Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin—everybody said—like silk.
Mme. Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the cafe so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maitre d’Anton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband—not at all.
Soon after Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 percent. Georges-Jacques’s own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.
Maitre Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. “Call yourself d’Anton,” he advised. “It makes a better impression.” On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. “So what if they all know it’s spurious?” Maitre Vinot said. “It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.”
When it was time to take his degree, Maitre Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days’ residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maitre Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldn’t come up with one. “Of course,” he said, “with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but …” His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrin’s chambers. D’Anton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.
After that he left the lie Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case—involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow. Did he take these cases to give himself time to think about other things? He was not, at this date, introspective. He was mildly surprised, then irritated, to find that the people around him were much less intelligent than himself. Bumblers like Vinot climbed to high office and prosperity. “Good-bye,” they said. “Not a bad week. See you Tuesday.” He watched them depart to spend their weekends in what with Parisians passed for the country. One day he’d buy himself a place—just a cottage would do, a couple of acres. It might take the edge off his restless moods.
He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coalheaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practiced it on Angelica, calling at the cafe each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a
Gabrielle thought, looks aren’t everything. She also thought, money isn’t everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the cafe seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of ’86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.
The trouble is that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.
Maitre Desmoulins had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.
Today’s case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maitre Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.
“Come back!” d’Anton shouted. He stopped, and turned. D’Anton drew level. “I can see you’re not used to winning. You’re supposed to commiserate with your opponent.”
“Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, let’s walk—I don’t like to be around here.”
D’Anton did not like to let a point go. “It’s a piece of decent hypocrisy. It’s the rules.”
Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. “You mean, I may gloat?”
“If you will.”
“I may say, ‘So that’s what they learn in Maitre Vinot’s chambers?’”
“If you must. My first case,” d’Anton said, “was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.”
“But you’ve come on a bit since then.”
“Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.”
Desmoulins stopped dead. “Do you really, Maitre d’Anton?”
“Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought—stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.”
“Yes, but I don’t always. I’ve not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, d’Anton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?”
