Although André admired Cazalès’s moral character, he did not forget the man’s role as a conservative leader. Whether in the Estates-General or in the current National Constituent Assembly, Cazalès strove to defend the Bourbons’ innate royal authority and the Tuileries’ “lawful” interests—positions fundamentally at odds with André’s political creed and irreconcilable in class terms.

After a dispirited stretch of small talk, Cazalès rose to take his leave. André made no attempt to detain him, merely noting that if he wished to contact him again, he could send word to the café and inform the proprietor.

Watching Cazalès depart, Penduvas returned to his commander’s side. Pointing at the conservative’s receding figure, André instructed, “You will personally handle all future contact with Cazalès.” Penduvas assented and reminded his chief that the Desmoulins wedding banquet was about to begin—should they go at once?

Seeing it was near noon, André said, “No hurry. We’ll lunch here first, then go. The wedding will run till evening.”

…

On leaving the café, Cazalès did not go home. At the next corner he turned onto Rue de Grenelle and climbed into a black four-wheeled carriage that had been waiting.

He meant to say, “To the Palais des Tuileries,” but what came out was, “42 Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, the apartment of the Comte de Mirabeau.”

In late November, Mirabeau—long ailing—had once more fallen bedridden after a night of excess with two scandal-ridden actresses from the Paris Opéra. Fortunately, his personal physician concluded that the “great oak” (a colleague’s teasing epithet for the Comte) was merely exhausted; a week or two of rest would restore him.

Even so, Parisians who loved their “oak” went in streams to Notre-Dame to pray to the Virgin for this great patriot. Fellow deputies visited as well, their faces all concern; Mirabeau, unmoved, would shout as soon as they left: “Another bastard who hopes I’ll meet God sooner!”

But when Cazalès arrived, Mirabeau brightened. In a pink dressing gown, the Titan hopped out of bed, swinging his shaggy, powerful arms, and ordered a good drink for the guest. The host himself could have only coffee or hot chocolate; wine and champagne were for visitors alone—the doctor had warned that alcohol endangered the Comte’s life, and the servants dared not disobey.

Mirabeau, in defiance, tossed back a cup of coffee, paced, and fumed: “My friend, everyone wants Mirabeau dead. It is sorrowful!”

“I do not; the King does not; nor do the people of Paris,” Cazalès said with a smile.

“Parisians like me,” Mirabeau went on, “but they do not know what I have done for the Tuileries. Else the raging mob would tear me limb from limb—even if I lay in my grave—and that vacillating King and his Queen do not trust me at all.”

Under the Queen’s influence, Louis XVI had grown suspicious and refused the Comte de Mirabeau’s sound counsel: before the Champagne Composite Regiment left Bordeaux, escape Paris by way of Reims, reach General Bouillé’s camp at Metz, and, with German mercenaries and conservative nobles, counterattack Paris.

The King feared that if he left, he would hand his red cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, the perfect chance to become regent, leading to France’s final rupture.

Mirabeau could spit blood over it. Inwardly he lamented: the royal family hovered forever between going and staying, unable to decide, and only after each chance was lost would they stoop to pick up a forgotten trump card. Now, just as the game began, it was to be called off.

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What made him fume all the more was Cazalès’s account of the conversation he had had with André an hour earlier.

“I said as much, I said it!” roared the Comte, then sagged into dejection. Days before, thieves had visited his apartment; besides some jewelry, they had taken 11 autograph letters from André. Plainly the deputy chief prosecutor in the Marne had sent men—André no longer trusted or needed Mirabeau.

“Could we still implement the march-north-to-Metz plan in time?” asked Cazalès.

“Too hasty. Far too risky,” said Mirabeau.

“What if André can be bought?” pressed Cazalès. He had weighed assassination but judged the risk of failure too high and let it go.

Mirabeau rejected it at once. “André’s appetite grows without end—you will never fill it! Besides, he knows exactly whence his standing, wealth, and power come: from Paris’s Revolution. He will never support the King—unless you set a crown on his head.”

He paused, then shifted tone. “Still, André keeps his word. Until next June, nothing will happen. Follow your bargain with him—go to Reims at once. I will go to the Tuileries tonight to seek an audience with the Queen.”

…

In the Cordeliers quarter’s commerce district, the newlyweds, the Desmoulins, had just seen off a wave of guests and, hand in hand, returned to their second-floor apartment at the Grand-Duc. Lucile, in a Grecian white gown and laurel, presented a “pure beauty”; Desmoulins wore his long waves, a maturing face, bright, lively eyes, and the air of excitement.

Their new home was next door to Danton’s. Still in the building were Lucile’s family: her father, Claude, a senior official at Paris City Hall; her mother, Anne-Françoise Boissière, a still-alluring woman said to have had several lovers; her sister, Adélaïde, sentimental and long unmarried. The groom’s father had died years before; his sickly mother was long bedridden; his only sister, after two days in Paris, had hurried back to Guise in the Aisne as soon as the wedding ended.

Of the hundred-odd attendees, many had left; remaining were General Arthur Dillon, a courteous middle-aged nobleman and elder brother to Colonel Théobald Dillon of the Army of the North; Father Pansmon, a perpetually drunk radical who swore loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and nearly lost his orders; and two Lycée Louis-le-Grand classmates of the groom—Robespierre and Fréron—along with their landlord-neighbor Danton and like-minded friends Brissot, Pétion, and Legendre.

The apartment had been carefully fitted over two months: deep-blue velvet curtains, a Bohemian crystal chandelier, fine upholstered sofas, costly silver candlesticks, a gilt dressing table.

“All this part of the bride’s dowry?” Fréron clicked his tongue, then teased his schoolmate. “Maximilien, marry the bride’s sister Adélaïde—Monsieur Claude Duplessis is said to have 300,000 livres in dowry and all manner of jewels ready.”

The Incorruptible glowered, shot Fréron a look, and stalked toward Pétion and Brissot, where the Commune’s member and the deputy were discussing the Decree on the Clerical Oath. Both supported it. To everyone’s surprise, Robespierre, a far-left deputy, voiced grave misgivings.

He called it the Assembly’s most fatal mistake of the year, bar none: “The revolutionaries force citizens to choose and to declare publicly whether they support the system. Though refusal bars them from public office in the new France, the paradox is that they retain the right to refuse—thereby recognizing their right to deny the Revolution. I can assert now: those who will refuse the oath will not be the mere handful of high prelates and subordinates the Assembly imagines.”

…

Brushed off, Fréron remained unbothered—elegant, dissipated. Once a fosterling of Madame Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV, he had transmuted the pains of a violently abusive father into a burning hatred of the Louis-Capet line. Though he had declined to propose to Mademoiselle Lucile and meant to heed his family and marry a noble’s daughter, he had not relinquished his clandestine tie with the bride. Indeed, the day after the apartment’s refurbishments were completed, Fréron had played the bridegroom here in Desmoulins’s stead.

At some point, Tallien drifted to his side—handsome, buoyant, a bachelor. Unlike the princess’s godson, Tallien was the illegitimate son of the Marquis de Bercy’s estate steward and a peasant woman—of abject station. After his mother’s death he drifted Paris’s streets in rags, working successively as clerk, painter, printer, and shop assistant. Perhaps from inborn insecurity, he favored splendid dress and a wide aristocratic hat with a tricolor plume.

Tallien handed Fréron a glass of champagne and complained: “Legendre said André would attend the banquet. Yet he still hasn’t shown—this deputy chief prosecutor of the Marne.”

Fréron glanced at him, drank, and said nothing. He knew the type: Tallien, sanctimonious, despised the very Legendre who had brought him into the Cordeliers Club, and schemed only to attach himself to some greater power—Mirabeau, Danton, Pétion, Robespierre, André—even Fréron himself.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep