Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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they were at the Invalides barracks, negotiating for arms. Someone turned him around gently and pointed out to him where the rays of the early sun blazed on fixed bayonets on the Champs-de-Mars. ‘They’ll not come,’ he said, and they didn’t. He heard his own voice saying calming, sensible things, as he looked upwards into the mouths of the cannon, where soldiers stood with lighted tapers in their hands. He was not frightened. Then the negotiation was over, and there was running and shouting. This is called storming the Invalides. For the first time he was frightened. When it was finished he leaned against the wall, and the brown-haired girl put a bayonet into his hands. He put his palm against the blade, and asked in simple curiosity, ‘Is it hard to do?’
‘Easy,’ the drunken grenadier said. ‘I’ve remembered you, you know. It was a matter of a little riot outside the Law Courts, couple of years back. Good day out. Sort of dropped you on the ground and kicked you in the ribs. Sorry about that. Just doing the job. Not done you any harm, by the look of it.’
Camille looked up at him steadily. The soldier was covered in blood, dripping with it, his clothes sodden, his hair matted, grinning through a film of gore. As he watched him he spun on his heels and executed a little dance, holding up his scarlet forearms.
‘The Bastille, eh?’ he sang. ‘Now for the Bastille, eh, the Bastille, the Bastille.’
DE LAUNAY, the governor of the Bastille, was a civilian, and he made his surrender wearing a grey frock-coat. Shortly afterwards he tried to stab himself with his sword-stick, but was prevented.
The crowd who pressed around de Launay shouted, ‘Kill him.’ Members of the French Guard attempted to protect him, shielding him with their bodies. But by the Church of Saint-Louis, some of the crowd tore him away from them, spat at him, and clubbed and kicked him to the ground. When the Guards rescued him, his face was streaming blood, his hair had been torn out in handfuls, and he was barely able to walk.
As they approached City Hall their path was blocked. There was an argument between those who wanted to put the man on trial before hanging him and those who wanted to finish him right away. Crushed and panic-striken, de Launay flung out his arms wide; they were grasped at both sides, so that he no longer had a free hand to wipe away the blood that ran from his scalp wounds into his eyes. Tormented, he struggled and lashed out with his foot. It made contact with the groin of a man named Desnot. Desnot – who was an unemployed cook – screamed in shock and agony. He fell to his knees, clutching himself.
An unknown man stepped from behind him and eyed the prisoner. After one second’s hesitation, he took a pace forward and pushed his bayonet into de Launay’s stomach. As it was withdrawn, de Launay stumbled forward on to the points of six more weapons. Someone hammered repeatedly at the back of his head with a big piece of wood. His protectors stepped back as he was dragged into the gutter, where he died. Several shots were fired into his smashed and twitching body. Desnot hobbled forward and pushed his way to the front. Somebody said, ‘Yours.’ He fished in his pocket, his face still twisted in pain, and knelt down by the body. Threading his fingers into the remaining strands of de Launay’s hair, he flicked open a small knife, and straining back the corpse’s head began to hack away at the throat. Someone offered him a sword, but he was not confident of his ability to manage it; his face betrayed little more than his own discomfort, and he continued digging with his pocket-knife until de Launay’s head was quite severed.
CAMILLE SLEPT. His dreams were green, rural, full of clear water. Only at the end the waters ran dark and sticky, the open sewers and the gashed throats. ‘Oh, Christ,’ a woman’s voice said. Choked with tears. His head was held against a not very maternal bosom. ‘I am in the grip of strong emotions,’ Louise Robert said.
‘You’ve been crying,’ he said. He stated the obvious. How long had he slept? An hour, or half a day? He could not understand how he came to be lying on the Roberts’ bed. He did not remember how he had got there. ‘What time is it?’ he asked her.
‘Sit up,’ she said. ‘Sit up and listen to me.’ She was a little girl, pallid, with tiny bones. She walked about the room. ‘This is not our revolution. This is not ours, or Brissot’s or Robespierre’s.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘I knew Robespierre,’ she said. ‘I suppose I might have been Mme Candle of Arras, if I’d taken trouble. Would that have been a good thing for me?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘This is Lafayette’s revolution,’ she said. ‘And Bailly’s, and fucking Philippe’s. But it’s a start.’ She considered him, both hands at her throat. ‘You of all people,’ she said.
‘Come back.’ He held out a hand to her. He felt that he had drifted out on a sea of ice, far far beyond human contact. She sat down beside him, arranging her skirts. ‘I have put the shutters of the shop up. No one is interested in delicacies from the colonies. No one has done any shopping for two days.’
‘Perhaps there will be no colonies. No slaves.’
She laughed. ‘In a while. Don’t divert me. I have my job to do. I have to stop you going anywhere near the Bastille, in case your luck runs out.’
‘It’s not luck.’ Barely awake, he is working on his story.
‘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 François. 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 théâtre,’ 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.’
François 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 Hérault de Séchelles.’ 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,’ François said. ‘Tell him you’re