bright, too.’
‘Do they? That’s not all they say. No, I’m taking on this cool customer here, this young fellow from Troyes. He reveals himself to be a loud-mouthed seditionary already, but what is that compared to the perils of a working day with the young Desmoulins?’
‘Not to worry. Perrin wants him anyway.’
‘That I can readily imagine. Didn’t Jean-Nicolas ever hear the gossip? No, he was always obtuse. That’s not my problem, let Perrin get on with it. Live and let live, I always say,’ Maître Vinot told Danton. ‘Maître Perrin’s an old colleague of mine, very sound on revenue law – they say he’s a sodomite, but is that my business?’
‘A private vice,’ Danton said.
‘Just so.’ He looked up at Danton. ‘Made my points, have I?’
‘Yes, Maître Vinot, I should say you’ve driven them well into my skull.’
‘Good. Now look, there’s no point in having you in the office if no one can read your handwriting, so you’d better start from the other end of the business – “cover the courts”, as we say. You’ll do a daily check on each case in which the office has an interest – you’ll get around that way, King’s Bench, Chancery division, Châtelet. Interested in ecclesiastical work? We don’t handle it, but we’ll farm you out to someone who does. My advice to you,’ he paused, ‘don’t be in too much of a hurry. Build slowly; anybody who works steadily can have a modest success, steadiness is all it takes. You need the right contacts, of course, and that’s what my office will give you. Try to work out for yourself a Life Plan. There’s plenty of work in your part of the country. Five years from now, you’ll be nicely on your way.’
‘I’d like to make a career in Paris.’
Maître Vinot smiled. ‘That’s what all the young men say. Oh well, get yourself out tomorrow, and have a look at it.’
They shook hands, rather formally, like Englishmen after all. Georges-Jacques clattered downstairs and out into the street. He kept thinking about Françoise-Julie. Every few minutes she flitted into his head. He had her address, the rue de la Tixanderie, wherever that was. Third floor, she’d said, it’s not grand but it’s mine. He wondered if she’d go to bed with him. It seemed quite likely. Presumably things that were impossible in Troyes were perfectly possible here.
ALL DAY, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police.
On the Pont-Neuf the public letter-writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat. He bought half a dozen for two sous each. Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market.
Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s labourer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were levelling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The labourers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs. What would Maître Vinot say? ‘Build slowly.’
There was a busker, a man with a strained, once-powerful baritone. He had a hideously destroyed face, one empty eye-socket overgrown with livid scar tissue. He had a placard that read HERO OF THE AMERICAN LIBERATION. He sang songs about the court; they described the Queen indulging in vices which no one had discovered in Arcis-sur-Aube. In the Luxembourg Gardens a beautiful blonde woman looked him up and down and dismissed him from her mind.
He went to Saint-Antoine. He stood below the Bastille, looked up at its eight towers. He had expected walls like sea-cliffs. The highest must be – what? Seventy-five, eighty feet?
‘The walls are eight feet thick, you know,’ a passer-by said to him.
‘I expected it to be bigger.’
‘Big enough,’ the man said sourly. ‘You wouldn’t like to be in there, would you? Men have gone in there and never come out.’
‘You a local?’
‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘We know all about it. There are cells under the ground, running with water, alive with rats.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard about the rats.’
‘And then the cells up under the roof – that’s no joke either. Boil in summer, freeze in winter. Still, that’s only the unlucky ones. Some get treated quite decent, depends who you are. They have beds with proper bed-curtains and they can take their own cat in to keep the vermin down.’
‘What do they get to eat?’
‘Varies, I suppose. Again, it’s according to who you are. You do see the odd side of beef going in. Neighbour of mine a few years back, he swears he saw them taking in a billiard table. It’s like anything else in life, I suppose,’ the man said. ‘Winners and losers, that’s all about it.’
Georges-Jacques looks up, and his eye is offended; it is impregnable, there is no doubt. These people go about their lives and work – brewing by the look of it, and upholstery – and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it’s there and not there. What really matters isn’t the height of the towers, it’s the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw. You can’t have your whole inner world rearranged by a man you meet in the street. Is nothing sacred? Stained from the dye-works, the river ran yellow, ran blue.
And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewellers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night’s hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Île Saint-Louis, in an empty office, Maître Desmoulins’s son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.
WE make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy – at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.
‘The Theory of Ambition’, an essay:
Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles
