Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety

The events of the book are complicated, so the need to dramatize and the need to explain must be set against each other. Anyone who writes a novel of this type is vulnerable to the complaints of pedants. Three small points will illustrate how, without falsifying, I have tried to make life easier.

When I am describing pre-revolutionary Paris, I talk about ‘the police’. This is a simplification. There were several bodies charged with law enforcement. It would be tedious, though, to hold up the story every time there is a riot, to tell the reader which one is on the scene.

Again, why do I call the Hôtel de Ville ‘City Hall’? In Britain, the term ‘Town Hall’ conjures up a picture of comfortable aldermen patting their paunches and talking about Christmas decorations or litter bins. I wanted to convey a more vital, American idea; power resides at City Hall.

A smaller point still: my characters have their dinner and their supper at variable times. The fashionable Parisian dined between three and five in the afternoon, and took supper at ten or eleven o’clock. But if the latter meal is attended with a degree of formality, I’ve called it ‘dinner’. On the whole, the people in this book keep late hours. If they’re doing something at three o’clock, it’s usually three in the morning.

I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could. I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

PART I

In Guise:

Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins, a lawyer

Madeleine, his wife

Camille, his eldest son (b. 1760)

Elisabeth, his daughter

Henriette, his daughter (died aged nine)

Armand, his son

Anne-Clothilde, his daughter

Clément, his youngest son

Adrien de Viefville and Jean-Louis de Viefville, their snobbish relations

The Prince de Condé, premier nobleman of the district and a client of Jean-Nicolas Desmoulins

In Arcis-sur-Aube:

Marie-Madeleine Danton, a widow, who marries

Jean Recordain, an inventor

Georges-Jacques, her son (b. 1759)

Anne Madeleine, her daughter

Pierrette, her daughter

Marie-Cécile, her daughter, who becomes a nun

In Arras:

François de Robespierre, a lawyer

Maximilien, his son (b. 1758)

Charlotte, his daughter

Henriette, his daughter (died aged nineteen)

Augustin, his younger son

Jacqueline, his wife, née Carraut, who dies after giving birth to a fifth child

Grandfather Carraut, a brewer

Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette, François de Robespierre’s sisters

In Paris, at Louis-le-Grand:

Father Poignard, the principal – a liberal minded man

Father Proyart, the deputy principal – not at all a liberal-minded man

Father Herivaux, a teacher of classical languages

Louis Suleau, a student

Stanislas Fréron, a very well-connected student, known as ‘Rabbit’

In Troyes:

Fabre d’Églantine, an unemployed genius

PART II

In Paris:

Maître Vinot, a lawyer in whose chambers Georges-Jacques Danton is a pupil

Maître Perrin, a lawyer in whose chambers Camille Desmoulins is a pupil

Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles, a young nobleman and legal dignitary

François-Jérôme Charpentier, a café owner and Inspector of Taxes

Angélique (Angelica) his Italian wife

Gabrielle, his daughter

Françoise-Julie Duhauttoir, Georges-Jacques Danton’s mistress

At the rue Condé:

Claude Duplessis, a senior civil servant

Annette, his wife

Adèle and Lucile, his daughters

Abbé Laudréville, Annette’s confessor, a go-between

In Guise:

Rose-Fleur Godard, Camille Desmoulins’s fiancée

In Arras:

Joseph Fouché, a teacher, Charlotte de Robespierre’s beau

Lazare Carnot, a military engineer, a friend of Maximilien de Robespierre

Anaïs Deshorties, a nice girl whose relatives want her to marry Maximilien de Robespierre

Louise de Kéralio, a novelist: who goes to Paris, marries François Robert and edits a newspaper

Hermann, a lawyer, a friend of Maximilien de Robespierre

The Orléanists:

Philippe, Duke of Orléans, cousin of King Louis XVI

Félicité de Genlis, an author – his ex-mistress, now Governor of his children

Charles-Alexis Brulard de Sillery, Comte de Genlis – Félicité’s husband, a former naval officer, a gambler

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a novelist, the Duke’s secretary

Agnès de Buffon, the Duke’s mistress

Grace Elliot, the Duke’s ex-mistress, a spy for the British Foreign Office

Axel von Fersen, the Queen’s lover

At Danton’s chambers:

Jules Paré, his clerk

François Deforgues, his clerk

Billaud-Varennes, his part-time clerk, a man of sour temperament

At the Cour du Commerce:

Mme Gély, who lives upstairs from Georges-Jacques and Gabrielle Danton

Antoine, her husband

Louise, her daughter

Catherine and Marie, the Dantons’ servants

Legendre, a master butcher, a neighbour of the Dantons

François Robert, a lecturer in law: marries Louise de Kéralio, opens a delicatessen, and later becomes a radical journalist

René Hébert, a theatre box-office clerk

Anne Théroigne, a singer

In the National Assembly:

Antoine Barnave, a deputy: at first a radical, later a royalist

Jérôme Pétion, a radical deputy, later called a ‘Brissotin’

Dr Guillotin, an expert on public health

Jean-Sylvain Bailly, an astronomer, later Mayor of Paris.

Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, a renegade aristocrat sitting for the Commons, or Third Estate

Teutch, Mirabeau’s valet

Clavière, Dumont and Duroveray, his ‘slaves’, Genevan politicians in exile

Jean-Pierre Brissot, a journalist

Momoro, a printer

Réveillon, owner of a wallpaper factory

Hanriot, owner of a saltpetre works

De Launay, Governor of the Bastille

PART III

M. Soulès, temporary Governor of the Bastille

The Marquis de Lafayette, Commander of the National Guard

Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist, editor of the People’s Friend

Arthur Dillon, Governor of Tobago and a general in the French army; a friend of Camille Desmoulins

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a well-known author

Collot d’Herbois, a playwright

Father Pancemont, a truculent priest

Father Bérardier, a gullible priest

Caroline Rémy, an actress

Père Duchesne, a furnace-maker: fictitious alter ego of René. Hébert, box-office clerk turned journalist

Antoine Saint-Just, a disaffected poet, acquainted with or related to Camille Desmoulins

Jean-Marie Roland, an elderly ex-civil servant

Manon Roland, his young wife, a writer

François-Léonard Buzot, a deputy, member of the Jacobin Club and friend of the Rolands

Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a novelist, Jacobin, friend of the Rolands

PART IV

At the rue Saint-Honoré:

Maurice Duplay, a master carpenter

Françoise Duplay, his wife