dressmakers, or whatever it is you do.”
“I’m three months pregnant. I’m not interested in dresses.”
“Don’t be horrible to her, Georges-Jacques,” Lucile said softly.
Gabrielle threw back her head and glared at her. “I don’t need your protection, you little slut.” She got up from the table. “Excuse me, please.” They watched her go.
“Forget about it, Lolotte,” Danton said. “She’s not herself.”
“Gabrielle has the temperament of these letter writers,” Fabre said. “She views everything in the worst possible light.”
Danton pushed the letters towards Fabre. “Quench your burning curiosity. But take them away.”
Fabre made Lucile an extravagant bow, and left the room with alacrity.
“He won’t like them,” Danton said. “Not even Fabre will like them.”
“Max has marriage proposals,” Camille said unexpectedly. “He gets two or three a week. He keeps them in his room, tied up with tape. He files everything, you know.”
“This is one of your fantasies,” Danton said.
“No, I assure you. He keeps them under his mattress.”
“How do you know?” Danton said narrowly.
They began to laugh. “Don’t go spreading this story,” Camille said, “because Max will know where it comes from.”
Gabrielle reappeared, standing in the doorway, sullen and tense. “When you are finished, I’d like to speak to my husband, just for one moment. If you can spare him?”
Danton got up. “You can be Minister of Justice today,” he said to Camille, “and I shall deal with what Gabrielle calls ‘the foreign business.’ Yes, my love, what was it you wanted?”
“Oh, hell,” Lucile said, when they’d gone. “Slut, am I?”
“She doesn’t mean anything. She’s very unhappy, she’s very confused.”
“We don’t help, do we?”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
Their hands touched, lightly. They were not going to give up the game.
The allies were on French soil. “Paris is so safe,” Danton told the Assembly, “that I have brought my infant sons and my aged mother to Paris, to my apartment in the Place des Piques.”
He met Citizen Roland in the Tuileries garden; they strolled among the trees. A green, dappled light fretted his colleague’s face. Citizen Roland’s voice shook. “Perhaps this is the time to go. The government must stay together, at all costs. If we were to move beyond the Loire, then perhaps, when Paris is taken—”
Danton turned on him ferociously. “Take care when you talk about running away, Roland—the people might hear you. Go on then, old man, you run. If you’ve no stomach for a fight you take yourself off. But I go nowhere, Roland, I stay here and govern. Paris taken? It’ll never be taken. We’ll burn it first.”
You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that, by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread; he will stand at the center, and it can go out from him.
Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice’s palace. She sniffed.
They began digging trenches round the city walls.
In the first weeks of the ministry, Dr. Marat often called. He disdained to bathe for these occasions, and refused to make an appointment; hopping through the galleries with his nervous, contorted stride, he would enunciate, “The minister, the secretary,” with a sort of disgust, and physically grapple with anyone who tried to stop him.
This morning two senior officials were conferring outside Secretary Desmoulins’s door. Their faces were aggrieved, their tones indignant. They made no effort to stop Marat. He deserves you, their expressions said.
It was a large and splendid room, and Camille was the least conspicuous thing in it. The walls were lined with portraits, aged to the colors of tallow and smoke; the grave ministerial faces, under their wigs and powder, were all alike. They gazed without expression at the occupant of a desk which had once perhaps been theirs: it is all one to us, we are dead. It seemed to give them no trouble to overlook Camille, no trouble whatsoever.
“Longwy has fallen,” Marat said.
“Yes, they told me. There is a map over there, they gave it to me because I don’t know where anything is.”
“Verdun next,” Marat said. “Within the week.” He sat down opposite Camille. “What’s the problem with your civil servants? They’re standing out there muttering.”
“This place is stifling. I wish I were running a newspaper again.”
Marat was not, at this time, publishing his own newspaper in the ordinary way; instead, he was writing his opinions on wall posters, and posting them up through the city. It was not a style to encourage subtlety, close argument; it made a man, he said, economical with his sympathies. He surveyed Camille. “You and I, sunshine, are going to be shot.”
“That had occurred to me.”
“What will you do, do you think? Will you break down and beg for mercy?”
