like Billaud. The man claimed a startling ability: he said he could recognize a conspirator by looking him straight in the eye.
The officials of the Commune drew up warrants for the immediate arrest of Brissot and Roland. Robespierre went home.
Eleonore Duplay caught him as he crossed the courtyard. “Is it true that everyone in the prisons is being killed?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Aghast: “But you’d have to know, they can’t do anything without asking you.”
He put out a hand and pulled her to his side, not in intimacy, but because he wanted to influence the expression on her face. “Supposing it were true, my dear Eleonore, my dear Cornelia, would you cry about it? If you think of the people the Austrians are killing now, driving them out of their farms, burning their roofs over their heads—well, which would you cry for?”
“I don’t question it,” she said. “You couldn’t be wrong.”
“Well, which would you cry for?” He answered himself. “Both.”
Danton sifted through the papers on the Public Prosecutor’s desk. He allowed himself this much familiarity with everyone’s business. In the end it all came back to him.
When he saw the two warrants, he lifted them, and dropped them again. Brissot. Roland. He let them lie, and stared at them, and as his mind moved, slowly, he began to shake from head to foot, as he had on the morning when he was told of the death of his first child. Who had been at the Commune all day? Robespierre. Whose word was law there? His, and Robespierre’s. Who had caused these warrants to be issued? Robespierre. One could call for the minutes, no doubt, one could read and judge the exact words that had brought it to this, one could apportion blame. But it was no more possible that the Commune had done this without Robespierre than that Roland and Brissot should be arrested and survive the night. I must move, he told himself; I must move from this spot.
It was Louvet, Manon Roland’s fair frail novelist friend, who touched his elbow. “Danton,” he said, “Robespierre denounced Brissot by name …”
“So I see.” He picked up the warrants. He turned on Louvet, his voice savage. “Jesus, how could you be such fools? How could I?” He pushed the papers under the man’s nose. “For God’s sake, man, go and hide yourself somewhere.”
He folded the warrants, slipped them into an inside pocket of his coat. “Now then. The little fellow will have to knock me down if he wants these back.”
Color had rushed into Louvet’s face. “There’s another war on now,” he said. “Either we will kill Robespierre, or he will kill us.”
“Don’t ask me to save you.” Danton’s hand in his chest skidded him across the room. “I have my own hide to think of, and the bloody Germans too.”
Petion picked up the warrants and dropped them, just as Danton had done. “
“Of course he knows.” Danton sat down and put his head in his hands. “By tomorrow there would have been no government. God knows what he thought he could pull out of it. Has he lost his mind, since I saw him yesterday, or was it intended, calculated—and in that case he is setting himself up as some sort of power, and since ’89 he has been lying to us, not outright, I grant you, but by implication—Petion, which is it?”
Petion seemed to be talking to himself, in his rising panic. “I think … that he is better than most of us, yes, certainly better, but now with the pressure of events …” He stopped. He himself was called Brissot’s friend; his natural antipathy to the man had not stopped people sticking the label on him. Since August 10, the Brissotins had governed on sufferance. The pretense was that they had invited Danton into the government; the truth was that he had given them their posts back, and that it was he who imposed his will at every cabinet meeting, sprawling in the great chair once occupied by Capet’s softer bulk. “Danton,” Petion said, “does Robespierre want my life too?” Danton shrugged; he did not know. Petion looked away; he seemed ashamed of his thoughts. “Manon said this morning, ‘Robespierre and Danton hold the big knife over us all.’”
“And what answer did you give to the dear woman?”
“We said, after all, Citizeness, Robespierre is only a little clerk.” Danton stood up. “I don’t hold a knife over you. You can tell her that. But there is a knife. And I’m not going to put my neck under it.”
“I don’t see what we did to deserve this,” Petion said.
“I do. I mean, if I were Robespierre, I would see. You people have studied your own political advantage for so long that you’ve forgotten what you ever wanted the power for. Look, I’ll not defend you—not in public. Camille has been working on me for months about Brissot. So has Marat, in his different way. And Robespierre—oh yes, he’s talked. We thought talking was all he ever did.”
“Robespierre must find out—that you have blocked him.”
“He’s not a dictator.”
Petion’s affable features were still blank with shock. “Would he be grateful to you, do you think, for saving him from the consequences of an ill-considered action? A moment of wrath?”
“Wrath? He’s never had a moment of wrath. I was wrong to say he must be going mad. You could lock him up in a dungeon for fifty years and he wouldn’t go mad. He’s got everything he needs inside his head.” For a moment he put an outstretched hand on Petion’s shoulder. “I bet he lives longer than we do.”
When Danton entered his own apartment, massive inside his scarlet coat, his wife gave him one swollen glance of beaten betrayal; she pulled away from his outstretched hands and crossed her arms over her body, as if to hide from him the shape of the child she was carrying.
“You, Gabrielle?” he said. “If only you knew. If only you knew how many people I’ve saved.”
“Get away from me,” she said. “I can hardly bear to be in the same room.
He rang for one of the maids. “Attend to her,” he said.
He crashed his way into the Desmoulins’s apartment. There was only Lucile, sitting quietly with her cat curled
