something, stretches out a hand for him. He tucks the covers round her. “Go back to sleep,” he whispers. Danton will not use the speech. He will hold the pages crumpled in his fist, and make it up as he goes along … . Still, he is not doing this because he has to, but to keep in practice, and to pass the time till dawn.
The cold is like knives against his thin dark skin. He moves quietly, feeling his way across the room, splashing icy water onto his face. If he makes any noise Jeanette will be up to light a fire and to tell him he has a weak chest—which he hasn’t—and to ply him with food he can’t eat. First of all he writes a letter home … “Your son, the regicide.” He reaches for fresh sheets of paper, for the speech. Lolotte’s cat dabs a tentative paw at his pen, its eyes suspicious; he runs a hand over its arched back, watching a reluctant dawn creep up over the eastern suburbs. His candle gutters in a strong draught, and he flicks his head around, taut with apprehension; he is alone, with the black outlines of the furniture and the engravings on the walls. As gently as the cat, his cold fingers brush the barrel of the small pistol in the drawer of his desk. Freezing rain hisses into the mud of the streets.
Seven-thirty a. m.: crouching by a stove in a small room, a priest, and Louis the Last. “There dwells on high an incorruptible judge … you can hear the National Guard beginning to assemble … . What have I done to my cousin Orleans, that he should persecute me in this way? … I can endure everything … these people see daggers and poisons everywhere, they fear I shall destroy myself … . I am occupied, wait for me a few moments … give me your last benediction, and pray that it may please God to support me to the end … . Clery, my valet, give him my watch and my clothes … .”
Ten-thirty a. m. The coat is snatched away from Sanson’s assistants, and cut up into snippets. Hot pies and gingerbread are for sale in the Place de la Revolution. People are swarming around the scaffold, soaking rags in the spilled blood.
Lepelletier, the martyr, lies in state.
Louis, the King, is quicklimed.
By the end of the first week of February, France is at war with England, Holland and Spain. The National Convention has promised armed support to any people who wish to rise against oppression: war to the chateaux, peace to the cottages. Cambon, of the Finance Committee: “The further we penetrate enemy territory, the more ruinously expensive the war becomes.”
At home there is a food shortage, soaring inflation. In Paris the Commune battles with the Girondist ministers and tries to placate the militants of the Sections; it controls bread prices at three sous, and Minister Roland never ceases to complain about such fecklessness with public money. In the Convention the Mountain is still no more than a vociferous minority.
Jacques Roux, sansculotte, at the Bar of the Convention: “There must be bread, for where there is no more bread there is no more law, no more freedom and no more republic.”
Riots in Lyon, in Orleans, Versailles, Rambouillet, Etampes, in Vendome, in Courville and here, in the city itself.
Dutard, an employee of the Ministry of the Interior, on the Gironde: “They wish to establish an aristocracy of the rich, of merchants and of men of property … . If I had the choice I should prefer the old regime; the nobles and the priests had some virtues, and these men have none. What do the Jacobins say? It is necessary to put a check on these greedy and depraved men; under the old regime the nobles and the priests made a barrier that they could not pass. But under the new regime there is no limit to their ambitions; they would starve the people. It is necessary to put some barrier in their way, and the only thing to do is to call out the mob.”
Camille Desmoulins, on the Minister Roland: “The people are to you just the necessary means of insurrection; having served to effect a revolution, they are to return to the dust and be forgotten; they are to allow themselves to be led by those who are wiser than they, and who are willing to take the trouble of governing them. Your whole conduct is marked out on these criminal principles.”
Robespierre, on the Gironde: “They think they’re the gentlemen, the proper beneficiaries of the Revolution. We’re just the riff-raff.”
February 10, quite early in the morning, Louise Gely took Antoine to his Uncle Victor’s house. The two babies—the Desmoulins’s child, and Francois-Georges, who has just had his first birthday—will be shuttled about by their wet nurse, who will try, amid the day’s predicted events, to see that they do not get too hungry.
Louise sprinted back to the Cour du Commerce, and found Angelique in possession of the ground. Her mother said, “Mind, young lady, if it’s going to be tonight, we don’t want you under our feet.”
Angelique said to her, “Don’t sulk, child, it makes you plain.”
Next, Lucile Desmoulins arrived. Nothing would make her plain, Louise thought spitefully. Lucile wore a black wool skirt, an elegant waistcoat; her hair was tied up with a tricolor ribbon. “God above,” she said, throwing herself into a chair, stretching out her legs to admire the toes of her riding boots. “If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s an obstetric drama.”
“I suppose you’d pay somebody to have them for you if you could, my sweet,” Angelique said.
“I certainly would,” Lucile said. “I really think there ought to be some better way of managing about it.”
The women seemed to find things for Louise to do, shutting her out of the conversation. She heard Gabrielle say she was “very sweet, very helpful.” Her cheeks burned. They shouldn’t discuss her.
Then, when Lucile came to go, she turned to Mme. Gely: “Please, if you need me at all, you know I can be here in half a minute.” Lucile’s dark eyes were enormous. “To me, Gabrielle doesn’t seem herself. She says she is afraid. She wishes Georges-Jacques were here.”
“That can’t be helped,” Mme. Gely said harshly. “He has his business in Belgium, it seems, which cannot wait.”
“Stilt—send for me,” Lucile said.
Mme. Gely gave her a curt nod. In her eyes, Gabrielle was a good, pious girl who’d been badly wronged; Lucile was little better than a prostitute.
Gabrielle said she’d like to rest. Louise trailed back upstairs, to the cramped dowdiness of her parents’ apartment. Mid-afternoon, and dusk already. She sat and thought about Claude Dupin. If Lucile knew how serious he was about her—how very soon she might be a wife—would she dare to treat her as a little ninny?
Her mother had smiled, indulgently; but secretly, she was triumphant. Such a good catch! After your next birthday, she said, then we’ll begin to talk about it. Fifteen is too young. Only the aristocracy get married at fifteen.
Claude Dupin himself was only twenty-four, but he was (already, her father said) the secretary-general of the
