sighed. ‘What is the use? Consciences cannot be forced.’
‘I believe Deputy Robespierre was your pupil too?’
‘For a little while.’
Father Pancemont looked at him as one who said, I was in Lisbon during the earthquake year. ‘You have given up teaching now?’ he asked.
‘Oh, look – there are worse people.’
‘I can’t think of any,’ the priest said.
THE WITNESSES to the marriage: Robespierre, Pétion, the writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and the Duke’s friend, the Marquis de Sillery. A diplomatically chosen selection, representing the left wing of the Assembly, the literary establishment and the Orléanist connection.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Camille said to Danton. ‘Really I wanted Lafayette, Louis Suleau, Marat and the public executioner.’
‘Of course I don’t mind.’ After all, he thought, I shall be a witness to everything else. ‘Are you going to be rich now?’
‘The dowry is a hundred thousand livres. And there’s some quite valuable silver. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve had to work for it.’
‘And are you going to be faithful to her?’
‘Of course.’ He looked shocked. ‘What a question. I love her.’
‘I only wondered. I thought it might be nice to have a statement of intent.’
THEY TOOK a first-floor apartment on the rue des Cordeliers, next door to the Dantons; and on 30 December they held their wedding breakfast for a hundred guests, the dark, icy day nuzzling in hostile curiosity at the lighted windows. At one o’clock in the morning they found themselves alone. Lucile was still in her pink wedding dress, now crumpled, and with a sticky patch where she had spilled a glass of champagne over herself some hours earlier. She sank down on to the blue chaise-longue, and kicked off her shoes. ‘Oh, what a day! Has there been anything like it in the annals of holy matrimony? My God, rows of people sniffing and groaning, and my mother crying, and my father crying, and then old Bérardier publically lecturing you like that, and you crying, and the half of Paris that wasn’t weeping in the pews standing outside in the streets shouting slogans and making lewd comments. And – ’ Her voice tailed off. The day’s sick excitement washed over her, wave on wave of it. Probably, she thought, this is what it’s like to be at sea. Camille seemed to be talking to her from a long way off:
‘…and I never thought that happiness like this could have anything to do with me, because two years ago I had nothing, and now I have you, and I’ve got the money to live well, and I’m famous…’
‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ Lucile said.
When she thought back on the ceremony, everything appeared to be a sort of haze, so that she felt that perhaps even by then she had had too much to drink, and she wondered in momentary panic, are we properly married? Is drunkenness an incapacity? What about last week, when we looked over the apartment – was I quite sober then? Where is the apartment?
‘I thought they’d never go,’ Camille said.
She looked up at him. All the things she’d been going to say, all the rehearsals she’d had for this moment, four years of rehearsals; and now, when it came to it, she could only manage a queasy smile. She forced her eyes open to stop the room spinning, and then closed them again, and let it spin. She rolled face down on the chaise-longue, drew up her knees comfortably, and gave a little grunt of contentment, like the dog at Saint-Sulpice. She slept. Some kind person slid a hand under her cheek, and then replaced the hand by a cushion.
‘LISTEN to what I will be,’ said the King, ‘if I do not uphold the constitutional oath on the poor bishops.’ He adjusted his spectacles and read:
‘…enemy of the public liberty, treacherous conspirator, most cowardly of perjurers, prince without honour, without shame, lowest of men…’ He broke off, put down the newspaper and blew his nose vigorously into a handkerchief embroidered with the royal arms – the last he had, of the old sort. ‘A happy new year to you too, Dr Marat,’ he said.
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