The night world is real, he often feels; the mornings, with their light and air, are populated by shadows, ghosts. He rises before dawn, to have the advantage of them.
WILLIAM AUGUSTUS MILES, observing the situation on behalf of His (English) Majesty’s government:
The man held of least account in the National Assembly…will soon be of the first consideration. He is a stern man, rigid in his principles, plain, unaffected in his manners, no foppery in his dress, certainly above corruption, despising wealth, and with nothing of the volatility of a Frenchman in his character. Nothing the King could bestow…could warp this man from his purpose. I watch him closely every night. He is really a character to be contemplated; he is growing every hour into consequence, and strange to relate, the whole National Assembly hold him cheap, consider him insignificant; when I said he would be the man of sway in a short time, and govern the million, I was laughed at.
EARLY IN THE YEAR, Lucile was taken to meet Mirabeau. She would never forget the man, standing squarely on a good Persian rug in a room decorated in appalling taste. He was thin-lipped, scarred and massive. He looked her over. ‘I believe your father’s a civil servant,’ he said. He thrust his face forward and leered at her. ‘Do you come in duplicate?’
Mirabeau, in a room, seemed to use up all the available air. He seemed, too, to use up all Camille’s brains. It was extraordinary, the set of delusions Camille could entertain; no, of course Mirabeau was not in the pay of the Court, that was slander. Of course Mirabeau was the perfect patriot. Come the day Camille can no longer sustain these eccentric beliefs, he is practically suicidal. There is almost no newspaper that week.
‘Max warned him,’ Adèle said. ‘He wouldn’t listen. Mirabeau has called that half-educated Austrian baggage “a great and noble woman”. And yet, to the people in the streets, Mirabeau is a god still. It shows how easily they can be misled.’
Claude put his head in his hands. ‘Must we have this every hour, every hour of the day and night, this blasphemy and sedition from the mouths of young women? In our own house?’
‘I was thinking,’ Lucile said, ‘that Mirabeau must have his own reasons for talking to the Court. But he has lost his credit with the patriots now.’
‘His reason? Money is his reason, and greed for power. He wants to save the monarchy so that they will be grateful to him and bound to him for ever more.’
‘Save the monarchy?’ Claude said. ‘From what? From whom?’
‘Father, the King has asked the Assembly for a civil list of twenty-five million, and the grovelling fools have granted it. You know the state of the nation. They want to drain its blood. Consider, can this last?’
He looked at his daughters to discern, if he could, the children they had once been. He felt impelled to plead with them. ‘But if you had not the King, or Lafayette, or Mirabeau, or the ministers – and I have heard you speak against them all – who would there be left to rule the nation?’
They exchanged glances. ‘Our friends,’ the sisters said.
Camille attacked Mirabeau in print, with a savagery he had not known himself to command. He did command it; abuse moves in the bloodstream, anger is better than food. For a time Mirabeau continued to speak out for him, defending him against the Right when they tried to silence him. ‘My poor Camille,’ he called him. In time, he would pass over to the ranks of his enemies. ‘I am truly Christian,’ Camille said. ‘I love my enemies.’ And indeed, his enemies gave him definition. He could read his purpose in their eyes.
Moving away from Mirabeau, he became closer to Robespierre. This made for a different life – evenings spent pushing papers across a desk, silence broken only by the odd murmur of consultation, the scratching of quills, the ticking of a clock. To be with Robespierre, Camille had to put on gravity like a winter cloak. ‘He is all I should be,’ he told Lucile. ‘Max doesn’t care for failure or success, it all evens out in his mind. He doesn’t care what other people say about him, or what opinion they hold of his actions. As long as what he does feels right, inside, that’s enough for him, that’s his guide. He’s one of the few men, the very few men, to whom only the witness of their own conscience is necessary.’
Yet just the day before, Danton had said to her, ‘Ah, young Maximilien, he’s too good to be true, that one. I can’t work him out.’
But after all, Robespierre had been quite right about Mirabeau. Whatever you thought about him, you had to admit that he was almost always right.
IN MAY, Théroigne left Paris. She had no money, and she was tired of the royalist papers calling her a prostitute. One by one, the murky layers of the past had been peeled away. Her time in London with a penniless milord. Her more profitable relationship with the Marquis de Persan. Her sojourn in Genoa with an Italian singer. A silly few weeks, when she was new in Paris, when she introduced herself to people as the Comtesse de Campinado, a great lady fallen on hard times. Nothing criminal, or madly hyperbolic: just the sort of thing we’ve all done when necessity has pressed. It left her open, though, to ridicule and insult. Whose life, she asked as she did her packing, would stand up to the sort of scrutiny mine has received? She meant to be back in a few months. The press will have moved on to new targets, she thought.
She left a gap, of course. She’d been a familiar figure at the Riding-School, lounging in the public gallery in a scarlet coat, her claque around her; strolling through the Palais-Royal, with a pistol in her belt. News came that she’d disappeared from her home in Liège; her brothers thought she’d gone off with some man, but before long rumours seeped through that she’d been abducted, that the Austrians had got her.
Hope they keep her, Lucile said. She was jealous of Théroigne. What gave her the right to be a pseudo-man, turning up at the Cordeliers and demanding the rostrum? It made Danton mad. It was funny to see what a rage it put him into. The kind of woman he liked was the kind he met at the Duke’s dinner table: Agnès de Buffon, who gave him the most ridiculous languishing looks, and the blonde Englishwoman, Grace Elliot, with her mysterious political connections and her mechanical, eye-flashing flirtatiousness. Lucile had been to the Duke’s house; she had watched Danton there. She supposed he knew what was happening; he knew that Laclos was setting him up, dangling these women under his nose. The procuress, Félicité, he left to Camille. Camille didn’t mind having to have intelligent conversations with women. He seemed to enjoy them. One of his perversions, Danton said.
That summer Camille’s old school-enemy, Louis Suleau, came to Paris. He came from Picardy under arrest, charged with seditious, anti-constitutional writings. He had a different brand of sedition from Camille, being more royalist than the King. Louis was acquitted; on the night of his release he and Camille sat up and argued until dawn. It was a very good argument – very articulate, very erudite, and its patron saint was Voltaire. ‘I have to keep Louis away from Robespierre,’ Camille said to Lucile. ‘Louis is one of the best people in the world, but I’m afraid Max doesn’t understand that.’
Louis was a gentleman, Lucile thought. He had dash, he had flair, he had presence. Soon he had a platform, too; he joined the editorial board of a royalist scandal-sheet called the Acts of the Apostles. The deputies who sat on the left were fond of calling themselves ‘the apostles of liberty’, and Louis thought such pomposity ought to be punished. Who were the contributors? A cabal of exhausted roués and defrocked priests, said the patriots whose noses were out of joint. How did it get written at all? The Acts held ‘evangelical dinners’ at the Restaurant du Mais and at Beauvillier’s, where they’d exchange gossip and plot the next edition. They would invite their opponents and ply them with drink, to see what they’d say. Camille understood the principle: a titbit here, a trade-off there, a screamingly good time at
