A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

What would you mean, what would I think?”

“If you were an impartial observer.”

“How can I be that?” Everybody knows you, he thought. “In my opinion,” he said, “you’d do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.”

“Well, how gratifying,” Camille said. “A neat, complete lecture. Maitre Vinot couldn’t have delivered it better. Soon you’ll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.”

“I’m right, though.”

“There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who can’t afford to pay for them.”

“Yes, but that’s a social problem, you’re not responsible for that state of affairs.”

“You ought to help people.”

“Ought you?”

“Yes—at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose—yes.”

“At your own expense?”

“You’re not allowed to do it at anyone else’s.”

D’Anton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. “You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.”

“A living? It’s not a living, it’s pillage, it’s loot, and you know it. Really, Maitre d’Anton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.”

“This revolution—will it be a living?”

“We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.”

“Is that usual?”

“Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.”

“To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.”

“He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, d’Anton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things,” he said, “because I think I may die at any time.”

“Where is your client?”

“At the Chatelet.”

“You do know you’re going the wrong way?”

Maitre Desmoulins looked at him as if he had said something foolish. “I hadn’t thought, you see, to get there by any particular route.” He hesitated. “D’Anton, why are you wasting time in this footling dialogue? Why aren’t you out and about, making a name for yourself?”

“Perhaps I need a holiday from the system,” d’Anton said. His colleague’s eyes, which were black and luminous, held the timidity of natural victims, the fatal exhaustion of easy prey. He leaned forward. “Camille, what has put you into this terrible state?”

Camille Desmoulins’s eyes were set farther apart than is usual, and what d’Anton had taken for a revelation of character was in fact a quirk of anatomy. But it was many years before he noticed this.

And this continued: one of those late-night conversations, with long pauses.

“After all,” d’Anton said, “what is it?” After dark, and drink, he is often more disaffected. “Spending your life dancing attendance on the whims and caprices of some bloody fool like Vinot.”

“Your Life Plan goes further, then?”

“You have to get beyond all that, whatever you’re doing you have to get to the top.”

“I do have some ambitions of my own,” Camille said. “You know I went to this school where we were always freezing cold and the food was disgusting? It’s sort of become part of me, if I’m cold I just accept it, cold’s natural, and from day to day I hardly think of eating. But of course, if I do ever get warm, or someone feeds me well, I’m pathetically grateful, and I think, well, you know, this would be nice—to do it on a grand scale, to have great roaring fires and to go out to dinner every night. Of course, it’s only in my weaker moods I think this. Oh, and you know—to wake up every morning beside someone you like. Not clutching your head all the time and crying, my God, what happened last night, how did I get into this?”

“It hardly seems much to want,” Georges-Jacques said.

“But when you finally achieve something, a disgust for it begins. At least, that’s the received wisdom. I’ve never achieved anything, so I can’t say.”

“You ought to sort yourself out, Camille.”

“My father wanted me home as soon as I qualified, he wanted me to go into his practice. Then again, he didn’t … . They’ve arranged for me to marry my cousin, it’s all been fixed up for years. We all marry our cousins, so the family money interbreeds.”

“And you don’t want to?”

“Oh, I don’t mind. It doesn’t really matter who you marry.”