A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“Yes, but there are things I want to do first. And it wouldn’t be a very pleasant vacation, thinking about it, would it?”

“Saints don’t take holidays,” Camille said. “And I prefer to think that although we are instruments of destiny, no one else will do, because we are like saints, agents of a divine purpose, and filled with the grace of God.”

Charlotte was on her way out too. She was getting worse than she deserved, he thought. They stood on the rue Honore and tears spilled out of her eyes and down her pert, feline face. “He wouldn’t treat me like this if he knew how I felt,” she said. “Those monstrous women are turning him into something that none of us will recognize. They make him smug, they make him think about himself all the time, how wonderful he is. Yes, he is wonderful, but he doesn’t need telling. Oh, he has no common sense, he has no sense of proportion.

He took her back to the rue des Cordeliers. Annette was there. She looked Charlotte over very carefully, and listened to her problems. She always looked, these days, like a person who could give advice but never did.

Everyone was coming that evening to sit in reserved places in the gallery at the Jacobins. “It will be a triumph,” Lolotte said. As the afternoon wore on, panic began to fight inside him like cats in a sack.

What kind of fear is it? He can take any number of fights with violin makers: that isn’t a problem. What he hates is that creeping sense of the big occasion; the hour approaching, the minutes ticking away; that gathering up of papers and conspicuous walk to the tribune, with a perceptible swell and rustle of animosity detectable as soon as he leaves his place. Claude had said, “You are the Establishment now”; but that is not quite true. Most of the deputies of the Center and Right think he should not be a member of the Convention, that his extreme views and his advocacy of violence should exclude him; when he gets up to speak they shout, “Lanteme Attorney” and “septembriseur.” Some days this gives him a jaunty feeling, feeds his arrogance; other days it makes him feel sick and cold. How could you know in advance which sort of day it was going to be?

The day the Gironde brought in their indictment against Marat—that had been one of the bad ones. They had packed the benches with their supporters; when you looked up at the Mountain, it was surprising how many people had stayed away. Who will speak up for Marat, mad and poisonous and repellent? He will. And they must have expected it, for the noise was orchestrated; we will put Marat on trial, they yelled, and you with him. Much more, in the usual vein: blood drinker. Get down from the tribune, they yell, before we drag you down; four years of revolution, and he is as much under threat as he ever was at the Palais-Royal, when the police closed in.

He had stood his ground for as long as he could, but the president was helpless, indicated by a gesture of his hands that there was nothing to be done. What the deputies felt for Marat was an extremity of loathing and dread, and they had transferred those feelings to him, and he was aware—one must always be aware—that the deputies do not attend sittings unarmed. Danton would have faced them out, he would have dominated them, forced their taunts back down their throats; but he did not have those abilities. He stopped trying to speak, contented himself with one long glance over the howling benches: nodded to the president, pushed back his hair, said to himself, “Well, Dr. Marat, first blood to them.”

When he walked shakily back to the Mountain’s benches, Danton was not there, Robespierre was not there; they wanted no involvement in this matter. Francois Robert, who was afraid of Marat and detested him, looked away. Fabre glanced towards him, raised one eyebrow, bit his lip. Antoine Saint-Just gave him a half-smile. “That cost you an effort, didn’t it?” Camille had said fiercely. He’d wished desperately to be outside, to breathe less hostile air, but if he had walked out at once, the Right would have added that to their list of triumphs: not only did we silence Marat’s chief supporter, but we also drove him out of our hall.

After an interval, he was able to pick his way out, into the gardens of the Tuileries. Four years in stale and airless rooms; four years of contention and fright. Georges-Jacques thinks the Revolution is something to make money out of, but now the Revolution is exacting its own price. Most of his colleagues have taken to alcohol, some to opium; some of them have developed a repertoire of strange and sudden illnesses, others have a habit of bursting into unmanly tears in the middle of the day’s business. Marat is an insomniac; his cousin Fouquier, the Public Prosecutor, has confided in him that he is harassed every night by dreams of dead people trailing him in the street. He is, by the general standard, coping quite well; but he is not equipped for an upset like today’s.

He had become aware, at this point, that two men were following him. Making his decision, he turned to face them. They were two of the soldiers who guarded the National Convention. They approached to within three paces. He put his hand to his heart. He was taken aback by the small flat tone of his own voice. “Of course, you’ve come to arrest me. I suppose the Convention has just decreed it.”

“No, Citizen, it’s not that. If we’d come to arrest you there’d be more than two of us. It is only that we saw you walking here by yourself and we know these are evil times and we were mindful of the way the good Citizen Lepelletier was struck down and died.”

“Yes, of course. Not that there would be much you could do. Unless you were minded to step heroically in the way?” he said hopefully.

“We might catch somebody,” the soldier said. “An assassin. We’re always on the lookout for these conspirators, you know, just as Citizen Robespierre tells us. Now—” He hesitated, turned to his colleague, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. “Oh yes—can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?”

“The grave,” Camille said. “The grave.”

“Only would you,” said the second soldier, “take your hand away from that pistol that you’ve got in your coat pocket? It’s making me nervous.”

That day—and that second of freakish despair—was not a day he wished to remember. Tonight at the Jacobins he will be—for the most part—among friends. Danton will be there, and so he will sit in his usual place beside him. Danton will be deliberately silent, impassive, knowing that one cannot talk or joke his nervousness away. When the time comes he will make his way slowly towards the tribune, because patriots will step out of their places to embrace him, and from the dark parts of the gallery where the sansculottes gather there will be applause and coarse shouts of encouragement. Then silence; and as he begins, thinking carefully ahead so that he can control any tendency to stutter, so that he can circumvent words and pluck them out and slot in others, he will be thinking, no wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now; when we are dead and a few years have passed they will grow tired of trying to hear us, they will say, what does it matter? We have elected our own place in the silences of history, with our weak lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed for something else.

COUR DU COMMERCE:

GELY: Have pity on us, Monsieur.

DANTON: Pity? What do you want pity for? Personally I’d have thought it was a stroke of good luck for