“Then you’d better go and give him your apologies, and tell him—in confidence—that he is right. Appeal to him to protect me from marauding committeemen—tell him I haven’t decided yet what I ought to do about Dumouriez. And tell him to drop anything he’s doing tonight and come and get drunk with me.”
“I’m not sure I ought to convey that message. It’s dissolute.”
“If you think that’s what people do for debauchery,” he said, “you’ve got a lot to learn.”
Next morning, Louise was up even earlier. Her mother came blundering out of her bedroom, fastening her wrap. “At this hour!” she said. She knew very well that Danton’s servants sleep, not in the apartment, but on the mezzanine floor. “You will be alone with him,” she said. “Anyway, how will you get in?”
Louise showed her the key in the palm of her hand.
She let herself in very quietly, opening and closing doors to the study, where Danton would be if he were up; but she doubted he would be. Camille was standing by the window: shirt, breeches, boots, hair not brushed. There were papers all over Danton’s desk, covered in someone else’s handwriting. “Good morning,” she said. “Are you drunk?”
She noticed what a split second it took for him to flare into aggression. “Do I look it?”
“No. Where is Citizen Danton?”
“I’ve done away with him. I’ve been busy dismembering him for the last three hours. Would you like to help me carry his remnants down to the concierge? Oh really, Louise! He’s in bed and asleep, where do you think he is?”
“And is he drunk?”
“Very. What is all this harping on intoxication?”
“He said that was what you were going to do. Get drunk.”
“Oh, I see. Were you shocked?”
“Very. What have you been writing?”
He drifted over to Danton’s desk, where he could sit down in the chair and look up full into her face. “A polemic.”
“I have been reading some of your work.”
“Good, isn’t it?”
“I think that it’s incredibly cruel and destructive.”
“If nice little girls like you thought well of it I wouldn’t be achieving much, would I?”
“I don’t think you can have kept your part of the bargain,” she said. “I don’t think you can have been very drunk, if you wrote all that.”
“I can write in any condition.”
“Perhaps that explains some of it.” She turned the pages over. She was conscious of his solemn black eyes fixed on her face. Around his neck there was a silver chain; what depended from it was hidden in the folds of his shirt. Did he perhaps wear a crucifix? Were things perhaps not as bad as they seemed? She wanted to touch him, very badly, feeling under the pious necessity of finding out; she recognized at once a point of crisis, what her confessor would call the very instant of temptation. He felt the direction of her gaze; he took from inside his shirt a chased-silver disc, a locket. Inside—without speaking, he showed her—was a fine curled strand of hair.
“Lucile’s?”
He nodded. She took the locket in the palm of her left hand; the fingers of her right hand brushed the skin at the base of his throat. It’s done—in a moment it’s done, finished with. She would like, at one level of her being, to cut her hand off. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll grow out of me.”
“You are incredibly vain.”
“Yes. There seems no reason why I should learn to be less so. But you, Citizeness, will have to learn to keep your hands to yourself.”
His tone was so scathing that she almost burst into tears. “Why are you being so nasty to me?”
“Because you opened the conversation by asking me if I were drunk, which is not considered polite even by today’s standards, and also because if someone trots out their forces at dawn you assume they have stomach for a fight. Get this very clear in your mind, Louise: if you think that you are in love with me, you had better re-think, and you had better fall out of love at lightning speed. I want no area of doubt here. What Danton is allowed to do to my wife, and what I am allowed to do to his, are two very different things.”
A silence. “Don’t bother to arrange your face,” Camille said. “You’ve arranged everything else.”
She began to shake. “What did he say? What did he tell you?”
“He’s infatuated with you.”
“He told you that? What did he say?”
“Why should I indulge you?”
“When did he say it? Last night?”
“This morning.”
“What words did he use?”
“Oh, I don’t know what words.”
“Words are your profession, aren’t they?” she shouted at him. “Of course you know what words.”
