Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety

He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coal-heaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practised it on Angelica, calling at the café each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a frisson at the backs of women’s necks. He remembered the prizewinner, took his advice; rolled the voice out from somewhere behind his ribs. It awaited perfection – a little extra vibrancy, a little more colour in the tone. But there it was – a professional asset.

Gabrielle thought, looks aren’t everything. She also thought, money isn’t everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of ’86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.

The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.

MAÎTRE DESMOULINS had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when it’s turning.

Today’s case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maître Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.

‘Come back!’ d’Anton shouted. He stopped, and turned. D’Anton drew level. ‘I can see you’re not used to winning. You’re supposed to commiserate with your opponent.’

‘Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, let’s walk – I don’t like to be around here.’

D’Anton did not like to let a point go. ‘It’s a piece of decent hypocrisy. It’s the rules.’

Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. ‘You mean, I may gloat?’

‘If you will.’

‘I may say, “So that’s what they learn in Maître Vinot’s chambers?”’

‘If you must. My first case,’ d’Anton said, ‘was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.’

‘But you’ve come on a bit since then.’

‘Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.’

Desmoulins stopped dead. ‘Do you really, Maître d’Anton?’

‘Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought – stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.’

‘Yes, but I don’t always. I’ve not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, d’Anton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?’

‘What do you mean, what would I think?’

‘If you were an impartial observer.’

‘How can I be that?’ Everybody knows you, he thought. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘you’d do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.’

‘Well, how gratifying,’ Camille said. ‘A neat, complete lecture. Maître Vinot couldn’t have delivered it better. Soon you’ll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.’

‘I’m right, though.’

‘There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who can’t afford to pay for them.’

‘Yes, but that’s a social problem, you’re not responsible for that state of affairs.’

‘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.’

D’Anton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. ‘You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.’

‘A living? It’s not a living, it’s pillage, it’s loot, and you know it. Really, Maître d’Anton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.’

‘This revolution – will it be a living?’

‘We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.’

‘To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.’

‘He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, d’Anton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things,’ he said, ‘because I think I may die at any time.’

‘Where is your client?’

‘At the Châtelet.’

‘You do know you’re going the wrong way?’

Maître Desmoulins looked at him as if he had said something foolish. ‘I hadn’t thought, you see, to get there by any particular route.’ He hesitated. ‘D’Anton, why are you wasting time in this footling dialogue? Why aren’t you out and about, making a name for yourself?’

‘Perhaps I need a holiday from the system,’ d’Anton said. His colleague’s eyes, which were black and luminous, held the timidity of natural victims, the fatal exhaustion of easy prey. He leaned forward. ‘Camille, what has put you into this terrible state?’

Camille Desmoulins’s eyes were set further apart than is usual, and what d’Anton had taken for a revelation of character was in fact a quirk of anatomy. But it was many years before he noticed this.

AND THIS CONTINUED: one of those late-night conversations, with long pauses.

‘After all,’ d’Anton said, ‘what is it?’ After dark, and drink, he is often more disaffected. ‘Spending your life dancing attendance on the whims and caprices of some bloody fool like Vinot.’

‘Your Life Plan goes further, then?’

‘You have to get beyond all that, whatever you’re doing you have to get to the top.’

‘I do have some ambitions of my own,’ Camille said. ‘You know I went to this school where we were always freezing cold and the food was disgusting? It’s sort of become part of me, if I’m cold I just accept it, cold’s natural, and from day to day I hardly think of eating. But of course, if I do ever get warm, or someone feeds me well, I’m pathetically grateful, and I think, well, you know, this would be nice – to do it on a grand scale, to have great roaring fires and to go out to dinner every night. Of course, it’s only in my weaker moods I think this. Oh, and you know – to wake up every morning beside someone you like. Not clutching your head all the time and crying, my God, what happened last night, how did I get into this?’