he said grimly. ‘Here in the provinces almost everyone has a vote, not just the moneyed men.’ For that reason, ‘They won’t be able to keep me out,’ he said.
His sister Charlotte said, ‘They’ll be ungrateful beasts if they don’t elect you. After all you’ve done for the poor. You deserve it.’
‘It isn’t a prize.’
‘You’ve worked so hard, all for nothing, no money, no credit. There’s no need to pretend you don’t resent it. You’re not obliged to be saintly.’
He sighed. Charlotte has this way of cutting him to the bone. Hacking away, with the family knife.
‘I know what you think, Max,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe you’ll come back from Versailles in six months, or even a year. You think this will alter your life. Do you want them to have a revolution just to please you?’
I DON’T CARE what the Estates-General do,’ said Philippe d’Orléans, ‘as long as I am there when they deal with the liberty of the individual, so that I can use my voice and vote for a law after which I can be sure that, on a day when I have a fancy to sleep at Raincy, no one can send me against my will to Villers-Cotterêts.’
Towards the end of 1788 the Duke appointed a new private secretary. He liked to embarrass people, and this may have been a major reason for his choice. The addition to his entourage was an army officer named Laclos. He was in his late forties, a tall, angular man with fine features and cold blue eyes. He had joined the army at the age of eighteen, but had never seen active service. Once this had grieved him, but twenty years spent in provincial garrison towns had endowed him with an air of profound and philosophic indifference. To amuse himself, he had written some light verse, and the libretto of an opera that came off after one night. And he had watched people, recorded the details of their manoeuvres, their power-play. For twenty years there had been nothing else to do. He became familiar with that habit of mind which dispraises what it most envies and admires: with that habit of mind which desires only what it cannot have.
His first novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published in Paris in 1782. The first edition sold out within days. The publishers rubbed their hands and remarked that if this shocking and cynical book was what the public wanted, who were they to act as censors? The second edition was sold out. Matrons and bishops expressed outrage. A copy with a blank binding was ordered for the Queen’s private library. Doors were slammed in the author’s face. He had arrived.
It seemed his military career was over. In any case, his criticism of army traditions had made his position untenable. ‘It seems to me I could do with such a man,’ the Duke said. ‘Your every affectation is an open book to him.’ When Félicité de Genlis heard of the appointment, she threatened to resign her post as Governor of the Duke’s children. Laclos could think of bigger disasters.
It was a crucial time in the Duke’s affairs. If he was to take advantage of the unsettled times, he must have an organization, a power base. His easy popularity in Paris must be put to good use. Men must be secured to his service, their past lives probed and their futures planned for them. Loyalties must be explored. Money must change hands.
Laclos surveyed this situation, brought his cold intelligence to bear. He began to know writers who were known to the police. He made discreet inquiries among Frenchmen living abroad as to the reasons for their exile. He got himself a big map of Paris and marked with blue circles points that could be fortified. He sat up by lamplight combing through the pages of the pamphlets that had come that day from the Paris presses; the censorship had broken down. He was looking for writers who were bolder and more outspoken than the rest; then he would make overtures. Few of these fellows had ever had a bestseller.
Laclos was the Duke’s man now. Laconic in his statements, his air discouraging intimacy, he was the kind of man whose first name nobody ever knows. But still he watched men and women with a furtive professional interest, and scribbled down thoughts that came to him, on chance scraps of paper.
In December 1788, the Duke sold the contents of his magnificent Palais-Royal art gallery, and devoted the money to poor relief. It was announced in the press that he would distribute daily a thousand pounds of bread; that he would defray the lying-in expenses of indigent women (even, the wits said, those he had not impregnated); that he would forgo the tithes levied on grain on his estates, and repeal the game laws on all his lands.
This was Félicité’s programme. It was for the country’s good. It did Philippe a bit of good, too.
RUE CONDÉ. ‘Although the censorship has broken down,’ Lucile says, ‘there are still criminal sanctions.’
‘Fortunately,’ her father says.
Camille’s first pamphlet lies on the table, neat inside its paper cover. His second, in manuscript, lies beside it. The printers won’t touch it, not yet; we will have to wait until the situation takes a turn for the worse.
Lucile’s fingers caress it, paper, ink, tape:
IT WAS RESERVED for our days to behold the return of liberty among the French … for forty years, philosophy has been undermining the foundations of despotism, and as Rome before Caesar was already enslaved by her vices, so France before Necker was already enfranchised by her intelligence … Patriotism spreads day by day, with the devouring rapidity of a great conflagration. The young take fire; old men cease, for the first time, to regret the past. Now they blush for it.
A DEPOSITION to the Estates-General:
The community of Chaillevois is composed of about two hundred persons. The most part of the inhabitants have no property at all, those who have any possess so little that it is not worth talking about. The ordinary food is bread steeped in salt water. As for meat, it is never tasted, except on Easter Sunday, Shrove Tuesday and the feast of the patron saint … A man may sometimes eat haricots, if the master does not forbid them to be grown among the vines … That is how the common people live under the best of Kings.
Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau:
My motto shall be this: get into the Estates at all costs.
NEW YEAR. You go out in the streets and you think it’s here: the crash at last, the collapse, the end of the world. It is colder now than any living person can remember. The river is a solid sheet of ice. The first morning, it was a novelty. Children ran and shouted, and dragged their complaining mothers out to see it. ‘One could skate,’ people said. After a week, they began to turn their heads from the sight, keep their children indoors. Under the bridges, by dim and precarious fires, the destitute wait for death. A loaf of bread is fourteen sous, for the New Year.
These people have left their insufficient shelters, their shacks, their caves, abandoned the rock-hard, snow-glazed fields where they cannot believe anything will ever grow again. Tying up in a square of sacking a few pieces of bread, perhaps chestnuts: cording a small bundle of firewood: saying no goodbyes, taking to the road. They move in droves for safety, sometimes men alone, sometimes families, always keeping with the people from their own district, whose language they speak. At first they sing and tell stories. After two days or so, they walk in silence. The procession that marched now straggles. With luck, one may find a shed or byre for the night. Old women are wakened with difficulty
