gaols. But the feeling is that Roland neither knows nor cares; cares, but doesn’t know; knows, but doesn’t care; cares, but doesn’t dare do anything about it. What does Roland matter anyway? One more pressing decision might give him a heart attack.
“To our lists,” says Citizen Hebert.
The lists are very long. There are about two thousand people in the prisons, after all; it’s difficult to establish an exact number, there are a lot of people unaccounted for. Whoever is struck from the lists will be let out tonight; the others must take their chances, stand before their impromptu judges.
They come to a priest, one Berardier. “I want him released,” Camille says.
“A refractory priest, who has refused the oath to the constitution—”
“Released,” Camille says fiercely. They shrug, stamp the order. Camille is unpredictable, it does not do to frustrate him too much; besides, there is always the possibility that a given person is a government agent, an undercover man. Danton has scribbled his own list of people to be released, and given it to Fabre. Camille asks to see it; Fabre refuses. Camille suggests that Fabre has altered it. Fabre asks what he is taken for. No one answers. Fabre insinuates that a middle-aged barrister whose release Camille has obtained had been one of his lovers in the early ’80s when he was very pretty and not very prosperous. Camille snaps back that it might be so but that is better than saving somebody’s life for a fat fee, which Fabre is probably doing. “Fascinating,” Hebert says. “Shall we go on to the next sheet?”
Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after that. There is no sense of evil in the room, just tiredness and the aftertaste of petty squabbling. Camille drinks quite a lot of Fabre’s brandy. Towards daybreak, a kind of dismal camaraderie sets in.
There had been, of course, the matter of who should do the killing, and it would obviously not be the men with the lists, not even the sansculotte with the pipe. It was thought advisable to recruit a number of butchers, and promise them a rate for the job. The intention was not mocking or macabre, but sound and humane.
Unfortunately, as the rumors of an aristo plot spread panic through the city, enthusiastic beginners joined in. They lacked skill, and the butchers tut-tutted over their small knowledge of anatomy. Unless it was their intention to torture and mutilate.
Exasperation at midday: “We might as well not have bothered sitting up all night over those lists,” Fabre says. “I’m sure the wrong people are being killed.”
Camille thinks of what Marat said: either we control it ourselves or it happens outside and beyond our control. It seems, as the unspeakable news comes in, hour by hour, that we have got the worst of both worlds. We will never, now, know an hour free from guilt; we will never, now, recover such reputation as we possessed; yet we neither planned nor willed the whole of it, the half of it. We simply turned away, we washed our hands, we made a list and we followed an agenda, we went home to sleep while the people did their worst and the people (Camille thinks) were translated from heroes to scavengers, to savages, to cannibals.
In the early stages at least, there was some attempt at order, some pretense, however risible, of legality. A group of sansculottes, red-capped, armed, behind the largest table they can find, the suspect before them: outside, the courtyard where the executioners wait, with cutlasses, axes, pikes. They set half of the suspects free—for a reason, or out of sentimentality, or because a mistake of identity has been found out just in time. The whole question of identification becomes more muddled as the day wears on, people claiming to have lost their papers or to have had them stolen; but anyone in prison must be there for a reason, isn’t that so, and that reason must be against the public good, and as one man said, all aristos look the same to me, I can’t tell their faces apart.
Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal—“Use your heads, give us a bloody chance, can’t you? We can’t keep up.” So the prisoners are waved away airily by their judges—“Go, you’re free.” Outside the door a steady man waits to fell them. Freedom is the last thing they know.
Mid-afternoon: Prudhomme, the journalist, waited for Danton’s meeting to break up. He did not know that Danton had laughed at the representations of the Supervisor of Prisons, or that he had sworn at Roland’s private secretary. Since that day in ’91, when a pack of National Guardsmen had thought he was Camille and nearly killed him, Prudhomme had felt himself entitled to take an interest in Danton and his friends.
Danton’s eyes took him in: somewhat blankly. “The prisoners are being massacred,” Prudhomme said to him.
“Fuck the prisoners. They must look after themselves.” He strode away. Camille looked closely at Prudhomme, failing, as he always did, to transpose Prudhomme’s fading scars onto his own face.
“It’s all right,” he said. He looked nervously guilty; it was the effect of Prudhomme, rather than the larger situation. He brushed one of Prudhomme’s clenched hands with his own. “It’s all organized. No one who is innocent will be touched. If his Section vouch for a prisoner, he’ll be set free. It’s—”
“Camille.” Danton stopped, turned around and bellowed at him. “For God’s sake, come here, hurry up.”
He would have liked to hit him. Or hit Prudhomme. His official attitude was: I don’t know anything about this.
The Princesse de Lamballe was murdered at La Force prison. Possibly she was raped. When the mob had torn out most of her internal organs and stuck them on pikes, they cut off her head and carried it to a hairdresser. At knife point they forced the nauseated man to curl and dress the Princesse’s pretty fair hair. Then they marched in procession to the Temple, where the Capet family were locked up. They put the head on a pike and hoisted it up to sway outside the high windows. “Come and say hallo to your friend,” they exhorted the woman inside.
Voltaire: “Reason must first be established in the minds of the leaders then gradually it descends and at length rules the people, who are unaware of its existence, but who, perceiving the moderation of their rulers, learn to imitate them.”
Nine ways by which one may share in the guilt of another’s sin:
By counsel
By command
By consent
By provocation
By praise or flattery
By concealment
By being a partner in the sin
By silence
By defending the ill deed.
When Robespierre spoke, the members of the Commune’s Watch Committee put down their pens and looked straight at him. They did not fidget with their papers, blow their noses or allow their eyes to wander. If they had coughs, they suppressed them. They squared their shoulders and put conscientious expressions on their faces. He expected their attention, so he got it.
There was a plot, Robespierre told them, to put the Duke of Brunswick on the throne of France. Incredible as it might seem—he looked around the room, and no one allowed incredulity to show on his face—the allied commander had such ambitions, and Frenchmen were furthering them. He named Brissot.
Billaud-Varennes, Danton’s former clerk, spoke at once to back him up. Whined rather, Max thought; he did not
