fingertips brushed the back of her hand. They were cold as ice. He turned on his heel. A door slammed. She had nothing left of him but the small chilled islands of skin. She heard her mother crying noisily out of sight, gasping and gagging. ‘Never,’ her father said, ‘never in twenty years has there been a word said out of place in this house, there have been none of these upsets, my daughters have never heard voices raised in anger.’
Adèle came out. ‘So now we are living in the real world,’ she said.
Claude wrung his hands. They had never seen anyone do it before.
THE D’ ANTONS’ son was a robust baby, with a brown skin, a full head of dark hair, and his father’s eyes, surprisingly light blue. The Charpentiers hung over the crib, pointing out resemblances and saying who he would be. Gabrielle was pleased with herself. She wanted to feed the baby herself, not send him off to a wet-nurse. ‘Ten years ago,’ her mother said, ‘that would have been quite unthinkable for a woman in your position. An advocate’s wife.’ She shook her head, disliking modern manners. Gabrielle said, perhaps some changes are for the better? But apart from this one, she could not think of any.
We are now in May 1788. The King has announced that he will abolish the Parlements. Some of their members are under arrest. Receipts are 503 million, expenditure is 629 million. Out in the street, one of the local pigs pursues a small child, and jumps on it under Gabrielle’s window. The incident makes her feel queasy. Since she gave birth, she does not wish to view life as a challenge.
So they moved on quarter day, to a first-floor apartment on the corner of the rue des Cordeliers and the Cour du Commerce. Her first thought was, we cannot afford this. They needed new furniture to fill it; it was the house of an established man. ‘Georges-Jacques has expensive tastes,’ her mother said.
‘I suppose the practice is doing well.’
‘This well? My dear, I’ve always enjoined obedience in you. But not imbecility.’
Gabrielle said to her husband, ‘Are we in debt?’
He said, ‘Let me worry about that, will you?’
Next day, at the front door of the new house, d’Anton stopped to admit before him a woman holding by the hand a little girl of nine or ten. They introduced themselves. She was Mme Gély, her husband Antoine was an official at the Châtelet court, M. d’Anton might know him? He did. And the baby, your first? And this is Louise – yes, I’ve just the one – and pray Louise, do not scowl, do you want your face to set like that? ‘Please tell Mme d’Anton that if she wishes any help, she has only to ask. Next week, when you are settled, do come to supper.’
The child Louise trailed after her as she walked upstairs. She gave d’Anton a backward glance.
He found Gabrielle sitting on a packing case, fitting together the halves of a dish. ‘This is all we’ve broken,’ she said. She jumped up and kissed him. ‘Our new cook is cooking. And I’ve engaged a maid this morning, her name’s Catherine Motin, she’s young and quite cheap.’
‘I’ve just met our upstairs neighbour. Very mincing and genteel. Got a little girl, about so high. Gave me a very suspicious look.’
Gabrielle reached up and joined her hands at the nape of his neck. ‘You’re not reassuring to look at, you know. Is the case over?’
‘Yes. And I won.’
‘You always win.’
‘Not always.’
‘I can pretend that you do.’
‘If you like.’
‘So you don’t mind if I adore you?’
‘It’s a question, I’m told, of whether you can bear the dead weight of a woman’s expectations. I’m told that you shouldn’t put yourself into the position with a woman where you have to be right all the time.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Camille, of course.’
The baby was crying. She pulled away. This day, this little conversation would come back to him, years on: the new-born wails, her breasts leaking milk, the sweet air of inconsequentiality the whole day wore. And the smell of polish and paint and the new carpet: a sheaf of bills on the bureau: summer in the new trees outside the window.
Price inflation 1785–1789:
Wheat 66%
Rye 71%
Meat 67%
Firewood 91%
STANISLAS FRÉRON was an old schoolfriend of Camille’s, a journalist. He lived around the corner and edited a literary periodical. He made waspish jokes and thought too much about his clothes, but Gabrielle found him tolerable because he was the godson of royalty.
‘I suppose you call this your salon, Mme d’Anton.’ He dropped into one of her new purple armchairs. ‘No, don’t look like that. Why shouldn’t the wife of a King’s Councillor have a salon?’
‘It’s not the way I think of myself.’
‘Oh, I see, it’s you that’s the problem, is it? I thought perhaps we were the problem. That you saw us as second-rate.’ She smiled politely. ‘Of course, some of us are second-rate. And Fabre, for instance, is third-rate.’ Fréron leaned forward and made a steeple out of his hands. ‘All those men,’ he said, ‘whom we admired when we were young, are now dead, or senile, or retired into private life on pensions that the Court has granted them to keep the fires of their wrath burning low – though I fear it was simulated wrath in the first place. You will remember the fuss there was when M. Beauharnais wanted to have his plays performed, and how our fat, semi-literate King banned them personally because he considered them subversive of the good order of the state; it proved, didn’t it, that M. Beauharnais’s ambition was to have the most opulent town-house in Paris, and now he is building it, within sight of the Bastille and within smell of some of the nastiest tenements of the city. Then again – but no, I could multiply examples. The ideas that were considered dangerous twenty years ago are now commonplaces of establishment discourse – yet people still die on the streets every winter, they still starve. And we, in our turn, are militant against the existing order only because of our personal failure to progress up its sordid ladder. If Fabre, for example, were elected to the Academy tomorrow, you would see his lust for social revolution turning overnight into the most douce and debonair conformity.’
‘Very nice speech, Rabbit,’ d’Anton said.
‘I wish Camille would not call me that,’ Fréron said with controlled exasperation. ‘Now everyone calls me that.’
D’Anton smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘About these people.’
‘Well then…have you met Brissot? He’s in America just now, I think, Camille had a letter. He is advising them on all their problems. A great theorist is Brissot, a great political philosopher, though with scarcely a shirt to his back. And all these professional Americans, professional Irishmen, professional Genevans – all the governments in exile, and the hacks, scribblers, failed lawyers – all those men who profess to hate what they most desire.’
‘You can afford to say it. Your family
