A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“You may think not,” Louise said.

“If I went to the Bastille, and I were killed, they’d put me in books, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes.” She looked at him oddly. “But you’re not going anywhere to be killed.”

“Unless your husband comes home and kills me,” he said, with reference to their situation.

“Oh yes.” She smiled grimly, eyes elsewhere. “Actually, I mean to be faithful to Francois. I think we have a future together.”

We all have a future now. It was not an accident, he thinks, it was not luck. He sees his body, tiny and flat, his hands groping for handholds against the blinding white chalk face of the future, feels his face pressed against the rock, and the giddy lurch of vertigo inside; he has always been climbing. Louise held him tightly. He sagged against her, wanting to sleep. “Such a coup de theatre,” she whispered. She stroked his hair. She brought him some coffee. Stay quite, quite still, she said. He watched it go cold. The air around him was electric. He examined the palm of his right hand. Her finger traced the cut, thin as a hair. “How would you think I got that? I don’t remember, but in the context it seems, with people being crushed to death and trampled on —”

“I think you lead a charmed life,” she said. “Though I never suspected it until now.”

Francois Robert came home. He stood in the doorway of the room and kissed his wife on the mouth. He took off his coat and gave it to her. Then deliberately he stood in front of a mirror and combed his curly black hair, while Louise waited by him, her head not quite up to his shoulder. When he finished he said, “The Bastille has been taken.” He crossed the room and looked down at Camille. “Despite the fact that you were here, you were also there. Eyewitnesses saw you, one of the mainstays of the action. The second man inside was Herault de Sechelles.” He moved away. “Is there some more of that coffee?” He sat down. “All normal life has stopped,” he said, as if to an idiot or small child. He pulled off his boots. “Everything will be quite different from now on.”

You think that, Camille said tiredly. He could not entirely take in what was said to him. Gravity has not been abolished, the ground below has been spiked. Even at the top of the cliff there are passes and precipices, blank defiles with sides like the sides of the grave. “I dreamt I was dead,” he said. “I dreamt I had been buried.” There is a narrow path to the heart of the mountains, stony, ambivalent, the slow-going tedious country of the mind. Still your lies, he says to himself. I did not dream that, I dreamt of water; I dreamt that I was bleeding on the streets. “You would think that my stutter might have vanished,” he said. “But life is not as charmed as that. Can you let me have some paper? I ought to write to my father.”

“All right, Camille,” Francois said. “Tell him you’re famous now.”

PART THREE

“Tell many people that your reputation is great; they will repeat it, and these repetitions will make your reputation.

“I want to live quickly … .”

“The Theory of Ambition” an essay:

JEAN-MARIE HERAULT DE SECHELLES

CHAPTER 1

Virgins

M. Soules, Elector of Paris, was alone on the walls of the Bastille. They had come for him early in the evening and said, Lafayette wants you. De Launay’s been murdered, they said, so you’re governor pro tem. Oh no, he said, why me?

Pull yourself together, man, they’d said; there won’t be anymore trouble.

Three a.m. on the walls. He had sent back his weary escort. The night’s black as a graceless soul: the body yearns towards extinction. From Saint-Antoine, lying below him, a dog howled painfully at the stars. Far to his left a torch licked feebly at the blackness, burning in a wall-bracket: lighting the clammy stones, the weeping ghosts.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, help us now and in the hour of our deaths.

He was looking into a man’s chest, and the man had a musket.

There should be, he thought wildly, a challenge, you are supposed to say, who goes there, friend or foe? What if they say “foe,” and keep coming?

“Who are you?” the chest said.

“I am the governor.”

“The governor is dead and all chopped up into little pieces.”

“So I’ve heard. I am the new governor. Lafayette sent me.”

“Oh really? Lafayette sent him,” the chest said. There were sniggers from the darkness. “Let’s see your commission.”

Soules reached inside his coat: handed over the piece of paper that he had kept next to his heart all these nervous hours.

“How do you expect me to read it in this light?” He heard the sound of paper crumpling. “Right,” the chest said with condescension. “I am Captain d’Anton, of the Cordeliers Battalion of the citizens’ militia, and I am arresting you because you seem to me a very suspicious character. Citizens, carry out your duty.”

Soules opened his mouth.

“No point shouting. I have inspected the guard. They’re drunk and sleeping like the dead. We’re taking you to our district headquarters.”

Soules peered into the darkness. There were at least four armed men behind Captain d’Anton, perhaps more in