Danton he will fear for his life. You heard the message that Fabre took—’It is Danton in person who requires to see him.’ Defermon will be waiting for him, thinking, ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ He will begin to feel guilty, simply because the letter has been delivered to him. Georges-Jacques will—overbear him.”
Darkness fell. They sat still, their fingers plaited together. She thought of her husband, overbearing people. Every day since .’89, his corpulence flung into the breach. She ran her fingertips along the edges of Camille’s carefully kept nails. She could feel his pulse racing, like a small animal’s.
“Georges is not frightened anymore.”
“Yes, but I come from the meeker portion of humanity.”
“Meek? Stop acting, Camille. You’re as meek as a serpent.”
He smiled and turned his head away. “I used to think,” he said, “that he wasn’t a very complicated person. But he is—very complicated, very subtle, in himself. It’s only his wants that are simple. Power, money, land.”
“Women,” Gabrielle said.
“Why did you say, just now, that he was destroying himself?”
“I’m not sure now what I meant. But at the time—when he was so angry and sneering and insulting—I saw it very clearly. This view he has of himself—he thinks, people may call me corrupt, but I’m just playing the system, I’m still my own man, nothing touches me. But it doesn’t work like that. He’s forgotten what he wanted. The means have become the end. He doesn’t see it, but he’s corrupt all through.” She shivered, swirled her glass with the last half-inch of wine settling red and sticky. “Oh,” she said, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Danton came home. Catherine walked in before him, touching a spill to tall wax candles in their branched silver sticks. Pools of sweet yellow light washed through the room. His great shadow stretched itself across the wall. He sank to one knee at the hearth and produced papers from his pocket.
“See?” he said. “Bluff. You were right. It was almost an anticlimax.”
“After the scene you made here,” Camille said, “I shall find the Last Judgement an anticlimax.”
“The timing was just right. The letter was with Defermon, as you said. The letter in my handwriting wasn’t enclosed. Nor the receipts. There was just this.” He held the papers to the blaze. “Just a tissue of denunciations from de Molleville. Everything made to sound as sinister as it possibly could be, claims that documents exist—but no actual evidence. I raged about, I said to Defermon, ‘So, you have letters from
Camille watched the flames eat the pages. He didn’t, he thought, allow me to read it; what else has de Molleville been saying? Gabrielle thinks we know everything, but you’ve got to be good to keep up with Georges- Jacques. “Who was the courier?”
“The worm did not know. It was no one the concierge recognized.”
“It would not have been so easy with Vergniaud, you know. It might not have been possible at all. And these documents—perhaps they do exist somewhere. Perhaps they are still here in Paris.”
“Well, whatever,” Danton said. “There’s not much I can do about that. But I tell you one thing—when de Molleville signed that pathetic letter of his, he signed Louis’s death warrant. I’ll not lift a finger for Capet now.”
Gabrielle dropped her head. “You lost,” her husband said to her. He touched her lightly on the back of the neck. “Go and rest,” he said. “You need to lie flat. Camille and I will drink another bottle. Today has wasted my time and effort.”
And tomorrow everyone will behave as if nothing has happened. But Danton moved restlessly about the room. He had not quite recovered his color, since the shock of opening the letter. Only now self-control seemed to be coming back, seeping to muscles and nerves. He would never be so sure of it again. He was going downhill now. He knew it.
CHAPTER 5
The king’s trial is over. The city gates have been closed. One cannot reign innocently, the Convention has decided. Merely to have been born condemns Louis to die? “That is the logic of the situation,” Saint-Just says calmly.
Five a.m. At a house in the Place Vendome, all the lights are burning. They have sent for surgeons, the best the republic can offer; they have sent, too, for the artist David, so that he can see what a martyr looks like, so that he can watch moment by moment as death effaces the features and immortality sets them into a better mold. This is the republic’s first martyr, who now hears a babble of voices, some near, half-familiar, some fading and far away; whose senses fade, moment by moment, while his funeral is planned in the next room. He is Michel Lepelletier, once a nobleman, now a deputy. There is nothing to be done for him: not in this world, at any rate.
David takes out his pencils. Lepelletier is an ugly man, that cannot be helped. The features are softening already; an arm lies slack and naked, like the arm of Christ carried to the tomb. The clothes, cut from his body, are stiff and black with blood. David handles the shirt, mentally re-clothes the moribund figure on the bed.
A few hours before, Lepelletier had been dining out, at the Restaurant Feurier in the Jardin de l’Egalite (as we call the Palais-Royal these days). A man approached him—a stranger, but quite friendly—perhaps to congratulate him on his republican firmness in voting for Capet’s death. Affable, but weary after the many all-night sittings, the deputy leaned back in his chair; the stranger produced from his coat a butcher’s knife, and hacked into the deputy’s torso, on the right-hand side below the ribs.
Lepelletier is carried to his brother’s house, intestines torn, blood pumping over his attendants, possessed of a wound that you could put your fist into. “I am cold,” he whispers. “I am cold.” They heap covers on him. He whispers, “I am cold.”
Five a. m.: Robespierre is asleep in his room on the rue Saint-Honore. His door is locked and double-bolted. Brount lies outside, his jaws gaping a little, his great dreaming paws twitching in pursuit of better days.
Five a. m.: Camille Desmoulins slides out of bed wide awake, as he used to do years before at Louis-le-Grand. Danton wants a speech, to try to force the resignation of Roland from the ministry. Lolotte turns, mutters
