Chapter Text
Messidor, An II
Blérancourt, near Noyon, August 19, 1790
You who support the tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I only know, like God, through his wonders; I speak to you, sir, to ask you to unite with me in order to save my sad country. The city of Gouci has relocated (this rumour goes around here) the free markets from the town of Blérancourt. Why do the cities devour the privileges of the countryside? Will there remain no more of them to the latter than size and taxes?
Support, please, with all your talent, an address that I make for the same letter, in which I request the reunion of my heritage with the national areas of the canton, so that one lets to my country a privilege without which it has to die of hunger.
I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not only the deputy of a province; you are one of humanity and of the Republic. Please, make it that my request be not despised.
I have the honour to be, Sir, your most humble, most obedient servant.
St Just, constituent of the department of Aisne
To Monsieur de Robespierre in the National Assembly in Paris
Almost four years had passed, yet Maxime still treasured this simple missive, which the tender misgivings of his heart always forbid him to dispose of. In the tumultuous years before ever he laid eyes on Saint-Just, it had been Maxime's talisman: words of faith reread in moments of doubt. If he had not done so in some time, it was only because Antoine’s presence had filled its place from the moment he first arrived in Paris.
Now, however, he and Antoine were parted by their duties if not by distance. His dear friend remained a whirlwind through the Bureau, the Convention and the Committee while Maxime, in self-imposed exile from all three, supported Antoine, Couthon and Payan from his room in the Duplay's and focused his efforts upon the Club. The warmth stoked between them helped to keep their mutual courage, to fortify them as they struggled alone through the long night of the Republic. Every evening, then, Maxime took up Antoine's letter just as he had in the past, savouring words he heard in his friend's inimitable voice. Though Maxime once flushed at the effusion of its opening sentence, he knew now that ‘Support, please, with all your talent’ was its most meaningful line. That what he first took for a boy’s idolatrous worship was, instead, a declaration of unity: a claim upon Maxime’s entire soul rather than an offering of Antoine’s youthful self. Maxime often brushed the note with his lips, as though by touching some lingering trace of Antoine’s skin thereon, his kiss might pass to the hand busily penning notes in the Police Bureau. His face pressed close to the rough grain, he imagined the paper still carried a lingering scent of tilled soil and ripening wheat, stone walls, the sweat on Antoine’s palm as he once clutched the letter to his breast and hastened to make the post.
Yet though this missive comforted Maxime’s nights and delivered some scant, fractured hours of rest, he woke with a single thought:
The Republic is dying.
She who sprang forth fully-formed from the spent loins of a broken past; who planted her strong feet upon French soil, spear in hand, and called their hearts; She, whom Maxime had loved and served most faithfully: dying. What was she become, the goddess of French liberty? France still, but robbed of the fullness of womanhood, her figure worn ragged, Her breasts flat and starved, Her ribs like curved, bare branches beneath the skin. Black, consumptive crescents shadowed Her fading eyes and Her body bloomed with the bruises of deceit, the open wounds of ongoing war. Her voice- once both hymn and chant de guerre- choked upon the blood poured down Her gaping throat by villains like Fouché. Where once Maxime walked in the shadowed grace of Her advancing steps, now he gathered Her in weak embrace, his back a humble shield ‘gainst the blows rained down upon Her. She was a great weight to bear, the Republic, and he but a frail and tired man to do it.
Had they toppled a king to raise another tyrant in his place? Driven princes from the battlefield to feed such howling, ambitious furies on French blood? Had they been spared the crush of Louis Capet’s heel, the maw of Pitt’s machinations, only so they might lose to vice? To die bringing forth Liberty was the essence of vertu, but to have stood bathed in Her light merely to cast Her aside in the gutter: what deeper shame could exist? What greater betrayal was there, than for these corrupt members of the Convention and Committees to infect honest deputies? Than to attack Her staunchest defenders, squandering the People's hope and effacing their own vile intrigues by attributing heaped corpses and foul ambitions to Her best allies?
If Maxime’s first thought were for the Republic, however, his bitter musings spawned further revelation: I am going to die.
In the beginning, the threat of death had fallen upon the shoulders of every representative like thick fog on an autumn morning upon the shoulders. By the summer of Year II, it had settled in their bones like old age, thinning hair and frosting it grey, hollowing cheeks and painting shadows ‘neath their eyes. Even Antoine’s face had not escaped a map of fragile lines demarcating the boundaries of every emotion permitted to grace it. As certain animals survive in harsh and inhospitable domains, they all had been shaped by uncertainty and turmoil. Yet martyrdom, though oft’ on Maxime’s lips, had always seemed nebulous: a distant uncertainty, a slow encroachment like the parching of summer grass. Somehow, death became a state of being than a singular fate. Now, however, the thought of it seemed inescapable, sharp and clear as a shard of broken glass. The consolation of philosophy had not prepared him for this moment: less the terror of dying, and more the sorrow of failure. Only his trusted friends gathered close to aid her. Georges rallied the Convention with his speeches as Payan held the Commune and battled endlessly against corruption. Bonbon and Philippe, with their boundless energy, hurtled like young lieutenants into the thick of every argument and mission. And Antoine, constant and clever, took Maxime’s place like Patroclus donning Achilles’ armour, his every word and deed in service to their shared ideals. He carried Maxime with steps that neither stumbled, nor slowed, nor wavered.
If any consolation existed it was this: that if the Republic was an idea, an ideal, She would die only to be reborn again, stronger and more radiant than ever. Other men would battle for Her in the streets of Paris, lie broken upon the same cobblestones and fall to the bayonets of a different tyrant. Those men would rewrite this sorry tale so the truth shone forth. Would treasure the words of true and faithful patriots, remembering them as one remembers old friends. In their own fraternal bonds they would seek to recreate the love of patrie and peuple and one another that bound Maxime to Georges or Philippe; perhaps some, even, would discover their strength in the antiquated love of a dear and loyal friend, burn with it as Maxime himself burned.
I will bear it, Maxime thought, bear it all to the very end. He would give of himself until She needed him no more, ‘til there was no more, even, to take, and go to the grave as his Creator willed. Such was the nature of all great change: it could not be purchased with words alone, but must come from blood and sacrifice. If he died, it would be knowing that the immortal ideas they had spoken would take shape again, long after his death. There was, he thought, a happiness in such knowledge. Maxime swallowed this comfort gratefully: a thin gruel when otherwise he might have starved.
*
A ridiculous dictator, Collot had called him on the final night that Maxime attended the Committee. Dictator! Dictator! Dictator! The accusation came ever more to mind, as he heard it murmured by faceless men as he merely passed by in the street. As he found himself compared to an entire encyclopedia of criminals and dictators and tyrants in the deluge of letters that spilled across his desk with each passing day. Was he so despised? So unworthy? At times Maxime read and reread them at such length that Éléonore, discovering him thus engaged, snatched the notes from his hands and ripped them apart. On other occasions, Bonbon balled them up to hurl from the window, calling apologies to the workmen below. Antoine set them alight; let the flame burn down so close to his skin that Maxime held his breath. That his mouth, closing ‘round those fingertips a moment later, soothed heat and tasted ash.
I am going to die, he thought again, and yet again. The outcome seemed almost inevitable now, and yet the fear that once accompanied this simple statement had long since dissipated, leaving certainty to crystalise. It was the other thought, following in its footsteps, that troubled his heart: I am going to die, and those I love will die with me.
Much as the likes of Tallien and Fouché might imagine that Maxime composed notes and tallies of suspects during his absence from Convention and Committee, or wrote endless lists of enemies to feed the guillotine, the only names Maxime called to mind belonged to his companions. In the dark hours when sleep eluded him, the silvered early ‘morn before full sunrise, he lay awake, imagining the crimes for which they could be accused:
Claude-François de Payan- crime: loyalty, pursuing the cause of morality and justice with rigour and zeal.
Jacques-Louis David- crime: passionate devotion to the Revolution. Love for Marat and the tyrant, Robespierre.
Maurice Duplay- crime: sheltering the monster, Robespierre. Benefiting from a tyrant’s largess.
Augustin Bon Joseph Robespierre- crime: fraternal love. Abjuring the native sweetness of his character in faithful devotion to his elder brother and the Republic.
Philippe-François-Joseph Le Bas- crime: bold, dutiful and outspoken against the conspirators. Honest in his love of the patrie. Devotion to the triumvir, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just.
Georges Auguste Couthon- crime: morality, vertu, gentility and sense of justice. Working tirelessly in the service of the People.
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just- crime: …
But Maxime’s mind, let alone his heart, never permitted his thoughts to stray further than that beloved name. He knew well enough how Antoine’s virtue incited every vice that his detractors possessed, how he roused in them both a possessive desire never to part from him and at the same time to destroy him utterly.
*
On 19 Messidor, Collot told the story of William Tell before the Jacobin Club, performing it with all the thunderous force, perhaps, with which he once performed in the theater. His voice welled from the broad depths of his chest, resounding from the walls, rolling across the gathered citizens. He spoke of the tyrannical villain Albrecht Gessler, who hung his hat from a pole and forced people to bow before it in deference. With tremulous, wet-eyed passion, Collot told of Tell’s defiance, of the terror and despair he felt when Gessler forced him to shoot the apple from his beloved son’s head. And then, voice soaring upwards, he spoke of bravery, of the courage of resistance, of the assassination of Gessler that sparked rebellion.
“Today, my friends, we are in dire need of another William Tell,” Collot cried, his gaze settling briefly upon Maxime’s. “If we are to liberate France from its Gesslers.”
*
From the beginning, the men of the clubs and the Convention acted like boys performing ancient battles, youths forging a manhood modeled on ancient myth. These simple visions offered simple comforts: monstrous villains ranged against god-blessed heroes possessed of the purest virtue. Such tales lacked neither death nor sorrow: good did not always triumph, and the lesson often lay as much in the courage of facing a cruel tyrant or accepting death, as it did in triumphing over either. Here is your path if you would be a man, such tales said: take up battle and slay the villain. If you cannot slay him, if you would not be craven, die honourably ‘neath the blades he wields against you; otherwise, be driven forth into the wilderness to die a coward or a madman. They had all been raised upon such stories, and thus every man amongst them sought to prove himself the heir of antiquity, as Telemachus sought to prove his manhood by stringing mighty Odysseus’ bow.
Maxime had no such tales to tell, no simple Gesslers to face. What could he liken this moment to but Heracles’ battle with the Lernaean Hydra? Mirabeau, Lafayette, Brissot, Hébert, Danton: all the old idols had fallen, yet now their enemies were innumerable, as though shattering such figureheads only birthed more conspirators. As honest as Maxime accounted most of the Jacobins- as sure as he was that their errors stemmed more from being grievously misled than from inherent iniquity- he might as easily have asked them to battle a morning’s mist, or take up swords and charge the Seine. What tale could he weave, after all, that would resonate in their hearts? Could those who had already succumbed to the corrupting, fatal influence of amour-propre, who wanted no more from life than to smash the ancient models and replace them with their own image, be asked to take up arms against a foe whose defeat offered no fame? Could a man who turned his eyes more oft’ to others’ faces, scorning to judge his own reflection, engage in private, secret battle with his soul?
Maxime could only speak to them, then, from the honesty of his heart. For all that Collot’s lethal influence was spreading, Maxime knew that he alone retained the support of the Jacobin Club. He stood at its rostrum with a sensation akin to Icarus plummeting from the very sky that had embraced him, flapping his broken wings in the gasped moments before he plunged into the grasping sea. David sat amongst the audience, hunched forward attentively, his face made grim by the play of light and shadow upon his stark features. Maurice, seated further along the same bench, looked careworn and frail. In front of them, Philippe, reclined amiably against Bonbon’s sturdier frame, his eyes shadowed with exhaustion and red as though he had recently been weeping. Conversely, Bonbon smiled fondly at those around him, impervious to any sense of disaster, perhaps still smitten with that young Corsican he had befriended and daydreaming of future missions. Georges sat in his chair at the very front, his expression one of serene encouragement, while Antoine sat by his elbow. The younger man’s gaze held Maxime’s, even as he bent to murmur something in Georges’ ear that made the other man laugh and press his hand. Seeing these dear allies, Maxime felt some of his old strength return. With his friends a beacon in this sea of masks, Maxime could speak, unwavering as they were unwavering.
“There are few generous men who love virtue for itself and ardently desire the happiness of the people,” Maxime began.
He paused, allowing the weight of his words to fall as he peered into the shadows. Such expressions they wore, these gathered patriots! Some looked to their hands or their feet, some to their friends. Others, as though to declare their own virtuosity, looked with pitying judgment towards their neighbours. Few apart from Maxime’s own dear friends seemed content to accord themselves neither honour nor denunciation. He cleared his throat of the mingled pride and despair that choked it.
“Of all the decrees which have saved the Republic,” he said, “the only ones to preserve it from corruption and free the people from tyranny are those which make honesty and virtue the order of the day. There is one remedy alone for all our ills: obedience to the laws of nature, laws which intend every man to be just and to live the virtuous life that forms the foundation of worthy societies. Such sentiment is written on the hearts of every patriot. It is a touchstone by which they may recognise their friends, even amongst a mass of deceivers.”
He spoke of men who fluctuated between being the impassioned support of liberty and shadowy, sullen observance. He spoke of the platitudes and empty tirades with which they cudgeled their enemies, even as they ignored public morality or the happiness of fellow-citizens. Their views, he said, oscillated like a weather vane depending upon which perspective purchased most favour: now the rage of a Hanriot, then the softness of Danton. Maxime spoke until his throat was raw and dry, until his eyes watered from peering so long into the shadows. Though he intended that they should denounce one another if necessity arose, that they be watchful and wary of the tricks and ploys of men like Collot, he wanted still more that they should denounce their own hearts. When at last he fell silent, his chest heaving from the force with which he had spoken, what he saw instead was their great and terrible arrogance: the certainty with which they faulted others, blind to how they themselves fed the great beast of the counter-revolution.
Some hours later, in the privacy of his bedchamber, Maxime paced the boards as he wrung his hands.
“I have not done enough,” he declared at last, forcing himself to look at Antoine. “Never enough.”
“Stop,” Antoine said, voice roughened by sleepless nights. “You spoke well. You have reminded them of certain, fundamental truths and can do no more.”
Tired though Antoine himself must be, his shoulders remained unbowed. As if to test their strength, Maxime placed his hands upon them; Antoine did not, would not, bend. His hands sought the lapels of Antoine’s coat. He bowed his head to his friend’s chest, and gripped him as a drowning man grips the rope thrown to his aid.
“My friend,” he sighed, as Antoine’s arms closed ‘round him. “My dearest friend. I am so very, very tired.”
*
“Saint-André came to see me,” Antoine said quietly. “He spoke of storms and portents.”
Maxime glanced up from his notebook, where he had been composing some notes on Fouché to present at the Club. Antoine stood at the window, gazing into the yard below. Within the short time since he had returned to Paris, the younger man’s face had lost its martial ruddiness and turned paler than ever. He was Endymion reborn, Maxime thought. Surely his elegant hands gripped the embrasure only so he might resist the Moon’s summons to eternal sleep.
“And you?” Maxime asked. “How did you answer?”
“I thanked him and said I would keep my own council.”
Antoine’s gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the windowpane. Maxime waited; waited so long that he began to think of turning back to his books.
“This absence you have forced upon yourself grows wide,” Antoine said at last. “It forms a gulf between you and the Convention. Between you and the Committee. Georges’ attempts to close it bring him nothing but pity and scorn. Everyone calls him your acolyte. Some openly ask whether he believes your hands may heal him, as Jesus healed the crippled man at Capernaum.”
Maxime flinched as the harsh ugliness of other men’s words dripped from the perfect curves of Antoine’s lips.
“For my part,” the younger man continued. “It is our ideals I press for. I do not compromise or plead for you, but every word from my mouth, every action I take, is guided by all we have spoken and dreamed of. There is- there can be- no separation: l’homme, le nation, la République. You. I.”
“What does the Committee think of this?”
“I am, I suppose, useful in their eyes. Wanted,” Antoine murmured. “You are not. Nor is Georges.”
He spoke as though continuing a discussion he had long held with himself. Antoine released the windowsill to skirt the shape of his breath upon the glass with his finger. He turned to face Maxime, the sorrow in his eyes enough to impel Maxime to his feet. He would have embraced his friend, had Antoine not raised a hand to forestall him.
“You cannot know how I am beset: in the streets, in the corridors, upon the steps, within the Committee,” Antoine said. “You were right to speak of false tongues and feigned sentiment, but do you not know, Maxime, how they also speak of storms? Of ships lost upon the wild ocean? How they call a man Leander and say they will spare him from the waves? Or Icarus, whom they will catch in his fall? Or Achilles, whom they will shield from Paris’ fatal arrow?”
“Antoine,” Maxime said softly. “I have known…we have known…the depths of this conspiracy for some time.”
“Yet they are careful not to commit crimes for which they might be denounced. If they speak, it is privately, and in the Committee there are only these…approaches.” Antoine’s features twisted the grace of his features into those of a god recoiling from some mortal’s impure embrace. His voice trembled. “You, Maxime, called me by these same names. You were the first. You taught me their sweetness as you once taught me the meaning of birdsong at dawn. You are every line I have written on friendship. You are the book from which I took my readings.”
Maxime felt pressure growing within his breast, as though Antoine held his heart in his hand and tightened his grip with every word.
“What answer did you give their entreaties?” Maxime asked.
“That I am not Leander, seduced, or a disobedient boy with broken wings. That Achilles was many things, but no coward or faithless friend. That if I were like Achilles at all, it would be in intensity of love and despair and rage, not in making peace with the Agamemnon’s of France.”
Only then did Antoine step forward, or Maxime did. Perhaps they moved as one, he thought, as their hands closed upon one another’s elbows. Perhaps they always had. Something, Maxime supposed, in their very souls…
“You must return, Maxime,” Antoine said. “Your absence allows calumny and slander to grow and spread. Falsehood is everywhere.”
“The Convention, much less the people it represents…”
“The general will is never wrong, but it can be misled: you know that. You also know I am of a more classical bent: if I have come to love Rousseau, it is more in the nature of loving you than he. On this matter, however, he wrote wisely. Will you ignore his lessons now, of all times?”
There was something youthful in that tender, breaking voice. Maxime traced his thumbs along the lines, fine and pale as spiderweb, that etched the corners of those boyishly large eyes. He reassured himself of their years together from this subtle, secret writing upon Antoine’s skin. Maxime rose onto his toes and kissed those cheeks, that supple mouth, though Antoine would bow neither to him. How could Maxime help but laugh at this stubbornness, this sweetest of defiences, as the whole world crumbled around them?
“My conscience,” Maxime said, “is pure, and I am calm.”
“Robespierre: the Roman, the Stoic.” A kiss, then, like an apology. Fine-boned fingers, light as bird’s feathers, brushed Maxime’s jaw. Antoine pulled back to meet his gaze, steady and implacable. “It is well. A man should not fear death when posterity awaits. But the Republic…”
“Is not one man.”
“No, or you would be the dictator they claim. But what will She become? An actress? A harlot? Stripped of dignity and mocked by the same men who defiled Her? Forced to birth oppressions when she might have nursed every freedom we dreamed of?” Antoine shook his head. “Maxime, it is not one man, but do you suppose they will spare Payan? Dumas? Will they allow Georges to live?”
Maxime hesitated. There was a tenderness between Georges and Antoine that did not encompass him: a loving, unnameable intimacy that never encroached upon their own relations. On Georges’ part at least, an admiration for a form that suggested the purity of masculine beauty found in Girodet or David. An admiration that had in it something of the fatal romance, but lacked the burning desire to be joined, to touch and consummate and find completion: more a desire of the mystic for the Beloved.
“He speaks of you,” Maxime said. “He says you are like a rose: exquisite, hardier than you look, defended by any number of thorns. And yet, as men will pluck a rose to stick in their buttonhole, they would have you beside them to ornament their cause. No one would begrudge you life, Antoine. Or the years you might still serve the patrie. Your ideals…”
“Am I, now, thrown in amongst your enemies? Do you feed me to beasts?”
“It is more important to serve the nation than...”
“One cannot govern without friends, Maxime, and a plucked rose is swift to wither. It is not made to be kept, or to live apart from what sustains it.”
“What is it, Antoine, that sustains you?”
“The nation. The people. Our ideals. You. All are inseparable to me. As a rose is simply the alchemy of sunlight and water, soil and seed.”
Had Antoine become the lawyer his mother intended him to be, Maxime thought, he might have been unstoppable. As it was, the simple, unadorned profundity of the argument left Maxime silent, chastened.
“I will die, and gladly so, if a time comes when I am deprived of the ability to benefit the people,” Antoine murmured, kissing Maxime with such tenderness and certainty that it was as though their years were numbered in millenia and not meager years. “Do not, my friend, allow your absence to hasten the blade.”
*
In the Club, Maxime spoke of Fouché’s crimes at Ville-Affranchie. He told every foul detail of the mutilation and murder that had ensued during his mission, of his obscene parodies of faith and religious rites. He spoke of the terror Fouché employed to silence patriots. In the end, the Club, if not yet the Tribunal, condemned him and drove him forth.
Of Collot, he said nothing. Not yet.
We shall see who the real Gesslers of France are, Maxime thought, when they are deprived of their henchmen.
Thermidor
They had both come- Antoine, Georges- like emissaries from a distant land, entreating him within the little room where Maxime greeted all his visitors.
“I ask nothing of you. Nothing,” Antoine said, his voice low and urgent, “but this: return to the Committee.”
“Antoine…”
“You are wandering, alone. I have made a path forward, even if it is with Barère. We have made them see reason on the implementation of the Ventôse Decrees.”
“You have friends on both Committees who tender you,” Georges interrupted, staying the flow of Antoine’s words with a motion of his hand. “You have us, and Le Bas and David besides. I have no love for Barère either, Maxime, but he is an opportunist: in no way can he be compared to such tigers as Billaud and Collot. He means you no harm.”
Perhaps not, Maxime thought, but then for what purpose, other than malice, would Vadier or Collot assent to furthering decrees that have languished for months?
“I esteem you both as patriots and as men," he said at last, meaning every word of it. "Never have you given me cause to doubt your virtue, or the purity of your hearts. I will go, since you ask it.”
And so saying, he clasped their hands. Georges’: loose skinned and thin, like a glove over bare bone. Antoine’s: firm, muscular, still rough from gripping reins and balancing quills. Warm. Alive. The both of them a tether for his very soul.
*
Despite the late hour, the heat of the mid-afternoon sun lingered, rendering the meeting room of the Committee of Public Safety stagnant. The air was thick with mingled breath, heavy with the scent of sweat and unwashed clothes. The two Committees stood ‘round the table as predator and prey will drink from the same river. The only sound was the creak of the windows being forced open, the protest of heat-swollen wood.
During the period in which Maxime absented himself from the Committee, it seemed nothing had changed. The room remained undisturbed, as though no time had passed. The table with its green cloth, its scatter of glasses and bottles, the fall of light and shadow: all seemed desperately familiar. The only variance was the silence between them all, crisp as a winter morning. A silence made the more disconcerting by both Committees being present.
“I think I express the feelings of both Committees, Robespierre, when I say we welcome your return,” Barère said at last, his unctuous voice spreading like oil spilled over water.
“Yes, we feared the depths of your ailment might keep you from us even longer,” Billaud said. His voice possessed an unfamiliar lightness somehow more ominous than the habitual rumble of his anger. “It is a relief to have you back.”
Billaud’s broad hand descended on Maxime’s shoulder: a weight to bear them down together. It was a trap seen too late, sprung too fast. Vadier, sallow, lined less by wisdom than by the multiplication of his vices, slipped into the seat on Maxime’s left. Amar and Carnot were swift to take the places on either side of Georges, wedging him into a space so narrow as to render his chair immovable until they deigned to stand. Antoine already sat beside Barère, and now Collot took the chair to his left. Only Le Bas and David found seats together, an island separated not only from Maxime, but Georges and Antoine. They had baited the hook well, if not entirely concealed it. Georges looked pained at this affront to his gentle nature, David confused. Le Bas’ hands trembled where they rested upon the table as he leaned forward to catch Antoine’s eye. Antoine’s gaze met Maxime’s, instead, steady and resolved in spite of all.
You have me, that gaze said, and I you. But in that moment, Maxime’s only thought was to expose the truth.
“It has been a little over four months," he began, "since Citizen Saint-Just delivered the Ventôse Decrees. Decrees whose policies were allowed to stagnate through ill-feeling. An excessive moderation that gave more succour to exiles and counterrevolutionaries than to impoverished patriots.”
As a young man in Arras, Maxime had composed copious notes on every case. His defenses were meticulously planned, the best lines and arguments circled, all else struck out. He would stand before a mirror, in those early days, to test his voice: that quality bequeathed to him by nature, yet subject in certain small ways to the force of his will. As he spoke now, Maxime listened to himself with that same critical ear: he smoothed the tremor from his words and forced his voice lower, restrained himself to the facts before him.
“And now you are happy to proceed. Now you say how well it is to prepare cases for the Tribunal rather than have calumniated patriots languishing in cells.” He paused long enough to quell the rising tide of his voice. “As though I do not know perfectly well how the laws of Prairial have been turned, by certain agents of conspiracy…”
“Agents,” Vadier huffed, his shoulder butting against Maxime’s.
He would not recoil, would not give his enemies the satisfaction of muttering amongst themselves: Robespierre the unmanly, Robespierre the untouched, Robespierre the cowardly and inhuman. He longed to adjust his cuffs, to occupy his fingertips with something other than the temptation to clench at the tablecloth, but satisfied neither desire. He let his gaze slip sideways towards Vadier.
“Agents. Do you suppose it matters whether one is paid by Pitt, or a willing servant of the counterrevolution? No. If a man’s deeds and words align him with the forces of tyranny, then he is an agent of it.”
Amar leaned forward. “What are you implying, Robespierre?”
“Do you suppose I have not noticed the steady increase in suspects? The executions? How you have made a travesty of justice by punishing the simple and misled before the villainous?”
“Oh,” said Lindet, throwing himself back in his chair. “Now he lacks a taste for blood.”
He turned to look at him. Lindet, from whom the shadow of mourning never lifted, who startled back from whatever he conjured in Maxime’s gaze.
“You speak thus,” Maxime said quietly. “Yet sit contentedly at this table, sharing wine with mercenaries and butchers.”
“Be still, all of you. Did we not agree to this sitting? Are we not all weary of these battles amongst good patriots? Come, let’s have peace among us for one evening at least.”
The rough grain of Billaud’s voice was worn smooth tonight. Maxime looked up at him: at the mouth still fixed in its grim line, at eyes that met his own with a thoughtful stillness that Maxime had never seen before. It was not, he reflected, what one might call calculating, yet there was something in Billaud’s calm that made him uneasy.
“We did not invite your return, Robespierre, to wage war. No, we would be men of peace.”
“Peace?” Maxime asked.
Antoine leaned forward, his arms folded before him on the table like a schoolboy. He fixed his gaze on Billaud.
“Peace is a tyrant’s word,” he said. “It is fit for slaves: as sugar lulls a teething child, talk of peace lulls a people unaccustomed to freedom. Say justice. There is only just and unjust in this world: the latter must not come to govern, the former must be allowed to govern us.”
“We are your friends,” Billaud said at last, with a great and billowing sigh: a terrific performance of sorrow. His hand, almost as large and rough as Danton’s, smothered Maxime’s, parted his fingers to force the thickness of his own between them and curl them down together. “We have always gone forward together.”
Across the green table, Maxime met Antoine’s eyes. Saw in them a confirmation of what he already knew: they had no friends here but each other. These laws the Committee suddenly saw fit to enact, the report upon them that they offered now for Antoine to deliver in the Convention, were a seduction. As a lascivious man might offer trinkets to some pretty girl, the Committees would seek to purchase Antoine's clever mind and ringing voice, those beguiling eyes, that marble form, his reputation for heroism and victory. This meeting, then, was not- perhaps had never been- a reconciliation with Maxime, but rather an overture to Antoine.
In that moment, the whole plot unfolded before Maxime.
Even so, when the moment came, he signed the new decree they put before him. Then he returned home to the Duplay’s, and to his desk. He began to write.
*
Maxime admitted no visitors. Though he heard Antoine’s steps upon the outer staircase and his tap upon the door, he resisted the longing to answer. Even when he heard the familiar richness of Antoine’s voice cajoling Maurice down below, when the landlord first asked Maxime to see the younger man and then attempted to intercede on Antoine’s behalf, Maxime refused to see him. He gave no reason for this abrupt cessation, as it must have seemed, of their friendship. Not because there was none, but because he could not trust his own voice to speak the truth: that he was composing a speech that would lay bare all his heart, that would either free him of censure or condemn him to death. That he would not, in writing it, condemn his friends to fall with him or feed the rumours that made of them no more than puppets at best, triumvirs at worse. He could offer no more than this: the choice of standing by him through this tribulation, or of dissolving their bonds and continuing ever forward.
“I will see no one,” Maxime said, firm, loud enough that his voice might even carry to Antoine as he waited.
He closed the door then, listening to Maurice’s retreating, defeated steps. Stood with his hand upon it, his fingers aching to fling the door open again; with his forehead bent against the wood as if to pass through so solid a barrier. And then, as Antoine's departing steps echoed upon the cobblestones below, he returned to work.
The letter arrived on the morning of 7 Thermidor, delivered by Éléonore’s trembling hand and written with greater irreverence than ever. Penned in such haste that the letters listed and ran together.
My dear friend,
What can this absence mean? Why is there silence between us, and a door barred to my most sincere entreaty?
I am pure. Do you doubt me? Some misgiving tells me you must.
Some poisonous calumny has been poured into your ear. Give me your rage then, Maxime. Let me burn with your denunciation. Strike me with every word. All else is intolerable.
I remain the Republic’s- and your-
Saint-Just
Did the words blur from the ache in Maxime’s eyes? Did the exhaustion of the hours spent in writing, in composing this great- and perhaps final- speech overcome him then? Did some dark and unacknowledged terror seize him? Maxime forbid it. Held instead to the remaining courage in his heart. To this final act of love: for the Republic, for his friends. For Antoine.
“Burn the letter, Éléonore,” Maxime said, his voice absolutely steady. His hand did not even tremble when he returned the missive to her, though his fingers lingered upon the paper. “As soon as possible.”
“I do not understand you, Maxime,” she said, such sorrow written on her lips that it was as though she were become Antoine’s looking glass. “It is by Saint-Just’s hand. If you could see his face, you would not affect such coldness.”
“That is why I do not see him, little bird.”
“But it is Antoine! My God, what can he possibly have done…?”
“Nothing, my dear,” Maxime said at last, gathering Éléonore into the circle of his arms. She did not weep, though her eyes were wet and her cheeks ruddy. “He is innocent. You are both so terribly, terribly innocent.”
*
Perhaps, Maxime supposed, this was his final evening, and so he spent it walking with Éléonore along the Champs-Élysées, Brount dancing upon the end of his leash. At last, Maxime did not think of the pages of spilled ink waiting upon his desk. If he was watched with the burning eyes of tyranny, if calumny hissed like venom from the mouths of passers-by, he paid it no mind. The sky, suspended above them like a great blue scrim, painted in long lashings of wispy silver cloud, streaked pink and orange and the brilliant red of a fresh wound.
“How beautiful,” he said, more to himself than to Éléonore, “this calm finality of the day.”
“Do you suppose, Maxime, that it will be a good ‘morrow?”
Her question made him recall another moment, years past: he, Camille and Danton in the Palais-Royal, lounging on the grass beneath such as sun as this. It is a sign, Camille had claimed, and yet that sign abandoned them both: Danton and Camille, after all, died under much the same light they once treasured. Maxime recalled, too, a rare and precious evening when he embraced Antoine under a sky such as this: awed by how it turned his friend’s skin to gold, shivering at the red stripe that spilled through the window, across Antoine’s throat and then, at last, shivering instead from the grace of Antoine’s every touch, the soft of his lips. Perhaps, Maxime thought, such signs and portents were all meaningless. Or perhaps, instead, it was not for Man to know the mind of that Supreme Being who governed them all: only He saw what was good in both love and death, in fear and in hope. Tomorrow, after all, Maxime would ascend the tribune. He would speak his whole heart, and they would hear him. He would die, or not, but his conscience would be pure, calm and he would remain inviolate. Such a fate could be called goodness, after all, even if it were cruel.
“It foretells a good morning,” he said gently, because he could not say what was in his heart: be brave, Éléonore, and live on.
“I understand now,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “You mean to die.”
Strange, perhaps, but in that moment Maxime smiled as he had not for some time. He pressed her hand while knowing, even as he did, that she would feel the farewell in it.
“I mean to live,” Maxime said, looking up at the sky. “If only in posterity.”