“Oh, this is ludicrous,” Robespierre said, and began to laugh a little anyway.
“What were you saying about Marat? He sent you a note?”
“Yes, he is ill, too, he can’t leave his house. Did you hear about that girl, Anne Theroigne?”
“What’s she done now?”
“She was making a speech in the Tuileries gardens, and a group of women attacked her—rough women from the public gallery. She’s attached herself to Brissot and his faction, for some reason only she understands—I can’t believe Brissot is delighted. She found the wrong audience—I don’t know, but perhaps they thought she was some woman of fashion intruding on their patch. Marat was passing by, it seems.”
“So he joined in?”
“He rescued her. Charged in, told the women to desist—rare chivalry, for the doctor, wasn’t it? He believes they might have killed her.”
“I wish they had,” Camille said. “Excuse me for a moment from the necessity to do invalid talk, I can’t be temperate about this matter. I will never forgive the bitch for what she did on August 10.”
“Oh well, Louis Suleau—of course, we had known him for all those years, but he ended up on the wrong side, didn’t he?” Robespierre dropped his head back against the pillows. “And then, so did she.”
“That is a callous thing to say.”
“It might happen to us. I mean, if we follow our judgements, our consciences, and if they lead us in certain directions, we may have to suffer for it. Brissot—after all—may be in good faith.”
“But I have just written this pamphlet—Brissot is a conspirator against the Republic—”
“So you have convinced yourself. So you’ll convince the Jacobins tonight. Certainly in power his people have been mistaken, stupid, criminally negligent, and we have to erase them from political life.”
“But Max, you wanted them killed in September. You tried to set it up.”
“I thought it was best to be rid of them before they did anymore damage. I thought of the lives that might be saved … .” He moved his legs, and some of the papers slithered to the floor. “It was a considered judgement. And Danton,” he smiled slightly, “has been wary of me since then. He thinks I am an unpredictable beast, with the key to my own cage.”
“And yet you say Brissot may be in good faith.”
“Camille, we’re judging by results, not intentions. Quite possibly he isn’t guilty of what you’ll charge him with tonight, but I’ll let you do it. I want them out of the Convention—but myself, I’d be happy if it went no further. The damage is done, we can’t recall the past by persecuting them. But the people won’t see things like that. They can’t be expected to.”
“You would save them. If you could.”
“No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won’t dispute it.”
Camille had walked away, turning his back, running his hand along the grain of the shelves that Maurice Duplay had built. Above them on the wall was a curious emblem he had carved: a great and splendid eagle with outstretched claws, like an eagle of the Romans.
“Such heroism,” Camille said slowly, “and in a nightshirt too. Policy is the servant of reason. It is a sort of blasphemy to make human reason contradict itself and advise in the name of policy what it forbids in the name of morality.”
“You say that,” Robespierre said tiredly, “yet you are corrupted.”
“What, by money?”
“No. There are more ways than that of being corrupted. You can be corrupted by friendship. Your attachments are too … too vehement. Your hatreds are too sudden, too strong.”
“You mean Mirabeau, don’t you? You’ll never let that topic go. I know he used me, and he used me to propagate sentiments in which—it turned out—he didn’t believe. But now you—it turns out—are just the same. You don’t believe a word of what you ‘let’ me say. I find this hard to accept.”
“In a way,” Robespierre said patiently, “if we want to rise above being like Suleau, and the girl, we have to avoid the snares of what we personally believe, hope for—and see ourselves just as instruments of a destiny that has been worked out already. You know, there would have been a Revolution, even if we had never been born.”
“I don’t think I believe that,” Camille said. “I think it injures my place in the universe to believe that.” He started picking up the papers from the floor. “If you really want to annoy Eleonore, I mean Comelia,” he said, “you can keep throwing them on the floor and asking for them again, like the baby does. Lolotte gets out of the way when she sees that trick starting.”
“Thank you, I’ll try.” A spasm of coughing.
“Has Saint-Just been to see you?”
“No. He has no patience with illness.”
Under Robespierre’s eyes there were deep purple stains against the skin. Camille remembered his sister, in the months before her death. He pushed the thought aside; refused to have it. “It’s all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you’re an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don’t you take a holiday?”
“Well, still, our individual fate is some concern of ours. If I took a holiday, Brissot and Roland and Vergniaud would start planning to cut off my head.”
“You said you wouldn’t mind. You’d sort of take it in your stride.”
