Camille’s face pressed to the beefy flesh of Duplay’s shoulder. He rehearsed this sentiment, to the dampish white skin barely veiled by coarse linen: your youngest daughter’s a practicing rapist. No, he thought. It really won’t do. The best thing to do is not to mention it to anybody, they’ll only laugh. The best thing to do is to get home to Lucile and after this be very very careful and very very good.
The first consolation was that it had taken less time than people feared—twelve hours from when it began; the second consolation was this tiny, black-haired child, lying along her arm. She felt such an access, such a purity of love that she could hardly speak; they warn you of all sorts of things, she thought, but no one ever warns you of this. She could hardly speak anyway; she was weary, deadly weary, hardly able to hold up her head.
What different opinions people had! Through each contraction her mother had held her hands, wincing at the strength of her grip saying, be a
Deliberately, consciously, Camille set the morning’s other events to the back of his mind. Holding the fragile scrap of being against his shoulder, he breathed promises: I shall be very very nice to you; whatever strange or stupid sorts of things you want to do will be all right by me. Claude peered at the baby, hoping that Camille would not offer to hand him over. “I wonder who he will look like,” he said.
Camille said. “There’s a lot of money on that.”
Claude closed his mouth on the heartfelt congratulations he had been about to offer his son-in- law.
“Why don’t we overthrow Louis on July 14?” inquired the
“Oh-hum,” said the
The Duke did not spot sarcasm easily. He groaned. “Every time you speak to Camille these days it costs me a small fortune.”
“You don’t know where rapacity begins. How much have you given Danton, over these last three years?”
“I couldn’t say. But if we fail this time, even a small riot will be beyond my means. When Louis falls—you don’t think, do you, that they’ll cheat me out of the throne this time?”
De Sillery would have liked to point out that he had thrown away his chance once already (by listening, he would have said, to my wife Felicite, the procuress); but Felicite and her daughter Pamela had left for England last autumn, seen safely across the channel by the ever-useful, ever-obliging Jerome Petion. “Let me think,” he said. “Have you bought up the Brissotins, the Rolandins, the Girondins?”
“Aren’t they all the same?” Philippe looked alarmed. “I thought they were.”
“Are you quite sure that you can offer Georges Danton more than the Court can? More than he stands to make out of a republic?”
“Has it come to that?” The Duke sounded disgusted; he quite forgot for a moment his own part in bringing it there.
“I don’t mean to be discouraging. I understand though that Danton thinks we should wait for the volunteers from Marseille.”
They are hand-picked, staunch patriots, these Marseille men, marching to the capital for the Bastille celebrations; they march singing their new patriotic song, and their minds and jaws are set. A neat spearhead for the Sections, when the day comes.
“The Marseille men … who do I pay in their case?”
“Young local politician called Charles Barbaroux.”
“How much will he want? Can we secure him?”
“Oh, dammit all.” De Sillery closed his eyes. He felt tired. “He’s been in Paris since February 11. He had a meeting with the Rolands on March 24.” Laclos would have had a little file on Barbaroux’s burgeoning self- importance, would have tabulated him in his “womanizer” column, with a little star for emphasis. “Do you ever wonder if it’s worth it?” de Sillery said.
It was a question Philippe couldn’t get his mind around. Anything had been worthwhile, any connivance, any shame, any slaughter, if at the end of it you were King of France. Then Felicite had come along and muddled him— and truly she was right, for it wasn’t worthwhile to be King and rapidly dead. But for years now he had been set on a course by the people around him; he had been chivvied and steered, willing or unwilling. There was no time to set another; and he was nearly bankrupt.
“But damn Danton,” he said, “I even let him have Agnes.”
“No one ‘lets’ him have anything,” Charles-Alexis said. “Danton just takes.”
“But he must give too,” Philippe said. “The people will want something from him. What will he give them?”
“He’ll give them one man, one vote. That’s something they’ve never had before.”
“They’ll like that, I suppose. They’ll come out on the streets for that.” The Duke sighed. “All the same, the 14th would have been nice.” When he looked back on ’89, he thought, those were my halcyon days. He voiced the thought.
“Your salad days,” Charles-Alexis said.
July 10, a state of emergency was declared. All over the city there were military bands, and recruiting booths decked with tricolor bunting. From the window of her bedroom Lucile could hear Danton pursuing his own recruiting drive, the noisiest for miles. The first clear expression she saw on the baby’s face looked very like exasperation. When she was well enough to travel she went out to the farm at Bourg-la-Reine. Camille came at the weekend and wrote a very long speech.
The General Council of the Commune met on July 24 to hear it. It was Danton’s manifesto—universal suffrage and universal reponsibility, the citizens of every Section empowered to assemble at any hour, to arm themselves, to
