Her face seemed luminous in the watery light. Now he saw that she was very cold, drenched and shivering. “The weather has broken,” she said. “And so much else.”
At the Cour du Commerce the concierge had the doors barred, so he talked to Gabrielle through a window. She was pasty-faced and her hair was in a mess. “Georges went out with our neighbor, M. Gely,” she said, “to recruit for the citizens’ militia. A few minutes ago Maitre Lavaux came by—you know him, he lives across the way?—and he said, ‘I’m very worried about Georges, he’s standing on a table yelling his head off about protecting our homes from the military and the brigands.’” She gaped at the people standing behind him. “Who are these? Are they with you?”
Louise Gely appeared, her face bobbing at Gabrielle’s shoulder. “Hallo,” she said. “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand in the street?”
Gabrielle put an arm around her and held her tight. “I’ve got her mother in here having the vapors. Georges said to Maitre Lavaux, ‘Come and join us, you’ve lost your position anyway, the monarchy’s finished.’ Why, why, why did he say that?” Her distraught hand clutched the sill. “When will he be back? What shall I do?”
“Because it’s true,” he said. “He’ll not be long, not Georges. Keep the door locked.”
The drunken grenadier dug him in the ribs. “That your wife, then?”
He stepped back and looked at the man in amazement. At that point something seemed to snap very loudly inside his head, and they had to prop him against a wall and pour brandy into him, so that soon after that nothing made much sense at all.
Another night on the streets: at five o’clock, the tocsin and the alarm cannon. “Now it begins in earnest,” Anne Theroigne said. She pulled the ribbons from her hair, and looped them into the buttonhole of his coat. Red and blue. “Red for blood,” she said. “Blue for heaven.” The colors of Paris: blood-heaven.
At six, they were at the Invalides barracks, negotiating for arms. Someone turned him around gently and pointed out to him where the rays of the early sun blazed on fixed bayonets on the Champs-de-Mars. “They’ll not come,” he said, and they didn’t. He heard his own voice saying calming, sensible things, as he looked upwards into the mouths of the cannon, where soldiers stood with lighted tapers in their hands. He was not frightened. Then the negotiation was over, and there was running and shouting. This is called storming the Invalides. For the first time he was frightened. When it was finished he leaned against the wall, and the brown-haired girl put a bayonet into his hands. He put his palm against the blade, and asked in simple curiosity, “Is it hard to do?”
“Easy,” the drunken grenadier said. “I’ve remembered you, you know. It was a matter of a little riot outside the Law Courts, couple of years back. Good day out. Sort of dropped you on the ground and kicked you in the ribs. Sorry about that. Just doing the job. Not done you any harm, by the look of it.”
Camille looked up at him steadily. The soldier was covered in blood, dripping with it, his clothes sodden, his hair matted, grinning through a film of gore. As he watched him he spun on his heels and executed a little dance, holding up his scarlet forearms.
“The Bastille, eh?” he sang. “Now for the Bastille, eh, the Bastille, the Bastille.”
De Launay, the governor of the Bastille, was a civilian, and he made his surrender wearing a gray frock coat. Shortly afterwards he tried to stab himself with his sword-stick, but was prevented.
The crowd who pressed around de Launay shouted, “Kill him.” Members of the French Guard attempted to protect him, shielding him with their bodies. But by the Church of Saint-Louis, some of the crowd tore him away from them, spat at him and clubbed and kicked him to the ground. When the Guards rescued him, his face was streaming blood, his hair had been torn out in handfuls and he was barely able to walk.
As they approached City Hall their path was blocked. There was an argument between those who wanted to put the man on trial before hanging him and those who wanted to finish him right away. Crushed and panic-striken, de Launay flung out his arms wide; they were grasped at both sides, so that he no longer had a free hand to wipe away the blood that ran from his scalp wounds into his eyes. Tormented, he struggled and lashed out with his foot. It made contact with the groin of a man named Desnot. Desnot—who was an unemployed cook—screamed in shock and agony. He fell to his knees, clutching himself.
An unknown man stepped from behind him and eyed the prisoner. After one second’s hesitation, he took a pace forward and pushed his bayonet into de Launay’s stomach. As it was withdrawn, de Launay stumbled forward onto the points of six more weapons. Someone hammered repeatedly at the back of his head with a big piece of wood. His protectors stepped back as he was dragged into the gutter, where he died. Several shots were fired into his smashed and twitching body. Desnot hobbled forward and pushed his way to the front. Somebody said, “Yours.” He fished in his pocket, his face still twisted in pain, and knelt down by the body. Threading his fingers into the remaining strands of de Launay’s hair, he flicked open a small knife, and straining back the corpse’s head began to hack away at the throat. Someone offered him a sword, but he was not confident of his ability to manage it; his face betrayed little more than his own discomfort, and he continued digging with his pocketknife until de Launay’s head was quite severed.
Camille slept. His dreams were green, rural, full of clear water. Only at the end the waters ran dark and sticky, the open sewers and the gashed throats. “Oh, Christ,” a woman’s voice said. Choked with tears. His head was held against a not very maternal bosom. “I am in the grip of strong emotions,” Louise Robert said.
“You’ve been crying,” he said. He stated the obvious. How long had he slept? An hour, or half a day? He could not understand how he came to be lying on the Roberts’ bed. He did not remember how he had got there. “What time is it?” he asked her.
“Sit up,” she said. “Sit up and listen to me.” She was a little girl, pallid, with tiny bones. She walked about the room. “This is not our revolution. This is not ours, or Brissot’s or Robespierre’s” She stopped suddenly. “I knew Robespierre,” she said. “I suppose I might have been Mme. Candle of Arras, if I’d taken trouble. Would that have been a good thing for me?”
“I really don’t know.”
“This is Lafayette’s revolution,” she said. “And Bailly’s, and fucking Philippe’s. But it’s a start.” She considered him, both hands at her throat. “You of all people,” she said.
“Come back.” He held out a hand to her. He felt that he had drifted out on a sea of ice, far far beyond human contact. She sat down beside him, arranging her skirts. “I have put the shutters of the shop up. No one is interested in delicacies from the colonies. No one has done any shopping for two days.”
“Perhaps there will be no colonies. No slaves.”
She laughed. “In a while. Don’t divert me. I have my job to do. I have to stop you going anywhere near the Bastille, in case your luck runs out.”
“It’s not luck.” Barely awake, he is working on his story.
