Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety

Camille Desmoulins had letters twice a week, huge letters; they became a public entertainment. He explained that he had first been sent away to school when he was seven years old, and as a consequence knew his family better on paper than he did in real life. The episodes were like chapters of a novel, and as he read them aloud for the general recreation, his friends began to think of his family as ‘characters’. Sometimes the whole group would be seized by pointless hilarity at some phrase such as ‘Your mother hopes you have been to confession’, and would repeat it to each other for days with tears of merriment in their eyes. Camille explained that his father was writing an Encyclopaedia of Law . He thought that the only purpose of the project was to excuse his father from conversing with his mother in the evenings. He ventured the suggestion that his father shut himself away with the Encyclopaedia , and then read what Father Proyart, the deputy principal, called ‘bad books’.

Camille replied to these letters in page after page of his formless handwriting. He was keeping the correspondence so that it could be published later.

‘Try to learn this truth, Maximilien,’ Father Herivaux said: ‘most people are lazy, and will take you at your own valuation. Make sure the valuation you put on yourself is high.’

For Camille this had never been a problem. He had the knack of getting himself into the company of the older, well-connected pupils, of making himself in some way fashionable. He was taken up by Stanislas Fréron, who was five years older, who was named after his godfather, the King of Poland. Fréron’s family was rich and learned, his uncle a noted foe of Voltaire. At six years old he had been taken to Versailles, where he had recited a poem for Mesdames Adelaide, Sophie and Victoire, the old King’s daughters; they had made a fuss of him and given him sweets. Fréron said to Camille, ‘When you are older I will take you about in society, and make your career.’

Was Camille grateful? Hardly at all. He poured scorn on Fréron’s ideas. He started to call him ‘Rabbit’. Fréron was incubating sensitivity. He would stand in front of a mirror to scrutinize his face, to see if his teeth stuck out or if he looked timid.

Then there was Louis Suleau, an ironical sort of boy, who smiled when the young aristocrats denigrated the status quo. It is an education, he said, to watch people mine the ground under their own feet. There will be a war in our lifetime, he told Camille, and you and I will be on different sides. So let us be fond of each other, while we may.

Camille said to Father Herivaux, ‘I will not go to confession any more. If you force me to go, I will pretend to be someone else. I will make up someone else’s sins and confess them.’

‘Be reasonable,’ Father Herivaux said. ‘When you’re sixteen, then you can throw over your faith. That’s the right age for doing it.’

But by the time he was sixteen Camille had a new set of derelictions. Maximilien de Robespierre endured small daily agonies of apprehension. ‘How do you get out?’ he asked.

‘It isn’t the Bastille, you know. Sometimes you can talk your way out. Or climb over the wall. Shall I show you where? No, you would rather not know.’

Inside the walls there is a reasoning intellectual community. Outside, beasts file past the iron gates. It is as if human beings have been caged, while outside wild animals range about and perform human occupations. The city stinks of wealth and corruption; beggars sit in roadside filth, the executioner carries out public tortures, there are beatings and robberies in broad daylight. What Camille finds outside the walls excites and appals him. It is a benighted city, he said, forgotten by God; a place of insidious spiritual depravity, with an Old Testament future. The society to which Fréron proposed to introduce him is some huge poisonous organism limping to its death; people like you, he said to Maximilien, are the only fit people to run a country.

Camille also said, ‘Wait until Father Proyart is appointed principal. Then we shall all be stamped into the ground.’ His eyes were alight at the prospect.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought: that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

BUT, AS IT HAPPENED, Father Proyart was passed over. The new principal was Father Poignard d’Enthienloye, a relaxed, liberal, talented man. He was alarmed at the spirit that had got about among his charges.

‘Father Proyart says you have a “set”,’ he told Maximilien. ‘He says you are all anarchists and puritans.’

‘Father Proyart doesn’t like me,’ Maximilien said. ‘And I think he overstates the case.’

‘Of course he overstates it. Must we plod? I have to read my office in half an hour.’

‘Are we puritans? He ought to be glad.’

‘If you talked about women all the time he would know what to do, but he says that all you talk about is politics.’

‘Yes,’ Maximilien said. He was willing to give reasonable consideration to the problems of his elders. ‘He is afraid that the high walls don’t keep American ideas out. He’s right, of course.’

‘Each generation has its passions. A schoolmaster sees them. At times I think our system is wholly ill-advised. We take away your childhoods, we force your ideas in this hothouse air; then we winter you in a climate of despotism.’ Delivered of this, the priest sighed; his metaphors depressed him.

Maximilien thought for a moment about running the brewery; very little classical education would be required. ‘You think it is better if people’s hopes are not raised?’ he said.

‘I think it is a pity that we bring on your talents, then say to you

’ the priest held his palm up – ‘this far, but no further. We cannot provide a boy like you with the privileges of birth and wealth.’

‘Yes, well.’ The boy smiled, a small but genuine smile. ‘This point had not escaped me.’

The principal could not understand Father Proyart’s prejudices against this boy. He was not aggressive, did not seem to want to get the better of you. ‘So what will you do, Maximilien? I mean, what do you intend?’ He knew that under the terms of his scholarship the boy must take his degree in medicine, theology or jurisprudence. ‘I gather it was thought you might go into the Church.’

‘Other people thought so.’ Maximilien’s tone was very respectful, the principal thought; he offers a due deference to the opinions of others, then takes no notice of them at all. ‘My father had a legal practice, once. I hope to pick it up. I have to go home. I am the eldest, you see.’

The priest knew this, of course; knew that unwilling relatives doled out a pittance for what the scholarship did not provide, so that the boy must always be acutely conscious of his social standing. Last year the bursar had to arrange for him to be bought a new topcoat. ‘A career in your own province,’ he said. ‘Will this be enough for you?’

‘Oh, I’ll move within my sphere.’ Sardonic? Perhaps. ‘But Father, you were worrying about the moral tone of the place. Don’t you want to have this conversation with Camille? He’s much more entertaining on the topic of moral tone.’

‘I deplore this convention of the single name,’ the priest said. ‘As if he were famous. Does he mean to go through life with only one name? I have no good opinion of your friend. And do not tell me you are not his keeper.’

‘I’m afraid I am, you see.’ He thought. ‘But come, Father, surely you do have a good opinion of him?’

The priest laughed. ‘Father Proyart says that you are not just puritans and anarchists, but strikers of poses too. Precious, self-conscious … this is the Suleau boy as well. But I see that you are not like that.’