“What?”
“I said, I will prevent it.”
She shook the paper at him. “They’ll blame you for this. Do you think you can protect him?”
“Protect him? Oh Christ—I think at any time, at any time before now, I’d have died for him. But I feel, now— perhaps I have a duty to remain alive?”
“A duty to whom?”
“To the people. In case worse befalls them.”
“I agree. You do have a duty to remain alive. Alive and in power.”
He averted his head. “How easily the phrases fall from your lips. As if you had grown up with them, Eleonore. Collot is back from Lyon, did you know? He had finished his
“Saint-Just will be here next week. He won’t want to know about your school days, Max. He won’t accept excuses.”
Robespierre lifted his chin, blindly and vicariously proud. “He’ll not be offered excuses. I know Camille. He’s stronger than you think, oh, not visibly, not evidently—but I do know him, you see. It’s a kind of iron-clad vanity he has—and why not, really? It all comes from July 12, from those days before the Bastille. He knows exactly what he did, exactly what risk he took. Would I have taken it? Of course not. It would have been meaningless—no one would even have looked at me. Would Danton have taken it? Of course not. He was a respectable fellow, a lawyer, a family man. You see, here we are, Eleonore, four years on—still in awe of what was done in a split second.”
“Stupid,” she said.
“Not really. Everything that’s important is decided in a split second, isn’t it? He stood up before those thousands of people, and his life turned on a hair. Everything after that, of course, has been an anticlimax.”
Eleonore got up, moved away from him. “Will you go to see him?”
“Now? No. Danton will be there. They will probably be having a party.”
“Well, why not?” Eleonore said. “I know the reign of superstition is over, but it is Christmas day.”
“It is incredible,” Danton said. He tipped his head back and tossed another glass down his throat. He did not look like an elder statesman. “There are demonstrators outside the Convention calling for a Committee of Mercy. They are standing six deep outside Desenne’s bookshop demanding another edition. The cover price was two sous and now they’re changing hands for twenty francs. Camille, you’re a one-man inflationary disaster.”
“But I wish now I had warned Robespierre. About the content, I mean.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Danton was vast and brash and hearty, the popular leader of a new political force. “Somebody go and get Robespierre. Somebody go and drag him out. It’s time we got him drunk.” He reached across and dropped his hand on Camille’s shoulder. “It’s time this Revolution relaxed a little. The people are sick of the killings, and the reaction to your writings proves it.”
“But we should have got the Committee changed this month. You should be on it now.”
Around them, the buzz of conversation resumed. It was understood to have been one of Danton’s heartening pronouncements. “Let’s not push things,” Danton said. “Next month will do. We’re creating the mood for change. We don’t want to force the issue, we want people to come to our way of thinking of their own accord.” Camille glanced at Fabre. “Now why are you not happy?” Danton demanded. “You have just achieved the greatest success of your career. I order you in the name of the Republic to be happy.”
Annette and Claude arrived soon afterwards. Annette looked wary and withdrawn, but Claude looked as if he were working up to a big speech. “Ah yes,” he said, addressing the air a foot above his son-in-law’s head. “I have not been lavishly complimentary, have I, in the past? But now I will congratulate you, from the heart. It is an act of great courage.”
“Why do you say that? Do you think they will want to cut off my head?”
A silence, sudden and complete and prolonged. No one spoke and no one moved. For the first time in years Claude found it possible to focus his gaze. “Oh, Camille,” he said, “who could want to hurt you?”
“Plenty of people,” Camille said remotely. “Billaud, because I’ve always laughed at him. Saint-Just, because he has a rage for leadership and I won’t follow. All the members of the Jacobins who’ve been after my blood since I defended Dillon. Ten days ago they brought up the business of Brissot’s trial. What right had I to pass out without informing the club? And Barnave—they wanted to know how I dared to go to the Conciergerie to speak to a traitor.”
“But Robespierre defended you,” Claude said.
“Yes, he was very kind. He told them I was given to emotional outbursts. He said that he had known me since I was ten years old and I had always been the same. He nodded and smiled at me as he came down from the tribune. His eyes were very sharp. He had engraved a valuation on me like a goldsmith’s mark.”
“Oh, there was more than that,” Lucile said. “He praised you very warmly.”
“Of course. The club was touched, flattered. He had allowed them a little insight into his private life—you know, touching evidence of his human nature.”
“What can you mean?” Claude said.
“Well, I revert to my former conviction. Quite clearly he is Jesus Christ. He has even condescended to be adopted by a carpenter. I wonder what he will do at the next meeting, when they demand my expulsion?”
“But nothing can happen to you while Robespierre is in power,” Claude said. “It’s not possible. Come now. It’s not possible.”
“You mean I have protection. But it is irksome, to be protected.”
