want to get it settled up within the next couple of months. I want to start off with Gabrielle with a clean slate.’
‘I wouldn’t call it a clean slate, exactly,’ Charpentier said gently. ‘That’s just what it isn’t. You’re mortgaging your whole future. Can’t you – ’
‘No, I can’t fight her over it. I was fond of her, at one time. And I think of the boy. Well, ask yourself – if I took the other attitude, would I be the kind of person you’d want for a son-in-law?’
‘Yes, I see that, don’t mistake me, it’s just that I’m old and hard-boiled and I worry about you. When does this woman want the final payment?’
‘She said ’91, the first quarter day. Do you think I should tell Gabrielle about this?’
‘That’s for you to decide. Between now and your wedding, can you contrive to be careful?’
‘Look, I’ve got four years to pay this off. I’ll make a go of things.’
‘Certainly, you can make money as a King’s Councillor. I don’t deny that.’ M. Charpentier thought, he’s young, he’s raw, he has everything to do, and inside he cannot possibly be as sure as he sounds. He wanted to comfort him. ‘You know what Maître Vinot says, he says there are times of trouble ahead, and in times of trouble litigation always expands.’ He rolled his pieces of paper together, ready for filing away. ‘I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.’
MARCH 2 1787. It was Camille’s twenty-seventh birthday, and nobody had seen him for a week. He appeared to have changed his address again.
The Assembly of Notables had reached deadlock. The café was full, noisy and opinionated.
‘What is it that the Marquis de Lafayette has said?’
‘He has said that the Estates-General should be called.’
‘But the Estates is a relic. It hasn’t met since – ’
‘1614.’
‘Thank you, d’Anton,’ Maître Perrin said. ‘How can it answer to our needs? We shall see the clergy debating in one chamber, the nobles in another and the commons in a third, and whatever the commons propose will be voted down two to one by the other Orders. So what progress – ’
‘Listen,’ d’Anton broke in, ‘even an old institution can take on a new form. There’s no need to do what was done last time.’
The group gazed at him, solemn. ‘Lafayette is a young man,’ Maître Perrin said.
‘About your age, Georges.’
Yes, d’Anton thought, and while I was poring over the tomes in Vinot’s office, he was leading armies. Now I am a poor attorney, and he is the hero of France and America. Lafayette can aspire to be a leader of the nation, and I can aspire to scratch a living. And now this young man, of undistinguished appearance, spare, with pale sandy hair, had captured his audience, propounded an idea; and d’Anton, feeling an unreasoning antipathy for the fellow, was compelled to stand here and defend him. ‘The Estates is our only hope,’ he said. ‘It would have to give fair representation to us, the commons, the Third Estate. It’s quite clear that the nobility don’t have the King’s welfare at heart, so it’s stupid for him to continue to defend their interests. He must call the Estates and give real power to the Third – not just talk, not just consultation, the real power to do something.’
‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ Charpentier said.
‘It will never happen,’ Perrin said. ‘What interests me more is Lafayette’s proposal for an investigation into tax frauds.’
‘And shady underhand speculation,’ d’Anton said. ‘The dirty workings of the market as a whole.’
‘Always this vehemence,’ Perrin said, ‘among people who don’t hold bonds and wish they did.’
Something distracted M. Charpentier. He looked over d’Anton’s shoulder and smiled. ‘Here is a man who could clarify matters for us.’ He moved forward and held out his hands. ‘M. Duplessis, you’re a stranger, we never see you. You haven’t met my daughter’s fiancé. M. Duplessis is a very old friend of mine, he’s at the Treasury.’
‘For my sins,’ M. Duplessis said, with a sepulchral smile. He acknowledged d’Anton with a nod, as if perhaps he had heard his name. He was a tall man, fifty-ish, with vestigial good looks; he was carefully and plainly dressed. His gaze seemed to rest a little behind and beyond its object, as if his vision were unobstructed by the marble-topped tables and gilt chairs and the black limbs of city barristers.
‘So Gabrielle is to be married. When is the happy day?’
‘We’ve not named it. May or June.’
‘How time flies.’
He patted out his platitudes as children shape mud-pies; he smiled again, and you thought of the muscular effort involved.
M. Charpentier handed him a cup of coffee. ‘I was sorry to hear about your daughter’s husband.’
‘Yes, a bad business, most upsetting and unfortunate. My daughter Adèle,’ he said. ‘Married and widowed, and only a child.’ He addressed Charpentier, directing his gaze over his host’s left shoulder. ‘We shall keep Lucile at home for a while longer. Although she’s fifteen, sixteen. Quite a little lady. Daughters are a worry. Sons, too, though I haven’t any. Sons-in-law are a worry, dying as they do. Although not you, Maître d’Anton. I don’t intend it personally. You’re not a worry, I’m sure. You look quite healthy. In fact, excessively so.’
How can he be so dignified, d’Anton wondered, when his talk is so random and wild? Was he always like this, or had the situation made him so, and was it the Deficit that had unhinged him, or was it his domestic affairs?
‘And your dear wife?’ M. Charpentier inquired. ‘How is she?’
M. Duplessis brooded on this question; he looked as if he could not quite recall her face. At last he said, ‘Much the same.’
‘Won’t you come and have supper one evening? The girls too, of course, if they’d like to come?’
‘I would, you know…but the pressure of work…I’m a good deal at Versailles during the week now, it was only that today I had some business to attend to…sometimes I work through the weekend too.’ He turned to d’Anton. ‘I’ve been at the Treasury all my life. It’s been a rewarding career, but every day gets a little harder. If only the Abbé Terray…’
Charpentier stifled a yawn. He had heard it before; everyone had heard it. The Abbé Terray was Duplessis’s all-time Top Comptroller, his fiscal hero. ‘If Terray had stayed, he could have saved us; every scheme put forward in recent years, every solution, Terray had worked it out years ago.’ That had been when he was a younger man, and the girls were babies, and his work was something he looked forward to with a sense of the separate venture and progress of each day. But the Parlements had opposed the abbé; they had accused him of speculating in grain, and induced the silly people to burn him in effigy. ‘That was before the situation was so bad; the problems were manageable then. Since then I’ve seen them come along with the same old bright ideas –
