A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

Why must he slander Gabrielle? Rabbit will say anything, she decided. Even he realized he had gone too far—she could see it in his face. Just imagine, she thought—“Gabrielle, can we come round tomorrow and borrow your bed?” Gabrielle would die sooner.

The thought of the Dantons’ bed gives her, she admits, a very strange feeling. An indescribable feeling, really. The thought crosses her mind that, when that day comes, Camille won’t hurt her but Danton will—and her heart bounds, she blushes again, more furiously, because she doesn’t know where the idea came from, she didn’t ask for it, she didn’t want to think that thought at all.

“Has something upset you?” Freron says.

She snaps: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Still, she can’t erase the picture from her mind: that belligerent energy, those huge hard hands, that weight. A woman must thank God, she says to herself, that she has a limited imagination.

The newspaper went through various changes of name. It began as the Courier du Brabant—they were having a revolution over the border, too, and Camille thought it worth a mention. It became the Revolutions de France et du Brabant, ended up simply as the Revolutions de France. Of course, Marat was the same, always changing his title, for various shady reasons. He had been the Paris Publicist, was now the People’s Friend. A title, they thought at the Revolutions, of risible naivete; it sounded like a cure for the clap.

Everyone is starting newspapers, including people who can’t write and who, says Camille, can’t even think. The Revolutions stands out; it makes a splash; it also imposes a routine. If the staff is small, temporary and a bit disorganized, this hardly matters; at a push, Camille can write a whole issue himself. What’s thirty-two pages (in octavo) to a man with so much to say for himself?

Monday and Tuesday they were in the office early, working on the week’s edition. By Wednesday the greater part was ready for the printer. On Wednesday, also, the writs came in from the previous Saturday’s libels, though it had been known for the victims to drag their lawyers back from the country on a Sunday morning and get writs served by Tuesday. Challenges to duels came in sporadically, throughout the week.

Thursday was press day. They made the last-minute corrections, then a menial would sprint around to the printer, M. Laffrey, whose premises were on the Quai des Augustins. Thursday midday brought Laffrey and the distributor, M. Garnery, both tearing their hair. Do you want to see the presses impounded, do you want us in gaol? Sit down, have a drink, Camille would say. He rarely agreed to changes; almost never. And they knew that the bigger the risk, the more copies they’d sell.

Rene Hebert would come into the office: pink-skinned, unpleasant. He made snide jokes all the time about Camille’s private life; no sentence lacked its double entendre. Camille explained him to his assistants; he used to work in a theater box office, but he was sacked for stealing from the petty cash.

“Why do you put up with him?” they said. “Next time he comes, shall we throw him out?”

They were like that at the Revolutions; always hoping for a less sedentary occupation.

“Ah, no, leave him alone,” Camille said. “He’s always been offensive. It’s his nature.”

“I want my own newspaper,” Hebert said. “It will be different from this.”

Brissot was in that day, perched on a desk, twitching. “Shouldn’t be too different,” he said. “This one is a pre- eminent success.”

Brissot and Hebert didn’t like each other.

“You and Camille write for the educated,” Hebert said. “So does Marat. I’m not going to do that.”

“You are going to start a newspaper for the illiterate?” Camille asked him sweetly. “I wish you every success.”

“I’m going to write for the people in the street. In the language they speak.”

“Then every other word will be an obscenity,” Brissot said, sniffing.

“Precisely,” Hebert said, tripping out.

Brissot is the editor of the French Patriot (daily, four pages in quarto, boring). He is also a most generous, painstaking, endlessly inventive contributor to other people’s papers. He quivers into the office most mornings, his narrow, bony face shining with his latest good idea. I’ve spent all my life groveling to publishers, he would say; and tell how he had been cheated, how his ideas had been stolen and his manuscripts pirated. He didn’t seem to see that there was any connection between this sad record of his, and what he was doing now—11:30 in the morning, in another editor’s office, turning his dusty, Quaker-style hat in his hands and talking his substance away. “My family—you understand, Camille? —was very poor and ignorant. They wanted me to be a monk, that was the best life they could envisage. I lost my faith—well, in the end, I had to break it to them, didn’t I? Of course, they didn’t understand. How could they? It was as if we spoke different languages. Say, they were Swedes, and I was Italian—that’s how close I was to my family. So then they said, you could be a lawyer, we suppose. Now, I was walking along the street one day, and one of the neighbors said, ‘Oh, look, there’s M. Janvier on his way back from court.’ And he pointed to this lawyer, stupid-looking man with a paunch, trotting along with his evening’s work under his arm. And he said, ‘You work hard, you’ll be like that someday.’ And my heart sank. Oh, I know, that’s a figure of speech—but, do you know, I swear it did, it bunched itself up and thudded into my belly. I thought, no, any hardship—they can put me in gaol—but I don’t want to be like that. Now, of course, he wasn’t that stupid-looking, he had money, he was looked up to, didn’t oppress the poor or anything, and he’d just got married for the second time, to this very nice young woman … so why wasn’t I tempted? I might have thought—well, it’s a living, it’s not too bad. But—there you are—steady money, easy life—it’s never quite been enough, has it?”

One of Camille’s volatile assistants put his head around the door. “Oh, Camille, here’s a woman after you. Just by way of a change.”

Theroigne swept in. She wore a white dress, and a tricolor sash about her waist. A National Guardsman’s tunic, unbuttoned, was draped over her slim, square shoulders. Her brown hair was a breeze-blown waterfall of curls; she had employed one of those expensive hairdressers who make you look as if you’ve never been near a hairdresser in your life. “Hallo, how’s it going?” she said. Her manner was at variance with this democratic greeting; she radiated energy and a quasi-sexual excitement.

Brissot hopped up from the desk, and considerately lifted the jacket from her shoulders, folded it carefully and laid it over a vacant chair. This reduced her to—what? A pretty-enough young woman in a white dress. She was displeased. There was a weight in the pocket of the tunic. “You carry firearms?” Brissot said, surprised.