A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“You must admit it is very apt. If it were not apt it would not have caught the public imagination. Yes, it is a portrait of the way we live now.”

“And you hold it up to Europe? Could you not restrain yourself? Do you want to make yourself the Emperor’s favorite reading? Do you expect a message of congratulation from Mr. Pitt? Fireworks in Moscow, and your health drunk in the emigre camps across the Rhine?” He spoke with a flat calm, as if the questions were reasonable ones. “Well, tell me.” He put his hands, palms down, on the stonework of the bridge and turned to look into Camille’s face; he waited.

“What are we doing out here?” Camille said. “It’s getting cold.”

“I’d rather talk outside. Inside, you can’t keep secrets.”

“You see—you admit it. You’re eaten away with the thought of conspiracy. Will you guillotine brick walls and doorposts?”

“I’m not eaten away with anything—except perhaps the desire to do what’s best for the country.”

“Then stop the Terror.” Camille shivered a little. “You have the moral leadership. You’re the one who can do it.”

“And have the government fall apart around us? Bring the Committee down?” His voice now was a rapid, urgent whisper. “I can’t do it. I can’t take that risk.”

“Let’s walk on a little way.” They walked. “Change the Committee,” Camille said. “That’s all I ask. Collot and Billaud-Varennes are not fit for you to associate yourself with.”

“You know why they’re there. They’re our sop to the Left.”

“I keep forgetting that we’re not the Left.”

“Do you want us to have insurrection on our hands?”

Camille halted again, looked across the river. “Yes, if necessary. Yes.” He was trying to stop the panic bubbling up inside him, stop the racing of his heart; Robespierre was not used to opposition now, and he was not used to opposing him. “Let’s fight it out once and for all.”

“Is that Danton’s wish? More violence?”

“Max, what do you think is being done every day in the Place de la Revolution?”

I’d rather sacrifice aristocrats than sacrifice each other. I have a loyalty to the Revolution and the men who made it. But you are defaming it in the face of all Europe.”

“Do you think that loyalty is covering up, pretending that reason and justice prevail?” The light had faded into the river, and now a night wind was getting up; it pulled at their clothes with cold insistent hands. “What did we have the Revolution for? I thought it was so that we could speak out against oppression. I thought it was to free us from tyranny. But this is tyranny. Show me a worse one in the history of the world. People have killed for power and greed and delight in blood, but show me another dictatorship that kills with efficiency and delight in virtue and flourishes its abstractions over open graves. We say that everything we do is to preserve the Revolution, but the Revolution is no more than an animated corpse.”

Robespierre would not look at him; but without doing so, he reached out for his arm. “Everything you say is true,” he whispered, “but I don’t know how to proceed.” A pause. “Come, let’s go home.”

“You said we couldn’t talk inside.”

“There’s no need to talk, is there? You’ve said it all.”

Hebert, Le Pere Duchesne:

Here, my brave sansculottes, here is a brave man you’ve forgotten. It is really ungrateful of you, for he declares that without him there would never have been a Revolution. Formerly he was known as My Lord Prosecutor to the Lanteme. You think I am speaking of that famous cutthroat who put the aristocrats to flight—but no, the man we’re speaking of claims to be the most pacific of persons. To believe him, he has no more gall than a pigeon; he is so sensitive, that he never hears the word “guillotine” without shivering to his very bones. It is a great pity that he is no orator, or he would prove to the Committee of Public Safety that it has no idea how to manage things; but if he cannot speak, M. Camille can make up for it by writing, to the great satisfaction of the moderates, aristocrats and royalists.

Proceedings of the Jacobin Club:

CITIZEN NICOLAS [intervening]: Camille, you are very close to the guillotine!

CITIZEN DESMOULINS: Nicolas, you are very close to making a fortune!

A year ago you dined on a baked apple, and now you’re the government printer.

[Laughter.]

Herault de Sechelles came back from Alsace in the middle of December. The job was done. The Austrians were in retreat and the frontier was secure; Saint-Just would be following in a week or two, trailing glory.

He called on Danton, and Danton was not at home. He left him a message, arranging a meeting, and Danton did not come. He went to Robespierre’s house, and was turned away by the Duplays.

He stood at a window of the Tuileries, to watch the death carts on their route, and sometimes he followed them to the end of the journey and mingled with the crowds. He heard of wives who denounced their husbands to the Tribunal, and husbands wives; mothers who offered their sons to National Justice and children who betrayed their parents. He saw women hustled from their lying-in, suckling their babies till the tumbrel arrived. He saw men and women slip and fall facedown in the spilt blood of their friends, and the executioners haul them up by their pinioned arms. He saw dripping heads held up for the crowds to bay at. “Why do you force yourself to watch these things?” someone asked him.

“I am learning how to die.”

29 Frimaire, Toulon fell to the Republican armies. The hero of the hour was a young artillery officer called Buonaparte. “If things go on as they are with the officers,” Fabre said, “I give Buonaparte three months before he gets his head cut off.”

Three days later, 2 Nivose, government forces smashed the remains of the rebel army of the Vendee. Peasants taken under arms were outlaws to be shot out of hand; nothing remained except the bloody manhunt through fields and woods and marshes.

In the green room with the silver mirrors, the disparate and factious members of the Committee of Public Safety were settling their differences. They were winning the war, and keeping the precarious peace on the Paris