A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

the Place des Armes. Maitre Desmoulins had an obsession nowadays, and de Viefville dreaded meeting him, meeting his baffled eyes and being asked once again the question that no one could answer: what had happened to the good and beautiful child he had sent to Cateau-Cambrésis nine years earlier?
    On Camille’s sixteenth birthday, his father was stamping about the house. “I sometimes think,” he said, “that I have got on my hands a depraved little monster with no feelings and no sense.” He had written to the priests in Paris, to ask what they teach his son; to ask why he looks so untidy, and why during his last visit home he has seduced the daughter of a town councillor, “a man,” he says, “whom I see every day of my working life.”
    Jean-Nicolas did not really expect answers to these questions. His real objections to his son were rather different. Why, he really wanted to know, was his son so emotional? Where did he get this capacity to infect others with emotion: to agitate them, discomfit them, shake them out of their ease? Ordinary conversations, in Camille’s presence, went off at peculiar tangents, or turned into blazing rows. Safe social conventions
took on an air of danger. You couldn’t, Desmoulins thought, leave him alone with anybody.
    It was no longer said that his son was a little Godard. Neither did the de Viefvilles rush to claim him. His brothers were thriving, his sisters blooming, but when Camille slipped in at the front door of the Old House, he looked as if he had come on a message from the Foundling Hospital.
    Perhaps, when he is grown up, he will be one of those boys whom you pay to stay away from home.
     
     
    T here are some noblemen in France who have discovered that their best friends are their lawyers. Now that revenue from land is falling steadily, and prices are rising, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting poorer too. It has become necessary to assert certain privileges that have been allowed to lapse over the years. Often, dues to which one is entitled have not been paid for a generation; that lax and charitable lordship must now cease. Again, one’s ancestors have allowed part of their estates to become known as “common land”—an expression for which there is usually no legal foundation.
    These were the golden days of Jean-Nicolas; if, privately, he had worries, at least professionally he was prospering. Maître Desmoulins was no bootlicker—he had a lively sense of his own dignity, and was moreover a liberal-minded man, an advocate of reform in most spheres of national life. He read Diderot after dinner, and subscribed to the Geneva reprint of the Encyclopédie , which he took in installments. Nevertheless, he found himself much occupied with registers of rights and tracing of titles. A couple of old strongboxes were brought around and trundled up to his study, and when they were opened a faint musty smell crept out. Camille said, “So that is what tyranny smells like.” His father swept his own work aside and delved into the boxes; very tenderly he held the old yellow papers up to the light. Clement, the youngest, thought he was looking for buried treasure.
    The Prince de Condé, the district’s premier nobleman, called personally on Maitre Desmoulins in the tall, white, book-filled, very very humble house on the Place des Armes. Normally he would have sent his land agent, but he was piqued by curiosity to know the man who was doing such good work for him. Besides, if honored by a visit, the fellow would never dare to send in a bill.
    It was late afternoon, autumn. Warming in his hand a glass of deep red wine, and mellow, aware of his condescension, the Prince lounged
in a wash of candlelight; evening crept up around them, and painted shadows in the corners of the room.
    “What do you people want?” he asked.
    “Well …” Maître Desmoulins considered this large question. “People like me, men of the professional classes, we would like a little