the streets look shabby now?”
“Yes. Where are we going?”
“Will you come and see my sister?”
“Will Eleonore be at home?”
“She’ll be at her drawing class. I know she doesn’t like you.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“I don’t know. How can I? She’s jealous of my friends, of my occupations.”
“Won’t you have to marry her?”
“Eventually, perhaps.”
“Also—no, never mind.”
Very often, he had come close to telling Robespierre what had happened with Babette on the morning his son was born. But Max was so fond of the girl, so much more at ease with her than with most people, and it seemed cruel to hunt out trust from where he had reposed it. And it would be horrible to be disbelieved; he might be disbelieved. Again, how to retell exactly what had been said and done, without putting your own interpretation on it, and submit it to another judgement? It wasn’t possible. So at the Duplay house he was very polite to everybody—except Eleonore—and very careful; and still the incident preyed upon his mind. He had once begun to tell Danton, then abandoned the subject; Danton would certainly say he was making it up, and tease him about his fantasy life.
Beside him, Robespierre’s voice was running on: “ … and I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a hero—a sort of effacement of oneself from history. The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the people. The real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants, and it is in the nature of tyranny not only to kill those who oppose it but to wipe their names out of the record, to obliterate them, so that resistance seems impossible.”
A passerby hesitated, stared. “Excuse me—” he said. “Good citizen—are you Robespierre?”
Robespierre didn’t look at the man. “Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.”
“Good citizen, forgive me,” the patriot said doggedly.
Eyes rested on him briefly. “Yes, I’m Robespierre,” he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulins’s arm. “Camille, history is fiction.”
ROBESPIERRE: … You see, you can’t understand how things were for me then. For the first two years at school I wasn’t exactly miserable, I was happy in a way, but I was cut off from people, sealed off by myself in a cell—then Camille came—do you think I’m being sentimental?
SAINT-JUST: I do rather.
ROBESPIERRE: You don’t understand how it was.
SAINT-JUST: Why all this preoccupation with the past? Why not look to the future?
ROBESPIERRE: A lot of us would like to forget the past, but you can’t, well, you can’t put it out of your head entirely. You’re younger than I am, naturally you think about the future. You haven’t got any past.
SAINT-JUST: A little.
ROBESPIERRE: Before the Revolution, you were a student, you were preparing for your life. You’ve never had any other job. You’re a professional revolutionary. You’re an entirely new breed.
SAINT-JUST: I had thought of that.
ROBESPIERRE: If I can explain—when Camille came—I myself, I find it difficult to get along with people sometimes, people don’t take to me so easily. I didn’t understand why Camille bothered with me, but I was glad. He was like a magnet to people. He was just the same as he is now. When he was ten years old he had that sort of— black radiance.
SAINT-JUST: You are fanciful.
ROBESPIERRE: It made things easier for me. Camille’s always complained that his family doesn’t care about him. I could never see that. And I couldn’t see how it mattered, when other people love him so much.
SAINT-JUST: So what are you saying—that because of some association in your past life, everything he does is all right?
ROBESPIERRE: Oh no. I’m just saying, he’s an extremely complicated person, and whatever he gets up to, the fact remains, we’re very close. Camille’s clever, you know. He’s also a very good journalist.
SAINT-JUST: I have doubts about the value of journalists.
ROBESPIERRE: You just don’t like him, really, do you?
CHAPTER 3
Danton thought: ambassadors give me a headache. For part of the day, every day, he had stared mutely at maps, turning the continent over in his mind, Turkey, Sweden, England, Venice … . Keep England out of this war. Beg and pray neutrality. Keep the English fleet out of it … and yet with English agents everywhere, talk of sabotage and forgery … . Yes, of course Robespierre is right, England is fundamentally hostile. But if we get into that sort of war, will we get out, within our natural lifetimes? Not, he thinks sourly, that we expect to have those.
