A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

Danton shook his head. Still hard to take it in. All the phrasemaking, the trimming and teasing of clauses, the drafting and re-drafting of the petition, the to-ing and fro-ing to the Jacobins and the Assembly, to end in this— swift, stupid, bloody. He had thought, lawyer’s tactics can win this; violence maybe but only as a last resort. He’d played by the rules—mostly. He’d kept within the law, just. He’d expected Lafayette and Bailly to play by the rules; to contain the crowds, let them be. But we are moving, now, into a world where the rules are being redefined; it is as well to expect the worst.

Camille said, “The patriots saw the petition as an opportunity. So, it seems, did Lafayette. He saw it as an opportunity for a massacre.”

This, they knew, was a journalist talking. Real life is never so clear and crisp. But that would always be the word for it, in the years ahead: “The Massacre on the Champs-de-Mars.”

Danton felt a huge surge of anger. Next time, he thought, bull’s tactics, lion’s tactics; but for now the tactics of a rat in a run.

Late afternoon: Angelique Charpentier was in her garden at Fontenay-sous-Bois, a flower basket over her arm. She was trying to behave decorously; really she would have liked to dive to her knees in the salad beds and do some violence to the slugs. Hot weather, thunder in the air: we’re not ourselves.

“Angelique?” Slim black shape against the sun.

“Camille? What are you doing here?”

“Can we go into the house? There are several others who will be here within an hour. You may not thank Georges-Jacques, but he thought this would be a place of safety. There has been a massacre. Lafayette has fired on the people celebrating the Bastille.”

“Georges—he’s not hurt?”

“Of course not. You know Georges. But the National Guard are looking for us.”

“Won’t they come here?”

“Not for a few hours. The city is in confusion.”

Angelique took his arm. This is not, she thought, the life I meant to have; this is not the life I meant for Gabrielle.

As they hurried to the house, she pulled off the white linen square that she wore to keep the sun off the back of her neck. She tried to pat her hair into place. How many for dinner? she wondered; people have to be fed. The city might have been a thousand miles away. It was that time of the afternoon when the birds are silent; heavy, undisturbed scents lay over the gardens.

Here was her husband Francois hurrying out, his face alarmed. Despite the temperature he looked as he always used to—dapper, particular. He was in shirt-sleeves, but his cravat was knotted neatly; his round brown wig was on his head; you could almost imagine the napkin over his arm. “Camille?” he said.

For a moment Camille thought half a decade might roll away. He wished he were back at the Cafe de l’Ecole, cool and echoing; the coffee strong, Angelique svelte, Maitre Vinot boring on about his Life Plan. “Oh, fuck this,” he muttered. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

One by one they straggled in through the afternoon. Camille seemed somehow to have got the advantage of them; by the time Danton arrived, he was sitting on the terrace, reading the New Testament and drinking lemonade.

Fabre brought news that Francois Robert had been seen alive. Legendre had seen patrols swarming over the Cordeliers district, and printing presses smashed, and a quantity of carcasses carried away from his shop by the vultures who came in the wake of the patrols. “Do you know,” he said, “there are days when my love of the sovereign people abates a bit?” He had seen a young journalist, Prudhomme, beaten up by National Guardsmen, dragged off somewhere looking quite bad. “I’d have gone back for him,” he said. “But you told us not to risk it, didn’t you, Danton?” His eyes appealed, dog-like, for approval.

Danton nodded once, without comment. “What did they want Prudhomme for?”

“Because,” Fabre said, “heat of the moment, they thought they had Camille.”

“I’d have gone back for Camille,” Legendre said.

Camille looked up from Saint Matthew. “The hell you would.”

Gabrielle, looking sallow and scared, arrived with enough baggage to withstand a siege. “Into the kitchen,” Angelique said, ripping the bags from her hands. “There are vegetables to be prepared. Five minutes to clean yourself up and then report for active service.” Cruel to be kind, she said under her breath; keep her busy, make small talk.

But Gabrielle was not fit even to string beans. She sat down at the kitchen table, Antoine on her knees, and dissolved into tears. “Look, he’s safe,” her mother said. “He’s making plans right now. The worst is over.” Still tears ran out of Gabrielle’s eyes. “You’re pregnant again, aren’t you?” Angelique said. She held her daughter, hiccupping and sobbing, against her chest, smoothing her hair and feeling the skin of Gabrielle’s cheek burning beneath her hand, as if she had a fever. What a time to find out, she thought. The baby Antoine began to wail. She could hear the men laughing, out on the terrace.

Gallows humor, she supposed; except Georges, who could be relied on, none of them had much appetite. The duck went to waste; the sauce congealed; the vegetables went cold in their dishes. Freron was the last to arrive; he was a wreck, bruised, trembling, incoherent. Alcohol was needed, before he could get his story straight. He had been caught on the Pont-Neuf, beaten to the ground. Some men from the Cordeliers’ Battalion had come by. They had recognized him, waded in, caused a diversion while he scrambled away. Otherwise, he said, he would have been dead.

“Has anyone seen Robespierre?” Camille asked. Heads were shaken. Camille picked up a table knife, and ran his finger round the edge of it reflectively. Lucile, he presumed, would be at the rue Conde; she would not have stayed in their apartment alone, for she was not without sense. Two days ago she had been saying, you know we really have to decide about this wallpaper, shall we have treillage? He’d said, Lucile, ask me a real question. He had a feeling that this was the real question, now. “I’m going back to Paris,” he said, and stood up.

There was a short silence. “Why don’t you just go in the kitchen and cut your own throat?” Fabre inquired. “We’ll bury you in the garden.”

“Now Camille,” Angelique said reproachfully. She leaned across the table and took him by the wrist.