M. Charpentier leaned forward to refill his cup. ‘No, I must be off,’ Duplessis said. ‘I’ve brought papers home. We’ll take you up on that invitation. Just as soon as the present crisis is over.’
M. Duplessis picked up his hat, bowed and nodded his way to the door. ‘When will it ever be over?’ Charpentier asked. ‘One can’t imagine.’
Angélique rustled up. ‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘You were distinctly grinning, when you asked him about his wife. And you,’ she slapped d’Anton lightly on the shoulder, ‘were turning quite blue trying not to laugh. What am I missing?’
‘Only gossip, my dear.’
‘Only gossip? What else is there in life?’
‘It concerns Georges’s gypsy friend, M. How-to-get-on-in-Society.’
‘What? Camille? You’re teasing me. You’re just saying this to test out my gullibility.’ She looked around at her smirking customers. ‘Annette Duplessis?’ she said. ‘Annette Duplessis?’
‘Listen carefully then,’ her husband said. ‘It’s complicated, it’s circumstantial, there’s no saying where it’s going to end. Some take season tickets to the Opéra; others enjoy the novels of Mr Fielding. Myself I enjoy a bit of home-grown entertainment, and I tell you, there’s nothing more entertaining than life at the rue Condé these days. For the connoisseur of human folly…’
‘Jesus-Maria! Get on with it,’ Angélique said.
II. Rue Condé: Thursday Afternoon (1787)
ANNETTE DUPLESSIS was a woman of resource. The problem which now beset her she had handled elegantly for four years. This afternoon she was going to solve it. Since midday a chilly wind had blown up, draughts whistled through the apartment, finding out the keyholes and the cracks under the doors: fanning the nebulous banners of approaching crisis. Annette, thinking of her figure, took a glass of cider vinegar.
When she had married Claude Duplessis, a long time ago, he had been several years her senior; by now he was old enough to be her father. Why had she married him anyway? She often asked herself that. She could only conclude that she had been serious-minded as a girl, and had grown steadily more inclined to frivolity as the years passed.
At the time they met, Claude was working and worrying his way to the top of the civil service: through the different degrees and shades and variants of clerkdom, from clerk menial to clerk-of-some-parts, from intermediary clerk to clerk of a higher type, to clerk most senior, clerk confidential, clerk extraordinary, clerk in excelsis, clerk-to-end-all-clerks. His intelligence was the quality she noticed chiefly, and his steady, concerned application to the nation’s business. His father had been a blacksmith, and – although he was prosperous, and since before his son’s birth had not personally been anywhere near a forge – Claude’s professional success was a matter for admiration.
When his early struggles were over, and Claude was ready for marriage, he found himself awash in a dismaying sea of light-mindedness. She was the moneyed, sought-after girl on whom, for no reason one could see, he fixed his good opinion: on whom, at last, he settled his affection. The very disjunction between them seemed to say, here is some deep process at work; friends forecast a marriage that was out of the common run.
Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.
Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, ‘Claude, you are dull.’ She remembered the damp grass underfoot, and how she had shivered as she looked back at the lights of the house. She had sought marriage to be free from her parents’ constraints, but now she had given Claude her parole. You must never break gaol again, she told herself; it ends badly, dead bodies in muddy fields. She crept back inside, washed her feet; drank a warm tisane, to cure any lingering hopes.
Afterwards Claude had treated her with reserve and suspicion for some months. Even now, if she was unwell or whimsical, he would allude to the incident – explaining that he had learned to live with her unstable nature but that, when he was a young man, it had taken him quite by surprise.
After the girls were born there had been a small affair. He was a friend of her husband, a barrister, a square, blond man: last heard of in Toulouse, supporting a red-faced dropsical wife and five daughters at a convent school. She had not repeated the experiment. Claude had not found out about it. If he had, perhaps something would have had to change, but as he hadn’t – as he staunchly, wilfully, manfully hadn’t – there was no point in doing it again.
So then to hurry the years past – and to contemplate something that should not be thought of in the category of ‘an affair’ – Camille arrived in her life when he was twenty-two years old. Stanislas Fréron – her family knew his family – had brought him to the house. Camille looked perhaps seventeen. It was four years before he would be old enough to practise at the Bar. It was not a thing one could readily imagine. His conversation was a series of little sighs and hesitations, defections and demurs. Sometimes his hands shook. He had trouble looking anyone in the face.
He’s brilliant, Stanislas Fréron said. He’s going to be famous. Her presence, her household, seemed to terrify him. But he didn’t stay away.
RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING, Claude had invited him to supper. It was a well-chosen guest list, and for her husband a fine opportunity to expound his economic forecast for the next five years – grim – and to tell stories about the Abbé Terray. Camille sat in tense near-silence, occasionally asking in his soft voice for M. Duplessis to be more precise, to explain to him and to show him how he arrived at that figure. Claude called for pen, paper and ink. He pushed some plates aside and put his head down; at his end of the table, the meal came to a halt. The other guests looked down at them, nonplussed, and turned to each other with polite conversation. While Claude muttered and scribbled, Camille looked over his shoulder, disputing his simplifications, and asking questions that were longer and more cogent. Claude shut his eyes momentarily. Figures swooped and scattered from the end of his pen like starlings in the snow.
She had leaned across the table: ‘Darling, couldn’t you…’
‘One minute – ’
‘If it’s so complicated – ’
‘Here, you see, and here – ’
‘ – talk about it afterwards?’
Claude flapped a balance sheet in the air. ‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘No more than vaguely. But then the comptrollers are vague, and it gives you an idea.’
Camille took it from him and ran a glance over it; then he looked up, meeting her eyes. She was startled, shocked by the – emotion, she could only call it. She took her eyes away and rested them on other guests, solicitous for their comfort. What he basically didn’t understand, Camille said – and probably he was being very stupid – was the relationship of one ministry to another and how they all got their funds. No, Claude said, not stupid at all: might he demonstrate?
Claude now thrust back his chair and rose from his place at the head of the table. Her guests looked up. ‘We might all learn much, I am
