“Every possibility,” said the clerk. “Such are the times.”
“I shall tolerate much, but I shall not permit you to smoke a pipe, like Pere Duchesne.”
Camille made a small gesture to his clients, of rueful apology, then turned his smile on the judge. The man and woman looked at each other, allowing their shoulders to sag a little. “You will not escape imprisonment,” their counsel had told them, “so we may as well use your case to discuss some wider issues.”
“I wish to ask the court—”
“Stand up.”
The lawyer hesitated, did so, wandered across to the judge to stare at him at close range. “I wish to ask for permission to publish my opinion.”
The judge dropped his voice. “Are you intending to start some sort of public controversy?”
“Yes.”
“You could do that without my permission.”
“It’s a formality, isn’t it? I’m polite.”
“Have you any quarrel with the verdict on the facts?”
“No.”
“On the law?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“I object to the use of the courts as instruments of the intrusive moralizing state.”
“Really?” The judge leaned forward; he liked to argue generalities. “As you seem to have wiped the church out of the picture, who is going to make men what they ought to be, if the laws do not do it?”
“Who is to say what men ought to be?”
“If the people elect their lawmakers—which, nowadays, they do—don’t they depute that task to them?”
“But if the people and their deputies were formed by a corrupt society, how are they to make good decisions? How are they to form a moral society when they have no experience of one?”
“We really are going to get home late,” the judge said. “We shall be here for six months if we are to do justice to the question. You mean, how are we to become good when we’re bad?”
“We used to do it through the agency of divine grace. But the new constitution doesn’t provide for that.”
“How wrong can you be?” the judge said. “I thought all you fellows were on course for the moral regeneration of humankind. Doesn’t it worry you that you’re out of step with your friends?”
“Since the Revolution you’re allowed to dissent, aren’t you?”
He seemed to be waiting for an answer. The judge was disconcerted.
CHAPTER 2
Georges-Jacques Danton: “Reputation is a whore, and people who talk about posterity are hypocrites and fools.”
Now we have a problem. It wasn’t envisaged that he should have part of the narrative. But time is pressing; the issues are multiplying, and in a little over two years he will be dead.
Danton did not write. He may have gone into court with a sheaf of notes; we have represented such occasions, fictitious but probable. The records of these cases are lost. He kept no diaries, and wrote few letters: unless perhaps he wrote the kind of letters that are torn up on receipt. He distrusted the commitments he might make on paper, distrusted the permanent snare for his temporary opinions. He could lay down his line at the tricolor-draped committee tables; others kept the minutes. If there were points to press at the Jacobins, patriotic wrath to vent at the Cordeliers, the public would wait till Saturday for recapitulation, and find his invective, a good deal polished up, between the gray paper covers of Camille Desmoulins’s journal. In times of excitement—and there are many such times—extempore editions of the paper are thrown together, to appear twice weekly, sometimes daily. As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille’s character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.
Since the massacre, of course, the paper no longer appears. Camille says he is sick of deadlines and printers’ tantrums and errors; his compulsion has gone freelance. This is no drawback, as long as he writes, every week, about as many words as Danton speaks. Between now and the end of his career, Danton will make scores of speeches, some of them hours long. He makes them up in his head, as he goes. Perhaps you can hear his voice.
I came back from England in September. The amnesty was the last act of the old National Assembly. We were supposed to inaugurate the new era in a spirit of reconciliation—or some such sanctimonious twaddle. You will see how that worked out.
The summer’s events had injured the patriots—literally, in many cases—and I returned to a royalist Paris. The King and his wife once more appeared in public, and were cheered. I saw no reason for pique; I am all for amiability. I need not tell you that my strong-minded friends at the Cordeliers felt differently. We have come a long way since ’88, when the only republicans I knew were Billaud-Varennes and my dear irrepressible Camille.
There was some jubilation—premature—about Lafayette’s departure from the capital. (I’m sorry, I can’t get used to calling him Mottie.) Had he emigrated, I would personally have ordained three days of fireworks and free love on our side of the river; but the man is now with the armies, and when we have war, which will be in six or nine months, we shall need to turn him into a national hero again.
