Three-Book Edition. Hilary Mantel

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      Pétion said, ‘It will be so difficult to keep any kind of…integrity.’

      Laclos poured him another drink. Camille said, ‘I want to start a newspaper.’

      ‘And whom did you envisage as your backer?’ Laclos said smoothly. He liked to hear people admit they needed the Duke’s money.

      ‘The Duke’s lucky I’ll take his money,’ Camille said, ‘when there are so many other sources. We may need the Duke, but how much more does the Duke need us.’

      ‘Collectively, he may need you,’ Laclos said in the same tone. ‘Individually he does not need you at all. Individually you may all jump off the Pont-Neuf and drown your sorry selves. Individually, you can be replaced.’

      ‘Oh, you think so?’

      ‘Yes, Camille, I do think so. You have a prodigiously inflated idea of your own place in the scheme of things.’

      Charles-Alexis leaned forward, put a hand on Laclos’s arm. ‘Careful, old thing. Change of subject?’ Laclos swallowed mutinously. He sat in silence, brightening only a little as de Sillery told stories of his wife. Félicité, he said, had kept stacks of notebooks under the marital bed. Sometimes she groped for them as you lay on top of her, labouring in pursuit of ecstasy. Did the Duke find this, he wondered, as off-putting as he always had?

      ‘Your wife’s a tiresome woman,’ Laclos said. ‘And Mirabeau says he’s had her.’

      ‘Very likely, very likely,’ de Sillery said. ‘He’s had everybody else. Still, she doesn’t do much these days. She’s happier organizing it for other people. When I think, my God, when I think back on my life…’ He fell into a short reverie. ‘Could I ever have imagined I’d end up married to the best-read procuress in Europe?’

      ‘By the way, Camille,’ Laclos said, ‘Agnès de Buffon was twittering on about your last pamphlet. The prose. She thinks she’s a judge. We must introduce you.’

      ‘And to Grace Elliot,’ de Sillery said. He and Laclos laughed.

      ‘They’ll eat him alive,’ Laclos said.

      At dawn Laclos opened a window and draped his elegant body out over the town, breathing in the King’s air in gasps. ‘No persons in Versailles,’ he announced, ‘are so inebriated as we. Let me tell you, my pirate crew, every dog has his day, and Philippe’s is at hand, soon, soon, August, September, October.’

      CAMILLE’S new pamphlet came out in September. It bore the title ‘A Lecture to Parisians, by the Lanterne’ and this epigraph from St Matthew: ‘Qui male agit odit lucem.’ Loosely translated by the author: scoundrels abhor the Lanterne. The iron gibbet on the Place de Grève announced itself ready to bear further burdens. It suggested their names. The author’s name did not appear; he signed himself ‘My Lord Prosecutor to the Lanterne’.

      At Versailles, Antoinette read the first two pages only. ‘In the normal way of things,’ she said to Louis, ‘this writer would be put in prison for a very long time.’

      The King was reading a geography book. He glanced up. ‘Then we must consult Lafayette, I suppose.’

      ‘Are you out of your mind?’ his wife asked him coldly: they had developed, in these exigencies, a fairly ordinary manner of talking. ‘The Marquis is our sworn enemy. He pays creatures such as this to slander us.’

      ‘So does the Duke,’ the King said in a low voice. He found it hard to pronounce Philippe’s name. ‘Our red cousin,’ the Queen called him. ‘Which is the more dangerous?’

      They pondered. The Queen thought it was Lafayette.

      LAFAYETTE read the pamphlet and hummed tunelessly under his breath. He took it to Mayor Bailly. ‘Too dangerous,’ the mayor said.

      ‘I agree.’

      ‘I mean, to arrest him would be too dangerous. The Cordeliers section, you know. He’s moved in.’

      ‘With respect, M. Bailly, I say this writing is treasonable.’

      ‘I can only say, General, that it came pretty near the bone last month when the Marquis de Saint-Huruge sent me an open letter telling me to oppose the King’s veto or be lynched. As you’re aware, when we arrested the man the Cordeliers made so much trouble I thought it best to let him go again. I don’t like it, but there you are. That whole district is spoiling for a fight. Do you know this man Danton, the Cordeliers’ president?’

      ‘Yes,’ Lafayette said. ‘I do indeed.’

      Bailly shook his head. ‘We must exercise caution. We can’t handle any more riots. We mustn’t make martyrs, you see.’

      ‘I’m compelled to admit,’ Lafayette said, ‘that there’s sense in what you say. If all the people Desmoulins threatens were strung up tomorrow, it would hardly be a Massacre of the Innocents. So we do nothing. But then our position becomes impossible, because we shall be accused of countenancing mob law.’

      ‘So what would you like to do?’

      ‘Oh, I would like…’ Lafayette closed his eyes. ‘I would like to send three or four stout fellows across the river with instructions to reduce My Lord Prosecutor to a little red stain on the wall.’

      ‘My dear Marquis!’

      ‘You know I don’t mean it,’ Lafayette said regretfully. ‘But sometimes I wish I were not such an Honourable Gentleman. I often wonder how civilized methods will answer, in dealing with these people.’

      ‘You are the most honourable gentleman in France,’ the mayor said stiffly. ‘That is generally known.’ Universally, he would have said, had he not been an astronomer.

      ‘Why do you think we have such trouble with the Cordeliers section?’ Lafayette asked. ‘There’s this man Danton, and that abortion Marat, and this – ’ he indicated the paper. ‘By the way, when this is at Versailles it stays with Mirabeau, which may tell us something about Mirabeau.’

      ‘I will make a note of it. You know,’ the mayor said mildly, ‘considered as literature, the pamphlet is admirable.’

      ‘Don’t tell me about literature,’ Lafayette said. He was thinking of Berthier’s corpse, the bowels trailing from the gashed abdomen. He leaned forward and flicked up the pamphlet with his fingertips. ‘Do you know Camille Desmoulins?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen him? He’s one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paperknife.’ He shook his head wonderingly. ‘Where do they come from, these people? They’re virgins. They’ve never been to war. They’ve never been on the hunting field. They’ve never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they’re such enthusiasts for murder.’

      ‘As long as they don’t have to do it themselves, I suppose,’ the mayor said. He remembered the dissected heart on his desk, a shivering lump of butcher’s meat.

      IN GUISE: ‘How am I to hold my head up on the street?’ Jean-Nicolas asked rhetorically. ‘The worse of it is, he thinks I should be proud of him. He’s known everywhere, he says. He dines with aristocrats every day.’

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