“I thought the ‘Old Cordelier.’ It was a phrase Georges-Jacques used. ‘We old Cordeliers,’ he said.”
“Yes, I like that. You see,” he said, turning to the women, “it puts the new Cordeliers—Hebert’s people—neatly in their place. The new Cordeliers don’t represent anything, they don’t stand for anything—they just oppose and criticize what other people do, and try to destroy it. But the Old Cordeliers—they knew what kind of revolution they wanted, and they took risks to get it. Those early days, they didn’t seem so heroic at the time, but they do looking back.”
“Was it in those days they used to call you ‘The Candle of Arras,’ Citizen Robespierre?”
“In those days!” Robespierre said. “The child talks as if it were in the reign of Louis XIV. I suppose your husband told you about that?”
“Oh yes—I don’t know anything by myself.”
Camille and his wife exchanged glances: strangle her now, or later?
“It’s quite true,” Robespierre said. “It was because they called Mirabeau ‘The Torch of Provence.’ The idea was,” he added remorselessly, “to bring home to me my own insignificance.”
“Yes. He explained that. Why do you think then that those days were heroic?”
“Why do you think that all heroes are people who make a great stir in the world?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose, because of books.”
“Someone should direct your reading.”
“Oh, she is a married woman,” Camille said. “She is beyond education.”
“I see you don’t like to be reminded of it,” Louise said. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to give offense.”
Robespierre smiled, shook his head. But he turned away from her: no time for this little girl now. “Camille, remember what I say. Go carefully. We can’t take any power from the Tribunal. If we do, and there are any reverses in the war, it will be like September again. The people will take the law into their own hands, and we’ve seen that, and it’s not pleasant. The government must be strong, it can’t be tentative—otherwise, what are the patriots at the front to think? A strong army deserves a strong government behind it. We must aim at unity. Force can overturn a throne, but only prudence can maintain a republic.”
Camille nodded, recognizing the unclothed bones of a speech to come. He felt guilty, about laughing at Max and saying he wanted to be God; he wasn’t God, God’s not so vulnerable.
Max left. Camille said, “I feel like an egg in a dog’s mouth.” He looked up at Louise. “I hope you are sufficiently reproved? Otherwise, please go home to your husband, and tell him to beat you.”
“Oh dear,” Louise said. “I thought it was all in the past.”
“One doesn’t really forget. Not that kind of thing.”
Danton came in a few minutes later. “Ah, the Old Cordelier himself,” Lucile said.
“There you are,” he said to his wife. “Have I just missed our friend?”
“You know damn well you have,” Camille said. “You must have skulked in a doorway till you saw him go.”
“We work together better when we’re apart.” He collapsed into a chair, stretched his legs, regarded Camille. “What’s so worrying?” he asked him abruptly.
“Oh … he keeps telling me to go carefully, as if—as if, I mustn’t do anything he wouldn’t do himself, but he won’t tell me what it is he would do.”
Camille was still sitting on the floor, and now Lucile was kneeling beside him: their flattering, wide-eyed attention fixed on Georges-Jacques, and the baby rolling about between them. Really, Louise thought, hating them, it’s as if they’re always waiting for somebody to come along with a crayon and a sketching block. When you think of her with her string of lovers … It’s sickening, how easy they find it to put on their act. Camille was saying, “Max doesn’t like to be cornered with an untried opinion. But there you are—some risks have to be taken. I don’t mind if I’m the first to take them. Would that count as a heroic sentiment, Louise?”
She spoke sharply: “Hero’s your vocation, isn’t it?”
So everybody laughed, at Camille.
December 5: “To the Old Cordeliers.” Fabre raised his glass. His face was hollow and flushed. “May the second issue prosper like the first.”
“Thank you.” Camille actually looked modest; at least he lowered his head and dropped his eyes, which is the outward sign of the inward grace. “I didn’t expect it to be so successful. As if people were waiting for it … I feel quite overwhelmed by the public support.”
Deputy Phillippeaux—one of these mystery deputies who are always on mission, whom he hardly knew until last week—leaned forward and patted his hand. “It’s wonderful, that’s why! It—well, you know, I’ve written my own pamphlet, but I feel that if you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you’d have done it so much better. You can”—the deputy touched his elegant cravat—“you can move the heart, I can only appeal to the conscience. Slaughter is what I’ve seen, you know?” Strong language didn’t come easily to him. He’d sat with the Plain, not the Mountain, and carefully trimmed his opinions, until now.
“Oh, slaughter,” Fabre said. “Our boy couldn’t stand it. One Brissotin with a small dagger hidden in his defense papers, that’s enough for him. He couldn’t take an atrocity, I’m afraid. Faints, I fear. Gracefully, mind.”
Amazing, how resilient Fabre is. Camille too. A small part of him feels like lead; the rest of him is ready for the fray, making the most of his capacity to drive people to a finger-twitching fury, or into a long, swooning, sentimental decline from sense. He feels light, very young. The artist Hubert Robert (whose specialty, unfortunately, is picturesque ruins) is always on his heels these days; the artist Boze is constantly giving him hard looks, and occasionally walks over to him and with unfeeling artist hands pulls his hair about. In his worse moods he thinks—get ready to be immortalized.
The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant. Mirabeau said: “Liberty’s a bitch who likes to be fucked on a mattress of corpses.” He knows this is true: but he will find some gentler way of presenting it to his reader.
