A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

of his mind. When he was not writing, or engaged in a shouting match, the life seemed to drain out of him; he felt passive, a husk, a ghost. Strange fantasies possessed him; the language of public debate took a violent, unexpected turn.

“After Legendre,” he wrote, “the member of the National Convention who has the highest opinion of himself is Saint-Just. One can see by his bearing that he feels his head to be the cornerstone of the Revolution; he carries it as if it were the Holy Sacrament.”

Saint-Just looked down at the passage, which some helpful person had underscored in green ink. There was very little expression in his face; he did not sneer, as people do in novelettes. “Like the Holy Sacrament,” he says. “I will make him carry his like Saint Denis.”

“Oh that’s quite good,” Camille said, when it was relayed. ‘For Antoine, that’s quite witty. I wonder if he is going to be clever when he grows up?”

Soon he was rummaging through the bookshelves: “Lucile, where is Saint-Just’s disgusting poem, the epic poem in twenty books? There was a verse beginning, ‘If I were God.’ Let us see how it continued, I’m sure it will provide the occasion for mockery.”

Then suddenly he stopped, sat down or rather fell into a chair. “What am I doing? Saint-Just and I are supposed to be on the same side. We are Jacobins, we are republicans …”

“I’ll find it for you,” Lucile said quietly.

“Perhaps better not.”

For he had begun to see visions: visions of that saint, France’s patron, who had walked for several leagues with his severed head in his hands. He first saw Denis in the Place de Greve, picking his way over the cobbles. He was neatly truncated, there was no gore; but the head swinging almost casually from his left wrist was Camille’s own. He saw him again going stealthily into the Duplay house, for a private meeting with Robespierre; he saw him waiting outside the entrance to the Jacobin Club—a newly arrived patriot, modest and provincial, wanting an introduction to the great world.

After a day or two it came to him that the only thing to do was to take the initiative. It would be quite easy to kill Saint-Just. He could see him alone, any time, at a convenient place; then a pistol shot, or (not to advertise the incident) a knife. He could see the pain brimming in Saint-Just’s velvet eyes.

And then, he would need a Plot: Saint-Just’s conspiracy against the Republic, which he had detected with the instinct of the impeccable and tested patriot. I am the Revolution. Who would fail to believe that he had slaughtered Saint-Just in an outburst of patriotic rage? He was not known for containing his temper. To avoid awkward questions it would have to be a small knife, the kind you would hardly know that you were carrying.

Don’t be stupid, he said to himself. Saint-Just isn’t going to kill you, any more than you’re going to kill him. Or even less.

He attended the Committee of War, of which he was secretary, and from its rooms wrote a sensible and chatty letter home, asking his father not to mention Rose-Fleur so much in their correspondence, as Lucile was mad with jealousy.

But still, the fantasy had moved into his brain, it had taken up occupation, he could not evict it. He thought of the hole in Lepelletier’s side, the wound made by a butcher’s killing knife, the wound he took the whole night to die of. He would have to be quick; it would have to be one true, telling blow; Saint-Just was a good deal bigger and stronger than he was, and he would have just one chance. At the Jacobins, when he heard the young man’s sonorous voice, he would smile to himself. He would dream of his plan in the Convention, when Saint-Just was at the tribune, his left hand making brief chopping motions in the air.

July 13: “A person from Caen,” Danton said. “Petion and Barbaroux are believed to have been there these last weeks. It is a Girondist conspiracy. Let me assure you, it was not I who arranged it.”

Camille said, “I heard someone in the street, shouting assassination … I was afraid that I … in a moment of … no, nothing, never mind.”

Danton stared at him for a second. “Anyway,” he said, “this finishes the Gironde. Murderers and cowards. They sent a woman.”

There was a crowd in the narrow street, a near-silent and stolid mass, its eyes riveted in fascination on two brightly lit windows of Marat’s apartment. It was an hour after midnight, strangely light, the heat subtropical. Camille waved away the sansculotte who guarded the bottom of the iron-railed steps. The man did not move—not right away.

“Never seen you close up,” he said. His eyes measured Camille. “How’s Danton taking it?”

“He is shocked.”

“I’ll bet. And you’ll be telling me next he’s sorry.”

Camille was used to the crowd calling out his name. This was a different, more unpleasant, kind of familiarity.

“Some are saying that Danton and Robespierre have put him where he’ll be quiet,” the man said. “Then again, some are saying it’s the royalists, some are saying it’s Brissot.”

“I know you,” Camille said. “I’ve seen you running behind Hebert, haven’t I? What are you doing here?”

He knew: squabbling over the legacy already.

“Ah,” the man said, “Pere Duchesne has his interests. The People will need a new Friend. It won’t be any of you—”

“Jacques Roux, perhaps?”

“You with that filthy swine Dillon—”

Camille pushed past him. Legendre was already in the house, his tricolor sash knotted untidily about his blustering, bulging person: taking charge. The ground seemed to shiver beneath his feet, as if the women’s screams were still rattling the windows; but all was quiet now, except for some stifled sobbing from behind a closed door. You have not eaten much today, Camille said to himself; that is why the walls seem liquid, why the air is disturbed.

The assassin sat in the parlor. Her hands were tied tightly, and behind her chair were two men with pikes. Before her was a small table covered with a scruffy white cloth, and on it were her assassin’s possessions: a gold