A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“I think not.” Robespierre looked around the table, expecting no contradiction. “As we are fully aware of their maneuvers now, we can afford to let them exhaust themselves in their labors for a week or two.” He glanced around again. “In that way we will discover all their accomplices. We will purify the Revolution once and for all. Have you heard enough?” One or two people nodded, their faces strained, at a loss. “I haven’t, but we won’t take up any more of your time.” He stood up, tapping his papers together with his fingertips. “Come,” he said to Fabre.

“Come?” Fabre said stupidly.

Robespierre motioned with his head towards the door. Fabre got up and followed him. He felt weak and shaky. Robespierre turned into a small room, barely furnished, rather like the one they had occupied on the day of the late riot.

“Do you often work in here?”

“As occasion demands. I like to have somewhere private. You can sit down, it’s not dusty.”

Fabre saw an army of locksmiths, window cleaners, old women with brooms, scouring the attics and cellars of public buildings to make clean hiding places for Robespierre. “Leave the door open,” Robespierre said, “as a precaution against eavesdroppers.” He tossed his notes onto the table; Fabre thought, that’s an acquired gesture, he got that from Camille. “You seem nervous,” Robespierre commented.

“What—I mean, what more would you like me to tell you?”

“Just whatever you like.” Robespierre was accommodating. “Minor points we could clear up now. The real names of the brothers Frei.”

“Emmanuel Dobruska. Siegmund Gotleb.”

“I’m not surprised they changed them, are you?”

“Why didn’t you ask me in front of the others?”

Robespierre ignored him. “This man Proli, Herault’s secretary, we see him at the Jacobins. Some people say that he is the natural son of Chancellor Kaunitz of Austria. Is that true?”

“Yes. Well, quite possibly.”

“Herault is an anomaly. He’s an aristocrat by birth, yet he is never attacked by Hebert.” Herault, Fabre thinks: and his mind drifts back—as it tends to, these days—to the Cafe du Foy. He’d been giving readings from his latest —Augusta was dying the death at the Italiens—and in came this huge, rough-looking boy, shoe-horned into a lawyer’s black suit, whom he’d made a sketch of in the street, ten years before. The boy had developed this upper-class drawl, and he’d talked about Herault—“his looks are impeccable, he’s well traveled, he’s pursued by all the ladies at Court”—and beside Danton had been this fey wide-eyed egotist who had turned out to be half the city’s extramarital interest. The years pass … plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose … “Fabre, are you with me?” said Robespierre.

“Oh, very much so.”

Robespierre leaned forward and plaited his fingers together; and Fabre, dragged up from the deeps of ’87, ’88, began to sweat. He heard what Robespierre was saying, and it was enough to chill the blood. “As Herault is never attacked by Hebert, I feel they must have a common allegiance. Hebert’s people are not just misguided fanatics— they are in touch with all these foreign elements you denounce. The object of their violent speeches and actions is to produce fear and disgust. They set out to make the Revolution appear ridiculous, and to destroy its credibility.”

“Yes,” Fabre looked away. “I understand that.”

“Hand in hand with this go the attempts to discredit great patriots. For example, the allegations against Danton.”

“It is clear,” Fabre said.

“One wonders why such conspirators should approach you.”

Fabre shook his head: wonderingly, glumly. “They have already met with some success, in the very heart of the Mountain. I suppose it encourages them. Chabot, Julien … all trusted men. Naturally, when these are examined, they will claim I’m implicated.”

“Our orders to you,” Robespierre put his fingertips together, “are to keep a careful eye on those people you’ve named—especially those you suspect of economic crimes.”

“Yes,” Fabre said. “Er—whose orders?”

Robespierre looked up, surprised. “The Committee’s.”

“Of course. I should have known you spoke for all.” Fabre leaned forward. “Citizen, I beg you not to be taken in by anything Chabot says. He and his friends are very glib and plausible.”

“You think I’m a complete fool, do you, Fabre?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You may go now.”

“Thank you. Trust me. Over the next month you’ll see everything come to fruition”

Robespierre dismissed him with a wave of his hand, as thoughtlessly peremptory as any anointed despot. Outside the door Fabre took out a silk handkerchief and dabbed his face. It had been the most unpleasant morning of his life—if you excepted the morning in 1777 when he’d been sentenced to hang—and yet in another way it had been easier than he’d expected. Robespierre had swallowed every suggestion, as if they merely confirmed conclusions he had already reached. “This foreign plot,” he’d kept saying. Clearly he was interested in the politics, and hardly at all in the East India Company. And will it, as he promised, come to fruition? Oh yes: because you can rely on Hebert to rant, on Chabot to cheat and lie and steal, on Chaumette to harass priests and close down churches—and now, every time they speak they’ll condemn themselves out of their own mouths; all these separate strands he sees as knotted together in conspiracy, and who knows, perhaps they are, perhaps they are. A pity he suspects Herault. I could warn him, but what use? Life anyway is so precarious for the ci- devants, perhaps his days were already numbered.