“And I think not,” Dumouriez muttered. He turned to her. “Be so good as to rouse him. We have a proposition which may be of interest.” He looked around the room. “It would mean your moving house. Perhaps, m’dear, you’d like to pack your china or something?”
“But no,” Manon said. She looked very young, and on the verge of frustrated tears. “You are teasing me. How can you do this?”
There was a slight abeyance of the grayness on her husband’s face. “I hardly think, my sweet, that M. Brissot would joke about so serious a subject as the composition of the government. The King offers the Ministry of the Interior. We—I—accept.”
Vergniaud had also been asleep, in his apartment at Mme. Dodun’s house, No. 5 Place Vendome. But one got out of bed for Danton. What he knew of Danton compelled his reluctant admiration, but he had one glaring fault—he worked too hard.
“But why this Roland?” Danton said.
“Because there was no one else,” Vergniaud said, listless. He was bored with the subject. He was tired of people asking him who Roland was. “Because he’s pliable. Believed to be discreet. Who would you have us take up? Marat?”
“They call themselves republicans, the Rolands. So do you, I think.”
Vergniaud nodded impassively. Danton studied him. A year under forty, he was not quite tall or broad enough to cut an impressive figure. His pale, heavy face was slightly marked from smallpox, and his large nose seemed to have slight acquaintance with his small, deep-set eyes, as if either feature would just as soon belong in some other face. He was not a man who would be noticed in a crowd; but at the tribune of the Assembly or the Jacobins—his audience silent, the galleries craning—he was a different man. He became handsome, with an assured graceful integrity of smooth voice and commanding body. There he had the presence supposed to belong only to aristocrats; a spark kindled in his brown eyes. “Note that,” Camille said. “That is the spark of self-regard.”
“Oh, but I like to see a man doing what he is good at,” Danton had answered warmly.
Of Brissot’s friends, he decided, this man was much the best. I like you, he thought; but you are lazy. “A republican in the ministry—” he said.
“—is not necessarily a republican minister,” Vergniaud finished. “Well, we shall see.” Carelessly he turned over a few papers on his desk. Danton saw in it a reflection of some slight contempt for the people they spoke of. “You will have to call on them, Danton, if you want to get on in life. Pay your compliments to the lady.” He chuckled at Danton’s expression. “Beginning to think you’re out on a limb? With Robespierre for company? He’d better reconcile himself to war. His popularity has never been lower.”
“Popularity is not the issue.”
“Not with Robespierre, no. But you, Danton, where do you go from here?”
“Up. Vergniaud, I wish you would throw in your lot with us.”
“Who exactly is ‘us’?”
Danton began to speak, then paused, struck for the first time by the disreputable quality of the names he had to offer. “Herault de Sechelles,” he said at length.
Vergniaud raised a heavy eyebrow. “Just the two of you? Messieurs Camille and Fabre d’Eglantine suddenly excluded from your confidence? Legendre too busy butchering? Well, I dare say these people are useful to you. But I don’t seek to attach myself to a faction. I favored the war, so I sat with the others who favored it. But I am not a Brissotin, whatever that may be. I am my own man.”
“I wish we all were,” Danton said. “But you will find it does not work out like that.”
One morning, late March, Camille woke up with a certain thought going around in his head. He had been talking to soldiers—General Dillon amongst others—and they said if there is going to be a war anyway, what is the point of standing out against public opinion and the tide of the times? Was it not better to put yourself at the head of an irresistible movement, rather than be trampled in the rush?
He roused his wife and told her. “I feel sick,” she said.
At 6:30 a.m. he was in Danton’s drawing room, pacing the carpet. Danton called him a fool.
“Why do I always have to agree with you? I’m not allowed any independent thoughts. I can think what I like as long as it happens to be what you think.”
“Go away,” Danton said. “I am not your father.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean that you sound like a fifteen-year-old and what you are trying do is pick a fight, so why don’t you go home for a few days and quarrel with your father? We would be spared political consequences.”
“I shall write—”
“You will not put pen to paper. You do try my temper, exceedingly. Go away, before I make you the first Brissotin martyr. Go to Robespierre, and see if you get a better reception.”
Robespierre was ill. The raw spring weather hurt his chest, and his stomach rejected what he fed it.
“So you desert your friends,” he said, wheezing a little.
“This need not affect our friendship,” Camille said grandly.
Robespierre looked away.
“You remind me—what’s the name of that English King?”
“George,” Robespierre snapped.
“I think I mean Canute.”
“You will have to go away,” Robespierre said. “I can’t argue with you this morning. I have to conserve my strength for important things. But if you commit yourself to paper, I shall never trust you again.”
Camille backed out of the room.
