“There’s time, for arrests.”
“I think,” Petion said sensibly, “that some of us ought to go to Paris—Mirabeau, don’t you think so?”
Mirabeau glared at him. He thinks a lot of himself, he thought, to interrupt me. “Why don’t you do that?” he growled. He pretended to have forgotten Petion’s name.
As soon as this reaches the Palais-Royal, Camille thought … He slid across the room to the Comte’s elbow. “Gabriel, I have to leave now.”
Mirabeau pulled him to his side, sneering-at what, was unclear. He held on to him, and with one large hand swept Camille’s hair back from his face. One of Mirabeau’s rings caught the corner of his mouth. “Maitre Desmoulins feels he would like to attend a little riot. Sunday morning, Camille: why aren’t you at Mass?”
He pulled away. He left the room. He ran down the stairs. He was already in the street when Teutch came pounding after him. He stopped. Teutch stared at him without speaking.
“Does the Comte send me some advice?”
“He does, but I forget what it is now.” He thought. “Oh yes.” His brow cleared. “Don’t get killed.”
It is mid-afternoon, almost three o’clock, when the news about Necker’s dismissal reaches the Palais-Royal. The reputation of the mild Swiss financier has been built up with great assiduity—and never more so than in this last week, when his fall has seemed imminent.
The whole populace seems to be out in the open: churning through the streets and heaving through the squares in the blistering heat to the public gardens with their avenues of chestnut trees and their Orleanist connections. The price of bread has just risen. Foreign troops are camped outside the city. Order is a memory, law has a tenuous hold. The French Guards have deserted their posts and returned to their working-men’s interests, and all the backroom skulkers are out in the daylight. Their closed and anemic faces are marked by nocturnal fancies of hanging, of other public agonies and final solutions; and above this the sun is a wound, a boiling tropical eye.
Under this eye, drink is spilled, tempers flash and flare. Wigmakers and clerks, apprentices of all descriptions and scene shifters, small shopkeepers, brewers, drapers, tanners and porters, knife grinders, coachmen and public prostitutes; these are the remnants of Titonville. The crowd moves backwards and forwards, scoured by rumor and dangerous unease, always back to the same place: and as this occurs the clock begins to strike.
Until now this has been a joke, a blood sport, a bare-knuckle contest. The crowd is full of women and children. The streets stink. Why should the court wait on the political process? Through these alleys the populace can be driven like pigs and massacred in back courts by Germans on horseback. Are they to wait for this to happen? Will the King profane Sunday? Tomorrow is a holiday, the people can die on their own time. The clocks finish striking. This is crucifixion hour, as we all know. It is expedient that one man shall die for the people, and in 1757, before we were born, a man called Damiens dealt the old King a glancing blow with a pocketknife. His execution is still talked of, a day of screaming entertainment, a fiesta of torment. Thirty-two years have passed: and now here are the executioner’s pupils, ready for some bloody jubilee.
Camille’s precipitate entry into history came about in this fashion. He was standing in the doorway of the Cafe du Foy, hot, elated, slightly frightened by the press of people. Someone behind him had said that he might try to address the crowds and so a table had been pushed into the cafe doorway. For a moment he felt faint. He leaned against this table, bodies hemming him in. He wondered if d’Anton had a hangover. What had possessed him to want to stay up all night? He wished he were in a quiet dark room, alone but, as d’Anton said, bloody horizontal. His heart raced. He wondered if he had eaten anything that day. He supposed not. He felt he would drown in the acrid miasma of sweat, misery and fear.
Three young men, walking abreast, came carving a way through the crowd. Their faces were set, their arms were linked, they were trying to get a bit of something going, and by now he had been present at enough of these street games to understand their mood and its consequences in terms of casualties. Of these men, he recognized two, but the third man he did not know. The third man cried, “To arms!” The others cried the same.
“What arms?” Camille said. He detached a strand of hair that was sticking to his face and threw out a hand in inquiry. Somebody slapped a pistol into it.
He looked at it as if it had dropped from heaven. “Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.” Somebody gave him another pistol. The shock was so great that if the man had not closed his fingers over the handle he would have dropped it. This is the consequence of intellectual rigor, of not letting people get away with a cheap slogan. The man said, “For God’s sake keep it steady, that kind are liable to go off in your face.”
It will certainly be tonight, he thought: the troops will come out of the Champs-de-Mars, there will be arrests, roundups, exemplary dealings. Suddenly he understood how far the situation had moved on from last week, from yesterday—how far it had moved in the last half hour. It will certainly be tonight, he thought, and they had better know it; we have run out to the end of our rope.
He had so often rehearsed this moment in his mind that his actions now were automatic; they were fluid and perfectly timed, like the actions of a dream. He had spoken many times from the cafe doorway. He had to get the first phrase out, the first sentence, then he could get beside himself and do it, and he knew that he could do it better than anyone else: because this is the scrap that God has saved up for him, like the last morsel on a plate.
He put one knee onto the table and scrambled up on to it. He scooped up the firearms. Already he was ringed about by his audience, like the crowds in an amphitheater. Now he understood the meaning of the phrase “a sea of faces”; it was a living sea, where panic-striken faces nosed for air before the current pulled them under. But people were hanging out of the upstairs windows of the cafe and of the buildings around, and the crowd was growing all the time. He was not high enough, or conspicuous. Nobody seemed to be able to see what he needed, and until he began to speak properly he would not be able to make himself heard. He transferred both the pistols to one hand, bundling them against his body, so that if they go off he will be a terrible mess; but he felt uncurably reluctant to part with them for an instant. With his left arm he waved to someone inside the cafe. A chair was passed out, and planted on the table beside him. “Will you hold it?” he said. He transferred one of the pistols back to his left hand. It was now two minutes past three.
As he stepped onto the chair he felt it slide a little. He thought it would be amazing if he fell off the chair, but people would say it was typical of him. He felt it being gripped by the back, steadied. It was an ordinary straw- bottomed chair. What if he were Georges-Jacques? He would go straight through it.
He was now at a dizzying height above the crowd. A fetid breeze drifted across the gardens. Another fifteen seconds had passed. He was able to identify certain faces, and surprise at this made him blink: ONE WORD, he thought. There were the police, and there were their spies and informers, men who have been watching
