This is an amazing historic novel; well written, well researched, and thorough. Mantel has a gift for dramatic dialogue and witty conversations. I always wanted to read about the early years of the French Revolution and Mantel's book certainly fits the bill.
The first strength of the work is the excellent character development for all the characters in the book, but especially for the three men at the center of the revolution. Danton and Robespierre were revealed, not only in all the complexity of their personalities, but also in regard to their political sensibilities. This is a rare treat in a novel. Not since Robert Graves' characters of Claudius and Herod Aggrippa in Claudius the God or President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward in Gore Vidal's Lincoln has an author been able to demonstrate the interactions of personality and political philosophy of the main characters of a historic novel. Danton reminded me so much of Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton in his over the top robust grasp of his own and other's humanity; his natural intuitive political sensibility; and his all too human appetites. Danton was a political animal as compared to Robespierre who was a political theorist and purist. About half-way through the novel, one of the characters remarks that women don't understand politics. Mantel's grasp of political processes, epecially in times of chaos and raw power, is fantastic. I loved the way she draws parallels between the terror in Paris under Robespierre and the terror in Rome under Tiberious.
The second strength of the book is that it is not only a historic novel, it is a political novel, and as such draws relationships between ideology and parties as well as personalities and affinities. Mantel is wonderful at painting a portrait of the times in regard to public opinion and sensibility. She captures the chaotic crowd mentality and the methodical chess-like plotting of the characters for advantage. She reveals some characters that revel in thier complete transparency, such as Danton, and others who tightly control what they reveal and what others may find out about them, such as Robespierre.
I needed to understand why the revolution in the United States forged a relatively solid nation and the revolution in France lead to chaos. I think Mantel points out the several issues to explain the difference. These would include the vast difference between the loyalist colonists in the Colonies as compared to the vast infrastructure that supported the aristocracy in France. The peasants in the Colonies were well fed and had far more opportunity than the peasants in France. Thus after the American revolution, the energy is directed outward and is expansive whereas in France the energy was directed inward and was implosive. In American, thousands moved into the Ohio valley to farm. In France, thousands invaded the churches, destroying centuries of art and culture. Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson never saw eye-to-eye but they never cut each other's heads off like you see in the struggle between Danton and Robespierre and Saint-Just.
At 750 pages, this book is quite a read. There are hundreds of characters and events. In the end, however, I thought it was a great achievement.
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A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel Paperback – November 14, 2006
by
Hilary Mantel
(Author)
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It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.
- Print length768 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateNovember 14, 2006
- Dimensions5.45 x 1.41 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100312426399
- ISBN-13978-0312426392
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The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War IBarbara W. TuchmanMass Market Paperback
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Mantel's writing is so exact and brilliant that, in itself, it seems an act of survival, even redemption.” ―Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
“More people really need to get with the concept that Mantel is one of the best writers in England.” ―Zadie Smith, author of On Beauty
“Brilliant, edgy historical fiction that captures the whiplash flux of the French Revolution with crisp immediacy on the page.” ―The Seattle Times
“An epic of extraordinary detail and depth . . . [it] moves beyond the realm of an absorbing yarn into the arena of a literary masterpiece.” ―Booklist
About the Author
Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Place of Greater Safety
A NovelBy Hilary MantelPicador
Copyright © 2006 Hilary MantelAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312426392
A Place of Greater Safety
PART ONE
Louis XV is named the Well-Beloved. Ten years pass. The same people believe the Well-Beloved takes baths of human blood ... . Avoiding Paris, ever shut up at Versailles, he finds even there too many people, too much daylight. He wants a shadowy retreat ... .In a year of scarcity (they were not uncommon then) he was hunting as usual in the Forest of Sénart. He met a peasant carrying a bier and inquired, "Whither he was conveying it?" "To such a place." "For a man or a woman?" "A man." "What did he die of?" "Hunger."JULES MICHELETCHAPTER 1Life as a BattlefieldNow that the dust has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. Now that the last red tile has been laid on the roof of the New House, now that the marriage contract is four years old. The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow. The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odor of family quarrels brewing.Maître Desmoulins's study is across the courtyard, in the Old House that fronts the street. If you stand in the Place des Armes and look up at the narrow white facade, you can often see him lurking behind the shutters on the first floor. He seems to stare down into the street; but he is miles away, observers say. This is true, and his location is very precise. Mentally, he is back in Paris.Physically, at this moment, he is on his way upstairs. His three-year-old son is following him. As he expects the child to be under his feet for the next twenty years, it does not profit him to complain about this. Afternoon heat lies over the streets. The babies, Henriette and Elisabeth, are asleep in their cribs. Madeleine is insulting the laundry girl with a fluency and venom that belie her gravid state, her genteel education. He closes the door on them.As soon as he sits down at his desk, a stray Paris thought slides around his mind. This happens often. He indulges himself a little: places himself on the steps of the Châtelet court with a hard-wrung acquittal and a knot of congratulatory colleagues. He gives his colleagues names and faces. Where is Perrin this afternoon? And Vinot? Now he goes up twice a year, and Vinot--who used to discuss his Life Plan with him when they were students--had walked right past him in the Place Dauphine not knowing him at all.That was last year, and now it is August, in the year of Grace 1763. It is Guise, Picardy; he is thirty-three years old, husband, father, advocate, town councillor, official of the bailiwick, a man with a large bill for a new roof.He takes out his account books. It is only two months ago that Madeleine's family came up with the final installment of the dowry. They pretended--knowing that he could hardly disabuse them--that it was a kind of flattering oversight; that a man in his position, with steady work coming in, would hardly notice the last few hundred.This was a typical de Viefville trick, and he could do nothing about it. They hammered him to the family mast while, quivering with embarrassment, he handed them the nails. He'd come home from Paris at their behest, to set things up for Madeleine. He hadn't known that she'd be turned thirty before her family considered his situation even halfway satisfactory.What de Viefvilles do, they run things: small towns, large legal practices. There are cousins all over the Laon district, all over Picardy: a bunch of nerveless crooks, always talking. One de Viefville is Mayor of Guise, another is a member of that august judicial body, the Parlement of Paris. De Viefvilles generally marry Godards; Madeleine is a Godard, on her father's side. The Godards' name lacks the coveted particle of nobility; for all that, they tend to get on in life, and when you attend in Guise and environs a musical evening or a funeral or a Bar Association dinner, there is always one present to whom you can genuflect.The ladies of the family believe in annual production, and Madeleine's late start hardly deters her. Hence the New House.This child was his eldest, who now crossed the room and scrambled into the window seat. His first reaction, when the newborn was presented: this is not mine. The explanation came at the christening, from the grinning uncles and cradle-witch aunts: aren't you a little Godard then, isn't he a little Godard to his fingertips? Three wishes, Jean-Nicolas thought sourly: become an alderman, marry your cousin, prosper like a pig in clover.The child had a whole string of names, because the godparents could not agree. Jean-Nicolas spoke up with his own preference, whereupon the family united: you can call him Lucien if you like, but We shall call him Camille.It seemed to Desmoulins that with the birth of this first child he had become like a man floundering around in a sucking swamp, with no glimmering of rescue. It was not that he was unwilling to assume responsibilities; he was simply overwhelmed by the perplexities of life,paralyzed by the certainty that there was nothing constructive to be done in any given situation. The child particularly presented an insoluble problem. It seemed inaccessible to the proceses of legal reasoning. He smiled at it, and it learned to smile back: not with the amicable toothless grin of most infants, but with what he took to be a flicker of amusement. Then again, he had always understood that the eyes of small babies did not focus properly, but this one--and no doubt it was entirely his imagination--seemed to look him over rather coolly. This made him uneasy. He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, "You prick."Standing on the window seat now, his son leans out over the square, and gives him a commentary on who comes and goes. There is the cure, there is M. Saulce. Now comes a rat. Now comes M. Saulce's dog; oh, poor rat."Camille," he says, "get down from there, if you drop out onto the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. Though you might, at that; who would notice?"Now, while he adds up the tradesmen's bills, his son leans out of the window as far as he can, looking for furthur carnage. The cure recrosses the square, the dog falls asleep in the sun. A boy comes with a collar and chain, subdues the dog and leads it home. At last Jean-Nicolas looks up. "When I have paid for the roof," he says, "I shall be flat broke. Are you listening to me? While your uncles continue to withhold from me all but the dregs of the district's legal work, I cannot get by from month to month without making inroads into your mother's dowry, which is supposed to pay for your education. The girls will be all right, they can do needlework, perhaps people will marry them for their personal charms. We can hardly expect you to get on in the same way.""Now comes the dog again," his son says."Do as I tell you and come in from the window. And do not be childish.""Why not?" Camille says. "I'm a child, aren't I?"His father crosses the room and scoops him up, prizing his fingers away from the window frame to which he clings. His eyes widen in astonishment at being carried off by this superior strength. Everything astonishes him: his father's diatribes, the speckles on an eggshell, women's hats, ducks on the pond.Jean-Nicolas carries him across the room. When you are thirty, he thinks, you will sit at this desk and, turning from your account books to the piffling local business on which you are employed, you will draft,for perhaps the tenth time in your career, a deed of mortgage on the manor house at Wiège; and that will wipe the look of surprise off your face. When you are forty, and graying, and worried sick about your eldest son, I shall be seventy. I shall sit in the sunshine and watch the pears ripen on the wall, and M. Saulce and the cure will go by and touch their hats to me.
What do we think about fathers? Important, or not? Here is what Rousseau says:The oldest of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family, yet children remain tied to their father by nature only as long as they need him for their preservation ... . The family may perhaps be seen as the first model of political society. The head of the state bears the image of the father, the people the image of his children.
So here are some more family stories.M. Danton had four daughters: younger than these, one son. He had no attitude to this child, except perhaps relief at its gender. Aged forty, M. Danton died. His widow was pregnant, but lost the child.In later life, the child Georges-Jacques thought he remembered his father. In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don't come back, to quibble or correct.M. Danton had been clerk to one of the local courts. There was a little money, some houses, some land. Madame found herself coping. She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out. Her sisters' husbands came by every Sunday, and gave her advice.Subsequently, the children ran wild. They broke people's fences and chased sheep and committed various other rural nuisances. When accosted, they talked back. Children of other families they threw in the river."That girls should be like that!" said M. Camus, Madame's brother."It isn't the girls," Madame said. "It's Georges-Jacques. But look, they have to survive.""But this is not some jungle," M. Camus said. "It is not Patagonia. It is Arcis-sur-Aube."Arcis is green; the land around is flat and yellow. Life goes on at asteady pace. M. Camus eyes the child, where outside the window he throws stones at the bam."The boy is savage and quite unnecessarily large," he says. "Why has he got a bandage round his head?""Why should I tell you? You'll only bad-mouth him."Two days ago, one of the girls had brought him home in the early warm dusk. They had been in the bull's field, she said, playing at Early Christians. This was perhaps the pious gloss Anne-Madeleine put on the matter; it was possible of course that not all the Church's martyrs agreed to be gored, and that some, like Georges-Jacques, went armed with pointed sticks. Half his face was ripped up from the bull's horn. Panic-stricken, his mother had taken his head in her hands and shoved the flesh together and hoped against hope it would stick. She bandaged it tightly and put another bandage around his head to cover the bumps and cuts on his forehead. For two days, with a helmeted, aggressive air, he stayed in the house and moped. He complained that he had a headache. This was the third day.Twenty-four hours after M. Camus had taken his leave, Mme. Danton stood at the same window and watched--as if in a dazed, dreadful repeating dream--while her son's remains were manhandled across the fields. A farm laborer carried the heavy body in his arms; she could see how his knees bent under the deadweight. There were two dogs running after him with their tails between their legs; trailing behind came Anne-Madeleine, bawling with rage and despair.When she reached them she saw that the man had tears in his eyes. "That bloody bull will have to be slaughtered," he said. They went into the kitchen. There was blood everywhere. It was all over the man's shirt, the dogs' fur, Anne-Madeleine's apron and even her hair. It went all over the floor. She cast around for something--a blanket, a clean cloth--on which to lay the corpse of her only son. The laborer, exhausted, swayed against the wall, marking the plaster with a long rust-colored streak."Put him on the floor," she said.When his cheek touched the cold tiles of the floor, the child moaned softly; only then did she realize he wasn't dead. Anne-Madeleine was repeating the De profundis in a monotone: "From the morning watch even until night: let Israel hope in the Lord." Her mother hit her across the ear to shut her up. Then a chicken flew in at the door and got on her foot."Don't strike the girl," the laborer said. "She pulled him out from under its feet."Georges-Jacques opened his eyes and vomited. They made him lie still, and felt his limbs for fractures. His nose was broken. He breathedbubbles of blood. "Don't blow your nose," the man said, "or your brains will drop out.""Lie still, Georges-Jacques," Anne-Madeleine said. "You gave that bull something to think about. He'll run and hide when he sees you again."His mother said, "I wish I had a husband."
No one had looked at his nose much before the incident, so no one could say whether a noble feature had been impaired. But the place scarred badly where the bull's horn had ripped up his face. The line of damage ran down the side of his cheek, and intruded a purple-brown spur into his upper lip.The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.When he was ten years old his mother married again. He was Jean Recordain, a merchant from the town; he was a widower, with one (quiet) boy to bring up. He had a few little eccentricities, but she thought they would do very well together. Georges went to school, a small local affair. He soon found that he could learn anything without the least trouble, so he did not allow school to impinge on his life. One day he was walked on by a herd of pigs. Cuts and bruises resulted, another scar or two hidden by his thick wiry hair."That's positively the last time I'll be trampled on by any animal," he said. "Four-legged or two-legged.""Please God it may be," his stepfather said piously.
A year passed. One day he collapsed suddenly, with a burning fever, chattering teeth. He coughed sputum stained with blood, and a scraping, crackling noise came from his chest, quite audible to anyone in the room. "Lungs possibly not too good," the leech said. "All those ribs driven into them at frequent intervals. Sorry, my dear. Better fetch the priest."The priest came. He gave him the last rites. But the boy failed to die that night. Three days later he still clung to a comatose half-life. His sister Marie-Cécile organized a cycle of prayers; she took the hardest shift, two o'clock in the morning till dawn. The parlor filled up with relations, sitting around trying to say the right thing. There were yawningsilences, broken by the desperate sound of everyone speaking at once. News of each breath was relayed from room to room.On the fourth day he sat up, recognized his family. On the fifth day he cracked jokes, and demanded food in quantity.He was pronounced out of danger.They had planned to open the grave, and bury him beside his father. The coffin, which they had put in an outhouse, had to be sent back. Luckily, they had only put a deposit on it.When Georges-Jacques was convalescent, his stepfather made an expedition to Troyes. Upon his return, he announced that he had found the boy a place in the minor seminary."You dolt," his wife said. "Confess it, you just want him out of the house.""How can I give my time to my inventions?" Recordain asked reasonably. "I'm living on a battlefield. If it's not stamping pigs it's crackling lungs. Who else goes in the river in November? Who else goes in at all? People in Arcis have no need to know how to swim. The boy's above himself.""Perhaps he could be a priest, after all," Madame said, conciliatory."Oh yes," Uncle Camus said. "I can just see him minstering to his flock. Perhaps they'll send him on a Crusade.""I don't know where he gets his brains from," Madame said. "There's no brains in the family.""Thanks," her brother said."Of course, just because he goes to the seminary it doesn't mean he has to be a priest. There's the law. We've got law in the family.""And if he disliked the verdict? The mind recoils.""Anyway," Madame said, "let me keep him at home for a year or two, Jean. He's my only son. He's a comfort to me.""Whatever makes you happy," Jean Recordain said. He was a mild, easygoing man who pleased his wife by doing exactly as she told him; much of his time nowadays he spent in an outlying farm building where he was inventing a machine for spinning cotton. He said it would change the world.His stepson was fourteen years old when he removed his noisy and overgrown presence to the ancient cathedral city of Troyes. Troyes was an orderly town. The livestock had a sense of its lowly place in the universe, and the Fathers did not allow swimming. There seemed an outside chance that he would survive.Later, when he looked back on his childhood, he always described it as extraordinarily happy.
In a thinner, grayer, more northerly light, a wedding is celebrated. It is January 2, and the sparse, cold congregation is able to wish each other the compliments of the season.Jacqueline Carraut's love affair occupied the spring and summer of 1757, and by Michaelmas she knew she was pregnant. She never made mistakes. Or only big ones, she thought.Because her lover had now cooled towards her, because her father was a choleric man, she let out the bodices of her dresses, and kept herself very quietly. When she sat at her father's table and could not eat, she shoveled the food down to the terrier who sat by her skirts. Advent came."If you had told me earlier," her lover said, "we would have only had the row about a brewer's daughter marrying into the de Robespierre family. But now, the way you're swelling up, we have a scandal as well.""A love child," Jacqueline said. She was not romantic by nature, but she felt the posture forced upon her. She held up her chin as she stood at the altar, and looked the family in the eye all day. Her own family, that is; the de Robespierre family stayed at home.François was twenty-six years old. He was the rising star of the local barrister's association and one of the district's most coveted bachelors. The de Robespierre family had been in the Arras district for three hundred years. They had no money, and they were very proud. Jacqueline was amazed by the household into which she was received. In her father's house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. The de Robespierres were polite to each other, and ate thin soup.Thinking of her, as they did, as a robust, common sort of girl, they ladled huge watery platefuls in her direction. They even offered her father's beer. But Jacqueline was not robust. She was sick and frail. A good thing she had married into gentility, people said spitefully. There was no work to be got out of her. She was just a little china ornament, a piece of porcelain, her narrow shape distorted by the coming child.François had stood before the priest and done his duty; but once he met her body between the sheets, he felt again the original, visceral passion. He was drawn to the new heart that beat in her side, to the primitive curve of her ribs. He was awed by her translucent skin, by the skin inside her wrists which showed greenish marble veins. He was drawn by her myopic green eyes, wide-open eyes that could soften or sharpen like the eyes of a cat. When she spoke, her phrases were like little claws, sinking in."They have that salty soup in their veins," she said. "If you cut them, they would bleed good manners. Tomorrow, thank God, we shall be in our own house."It was an embarrassed, embattled winter. François's two sisters hovered about, taking messages and being afraid of saying too much. Jacqueline's child, a boy, was born on May 6, at two in the morning. Later that day, the family met at the font. François's father stood godparent, so the baby was named after him, Maximilien. It was a good, old, family name, he told Jacqueline's mother; it was a good, old family to which her daughter now belonged.There were three more children of this marriage within the next five years. The time came to Jacqueline when sickness, then fear, then pain, was her natural condition. She did not remember any other kind of life.
That day Aunt Eulalie read them a story. It was called "The Fox and the Cat." She read very quickly, snapping the pages over. It is called not giving your full attention, he thought. If you were a child they would smack you for it. And this book was his favorite.She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. Disregarded, he slid down onto the floor, and played with the bit of lace at her cuff. His mother could make lace.He was full of foreboding; never was he allowed to sit on the floor (wearing out your good clothes).His aunt broke off in the middle of sentences, to listen. Upstairs, Jacqueline was dying. Her children did not know this yet.They had evicted the midwife, for she had done no good. She was in the kitchen now eating cheese, scraping the rind with relish, frightening the servant-girl with precedents. They had sent for the surgeon; at the top of the stairs, François argued with him. Aunt Eulalie sprang up and closed the door, but you could still hear them. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady's hand to Augustin's cradle, rocking, rocking."I see no way to deliver her," the man said, "except by cutting." He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. "I might save the child.""Save her," François said."If I do nothing, they'll both die.""You can kill it, but save her."Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle, and Augustin cried at the jolt. Lucky Augustin, already born.They were arguing now--the surgeon impatient at the layman's slow comprehension. "Then I might as well fetch the butcher," François shouted.Aunt Eulalie stood up, and the book slipped out of her fingers, slithered down her skirt, fell and opened itself on the floor. She ran up the stairs: "For Jesus' sake. Your voices. The children."The pages fanned over--the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. Maximilien picked it up and straightened the bent corners of the pages. He put his sister's fat hands on the cradle. "Like this," he said, rocking.She raised her face, with its slack infant mouth. "Why?"Aunt Eulalie passed him without seeing him, perspiration broken out along her upper lip. His feet pattered on the stairs. His father was folded into a chair, crying, his arm thrown over his eyes. The surgeon was looking in his bag. "My forceps," he said. "I shall make the attempt, at least. The technique is sometimes efficacious."The child pushed the door just a little, making a gap to slip in. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields. There was a good fire, and logs lay ready in a basket. The heat was close and visible. His mother's body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. She turned to him just her eyes, not her head, and the threadbare remnants of a smile. The skin around her mouth was gray.Soon, it seemed to say, you and I shall part.When he had seen this he turned away. At the door he raised a hand to her, a feeble adult gesture of solidarity. Outside the door the surgeon had taken off his topcoat and stood with it over his arm, waiting for someone to take it away from him and hang it up. "If you had called me a few hours ago ..." the surgeon remarked, to no one in particular. François's chair was empty. It seemed he had left the house.The priest arrived. "If the head would emerge," he said, "I should baptize it.""If the head would emerge our troubles would be over," the surgeon said."Or any limb," the priest said hopefully. "The Church countenances it."Eulalie passed back into the room. The heat billowed out as she opened the door. "Can it be good for her? There is no air.""Chills are disastrous," the surgeon said. "Though anyway--""Extreme Unction, then," the priest suggested. "I hope there is a convenient table."He took out of his bag a white altar cloth, and delved in again for his candles. The grace of God, portable, brought to your hearth and home.The surgeon's eyes roamed around the stairhead. "Get that child away," he said.Eulalie gathered him into her arms: the love child. As she carried him downstairs the fabric of her dress chafed his cheek, made a tiny sound of rasping.Eulalie lined them up by the front door. "Your gloves," she said. "Your hats.""It's warm," he said. "We don't really need our gloves.""Nevertheless," she insisted. Her face seemed to quiver.The wet nurse pushed past them, the baby Augustin tossed against her shoulder, held with one hand as if he were a sack. "Five in six years," she said to Eulalie, "what can you expect? Her luck's run out, that's all."They went to Grandfather Carraut's. Later that day Aunt Eulalie came, and said that they must pray for their baby brother. Grandmother Carraut mouthed, "Christened?" Aunt Eulalie shook her head. She cast an eye down at the children, a can't-say-too-much look. She mouthed back at Grandmother: "Born dead."He shuddered. Aunt Eulalie bent down to kiss him. "When can I go home?" he said.Eulalie said, "You'll be all right with Grandmother for a few days, till your mother's feeling better."But he remembered the gray flesh around her mouth. He understood what her mouth had said to him: soon I shall be in my coffin and soon I shall be buried.He wondered why they told lies in this way.He counted the days. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette went to and fro. They said, aren't you going to ask us how your mother is today? Aunt Henriette said to Grandmother, "Maximilien doesn't ask how his mother is."Grandmother replied, "He's a chilly little article."He counted the days until they decided to tell the truth. Nine days passed. It was breakfast time. When they were having their bread and milk, Grandmother came in."You must be very brave," she said. "Your mother has gone to live with Jesus."Baby Jesus, he thought. He said, "I know."When this happened, he was six. A white curtain fluttered in the breeze from the open window, sparrows fussed on the sill; God the Father, trailing clouds of glory, looked down from a picture on the wall.
Then in a day or two, sister Charlotte pointing to the coffin; his smaller sister Henriette grumbling in a corner, fractious and disregarded."I will read to you," he told Charlotte. "But not that animal book. It is too childish for me."Later the grown-up Henriette, who was his aunt, lifted him up to look in the coffin before it was closed. She was shaking, and said over his head, "I didn't want to show him, it was Grandfather Carraut who said it must be done." He understood very well that it was his mother, the hatchet-nosed corpse with its terrifying paper hands.Aunt Eulalie ran out into the street. She said, "François, I beg of you." Maximilien ran after her, grabbing at her skirts; he saw how his father did not once turn back. François strode down the street, off into the town. Aunt Eulalie towed the child with her, back into the house. "He has to sign the death certificate," she said. "He says he won't put his name to it. What are we going to do?"Next day, François came back. He smelled of brandy and Grandfather Carraut said it was obvious he had been with a woman.During the next few months François began to drink heavily. He neglected his clients, and they went elsewhere. He would disappear for days at a time; one day he packed a bag, and said he was going for good.They said--Grandmother and Grandfather Carraut--that they had never liked him. They said, we have no quarrel with the de Robespierres, they are decent people, but him, he is not a decent person. At first they kept up the fiction that he was engaged in a lengthy and prestigious case in another city. He did return from time to time, drifting in, usually to borrow money. The elder de Robespierres--"at our time of life"--did not feel they could give his children a home. Grandfather Carraut took the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette, who were unmarried, said they would take the little girls.At some point during his childhood, Maximilien found out, or was told, that he had been conceived out of wedlock. Possibly he put the worst construction on his family circumstances, because during the rest of his life he never mentioned his parents at all.
In 1768 François de Robespierre turned up in Arras after an absence of two years. He said he had been abroad, but he did not say where, orhow he had lived. He went over to Grandfather Carraut's house, and asked to see his son. Maximilien stood in a passageway and heard them shouting from behind a closed door."You say you have never got over it," Grandfather Carraut said. "But have you stopped to ask your son whether he has got over it? The child is her image, he's not strong; she was not strong, you knew that when you forced yourself on her after each childbirth. It's only thanks to me that they have any clothes to their backs and are growing up Christians."His father came out and found him and said, he's thin, he's small for his age. He spent a few minutes talking to him in a strained and embarrassed way. Leaving, he bent down to kiss him on the forehead. His breath was sour. The love child jerked his head back, with an adult expression of distaste. François seemed disappointed. Perhaps he wanted a hug, a kiss, to swing his son around in the air?Afterwards the child, who had learned to measure out sparingly his stronger emotions, wondered if he ought to be sorry. He asked his grandfather, "Did my father come to see me?"The old man grumbled as he moved away. "He came to borrow money again. Grow up."Maximilien gave his grandparents no trouble at all. You would hardly know he was in the house, they said. He was interested in reading and in keeping doves in a cote in the garden. The little girls were brought over on Sundays, and they played together. He let them stroke--very gently, with one finger--the doves' quivering backs.They begged for one of the doves, to take home and keep for themselves. I know you, he said, you'll be tired of it within a day or two, you have to take care of them, they're not dolls you know. They wouldn't give up: Sunday after Sunday, bleating and whining. In the end he was persuaded. Aunt Eulalie bought a pretty gilt cage.Within a few weeks the dove was dead. They had left the cage outside, there had been a storm. He imagined the little bird dashing itself in panic against the bars, its wings broken, the thunder rolling overhead. When Charlotte told him, she hiccupped and sobbed with remorse; but in five minutes, he knew, she would run out into the sunshine and forget it. "We put the cage outside so he would feel free," she sniffed."He was not a free bird. He was a bird that needed looking after. I told you. I was right."But his rightness gave him no pleasure. It left a bitter taste in his mouth.His grandfather said that when he was old enough he would take him into the business. He escorted the child around the brewery, to look atthe various operations and speak with the men. The boy took only a polite interest. His grandfather said that, as he was more bookish than practical, he might like to be a priest. "Augustin can go into the business," he said. "Or it can be sold. I'm not sentimental. There are other trades than brewing."When Maximilien was ten years old, the Abbot of Saint-Waast was induced to interest himself in the family. He interviewed Maximilien in person, and did not quite take to him. Despite his self-effacing manner, he seemed basically contemptuous of the Abbot's opinions, as if he had his mind on higher things and plenty of tasks to engage him elsewhere. However, it seemed clear that he had a good brain going to waste. The Abbot went so far as to think that his misfortunes were not his fault. He was a child for whom one might do something; he had been three years at school in Arras, and his teachers were full of praise for his progress and industry.The Abbot arranged a scholarship. When he said, "I will do something for you," he did not mean a mere trifle. It was to be Louis-le-Grand, the best school in the country, where the sons of the aristocracy were educated--a school that looked out for talent, too, and where a boy with no fortune might get on. So the Abbot said: moreover, he enjoined furious hard work, abject obedience, unfailing gratitude.Maximilien said to his Aunt Henriette, "When I go away, you will have to write me letters.""Of course.""And Charlotte and Henriette are to write me letters, please.""I'll see they do.""In Paris I shall have a lot of new friends, as well.""I expect so.""And when I am grown up I will be able to provide for my sisters and my brother. No one else will have to do it.""What about your old aunts?""You too. We'll get a big house together. We won't have any quarrels at all."Fat chance, she thought. She wondered: ought he to go? At twelve he was still such a small boy, so softly spoken and unobtrusive; she was afraid he would be overlooked altogether once he left his grandfather's house.But no--of course he had to go. These chances are few and far between; we have to get on in this world, no good to be done by clinging to women's apron strings. He made her think of his mother, sometimes; he had those sea-colored eyes that seemed to trap and hold the light. Inever disliked the girl, she thought. She had a feeling heart, Jacqueline.During the summer of 1769 he studied to advance his Latin and Greek. He arranged about the care of the doves with a neighbor's daughter, a little girl slightly older than himself. In October, he went away.
In Guise, under the de Viefville eye, Maitre Desmoulins's career had advanced. He became a magistrate. In the evenings after supper he and Madeleine sat looking at each other. Money was always short.In 1767--when Armand was able to walk, and Anne-Clothilde was the baby of the household--Jean-Nicolas said to his wife:"Camille ought to go away to school, you know."Camille was now seven years old. He continued to follow his father about the house, talking incessantly in a de Viefville fashion and rubbishing his opinions."He had better go to Cateau-Cambrésis," Jean-Nicolas said, "and be with his little cousins. It's not far away."Madeleine had a great deal to do. The eldest girl was persistently sick, servants took advantage and the household budget required time-consuming economies. Jean-Nicolas exacted all this from her; on top of it, he wanted her to pay attention to his feelings."Isn't he a bit young to be taking the weight of your unfulfilled ambitions?" she inquired.For the souring of Jean-Nicolas had begun. He had disciplined himself out of his daydreams. In a few years' time, young hopefuls at the Guise Bar would ask him, why have you been content with such a confined stage for your undoubted talents, Monsieur? And he would snap at them that his own province was good enough for him, and ought to be good enough for them too.
They sent Camille to Cateau-Cambrésis in October. Just before Christmas they received an effusive letter from the principal describing the astonishing progress that Camille had made. Jean-Nicolas waved it at his wife. "Didn't I tell you?" he said. "I knew it was the right thing to do."But Madeleine was disturbed by the letter. "It is as if," she said, "they are saying, 'How attractive and intelligent your child is, even though he has only one leg.'"Jean-Nicolas took this to be a witticism. Only the day before Madeleine had told him that he had no imagination and no sense of humor.A little later the child arrived home. He had developed an appalling speech impediment, and could hardly be persuaded to say anything at all. Madeleine locked herself in her room and had her meals sent up. Camille said that the Fathers had been very kind to him and opined that it was his own fault. His father said, to cheer him, that it was not a fault but an inconvenience. Camille insisted that he was obscurely blameworthy, and asked coldly on what date it would be possible to return to school, since at school they did not worry about it and did not discuss it all the time. Jean-Nicolas contacted Cateau-Cambrésis in a belligerent mood to ask why his son had developed a stutter. The priests said he came with it, and Jean-Nicolas said he assuredly did not leave home with it; and it was concluded that Camille's fluency of speech lay discarded along the coach route, like a valise or a pair of gloves that has gone astray. No one was to blame; it was one of those things that happen.In the year 1770, when Camille was ten years old, the priests advised his father to remove him from the school, since they were unable to give him the attention his progress merited. Madeleine said, "Perhaps we could get him a private tutor. Someone really first class.""Are you mad?" her husband shouted at her. "Do you think I'm a duke? Do you think I'm an English cotton baron? Do you think I have a coal mine? Do you think I have serfs?""No," his wife said. "I know what you are. I've no illusions left."It was a de Viefville who provided the solution. "To be sure," he said, "it would be a pity to let your clever little boy come to nothing for the want of a little cash. After all," he said rudely, "you yourself are never going to set the world ablaze." He ruminated. "He's a charming child. We suppose he'll grow out of the stutter. We must think of scholarships. If we could get him into Louis-le-Grand the expense to the family would be trifling.""They'd take him, would they?""From what I hear, he's extraordinarily bright. When he is called to the bar, he will be quite an ornament to the family. Look, next time my brother's in Paris, I'll get him to exert himself on your behalf. Can I say more?"
Life expectancy in France has now increased to almost twenty-nine years.
The College Louis-le-Grand was an old foundation. It had once been run by Jesuits, but when they were expelled from France it was takenover by the Oratorians, a more enlightened order. Its alumni were celebrated if diverse; Voltaire, now in honored exile, had studied there, and Monsieur the Marquis de Sade, now holed up in one of his chateaux while his wife worked for the commutation of a sentence passed on him recently for poisoning and buggery.The College stood on the rue Saint-Jacques, cut off from the city by high solid walls and iron gates. It was not the custom to heat the place, unless ice formed on the holy water in the chapel font; so in winter it was usual to go out early to harvest some icicles and drop them in, and hope that the principal would stretch a point. The rooms were swept by piercing draughts, and by gusts of subdued chatter in dead languages.Maximilien de Robespierre had been there for a year now.When he had first arrived he had been told that he would want to work hard, for the Abbot's sake, since it was to the Abbot he owed this great opportunity. He had been told that if he were homesick, it would pass. Upon his arrival he sat down to make a note of everything he had seen on the journey, because then he would have done his duty to it, and need not carry it around in his head. Verbs conjugated in Paris just as they did in Artois. If you kept your mind on the verbs, everything would fall into place around them. He followed every lesson with close attention. His teachers were quite kind to him. He made no friends.One day a senior pupil approached him, propelling in front of him a small child. "Here, Thing," the boy said. (They had this affectation of forgetting his name.)Maximilien stopped dead. He didn't immediately turn around. "You want me?" he said. Quite pleasant-offensive; he knew how to do that."I want you to keep your eye on this infant they have unaccountably sent. He is from your part of the country--Guise, I believe."Maximilien thought: these ignorant Parisians think it is all the same. Quietly, he said, "Guise is in PICARDY. I come from ARRAS. ARRAS is in ARTOIS.""Well, it's of no consequence, is it? I hope you can take time from your reputedly very advanced studies to help him find his way about.""All right," Maximilien said. He swung around to look at the so-called infant. He was a very pretty child, very dark."Where is it you want to find your way to?" he asked.Just then Father Herivaux came shivering along the corridor. He stopped. "Ah, you have arrived, Camille Desmoulins," he said.Father Herivaux was a distinguished classicist. He made a point of knowing everything. Scholarship didn't keep the autumn chills out; and there was so much worse to come."And I believe that you are only ten years old," Father said.The child looked up at him and nodded."And that altogether you are very advanced for your years?""Yes," said the child. "That's right."Father Herivaux bit his lip. He scurried on. Maximilien removed the spectacles he was obliged to wear, and rubbed the corners of his eyes. "Try 'Yes, Father,'" he suggested. "They expect it. Don't nod at them, they tend to resent it. Also, when he asked you if you were clever, you should have been more modest about it. You know--'I try my best, Father.' That sort of thing.""Groveler, are you, Thing?" the little boy said."Look, it's just an idea. I'm only giving you the benefit of my experience." He put his glasses back on. The child's large dark eyes swam into his. For a moment he thought of the dove, trapped in its cage. He had the feel of the feathers on his hands, soft and dead: the little bones without pulse. He brushed his hand down his coat.The child had a stutter. It made him uneasy. In fact there was something about the whole situation that upset him. He felt that the modus vivendi he had achieved was under threat; that life would become more complicated, and that his affairs had taken a turn for the worse.
When he returned home to Arras for the summer holiday, Charlotte said, "You don't grow much, do you?"Same thing she said, year after year.His teachers hold him in esteem. No flair, they said; but he always tells the truth.He was not quite sure what his fellow pupils thought of him. If you asked him what sort of a person he thought he was, he would tell you he was able, sensitive, patient and deficient in charm. But as for how this estimate might have differed from that of the people around him--well, how can you be sure that the thoughts in your head have ever been thought by anyone else?He did not have many letters from home. Charlotte sent quite often a neat childish record of small concerns. He kept her letters for a day or two, read them twice; then, not knowing what to do with them, threw them away.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 likechapters 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 Encyclopedia 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 Encyclopedia, and then read what Father Proyart, the deputy principal, called "bad books."Camille replied to these letters in page after page of his sprawling 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." François 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 anymore. 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; beggers 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 appalls 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.""You think I should just be myself?""Why not?""I usually feel some greater effort is called for." Later, putting down his breviary, the priest brooded over the interview. He thought, this child will just be unhappy. He will go back to his province, and he will never amount to anything.
The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.Camille Desmoulins, 1793: "They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer."Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: "History is fiction."A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY. Copyright © 1992 by Hilary Mantel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Continues...
Excerpted from A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel Copyright © 2006 by Hilary Mantel. Excerpted by permission.
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- Publisher : Picador; First Edition (November 14, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 768 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312426399
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312426392
- Item Weight : 1.29 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.45 x 1.41 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #45,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Hilary Mantel is one of Britain’s most accomplished, acclaimed and garlanded writers. She is the author of fifteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have both been awarded The Man Booker Prize. The conclusion to The Wolf Hall Trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was published in 2020.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2009
I could say that I've spent the last week of my life immersing myself in the minutiae of the French Revolution, but this would miss the mark, widely, of my experience of reading this book. I could say, more accurately, that I've been reading about three bright, young scholarship lads (Camille Desmoulins, Maximillian Robespierre and Georges Danton) who, after graduation, became lawyers - being hardly fit for the priesthood - and somehow managed to overthrow the powers that be in one of the most powerful states of Europe before the demos devoured them, but, while this might skim the target, it would be nowhere near the centre. For what I have been reading - as it came across to me whilst reading and, even more strongly, upon reflection afterwards - pace to the other reviewers whose experiences were quite different - was an homage to Camille Desmoulins, a character with whom most general readers will be unfamiliar, but whose alluring portrait graces the cover of my copy.
Camille is the spirit of the times incarnate. He is the androgynous cynosure of both men and women alike. He somehow IS youth; he defines the term enfant terrible, and, above all, he is brilliant and - lovely French term - sans souci. Also, as it happens, he is the one to whom all the major players here attribute the start of the revolution.
By the end of the book, one knows how he walks, talks, flicks his hair and would probably respond to any given remark. But, above all, there is his high-strung brio. His - despite all the rumours - faithful wife, Lucile, whom he married initially to carry on an affair with her mother, tells Danton at one point rather late in the game, "But for myself - I think possibly when I first saw Camille, I was twelve then, twelve or thirteen - I thought, oh, here comes hell."
And hell, of course, arrives soon enough. But Camille has been expecting this all along. He has none of the asceticism of Robespierre or demagoguery of Danton. Whilst mobs are rioting in the streets of Paris, he is occupying himself with - among other less reputable pastimes - learning Hebrew and Sanskrit and, though an atheist, writing a book on the Church fathers.
The book gives rise to other questions, of course, and makes a bang-up case, I should say, that if you're going to have a revolution or maintain any sort of representative democracy, you best have a slew of educated lawyers about who adhere to the rule of law, whatever their other deficiencies. Mob rule is NOT a pretty sight. Also, as a narrative, the book could use a bit of trimming and copy-editing, quotation marks are thrown about so randomly that it's very often difficult to tell whether a character is merely thinking something or actually uttering it. As for evaluating it, in general terms, as a fictive historical narrative, I can only repeat the judgement of another reviewer: Somewhere between A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace, though, really, the narrative style is far from either of these books.
In the end, though, I always come back to Camille, from whom the book takes its title:
"Oh yes - we can offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?"
"The grave." Camille said. "The grave."
But, for most of the book, a smile crosses one's lips when this insouciant young lawyer enters the narrative to play merry hell with everything and, of course, one is reminded of Wordsworth's lines from his poem on the French Revolution:
"Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven."
And about the entire trio, but especially Camille, Yeats' line in memory of Major Robert Gregory:
"What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?"
Camille is the spirit of the times incarnate. He is the androgynous cynosure of both men and women alike. He somehow IS youth; he defines the term enfant terrible, and, above all, he is brilliant and - lovely French term - sans souci. Also, as it happens, he is the one to whom all the major players here attribute the start of the revolution.
By the end of the book, one knows how he walks, talks, flicks his hair and would probably respond to any given remark. But, above all, there is his high-strung brio. His - despite all the rumours - faithful wife, Lucile, whom he married initially to carry on an affair with her mother, tells Danton at one point rather late in the game, "But for myself - I think possibly when I first saw Camille, I was twelve then, twelve or thirteen - I thought, oh, here comes hell."
And hell, of course, arrives soon enough. But Camille has been expecting this all along. He has none of the asceticism of Robespierre or demagoguery of Danton. Whilst mobs are rioting in the streets of Paris, he is occupying himself with - among other less reputable pastimes - learning Hebrew and Sanskrit and, though an atheist, writing a book on the Church fathers.
The book gives rise to other questions, of course, and makes a bang-up case, I should say, that if you're going to have a revolution or maintain any sort of representative democracy, you best have a slew of educated lawyers about who adhere to the rule of law, whatever their other deficiencies. Mob rule is NOT a pretty sight. Also, as a narrative, the book could use a bit of trimming and copy-editing, quotation marks are thrown about so randomly that it's very often difficult to tell whether a character is merely thinking something or actually uttering it. As for evaluating it, in general terms, as a fictive historical narrative, I can only repeat the judgement of another reviewer: Somewhere between A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace, though, really, the narrative style is far from either of these books.
In the end, though, I always come back to Camille, from whom the book takes its title:
"Oh yes - we can offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?"
"The grave." Camille said. "The grave."
But, for most of the book, a smile crosses one's lips when this insouciant young lawyer enters the narrative to play merry hell with everything and, of course, one is reminded of Wordsworth's lines from his poem on the French Revolution:
"Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven."
And about the entire trio, but especially Camille, Yeats' line in memory of Major Robert Gregory:
"What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?"
Top reviews from other countries
Placeholder
5.0 out of 5 stars
End of a saga
Reviewed in India on January 3, 2022
Wonderful conclusion to the trilogy.
Holbein
5.0 out of 5 stars
La prosa del itinerario fatal de los líderes de la Revolución Francesa
Reviewed in Spain on April 30, 2021
La pequeña historia que la gran historia esconde novelada con la extraordinaria capacidad de la autora para documentarse y redactar escenas y diálogos verosímiles y apasionantes, donde se sigue el proceso de cómo la más influyente revolución de la Europa occidental se gestó y acabó devorando a sus más famosos hijos en un frenesí sangriento. Un libro desmitificador.
reader
4.0 out of 5 stars
Appassionante
Reviewed in Italy on July 28, 2020
Appassionante romanzo storico che, attraverso soprattutto i personaggi di Danton, Desmoulins e Robespierre, apre a una visione come "in presa diretta" degli anni e delle passioni della rivoluzione francese. Pare di essere nelle piazze e nei palazzi di Parigi, nei luoghi e tra le persone e le agitazioni le speranze le paure e gli intrighi del tempo.
È una lettura appassionante, che prende il lettore e non lo molla fino alla fine.
È una lettura appassionante, che prende il lettore e non lo molla fino alla fine.
Kate Cudahy
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterpiece of historical fiction
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2017
It takes nerves of steel to write a novel on the French Revolution. I can’t even begin to imagine how you’d approach such a project given the complex, ambiguous weave of personal and political motivations and relationships which contributed to this watershed in European history. On the other hand, it is an irresistibly dramatic subject: the notion of an ideal which rots even as it takes root. And the very fact that the “reign of terror” was ultimately birthed by staid, middle class, respectable lawyers somehow prefigures the cold calculations of the Nazi death machine – the Nazis, it should be added, employed the guillotine during the second world war.
Hilary Mantel’s narrative is a dizzying, polyphonic masterpiece. Rather than isolating a single character and their perspective – as she does in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy – we hear from many characters caught up in this political maelstrom, their voices rising and fading in succession, sometimes blurring into each other. While the story pivots around the relationship between Desmouslins, Dantons and Robespierre, we encounter their wives and lovers, their families, business associates and relations, aristocrats, Jacobins and Girondistes. And the text itself has an almost collage-type structure, laced with reports from newspapers and pamphlets, the prose sometimes slipping into pure dramatic dialogue. It’s a chaotic, mind-bendingly complex narrative which sometimes seems to teeter on the brink of losing its form, but Mantel keeps it all together with virtuoso skill.
The narrative is punctured by a robust wit and an eye for irony which somehow deflates our notion of these men and women as icons or emblems – and allows the reader to encounter them on a very human level. Robespierre’s belief in his own value to the revolutionary project, for example, contributes to his failure to save his childhood friend Desmoulins from the guillotine, while Danton – orator and man of the people – is revealed to be permanently on the take, determined to make his fortune and get out of the revolution while the going’s good. Ultimately, of course, it is the revolution which devours him before he can make good his escape.
What I also really appreciated about the book is how many women’s voices we hear, whether it’s the frustration of female politicians such as Anne Theroigne and Madame Roland, straining against the misogyny of male revolutionaries, or wives and lovers – Lucile Desmoulins, Louise Gély and Eleanor Duplay. So often in narratives of the revolution, these are the voices which get suppressed and it becomes male-oriented. The historical role of women has gone unacknowledged, but Mantel brings their voices to the fore, emphasising their insecurities, their own private tragedies and their political influence.
This is a novel which drops you headfirst into Paris at the end of the eighteenth century without too much of a lifeline. But if you’re prepared to take on the challenge, it’s a book which absorbs and fascinates, which prompts you to research as you’re reading, and offers a sustained and intense insight into the minds behind one of the most frightening episodes in European history. Worth not one read, but many.
Hilary Mantel’s narrative is a dizzying, polyphonic masterpiece. Rather than isolating a single character and their perspective – as she does in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy – we hear from many characters caught up in this political maelstrom, their voices rising and fading in succession, sometimes blurring into each other. While the story pivots around the relationship between Desmouslins, Dantons and Robespierre, we encounter their wives and lovers, their families, business associates and relations, aristocrats, Jacobins and Girondistes. And the text itself has an almost collage-type structure, laced with reports from newspapers and pamphlets, the prose sometimes slipping into pure dramatic dialogue. It’s a chaotic, mind-bendingly complex narrative which sometimes seems to teeter on the brink of losing its form, but Mantel keeps it all together with virtuoso skill.
The narrative is punctured by a robust wit and an eye for irony which somehow deflates our notion of these men and women as icons or emblems – and allows the reader to encounter them on a very human level. Robespierre’s belief in his own value to the revolutionary project, for example, contributes to his failure to save his childhood friend Desmoulins from the guillotine, while Danton – orator and man of the people – is revealed to be permanently on the take, determined to make his fortune and get out of the revolution while the going’s good. Ultimately, of course, it is the revolution which devours him before he can make good his escape.
What I also really appreciated about the book is how many women’s voices we hear, whether it’s the frustration of female politicians such as Anne Theroigne and Madame Roland, straining against the misogyny of male revolutionaries, or wives and lovers – Lucile Desmoulins, Louise Gély and Eleanor Duplay. So often in narratives of the revolution, these are the voices which get suppressed and it becomes male-oriented. The historical role of women has gone unacknowledged, but Mantel brings their voices to the fore, emphasising their insecurities, their own private tragedies and their political influence.
This is a novel which drops you headfirst into Paris at the end of the eighteenth century without too much of a lifeline. But if you’re prepared to take on the challenge, it’s a book which absorbs and fascinates, which prompts you to research as you’re reading, and offers a sustained and intense insight into the minds behind one of the most frightening episodes in European history. Worth not one read, but many.
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arthur richardson
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning portrayal of the French Revolution
Reviewed in Australia on March 10, 2017
Enthralling description of the chaos and randomness of the French Revolution. Great characterization of many of the revolutionary figures. Desmoulins came alive. Compelling!
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