Fabre looked away. “Yes …” he muttered. “To survive at all will be the thing now. And Brunswick is willing to lose a battle—with his reputation at stake?”
“It will be managed so that he doesn’t lose face. He knows what he’s doing. So do 1. Now, Fabre, some professional criminals. I have contacts already, which you must follow up. They mustn’t know who they’re working for. They will all be,” he waved a hand, “dispensable. We can allow Roland to direct the police in a certain amount of inept investigation. Of course, we can expect the matter to be taken very seriously. Death penalty.”
“What’s to stop them talking at their trial? Because we may need to let the police catch
“As far as you can, make sure they have nothing to talk about. We shall have a blanket of obfuscation between each stratum of this conspiracy, and between each conspirator. So see to that. Obfuscate. If anyone should begin to suspect government involvement, the trail should lead to Roland. Now, there are two people in particular who must know nothing of this. One is Roland’s wife. The woman is innocent of practical politics, and very loud-mouthed. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem able to keep anything from her.”
“The other person is Camille,” Fabre said. “Because he would tell Robespierre, and Robespierre would call us traitors for talking to Brunswick at all.”
Danton nodded. “I can’t divide Camille’s loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.”
“But both of them are in a position to find out so much.”
“That’s a risk we take. Now, I can buy one battle—and by doing so, I can hope to turn the tide of the war. But after that I can’t remain in office. I would be open to blackmail, by Brunswick or more likely by—”
“General Dumouriez.”
“Quite. Oh, I know you don’t like the odds, Fabre. But consider yourself. I don’t know how much you’ve embezzled from the ministry in the past few weeks, but I take it to be more than a trifle. I—let us say as long as your ambitions remain on a reasonable scale—I won’t thwart them. You are thinking, what use will Danton be to me out of office? But Fabre, war is so lucrative. You’ll never be far from power now. Inside information … just imagine. I know what you’re worth to me.”
Fabre swallowed. He looked away. His eyes seemed unfocused. “Do you ever think, does it ever bother you … that everything is founded on lies?”
“That’s a dangerous thing to say. I don’t like that.”
“No, I didn’t mean on your part, I was asking … on my own account … to see if one might compare experiences.” He smiled wanly; for the first time in all the years he’d known him, Danton saw him at a loss, mystified, a man whose life has been taken out of his control. He looked up. “It’s nothing,” he said lightly. “I didn’t mean anything, Danton.”
“You can’t afford to speak without thinking. No one must know the truth about this, not in a thousand years. The French are going to win a battle, that’s all. Your silence is the price of mine, and neither of us breaks the silence, even to save our own lives.”
CHAPTER 2
“I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.” Oh, Manon thought, not before that? It seemed to her that her letters, her writings, should have prompted some quickening of sensibility in the man who —she now knew—was the only one who could ever have made her happy.
This was no hasty process. Rivers of ink had flowed between them, when they’d been apart; when they’ve been together—or, let us say, in the same city—they have seldom had a private moment. Salon conversation, hours of it, has been their lot; they spoke the language of legislators, before they spoke the language of love. Even now, Buzot did not say much. He seemed perplexed, torn, tormented. He was younger than she was, less tutored in his emotions. He had a wife: a plain woman, older.
Manon ventured this: her fingertips on his shoulder, as he sat with his head in his hands. It was consolatory; and it stopped her fingers from trembling.
There was a need for secrecy. The newspapers nominated lovers for her—Louvet, often. Until now she’d reacted with public scorn; have they no arguments, have they not even a higher form of wit? (In private, though, these skits and squibs brought her near to tears; she asked herself why she was meted out the same treatment as that peculiar, wild young woman Theroigne, the same treatment—when she thought about it—as the Capet woman used to get.) The newspapers—just—she could bear; what was harder to bear was the activity of the gossip circus that centered on the Ministry of Justice.
Danton’s comments were relayed to her; he claimed her husband had been a cuckold for years, in every moral sense if not the physical one. But how could he imagine her situation; how could he appreciate, acknowledge the delicate satisfactions of a relationship between a chaste woman and an honorable man? It was impossible to think of him in any context but that of the grossly physical. She had seen his wife; since he became a minister he had brought her once to the Riding School, to sit in the public gallery and hear him roaring at the deputies. She was a dull type of woman, pregnant, probably with no thought in her head beyond gruel and baby mush. Still, she’s a woman—how could she bear it, she asked out loud, how could she bear to have that bully’s overweight body stretched on top of hers?
It was an unguarded remark, a remark almost shocked out of her by the strength of her own repulsion; next day it was of course repeated all over town. She went scarlet at the thought of it.
Citizen Fabre d’Eglantine called. He crossed his legs and put his fingertips together. “Well, my dear,” he said.
This ghastly assumption of familiarity was what she resented. This unserious person, who associated with females who trembled on the outer fringes of polite society: this creature with his theatrical affectations and his snide remarks out of earshot; they sent him here to watch her, and he went back and made reports. “Citizen Camille is saying,” he told her, “that your now-famous remark suggests that you are in fact greatly attracted to the minister—as he has always suspected.”
“I can’t imagine how he presumes to divine the state of my feelings. As we have never met.”
“No, I realize this: why won’t you meet him?”
