A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“Including you,” Lucile murmured.

“No, not including me.” Theroigne stopped pacing. “Never including me. I have never slept with Camille, or with Jerome Petion, or with any of the other two dozen men the newspapers have named.”

“The papers will print anything,” Lucile said. “Sit down, please. You’re making me wild and frantic with your red pacing.”

Theroigne didn’t sit. “Louis Suleau will print anything,” she said. “This filthy Acts of the Apostles. Why is Suleau at large, that’s what I want to know? Why isn’t he dead?”

Lucile thought, perhaps I can pretend to go into labor. She essayed a small moan. Theroigne took no notice. “Why is it,” she said, “that Camille can get away with anything? When Suleau laughed at me he just laughed with him, they had their heads together making up more libels, inventing more lovers for me, plotting to expose me to derision and scorn—but no one says to Camille, look, you hang around with Suleau, so how can you be a patriot? Tell me, Lucile, how does it happen?”

“I don’t know.” Lucile shook her head. “It’s a mystery. I suppose—you know how in families there’s usually one child who gets away with more than the others? Well, perhaps it’s like that in revolutions as well.”

“But I’ve suffered, Lucile. I’ve been a prisoner. Does no one understand that?”

Oh Lord, Lucile thought, it looks as if Theroigne has set in for the afternoon. She tottered to her feet. She could see that Theroigne was about to cry. She made clucking noises, laid a hand upon her upper arm, pressed her gently to the blue chaise-longue. “Jeanette,” she called, “have we some ice? Bring me something cool, bring me something sweet.” Inside the scarlet cloth the girl’s skin was hot and damp. “Are you ill?” Lucile asked her. “Dear little Anne, what have they done to you?” As she pressed a folded handkerchief against the girl’s temples, she saw herself, as if from an angel’s height, and thought, what a saintly young woman I am, mopping up this liar.

Theroigne said, “I tried to speak to Petion yesterday, and he pretended not to have seen me. I want to give Brissot’s people my support, but they pretend I don’t exist. I do exist.”

“Of course,” Lucile said. “Of course you do.”

Theroigne dropped her head. The tears dried on her cheeks. “When will your baby be born?”

“Next week, the doctor says.”

“I had a child.”

“What? Did you? When?”

“She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She would have been—oh, I don’t know. The years go by. You lose track. She died the spring before the Bastille. No, that’s not right—’88, she died, I never saw her, hardly ever. I left her with a foster mother, I paid every month, I sent money for her from wherever I was, Italy, England. But it doesn’t mean I’m hard, Lucile, it doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. I did. She was my little girl.”

Lucile eased herself back into her chair. She rested her hands on the writhing, hidden form of her own baby. Her face showed strain. Something in Theroigne’s tone—something very hard to place—suggested that she might be making this up. “What was your little girl’s name?” she asked.

“Francoise-Louise.” Theroigne looked down at her hands. “One day I would have come for her.”

“I know you would,” Lucile said. A silence. “Do you want to tell me about the Austrians? Is that it?”

“Oh, the Austrians. They were strange.” Theroigne threw back her head. She laughed, her laugh uncertain, forced; alarming, how she snapped from topic to topic, from mood to mood. “They wanted to know the course of my life, my whole life from the time I was born. Where were you on such a date, month, year?—I can’t remember, I’d say—then, ‘Allow us to assist your memory, Mademoiselle,’ and out would come some piece of paper, some little chit I’d signed, some receipt, some laundry list or some pawnbroker’s ticket. They frightened me, those bits of paper; it was as if all my life, from the time I learned to write, these blessed Austrians had set spies to follow me about.”

Lucile thought: if half of this is fact, what do they know about Camille? Or Georges-Jacques? She said, “Well, you know that can’t be true.”

“How do you account for it then? They had a piece of paper from England, a contract I’d signed with this Italian singing teacher, this man who said he’d promote me. And yes, I had to agree with them, that’s my handwriting—I remembered signing it—the idea was, he’d give me lessons, to improve my technique, then I’d pay him back out of my concert fees. Now, I signed that paper, Lucile, on a foggy afternoon, in London, in Soho, in my teacher’s house on Dean Street. So tell me, tell me, if you can work it out at all—how did that piece of paper get from Dean Street, Soho, onto the desk of the commandant of the prison at Kufstein? How can it have got there, unless someone has been following me all these years?” Suddenly she laughed again, that disturbing, stupid giggle. “On this paper, you know, I’d signed my name, and underneath it said “Anne Theroigne, Spinster.” The Austrians said, “Who is he, this Englishman, this Mr. Spinster? Did you make a secret marriage to him?”

“So there you are,” Lucile said. “They don’t know all about you, do they? This Kufstein, what was it like?”

“It grows out of the rocks,” Theroigne said. Her mood had swung again; she spoke softly, calmly, like a nun looking back on her life. “From the windows of my room I could see the mountains. I had a white table and a white chair.” She frowned, as if trying to recollect. “When they shut me up at first I sang. I sang every song I knew, every aria, every little ditty. When I came to the end of them I started again.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Oh no. Nothing like that. They were polite, they were … tender. Each day they brought me food, they asked me what I’d like to eat.”

“But what did they want from you, Anne?” She wanted to add, “because you aren’t important.”

“They said I organized the October days, and they wanted to know who paid me to do it. They said I rode to Versailles astride a cannon, and that I led the women into the palace and that I had a sword in my hand. It’s not true, you know. I was there already, in Versailles. I’d rented a room, so I could go to the National Assembly every