Authors: Anne Perry
Célie could not sit still any longer. She stood up, excused herself, and went upstairs to St Felix’s room. She closed the door and stood, trying to think, in which book he would have hidden the passes. He must have known how close Menou was to arresting him. That was why he had run. Had he had time to think about the passes? Had there been anything but terror in his mind? But Menou had been likely to search any time before that. He would have kept the passes somewhere safe right from the beginning.
She looked around at the bare room. It had held so little of the essence of the man. She remembered thinking that when Menou was here. Nothing personal except books.
There were only a dozen. She was on the second to last one and growing desperate when she heard a sound in the doorway and froze.
It was Amandine, her eyes accusing.
‘I’m looking for the passes!’ Célie whispered fiercely. ‘None of it’s any good without them!’
‘Oh ...’ Amandine’s shoulders relaxed. ‘I see. Have you found them?’
‘No!’ She shook the book she was holding. Nothing fell out. She put it back and took the last one, the translation of Dante, and fingered through it, then held it by the ends of the spine and shook it. Nothing. Despair welled up inside her. He must have taken them with him! He could not know he was going to be shot.
Reluctantly, tears stung in her eyes.
‘They aren’t here.’ She swallowed and put the book back, hiding her face for a moment. She wiped her hand across her cheeks. It would do Amandine no good to see her weep. ‘I’ll have to go and tell Georges. He might be able to do something. I don’t know what.’
‘I’ll tell Madame you’ve gone for something,’ Amandine said flatly. ‘Cheese ... I don’t know ...’
‘Thank you.’ Célie turned back to face Amandine, and tried to force herself to smile for a moment. ‘Thank you. I’ll even see if I can find some ... or soap ... or onions ... or anything!’
It had stopped raining. The sky was full of patches of blue, and shafts of sunlight lit the pavement and danced in the puddles. But there was still a hard edge to the wind, and there was every excuse to hurry along the street, looking to neither right nor left. There was not enough of her face showing for anyone to have recognised Célie as she turned into an alley, unless they caught sight of her pale hair. It was far too cold to stand around, and in a short while the light would fade. Tomorrow morning the King would die. Tonight everyone had something to think about, to fear or to celebrate. The cafés were full. People talked, drank, made wild gestures and predictions, promises and threats. The smell of fear was in the air.
The sun was gold on the rooftops and the shadows black when Célie reached the alley. She went up the stairs, feeling her way in the gloom, and at the top she knocked sharply.
Georges opened the door, a candle burning so low on the table behind him she knew him only by the outline of his head.
‘Célie?’ his voice lifted in surprise, and both pleasure and alarm. ‘What is it?’ He stepped back for her to come into the room.
She closed the door behind her. ‘Briard came to the house this afternoon!’
He stopped, then turned slowly, eyes wide.
She watched him intently, the slightest change in expression or inclination of his body.
‘Just after you left,’ she went on. ‘He was very discreet, and it was ages before I realised who he was. But he really looked like the King. He would be perfect.’ She hesitated.
‘What?’ he demanded, his voice cracking with an emotion she could not read, but so intense it shook his body. She could not see his features in the dim light.
‘I liked him,’ she answered quietly. ‘It was stupid. I spoke with him for just a few moments, but it hurts to think what will happen to him. And of course he knows.’ She needed Georges to understand.
He said nothing. There was no possible answer.
‘But we don’t have the passes,’ she hurried on, before he could hope, crushed by having to tell him. ‘I searched St Felix’s room everywhere, even after Menou went, but they’re not there. He must have taken them with him in case they were found. We’ve got to have papers to get the King out of Paris, past the section leaders, if there are any still on duty. They’ll send men out in every direction after him.’
‘I know about the passes. St Felix took them when he ran. They were destroyed.’ Now his voice was different. There was excitement, even a rush of joy in it he could not conceal. ‘We might get by in the panic, but I doubt it,’ he went on, gathering emphasis. ‘Somebody’s head will have to fill the basket, and it will take a lot of them to replace the King’s. Everyone leaving Paris will be suspect, especially fat, elderly gentlemen who look ill and terrified.’
It seemed hopeless. Célie was cold in this grim room with the last of the winter daylight fading over the rooftops, and now barely reaching the windows. There was no sound up here but the creaking of the wood settling and a faint thread of the wind. They seemed removed from the bustle and the anger of the streets, but not from the desperation, and certainly not from the hunger.
‘Who can we get new papers from?’ she asked quietly. ‘Dare we forge them ourselves? Will they look that closely?’
His answer was immediately, and touched with a glint of humour. ‘Yes, they will. It’s the first thing they’d think of. They need to be real, and with a signature no one will argue with.’
‘Well, we can’t ask Robespierre!’ she said drily. ‘He’s suspicious of everyone. He’d want to know all the details, ask endless questions, and then refuse.’ She remembered the venomous little face and the consuming passion in it. ‘He’s obsessed with purifying everything. He’ll go on until there’s nobody left, unless someone stops him. He’s always talking about the “Virtue of the People,” but I sometimes wonder if he sees real people at all, if he knows they have feelings and can be hurt or deceived, and it matters!’ She felt a sudden anger so sharp it twisted inside her as she saw Monsieur Lacoste’s face in her mind’s eye, and his blind belief, all the hope he had invested in a man who did not see him, or anyone like him, as real, with flesh to bleed and dreams to be betrayed.
‘And don’t even think of asking Marat!’ she added. ‘All he can think of is blood—rivers of it—seas of it. The only people he cares about are the Communards—and all they can think of are their empty plates.’
‘Who can blame them, poor devils,’ Georges answered with sudden gentleness. ‘It has to be Danton. He is still the sanest, the most like an ordinary man. He’s reachable, and that makes the difference. And he’s a patriot, not in love with dreams, but with reality. That’s what’s wrong with all the rest of them.’ He gestured to the chair and she sat down on it. He folded up on the mattress opposite her. A sharp twist of humour touched his lips. ‘Have you read any of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Célie?’
She hesitated. Should she be honest? Her parents had quoted him as if he were a prophet of the new light, and she had turned from him in disgust, holding his endless ideas responsible for their obsessions. Even though Madame de Staël and her friends had spoken of him often, with respect, it had not softened her resolve never to read him herself.
She knew they all praised the breadth, sensitivity and originality of his ideas. Even those who did not agree were thoroughly familiar with his work. Half the dreams of the revolution had been fired by idealism such as his, the belief in a better world founded on the innately noble nature of man, if educated rightly and freed from oppression and injustice. She had heard that Robespierre admired him passionately, as had so many of the leading revolutionaries, except Danton.
Georges would not admire her childish stubbornness, and his disapproval would wrench inside her like a sprain. She had proved her courage, loyalty, imagination, quickness of thought. But it did not free her from the pain of caring, to which she could see no end. The pain would only become deeper if he found her ignorant or silly, or knew that she was trying too hard.
‘You haven’t.’ His voice cut across her thoughts.
The colour burned up her face. She should have been honest. She was furious with herself. How stupid!
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I was just thinking of what I had heard people say of him. I suppose it is something I should read, in order to understand what is happening, but I always thought I would dislike it.’
‘I’m sure you would!’ he said with a sudden grin, laughter flaring up in his eyes in desperate relief for an instant of triviality far from the real.
‘You have far too much knowledge of life to be taken in by people who wander around falling in love with each other’s spirits,’ he went on, his voice edged with derision. ‘Weeping and arguing and sympathising together, but never reaching anything so natural as touching one another.’
That was not what she thought of as falling in love. Love was a joy that welled up uncontrollably, making your heart almost choke you, the thought of it unreturned was another name for hell. It was what gave you courage to do the impossible, lit the most pedestrian things with magic, and made another person so precious the thought of them in danger made you weak with terror. Above all it was touching, even if only in dreams.
But she did not want him to know that!
He was watching her face. ‘Everyone in his works is discontented, without knowing why,’ he continued, his voice charged with amazement and derision. ‘They are all starving in the soul, but no one has the wit or the physical instinct to know that love, with its power and laughter, its pain and sweetness—and absurdity—is the answer.’
It was the first time she had heard him speak of love. She was afraid of what he might say, but she could not let go. She needed to know—whatever it was. The impression she had of Rousseau was of an emotion she did not understand, and certainly could not share.
‘I thought they were all in love?’ she questioned, trying to keep her voice level, the urgency and the emotion out of her eyes.
He dismissed it with a jerk of his hand, contemptuously. ‘Not real love, not love that can give and take, and find any fulfilment, only anguish that is always travelling but never arrives.’ He was still watching her just as intently. ‘Anyway, every time they are on the brink of actually doing anything, they stop and philosophise for pages!’
‘Isn’t that because he’s a philosopher?’ she asked, feeling a warmth begin to open up inside her. She recalled an ardent admirer in Madame’s salon talking about the purity of Rousseau’s characters, their nobility and chastity. Did Georges see that in them? Was that what he admired?
‘In treatises, yes,’ he answered, meeting her eyes. ‘Not in life. What is the use of knowing everything, if you never actually practise it? They are forever cooking and never eating.’
‘Oh ... I see.’
‘Do you?’ He touched her lightly, so lightly she barely felt more than the brush of his hand on her arm. ‘You would if you read Rousseau.’ His voice was soft. ‘But please don’t waste your time.’
Her mind raced away with thoughts she dared not entertain, imagination not of Rousseau’s dreamers’ love, but of Georges,’ urgent, intimate and real.
There was no time for it. It would be too precious, too consuming. She forced it away.
‘Can we really ask Danton?’ She brought them back to the immediacy of the present. They had barely twelve hours, and Georges was right: without passes they could not succeed. Briard would have sacrificed himself for nothing. ‘I suppose there’s no way without telling him the truth?’ she asked.
He looked at her steadily, weighing his answer.
‘None at all,’ he said at last. ‘There’s no one else. And he’ll guess anyway. Wiser not to look as if we are trying to deceive him. I’ll go ... now.’ He straightened up.
‘No!’ she said sharply, instinctively reaching out and grasping his wrist. ‘Better I go. Danton’ll know who you are. You could even be stopped before you’ve had a chance to tell him the whole story ... the reasons ... the truth.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
She was standing beside him now.
‘Of course I do! Everyone knows where Danton lives!’
He winced, his lips tightening. He hated sending her on a dangerous errand yet again. In getting him out of the house on the Boulevard St-Germain she had proved her nerve, shown that she could be as clever and as brave as she wished to be, but it had undone nothing as far as his freedom was concerned.
She turned to the door. She must give him no time to argue the issue, or herself to weaken.
‘If I get them, I’ll come back.’
‘Be careful!’ he urged her, fear sharp in him.
She knew from his voice, the quick intake of breath, what he was going to say now. She did not want to hear it. It would make it harder. She opened the door. ‘I’m always careful.’ She smiled at him quickly and went out.
It was a little after nine o’clock by the time Célie reached the Cour du Commerce towards Danton’s house. The night was crisp, thin moonlight on the rime of frost, freezing roofs gleaming in its pallor, black shadows below. Her heart was beating so hard her breath caught in her throat, and her stomach was churning around, making her feel slightly sick. She was frightened of Danton, the immense power of him. It was like facing a violent force of nature, unpredictable, capable of destroying everything. If she misjudged it, she could be seized and go to the guillotine the same morning as the King!
And if she told Danton too much he might forestall the plan, and all of them would be taken: Briard, the crowd who mobbed the King’s carriage ... Georges.
She was at Danton’s doorway. She was shaking so badly her own breathing all but choked her. This was the moment of decision. Once she had knocked, it was too late. Forward—to see Danton to ask him to sign a pass for the King to escape, to risk her own life if it went wrong. It would be immediate, right here in Danton’s house. No one would be able to help her. No one would even know, until it was too late.
She would not see them again—not Amandine, nor Madame Lacoste. She was surprised to think how much she liked Madame. And she would not see Georges again. It was not enough to have proved she could be as brave as Madame de Staël. She had thought it would be, but it was barely a beginning. She wanted so much more than that! She wanted to love with all her heart and mind and passion, to feel everything there was, all the joy, even all the pain.