Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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to go and talk to Mirabeau.’
‘Poor sod.’ D’Anton slept momentarily on his feet. ‘It’s going to be hotter than ever today.’ He swung open the shutter. The glare leapt into the room.
CAMILLE’S DIFFICULTY was not staying awake; it was catching up with his personal effects. It was some time since he had been of fixed address. He wondered, really, if d’Anton could enter into his difficulties. When you turn up unexpectedly at somewhere you used to live, it’s very difficult to say to people, ‘Take your hands off me, I only came for a clean shirt.’ They don’t believe you. They think it’s a pretext.
And again, he is always in transit. It can easily take three hours to get from Paris to Versailles. Despite his difficulties, he is at Mirabeau’s house for the hour when normal people have their breakfast; he has shaved, changed, brushed his hair, he is every inch (he thinks) the modest young advocate waiting on the great man.
Teutch rolled his eyes and pushed him in at the door. ‘There’s a new cabinet,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t include HIM.’
Mirabeau was pacing about the room, a vein distended in his temple. He checked his stride for a moment. ‘Oh, there you are. Been with fucking Philippe?’
The room was packed: angry faces, faces drawn with anxiety. Deputy Pétion dropped a perspiring hand on his shoulder. ‘Well, looking so good, Camille,’ he said. ‘Me, I’ve been up all night. You know they sacked Necker? The new cabinet meets this morning, if they can find a Minister of Finance. Three people have already turned it down. Necker’s popular – they’ve really done it this time.’
‘Is it Antoinette’s fault?’
‘They say so. There are deputies here who expected to be arrested, last night.’
‘There’s time, for arrests.’
‘I think,’ Pétion 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 Pétion’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. ‘Maître 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 Orléanist 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 anaemic 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. Wig-makers 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 rumour 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 chidren. 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 pocket-knife. 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 Café 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 café 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 rigour, 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, round-ups, 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 café 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 on to 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 amphitheatre. 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 café 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