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

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    He seemed, in some more important way, disabled for the life they
had planned for him. He was so nervous you could almost hear his heart beating. Small-boned, slight and pallid, with a mass of dark hair, he looked at his relative from under his long eyelashes and flitted about the room as if his mind were only on getting out of it. His relative’s reaction was, poor little thing.
    But when he got outside into the street, this sympathy evaporated. He would feel he had been verbally carved up. It was not fair. It was like being tripped in the gutter by a cripple. You wanted to complain, but when you saw the circumstances you felt you couldn’t.
    Monsieur’s primary purpose in visiting the capital was to attend the Parlement of Paris. The Parlements of the realm were not elected bodies. The de Viefvilles had bought their membership, and would pass it to their heirs: to Camille, perhaps, if he behaves better. The Parlements heard cases; they sanctioned the edicts of the King. That is, they confirmed that they were the law.
    Occasionally, the Parlements grew awkward. They drafted protests about the state of the nation—but only when they felt their interests threatened, or when they saw that their interests could be served. M. de Viefville belonged to that section of the middle classes that did not want to destroy the nobility, but rather hoped to merge with it. Offices, positions, monopolies—all have their price, and many carry a title with them.
    The Parlementarians worried a great deal when the Crown began to assert itself, to issue decrees where it had never issued them before, to produce bright new ideas about how the country should be run. Occasionally they got on the wrong side of the monarch; since any resistance to authority was novel and risky, the Parlementarians managed the difficult feat of being both arch-conservatives and popular heroes.
    In January 1776, the minister Turgot proposed the abolition of the feudal right called corvée—a system of forced labor on roads and bridges. He thought that the roads would be better if they were built and maintained by private contractors, rather than by peasants dragged from their fields. But that would cost, wouldn’t it? So perhaps there could be a property tax? And every man of means would pay it—not just commoners, but the nobility too?
    Parlement turned this scheme down flat. After another bitter argument, the King forced them to register the abolition of the corvée. Turgot was making enemies everywhere. The Queen and her circle stepped up their campaign against him. The King disliked asserting, himself, and was vulnerable to the pressures of the moment. In May, he dismissed Turgot; forced labor was reinstated.
    In this way, one minister was brought down; the trick bore repetition. Said the Comte d’Artois, to the back of the retreating economist: “Now at last we shall have some money to spend.”
    When the King was not hunting, he liked to shut himself up in his workshop, doing metalwork and tinkering with locks. He hoped that by refusing to make decisions he could avoid making mistakes; he thought that, if he did not interfere, things would go on as they always had done.
    After Turgot was sacked, Malesherbes offered his own resignation. “You’re lucky,” Louis said mournfully. “I wish I could resign.”
     
     
    1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:

    The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

    W hen M. de Viefville arrived home, he would make his way through the narrow huddle of small-town streets, and through the narrow huddle of provincial hearts; and he would bring himself to call on Jean-Nicolas, in his tall, white, book-filled house on