didn’t Jean-Nicolas ever hear the gossip? No, he was always obtuse. That’s not my problem, let Perrin get on with it. Live and let live, I always say,’ Maître Vinot told Danton. ‘Maître Perrin’s an old colleague of mine, very sound on revenue law – they say he’s a sodomite, but is that my business?’
‘A private vice,’ Danton said.
‘Just so.’ He looked up at Danton. ‘Made my points, have I?’
‘Yes, Maître Vinot, I should say you’ve driven them well into my skull.’
‘Good. Now look, there’s no point in having you in the office if no one can read your handwriting, so you’d better start from the other end of the business – “cover the courts”, as we say. You’ll do a daily check on each case in which the office has an interest – you’ll get around that way, King’s Bench, Chancery division, Châtelet. Interested in ecclesiastical work? We don’t handle it, but we’ll farm you out to someone who does. My advice to you,’ he paused, ‘don’t be in too much of a hurry. Build slowly; anybody who works steadily can have a modest success, steadiness is all it takes. You need the right contacts, of course, and that’s what my office will give you. Try to work out for yourself a Life Plan. There’s plenty of work in your part of the country. Five years from now, you’ll be nicely on your way.’
‘I’d like to make a career in Paris.’
Maître Vinot smiled. ‘That’s what all the young men say. Oh well, get yourself out tomorrow, and have a look at it.’
They shook hands, rather formally, like Englishmen after all. Georges-Jacques clattered downstairs and out into the street. He kept thinking about Françoise-Julie. Every few minutes she flitted into his head. He had her address, the rue de la Tixanderie, wherever that was. Third floor, she’d said, it’s not grand but it’s mine. He wondered if she’d go to bed with him. It seemed quite likely. Presumably things that were impossible in Troyes were perfectly possible here.
ALL DAY, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police.
On the Pont-Neuf the public letter-writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat. He bought half a dozen for two sous each. Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market.
Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s labourer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were levelling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The labourers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs. What would Maître Vinot say? ‘Build slowly.’
There was a busker, a man with a strained, once-powerful baritone. He had a hideously destroyed face, one empty eye-socket overgrown with livid scar tissue. He had a placard that read HERO OF THE AMERICAN LIBERATION. He sang songs about the court; they described the Queen indulging in vices which no one had discovered in Arcis-sur-Aube. In the Luxembourg Gardens a beautiful blonde woman looked him up and down and dismissed him from her mind.
He went to Saint-Antoine. He stood below the Bastille, looked up at its eight towers. He had expected walls like sea-cliffs. The highest must be – what? Seventy-five, eighty feet?
‘The walls are eight feet thick, you know,’ a passer-by said to him.
‘I expected it to be bigger.’
‘Big enough,’ the man said sourly. ‘You wouldn’t like to be in there, would you? Men have gone in there and never come out.’
‘You a local?’
‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘We know all about it. There are cells under the ground, running with water, alive with rats.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard about the rats.’
‘And then the cells up under the roof – that’s no joke either. Boil in summer, freeze in winter. Still, that’s only the unlucky ones. Some get treated quite decent, depends who you are. They have beds with proper bed-curtains and they can take their own cat in to keep the vermin down.’
‘What do they get to eat?’
‘Varies, I suppose. Again, it’s according to who you are. You do see the odd side of beef going in. Neighbour of mine a few years back, he swears he saw them taking in a billiard table. It’s like anything else in life, I suppose,’ the man said. ‘Winners and losers, that’s all about it.’
Georges-Jacques looks up, and his eye is offended; it is impregnable, there is no doubt. These people go about their lives and work – brewing by the look of it, and upholstery – and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it’s there and not there. What really matters isn’t the height of the towers, it’s the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw. You can’t have your whole inner world rearranged by a man you meet in the street. Is nothing sacred? Stained from the dye-works, the river ran yellow, ran blue.
And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewellers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night’s hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Île Saint-Louis, in an empty office, Maître Desmoulins’s son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.
PART TWO (#ulink_e65e3e08-aee3-5f73-ba3d-09670d7ff696)
WE make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy – at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.
‘The Theory of Ambition’, an essay:
Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles
I. The Theory of Ambition (#ulink_41c7dcc6-407c-5d5a-a593-9cb4fba8b164)
(1784–1787) (#ulink_41c7dcc6-407c-5d5a-a593-9cb4fba8b164)
THE CAFÉ DU PARNASSE was known to its clients as the Café de l’École, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The café was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small-talk at the Café de l’École was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.
Monsieur’s wife Angélique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matron’s cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angélique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the café every day – perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. ‘I will read it later,’ she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.
Her daughter, Antoinette Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the café. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.
Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin – everybody said – like silk.
Mme Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the café so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maître d’Anton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband – not at all.
SOON AFTER Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 per cent. Georges-Jacques’s own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.
Maître Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. ‘Call yourself d’Anton,’ he advised. ‘It makes a better impression.’ On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. ‘So what if they all know it’s spurious?’ Maître Vinot said. ‘It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.’
When it was time to take his degree, Maître Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days’ residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maître Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldn’t come up with one. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but …’ His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrin’s chambers. D’Anton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.
After that he left the Île Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case – involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow. Did he take these cases to give himself time to think about other things? He was not, at this date, introspective. He was mildly surprised, then irritated, to find that the people around him were much less intelligent than himself. Bumblers like Vinot climbed to high office and prosperity. ‘Goodbye,’ they said. ‘Not a bad week. See you Tuesday.’ He watched them depart to spend their weekends in what with Parisians passed for the country. One day he’d buy himself a place – just a cottage would do, a couple of acres. It might take the edge off his restless moods.
He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coal-heaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practised it on Angelica, calling at the café each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a frisson at the backs of women’s necks. He remembered the prizewinner, took his advice; rolled the voice out from somewhere behind his ribs. It awaited perfection – a little extra vibrancy, a little more colour in the tone. But there it was – a professional asset.
Gabrielle thought, looks aren’t everything. She also thought, money isn’t everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of ’86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.
The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.
MAÎTRE DESMOULINS had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.
Today’s case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maître Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.
‘Come back!’ d’Anton shouted. He stopped, and turned. D’Anton drew level. ‘I can see you’re not used to winning. You’re supposed to commiserate with your opponent.’
‘Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, let’s walk – I don’t like to be around here.’
D’Anton did not like to let a point go. ‘It’s a piece of decent hypocrisy. It’s the rules.’
Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. ‘You mean, I may gloat?’
‘If you will.’
‘I may say, “So that’s what they learn in Maître Vinot’s chambers?”’
‘If you must. My first case,’ d’Anton said, ‘was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.’
‘But you’ve come on a bit since then.’
‘Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.’
Desmoulins stopped dead. ‘Do you really, Maître d’Anton?’
‘Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought – stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.’
‘Yes, but I don’t always. I’ve not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, d’Anton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?’
‘What do you mean, what would I think?’
‘If you were an impartial observer.’
‘How can I be that?’ Everybody knows you, he thought. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘you’d do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.’
‘Well, how gratifying,’ Camille said. ‘A neat, complete lecture. Maître Vinot couldn’t have delivered it better. Soon you’ll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.’
‘I’m right, though.’
‘There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who can’t afford to pay for them.’
‘Yes, but that’s a social problem, you’re not responsible for that state of affairs.’
‘You ought to help people.’
‘Ought you?’
‘Yes – at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose – yes.’
‘At your own expense?’
‘You’re not allowed to do it at anyone else’s.’
D’Anton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. ‘You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.’
‘A living? It’s not a living, it’s pillage, it’s loot, and you know it. Really, Maître d’Anton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.’
‘This revolution – will it be a living?’
‘We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.’
‘Is that usual?’
‘Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.’
‘To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.’
‘He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, d’Anton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things,’ he said, ‘because I think I may die at any time.’
‘Where is your client?’
