Louise said, “Tell me what has happened.”
Only then did the woman seem to realize that she had seen Louise before. “From upstairs?” she said. “Didn’t you know? Five o’clock. That poor lady, she was always good to me. Jesus grant her rest.”
“The baby?” Louise said. She had gone ice-cold. “Because I said I would take care of it …”
“A little boy. You can’t be sure, but I don’t think we’ll have him long. My friend was to take him, who lives by me. Mme. Charpentier says that will be all right.”
“Whatever,” Louise said. “If the arrangements were made. Where is Francois-Georges?”
“With Mme. Desmoulins.”
“I’ll go and get him.”
“He’s all right for an hour or two, I should leave him—”
Oh God, Louise thought. I made promises. She saw in a minute that the babies were not moral bonds, but physical beings, with fragile, impatient demands she could not fulfill.
“Mme. Danton’s husband will be coming home,” the woman said. “He will say what should be done and who should go where. You don’t need to worry your little head.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Louise said. “Madame said I was to look after them. Promises have to be kept.”
It took time for the message to get through. It was five days later, February 16, when Georges-Jacques turned up at home. His wife was buried, but there had not been time to tidy her away; and besides, they had waited on his wishes, as if they knew not to preempt him, as if they could predict the violence of his anger and guilt and grief.
Her dresses hung limp in a closet, like victims of torture. Under the old regime, women had been burned alive, and men broken on the wheel; had they suffered more than she had? He didn’t know. No one would tell him. No one wanted him to have any details. In this death house, drawers and chests exhaled a light flower scent. Cupboards were in order. She had kept an inventory of the china, he found. Two days before her death, she’d dropped a cup. At Sevres just now they were designing a new demitasse. As you sip your mocha you may admire the dripping head of Capet—scattering golden drops of blood, and held in Sanson’s golden hand.
The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half-finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked.
And this is it.
CHAPTER 6
The baby was still alive, but he didn’t want to see it. He made no comment on the arrangements that had been made. Letters of condolence lay heaped on his desk. As he opened them, he thought, each of these writers is a decent hypocrite: each of them knows what I did to her. They write as if they did not. They write to bring themselves to my attention, to make their names stick in my mind.
Robespierre’s letter was long and emotional. It would slide from the personal to the political—this being Max —and then—this being Max—it would slide back. I am more than ever your friend, it said, and I will be your friend till death. “From this moment you and I are one …” it said. Even in his present condition, Danton thought it an overstatement of the case. He wondered at its distraught tone.
Camille did not write him a letter. He sat without speaking, his head bowed, and let Danton talk about the past, and shed tears, and rant on at him for one dereliction or another. He did not know why he was in the line of fire, why his whole career and character were suddenly under review, but it seemed to do Danton good to shout at him. Danton grew exhausted by the business. He slept at last. He’d wondered if sleep would ever be possible again. Gabrielle seemed to haunt the red-walled study, haunt the octagonal dining room where his clerks had once toiled; she haunted the alcove in the bedroom where they had lain in their separate beds, the distance widening between them month by month.
He turned up her journal, kept sporadically in a bold hand. He read each page, and the mechanics of his past were laid bare for him. Unwilling that anyone else should see the book, he burned it, putting it on the fire a leaf at a time, watching it curl and char. Louise sat in a corner of the apartment, her eyes puffy and her features coarsened and blurred. He did not send her away; he hardly seemed to notice her. On March 3 he left for Belgium again.
March was near-disaster. In Holland the depleted armies crashed to defeat. In the Vendee insurrection became civil war. In Paris mobs looted shops and smashed Girondin printing presses. Hebert demanded the heads of all the ministers, all the generals.
On March 8 Danton mounted the tribune of the Convention. The patriots never forgot the shock of his sudden appearance, nor his face, harrowed by sleepless nights and the exhaustion of traveling, pallid with strain and suffering. Complex griefs caught sometimes at his voice, as he spoke of treason and humiliation; once he stopped and looked at his audience, self-conscious for a moment, and touched the scar on his cheek. With the armies, he has seen malice, incompetence, negligence. Reinforcements must be massive and immediate. The rich of France must pay for the liberation of Europe. A new tax must be voted today and collected tomorrow. To deal with conspirators against the Republic there must be a new court, a Revolutionary Tribunal: from that, no right of appeal.
From the body of the hall someone called “Who killed the prisoners?” The Convention erupted: chants of
A voice from the Gironde: “You talk like a king.”
He threw up his chin. “You talk like a coward.”
He had spoken for almost four hours. Outside a mob was gathering, chanting his name. The deputies stood in their massed ranks and applauded. Even Roland, even Brissot were on their feet; they wanted to escape. Beside
