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Saintonge in the Marais.”
Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.
was quite strange, she thought—most men seemed to fall over themselves in their eagerness to get more out of her than her normal workaday affability.
The Commune is to be reshuffled, there will be elections. The office ranking below mayor will be that of administrator. There will be sixteen administrators.
tergiversators
Ink spattered the roses, the ribbons, the violins.
his mind was moving quite coldly, quite calmly, in a certain direction.
Gabrielle tried to meet his eyes for a moment. Apprehension gives a yellow cast to her skin, he has observed. One day he noticed—as one notices rain clouds, or the time on the face of a clock—that he doesn’t love her now.
They live by words, she thought; they don’t need sleep.
people who have bought coconuts and don’t know what to make of them.
We live at a time of great events and little men.’”
His pale, heavy face was slightly marked from smallpox, and his large nose seemed to have slight acquaintance with his small, deep-set eyes, as if either feature would just as soon belong in some other face.
“Reculer pour mieux sauter.”
viragos.”
it doesn’t matter what you actually did, it’s what people say you did.
It was a room for hopes to die in;
But when you saw Camille you wanted to touch him; when you saw his cousin, that was not your reaction.
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.
“Why do you think the Dantons have separate beds?” she whispered to Lucile, when she thought they were out of earshot. Lucile shrugged. Gabrielle said in a drugged voice, “Because he lashes his arms about, dreams he’s fighting—1 don’t know who.”
Robespierre opened it at a marked page. “Listen to this. ‘The inflexibility of the laws can in some circumstances make them dangerous and cause the ruin of a state in a crisis … if the danger is such that the machinery of the laws is an obstacle, then a dictator is appointed, who silences the laws.’”
Camille shook his head. “So what do you want us to do? Go into the prisons and kill them all?” “At last,” Marat said. “I thought we should never arrive.” “In cold blood?” “However you like.” “And you’ll organize this, will you, Marat?” “Oh no, it would just happen spontaneously. The people, you see, being in such terror, being so inflamed against their enemies—” “Spontaneously?” Camille said. “Oh, very likely.” And yet, he thought: we have a city that is in immediate peril, we have a populace that is enraged, we have a sea of futile unfocused hatred slapping at the institutions of state and
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Honor is a luxury.”
Lucile has her baby back; infant cries echo through the grand suites, under the painted ceilings, among the documents and the leather-bound law books, where no baby has ever cried before.
And these are the conspirators within: the heart that flutters, the head that aches, the gut that won’t digest, and eyes that, increasingly, cannot bear bright sunlight. Behind them is the master conspirator, the occult part of the mind; nightmares wake him at half-past four, and then there is nothing to do but lie in a hopeless parody of sleep until the day begins.
But the feeling is that Roland neither knows nor cares; cares, but doesn’t know; knows, but doesn’t care; cares, but doesn’t dare do anything about it.
“The prisoners are being massacred,”
Princesse de Lamballe
They squared their shoulders and put conscientious expressions on their faces.
You people have studied your own political advantage for
so long that you’ve forgotten what you ever wanted the power for. Look,
He looked younger, for a minute or two.
pettifogger
Power becomes him, fits him like an old topcoat; his little eyes glitter if anyone tries to dispute with him. Fabre feeds his ego in all the unsubtle ways he likes best; they are comfortable together, sit up drinking and discussing shady inter-departmental deals. When dawn comes, Danton find himself alone with the map of Europe.
We shall have a blanket of obfuscation between each stratum of this conspiracy, and between each conspirator. So see to that. Obfuscate. If anyone should begin to suspect government involvement, the trail should lead to Roland.
Fabre swallowed. He looked away. His eyes seemed unfocused. “Do you ever think, does it ever bother you … that everything is founded on lies?”
She has enjoyed sweeping down grand staircases,
it will need vigor to expel them from public life.”
revolutionaries. They are not revolutionaries at all. They are atavists.
He hesitated, turned to his colleague, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. “Oh yes—can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?” “The grave,” Camille said. “The grave.”
“There is often a lot of money to be made out of deteriorating situations.”
She was accused of being what she was.
“Ça Ira.”
“We don’t need processions and rosaries and relics, but we do need, when things are very bad, the prospect of consolation—we do need, when things are even worse, the idea that in the long run there is someone who could manage to forgive us.”
Four years of Revolution, Citizen … and everywhere the same greed, pettiness and egoism, the same brutal indifference to the suffering of others and the same diabolic thirst for blood. I simply can’t fathom the depth of people.”
As soon as words had become crimes against the state, it was only a small step to transform into offenses mere glances, sorrow, compassion, sighs, even silence … .
“You see—you admit it. You’re eaten away with the thought of conspiracy. Will you guillotine brick walls and doorposts?”
It’s a kind of iron-clad vanity he has—and why not, really?
Everything that’s important is decided in a split second, isn’t it?
“The Committee calls it projected insurrection.” “He has not my status in the Revolution. Nothing like it.”
There is the world and there is the shadow-play world; there is the world of
