Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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paper – if there is one. It appears that he made a speech at the Palais-Royal and that it had a certain effect and that he has now become some sort of hero to these people. To the mob, I should say. The police moved in to arrest him and he unwisely held them off at gunpoint.’
‘I’m not sure it was unwise,’ Adèle said, ‘given the result it seems to have produced.’
‘Oh, I should have taken measures,’ Claude said. ‘I should have sent you both away. I ask what I have done to deserve it, one daughter hobnobbing with radicals and the other planning to plight herself to a criminal.’
‘Criminal?’ Lucile sounded surprised.
‘Yes. He has broken the law.’
‘The law will be altered.’
‘My God,’ Claude said, ‘do you tell me? The troops will flatten them.’
‘You seem to think that all this is accidental,’ Lucile said. ‘No, Father, let me speak, I have a right to speak, since I know better than you what is going on. You say there are thousands of rioters, how many thousands you are not sure, but the French Guards will not attack their own people, and most of them indeed are on our side. If they are properly organized they will soon have enough arms to engage the rest of the troops. The Royal Allemand troops will be swamped by sheer force of numbers.’
Claude stared at her. ‘Any measures you might have taken are too late,’ his wife said in a low voice. Lucile cleared her throat. It was almost a speech she was making, a pale drawing-room imitation. Her hands shook. She wondered if he had been very frightened: if pushed and driven by the crowds he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the living heart of all the close designs.
‘All this was planned,’ she said. ‘I know there are reinforcements, but they have to cross the river.’ She walked to the window. ‘Look. No moon tonight. How long will it take them to cross in the dark, with their commanders falling out amongst themselves? They only know how to fight on battlefields, they don’t know how to fight in the streets. By tomorrow morning – if they can be held now at the Place Louis XV – the troops will be cleared out of the city centre. And the Paris Electors will have their militia on the streets; they can ask for arms from City Hall. There are guns at the Invalides, forty thousand muskets – ’
‘Battlefield?’ Claude said. ‘Reinforcements? How do you know all this? Where did you learn it?’
‘Where do you suppose?’ she said coolly.
‘Electors? Militia? Muskets? Do you happen to know,’ he asked, with hysterical sarcasm, ‘where they will get the powder and shot?’
‘Oh yes,’ Lucile said. ‘At the Bastille.’
GREEN WAS THE COLOUR they had picked for identification – green, the colour of hope. In the Palais-Royal a girl had given Camille a bit of green ribbon, and since then the people had raided the shops for it and yards and yards of sage-green and apple and emerald and lime stretched over the dusty streets and trailed in the gutters. In the Palais-Royal they had pulled down leaves from the chestnut trees, and now wore them sad and wilting in their hats and buttonholes. The torn, sweet vegetable smell lay in clouds over the afternoon.
By evening they were an army, marching behind their own banners. Though darkness fell, the heat did not abate; and sometime during the night the storm broke, and the crack of thunder overhead vied with the sting and rumble of gunfire and the crash of splintering glass; people sang, orders were bawled into the darkness, all night long there was the thud of boots on cobblestones and the ring of steel. Jagged flashes from the sky lit the devastated streets, and smoke billowed on the winds from the burning barriers. At midnight a drunken grenadier said to Camille, ‘I’ve seen your face somewhere before.’
At dawn, in the rain, he met Hérault de Séchelles; but then he was beyond surprise by now, and would not have passed any comment if he had found himself shoulder to shoulder with Mme du Barry. The judge’s face was dirty, his coat was ripped half off his back. In one hand he had a very fine duelling pistol, one of a valuable pair made for Maurice de Saxe: and in the other a meat-cleaver.
‘But the waste, the irresponsibility,’ Hérault said. ‘They’ve plundered the Saint-Lazare monastery. All that fine furniture, my God, and the silver. Yes, they’ve raided the cellars, they’re lying in the streets vomiting now. What’s that you say? Versailles? Did you say “finish it off” or “finish them off”? If so I’d better get a change of clothes, I’d hate to turn up at the palace looking like this. Oh yes,’ he said, and he gripped the cleaver and charged back into the crowds, ‘it beats filing writs, doesn’t it?’ He had never been so happy: never, never before.
DUKE PHILIPPE had spent the 12th at his château of Raincy, in the forest of Bondy. On hearing of the events in Paris, he expressed himself ‘much surprised and shocked’. ‘Which,’ says his ex-mistress Mrs Elliot, ‘I really thought he was.’
At the King’s levee on the morning of the 13th, Philippe was first ignored; then asked by His Majesty (rudely) what he wanted; then told, ‘Get back where you came from.’ Philippe set off for his house at Mousseaux in a very bad temper, and swore (according to Mrs Elliot) ‘that he would never go near them again’.
IN THE AFTERNOON Camille went back to the Cordeliers district. The drunken grenadier was still dogging his footsteps saying, ‘I know you from somewhere.’ There were four murderous but sober French Guardsmen who were under threat of lynching if anything happened to him; there were several escaped prisoners from La Force. There was a raucous market-wife with a striped skirt, a woollen bonnet, a broad-bladed kitchen knife and a foul tongue; I’ve taken a fancy to you, she kept saying, you aren’t going anywhere from now on without me. There was a pretty young woman with a pistol in the belt of her riding-habit, and her brown hair tied back with a red ribbon and a blue one.
‘What happened to the green?’ he asked her.
‘Somebody remembered that green is the Comte d’Artois’s colour. We can’t have that – so now it’s the Paris colours, red and blue.’ She smiled at him with what seemed like old affection. ‘Anne Théroigne,’ she said. ‘We met at one of Fabre’s auditions. Remember?’
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 neighbour, M. Gély,’ she said, ‘to recruit for the citizens’ militia. A few minutes ago Maître 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 Gély 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 vapours. Georges said to Maître 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,’