for life.
Then she looked around and said, ‘This wallpaper must have cost a pretty penny.’
At the first meal she complained about the vegetables, and asked how much I paid our cook. ‘Far too much,’ she said. ‘Anyway, where does all the money come from?’ I explained to her how hard Georges worked, but she just snorted, and said that she had an idea of how much lawyers earned at his age and it wasn’t enough to keep a house like a palace and a wife in the lap of luxury.
That’s where she thinks I am.
When I took her shopping, she thought the prices were a personal insult. She had to admit we got good meat, but she said Legendre was common, and that she didn’t bring up Georges with all the care she’d lavished on him to see him associate with someone who ran a butcher’s shop. She amazed me – it isn’t as if Legendre stands there wrapping up bleeding parcels of beef these days. You never see him in an apron. He puts on a black coat like a lawyer and sits beside Georges at City Hall.
Madame Recordain would say, in the mornings: ‘Of course, I don’t require to go anywhere.’ But if we didn’t, she would say in the evening, ‘It’s a long way to come and sit and see four walls.’
I thought I’d take her to visit Louise Robert – seeing as Madame is such a snob, and Louise is so well-born. Louise couldn’t have been more charming. She didn’t say a single word about the republic, or Lafayette, or Mayor Bailly. Instead she showed Madame all her stock and explained to her where all the spices came from and how they were grown and prepared and what they were for, and offered to make her up a parcel of nice things to take home. But after ten minutes Her Ladyship was looking like thunder, and I had to make my excuses to Louise and follow her out. In the street she said, ‘It’s a disgrace for a woman to marry beneath her. It shows low appetites. And it wouldn’t surprise me if I found out they weren’t married at all.’
Georges said, ‘Look, because my mother comes, does it mean I can’t see my friends? Invite some people to supper. Somebody she’ll like. How about the Gélys? And little Louise?’
I knew this was a sacrifice on his part, because he’s not over-fond of Mme Gély; in fact, the strain was showing in his face already. And I had to say, ‘Well, no, they’ve already met. Your mother thinks Mme Gély is mincing and ridiculous and mutton dressed as lamb. And Louise is precocious and needs a stick taking to her.’
‘Oh dear,’ Georges said: which was quite mild for him, don’t you think? ‘We must know somebody nice. Don’t we?’
I sent a note to Annette Duplessis, saying, please please could Lucile come to supper? Georges’s mother would be there, it would be perfectly proper, she’d never be alone with etc. So Lucile was allowed to come; she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and she behaved like an angel, asking Madame all sorts of intelligent questions about life in Champagne. Camille was so polite – as, indeed, he almost always is, except in his newspaper – I had hidden the back-numbers, of course. I asked Fabre too, because he’s so good at keeping a conversation going – and he tried really hard with Madame. But she kept snubbing him, and in the end he gave up and started to look at her through his lorgnette, which I had given him strict instructions not to do.
Madame walked out as we were having coffee, and I found her in our bedroom running her finger under the windowsill, looking for dust. I said to her very politely, ‘Is there anything the matter?’ and she said in the most sour tone you can imagine, ‘There’ll be plenty the matter with you if you don’t watch that girl with your husband.’
For a minute I didn’t even know what she meant.
‘And I can tell you something else,’ she said. ‘You’d better watch that boy with your husband as well. So they’re going to be married, are they? They’ll suit each other.’
Once we got admission tickets for the public gallery at the Riding-School, but the debate was very dull. Georges says that any time now they will be discussing taking over the church’s lands for the nation, and that if she’d been present for that debate she’d have caused a commotion and got us thrown out. As it was, she called them villains and ingrates, and said no good would come of it. M. Robespierre saw us and came over for a few minutes, and was very kind. He pointed out the important people, including Mirabeau. Madame said, ‘That man will go straight to hell when he dies.’
M. Robespierre looked at me sideways and smiled and said to Madame, ‘You’re a young lady after my own heart.’ This set her up for the day.
All summer the consequences of that business of Dr Marat seemed to be hanging over us. We knew there was a warrant for Georges’s arrest, drawn up and ready, gathering dust in a drawer at City Hall. And I’d think, every morning, what if today is the day they decide to take it out and blow the dust off? We had plans – if he was arrested, I was to pack a bag and go at once to my mother, give the keys of the apartment to Fabre and leave everything else to him. I don’t know why Fabre – I suppose because he’s always around.
At this time Georges’s affairs were very complicated. He didn’t seem to spend much time in his own office. I suppose Jules Paré must be competent, because the money keeps coming in.
Early in the year something happened that Georges said showed the authorities were very frightened of him. They abolished our district, and all the others, and re-organized the city into voting areas. From now on there weren’t to be any public meetings of the citizens in a particular district unless it was for an election. Already they had stopped us calling our National Guard battalion ‘the Cordeliers’. They said we were just to be called ‘Number 3’.
Georges said it would take more than this to kill the Cordeliers. He said we were going to have a club, like the Jacobins but better. People from any part of the city could attend, so no one could say it was illegal. Its real name was the Club of the Friends of the Rights of Man, but from the beginning everybody called it the Cordeliers Club. At first they had meetings in a ballroom. They wanted to hold them in the old Cordeliers monastery, but City Hall had the building sealed up. Then one day – no explanation – the seals came off, and they moved in. Louise Robert said it was done by the influence of the Duke of Orléans.
It’s hard to get into the Jacobin Club. The yearly subscription is high, and you have to have a lot of members to back your application, and their meetings are very formal. When Georges went to speak there once he came home annoyed. He said they treated him like dirt.
At the Cordeliers anyone could come and speak. So you would get a lot of the actors and lawyers and tradesmen from around here, but you’d also get quite rough-looking types who’d walk in off the street. Of course, I never went there when there was a meeting, but I saw what they’d done with the chapel. It was very bleak and bare. When some windows got broken it was weeks before they were mended. I thought, how odd men are, at home they like to be comfortable but outside they pretend they don’t care. The president’s desk was a joiner’s bench that happened to be lying about when they moved in. Georges really wouldn’t have much to say to a joiner, if it weren’t for the present upheavals. The speaker’s rostrum at the club was made of four rough beams with a plank running between them. On the wall somebody had nailed a strip of calico with a slogan in red paint. It said Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
After the bad time I had with Georges’ mother I was miserable when he said he wanted to spend some time in Arcis. To my great relief, we stayed with his sister Anne Madeleine, and to my surprise we were received everywhere with great deference and respect. It was uncanny really – unnerving. Anne Madeleine’s friends were practically curtseying to me. At first I thought the local people must have heard of Georges’s successes as president of the district, but I soon realized that
