A Place of Greater Safety

by Hilary Mantel

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.”

Half his face was ripped up from the bull’s horn. Panic-stricken, his mother had taken his head in her hands and shoved the flesh together and hoped against hope it would stick.

The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.

One day he was walked on by a herd of pigs. Cuts and bruises resulted, another scar or two hidden by his thick wiry hair.

For the souring of Jean-Nicolas had begun. He had disciplined himself out of his daydreams. In a few years’ time, young hopefuls at the Guise Bar would ask him, why have you been content with such a confined stage for your undoubted talents, Monsieur? And he would snap at them that his own province was good enough for him, and ought to be good enough for them too.

“most people are lazy, and will take you at your own valuation. Make sure the valuation you put on yourself is high.”

In easy times, a loaf of brown bread costs eight or nine sous. A general laborer, who is paid by the day, can expect to earn twenty sous; a mason might get forty sous, a skilled locksmith or a joiner might get fifty. Items for the budget: rent money, candles, cooking fat, vegetables, wine. Meat is for special occasions. Bread is the main concern.

Bread is the main thing to understand: the staple of speculation, the food for all theories about what happens next. Fifteen years from now, on the day the Bastille falls, the price of bread in Paris will be at its highest in sixty years. Twenty years from now (when it is all over), a woman of the capital will say: “Under Robespierre, blood flowed, but the people had bread. Perhaps in order to have bread, it is necessary to spill a little blood.”

He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done. After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. “You’re lucky,” Louis said mournfully. “I wish I could resign.”

Condé raised his eyebrows. “You want the nobility to pay your taxes for you?” “No, Monseigneur, we want you to pay your own.”

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.

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.

Sir Francis Burdett, British Ambassador, on Paris: “It is the most ill-contrived, ill-built, dirty stinking town that can possibly be imagined; as for the inhabitants, they are ten times more nasty than the inhabitants of Edinburgh.”

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. “The Theory of Ambition,” an essay: JEAN-MARIE HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES

“You ought to help people.” “Ought you?” “Yes—at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose—yes.” “At your own expense?” “You’re not allowed to do it at anyone else’s.”

We have to break out of this cycle, Your Majesty, he said. Believe me—please, you must believe me—things have never been this bad before.

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, selfconsciously. 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.”

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.

Obviously, things are not going to be the same after this. He’ll not forget how they got together, conspired against him, condemned him in the local press as an anti-clerical troublemaker. Him? The abbot’s protégé? The Bishop’s golden boy? Very well. If that’s how they want to see him, he will not trouble from now on to make things easy for his colleagues, to be so very helpful and polite. It is a fault, that persistent itch to have people think well of him.

Robespierre helps a poor man against the elite and is slandered.

He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.

A week later the Comptroller General, Brienne, discovered (or so it was said) that the state’s coffers contained enough revenue for one-quarter of one day’s expenditure. He declared a suspension of all payments by the government. France was bankrupt. His Majesty continued to hunt, and if he did not kill he recorded the fact in his diary: rien, rien, rien. Brienne was dismissed.

“I hope you aren’t still entertaining notions about marrying my daughter.” “I am, rather.” “If you could just see it from my point of view.” “No, I’m afraid I can see it only from my own.”

The very young and the very old are taken in by the hospitals. Harassed monks and nuns try to bespeak extra linen and a supply of fresh bread, only to find that they must make do with soiled linen and bread that is days old. They say that the Lord’s designs are wonderful, because if the weather warmed up there would be an epidemic. Women weep with dread when they give birth.

He seems to enjoy the attention he is getting, though when asked about the circumstances of his incarceration he weeps. On a bad day he does not know who he is at all. On a good day he answers to Julius Caesar.

The ex-minister Foulon had once remarked, in a time of famine, that if the people were hungry they could eat grass. Or so it was believed. That was why—and reason enough—on July 22 he was in the Place de Grève, with an audience.

But the hand of heaven can’t hold them back—they vie in the pandemonium to be each more patriotic than the last, they gabble to relinquish what belongs to them and with eagerness even greater what belongs to others. Next week, of course, they will try to backtrack; but it will be too late.

“Is the militia on the King’s side?” “Oh, everybody is on the King’s side,” her husband said. “It’s just his ministers and his servants and his brothers and his wife we can’t stand. Louis is all right, silly old duffer.” “But why do people say that Lafayette’s a republican?” “In America he’s a republican.” “Are there any republicans here?” “Very few.” “Would they kill the King?” “Heavens, no. We leave that sort of thing to the English.”

“Isn’t the reasoning clear? With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy.

The king’s trial is over. The city gates have been closed. One cannot reign innocently, the Convention has decided. Merely to have been born condemns Louis to die?

“I don’t think I believe that,” Camille said. “I think it injures my place in the universe to believe that.”

but what is the point of combating the tyrants of Europe if we behave like tyrants ourselves? What is the point of any of it?” “Camille, this isn’t tyranny—these powers we are taking, we may never need to use them, or not for more than a few months.

Decree of the National Convention: “The government of France is revolutionary until the peace … . Terror is the order of the day.”

“Hey, Sanson?” “Citizen Danton?” “Show my head to the people. It’s worth the trouble.”

“Show me how to do it,” he said. “I want to learn.” “Boys don’t do it,” she said. Her face was composed; her work continued. His throat closed at the exclusion.

The time, fatal to Danton, is at length arrived … . We do not comprehend why Camille Desmoulins, who was so openly protected by Robespierre, is crushed in the triumph of this dictator.