A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

FABRE: And then stop the Terror?

DANTON: Yes. Things have gone too far.

FABRE: I agree with that. I want Vadier’s hot breath off my neck.

DANTON: That’s all it means to you?

FABRE: Come on, man. What does it mean to you? It’s not that you’re turning soft, are you? You’re not mellowing?

DANTON: No? Perhaps I am. Anyway, I work hard to make my own interest coincide with the national interest.

FABRE: Do you want to run the country again, Georges-Jacques?

ANTON: I don’t know. I haven’t decided what I want.

FABRE: Christ, you’d better decide soon. You’re going to take them all on. It’s dangerous. You’ve got to have your wits about you. You can’t go into it half-asleep, or you’ll ruin us all. I don’t know—you don’t seem to have much relish for it. You don’t seem to be your old self.

DANTON: It’s Robespierre, he confuses me. I have the feeling that he’s hedging his bets all the time.

FABRE: Well … keep Camille sweet.

DANTON: Yes, I was thinking … if Camille gets into any trouble, I mean any more trouble, Robespierre will have to stand up and defend him, and that will mean he commits himself.

FABRE: Yes, what a good idea.

DANTON: It doesn’t matter what Camille does. Robespierre will always straighten it out for him.

FABRE: We can rely on that.

Fabre d’Eglantine: When, of course, your whole name incorporates a lie, you continually seek reassurance of your reality, you are constantly seeking sources of self-esteem.

When the East India Company business blew up, I kept well out of it till I raised my price. When the prices was right, I committed a crime. But such a small crime! Bear with me. May I ask your indulgence, your good faith for a moment? You see, it wasn’t entirely the money.

I wanted them to say: you are a powerful man, Fabre! I wanted to see how high a price they put on my protection. It wasn’t my financial acumen that they were buying. Camille has remarked that my head is entirely filled with greasepaint and old prompt copies, where the brain should be; for my part I am always struck by how closely life resembles a hackneyed theatrical plot. What they wanted was my influence, the status that a close friend of Danton commands. Indirectly, I’m sure, they thought they were buying Danton too. After all, my colleagues in the venture had dealt with him before. I shouldn’t like you to think that the East India business happened in isolation. Forgery was just a logical extension of sharp practice, just a further step from currency speculation and crooked army contracts. Except that little step was onto the wrong side of the law; and for people like me in times like this it’s a bad thing to be on the wrong side of any law, any law at all. Now the idiot poet is on one side, and on the other side is Danton and the Incorruptible’s inseparable companion in boyhood adventures; looking smug.

I’m afraid I see no good coming of it. There was a point—it may have passed you by—when Danton and I abdicated from self-interest. When I say a point, I mean exactly that, a few seconds in which a decision was taken; I don’t say that afterwards we behaved differently, or better. When we planned how to win Valmy, we said we would never speak of it, not even to save our own lives.

Now—from that moment when we admitted to each other that there was something we wouldn’t do—we started to lurch at our destruction like two drunks in the sick early morning. Because each conviction he holds costs the opportunist double-dear; each time he places his trust, he bleeds a little. Valmy turned the tide for the Republic; since then, the French have been able to hold up their heads in Europe.

Now, Danton would never abandon his friends. If that sounds mawkish, I apologize. To put it another way—and this may make more sense to you—every trail I’ve padded in recent years leads to Danton at the heart of the wood. All the accusations Hebert levels at Lacroix about his Belgian mission are true of Danton. Hebert knows it. Vadier will find me out. He wants Danton too. Why? I suppose he offends his sense of propriety. Vadier is a moralist; so, I think, is Fouquier. It is a tendency I deplore. God knows what risks we take, God knows all that Danton has done. God and Camille. God will keep his mouth shut.

When I began denouncing conspiracies, to take the heat off myself, how did I know that Robespierre would seize on everything I said? He was looking for a conspiracy in the heart of patriotism: God help me, I provided one. Assume its existence, and every word and action seems to prove it, so that sometimes one wonders, of course— what if Robespierre’s right, and I’m the fool, what if some con trick I thought was cooked up in a Palais-Royal cafe is really a gigantic conspiracy woven in Whitehall?

No, no—I won’t think about it. A man could go mad.

In a way I wish they’d move in and arrest me. It may sound absurd, but arrest is the only thing that will prevent me from doing things to complicate it even more. My head aches, thinking about it; I get so depressed. It’s this waiting that unnerves me, the halt in the chase; keep moving, that’s always been my motto, all my life. Perhaps it is a technique of Vadier’s, or perhaps they are waiting till they come up with something else, something worse; or waiting till Danton commits himself to my defense?

I am afraid that if things go on as they are I shall never finish The Maltese Orange. It’s a good play, there are some very creditable verses in it. Perhaps it would be the big success that has always just eluded me.

Danton, these last few days, looks more like a mangy stuffed bear than someone who’s planning to set the nation by the ears. He seems much affected by the executions. He spends hours just thinking; you ask him what he’s doing and he says, thinking.

And Camille: they’ll never pin corruption charges on him, and I don’t think they’ll try. According to Rabbit, he and Duplessis spend many a cozy afternoon out at that farm of theirs, talking over the details of the fast ones he’s pulled: all strictly legal and below board. It’s their only point of contact.

But here I am, indulging in abuse again. The truth is that when I see Camille looking so stricken, with his absurdly over-sensitive airs, I want to take hold of him and shake him and say, I am suffering too. Robespierre would tear his hair and vomit if he knew that de Sade had set him off on all this. Unless Danton does something