A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

“I asked Camille’s friend Robespierre to come over for the day,” he said. “But he can’t take time off from the Assembly. Very conscientious.”

“That poor boy,” Angelique said. “I can’t think what kind of a family he comes from. I said to him, my dear, aren’t you homesick? Don’t you miss your own people? He said—serious as may be—‘Well, Mme. Charpentier, I miss my dog.’”

“I rather liked him,” Charpentier said. “How he ever got mixed up with Camille I can’t imagine. Now,” he rubbed his hands, “what’s the order of the day?”

“Lafayette will be here in fifteen minutes. We all go to Mass, the priest blesses our new battalion flag, we file out, run it up, march past, Lafayette stands about looking like a commander-in-chief. I assume he will expect to be cheered. I should think there’ll be enough oafs to make a respectable din, even in this cynical district.”

“I’m still not sure I understand.” Gabrielle sounded aggrieved. “Is the militia on the King’s side?”

“Oh, everybody is on the King’s side,” her husband said. “It’s just his ministers and his servants and his brothers and his wife we can’t stand. Louis is all right, silly old duffer.”

“But why do people say that Lafayette’s a republican?”

“In America he’s a republican.”

“Are there any republicans here?”

“Very few.”

“Would they kill the King?”

“Heavens, no. We leave that sort of thing to the English.”

“Would they keep him in prison?”

“I don’t know. Ask Mme. Robert when you see her. She’s one of the extremists. Or Camille.”

“So if the National Guard is on the King’s side—”

“On the King’s side,” he interrupted her, “as long as he doesn’t try to go back to where we were before July.”

“Yes, I understood that. It’s on the King’s side, and against republicans. But Camille and Louise and Francois are republicans, aren’t they? So if Lafayette told you to arrest them, would you do it?”

“Good God, no. I’m not going to do his dirty work.”

And he thought, we could be a law unto ourselves in this district. I might not be the battalion commander, but he’s under my thumb.

Camille arrived, breathless and ebullient. “The news couldn’t be better,” he said. “In Toulouse my new pamphlet has been burned by the public executioner. It’s too kind of them, the publicity will certainly mean a second edition. And in Oleron a bookshop that was selling it has been attacked by monks, and they threw out all the stock and started a fire and carved up the bookseller.”

“I don’t think that’s very funny,” Gabrielle said.

“No. Quite tragic really.”

A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.

There was not a breath of wind when they ran up the new flag; it lay around its pole like a lolling tricolor tongue. Gabrielle stood between her father and mother. Her neighbors the Gelys were on her left, little Louise wearing a new hat of which she was unsufferably proud. She was conscious of people’s eyes upon her: there, they were saying, that’s d’Anton’s wife. She heard someone say, “How handsome she is, have they children?” She looked up at her husband, who stood on the church steps, his prize-fighter bulk towering over the ramrod figure of Lafayette. She worked up some contempt for the general, because of her husband’s contempt. She could see that they were being polite to each other. The commander of the battalion waved his hat in the air, raised the shout for Lafayette. The crowd cheered; the general acknowledged them with a spare smile. She half-closed her eyes against the sun. Behind her she could hear Camille’s voice running on, talking to Louise Robert exactly as if she were a man. The deputies from Brittany, he was saying, and the initiative in the Assembly. I wanted to go to Versailles as soon as the Bastille was taken—she heard Mme. Robert’s muffled agreement—but it should be done as soon as possible. He’s talking about another riot, she thought: another Bastille. Then from behind her, there was a shout: “Vive d’Anton.”

She turned, amazed and gratified. The cry was taken up. “It’s only a few Cordeliers,” Camille said, apologetically. “But soon it will be the whole city.”

A few minutes later, the ceremony was over and the party could begin. Georges was down among the crowd, hugging her. “I was thinking,” Camille said. “It’s time you took out that apostrophe from your name. It doesn’t suit the times.”

“You may be right,” her husband said. “I’ll do it gradually—no point making an announcement.”

“No, do it suddenly,” Camille said. “So that everyone knows where you stand.”

“Bully,” Georges-Jacques said fondly. He was acquiring it too: this appetite for confrontation. “Do you mind?” he asked her.

“I want you to do whatever you think best,” she said. “I mean, whatever you think right.”

“Suppose they did not coincide?” Camille asked her. “I mean, what he thought best and what he thought right?”

“But they would,” she said, flustered. “Because he is a good man.”

“That is profound. He will suspect you of thinking while he is not in the house.”