A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel
4/5
()
About this ebook
The story of three young provincials of no great heritage who together helped to destroy a way of life and, in the process, destroyed themselves: Camille Desmoulins, bisexual and beautiful, charming, erratic, untrustworthy; Georges Jacques Danton, hugely but erotically ugly, a brilliant pragmatist who knew how to seize power and use it; and Maximilien Robespierre, "the rabid lamb," who would send his dearest friend to the guillotine. Each, none older than thirty-four, would die by the hand of the very revolution he had helped to bring into being.
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.
Read more from Hilary Mantel
Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Black: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fludd: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Change of Climate: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Experiment in Love: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Learning to Talk: Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEvery Day Is Mother's Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wolf Hall Picture Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to A Place of Greater Safety
Related ebooks
Ghost Light: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Radetzky March Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cazalet Chronicles: Five Novels in One Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Claudius the God Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Howards End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Old Filth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Hours: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Stones of Florence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Daughter of Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Outcasts of Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Medici Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I, Claudius Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wolf Hall: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wreath Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The South: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5De Gaulle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Last Friends Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Song of the Lark Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Moment in the Sun Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Henry and Cato: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Buddenbrooks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Historical Fiction For You
The Invisible Hour: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paris Apartment: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of Eve Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Euphoria Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Tender Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hallowe'en Party: Inspiration for the 20th Century Studios Major Motion Picture A Haunting in Venice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Grapes of Wrath Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Yellow Wife: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crow Mary: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Kitchen House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Magic: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rules of Magic: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sisters Brothers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quiet American Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Red Tent - 20th Anniversary Edition: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hang the Moon: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sold on a Monday: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Island of Sea Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Carnegie's Maid: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House Is on Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for A Place of Greater Safety
24 ratings19 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How do you describe a masterpiece that’s such a slog to read? I came away with no clearer understanding of the Revolution or the path to the Terror, but there’s no question this book is brilliant.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book is a huge undertaking (and not at all a good poolside read). I like historical fiction, but this is FOR REAL historical fiction. At times, I had to stop reading and Google what was happening so that I could keep up. During the two weeks it took me to read (which is VERY unusual), I also took breaks and read lighter books because the French Revolution is definitely HEAVY. The many different POVs were also daunting. Overall, it's a very interesting book...but it doesn't make me want to read Wolf Hall anytime soon.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is the story of Camille Desmoulins, Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre and their role in the French Revolution. A hugely interesting book, I also found it confusing because of my limited knowledge of that period of History. The changing allegiances, the Committees, the meetings, the drama - it was hard to keep track of everything that was happening. But despite that this is an amazing work of fiction - the author is in command of her subject and of herself as a writer - every word is carefully chosen and every word has an affect on the reader - we share the joy and pain of the characters and move beside them on their journey from idealistic revolutionaries to their bitter end at the guillotine.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the late 1700s, the growing unrest in France by the populace leads to some men and women pushing their ideals towards the forming of a republic to great heights and for some, to great falls. This is the beginning of the French Revolution, and amongst the many characters who played a part in the fall of the monarchy, are 3 men, George-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre.The relationship of these 3 men is fascinating. Danton is an ambitious lawyer, charismatic, lusty and full of purpose. Desmoulins writes incendiary pamphlets that are distributed around the country to expose corruption of the monarchy and injustices, but is seen as flighty bisexual. Robespierre is a austere lawyer whose ideals are lauded by many. All three share a long term camaraderie and all three share goals of ridding France of the current corrupt practices by the monarchy, but at the same time are not above indulging in their own form of corruption.The progression they and the other characters in this absorbing historical fiction make towards scheming, planning and then the execution of their plans to build a republic is gripping. The author's use of letters, diaries and other documents lend a balancing weight to the creativity in which she bestows on the early lives of Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins. As the revolution gains momentum though, we also see how idealism can sometimes be warped as egos grow in proportion to the power that is bestowed or taken by the men. Pride sometimes does come before a fall.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Where I got the book: my local library. Spoilers but only if you never knew the French Revolution = wholesale death and that real characters who lived 200+ years ago may be a little on the deceased side by now anyway."Louise Robert says she would write a novel...but she fears that as a character in fiction Camille would not be believed. Indeed, I just had to look him up to make sure."Oh, Camille. What a character. And he's flanked by two more tours de force of the literary re-creation of history. Mantel takes the lives of Camille (it's impossible to call him by his surname, Desmoulins), Danton and Robespierre from early childhood right through a date with Mme. La Guillotine. What a study in contrasts. Camille, Mr. Dark Radiance. Danton, brutal, ugly, massive and yet strangely sexy. Robespierre, aesthetic, stiff, nerveless and cold. And then the other character, the French Revolution: unstoppable history, heartbreaking because it had to happen that way.Mantel give us the Revolution in conversations. Chunks of dialogue interlarded with here a quotation, there a fact, yonder a dramatic scene. But it's the conversations and the thoughts of the person through whose eyes we're seeing that drive the logic of the inexorable slide toward the Terror. In the Cromwell novels, Mantel funnels everything through Cromwell's POV; here, we're endlessly shifting, a habit I decry in many novels but Mantel pulls it off. She also gets away with switching tenses and generally leaving the reader to work out what's happening by herself. And she does this over 749 pages, which makes it a novel not for the fainthearted. Well worth the reading if you can manage it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Written in 1992 before she was a household name, this exploration of the background to and immediate aftermath of the French Revolution focuses mainly on its three most prominent and famous participants: Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton and Camille Desmoulins. It follows them from early childhood through to their very different upbringings and their school and college days until their paths meet in pre-revolutionary Paris, through the turbulent days of the storming of the Bastille, the king`s execution and the so-called Reign of Terror that followed the abolition of the monarchy.Having read a lot of favourable reviews and not knowing a great deal about this period in French history apart from what I learnt at school, I was keen to get to grips with the book myself. It is important to remember that this is a fictionalised retelling of the real events, based on surviving accounts, and not a straightforward biography of the main characters, even if it appears so through large sections of the book. As such, it is not entirely successful: at 872 pages, it is far too long and wordy, I kept losing track of the changing names of the various committees and who occupied which position in it as well as the multitude of individuals despite a cast list in the prelims of the novel. With constantly changing allegiances, I found it difficult to follow which faction some of the minor characters belonged to at any given point in time. It is written in a real hotchpotch of styles, mostly in third person singular (with occasional confusion as to who is speaking when it comes to dialogue), but also in first person plural (who is that supposed to be?), both in past and present tense, so that the novel appears as part biography, autobiography and stage play; this detracts from the already rather complicated goings-on in my opinion. Characters discuss philosophical truths for pages at a time and, while interesting and enlightening on the whole, the momentum and narrative tension evaporate and get lost; in my opinion it is wrong that a book about the French Revolution should drag so much in places. Where Hilary Mantel succeeds unreservedly is the evocation of end of 18th-century France and Paris and Versailles in particular, and the portrayal of the characters that play a part in the Revolution. She manages to raise them from the printed page and transform them from being mere historical figures into human beings, with all their likes and dislikes, weaknesses and neuroses. She describes the terror, violence and arbitrary executions with an almost clinical detachment, reflecting the main participants' actions during the Reign of Terror; consumed by personal enmities, everyone takes the law into their own hands and justifies the arrest and execution of individuals with a different opinion than their own as being for the safety of the nation. The mob scenes are pretty scary, but even more terrifying is the ruthless efficiency of the various committees, a well-organised killing machine that makes a travesty of the law and delights in its own bureaucracy. Here the famous adage "The Revolution devours its own children" really brings home the state of fear and terror that must have prevailed in France at that time, especially in Paris. Having spent an entire part of the book on the three main characters' childhoods and upbringings, I felt the end note, which deals with Robespierre and St Just's downfall, unaccountably rushed; the reader is left with no explanation as to what had happened to change their fortunes as they had managed to dispose of their opponents and their stars were still in the ascendant when the novel ends. Hilary Mantel's prose is atmospheric and descriptive and she has a lovely turn of phrase at times, yet on the whole I feel rather reluctant to pick up her Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, another brick of a novel with nearly 700 pages, on the basis of this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The task Mentel set herself when she began this work is in itself terrifying. An account of the lives of three main players in the revolution, from French provincial birth to Parisian death.The resulting novel is, unavoidably, massive and takes in a cast so large that the book requires a list of characters at its start. Its large cast reminded me of Dickens and Tolstoy and like those nineteenth century authors Mantel is one of the many writers who have tackled the French Revolution in literature and in this work she shows her flair for historical writing that also won her the Booker in 2009. Mantel, like Dickens, is at her best when giving full reign to her omniscient narrator, eighteenth century existence is brought vividly to life and the interior thoughts of the characters are dealt with with a beautiful sense of empathy.The dialogue I was less happy with. Most of the people featured in the book were great and intelligent individuals but much of the speech in the novel comes across as too polished and witty by half. These people were masters of oratory and self publication, but all the time? Mantel sometimes gives us the dialogue set out as if it were a play text which is possibly an intentional way for the author to acknowledge this problem herself.In setting out on such a work Mantel must have known she could not please everybody but I for one am glad she has. The book deserves to be better known and hopefully in light of her Booker success it will be.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewelers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night's hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Ile Saint-Louis, in a empty office, Maitre Desmoulins's son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours a day in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn, lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.Robespierre and Danton are the two towering figures of the French Revolution. They were almost comically different; Danton living large, with enormous appetites, voice and zest for the challenges of leading a revolution, and Robespierre, tidy, precise and constrained in his personal and public life. They're great fodder for a many a book. However, here Hilary Mantel does something different. She puts the spotlight on Camille Desmoulins, the stuttering lawyer whose speech in the gardens of the Palais Royale was the spark that set the revolution alight. Oh, Mantel spends plenty of time in Danton's head and narrates from the POV of everyone from Robespierre to both of Danton's wives, but the central focus remains on the volatile and scandal-prone Desmoulins. This does make excellent sense; Camille is the connection between Danton and Robespierre, close to both men, but Mantel is interested in Desmoulins for his own sake. This gives a new angle to a familiar story, although Mantel's writing is so fine that she hardly needs the boost. Usually, it's clear who an author prefers, either Danton or Robespierre. Mantel treads a delicate path of showing both men sympathetic and abundant in faults. She also fleshes out the secondary actors in the Revolution, from Marat (a surprisingly positive portrayal) to Danton's teenage second wife.Robespierre smiled his thin smile. he was conscious of the thinness of it. If he were remembered into the next generation, people would speak of his thin, cold smile, as they would speak of Danton's girth, vitality, scarred face. He wanted, always, to be different--and especially with Danton. Perhaps the smile looked sarcastic, or patronizing or disapproving. But it was the only one available to his face.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a big novel primarily about the first five years of the French Revolution, from the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to the peak of the Terror in the mid 1790s, but it starts by following the early lives of three of the principal players, Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton. Once we reach their adult lives there is an almost equal focus on their personal lives as there is on the events they inspire, our caught up in, and are ultimately destroyed by. Indeed, the extent to which their public and private lives are inextricably intertwined, and the impact this has on the women and children in their lives is a major feature of the novel.Robespierre in particular comes across as a far more complex character than the monster of historical stereotype. That is not say that he would have been a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize had it existed in the 1790s; the surprise is that one gets the impression he would like to have been. The man who bears a large share of responsibility for the Terror is depicted by Mantel as someone who actually found violence highly distasteful. I do not know sufficient about French history in this, or indeed any other period, to be able to differentiate the fact from the fiction. Intriguingly, the author's foreword suggests that it is the hardest to believe incidents that are most likely to be factual.Faced with a book that is not far short of 900 pages in paperback, one is bound to ponder whether it needed to be this long, or whether a bit of editing might not have gone amiss? Well it took me more than three weeks to read - slow by my standards - but whilst I tired somewhat of the idea of reading this book, whenever I picked it up it recaptured and held my attention. I was never tempted to skim read. Big events perhaps require big books.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This novel is very long (870 pages), but highly readable and I got through it in a week and a half. It is immensely interesting and dramatic though also rather depressing, as the original high ideals of the Revolution in 89 and 90 disappear in a torrent of blood, especially after the prison massacre of September 92 and when the reign of terror begins in summer 93. Danton is the strongest and most sympathetic of the main characters and emerges as a colourful, three dimensional persona, occasionally ruthless but essentially very human. Desmoulins is the most irritating of the main characters. Robespierre is the most complex. Until the reign of terror, he is the most liberal character, being opposed to the death penalty and in favour of freedom of speech. But he descends into a cold blooded tunnel vision where his perception of the needs of the Revolution outweighs all human considerations. The appalling Saint Just is the epitome of coldbloodedness throughout. The final trial of Danton makes for morbidly engrossing yet also depressing reading as the last pretences of justice are cynically removed. The fall of Robespierre is not covered.Being so long, the novel gives a good impression of the different stages in the evolution of the Revolution, from the early more enlightened phases to the climax of the reign of terror. It is sometimes forgotten that France remained a monarchy for three years after the fall of the Bastille. Perhaps the Revolution could have taken a more liberal, democratic course if early events had turned out differently.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An interesting book which gets better as it goes, with a great finalé (if you don't know already what happens to the key protagonists).The book is good despite the style, where different styles of narrative are tried, to no discernable pattern or benefit, except to irritate the reader. In the addition the great number of characters causes problems and the index in the front is essential in helping to keep track of people. Despite this I would encourage anyone to percervere, as it's it's worth it in the end.Of the 3 main characters, Mantel does a great job with Danton and Demoullins, but Robbespierre still remained an enigma to me (and Danton and Demoullins!!) at the end (which I think comes to early in that it doesn't deal with his downfall). In some ways I think Mantel writes best about the female characters, who are more clearly drawn and understandable.All in all, well worth a read and a great insight into the French Revolution.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Incredible atmosphere. It's like being there.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I really loved Wolf Hall so I was excited to find and read this one. It's a great big wristbreaker of a book, but I don't mind that.I had a weird progression with this book where I started thinking, "Man, this is really great, really well-written," and progressed to not wanting to pick it up and picking up everything else, but it (never a good sign). In the end I gave myself permission to abandon it. Not every book is for everybody or for every time and this one just wasn't right for me right now. I may try reading it again in winter - and in paperback - the hardback is just punishing in its heft.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Firstly, I know nothing about the French Revolution or the terror, so I got a lot of information about various important characters. However, there is a level of assumed knowledge here and lots of important things happen off camera - we barely see the King being killed or indeed much of what actually happens (there's a war? how's it going?) So that's where the book loses half a star. But we get so many nuances about the 3 main characters, that we remain entranced. I learnt about Camille and Robespierre and Danton and their long complex history. And it's a fascinating study of intentions and outcomes, what did these men want, what did they create, what did they get (well, even I knew what they got, but did they 'deserve' it? Could we have predicted it?) I loved the book and it will start me reading more about the French Revolution
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Being a big fan of Hilary Mantel, I read her first novel, years in the making, A Place of Greater Safety. Alas, I could not finish it. First, it's about the French revolution. Not that the French didn't need a revolution, but it was whacked, as my son would say. And I cannot keep all those people straight. I'm sure that's my fault. Second, I became bored. People talked and talked and talked and nothing happened. I'm sure, since this was the French revolution after all, a great deal did happen. It was happening too slowly to keep me interested. I had to keep going to the index of characters, which is about 15 pages long, to keep track of everyone, so I gave up. I'm sure it's a good book, but I couldn't do it. If I were fascinated by the French revolution, undoubtedly that would make a big difference.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rating: 4.5 out of 5 StarsMs. Mantel has been in the press quite a bit lately thanks to the critical success of her latest, Wolf Hall. Almost every review I've read mentions the unusual writing style she uses, so when I received this book for Christmas, I was curious. Her style is different, though not difficult as I had feared. She jumps around to different tenses and points of view; from omniscient to third to first, some scenes are in the present tense, some feature a character addressing the reader, some are written as screenplay with stage directions...it sounds like a big mess, but oddly enough, it works in this context and seems to enhance rather than detract from the story. To me, the style seemed to mirror and reinforce the frenetic, tumultuous and paranoid culture that was the French Revolution. The story focuses on three of the most recognizable and controversial participants of the Revolution, beginning with childhood and following each of them through education and early careers to the point where they come together to help shape the beginnings of the Revolution.It took me a week to get around to writing my review for this novel because I needed some time to digest it and decide how I wanted to rate it. There's no question this is an extremely well-written book, meticulously researched and peppered with excerpts from newspapers, diaries and letters; full of zippy, witty dialogue and poetic narrative. The scope of the book is huge but the author does a great job of bringing it into focus. It was a slow read for me because it is a dense book, each page packed with words and each word not to be missed for fear of misunderstanding, but I really enjoyed it, though I was rather depressed afterwards. It left me feeling a bit resentful towards the population of France during the Revolution, and with a sense of mourning for humanity's loss.It's not the type of book I could read over and over again.The French Revolution was far different from its American counterpart. The French people were not united against one common foe, but divided into violent factions, each opposing a different foe and always opposing each other. Add to that the fact that the rest of the European powers decided it was a great time to take advantage of a weakened France and invade and you've got a recipe for a time of terror and confusion, where virtually the entire ruling class was executed along with many of the brightest and most capable minds of the time, and where there was, in fact, no place of greater safety.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A flawed book, but a very impressive and absorbing one.Mantel traces the story of the Revolution through the experiences of Danton, Robespierre and Desmouslins, along with an extensive cast of the men and women who knew, loved, or hated them. If I'm honest I'd have to say it could have lost a couple of hundred pages – a tighter edit is definitely in there somewhere, although there's something to be said for a lengthy story that you have to live with for a few days.Part of me wanted more detail about ordinary life. A Place of Greater Safety is not about that, and there is rather little in the way of dramatisation of the average Parisian's experience through those dark days at the end of the 18th century. This is very much concerned with the ‘great men’ of the time and how they saw things. It's a very useful window on those men, but at the same time the uninformed reader might be left wondering why this fight was thought so necessary in the first place.Mantel also assumes a fair amount of knowledge about who her characters are. This allows for some beautiful touches of irony in her narration, but, especially towards the beginning, it can make it difficult to distinguish between even such different characters as Robespierre and Danton. Camille Desmoulins is the one who really comes to life here: witty, artistic, sometimes cruel, he is painted convincingly as an aesthete avant la lettre, and a great foil for the splenetic, populist Danton, and the cautious and frighteningly logical Robespierre.The writing is deceptively simple; it sketches a few lines of dialogue here, a couple of descriptive touches there, not going in for rich portraits of Revolutionary Paris but rather outlining the salient landmarks and allowing the reader to fill in the details. By the time the last hundred pages roll around, the cumulative effect is crushingly powerful, and there is an almost unbearable sense of how badly things will end. I had to put the book down every 20 pages; I just couldn't live in that world for too long at a time. The impression, of good-intentions-gone-wrong, is beautifully given, and followed through ruthlessly. Sometimes the rigorous historical accuracy seemed more of an artistic constraint than a help; but ultimately I was left moved and appalled by the way this story played out. It's a perfect accompaniment to any non-fictional reading in the period, and a great description by any standards of humanity's ability to turn on itself.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A wonderful, rich, dense (in a good way) novel about the French Revolution, focusing primarily on three prominent revolutionaries: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre. The book follows them from childhood through the beginnings of the Revolution, when all three were young lawyers -- Danton and Desmoulins in Paris, Robespierre in his home province. And while Robespierre is the most notorious in history, he is the least of three in this novel's focus. It was a bit of hard slogging at first, admittedly, because there were so many names, titles and allegiances to track -- but once those are familiar it so absorbing you won't want to stop. Even though you know it won't end well for these characters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is historical fiction for people who don't read historical fiction. It essentially traces the movements of key figures in the years and days leading to the French Revolution. I am in a nonfiction phase right now, yet it drew me in enough that I forgot to water my veggies for a few days. Trust me, that is a big deal. Writing this even makes me want to read it again. Maybe I'll give it that last star after a second read...
Book preview
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
PART ONE
Louis XV is named the Well-Beloved. Ten years pass. The same people believe the Well-Beloved takes baths of human blood … . Avoiding Paris, ever shut up at Versailles, he finds even there too many people, too much daylight. He wants a shadowy retreat … .
In a year of scarcity (they were not uncommon then) he was hunting as usual in the Forest of Sénart. He met a peasant carrying a bier and inquired, Whither he was conveying it?
To such a place.
For a man or a woman?
A man.
What did he die of?
Hunger.
JULES MICHELET
CHAPTER 1
Life as a Battlefield
Now that the dust has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. Now that the last red tile has been laid on the roof of the New House, now that the marriage contract is four years old. The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow. The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odor of family quarrels brewing.
Maître Desmoulins’s study is across the courtyard, in the Old House that fronts the street. If you stand in the Place des Armes and look up at the narrow white facade, you can often see him lurking behind the shutters on the first floor. He seems to stare down into the street; but he is miles away, observers say. This is true, and his location is very precise. Mentally, he is back in Paris.
Physically, at this moment, he is on his way upstairs. His three-year-old son is following him. As he expects the child to be under his feet for the next twenty years, it does not profit him to complain about this. Afternoon heat lies over the streets. The babies, Henriette and Elisabeth, are asleep in their cribs. Madeleine is insulting the laundry girl with a fluency and venom that belie her gravid state, her genteel education. He closes the door on them.
As soon as he sits down at his desk, a stray Paris thought slides around his mind. This happens often. He indulges himself a little: places himself on the steps of the Châtelet court with a hard-wrung acquittal and a knot of congratulatory colleagues. He gives his colleagues names and faces. Where is Perrin this afternoon? And Vinot? Now he goes up twice a year, and Vinot—who used to discuss his Life Plan with him when they were students—had walked right past him in the Place Dauphine not knowing him at all.
That was last year, and now it is August, in the year of Grace 1763. It is Guise, Picardy; he is thirty-three years old, husband, father, advocate, town councillor, official of the bailiwick, a man with a large bill for a new roof.
He takes out his account books. It is only two months ago that Madeleine’s family came up with the final installment of the dowry. They pretended—knowing that he could hardly disabuse them—that it was a kind of flattering oversight; that a man in his position, with steady work coming in, would hardly notice the last few hundred.
This was a typical de Viefville trick, and he could do nothing about it. They hammered him to the family mast while, quivering with embarrassment, he handed them the nails. He’d come home from Paris at their behest, to set things up for Madeleine. He hadn’t known that she’d be turned thirty before her family considered his situation even halfway satisfactory.
What de Viefvilles do, they run things: small towns, large legal practices. There are cousins all over the Laon district, all over Picardy: a bunch of nerveless crooks, always talking. One de Viefville is Mayor of Guise, another is a member of that august judicial body, the Parlement of Paris. De Viefvilles generally marry Godards; Madeleine is a Godard, on her father’s side. The Godards’ name lacks the coveted particle of nobility; for all that, they tend to get on in life, and when you attend in Guise and environs a musical evening or a funeral or a Bar Association dinner, there is always one present to whom you can genuflect.
The ladies of the family believe in annual production, and Madeleine’s late start hardly deters her. Hence the New House.
This child was his eldest, who now crossed the room and scrambled into the window seat. His first reaction, when the newborn was presented: this is not mine. The explanation came at the christening, from the grinning uncles and cradle-witch aunts: aren’t you a little Godard then, isn’t he a little Godard to his fingertips? Three wishes, Jean-Nicolas thought sourly: become an alderman, marry your cousin, prosper like a pig in clover.
The child had a whole string of names, because the godparents could not agree. Jean-Nicolas spoke up with his own preference, whereupon the family united: you can call him Lucien if you like, but We shall call him Camille.
It seemed to Desmoulins that with the birth of this first child he had become like a man floundering around in a sucking swamp, with no glimmering of rescue. It was not that he was unwilling to assume responsibilities; he was simply overwhelmed by the perplexities of life, paralyzed by the certainty that there was nothing constructive to be done in any given situation. The child particularly presented an insoluble problem. It seemed inaccessible to the processes of legal reasoning. He smiled at it, and it learned to smile back: not with the amicable toothless grin of most infants, but with what he took to be a flicker of amusement. Then again, he had always understood that the eyes of small babies did not focus properly, but this one—and no doubt it was entirely his imagination—seemed to look him over rather coolly. This made him uneasy. He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, You prick.
Standing on the window seat now, his son leans out over the square, and gives him a commentary on who comes and goes. There is the cure, there is M. Saulce. Now comes a rat. Now comes M. Saulce’s dog; oh, poor rat.
Camille,
he says, get down from there, if you drop out onto the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. Though you might, at that; who would notice?
Now, while he adds up the tradesmen’s bills, his son leans out of the window as far as he can, looking for further carnage. The cure recrosses the square, the dog falls asleep in the sun. A boy comes with a collar and chain, subdues the dog and leads it home. At last Jean-Nicolas looks up. When I have paid for the roof,
he says, I shall be flat broke. Are you listening to me? While your uncles continue to withhold from me all but the dregs of the district’s legal work, I cannot get by from month to month without making inroads into your mother’s dowry, which is supposed to pay for your education. The girls will be all right, they can do needlework, perhaps people will marry them for their personal charms. We can hardly expect you to get on in the same way.
Now comes the dog again,
his son says.
Do as I tell you and come in from the window. And do not be childish.
Why not?
Camille says. I’m a child, aren’t I?
His father crosses the room and scoops him up, prizing his fingers away from the window frame to which he clings. His eyes widen in astonishment at being carried off by this superior strength. Everything astonishes him: his father’s diatribes, the speckles on an eggshell, women’s hats, ducks on the pond.
Jean-Nicolas carries him across the room. When you are thirty, he thinks, you will sit at this desk and, turning from your account books to the piffling local business on which you are employed, you will draft, for perhaps the tenth time in your career, a deed of mortgage on the manor house at Wiège; and that will wipe the look of surprise off your face. When you are forty, and graying, and worried sick about your eldest son, I shall be seventy. I shall sit in the sunshine and watch the pears ripen on the wall, and M. Saulce and the cure will go by and touch their hats to me.
What do we think about fathers? Important, or not? Here is what Rousseau says:
The oldest of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family, yet children remain tied to their father by nature only as long as they need him for their preservation … . The family may perhaps be seen as the first model of political society. The head of the state bears the image of the father, the people the image of his children.
So here are some more family stories.
M. Danton had four daughters: younger than these, one son. He had no attitude to this child, except perhaps relief at its gender. Aged forty, M. Danton died. His widow was pregnant, but lost the child.
In later life, the child Georges-Jacques thought he remembered his father. In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don’t come back, to quibble or correct.
M. Danton had been clerk to one of the local courts. There was a little money, some houses, some land. Madame found herself coping. She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out. Her sisters’ husbands came by every Sunday, and gave her advice.
Subsequently, the children ran wild. They broke people’s fences and chased sheep and committed various other rural nuisances. When accosted, they talked back. Children of other families they threw in the river.
That girls should be like that!
said M. Camus, Madame’s brother.
It isn’t the girls,
Madame said. It’s Georges-Jacques. But look, they have to survive.
But this is not some jungle,
M. Camus said. It is not Patagonia. It is Arcis-sur-Aube.
Arcis is green; the land around is flat and yellow. Life goes on at a steady pace. M. Camus eyes the child, where outside the window he throws stones at the barn.
The boy is savage and quite unnecessarily large,
he says. Why has he got a bandage round his head?
Why should I tell you? You’ll only bad-mouth him.
Two days ago, one of the girls had brought him home in the early warm dusk. They had been in the bull’s field, she said, playing at Early Christians. This was perhaps the pious gloss Anne-Madeleine put on the matter; it was possible of course that not all the Church’s martyrs agreed to be gored, and that some, like Georges-Jacques, went armed with pointed sticks. Half his face was ripped up from the bull’s horn. Panic-stricken, his mother had taken his head in her hands and shoved the flesh together and hoped against hope it would stick. She bandaged it tightly and put another bandage around his head to cover the bumps and cuts on his forehead. For two days, with a helmeted, aggressive air, he stayed in the house and moped. He complained that he had a headache. This was the third day.
Twenty-four hours after M. Camus had taken his leave, Mme. Danton stood at the same window and watched—as if in a dazed, dreadful repeating dream—while her son’s remains were manhandled across the fields. A farm laborer carried the heavy body in his arms; she could see how his knees bent under the deadweight. There were two dogs running after him with their tails between their legs; trailing behind came Anne-Madeleine, bawling with rage and despair.
When she reached them she saw that the man had tears in his eyes. That bloody bull will have to be slaughtered,
he said. They went into the kitchen. There was blood everywhere. It was all over the man’s shirt, the dogs’ fur, Anne-Madeleine’s apron and even her hair. It went all over the floor. She cast around for something—a blanket, a clean cloth—on which to lay the corpse of her only son. The laborer, exhausted, swayed against the wall, marking the plaster with a long rust-colored streak.
Put him on the floor,
she said.
When his cheek touched the cold tiles of the floor, the child moaned softly; only then did she realize he wasn’t dead. Anne-Madeleine was repeating the De profundis in a monotone: "From the morning watch even until night: let Israel hope in the Lord." Her mother hit her across the ear to shut her up. Then a chicken flew in at the door and got on her foot.
Don’t strike the girl,
the laborer said. She pulled him out from under its feet.
Georges-Jacques opened his eyes and vomited. They made him lie still, and felt his limbs for fractures. His nose was broken. He breathed bubbles of blood. Don’t blow your nose,
the man said, or your brains will drop out.
Lie still, Georges-Jacques,
Anne-Madeleine said. You gave that bull something to think about. He’ll run and hide when he sees you again.
His mother said, I wish I had a husband.
No one had looked at his nose much before the incident, so no one could say whether a noble feature had been impaired. But the place scarred badly where the bull’s horn had ripped up his face. The line of damage ran down the side of his cheek, and intruded a purple-brown spur into his upper lip.
The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.
When he was ten years old his mother married again. He was Jean Recordain, a merchant from the town; he was a widower, with one (quiet) boy to bring up. He had a few little eccentricities, but she thought they would do very well together. Georges went to school, a small local affair. He soon found that he could learn anything without the least trouble, so he did not allow school to impinge on his life. One day he was walked on by a herd of pigs. Cuts and bruises resulted, another scar or two hidden by his thick wiry hair.
That’s positively the last time I’ll be trampled on by any animal,
he said. Four-legged or two-legged.
Please God it may be,
his stepfather said piously.
A year passed. One day he collapsed suddenly, with a burning fever, chattering teeth. He coughed sputum stained with blood, and a scraping, crackling noise came from his chest, quite audible to anyone in the room. Lungs possibly not too good,
the leech said. All those ribs driven into them at frequent intervals. Sorry, my dear. Better fetch the priest.
The priest came. He gave him the last rites. But the boy failed to die that night. Three days later he still clung to a comatose half-life. His sister Marie-Cécile organized a cycle of prayers; she took the hardest shift, two o’clock in the morning till dawn. The parlor filled up with relations, sitting around trying to say the right thing. There were yawning silences, broken by the desperate sound of everyone speaking at once. News of each breath was relayed from room to room.
On the fourth day he sat up, recognized his family. On the fifth day he cracked jokes, and demanded food in quantity.
He was pronounced out of danger.
They had planned to open the grave, and bury him beside his father. The coffin, which they had put in an outhouse, had to be sent back. Luckily, they had only put a deposit on it.
When Georges-Jacques was convalescent, his stepfather made an expedition to Troyes. Upon his return, he announced that he had found the boy a place in the minor seminary.
You dolt,
his wife said. Confess it, you just want him out of the house.
How can I give my time to my inventions?
Recordain asked reasonably. I’m living on a battlefield. If it’s not stamping pigs it’s crackling lungs. Who else goes in the river in November? Who else goes in at all? People in Arcis have no need to know how to swim. The boy’s above himself.
Perhaps he could be a priest, after all,
Madame said, conciliatory.
Oh yes,
Uncle Camus said. I can just see him minstering to his flock. Perhaps they’ll send him on a Crusade.
I don’t know where he gets his brains from,
Madame said. There’s no brains in the family.
Thanks,
her brother said.
Of course, just because he goes to the seminary it doesn’t mean he has to be a priest. There’s the law. We’ve got law in the family.
And if he disliked the verdict? The mind recoils.
Anyway,
Madame said, let me keep him at home for a year or two, Jean. He’s my only son. He’s a comfort to me.
Whatever makes you happy,
Jean Recordain said. He was a mild, easygoing man who pleased his wife by doing exactly as she told him; much of his time nowadays he spent in an outlying farm building where he was inventing a machine for spinning cotton. He said it would change the world.
His stepson was fourteen years old when he removed his noisy and overgrown presence to the ancient cathedral city of Troyes. Troyes was an orderly town. The livestock had a sense of its lowly place in the universe, and the Fathers did not allow swimming. There seemed an outside chance that he would survive.
Later, when he looked back on his childhood, he always described it as extraordinarily happy.
In a thinner, grayer, more northerly light, a wedding is celebrated. It is January 2, and the sparse, cold congregation is able to wish each other the compliments of the season.
Jacqueline Carraut’s love affair occupied the spring and summer of 1757, and by Michaelmas she knew she was pregnant. She never made mistakes. Or only big ones, she thought.
Because her lover had now cooled towards her, because her father was a choleric man, she let out the bodices of her dresses, and kept herself very quietly. When she sat at her father’s table and could not eat, she shoveled the food down to the terrier who sat by her skirts. Advent came.
If you had told me earlier,
her lover said, we would have only had the row about a brewer’s daughter marrying into the de Robespierre family. But now, the way you’re swelling up, we have a scandal as well.
A love child,
Jacqueline said. She was not romantic by nature, but she felt the posture forced upon her. She held up her chin as she stood at the altar, and looked the family in the eye all day. Her own family, that is; the de Robespierre family stayed at home.
François was twenty-six years old. He was the rising star of the local barrister’s association and one of the district’s most coveted bachelors. The de Robespierre family had been in the Arras district for three hundred years. They had no money, and they were very proud. Jacqueline was amazed by the household into which she was received. In her father’s house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. The de Robespierres were polite to each other, and ate thin soup.
Thinking of her, as they did, as a robust, common sort of girl, they ladled huge watery platefuls in her direction. They even offered her father’s beer. But Jacqueline was not robust. She was sick and frail. A good thing she had married into gentility, people said spitefully. There was no work to be got out of her. She was just a little china ornament, a piece of porcelain, her narrow shape distorted by the coming child.
François had stood before the priest and done his duty; but once he met her body between the sheets, he felt again the original, visceral passion. He was drawn to the new heart that beat in her side, to the primitive curve of her ribs. He was awed by her translucent skin, by the skin inside her wrists which showed greenish marble veins. He was drawn by her myopic green eyes, wide-open eyes that could soften or sharpen like the eyes of a cat. When she spoke, her phrases were like little claws, sinking in.
They have that salty soup in their veins,
she said. If you cut them, they would bleed good manners. Tomorrow, thank God, we shall be in our own house.
It was an embarrassed, embattled winter. François’s two sisters hovered about, taking messages and being afraid of saying too much. Jacqueline’s child, a boy, was born on May 6, at two in the morning. Later that day, the family met at the font. François’s father stood godparent, so the baby was named after him, Maximilien. It was a good, old, family name, he told Jacqueline’s mother; it was a good, old family to which her daughter now belonged.
There were three more children of this marriage within the next five years. The time came to Jacqueline when sickness, then fear, then pain, was her natural condition. She did not remember any other kind of life.
That day Aunt Eulalie read them a story. It was called The Fox and the Cat.
She read very quickly, snapping the pages over. It is called not giving your full attention, he thought. If you were a child they would smack you for it. And this book was his favorite.
She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. Disregarded, he slid down onto the floor, and played with the bit of lace at her cuff. His mother could make lace.
He was full of foreboding; never was he allowed to sit on the floor (wearing out your good clothes).
His aunt broke off in the middle of sentences, to listen. Upstairs, Jacqueline was dying. Her children did not know this yet.
They had evicted the midwife, for she had done no good. She was in the kitchen now eating cheese, scraping the rind with relish, frightening the servant-girl with precedents. They had sent for the surgeon; at the top of the stairs, François argued with him. Aunt Eulalie sprang up and closed the door, but you could still hear them. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady’s hand to Augustin’s cradle, rocking, rocking.
I see no way to deliver her,
the man said, except by cutting.
He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. I might save the child.
Save her,
François said.
If I do nothing, they’ll both die.
You can kill it, but save her.
Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle, and Augustin cried at the jolt. Lucky Augustin, already born.
They were arguing now—the surgeon impatient at the layman’s slow comprehension. Then I might as well fetch the butcher,
François shouted.
Aunt Eulalie stood up, and the book slipped out of her fingers, slithered down her skirt, fell and opened itself on the floor. She ran up the stairs: For Jesus’ sake. Your voices. The children.
The pages fanned over—the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. Maximilien picked it up and straightened the bent corners of the pages. He put his sister’s fat hands on the cradle. Like this,
he said, rocking.
She raised her face, with its slack infant mouth. Why?
Aunt Eulalie passed him without seeing him, perspiration broken out along her upper lip. His feet pattered on the stairs. His father was folded into a chair, crying, his arm thrown over his eyes. The surgeon was looking in his bag. My forceps,
he said. I shall make the attempt, at least. The technique is sometimes efficacious.
The child pushed the door just a little, making a gap to slip in. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields. There was a good fire, and logs lay ready in a basket. The heat was close and visible. His mother’s body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. She turned to him just her eyes, not her head, and the threadbare remnants of a smile. The skin around her mouth was gray.
Soon, it seemed to say, you and I shall part.
When he had seen this he turned away. At the door he raised a hand to her, a feeble adult gesture of solidarity. Outside the door the surgeon had taken off his topcoat and stood with it over his arm, waiting for someone to take it away from him and hang it up. If you had called me a few hours ago …
the surgeon remarked, to no one in particular. François’s chair was empty. It seemed he had left the house.
The priest arrived. If the head would emerge,
he said, I should baptize it.
If the head would emerge our troubles would be over,
the surgeon said.
Or any limb,
the priest said hopefully. The Church countenances it.
Eulalie passed back into the room. The heat billowed out as she opened the door. Can it be good for her? There is no air.
Chills are disastrous,
the surgeon said. Though anyway—
Extreme Unction, then,
the priest suggested. I hope there is a convenient table.
He took out of his bag a white altar cloth, and delved in again for his candles. The grace of God, portable, brought to your hearth and home.
The surgeon’s eyes roamed around the stairhead. Get that child away,
he said.
Eulalie gathered him into her arms: the love child. As she carried him downstairs the fabric of her dress chafed his cheek, made a tiny sound of rasping.
Eulalie lined them up by the front door. Your gloves,
she said. Your hats.
It’s warm,
he said. We don’t really need our gloves.
Nevertheless,
she insisted. Her face seemed to quiver.
The wet nurse pushed past them, the baby Augustin tossed against her shoulder, held with one hand as if he were a sack. Five in six years,
she said to Eulalie, what can you expect? Her luck’s run out, that’s all.
They went to Grandfather Carraut’s. Later that day Aunt Eulalie came, and said that they must pray for their baby brother. Grandmother Carraut mouthed, Christened?
Aunt Eulalie shook her head. She cast an eye down at the children, a can’t-say-too-much look. She mouthed back at Grandmother: Born dead.
He shuddered. Aunt Eulalie bent down to kiss him. When can I go home?
he said.
Eulalie said, You’ll be all right with Grandmother for a few days, till your mother’s feeling better.
But he remembered the gray flesh around her mouth. He understood what her mouth had said to him: soon I shall be in my coffin and soon I shall be buried.
He wondered why they told lies in this way.
He counted the days. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette went to and fro. They said, aren’t you going to ask us how your mother is today? Aunt Henriette said to Grandmother, Maximilien doesn’t ask how his mother is.
Grandmother replied, He’s a chilly little article.
He counted the days until they decided to tell the truth. Nine days passed. It was breakfast time. When they were having their bread and milk, Grandmother came in.
You must be very brave,
she said. Your mother has gone to live with Jesus.
Baby Jesus, he thought. He said, I know.
When this happened, he was six. A white curtain fluttered in the breeze from the open window, sparrows fussed on the sill; God the Father, trailing clouds of glory, looked down from a picture on the wall.
Then in a day or two, sister Charlotte pointing to the coffin; his smaller sister Henriette grumbling in a corner, fractious and disregarded.
I will read to you,
he told Charlotte. But not that animal book. It is too childish for me.
Later the grown-up Henriette, who was his aunt, lifted him up to look in the coffin before it was closed. She was shaking, and said over his head, I didn’t want to show him, it was Grandfather Carraut who said it must be done.
He understood very well that it was his mother, the hatchet-nosed corpse with its terrifying paper hands.
Aunt Eulalie ran out into the street. She said, François, I beg of you.
Maximilien ran after her, grabbing at her skirts; he saw how his father did not once turn back. François strode down the street, off into the town. Aunt Eulalie towed the child with her, back into the house. He has to sign the death certificate,
she said. He says he won’t put his name to it. What are we going to do?
Next day, François came back. He smelled of brandy and Grandfather Carraut said it was obvious he had been with a woman.
During the next few months François began to drink heavily. He neglected his clients, and they went elsewhere. He would disappear for days at a time; one day he packed a bag, and said he was going for good.
They said—Grandmother and Grandfather Carraut—that they had never liked him. They said, we have no quarrel with the de Robespierres, they are decent people, but him, he is not a decent person. At first they kept up the fiction that he was engaged in a lengthy and prestigious case in another city. He did return from time to time, drifting in, usually to borrow money. The elder de Robespierres—at our time of life
—did not feel they could give his children a home. Grandfather Carraut took the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette, who were unmarried, said they would take the little girls.
At some point during his childhood, Maximilien found out, or was told, that he had been conceived out of wedlock. Possibly he put the worst construction on his family circumstances, because during the rest of his life he never mentioned his parents at all.
In 1768 François de Robespierre turned up in Arras after an absence of two years. He said he had been abroad, but he did not say where, or how he had lived. He went over to Grandfather Carraut’s house, and asked to see his son. Maximilien stood in a passageway and heard them shouting from behind a closed door.
You say you have never got over it,
Grandfather Carraut said. But have you stopped to ask your son whether he has got over it? The child is her image, he’s not strong; she was not strong, you knew that when you forced yourself on her after each childbirth. It’s only thanks to me that they have any clothes to their backs and are growing up Christians.
His father came out and found him and said, he’s thin, he’s small for his age. He spent a few minutes talking to him in a strained and embarrassed way. Leaving, he bent down to kiss him on the forehead. His breath was sour. The love child jerked his head back, with an adult expression of distaste. François seemed disappointed. Perhaps he wanted a hug, a kiss, to swing his son around in the air?
Afterwards the child, who had learned to measure out sparingly his stronger emotions, wondered if he ought to be sorry. He asked his grandfather, Did my father come to see me?
The old man grumbled as he moved away. He came to borrow money again. Grow up.
Maximilien gave his grandparents no trouble at all. You would hardly know he was in the house, they said. He was interested in reading and in keeping doves in a cote in the garden. The little girls were brought over on Sundays, and they played together. He let them stroke—very gently, with one finger—the doves’ quivering backs.
They begged for one of the doves, to take home and keep for themselves. I know you, he said, you’ll be tired of it within a day or two, you have to take care of them, they’re not dolls you know. They wouldn’t give up: Sunday after Sunday, bleating and whining. In the end he was persuaded. Aunt Eulalie bought a pretty gilt cage.
Within a few weeks the dove was dead. They had left the cage outside, there had been a storm. He imagined the little bird dashing itself in panic against the bars, its wings broken, the thunder rolling overhead. When Charlotte told him, she hiccupped and sobbed with remorse; but in five minutes, he knew, she would run out into the sunshine and forget it. We put the cage outside so he would feel free,
she sniffed.
He was not a free bird. He was a bird that needed looking after. I told you. I was right.
But his rightness gave him no pleasure. It left a bitter taste in his mouth.
His grandfather said that when he was old enough he would take him into the business. He escorted the child around the brewery, to look at the various operations and speak with the men. The boy took only a polite interest. His grandfather said that, as he was more bookish than practical, he might like to be a priest. Augustin can go into the business,
he said. Or it can be sold. I’m not sentimental. There are other trades than brewing.
When Maximilien was ten years old, the Abbot of Saint-Waast was induced to interest himself in the family. He interviewed Maximilien in person, and did not quite take to him. Despite his self-effacing manner, he seemed basically contemptuous of the Abbot’s opinions, as if he had his mind on higher things and plenty of tasks to engage him elsewhere. However, it seemed clear that he had a good brain going to waste. The Abbot went so far as to think that his misfortunes were not his fault. He was a child for whom one might do something; he had been three years at school in Arras, and his teachers were full of praise for his progress and industry.
The Abbot arranged a scholarship. When he said, I will do something for you,
he did not mean a mere trifle. It was to be Louis-le-Grand, the best school in the country, where the sons of the aristocracy were educated—a school that looked out for talent, too, and where a boy with no fortune might get on. So the Abbot said: moreover, he enjoined furious hard work, abject obedience, unfailing gratitude.
Maximilien said to his Aunt Henriette, When I go away, you will have to write me letters.
Of course.
And Charlotte and Henriette are to write me letters, please.
I’ll see they do.
In Paris I shall have a lot of new friends, as well.
I expect so.
And when I am grown up I will be able to provide for my sisters and my brother. No one else will have to do it.
What about your old aunts?
You too. We’ll get a big house together. We won’t have any quarrels at all.
Fat chance, she thought. She wondered: ought he to go? At twelve he was still such a small boy, so softly spoken and unobtrusive; she was afraid he would be overlooked altogether once he left his grandfather’s house.
But no—of course he had to go. These chances are few and far between; we have to get on in this world, no good to be done by clinging to women’s apron strings. He made her think of his mother, sometimes; he had those sea-colored eyes that seemed to trap and hold the light. I never disliked the girl, she thought. She had a feeling heart, Jacqueline.
During the summer of 1769 he studied to advance his Latin and Greek. He arranged about the care of the doves with a neighbor’s daughter, a little girl slightly older than himself. In October, he went away.
In Guise, under the de Viefville eye, Maitre Desmoulins’s career had advanced. He became a magistrate. In the evenings after supper he and Madeleine sat looking at each other. Money was always short.
In 1767—when Armand was able to walk, and Anne-Clothilde was the baby of the household—Jean-Nicolas said to his wife:
Camille ought to go away to school, you know.
Camille was now seven years old. He continued to follow his father about the house, talking incessantly in a de Viefville fashion and rubbishing his opinions.
He had better go to Cateau-Cambrésis,
Jean-Nicolas said, and be with his little cousins. It’s not far away.
Madeleine had a great deal to do. The eldest girl was persistently sick, servants took advantage and the household budget required time-consuming economies. Jean-Nicolas exacted all this from her; on top of it, he wanted her to pay attention to his feelings.
Isn’t he a bit young to be taking the weight of your unfulfilled ambitions?
she inquired.
For the souring of Jean-Nicolas had begun. He had disciplined himself out of his daydreams. In a few years’ time, young hopefuls at the Guise Bar would ask him, why have you been content with such a confined stage for your undoubted talents, Monsieur? And he would snap at them that his own province was good enough for him, and ought to be good enough for them too.
They sent Camille to Cateau-Cambrésis in October. Just before Christmas they received an effusive letter from the principal describing the astonishing progress that Camille had made. Jean-Nicolas waved it at his wife. Didn’t I tell you?
he said. I knew it was the right thing to do.
But Madeleine was disturbed by the letter. It is as if,
she said, they are saying, ‘How attractive and intelligent your child is, even though he has only one leg.’
Jean-Nicolas took this to be a witticism. Only the day before Madeleine had told him that he had no imagination and no sense of humor.
A little later the child arrived home. He had developed an appalling speech impediment, and could hardly be persuaded to say anything at all. Madeleine locked herself in her room and had her meals sent up. Camille said that the Fathers had been very kind to him and opined that it was his own fault. His father said, to cheer him, that it was not a fault but an inconvenience. Camille insisted that he was obscurely blameworthy, and asked coldly on what date it would be possible to return to school, since at school they did not worry about it and did not discuss it all the time. Jean-Nicolas contacted Cateau-Cambrésis in a belligerent mood to ask why his son had developed a stutter. The priests said he came with it, and Jean-Nicolas said he assuredly did not leave home with it; and it was concluded that Camille’s fluency of speech lay discarded along the coach route, like a valise or a pair of gloves that has gone astray. No one was to blame; it was one of those things that happen.
In the year 1770, when Camille was ten years old, the priests advised his father to remove him from the school, since they were unable to give him the attention his progress merited. Madeleine said, Perhaps we could get him a private tutor. Someone really first class.
Are you mad?
her husband shouted at her. Do you think I’m a duke? Do you think I’m an English cotton baron? Do you think I have a coal mine? Do you think I have serfs?
No,
his wife said. I know what you are. I’ve no illusions left.
It was a de Viefville who provided the solution. To be sure,
he said, it would be a pity to let your clever little boy come to nothing for the want of a little cash. After all,
he said rudely, you yourself are never going to set the world ablaze.
He ruminated. He’s a charming child. We suppose he’ll grow out of the stutter. We must think of scholarships. If we could get him into Louis-le-Grand the expense to the family would be trifling.
They’d take him, would they?
From what I hear, he’s extraordinarily bright. When he is called to the bar, he will be quite an ornament to the family. Look, next time my brother’s in Paris, I’ll get him to exert himself on your behalf. Can I say more?
Life expectancy in France has now increased to almost twenty-nine years.
The College Louis-le-Grand was an old foundation. It had once been run by Jesuits, but when they were expelled from France it was taken over by the Oratorians, a more enlightened order. Its alumni were celebrated if diverse; Voltaire, now in honored exile, had studied there, and Monsieur the Marquis de Sade, now holed up in one of his chateaux while his wife worked for the commutation of a sentence passed on him recently for poisoning and buggery.
The College stood on the rue Saint-Jacques, cut off from the city by high solid walls and iron gates. It was not the custom to heat the place, unless ice formed on the holy water in the chapel font; so in winter it was usual to go out early to harvest some icicles and drop them in, and hope that the principal would stretch a point. The rooms were swept by piercing draughts, and by gusts of subdued chatter in dead languages.
Maximilien de Robespierre had been there for a year now.
When he had first arrived he had been told that he would want to work hard, for the Abbot’s sake, since it was to the Abbot he owed this great opportunity. He had been told that if he were homesick, it would pass. Upon his arrival he sat down to make a note of everything he had seen on the journey, because then he would have done his duty to it, and need not carry it around in his head. Verbs conjugated in Paris just as they did in Artois. If you kept your mind on the verbs, everything would fall into place around them. He followed every lesson with close attention. His teachers were quite kind to him. He made no friends.
One day a senior pupil approached him, propelling in front of him a small child. Here, Thing,
the boy said. (They had this affectation of forgetting his name.)
Maximilien stopped dead. He didn’t immediately turn around. You want me?
he said. Quite pleasant-offensive; he knew how to do that.
I want you to keep your eye on this infant they have unaccountably sent. He is from your part of the country—Guise, I believe.
Maximilien thought: these ignorant Parisians think it is all the same. Quietly, he said, Guise is in PICARDY. I come from ARRAS. ARRAS is in ARTOIS.
Well, it’s of no consequence, is it? I hope you can take time from your reputedly very advanced studies to help him find his way about.
All right,
Maximilien said. He swung around to look at the so-called infant. He was a very pretty child, very dark.
Where is it you want to find your way to?
he asked.
Just then Father Herivaux came shivering along the corridor. He stopped. Ah, you have arrived, Camille Desmoulins,
he said.
Father Herivaux was a distinguished classicist. He made a point of knowing everything. Scholarship didn’t keep the autumn chills out; and there was so much worse to come.
And I believe that you are only ten years old,
Father said.
The child looked up at him and nodded.
And that altogether you are very advanced for your years?
Yes,
said the child. That’s right.
Father Herivaux bit his lip. He scurried on. Maximilien removed the spectacles he was obliged to wear, and rubbed the corners of his eyes. Try ‘Yes, Father,’
he suggested. They expect it. Don’t nod at them, they tend to resent it. Also, when he asked you if you were clever, you should have been more modest about it. You know—‘I try my best, Father.’ That sort of thing.
Groveler, are you, Thing?
the little boy said.
Look, it’s just an idea. I’m only giving you the benefit of my experience.
He put his glasses back on. The child’s large dark eyes swam into his. For a moment he thought of the dove, trapped in its cage. He had the feel of the feathers on his hands, soft and dead: the little bones without pulse. He brushed his hand down his coat.
The child had a stutter. It made him uneasy. In fact there was something about the whole situation that upset him. He felt that the modus vivendi he had achieved was under threat; that life would become more complicated, and that his affairs had taken a turn for the worse.
When he returned home to Arras for the summer holiday, Charlotte said, You don’t grow much, do you?
Same thing she said, year after year.
His teachers hold him in esteem. No flair, they said; but he always tells the truth.
He was not quite sure what his fellow pupils thought of him. If you asked him what sort of a person he thought he was, he would tell you he was able, sensitive, patient and deficient in charm. But as for how this estimate might have differed from that of the people around him—well, how can you be sure that the thoughts in your head have ever been thought by anyone else?
He did not have many letters from home. Charlotte sent quite often a neat childish record of small concerns. He kept her letters for a day or two, read them twice; then, not knowing what to do with them, threw them away.
Camille Desmoulins had letters twice a week, huge letters; they became a public entertainment. He explained that he had first been sent away to school when he was seven years old, and as a consequence knew his family better on paper than he did in real life. The episodes were like chapters of a novel, and as he read them aloud for the general recreation, his friends began to think of his family as characters.
Sometimes the whole group would be seized by pointless hilarity at some phrase such as Your mother hopes you have been to confession,
and would repeat it to each other for days with tears of merriment in their eyes. Camille explained that his father was writing an Encyclopedia of Law. He thought that the only purpose of the project was to excuse his father from conversing with his mother in the evenings. He ventured the suggestion that his father shut himself away with the Encyclopedia, and then read what Father Proyart, the deputy principal, called bad books.
Camille replied to these letters in page after page of his sprawling formless handwriting. He was keeping the correspondence so that it could be published later.
Try to learn this truth, Maximilien,
Father Herivaux said: most people are lazy, and will take you at your own valuation. Make sure the valuation you put on yourself is high.
For Camille this had never been a problem. He had the knack of getting himself into the company of the older, well-connected pupils, of making himself in some way fashionable. He was taken up by Stanislas Fréron, who was five years older, who was named after his godfather, the King of Poland. Fréron’s family was rich and learned, his uncle a noted foe of Voltaire. At six years old he had been taken to Versailles, where he had recited a poem for Mesdames Adelaide, Sophie and Victoire, the old King’s daughters; they had made a fuss of him and given him sweets. Fréron said to Camille, When you are older I will take you about in society, and make your career.
Was Camille grateful? Hardly at all. He poured scorn on Fréron’s ideas. He started to call him Rabbit.
François was incubating sensitivity. He would stand in front of a mirror to scrutinize his face, to see if his teeth stuck out or if he looked timid.
Then there was Louis Suleau, an ironical sort of boy, who smiled when the young aristocrats denigrated the status quo. It is an education, he said, to watch people mine the ground under their own feet. There will be a war in our lifetime, he told Camille, and you and I will be on different sides. So let us be fond of each other, while we may.
Camille said to Father Herivaux, I will not go to confession anymore. If you force me to go, I will pretend to be someone else. I will make up someone else’s sins and confess them.
Be reasonable,
Father Herivaux said. When you’re sixteen, then you can throw over your faith. That’s the right age for doing it.
But by the time he was sixteen Camille had a new set of derelictions. Maximilien de Robespierre endured small daily agonies of apprehension. How do you get out?
he asked.
It isn’t the Bastille, you know. Sometimes you can talk your way out. Or climb over the wall. Shall I show you where? No, you would rather not know.
Inside the walls there is a reasoning intellectual community. Outside, beasts file past the iron gates. It is as if human beings have been caged, while outside wild animals range about and perform human occupations. The city stinks of wealth and corruption; beggars sit in roadside filth, the executioner carries out public tortures, there are beatings and robberies in broad daylight. What Camille finds outside the walls excites and appalls him. It is a benighted city, he said, forgotten by God; a place of insidious spiritual depravity, with an Old Testament future. The society to which Fréron proposed to introduce him is some huge poisonous organism limping to its death; people like you, he said to Maximilien, are the only fit people to run a country.
Camille also said, Wait until Father Proyart is appointed principal. Then we shall all be stamped into the ground.
His eyes were alight at the prospect.
This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought: that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
But, as it happened, Father Proyart was passed over. The new principal was Father Poignard d’Enthienloye, a relaxed, liberal, talented man. He was alarmed at the spirit that had got about among his charges.
Father Proyart says you have a ‘set,’
he told Maximilien. He says you are all anarchists and puritans.
Father Proyart doesn’t like me,
Maximilien said. And I think he overstates the case.
Of course he overstates it. Must we plod? I have to read my office in half an hour.
Are we puritans? He ought to be glad.
If you talked about women all the time he would know what to do, but he says that all you talk about is politics.
Yes,
Maximilien said. He was willing to give reasonable consideration to the problems of his elders. He is afraid that the high walls don’t keep American ideas out. He’s right, of course.
Each generation has its passions. A schoolmaster sees them. At times I think our system is wholly ill-advised. We take away your childhoods, we force your ideas in this hothouse air; then we winter you in a climate of despotism.
Delivered of this, the priest sighed; his metaphors depressed him.
Maximilien thought for a moment about running the brewery; very little classical education would be required. You think it is better if people’s hopes are not raised?
he said.
I think it is a pity that we bring on your talents, then say to you
—the priest held his palm up—this far, but no further. We cannot provide a boy like you with the privileges of birth and wealth.
Yes, well.
The boy smiled, a small but genuine smile. This point had not escaped me.
The principal could not understand Father Proyart’s prejudices against this boy. He was not aggressive, did not seem to want to get the better of you. So what will you do, Maximilien? I mean, what do you intend?
He knew that under the terms of his scholarship the boy must take his degree in medicine, theology or jurisprudence. I gather it was thought you might go into the Church.
Other people thought so.
Maximilien’s tone was very respectful, the principal thought; he offers a due deference to the opinions of others, then takes no notice of them at all. My father had a legal practice, once. I hope to pick it up. I have to go home. I am the eldest, you see.
The priest knew this, of course; knew that unwilling relatives doled out a pittance for what the scholarship did not provide, so that the boy must always be acutely conscious of his social standing. Last year the bursar had to arrange for him to be bought a new topcoat. A career in your own province,
he said. Will this be enough for you?
Oh, I’ll move within my sphere.
Sardonic? Perhaps. But Father, you were worrying about the moral tone of the place. Don’t you want to have this conversation with Camille? He’s much more entertaining on the topic of moral tone.
I deplore this convention of the single name,
the priest said. As if he were famous. Does he mean to go through life with only one name? I have no good opinion of your friend. And do not tell me you are not his keeper.
I’m afraid I am, you see.
He thought. But come, Father, surely you do have a good opinion of him?
The priest laughed. Father Proyart says that you are not just puritans and anarchists, but strikers of poses too. Precious, self-conscious … this is the Suleau boy as well. But I see that you are not like that.
You think I should just be myself?
Why not?
I usually feel some greater effort is called for.
Later, putting down his breviary, the priest brooded over the interview. He thought, this child will just be unhappy. He will go back to his province, and he will never amount to anything.
The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.
Camille Desmoulins, 1793: They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer.
Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: History is fiction.
CHAPTER 2
Corpse-Candle
Just after Easter, King Louis XV caught smallpox. From the cradle his life had been thronged by courtiers; his rising in the morning was a ceremony governed by complex and rigid etiquette, and when he dined he dined in public, hundreds filing past to gape at every mouthful. Each bowel movement, each sex act, each breath a matter for public comment: and then his death.
He had to break off the hunt, and was brought to the palace weak and feverish. He was sixty-four, and from the outset they rather thought he would die. When the rash appeared he lay shaking with fear, because he himself knew he would die and go to Hell.
The Dauphin and his wife stayed in their own rooms, afraid of contagion. When the blisters suppurated, the windows and doors were flung wide open, but the stench was unbearable. The rotting body was turned over to the doctors and priests for the last hours. The carriage of Mme. du Barry, the last of the Mistresses, rolled out of Versailles forever, and only then, when she had gone and he felt quite alone, would the priests give him absolution. He sent for her, was told she had already left. Already,
he said.
The Court had assembled, to wait events, in the huge antechamber known as the Œil de Boeuf. On May 10, at a quarter past three in the afternoon, a lighted taper in the window of the sickroom was snuffed out.
Then suddenly a noise exploded like thunder from a clear sky—the rush, the shuffle, the tramp of hundreds of feet. Of blank and single mind, the Court charged out of the Œil de Boeuf and through the Grand Galerie to find the new King.
The new King is nineteen years old; his consort, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, is a year younger. The King is a large, pious, conscientious boy, phlegmatic, devoted to hunting and the pleasures of the table; he is said to be incapable, by reason of a painfully tight foreskin, of indulging the pleasures of the flesh. The Queen is a selfish little girl, strong-willed and ill-educated. She is fair, fresh-complexioned, pretty because at eighteen almost all girls are pretty; but her large-chinned Hapsburg hauteur is already beginning to battle with the advantages conferred by silk, diamonds and ignorance.
Hopes for the new reign run high. On the statue of the great Henri IV, the hand of an unknown optimist writes Resurrexit.
When the Lieutenant of Police goes to his desk—today, last year, every year—the first piece of information he requires concerns the price of a loaf in the bakers’ shops of Paris. If Les Halles is well supplied with flour, then the bakers of the city and the faubourgs will satisfy their customers, and the thousand itinerant bakers will bring their bread in to the markets in the Marais, in Saint-Paul, in the Palais-Royal and in Les Halles itself.
In easy times, a loaf of brown bread costs eight or nine sous. A general laborer, who is paid by the day, can expect to earn twenty sous; a mason might get forty sous, a skilled locksmith or a joiner might get fifty. Items for the budget: rent money, candles, cooking fat, vegetables, wine. Meat is for special occasions. Bread is the main concern.
The supply lines are tight, precise, monitored. What the bakers have left over at the end of the day must be sold off cheap; the destitute do not eat till night falls on the markets.
All goes well; but then when the harvest fails—in 1770, say, or in 1772 or 1774—an inexorable price rise begins; in the autumn of 1774 a four-pound loaf in Paris costs eleven sous, but by the following spring the price is up to fourteen. Wages do not rise. The building workers are always turbulent, so are the weavers, so are the bookbinders and (poor souls) the hatters, but strikes are seldom to procure a wage rise, usually to resist a cut. Not the strike but the bread riot is the most familiar resort of the urban working man, and thus the temperature and rainfall over some distant cornfield connects directly with the tension headaches of the Lieutenant of Police.
Whenever there is a shortage of grain, the people cry, A famine pact!
They blame speculators and