looked at him as if he had said something foolish. ‘I hadn’t thought, you see, to get there by any particular route.’ He hesitated. ‘D’Anton, why are you wasting time in this footling dialogue? Why aren’t you out and about, making a name for yourself?’
‘Perhaps I need a holiday from the system,’ d’Anton said. His colleague’s eyes, which were black and luminous, held the timidity of natural victims, the fatal exhaustion of easy prey. He leaned forward. ‘Camille, what has put you into this terrible state?’
Camille Desmoulins’s eyes were set further apart than is usual, and what d’Anton had taken for a revelation of character was in fact a quirk of anatomy. But it was many years before he noticed this.
AND THIS CONTINUED: one of those late-night conversations, with long pauses.
‘After all,’ d’Anton said, ‘what is it?’ After dark, and drink, he is often more disaffected. ‘Spending your life dancing attendance on the whims and caprices of some bloody fool like Vinot.’
‘Your Life Plan goes further, then?’
‘You have to get beyond all that, whatever you’re doing you have to get to the top.’
‘I do have some ambitions of my own,’ Camille said. ‘You know I went to this school where we were always freezing cold and the food was disgusting? It’s sort of become part of me, if I’m cold I just accept it, cold’s natural, and from day to day I hardly think of eating. But of course, if I do ever get warm, or someone feeds me well, I’m pathetically grateful, and I think, well, you know, this would be nice – to do it on a grand scale, to have great roaring fires and to go out to dinner every night. Of course, it’s only in my weaker moods I think this. Oh, and you know – to wake up every morning beside someone you like. Not clutching your head all the time and crying, my God, what happened last night, how did I get into this?’
‘It hardly seems much to want,’ Georges-Jacques said.
‘But when you finally achieve something, a disgust for it begins. At least, that’s the received wisdom. I’ve never achieved anything, so I can’t say.’
‘You ought to sort yourself out, Camille.’
‘My father wanted me home as soon as I qualified, he wanted me to go into his practice. Then again, he didn’t…They’ve arranged for me to marry my cousin, it’s been fixed up for years. We all marry our cousins, so the family money interbreeds.’
‘And you don’t want to?’
‘Oh, I don’t mind. It doesn’t really matter who you marry.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ His thinking had been quite other.
‘But Rose-Fleur will have to come to Paris, I can’t go back there.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘I don’t know really, our paths so seldom cross. Oh, to look at, you mean? She’s quite pretty.’
‘When you say it doesn’t matter who you marry – don’t you expect to love someone?’
‘Yes, of course. But it would be a vast coincidence to be married to them as well.’
‘What about your parents? What are they like?’
‘Never seem to speak to each other these days. There’s a family tradition of marrying someone you find you can’t stand. My cousin Antoine, one of my Fouquier-Tinville cousins, is supposed to have murdered his first wife.’
‘What, you mean he was actually prosecuted for it?’
‘Only by the gossips at their various assizes. There wasn’t enough evidence to bring it to court. But then Antoine, he’s a lawyer too, so there wouldn’t be. I expect he’s good at fixing evidence. The business rather shook the family, and so I’ve always regarded him as, you know,’ he paused wistfully, ‘a sort of hero. Anyone who can give serious offence to the de Viefvilles is a hero of mine. Another case of that is Antoine Saint-Just, I know we are related but I can’t think how, they live in Noyon. He has recently run off with the family silver, and his mother, who’s a widow, actually got a lettre de cachet and had him shut up. When he gets out – they’ll have to let him out one of these days, I suppose – he’ll be so angry, he’ll never forgive them. He’s one of these boys, sort of big and solid and conceited, incredibly full of himself, he’s probably steaming about at this very minute working out how to get revenge. He’s only nineteen, so perhaps he’ll have a career of crime, and that will take the attention off me.’
‘I can’t think why you don’t write and encourage him.’
‘Yes, perhaps I shall. You see, I do agree that I can’t go on like this. I have had a little verse published – oh, nothing really, just a modest start. I’d rather write than anything – well, as you can imagine, with my disabilities it’s a relief not having to talk. I just want to live very quietly – preferably somewhere warm – and be left alone till I can write something worthwhile.’
Already, d’Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser. ‘Don’t you care for anyone respectable?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes – I care for my friend de Robespierre, but he lives in Arras, I never see him. And Maître Perrin has been kind.’
D’Anton stared at him. He did not see how he could sit there, saying ‘Maître Perrin has been kind.’
‘Don’t you mind?’ he demanded.
‘What people say? Well,’ Camille said softly, ‘I should prefer not to be an object of general odium, but I wouldn’t go so far as to let my preference alter my conduct.’
‘I’d just like to know,’ d’Anton said. ‘I mean, from my point of view. Whether there’s any truth in it.’
‘Oh, you mean, because the sun will be up in an hour, and you think I’ll run down to the Law Courts and tell everybody I spent the night with you?’
‘Somebody told me…that is, amongst other things they told me…that you were involved with a married woman.’
‘Yes: in a way.’
‘You do have an interesting variety of problems.’
Already, by the time the clock struck four, he felt he knew too much about Camille, and more than he was comfortable with. He looked at him through a mist of alcohol and fatigue, the climate of the years ahead.
‘I would tell you about Annette Duplessis,’ Camille said, ‘but life’s too short.’
‘Is it?’ D’Anton has never thought about it before. Creeping towards his future it sometimes seems long, long enough.
IN JULY 1786 a daughter was born to the King and Queen. ‘All well and good,’ said Angélique Charpentier, ‘but I expect she’ll be needing some more diamonds to console her for losing her figure.’
Her husband said, ‘How would we know if she’s losing her figure? We never see her. She never comes. She has something against
