streets. “Under this Committee,” said the people, “the Revolution is on the march.”
It had grown dark. Eleonore thought that the room was empty. When Robespierre turned his head, the movement startled her. His face was white in the shadows. “Are you not going to the Committee?” she said softly. He turned his head away, so that he was looking at the wall again. “Shall I light the lamp?” she said. “Please speak to me. Nothing can be so bad.”
She stood behind his chair and slipped a hand onto his shoulder. She felt him stiffen. “Don’t touch me.”
She removed her hand. “What have I done wrong?” She waited for an answer. “You’re being childish. You can’t sit here in the cold and dark.”
No reply. She walked rapidly from the room, leaving the door ajar. She was back in a moment with a taper, which she touched to the wood and kindling laid ready in the grate. She knelt down by the hearth, tending the infant flames, her dark hair sliding over her shoulder.
“I will not have lights,” he said.
She leaned forward, placing another splinter of wood, fanning the blaze. “I know you’ll let it go right out if I don’t watch it,” she said. “You always do. I have only just got in from my class. Citizen David commended my work today. Would you like to see? I can run downstairs and get my folio.” She looked up at him, still kneeling, her hands spread out on her thighs.
“Get up from there,” he said. “You are not a servant.”
“No?” Her voice was cool. “What am I? It would be against your principles to speak to a servant as you speak to me.”
“Five days ago,” he said, “I proposed to the Convention that we should set up a Committee of Justice to examine the verdicts of the Tribunal and to look into the cases of those imprisoned on suspicion. I thought this was what was needed; apparently not, though. I have just seen the fourth issue of the ‘Old Cordelier.’ Here.” He pushed the pamphlet across the desk. “Read it.”
“I can’t, in this light.” She lit the candles, lifting one high to look into his face. “Your eyes are red. You have been crying. I didn’t think you cried when you were criticized in the press. I thought you were beyond that.”
“It’s not criticism,” he said. “It’s not criticism that’s the problem, it’s quite other, it’s the claims, it’s the claims made on me. I am addressed by name. Look.” He pointed to the place on the page. “Eleonore, who has been more merciful than I have? Seventy-five of Brissot’s supporters are in prison. I have fought the committees and the Convention for these men’s lives. But this is not enough for Camille—it’s not nearly enough. He wants to force me into some—some kind of bullring. Read it.”
She took the pamphlet, brought a chair up to his desk to get the light. “Robespierre, you are my old school comrade, and you remember the lesson history and philosophy taught us: that love is stronger and more enduring than fear.”
Eleonore looked up. “The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.”
“Release from prison the 200,000 citizens you call ‘Suspects.’ In the Declaration of the Rights of Man there is no provision for imprisonment on suspicion.
“You seem determined to wipe out opposition by using the guillotine—but it is a senseless undertaking. When you destroy one opponent on the scaffold, you make ten more enemies among his family and friends. Look at the sort of people you have put behind bars—women, old men, bile-ridden egotists, the flotsam of the Revolution. Do you really believe they constitute a danger? The only enemies left in your midst are those who are too sick and too cowardly to fight; all the brave and able ones have fled abroad, or died at Lyon or in the Vendee. Those who are left do not merit your attention. Believe me—freedom would be more firmly established, and Europe brought to her knees, if you established a Committee of Mercy.”
“Have you read enough?” he asked her.
“Yes. They’re trying to force your hand.” She looked up. “Danton’s behind it, I suppose?”
Robespierre didn’t speak, not at first. When he did it was in a whisper, and not to the point. “When we were children, you know, I said to him, Camille, you’re all right now, I am going to look after you. You should have seen us, Eleonore—you would have been quite sorry for us, I think. I don’t know what would have become of Camille, if it weren’t for me.” He buried his face in his hands. “Or of me, if it weren’t for him.”
“But you’re not children now,” she said softly. “And this affection you speak of no longer exists. He’s gone over to Danton.”
He looked up. His face is transparent, she thought; he would like the world transparent too. “Danton’s not my enemy,” he said. “He’s a patriot, and I’ve staked my reputation on it. But what’s he done, these last four weeks? A few speeches. Grand-sounding rhetoric that keeps him in the public eye and means nothing at all. He fancies himself as the elder statesman. He’s risked nothing. He has thrown my poor Camille into the furnace while he and his friends stand by warming their hands.”
“Don’t be upset, it doesn’t help.” She averted her face. She was studying the pamphlet again. “He implies that the Committee has abused its powers. It seems clear that Danton and his friends see themselves as an alternative government.”
“Yes.” He looked up, half-smiled. “Danton offered me a job once before. No doubt he’d do it again. They expect me to go along with them, you see.”
“Go along with them? With that gang of swindlers? You’d go along with them as you’d go along with brigands who were holding you to ransom. All they want is to use your name, use your credit as an honest man.”
“Do you know what I wish?” he said. “I wish Marat were alive. What a pass I’ve come to, when I wish that! But Camille would have listened to him.”
“This is heresy,” Eleonore said. She bent her head over the page. She read, it seemed to him, with a tortured slowness; she seemed to weigh every word. “The Jacobins will expel him.”
“I will prevent it.”
