Jean-Jacques was still smiling. His teeth were crooked, but they were very white. ‘There is a particularly large and greedy fellow called Philippe Duclos on the local committee,’ he replied. ‘The man with the cheese, whose name I don’t know, has hidden them so well no one knows where they are, except that they are somewhere in his house, of course. Marie-Claire is going to use Philippe to put his men there, so that the good citizen can no longer get to his cheese in secret.’ He smiled even more widely. ‘Only he is, of course, going to warn Citizen “Cheese” beforehand, so he will have the chance to move them. Then…’ He clapped his hands together sharply and made a fist of the right one. ‘We have them!’ he said with triumph. ‘Half for Philippe, half for Marie-Claire. She will eat some, and sell some, which I will buy.’ He opened his hands wide in a generous, expansive gesture, and his irregular face was alight with pleasure. ‘In two days’ time we shall dine on fresh bread. I have some decent wine, not this rubbish, and ripe Camembert! How is that, my friend?’
‘Unlikely,’ Carton replied ruefully, but he did smile back.
‘You are a misery!’ Jean-Jacques chided, shaking his head. ‘Are all Englishmen like you? It must be your climate: it rains every day and you come to expect it.’
‘It doesn’t rain in London any more than it rains in Paris,’ Carton answered him. ‘It’s me.’ It was a confession of truth. His general cynicism stretched beyond his own lack of worth to include everyone else.
‘Cheese,’ Jean-Jacques said simply. ‘And more wine. That must make you feel better!’ He reached for the bottle and poured more for both of them. Carton accepted with a moment of real gratitude, not so much for the wine as for the friendship. He thought the plan was doomed to failure, but it would be pointless to say so.
Carton deliberately put the cheese out of his mind. Even in Paris torn apart by the violence of revolution and sweating with fear, it was necessary to earn a living. He could seldom practise his usual profession of law, but he had a superb gift of words, even in French, which was not his own language, and Paris was awash with newspapers, pamphlets, and other publications. There was the highly popular, scurrilous Père Duchesne edited by the foul-mouthed ex-priest Hébert, which slandered just about everyone, but most particularly the Citizeness Capet, as Queen Marie Antoinette was now known. The latest suggestion was that she had an unnatural relationship with her own son, who in the normal course of events would now have become Louis XVII.
And of course there was L’Ami du Peuple, edited by that extraordinary man, Jean-Paul Marat, who liked to be known as ‘The Rage of the People’. Someone had had the audacity, and the lunacy, to haul him up before the Revolutionary Tribunal in April. He had stormed in, filthy and in rags as usual, carrying the stench of his disease with him. The whole body of them had quailed before him, terrified, and he had been carried out shoulder-high in triumph. There was now no stopping him. The Paris Commune was his creature, to a man.
Carton always took good care to avoid him. Even though Marat lived here in the Cordeliers District, as did most of the revolutionary leaders, it was possible to stay out of his way. Instead Carton wrote for small, relatively innocuous publications, and earned sufficient to get by.
So it was that two days later on July 9 he sat in the Café Procope again, near the door in the clinging, airless heat. He was eating a bowl of stew with rough bread – more than some could afford – when Marie-Claire came in. Even before she turned toward him he could see the fury in her. Her thin little body was rigid under its cotton blouse and long, ragged blue skirt, and her arms were as stiff as sticks. She looked left and right, searching, then turned far enough to see Carton and immediately came over to him. Her face was white and her eyes blazing.
‘Have you seen Jean-Jacques?’ she demanded without any of the usual greeting.
‘Not today,’ he replied, clearing a little space on the table so she would have room for a plate. ‘But it’s early. Have some stew while there still is some. It’s not bad.’
Her lip curled. ‘What is it? Onions and water?’ She sat down hard, putting her elbows on the table and both hands over her face. ‘I’ve lost my cheeses! That son of a whore took them all! It was my idea, my plan!’ She looked up at him, her face burning with indignation. ‘He didn’t even know about them, Fleuriot, until I told him!’
Carton was disappointed. He realised he had been looking forward to the richness and the flavour of cheese. It seemed like a long time since he had eaten anything that was a pleasure, not merely a necessity, although he was aware how many had not even that. The crowds pouring out of the areas of factories, abattoirs, and tanneries, such as the Faubourg St Antoine, with their acid-burned, copper-coloured faces, hollow-eyed, dressed in rags and alight with hatred, were witness enough of that. They were the people who worshipped Marat and gave him his unstoppable power.
Citizen Procope came by, and Carton requested a bowl of soup and bread for Marie-Claire. She thanked him for it, and for a moment the rage melted out of her eyes.
‘Forget the cheese,’ he advised regretfully. ‘There’s nothing you can do anyway. It’s gone now.’
Her face hardened again. ‘The pig! Slit his throat, and he’d make a carcass of bacon to feed us for a year! He won’t have got rid of all that food, he’ll have it stored somewhere. The Committee could find it, because they’d take his house apart, if they had to.’
Carton’s stomach tightened. ‘Don’t do it!’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t say anything at all! It’ll only come back on you. You’ve lost them – accept it.’ He leaned forward across the table, stretching out his hand to grasp her thin wrist. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself!’
She glared back at him. ‘You’d let that pig get away with it? Never!’ Her teeth were clenched, the muscles tight on her slender jaw. ‘I’ll make him sweat as if the blade were already coming down on his neck. You’ll see!’
Citizen Procope brought her soup and Carton paid for it.
She took her bowl in both hands, as if it might escape her. ‘You’ll see!’ she repeated, then picked up the spoon and began to eat.
The next morning Carton was again sitting at his usual table at the café with a cup of coffee that tasted like burnt toast, and possibly bore a close relationship. At the next table three men were laughing uproariously at the latest joke in Père Duchesne, and adding more and more vulgar endings of the tale, when Jean-Jacques came storming in through the open door, his hair tangled, his shirt sticking to his body with sweat. His face was white and he swivelled immediately toward Carton’s table and staggered over, knocking into chairs.
Carton was alarmed. ‘What is it?’ he asked, half rising to his feet.
Jean-Jacques was gasping for breath, choking as he struggled to get the words out. ‘They’ve arrested her! Marie-Claire! They’ve taken her to the prison! You’ve got to help me! They’ll…’ He could not bring himself to say it, but it hung in the air between them.
Carton found his own voice husky. ‘What have they charged her with?’ It was all unreal, like a fluid fear turned suddenly solid. He knew when Marie-Claire had spoken of it that it was a bad idea to seek revenge, but this was different, it was no longer thought but fact, shivering, sick and real.
‘Hoarding food!’ Jean-Jacques said, his voice rising toward hysteria, as if he might burst into mad laughter any moment. ‘She doesn’t even have the damn cheeses – or the bacon! Philippe has!’
‘I don’t suppose that makes any difference.’ Carton sank back into his chair and gestured for Jean-Jacques to sit down also. It was always better to be inconspicuous. They did not want anyone looking at them, or remembering.