‘Good God, the Comte’s been after you.’ The valet took him by the elbow. ‘Come with me.’
Nothing had been easy so far: he could not believe that this was going to be easy. The Comte de Mirabeau was wrapped in a crimson silk dressing-gown, which suggested some antique drapery: as if he waited on a party of sculptors. Unshaven, his face glistened a little with sweat; it was pock-marked, and the shade of putty.
‘So I have got the Philosopher,’ he said. ‘Teutch, give me coffee.’ He turned, deliberately. ‘Come here.’ Camille hesitated. He felt the lack of a net and trident. ‘I said come here,’ the Comte said sharply. ‘I am not dangerous.’ He yawned. ‘Not at this hour.’
The Comte’s scrutiny was like a physical mauling, and designed to overawe. ‘I meant to get around to waylaying you in some public place,’ he said, ‘and having you fetched here. Unfortunately I waste my time, waiting for the King to send for me.’
‘He should send for you, Monsieur.’
‘Oh, you are a partisan of mine?’
‘I have had the honour of arguing from your premises.’
‘Oh, I like that,’ Mirabeau said mockingly. ‘I dearly love a sycophant, Maître Desmoulins.’
Camille cannot understand this: the way Orléans people look at him, the way Mirabeau now looks at him: as if they had plans for him. Nobody has had plans for him, since the priests gave him up.
‘You must forgive my appearance,’ the Comte said smoothly. ‘My affairs keep me up at nights. Not always, I am bound to say, my political ones.’
This is nonsense, Camille sees at once. If it suited the Comte, he would receive his admirers shaven and sober. But nothing he does is without its calculated effect, and by his ease and carelessness, and by his careless apologies for it, he means to dominate and outface the careful and anxious men who wait on him. The Comte looked into the face of his impassive servant Teutch, and laughed uproariously, as if the man had made a joke; then broke off and said, ‘I like your writings, Maître Desmoulins. So much emotion, so much heart.’
‘I used to write poetry. I see now that I had no talent for it.’
‘There are enough constraints, without the metrical, I think.’
‘I did not mean to put my heart into it. I expect I meant it to be statesman-like.’
‘Leave that to the elderly.’ The Comte held up the pamphlet. ‘Can you do this again?’
‘Oh that – yes, of course.’ He had developed a contempt for the first pamphlet, which seemed for a moment to extend to anyone who admired it. ‘I can do that … like breathing. I don’t say like talking, for reasons which will be clear.’
‘But you do talk, Maître Desmoulins. You talk to the Palais-Royal.’
‘I force myself to do it.’
‘Nature framed me for a demogogue.’ The Comte turned his head, displaying his better profile. ‘How long have you had that stutter?’
He made it sound like some toy, or tasteful innovation. Camille said, ‘A very long time. Since I was seven. Since I first went away from home.’
‘Did it overset you so much, leaving your people?’
‘I don’t remember now. I suppose it must have done. Unless I was trying to articulate relief.’
‘Ah, that sort of home.’ Mirabeau smiled. ‘I myself am familiar with every variety of domestic difficulty, from short temper at the breakfast table to the consequences of incest.’ He put out a hand, drawing Camille into the room. ‘The King – the late King – used to say that there should be a Secretary of State with no other function but to arbitrate in my family’s quarrels. My family, you know, is very old. Very grand.’
‘Really? Mine just pretends to be.’
‘What is your father?’
‘A magistrate.’ Honesty compelled him to add. ‘I’m afraid I am a great disappointment to him.’
‘Don’t tell me. I shall never understand the middle classes. I wish you would sit down. I must know something of your biography. Tell me, where were you educated?’
‘At Louis-le-Grand. Did you think I was brought up by the local curé?’
Mirabeau put down his coffee cup. ‘De Sade was there.’
‘He’s not entirely typical.’
‘I had the bad luck to be incarcerated with de Sade once. I said to him, “Monsieur, I do not wish to associate with you; you cut up women into little pieces.” Forgive me, I am digressing.’ He sank into a chair, an unmannerly aristocrat who never sought forgiveness for anything. Camille watched him, monstrously vain and conceited, going on like a Great Man. When the Comte moved and spoke, he prowled and roared. When he reposed, he suggested some tatty stuffed lion in a museum of natural history: dead, but not so dead as he might be. ‘Continue,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Why am I bothering with you? Do you think I want to leave your little talents to the Duke’s pack of rascals? I am preparing to give you good advice. Does the Duke give you good advice?’
‘No. He has never spoken to me.’
‘How pathetically you say it. Of course he has not. But myself, I take an interest. I have men of genius in my employ. I call them my slaves. And I like everyone to be happy, down on the plantation. You know what I am of course?’
Camille remembers how Annette spoke of Mirabeau: a bankrupt, an immoralist. The thought of Annette seems out of place in this stuffy little room crowded with furniture, old hangings on the walls, clocks ticking away, the Comte scratching his chin. The room is strewn with evidence of good living: why do we say good living, he wonders, when we mean extravagance, gluttony and sloth? That the bankruptcy is not discharged does not seem to hinder the Comte from acquiring expensive objects – amongst which it seems he is now numbered. As for immorality, the Comte seems only too eager to admit to it. The wild-beast collection of his ambitions crouches in the corner, hungry for its breakfast and stinking at the end of its chain.
‘Well, you have had a nice pause for thought.’ The Comte rose in one easy movement, trailing his drapery. He put an arm around Camille’s shoulders and drew him into the sunlight that streamed in at the window. The sudden warmth seemed an effulgence of his own. There was liquor on his breath. ‘I ought to tell you,’ he said, ‘that I like to have about me men with complicated and sordid pasts. I am then at my ease. And you, Camille, with your impulses and emotions which you have been selling at the Palais-Royal like poisoned bouquets –’ He touched his hair. ‘And your interesting, faint but perceptible shadow of sexual ambivalence –’
‘Do you always take people apart in this way?’
‘I like you,’ Mirabeau said drily, ‘because you never deny anything.’ He moved away. ‘There is a handwritten text circulating, called “La France Libre”. Is it yours?’
‘Yes. You did not think that anodyne tract you have there was the whole of my output?’
‘No, Maître Desmoulins, I did not, and I see that you also have your slaves and your copyists. Tell me your politics – in one word.’
‘Republican.’
Mirabeau swore. ‘Monarchy is an article of faith with me,’ he said. ‘I need it, I mean to assert myself through it. Are there many of your underground acquaintances who think as you do?’
‘No, not more than half a dozen. That is, I don’t think you could find more than half a dozen republicans in the whole country.’
‘And