A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online Page A

priest.”
    “Oh, you want to leave that alone,” Fabre said. “Do you know how they pick bishops? On their pedigree. Have you a pedigree? Look at you. You’re a farm boy. What’s the point of entering a profession unless you can get to the top?”
    “Could I get to the top if I became a traveling actor?”
    He asked civilly, as if he were prepared to consider anything.
    Fabre laughed. “You could play the villains. You’d be well received. You’ve got a good voice there, potentially.” He patted his chest. “Let it come from here.” He pounded his fist below his diaphragm. “Breathe from here. Think of your breath as a river. Let it just flow, flow. The whole trick’s in the breathing. Just relax, you see, drop those shoulders back. You breathe from here ”—he stabbed at himself—“you can go on for hours.”
    “I can’t think why I’d need to,” Danton said.
    “Oh, I know what you think. You think actors are the bottom of the heap, don’t you? You think actors are ambulant shit. Like Protestants. Like Jews. So tell me, boy, what makes your position so brilliant? We’re all worms, we’re all shit. Do you realize that you could be locked up tomorrow, for the rest of your natural life, if the King put his name to a piece of paper that he’s never even read ?”
    “I don’t see why he should do that,” Danton said. “I’ve hardly given him cause. All I do is go to school.”
    “Yeah,” Fabre said. “Exactly. Just make sure to live the next forty years without drawing attention to yourself. He doesn’t have to know you, that’s the point, don’t you see. Jesus, what do they teach you at school these days? Anybody, anybody who is anybody, who doesn’t like
you and wants you out of the way, can go to the King with their document—“Sign here, Your Moronship”—and that’s you in the Bastille, chained up fifty feet below the rue Saint-Antoine with a bunch of bones for company. No, you don’t get a cell to yourself, because they never bother to shift the old skeletons. You know, of course, they have a special breed of rat in there that eats the prisoners alive?”
    “What, bit by bit?”
    “Absolutely,” Fabre said. “First a little finger. Then a tiny toe.”
    He caught Danton’s eye, burst into laughter, balled up a spoiled piece of paper and tossed it over his shoulder. “Bugger me,” he said, “it’s a body’s work educating you provincials. I don’t know why I don’t just go to Paris and make my fortune.”
    Georges-Jacques said, “I hope to go to Paris myself, before too long.” The good voice died in his throat; he had not known what he hoped, till he spoke. “Perhaps when I’m there I’ll meet you again.”
    “No perhaps about it,” Fabre said. He held up his own sketch, the slightly flawed one. “I’ve got your face on file. I’ll be looking out for you.”
    The boy held out his vast hand. “My name is Georges-Jacques Danton.”
    Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. “Good-bye,” he said. “Georges-Jacques—study law. Law is a weapon.”
     
     
    A ll that week he thought about Paris. The prizewinner gnawed at his thoughts. Maybe he was just ambulant shit—but at least he’d been somewhere, might go somewhere else. Breathe from here, he kept saying to himself. He tried it. Yes, it was all true. He felt he could keep talking for days.
     
     
    W hen M. de Viefville des Essarts went to Paris, he would call on his nephew at the College Louis-le-Grand, to see how he did. By now, he had reservations—grave ones—about the boy’s future. The speech impediment was no better, perhaps worse. When he talked to the boy, an anxious smile hovered about his lips. When the boy got stuck partway through a sentence, it was embarrassing—sometimes desolating. You could dive in, help him out with what he was going to say. Except with Camille, you never knew quite where he was heading. His sentences might begin in the ordinary way, and end up anywhere at