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 is favoured, your paper’s on the right side of the censors. A radical opinion is a luxury you may allow yourself.’
‘You denigrate me, d’Anton.’
‘You denigrate your friends.’
Fréron stretched his legs. ‘End of argument,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Do you know why he calls me Rabbit?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
Fréron turned back to Gabrielle. ‘So, Mme d’Anton, I still believe you have the makings of a salon. You have me, and François Robert and his wife – Louise Robert says she would write a novel about Annette Duplessis and the rue Condé débâcle, but she fears that as a character in fiction Camille would not be believed.’
The Roberts were newly married, soddenly infatuated with each other, and horribly impoverished. He was twenty-eight, a lecturer in law, burly and affable and open to suggestions. Louise had been Mlle de Kéralio before her marriage, brought up in Artois, daughter of a Royal Censor; her aristocratic father had vetoed the match, and she had defied him. The weight of the family displeasure left them with no money and all routes of advancement barred to François; and so they had rented a shop in the rue Condé and opened a delicatessen, specializing in food from the colonies. Now Louise Robert sat behind her till turning the hems of her dresses, her eyes on a volume of Rousseau, her ears open for customers and for rumours of a rise in the price of molasses. In the evening she cooked a meal for her husband and laboriously checked the day’s accounts, her haughty shoulders rigid as she added up the receipts. When she had finished she sat down and chatted calmly to François of Jansenism, the administration of justice, the structure of the modern novel; afterwards she lay awake in the darkness, her nose cold above the sheets, praying for infertility.
Georges-Jacques said, ‘I feel at home here.’ He took to walking about the district in the evening, doffing his hat to the women and getting into conversation with their husbands, returning on each occasion with some fresh item of news. Legendre the master butcher was a good fellow, and in a profitable line of business. The rough-looking man who lived opposite really was a marquis,
