A Place of Greater Safety

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I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it’s about the French Revolution, it’s not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances [.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought: that the worse things get, the better they get. 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. 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.

He soon found that he could learn anything without the least trouble, so he did not allow school to impinge on his life. He had a strong sympathy with the poor, which made him very popular, at first in his hometown of Arras and, later, as a deputy to the Estates General and the National Assembly at Versailles and Paris.

Danton and Robespierre eventually become colleagues in the National Convention and, for a time at least, political allies, but they are not close personal friends in the same way each is a close friend of Desmoulins. There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry. He takes bribes from the English and from French monarchists living abroad in exile, and he plays various factions off against each other and always comes out the richer. 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. N o one had looked at his nose much before the incident, so no one could say whether a noble feature had been impaired.

Desmoulins is a charming character, a lawyer and journalist, who is not afraid to criticize the old regime, and later becomes a leading figure in the Revolution as the publisher and main author of the newspaper Révolutions de France. Desmoulins is a brilliant man, but not usually a great public speaker, because he has a stutter, which, according to Mantel, began when he was sent to boarding school at seven. 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. And Camille in the end just breaks, but Robespierre his thoughts and motivations are never really seen directly. Then there was Louis Suleau, an ironical sort of boy, who smiled when the young aristocrats denigrated the status quo.

I found it difficult that sometimes they were referred to as their christian names and then others as their surnames but when you get to around page 300 you have learnt that Desmoulins is also Camille, Robespierre is also Max and Georges/Georges-Jaques is also Danton.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?

So great a hold did it have over me that I began quite obsessively to seek out every book I could lay hands on that dealt either with the Revolution itself or with the principal players. I found myself struggling with a slow crawl through the social history of what should have read as very hard. Camille," he says, "get down from there, if you drop out onto the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. It would be impossible to summarize the plot without making this an enormously long review, so I will just give the basics here. In Mantel’s version of events, Danton had opposed the king’s death at first, but is blackmailed into voting for death after his involvement with French royalists is discovered, but I don’t know how much truth there is in this.

She bandaged it tightly and put another bandage around his head to cover the bumps and cuts on his forehead. He continued to follow his father about the house, talking incessantly in a de Viefville fashion and rubbishing his opinions.