A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

dragging Camille’s limp body. His eyes are closed and his mouth is bleeding. Fabre sees him; his face crumples, and suddenly he begins to cry. “You bastards, you bastards,” he says. “Oh, you bastards, you bastards, you bastards.”

Fouquier looks around the members of the jury. Souberbielle avoids his eye. “I think that’s about it,” he says to Hermann. He nods to Vadier. “Satisfied?”

“I shall be satisfied when their heads are off.”

“The crowds are reported large but passive,” Fouquier says. “It is as Citizen Robespierre says; in the end, they have no allegiance. It is finished.”

“Are we to have them back in the courtroom, and go through all that again?”

“No, I think not,” Fouquier says. He hands a sheet of paper to one of the court officials. “Get them into the outer office. This is the death sentence. Read it to them while Sanson’s men are cutting their hair.” He takes out his watch. “It’s four o’clock. He’ll be ready.”

“I don’t give a fuck for your sentence. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested in the verdict. The people will judge Danton, not you.”

Danton continues talking over the official’s voice, so that none of the men with him hear their death sentences being read. In the courtyard beyond the prison’s outer office, Sanson’s assistants are joking and calling to each other.

Lacroix sits on a wooden stool. The executioner tips open the collar of his shirt and rapidly cuts off the hair that grows over the back of his neck. “One unconscious,” a guard calls out. “One unconscious.”

Behind the wooden grille that separates the prisoners from the courtyard, the master executioner raises his hand to show that he has understood. Chabot is covered by a blanket. His face is blue. He is slipping into a coma. Only his lips move.

“He ordered himself some arsenic,” the guard says. “Well, you can’t stop the prisoner’s requirements getting through.”

“Yes,” Herault says to Danton. “I contemplated it. In the end I thought, to commit suicide under these circumstances is an admission of guilt, and if they insist on cutting your corpse’s head off, as they do, it is in questionable taste. One should set an example to this riff-raff, don’t you think? In any event, it is better to open a vein.” His attention is drawn to the opposite wall, where a savage scuffle is going on. “My dear Camille, what is the point?” Herault asks.

“You are giving us a lot of trouble, you are,” one of the guards says. They have finally got Camille tied up very tightly. They have discussed whether to accidentally knock him unconscious, but if they do that Sanson will get testy and call them bloody amateurs. His shirt was torn off his back when they tried to hold him still to cut his hair, and the rags of it hang on his thin shoulders. A dark bruise is spreading visibly under his left cheekbone. Danton crouches by him.

“We must tie your hands, Citizen Danton.”

“Just one second.”

Danton reaches down, and takes from around Camille’s neck the locket that holds a twist of Lucile’s hair. He puts it into his bound hands, and feels Camille’s fingers close over it.

“You can go ahead now.”

Lacroix digs him in the ribs. “Those Belgian girls—it was worth it, yes?”

“It was worth it. But not for the Belgian girls.”

Herault is a little pale as he steps into the first tumbrel. Otherwise, there is no change visible on his face. “I am glad I don’t have to travel with the thieves.”

“Only the best-quality revolutionaries in this tumbrel,” Danton says. “Are you going to make it, Fabre, or shall we bury you en route?

Fabre lifts his head with an effort. “Danton. They took my papers, you know.”

“Yes, that is what they do.”

“I just wanted to finish The Maltese Orange, that was all. There were such beautiful verses in it. Now the Committee will get the manuscript, and that bastard Collot will pass it off as his own.” Danton tips back his head and begins to laugh. “They will put it on at the Italiens,” Fabre says, “under that blasted plagiarist’s name.”

Pont-Neuf, Quai de Louvre. The cart sways and jolts. He plants his feet apart to keep upright and to steady Camille’s sagging weight. Camille’s tears seep through the cloth of his shirt. He is not crying for himself but for Lucile: perhaps for their composite self, their eternity of letters, their repertoire of gestures and quirks and jokes, all lost now, vanished and for their child. “You are not meeting Herault’s standards,” Danton says softly.

He scans the faces of the crowd. Silent, indifferent, they slow the progress of the carts. “Let us try to die with dignity,” Herault suggests.

Camille looks up, snaps out of his coma of grief, “Oh, fuck off,” he says to Herault, “stop being such a ci-devant.”

Quai de l’Ecole. Danton raises his eyes to the facade of the buildings. “Gabrielle,” he murmurs. He looks up as if he expects to see someone there: a face withdrawing behind a curtain, a hand raised in farewell.

Rue Honore. The interminable street. At the end of it they shout curses at the shuttered facade of the Duplay house. Camille, though, tries to speak to the crowds. Henri Sanson glances over his shoulder apprehensively. Danton drops his head, whispers to him, “Be calm, now. Let that vile rabble alone.”

The sun is setting. It will be quite dark, Danton thinks, by the time we are all dead. At the tail of the cart, muffled in sansculotte garb, the Abbe Keravenen recites silently the prayers for the dying. As the cart turns into the Place de la Revolution, he raises his hand in conditional absolution.

There is a point beyond which—convention and imagination dictate—we cannot go; perhaps it’s here, when the carts decant onto the scaffold their freight, now living and breathing flesh, soon to be dead meat. Danton imagines that, as the greatest of the condemned, he will be left until last, with Camille beside him. He thinks less of eternity than of how to keep his friend’s body and soul together for the fifteen minutes before the National Razor separates them.

But of course it is not like that. Why should it be as you imagine? They drag Herault away first: rather, they