“He doesn’t look as if he would.”
“That will endear him to everyone, I’m sure.”
“Endear,” Danton laughed. “The boy alarms me. That chilly, purposive smirk.”
“Perhaps he’s trying to look pleasant.”
“Herault will be jealous. The women will be interested in someone else.”
“Herault need not worry. Saint-Just isn’t interested in women.”
“You used to say that about Saint Maximilien, but now he has the delightful Comelia. Yes, isn’t it so?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
So that was common gossip now, besides the supposed infidelity of Roland’s wife and the menage here at the Place des Piques. What things for people to occupy themselves with, he thought.
Perhaps Danton would leave office soon. For himself he would be pleased. Yet it seemed certain that Roland’s supporters would try to arrange for him to stay on at the Interior, though he had been elected to the Convention. Even after the scandal about the Crown Jewels, the dusty old bureaucrat was riding high. And if he stayed in office, why not Danton, so much more necessary to the nation?
I don’t want to be here much longer, he thought. I shall turn into Claude. I don’t much want to speak to the Convention either, they won’t be able to hear me. Then again, he said to himself, it isn’t a question of what I want.
It was more troubling to think that Danton himself wanted to leave office. Even now he hadn’t thrown over his dreams—his delusions—of getting out of Paris for good. In the small hours, Camille had found him solitary in a pool of yellow candlelight, poring over the deeds to his Arcis property, each boundary stone, watercourse, right of way. As he lifted his head Camille had seen in his eyes a picture of mellow buildings, fields, copses and streams.
“Ah,” he had said, startled. “I thought my assassin had come at last.” He laid a hand, palm down, on the deeds. “To think of the Prussians here, perhaps.”
Fabre had been evasive lately, Camille thought. Not that he was given to plain speaking. If Fabre had to choose, between money and revolutionary fame … No, he’d refuse to choose, he’d go on dizzily demanding both.
“What interpretation are we to put on the removal of the Crown Jewels?” Camille asked Danton.
What are we to think? Or—what are we to say? He watched Danton digest the ambiguity.
“I think we must say that Roland’s carelessness is much to blame.”
“Yes, he should have made better security arrangements, should he not? Fabre was with the Citizeness Roland the day after. He went at half-past ten and came back at one. Do you think he had been castigating her?”
“How do I know?”
Camille gave him an amused, sideways glance. “And after he left the Citizeness, she went straight to her husband and told him that the man who stole the Crown Jewels had just called.”
“How do you know that?”
“Perhaps I’m making it up. Do you think I am?”
“You could be,” Danton said unhappily.
“Don’t trust Dumouriez.”
“No. Robespierre says it. I am sick of him saying it.”
“Robespierre is never wrong.”
“Perhaps I should go to the front myself. See a few people. Get a few things straightened out.”
So—perhaps when these pastoral moods came upon him, it was really a kind of fear. God knows he was vulnerable enough, though it seemed strange to apply the word to him. He was vulnerable to Dumouriez, and to supporters of the Bourbons, too, seeking fulfillment of promises made … . “There’s nothing to worry about. M. Danton will look after us.”
Camille swept the thought away hastily, pushing his hair back in nervous agitation, as if someone were in the room with him. He seemed to hear Robespierre’s voice drifting across a cold spring day in 1790: “Once you bestow affection on a person, reason flies out of the window. Look at the Comte de Mirabeau—objectively, if you can, for a moment. The way he lives, his words, his actions, put me on my guard immediately—then I apply a little thought, and I discover that the man is wholly given over to self-aggrandizement. Now why can’t you come to this conclusion, because it’s plain enough? You don’t yield to your feelings in other respects, when they run counter to your larger aims; for instance, you’re frightened of speaking in public, but you don’t let it stop you. Then, like that— you have to be ruthless with your feelings.”
Suppose he found that persistent unsparing voice at his elbow one day, claiming that Danton lacked probity; he had an answer, pat, not a logical one, but one sufficiently chilling to put logic in abeyance. To question Danton’s patriotism was to cast in doubt the whole Revolution. A tree is known by its fruits, and Danton made August 10. First he made the republic of the Cordeliers, then he made the Republic of France. If Danton is not a patriot, then we have been criminally negligent in the nation’s affairs. If Danton is not a patriot, we are not patriots either. If Danton is not a patriot, then the whole thing—from May ’89—must be done again.
It was a thought to make even Robespierre tired.
When the news of the victory at Valmy reached Paris, the city was delirious with relief and joy, and it was only later that a few people began to wonder why the French had not pursued their immediate advantage, chased up Brunswick and cut his retreat to pieces. The National Convention, meeting for the first time, had officially proclaimed the French Republic; it was the best of omens. Before long there will be no enemies on French soil—or no foreign enemies at least. The generals will push on to Mainz, Worms, Frankfurt; Belgium will be occupied, England, Holland and Spain will enter the war. In time defeats will occur, and betrayal, conspiracy and
