no, leave him alone,’ Camille said. ‘He’s always been offensive. It’s his nature.’
‘I want my own newspaper,’ Hébert said. ‘It will be different from this.’
Brissot was in that day, perched on a desk, twitching. ‘Shouldn’t be too different,’ he said. ‘This one is a pre-eminent success.’
Brissot and Hébert didn’t like each other.
‘You and Camille write for the educated,’ Hébert said. ‘So does Marat. I’m not going to do that.’
‘You are going to start a newspaper for the illiterate?’ Camille asked him sweetly. ‘I wish you every success.’
‘I’m going to write for the people in the street. In the language they speak.’
‘Then every other word will be an obscenity,’ Brissot said, sniffing.
‘Precisely,’ Hébert said, tripping out.
Brissot is the editor of the French Patriot (daily, four pages in quarto, boring). He is also a most generous, painstaking, endlessly inventive contributor to other people’s papers. He quivers into the office most mornings, his narrow, bony face shining with his latest good idea. I’ve spent all my life grovelling to publishers, he would say; and tell how he had been cheated, how his ideas had been stolen and his manuscripts pirated. He didn’t seem to see that there was any connection between this sad record of his, and what he was doing now – 11.30 in the morning, in another editor’s office, turning his dusty, Quaker-style hat in his hands and talking his substance away. ‘My family – you understand, Camille? – was very poor and ignorant. They wanted me to be a monk, that was the best life they could envisage. I lost my faith – well, in the end, I had to break it to them, didn’t I? Of course, they didn’t understand. How could they? It was as if we spoke different languages. Say, they were Swedes, and I was Italian – that’s how close I was to my family. So then they said, you could be a lawyer, we suppose. Now, I was walking along the street one day, and one of the neighbours said, “Oh, look, there’s M. Janvier on his way back from court.” And he pointed to this lawyer, stupid-looking man with a paunch, trotting along with his evening’s work under his arm. And he said, “You work hard, you’ll be like that someday.” And my heart sank. Oh, I know, that’s a figure of speech – but, do you know, I swear it did, it bunched itself up and thudded into my belly. I thought no, any hardship – they can put me in gaol – but I don’t want to be like that. Now, of course, he wasn’t that stupid-looking, he had money, he was looked up to, didn’t oppress the poor or anything, and he’d just got married for the second time, to this very nice young woman…so why wasn’t I tempted? I might have thought – well, it’s a living, it’s not too bad. But – there you are – steady money, easy life – it’s never quite been enough, has it?’
One of Camille’s volatile assistants put his head around the door. ‘Oh, Camille, here’s a woman after you. Just by way of a change.’
Théroigne swept in. She wore a white dress, and a tricolour sash about her waist. A National Guardsman’s tunic, unbuttoned, was draped over her slim, square shoulders. Her brown hair was a breeze-blown waterfall of curls; she had employed one of those expensive hairdressers who make you look as if you’ve never been near a hairdresser in your life. ‘Hallo, how’s it going?’ she said. Her manner was at variance with this democratic greeting; she radiated energy and a quasi-sexual excitement.
Brissot hopped up from the desk, and considerately lifted the jacket from her shoulders, folded it carefully and laid it over a vacant chair. This reduced her to – what? A pretty-enough young woman in a white dress. She was displeased. There was a weight in the pocket of the tunic. ‘You carry firearms?’ Brissot said, surprised.
‘I got my pistol when we raided the Invalides. Remember, Camille?’ She swished across the room. ‘You’re not seen much on the streets, these last weeks.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t cut the figure,’ Camille murmured. ‘Not like you.’
Théroigne took his hand and turned it palm-up. You could still just see the bayonet-cut, not much thicker than a hair, that he had got on 13 July. Théroigne, meditatively, drew her forefinger along it. Brissot’s mouth became slightly unhinged. ‘Look, am I in your way?’
‘Absolutely not.’ The last thing he wanted was any rumours about Théroigne coming to Lucile’s ears. As far as he knew, Anne was leading a chaste and blameless life; the strange thing was, that she seemed dedicated to giving the contrary impression. The royalist scandal-sheets were not slow to pick anything up; Théroigne was a gift from God, as far as they were concerned.
‘Can I write for you, my love?’ she said.
‘You can try. But I have very high standards.’
‘Turn me down, would you?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid I would. The fact is, there’s just too much on offer.’
‘As long as we know where we stand,’ she said. She scooped up her jacket from the chair where Brissot had disposed it, and – out of some perverse form of charity – placed a kiss on his sunken cheek.
When she’d gone, an odour trailed behind her – female sweat, lavender-water. ‘Calonne,’ Brissot said. ‘He used lavender water. Remember?’
‘I didn’t move in those circles.’
‘Well, he did.’
Brissot would know. He would know everything, really. He believed in the Brotherhood of Man. He believed that all the enlightened men in Europe should come together to discuss good government and the development of the arts and sciences. He knew Jeremy Bentham and Joseph Priestley. He ran an anti-slavery society, and wrote about jurisprudence, the English parliamentary system and the Epistles of Saint Paul. He had arrived at his present cramped apartment on the rue de Grétry by way of Switzerland, the United States, a cell in the Bastille and a flat on Brompton Road. Tom Paine was a great friend of his (he said) and George Washington had more than once asked for his advice. Brissot was an optimist. He believed that common sense and love of liberty would always prevail. Towards Camille he was kind, helpful, faintly patronizing. He liked to talk about his past life, and congratulate himself on the better days ahead.
Now Théroigne’s visit – perhaps the kiss, particularly – put him into a regular fit of how-did-we-get-here and ain’t-life-strange. ‘I had a hard time,’ he said. ‘My father died, and shortly afterwards my mother became violently insane.’
Camille put his head down on his desk, and laughed and laughed, until they really thought he would make himself quite ill.
On Fridays Fréron would usually be in the office. Camille would go out to lunch for several hours. Then they would have a writ conference, to decide whether to apologize. Since Camille would not be entirely sober, they never apologized. The staff of the Révolutions was never off duty. They were committed to leaping out of bed in the small hours with some hair-raising bright idea; they were doomed to be spat at in the street. Each week, after the type was set, Camille would say, never again, this is the last edition, positively. But next Saturday the paper would be out again, because he could not bear anyone to think that THEY had frightened him, with their threats and insults and challenges, with their money and rapiers and friends at Court. When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying
