mere half-heartedness receive a ghastly reward; as the numbers of the Convention dwindle, one can seem to see every day on the empty benches a figure of Death, smiling, familiar and spry.
For the moment the Convention’s most startling phenomenon was Danton’s voice; it was heard every day, on every question, but its arrogant power never ceased to surprise. Shunning the ministerial bench, he sat in the high tier of seats to the left of the chamber, with the other Paris deputies and the fiercer of the provincials. These seats, and by extension those who occupy them, will be called the Mountain. The Girondins, Brissotins—whatever you please to call them—drift to the right of the hall, and between them and the Mountain lies the area called the Plain, or the Swamp, in accordance with the quaking natures of those who sit there. Now that the split was visible, wide open, there seemed no reason for discretion or restraint. Day after day, Buzot poured out into the airless, stifling, sweating chamber Manon Roland’s suspicions of Paris: tyrant city, leech, necropolis. Sometimes she watched him from the public gallery, rigidly impersonal in her applause; in public they behaved like polite strangers, and in private, though less strange, they were not less polite. Louvet carried in his pocket a speech, kept for the right time, which he called a
Because of the crux of the matter—September, October, November—was the Brissotin attempt to rule; their private army of 16,000, brought from the provinces, singing in the streets, demanding the blood of would-be dictators—Marat, Danton, Robespierre—whom they called the Triumvirate. The War Minister shuttled that army to the front before there were pitched battles on the streets; but the battle-lines of the Convention were not within his jurisdiction.
Marat sat alone, hunched over his bloody preoccupations. When he got up to speak, the Brissotins hurried out of the chamber, or stayed to stare with fascinated distaste, murmuring among themselves; but as time passed they stayed to listen, because his words concerned them intimately. He spoke with one arm crooked before him and resting on the tribune, his head flung back on his short, muscular neck, prefacing his remarks with the demonic chuckle he cultivated. He was ill, and no one knew the name of his disease.
Robespierre met him—in passing, of course, he had always known him, but he had shrunk from closer contact. There was the danger that, if you talked with Marat, you would be blamed for him, accused of dictating his writings and fanning his ambition. And yet, one can’t pick and choose; in the present climate one must count up one’s friends. Perhaps from this point of view the meeting was not wholly successful, serving only to show how the patriots were divided. Robespierre’s body, young and compact, had a neat, feline tension inside his well-cut clothes; his emotions, or those emotions that might be worn on his face, were buried with the victims of September. Marat twitched at him across a table, coughing, a dirty kerchief wrapped around his head. He spluttered with passion, his grubby fist pumped, frustration blotched and mottled his skin. “Robespierre, you don’t understand me.”
Robespierre watched him dispassionately, his head tilted a little to one side. “That is possible.”
Robespierre rose from his place on the Mountain. He made for the rostrum, his small head lowered in a way that suggested belligerence. Gaudet, the Girondist who was president of the Convention, tried to stop him speaking. Danton’s voice was audible above the uproar. “Let him speak. And I demand to speak, when he’s done. It’s time a few things were put straight around here.”
VERGNIAUD [
GAUDET [
VERGNIAUD: Up to a point.
GAUDET: Where the money runs out.
VERGNIAUD: It’s more complicated than that. God help you if you can’t see it’s more complicated than that.
GAUDET: Robespierre has the rostrum.
VERGNIAUD: As usual. [
GAUDET: Not in your sense.
VERGNIAUD: There is no show.
GAUDET: The people like it well enough. His style.
VERGNIAUD: Oh yes, the people. The People.
Robespierre was unusually angry. It was the insult of Roland as an opponent, this dotard with his trollop of a wife and his incessant, obsessive muttering about the accounts of Danton’s ministry. That, and the gnat bites of their insinuations, whispers behind hands, stray voices in the street that call “September” and pass on. Danton has heard them too. It sometime shows in his face.
Robespierre’s voice, above the low muttering which filled the body of the hall, was dripping with contempt: “Not one of you dares accuse me to my face.”
There was a pause, a little silence for the Gironde to contemplate their cowardice.
“I accuse you.”
Louvet walked forward, fumbling inside his coat for the pages of the Robespierricide. “Ah, the pornographer,” Philippe Egalite said. The Duke’s voice rolled down, from the height of the Mountain. There was an outbreak of sniggering. Then the silence welled back.
Robespierre stepped aside, and yielded Louvet the rostrum. He wore a patient, hesitant smile; he glanced up towards the Paris deputies, then took a seat, in Louvet’s line of sight, and waited for him to begin his tirade.
“I accuse you of persistently slandering the finest patriots. Of having spread your slanders in the first week of September, when rumors were death blows. I accuse you of having degraded and proscribed the representatives of the nation.” He paused—the Mountain were yelling, baying at him—it was difficult to continue—Robespierre twisted his head, looked up at them, and the noise subsided, dwindled, tailed off, into another silence.
In it, Louvet resumed; but his voice, pitched for opposition, for a shouting match, had the wrong timbre now, and as he heard it—as he heard what was wrong, as he said to himself, this will not do—his voice shook a little. To
