said.
‘I think it is a pity that we bring on your talents, then say to you
’ the priest held his palm up – ‘this far, but no further. We cannot provide a boy like you with the privileges of birth and wealth.’
‘Yes, well.’ The boy smiled, a small but genuine smile. ‘This point had not escaped me.’
The principal could not understand Father Proyart’s prejudices against this boy. He was not aggressive, did not seem to want to get the better of you. ‘So what will you do, Maximilien? I mean, what do you intend?’ He knew that under the terms of his scholarship the boy must take his degree in medicine, theology or jurisprudence. ‘I gather it was thought you might go into the Church.’
‘Other people thought so.’ Maximilien’s tone was very respectful, the principal thought; he offers a due deference to the opinions of others, then takes no notice of them at all. ‘My father had a legal practice, once. I hope to pick it up. I have to go home. I am the eldest, you see.’
The priest knew this, of course; knew that unwilling relatives doled out a pittance for what the scholarship did not provide, so that the boy must always be acutely conscious of his social standing. Last year the bursar had to arrange for him to be bought a new topcoat. ‘A career in your own province,’ he said. ‘Will this be enough for you?’
‘Oh, I’ll move within my sphere.’ Sardonic? Perhaps. ‘But Father, you were worrying about the moral tone of the place. Don’t you want to have this conversation with Camille? He’s much more entertaining on the topic of moral tone.’
‘I deplore this convention of the single name,’ the priest said. ‘As if he were famous. Does he mean to go through life with only one name? I have no good opinion of your friend. And do not tell me you are not his keeper.’
‘I’m afraid I am, you see.’ He thought. ‘But come, Father, surely you do have a good opinion of him?’
The priest laughed. ‘Father Proyart says that you are not just puritans and anarchists, but strikers of poses too. Precious, self-conscious … this is the Suleau boy as well. But I see that you are not like that.’
‘You think I should just be myself?’
‘Why not?’
‘I usually feel some greater effort is called for.’ Later, putting down his breviary, the priest brooded over the interview. He thought, this child will just be unhappy. He will go back to his province, and he will never amount to anything.
THE YEAR NOW is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.
Camille Desmoulins, 1793: ‘They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer.’
Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: ‘History is fiction.’
JUST AFTER EASTER, King Louis XV caught smallpox. From the cradle his life had been thronged by courtiers; his rising in the morning was a ceremony governed by complex and rigid etiquette, and when he dined he dined in public, hundreds filing past to gape at every mouthful. Each bowel movement, each sex act, each breath a matter for public comment: and then his death.
He had to break off the hunt, and was brought to the palace weak and feverish. He was sixty-four, and from the outset they rather thought he would die. When the rash appeared he lay shaking with fear, because he himself knew he would die and go to Hell.
The Dauphin and his wife stayed in their own rooms, afraid of contagion. When the blisters suppurated the windows and doors were flung wide open, but the stench was unbearable. The rotting body was turned over to the doctors and priests for the last hours. The carriage of Mme du Barry, the last of the Mistresses, rolled out of Versailles for ever, and only then, when she had gone and he felt quite alone, would the priests give him absolution. He sent for her, was told she had already left. ‘Already,’ he said.
The Court had assembled, to wait events, in the huge antechamber known as the Œil de Boeuf. On 10 May, at a quarter past three in the afternoon, a lighted taper in the window of the sickroom was snuffed out.
Then suddenly a noise exploded like thunder from a clear sky – the rush, the shuffle, the tramp of hundreds of feet. Of blank and single mind, the Court charged out of the Œil de Boeuf and through the Grand Galerie to find the new King.
THE NEW KING is nineteen years old; his consort, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, is a year younger. The King is a large, pious, conscientious boy, phlegmatic, devoted to hunting and the pleasures of the table; he is said to be incapable, by reason of a painfully tight foreskin, of indulging the pleasures of the flesh. The Queen is a selfish little girl, strong-willed and ill-educated. She is fair, fresh-complexioned, pretty because at eighteen almost all girls are pretty; but her large-chinned Hapsburg hauteur is already beginning to battle with the advantages conferred by silk, diamonds and ignorance.
Hopes for the new reign run high. On the statue of the great Henri IV, the hand of an unknown optimist writes ‘Resurrexit’.
WHEN THE LIEUTENANT of Police goes to his desk – today, last year, every year – the first piece of information he requires concerns the price of a loaf in the bakers’ shops of Paris. If Les Halles is well supplied with flour, then the bakers of the city and the faubourgs will satisfy their customers, and the thousand itinerant bakers will bring their bread in to the markets in the Marais, in Saint-Paul, in the Palais-Royal and in Les Halles itself.
In easy times, a loaf of brown bread costs eight or nine sous. A general labourer, who is paid by the day, can expect to earn twenty sous; a mason might get forty sous, a skilled locksmith or a joiner might get fifty. Items for the budget: rent money, candles, cooking fat, vegetables, wine. Meat is for special occasions. Bread is the main concern.
The supply lines are tight, precise, monitored. What the bakers have left over at the end of the day must be sold off cheap; the destitute do not eat till night falls on the markets.
All goes well; but then when the harvest fails – in 1770, say, or in 1772 or 1774 – an inexorable price rise begins; in the autumn of 1774, a four-pound loaf in Paris costs eleven sous, but by the following spring the price is up to fourteen. Wages do not rise. The building workers are always turbulent, so are the weavers, so are the bookbinders and (poor souls) the hatters, but strikes are seldom to procure a wage rise, usually to resist a cut. Not the strike but the bread riot is the most familiar resort of the urban working man, and thus the temperature and rainfall over some distant cornfield connects directly with the tension headaches of the Lieutenant of Police.
Whenever there is a shortage of grain, the people cry, ‘A famine pact!’ They blame speculators and stockpilers. The millers, they say, are conspiring to starve the locksmiths, the hatters, the bookbinders and their children. Now, in the seventies, the advocates of economic reform will introduce free trade in grain, so that the most deprived regions of the country will have to compete in the open market.
