A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Read online

  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 hom
e 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; beggers 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.”
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  “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.