A Place of Greater Safety

(1774–1780)

JUST AFTER EASTER, King Louis XV caught smallpox. From the cradle his life had been thronged by courtiers; his rising in the morning was a ceremony governed by complex and rigid etiquette, and when he dined he dined in public, hundreds filing past to gape at every mouthful. Each bowel movement, each sex act, each breath a matter for public comment: and then his death.

He had to break off the hunt, and was brought to the palace weak and feverish. He was sixty-four, and from the outset they rather thought he would die. When the rash appeared he lay shaking with fear, because he himself knew he would die and go to Hell.

The Dauphin and his wife stayed in their own rooms, afraid of contagion. When the blisters suppurated the windows and doors were flung wide open, but the stench was unbearable. The rotting body was turned over to the doctors and priests for the last hours. The carriage of Mme du Barry, the last of the Mistresses, rolled out of Versailles for ever, and only then, when she had gone and he felt quite alone, would the priests give him absolution. He sent for her, was told she had already left. ‘Already,’ he said.

The Court had assembled, to wait events, in the huge antechamber known as the Œil de Boeuf. On 10 May, at a quarter past three in the afternoon, a lighted taper in the window of the sickroom was snuffed out.

Then suddenly a noise exploded like thunder from a clear sky – the rush, the shuffle, the tramp of hundreds of feet. Of blank and single mind, the Court charged out of the Œil de Boeuf and through the Grand Galerie to find the new King.

THE NEW KING is nineteen years old; his consort, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, is a year younger. The King is a large, pious, conscientious boy, phlegmatic, devoted to hunting and the pleasures of the table; he is said to be incapable, by reason of a painfully tight foreskin, of indulging the pleasures of the flesh. The Queen is a selfish little girl, strong-willed and ill-educated. She is fair, fresh-complexioned, pretty because at eighteen almost all girls are pretty; but her large-chinned Hapsburg hauteur is already beginning to battle with the advantages conferred by silk, diamonds and ignorance.

Hopes for the new reign run high. On the statue of the great Henri IV, the hand of an unknown optimist writes ‘Resurrexit’.

WHEN THE LIEUTENANT of Police goes to his desk – today, last year, every year – the first piece of information he requires concerns the price of a loaf in the bakers’ shops of Paris. If Les Halles is well supplied with flour, then the bakers of the city and the faubourgs will satisfy their customers, and the thousand itinerant bakers will bring their bread in to the markets in the Marais, in Saint-Paul, in the Palais-Royal and in Les Halles itself.

In easy times, a loaf of brown bread costs eight or nine sous. A general labourer, who is paid by the day, can expect to earn twenty sous; a mason might get forty sous, a skilled locksmith or a joiner might get fifty. Items for the budget: rent money, candles, cooking fat, vegetables, wine. Meat is for special occasions. Bread is the main concern.

The supply lines are tight, precise, monitored. What the bakers have left over at the end of the day must be sold off cheap; the destitute do not eat till night falls on the markets.

All goes well; but then when the harvest fails – in 1770, say, or in 1772 or 1774 – an inexorable price rise begins; in the autumn of 1774, a four-pound loaf in Paris costs eleven sous, but by the following spring the price is up to fourteen. Wages do not rise. The building workers are always turbulent, so are the weavers, so are the bookbinders and (poor souls) the hatters, but strikes are seldom to procure a wage rise, usually to resist a cut. Not the strike but the bread riot is the most familiar resort of the urban working man, and thus the temperature and rainfall over some distant cornfield connects directly with the tension headaches of the Lieutenant of Police.

Whenever there is a shortage of grain, the people cry, ‘A famine pact!’ They blame speculators and stockpilers. The millers, they say, are conspiring to starve the locksmiths, the hatters, the bookbinders and their children. Now, in the seventies, the advocates of economic reform will introduce free trade in grain, so that the most deprived regions of the country will have to compete in the open market. But a little riot or two, and on go the controls again. In 1770, the Abbé Terray, the Comptroller-General of Finance, acted very quickly to reimpose price controls, levies, restrictions on the movement of grain. He sought no opinions, just acted by royal decree. ‘Despotism!’ cried those who had eaten that day.

Bread is the main thing to understand: the staple of speculation, the food for all theories about what happens next. Fifteen years from now, on the day the Bastille falls, the price of bread in Paris will be at its highest in sixty years. Twenty years from now (when it is all over), a woman of the capital will say: ‘Under Robespierre, blood flowed, but the people had bread. Perhaps in order to have bread, it is necessary to spill a little blood.’

THE KING CALLED to the ministry a man named Turgot, to be Comptroller-General of Finance. Turgot was forty-eight years old, a new man, a rationalist, a disciple of laissez-faire. He was energetic, bursting with ideas, full of the reforms he said must be made if the country was to survive. In his own opinion, he was the man of the hour. One of his first actions was to ask for cuts in expenditure at Versailles. The Court was shocked. Malesherbes, a member of the King’s Household, advised the minister to move with greater caution; he was making too many enemies. ‘The needs of the people are enormous,’ Turgot replied brusquely, ‘and in my family we die at fifty.’

In the spring of 1775 there was widespread rioting in market towns, especially in Picardy. At Versailles, eight thousand townspeople gathered at the palace and stood hopefully gazing up at the royal windows. As always, they thought that the personal intervention of the King could solve all their problems. The Governor of Versailles promised that the price of wheat in the town would be pegged. The new King was brought out to address the people from a balcony. They then dispersed without violence.

In Paris, mobs looted the bakers on the Left Bank. The police made a few arrests, playing the situation softly, avoiding clashes. There were 162 prosecutions. Two looters, one a boy of sixteen, were hanged in the Place de Grève. May 11, 3 p.m.; it served as an example.

IN JULY 1775, it was arranged that the young King and his lovely Queen would pay a visit to the Collège Louis-le-Grand. Such a visit was traditional after coronations; but they would not stay or linger, for they had more entertaining things to do. It was planned that they should be met, with their retinue, at the main gate, that they should descend from their carriage, and that the school’s most industrious and meritorious pupil would read them a loyal address. When the day came, the weather was not fine.

An hour and a half before the guests could reasonably be expected, the students and staff assembled at the rue Saint-Jacques gate. A posse of officials turned up on horseback, and pushed them back and rearranged them, none too gently. The scanty spots of rain became a steady drizzle. Then came the attendants and bodyguards and persons-in-waiting; by the time they had disposed themselves everyone was cold and wet, and had stopped jockeying for position. No one remembered the last coronation, so nobody had any idea that it was all going to take so long. The students huddled in miserable groups, and shifted their feet, and waited. If anyone stepped out of line for a moment the officials jumped forward and shoved him back, flourishing weapons.

Finally the royal carriage drew up. People now stood on their toes and craned their necks, and the younger ones complained that it wasn’t fair that they couldn’t see a thing after waiting all this time. Father Poignard, the principal, approached and bowed. He began to say a few words he had prepared, in the direction of the royal conveyance.

The scholarship boy’s mouth felt dry. His hand shook a little. But because of the Latin, no one would detect his provincial accent.

The Queen bobbed out her lovely head and bobbed it in again. The King waved, and muttered something to a man in livery, who conveyed it by a sneer down a line of officials, who conveyed it by dumb show to the waiting world. All became clear; they would not descend. The address must be read to Their Majesties as they sit snug in the coach.

Father Poignard’s head was whirling. He should have had carpets, he should have had canopies, he should have had some kind of temporary pavilion erected, perhaps bedecked with green boughs in the fashionable rustic style, perhaps with the royal arms on display, or the monarchs’ entwined monograms made out of flowers. His expression grew wild, repentant, remote. Luckily, Father Herivaux remembered to give the nod to the scholarship boy.

The boy began, his voice gathering strength after the first few nervous phrases. Father Herivaux relaxed; he had written it, coached the boy. And he was satisfied, it sounded well.

The Queen was seen to shiver. ‘Ah!’ went the world. ‘She shivered!’ A half-second later, she stifled a yawn. The King turned, attentive. And what was this? The coachman was gathering the reins! The whole ponderous entourage stirred and creaked forward. They were going – the welcome not acknowledged, the address not half-read.

The scholarship boy did not seem to notice what was happening. He just went on orating. His face was set and pale, he was looking straight ahead. Surely he must know that by now they are driving down the street?

The air was loud with unvoiced sentiment. All term we’ve been planning this … The crush moved, aimlessly, on the spot. The rain was coming down harder now. It seemed rude to break ranks and dash for cover, yet no ruder than what the King and Queen had done, driving off like that, leaving Thing talking in the middle of the street …

Father Poignard said, ‘It’s nothing personal. It’s nothing we did, surely? Her Majesty was tired …’

‘Might as well talk to her in Japanese, I suppose,’ said the student at his elbow.

Father Poignard said, ‘Camille, for once you are right.’

The scholarship boy was now concluding his speech. Without a smile, he bid a fond and loyal goodbye to the monarchs who were no longer in sight, and hoped that the school would have the honour, at some future time …

A consoling hand dropped on his shoulder. ‘Never mind, de Robespierre, it could have happened to anybody.’

Then, at last, the scholarship boy smiled.

THAT WAS PARIS, July 1775. In Troyes, Georges-Jacques Danton was about half-way through his life. His relatives did not know this, of course. He was doing well at school, though you could not describe him as settled. His future was the subject of family discussion.

SO: IN TROYES one day, near the cathedral, a man was drawing portraits. He was trying to sketch the passers-by, throwing occasional glances at the sky and humming to himself. It was a catchy, popular air.

No one wanted to be sketched; they pushed past and bustled on. He did not seem put out – it seemed to be his proper occupation, on a fine and pleasant afternoon. He was a stranger – rather dandified, with a Parisian air. Georges-Jacques Danton stood in front of him. In fact, he hovered conspicuously. He wanted to look at the man’s work and to get into conversation. He talked to everyone, especially to strangers. He liked to know all about people’s lives.

‘Are you at leisure to be portrayed?’ The man did not look up; he was putting a fresh sheet of paper on his board.

The boy hesitated.

The artist said, ‘You’re a student, you’ve no money, I know. But you do have that face – sweet Jesus, haven’t you had a busy time? Never seen a set of scars quite like it. Just stay still while I do you in charcoal a couple of times, then you can have one of them.’

Georges-Jacques stood still to be drawn. He watched the man out of the corner of his eye. ‘Don’t talk,’ the artist said. ‘Just do me that terrifying frown – yes, just so – and I’ll talk to you. My name is Fabre, Fabre d’Églantine. Funny name, you say. Why d’Églantine? you ask. Well, since you ask – in the literary competition of 1771, I was awarded a wreath of eglantine by the Academy of Toulouse. A signal, coveted, memorable honour – don’t you think? Yes, quite right, I’d rather have had a small gold bar, but what can you do? My friends pressed me to add the suffix ‘d’Églantine’ to my own homely appellation, in commemoration of the event. Turn your head a little. No, the other way. So – you say – if this fellow is feted for his literary efforts, what is he doing making sketches in the street?’

‘I suppose you must be versatile,’ Georges-Jacques said.

‘Some of your local dignitaries invited me to read my work,’ Fabre said. ‘Didn’t work out, did it? I quarrelled with my patrons. No doubt you’ve heard of artists doing something of that sort.’

Georges-Jacques observed him, as best he could without turning his head. Fabre was a man in his mid-twenties, not tall, with unpowdered dark hair cut short. His coat was well-brushed but shiny at the cuffs; his linen was worn. Everything he said was both serious and not serious. Various experimental expressions chased themselves across his face.

Fabre chose another pencil. ‘Little to the left,’ he said. ‘Now, you say versatile – I am in fact a playwright, director, portraitist – as you see – and landscape painter; a composer and musician, poet and choreographer. I am an essayist on all subjects of public interest, and speak several languages. I should like to try my hand at landscape gardening, but no one will commission me. I have to say it – the world doesn’t seem to be ready for me. Until last week I was a travelling actor, but I have mislaid my troupe.’

He had finished. He threw his pencil down, screwed up his eyes and looked at his drawings, holding them both out at arms’ length. ‘There you are,’ he said, deciding. ‘That’s the better one, you keep it.’

Danton’s unlovely face stared back at him: the long scar, the bashed-in nose, the thick hair springing back from his forehead.

‘When you’re famous,’ he said, ‘this could be worth money.’ He looked up. ‘What happened to the other actors? Were you going to put on a play?’

He would have looked forward to it. Life was quiet; life was dull.

Quite abruptly, Fabre rose from his stool and made an obscene gesture in the direction of Bar-sur-Seine. ‘Two of our most applauded thespians mouldering in some village dungeon on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. Our leading lady impregnated months ago by some dismal rural wight, and now fit only for the most vulgar of low comedy roles. We have disbanded. Temporarily.’ He sat down again. ‘Now you –’ his eyes lit up with interest – ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to run away from home and become an actor?’

‘I don’t think so. My relatives are expecting me to become a priest.’

‘Oh, you want to leave that alone,’ Fabre said. ‘Do you know how they pick bishops? On their pedigree. Have you a pedigree? Look at you. You’re a farm boy. What’s the point of entering a profession unless you can get to the top?’

‘Could I get to the top if I became a travelling actor?’

He asked civilly, as if he were prepared to consider anything.

Fabre laughed. ‘You could play the villains. You’d be well received. You’ve got a good voice there, potentially.’ He patted his chest. ‘Let it come from here.’ He pounded his fist below his diaphragm. ‘Breathe from here. Think of your breath as a river. Let it just flow, flow. The whole trick’s in the breathing. Just relax, you see, drop those shoulders back. You breathe from here –’ he stabbed at himself – ‘you can go on for hours.’

‘I can’t think why I’d need to,’ Danton said.

‘Oh, I know what you think. You think actors are the bottom of the heap, don’t you? You think actors are ambulant shit. Like Protestants. Like Jews. So tell me, boy, what makes your position so brilliant? We’re all worms, we’re all shit. Do you realize that you could be locked up tomorrow, for the rest of your natural life, if the King put his name to a piece of paper that he’s never even read?’

‘I don’t see why he should do that,’ Danton said. ‘I’ve hardly given him cause. All I do is go to school.’

‘Yeah,’ Fabre said. ‘Exactly. Just make sure to live the next forty years without drawing attention to yourself. He doesn’t have to know you, that’s the point, don’t you see, Jesus, what do they teach you at school these days? Anybody, anybody who is anybody, who doesn’t like you and wants you out of the way, can go to the King with their document – “Sign here, Your Moronship” – and that’s you in the Bastille, chained up fifty feet below the rue Saint-Antoine with a bunch of bones for company. No, you don’t get a cell to yourself, because they never bother to shift the old skeletons. You know, of course, they have a special breed of rat in there that eats the prisoners alive?’

‘What, bit by bit?’

‘Absolutely,’ Fabre said. ‘First a little finger. Then a tiny toe.’

He caught Danton’s eye, burst into laughter, balled up a spoiled piece of paper and tossed it over his shoulder. ‘Bugger me,’ he said, ‘it’s a body’s work educating you provincials. I don’t know why I don’t just go to Paris and make my fortune.’

Georges-Jacques said, ‘I hope to go to Paris myself, before too long.’ The good voice died in his throat; he had not known what he hoped, till he spoke. ‘Perhaps when I’m there I’ll meet you again.’

‘No perhaps about it,’ Fabre said. He held up his own sketch, the slightly flawed one. ‘I’ve got your face on file. I’ll be looking out for you.’

The boy held out his vast hand. ‘My name is Georges-Jacques Danton.’

Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Georges-Jacques – study law. Law is a weapon.’

ALL THAT WEEK he thought about Paris. The prizewinner gnawed at his thoughts. Maybe he was just ambulant shit – but at least he’d been somewhere, might go somewhere else. Breathe from here, he kept saying to himself. He tried it. Yes, it was all true. He felt he could keep talking for days.

WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE des Essarts went to Paris, he would call on his nephew at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, to see how he did. By now, he had reservations – grave ones – about the boy’s future. The speech impediment was no better, perhaps worse. When he talked to the boy, an anxious smile hovered about his lips. When the boy got stuck part-way through a sentence, it was embarrassing – sometimes desolating. You could dive in, help him out with what he was going to say. Except with Camille, you never knew quite where he was heading. His sentences might begin in the ordinary way, and end up anywhere at all.

He seemed, in some more important way, disabled for the life they had planned for him. He was so nervous you could almost hear his heart beating. Small-boned, slight and pallid, with a mass of dark hair, he looked at his relative from under his long eyelashes and flitted about the room as if his mind were only on getting out of it. His relative’s reaction was, poor little thing.

But when he got outside into the street, this sympathy evaporated. He would feel he had been verbally carved up. It was not fair. It was like being tripped in the gutter by a cripple. You wanted to complain, but when you saw the circumstances you felt you couldn’t.

Monsieur’s primary purpose in visiting the capital was to attend the Parlement of Paris. The Parlements of the realm were not elected bodies. The de Viefvilles had bought their membership, and would pass it to their heirs: to Camille, perhaps, if he behaves better. The Parlements heard cases; they sanctioned the edicts of the King. That is, they confirmed that they were the law.

Occasionally, the Parlements grew awkward. They drafted protests about the state of the nation – but only when they felt their interests threatened, or when they saw that their interests could be served. M. de Viefville belonged to that section of the middle classes that did not want to destroy the nobility, but rather hoped to merge with it. Offices, positions, monopolies – all have their price, and many carry a title with them.

The Parlementarians worried a great deal when the Crown began to assert itself, to issue decrees where it had never issued them before, to produce bright new ideas about how the country should be run. Occasionally they got on the wrong side of the monarch; since any resistance to authority was novel and risky, the Parlementarians managed the difficult feat of being both arch-conservatives and popular heroes.

In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée – a system of forced labour on roads and bridges. He thought that the roads would be better if they were built and maintained by private contractors, rather than by peasants dragged from their fields. But that would cost, wouldn’t it? So perhaps there could be a property tax? And every man of means would pay it – not just commoners, but the nobility too?

Parlement turned this scheme down flat. After another bitter argument, the King forced them to register the abolition of the corvée. Turgot was making enemies everywhere. The Queen and her circle stepped up their campaign against him. The King disliked asserting himself, and was vulnerable to the pressures of the moment. In May, he dismissed Turgot; forced labour was reinstated.

In this way, one minister was brought down; the trick bore repetition. Said the Comte d’Artois, to the back of the retreating economist: ‘Now at last we shall have some money to spend.’

When the King was not hunting, he liked to shut himself up in his workshop, doing metalwork and tinkering with locks. He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done.

After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. ‘You’re lucky,’ Louis said mournfully. ‘I wish I could resign.’

1776: A DECLARATION of the Parlement of Paris:

The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

WHEN M. DE VIEFVILLE arrived home, he would make his way through the narrow huddle of small-town streets, and through the narrow huddle of provincial hearts; and he would bring himself to call on Jean-Nicolas, in his tall white book-filled house on the Place des Armes. Maître Desmoulins had an obsession nowadays, and de Viefville dreaded meeting him, meeting his baffled eyes and being asked once again the question that no one could answer: what had happened to the good and beautiful child he had sent to Cateau-Cambrésis nine years earlier?

On Camille’s sixteenth birthday, his father was stamping about the house. ‘I sometimes think,’ he said, ‘that I have got on my hands a depraved little monster with no feelings and no sense.’ He has written to the priests in Paris, to ask what they teach his son; to ask why he looks so untidy, and why during his last visit home he has seduced the daughter of a town councillor, ‘a man,’ he says, ‘whom I see every day of my working life’.

Jean-Nicolas did not really expect answers to these questions. His real objections to his son were rather different. Why, he really wanted to know, was his son so emotional? Where did he get this capacity to infect others with emotion: to agitate them, discomfit them, shake them out of their ease? Ordinary conversations, in Camille’s presence, went off at peculiar tangents, or turned into blazing rows. Safe social conventions took on an air of danger. You couldn’t, Desmoulins thought, leave him alone with anybody.