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.
III. Lady’s Pleasure (1791)
’91: ‘LAFAYETTE,’ Mirabeau suggests to the Queen, ‘is walking more closely in the footsteps of Cromwell than becomes his natural modesty.’
We’re done for, Marat says, it’s all up with us; Antoinette’s gang are in league with Austria, the monarchs are betraying the nation. It is necessary to cut off 20,000 heads.
France is to be invaded from the Rhine. By June, the King’s brother Artois will have an army at Coblenz. Maître Desmoulins’s old client, the Prince de Condé, will command a force at Worms. A third, at Colmar, will be under the command of Mirabeau’s younger brother, who is known, because of his shape and proclivities, as Barrel Mirabeau.
The Barrel spent his last few months in France pursuing the Lanterne Attorney through the courts. He now hopes to pursue him, with an armed force, through the streets. The émigrés want the old regime back, not one jot or one tittle abated: and a firing squad for Lafayette. They call, as of right, for the support of the powers of Europe.
The powers, however, have their own ideas. These revolutionaries are dangerous, beyond doubt; they menace us all in the most horrible fashion. But Louis is not dead, nor deposed; though the furnishings and appointments at the Tuileries may not measure up to those at Versailles, he is not even seriously inconvenienced. In better times, when the revolution is over, he may be inclined to admit that the sharp lesson has done him good. Meanwhile it is a secret, unholy pleasure to watch a rich neighbour struggle on with taxes uncollected, a fine army rent by mutiny, Messieurs the Democrats making themselves ridiculous. The order established by God must be maintained in Europe; but there is no need, just at present, to re-gild the Bourbon lilies.
As for Louis himself, the émigrés advise him to begin a campaign of passive resistance. As the months pass, they begin to despair of him. They remind each other of the maxim of the Comte de Provence: ‘When you can hold together a number of oiled ivory balls, you may do something with the King.’ It infuriates them to find that Louis’s every pronouncement bows to the new order – until they receive his secret assurance that everything he says means the exact opposite. They cannot understand that some of those monsters, those blackguards, those barbarians of the National Assembly, have the King’s interests at heart. Neither can the Queen comprehend it:
‘If I see them, or have any relations with them, it is only to make use of them; they inspire me with a horror too great for me to ever become involved with them.’ So much for you, Mirabeau. It is possible that Lafayette is penetrated with a clearer idea of the lady’s worth. He has told her to her face (they say) that he intends to prove her guilty of adultery and pack her off home to Austria. To this end, he leaves every night a little door unguarded, to admit her supposed lover, Axel von Fersen. ‘Conciliation is no longer possible,’ she writes. ‘Only armed force can repair the damage done.’
Catherine, the Tsarina: ‘I am doing my utmost to spur on the courts of Vienna and Berlin to become entangled in French affairs so that I can have my hands free.’ Catherine’s hands are free, as usual, for choking Poland. She will make her counter-revolution in Warsaw, she says, and let the Germans make one in Paris. Leopold, in Austria, is occupied with the affairs of Poland, Belgium, Turkey; William Pitt is thinking of India, and financial reforms. They wait and watch France weakening herself (as they think) by strife and division so that she is no longer a threat to their schemes.
Frederick William of Prussia thinks a little differently; when war breaks out with France, as he knows it will, he intends to come out best. He has agents in Paris, directed to stir up hatred of Antoinette and the Austrians: to urge the use of force, to unbalance the situation, and tilt it to violent conclusions.
