A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

killer. But then, “Think of the poor fools,” Georges said to him in parting.

“Yes,” Camille replied. “Sitting there, waiting to be murdered.”

The day of the riot I did not go out, and neither did Georges. No one came until the middle of the evening. Then I heard the stories the day had produced.

The people from Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel, led by agitators from the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, had entered the Tuileries, armed and in their thousands. Legendre was one of the leaders; he insulted the King to his face, and came back here to sit in my drawing room and boast about it. Perhaps the King and Queen should have died under their staves and pikes, but it didn’t happen like that. I was told that they stood for hours in a window embrasure, with the little Dauphin and his sister, and the King’s own sister Mme. Elisabeth. The crowd filed past them and laughed at them, as if they were the freaks at a country fair. They made the King put on a “cap of liberty.” These people—people out of the gutter—passed the King cheap wine and made him drink from the bottle to the health of the nation. This went on for hours.

At the end of it they were still alive. A merciful God protected them; and as for the man who should have protected them—Petion, I mean, the Mayor of Paris—he didn’t show his face until the evening. When he could not decently wait any longer, he went to the Tuileries with a group of deputies and got the mob out of the palace. “And then, do you know what?” Vergniaud said. I handed him a glass of cold white wine. It was 10 p.m. “When they had all gone, the King snatched the red cap off his head, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.” He nodded his thanks to me, urbanely. “The curious thing is that the King’s wife behaved with what can only be called dignity. It is unfortunate, but the people are not so opposed to her as they were before.”

Georges was in a rage. It is a spectacle to comtemplate, his rage. He tore off his cravat, strode about the room, his throat and chest glistening with sweat, his voice shaking the windows. “This bloody so-called Revolution has been a waste of time. What have the patriots got out of it? Nothing.” He glared around the room. He looked as if he would hit anyone who contradicted him. Outside there was some far-off shouting, from the direction of the river.

“If that’s true—” Camille said. But he couldn’t manage it, he couldn’t get his words out. “If this one’s done for —and I think it always was done for—” He put his face into his hands, exasperated with himself.

“Come on, Camille,” Georges said, “there’s no time to wait around for you. Fabre, please bang his head against the wall.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say, Georges-Jacques. We have no more time left.” I don’t know whether it was the threat, or because he suddenly saw the future, that Camille recovered his voice: but he began to speak in short, simple sentences. “We must begin again. We must stage a coup. We must depose Louis. We must take control. We must declare the republic. We must do it before the summer ends.”

Vergniaud looked uneasy. He ran his finger along the arm of his chair. He looked from face to face.

Camille said, “Georges-Jacques, you said you weren’t ready, but you must be ready now.”

Manon out of office. A phrase of Danton’s kept coming back to her: “France’s natural frontiers.” She spent hours these days poring over the maps of the Low Countries, the Rhine. Properly: had she not been one of the foremost advocates of the war policy? Less easy to find the natural frontiers of a human being …

They blamed her, of course, the feather-brained patriots; they said it was because of her letter that Louis had dismissed the ministry. It was nonsense: Louis just wanted a pretext, that was all. She had to brace herself against their accusations, accusations that she had interfered, that she had meddled, that she dictated policy to Roland. It was so unfair; they had always worked together, she and her husband, pooling their talents and energy; she knew his thoughts before he knew them himself. “Roland loses nothing,” she said, “by being interpreted through me.” Glances were exchanged. Always, glances exchanged. She would have liked to slap their complacent male faces.

Buzot alone seemed to understand. He took her hand, pressed it. “Don’t regard them, Manon,” he whispered. “True patriots know your worth.”

They would regain office; this was her opinion. But they would have to fight for it. June 20, the so-called “invasion” of the Tuileries—it had been a fiasco, it had been a joke. It had been mismanaged from start to finish; and mismanagement seemed to be the rule.

Afternoons, these days, she was in the public gallery at the Riding School, listening with gritted teeth to the debate. One day a young woman strode in, wearing a scarlet riding habit, a pistol stuck in her belt. Alarmed, Manon looked around for the usher; but no one except herself took the spectacle amiss. The young woman was laughing; she was surrounded by a pack of supporters; she disposed herself on a bench, proprietorially, and ran her hand back through brown curls cropped short like a man’s. Her claque applauded Vergniaud; they called out his name; they called out to other deputies, and then they tossed apples along the rows and ate them and threw down the cores.

Vergniaud came up to speak to her and she congratulated him on his speech, but in reserved tones; he got too much praise. To the strange, scarlet girl, he merely inclined his head. “That is Theroigne,” he said. “Can it be that you have not seen her before? She spoke to the Jacobins in spring, telling of her ordeal among the Austrians. They yielded the tribune to her. Not many women can say the same.”

He stopped then, with the air of a man who had talked himself into a corner. A hunted, vaguely mutinous expression crossed his face. “Don’t trouble yourself,” Manon murmured. “I shall not ask you to arrange it. I am not one of these viragos.”

“What are they, after all?” Vergniaud said. “Street girls.”

She could, of course, have punched him on the jaw. But look what he was offering—a sweet readmission to the conspiracy, a reinstatement. She smiled. “Street girls,” she said.

Lucile’s baby had taken a lurch to the left, and was kicking her with vigor. She could hardly push herself into an approximately upright position, let alone be civil to a visitor. “Hell,” she said, staring at Theroigne’s outfit. “Aren’t you hot in that scarlet attire? Isn’t it time you put it into honorable retirement?” She could see, in fact, that the hem was frayed, that the dust of the streets was upon it, that even the red was not so red as it used to be.

“Camille’s avoiding me,” Theroigne complained. She paced the room. “He’s hardly exchanged two words with me since I came back to Paris.”

“He’s busy,” Lucile said.

“Oh yes, I’m sure he’s busy. Busy playing cards at the Palais-Royal, busy dining with aristocrats. How can anyone think of passing the time of day with an old friend when there’s so much champagne to be drunk and so many silly, empty-headed bitches to be screwed?”