“You look quite cheerful, husband.” Lucile was back with the brandy.
Annette glanced up at him. So he does, she thought: surely he’s indestructible? She drank her brandy in one gulp.
Camille’s speech to the Convention was short, audible and alarming. There were murmurs that the relatives of politicians might be suspect as much as anyone else; but most of his audience looked as if it knew precisely what he was talking about when he described the invasion of the Duplessis household. They were lucky if it hadn’t happened to them, he said; soon, perhaps, it would.
Looking around the half-empty benches, the deputies knew he was right. There was applause when he referred to the uncontrolled depredations of a former theater box-office attendant: a mutter of agreement when he deplored a system that could let such a loathsome object flourish. As he left, Danton was on his feet, calling for an end to the arrests.
At the Tuileries, “Present my compliments to Citizen Vadier and tell him the Lanterne Attorney is here,” Camille said. Vadier was brought out of a session of the Policy Committee by his clerks. “Close down my paper and you get me in person,” Camille said, smiling kindly and giving Vadier a shove against the wall.
“Lanterne Attorney!” Vadier said. “I thought you’d repented of all that?”
“Call it nostalgia,” Camille said. “Call it habit. Call it what you like, but do realize that you won’t get rid of me until I have some answers from you.”
Vadier looked morose, and pulled his long Inquisitor’s nose. He swore by the limbs of the Supreme Being that he knew nothing of the affair. Yes, he admitted, it could be that the Section officials were out of control; it was possible, yes, that Hebert was acting out of personal malice; no, he had no knowledge of any evidence against Claude Duplessis, retired civil servant. He looked at Camille with frank detestation and considerable alarm. “Hebert is a fool,” he muttered as he hurried away, “to give Danton’s mob a chance to try their strength.”
Robespierre appeared blinking and preoccupied from the Committee of Public Safety, summoned by an urgent message. He hurried forward and took Camille’s hands, dictated a rapid stream of orders to a secretary and signified his intention of seeing Pere Duchesne in hell. The onlookers noted his tone, the haste, the handclasp above all. Hastily, they memorized the signs on his face, to puzzle over and interpret later; immediately, with the lift of an eyebrow, a glance held a second too long, the questioning twitch of a nostril sniffing the political wind— immediately, imperceptibly, allegiances began to drift. By midday, the expression on Hebert’s face had become less complacent; he was, in fact, on the run, and remained so in his own mind until well after Claude Duplessis’s release: until some weeks later, when he himself heard a patrol in the early morning, and found he had no friends.
The new calender wasn’t working. Nivose wasn’t snowy, and spring would be here before Germinal. It would arrive immoderately early, so that flower girls congregated on street corners and the seamstresses were busy with simple patriotic dresses for the summer of ’94.
In the Luxembourg Gardens trees hung out unseasonable flags of green among the cannon foundries. Fabre d’Eglantine watched the season change, from his prison room in the National Building that was once the Luxembourg Palace. The raw, bright, blustery days made the pain in his chest worse. Each morning he examined himself in the fine mirror he had sent home for, and noted that his face was thinner and his eyes suspiciously bright, with a brightness that had nothing to do with his prospects.
He heard that Danton’s initiatives didn’t prosper, that Danton didn’t see Robespierre. Danton, see Robespierre, he demanded of his prison wall: bully, beg, deceive, demand. Sometimes he lay awake listening for the sound of the Dantonist mob roistering through the city; silence answered back. Camille is friends with Robespierre again, his gaoler told him; adding that he and his wife didn’t believe that Camille was an aristocrat, and that Citizen Robespierre was a true friend of the working man, his continued good health the only guarantee of sugar in the shops and firewood at reasonable prices.
Fabre ran over in his mind all the things he had ever done for Camille; they were not many. He sent out for his complete set of the
17 Pluviose—it wasn’t raining—Robespierre spoke to the Convention, outlining the basis of his future policy, his plans for the Republic of Virtue. As he left the hall a rustle of consternation followed him. He seemed more tired than one could reasonably be, even after his hours at the tribune; his lips were bloodless, his eyes dark and hollow with exhaustion. Some of the survivors from those days mentioned Mirabeau’s sudden collapse. But he appeared punctually for the next session of the Committee; his eyes traveled from face to face, to see who was disappointed.
22 Pluviose, he woke in the night fighting for breath. In the intervals of panic he forced himself to his writing table. But he had forgotten what he wanted to write; a wave of nausea brought him to his hands and knees on the floor. You do not die, he said, as he fought to expel the air trapped in his lungs, you do not, he said with each aspiration, die. You have survived this before.
When the attack passed he ordered himself up from the floor. I will not do it, his body said: you have finished me, killed me, I refuse to serve such a master.
His head dropped. If I stay here, he thought, I shall stretch out and go to sleep on the floor, just where I am, I will then take a chill, everything will be finished.
So, said the body, you should not have treated me as your slave, abusing me with fasting and chastity and broken sleep. What will you do now? Tell your intellect to get you off the floor, tell your mind to keep you on your feet tomorrow.
He took hold of the leg of a chair, then its back. He watched his hand creep along the wood; he was falling asleep. His hand became infinitely distant. He dreamed of his grandfather’s household. There are no barrels for this week’s brewing, someone said; all the wood has been used for scaffolding. Scaffolding or scaffolds? Anxiously he felt in his pocket for a letter from Benjamin Franklin. The letter told him, “You are an electrical machine.”
Eleonore found him at first light. She and her father stood guard over the door. Souberbielle arrived at eight o’clock. He spoke very slowly, very distinctly, as if to a deaf person: cannot answer for the consequences, he said, cannot answer for the consequences. He nodded to show that he understood. Souberbielle bent to catch his whisper. “Shall I make my will?”
“Well, I don’t think so,” the doctor said cheerfully. “Have you much to bequeath, by the way?”
He shook his head; let his eyes close, and smiled slightly.
“There is never anything the matter with them,” Souberbielle said. “I mean, in the sense that it is this disease, or that disease. In September we thought we’d lost Danton. So many years of hard work and panics can reduce even a strong man like that to a wreck—and Citizen Robespierre is not strong. No, of course he is not dying. Nobody actually dies of the things that are wrong with him, they just have their lives made harder. How long? He needs to
