AS THE EVENING DREW ON, M. Duplessis walked out with a couple of friends who wished to satisfy their curiosity. He took a stout cane, with which he intended to repel working-class bullyboys. Mme Duplessis asked him not to go.
Annette’s face was pinched with anxiety. The servants had brought in disgusting rumours, and she was afraid there might be substance to them. Lucile seemed sure there was. She sat conspicuously quietly and modestly, like a lottery winner.
Adèle was at home. She usually was now, unless she was at Versailles paying calls and picking up gossip. She knew deputies’ wives and deputies, and all the café talk, and all the voting strategies in the National Assembly.
Lucile went to her room. She took pen and ink, and a piece of paper, and on the paper she wrote, ‘Adèle is in love with Maximilien Robespierre.’ She tore the strip off the sheet, and crumpled it in her palm.
She picked up some embroidery. She worked slowly, paying close attention to what she was doing. Later she intended to show people the meticulous work she had done that afternoon between a quarter past five and a quarter past six. She thought of practising some scales. When I am married, she thought, I will have a piano: and there will be other innovations.
When Claude got home, he walked straight into his study, coat, cane and all, and slammed the door. Annette understood that he might need a short time to recover himself. ‘I’m afraid your father may have received some bad news,’ she said.
‘How could he,’ Adèle said, ‘just by going out to see what’s happening? I mean, it’s not anyone’s personal bad news, is it?’
Annette tapped at the door. The girls stood at her elbows. ‘Come out,’ she said. ‘Or shall we come in?’
Claude said, ‘The minister has been made a pretext.’
‘Necker,’ Adèle corrected. ‘He’s not the minister any more.’
‘No.’ Claude was torn between his loyalty to his departmental chief and his desire to have his thoughts out in the open. ‘You know I never cared for the man. He is a charlatan. But he deserves better than to be made a pretext.’
‘My dear,’ Annette said, ‘there are three women here in considerable agony of mind. Do you think you could bring yourself to be a little more particular in your description of events?’
‘They are rioting,’ Claude said simply. ‘The dismissal of M. Necker has caused a furore. We are plunged into a state of anarchy, and anarchy is not a word I use.’
‘Sit down, my dear,’ Annette said.
Claude sat, and passed a hand over his eyes. From the wall the old King surveyed them: the present Queen in a cheap print, feathers in her hair and her chin flattered into insignificance: a plaster bust of Louis, looking like a wheelwright’s mate: the Abbé Terray, both full-face and in profile.
‘There is a state of insurrection,’ he said. ‘They are setting the customs barriers on fire. They have closed the theatres and broken into the waxworks.’
‘Broken into the waxworks?’ Annette was conscious of the idiot grin growing on her face. ‘What did they want to do that for?’
‘How do I know?’ Claude raised his voice. ‘How should I know what they are doing things for? There are five thousand people, six thousand people, marching on the Tuileries. That is just one procession and there are others coming up to join them. They are destroying the city.’
‘But where are the soldiers?’
‘Where are they? The King himself would like to know, I’m sure. They might as well be lining the route and cheering, for all the use they are. I thank God the King and Queen are at Versailles, for who knows what might not happen, as at the head of these mobs there is – ’ Words failed him. ‘There is that person.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Annette’s voice was matter-of-fact. She only said it in courtesy to form; she knew it was true.
‘Please yourself. You can read it in the morning paper – if there is one. It appears that he made a speech at the Palais-Royal and that it had a certain effect and that he has now become some sort of hero to these people. To the mob, I should say. The police moved in to arrest him and he unwisely held them off at gunpoint.’
‘I’m not sure it was unwise,’ Adèle said, ‘given the result it seems to have produced.’
‘Oh, I should have taken measures,’ Claude said. ‘I should have sent you both away. I ask what I have done to deserve it, one daughter hobnobbing with radicals and the other planning to plight herself to a criminal.’
‘Criminal?’ Lucile sounded surprised.
‘Yes. He has broken the law.’
‘The law will be altered.’
‘My God,’ Claude said, ‘do you tell me? The troops will flatten them.’
‘You seem to think that all this is accidental,’ Lucile said. ‘No, Father, let me speak, I have a right to speak, since I know better than you what is going on. You say there are thousands of rioters, how many thousands you are not sure, but the French Guards will not attack their own people, and most of them indeed are on our side. If they are properly organized they will soon have enough arms to engage the rest of the troops. The Royal Allemand troops will be swamped by sheer force of numbers.’
Claude stared at her. ‘Any measures you might have taken are too late,’ his wife said in a low voice. Lucile cleared her throat. It was almost a speech she was making, a pale drawing-room imitation. Her hands shook. She wondered if he had been very frightened: if pushed and driven by the crowds he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the living heart of all the close designs.
‘All this was planned,’ she said. ‘I know there are reinforcements, but they have to cross the river.’ She walked to the window. ‘Look. No moon tonight. How long will it take them to cross in the dark, with their commanders falling out amongst themselves? They only know how to fight on battlefields, they don’t know how to fight in the streets. By tomorrow morning – if they can be held now at the Place Louis XV – the troops will be cleared out of the city centre. And the Paris Electors will have their militia on the streets; they can ask for arms from City Hall. There are guns at the Invalides, forty thousand muskets – ’
‘Battlefield?’ Claude said. ‘Reinforcements? How do you know all this? Where did you learn it?’
‘Where do you suppose?’ she said coolly.
‘Electors? Militia? Muskets? Do you happen to know,’ he asked, with hysterical sarcasm, ‘where they will get the powder and shot?’
‘Oh yes,’ Lucile said. ‘At the Bastille.’
GREEN WAS THE COLOUR they had picked for identification – green, the colour of hope. In the Palais-Royal a girl had given Camille a bit of green ribbon, and since then the people had raided the shops for it and yards and yards of sage-green and apple and emerald and lime stretched over the dusty streets and trailed in the gutters. In the Palais-Royal they had pulled down leaves from the chestnut trees, and now wore them sad and wilting in their hats and buttonholes. The torn, sweet vegetable smell lay in clouds over the afternoon.
