“Oh, I would advise you,” he turned to Hermann, “not to allow witnesses for the defense.”
“One question,” Hermann said. “Why don’t you send in some assassins to kill them in their cells? God knows, I am no Dantonist, but this is murder.”
“Oh come.” Saint-Just was irritated. “You complain of lack of time, and then you use it up with frivolous questions. I am not here to make small talk. You know quite well the importance of doing these things in the public eye. Now, the following people are to be charged with the four I have already named. Herault, Fabre—all right?”
“The papers are ready,” Fouquier said sourly.
“The swindler Chabot, and his associates Basire and Delaunay, both deputies—”
“To discredit them,” Hermann said.
“Yes.” Fouquier said. “Mix up the politicians with the cheats and thieves. The public will think, if one is on trial for fraud, all the rest must be.”
“If you’ll allow me to continue? With them a batch of foreigners—the brothers Frei, the Spanish banker Guzman, the Danish businessman Diedrichsen. Oh, and the army contractor, the Abbe d’Espanac. Charges are conspiracy, fraud, hoarding, currency speculation, congress with foreign powers—I’ll leave it to you, Fouquier. There’s no shortage of evidence against any of these people.”
“Only against Danton.”
“Well, that’s your problem now. By the way, Citizens—do you know what these are?”
Fouquier looked down. “Of course I know. Blank warrants, signed by the Committee. That’s a dangerous practice, if I may say so.”
“Yes, it is dangerous, isn’t it?” Saint-Just turned the papers around and entered a name on each. “Do you want to see them now?” He held them up between finger and thumb, flapping them to get the ink dry. “This one is yours, Hermann—and this one, Citizen Prosecutor, is for you.” He smiled again, folded them and slipped them into an inside pocket of his coat. “Just in case anything goes wrong at the trial,” he said.
The National Convention: the session opens in disorder. First on his feet is Legendre. His face is haggard. Perhaps noises in the street woke him early?
“Last night certain members of this Assembly were arrested. Danton was one, I’m not sure about the others. I demand that the members of the Convention who are detained be brought to the Bar of the House, to be accused or absolved by us. I am convinced that Danton’s hands are as clean as mine—”
A whisper runs through the chamber. Heads turn away from the speaker. President Tallien looks up as the Committees enter. Collot’s face seems flaccid, unused: he does not assume a character till the day’s preformance begins. Saint-Just wears a blue coat with gold buttons, and carries many papers. A rustle of alarm sweeps the benches. Here is the Police Committee: Vadier with his long, discolored face and hooded eyes, Lebas with his jaw set. And in the small silence they command, like the great tragedian who delays his entrance—Citizen Robespierre, the Incorruptible himself. He hesitates in the aisle between the tiered benches, and one of his colleagues digs him in the small of the back.
When he had mounted the tribune he said nothing; he folded his hands on his notes. The seconds passed. His eyes traveled around the room-resting, it was said, for the space of two heartbeats on those he mistrusted.
He began to speak: quite calmly, evenly. Danton’s name was raised, as if some privilege attached to it. But there would be no privilege, from now on; rotten idols would be smashed. He paused. He pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead. His eyes fixed upon Legendre, fixed with their glacial, short-sighted stare. Legendre pressed together his huge slaughterer’s hands, his throat-cutting and ox-felling hands, until the knuckles grew white. And in a moment he was on his feet, babbling: you have mistaken my intention, you have mistaken my intention. “Whoever shows fear is guilty,” Robespierre said. He descended from the tribune, his thin, pale mouth curved between a smile and a sneer.
Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read without passion, almost without inflection, his eyes on the papers that he held in his left hand. Occasionally he would raise his right arm, then let it fall limply by his side: this was his only gesture, a staid, mechanical one. Once, towards the end, he raised his young face to his audience and spoke directly to them: “After this,” he promised, “there will be only patriots left.”
Rue Marat: “Well, my love,” Lucile said to her child, “are you coming with me to see your godfather? No, perhaps not. Take him to my mother,” she said to Jeanette.
“You should bathe your face before you go out. It is swollen.”
“He might expect me to cry. He might predict it. He won’t notice what I look like. He doesn’t.”
“If it’s possible,” Louise Danton said, “this place is in a worse state than ours.”
They stood in the wreck of Lucile’s drawing room. Every book they possessed was piled broken-spined on the carpet; drawers and cupboards gaped open, rifled. The ashes in the hearth had been raked over minutely. She reached up and straightened her engraving of Mary Stuart’s end. “They have taken all his papers,” she said. “Letters. Everything. Even the manuscript of the Church Fathers.”
“If Robespierre agrees to see us, what shall we say? Whatever shall we say?”
“You need say nothing. I will do it.”
“Who would have thought, that the Convention would hand them over like that, with no protest!”
“I would have thought it. No one—except your husband—can stand up to Robespierre. There are letters here,” she told Jeanette, “to every member of the Committee of Public Safety. Except Saint-Just, there is no point in writing to him. Here are the letters for the Police Committee; this is for Fouquier, and these are for various deputies, you see that they are all addressed. Make sure they go right now. If I get no replies, and Max won’t see me, I’ll have to think of some new tactics.”
At the Luxembourg, Herault assumed the role of gracious host. It had been, after all, a palace, and was not designed as a prison. “Secret and solitary, you’ll find it isn’t,” Herault said. “From time to time they do lock us away, but generally we live in the most delightfully sociable manner—in fact I have seen nothing like it since Versailles. The talk is witty, manners are of the best—the ladies have their hair dressed, and change three times a day. There are dinner parties. Anything you want—short of
