Since he left office, some of this is no longer his direct concern. But there is enough to occupy him: the pressure for the King’s trial, the stupidity and divisiveness of the Brissotins. Even after the Robespierricide, he clings to a half-faith in their good intentions. He had not wanted to be pulled into the struggle; but they have taken all his choices away.
Soon, perhaps within a year, he hopes to be out of Paris. Perhaps he is deluding himself, but he hopes to leave it all in the hands of other people. With the Prussians driven out, those houses and farms are secured to him. And the children—Antoine is growing up sturdily, and Francois-Georges is a fat, contented baby, he’s not going to die. Also the new child. In Arcis, Gabrielle will begin to understand him better. Whatever he has done, whatever their differences of opinion, he is committed to her, he feels. In the country, they are going to be ordinary people again.
It is when he’s had too much to drink that he imagines this simple future for himself. It is a pity that it is so often Camille who is around at these times to disabuse him of his dreams, leaving him lachrymose, or raging against the trap of power he thinks he has fallen into. Whether at other times he believes in this future … He can hardly understand his pursuit of Lucile, because of the complications it makes. Yet it continues …
“I don’t like palaces. I’m glad to be home.” So Gabrielle says. Some version of the feeling seems to be general. Camille is glad to be parting from his staff, and his staff are glad to be parting from Camille. As Danton says, now we can find a lot of other things to worry about. Lucile does not entirely share the general feeling. She has enjoyed sweeping down grand staircases, the visible exercise of power.
At least in returning home she is relieved of Gabrielle’s company, and of Louise Robert’s. In recent weeks Louise has been applying her novelist’s imagination to their menage—and what a lot of imagination novelists have! “Observe,” she says, “the expression of pleasure and interest Camille wears when Danton deigns to maul his wife about in his presence! Why don’t you three set up house together when you leave here? Isn’t that what it’s coming to?”
“And,” said Fabre, “may I come to breakfast?”
“I’m sick,” Louise said, “of this drama you’re playing out, man falls in love with best friend’s wife, how tragic, etc., how terrible to be human. Tragic? You can hardly keep the grins off your faces.”
Yes, it was true; they hardly could, and that included Danton. Luckily Gabrielle had been elsewhere for the gifted writer’s outburst. Gabrielle had been kind to her, in the past; but in the present, she is relentlessly morose. She’s put on a lot of weight, with this pregnancy; she moves slowly, says she can’t breathe, says the city stifles her. Luckily, Gabrielle’s parents have just sold their house at Fontenay and moved to Sevres, bought two properties set in parkland. One house they’ll live in; one is for their daughter and son-in-law to use when they like. The Charpentiers have never been poor, but the likelihood is that Georges-Jacques has put up the money; he just doesn’t want people to know how much cash he’s laying out these days.
So, Lucile thinks, Gabrielle has the prospect of escape; but in her apartment at the rue des Cordeliers, she sits still and silent, in the conscious postures of pregnant women. Sometimes she cries; this chit Louise Gely trips down the stairs to join her in a few sniffles. Gabrielle is crying for her marriage, her soul and her king; Louise is crying, she supposes, for a broken doll or a kitten run over in the street. Can’t stand it, she thinks. Men are better company.
Freron was safely home from his mission in Metz. You would never know, from his journalism, that Rabbit had once been a gentleman. He was a good writer—the trade was in his blood—but his opinions grew steadily more violent, as if it was a contest and he badly wanted to win; at times you couldn’t distinguish his work from Marat’s. Despite his new ferocity, her other beaux considered him the one from whom they had nothing to fear. Yet she had been heard to ask him once, earnestly: “Will you always be there, in case I need you?” He had replied that he would be there for time and eternity: things like that. The problem—week to week—was that he had the status of Old Family Friend. So at weekends he could come out to the farm at Bourg-la-Republique. There he would follow her around, and try to get her alone. Poor Rabbit. His chances were nil.
It was difficult, sometimes, to remember that there was a Mme. Freron, and a Mme. Herault de Sechelles.
Herault called in the evenings, when the Jacobins were in session. Bores, he called them, dreadful bores. In fact politics fascinated him; but he did not suppose it could fascinate her, and so he set out to strike a sympathetic chord. “They are discussing economic controls,” he would say, “and how to quiet these ludicrous sansculotte agitators, with their continual whine about the price of bread and candles. Hebert does not know whether to ridicule them or take them up.”
“Hebert is prospering,” she would suggest sweetly, and he would say, “Yes, at the Commune, Hebert and Chaumette are such a force—” and then he would break off, feeling foolish, realizing he’d been sidetracked again.
Herault was Danton’s friend, he sat with the Mountain, but he could not mend a single aristocratic way. “It is not just your speech, your manner, but your whole way of thinking that is profoundly aristocratic,” she told him.
“Oh, no, no. Surely not. Very modern. Very republican.”
“Your attitude to me, for instance. You can’t put it out of your mind that before the Revolution I would have fallen flat on my back in simulated adoration if you had even glanced in my direction. If I hadn’t, my family would have given me a push. And at that, it might not have been simulated. The way women thought then.”
“If that’s true,” he said, “and of course it is true, how does it affect our situation today?” (He thinks, women don’t change.) “I’m not trying to exercise any prerogative over you. I simply want to see you have some pleasure in your life.”
She folded her hands over her heart. “Altruism!”
“Dear Lucile. The worst thing your husband has done to you is to make you sarcastic.”
“I was always sarcastic.”
“I find it to hard to believe. Camille manipulates people.”
“Oh, so do I.”
“He is always trying to convince people that he is harmless, so that the stab in the back will be a greater shock to them. Saint-Just, whom I do not unreservedly admire—”
“Oh, change the subject. I don’t like Saint-Just.”
“Why is that, I wonder?”
