“Don’t upset yourself,” Danton said soothingly. “Better the jumped-up intellectual you know, eh?” He had quite expected the Electors to resist handing the nation’s affairs over to Camille. Kersaint wasn’t, anyway, what he called an intellectual; he was a naval officer from Brittany, had sat in the last Assembly.
Robespierre said, “Citizen Legendre, if there is a conspiracy to stop Camille’s election, I shall quash it.”
“Now wait a minute …” Legendre said. His objection tailed off, but he looked uneasy. He hadn’t mentioned a
“I shall propose that until the elections are over, an hour a day be given to a public discussion of the candidates’ merits.”
“Oh, a discussion,” Legendre said, relieved. For a moment he’d thought Robespierre might be planning to put a warrant out for Kersaint. Last week, you’d known what kind of a man you were dealing with; this week, you didn’t know. It put him up in your estimation, in a way.
Danton grinned. “You’d better make a list of Camille’s merits, and circulate it. We aren’t all so inventive as you. I don’t know how you’d justify Camille, except under the heading ‘exceptional talent.’”
“You do want him elected?” Robespierre demanded.
“Of course. I want someone to talk to during the boring debates.”
“Then don’t sit there laughing.”
Camille said, “I wish you wouldn’t discuss me as if I weren’t here.” On the next ballot, Citizen Kersaint, who before had received 230 votes, now mysteriously found that he had only thirty-six. Robespierre shrugged. “One does try to persuade people, of course. There’s no more to it than that. Congratulations, my dear.” For some reason, an image comes into his head, of Camille at twelve or thirteen years old: a violent, whimsical child, given to stormy outbreaks of tears.
Meanwhile the volunteers, in their thousands, march to the front singing. They have sausages and loaves of bread stuck on the end of their bayonets. Women give them kisses and bunches of flowers. Do you remember how it used to be when the recruiting sergeant came to a village? No one hides now. People are scraping the walls of their cellars for saltpeter to make gunpowder. Women are giving their wedding rings to the Treasury to be melted down. Many of them, of course, will be taking advantage of the new laws to get divorced.
“Pikes?” Camille said.
“Pikes,” Fabre said sullenly.
“I don’t wish to appear legalistic, a pettifogger as it were, but is it the business of the Minister of Justice to purchase pikes? Does Georges-Jacques know we’ve got a bill for pikes?”
“Oh, come on, do you think I can go running to the minister with every trifling expense?”
“When you add it all up,” Camille pushed his hair back, “we’ve spent a lot of money over the past few weeks. It worries me to think that now we’re all deputies there’ll be new ministers soon, and they’ll want to know where the money has gone. Because really, I haven’t the least idea. I don’t suppose you have?”
“Anything that causes difficulty,” Fabre said “you just put down as ‘Secret Fund.’ Then nobody asks any questions, because they can’t, you see—it’s secret. Don’t worry so much. Everything’s all right as long as you don’t lose the Great Seal. You haven’t lost it, have you?”
“No. At least, I saw it somewhere this morning.”
“Good—now look, shall we reimburse ourselves a bit? What about that money Manon Roland is supposed to be getting for her ministry to issue news sheets?”
“Oh yes. Georges told her that she’d better ask me nicely to edit them.”
“He did, I was there. She said perhaps her husband would see you, and decide if you were suitable. Our minister, he began to bellow and paw the ground.”
They laughed. “Well, then,” Camille said. “One Treasury warrant …” His hand moved over his desk. “Claude taught me this … they never query anything, you know, if it has Danton’s signature.”
“I know,” Fabre said.
“What did I do with the signature stamp? I lent it to Marat. I hope he brings it back.”
“Speaking of Queen Coco,” Fabre said, “have you noticed anything different in her manner lately?”
“How could I? You know I’m forbidden the presence.”
“Oh yes, of course you are. Well, let me tell you … There’s a certain lightness in the step, a certain bloom on the cheek—what does that betoken?”
“She’s in love.”
Fabre is now around forty years years old. He is neat, pale, built on economic lines: actor’s eyes, actor’s hands. Bits of his autobiography emerge, late at night, in no particular chronological order. No wonder nothing fazes him. In Namur once, aided by army- officer friends, he eloped with a fifteen-year-old girl called Catiche; he did it, he explains, to preserve her virginity from the girl’s own father. Better that he should have it … . They had been apprehended; Catiche had been hastily married off, he had been sentenced to hang. How is it, then, that he lives to tell the tale? All these years on, and with so much excitement in between, he can hardly remember. Camille says, “Georges-Jacques, we have lived sheltered lives, you and me.”
“Monk-like,” the minister agrees.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Fabre says modestly.
Fabre follows the minister as he stamps through public buildings, his large hands slapping backs and desktops, wringing the necks of all compromise solutions, all the tried and tested methods, all the decent ways of doing things. Power becomes him, fits him like an old topcoat; his little eyes glitter if anyone tries to dispute with him. Fabre feeds his ego in all the unsubtle ways he likes best; they are comfortable together, sit up drinking and discussing shady inter-departmental deals. When dawn comes, Danton find himself alone with the map of Europe.
