“No, I must protest,” Fabre said. “Marat’s friends have signed it, though I confess myself amazed to learn that Marat has ninety-six friends. Danton has not signed it. Robespierre has not.”
“Camille Desmoulins has.”
“Oh, we have no control over Camille.”
“Robespierre and Danton will not sign it simply because it is Marat who has put it forward,” she said. “You are hopelessly divided. You think you can frighten us. But you will not throw us out of the Convention, you have not the numbers or force to do it.”
Fabre looked at them through his lorgnette. “Do you like my coat?” he asked. “It’s a new English cut.”
“You will never achieve anything and you don’t represent anybody. Danton and Robespierre are afraid that Hebert will steal their thunder, Hebert and Marat are afraid of Jacques Roux and the other agitators on the streets. You’re terrified of losing your popularity, of not being out in front of the Revolution anymore—that’s why you have given up any pretense at decent gentlemanly conduct. The Jacobins are ruled by their public gallery, and you play to them. But be warned—this cityful of ragged illiterates that you pander to is not France.”
“Your vehemence amazes me,” Fabre said.
“In the Convention there are decent men from all over the nation, and you Paris deputies won’t be able to browbeat them all. This Tribunal, this end to immunity, it doesn’t work for you alone. We have our plans for Marat.”
“I see,” Fabre said. “Of course, you know, in a sense all this was unnecessary. If only you’d been halfway civil to Danton, not made those unfortunate remarks about how you wouldn’t like to have sexual intercourse with him. He’s a good fellow, you know, always ready to do a deal, and he’s not in the least out for blood. It’s just that recently, with his personal misfortunes, he’s not so easygoing as he was.”
“We don’t want a deal,” she said, furious. “We don’t want to do a deal with the people who organized the massacre last September.”
“That’s very sad,” Fabre said deliberately. “Because up till now, you know, it’s been a business of compromises, more acceptable or less acceptable, and accommodation, and perhaps making yourself—I don’t deny it—a little bit of money on the side. But it’s turning awfully serious now.
“Not before time,” she said.
“Well,” he stood up, “shall I convey your compliments to anyone?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Do you see much of Citizen Brissot?”
“Citizen Brissot is running his own version of the Revolution,” she said, “and so is Vergniaud. They have their own supporters and their own friends, and it is monstrously stupid and unfair to lump us together with them.”
“I’m afraid it’s unavoidable really. I mean if you see each other, exchange information, vote the same way, however coincidentally—well, to outsiders it does seem that you are a sort of faction. That’s how it would seem to a jury.”
“On that basis, you would be judged with Marat,” Buzot said. “I think you’re a little premature, Citizen Fabre. You must have a case before you can have a trial.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Fabre muttered.
On the stairs he met Roland himself. He was on his way to draft a petition—his eighth or ninth—for an examination of the accounts of Danton’s ministry. He had a dilapidated air, and he smelled of infusions. He looked away from Fabre’s eyes; his own were lusterless and aggrieved. “Your Tribunal was a mistake,” he said without preliminary. “We are entering a time of terror.”
Brissot: reading, writing, scurrying from place to place, gathering his thoughts, scattering his good will; proposing a motion, addressing a committee, jotting down a note. Brissot with his cliques, his factions, his whippers-in and his putters- out; with his secretaries and messengers, his errand boys, his printers, his claque. Brissot with his generals, his ministers.
Who the devil is Brissot anyway? A pastry cook’s son.
Brissot: poet, businessman, adviser to George Washington.
Who are the Brissotins? A good question. You see, if you accuse people of a crime (for example, and especially, conspiracy) and refuse to sever their trials, then it will at once be seen that they are a group, that they have cohesion. Then if we want to say, you’re a Brissotin, you’re a Girondist—prove that you’re not. Prove that you have a right to be treated separately.
How many are there? Ten eminences: sixty or seventy non-entities. Take, for instance, Rabaut Saint- Etienne:
When the National Convention shall be purged of that kind of man, so that people shall ask what a Brissotin was, I will move that to preserve a perfect specimen of one this man’s skin be stuffed, and that the original may be kept entire at the Museum of Natural History; and for this purpose, I will oppose his being guillotined.
Brissot: his contributors and his orators, his minutes and his memoranda, his fixers and his dupes.
Brissot: his ways and his means and his means to an end, his circumstances, his ploys, his
I establish it as a fact that the Right wing of the Convention, and principally their leaders, are almost all partisans of royalty and accomplices of Dumouriez; that they are directed by the agents of Pitt, Orleans and Prussia; that they wanted to divide France into twenty or thirty federative republics, that no Republic might exist. I maintain that history does not furnish an example of a conspiracy so clearly proved, by so many weighty probabilities, than the conspiracy of Brissot against the French Republic.
Camille Desmoulins, a pamphlet: “A Secret History of the Revolution.”
CHAPTER 7
At the top of the Queen’s Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of
