I don’t mean to blaspheme, I’m just repeating what is said by the poor deluded rabble on the streets. Why did the Gironde go after Marat? He was half-dead anyway. Then again, if the bitch was acting on her own initiative, as she claimed, doesn’t it just prove what I’ve always said, that women have no political sense? She should have gone for Robespierre, or me.”
Oh, don’t say that, Louise begged him; at the same time she found it difficult to imagine a kitchen knife slicing through those solid layers of muscle and fat. Danton looked down the table. “Camille,” he said, “one drop of ink disposed by you is worth all the blood in Marat’s body.”
He refilled glasses. He will drink another bottle, Louise thought, and then perhaps he will fall asleep right away. “And to Liberty,” he said. “Raise your glass, General.”
“To Liberty,” said General Dillon, feelingly. “Long may we, if you know what I mean, be at liberty to enjoy it.”
July 26: Robespierre sat with his head bowed, his hands knotted together between his knees; he was the picture of misery. “Do you see?” he asked. “I have always resisted such involvement, I have always refused office.”
“Yes,” Camille said. He had a headache, from last night. “The situation changes.”
“Now, you see—” Robespierre had developed a minute facial tic, distressing to him; every so often he would break off what he was saying and press his hand against his cheek. “It’s clear that a firm central authority … with the enemy advancing on every front … You know I have always defended the Committee, always seen the need for it … .
“Yes. Stop apologizing. You’ve won an election, not committed a crime.”
“And there are factions—shall I say Hebert, shall I say Jacques Roux—who wish France to have no strong government. They take advantage of the natural discontents of the man in the street, exploit them and make all the trouble they can. They put forward measures that can only be called ultra-revolutionary, measures that seem disgusting and threatening to decent people. They bring the Revolution into disrepute. They try to kill it by excess. That is why I call them agents of the enemy.” He put his hand to his face again. “If only,” he said, “Danton were not so chronically careless.”
“Clearly he doesn’t think the Committee as important as you do.”
“Put it on record,” Robespierre said, “that I didn’t seek the office. Citizen Gasparin fell ill, it was thrust upon me. I do hope they won’t start calling it the Robespierre Committee. I shall be just one among many …”
One best friend off the Committee. The other best friend on. Camille is used to being the experimental audience for speeches Robespierre is rehearsing; it has been like this since ‘89. Ever since that charged, emotional moment at the Duplays’ house—“you were always in my heart”—he has felt that more is expected of him. Robespierre is becoming one of those people in whose company it is impossible to relax for a moment.
Two days later the Committee of Public Safety is given the power to issue warrants for arrest.
Jacques Roux, whose following grows, announced that the new author of his news sheet was “the ghost of Marat.” Hebert advised the Jacobins that if Marat needed a successor—and the aristocrats another victim—he was ready. “That talentless little man,” Robespierre said. “How dare he?”
On August 8, Simone Evrard appeared at the Bar of the Convention, and made an impassioned denunciation of certain persons who were leading the sansculottes to perdition. All her views, she said, were those expressed by the martyr, her husband, in his last hours. It was a fluent, confident tirade; just occasionally she paused to peer more closely at her notes, to puzzle out Citizen Robespierre’s tiny, uneven handwriting.
A week later there is another addition to the Committee of Public Safety: Lazare Camot, the military engineer whom Robespierre had first met at the Academy of Arras. “I don’t particularly get on with military men,” Robespierre said. “They seem to be full of personal ambition, and to have a strange set of priorities. But they are a necessary evil. Camot always,” he added distantly, “seemed to know what he was talking about.”
Thus Carnot, later to be known as the Organizer of Victory; Robespierre, the Organizer of Carnot.
When the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal was arrested (suspected of mishandling the trial of Marat’s assassin) his replacement was Citizen Hermann, late of the Arras Bar. Hadn’t he, all those years ago, been the only one to recognize that Robespierre was talking sense? “I knew him,” he said to Mme. Duplay, “when I was a young man.”
“What do you think you are now?” she asked him.
The outgoing president was taken away by gendarmes while the Tribunal was actually in session. Fouquier- Tinville liked a drama; his cousin had no monopoly.
When the Minister of the Interior resigned, the two rivals for the post were Hebert and Jules Pare, now a lawyer of note. The latter was appointed. “We all know why, of course,” said Hebert. “He was once Danton’s managing clerk. We get so big for our boots that we don’t actually do any work ourselves, we just let our minions exercise power on our behalf. He has his other clerk, Desforgues, at the Foreign Office. Pare and Danton are as thick as thieves. Just as,” he added, “Danton was with Dumouriez.”
“Odious runt,” Danton said. “Isn’t it enough for him to have his creatures all over the War Office, and his so- called newspaper distributed to the troops?”
He asserted himself at the Jacobin Club; won some applause. As he quit the rostrum, Robespierre rose to speak. “No one,” he told the club, “has the right to voice the least breath of criticism against Danton. Anyone who seeks to discredit him must first prove a match for him in energy, forcefulness and patriotic zeal.”
More applause; some members rose to their feet. Danton was cheered; sprawled on the bench,
“What are you looking so worried for?” Danton asked him.
“I’m worried about preserving this accord between you.” He made a small gesture, to show how he was preserving it; it seemed to be the size of a hen’s egg, and as fragile.
Late August, conscription came in, and General Custine
