people, but I know I am doomed to live with that.” He made a small gesture, as if putting the controversy aside. “Tell me, Georges-Jacques—do I seem unreasonable?”
“No, what you say is logical …it’s just …” I couldn’t think how to finish my sentence.
“The Right try to present me as a fanatic. They’ll end up by making me one.”
He got up to go, and the dog jumped up and glared at me when I took his hand.
“I should like to talk to you, informally,” I said. “I’m tired of speaking at you in public places, of never getting to know you any better. Come to supper tonight?”
“Thank you, but,” he shook his head, “too much work. Come and see me at Maurice Duplay’s.”
So he went downstairs, the reasonable person, with his dog padding after him and growling at the shadows.
I felt depressed. When Robespierre says he dislikes the whole idea of war, it is an emotional reaction—and I am not immune to those. I share his distrust of soldiers; we are suspicious, envious perhaps, as only pen pushers can be. Day by day, the movement for war gains momentum. We must strike first, they say, before we are stricken. Once they begin to beat the big drum, there’s no reasoning with them. Now, if I have to stand against the tide, I would rather do it with Robespierre than anyone. I may make jokes at his expense—no, not “may,” I do—but I know his energy, and I know his honesty.
And yet … he feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says that the head part came first; and we believe him.
I did visit him at Duplay’s, but first I let Camille reconnoiter. The master carpenter had hidden him when he was in danger, and we all assumed that when things got back to normal, etcetera—but he stayed.
Once you shut the gate from the rue Saint-Honore, the place seems quiet, almost rural. The yard is full of Duplay’s workmen, but the noise is muted and the air is fresh. He has a room on the first floor, plain but pleasant enough. I did not notice the furniture, I suppose it is not anything special. When I called on him he waved at a large bookcase, new and well finished if not stylish. “Maurice made that for me.” He was pleased with it. As if he were pleased someone would take the trouble.
I looked at his books. Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the yard; few other modern authors. Cicero, Tacitus, the usual: all well-thumbed. I wonder—if we go to war with England, will I have to hide my books of Shakespeare, and my Adam Smith? I guess that Robespierre reads no modern language but his own, which seems a pity. Camille, by the way, thinks modern languages beneath his notice; he is studying Hebrew, and looking for someone to teach him Sanskrit.
He had warned me what to expect of the Duplays. “There … are … these … dreadful … people,” he had said. But that day he was engaged in pretending to be Herault de Sechelles, so I did not take him too seriously. “There is, first, the paterfamilias Maurice. He is fifty or fifty-five, balding and very, very earnest. He can bring out only the worst in our dear Robespierre. Madame is a homely sort, and can never have been even tolerably good-looking. There is a son, also called Maurice, and a nephew, Simon—these last both young, and apparently quite witless.”
“But tell me about the three daughters,” I said. “Are they worth calling on?”
Camille gave an aristocratic groan. “There is Victoire, who cannot easily be distinguished from the furniture. She never opened her mouth—”
“Not surprising, if you were in this mood,” Lucile said. (She was, however, vastly entertained.)
“There is the little one, Elisabeth—they call her Babette—who is tolerable, if you like goose-girls. And then the eldest—words fail me.”
They didn’t, of course. Eleonore, it appeared, was an unfortunate girl, plain, drab and pretentious; she was an art student under David, and preferred to her own perfectly adequate name the classical appellation “Cornelia”: this detail, I confess, I found risible.
To dispel any remaining illusions, he opined that the bed curtains in Robespierre’s room were made out of one of Madame’s old dresses, because they were just the kind of ghastly fabric she would choose for her personal adornment. Camille goes on like this for days on end, and it’s impossible to get any sense out of him.
They are good people, I suppose; have struggled to get to their present comfortable position. Duplay is a staunch patriot: goes in for plain speaking at the Jacobins, but is modest with it. Maximilien seems at home there. It probably, when I think of it, helps him financially to live with them. He gave up his post as Public Prosecutor as soon as he decently could, saying that it interfered with his “larger work.” So he has no office, no salary, and must be living on savings. I understand that wealthy but disinterested patriots send him drafts on their bankers. And what do you think? Yes, he writes polite notes and sends them back.
The daughters—the shy one is nothing worse than that, and Babette has a certain schoolroom appeal. Eleonore, I admit …
They do their best to make him comfortable: God knows, it’s time somebody did that. It is a rather spartan comfort, by our refurbished standards; I’m afraid it brings out the worst in us when we sneer at the Duplays, with what Camille calls their “good plain food and good plain daughters.”
Later, I became aware of something odd in the atmosphere of the house. Some of us began to jib when the family began to collect portraits of their new son to decorate their walls, and Freron asked me if I did not think it was prodigiously vain of Robespierre to allow it. I suppose we have all had our portrait made: even I, at whom any artist might balk. But this was different; you sat with Robespierre in the little parlor where he sometimes received visitors, and found him meeting your eyes not just in person but in oils, in charcoal, three-dimensionally in terra-cotta. Every time I called—which perhaps was not often—there was a new one. It made me uneasy—not just the portraits and busts, but the way all the family looked at him. They’re grateful he turned up on their doorstep at all, but that’s no longer enough. They fasten their eyes on him, Father, Mother, young Maurice, and Simon, Victoire, Eleonore, Babette. In his place I should ask myself: what do these people really want? What will I lose if I give it them?
Any gloom we might have felt at the end of ’91 was dispelled by the continuing comedy of Camille’s return to the Bar.
They do contrive to spend a lot of money, he and Lucile—although, like most patriots, they avoid public censure by keeping few servants and no carriage. (I keep a carriage; I place personal comfort above the plaudits of the masses, I fear.) But where does anyone’s money go? They entertain, and Camille gambles, and Lolotte spends money on the things women do spend money on. But all in all, Camille’s venture was prompted less by shortage of
