A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

He shook his head. “I can’t always see it now in such absolute terms, I wish I could. I feel sometimes I’m losing my direction. Danton understands, he knows how to talk about this. He says, you make a few botches, you have a few successes, and that’s what politics is about.”

“Cynical,” Eleonore said.

“No, it’s a viewpoint—the way he looks at it, you do have your general principles to guide you, but you have to make the best of each situation as it arises. Now Saint-Just, he thinks differently—in his opinion, you have to see in each particular circumstance a chance to make your principles operate. Everything, for him, is an opportunity to state the larger case.”

“And where do you stand?”

“Oh, I’m just”—he threw his hands out—“floundering. Only here, with this issue, I do know where I am. I will not have this intolerance, I will not have this bigotry, I will not have the lifetime’s faith of simple people pulled from under them by dilettantes with no idea of what faith means. They call the priests bigots, but they are the bigots, who want to stop Mass being said.”

You “won’t have it,” she thought. That means the Tribunal, if they don’t back down. She herself was not inclined to believe in a God; or not in a beneficent one, anyway.

Up in his room he wrote a letter to Danton. He read it over, corrected it minutely, as he corrected everything, scoring it over, refining his meaning, stating his case. He was not satisfied with it; he tore it up—into small pieces, because he was not too angry to be careful—and wrote another. He wanted to ask Danton to come to Paris and help him crush Hebert. He wanted to say that he needed help, but would not be patronized: needed an ally, but would not be dominated.

Even the second draft was not satisfactory. Why didn’t he think of asking Camille to write it? Camille could put his case so simply, had put it so simply earlier that day: “We don’t need processions and rosaries and relics, but we do need, when things are very bad, the prospect of consolation—we do need, when things are even worse, the idea that in the long run there is someone who could manage to forgive us.”

He sat with his head bowed. You have to smile; what would Father Berardier say? Here we are, when all’s said and done, two good Catholic boys. Never mind that he hasn’t heard Mass in years, that Camille counts a week wasted if he hasn’t broken every Commandment in the book. Strange, really, how you find yourself back where you started. Or not, of course: he remembered Camille being slapped around the head by Father Proyart for taking Plutarch’s Lives to Mass. “I’d just got to an exciting bit …”he’d said. In those days Plutarch passed for excitement. No wonder Camille cut loose when he got away from the priests. They asked us to be something more than human. And I, I struggled on, trying to be what they wanted—though I didn’t know I was doing it, though I thought I was living by another creed entirely.

His lighter mood didn’t last long. He addressed himself to a third draft. How does one write to Danton? He took out his DANTON notebook and read it over. He was no wiser when he finished, but much more depressed.

Jean-Marie Roland was in hiding in Rouen. On the day—November 10—when the news of his wife’s execution reached him, he left the house where he was hiding and walked some three miles out of town. He carried his sword-stick in his hand. He stopped in a deserted lane, by an apple orchard, and sat down under one of the trees. This was the place; there was no point in walking any further.

The ground was iron-hard, the trunk of the tree was cold to the touch; winter was in the air. He experimented; the first sight of his own blood dismayed him, turned him sick. But this was the place.

The body was found sometime later, by a passerby who had at first taken him to be an elderly man asleep. It was impossible to say for how many hours he had been dead or whether, impaled by the slender blade, it had taken him very long to die.

November 11, in pouring rain, Mayor Bailly was executed; by popular request, a guillotine was set up for the occasion on the Champs-de-Mars, where in ’91 Lafayette had fired on the people.

“Camille,” Lucile said, “there’s a marquis to see you.” Camille looked up from The City of God, and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Impossible.”

“Well then, a former marquis.”

“Does he look respectable?”

“Yes, very. All right? I’ll leave you then.”

Suddenly, and after all these years, she has no appetite for politics. Vergniaud’s dying words keep running through her head: “The Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children.” It is becoming one of the slogans and pat phrases she seems to have lived by. (Does a father’s authority count for nothing? I don’t know why people complain they can’t make money nowadays, I have no trouble. They were my friends and my writings have killed them.) They run through her dreams every night, she finds them rising to her lips in conversation, the common currency of the last five years. (It’s all organized, no one who’s innocent will be touched. I loathe firm government. There’s nothing to worry about, M. Danton will look after us.) She no longer attends the debates of the Convention, sitting in the public gallery eating sweets with Louise Robert. She went once to the Tribunal, to hear Cousin Antoine bullying his victims; once was enough.

“Some confusion over identity,” de Sade said to Camille. “I should have sent in my credentials as an official of the Section des Piques. My mind was wandering. That’s enough to get someone denounced as suspect.” He reached out one of his small, soft hands and took away Camille’s book. “Devotional reading,” he said. “My dear. This is nothing to do with … ?”

“Fainting? Oh no. Just my usual diversion. I’m writing a work on the Church Fathers.”

“Each to his own,” de Sade said. “We authors must look out for each other, don’t you think?”

He was in his early fifties now, a small man, rather plump, with receding grayish blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had put on weight, but he still moved with elegance. He wore the dark clothes and tensely purposeful expression of the Terrorist politician, and he carried a folio of papers knotted with a flamboyant tricolor ribbon. “Obscene illustrations?” Camille inquired, indicating it.

“Good God,” de Sade said, shocked. “You consider yourself my moral superior, don’t you, M. Lanterne Attorney?”

“Well, I am most people’s moral superior. I know all the theory, and I have all the ethical scruples. It is only in my conduct that there is something wanting. Can I have Saint Augustine back, please?”