A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Read online

  “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.