A Place of Greater Safety. Hilary Mantel

at what cannot possibly be of any account.’

      By the front door, his small entourage had quickly assembled. He looked back at Jean-Nicolas. ‘I say out of my way and I mean well out of my way.’

      When the Prince had driven away, Jean-Nicolas mounted the stairs and re-entered his office. ‘Well, Camille?’ he said. A perverse calm had entered his voice, and he breathed deeply. The silence prolonged itself. The last of the light had faded now; a crescent moon hung in pale inquiry over the square. Camille had retired into the shadows again, as if he felt safer there.

      ‘That was a very stupid, fatuous conversation you were having,’ he said in the end. ‘Everybody knows those things. He isn’t mentally defective. They’re not: not all of them.’

      ‘Do you tell me? I live so out of society.’

      ‘I liked his phrase, “this son of yours”. As if it were eccentric of you, to have me.’

      ‘Perhaps it is,’ Jean-Nicolas said. ‘Were I a citizen of the ancient world, I should have taken one look at you and popped you out on some hillside, to prosper as best you might.’

      ‘Perhaps some passing she-wolf might have liked me,’ Camille said.

      ‘Camille – when you were talking to the Prince, you somehow lost your stutter.’

      ‘Mm. Don’t worry. It’s back.’

      ‘I thought he was going to hit you.’

      ‘Yes, so did I.’

      ‘I wish he had. If you go on like this,’ said Jean-Nicolas, ‘my heart will stop,’ he snapped his fingers, ‘like that.’

      ‘Oh, no,’ Camille smiled. ‘You’re quite strong really. Your only affliction is kidney-stones, the doctor said so.’

      Jean-Nicolas had an urge to throw his arms around his child. It was an unreasonable impulse, quickly stifled.

      ‘You have caused offence,’ he said. ‘You have prejudiced our future. The worst thing about it was how you looked him up and down. The way you didn’t speak.’

      ‘Yes,’ Camille said remotely. ‘I’m good at dumb insolence. I practise: for obvious reasons.’ He sat down now in his father’s chair, composing himself for further dialogue, slowly pushing his hair out of his eyes.

      Jean-Nicolas is conscious of himself as a man of icy dignity, an almost unapproachable stiffness and rectitude. He would like to scream and smash the windows: to jump out of them and die quickly in the street.

      THE PRINCE WILL SOON forget all this in his hurry to get back to Versailles.

      Just now, faro is the craze. The King forbids it because the losses are so high. But the King is a man of regular habits, who retires early, and when he goes the stakes are raised at the Queen’s table.

      ‘The poor man,’ she calls him.

      The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses – about 150 each year – are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armoured trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington’s troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural – in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new – then moves elsewhere.

      ‘I am terrified of being bored,’ she says.

      She has no child. Pamphlets distributed all over Paris accuse her of promiscuous relations with her male courtiers, of lesbian acts with her female favourites. In 1776, when she appears in her box at the Opéra, she is met by hostile silences. She does not understand this. It is said that she cries behind her bedroom doors: ‘What have I done to them? What have I done?’ Is it fair, she asks herself, if so much is really wrong, to harp on one woman’s trivial pleasures?

      Her brother the Emperor writes from Vienna: ‘In the long run, things cannot go on as they are … The revolution will be a cruel one, and may be of your own making.’

      IN 1778 VOLTAIRE returned to Paris, eighty-four years old, cadaverous and spitting blood. He traversed the city in a blue carriage covered with gold stars. The streets were lined with hysterical crowds chanting ‘Vive Voltaire.’ The old man remarked, ‘There would be just as many to see me executed.’ The Academy turned out to greet him: Franklin came, Diderot came. During the performance of his tragedy Irène the actors crowned his statue with laurel wreaths and the packed galleries rose to their feet and howled their delight and adoration.

      In May, he died. Paris refused him a Christian burial, and it was feared that his enemies might desecrate his remains. So the corpse was taken from the city by night, propped upright in a coach: under a full moon, and looking alive.

      A MAN CALLED NECKER, a Protestant, Swiss millionaire banker, was called to be Minister of Finance and Master of Miracles to the court. Necker alone could keep the ship of state afloat. The secret, he said, was to borrow. Higher taxation and cuts in expenditure showed Europe that you were on your knees. But if you borrowed you showed that you were forward-looking, go-getting, energetic; by demonstrating confidence, you created it. The more you borrowed, the more the effect was achieved. M. Necker was an optimist.

      It even seemed to work. When, in May 1781, the usual reactionary, anti-Protestant cabal brought the minister down, the country felt nostalgia for a lost, prosperous age. But the King was relieved, and bought Antoinette some diamonds to celebrate.

      Georges-Jacques Danton had already decided to go to Paris.

      It had been so difficult to get away, initially; as if, Anne-Madeleine said, you were going to America, or the moon. First there had been the family councils, all the uncles calling with some ceremony to put their points of view. They had dropped the priest business. For a year or two he had been around the little law offices of his uncles and their friends. It was a modest family tradition. Nevertheless. If he was sure it was what he wanted …

      His mother would miss him; but they had grown apart. She was a woman of no education, with an outlook that she had deliberately narrowed. The only industry of Arcis-sur-Aube was the manufacture of nightcaps; how could he explain to her that the fact had come to seem a personal affront?

      In Paris he would receive a modest clerk’s allowance from the barrister in whose chambers he would study; later, he would need money to establish himself in practice. His stepfather’s inventions had eaten into the family money; his new weaving loom was especially disaster prone. Bemused by the clatter and the creak of the dancing shuttles, they stood in the barn and stared at his little machine, waiting for the thread to break again. There was a bit of money from M. Danton, dead these eighteen years, which had been set aside for when his son grew up. ‘You’ll need it for the inventions,’ Georges-Jacques said. ‘I’ll feel happier, really, to think I’m making a fresh start.’

      That summer he visited the family. A pushy and energetic boy who went to Paris would never come back – except for visits, perhaps, as a distant and successful man. So it was proper to make these calls, to leave out no one, no distant cousin or great-uncle’s widow. In their cool, very similar farmhouses he had to stretch out his legs and outline to them what he wanted in life, to submit his plans to their good understanding. He spent long afternoons in the parlours of these widows and maiden aunts, with old ladies nodding in the attenuated sunlight, while the dust swirled purplish and haloed their bent heads. He was never at a loss for something to say to them; he was not that sort of person.