Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien. Hilary Mantel
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’91: eighteen months of revolution, and securely under the heel of a new tyranny.
‘That man is a liar,’ Robespierre says, ‘who claims I have ever advocated disobedience to the laws.’
JANUARY AT BOURG-LA-REINE. Annette Duplessis stood at the window, gazing into the branches of the walnut tree that shaded the courtyard. From here, you could not see the foundations of the new cottage; just as well, for they were as melancholy as ruins. She sighed in exasperation at the silence welling from the room behind her. All of them would be beseeching her, inwardly, to turn and make some remark. If she were to leave the room, she would come back to find it alive with tension. Taking chocolate together mid-morning: surely that should not be too much of a strain?
Claude was reading the Town and Court Journal, a right-wing scandal-sheet. He had a faintly defiant air. Camille was gazing at his wife, as he often did. (Two days married, she discovered with a sense of shock that the black soul-eating eyes were short-sighted. ‘Perhaps you should wear spectacles.’ ‘Too vain.’) Lucile was reading Clarissa, in translation and with scant attention. Every few minutes her eyes would flit from the page to her husband’s face.
Annette wondered if this were what had plunged Claude so deeply into disagreeableness – the girl’s air of sexual triumph, the high colour in her cheeks when they met in the mornings. You wish she were nine years old, she thought, kept happy with her dolls. She studied her husband’s bent head, the strands of grey neatly dressed and powdered; rural interludes wrung no concessions from Claude. Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.
Claude let his paper fall. Camille snapped out of his reverie and turned his head. ‘What now? I told you, if you read that thing you must expect to be shocked.’
Claude seemed unable to articulate. He pointed to the page; Annette thought he whimpered. Camille reached forward for it; Claude clasped it to his chest. ‘Don’t be silly, Claude,’ Annette said, as one does to a baby. ‘Give the paper to Camille.’
Camille ran his eyes down the page. ‘Oh, you’ll enjoy this. Lolotte, will you go away for a minute?’
‘No.’
Where did she get this pet-name? Annette had some feeling that Danton had given it to her. A little too intimate, she thought; and now Camille uses it. ‘Do as you’re told,’ she said.
Lucile didn’t move. I’m married now, she thought; don’t have to do what anybody says.
‘Stay then,’ Camille said, ‘I was only thinking to spare your feelings. According to this, you’re not your father’s daughter.’
‘Oh, don’t say it,’ Claude said. ‘Burn the paper.’
‘You know what Rousseau said.’ Annette looked grim. ‘“Burning isn’t answering.”’
‘Whose daughter am I?’ Lucile asked. ‘Am I my mother’s daughter, or am I a foundling?’
‘You’re certainly your mother’s daughter, and your father’s the abbé Terray.’
Lucile giggled. ‘Lucile, I am not beyond slapping you,’ her mother said.
‘Hence the money for the dowry,’ Camille said, ‘comes from the abbé’s speculation in grain at times of famine.’
‘The abbé did not speculate in grain.’ Claude held Camille in a red-faced inimical stare.
‘I do not suggest he did. I am paraphrasing the newspaper.’
‘Yes…of course.’ Claude looked away miserably.
‘Did you ever meet Terray?’ Camille asked his mother-in-law.
‘Once, I think. We exchanged about three words.’
‘You know,’ Camille said to Claude, ‘Terray did have a reputation with women.’
‘It wasn’t his fault.’ Claude flared up again. ‘He never wanted to be a priest. His family forced him into it.’
‘Do calm yourself,’ Annette suggested.
Claude hunched forward, hands pressed together between his knees. ‘Terray was our best hope. He worked hard. He had energy. People were afraid of him.’ He stopped, seeming to realize that for the first time in years he had added a new statement, a coda.
‘Were you afraid of him?’ Camille asked: not scoring a point, simply curious.
Claude considered. ‘I might have been.’
‘I’m quite often afraid of people,’ Camille said. ‘It’s a terrible admission, isn’t it?’
‘Like who?’ Lucile said.
‘Well, principally I’m afraid of Fabre. If he hears me stutter, he shakes me and takes me by the hair and bangs my head against the wall.’
‘Annette,’ Claude said, ‘there have been other imputations. In other newspapers.’ He looked covertly at Camille. ‘I have contrived to dismiss them from my mind.’
Annette made no comment. Camille hurled the Town and Court Journal across the room. ‘I’ll sue them,’ he said.
Claude looked up. ‘You’ll do what?’
‘I’ll sue them for libel.’
Claude stood up. ‘You’ll sue them,’ he said. ‘You. You’ll sue someone for libel.’ He walked out of the room, and they could hear his hollow laughter as he climbed the stairs.
FEBRUARY, Lucile was furnishing her apartment. They were to have pink silk cushions; Camille wondered how they would look a few months on, when grimy Cordeliers had mauled them. But he confined himself to an unspoken expletive when he saw her new set of engravings of the Life and Death of Maria Stuart. He did not like to look at these pictures at all. Bothwell had a ruthless, martial expression in his eye that reminded him of Antoine Saint-Just. Bulky retainers in bizarre plaids waved broadswords; kilted gentlemen, showing plump knees, helped the distressed Queen of Scots into a rowing boat. At her execution Maria was dressed to show off her figure, and looked all of twenty-three. ‘Crushingly romantic,’ Lucile said. ‘Isn’t it?’
Since they had moved, it was possible to run the Révolutions from home. Inky men, short-tempered and of a robust turn of phrase, stamped up and down the stairs with questions to which they expected her to know the answers. Uncorrected proofs tangled about table legs. Writ-servers sat around the street door, sometimes playing cards and dice to pass the time. It was just like the Danton house, which was in the same building round the corner – complete strangers tramping in and out at all hours, the dining room colonized by men scribbling, their bedroom an overflow sitting room and general thoroughfare.
‘We must order more bookcases made,’ she said. ‘You can’t have things in little piles all over the floor, I skid around when I get out of bed in the morning. Do you need all these old newspapers, Camille?’
‘Oh yes. They’re for searching out the inconsistencies of my opponents. So that I can persecute them when they change their opinions.’
He lifted one from a pile. ‘Hébert’s,’ she said. ‘That is dismal trash.’
René Hébert was peddling his opinions now through the persona of a bluff, pipe-smoking man of the people, a fictitious furnace-maker called Père Duchesne. The paper was vulgar, in every sense – simple-minded prose studded with obscenity. ‘Père Duchesne is a great royalist, isn’t he?’ Camille swiftly marked a passage. ‘I may have to hold that one against you, Hébert.’
‘Is Hébert really like Père Duchesne? Does he really smoke a pipe and swear?’
‘Not at all. He’s an effete little man. He has peculiar hands that flutter about.