The Academy of Arras elected him president, but he bored them with his harangues about the rights of illegitimate children. You’d think there was no other issue in the universe, one of the members complained.
‘If your mother and your father had conducted themselves properly,’ Grandfather Carraut had said, ‘you would never have been born.’
CHARLOTTE would take out her account books and observe that the cost of his conscience grew higher by the month. ‘Of course it does,’ he said. ‘What did you expect?’
Every few weeks she would round on him and deliver these wounding blows, proving to him that he was not understood even in his own house.
‘This house,’ she said. ‘I can’t call it a home. We have never had a home. Some days you are so preoccupied that you hardly speak. I may as well not be here. I am a good housekeeper, what interest do you display in my arrangements? I am a fine cook, but you have no interest in food. I invite company, and when we take out the cards or prepare to make conversation you withdraw to the other side of the room and mark passages in books.’
He waited for her anger to subside. It was understandable; anger these days was her usual condition. Fouché had offered her marriage – or something – and then left her high and dry, looking a bit of a fool. He wondered vaguely if something ought to be done about it, but he was convinced she’d be better off without the man in the long run.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to be more sociable. It’s just that I’ve a lot of work on.’
‘Yes, but is it work you’ll be paid for?’ Charlotte said that in Arras he had got himself the reputation of being uninterested in money and soft-hearted, which surprised him, because he thought of himself as a man of principle and nobody’s fool. She would accuse him of alienating people who could have promoted his career, and he would begin again to explain why it was necessary to reject their help, where his duties lay, what he felt bound to do. She made too much of it, he thought. They could pay the bills, after all. There was food on the table.
Charlotte would go round and round the point, though. Sooner or later, she would work herself into a crying fit. Then out it would come, the thing that was really bothering her. ‘You’re going to marry Anaïs. You’re going to marry Anaïs, and leave me on my own.’
IN COURT he was now making what people called ‘political speeches’. How not? Everything’s politics. The system is corrupt. Justice is for sale.
JUNE 30 1787:
It is ordered that the language attacking the authority of justice and the law, and injurious to judges, published in the printed memoir signed ‘De Robespierre, Barrister-at-Law’, shall be suppressed; and this decree shall be posted in the town of ARRAS.
BY ORDER OF THE MAGISTRATES OF BÉTHUNE
EVERY SO OFTEN, a pinpoint of light in the general gloom: one day as he was coming out of court a young advocate called Hermann sidled up to him and said, ‘You know, de Robespierre, I’m beginning to think you’re right.’
‘About what?’
The young man looked surprised, ‘Oh, about everything.’
HE WROTE AN ESSAY for the Academy of Metz:
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.
When he had written that, he put his pen down and stared at the passage and thought, this is all very well, it is easy for me to say that, I have no dearest friend. Then he thought, of course I have, I have Camille.
He searched for his last letter. It was rather muddled, written in Greek, some business about a married woman. By applying himself to the dead language, Camille was concealing from himself his misery, confusion and pain; by forcing the recipient to translate, he was saying, believe that my life to me is an élitist entertainment, something that only exists when it is written down and sent by the posts. Max let his palm rest on the letter. If only your life would come right, Camille. If only your head were cooler, your skin thicker, and if only I could see you again … If only all things would work together for good.
Now it is his daily work to particularize, item by item, the iniquities of the system, and the petty manifestations of tyranny here in Arras. God knows, he has tried to placate, to fit in. He has been sober and conformist, deferential to colleagues of experience. When he has spoken violently it has only been because he hoped to shame them into good actions; in no way is he a violent man. But he is asking the impossible – he is asking them to admit that the system they’ve laboured in all their lives is false, ill-founded and wicked.
Sometimes when he is faced with a mendacious opponent or a pompous magistrate, he fights the impulse to drive a fist into the man’s face; fights it so hard that his neck and shoulders ache. Every morning he opens his eyes and says, ‘Dear God, help me to bear this day.’ And he prays for something, anything, to happen, to deliver him from these endless polite long drawn-out recriminations, to save him from the dissipation of his youth and wit and courage. Max, you can’t afford to return that man’s fee. He’s poor, I must do it. Max, what would you like for dinner? I haven’t an idea. Max, have you named the happy day? He dreams of drowning, far far under the glassy sea.
He tries not to give offence. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. 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.
IV. A Wedding, a Riot, a Prince of the Blood
LUCILE has not said yes. She’s not said no. She’s only said, she’ll think about it.
ANNETTE: her first reaction had been panic and her second rage; when the immediate crisis was over and she had not seen Camille for a month, she began to curtail her social engagements and to spend the evenings by herself, worrying the situation like a dog with a bone.
Bad enough to be deemed seduced. Worse to be deemed abandoned. And to be abandoned for one’s adolescent daughter? Dignity was at its nadir.
Since the King had dismissed his minister Calonne, Claude was at the office every evening, drafting memoranda.
On the first night, Annette had not slept. She had tossed and sweated into the small hours, plotting herself a revenge. She had thought that she would somehow force him to leave Paris. By four o’clock she could no longer bear to remain in her bed. She got up, pulled a wrap about her shoulders, walked through the apartment in the dark; walked barefoot, like a penitent, 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. When dawn came she was shivering by an open window. Her resolution seemed a fantasy or nightmare, a monstrous baroque conceit dreamed by someone other than herself. Come now, it’s an incident, she said to herself: that’s all. She was left, then as now, with her grievance and her sense of loss.
Lucile looked at her warily these days, not knowing what was going on in her head. They had ceased to speak to each other, in any sense that mattered. When others were present they managed some vapid exchanges; alone together, they were mutually embarrassed.
LUCILE: she spent all the