“I see. ‘Morning, Danton—are you a traitor?’ ‘Certainly not, David—do run away back to your easel.’ ‘I’ll do that—left a daub half-finished. Get well soon!’ That sort of formality? And I suppose that for Robespierre, it’s fuel to his flames? It feeds his notions of gigantic conspiracies?”
“Yes. We suppose Comte must be a British agent. After all, we reason with ourselves—we stretch our imaginations to suppose that it might be true—and then we reason with ourselves, how would this nonentity Comte, this servant, this menial, know anything of the plans of a man like Danton? That is how we reason, Robespierre and I.”
“I know what you mean, Camille,” Louise said warningly. “Why don’t you ask him straight out if there is anything in it?”
“Because it is absurd.” Camille lost his temper. “Because I have other loyalties, and if it is true, they will kill him.”
Louise stepped back. Her hand fluttered to her throat. Camille saw her difficulty at once: she wanted and didn’t want him dead.
“Louise, take no notice,” Danton said. “Go now and make sure our packing is done.” Tiredness crept back into his voice. “You must learn a little better to distinguish—it is a ridiculous story. It is as Robespierre says. It is a slander.”
She hesitated. “We’re still going to Arcis?”
“Of course. I have written to them to expect us.”
She left the room.
“I have to go,” Danton said. “I must recover my health. Without that, nothing.”
“Yes, of course you must go.” Camille averted his face. “You are avoiding the big trials, are you not?”
“Come here.” Danton put out a hand to him. Camille pretended not to see it. “I’m sick of the city,” Danton said. “I’m sick of people. Why don’t you come with me, get a change of air?” He thought, I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him to Robespierre and that rarefied climate of perpetual chill.
“I’ll write to you,” Camille said. He crossed the room, touched his lips to Danton’s cheekbone. It felt like the least that could be done.
It was late when they reached Arcis, and growing cold. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he felt the power draining from the sun, the soil losing its summer warmth. He put out an arm for Louise. “Here,” he said. “Here is where I was born.”
Pulling her traveling cape about her, she looked up wonderingly at the manor house, at the milky darkness rolling in from the river. “No, not here,” he said. “Not in this very house. But close by. Come now,” he said to the children. “You’ve come to your grandmother. You remember?”
Silly question. Somehow Georges always thinks his children are older than they are, he expects them to have long memories. Francois-Georges was a year old when his mother died; now, a big tough baby, he clung to his stepmother and lashed his heels about her fragile rib cage. Antoine, limp and exhausted by the excitement, hung around his father’s neck like a child fetched up from a shipwreck.
Anne-Madeleine’s husband held a torch high. And there she was—it was Louise’s first sight of these alarming sisters—running and tripping over her feet, like some schoolgirl. “Georges, Georges, my brother Georges!” She hurled herself at him. His arm encircled her. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, kissed him on both cheeks, broke away and scooped up the nearest of her children and held up the little boy for inspection. This was Anne-Madeleine, who had pulled him out from under the bull’s feet.
And here was Marie-Cecile; her convent had dispersed, she was home, she was where she should be: didn’t he say he’d look after her? She still had her nun’s deportment; she tried to fold her hands away in the sleeves of a habit she no longer wore. And here was Pierrette, tall, smiling, full-faced, a spinster more matronly than most of the mothers of Paris. Anne-Madeleine’s latest baby dribbled onto her shoulder. They surrounded Louise and squeezed her; they felt, as they did so, the ghost promise of Gabrielle’s opulent flesh. “My little dove!” they said, laughing. “You are so young!”
They dived away, the sisters, into the kitchen. “Bleak little thing! So duty-ridden! No breasts at all!”
“Didn’t you think he’d bring that Lucile-thing? That black-eyed girl? That he’d detach her from her black-eyed husband?”
“No, that evil pair, they were born for each other.” The sisters fell about, laughing. The visit of the Desmoulinses had been one of the high points of their lives; they couldn’t wait for them to come back again, creating a similar metropolitan
They began to play out the scene taking place between Georges-Jacques and their mother. “It’s a comfort,” croaked Marie-Cecile, “to see you again before I die.”
“Die?” Anne-Madeleine said. “You old fraud, you’ll not die. You’ll outlive me, I swear it.”
“And how Georges-Jacques does swear!” said Pierrette. “How he does! Do you think he’s fallen into bad company?”
In the parlor of the manor house, Mme. Recordain’s blue eyes were sparkling into the dusk. “Come in from the night air, daughter. Sit here by me.” Diagnostic fingers studded themselves into her waist. Two months! And not pregnant! The Italian girl, who was dead, did her duty by Georges-Jacques—now we have one of these skimpy Parisiennes on our hands.
As if fearing that this examination might be taking place, the sisters came surging out from somewhere in the depth of the house. They swarmed about their brother, proposing various kinds of food he might eat, patting his head and making family jokes-soft-bodied country-women, in their strange, dowdy, practical clothes.
“It might be better if you were the one to uncover it.” Fabre had not heard Lucile say this, but it was his own thought. On the day Danton left Paris he sat alone in his apartment, fighting his desire to shriek and smash and hammer the walls, like a bad child to whom promises have been broken. He took up again the brief, polite noncommittal note that Danton had sent around before his departure; he tore it into tiny strips and burned it shred by shred.
After a tiring and disputatious meeting of the Jacobin Club, he intercepted Robespierre and Saint-Just as they walked side by side from the hall. Saint-Just did not attend assiduously at the evening meetings; he thought the sessions pointless, though he did not say so, and to himself he called the members opinion mongers. He was not much interested in anyone’s opinions. In a few days he would be in Alsace, with the armies. He was looking forward
