A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in.

That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions. At this stage people call it the Danton Committee, wondering what he is doing in that green sanctum, green wallpaper, his elbows propped on the great oval table covered by a green cloth. He finds the color negative, disturbing. A crystal chandelier tinkles above his head; the mirrored walls reflect his bull neck and scarred face. Sometimes he looks out of the windows, over the gardens. In the Place Louis XV, now the Place de la Revolution, the guillotine is at work. From this room, as he negotiates for peace, he imagines he can hear Sanson making a living; hear the creak of the machine’s moving parts, the clump of the blade. Army officers, for the moment; at least they should know how to die.

In April there were seven executions; undramatically, the numbers will increase. The Section committees will be very ready to yelp for arrests, very quick with their accusations that such a one is a lukewarm patriot, aristo sympathizer, black marketeer or priest. House searches, food issue, recruiting, passports, denunciations: hard to know where the Section committees end and the good offices of the Commune begin. There was a day when the Palais-Royal was cordoned off by the police, and all the girls were herded together. Their identity cards were taken from them; for an hour or so, they stood barracking their captors in small flocks, their faces hard and hopeless under their paint; then the cards were handed back, they were told to go where they liked. The little Terror of Pierre Chaumette.

From here he has to watch the Austrians and the Prussians, the English and the Swedes; the Russians and the Turks and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; Lyon, Marseille, the Vendee and the public gallery; Marat at the Jacobin Club and Hebert at the Cordeliers; the Commune and the Section committees and the Tribunal and the press. Sometimes he sits and thinks of his dead wife. He cannot imagine the summer without her. He is very tired. He begins to stay away from the Jacobins and the evening meetings of the Committee. Danton is letting his reputation slide, some people say: he is letting go. Other people say he wouldn’t dare. Sometimes Robespierre comes to see him, panicked and asthmatical, twitching at the sleeves and collars of his very correct clothes. Robespierre is turning into a caricature of himself, Lucile remarks. When Danton is not at home, with little Louise skirting around him, he is with the Desmoulins, living with them practically, as Camille once lived with him.

His pursuit of Lucile is a formality now, a habit. He begins to see how different she is from the earnest, busy, simple women he requires for his domestic comfort. After a day poring over her Rousseau she would announce a scheme for a bucolic retirement from the capital, and drive into the country with her infant, screaming at being separated from his grandmother; there she would formulate plans for his education. Her hair streaming down her back and a large straw hat on her head, she would do a little dilettante weeding in the herb beds, by way of getting close to nature; she would read poetry in the afternoon, in a garden swing under an apple tree, and go to bed at nine o’clock.

Two days pass, and the bawling of Robespierre’s godchild would be driving her out of her mind; scattering orders about the sending after of fresh eggs and salad, she would charge back to the rue des Cordeliers, worrying all the way about missing her music lessons and whether her husband has left her. You look a complete wreck, she would say to him crossly; what have you been eating, whoever have you been sleeping with? Then for a week it will be parties and staying up all night; the baby departs to grandmother, nurse scuttling after.

In a different kind of mood, she takes up her station early, on the blue chaise-longue; she is wrapped so deeply in daydreams that no one dares to interrupt her, no one dares to say a word. One day she stirs from her reverie and says, do you know, Georges-Jacques, I sometimes think I may have fantasized the Revolution completely—it seems too unlikely to be true. And Camille—what if he is something I have simply fabricated, just a phantom I have called up out of the depth of my nature, a ghostly second self who works out my discontents?

He thinks of this, and then of his own creations: two dead children, and a woman killed—he believes—by unkindness; his plans for peace aborted, and now the Tribunal.

The Tribunal sits at the Palais de Justice, in a hall adjoining the prison of the Conciergerie: a gothic hall, marble-flagged. Its president, Montane, is a moderate man, but when necessary he will be replaced. Come next autumn, we will have the spectacle of Vice President Dumas, a red-faced, red-haired man, who is sometimes assisted to his place in an alcoholic daze. He presides with two loaded pistols on the table before him, and his apartment in the rue de Seine is like a fortress.

The Tribunal has a pool of jurors, proven patriots, chosen by the Convention. Souberbielle, Robespierre’s doctor, is one of them; he rushes distractedly between the courtroom, his hospital and his most important private patient. Maurice Duplay is also a juror. He dislikes the work and never talks about it at home. Another, Citizen Renaudin, is a violin maker by profession and responsible for a sudden flare-up of violence at the Jacobins one evening, one of the causeless, chilling incidents that are always happening these days; standing up to oppose Citizen Desmoulins, he despairs of logic, advances on him and knocks him clear across the room. Pounced on by the ushers, dragged out by brute force, his voice is heard even over the indignant bawling of the public galleries: “Next time I’ll kill you, next time I’ll kill you.”

The Public Prosecutor is Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, a quick, dark man, who takes up moral stances: not such a showy patriot as his cousin, but far more hardworking.

The Tribunal often acquits: in these early days, at least. Take Marat, for instance; he is indicted by the Gironde, Citizen Fouquier is perfunctory, the courtroom is packed with Maratists from the streets. The Tribunal throws the case out: a singing, chanting mob carries the accused shoulder-high to the Convention, through the streets and to the Jacobin Club, where they enthrone the grinning little demagogue in the president’s chair.

In May, the National Convention moves from the Riding School to the former theater of the Tuileries, which is refurbished for it. Entertain no notion of pink, dimpling Cupids, the crimson curve of boxes, powder and perfume, the rustle of silk. Think of this scenery: straight lines and right angles, plaster statues with plaster crowns; of plaster laurel and plaster oak. A square tribune for the speaker; behind it, hung almost horizontal, three immense tricolor flags; beside it, memento mori, the bust of Lepelletier. The deputies take their seats in a tiered semi-circle; they are without desks or tables, so that they have nowhere to write. The president has his handbell, his inkstand, his folio book; much they avail him, when three thousand insurrectionists pour from the Faubourgs and mill about on the floor below him. Sunlight slides narrowly through the deep windows; on winter afternoons, faces loom, indistinct, from hostile benches. When the lamps are lit, the effect is ghastly; they deliberate in catacombs, and accusation drips from unseen mouths. In a greater dimness, the public galleries barrack and bay.

In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: “I’ll slaughter you!” “First,” says the deputy, “have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.” And one day a Brissotin stumbles, mounting the nine awkward steps to the tribune: “It’s like mounting the scaffold,” he complains. Delighted, the Left yells at him: make use of the rehearsal. A weary deputy puts his hand to his head, sees Robespierre watching him and withdraws it hurriedly: “No, no,” he says, “he will suppose I am thinking of something.”

As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or