Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety

‘Very nice speech, Rabbit,’ d’Anton said.

‘I wish Camille would not call me that,’ Fréron said with controlled exasperation. ‘Now everyone calls me that.’

D’Anton smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘About these people.’

‘Well then … have you met Brissot? He’s in America just now, I think, Camille had a letter. He is advising them on all their problems. A great theorist is Brissot, a great political philosopher, though with scarcely a shirt to his back. And all these professional Americans, professional Irishmen, professional Genevans – all the governments in exile, and the hacks, scribblers, failed lawyers – all those men who profess to hate what they most desire.’

‘You can afford to say it. Your family is favoured, your paper’s on the right side of the censors. A radical opinion is a luxury you may allow yourself.’

‘You denigrate me, d’Anton.’

‘You denigrate your friends.’

Fréron stretched his legs. ‘End of argument,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Do you know why he calls me Rabbit?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

Fréron turned back to Gabrielle. ‘So, Mme d’Anton, I still believe you have the makings of a salon. You have me, and François Robert and his wife – Louise Robert says she would write a novel about Annette Duplessis and the rue Condé débâcle, but she fears that as a character in fiction Camille would not be believed.’

The Roberts were newly married, soddenly infatuated with each other, and horribly impoverished. He was twenty-eight, a lecturer in law, burly and affable and open to suggestions. Louise had been Mlle de Kéralio before her marriage, brought up in Artois, daughter of a Royal Censor; her aristocratic father had vetoed the match, and she had defied him. The weight of the family displeasure left them with no money and all routes of advancement barred to François; and so they had rented a shop in the rue Condé and opened a delicatessen, specializing in food from the colonies. Now Louise Robert sat behind her till turning the hems of her dresses, her eyes on a volume of Rousseau, her ears open for customers and for rumours of a rise in the price of molasses. In the evening she cooked a meal for her husband and laboriously checked the day’s accounts, her haughty shoulders rigid as she added up the receipts. When she had finished she sat down and chatted calmly to François of Jansenism, the administration of justice, the structure of the modern novel; afterwards she lay awake in the darkness, her nose cold above the sheets, praying for infertility.

Georges-Jacques said, ‘I feel at home here.’ He took to walking about the district in the evening, doffing his hat to the women and getting into conversation with their husbands, returning on each occasion with some fresh item of news. Legendre the master butcher was a good fellow, and in a profitable line of business. The rough-looking man who lived opposite really was a marquis, the Marquis de Saint-Huruge, and he has a grudge against the regime; Fabre tells a tremendous story about it, all about a misalliance and a lettre de cachet .

It would be quieter here, Georges-Jacques had said, but the apartment was constantly full of people they half-knew; they never ate supper alone. The offices were on the premises now, installed in a small study and what would otherwise have been their dining room. During the day the clerks Paré and Deforgues would drift in to talk to her. And young men she had never seen before would come to the door and ask her if she knew where Camille lived now. Once she lost her temper and said, ‘As near as makes no difference, here.’

Her mother came over once or twice in the week, to cluck over the baby and criticize the servants and say, ‘You know me, Gabrielle, I’d never interfere.’ She did her own shopping, because she was particular about vegetables and liked to check her change. The child Louise Gély came with her, to pretend to help her carry her heavy bags, and Mme Gély came to advise her about the local shopkeepers and pass comments on the people they met in the streets. She liked the child Louise: open-faced, alert, wistful at times, with an only-child’s precocity.

‘Always so much noise from your place,’ the little girl said. ‘So many ladies and gentlemen coming and going. It’s all right, isn’t it, if I come down sometimes?’

‘As long as you’re good and sit quietly. And as long as I’m there.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of coming otherwise. I’m afraid of Maître d’Anton. He has such a countenance.’

‘He’s very kind really.’

The child looked dubious. Then her face brightened. ‘What I mean to do,’ she said, ‘is to get married myself as soon as someone asks me. I’m going to have packs of children, and give parties every night.’

Gabrielle laughed. ‘What’s the hurry? You’re only ten.’

Louise Gély looked sideways at her. ‘I don’t mean to wait until I’m old.’

ON 13 JULY there were hail-storms; to say this is to give no idea of how the hail fell – as if God’s contempt had frozen. There was every type of violence and unexplained accidents on the streets. The orchards were stripped and devastated, the crops flattened in the fields. All day it hammered on windows and doors, like nothing in living memory; on the night of the 13th to 14th, a cowed populace slept in apprehension. They woke to silence; it seemed so long before life flowed through the city; it was hot, and people seemed dazed by the splintered light, as if all France had been pushed under water.

One year to the cataclysm: Gabrielle stood before a mirror, twitching at her hat. She was going out to buy some lengths of good woollen stuff for Louise’s winter dresses. Mme Gély would not contemplate such a fool’s errand, but Louise liked her winter clothes in her wardrobe by the end of August; who knew what the weather would do next, she asked, and if it should suddenly turn chilly she would be stranded, because she had grown so much since last year. Not that I go anywhere in winter, she said, but perhaps you will take me to Fontenay to see your mother. Fontenay, she said, is the country.

There was someone at the door. ‘Come in, Louise,’ she called, but no one came. The maid Catherine was rocking the screaming baby. She ran to the door herself, hat in hand. A girl she didn’t know stood there. She looked at Gabrielle, at the hat, stepped back. ‘You’re going out.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

The girl glanced over her shoulder. ‘Can I come in for five minutes? I know this sounds unlikely, but I’m sure the servants have been told to follow me about.’

Gabrielle stepped aside. The girl walked in. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, shook out her dark hair. She wore a blue linen jacket, tight-fitting, which showed off her hand-span waist and the supple line of her body. She ran a hand back through her hair, lifted her jaw, rather self-conscious: caught sight of herself in the mirror. Gabrielle felt suddenly dumpy and badly dressed, a woman getting over a pregnancy. ‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that you must be Lucile.’

‘I came,’ Lucile said, ‘because things are so awful and I desperately need to talk to somebody, and Camille has told me all about you, and he’s told me what a kind and sympathetic person you are, and that I will love you.’

Gabrielle recoiled. She thought, what a low, mean, despicable trick: if he’s told her that about me, how can I possibly tell her what I think of him? She dropped her hat on a chair. ‘Catherine, run upstairs and say I’ll be delayed. Then fetch us some lemonade, will you? Warm today, isn’t it?’ Lucile looked back at her: eyes like midnight flowers. ‘Well, Mlle Duplessis – have you quarrelled with your parents?’

Lucile perched on a chair. ‘My father goes around our house saying, “Does a father’s authority count for nothing?” He intones it, like a dirge. My sister keeps saying it to me and making me laugh.’