something to Gabrielle. She caught it awkwardly. It was a hairbrush, heavy, silver-backed. “From the Queen’s dressing table,” the man said.
Gabrielle’s forefinger traced the embossed monogram: “A” for Antoinette. The man lurched forward and caught Lucile around the waist, spinning her off her feet. He smelled of wine, tobacco and blood. He kissed her throat, a sucking, greedy, proletarian kiss; he set her on her feet again, clattered back into the street.
“Goodness,” Louise said. “What a legion of admirers you have, Lucile. He’s probably been waiting two years for the chance to do that.”
Lucile took out her handkerchief and dabbed at her neck. It wasn’t my admirers I met this morning, she thought. She wagged a finger and dropped her voice a tone, for her well-rehearsed Remy imitation: “I just say to them, now boys, stop quarreling over me—liberty, equality, fraternity, remember?”
The Queen’s hairbrush lay where Gabrielle had dropped it, on the drawing-room carpet.
Danton came home. It was late afternoon. They could hear his voice out in the street. He came home with Fabre the genius of our age, with Legendre the butcher, with Collot d’Herbois much-the-worst-person-in-the-world; with Francois Robert, with Westermann. He came home with his arms around the shoulders of Legendre and Westermann, unsteady on his feet, unshaven, exhausted, reeking of brandy. “We won!” they shouted. It was a simple chant—as slogans go it was right to the point. He gathered Gabrielle into his arms, hugged her fiercely, protectively; once again she felt her knees give way.
He propped her into a chair. “She’s had terrible trouble staying upright at all,” Louise Robert said. Her skin glowed now, beneath the rouge; Francois was back at her side.
“Get out, the lot of you!” Danton said. “Haven’t you beds to go to?” He crashed into his own bedroom, threw himself down on his bed. Lucile followed him. She touched the back of his neck, took him by the shoulders. He groaned. “Try me some other time,” he advised. He flopped onto his back, grinning. “Oh, Georges-Jacques, Georges-Jacques,” he said to himself, “life’s just a series of wonderful opportunities. What would Maitre Vinot make of you now?”
“Tell me where my husband is.”
“Camille?” His grin broadened. “Camille’s at the Riding School, fixing the next bit of the Life Plan. No, Camille’s not like humans, he doesn’t need sleep.”
“When I last saw him,” she said, “he was in a state of shock.”
“Yes.” The grin faded. His eyelids fluttered closed, then opened again. “That bitch Theroigne slaughtered Suleau within twenty yards of where he stood. You know, we never saw Robespierre all day. Perhaps he was hiding in Duplay’s cellar.” His voice began to trail off. “Suleau was at school with Camille. Small world, so was Max. Camille is a hardworking boy, and will go far. Tomorrow we shall know … .” His eyes closed. “That’s it,” he said.
The Assembly had begun its current sitting at 2 a.m. The debate was attended by some inconveniences: drowned out intermittently by gunfire, and thrown into confusion by the arrival of the royal family at about 8:30 in the morning. Only yesterday it had voted to suspend any further discussion on the future of the monarchy, yet it did seem now that the vestiges of the institution had been left behind in the smashed and devastated palace. The Right said that the adjournment of the debate had been the signal for insurrection; the Left said that when the deputies abandoned the issue they also abandoned any claim to be leaders of public opinion.
The King’s family and a few of their friends were squashed into a reporters’ box which looked down on the deputies from behind the President’s dais. From mid-afternoon onwards, a constant procession of petitioners and delegates jostled through the corridors and overflowed the debating chamber. The rumors from outside were frightful and bizarre. All the bolsters and mattresses in the palace had been slashed, and the air was thick with flying feathers. Prostitutes were plying their trade on the Queen’s bed: though how this fitted with the earlier story, no one could say. A man had been seen playing the violin over the corpse of someone whose throat he had cut. A hundred people had been stabbed and clubbed to death in the rue de l‘Echelle. A cook had been cooked. The servants were being dragged from under beds and up chimneys and tossed out of windows to be impaled on pikes. Fires had been started, and there were the usual dubious reports of cannibalism.
Vergniaud, the current president of the Assembly, had long ago given up trying to distinguish truth from fantasy. Below him, on the floor of the House, he counted rather more invaders than deputies. Every few minutes the doors would burst open to admit begrimed and weary men staggering under the weight of what, if it had not been brought straight to the Riding School, would have been loot. Really, Vergniaud thought, it was going too far to place inlaid night-stools and complete sets of Moliere at the feet of the Nation. The place had begun to resemble an auction room. Vergniaud tried unobtrusively to loosen his cravat.
In the cramped, airless reporters’ box, the royal children were falling asleep. The King, who believed in keeping his strength up, was gnawing at the leg of a capon. From time to time he wiped his fingers on his sad purple coat. On the benches below him a deputy put his head in his hands. “Went out for a piss,” he said. “Camille Desmoulins ambushed me. Pushed me against the wall, made me support Danton for Pope. Or something. Seems Danton might stand for God, they haven’t decided yet, but I’m told I’d better vote for him or else I might wake up with my throat cut.”
A few benches away, Brissot conferred with ex-minister Roland. M. Roland was yellower in the face than he used to be; he hugged his dusty hat to his chest, as if it were his last line of defense.
“The Assembly must be dissolved,” Brissot said, “there will have to be fresh elections. Before this session breaks up, we must nominate a new cabinet, a new Council of Ministers. Yes, now, we must do it now—someone must govern the country. You will return to your post as Minister of the Interior.”
“Really? And Servan, Claviere?”
“Yes, indeed,” Brissot said. He thought, this is what I was born to do: shape governments. “Back to the situation as it was in June, except that you won’t have the royal veto to hamper you. And you’ll have Danton for a colleague.”
Roland sighed. “Manon won’t like this.”
“She must make her mind up to it.”
“Which ministry do we want Danton to have?”
“It hardly matters,” Brissot said bleakly, “as long as he has the whip hand.”
“Has it come to that?”
“If you’d been on the streets today, you couldn’t doubt it.”
