Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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we were going to have a club, like the Jacobins but better. People from any part of the city could attend, so no one could say it was illegal. Its real name was the Club of the Friends of the Rights of Man, but from the beginning everybody called it the Cordeliers Club. At first they had meetings in a ballroom. They wanted to hold them in the old Cordeliers monastery, but City Hall had the building sealed up. Then one day – no explanation – the seals came off, and they moved in. Louise Robert said it was done by the influence of the Duke of Orléans.
It’s hard to get into the Jacobin Club. The yearly subscription is high, and you have to have a lot of members to back your application, and their meetings are very formal. When Georges went to speak there once he came home annoyed. He said they treated him like dirt.
At the Cordeliers anyone could come and speak. So you would get a lot of the actors and lawyers and tradesmen from around here, but you’d also get quite rough-looking types who’d walk in off the street. Of course, I never went there when there was a meeting, but I saw what they’d done with the chapel. It was very bleak and bare. When some windows got broken it was weeks before they were mended. I thought, how odd men are, at home they like to be comfortable but outside they pretend they don’t care. The president’s desk was a joiner’s bench that happened to be lying about when they moved in. Georges really wouldn’t have much to say to a joiner, if it weren’t for the present upheavals. The speaker’s rostrum at the club was made of four rough beams with a plank running between them. On the wall somebody had nailed a strip of calico with a slogan in red paint. It said Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
After the bad time I had with Georges’ mother I was miserable when he said he wanted to spend some time in Arcis. To my great relief, we stayed with his sister Anne Madeleine, and to my surprise we were received everywhere with great deference and respect. It was uncanny really – unnerving. Anne Madeleine’s friends were practically curtseying to me. At first I thought the local people must have heard of Georges’s successes as president of the district, but I soon realized that they don’t get the Paris newspapers and they don’t much care what goes on there anyway. And people kept asking me strange questions, like, what’s the Queen’s favourite colour, what does she like to eat. So one day it came to me: ‘Georges,’ I said, ‘they think that because you’re a King’s Councillor, he asks you in every day to give him advice.’
For a moment he looked amazed. Then he laughed. ‘Do they? Bless them. And I have to live in Paris, with all these cynics and wits. Give me four or five years, Gabrielle, and I’ll come back here and farm. We’ll get out of Paris for good. Would you like that?’
I didn’t know how to answer. On the one hand, I thought, how wonderful to be away from the newspapers and the fishwives and the crime rate and the shortages of things in the shops. But then I thought of the prospect of Mme Recordain calling on me every day. So I didn’t say anything, because I saw it was just a whim of his. I mean, is he going to give up the Cordeliers Club? Is he going to give up the Revolution? I watched him start to get restless. And one evening he said, ‘We’re going back tomorrow.’
All the same, he spent a long time with his stepfather, looking at properties, and arranging with the local notary about buying a piece of land. M. Recordain said, ‘Doing nicely, son, are you?’ Georges only smiled.
I think that summer will always be clear in my memory. In my heart I was uneasy, because I believe in my heart that whatever is happening we should be loyal to the King and Queen and to the church. But soon, if some people have their way, the Riding-School will be more important than the King, and the church will be just a goverment department. I know that we are bound to obey authority, and that Georges has often flouted it. That is in his nature, because at school, Paré tells me, they used to call him ‘the Anti-Superior’. Of course you must try to overcome the worst things in your nature, but meanwhile where am I? – because I am bound to obey my husband, unless he counsels me to commit sin. And is it a sin to cook supper for people who talk about sending the Queen back to Austria? When I asked my confessor for guidance, he said that I should maintain an attitude of wifely obedience and try to bring my husband back to the Catholic faith. That was no help. So outwardly I defer to all Georges’s opinions, but in my heart I make reservations – and every day I pray that he will change some of them.
And yet – everything seems to be going so well for us. There’s always something to celebrate. When it came to the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, every town in France sent delegations to Paris. A great amphitheatre was built on the Champs-de-Mars, and an altar was set up which they called the Altar of the Fatherland. The King went there, and took an oath to uphold the constitution, and the Bishop of Autun said High Mass. (It is a pity he is an atheist.) We didn’t go ourselves; Georges said he couldn’t stand to see the people kiss Lafayette’s boots. There was dancing where the Bastille used to be, and in the evening we had celebrations throughout our own district, and we went from one party to another, and stayed out all night. I got quite tipsy, everyone laughed at me. It had poured with rain all day, and somebody made a verse saying it proved that God was an aristocrat. I’ll never forget the ludicrous business of trying to let off fireworks in a downpour; or Georges bringing me back home, me leaning on his arm, the cobbles wet and slick and dawn breaking over the streets. Next day I saw that my new satin shoes had got a water-mark; they were completely ruined.
You should see us now; you wouldn’t know us from last year. Some quite fashionable ladies have given up powdering their hair; instead of pinning it up, they wear it down, in loose curls. Many gentlemen have also given up powder, and far less lace is worn. It’s quite unfashionable for a woman to paint her face; I don’t know what they do at Court now, but Louise Robert is the only woman I know who still wears rouge. Admittedly, she has not a good colour without it. We make our dresses from the simplest of fabrics, and the fashionable colours are the national colours, red, white and blue. Mme Gély says the new fashions are not flattering to older women, and my mother agrees with her. ‘But you,’ my mother says, ‘can take your chance to get out of laces and stays.’ I don’t agree with her. I haven’t got my figure back since Antoine was born.
The modish jewellery this year is a chip of stone from the Bastille, made into a brooch or worn on a chain. Félicité de Genlis has a brooch with the word LIBERTY spelled out in diamonds – Deputy Pétion described it to me. We have given up our elaborate fans, and now have them made out of cheap sticks and pleated paper, with bright colours portraying some patriotic scene. I have to be very careful to have a scene that fits in with my husband’s views. I can’t have a portrait of Mayor Bailly crowned with laurels, or of Lafayette on his white horse, but I can have Duke Philippe, or the taking of the Bastille, or Camille making his speech in the Palais-Royal. But why should I want his portrait when I see too much of the original?
I remember Lucile at our apartment, the morning of the Bastille celebrations, her tricolour ribbons all bedraggled, wringing out the hem of her dress. The muslin clung to her figure in the most startling way, and she didn’t seem to be possessed of much in the way of underwear. Think what Georges’s mother would have said! I was quite severe with her myself – I had a fire lit, and I took away her clothes, and wrapped her in the warmest blanket I could find. I’m sorry to report that Lucile looks quite exquisite in a blanket. She sat with her bare feet drawn up beneath her, like a cat.
‘What a child you are,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised your mother let you go out dressed like that.’
‘She says I must learn from my mistakes.’ She put out two white arms from her blanket. ‘Let me have the baby.’
I gave her my little Antoine. She billed and cooed at him for a bit. ‘Camille has been famous for a whole year now,’ she said dejectedly, ‘and we’re no nearer getting married. I thought it would be neat if I got pregnant, it would hurry things up. But – there you are – can’t get him into bed. You’ve no idea what Camille’s like when he’s got one of his fits of rectitude. John Knox was merely a beginner.’
‘You wicked girl,’ I said. More for form’s sake, than anything. I like her; you can’t help it. Oh, I’m not a perfect fool, I know that Georges looks at her, but so do all the men. Camille lives just around the corner now. He’s actually got a really nice apartment, and a rather fierce-looking