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As soon as he sits down at his desk, a stray Paris thought slides around his mind. This happens often. He indulges himself a little: places himself on the steps of the Châtelet court with a hard-wrung acquittal and a knot of congratulatory colleagues.
That was last year, and now it is August, in the year of Grace 1763. It is Guise, Picardy; he is thirty-three years old, husband, father, advocate, town councillor, official of the bailiwick, a man with a large bill for a new roof.
grinning uncles and cradle-witch aunts:
She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out.
This is Mantel at her best.
how can you be sure that the thoughts in your head have ever been thought by anyone else?
That was Paris, July 1775. In Troyes, Georges-Jacques Danton was about halfway through his life. His relatives did not know this, of course.
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.”
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?”
In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée—a system of forced labor 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?
There are some noblemen in France who have discovered that their best friends are their lawyers.
Camille said, “So that is what tyranny smells like.”
“Free thought, free speech—is that too much to ask?” “It’s a bloody great deal to ask, and you know it,” Condé said glumly. “The pity of it is, I hear such stuff from my peers. Elegant ideas for a social re-ordering. Pleasing plans for a ‘community of reason.’ And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear. It’ll end in revolution. And that’ll be no tea party.”
He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements.
The streets were lined with hysterical crowds chanting “Vive Voltaire.” The old man remarked, “There would be just as many to see me executed.”
A man called Necker, a Protestant, Swiss millionaire banker, was called to be Minister of Finance and Master of Miracles to the court.
He spent long afternoons in the parlors 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
I’d rather be dead, he thought, than be a woman.
Her bags around her feet, Françoise-Julie stood and clung to his arm. She laughed, with sheer delight at being back. “What I like,” she said, “is that it’s always changing. They’re always tearing something down and building something else.”
These people go about their lives and work—brewing by the look of it, and upholstery—and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it’s there and not there. What really matters isn’t the height of the towers, it’s the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw.
Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.
so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure.
The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow.
the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.
“Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.”
But the Parlements had opposed the abbé; they had accused him of speculating in grain, and induced the silly people to burn him in effigy.
Did they imagine that he was going to be less than a very very good lawyer indeed?
And so whether this judicial position was because they thought he merited it, or whether it was a sop, a bribe, a device to blunt his judgement, or whether it was a prize, a favor or even a piece of compensation … compensation for an injury not yet inflicted?
“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, Amen.”
God is not going to tell him what to do. God is not going to help him. He does not believe in a God of that sort. He’s not an atheist, he tells himself: just an adult.
Yes, just imagine. Louise packed her bags and hurtled off into the future. He was dimly aware of a turning missed; one of those forks in the road, that you remember later when you are good and lost.
The mainspring of energy in a republic is vertu, the love of one’s laws and one’s country; and it follows from the very nature of these that all private interests and all personal relationships must give way to the general good … . Every citizen has a share in the sovereign power … and therefore cannot acquit his dearest friend, if the safety of the state requires his punishment.
for the last thing she wanted was to make any noise at all, to wake her maid, to wake her daughter—who was sleeping, no doubt, the chaste and peaceful sleep of emotional despots.
He turned his head to the door, where outside the city lay. There are a million people, he thought, of whose opinions I know nothing. There were people hasty and rash, people unprincipled, people mechanical calculating and nice. There were people who interpreted Hebrew and people who could not count, babies turning fish-like in the warmth of the womb and ancient women defying time whose paint congealed and ran after midnight, showing first the wrinkled skin dying and then the yellow and gleaming bone. Nuns in serge. Annette Duplessis enduring Claude. Prisoners at the Bastille, crying to be
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The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
it’s easier to draw the men the taste of the age admires,
florid fleshy men with their conscious poise and newly barbered heads.
The wind tossed handfuls of sleet against the windows,
And we, in our turn, are militant against the existing order only because of our personal failure to progress up its sordid ladder.
They gather in back courts, in church porches, anywhere that is out of the knife of the wind.
shudder when I find myself in the presence of some of the people we have to use
The literal truth doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is what they think on the streets.”
The wild-beast collection of his ambitions crouches in the corner, hungry for its breakfast and stinking at the end of its chain.
tawdry grandee, in some noisy melodrama.
percipient:
What does the crowd want? To roar. Its wider objectives? No coherent answer. Ask it: it roars. Who are these people? No names. The crowd just wants to grow, to embrace, to weld together, to gather in, to melt, to bay from one throat.
The night’s black as a graceless soul:
the body yearns towards extinction. From Saint-Antoine, lying below him, a dog howled painfully at the stars. Far to his left a torch licked feebly at the blackness, burning in a wall-bracket: lighting the clammy stones, the weeping ghosts.
precise triangular smile,
“You are the most honorable gentleman in France,” the mayor said stiffly. “That is generally known.” Universally, he would have said, had he not been an astronomer.
