“Fabre, do I mean it?”
“Yes, you mean it.”
“Now, does it worry you, Fabre?”
“Not in the sense of having scruples. I think it frightens me. Worrying about the possible complications.”
“Not in the sense of having scruples,” Danton repeated. “Frightens him. Scruples. What a beautiful concept. Mention this conversation to Robespierre, Camille, and I’m finished with you. My God,” he said. He went away, shaking his head vigorously.
“Mention what?” Camille said.
Lafayette’s plan: a grand review of the National Guard, at which the general will inspect the troops and the King himself will be present to take the salute. The King will withdraw, Lafayette will harangue the battalions; for is he not their first, most glorious commander, does he not have the natural authority to take control again? Then in the name of the constitution, in the name of the monarchy, in the name of public order, General Lafayette will proceed to put the capital to rights. Not that he has the King’s enthusiastic backing; for Louis is afraid of failure, afraid of the consequences of it, and the Queen says coldly that she would rather be murdered than be saved by Lafayette.
Petion can move quickly, when he likes. An hour before the review is due to begin, he simply cancels it: leaving the arrangements to cannon into each other, and relying on natural confusion to undo any larger schemes. The general is left to trail through the streets with his aides, cheered on by patriots of the old-fashioned sort. He is left to assess his situation; to take the road out of Paris to his army command on the frontier. At the Jacobins, Deputy Couthon is wheeled to the tribune, to denounce the general as a “great scoundrel”; Maximilien Robespierre calls him “an enemy of the Fatherland”; Messieurs Brissot and Desmoulins vie with each other in heaping the hero with abuse. The Cordeliers come back from the short holiday many of them had found it wise to take, and burn the general in effigy, coining slogans for the future above the cracking and spitting of the uniformed doll.
Annette said, “If she survives this, will you be good?” July morning, sunshine, a fresh breeze. Camille looked out of the window, saw the rue des Cordeliers, his neighbors busying about, life going on in its achingly usual way; heard the printing presses at work in the Cour du Commerce, saw women stopping to chat on the corner, tried hard to imagine any other kind of life or any kind of death. “I’ve stopped striking bargains with God,” he said. “So don’t you try to wring a bargain from me, Annette.”
He looked, Annette thought, utterly wretched; pale, shaky, quite unable to come to terms with the fact that his wife must give birth and that it was going to hurt her. It’s remarkable, really, how many quite ordinary things Camille can’t or won’t come to terms with. I’ll put the knife in just a bit, Annette thought, just as inch or two; not often that you have him at a disadvantage these days. “You’re just playing at marriage,” she said. “Both of you. This is the bit that isn’t a game.” She waited.
“I would die,” Camille said, “if anything happened to her.”
“Yes.” Annette got up wearily from her chair. She had gone to bed at midnight, but been roused at two o’clock. “Yes, I almost believe you would.”
She would go back to her daughter now. Lucile was still quite cheerful; that was because she didn’t know how bad it was going to get. She thought, could I have saved her from this? Of course she could. She could have followed her inclinations seven years ago; in that case, she would now be remembered by Camille, if he ever thought of her at all, as just a woman in his past, a woman he’d had to work extra hard for; and he would no longer be part of her life, he would be someone she read about in the newspapers. Instead, she had clung to her precious virtue, her daughter was married to the Lanteme Attorney and was now in labor, and she was observing daily— shuttling between the rue Conde and the rue des Cordeliers—the sort of sickeningly destructive love affair that you only read about in books. Of course, people could call it different things, but she called it a love affair. And she thought she had lived long enough to know what she was talking about.
“We must have you out of here,” she said. “Go for a walk. Get some fresh air. Why don’t you go and see Max? He’s full of reassuring good sense and homely wisdom.”
“Mm.” Camille looked ill with tension. “Bachelors always are. Send to me immediately, won’t you? The very minute?”
“Annette said I must go away, she said I disseminated panic. I hope you don’t mind my arriving at this hour.”
“I expected it,” Robespierre said. “We should be together, you and me. I have to go and get the day under way, but I’ll be back in an hour or two. The family will look after you. Would you like to go down and talk to one of the girls?”
“Oh no,” Camille said. “I’ve given up talking to girls. Look what it leads to.”
It was hard for Robespierre to smile. He reached forward and squeezed Camille’s hand. Odd, that; he usually avoided touching people. Camille divined that some kind of psychic emergency was taking place. “Max,” he said, “you’re almost in a worse state than I am. If I am disseminating panic, you are communicating disaster.”
“It will be all right,” Robespierre said, in a tone deeply unconvinced. “Yes, yes, it will be, I feel it. She’s a healthy girl, she’s strong, there’s no reason to believe, is there, that anything could go wrong?”
“Desperate, isn’t it?” Camille said. “Can’t even
“Why can’t you?”
“I don’t believe God listens to those sorts of prayers. They’re selfserving, aren’t they?”
“God accepts all kinds of prayers.”
They looked at each other, vaguely alarmed. “We are here under Providence,” Robespierre said. “I am sure of that.”
“I couldn’t say that I’m sure of it. Though I do find the idea consoling.”
“But if we are not under Providence, what is everything for?” Robespierre now looked wildly alarmed. “What is the Revolution for?”
For Georges-Jacques to make money out of, Camille thought. Robespierre answered himself. “Surely it is to bring us to the kind of society that God intends? To bring us to justice and equality, to full humanity?”
Oh good heavens, Camille thought. This Max, he believes every word he says. “I wouldn’t presume to know what kind of society God intends. It sounds to me as if you’ve gone to a tailor to order your God. Or had him knitted, or something.”
