but here amid the tassels and gold paint. You could hear it on Deputy Petion’s lips as he inclined his powdered head to Deputy Buzot, a personable young lawyer from Evreux. There were twenty or thirty men who always sat together, who kept up a disaffected murmur, and sometimes laughed. Deputy Robespierre’s maiden speech was ruled out of order on a technicality. People wondered what he had done to upset Mirabeau at this early stage. Mirabeau calls him “the rabid lamb.”
The Archbishop of Aix came to the Third Estate carrying a piece of stony black bread and weeping crocodile tears. He exhorted the deputies to waste no more time in futile debate. People were starving, and this was the sort of thing they were being given to eat. He held up the bread delicately, between finger and thumb, for inspection; he took out a handkerchief, embroidered with his coat of arms, and dusted from his hands the blue-and-white mold. Deputies said, disgusting. The best thing they could do, the Archbishop said, was to forget the procedural wrangles and form a joint committee with the other two Estates, to discuss famine relief.
Robespierre stood up. He began to move towards the rostrum. He fancied that someone might try to stop him, saw them rising in their seats to be there first, so he put his small, neat head down like a bull’s and walked as if he meant to shake them off. If they join with the other Estates for one committee session, for one vote, the Third Estate has lost its case. This was a trick, and the archbishop had come to play it. Those few steps seemed like a field, and he was walking uphill in the mud, shouting “No, no,” his voice carried off by the wind. His heart seemed to have jumped up and hardened into his throat, the exact size of the piece of black bread the archbishop held in his hand. He turned, saw below him hundreds of white, blank, upturned faces, and heard his voice in the sudden hush, blistering and coherent:
“Let them sell their carriages, and give the money to the poor … .”
There is a moment of incomprehension. There is no applause, but a mutter, sharp and curious. People stand up to get a better view. He blushes faintly under their attention. Here everything begins: June 6, 1789, 3 p.m.
June 6, 7 p.m., Lucile Duplessis’s diary:
Must we crawl forever? When shall we find the happiness we all seek? Man is easily dazzled—when he forgets himself he thinks he is happy. No, there is no happiness on the earth, it is only a chimera. When the world no longer exists—but how can it be wiped out? They say there will be nothing anymore. Nothing. The sun to lose its brightness, to shine no more. What will become of it? How will it set about becoming nothing?
Her pen hovers, about to underline
Her father says, “You’re not eating, Lucile. You’re fading away. What’s happening to my pretty girl?”
She’s fining down, Father. The angles of her body emerge, shoulder and wrist. There are shadows under her eyes. She refuses to put her hair up. Her eyes were once of the sharp, lively kind; but now she looks at people with a concentrated dark stare.
Her mother says, “Lucile, I wish you would stop fiddling with your hair. It reminds me—I mean, it irritates me.”
Go out of the room then, Mother: turn your eyes away.
Her heart must be stony, for it seems that it won’t break. Every morning she finds herself living, breathing, bodily present, and begins her day in the iron ring of their faces. Looking into her father’s eyes she sees the reflection of a happy young woman in her mid-twenties, with two or three pretty children gathered at her knee; in the background is a stalwart, honorable man with a well-pressed coat, a nebulous area where the face should be. She’ll not give them that satisfaction. She thinks of means of suicide. But that would be to make an end; and true passion, you know, is never consummated. Better to find a cloister, skewer that metaphysical lust under a starched coif. Or to walk out of the front door one day on a casual errand, into poverty and love and chance.
Miss Languish, d’Anton calls her. It is something to do with the English plays he reads.
On June 12, three country cures come over to the Third Estate. By the 17th, sixteen more have joined them. The Third Estate now calls itself the “National Assembly.” On June 20, the National Assembly finds itself locked out of its hall. Closed for refurbishment, they are told.
M. Bailly is solemn amid the sardonic laughter, summer rain running down his hat. Dr. Guillotin, his fellow academician, is at his elbow. “What about that tennis court down the road?”
Those within earshot stared at him. “It’s not locked—I know it wouldn’t give us a lot of room but … Well, anybody got a better suggestion?”
At the tennis court they stand President Bailly on a table. They swear an oath, not to separate until they have given France a constitution. Overcome by emotion, the scientist assumes an antique pose. It is, altogether, a Roman moment. “We’ll see how they stick together when the troops move in,” the Comte de Mirabeau says.
Three days later, when they are back in their own premises, the King turns up at their meeting. In an unsteady and hesitant voice he annuls their actions. He will give them a program of reform, he alone. In silence before him, black coats, bleached cravats, faces of stone: men sitting for their own monuments. He orders them to disperse, and, gathering his sorry majesty, exits in procession.
Mirabeau is at once on his feet. Scrupulously attentive to his own legend, he looks around for the shorthand writers and the press. The Master of Ceremonies interrupts: will they kindly break up the meeting, as the King has ordered?
Mirabeau: “If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all await death; but he need not hope that we shall separate until we have made the constitution.”
Audible only to his neighbor, he adds, “If they come, we bugger off, quick.”
For a moment all are silent—the cynics, the detractors, the rakers-up of the past. The deputies applaud him to the echo. Later they will drop back to let him pass, staring at the invisible wreath of laurels that crowns his unruly hair.
“The answer’s the same, Camille,” said Momoro the printer. “I publish this, and we both land in the Bastille. There’s no point in revising it, is there, if every version gets worse?”
Camille sighed and picked up his manuscript. “I’ll see you again. That is, I might.”
On the Pont-Neuf that morning a woman had called out to tell his fortune. She had said the usual: wealth, power, success in matters of the heart. But when he had asked her if he would have a long life, she had looked at his palm again and given him his money back.
D’Anton was in his office, a great pile of papers before him. “Come and watch me in court this afternoon,” he invited Camille. “I’m going to drive your friend Perrin into the ground.”
“Can’t you get up any malice, except against the people you meet in court?”
