A Place of Greater Safety. Hilary Mantel

Mirabeau’s valet

      Clavière, Dumont and Duroveray, his ‘slaves’, Genevan politicians in exile

      Jean-Pierre Brissot, a journalist

      Momoro, a printer

      Réveillon, owner of a wallpaper factory

      Hanriot, owner of a saltpetre works

      De Launay, Governor of the Bastille

      PART III

      M. Soulès, temporary Governor of the Bastille

      The Marquis de Lafayette, Commander of the National Guard

      Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist, editor of the People’s Friend

      Arthur Dillon, Governor of Tobago and a general in the French army; a friend of Camille Desmoulins

      Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a well-known author

      Collot d’Herbois, a playwright

      Father Pancemont, a truculent priest

      Father Bérardier, a gullible priest

      Caroline Rémy, an actress

      Père Duchesne, a furnace-maker: fictitious alter ego of René. Hébert, box-office clerk turned journalist

      Antoine Saint-Just, a disaffected poet, acquainted with or related to Camille Desmoulins

      Jean-Marie Roland, an elderly ex-civil servant

      Manon Roland, his young wife, a writer

      François-Léonard Buzot, a deputy, member of the Jacobin Club and friend of the Rolands

      Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a novelist, Jacobin, friend of the Rolands

      PART IV

       At the rue Saint-Honoré:

      Maurice Duplay, a master carpenter

      Françoise Duplay, his wife

      Eléonore, an art student, his eldest daughter

      Victoire, his daughter

      Elisabeth (Babette), his youngest daughter

      Charles Dumouriez, a general, sometime Foreign Minister

      Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, a lawyer; Camille Desmoulins’s cousin

      Jeanette, the Desmoulins’s servant

      PART V

       Politicians described as ‘Brissotins’ or ‘Girondins’:

      Jean-Pierre Brissot, a journalist

      Jean-Marie and Manon Roland

      Pierre Vergniaud, member of the National Convention, famous as an orator

      Jérôme Pétion

      François-Léonard Buzot

      Jean-Baptiste Louvet

      Charles Barbaroux, a lawyer from Marseille and many others

      Albertine Marat, Marat’s sister

      Simone Evrard, Marat’s common-law wife

      Defermon, a deputy, sometime President of the National Convention

      Jean-François Lacroix, a moderate deputy: goes ‘on mission’ to Belgium with Danton in 1792 and 1793

      David, a painter

      Charlotte Corday, an assassin

      Claude Dupin, a young bureaucrat who proposes marriage to Louise Gély, Danton’s neighbour

      Souberbielle, Robespierre’s doctor

      Renaudin, a violin-maker, prone to violence

      Father Kéravenen, an outlaw priest

      Chauveau-Lagarde, a lawyer: defence council for Marie-Antoinette

      Philippe Lebas, a left-wing deputy: later a member of the Committee of General Security, or Police Committee; marries Babette Duplay

      Vadier, known as ‘the Inquisitor’, a member of the Police Committee

       Implicated in the East India Company fraud:

      Chabot, a deputy, ex-Capuchin friar

      Julien, a deputy, former Protestant pastor

      Proli, secretary to Hérault de Séchelles, and said to be an Austrian spy

      Emmanuel Dobruska and Siegmund Gotleb, known as Emmanuel and Junius Frei: speculators

      Guzman, a minor politician, Spanish-born

      Diedrichsen, a Danish ‘businessman’

      Abbé d’Espanac, a crooked army contractor

      Basire and Delaunay, deputies

      Citizen de Sade, a writer, formerly a marquis

      Pierre Philippeaux, a deputy: writes a pamphlet against the government during the Terror

       Some members of the Committee of Public Safety:

      Saint-André

      Barère

      Couthon, a paraplegic, a friend of Robespierre

      Robert Lindet, a lawyer from Normandy, a friend of Danton

      Etienne Panis, a left-wing deputy, a friend of Danton

       At the trial of the Dantonists:

      Hermann (once of Arras), President of the Revolutionary

      Tribunal

      Dumas, his deputy

      Fouquier-Tinville, now Public Prosecutor

      Fleuriot and Liendon, prosecution lawyers

      Fabricius Pâris, Clerk of the Court

      Laflotte, a prison informer

      Henri Sanson, public executioner

Map of Revolutionary Paris

PART ONE

      LOUIS XV is named the Well-Beloved. Ten years pass. The same people believe the Well-Beloved takes baths of human blood … Avoiding Paris, ever shut up at Versailles, he finds even there too many people, too much daylight. He wants a shadowy retreat …

      In a year of scarcity (they were not uncommon then) he was hunting as usual in the Forest of Sénart. He met a peasant carrying a bier and inquired, ‘Whither he was conveying it?’ ‘To such a place.’ ‘For a man or a woman?’ ‘A man.’ ‘What did he die of?’ ‘Hunger.’

      Jules Michelet

I. Life as a Battlefield

       (1763–1774)

      NOW THAT THE DUST has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. Now that the last red tile has been laid on the roof of the New House, now that the marriage contract is four years old. The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow. The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odour of family quarrels brewing.

      Maître