Camille insisted. ‘You’re a satirist. If you want to get on – well, try toadying to the Court a bit more.’
Fabre lowered his lorgnette. He was immensely, visibly gratified and flattered – just by that one sentence, ‘I know your work.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Sell out? I don’t think so. I do like an easy life, I admit. I try to turn a fast penny. But there are limits.’
D’Anton had found them a table. ‘What is it?’ Fabre said, seating himself. ‘Ten years? More? One says, “Oh, we’ll meet again,” not quite meaning it.’
‘All the right people are drifting together,’ Camille said. ‘You can pick them out, just as if they had crosses on their foreheads. For example, I saw Brissot last week.’ D’Anton did not ask who was Brissot. Camille had a multitude of shady acquaintances. ‘Then, of all people, Hérault just now. I always hated Hérault, but I have this feeling about him now, quite a different feeling. Against my better judgement, but there it is.’
‘Hérault is a Parlementary judge,’ d’Anton told Fabre. ‘He comes from an immensely rich and ancient family. He’s not more than thirty, his looks are impeccable, he’s well-travelled, he’s pursued by all the ladies at Court – ’
‘How sick,’ Fabre muttered.
‘And we’re baffled because he’s just spent ten minutes talking to us. It’s said,’ d’Anton grinned, ‘that he fancies himself as a great orator and spends hours alone talking to himself in front of a mirror. Though how would anyone know, if he’s alone?’
‘Alone except for his servants,’ Camille said. ‘The aristocracy don’t consider their servants to be real people, so they’re quite prepared to indulge all their foibles in front of them.’
‘What is he practising for?’ Fabre asked. ‘For if they call the Estates?’
‘We presume so,’ d’Anton said. ‘He views himself as a leader of reform, perhaps. He has advanced ideas. So he seems to say.’
‘Oh well,’ Camille said. ‘“Their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord.” It’s all in the Book of Ezekiel, you see, it’s quite clear if you look at it in the Hebrew. About how the law shall perish from the priests and the council from the ancients. “And the King will mourn, and the Prince shall be clothed with sorrow…” – which I’m quite sure they will be, and quite rapidly too, if they go on as they do at present.’
Someone at the next table said, ‘You ought to keep your voice down. You’ll find the police attending your sermons.’
Fabre slammed his hand down on the table and shot to his feet. His thin face turned brick-red. ‘It isn’t an offence to quote the holy Scriptures,’ he said. ‘In any damn context whatsoever.’ Someone tittered. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ Fabre said vehemently to Camille, ‘but I’m going to get on with you.’
‘Oh God,’ d’Anton muttered. ‘Don’t encourage him.’ It was not possible, considering his size, to get out without being noticed, so he tried to look as if he were not with them. The last thing you need is encouragement, he thought, you make trouble because you can’t do anything else, you like to think of the destruction outside because of the destruction inside you. He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical, calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Claude. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be free. People deformed and people only disfigured, abandoned children sucking the thin milk of duty: crying to be taken in. There were courtiers: there was Hérault, dealing Antoinette a losing hand. There were prostitutes. There were wig-makers and clerks, freed slaves shivering in the squares, the men who took the tolls at the customs posts in the walls of Paris. There were men who had been gravediggers man and boy all their working lives. Whose thoughts ran to an alien current. Of whom nothing was known and nothing could be known. He looked across at Fabre. ‘My greatest work is yet to come,’ Fabre said. He sketched its dimensions in the air. Some confidence trick, d’Anton thought. Fabre was a ready man, wound up like a clockwork toy, and Camille watched him like a child who had been given an unexpected present. The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
LUCILE: inaction has its own subtle rewards, but now she thinks it is time to push a little. She had left those nursery days behind, of the china doll with the straw heart. They had dealt with her, Maître Desmoulins and her mother, as effectively as if they had smashed her china skull. Since that day, bodies had more reality – theirs, if not hers. They were solid all right, and substantial. Woundingly, she felt their superiority; and if she could ache, she must be taking on flesh.
Midsummer: Brienne, the Comptroller, borrowed twelve million livres from the municipality of Paris. ‘A drop in the ocean,’ M. Charpentier said. He put the café up for sale; he and Angélique meant to move out to the country. Annette did her duty to the fine weather, making forays to the Luxembourg Gardens. She had often walked there with the girls and Camille; this spring the blossom had smelt faintly sour, as if it had been used before.
Lucile had spent a lot of time writing her journal: working out the plot. That Friday, which began like any other, when my fate was brought up from the kitchen, superscribed to me, and put into my ignorant hand. How that night – Friday to Saturday – I took the letter from its hiding place and put it against the cold ruffled linen of my nightgown, approximately over my shaking heart: the crackling paper, the flickering candlelight, and oh, my poor little emotions. I knew that by September my life would be completely changed.
‘I’ve decided,’ she said. ‘I’m going to marry Maître Desmoulins after all.’ Clinically, she observed how ugly her mother became, when her clear complexion blotched red with anger and fear.
She has to practise for the conflicts the future holds. Her first clash with her father sends her up to her room in tears. The weeks wear on, and her sentiments become more savage: echoed by events in the streets.
THE DEMONSTRATION had started outside the Law Courts. The barristers collected their papers and debated the merits of staying put against those of trying to slip through the crowds. But there had been fatalities: one, perhaps two. They thought it would be safer to stay put until the area was completely cleared. D’Anton swore at his colleagues, and went out to pick his way across the battlefield.
An enormous number of people seemed to be injured. They were what you would call crush injuries, except for the few people who had fought hand-to-hand with the Guards. A respectably dressed man was walking around showing people the hole in his coat where it had been pierced by a bullet. A woman was sitting on the cobblestones saying, ‘Who opened fire, who ordered it, who told them to do it?’ demanding an explanation in a voice sharp with hysteria. Also there were several unexplained knifings.
He found Camille slumped on his knees by a wall scribbling down some sort of testimony. The man who was talking to him was lying on the ground, just his shoulders propped up. All the man’s clothes were in shreds and his face was black. D’Anton could not see where he was injured, but beneath the black his face looked numb, and his eyes were glazed with pain or surprise.
D’Anton said, ‘Camille.’
Camille looked sideways at his shoes, then his eyes travelled upwards. His face was chalk-white. He put down his paper and stopped trying to follow the man’s ramblings. He indicated a man standing a few yards away, his arms folded, his short legs planted apart, his eyes on the ground. Without tone or emphasis, Camille said, ‘See that? That’s Marat.’
D’Anton