“Guilty?” Camille said. “Never. His innocence shines forth.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Fabre said.
“There’s a letter—” Gabrielle began.
“Be quiet,” Camille said. “Before he hits you again. On purpose, this time.”
“What letter?” Fabre said.
“No letter,” Camille said. “There never was a letter. I hope not, anyway. You know, Georges-Jacques, a good deal depends on whether the courier was intelligent. Most people aren’t intelligent, don’t you find?”
“Trying to confuse me,” Fabre complained.
Danton bent to kiss his wife. “I may yet save myself.”
“You think so?” She averted her face. “Yet you are still destroying yourself.”
He looked at her intently for a second, then straightened up. He turned to Camille and put a hand into his hair, pulling his head back. “You won’t wring any apologies from me,” he said. “Fabre, do you know a deputy, timid and obscure, they call him Defermon? Can you find him for me? Tell him that Danton will visit him at his own house one hour from now. No excuses. He must be there. It is Danton in person who requires to see him. Be sure to stress that. Go on. Don’t stand about.”
“Just that? No other message?”
“Go.”
Fabre turned at the door and shook his head at Camille. He talked to himself, as he hurried along the street: think they can fool me, do they, I’ll soon find out what’s what.
Danton walked into his study and slammed the door; later, they heard him moving about, in different rooms of the apartment.
“What will he do?” Gabrielle said.
“Well, you know, with other people a complicated problem needs a complicated solution, but with Georges- Jacques solutions are usually rather simple and quick. It’s true what I said, people are frightened of him. They remember August, when he dragged Mandat around City Hall. They don’t know what he might do next. It’s true, you know, Gabrielle. Money from England, from the Court—all that.”
“I know. I’m not much of a simpleton, even though he’s always taken me for one. He had an expensive mistress and a child when we married. He thinks I don’t know. That’s why we were so poor at first. He bought his practice from his mistress’s new lover. Did you know that? Yes, of course you did, I don’t know why I’m saying all this.” Gabrielle lifted her arms, began repinning her hair; an automatic action, but her fingers were clumsy, looked swollen. Her face, too, looked swollen, quite apart from the damage that Georges had done, and her eyes were shadowed, without life. “I’ve annoyed him, you see, all these years, by pretending to keep some form of integrity. So have you—that’s why he’s angry with us both, that’s why he’s persecuting us together. Both of us knew everything and wouldn’t admit it. Oh, I’m no saint, Camille—I knew where the money came from, and I took it, to make a more comfortable life for us. Once you’re pregnant for the first time you don’t mind what happens, you just think about your children.”
“So you don’t really care—about the King, say?”
“Yes, I do care, but I’ve had to be very accommodating this past year, very tolerant, very easy. Or he would have divorced me, I think.”
“No. He would never have done that. He’s an old-fashioned sort of person.”
“Yes, but—we see this all along—his passions take a greater hold on him than his habits do. It would have depended—if Lucile had been as compliant as she pretends to be. But she would never leave you.” She turned to ring the bell for a servant. “When he brought out the letter—so angry—I wondered what I had done. I thought it was one of those anonymous letters, and that someone had slandered me.”
“Libeled you,” Camille said automatically.
Marie came from the kitchen, wrapped in her large linen apron, her face drawn. “Catherine has taken the child upstairs to Madame Gely,” she said, without being asked.
“Marie, bring me a bottle of something from the cellar. I don’t know—Camille, what would you like? Anything, Marie.” She sighed. “Servants grow familiar. I wish, I do wish that I had talked to you before.”
“I think you were afraid to admit that we had a common predicament.”
“Oh, that you are in love with my husband—I’ve known that for years. Don’t look so stunned—be truthful now, if you had to describe your own feelings towards him, what else could you say? But I don’t think I’m in love, not anymore. Today has been the day I met someone I’ve been waiting to meet for a very long time. I’ve been thinking—I’m not such a feeble creature that I needed to marry that kind of man. But what does it matter now?”
Danton stood in front of them. He held his hat in his hand, and his caped greatcoat over his arm. He had shaved; he wore a black coat, and a very plain white muslin cravat.
“Shall I come with you?” Camille said.
“God, no. Wait here.”
He marched out. Again, “What will he do?” Gabrielle whispered. Conspiracy seemed to have set in between them. She sat drinking deeply, her glass cupped in her palm, her face still and thoughtful; after five minutes had passed, she reached out and took Camille’s hand in hers.
He said, “We must suppose, we must hope it is Defermon who has the letter. We must suppose he has been trembling over it for a month, waiting for Louis’s trial to begin. He’ll have thought, ‘If I take this letter seriously, if I read it out in the Convention, the Mountain will fall on me. And Deputy Lacroix is fast friends with Danton since they were in Belgium, and Lacroix has influence with the Plain.’ Defermon will see that the only people he will please are Brissot and Roland and their cronies. And he will say, Danton comes here boldly, not like a guilty man, and he says it is a forgery, a trick—Defermon will want to believe him. We are supposed to be such thugs, that if he upsets
