A Place of Greater Safety

by Hilary Mantel

In the course of writing this book I have had many arguments with myself, about what history really is. But you must state a case, I think, before you can plead against it.

I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could. I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, ‘You prick.’

Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched. Camille Desmoulins, 1793: ‘They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer.’ Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: ‘History is fiction.’

There were a few hours when you felt ‘Life is really like this’; you supposed this was happiness, and it was. You thought about it at the time, self-consciously. Then you came back, tired, in the evening, and things went on as before. You said, ‘Last week, when I went to the country, I was happy.’

A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.

‘Where do they come from, these people? They’re virgins. They’ve never been to war. They’ve never been on the hunting field. They’ve never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they’re such enthusiasts for murder.’

Her brown hair was a breeze-blown waterfall of curls; she had employed one of those expensive hairdressers who make you look as if you’ve never been near a hairdresser in your life.

Camille didn’t mind having to have intelligent conversations with women. He seemed to enjoy them. One of his perversions, Danton said.

Desmoulins, autumn: ‘Our revolution of 1789 was a piece of business arranged between the English government and a minority of the nobility, prepared by some in the hopes of turning out the Versailles aristocracy, and taking possession of their castles, houses and offices: by others to saddle us with a new master: and by all, to give us two Houses, and a constitution like that of England.’

He turned away; he didn’t feel he could bear it. He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament; or it might be something you learn when you’re a child, a kind of language, harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a good grasp on by the time you’re seven. What if you haven’t got that grasp? What if you’re in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind? It occurred to him that there are some people, ashamed of being illiterate, who always pretend to others that they can read. Sooner or later they get found out, of course. But it is always possible that while you are valiantly pretending, the principles of reading strike you for the first time, and you are saved. By analogy, it is possible that while you, the unhappy person, are trying out some basic expressions – the kind of thing you get in phrasebooks for travellers – the grammar and syntax of this neglected language are revealing themselves, somewhere at the back of your mind. That’s all very well, he thought, but the process could take years. He understood Lucile’s problem: how do you know you will live long enough to be fluent?

Lolotte, does it matter so much?’ ‘Not really. I suppose he must have been nice.’ ‘Yes, he was.’ Oh, the relief of saying so. ‘He was really extremely nice to me. And somehow, oh, you know, it didn’t seem much to do.’ She stared at him. He’s quite unique, she thought. ‘But now –’ and suddenly she felt she had the essence of it – ‘now you’re a public person. It matters to everybody what you do.’ ‘And now I am married to you. And no one will ever have anything to reproach me with, except loving my wife too much and giving them nothing to talk about.’

‘As you seem to have the wiped the church out of the picture, who is going to make men what they ought to be, if the laws do not do it?’ ‘Who is to say what men ought to be?’ ‘If the people elect their lawmakers – which, nowadays, they do – don’t they depute that task to them?’ ‘But if the people and their deputies were formed by a corrupt society, how are they to make good decisions? How are they to form a moral society when they have no experience of one?’ ‘We really are going to get home late,’ the judge said. ‘We shall be here for six months if we are to do justice to the question. You mean, how are we to become good when we’re bad?’

What happens next time things go wrong? People like us, we have our day – we might get to the top of the heap for a year or two, but it doesn’t last, it’s not in the nature of things that it should.’ ‘We are trying, you see, to alter the nature of things.’

Couthon’s spine is diseased, he has constant pain. Robespierre says this does not embitter him. Only Robespierre could believe this.

And yet … he feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says that the head part came first; and we believe him.

The criminal ascends with his guards. He is not to suffer, because in France the age of barbarism is over, superseded by a machine, approved by a committee.

You can grow up, not what you would call a person of iron conviction; but you think there are things about you that won’t change, beliefs you will always hold, things happening that will go on happening: a world that will do you for as long as you need it. Don’t be deceived.

‘I wouldn’t presume to know what kind of society God intends. It sounds to me as if you’ve gone to a tailor to order your God. Or had him knitted, or something.’

Lucile Desmoulins is twenty-two years old, wife, mother, mistress of her house. In the August heat – a fly buzzing against glass, a man whistling in the street, a baby crying on another floor – she feels her soul set into its shape, small and stained and mortal. Once she might have said the prayers for the dead. Now she thought, what the fuck’s the use, it’s the living I have to worry about.

LIFE’S GOING to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now. Everything you disapprove of you’ll call ‘aristocratic’. This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church. If ‘Liberty’ was the watchword of the first Revolution, ‘Equality’ is that of the second. ‘Fraternity’ is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.

On the sansculotte head, the red bonnet, the ‘cap of liberty’. Why liberty is thought to require headgear is a mystery.

The second train of thought: actions are being manufactured out of speech. How can words save a country? Words make myths, it seems, and for their myths people fight to win.

There was a need for secrecy. The newspapers nominated lovers for her – Louvet, often. Until now she’s reacted with public scorn; have they no arguments, have they not even a higher form of wit? (In private, though, these skits and squibs brought her near to tears; she asked herself why she was meted out the same treatment as that peculiar, wild young woman Théroigne, the same treatment – when she thought about it – as the Capet woman used to get.)

August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world. ‘Mm,’ Camille says, up on the Mountain. ‘This is not an ethical position. It is an excuse.’ He is speaking quietly, almost to himself; he is surprised by the violence with which his colleagues turn round on him. ‘He is in politics, practical politics,’ Danton says. ‘What the fuck does he want with an ethical position?’ ‘I don’t like this idea of ordinary crimes and political crimes. Our opponents can use it to murder us, just as we can use it to murder them. I don’t see what good the idea does. We ought to admit that all crimes are the same.’ ‘No,’ Saint-Just said. ‘And you talk, Lanterne Attorney.’ ‘But when I was the Lanterne Attorney, I said, right, let’s have some violence, it’s our turn. I never excused myself by saying I was a legislator to the world.’ ‘He is not making excuses,’ Saint-Just said. ‘Necessity does not have to be excused or justified.’ Camille turned on him. ‘Where did you read that, you half-wit? Your politics are like those improving fables they give to children, each one with a little moral tag on the end. What does it mean? You don’t know. Why do you say it? You have to say something.’

Beside him, Robespierre’s voice was running on: ‘… and I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a hero – a sort of effacement of oneself from history. The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the people. The real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants, and it is in the nature of tyranny not only to kill those who oppose it but to wipe their names out of the record, to obliterate them, so that resistance seems impossible.’

‘Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.’ ‘Good citizen, forgive me,’ the patriot said doggedly. Eyes rested on him briefly. ‘Yes, I’m Robespierre,’ he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulins’s arm. ‘Camille, history is fiction.’

As soon as words had become crimes against the state, it was only a small step to transform into offences mere glances, sorrow, compassion, sighs, even silence … It was a crime against the state that Libonius Drusus asked the fortune tellers if he would ever be rich … It was a crime against the state that one of Cassius’ descendants had a portrait of his ancestor in his house. Mamercus Scaurus committed a crime by writing a tragedy in which certain verses were capable of a double meaning. It was a crime against the state that the mother of the consul Furius Geminus mourned for the death of her son … It was necessary to rejoice at the death of a friend or relative, if one wished to escape death oneself. Was a citizen popular? He might start a faction. Suspect. Did he try instead to retreat from public life? Suspect. Are you rich? Suspect. Are you – to all appearances – poor? You must be hiding something. Suspect. Are you melancholy? The state of the nation must upset you. Suspect. Are you cheerful? You must be rejoicing at national calamities. Suspect. Are you a philosopher, an orator or a poet? Suspect.