“I expect so,” Camille said realistically.
“But your life is worth something. Mine, too, though I wouldn’t expect many people to agree. We have a duty to the Revolution, at this point. Brunswick is fully mobilized. What does Danton say? The position is desperate, not hopeless. He is not a fool, I take him to have some grounds for hope. But Camille, I am afraid. The enemy say they will devastate the city. People will suffer, you know, as perhaps they never have in all our history. Can you imagine the revenge the royalists will take?”
Camille shook his head, meaning, I try not to.
“Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.” Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. “It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.”
Camille put his elbows on the desk, and watched Marat. He could not imagine what Marat expected him to say.
“I don’t know how the enemy advance may be stopped,” Marat said. “I leave that to Danton and to the soldiers. It is this city that is my business, it is the traitors within, the subversives, the royalists packed into our prisons. These prisons are not secure—you know very well, we have people shut up in convents, in hospitals, we have not places enough for them, or any way of keeping them secure.”
“Pity we knocked the Bastille down,” Camille said. “I suppose.”
“And if they break out?” Marat said. “No, I am not being fanciful—the weapon of imprisonment, the whole notion of it, demands some assent from the victim, some cooperation. Suppose that cooperation is withdrawn? As our troops join battle, leaving the city to women and children and politicians, the aristocrats pour out of the prisons, locate their arms caches—”
“Arms caches? Don’t be stupid. Why do you think the Commune has been making house-to-house searches?”
“And can you swear to me that they’ve missed nothing?”
Camille shook his head. “So what do you want us to do? Go into the prisons and kill them all?”
“At last,” Marat said. “I thought we should never arrive.”
“In cold blood?”
“However you like.”
“And you’ll organize this, will you, Marat?”
“Oh no, it would just happen spontaneously. The people, you see, being in such terror, being so inflamed against their enemies—”
“Spontaneously?” Camille said. “Oh, very likely.” And yet, he thought: we have a city that is in immediate peril, we have a populace that is enraged, we have a sea of futile unfocused hatred slapping at the institutions of state and washing through the public squares, and we have victims, we have the focus for that hate, we have traitors ready, to hand—yes, it became more likely, by the minute.
“Oh, come on, man,” Marat said. “We both know how these things are done.”
“We have already begun putting the royalists on trial,” he said.
“Have we got a year or two, do you think? Have we got a month? Have we got a week?”
“No. No, I see what you mean. But Marat, we’ve never—I mean, we never contracted ourselves for this sort of thing. It’s murder, whichever way you look at it.”
“Take your hands away from your face. Hypocrite. What do you think we did in .’89? Murder made you. Murder took you out of the back streets and put you where you sit now. Murder! What is it? It’s a word.”
“I shall tell Danton what you advise.”
“Yes. You do that.”
“But he will not connive at it.”
“Let him suit himself. It will happen anyway. Either we control it as far as we can or it happens outside and beyond our control. Danton must be either master or servant—which will he be?”
“He will lose his good name. His honor.”
“Oh, Camille,” Marat said softly. “His honor!” He shook his head. “Oh, my poor Camille.”
Camille threw himself back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, looked at the faces that lined the room; the ministers’ eyes were dull beneath their patina, the whites pickled by age. Had they wives, children? Had they feelings at all? Beneath their embroidered waistcoats, had the ribs moved, had the hearts ever beat? The portraits stared back at him; they made no sign. The officials had removed themselves from beyond the door. He could hear a clock, hear the minutes ticking away. “The people have no honor,” Marat said. “They have never been able to afford it. Honor is a luxury.”
“Suppose the other ministers prevent it?”
“Other ministers? Spare me that. What are the other ministers? Eunuchs.”
“Danton will not like this.”
“He doesn’t have to like it,” Marat said fiercely, “he has to see the necessity. That would be easy for him, I should think—a child can see the necessity. Like it? Do you think I like it?” Camille didn’t answer. Marat paused for thought. “Well, I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t mind it at all.”
The preliminaries for elections to the Convention have already begun. It seems, then, that life is going forward. Bread is being baked for the next day, plays are in rehearsal.
