hungry they could eat grass. Or so it was believed. That was why – and reason enough – on 22 July he was in the Place de Grève, with an audience.
He was under guard, but it seemed likely that the small but ugly crowd, who had plans for him, would tear him away. Lafayette arrived and spoke to them. He had no wish to stand in the way of the people’s justice; but at least Foulon should have a fair trial.
‘What’s the use of a trial,’ someone called out, ‘for a man who’s been convicted these thirty years?’
Foulon was old; it was many years since he had ventured his bon mot. To escape this fate he had hidden, and put about rumours of his own death. It was said that a funeral had been conducted over a coffin packed with stones. Tracked down, arrested, he now looked beseechingly at the general. From the narrow streets beyond City Hall, there came the low rumble which Paris now identified as marching feet.
‘They’re converging,’ an aide reported to the general. ‘From the Palais-Royal on one hand, and from Saint-Antoine on the other.’
‘I know,’ the general said. ‘I can hear on both sides of my head. How many?’
No one could estimate. Too many. He looked at Foulon without much sympathy. He had no forces on hand; if the city authorities wanted to protect Foulon, they would have to do it themselves. He glanced at his aide, gave a minute shrug.
They pelted Foulon with grass, tied a bunch of it on his back, stuffed his mouth with it. ‘Eat up the nice grass,’ they urged him. Gagging on the sharp stalks, he was dragged across the Place de Grève, where a rope was tossed over the iron projection of the Lanterne. For a few moments the old man swung where at dusk the great light would swing. Then the rope snapped; he plummeted into the crowd. Mauled and kicked, he was hoisted back into the air. Again the rope broke. The mob’s hands grasped him, careful not to deliver the coup de grace. A third noose was placed about the livid neck. This time the rope held. When he was dead, or nearly so, the mob cut off his head and speared it on a pike.
At the same time, Foulon’s son-in-law Berthier, the Intendant of Paris, had been arrested in Compiègne and conveyed, glassy-eyed with terror, to City Hall. He was bundled inside, through a crowd that peppered him with crusts of sour black bread. Shortly afterwards he was bundled out again, on his way to the Abbaye prison; shortly after that, he was bundled to his death – strangled perhaps, or finished with a musket-ball, for who knew the moment? And perhaps he was not dead either when a sword began to hack at his neck. His head in turn was stabbed on to a pike. The two processions met and the pikes swayed together, bringing the severed heads nose-to-nose. ‘Kiss Daddy!’ the mob called out. Berthier’s chest was sawn open, and the heart was wrenched out. It was skewered on to a sword, marched to City Hall, and flung down on Bailly’s desk. The mayor almost collapsed. The heart was then taken to the Palais-Royal. Blood was squeezed out of it into a glass, and people drank it. They sang:
A party isn’t a party
When the heart’s not in it.
THE NEWS OF THE LYNCHINGS at Paris caused consternation at Versailles, where the Assembly was absorbed in a debate on human rights. There was shock, outrage, protest: where was the militia while this was going on? It was generally believed that Foulon and his son-in-law had been speculators in grain, but the deputies, moving between the Hall of the Lesser Pleasures and the well-stocked larders of their lodgings, had lost touch with what is often called popular sentiment. Disgusted at their hypocrisy, Deputy Barnave asked them, ‘This blood that has been shed, was it so pure?’ Revolted, they shouted him down, marking him in their minds as dangerous. The debate would resume; they were intent on framing a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’. Some were heard to mutter that the Assembly should write the constitution first, since rights exist in virtue of laws; but jurisprudence is such a dull subject, and liberty so exciting.
Night of 4 August, the feudal system ceases to exist in France. The Vicomte de Noailles rises and, voice shaking with emotion, gives away all he possesses – not a great deal, as his nickname is ‘Lackland’. The National Assembly surges to its feet for a saturnalia of magnanimity; they slough off serfs, game laws, tithes in kind, seigneural courts – and tears of joy stream down their faces. A member passes a note to the President – ‘Close the session, they have lost control of themselves.’ But the hand of heaven can’t hold them back – they vie in the pandemonium to be each more patriotic than the last, they gabble to relinquish what belongs to them and with eagerness even greater what belongs to others. Next week, of course, they will try to backtrack; but it will be too late.
And Camille moves around Versailles spreading a scatter of crumpled paper, generating in the close silence of the summer nights the prose he no longer despises…
It is on that night, more so than on Holy Saturday, that we came forth from the wretched bondage of Egypt…That night restored to Frenchmen the rights of man, and declared all citizens equal, equally admissable to all offices, places and public employ; again, that night has snatched all civil offices, ecclesiastical and military from wealth, birth and royalty, to give them to the nation as a whole on the basis of merit. That night has taken from Mme d’Epr— her pension of 20,000 livres for having slept with a minister…Trade with the Indies is now open to everyone. He who wishes may open a shop. The master tailor, the master shoemaker, the master wig-maker will weep, but the journeymen will rejoice, and there will be lights in the attic windows…O night disastrous for the Grand Chamber, the clerks, the bailiffs, the lawyers, the valets, for the secretaries, for the under-secretaries, for all plunderers…But O wonderful night, vera beata nox, happy for everyone, since the barriers that excluded so many from honour and employment have been hurled down for ever, and today there no longer exist among the French any distinctions but those of virtue and talent.
A DARK CORNER, in a dark bar: Dr Marat hunched over a table. August 4 was a sick joke, he said.
He scowled at the manuscript in front of him. ‘Vera beata nox – I wish it were true, Camille. But you’re myth-making, do you see? You’re making a legend of what is happening, a legend of the Revolution. You want to have artistry, you see, where there’s only the necessity – ’ He broke off. His small body seemed to contract in pain.
‘Are you ill?’
‘Are you?’
‘No, I’ve just been drinking too much.’
‘With your new friends, I suppose.’ Marat shuffled back on the bench, the same expression of tension and discomfort on his face; then he considered Camille, his fingers tapping arhythmically on the table top. ‘Feeling safe, are we?’
‘Not especially. I’ve been warned I might be arrested.’
‘Don’t expect the Court to stand on formalities. A man with a knife could do a nice job on you. Or on me for that matter. What I’m going to do is move into the Cordeliers district. Somewhere I can shout for help. Why don’t you move in there too?’ Marat grinned, showing his dreadful teeth. ‘All neighbours together. Very cosy.’ He bent his head over the papers, scrabbling through them, stabbing with his forefinger. ‘What you say next, I approve. It would have taken the people years of civil war, at any other time, to rid themselves of such enemies as Foulon. And in wars, thousands of people die, don’t they? Therefore the lynchings are quite acceptable. They are the humane alternative. You may be made to suffer for that sentiment, but don’t be afraid to take it to the printer.’ Thoughtfully the doctor rubbed the bridge of his flat nose: so prosaic, the gesture, the tone. ‘You see what we must do, Camille, is to cut off heads. The longer we delay, the more we will have to decapitate. Write that. The necessity is to kill people, and to cut off their heads.’
FIRST TENTATIVE SCRAPE of the bow on gut. One, two: d’Anton’s fingers tapped the pommel of his sabre. His neighbours stamped and shrilled under his window, flourishing seating plans. The orchestra of the Royal Academy of Music was tuning up. Good idea of his, hiring them, gives the occasion a bit of tone. There’d also, of course, be a military band. As president of the district and a captain in the National Guard (as the citizens’ militia now called itself) he was responsible for all parts of the day’s arrangements.