Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

First Number

Like the increasingly grey skies and embattled leaves clinging to the trees, the Revolution was discoloured.  Though in this case, rather than be changed by the redoubtable force of Nature, it was altered by the weakness of the very men who made it.  Here and there the red splash of blood and the orange blaze of counterrevolution, the gold of of venality and greed.  It was a barren world bereft of true friendship, reduced only to empty alliances and abuse.  At times Maximilien Robespierre doubted even good, honest Couthon, though he was a man of earnest and irreproachable character as well as immense courage.  At times, in the blackest of moods and wracked with illness, he almost doubted Antoine.

“Impossible as a dream,” he murmured one night, as Vendémiaire drew to a close.  His pressed his palms flat to the solid breadth of Antoine’s chest, trying, perhaps, to assure himself of reality.  “You have changed, and all my reason suggests our paths must diverge here.”

“Leave falseness to Danton,” Antoine replied.  “I have merely left behind the idolatry of youth, Maxime.  I love you as a man, not a boy.  As an equal, not a protégé.  If I did not, I would flatter and dissemble.  I would shelter in your shadow while planting knives in your back.  I would not tell you how very wrong you are at times, or hold my own opinions.”

“That seems counter-intuitive.”

“Love is.”

Maxime almost preferred these doubts, the phantasms of his exhausted mind, to the fears that plagued him.    That drove such a fist into his throat that, at times, it seemed he lost all capacity for speech.  If, in 1792, the future had seemed a bright and shining thing- a great, golden sun seen through the smoke of war- then that sun was now revealed as no more than one of Fabre’s props, the smoke merely a curtain hung to obscure its radiance.  He did not doubt the People themselves, but as scandal and calumny chased the heels of plots and intrigues, he no longer saw their goodness and honesty reflected in the faces of their representatives.  Even men like Hébert, who claimed their rough voice for an expression of his own honest nature, was nothing now but a cynical, murderous opportunist.  And if, Maxime thought, he had been so long deceived, like some credulous fool at the Comédie, then he had led all of his allies, his most beloved friend, his own family, towards this most dangerous precipice they now walked upon.  

His attention was increasingly called to such thoughts in the strangest of places, at the most inopportune of times.  The flash of light on cutlery became the fall of the guillotine, a loud shout became the yell of dictateur!, the crackle of a firework the sharp report of an assassin’s pistol.  It was not that he had no peace or happiness, that he did not remain blessed in his companions and colleagues, but the peace he occasionally felt was as disrupted by pointless imaginings as the sun by Autumn’s irregular weather.  All of Paris, he felt, lived under this particular cloud.  

In the early morning hours before Antoine’s departure for Alsace, they walked together through the garden of the Tuileries as they often had in happier times.  There was something comforting in the shadows, Maxime thought, as was often the case with such friendships as theirs.  It allowed for Antoine’s hand to momentarily grace his waist, or his to steal into the crook of Antoine’s arm, without risk of undue notice.  This particular moment, however, was sharpened with the cold and the constant companion of Maxime’s loneliness: tomorrow Antoine would be gone, as would Phillipe, and some more of the light in his world would be shut out.  The other matter did not bear consideration: that Antoine might fall beneath cannonade or Austrian blade.  That, or return to a political landscape much transformed by smaller, more lethal battles.

They stopped beneath the bare, spreading branches of a chestnut tree and stood looking at one another in silence.  Maxime could not say which of them paused first, only that he intended to say something terribly noble and brave, to affect- at least- a shallow sort of courage.  Before he could gather the words, however- for he had never been at his best when speaking without notes- a stray leaf fell from the branch above and caught on the brim of Antoine’s hat.  It was cold and dry beneath Maxime’s hand as he reached to pluck it, so paper-thin it fell apart at the barest curl of his fingers.  He was not a man much given to signs and portents, and yet suddenly the cold of the late hour seemed to penetrate every fiber of his being.

“I have led you to death,” he whispered.

Antoine said nothing, only closed his hand around Maxime’s arm and led him from their path.  Deep, then, into the space where the blessed shadows lay thickest.  Maxime turned ‘round, his back to the thick trunk of the sprawling tree.  When he looked again towards the Tuileries, its windows were but thin patches of light that barely pierced the night beyond its walls.  Even still, he could not escape a sense that this was too open, too public a thing.  That even here there might be watchers lurking.  He was about to say so, when one of Antoine’s gloved fingers settled over his lips.

“You led me nowhere I had not already decided to go,” Antoine said.  “If I feared death, I would have remained in Blérancourt.”

“Even so…”

Antoine bent to him.  If only, Maxime thought abstrusely, Camille knew how oft’ he bows the same head he is accused of carrying with such pride.  He slipped off his hat and held it like a shield against the intrusion of light and prying eyes, against opprobrium and ignorance.  Strange, that even this simple, harmless expression of love, this most reasonable conclusion to the depths of their affection for one another, could yet be used to tear them apart.  

Antoine’s lips, chill and chapped, touched his own.  Maxime thought no more.  Obscured by the hat, by Antoine’s height and the hand he cupped to Maxime’s other cheek, no one would see how he opened his mouth to it and drank the watered-down traces of wine that lingered on Antoine’s tongue.  Nor would they see, beneath the voluminous folds of Antoine’s winter cloak, how Maxime gripped first his shoulders, then his waist, and at last the sharp cut of his hips to pull him close.  His mouth dropped wide and he drew in a great gulp of cold air that filled his lungs with knives.  Antoine slumped against him, his mussed hair drifting in strands between Maxime’s still-parted lips.  Antoine laughed and Maxime turned his gaze upwards to the branches.  There was nothing, momentarily, but the trees’ crooked limbs against the backdrop of a darker sky, Antoine’s soft curse as his lips brushed a farewell over the side of Maxime’s neck.

“It is imperative that you resolve these matters in Alsace,” Maxime said, once they had both mustered the will to separate from one another.  “If we cannot wrest control of the region, and soon, we are doomed.  The people, Antoine…”  

He could not but be proud of the resolve in his voice, his commitment.  Yes, he would send the man away and not weep like some forgotten bride, he would accept that Antoine must be sacrificed to the churning machinery of war in order to save the Revolution, he would accept yet another gauche funeral procession and his lack of right to give full vent to mourning.  Maxime would accept all of that, as he knew Antoine would, and swallow its bitterness as Socrates swallowed the hemlock.  

“Of course.  You may leave it to me.  Or rather, to us.”

“And you must return swiftly, my friend,” Maxime said, taking Antoine’s hand in his own, brave now that they had already dared so much, his veins still singing with desire for him.  “The Committee would be lost without you.”

“Only the Committee?”

“Couthon, in particular.”

“You tease.  Now embrace me, in case there are no more chances.  I must make ready.”

This much was permitted: his hands on Antoine’s elbows, the forceful strike of lips to cheek.  The tender brush of his lips across Maxime’s, there and gone just as quickly, might easily be taken for simple accident.  They were not, after all, the only men whose lips had touched in passing error.  And then they were leaving the garden, that cold and private world, behind.  As they reentered the city streets, Maxime felt that he passed his friend from the safety of his own arms to the perilous grasp of the whole world.

In the weeks that followed, he had much time to reevaluate that thought, to wonder whether he would not prefer the army himself.  Paris in Brumaire of Year II was a wilderness he no longer recognised, its tall buildings fencing him ‘round like unassailable cliffs, its people downtrodden and grey.  Where, then, was hope?  Where the sign of its ending?  Where his dreams?  Maxime felt his home at the Duplay’s, the very presence of the Duplay family themselves, like the humble fire to which he returned in order to shut out the night and keep predators at bay.  And to their warmth and light he gathered his friends, those remaining companions who had not been drawn into the mire of the political drama unfolding.

And all around two circling packs of wolves.  Their howling.  Their hunger for each other’s blood.  And his.

        

Second Number

There were many things that Maximilien Robespierre accounted for.  Each decision, its potential for success or disaster, was weighed and tallied.  It was part of why he kept his notebook, after all- nothing in it superfluous, every thought carefully recorded and considered, gone over in great detail.  There were some things, however, for which he could not account.

He had dreams, of course he did, of where the Revolution would lead once some measure of stability allowed the Committee to breathe again.  When they were not busy, always, managing threats to their very existence: the posturing of the Hébertists, the foreign agents and émigrés, the wars upon their very doorstep.  He even knew the path he might take to achieve it.  He was not, however, a man cut from the same cloth as Hébert or Danton.  He did not desire the mantle of leadership for himself, or consider his role in any way unequal to that of the men around him.  How he had managed to be perceived that way, then, was almost entirely beyond reckoning.

At times, isolated as he was in Paris with Antoine, Philippe, Augustin and Couthon so oft’ away, he felt himself alone on the deck of this strange ship called Revolution.  At times he would take to the helm and carefully steer between the rocks and hidden bars that threatened to strand them, if not rip a hole through their very keel.  At other times the hands of the factions attempted to seize the wheel, to drive them aground or out into the wildest depths.  How often he longed, in those dark days, to have his friends return, no matter how necessary their presence was on mission.  How he waited for their correspondence and answered in kind, regretting every long delay, the glacial progress of the telegraph line between Paris and Lille.  He feared nothing but failure, but even so: how deep lay the morning fogs around the ship, how treacherous these unknown waters, how oft’ he thought he heard Siren song and martial drums on the wind.

This, too, was unaccounted for: the depths of his relief when Phillipe and Antoine returned briefly to Paris.  With them all back together, the family Maxime had built for himself seemed very nearly whole, were it not for Augustin’s absence.  Maxime watched them all at the table together, content and happy, heedless of the simple nature of Madame Duplay’s meal which she had laboured so hard to prepare for their triumphant return.  He watched them laugh and jest, tell tales of adventure and daring that Philippe surely exaggerated.  He watched Philippe seize every moment to tenderly embrace Babet, and she to place his hand upon her growing belly.  Maxime could not even find it in himself to be maddened by Henriette’s siege of Antoine’s attention.  He was, after all, secure in the eternal nature of their mutual admiration and the more pragmatic knowledge that, if Antoine must marry even for the sake of pretense, then Henriette would make a fine match for him.  Maxime watched and could not but think of all the goodness in the world, his fortunate share in it, and how much he would suffer if only to see that fortune shared amongst all of France.  He would find a way to speak of it one day, he assured himself.  To express the necessity of good and virtuous people, the people at this simple table, replacing the falsity of what had once been called good society.      

In those scant days, he felt he lived within a waking dream.  Here again were late nights of discussion, of working shoulder to shoulder, of quickly shared meals and midnight coffee.  Here again Philippe’s gentle wit, mercilessly punctured by Antoine’s sharpness.  In the pre-dawn hours when all Paris but they still slept, Phillipe slouched off to Babet’s arms, surely warm and waiting.  Each night, Maxime’s own bed remained cold and unused, no more than ten steps from where he sat with Antoine, calling him to rest though it seemed they both remained unwilling to either part or sleep alone.

“However proud I am to serve the Republic,” Antoine said that final night, his voice worn rough with exhaustion and his eyes underlined in the deepest of shadows.  “I confess at times it feels like exile.”

“Perhaps it is only absence which does it.  It feels no different here.”

“At least you have no Austrians, no cannons, and no Schneider.”

“I have, instead, Hébert and Danton.”

“I will fight them all.”

Maxime laughed to think of it: Antoine who would face war and the maneuvering of petty men in the field, only to return home and wage war all over again.  Inexhaustible, it seemed, except for his gradually slurring speech, the heaviness of his eyelids.

“There is no need,” he ventured, embarking bravely upon his own stratagem, “to return to the Rue Gaillon tonight.  I believe even the birds are near waking.”

“Ask.”

“Stay.”

A dream, Maxime told himself, several hours later.  The sharp, grey light of a winter’s dawn streamed in through his window, turning the leaves and petals of frost on its panes to pure silver.  Antoine’s entire body curved around his, arm like an iron bar across Maxime’s chest, fingers curled in the fabric of Maxime’s shirt.  They had removed only their coats and vests, their shoes, before lying down and tumbling into sleep.  How, then, they had come to fit together on his narrow bed, like pieces of a most challenging puzzle, seemed too great a mystery for so early an hour.  Maxime knew only that each attempt to extricate even so much as his foot from the tangle they now lay in was to invite tighter embrace, and so he spent at least half an hour scientifically testing the theory by subtle motion of his hands or arms, his feet and legs, with the result that he soon found himself half-crushed beneath Antoine’s shifting weight and idly fearing the arrival of the barber.

And still you dream: not so very long after, still well before the dreaded barber.  The Duplay’s up and about, moving elsewhere in the house, his wash basin brought, the workmen already outside.  Antoine, voice husky and face rough with the dark shadow of stubble, spoke in a low rumble as he splashed water on his face.  Maxime barely attended to the words, entirely too focused on watching the younger man slip off his shirt to rinse the hard lines of his body.  Antoine paused, half-smiling, half-serious.  Irritated, perhaps, by Maxime’s distraction.

“Speak,” Maxime said.  His hand reached for the washcloth.  “Only let me…”

A compromise, then: all of Antoine’s thoughts pouring free of his mouth, as though he had prepared such speech in his sleep, while Maxime listened and argued and agreed and laughed even as he passed the cloth across Antoine’s chest, beneath his arms, down the delicate line of his spine.  Turned about, his own shirt gone then, Antoine still talking and cajoling while the cloth moved over Maxime’s neck, his arms.  Cast aside at his chest so that Antoine could hold him at the ribs, pushing his fingers into Maxime’s loose hair to keep him in place and kiss his face, his mouth, his neck.  He might have knelt.  Maxime might finally, finally have let him, but there remained too much to do.  They were, after all, nothing if not the willing subjects of that tyrant known as work.

Soon after, they left: Philippe, Babet, Henriette, Antoine.  Maxime’s room was cold even with the small fire, the tender warmth of memory to return to.  More often, however, he remembered Antoine’s final words:

Be wary, Maxime.  Be safe.

A dream it was, and he woke without them.  

Third Number

It was late on the 17th of Frimaire when Camille arrived in Maxime’s room, his hair disheveled and speckled with silver drops of melting snow, a smile warming his face.  In one hand he clutched a sheaf of papers- the raw source of the second issue of Le Vieux Cordelier- while the other clung to the neck of a wine bottle.  The sight of him like this sent Maxime tumbling back to the summer of 1789, the Camille who had jumped on the table at the Cafe du Foy, the warmth of their regard for one another in those days.  Perhaps Camille himself thought the same thing, for he looked at Maxime, then, with a warmth they had both lost long ago.  Maxime had first feared that he had invited one of the wolves into his own parlour, but now he knew himself to be wrong.  This was no wolf, nor even its pup: just a boy run wild amongst them.

“Maxime!” Camille exclaimed, as though they had not seen one another only recently, and put out his arms.

No less now than in his younger days, Camille did nothing by halves.  His embrace crushed the breath from Maxime’s lungs, smothering him in the heat of his body.  It was impossible not to feel his own current state of frailty, the result of eating little and spending such late nights at the club or with the Committee.  Charlotte will chide me again, he thought, even as he half-marveled at how soft and yielding Camille’s body had become during this same time.  He felt, Maxime thought, almost like a nobleman.  

If Camille had noticed this momentary hesitation, it did not show in his face as he crossed the threshold into Maxime’s study.  He swung the bottle of wine above his head with a lazy twirl of his wrist, as delighted as a schoolboy.

“A gift,” he crowed, setting it down upon Maxime’s desk.  “Danton sends his regards.”

A chill passed over him, as though Danton were in the very room and had stooped to breathe against his neck.  Maxime put a hand up, rubbing the nape of his neck where the absent man’s phantom fangs had bitten.  He looked at the bottle upon his desk: its fine green glass, the liquid inside white rather than the habitual vin rouge that had replaced the grands crus of the monarchy.  Of course Danton would send white wine.  A Riesling or Ruländer, perhaps?  A Gewürztraminer or a Verdejo?  Had he pilfered it from confiscated property at some point, or obtained it in Belgium?  Had it come from the hands of Dumouriez?  A thousand half-remembered stories and idle jests seemed to whisper in his ears, so that he must shake his head and remind himself to focus only on Hébert.

“Thank you, Camille,” he said.  “But I have a terrible stomachache.”

Camille’s laugh was as bright and fragile as the bubbles in champagne.  If he had even a passing thought as to the nature of the ‘gift’, then it did not show upon his face.  

“Well then,” Camille said.  “I shall d-drink to you, M-maxime, and enjoy it all.”

How strange, Maxime thought, the easiness with which we fall into old patterns, as if the natures of our past always wait to resurface.  He recalled this, and not without fondness: the smell of ink and powder and wine, Camille’s sparkling wit, the press of their knees and arms as they sat side by side at the desk editing his journal, refining its points.  More than any of them, even Antoine, he still had that air of youthfulness despite the silver hairs amongst his sleek black curls and the web of fine lines where smiling had creased the skin like leather.  There were still the familiar splashes of ink decorating his cuffs, though they lacked the frays and tears of old.  He had crafted himself into someone, Maxime realised, but he could not say who.  It was like all of their portraits and busts: each capturing a particular aspect of the subject, each different in appearance, each choosing how best to emphasise what the artist saw.  Here sat the new Camille and the old.  Here sat a man he no longer understood.

“You stare, Maxime,” Camille said, setting down his quill so that it drooled a great bead of black ink onto the paper.  Another habit he had not yet grown out of.  Maxime remembered it, even in Louis-le-Grand.

“I suppose I do.”

In the dim yellow light, Camille’s face was ruddy from the wine and his skin damp from the close-pressed heat of the room.  It made him look boyish, far younger than his years.  Camille who must always be protected from his worst impulses.  Camille who put himself in danger.  Camille who had turned from him, at some point, and towards Danton instead.  Camille who had come cloaked as his mentor, drinking his wine, heedless of the risk and desirous of a revolution without Revolution.

Camille grinned, a smile that slipped drunkenly sideways across his face.  “I’m practically a grandfather, Maxime, to these young pups taking up arms now.”

“The Old Cordelier indeed.”

“Better an old Cordelier than Le Père Duchesne.”

Maxime laughed hard enough to start a far more pleasant ache in his belly.  Laughed as he had not since Antoine left again for the front.  Like old times and fond memories.

“Tell me, Maxime, is my face still lovely as ever?  Lolotte is a kind liar, and Danton a Caligula.”

Do not, Maxime thought, do not bring Danton here.

“What do you see, Maxime, when you look now at my face.  Tell me it is the b-better part of our memories, for I treasure them as much as ever.”  Camille leaned closer, their knees brushing now, avid and too curious for his own good.  He reached out and held Maxime by the arms.  “You are still m-my friend, let us renew that love for one another.”

“I see,” Maxime said, his gaze fixed on the blackened fingers.  “That you have grown soft.”

A clumsy sentence.  Even as it left his lips he knew how like an insult it sounded, the images it called to mind: Louis Capet, La Tour du Pin, Cazotte, de la Porte.  He had intended it quite literally, and yet could not deny that Camille’s was the face of moderation in the political sphere and excess in private.

“You m-m-mean to say I am not him.  That I am not hard and cold as if I had been chipped from ice.”  Camille- never, in Maxime’s experience, able to sit when he was angry- leapt to his feet and scowled down at him.  “That I am not so sharp that you can cut yourself upon my edges.”

“I compare you to yourself, not Saint-Just.”

“And yet you knew to whom I referred.”

“You two hold an uneasy truce,” Maxime sighed.  Why, he wondered, can you not see how very tired I am?  “It is always ready to flare again into open war.  Your enmity…”

“Is more likely to end with one of us in the grave, than with the fraternal embrace you seem to wish.”

“I love you both, Camille.  Should I sit idly by like Claudius, and make it my pleasure to watch two of the bravest patriots in all of France tear one another apart?”  Maxime shook his head.  “No, Camille, this is insanity.  And yet you will play it like a harp while all that we have built burns down around us.  Your hatred of him verges on counterrevolution, on the forces of reaction.”

“Ah, Robespierre, he will make a D-domitian out of you instead!  Is it now counterrevolutionary to hate a m-man only because you love him?”

“You twist my words.  It is counterrevolution to allow personal enmity to override the needs of the patrie.  To offer distraction after distraction with the intent of drowning a virtuous man in calumny.  It is counterrevolution to dwell on such pettiness while we are mired in war and conflict.”

“Every k-k-king, every emperor, has had his favourite, M-maxime,” Camille spat.  “Hadrian his Antinous, for instance.”

“Camille!”

Whose voice was this, that roared so loud?  Whose closed fist struck the desk, shaking the bottle upon it?  Maxime realised almost belatedly that it was his own, and only then from the rawness in his throat and the sting in his hand.  Camille’s laughter bubbled up again, pitching sharp as a false note.  He is frightened, Maxime thought.  And then, we all are.

Camille, then, down upon his knees in front of Maxime.  Still that helpless, broken laughter burbling from his mouth like water from a spring.  He pressed his forehead to Maxime’s knees and gripped his legs, fingers clenched in the fabric, shoulders still trembling with laughter.  Old habit made Maxime want to touch Camille’s hair, to stroke it back from his face.  Instead he clenched his own hands until their very bones seemed to creak and groan beneath the strain.  He felt the heat of Camille’s face even through the fabric of his culottes.  When the other man turned his head, his cheeks were red as apples.  There were tears upon them, still wet.  Laughter or sorrow.  Both.

“My old friend,” Camille said, closing his eyes, tears gumming his long lashes into thick black spikes.  “I am drunk.  But I must be drunk to speak to you, anymore, of my heart.”

“You are being silly.  A child.  Camille, just one week ago…”

“You frighten me, M-maxime.  You have forgotten how to live.”

“No, no.  I believe I have remembered it, Camille.”

Camille sat back, the weight and warmth from him quickly gone.  “Very well, I have bruised you tonight with my words.  As you have bruised me with yours.”  He cleaned his face with one cuff and blinked up at Maxime, resolved again, suddenly, into the Mercury of the Revolution.  “I think that we are destined to this until the end.  I will not cease to write the truth.”

“I do not ask that.  Only to consider, as you have tonight and in the issue before, to be judicious and wise in what you print.  You must, Camille.  Danton has little favour anymore, and even I cannot always protect you.”  He paused.  “No.  Rather, I will not.”

“You would betray all our years of friendship?  The times we have fought together, consoled each other…”

Maxime stood up and shuffled Camille’s papers together, heedless of their order, the smeared ink upon them.  “I would betray something far greater, if I allowed you to abandon the people and the patrie.”  

Fourth Number

O!  My dear Robespierre!  It is to you I address these words…

His very name written there, stark black against the white of the pages he clutched in his hand.  My dear, my dear- how very long it had been, indeed, since Camille had called upon him with such affection.  And what a mockery he now made of it all: their boyish friendship, their early years side-by-side in mutual struggle against the forces of the monarchy.  How he called upon it only after his sly accusations of despotism, the torrent of reproach he had unleashed.  How split-tongued, like a serpent, though without the snake’s just and natural cause.  Or perhaps it was Camille’s nature all along, and affection had merely made him blind to it.    

You whose eloquent words posterity will reread!

Such flattery, as though Camille had ever hearkened to words other than his own.

Remember the lessons of history, of philosophy…

As though Maxime were an errant child.  As though he could forget these lessons so easily: as easily as Danton forgot his false dealings, as easily as Camille forgot and rediscovered their friendship over bottles of wine, only to forget again and recall it when expedient.  

…That love is stronger, more enduring than fear…

As though Camille knew of a love that did not have himself at its centre, the sun around which others must orbit.  As though he knew any manner of love beyond its most physical of expressions, or could admit that love must sometimes possess boundaries.  No, Camille’s love existed only between the individual, to whom he gave primacy.  He had written, Maxime was sure, without considering love of the patrie, love of the People, love of virtue.  Or no, rather, for Camille there was no love beyond what his hand could reach out and pluck: love for Lucile, love for Horace, love for Danton and their mutual friends.  He could not perceive, as Maxime had begun to, that a love of virtue might entail elements of terror.  That the very essence of justice was love, fashioned into a blade with which to strike down its enemies.

That acts of clemency are the ladder of pride…

And was that all?  A ladder?  Clemency as a means to raise oneself above the People?  What hideous misuse of so gentle a term.

It is true that it is rather a committee of justice which has been proposed.

Was this what friendship was reduced to?  From those early days when they had all stood united, they had sunk to this: a fractured limb shattered beyond all repair, as Camille tried to splint it with mere words, to bind them together in a cause they could not, would not, share.  Every part of Maxime chafed against this imposition, the ways in which every word and action he made were put to use in Danton’s service, in Hébert’s, let alone in the hands of foreign agents and counterrevolutionaries.  Was this, then, his future?  A constant battle to assert his own words, to be true to himself, the People, the patrie?  And if he fell, what then would they make of him?  How then to ensure their understanding, when in truth he thought it only Antoine and Éléonore who understood him to the very depths of his heart.  

It was Éléonore after all who had brought him the fourth issue of Le Vieux Cordelier, knowing, he supposed, in that inimical way of hers that he must read its contents for himself, much as he had expressed the wish never again to read Camille’s writing.  Like any good friend, she had sat silently watching him as he read, reread and reread again every page Camille had written.  In the end, she took it from his trembling hands and cast it into the fire.

“What Citizen Desmoulins wrote,” she had said, in a tone lingering between question and statement.  “Was terrible for you.”

“You should trust the depth of your intellect.  You are a better friend to me, even, than some Jacobins.  Tell me your thoughts, what you would do, if your sex were permitted the political sphere.”

“I hope some day we shall be,” she said firmly.  “It does not suit my nature to be confined to this role.  What is it that you said of me…that I had a man’s spirit, able to die as well as love?”

“I did, and have had no cause to doubt it.”

She had sighed and looked at his empty hands, where moments before he had held Camille’s journal.  Stared at them so long that it was as though she were reading it all over again.

“It is Citizen Saint-Just who would be here now,” she had finally said.  “He would have brought you the pamphlet in my stead.  So, it stands to reason that I must be his voice, with he so far away.”

“And what would be his counsel, and yours?”

“He would say that you should trust in yourself.  He would say that you must face this world without doubt, that you must walk to the tribune as the Incorruptible.  He would say that the People are in your heart, and the patrie in your hands, and that nothing Citizen Desmoulins can write will ever take that from you.”  She hesitated, her hands clenching the fabric of her skirt, and then, “He would say that you are his friend, and that he loves you for all that is good, and kind, and calm about you, but that today you must become iron.  Today you must use his voice in the Convention, as you did at the King’s trial, because anything less will be taken for weakness and indulgence.”

“And you?”

“The same.  You are different men, I know, but you share your every thought and dream.  After all this is done, it is he who may need to become you, but now?  You must become him, as though you share one soul.  One heart and mind.”

He had taken her hand, then, as he had years ago when the Revolution seemed half-won already.  When he had thought to marry and accept the life expected of him, to return to the quiet, domestic bliss assured by every fairytale.  Before he had met Antoine.  Before he had heard him speak.  Before they had spent late nights in one another’s company, discussing a million topics and plans and shared ideals.  Before they had kissed and he had realised that there would never be another, man nor woman.

“Little bird,” he said then, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb.  “We share all these things, but you must know they are shared with you too.”

If he had feared that she would not understand, or that it would result in some impropriety on her part, he needn’t have.  Of all the women in the world, he had chosen the best, for she merely pressed his hand and rose to her feet.

“Then I speak with our voice- his and mine: you must finish your speech,” she had said.  “And rescue us all from this new terror their indulgence threatens to unleash.”

Of course, he would have finished the speech anyway, but her words buoyed him and sped his quill across the page.  He barely slept, seizing little more than an hour, in the end, for he would not finish without his additions and corrections in place.  If he had been alone when first she gave him the pamphlet he might have chosen different words, but he felt that night as though both these better angels stood at his shoulder and guided him onward.  Yes, yes, they were his words in the end, but theirs as well, and he dined for breakfast on all the rage and despair he had swallowed with Camille’s words, fortified himself with sweet, black coffee and the depths of his love: broad as the People and the nation of France, close as Antoine and Éléonore, Charlotte and Augustin, Georges and Phillipe and the family he had built for himself with the Duplays.

Today, he thought, as he marched into the Convention, all traces of exhaustion banished.  You fight for the Republic and its future, and you fight for its smallest components, without which it is nothing.

“Citizen Representatives of the people,” he began as, at last, he ascended the tribune.  “Success numbs weak spirits, but it stimulates strong ones.”

They listened, the representatives.  Whatever their private thoughts and concerns, no matter who amongst them wore only the mask of patriotism, now they were attentive.  Did their hearts kindle and light with Camille’s injudicious words?  Then each word Maxime spoke would serve to douse it.  Did they believe France to be saved, the Revolution finished, the Republic so thoroughly free that they could now change from revolutionary government to a constitutional one?  Then he would disabuse them of the very notion.  He spoke, and as he did it was as though he stood outside himself and watched with Antoine’s wise, judicious eyes.  He laid each word with careful precision, timed each motion of his hands and the very rhythm of breath and speech.  He built of his words a stronghold, sturdy and unassailable, every syllable like a new-laid brick.

“Revolutionary government owes to all good citizens the fullest protection the state can afford,” he said, and watched the representatives lean forward in their seats, waiting upon him to end his pause.  “To the enemies of the people it owes nothing but death.”

Afterward the representatives embraced Maxime, as he had known they would.  They gathered ‘round and pressed him close, clapped his back and seized his hand and otherwise made great and vigorous protestation of their support.  He could not know, of course, which of them truly believed it, which was merely deluding himself, and which might be an enemy.  It hardly mattered, for in that moment he felt that he had returned somewhat to himself, that Antoine might have smiled at his ferocity and dragged him away to more private embrace.

You would be proud, my friend, he thought, and felt the joy of it spread across his face.  For I have found my long-avoided path.

Chapter Text

In Ancient Rome, the vir triumphalis returned from martial victory to ceremonial honours.  Leading the procession in an engraved chariot, crowned in laurels and swathed in purple and gold, he faced the cheering citizens.  In that moment, at least, he was elevated beyond the mortal realm to become something nearer the gods themselves.  How magnificent the scene of rejoicing and celebration, the piping music, the flowers strewn to pave his way.  How such a man must live on in fame, his face and form and name treasured within the hearts of all who saw him.

Such reward surely belonged to Antoine and Philippe after their most recent mission in Alsace.  Maxime imagined the celebrations that might ensue in some other version of France: a full-fledged Republic where all battles ended in victory, the local representatives served the revolutionary government rather than undermined it, where factionalism and shifting allegiance had not torn great rifts through the societies.  He imagined the young representatives riding into the city still clad in their tricolour sashes and plumed hats, to the generous applause of a happy, contented people.  While it was no less than both men deserved, and while this vision echoed Maxime’s own heart, it was not for their sake that he imagined it.  Nor was it vanity or misplaced pride in his colleagues.  Rather, he wished it so because such a return would signal that the Revolution had succeeded, that there was food upon every table and peace throughout the nation, that virtue had triumphed.

Maxime’s anticipation of Antoine’s pending return, therefore, was like the consumption of an unripe fruit: sweet in some places, sour in others.  Sweet because he had felt Antoine’s absence like a missing limb, a tangible lack that made him start at every glimpse of a blue frock coat and head of unbound curls.  Because he had missed the intensity of their discussion, the piquancy of minor disagreements, the thousand ways in which they worked as one being.  Because Maxime’s dreams had been filled for months with blood and terror: with Antoine’s capture, Antoine’s tortuous death at the hands of their enemies.  Because when he did not have nightmares, they were filled instead with such langurous pleasure that Maxime woke confused and panting, reaching for himself and a man who wasn’t there.  Because only upon his return would Maxime know him safe; would his hand be able to reach for him.

Sour, alternately, because he knew all too well what Antoine would see when he and Le Bas arrived.  If he arrived near dawn, he would find long lines of women awaiting the meager portion of bread most would be denied; if late, he would see the signs declaring ‘no bread’ that hung in the windows of every bakery.  He would see how wan and worn the people of Paris were, faded like bright cloth left too long in the sunshine, their skin like parchment over bone.  Rather than cheers, he would enter the Convention to face sullen distrust.  Rather than strewn flowers, he would stride across the scattered pages of Camille’s increasingly rancorous journal.

I would have done more, Maxime thought he might say, once he and Antoine were alone again.  But what had he not done?  What more could he give than his endless hours, his heart, his mind, his very health?  What more could one man do, if he refused to make of himself a tyrant?

No triumphal procession, then, only this: the depths of the night outside the Pavillon de l'Égalité, the window panes shuddering with each slap of sleet and rain as if struck by the enraged hand of vengeful Boreas.  A particular rhythm of steps approached from the direction of the corridor, one Maxime recognised much as one might recall the pattern of moves in a dance learned from childhood.  One, two, three, four and the half-skipped fifth that meant he was trying not to break into a run.  Maxime’s eyes, focused on the letter before him, drifted again and again over the same word though he could not say what it was.  He maintained his lowered head, his hands flat against the table, even as the doors swung wide enough to strike the stone walls.  The other men of the Committee of Public Safety moved in a tumbling roar of pushed chairs and raised voices.  Maxime did not look.  He delayed the very sight of him, lest Collot’s watchful eyes should mark his relief, let alone his excitement.

Only when Maxime judged enough time to have safely passed did he look up.  Antoine wore no triumphator’s toga or crown of laurels.  Neither, after all, would have done true justice to his courage and talents.  No, Antoine arrived drenched and bareheaded, clad in the familiar deep blue of his worn frock coat.  Never, Maxime thought, had Antoine so resembled a hero of their age: wet curls clinging like vine to his cheeks, face pallid, the thin skin beneath his eyes bruised with exhaustion, his shoes soaked through and his stockings spattered with mud.  He stood tall, yet, and unbowed.  The others crowded ‘round, disputes momentarily forgotten as they claimed their pieces of Antoine’s victory by mere proximity.  They clasped his hands and clapped his back, made jest of his pitiable state, congratulated him in the most overwrought of terms.  Even Collot embraced him, laughing as he came away wet.  Antoine accepted all this with nods and smiles, his gaze idly meeting Maxime’s across the room.

“Saint-Just, we should be better friends after all your work on mission.”  It was Billaud who spoke this time, loud enough for all of them.  Maxime watched him squeeze Antoine’s shoulder, fingers lingering before cupping the side of the other man’s neck as if to kiss or kill him.  He shot a sly glance over his shoulder at Maxime.  “The Republic needs a man of courage and decisive action, if we are to move forward to victory.  It is not too much to say all our hope is in you.  Now come, let’s have you out of this wet coat.”

Billaud’s coarse hands closed first on the high collar of Antoine’s coat before punching each of its buttons free.  Maxime had not, nor would ever, attend the executions in the Place de la Révolution: the guillotine served a necessary purpose, but the festal atmosphere attending its function had long filled him with revulsion.  Stories of what happened there still reached him, however, carried as often as not by the blood-soaked tongues of Billaud, of Collot, of Hébert.  The way Billaud stripped Antoine of his coat reminded him of the tales the jailers’ preparations: the fierceness with which they tore the shirt and collar and bound the wrists, the contempt with which they cut the prisoner’s hair.  Despite Billaud’s words of praise, the familiar confidence with which he touched the other man, the subtle poison of its implication lingered in the air like sweat covered over with excess of perfume.  Throughout, Antoine stood as still as a Roman: his head high, his jaw set, utterly accepting of this petty indignity.

“As the people of Lyon might tell you, courage and action must be accompanied by probity and virtue, lest they be made a pretty mask for slaughter,”  Antoine said mildly, reclaiming his sodden coat from Billaud’s arm.  “I make my friends where decisiveness is coupled with morality.  Citizen Robespierre, I greet you.”

“And I you,” Maxime said, rising at last to embrace him with arms rather than words.  “You have just come in time for the day’s correspondence.”

*****  

It was well past midnight when they finally left the Committee, huddled- though it made little difference- beneath the meager protection afforded by Maxime’s umbrella.  Neither spoke, too focused on battling the elements and, on Maxime’s part, considering the contents of the final report Antoine had delivered mere moments before.  Perhaps, Maxime assured himself as he climbed the narrow, dimly lit staircase to Antoine’s apartments, that was how he came to be here.  He had always been inattentive, after all: too prone to living within his own thoughts.  Surely that explained why he had followed his young friend away from the warm comfort of the Duplay household and back to the rue Gaillon instead, though neither had mentioned anything of it.  Astonishing, Maxime thought, to finally stand in Antoine’s rooms when he had so assiduously avoided visiting him here.  There was an intimacy to this moment that he had not anticipated, a sense that they had crossed some invisible boundary as one might accidentally step across the unmarked border of another nation. 

With the fire burned down to glowing embers in its grate, Maxime had little impression of the rooms other than that they were small or, more generously, cozy.  Despite the excess and frippery Antoine's enemies so often attributed to him, there was no sign that he lived anything but well within his means.  The fire must have burned some few hours at least, but there remained a faint chill to the air that suggested its owner’s long absence.  The familiar scent of him, however- soap and worn leather, ink and paper, mixed with something indefinably him- lingered in the air.  As Antoine lit the candles, the room itself took on colour and detail: a deep, rich red like heart’s blood, gilt mirrors that made the light reflect and expand almost painfully for Maxime's failing sight, hulking shadows that soon resolved into armoires and armchairs.

“You will need some bigger rooms before your wedding, I think,” Maxime teased, a cruel barb to himself and a reminder to them both.

“It is large enough for my use,” Antoine said, turning away from the final lamp.  He leveled his gaze at Maxime like a pistol ready to be shot.  “And I have broken off relations with Citizeness Le Bas.”

“Ah," Maxime replied.  "I am sorry to hear it.”

Not entirely a lie, Maxime decided, but not quite truth, either.  An appropriate thing to say, under the circumstances.

“It is better for us both.  I will not be made a prize, or bred like a fine stallion with a suitable mare.”

Maxime had heard Antoine angry before, many times.  There remained something in it that always roused his spirit and sent a pleasant chill crawling along the back of his neck.  This, however, was different.  The rawness In his speech suggested a deep, still-bleeding wound that Maxime had never detected.  Certainly, he had always thought Antoine as accepting of the match as Henriette, if less openly enthusiastic than Philippe.

“I do not believe that was ever Philippe’s intention.  If anything, he wished to make a true brother of a much-admired friend and a political ally.”  Maxime paused.  “He wanted you to know peace and homely comfort.  The joy of a baby in your arms and children upon your knee.”    

“Even so, here we are.  Marrying for political allegiance is a nobleman’s game, Maxime.  I will not be forced to play a part in it, nor will I make misery of Henriette’s future even if my rejection has given her a painful present.” Antoine’s voice was no less fierce than the wind howling outside, and a good deal more cold.  Then he sighed and passed a hand across his face.  “I apologise, I’ve slept little these last few days, and eaten less.”

“Eat,” Maxime said, waving the matter away.  “I will read again through your report to occupy myself.”

They settled, then, into amiable silence in the armchairs closest the growing fire. Antoine took a rough meal of sliced pear, roasted chestnuts still in their paper and a piece of soft cheese rendered solid by the cold air.  Meanwhile, Maxime settled his glasses upon his nose and used the opportunity to reread Antoine's report.

Arriving in Alsace and going immediately to the Army of the Rhine, we found only disorder and the habitual malaise of low morale amongst both soldiers and the wider citizenry.  Of their grievances it must only be said that these were perfectly sensible to a true patriot, for the soldiers languished under the indolence and hauteur of their superiors (many of which were dregs of the ancien regime).  Apart from this, the men lacked discipline and basic training, had no good role models from amongst the officers and were besides poorly provisioned in terms of both food and clothing.

From even the most cursory examination of the situation, Citizen Le Bas and I implemented a course of action intended to staunch the Army’s wounds and assist the People in their plight.  We regarded the recall of earlier representatives, who had plainly failed in their mission, as essential to our course.  We quickly pledged the service of our hearts to the soldiers, instituting the strictest discipline towards commanders, officers and agents of the government.  We also requisitioned…     

“Maxime.”

Addressed in so conciliatory and hushed a tone, Maxime looked up immediately.  He found Antoine unaccountably closer, perched upon the edge of the chair opposite.  It was not desire written upon Antoine’s face, though their knees brushed when he shifted closer again, striking like flint to light its spark.  No, rather, there was some sorrow in him, some vestige of the young man who spoke so alarmingly and casually of his own death at times.

“And you praised me, long ago, for my ‘miracles’,” Maxime said lightly, gazing down at the report in his hands.  Not wanting to know, yet, what dread thing had struck his friend’s heart.  “Your actions can hardly be accounted less.”

Antoine’s fingers caught Maxime’s chin, turning his face up again.  Maxime had thought for some time that there must come an end to this pleasant dream they had shared.   He awaited it now like a man awaiting Death, with cold dread in his heart and a weight like stone in his belly.

“I have been considering friendship,” Antoine said.  “Its nature.  Its virtue.  I had much time, on mission, to ponder such things from the examples I saw around me- both good and bad.”

“And your conclusion?”

Antoine stood and moved away from him.  Went to look at the books upon the mantle, fingers tapping along their spines.  “It is more in the nature of a report.  One which will remain only between us.”

“Deliver it, then.”

“While I was on mission, I met a boy in the ranks…I call him a boy because he was so young, though in the end he fought like a man.  I did not know it immediately, but he had arrived in the army with a particular friend.  I believe they came from the same village, and had been conscripted with the levée en masse.  They were placed in separate units.”

“Go on.”

Though Maxime did not want him to.  Though he knew already where this path led.  Knew from a thousand stories and the deep sorrow in Antoine’s voice.

“I first saw him in the camp while we were with the Army of the Moselle.  I suspected him.   He held himself apart from others, not even speaking to them, and they treated him like a ghost in turn.  It would not do to have morale sunk on the eve of battle, or so I thought.”

“A wise decision.”

“I had him, therefore, brought to my tent.  I demanded to know the reason for his conduct.  I was stern.  Cruel, even.”  Antoine turned ‘round then to face Maxime. His eyes- bright with unshed tears- belied the fierce twist of his mouth.  “He said he had lost his friend at Kaiserslautern, and that he meant to avenge him at Wissembourg.  That he thought of nothing else.  That he ate only to have the energy for killing as many of the enemy as possible.  He was plain-speaking and honest, so I believed him and congratulated him on his mettle.”

“And then?”

“I mentioned him to Hoche, who called him an ugly name.  Apparently, after the loss at Kaiserslautern, the ferocity of the boy’s grief disturbed the men of his unit.  Hoche said the boy would face battle again soon enough, where he might as well get himself killed to avoid bringing himself more disgrace and upsetting the others.”

“Did he survive the battle at Wissembourg, then?” Maxime asked, his voice no more than a hoarse whisper.  Let the whole world expect his fortitude and call him a man of cold reason, he could not hide how Antoine’s tale affected him.  He recalled old tales again, a litany of deaths.  He recalled David weeping in private for Marat.

“After Baudot and I had fired the batteries, I sought news of my young friend.  Each soldier I met said that he had fought like a veritable Pyrrhus: mightily, but at great cost to himself.  He killed every Austrian in his path and had to be dragged from the field after the battle was won.  All claimed that he was found, badly wounded, dragging himself amongst the dead and dying enemy, putting an end to them all.”  Antoine took a breath that shook the strength of his shoulders.  “He was already half dead when I found him in the field hospital.  He asked whether he had not done well, and whether his love had not been avenged.  I said yes, he had, and that I hoped one day to take his example and do no less myself.  He took my hand, said he understood me well enough, and died clasping it while he murmured the name of another.  You will not mind, I suppose: I ordered that when their bodies reached their village, they should be buried together in a single grave, with patriotic honours, for their civic virtue.”

“I do not mind,” Maxime said, his voice a little firmer this time.  Here, upon the familiar grounds of political theory, he was on more solid ground.  “Can you say that he fought for the Republic, however, or for his friend?”

“Don’t you see?” Antoine cried, throwing himself down again onto the armchair.  “They are one and the same- is the Republic mere dirt and lines on a map, or is it the People and an ideal?  If a man cannot read Lycurgus and Tacitus, Rousseau and Montesquieu, if he lives within the city and cares not at all for mountains and seas and fields of wheat, can he not still find virtue and Republican values by looking to the goodness of his friends?  Am I not the man I am now because of you?  Like those boys who died in battle, those flowers of carnage blooming as hyacinths did from spilled blood, I have become greater for being at your side.  We have seen the same in Sparta and amongst the famous Theban Band.  How great, how strong might not our Republic be with such examples as these?  Imagine such friends enjoined to fight together rather than in separate units.”

Maxime could not but smile at his friend’s declaration, the way the words tumbled so earnestly from his mouth.  “You would overturn the structure of the entire army to gamble upon the loyalty of friends?”

“Men do not fight for dirt alone, they fight for what they love.  And all true friendship, Maxime, is love.”  Antoine laughed suddenly, his head thrown back with delight.  When he looked again at Maxime, it was with an expression of utter triumph.  “You said once you feared our deep affection for one another would shape you into a tyrant, but I have utterly disproved your theory.  There is strength in such feeling, not weakness, and we would do better not to fear it.”

“You may not know yet, with your absence from Paris: Camille has made much the same argument in his journal.”

“I know precisely what he writes in that rag he dares call a pamphlet.  I know that he uses such words as compassion, love, friendship, mercy, as a means to continue in his venality and that of his associates.  Do not, Maxime, confuse me with Camille.”

“No, no I am sorry.  You are not him at all, Antoine,” Maxime said, reaching for his hand across the narrow divide between them.  “You are a man of exceptional talents, and all that is pure and good in this world.”

Maxime removed his wig then and set it aside, the white flag of truce in a battle he had long been waging with himself.  He stared at it, passing a hand back over his natural hair, the rope of his queue.  Maxime felt oddly naked, even while still cocooned within the layers of his clothing.  Moreso when he managed again to look at Antoine, to see the open desire and admiration in the younger man’s gaze.  If that look might give other men confidence or pride, it only made Maxime feel the full weight of the gap between their years and their beauty.  No, he was not at court, nor subject to the vaunted aestheticism of the Rosati who had always mocked his plain simplicity of appearance, and yet some previously hidden vanity presented itself.  He longed to be more like the young lovers of Antoine’s tale, though no doubt the reality had been one of rotten teeth and smallpox scars rather than the Grecian beauty Maxime both feared and hoped they had possessed.

“Let me,” Antoine said quietly, leaving the sentence entirely unfinished.

Maxime stood, drawing Antoine with him so that they stood almost chest to chest.  The Revolution had consumed- happily- his whole life, his every passion.  But Antoine himself was all his hopes and dreams for the Revolution shaped into flesh and bone, voice and soul.  Maxime could not deny him.  Antoine’s fingers on the buttons of his coat were a momentous thing.  How long has it been, Maxime wondered, since I have been undressed by a lover?  Years ago, he realised, before he had permanently left Arras for Paris.  Yet here they were, Antoine slipping Maxime’s coat down his arms, not yet even touching him directly.  It was both a sweet torture and a measure of his absolute regard.

“Did you think of me, in Alsace?” Maxime asked.

“When I was not thinking of Austrians.”

Those same fingers, now on the first buttons of Maxime’s waistcoat.

“Or Le Bas’ snoring.”

The second.

“Only every waking hour but those.”

The third.

“What was happening in Paris.  Whether you were well or ill.  Whether the factions had yet devoured you and I had not heard.  Whether you would be able to stay our course here, alone.  One cannot govern without friends, Maxime.”

The fourth.

“And then at night,” Antoine murmured, removing the waistcoat now.  He freed Maxime’s hair from its tie, combing through the lank strands so that it hung loose down his back, ‘round his shoulders.  “Amongst all the nightmares, there was sweetness too.”

“Did you touch yourself?”

The question was timid, gentle, in Maxime’s mind.  It emerged from his throat, however, with the sound of an order, as if he were speaking of taxation in the Convention or arguing with Hérault in the Committee.  Antoine’s eyes narrowed only a fraction, keen interest rather than irritation.

“Alsace is cold,” he said.  “I thought of you often.”

Maxime took a short breath.

“I want to see.”

God, that such eyes should go even wider.  That the Supreme Being should craft men so perfectly matched as they.  That anyone could call it unnatural.  Antoine smiled and reached to undo his own cravat.

“No.  Rather, allow me.”

It was easier, Maxime found, to undress Antoine if he focused on each aspect separately and ignored entirely the soft rush of his quickened breathing.  The cravat came away first, followed by coat and waistcoat.  If only to draw out this most inevitable of moments, Maxime went to lay Antoine’s clothes over the back of the nearest chair.  When he turned 'round again, Antoine still stood in place, his head high and his hands clasped behind his back.  Maxime knew it well, this stance, for Antoine- a man of persistent action and motion- adopted it only when he did not want others to perceive his uncertainty and confuse it with weakness.  Long had he drawn on Lacedaemon for his strength, and now he stood as still as one of their soldiers even in the midst of his own room.

It was then that Maxime realised a thought he had not even entertained.

“You have never done this,” he said, horrified at the arousal in his own voice.

“Women.  And play- boyish play- at school.”

Maxime swallowed, but there was not a single drop of spit in his entire mouth.  It went down hard and burning, chafing the tender inside of his throat.  The youth who had written such bawdy satirical poetry, who had kissed him and made a boy’s sweet Summer oath, who had slept at his side and washed with him in the morning: Maxime had taken each moment for experience at seduction, and now could not reconcile the memories with this new understanding.

“All I know comes from dead pages and dry myths.  I lack only experience.”  Antoine smiled, though it was a fragile thing, lacking any real mirth.  “You will find me a quick study.”

“I always have,” Maxime said.  Then, “Lie down.  Show me how you would do it if I were not here.  Without artifice.”

He followed Antoine into the small bedroom adjoining the parlour.  Watched him stretch out on the striped coverlet, his head on the pillow, his face already flushed.  Antoine did all this with an expression of determination, a bite of his lip as he braced his feet and lifted his hips enough to push both culottes and drawers down about his thighs.  With one hand he pulled his shirt up about his ribs so that the ruddy length of his sex lay against the slight concave of his belly, against the trail of dark hair leading from groin to navel.  His other hand hovered above it, tentative and uncertain.

It’s been so long for me, Maxime thought to himself as he toed off his shoes and let his knees press the edge of the mattress, it won’t be as you expect.  No artifice, he had said, and yet now Maxime thought he might pretend to be whatever the other man had imagined.  Antoine’s fevered visions of yielding ephebes and their older lovers, whatever he might have chanced to glimpse in the darker regions of Paris.  He would be anything for him but this tired, uncertain man, so lacking the fullness of desire that he had been able to go without for the best part of four years.  So full of love for the man in front of him that he was left only with this cursed gentleness that seemed fit for nothing but mockery.

Antoine laughed, his eyes squeezing briefly shut as he rested the heel of his hand against the inside of his thigh.  I know, Maxime thought, I know it.  This is unbearable.

“I have only made love to actors before, Antoine,” Maxime murmured apologetically.  “People for whom friendship was simply one more performance.  I don’t know how to do this.”

With that mea culpa, Maxime found his resolve and reached out to cup a hand around Antoine’s ankle.  He pressed his mouth to Antoine’s shin, his knee, his thigh.  Higher then: a quick bite to the sharp of his hipbone, yielding a startled yell.  Maxime settled himself along Antoine’s side, his head upon his shoulder, meaning only to remain close beside him.  He reached out and touched the back of Antoine’s hand with his fingertips, pressing down until Antoine touched himself at last.  Only that slim barrier of skin and flesh and bone remained between Maxime’s fingertips and Antoine’s sex.

“Fuck,” Antoine growled.

Even that rare curse, so coarse to Maxime’s ear, seemed delicious in the moment.  Antoine’s hand curled now, tightened to a loose grip into which he pushed himself.  He turned his head and spat into the palm of his free hand, licked the wetness to a broad swathe and then swapped hands.  Closed his slick palm, his thin fingers, tight around himself.  Maxime winced a little in sympathy, for the touch seemed almost cruel for so delicate a thing.  

At Antoine's first moan, low and deep, Maxime could do nothing but watch and starve like Tantalus.  He did not breathe except in shallow sips of air.  He barely blinked, though it made his eyes ache even with glasses still on.  His whole world narrowed to the young man before him.  What breath he had at last found rhythm with the strokes of Antoine’s hand: now fast and firm, now hitched and slow; great, long gasps of air whenever Antoine switched from the pace of his hand to the powerful roll of his hips.  Every so often Maxime’s gaze shifted away, finding instead the flex of muscle beneath skin, the glinting smear of pre-release on Antoine’s belly, the parted lips that he bit and licked by turns.  The entire room smelled of Antoine’s sweat and sex.  Antoine’s breathing grew ragged, louder than the gale still battering the windows.  His mouth fell wide, working around sounds that never quite became words.  A tighter grip, the faster pull of his hand even as the motion itself faltered.

All the while, Maxime wanted.  God, how he wanted: his own hand on that velvet layer of Antoine’s skin, his mouth fitted to that girth and his throat to the fullness of its length.  His mouth was wet for it.  He had now the measure of what it would be like: to be draped over Antoine’s back, between his thighs.  To be under him and driven on by that relentless energy.  Kings and emperors had their favourites, Camille had said.  Well, if it were so then Maxime was only a common man who had chanced upon the most precious and priceless treasure in all of France.  No pretty, perfumed toy to be played with and discarded, no object to be broken and forgotten, his beloved friend: wild and tame by turns, flawed and flawless at once, soldier and poet, strategist and dreamer, fragile, invulnerable and so very, very alive.

Maxime had thought not to touch him.  To deny himself for some residual fear, to avoid causing Antoine disappointment or encouraging him to some act he did not want.  He couldn’t.  Not with the almost pained whine of Antoine’s breathing, the syllables of Maxime’s name breaking apart on his lips.  Up, then.  He set one knee to the mattress and brought his other leg over to balance above Antoine’s waist.  How wide Antoine’s mouth then, how stunned, as Maxime grasped his jaw and kissed him, swallowing his broken yell so that only its edges emerged.  Antoine’s entire body, young and vital and strong, strained upwards, mouth slack and fallen even wider, his feet pushing against the mattress so that Maxime must grip his shoulders and keep his own scant weight balanced as he rode out the tremors of Antoine’s climax.

Antinous, Achilles, Hyacinth, Ganymede: a hundred Classical allusions presented themselves to Maxime’s mind as he looked down at the man beneath his hands.  His hair was sweat-dark at the temples despite the chill in the room, his skin still so pale and smooth, the full bow of his mouth.

“Antoine,” he murmured instead, when no ancient comparison was enough.  When he thought only of the present, of Antoine’s pure soul and great courage, the first- and in Maxime’s eyes only- hero of the Republic.  “My dearest friend.  My best beloved.  I understand now…I understand…”

Antoine didn’t open his eyes, but his mouth curved into a tired smile.

“You have a terrible beauty,” Maxime said, a little wonderingly.  “Like an army with banners.”

“And yet you remain unconquered,” he teased.  “Unlike my efforts against the Austrians.”

Maxime hesitated a moment longer, then reached for the cleaner of Antoine’s hands.  Kissed his palm and moved it down between them.  Led him to press its heel against the hard bar of his sex.  Antoine’s tired eyes flew wide of a sudden, awake and lit from within.  His fingers brushed cautiously along the length of him.  Maxime sighed into Antoine’s mouth and let himself press forward, to feel it again and again once more.

“Did you, Maxime, think of me?”

“Often,” he said.  Then, turning Antoine’s own answer back on him.  “Paris is cold too.”

“I want to see.”

“You don’t need to…”

“I want.”

Antoine’s hands fell back against the pillow beside his head, as if to say go ahead, I will not touch you if you do not like it.  That motion alone destroyed the last of Maxime’s restraint.  He lunged forward, left hand curling around Antoine’s wrist while the right busied itself with his own buttons.  Maxime’s teeth fenced the shout spooled on the back of his tongue as his hand closed around his sex, hips jerking forward of their own desperate accord.  His gaze shifted from Antoine’s face to the sharp cut of his collarbone visible through his open collar, the thick spill of release on his belly, the shaft of his sex barely subsided.  Back to his face, then, to find he’d lifted his head from the pillow to watch with the most open, honest desire.  Maxime found himself already hurtling towards the precipice of his own climax, breathing with something closer to pain and then hovering there at a fixed, excruciating point and unable to plunge beyond it.

“Ah, Antoine.”  He almost sobbed at the feeling, the frustration of it all: his age, his tiredness, his illness.  “I can’t…”

Antoine’s face then: the guilelessness of his sympathy, as if he felt the same ache of it.  The tendons in his wrist flexed beneath Maxime’s grip as if to move.

“Let me, Maxime, please…”

Antoine surged up the moment Maxime’s grip relented.  He caught Maxime as a hawk, released from its traces, might catch a starling in flight: with the entirety of his body and effort, half lifting him with one arm while he used the other to brace himself and roll Maxime down onto the bed.  Maxime’s back struck the mattress, his mouth falling open in startlement only to be covered a moment later.  Antoine’s kiss was quick, bruising, and then his arm was around Maxime’s shoulders, free hand dragging Maxime’s shirt high, undoing the last few buttons of his culottes to pull them down over his hips.  Then there was only Antoine’s hand, calloused and smooth and warm all at once, too tight around Maxime’s length, not tight enough until Maxime closed his own hand over his friend’s to show him how best he liked it.  Maxime felt himself brought to the edge again, the familiar tension centred between his legs and winding every muscle in his body tighter.  He looked down, half despairing, only to see how Antoine’s hand looked around his sex, the way his hips pressed up into each downward slide of Antoine’s grip.  It was this alone that sent Maxime plummeting from the high ledge he’d been brought to.  He broke apart in the fall, pushing up into Antoine’s tightening grip and grabbing at the sheets, at Antoine’s arm, at anything he could cling to.  Clenched his teeth so tight he thought his jaw might snap, his teeth shatter, as his shout became no more than a long, growling moan between them.

Maxime fell back at last, panting still, every limb warm and helpless and heavy.  Antoine kissed him on the mouth, the tip of his nose, his closed eyelids.  Was so very, very gentle as he cleaned them both and dragged Maxime’s shirt off, worked him entirely free of his culottes and drawers, his stockings, fingers tracing the edges of each bandage on his legs.  It was only a faint surprise when, through increasingly heavy blinks of his eyes, he saw Antoine stand and remove the rest of his own clothes.  The younger man slipped naked beneath the blankets, skin blazingly warm against Maxime’s perpetual chill, and curved around him so that Maxime felt as contained within his arms as a snail within its shell.

Hours later, Maxime woke to the faint chill of early morning and the utter silence of Antoine’s rooms.  Beyond the window, all Paris slept on.  

The storm had subsided overnight.

Chapter Text

Fifth Number

The streets of Paris once thronged with brightly painted carriages shining with lacquer and emblazoned with noble coats of arms.  Always the curtains obscured that most disagreeable sight: the People.  Might it not also, Maxime sometimes wondered, be that this aristocratic contempt and disgust stemmed from another source?  That deep within the souls of the Second Estate, some seed of guilt existed, pricking them from within.  That in closing the curtains on the People, they sought to bury that kernel of truth so it might never be reached by the light of Reason and compassion, and thus could never sprout and take root.  As Abimelech sowed his own capital with salt, so the the aristocracy sowed their minds with hatred and bitterness, refusing to perceive the inherent equality of nature between themselves and the impoverished mother begging in the street.

Even now, amongst those elected to the Convention, there remained many who might have preferred to be conveyed to its august doors in such manner.  Who had rather avoid sights they might call unsavoury, or the caustic remarks of citizens who- burdened with entirely practical concerns about the war, food shortages, the harshness of a winter without suitable clothing- might go so far as to threaten them in word or deed.  It was a guilty man indeed, Maxime thought, who could not walk from his place of residence to his place in the Convention or the Committee.  His own daily walk he took as a means to greet any who might wish words with him.  Many times had he learned some vital news, or found chance to offer assistance to a citizen in need by only the simple act of being present to them.  Recently, however, he took his walk as an act of penance: exposing himself to their just censure, forcing himself to face the grim realities of a Paris under siege from Man and Nature.

Rarely did he have genuine cause to regret his stance on the matter, apart, perhaps, from days when the weather turned particularly bleak.  The 16th of Nivôse, Year II, however, was not such a day.  Running a little later than his ordinary custom, he cut through the gardens of the Tuileries.  Much as his mind was already preoccupied with debate, it did not prevent his admiration of the piercingly blue sky or the sparkle of the sun on the crisp rime overlaying banks of snow.  This, then, he had learned from Antoine in a mere handful of too-short days: that it was necessary to savour, in the smallest of bites and the midst of disaster, the world's beauty.  To be satisfied by a single, furled brown leaf still clinging to a branch by its stem as if demanding resurrection, the winter sharpness of the stars through the gauze of wispy cloud at three in the morning, the prickling sensation of the first snowflake to land on one’s bare hand.  To perceive the stroke of fingertips in the passing of correspondence, the warm brush of breath against an ear in whispered conference, the appreciation of the tiny gap of skin- no wider than Maxime’s smallest fingertip and palest pink like the inside of a shell- between stark white collar and curve of jaw, as equal in revelation and significance to the act of making love.  Maxime fairly ran through the snow because he meant to tell Antoine this.  To explain that, exhausted and pressed with illness and fear though he was, he had yet drawn energy and strength from Antoine’s return, their single shared night, the multitude of realisations that followed from it.  On he rushed, composing- as he often did- an entire speech within his mind.

Inspiring.  You have always been inspiring to me.  With your words I see again the future of France, and we will build it together.  A fool I was, to ever perceive our dear friendship as an obstacle.  You are my very soul…

A pretty speech, and one he might even have delivered were it not for the figure approaching him from the direction of the Convention.  He came on too early: a blot upon the sun, as broad and tall and terrifying as the black clouds of violent storm.

“Maxime,” Danton bellowed, across all the distance separating them, his arms thrown wide.  “My friend, I thought I had missed you.”

“You have caught me at a disadvantage, Georges: I am late.”

“So you are human after all.  Tell me it was the Duplay woman?”

Maxime struggled with the frown that threatened to cross his face.  It would not do to let Danton see how his needling- having increased with the tension of passing months- bothered him.  Rather, he came to a halt a little distance away, like a lone wolf uncertain of its match.

“It is early for you,” Maxime remarked, polite and peaceable under the circumstances.  

In the first days of the Revolution, there was no concept of ‘early’.  Even accounting for his unceasing and immoderate dalliances, Danton had stayed awake with them all through many a long night.  Had risen early to tackle the sundry tasks that were the business of Revolution.  

Danton drew a deep laugh from the great well of his chest.  “You are right at that.  My sweet little morsel could hardly release me from those plump arms of hers.  Again, Georges, again, she begged, don’t go to those cold and dusty halls.  Yet here I am.”  He laughed once more, purposely oblivious, so it seemed, to the revulsion that must surely show on Maxime’s face.  “There are times, old friend, when I envy your bachelorhood.  You cannot know the heroism of my morning struggles.”

At that, Maxime recalled the dawn after Antoine’s return and could not but recover his earlier smile.  There had been no begging between them; rather, their struggle was mutual.  They had tarried in bed, using the pretext of discussion to remain there, hands wandering with words until touch entirely replaced speech.  Then Antoine had fit himself against Maxime with perfect ease: matching keys without a lock.  Maxime had fairly marveled at it even as he bowed his head and groaned into the other man’s chest.  Even after, with the sharp edge of their desire blunted by satisfaction, they had delayed.  There was a breakfast of strong coffee, a handful of stale walnuts and slivers of pear that Maxime ate only because the taste of Antoine’s fingers lingered on its flesh.  There was Maxime insisting on clarifying a number of points in the report.  There was Antoine insisting on shaving Maxime’s softly bristled face, the intimacy of his focus, the perilous scrape of blade over throat.  And then, of course, Maxime must do the same in return.  There was then the unnerving steadiness of Antoine’s gaze, his rough stubble giving way beneath the razor, his hitched breath when Maxime nicked his cheek out of clumsy inexperience.  And after that, the thousand penitential kisses Maxime had to offer for the temerity of having broken Antoine’s precious skin.  If it were not for the fact that his barber had expected him, that his mysterious absence would have thrown the Duplay’s into panic, he might well have gone directly to the Committee with Antoine.  As it was, he had had instead to make his way first to the rue Saint-Honoré, and then to pass the curious eyes of the Duplay workmen, feeling every instant that he wore the proof of their lovemaking like a badge upon his breast.

“Ah,” Danton barked, seizing upon this delay in answer.  “Don’t tell me l’Incorruptible knows something of what I speak!?”

“No.  I only thought how different our paths have been, though they reach the same destination.”

Danton’s expression darkened somewhat, perhaps interpreting the remark as censure.  When he spoke again, his voice brooked no refusal.  “Embrace me now, as we have done before.”

Always, Maxime thought, these indulgents called upon history: their own, that of the Revolution, even to the dead years of Antiquity.  He sought to hold Danton at arm’s length, to clasp him instead by the elbows and avoid kissing.  Danton refused.  Instead he used his great height and size to advantage.  Maxime’s feet struggled to find purchase on the powdered snow and frozen ground, dragging lines that marked this abuse as Danton pulled Maxime close.  It was only by bracing his palms against Danton’s heavy chest that Maxime avoided being crushed into him.  I could struggle, he thought, if I were a woman.  He was not, though, and so he only turned his face to stare blindly at the snow-covered garden, submitting to Danton’s thick, wet lips against first one cheek, then the other.  Maxime stood firm within the iron trap of Danton’s unrelenting arms while all his being revolted against this attempt to subsume him.  As though Danton meant to make of them one being, to smudge the stark lines drawn between them.  Pressed so close, and despite the open air and the smell of a thousand morning fires upon it, Danton smelled thickly of wine and sleeplessness, a lingering note of his wife’s perfume, and below that something raw and cloying like the meat of an open wound.

Poor injured beast, he thought, more from lingering, tender affection for their old friendship and the wars it had survived than from any present sympathy.  Poor Pierrot, poor fool loved by and loving in turn a greater one: Camille, Harlequin of the Cordeliers.

“I am late,” Maxime reiterated, firm this time despite his gentler thoughts.

Danton blinked, some buried part of his former self seeming to ‘rouse.  He shook himself like the great, shaggy bear he so resembled, as if waking from hibernation, and looked at Maxime with an expression almost of horror.  As he made to speak, Maxime instead put up a hand for silence.  Freed of Danton’s grip, he stepped neatly ‘round him.

“Walk with me,” Maxime said, tossing a glance back over his shoulder.  “You must have some matter to discuss, to launch an attack at such a time.”

One step brought Danton already to his side, their arms jogging.  Maxime snuffed the desire to shift away.  

“Your estimation of me is rather low, Maxime, to call it an attack.”

“Am I wrong?  You deployed yourself to watch for me as Pitt watches the Channel.  Owing to the clear weather we are enjoying, you spied me cutting across the garden and sailed forth.”

“I think I am a little too heavy for swift battle with a smaller ship,” Danton said, patting the fullness of his belly.  “You might escape easily, if you wished.  We’re the veterans of the Revolution now, Maxime, can we not at least speak to one another as old soldiers do?”

“I have not yet put down my sword.”

“And I have?”

“It is blunt and fit more for bludgeoning.”

“Then you have nothing to fear from a little moment’s conversation with me.”

They had nearly reached their destination now, so hasty were Maxime’s steps.  He stopped and turned to Danton, his hand out to ward away too close a proximity between them.  Danton knocked his arm aside and stepped through this meager boundary.  Stood with arms folded, glowering down in silent mockery of Maxime’s temerity: who are you, small one, his expression said, to tell Danton where he may or may not go.  It was, Maxime reflected- though he fairly trembled with indignation and restraint- simply an extension of their political will.  The many ways in which Danton and his allies set themselves above both their colleagues and the People, in which they refused to accept just limitation and the rules that applied to others, the way that they decried the open violence of the Hébertistes while privately wallowing in its subtler, more insidious forms.  These, then, were the dangers to steer between: the open risk of Hébert, standing tall and imposing as a cliff and Danton, his reach more broad for his popularity, lurking below the surface of the water like a jagged reef.

“I am not afraid of you, Georges,” Maxime said at last.  He had considered using the other man’s surname, but the moment rather suggested caution over conflict.  “You mistake my intent, as many often do.”

“Be clearer then, if you expect understanding,” Danton growled.  “Damn you, Maxime, can you not speak plainly even now?  When everything, even when and where a man shits, seems to be grounds for levying some charge or other against him?”

“I have said before that if the Convention does not trust its Committees, then they should be dissolved.  I have demanded that the instrument itself be smashed, if the Convention does not believe in it.  The suggestion was refused.”  

“Maxime, be reasonable.  Can I not even speak my heart to you anymore, as two men, old friends, fellows in Revolution, should?  Why drift to greater matters of philosophy and politics?”

Echoes of Camille final visit to the Duplay’s in that plea.  Maxime broke the distance between them.  He put his hand flat over Danton’s heart and thought perhaps it trembled beneath his touch.

“Therein lies the problem, Georges: you perceive the Revolution as something outside yourself, like an artifact or a performance in which you play only an occasional part.”  Maxime patted Danton’s chest and then withdrew.  “I believe I know much of what you came to say, if not its specifics.  It has been this way between us for some time now, after all: you are affable as ever when we meet, but our days of casual visits have been over for some time.  I have watched you fall into worsening habit and greater torpor since Gabrielle’s death…”

“Say her name again and I will strike you.”

“If you strike me it will only be because I speak the truth to you, Georges, as no one around you will.  They will not speak the truth because they profit from your largess.  Camille will not tell you the truth because he does not see it, and will not see it because he has loved you well for all the years we have been in Paris.”  Maxime sighed.  Even speaking Camille’s name exhausted him.  “So, slap me then, as if I am a woman you have finished using.”

“Your shrillness reminds me of…”

“Slap me for Camille’s sake.  Strike me because you know that you are at fault.  That you and your foolish alliances have brought him to the very gates of the Underworld whereupon it is written ‘Abandon all hope’.  I know in my heart what you came to me with: some danger that you or he, or both of you yet together, have caused.  That, Georges, is why you come: not as a friend, but as a debtor who would beg the loan of my protection, the mantle of my reputation and who would only pay me back in the false coin of the atrocity you call friendship.”

Maxime half awaited the tart, belittling slap that would put him in his place.  He knew well enough how Danton perceived him as a man, how little he esteemed bookishness compared to his own physical might and vigour.  It never came.  Rather, all of Danton’s frozen rage gave way like thawing ice on the Seine: a cracking, first, of his stiff expression before the corners of his scarred mouth sagged and his small eyes grew wet with tears.

“How far we’ve fallen,” he said presently.  “How is our Revolution changed, that patriots such as you and I may only speak to one another with this cursed rage.  Yes, yes, I am tired of fighting and not scared to say it.  Here…” Danton paused in his diatribe, then, to rid himself of his gloves and press Maxime’s hands between his massive paws, hot and damp with sweat.  “Your hands are as cold as death, my dear, but see how I still have warmth for you.”

“I do not lack it,” Maxime said, allowing his voice to soften but a fraction.  “But I will not allow the warmth I still feel for you, or Camille for that matter, to become the bonfire on which the Republic burns.”

“I would ask nothing of you whatsoever were it not for…”

“For what?”  Maxime’s voice emerged dry and cracking from his throat.  

He knew already from the very fact that Danton had come to him at all.  Or perhaps he read it as a seer might read fate from a palm, except rather than those heavy hands he read the creases of Danton’s face, the way he held Maxime’s hands all the tighter, the pain that seemed to linger within his eyes.  It was confirmed the moment Danton released Maxime and reached for the rolled papers in his pocket.  He knew immediately what it was, recognised the very grain of the paper it had been printed upon.

Camille, he thought, whatever will teach you the value of silence and introspection?  Why must you spill your every thought to the whole world, as if it is your friend?  Why must you always make danger your lover, as though only threatening arms may hold you down and press you close?

Almost timid now, Danton held Camille’s journal out like an offering.  It remained in the space between them, for Maxime could not will his hands to take it.

“Take it, take it damn you,” Danton hissed.  And then, softer, “You have come out of it better, Maxime, for he said all patriots must love you and you know that Camille is one of the best.  He called Hébert a prick.”

Maxime’s laughter emerged in a great, despairing sob.  That same laughter seized Danton as well so that they both rocked and shook with its force, reeling.  Maxime’s cheeks were hot as if chapped by a sharp wind, his tears a cool path upon them.  He breathed like a drowning man, seizing lungfuls of air between each renewed burst of laughter.  What should have been a sign of joy and mirth had instead all the terrifying qualities of a mania, like the dancing plague that once seized Strasbourg.  Maxime swayed.  A sensation like falling, then, as if he had tumbled from some great height.  He closed his hands on the front of Danton’s gaping coat and clung to him, rising and falling on the swell of his chest.  The incoming tide slowed its pace, receded until they were left washed ashore together, shipwrecked and holding each other’s arms.  Maxime could not forget their friendship, no matter how he longed to, no matter how selfish it was to wish for Danton to wash his hands clean, to find the solid path again.  He still wanted them to walk forward into this new world together.

“I have missed you, old friend,” Danton said, sounding terribly sincere.

This is not real, Maxime told himself.  It is all a bitter lie.  I am only too tired to make war upon both fronts.  “And I you,” he said.

It was a statement little requiring honesty, and seemed less cruel than the truth: that the man he missed had died in that interminable summer of 1793.  That looking at Danton now had much the same quality as reading the gravestone of a beloved friend.  What he felt was not, then, missing so much as mourning, and that realisation turned his stomach weak.

“It is my foolishness that brought Camille to this,” Danton said.  “I admit it: I encouraged him to take up the pen, little thinking what it would come to.”

Did you learn nothing, Maxime thought, nothing at all, from the Champ de Mars?  How many people will your haste and thoughtlessness condemn?

“Camille has always been dangerously honest,” Maxime said.  “A man with the honesty of a child, one might say, who does not care to consider the harm or truth to his words.”

“Maxime, he is courting war and will listen to no one.”

“I have said as much before.”

“He will go to the Jacobins tonight.  His words, damn him, his words are as bright and clever as always but he is cut to the quick, Maxime, and you know how he is when he takes insult.”  Danton paused and dropped his voice.  “He will get himself killed, Maxime.  He is singing his way to the guillotine, drunk on his own wit and I…”

Maxime blinked.

“I will not have it,” Danton said suddenly, a spill of words as though he had cut his throat to have them emerge.  “But I…I admit, I am not Danton anymore.  I count on nothing, at least from the representatives and the societies.  There is only you, Maxime.”

It had been some time, perhaps even years, since Maxime had felt the tic in his eye.  It came always, so it seemed to him, at moments when he was pressed for a choice of great magnitude, and had not the time to prepare for it.  He knew his answer already, but to say it…

“The Revolution is not a man,” he said, holding up a hand before Danton could mount a rebuke.  “It is beyond the individual.  You wish, Danton, to turn my affections to acts of tyranny.  For me to play the puppeteer in this.  I will not.”

“God damn you, Maxime!”

“I will not,” he repeated, though his entire body felt shot-through with the morning cold.  “But I will read what Camille has written and attend the club tonight.  You may count on me to listen, and speak as I think best for the patrie, for the People.”

With this promise, he abandoned Danton in the snow-draped garden.

     
*****

Sing then, Thamyris, the rage and sorrow of broken men: the Titanomakhia of the Jacobins, when the best and most venerable of the patriots amongst them waged war upon their sacred brothers.  Sing on.  Sing of mighty factions ranged one against the other like the ancient city-states of Hellas.  Of the bellicose speech and powerful roars that made even the candles tremble.  Of the giants of the Republic straining one against another.  Of villainous words and bitter deception.  Of corruption: its disease spreading soul to soul, the rot at the heart of stout heroes.  Of the invisible blade, Death itself, hanging above them all.  Begin with the battle between that warlord of words, Hébert, and the divine trickster, Camille Desmoulins.  Sing tragedy, weep it, poor Thamyris.

“I can prove!  I can prove!” Camille shouted, not from the tribune but from the floor itself, driven onto his toes with the sheer force of exclamation.  He waved his papers like a flag, swung about with them held before him.  “I can prove that this man, this same Hébert who dares to take the mantle of ‘people’s friend’ from off Marat’s blessed grave, I can prove to you that he has cheated the Revolutionary government of some forty-three thousand livres.  Could forty-three thousand livres not benefit the working folk of the Republic that he pretends to represent?  Could it not have benefited our beleaguered armies in some small fashion?  Is it more needed by a man wallowing in 120 000 livres?”

A reasonable enough argument, Maxime thought, leaning forward in his chair, but the kind that convinced no one but Camille’s own faction.  On the faces of Fabre, and of Philippeaux- so recently accused, perhaps now hoping for reprieve by this battle- victory was already writ.  Yet even the most cursory glance at the remaining Jacobins showed nothing of the sort.  Collot remained poised upon the tribune, his mouth twisted into a sneer of thorough contempt.  And though Hébert’s face suggested the enraged terror of Krónos disgorging the very children he sought to devour, it was reflected nowhere else.  Perhaps they, like Maxime, had already realised the fatal error of his argument.

Ah Camille, Maxime thought.  You have forgot your earliest of lessons at law.  To win a dispute by a petty act of misdirection was but the sleight of hand trick of a tawdry magician.  Shifting the judge’s attention to a separate matter had its place in the court of law and, better played, might well deceive the hearer.  Now, however, the avoidance of the denunciations against him could only be interpreted as a weakness.  This knowledge sank through Maxime like a weight, pinning him in place.  His eyes met Antoine’s, found his thoughts reflected there.  Maxime dared look to Danton.  He found him sitting directly behind Camille’s empty place, staring at it as though it held all the future he had left to know.

Hébert leapt up.  “And you, Camille?  You who live in perpetual indolence, who has barely warmed a seat in the Convention and knows only how to vomit forth nonsense upon the rag his master buys him?  What has the Revolution gained from you?  Accurately, you call yourself a grandfather of the Revolution: like an old and idle man, you have given nothing to this nation for the past few years.”

A successful riposte.  Throughout the entire room the members began to mutter.  There was a smattering of applause from Hébert’s supporters, and- more worryingly- laughed approval from those who remained unaligned.  The club had always been loud, boisterous even, but they had entirely dispensed with anything but the most basic semblance of order, for there could be none in this moment.  Too far had they advanced, too necessary this battle.

“What have you given it, Hébert, but blood?” Danton’s unmistakable roar filled Camille’s uncharacteristic silence.

Hébert spluttered.  Perhaps he choked on his own words, or the blood he was accused of spilling, or the broken stones of the churches he had defiled.  

“See!  See!” Camille now, recovered, wagging his finger at Hébert.  “Here is the man without his mask.  Here is the little man who pretends to be for the People, when really he is for himself!”

“I demand you explain yourself, Camille!” Collot, this time, from the tribune.  He leaned so far over it that it seemed he might slither across the board to strike.  “You speak of masks, when your own is fallen already!”

Danton lumbered to his feet, silent but steady, all his fearful might at Camille’s back.  Well could Maxime recall the lessons he had learned- that they all had learned, as men of similar class and education- that to strike another man was undignified, entirely below them, the province of the bestial and unreasoning.  Even so, watching the tableaux play out before him, Maxime half thought it might descend to fisticuffs.  

Augustin leaned forward in his usual place to the left, close by Maxime.  Tender, gentle Bonbon, always prone to concerned kindness.  He had known them all, of course, when every man seemed a brother and he just a boy among them.  A little brother to everyone.  Camille, Maxime recalled, had once tussled Augustin’s hair so that he- always prone to slight vanity, and the love of being loved- had blushed and encouraged Camille’s extravagant, blithe flirtation.  Augustin will take Camille’s side, if any, Maxime thought.  There was some sympathy of character there, though he was no partisan of Danton’s.

When Maxime looked to Antoine, on the other hand, his expression offered nothing but condemnation.

“I might have dressed for the occasion,” Antoine called out to him, with the dim twist of a smile.  “If I had but known we had taken a box at the Opéra tonight.”

It ought to have made Maxime laugh and was, perhaps, intended to.  Indeed, the scene had that wild air and complexity of plot that characterised the aristocratic writings of a Lully and the clangor of a Corneille.  Yet he dared not laugh at all.  The daggers this night were real and could strike true at any moment.  What then, what then…

Before Maxime could compose his thoughts to some semblance of order, Augustin rose.  It took Maxime a moment longer to gauge his brother’s purpose.  When he did, it was as though the entire floor fell away beneath him, yawning upon the great chasm of Tartarus into which Zeus cast the raging, vengeful Titans.  His hand flexed, meaning, out of brotherly habit, to catch Augustin by his coat and pull him out of danger.  It was, in the end, the sharp shake of Antoine’s head that halted him.  

“I wish to take the tribune,” Augustin called, above all the din.  “I will speak to you all.”

“You have it, Citizen Robespierre,” Maxime said, his heart swollen with love and fear as Augustin crossed the floor.  

Collot gave way to him with the bemused sort of patience that most acceded to in Bonbon’s presence.  With his rounded limbs and gentle face lined only with solicitude, he retained something of the child Maxime recalled.

“You must all forgive me,” Augustin began, with that openness of spirit that characterised all his relations with others, speaking to them as friends rather than colleagues or even brothers.  “I have been absent these five months and thus know little of what has brought us to this reprehensible state.  Furthermore, I am not an orator like my elder brother, so my words are but simple things before you all.”

Still occupying the floor, Camille relaxed.  He met Maxime’s gaze and smiled that wide and fox-fanged grin of his.

“I do recall, however, my first nights in this stalwart society, this assemblage of brothers.  I looked upon you all as a child must look upon his parents: with a sense of admiration bordering upon worship, with gratitude for the lessons you taught me.  I am not so young as to forget Marat’s lively speech, or Desmoulins’ ringing wit, or the white heat of Saint-Just’s every word.  I drank it in as a babe in arms would drink their mother’s milk, and grew strong and straight in modest virtue from doing so.”  Augustin’s face crumpled, his voice gone raw and thick with the driving force of his emotion.  “Imagine how it troubles my very soul, then, to call thus upon you.  For it feels to me that I, like a child calling upon violent and warring parents, must now take up the mantle of responsibility and call you back to yourselves.  My brothers, please: your bride is the Republic Herself, and yet you abuse her mightily with this argument, this fomentation of misguided revolt, when all you should seek with her is the purity of purpose that is unity in troubled times.”

Maxime’s breath caught and held, burning in his chest.  It was a very Augustin manner of speech, driven more by the heart than by the head for all his intellect.  A lovely, fragile sort of thing that these leviathans of the club might as easily crush by accidental violence than by intended cruelty.  Maxime saw in the faces of the members, at least, a shift: the excitement of denunciation easing, replaced by shame and discomfort.  More than a few looked to their feet and others, emboldened by Augustin’s kindly-meant rebuke, made silent nods or quiet applause to show their support.  Augustin did not quite smile, but Maxime saw him swell with this unexpected praise.  Be steady, Maxime thought, for herein lies the trap: pride.

“Camille stands accused of holding principles that are not those of this society…”

Close by, Antoine uttered that rarest of sounds: a gasp of pure shock, loud in the near-silent room.  Camille spun in Maxime’s direction, his lips parted around silence. He might court danger, but Camille was still too good a man to call it down upon others.

“I had rather ask which man has caused the miserable quarrels of individuals to be elevated to the national stage?  Who it is who has preferred personal grudges over the needs of the Republic?  And who, indeed, would rather that all our attention fall upon each other, true citizens and patriots, instead of foreigners and intriguers.  Who is it who gains most by making war in Heaven?  If Camille holds principles that are not belonging to the Jacobins, then are we to believe that those vexing us with petty disputes uphold the principles of equality and liberty?  Do they wish us all to ‘vivre libre ’?  Ou mourir?”

A great mumbling went up amongst the members, amidst the creaking of wood as the entire body seemed to shift in their seats.  At the tribune, Augustin looked no less certain of his course.  Indeed, he seemed to interpret this response as wholly sympathetic.  Maxime knew otherwise: it was the sound of a turning tide.  A moment later, one voice rose over all.

“Oh, God!” Hébert cried, high and quavering, clutching at his breast as though struck through.  “Do they wish to assassinate me?”

The club erupted into a maelstrom of noise: stamped feet and clapping of hands, one man howling at Hébert’s performance, while another called Augustin’s speech tyranny.  In the midst of it all, Danton lumbered to his feet, face grim and grey, pulling Camille back to the safety of their corner.  Camille, however, would fight and rage with all the rest.  He twisted and tore at Danton’s unyielding grip, cursing and pleading and cajoling by turns.  Maxime pushed himself to his feet, rising through noise that fell upon his shoulders like the weight of the entire world.  All eyes, then, turned to him, to the hand he raised for attention.  Antoine glared the men around him to cowed silence, and Maxime saw Danton do much the same at his end.  Soon each friend was hushing his neighbour so they might hear, if not out of respect for Maxime’s presidency, then certainly out of sheer curiousity.

The words he must speak were heavy on the back of his tongue.  Maxime felt he should choke upon them.  That it would be better, perhaps, to do so.  Or maybe only easier.  The Republic, the Revolution, he reminded himself, is more than a single man.  More than blood, more than the murky waters of faded friendships.

“Citizen Robespierre,” he said, in a voice so firm he barely recognised it as his own.  “Descend the tribune.  Your latter remarks were impertinent.  If I did not support the transparency of our records, I should have them struck from the evening’s discussion.  Step down.”

Bonbon, please…

Augustin obeyed, though with a look of such confused betrayal that Maxime had to fix his gaze instead on Maurice’s gentle, worried face.  Only then, thus calmed, could he let his gaze sweep the rest of them.  Steady, they would see, incorruptible; inside, but a man, pierced by a dozen blades at once.

“Collot was right to call for an explanation of Philippeaux’s behaviour.  Right, too, to raise the question amongst us that has been too long delayed and silenced: are Camille’s actions and words- the beliefs that he professes in his journal- in keeping with the values of our society.”  A startled cry went up: Camille’s.  Maxime made himself look directly at the man, at his stunned, flushed face, too shocked now for anything but silence.  “A virtuous man need not fear such questioning, for he has done nothing to warrant censure.  The matters that Camille has raised before us are serious, and cannot be ignored, but as President of the Jacobin Club it is my duty to state that the order of business against Phillipeaux and Desmoulins has not been answered.  Nor do I believe it will be answered this night.  We will take up this matter again on the Seventh, when Camille shall- I am sure- provide us with due explanation of his writings, and respond in full to Collot’s allegations.”  

Collot nodded and bowed his head, a smile upon his conniving face.  Maxime turned to Hébert.

“And then, perhaps,” Maxime said, “we shall hear your explanation.”

*****

So long had this great clash of words and accusations seemed that Maxime was shocked to emerge at last into the sharpness of night.  He had expected at least the grey rime of dawn, yet the sky was instead black and hung thick with cloud so that not a single star shone through.  It seemed, walking home with Maurice and Antoine, as though they wandered beneath the smoky mantle of recent war, each man keeping more or less to himself, carrying the memory of his own private wounds.  The closure of the night’s proceedings was mere truce.  It would scar, this night, only to reopen and bleed freely again some two nights hence when Camille stood again before them.

He will think of himself Christ the martyr, Maxime thought.  And I his Pontius Pilate.  Or worse, his Judas Iscariot.  That idea, the image of Camille driven out, of his standing before the Tribunal, of Collot’s grinning, death’s head face, remained with him even now, in the midst of his own room.

“You are ill because you lock yourself in one chamber of your mind and dwell there,” Antoine said.  “You are still at the Jacobins: scared, doubting yourself rather than others, angry.  Even now, you compose speeches you never said, and refine those you did.”

“It is not so easy to cast aside our years of friendship.  To turn my back on the child I am godfather to.  To ignore Lucile’s tender heart which breaks for him,” he replied, pacing the boards while Antoine watched on.  “And yet I know.  I know Collot is right.  I know it all must be said.  I know who I am, in this.  What I would give for the Republic.  I would give Camille’s life if it were placed in my hands.  I would give even yours, though I think I would follow you.”

“And your own?”

Maxime looked up at him, into his eyes and then swiftly away again, lest he be drawn too deeply into them.  “My own is nothing," he muttered.  "It is dust compared to the gold your soul is made of.”

“We are all dust, Maxime.  And gold ground to fine enough powder is dirt like any other.”

“I am only a man, Antoine.  And I have been frail and ill all my life.  It is a wonder to me that I did not die before my mother did.”

“We are all but men, much as demagogues like Danton strive to appropriate godhood.  That is why a dictatorship may never function properly, and a democracy is easily rent by petty difference or turned into a dank morass of populism.”  Antoine paused.  “Only think, since you will compare yourself so poorly to others: you are not incorruptible because you follow certain precepts and cultivate certain virtues.  You are incorruptible because you are capable of every form that love takes, yet also of refusing its call for something greater.”

Maxime laughed.  “You are kind.  Especially after I have said I would kill you.”

“If I deviated from my path to turn traitor, I would have no hand but yours release the blade.  Besides, you said you would follow.”

“I had rather die than think I could so misjudge a man’s quality.  I would have to accept that there is no truth at all in the world, if even you proved false.”

“I will not.”  Antoine’s smile was impossibly gentle, yet firm, reminiscent of one or two of the maîtres at college.  “I have some few hours before I must return to the Committee.  I would give you them only if you are here.”

Maxime paused in his ceaseless pacing to look directly at him.  But one shared night, he thought, one night to gain such infernal confidence.

“I do not know how to be other than myself,” he said aloud.  “I have always been thus.  Less than your Romans or Spartans, though I have tried.”

“Then I shall teach you the way, like Orpheus leading Eurydice from the Underworld.”

“The venture did not end well.”

“Orpheus loved without faith.  When, Maxime, have you known me to doubt?  When have I ever had cause to look back for you?”  Antoine stepped forward.  Said, “We have been beside one another, almost from the very start.”

His kiss, when it came, had an impossible depth to it.  More like a great, long breath for Maxime to fill his lungs with.  

“I fear I fall behind,” Maxime murmured, as they broke apart.

“Would I allow it?”

“If I did not live up to your lofty ideals, perhaps.  I have never once been that man you wrote to so admiringly.  I kept it, your letter, and many are the times it has reminded me of what I strive to be.  Still, you must see now how I fail in that mission, and perhaps you…”

He knew, keenly, that he was amongst the rare few privileged enough to witness Antoine unguarded.  To glimpse emotion on a face trained to stillness and reserve.  The look Antoine gave him now, as though struck, cut Maxime to the very quick.

“Forgive me,” he said immediately, seizing Antoine’s hand in both his own.  “Charlotte could tell you the fool I am.  That I have always been.”

“The Stoics teach us that there is nothing ill, but our way of thinking makes it so.  Mens impudicam facere, non casus, solet.  You quarrel with a Saint-Just who does not exist.  Who will never exist.”  Whatever he had felt, Antoine’s voice was calm and steady now he spoke.  “Saint-Just is your colleague.  He is the man in the Committee who is your cold-hearted ally, pretending always to merely scant, polite regard.  Here, at least, let me be Antoine.  Your friend.  Do not battle with me.”

“How should I, at any rate?” Maxime laughed.  “I would make a pitiful soldier.  I am weak and tired with my rage.  It feels like all I have eaten today.  I would gladly let you win this battle by distraction.”

“Oh, but it is not distraction,” Antoine murmured, his hands cupping the back of Maxime’s neck, thumbs beneath his jaw.  “It is a lesson.”

Maxime quickened at that.  Felt the speed of his pulse rise beneath the careful press of Antoine’s thumbs.

“In what?”

“Being alive to what is before us.”  A quick touch of lips, there and then gone.  Even so, Maxime could attend to nothing but the sweetness of the smile Antoine had pressed so briefly upon him.  “No golden past.  No smoke-clouded future.  This room.  You.  I.”

It was lovemaking, then, of the sweetest, most langurous sort.  As though they possessed every moment in time to divest each other of their clothes and settle upon the bed, to construct maps and stratagems upon one another’s bodies with hands and lips.  Yet still Maxime’s mind wandered to denunciations.  The club.  Hébert and Collot.  What they would think if they saw him now: Le Romain, l’Incorruptible, naked and hard and wanting, his mouth fervent and worshipful on Antoine’s shoulders.  He is drowned in luxury.  He will make his favourite into a new Lafayette.  Unnatural behaviour is a mark of the aristocracy, with no place amongst the Revolution.  Had not Hébert fixated more on the amours of the ci-devant Queen than on her crimes against the people of France?  

“Stop.”

Antoine’s voice, firm and unyielding, pierced this jumble of invented argument.  The younger man propped himself up on one elbow to look down at Maxime.

“Here,” he demanded, sliding a hand down the centre of Maxime’s body.  Seeking, finding.  “Only here.”

And then Maxime could be nowhere else, because Antoine’s mouth was on his chest, kissing each rocky point of rib down to Maxime’s belly.  His tumbled curls teased light as the brush of a feather on Maxime’s bare skin.  Moments later, the tip of his tongue skirted the edge of Maxime’s navel, tortuously close to where it was most wanted.  Antoine raised his head then to regard him, waiting upon Maxime’s stunned nod.  He gave it.

With the greatest of care, he pressed a lingering kiss to the head of Maxime’s sex.  And then, emboldened, perhaps, by Maxime’s whispered assent, the clutch of his fingers on his forearm, Antoine eased a little more of the foreskin back and took him between his lips.  Maxime was then a marionette held on blissful strings.  His hips drew sharply up, compelled by no greater force than the lap of Antoine’s tongue and the tentative suction of his mouth.  The sound he made then was nameless, fierce, drawn up from some depth he hadn’t known existed.  No club, no guillotine, no factions, only his dearest friend, the sweetness of his mouth, the hand on his hip to draw him up or push him down.  The feel of Antoine’s thick curls beneath his hand, knotted ‘round his fingers, as Maxime caressed and pressed him down by turns.

Antoine lifted his head, swiping saliva from his chin with the back of one hand.  At Maxime’s despairing groan, he soothed a hand along his hip, his side, as though calming a restive horse.

“Maxime,” he said.  “I would dare more, if you allow it.”

Anything, Maxime thought, only for Reason to reassert its sensibility a moment later.

“Ask.”

“I want my fingers inside you.”

Maxime’s breath hitched at that: half in desire, half fear.  He hesitated, propping himself up on his elbows to meet Antoine’s hunger-black gaze.  He could not take the measure of the statement from that alone, knew only those swollen lips and spit-slick chin.  

“I…find little pleasure in sodomy, if you were thinking to ready me for it.”

“I meant only fingers, Maxime.  One, if you will.  And my mouth on you.”

“You’ve grown bold.”

“It is my nature to always strive for more.”

Maxime took his hand and brought it to his lips.  Bit each sharp point of the younger man’s knuckles and soothed them with as many kisses.

“You will need them wet, I think,” Maxime said quietly, and took the first of Antoine’s fingers into his mouth.  

He made it so, and easily, for at times he thought he could compose entire poems to the salt and savour of Antoine’s skin.  That he should be a more worthy subject than tarte, or Sylvie or Mademoiselle Demoncheaux.

“Go ahead,” he murmured, when he judged it done and easy enough to take.

Having commenced upon only a short course of study in Greek love, it seemed Antoine had decided to apply himself quickly now to the application of its art.  Here, too, he proved a Mozart or a da Vinci: virtuoso and homo universalis both.  Maxime had only to tilt his hips up a fraction before Antoine entered him with steady, inexorable pressure, as if Maxime’s body had been designed with no purpose but to give for him.  He slid deep, down to the joint connecting finger to hand, down ‘til he could go no further.

“Oh,” Maxime said then, at the very moment of being fully breached.  An absurd little exclamation at the sensation.  There was nothing but pleasure, as though each part of his sex were connected to the place where Antoine now touched him, as electricity is conducted by wire.  And then again, as Antoine pressed from within, it scraped from his throat in a raw whisper, “Oh.”

Maxime could think of nothing, hold nothing but Antoine’s name in his mind, his throat, his mouth.  He was a being of reaction, sensation.  Each upward cant of his hips drove him against the slick weight of Antoine’s tongue, deep into his mouth, the clench of his throat, even as he lost the depth of that most intimate touch.  Each attempt to push down, to take more than Antoine could even give, brought another flare of pleasure yet took him from that mouth.  He could not decide.  He did not need to.  Antoine gave both.  Maxime came apart quaking from it, from holding himself still, near-soundless, even as his fingers touched Antoine’s cheek to feel his mouth work as he swallowed.

For some long moments, which could as easily have been hours as mere seconds, Maxime lay panting.  The room was hot, he realised slowly, and the place where he lay damp with sweat.  The mingled scent of their bodies, their lovemaking, was so thick on the air that he could almost taste it in much the manner good wine can be tasted by scent alone.  His heart was a terrifying thing, fast as that of the little birds he had raised as a boy.  A sweet memory, that, but sweeter still the sight of Antoine lying between his narrow thighs, tussled head resting on Maxime’s belly, lips so bruised and full from taking him that they were warm and tender to the touch, like the flesh beneath the bruised skin of a peach.

“Come,” Maxime whispered, for his voice would go no louder, was hoarse as if he had abandoned himself to yelling.  He reached down, hands still shaking slightly with the force of climax, and drew Antoine up to him.  “Come here.”

A quick kiss, Maxime’s tongue- idly curious for the taste of himself lingering in Antoine’s mouth- slipping between parted lips.  He rolled gracelessly, all angles and tired limbs, to lie so that he was half on his stomach and propped up only by the flex of his knees and the pillow of his left arm.  He drew Antoine with him, over him, like a cloak.  Parted his legs the barest of fractions and reached back blindly for Antoine’s hip, urging him closer until, with a final shift, the length of Antoine’s sex settled against the crease of Maxime’s rear.  The arm Antoine had thrown over him was hard, each muscle strained tight as if he gripped his own will in that slim, bare hand.  If it were possible to love him more for this quiet, undemanding restraint, Maxime would have.  As it was, he only pushed his hips back to make the suggestion.

“Like this,” he said, reaching this time to part himself so that Antoine might settle within the cleft of his backside.

“My God, Maxime.  I did not know…”

What exactly Antoine did not know, Maxime never discovered, nor did he particularly care to.  He was alive only to the graceful force of each thrust Antoine made against him, the wet heat where they slipped skin-to-skin, the scrape of Antoine’s teeth over the nape of his neck.  Without thought beyond to please him, Maxime pressed back as much as he could, as much as Antoine’s adamant grip on his hip allowed.  Urged him on until the motion of Antoine’s hips stuttered and his breathing turned ragged.  Antoine shifted them both effortlessly, pinning Maxime beneath his weight and caging him in his arms, knuckles whiter than the sheets he gripped. He groaned against Maxime's ear, hips jerking in short, frantic motions until he finished against the small of Maxime's back.

They lay tangled for a time, neither speaking.  Antoine’s fingers traced the line of Maxime’s spine until they reached the sticky mess on his lower back before resuming a path up again.  Somehow, through the haze of it all, they managed to clean themselves up before tumbling back onto Maxime’s narrow bed.  Maxime lay with one leg slung over Antoine’s, his head on his breast, thoughts returning.  They were like a storm on the horizon of a cloudless blue sky.  He would not draw them closer, though, for he was too busy making thorough investigation of the scant starburst of freckles on the white skin of Antoine’s arm.  

“Ille me amplexus atque osculans flere prohibebat,” he murmured, tracing them and then advancing to the dusky halo of smooth skin ‘round one nipple.

“Once, I told Gateau I wanted only a wife, a simple cottage, and children,” Antoine said, his laughter shaking through Maxime.  “Rather, I should have declared my longing for a companion who would quote Cicero to me in bed.”

Maxime froze, his hand still on Antoine’s chest.  It was impossible not to think, then, of all he was taking him from.  Of the simple happiness Antoine had first desired.  

“A wife.  Children,” he said.  “Antoine, I had rather you…”

“Hush, Maxime,” Antoine said, rolling over so that Maxime lay half beneath him again.  “Or I shall give your lesson again and have it stick this time.”

*****

 
Were they but in Arras, a world and a time away, Maxime might have composed entire stanzas to describe the fall of winter light on Antoine’s auburn curls.  A thousand trite and clumsy rhymes comparing the lines of his body to Donatello’s David or to Saint Sebastian of the many arrows.  Instead he lay in bed and watched him dress.  There was no need, he thought, for paper: surely he would go to the grave with this image still in his mind.

Antoine was gone mere moments later, with a hasty kiss and a promise to meet within hours.  Over the subtle din of the workshop and its men, the sound of the Duplay household waking, Maxime listened to the familiar rhythm of his departing steps.

In his absence, the storm on the horizon of Maxime’s clear mind became instead an army.  And at its head, Camille. 

Chapter Text

How fast these winter days fled.  Night left late, its thickened darkness pushed back by grey dawn as a velvet curtain by a pale hand; it returned early, preceded by only a short, despairing dusk.  An ouroborous, then, black maw wide to bite upon its own tail.  If the summer sun once reigned, it was now fallen to a new king.  All trembled and shook before the tyranny of Emperor Winter.

Not all despised the season, though.  The Duplays, Maxime had learned through years of quiet observation, took the opportunity to shelter closer together than ever, bound tight by warm food and warmer company.  He had watched Danton and Camille compete with their wives at sliding as far as possible along the perilous stretches of ice upon the footpaths.  Even Billaud and Collot were known to drink warmed wine together of an evening, in the amiable, sharp-toothed manner of wolves cloaked in the skin of men.

Maxime, however, felt the yoke of its rule more cruelly than those around him.  It had long been that way for him: winter days passed far too quick, while the season itself lasted like a malady.  Within the last few months, however, he had very nearly convinced himself to enjoy it.  Though he had resented the theft of daylight hours, he had begun instead to appreciate all the long night offered to placate him for their loss. Madame Duplay’s dinners, though simple, were hearty and comforting, made even more pleasurable by the company of their friends ‘round the table.  Long nights meant Éléonore bent to her needlework, pretending to ignore the after dinner discussion of the men, though she fiercely argued a multitude of points with Maxime once her parents retired to bed.  Winter nights were Brount’s gargantuan body curled warm at Maxime’s feet.  Not least, they had recently become Antoine’s sleep-worn voice before dawn, the animal pleasure of lying wrapped together, Antoine’s skin so warm and radiant that Maxime thought he must hold Apollo himself in his arms, rather than this man of flesh and blood.  You take nothing for yourself, Maximilien, he would remind himself, and though no man can ‘deserve’ more than his rights, he may at least see such things as the gifts of Providence.

None of this light in the darkness prevented- or even slowed- time.  The swift-running days and long nights alike passed as if within a single blink.  Sooner than Maxime liked, sooner than even his nightmares accounted it, came the great, dark night of 18th Nivôse.

*****

For one who has studied Nature often and at length,  Maxime thought, a simple truth soon becomes obvious: what is called by many ‘the calm before the storm’ is no such thing at all.  Observe: first comes a shift in the air like a great breath, inhaled swiftly and exhaled in a long, unending sigh.  Upon it rise the birds: a murder of crows in advance, a flock of pigeons on the wing to search for cover, and all amongst the streets and houses the twittering alarm of sparrows and starlings.  It is then, perhaps, a quiet falls upon the world like the silence accompanying the curtain’s rise at the theatre: fragile, rent by certain indistinct noises that seem only to heighten the state of anticipation.  Carried upon the air is the roiled scent of distant fields, evergreen trees, something sweet like the sea though it lies far off.  The sky changes colour, layered in shades of black and grey and misty white.  The clouds roil and twist, heaving like the coils of some great serpent.  All, man and beast alike, look up so that in their motion they almost reflect the whirling clouds above.  It is not calm that comes before the storm, then: it is terror.

That same curious state of primitive foreboding settled over Maxime as he took the President’s seat at the Jacobin Club.  It seemed to grip the members, extending even to the gallery.  Like the characters in Classical tragedy, each man turned to his fellows as though waiting for the arrival of a deus ex machina to spare them further violence.  With Camille nowhere to be seen, Maxime could do naught but rise to deliver them.

“Some few days ago,” he began.  “We descended, if briefly, into conflict amongst each other.  I do not deny it, for it is essential that the foreigner, the royalist, the traitor, sees that though we may err we will yet come together stronger.  That though they strive to widen these divisions amongst us, divisions which are but simple matters of our individual natures, we are capable of seeing through their stratagems to strive for the good of the patrie.”

He paused.  Not in some time had his voice rung so clear and true, had he found it so favourable to his own ears.  It came again like the voice of 1789 that had challenged the Archbishop of Nîmes, or that of 1792 which had risen to support Antoine on the matter of the King.  He lowered his glasses to look more clearly at this audience that listened so attentively.  Saw as he once had, almost two years ago now, Antoine’s pale and handsome face- lovelier, even, than it had been then- like a white flame amongst insubstantial shadow.  If I have been the candle of Arras, Maxime thought, and Mirabeau the torch of Provence, then Antoine is the fire of the Aisne.

“I declare to you now that there are no factions amongst us.  There is only the French people.”  Maxime made his gaze settle upon Danton.  Upon Hébert he let it weigh longest.  “The French people against its enemies.”

Antoine broke the silence, raising his hands to grant measured applause.  Unsmiling, only his eyes contained feeling in much the same way a still pond will capture the bright firmament above.  It was for Robespierre alone to read: the private correspondence of long familiarity.  When at last Maxime managed to part their gaze, it was to find Danton, wet-eyed and ruddy with open relief.  He accepted the grateful bow of Danton’s head.  Amidst all this went up the cries: ‘yes, yes!’ and ‘hurrah, Robespierre has it!’

Perhaps Camille’s absence meant he had reconsidered, Maxime thought as he motioned for quiet.  Perhaps he would let the matter lie.  Perhaps it marked a certain penitence, rather than arrogance: the slow and dragging feet of guilt were what delayed him rather than habitual insouciance.

“Shall we not focus on the role the foreigner has played in all this, rather than on all the ill feeling of the past few nights?”  Maxime hesitated and then, when he were certain Camille still had not come, pressed on.  “I propose instead we discuss the role of the English government in our present state of affairs, and the vices inherent to the British constitution.”

The motion carried, the tension of the room broke in sweet relief: like drizzle when one has expected a torrent.  It was then Camille came, bright as a lightning bolt in advance of the thunder.

“Forgive me!  Forgive me, Citizen Robespierre!” he called, skittering across the floor on coltish legs, worn shoes slipping on smooth stone.  Straight to the tribune he went.  “I have come to answer the allegations made against me by Collot d’Herbois.”

Here was Camille, and more Camille than he had been for some time.  How, then, to account for the prickling produced by the very sight of him.  As Maxime looked upon him- on the black curls loose upon his shoulders, the flushed cheeks, the open coat and bare throat that seemed a declaration of childish disorder and absolute innocence- he felt nothing else.  Here stood the clever forgery of innocence, nimble Harlequin costumed as a feckless youth, wayward and reckless.  The clever deceit worked upon the audience, their eyes lingering upon his fine and boyish form, catching on the details of his disordered manner of dress and immediately declaring him a petty, pretty thing entirely beneath their interest.  Indeed, it seemed the majority of members sans, perhaps, Antoine and the partisans of Hébert and Collot, waited upon Camille’s gentle explanation as doting parents will wait intemperately upon the excuses of a treasured nursling.      
 
“Since you have already taken to the tribune,” Maxime said, drawing Camille’s dark, falcon eyes.  “Please.  We would have you explain your relations with Philippeaux, and your praise of him.”

Somehow that seemed to strike Camille with surprise, so that his eyes widened and his lips parted.  Maxime knew that look.  It recalled the small, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy who tripped upon his own words and began most every sentence with a soft hum as though preparing his tongue for speech.  This, then, was not calculation.  To see Camille stand there so stunned ripped at the tender place in Maxime’s heart that still held him dear.

“The t-truth of the m-m-matter is this.”  Camille took a breath, hummed, and tried again.  “The truth of the m-matter is that I have little relation with Citizen Philippeaux.  I did not speak of him as a friend, when I wrote, nor am I his friend now.”  

A muttering went up then amongst the members, though Maxime could not quite divine its meaning.  Perhaps they merely echoed Camille’s confused, evasive tone.  

“I d-do not always think, as you have ‘oft reproached me, Citizen Robespierre.”  Here Camille seemed more sure.  The winsome smile that charmed the hearts of women and men alike blossomed on his face.  “In this m-matter, I wished to speak to a b-broader theme, though I admit p-p-perhaps the manner was in poor taste and effect.  Like many who t-t-take up the quill to m-make their way in this world, I am sometimes c-carried off by my own c-calling.  I did not look deep enough into the truth of the remarks against Philippeaux, when I ought to have.  Therefore I stand b-before you all now and d-declare that I retract the ill-considered p-praise of which I am guilty.  As to Philippeaux and the allegations against him, I have no knowledge and g-gladly cede that g-ground to those who are b-better informed.”

The response pleased Maxime.  He felt himself transported back to Arras and the cases he had made there.  The moment when, speaking to his clients, they spilled some useful detail or presented some vulnerability that might be used in their defense.  If Collot and Hébert were the forces of prosecution, then the members and all those crowding the galleries must be appealed to.  It was they he must convince.  He must speak now, and so convincingly that even Antoine would waive his habitual animosity towards Camille and grant him pardon.  Camille, thankfully, had provided the very language with which to do so.  Maxime’s eyes met Danton’s.  Saw realisation and understanding confirmed there, one man of law to another.

“I have oft’ defended Camille, permitting myself such reflections as our long friendship allows,” Maxime said, rising.  All around was hushed silence as if, indeed, they had been transported to a court of law.  “Today I must set aside such gentle considerations and take up the matter of his writings in Le Vieux Cordelier.”

He paused to push his glasses higher upon his nose, using the delay to read the expressions of the audience.  They hung, Maxime thought, upon his every word and waited attentively.  Camille watched from the tribune, his smile flickering in uncertainty, here and then gone.  I shall hurt you, Maxime thought, I shall hurt you frightfully, Camille, but be brave and bear it wisely.

“It is beyond doubt that Camille’s scribblings are dangerous.  They have fed the hopes of France’s enemies when we would have them starve, they have warmed the hearts of the aristocrat and the foreigner, they have encouraged and spread within the public the disease of malignity.  Fancying himself a Juvenal, a Molière or yet a Voltaire, he has attempted a vain satire involving Tacitus, which has done nothing but show wise men how little our Camille understands of that author.”

A ripple of laughter, at which Camille winced like a man buffeted by a freezing wind.  Press on, Maximilien, he told himself, and even a look at Danton’s stricken face proved that he must.

“Camille had promised to abjure his writings and cease trumpeting these erroneous views.  He had promised to cease using the privilege history grants him, and indeed the love and esteem in which good patriots hold him, as currency with which to buy the support of an ignorant readership.”  Maxime took a breath.  He closed his eyes briefly.  The moment was like taking a plunge from some high ledge: one step, then nothingness.  “But success has made him proud.  The outpouring of love and praise has made him drunk with its sweetness, though it flows from the aristocrat’s mouth to his own.”

Someone in the gallery gasped loud enough for the walls to amplify and carry it to their furthest corners.  Did Maxime’s heart break then?  Of his own accord he would make it dust.  Did his words settle like rocks in his throat?  He would yet choke them up.  Did his eyes sting?  Then he would seek Antoine’s face amongst the crowd and make his own the stern reflection of it.  

“Camille is nothing but a spoilt child,” Maxime declared, his voice ringing on stone and glass.  He would not turn from Camille’s dark gaze, black as a bruise, but face it: the end of years.  “An infant of happy disposition, led astray by bad company he will not quit.”

The younger men shook and strained where he stood.  Maxime, however, spoke as cauterising flame: a brutal necessity to burn out this impurity.

“We must protest his scribblings, which even Brissot would not approve, yet preserve Camille amongst us.  Rather than turn him out, I demand that the offending numbers be burned in the Society.”

A waiting silence settled throughout hall and gallery, broken only by neighbour whispering to neighbour.  Maxime looked at Antoine and found him whispering in Augustin’s ear, as if translating Maxime’s cruel language into the purity of love underlying it.  Collot nodded.  Danton sat with eyes closed, his hands gripping the edge of his seat with Herculean strength.  

Last, Camille: his head high and shoulders set, his pale neck and cheeks flushed as with some fever.  His dark eyes glittered.  Oh, but how Maxime wished some tears would fall then.  How he longed for Camille to fall weeping at the truth he spoke, so Maxime might dare cross the floor and embrace him.  Pass him, then, to safe harbour in Danton’s loving arms to be carried home to the safety of his marriage bed.  But it was not tears that made Camille’s compelling eyes shine bright, rather they glittered with something hard as diamond.

“As Robespierre speaks to me in the language of friendship, then I shall adopt the same tone,” he said, stutter incinerated by open rage.  “You have said my numbers must be burned.  Then in the words of Rousseau I reproach you, my dear friend: burning is not answering.”

Maxime had been struck but once in all his life, and then only in his very youth.  Camille’s words recalled that moment: they were a balled fist to his stomach, sharp knuckles on his cheekbones.  They hurt, yes, but the humiliation was worse than the injury itself.  Maxime could look nowhere but at Camille, at the face he once loved well.  How strange, he thought, that his heart could be so badly rent and yet not break.  That he could take such wounds yet not bleed.  What at first impact had seemed a mortal blow, proved now merely a shot passed cleanly through: they hurt and left behind an emptiness, but soon enough the wound would close and mend.  What relief, now, to see Camille unmasked.  To perceive him with absolute clarity.

Danton laboured to his feet.  It was only that heavy, lurching motion that drew Maxime’s gaze away from that sight.

“Camille,” came the leonine rumble of his famed voice, sweet and soothing as honey.  “Camille, you need not be alarmed.  Accept Robespierre’s chastisement, for he speaks as both a patriot and a dear friend.  While we must all be wary of the curtailment of freedom that paves the path to dictatorship, I heard nothing in his speech but love for the Republic and for you.  Be appeased then, Camille, and take your seat.”

Though Maxime could not quite fathom it, he heard then in Danton’s voice the very timbre of a true and unceasing love.  Never had the man conveyed greater sincerity, and it was perhaps unsurprising that it should be directed towards but a single man.  Maxime could not help but imagine some strangely different world where he might be forced to face Antoine in such manner, to strive so hard to rescue him from danger that he would degrade himself by open pleading even if he were in the wrong.  Danton had no Roman heart, let alone capacity for rigid logic.  How he could stand this moment without collapsing to his knees and weeping was beyond understanding.  How relieved Maxime was, then, that Antoine had long ago surpassed Camille in his own heart and mind.  That they were such different men that Maxime would never have to know Danton’s pain, the open wound that he bared before Billaud's sneering contempt.

Camille, however, would yet plunge on.  He hummed in prelude to speech.  So, Maxime thought, I must drive the point home then.  It was not in his nature to feel hatred.  Even his anger was of a controlled sort: he did not like to give it vent, and despised the manner in which it other men became drunk on its excess.  This once, however, he slipped Fury's leash as if it were a hound to the chase: raw, yet governed with purpose.

“Very well, I retract my last motion.  I have the truth of it: where I thought you wayward, misguided, I see now that you work with intent.  That you have harnessed yourself thoroughly to this foolish cause.  Since you reject the label of child, then you will face us instead as a man, with a man’s full responsibility for his words and actions.”  Maxime looked upon the members, the gallery.  “Let Camille’s issue not be burned, but answered.  Since he wills it so, let him be covered in ignominy.”

Danton turned in one powerful, fluid motion towards Maxime.  Camille’s entire body seemed to sway and sag; it jerked as Maxime’s next words pierced him through.

“Know this, Camille,” Maxime cried, voice shaking with the anger that devoured his meat, his very bones.  “Were you not Camille, there would be no indulgence for you.”

You have taken it all from my heart.

*****

In the past, Maxime might have returned home after such a meeting.  Fatigue would pull at each step he climbed to his rooms, as thick mud pulls a man beneath its surface to drown him.  He might have slept, insensible even to the world of dreams.  This night Maxime felt no aches or pains, nor even his habitual tiredness at such late hours.  His blood, it seemed, was too high for all that and his heart ran fast and fast and faster still.  His hands trembled with no place to ground the current of ceaseless energy.  Instead, he joined Antoine and Couthon as they made their way back towards the Palais de la Nation and the Committee.

Resounding applause greeted Maxime upon reaching the Pavillon de l'Égalité.  He tolerated the hands that gripped his arms, his shoulders.  Took the watered wine that Carnot fixed for him and drank the first mouthful fast enough for Billaud to make jest of his haste.  The room had the loud and jovial tone of the theatre or the circus.  How strange, Maxime thought, to be treated as the actor of some fine and clever scene.  Only Antoine stood aloof, though he wore the small, habitual smile that David and Prud’hon had fixed to his curved lips for posterity.  His fine-carved eyes and steady gaze remained fixed on Maxime from across the room, fathomless as the darkest depths of the sea.   
        
It was not until some hours later, in the coldest hours well past midnight, that Maxime found himself more or less alone with Antoine.  The others slept in their camp beds, and Couthon within the hard confines of his chair.  At the other end of the table, Barère nodded into his cravat as he worked upon some lengthy piece of correspondence.

For a time he and Antoine sat, pressed close in companionable silence as they read over a report from Jourdan of the Army of the North.  Perhaps, Maxime thought, their minds were both fixed upon the same thing: the chaos of war, their beleaguered armies, the necessity of Antoine leaving on mission again.  What then?  Another some weeks or months spent praising his victories, his strategic brilliance, the discipline he meted out in every sphere of his existence; those same months awaiting news of his capture, his death, mourning in advance so the blow would come a little more easily when it struck.  Those same weeks and months here in Paris, friendless, beset by factionalism and facing the despair of the very people they both sought to protect, whose lives they would have live in perpetual security and the joys of freedom.  And then Antoine spoke, turning a page as he did so, his hushed voice muffled by its rustling.

“I think I recall all your printed works by heart,” Antoine said, disarming in his honest sincerity.  “As I learned my catechism.  It is how I first knew your soul, after all.”

Maxime’s breath caught and held.  Here he had been thinking of war, while Antoine- ever mindful of the lessons of Seneca and Epictetus- remained firmly in what had been and what was now.

“Your every word shaped my purpose.  They summoned me to Paris, or so I recall it.”

Disarming he was, and disarming this moment: the intimacy of Antoine’s speech flaying Maxime alive.  The words themselves were nothing more than other ardent friends might say, seeming daring and obvious only because they called certain memories to Maxime’s mind.  Antoine continued regardless: turning pages, whispering low.

“I remember, even, the first time I saw you take the tribune at the Jacobin Club.”  

Antoine paused.  The length of his silence- broken only by the stirrings and sputterings of sleeping men- drew Maxime’s reluctant gaze.  The other man's expression was one of earnest solemnity, as though he expounded upon some hidden truth that Maxime was slow to understand.  He imagined Antoine choosing his words with care, paring them back to their simplest form as Maxime pruned particularly overgrown branches of his own oration.  

“Never,” Antoine finally said, hand light on the back of Maxime’s as if to stay him.  “Have I admired you more.”

Maxime could not look directly at him, for often it was that Antoine shone too brightly for anyone to look at directly.  Like Zeus standing in glory before Semele, he could burn mere mortals to the very ground.  Instead Maxime studied, in safety, the pale skin of his long-fingered hands, the blunt clip of his nails, the minute cut near the point of one of his knuckles.  Maxime feared the obvious question, the one that loomed before him, and yet he could not prevent his misgivings.  Had there ever been a time in all his life when he had not doubted and questioned, when he had merely accepted the surface of things without peering beneath as much as he might fear what lay there?

“This admiration,” he said.  “Is it because it was Camille?”

“I have never hated Camille, that is mere invention.  All that I feel, all that I think, I devote to the Revolution: I am detached from everything it is not, and Camille has mistaken my indifference for loathing.”  Antoine turned to him.  “Rather, I admire you, Citizen Robespierre, because I believe in the necessity of sacrifice.  I know what you gave tonight, and it is everything.”

As with all storms, this unbearable tension must break at last.  The battle with Camille had not done it.  If anything, it had wound Maxime tighter.  So tight, now, that like a child’s automaton he must release or be torn apart by the strain.  Antoine’s words undid the Gordian knot of all Maxime’s thoughts, his emotions, loose and unraveling with each passing instant.  Maxime drew a breath so deep, released it so harshly, that Barère startled awake and sat blinking at them with dazed, unfocused eyes.

“He is not my life, after all,” Maxime said beneath his breath, trying for wry humour.  

Antoine did not smile.

“Our lives,” the younger man said.  “Are but the easiest part to give.”

*****

 On the following night they read Camille’s numbers: the fourth, the third.  There was a certain irony, Maxime thought, in Camille’s comparison of their present state with the combat of Vitellius and Vespasian, for it was he that the audience now watched.  The banks of seating, the entire gallery, were full and listless.  Tonight they stirred and whispered, jeered and bayed, waiting for blood.  It was an ugly, unbridled thing: not an expression of patriotic rage, not the chastising voice of the people, but the gladiatorial entertainment that the factions both decried and fomented.  It bore the quality of some shameful disease of vice: a private wound, confined at first to extremities easily concealed even as it infected every part of the body, fruiting at last when conditions proved ripe.  The majority of members, let alone the gallery, seemed taken with its fever.  Billaud and Collot, Hébert and his supporters, ran hot, leaving Camille, Danton and their men to tremble and pale before them.    

“The people would rage at this,” Antoine had said to Maxime, some hours or minutes ago when proceedings first commenced.  “If they but knew.  Is it their voice I hear in this hall, my friend, or Perfidy?”

Whatever voice spoke that night, Maxime reflected, it was not the people’s.  It spoke nothing of the Republic or of the Revolution.  It spoke personal enmity instead, a desire for supremacy that was unthinkable in 1789, when all the world’s joy and freedom stretched an open plain before them.  Momoro’s voice howled Camille’s gentle words like a fierce wind scatters blossoms from their branches.  How, Maxime wondered, had they so changed from those young men in Versailles?  Did the blood upon their hands make such beasts of them, twisting them into this mockery of virtues they once espoused?  

Yes, he thought, the people should rage or weep to think how they are here betrayed.  But there were none of the people amongst them tonight, not truly.  Maxime, however, was moved by them nonetheless.  By empty bellies and half-starved babes in arms, damp hovels admitting winter wind and sleet, families ripped apart by unceasing war, goodness and vertu lost or corrupted by harsh circumstance, all while their representatives squabbled over bones long devoid of meat or marrow.  He was moved by Antoine who, in spite of his prodigious learning and refined dress, was the closest of all the Paris Jacobins to being a child of nature; who had smeared his hands with good, dark earth in his garden at Blérancourt, wrapped them around a sword to defend the nation, who felt the high stone walls of Paris like they were the Bastille of his very soul.  Maxime was moved, yes, but he did not speak for them, or take their voice as Hébert did when he played at Père Duchesne.  Rather, these many voices merged within him to pass through a throat too narrow for their fullness and range.

Should it hurt?  Should there be pain here, in his back, where Camille's blades were buried?  Momoro’s voice twisted them, filling Camille’s pleading words with the hot air of his rage: my dear Robespierre; oh, my old school friend.  He should feel pain at that.  He did not.  He made of himself a vessel as he had always done as advocate, and moreso as judge: there was no place here for the man, the individual.  He could not find that tender place in himself even if he wanted to.  He knew only that he would wake from this seeming trance, this state of being l’Incorruptible- not quite Robespierre, not quite Maxime- bearing the aches and bruises of a battle he hardly knew he fought.  He sat still and silent for now, barely attending to the debate except when called to, if only because his judgment already waited, fully-formed, like Athena waiting to spring from Zeus’ skull.  He ached with its pressure, the dim candlelight momentarily blurring until Maxime blinked them back to clarity.

Maxime rose as the last voices died away, driven to his feet more by force of thought than strength of muscle.  He waited for a relative silence to settle, for in this sad performance he knew well that the audience awaited his entrance.  He did not look to Antoine, for he felt their souls so finely attuned to one another by now that he knew already their words and thoughts were shared.  He looked instead to Camille, whose font of cheap phrase seemed at last to have dried.  Camille who sat now with his pale face turned sickly grey, his sharp eyes underscored by deepest shade.  

“Camille’s words, it must be admitted, strike a painful blow to our enemies; yet with his sarcasm, his silly attempts at satire, he tears apart worthy patriots,” Maxime said.  He paused, allowing that to settle and then, “He has always been a strange mixture of truth and lies, of policy and idiocy, of sense and fancy.  I will take no side in this battle, for it is not of the people, of the Republic nor yet of the Revolution.  It is a battle stemming not from love of others, or love of the patrie and the people, but from that amour-propre of which Rousseau so rightly warns us.  Hébert and Camille are equally wrong, in my eyes.  To take Hébert’s part would be to cede ground to a man who thinks only of himself, not the nation, and who covets the attention of the people only to use their good will for personal gain.  As for Camille, do as you will.  Retain or expel him, for he is only an individual and we must remain guided by what is good for the entire nation.”

A cry went up, unfamiliar, in the quiet that followed.  It took Maxime a moment to realise that it was Camille voice, devoid of words, stripped bare and raw and keening.  Danton was there, however, quick to soothe and silence him even as Fabre rose to leave from his place amongst them.  Later, Maxime would have time to consider the moment devoid of its confusion, the sudden burst of energy and anger it caused in him.  To realise that it was Fabre’s faithlessness, his willingness to abandon his fellows- to abandon even Camille, who had so oft’ spoke of him in loving terms- that caused what followed more even than his chicanery and fraud.  In the instant, however, Maxime knew only that the motion drew his eyes, that he spotted Fabre’s skulking figure and a great fury rose in him, bursting free of that place in his heart where he sealed all unworthy and unnecessary things.

“That man,” he called, so suddenly that all fell quiet again, leaving his words to echo.  “He who is so clever with his staging and his plots, who looks upon us all with his lorgnette as if Revolution is but a play to be performed.  Let Fabre who names himself d’Eglantine explain himself now!”

In the instant that followed came that horrid cry- ‘to the guillotine!’- as ominous as the pollice verso to a defeated gladiator.  And though Maxime instantly ejected he who shouted it, though Maxime himself would have him choke to death on the very words, they could hardly be torn from all the ears that heard them.  Well might the fool have erected that ghastly monument in their very midst, for in the instant it was said Maxime felt its blade poised above the Jacobins, its breath upon every neck bent to its will.      

      

   *****

If any stranger looked for them after the close of the meeting, when all had exited the hall, here is what Maxime thought they saw: two men cloaked in the shadows of a doorway, standing at arm’s distance with their hands upon one another’s elbows.  Perhaps they marked the urgency in how they gripped one another, though it was writ more plainly on the face of the elder than the younger.  Perhaps they took them for kin, though their appearance was at great odds.  They would be taken for friends at very least, brothers within that expanded definition of the term which the Revolution had wrought.  But the interpretation of this private language of touch and expression was, Maxime reflected, for them alone.  Where Antoine’s fingers clutched, their warmth snuffed by the thick layers of Maxime’s clothing, he knew praise and the renewal of the solemn, unspoken vows between them.  Maxime, for his part, spoke all his gratitude and devotion by press of palm and finger.  So subtle a language, Maxime thought, yet one of such infinite hope and profundity.

They parted with unspoken understanding: Antoine to the Committee, Maxime to the Duplays.  It was all done, Maxime thought.  Camille had been taught this harsh lesson, he would remain or fall according to the will of the Society, but he was at the very least safe and spared the worst.  Let him live and become obscure.  Hébert, however, was the one who bore further consideration: his allies everywhere, as termites will embed themselves in even the soundest of structures, devouring each sturdy beam to the point of collapse.  

“Maxime!”

Before he could give the matter further thought, Augustin’s voice halted him.  Maxime meant to tease him for this little delay, for falling yet again into incessant chatter after a meeting.  Something in Augustin’s open, excited expression made him hesitate.  He knew that look, for he had seen it often in the last few years.  It had all the thoughtlessness, the pure emotion, that characterised so many moments in the Revolution.  Seldom, Maxime had found, did it bode well.  Far too often, rather, such an expression signified only that reasonable caution was abandoned for the sake of glory or advancement, the momentary joy of fleeting victory.  Augustin hooked their arms together as they fell into step.

“Danton,” Augustin breathed, half pulling Maxime along the street with the force of his longer stride.  “Has just declared he will soon return to the Convention.”

Maxime looked up at the stars.  He breathed.  In his ears, the rumbling of the tumbril, the rolling of drums, the whispering fall.   

Chapter Text

21 Nivôse

There was a France that was the Elysium of Maxime’s mind; an Arkadía visited in dreams and imaginings, hinted at in the subtle poetry of his speeches and the Utopian writings that he scribbled down in early hours and burned immediately.  Dreams that rose on smoke to Heaven like the offerings he had read were given in China.  There was a France he found not within the heaving tumult of the Committee and the Convention, but by walking through the streets and living amongst the Duplays.  A France he embraced each morn’ as he greeted Le Bas or Augustin.  That he heard, sweet as song falling from Antoine’s lips, more beautiful than any music the younger man played upon his ivory flute.

Where does this lead?

He asked it of Antoine one morning, standing in one of the many side-rooms. Seizing but a small moment to be alone with him when they were so ‘oft kept separate by their labours to talk and dream as they were wont to do, a brief reprieve from the bleak and the visionless.

“What do you see,” he asked, a question whose answer he trusted to few others.  “When I speak of France?  Of the Republic, our future?”

A tilted head, the sweep of thumb over the ripe swell of lower lip.  Antoine, full of life and thought, but considering the question with customary guilelessness and gravitas.  Saint-Just: the desires of the flesh enchained by the desires of the soul.

“Joy, amongst all good patriots.  Enemies driven from our land so we may enjoy our accomplishments in peace.”  He hesitated.  “When the land is sown with so much blood, it nourishes life.  I imagine their sacrifice, then, turned to long grass and wildflowers, such as will never be trampled again.”

Maxime closed his eyes and pictured it: dark wooded hills and green meadows stretching before him, the scent of spring grass in the sunlight and the industrious hum of bees upon the shore of a swollen stream.  Wild strawberries ripening sharp to the tongue, the sweet smell of lupins in the shade.  Antoine's coat matched to the blue, five-pointed star of periwinkles as the smooth white bells of Solomon’s Seal matched the pallor of his skin.  Here and there, perhaps, red poppies sprung from the ground in deference to the blood spilled there.

“I see a content people, prosperous, each possessing the same wealth as his neighbour.  Wealth itself measured by no currency other than the sweetness of the hearth and the company of dear- perhaps, I brave, the very dearest- friends.  A people no longer chained to absurd and unnecessary hierarchies will soon abandon the oppression of others, seeing no purpose in scrabbling for scraps of power merely to survive.  Vice, then, abandoned.  The bottle tossed aside, men drunk only on the pleasantness of waking each morning; no harlotry or callow lust, but bonds of love formed between good citizens and sustaining what is needful to their souls.”

Antoine’s voice was a balm, warm as the sun through the thick glass of the nearby window.  Maxime leaned back against the door behind him, if only through some heady mix of exhaustion and the desire to tarry longer in this dreamlike state.  The only freedom granted them that of their minds, much as Rousseau himself had found in his fugitive years after Môtiers.  He felt himself in this place Antoine described, so like the Republic of his own imaginings.  Felt himself there because it existed- this independence, this virtue- between them.  He thought then of Antoine’s sorry tale of the loving friends in Alsace, of what goodness they might have wrought had they survived, and resolved himself.    

“Your words I would listen to all day,” he said.  ”But listening is not doing.”

“It is not.  Nor is dream made reality by lingering in sleep.”

“If I am honest, I have found my dreams more satisfying awake, of late.”

How he spoke now.  As Antoine once maintained, it was quite impossible to disentangle the Revolution from the Republic, good governance from vertu, Reason from sentiment, patrie from peuple, agape from philia from eros.  Nothing so resembled the purity of Truth as this tender confusion, this refusal of his heart and mind to perceive what most men considered harsh distinctions.  He spoke of all these things at once, in most every sentence uttered between them.  There was only just and unjust, and all that was just lay here within this room, within his reach.  The ardor, then, in his voice, met and matched in Antoine’s dark eyes.

“The tangible is often more satisfying than the ethereal,” Antoine said.  “Unless one is the Pope.”

“The immortality of the soul…”

“Is rendered more beautiful by our words and deeds while living.  I do not mock eternity,” Antoine’s voice dropped, taking on the depth of his dedication.  “Nor do I mock you, Maxime.  You, who have made a deist of me.”

A kiss then, made sweeter by its brevity: chaste osculum, carrying on full, chapped lips the promise of swift advance to basium at some distant, stolen hour.  Their discussion, however, remained with him throughout the day.  If, in some men, it might have formed a distraction, for Maxime it provided only focus.  There was not a paper he signed, nor a report he read, nor correspondence entered into without thinking of that future Antoine described.  Without consideration for how it might be brought into being, or how each stroke of his pen and word on his tongue might add or detract to it.

His mind wandered often, that day, to images of a hard and brutal birth.  He thought of a stillborn brother, and his mother feverish and bleeding in bed.  He could not avoid the obvious analogy: the Revolution a long and cruel labour to bring about joy, the Republic an infant who might be delivered whole and wailing or blue and silent.  Death like a midwife ‘round the bed they laid her on.

Maxime’s stomach ached.  He took himself outside and vomited sour bile into the snow.  He hid it.  Said nothing.  Always, there was more work to be done, yet how flawed the shaking hands and narrow shoulders responsible for its delivery. 

Perhaps, he later reflected, it was this lack of strength that explained his actions that night at the Society.  Had he not sufficiently dedicated himself, a lonely priest of Reason for so many years, to this course?  Did he doubt?  Was it but that, for all their flaws, he had always heard Danton’s rumbling laughter in the future of his design?  Had always seen its radiant light falling on Camille’s glossy, raven curls?  How was it, then- knowing how Camille had acted to deceive, had succored the aristocrat, had acted in every way to delay the coming of dream- that he could not take a stance against him when it was called for?  That he should temper his speech in such a way as to imply consent, to argue for his staying amongst them, subtle though it might be.  An act utterly invisible to some, yet sufficient enough for others to fire cries of dictateur!

Antoine watched on, silent.  Antoine across whose radiant face passed anger and weary disappointment, as the shadows of passing clouds will cross a sunlit field of wheat.  Antoine who met his gaze and voted for Camille’s expulsion.  You punish only striking crimes, Antoine once wrote, hypocritical crimes are unpunished.  The rebuke rang again in Maxime’s ears, loud as if Antoine had spoken.  The truth of it now seemed even clearer.  Yes, Hébert was the greater threat.  Yes, they had all learned well enough that fighting a war on two fronts was pure foolishness.  But was it all?  Was there not some part of him that clung to fond memories, to the knowledge that Camille’s patriotism- though foolishly expressed and utterly flawed- was yet beyond question?  

Or perhaps it was this: in Camille, Maxime saw the very nature and craft of a Pandora.  A man made replete with grace and longing, shameful mind and deceitful nature, a mouth shaped for the sweetness of lies and crafty words.  Was it not to be said that Camille in his wickedness had passed to Maxime’s hands that fateful jar, from which all pains derive?  To have him destroyed, to send him from their company…would that not make yet more calamities spill forth?

Antoine, a master of words and an even greater master of the spaces between them, said nothing of any of it as they left the club.

“Your silence,” Maxime said, ever the first to speak. “Rends my heart.”

Hope, he thought, hope clung to the lip of the pithos and would not be dislodged.

“Your speech rends mine.”

As though hope, too, had given way: walked into the night, shaped into the form of the one unbent, unbroken man in all of France.

22 Nivôse

“Reports, reports!  The Committee is besieged by reports!”  

Billaud paced the room like a poor, sad beast of the Royal Menagerie.  Maxime had viewed them once with Éléonore: huge felines, their fur worn rough and thin, their bones showing through the pelt, their yellow eyes mounting sad challenge to an excited audience who had never expected to see their like.  Éléonore had been moved more to anger than he, who rather felt the sympathy of kinship with them.  Now, looking at Billaud with his thinning mane of dark hair, Maxime thought of the old lion who had shown his yellowing and broken fangs and roared at the temerity of their gaze.  Like the great cats, Maxime reflected, they turned upon one another within this shared and narrow pen, forgetting the real enemy.

“Vadier brings us nothing but warnings: discontent and despair, rage in the streets.  It is as if I am at college again being cudgeled by the priests about sin.  And what is our sin, Citizen Representatives?  It is factionalism.  It is Hébert.”  He paused, bracing his hands on the table as though it were the lectern and fixing Maxime with his weighted gaze.  “It is Camille.”

Maxime took a sip of water from the glass by his hand.  The smile on his face felt dry, cracked like a riverbed in high summer.  

“Fabre will be arrested tomorrow, and his regrettable conduct brought to light," he said.  "The factions…”

Collot leaned forward, resting his elbows upon the table.  “The factions, Robespierre, are not Fabre alone.”

“Is it not he who cloaked his criminality in the costume of patriotism?”

“Is it not also the case that visible sign of illness sometimes hints at something far deeper?” Billaud asked.  “Something beneath the skin?”

“Shall I have my doctor attend our meetings, to advise further?”

The remark drew a smattering of laughter.  Not from Billaud, however, whose smile was thin and cold as the crescent of a winter moon.  He stalked around the table, in slow prowl: letting men like Carnot and Barère feel the very weight of his presence, tapping the surface of the table, squeezing Collot’s shoulder with the violent familiarity of brother beasts.  He came to a halt beside Antoine.  Bent to refill the younger man's wine glass.

“Speak, Saint-Just, since you are sensible.”  Billaud's voice lilted.  Red, he poured: darker than the grapes it had been pressed from, a depth like blood or the crimson of striped coverlets that Maxime had clutched in his fists.  “Tell us your thoughts.”

Maxime watched over the rims of his spectacles.  It was not bait as one might give a bear to incite rage.  No, more like meat upon a hook, angling for something more than Antoine’s momentary attention.  If Antoine noticed- and Maxime was certain he did- he gave no sign, only bowed his head in polite acknowledgement and raised the glass to his lips.

“I think a man may know how to string some few thousand words together, and do his accounting, without understanding the value of either.”  

A smattering of applause, Billaud’s peppered with delighted laughter.  

“An honest man is brief.  Sure,” Antoine continued.  “All his emotions are verbs: action, expression, not idle prose.”      

His words had an effect like the snuffing of a candle: as if they had all been robbed quite suddenly of air.  Maxime could not but smile and incline his head in deference to a point well-made.

A soft clearing of the throat announced that Barère would speak.

“In age,” he said.  “Are you not but one of these ‘children’ of the Revolution that Camille speaks of?”

“Years are meaningless.  Sensibility is everything.”

Billaud thumped the table with his fist, sending glasses and lamps trembling.  “What is this?  Our chief letter-writer tweaking the nose of a man who has seen blood and battle?  Who will see more of it still?  No!”  Billaud stretched across the table to grab his own glass and raise it high.  “I, for one, salute our dear Ares and his sensibility.  To Saint-Just, then, the wine if not the laurels.”

“Saint-Just!” Went up the call, they each taking a drink of their wine, though Barère’s pale face almost matched its colour.

“Yes,” Maxime said, meeting Antoine’s gaze across the table.  “Few can lay so genuine a claim to their words and deeds marching apace with one another.”

“Let us have our one Saint-Just, then.” Billaud, quick upon the heels of any remark he had not given himself.  His eyes focused directly upon Maxime as his hand closed firm on Antoine’s shoulder.  “Better our one Saint-Just, than a thousand Desmoulins.”

“I need no veneration, Citizen,” Antoine said.

“You are a saint, however.  Women swoon at Robespierre’s every word, but men…ah, my friend, men would kneel before you.”

“The people grant worship to mere men because it is easier to wind oneself in chains than live free.  That is the danger of demagoguery, and men who prostitute themselves to public opinion.”  Antoine rose then, stepping free of Billaud’s grasp.  “If we are to escape that particular danger, it becomes necessary to propose an alternative.  To chart a course for the government, and move in a single direction.  Only thus can factionalism be defeated.”  

“We are not physicians, Saint-Just,” Barère said.  His voice, Maxime noted, was soft as ever: neither rebuke nor praise, never one thing or another.  “To prescribe a tonic and thereby cure human nature.”

Maxime’s raised his head, for it was a strange, unworthy remark from an unexpected quarter.  “Do you mean to suggest the people are at fault, and not their representatives?”

A silence fell.  Beyond the high windows, the same, and an all-consuming darkness.  The only sound came from the direction of other Committees, the sound of other arguments.  Something skulked in the backs of Barère’s eyes.  All the rest were quiet, fixing their gaze on any spot that might be taken for interest.

“Robespierre addresses my point,” Antoine said.  “The people require no tonics and tinctures, it is their representatives who require an understanding of revolutionary principles.  How can factions not form when each man works for himself?  How should the people come to love the Republic, if it seems to them only a mass of contradictions and a nest of vipers?”

“You propose to address it?” Billaud asked.  “A reminder to the Convention of its principles?”

“Rather,” Saint-Just replied.  “A reminder of morality.”

“You are fortunate that I love saints better than priests, my friend.”  Billaud cocked his head.  “From your mouth, moralité is pure sweetness, but we should be cautious of substituting gods and prophets for demagogues and heroes.”

“Caution gave men kings.  Let us use reason, instead, in our endeavors.”

“And who would you have draft this speech, should we pursue it?”

“Who could," Antoine asked, gaze meeting Maxime's in gentle provocation.  "But Robespierre?” 

       

25 Nivôse

“I have been writing a report for the Society, on the faction of Fabre d’Eglantine. Will you read it?”

Though they had worked together, he and Antoine, for little beyond a year, it might as well have been all their lives, or all history to the dawn of Creation.  Before it, perhaps, when there was nothing but darkness and peace in the Heavens, and they had spoken the language of atoms within the void.  How, then, should he not comprehend the very language of Antoine’s silent reproach?  Maxime watched him study the pages before him: mouth curved downward, finger tapping against certain phrases.  How cruel, Maxime thought, to be known so thoroughly one cannot be misunderstood.

“It is insightful,” Antoine said at last, looking up.  “You always are.”

“You object.”

“You have elucidated the play most clearly, Maxime.  But absolve the playwright.”

27 Nivôse

Together, in Maxime’s rooms, at Maxime’s desk.  His completed Discours sur la faction Fabre-d’Eglantine was a neat, untouched pile upon the surface.  Complete, yes, but untouched: he could not bear to look at it anymore, to see for himself all he had avoided, the uncertainties he had rendered truths.  Untouched because Antoine, sitting opposite him in silent contemplation, had spared it no glance.

“Fabre will face the Tribunal soon,” Antoine said.  “We have spoken of plays.  Of performance.  We know how this ends.”

“As it must, though I take no pleasure in thinking of it.”

Antoine nodded, his gaze settling on the frontispiece of the report.  It was rare to catch him like this in waking hours, to find these quiet moments when he were not in perpetual motion.  Finding Antoine thus had much the same quality of having sat, patiently, waiting for a swift to pause its incessant flight.  The moment in which Maxime could observe him to heart’s content was but brief, disrupted the same instant it began.  Antoine shifted to the edge of the seat, the wood creaking softly beneath his weight.  For a moment, Maxime recalled Camille’s final visit: Camille’s face the very mask of honesty, Camille drunk and on his knees before him.  Maxime shivered.  Shivered again for entirely different reasons when Antoine’s hand cupped first his cheek, then the side of his neck.

“In the final act,” Antoine said, “make me your instrument.”

“You speak of use.  You speak of yourself- to me, of all people- as property.”

“I speak as a soldier, offering his body to the Republic, which we account patriotism.  I speak as a man, standing beside his friend on the battlefield, and taking wounds for him when he can take no more.”

“You think me weak.”

“Never.  You are the strongest of them all.”  Antoine’s voice was no more than a murmur, his hands steady and firm on Maxime’s shoulders.  “Marat fled to London, Danton retired to the countryside, Desmoulins collapsed when the Girondins were sentenced.  Desmoulins, of all people, when it is you who spoke against the death penalty, you who have taken every death since like a black mark on your soul.”

“Antoine…”

“I will not permit you to forget yourself, Maxime,” he said.  “Or to lose yourself in what others make of you.  So I say again: make me your instrument, when you must finally face Danton."

"I..."

"Know I will do as I must, and instead turn your eyes to life, not death.  Trust me, Maxime.”

“My dear friend," Maxime whispered.  "My dear friend, you as no one else.”  

28 Nivôse

“I have been thinking of morality,” Maxime said, as he and Antoine walked beside the Seine.  “And of the soul.”

The words, thick upon his tongue, came slow from his mouth, like trying to pour cold treacle from a jar.  When Antoine looked down at him, gaze shadowed by the brim of his hat, Maxime glanced away.  He felt what could only be described as a shyness, such as he had not felt for many years.  Much the same as he had felt upon receiving his first prizes in college, or the first morning he dared raise his voice in the National Assembly.  Stronger, perhaps, because he esteemed Antoine enough to wish his sympathetic hearing and fear his rejection.

“Regarding Fabre, still?”

“No.  It cannot…” he stopped, the words lodged within his throat.  “It cannot be confined in such ways.  One man.  One group.  It is…”

Maxime hesitated.  To trust, he thought, you know not how great a thing it is to ask of me, nor how I have given you already.  He had contained these words so long, as other men might contain their secrets.  They felt vital to him as the organs of his body, the blood pumping through his veins.  How to explain their formlessness, how he were only now shaping their structure as Pygmalion shaped Galatea from yielding ivory.  To share them so soon seemed a brutal act upon his person.  Seemed, in the violence with which he tore them from his breast, as though he cut open the cage of his ribs to reveal his own heart.

“It is greater- it must be- than the individual.  Otherwise, we shall tear ourselves into smaller and smaller pieces, each man determining for himself his own morality.  Absolving himself at will.”

“Yes.”

“I have not stopped.  I have not slept.  I have turned all of myself to…”

what is best for the Republic.

“It is all of myself, Antoine.  In ink and paper.  Will you read me, please?  I would have no other eyes but your own.”

It was more, he thought, than the revelation of his heart.  He took his notebook from the safety of his coat pocket, and it was as though he took his heart from his breast and gave it, in cupped hands, for Antoine to partake of.  How fearful a thing it was to trust a friend with something so precious and singular as one’s own trembling, burning heart.  Yet how rewarded that moment's faith: Antoine’s hands upon it as though upon some brittle, antique thing, his fingers turning each page with solicitous care.  

“May I?” Antoine asked, even as he took the book beneath the watery light of a street lamp.  And then, moments later (for they were mere notes after all), he turned.  “Yes.  Yes to all you have said.  I see it, this model of virtue you speak of.”

Maxime smiled and took his arm, for it was late, with none there to see or judge amiss.  He permitted himself the brief, simple pleasure of their arms pressed close.

“It is but the beginning,” he said.  

29 Nivôse

Maxime’s notebook swelled with thoughts, with observations, more disorderly than normal: a great outpouring of all that was in his heart and all his morning visitors.  From a widow who lost her husband at Valmy and her son at Jemappes, he took the grief of patriotism unrewarded.  From a butcher whose shop had closed when there was no meat to sell, he took the need for public wealth.

Love for the homeland produces all virtues.  Strength of soul makes the people capable of sacrifice, he wrote.  Commerce provides wealth for all, else we return to monstrous opulence.  This is unthinkable.

“What do you see, old friend, when we speak of France?  Of the future?”

He asked Maurice the question one morning, having come down to the workshop to give his morning greeting.  Though the night had been bitter, the room was bright with lamplight and subtly warmed by the bodies of labouring men.  It smelled comfortingly of fresh sweat, raw wood and metal.  Motes of sawdust thickened each breath, dancing on currents of air, golden in the beams of light. 

Industry, Maxime thought, a man’s hard and honest labour. 

One of the youngest apprentices, a boy no more than fourteen or so, had fairly stopped in his work.  He stared openly at Maxime, in the manner of the people: half daring challenge, half admiration.  Maxime offered him a smile before politely returning his attention to Maurice, standing before him in quiet contemplation.

“I should say it is the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality,” the older man- more a father than Maxime had ever known- said, in his slow and halting way.  “Much like here: there is hard work and toil, yes, but no man is accorded greater status than any other, except in what he shows of his craft.”

Many hours later, Maxime- kept awake in part by the pain in his legs, in part by his tumult of thoughts- came downstairs for a cup of water.  He found Éléonore still awake in the salon, her dark head bent to the study of a book upon her lap.  At his appearance she neither startled, nor fussed, nor offered to fetch, but sat as the very model of patience until he took a seat beside her on the settee.  

“You study so deeply, I had almost taken you for a young Oratorian,” he said, as lightly as he dared.  And then, when she had turned the book towards him so he might see its cover- Yu le Grand et Confucius, histoire Chinoise- he continued, “Will you then, by study, make yourself in the model of an ancient sage?”

“Rome and Greece have little to offer a woman,” Éléonore replied.  “Citizen Saint-Just has given it to me in loan.  Seeing that I had done with European philosophers, he said he thought my gaze might be drawn East instead.”

“Antoine gave you this?”

“When last he came to visit you.  What is it he said?  That he abhors all chains, and sees I am cruelly chafed by those binding me to the sphere of my sex.”  She looked directly at Maxime.  “I do not always understand him, but he is better than a brother.  He loves me well, if only because he loves all that is part of you.”

“Well then, dear sage,” he said, preferring not to pursue the quarry of her wit any further.  “What is your council?  Speak to me now of France, rather than antiquity.”

Her large, dark eyes- so like Antoine’s, in many ways, though gentled somewhat by the softness of her face- widened at the question.  Did it surprise her so to be asked, even after all of their confidences and hours of discourse?  It saddened him, and so he did as he would never dare with any other woman: he reached out and put his hand upon her shoulder, as easily and fraternally as he might with Le Bas or Augustin or Couthon.  How marvelously was his faith proved by the way she squared her shoulders beneath his grip, rising to sit taller rather than fluttering to him in shallow admiration.

“Justice and virtue must be carved into our hearts, not in stone or useless plaques upon which the eye quickly glances and moves on.  Not where they may be replaced at will by  tyrants.”  She looked at him then, her mouth a solemn line and her gaze as steady and serious as that of the philosophers and sages she read.  “Written laws are easily altered, and the mind forgets.  A lesson learned by heart, and held safe within the breast, is seldom lost.”  

30 Nivôse

“You have bared your very heart to me.  No, your very soul,” Antoine said, his voice always at its deepest point when burdened with uncertainty.  The depth of a perfectly tuned cello, it had, a more sombre instrument than the violin, less stentorian than the bass.  “And I would have nothing disparate or secret in our relations.”

Maxime looked up from the draft of the speech before him.  He had been occupied in marshaling his notations into some form of logical order, some overarching theme, but already it seemed too grand and complex an act.  How should he force all his thoughts, the inner-workings of his heart, the guidance of virtuous friends, into one object?  How could he create a speech so worthy of its subject that it might provoke tears in those guilty of moderation, and terror in the hearts of those who- by their baying for blood, their destruction of harmless faith and its very symbols- would turn the Revolution into a source of disgust amongst the very people is served?  Thus Antoine’s interruption, rather than being a source of frustration, was instead a relief.  

“Nor I,” Maxime said gently.  “What secrets do you carry, then?”

“None, but this.”

From his coat Antoine produced a leather-bound notebook, bound so tight by its cords that it was as if the other man had sought to strangle the contents within.  Indeed, were it not for Antoine’s help in undoing them, Maxime might not have been granted access at all.  At last, however, the book opened, releasing the scent of ink and powder and paper.  Antoine’s writing- never neat, far less so when expecting privacy- spidered out before Maxime’s eyes: a mass of staccato lettering, whole lines and paragraphs struck through with much the same brutality as his clipped speech in public.

“You may not find greatness here, but honesty,” Antoine said, voice harsh as the lines of his writing.  “If it will serve you.”

It is necessary to replace all other interests with the public interest.

Natural connections- needs, desires- that is the social state.  The relationship of men between themselves.

It is not enough to govern: examples of virtue and modesty must be given.

Each breath came arid to Maxime’s lungs, his mouth entirely dry, as if he stood in a desert and not the heart of Paris in winter.  He read each short, sharp sentence with all the fierce joy of sudden freedom shared.  Here his own heart, his own mind, put so easily into another’s words.  When he managed at last to drag his gaze from the page, he found Antoine standing with his hands braced upon the windowsill, peering out into the night.  

“You are constructing the edifice of our future, then?” Maxime asked, if only to call him back.  His voice was so suffused with warmth that his very throat, his chest, warmed with it as with a strong draught of brandy.

“I am moved to theory and philosophy, at times.”

“And write as a modern Harmodius,” Maxime replied, trusting him to understand the implication.  And then, more seriously, “You write, my friend, as though to tell me of my own mind.”  Recalling Éléonore’s words, he amended, “As though to tell me of my own heart.”

“Take my words: they are yours.  There is not one part of myself, I think, that is not a part of you anyway.”  Antoine smiled, fragile as a candle flame upon first being lit.  “Besides, if you have read your Symposium, you must understand why.”

“How strange that we have both been so hesitant with one another as to conceal these thoughts so long.”

“Strange?  It is only the casting off of old chains.”

Antoine returned to put a tentative hand upon his shoulder, as if fearing its reception.  Maxime, naturally enough, took his hand and kissed his palm as fervently as he dared, and each of his fingers besides. 

“It takes some time to accustom oneself to independence," Antoine said, as if talking to himself.  "I think our minds bear the weight and pain the longest.”

Yes, Maxime thought, they do.   He imagined the Convention, all its members bound by the chains of tyranny and some- like he and Antoine- casting off more than simply the yoke of aristocracy.  How hard a struggle to lift that weight, and how many would fail to accomplish the task.  How many, in tiring, would relent instead, devoid of the companionship so necessary to the human spirit.

“Lend them your virtue, Maxime,” Antoine said, as though reading his very thoughts.  “And couple it with justice.  That is the only way.”

3 Pluviôse

Thus Plato wrote in The Symposium, through the voice of Parminides:

For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live at principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work.

Well he said it, for Maxime feared no longer.  The uniform was there in the corner of Maxime’s eye: the dark blue coat with its glinting epaulettes, the tricoleur sash and white riding gloves.  He had seen it, of course, the moment he had entered Antoine’s rooms.  Had, indeed, known that it must be laid out from the moment the Committee read its official decree to send him to the Army of the North.  Love of the homeland assumes or produces all the virtues, Maxime had written, for what are they, but the strength of the soul needed to make people capable of such sacrifices?

“Come,” said Antoine, already free of coat and cravat, stretching a hand to draw him to bed.  “Let us embrace with arms, before we have only words.”

An honest man’s emotions are verbs; action and expression, not idle words.  Antoine seemed devoted to the proving of his point.  There was neither hesitation nor haste in the way they divested each other of their clothing, the communication of their wholly mutual reverence spoken more in touch and sigh and exclamation than in words.  Antoine gave Maxime’s queue a quick wrench, entirely playful until Maxime tipped his head back and moaned, so that Antoine dove forward to press his ravenous mouth to the very place on Maxime's throat from whence such sound came.  They pressed close, knee-to-knee and chest-to-chest, mouths barely parting except to find a bare shoulder, an unexplored stretch of neck to lay tender claim to.

It was Antoine who sat at last, his long, strong legs folding elegantly behind the backs of Maxime’s.  Antoine who looked up at him, the blacks of his eyes having eclipsed much of their colour, and pulled Maxime down by steady grip upon his hips.  It took Maxime but a moment to understand his aim, but once discovered he could only hasten to accomplish it.  He curved both his wiry arms loose around Antoine’s neck as though they had been crafted with no other purpose, brought his legs to encircle the narrow cut of Antoine's waist.

“Rest your weight upon my lap,” Antoine murmured.

And so doing, Maxime found with subtle shock that they were more of a height.  That he could look and meet Antoine’s gaze directly, or do no more than lean forward to seek his mouth.  Antoine’s hands settled, one under Maxime’s thigh and one fitting to the curve of his buttock, pulling him close, until there was no more space between them.

“Ah!”

The broken cry sprang from Maxime’s mouth to the rough of Antoine’s cheek.  His hips bucked helplessly so that they struck together again, again and again once more before Maxime could gain control of the motion.  Here too they fit perfectly: sex against sex, an almost unbearable warmth where their chests almost touched.  Antoine looked at him, and his expression was one of such honest friendship and open wonder that Maxime could barely meet it.  Rather he bound himself closer by strength of leg and arm, assured Antoine would not break of it, and rocked tight against him.  Seated thus, Antoine had no leverage and so it was Maxime instead who directed them: at first in slower, longer strokes so they might feel all of each other, and then shorter, firmer, his body driving helplessly towards release.  

“I can’t…like this…” Antoine’s voice came, a broken, shuddering gasp against Maxime’s neck.  “I need more...”

It was an easy thing to change position: Maxime upon his back, Antoine above him.  The weight of his body, the immensity of their friendship, the dim light from the lamps gold on Antoine's skin and a halo for his dark hair: all seemed too much to ask the Gods for. 

“Oh,” Maxime said, as Antoine pressed down and down again with a sharp hitch of his hips.

Meaning, in its entirety: oh, how well we fit together, as if healing the very state of man.  In assistance of which, Maxime wrapped his legs, thin as they were, around Antoine’s waist so they pressed still tighter.  The roll of Antoine’s hips came sure now, certain and inexorable.  Maxime spread out beneath him like yielding sand molded by the wave that strikes it.  A quicker pace- at last, at last- clumsy and certain and wonderful all at once.  Each of Maxime’s limbs tensed, poised upon a narrow edge, that same tension thickest between his legs.  He flung one arm over his eyes.  Came undone upon a sudden strike to that part of his sex that was most sensitive to touch.  Covered his mouth with one hand and moaned into the palm. He drew each breath hard and sharp and fast, though it guttered with what seemed a second, shallower tremor of pleasure as Antoine stilled and groaned above him, spending warm and slick as Maxime had between their joined bodies.

They slept little: an hour, less.  A bare instant of rest before Antoine and Le Bas were due to leave by carriage to Guise.  They dressed together in the early hours of the morning, though it was Maxime who took the privilege of knotting the tricoleur at Antoine's hip.  He did so with all the simple pride and love of glory possessed by a man who is sacrificing the best part of himself for the homeland.

    
4 Pluviôse

It was Éléonore, of course, who brought him the note.  Who else, in the end, could be so trusted?  Who else would join Antoine in such loving conspiracy.

Dare, my dearest friend, it read, for you have your Alcestis on the one side and your Harmodius upon the other.  I embrace you.  Saint-Just

Éléonore had not asked to read it, and quickly concealed her interest when his delighted laughter burst forth.  Nonetheless, and not without fear, Maxime passed it to her to read.  She did so with bent head and growing smile, then fell serious once more.

“Let this be one of those things engraved upon your heart,” she said, not unkindly, but with the solicitous care of deep friendship.  “Shall I burn it?”

Maxime smiled.  “Yes, dear Alcestis.  For I have read that burnt offerings may yet reach Heaven.”

17 Pluviôse

“Citizen people’s representatives.  Some time ago, we laid down the principles of our external policy.”  Maxime paused, looking at the upturned faces around him, seeking out Danton, seeking out Hébert.  “We are here today to develop the principles of our internal policy.”

Chapter Text

I am my mother’s son.  Strong enough to withstand humiliation and censure, to labour and bear- in my own fashion- yet vanquished by my own body.

Maxime’s thoughts wandered bleak roads in his convalescence during the long winter nights of Pluviôse.  Such was the nature of his mind: to reach the clear air at the very peaks of delight, only to be hurled violently from them like Hephaestus from Olympus.  Something had torn loose from him on the day he read the report on political morality.  Some vital, internal part ripped away by the sheer force with which he rendered vision to written word, written word to speech.  Like all wounds made within the body, it was impossible to staunch.  He had known it that very day, yet still committed himself to rise, to attend the Committee, the Convention, the club.  To serve the people as though he did not feel the approach of his usual ailment.

In the end, moral fortitude could not triumph over physical weakness: he collapsed rising from the Duplay's dinner table.  Thus was he now confined like an invalid to his chamber: the sentence pronounced by Dr Souberbielle, with Éléonore as stern a warder as any hired man.  In such state, it was impossible not to recall his mother.  He knew, after all, the scent of the sickroom: the metallic tang of blood and sweat, the oily, cloying smell upon the skin.  Her room had smelled the same.  A scent that haunted certain dreams, or quickened his breath if he caught so much as its hint upon the air.  The scent of some thirty years gone, when he- a small boy of paper skin and weak eyes, a boy taught to make Arras lace and sew buttons- had hovered like a ghost in her silent chamber, white and unnoticed as the curtains swaying in a summer breeze.

“Shall I die of it too?” he asked Éléonore one night, when his fever raged so high his entire body burned in its shroud of blinkets.  “Bringing forth ideas ‘til my body tears itself apart?”

“Women bear until we can bear no more, or we break.”  Éléonore choked the water from the cloth in her hands and lay it cool upon his forehead.  “Men may walk away from ideas that pain them, or threaten their lives.”

To walk away, Maxime thought.

A small cottage, beyond the reach of roads or armies.  A garden.  Canaries.  Brount bounding after rabbits in the long grass.  Antoine, sleeves rolled to his elbows, a brace of pheasants dangling from his hand and a smear of dirt crowning his brow; Éléonore taking her notebook and pencil into the fields, a naturalist of their small world.  At night, a river of stars cutting the black sky and the three of them side by side beneath it, Maxime playing the astronomer, drawing on Lalande’s Traité d'astronomie.  Antoine playing the flute, Éléonore completing her artwork, Maxime reciting foolish poetry.  A child, perhaps, produced like a miracle between them.  Maxime saw it: he, ever solicitous of Éléonore’s health and she moving about the cottage humming lullabies, Antoine with his smooth cheek pressed to the swell of her belly.  A child- a veritable Hippolyta of a girl, or Theseus of a boy- with dark curls and fair face, nursed on a richness of milk, provided all the lessons of nature, raised with the best of parents in the most loving of houses.

“I long for it,” he said, taking a sip of water from the cup she passed him.

“You long, I think, as a sailor longs for land: as an abstraction.  He thinks- so I’m led to suppose- of hearth and home and steady ground on which to plant his feet.  Yet almost the moment he has seen his family and spent some time in his own house, he longs again for the wild sea.”  Other women, Maxime thought- albeit on the basis of scant and ancient history- would look away or try to provoke denials.  Éléonore only met his gaze.  “The Revolution will call you back, as waves and salt air summon the sailor, no matter how he may try otherwise.  It is the sea, for you and Citizen Saint-Just, and no hearth will keep you home.”

He understood Éléonore’s meaning: a married woman could no more demand her body not to bear than demand the moon not rise at sunset.  Conversely he, like the sailor in her analogy, could escape the fate now crowning for him: run with Éléonore, and by force of violence drag Antoine between them far from civilisation, there to live as nature dictated best.  Yet how could the resistance of oppression and tyranny be called ‘choice’, when it was survival itself?  Was defending his friends, the French people- perceiving them all to be of one family- not a most sublime facet of natural impulse?  And what manner of man, having drifted far from his original state to learn the ways of civil society, could abrogate his responsibilities?  Turn his back, deny vertu and abandon both People and patrie?

What manner of man, he thought, but Danton?

“If I could but doubt the People,” he said at last.  “If I could rip hope from my breast, perhaps then…”

“Then,” Éléonore replied.  “You would no longer be Robespierre.”

*****

Like a flock of birds, these letters and pamphlets arrived.  Each day they smothered his desk beneath the evanescent weight of a flurry of paper wings.  To these journalists, these correspondents, Maxime was no man at all.  To them he was at best the lost lamb in the field and they the circling crows, at worst the old and dying wolf, no teeth with which to snap, too tired to do more than await the slow death of beasts.

In one letter he was made a tyrant mired in infamy, who sought to become the brutal, rapacious heir to Tarquin.  In another, the meek, gentle beacon of patriotism seen through the smoke of war and foreign intrigue.  One man wrote at length upon the shrill screams Maxime would give when he finally assassinated him.  A woman offered her hand in marriage, for he must surely lack the tender comforts offered by the female sex.  Each letter- some which made him laugh, others which left him ill and trembling- presented to him a different man.  A man Maxime neither knew nor recognised, who was not himself and yet was called by his name.

From Jullien:

I have not the words to express the state of the provinces.  Everywhere are new laws openly disregarded and the assignat refused, and I have myself heard the cries of Vive le Roi! shouted by cowards (I will not call them citizens or men) who hide immediately after.  It is, in part, the continued effect of Carrier’s brutality in Nantes that has embittered all the populace against us (or so it seems to me).

Far less compelling notes arrived almost by the hour.  Are you well, they asked, before launching into panegyrics against suspicious neighbours.  They begged him to use his influence to reassign them here or there, to find some place for they or their relatives safe within the bosom of government.  Forgotten Girondins still languishing in La Force pleaded for clemency.  Some offered to trade the secret confessions of the cell for their freedom, exchanging their souls for freedom.

And still there was Camille: Robespierre, Robespierre, mea culpa but oh! how I am wronged by you.

Amongst all these letters, only Antoine spoke to him as a man and not some object of veneration or degradation:

You will by now have read my letter to the Committee.  My words are harsh but necessary.  When you are not so sorely needed in Paris, it would be best for you to see the armies for yourself and thus measure the honesty of my lessons.

We have made a timely arrival, at least.  We will settle this disarray while the army is encamped for winter.  I intend to instill proper discipline, so that the Army of the North may strike hard upon the coming of spring.  All is a matter of provision, effective organisation and sorting out some foolishness amongst one or two of the officers.  Of these, provisioning is the worst.  It is bitterly cold, and I am fortunate enough to be provisioned with a decent uniform, a thick cloak, and warm thoughts of the future.  No man can feel his worth without such things, and so the soldiers become demoralised.  Anti-Republican sentiment spreads like a disease.  You, who have so long taken the part of the people, will understand this better than anyone.  I encourage you, therefore, to impress upon the Committee the utter necessity of demonstrating to these soldiers our faith in them.

The rest is not for the post.  I embrace our common friends.  I embrace you.

All of the other missives brought to him the weighted ugliness of a dream swiftly dissolving into nightmare.  This letter, however, Maxime kept.  He tucked it close by another composed in the same staccato writing and dated August 19, 1790.

*****
 

Saint-Just arrived in Paris at first light on 24 Pluviôse.  Never again would Maxime be able to disassociate the man with the first rays brought by Phoebus.  Pale yellow light upon the windowsill, the fluttering shadow of a nesting pigeon, the dim and distant sounds of a waking city: all this and a familiar voice in the courtyard, steps taken two at a time upon the staircase.  Maxime had reached the study door and almost had it open by the time Antoine’s familiar knock rang upon it. 

The man who stood before him was almost unfamiliar.  If Maxime had thought to name him Apollo for bringing dawn with his triumphant return, or sweetly claim his beauty as fair and unchanging as sleeping Endymion’s, he was most wonderfully robbed of these allusions.  Here upon his very doorstep stood fearsome, bearded Ares; stood young, proud Alexander, fresh from Persepolis, with the mud of the road clinging to him like grace.

“May I ?” Antoine asked, raising an eyebrow and motioning to the threshold.

The cold of the early morning reasserted itself then.  If Maxime’s mind had wandered to Olympus and the plains of Guagemela, it now returned abruptly to Paris.  The bitter cold drove a spike through the bare soles of his feet, a breath of air whispering through his ancient, frayed morning robe.

“I had not thought to look for you yet,” he said, stepping aside.

“There is nothing more to be done, for now.  I have repaired order and left some institutions in place to prevent its collapse.  Babet will be cross with me again: Le Bas is delayed a day or so.”

“You rode ahead, then?”

“By post.  You need me.”  He lifted a hand to his face and touched the hair grown thick and dark upon his cheeks.  “I wasted no time.”

A silence held, stretching thinner with passing time.  Not the silence of discomfort, but one of building pressure:  all the unspoken things they held within their throats massed so thick it was impossible to bring them forth. 

“Maxime,” Antoine finally said.  And then, without the habitual sternness: “They told me, in Guise, that you were poisoned.  In Maubeuge that you were like to die.”

Maxime turned.  Who was it had spread the tales of Antoine’s fixed and icy expression?  Who, indeed, was fool enough to believe them?  Does the particular stillness of a deep lake signify its absence of life, or that life merely teems far beneath the reach of Man?  Antoine’s sentiments were but refined and subtle things, too deep to ripple across the surface of his face.

“It was only…” Maxime motioned, a gesture that encompassed head to feet and back again.  “My nature.”

“They use you against yourself,” Antoine replied, setting aside his hat and gloves, the blade at his hip.  “Rumour, innuendo, lies: all powerful weapons.  Even I felt... I was troubled, when these stories first reached my ears.”

“I suppose we must ask where such stories came from.”

“The factions, of course.  A single rumour is like a drop of poison in the well, a more potent weapon of war than cannons and ships of the line.  You cannot imagine: even in Maubeuge I had in one ear that you were close to death, and in another that you were engaged in conferences at Choisy…”

“Conferences?”

“For taking the throne.  For establishing a dictatorship.  For partitioning the country.”

You are accustomed to this, Maxime reminded himself.  Gossip.  Rumour.  It was the lifeblood of those who lined their pockets and called it revolution, of the powerful men who played at law as others played at cards.  Rumour had been his swaddling cloth and settled over his shoulders along with the legal robes he donned, it had shadowed him through the Assembly and planted knives in his back from the very beginning.  Perhaps, Maxime thought, he had somehow convinced himself that he had proven his probity.  That with so many witnesses to his sacrifice he would emerge from it all clean and stainless.  These lies, these fresh calumnies, burrowed into his heart.

On trembling legs and with a fresh rush of feverish heat, Maxime made his way back to bed.  He could not stand, after all, and nothing could induce him to bear the humiliation of collapsing at Antoine's feet. 

“Do the people believe such tales?” he asked.

“No.  They are words of comfort shared between enemies.  The people know your goodness, as do I.  As does Éléonore.  As do all of your friends.  We are France, Maxime.  The Republic.  The rest are not fit to be called citizens.”  As he spoke, Antoine sat by his side.  He smiled, a show of pale teeth through dark beard.  “Shall I tell you more?  Of how, while poisoned or plotting, you have been disporting yourself with women?  Actresses, ci-devant duchesses, your loving admirers in the gallery?”

“Of course.”

Antoine gave a thoughtful hum and bent forward to press his lips to Maxime’s.  If it were a question, Maxime answered immediately.  Opened his mouth to Antoine’s tongue as a lock will fall open to its key.  Antoine shifted closer, his mouth now hard, now yielding upon Maxime’s own.

“Hmm,” he said, pulling back a fraction.  “I taste no woman on your tongue, much less the dozens you’re accused of.”

“That is hardly admissible evidence.”

“Perhaps,” said Antoine, “a more thorough investigation?”

*****

Antoine spoke of beasts.  He spoke of the Revolution, of factions, of the political landscape of Paris like a wilderness.  A place of blood and bared teeth, the shifting contestation of weak and strong, predator and prey.  They were all, he seemed to contest, men of nature, obedient to its unwritten laws.  

In this he was wrong.

Hébert, Carrier, Roux: all three were the products of civilisation.  In the wild they might indeed have played the ravening beast: frothing at the mouth, bloody in tooth and claw, snapping even at their kindred.  Thus, a certain natural justice might be applied to them.  In the wild, did not the whole pack turn oft' upon madness?  Did they not drive out he who could not abide the fragile peace of beasts?  Kill those who threatened to bring ruin and disunity?  In nature, then, such men would find no ear.   Would hardly survive their wretched, bloody birth.

If there was anything of nature in them it was twisted now.  Warped, as sturdy wood is warped by water, by the unceasing force of civilisation: its strange and contradictory laws, its false hierarchies, its pettiness.  What was Carrier, but a butcher of men?  What was Hébert but the Savonarola of atheism?  

From his pulpit at the Cordeliers Hébert harangued the Sections: mourn the Revolution and shroud Liberty in black, only the kiss of an iron blade will wake these endormiers, throw Bibles and church beams onto the pyre.  Rise, he called, rise ye men of faith.  Fire and blood and bone.  Rise!

Even from the sick room, Maxime heard their howling.  Their howling, and the silence that greeted it.

On the night of 15 Ventôse, the night after Hébert’s ridiculous, failed attempt at insurrection, Antoine sat at the end of Maxime’s bed.  With hair mussed and smooth cheeks slapped red by Zephyrus’ loving hands, his eyes bright and sharp, he could not have looked less like the president of the Convention.  Often, Maxime had wondered what Antoine looked like early in the Revolution, in those wild days of 1789 when every opportunity stretched before them, with he no more than a sapling youth of twenty-one as the first stones of the Bastille fell.  That young man was surely here now, though tempered by the man of philosophy and shaped at last by politics and war, love and rage.  

“Strike first, while they are still reeling with disappointment,” Antoine said.  “Strike hard.”

Maxime looked down at his own hands where they rested upon the coverlet.  How close the skin whipped to each small and fragile bone.  How thin were the creases forming in these, his middle years, upon the skin closest his wrist and engraving themselves deeper at the knuckles.  He thought he saw blood upon them, etching each grain of his skin.  The Revolution, he reminded himself, was the labour through which the Republic would be birthed, and when had ever birth been an act without blood?  But ah, such a terrible quantity!  He thought of bloody sheets and bloody skirts.  He thought of the rank, carrion smell he sometimes caught in the streets, like passing by an abattoir.  His linen collar, hard and tight as the lunette of the guillotine, pressed his throat and he thought of Antoine’s pale and lovely neck, bared for death and ringed red where it touched the blood of their friends.

Hébert must die, yes, and yet, though Maxime had no love for the man- indeed, possessed for he and his actions a rare and almost overpowering hatred- the weight of it seemed too heavy to bear.  He was no Atlas to carry the world upon his shoulders, and indeed the labour of denunciation itself seemed more like the punishment of Sisyphus.  As soon as one appeared to have reached the summit, the boulder formed of calumny, reaction and ambition rolled down to its beginning and must again be moved.  Maxime's hands trembled from the strain of pushing that lumpen weight of stone, covered in the blood of the men who formed its weight.  Each time, he wanted to say, it grows heavier.  These hands that once wrote “The horror of crime is diminished when it is punished by another crime” are breaking beneath the force of such brutal necessity.

Maxime took Antoine’s hands within his own then, an act the younger man submitted to with a curious and tender smile quite at odds with his speech.  How fine they were, Maxime thought.  How smooth and warm the skin, its fairness dotted here and there with freckles that served only to highlight his utter rarity.  How supple the flesh beneath, his hands a wonder of human musculature and engineering.  Only here, upon the palm, at the base of each finger a slight imperfection: the calluses worn by reins held in carelessly ungloved hands.  There was no sign of blood upon them, as though he were a being made of so fine a material that nothing would stain them.  Thank God, he thought, I have left no mark upon you.

“I have faith in you.  In these,” Maxime said, pressing Antoine’s hands in his own.  “You have always done what is best for the nation.  I trust you to act as you see fit in my absence.”

“I neither lack faith, nor seek permission,” Antoine replied.  “I know myself: my limitations as much as my greatness.”

From any other man the words would have seemed no more than distasteful vanity.  From Antoine they were only pure, unreserved honesty.

“Your limitations?” Maxime asked, the word bitter on his tongue like burnt coffee.  “I see none.  And I have seen all of you.”

“Then you know them most intimately.”

“You are wise and thoughtful.  Kind to the just and virtuous, cold and terrifying to the treacherous.  You speak only what is necessary, and yet your every word is poetry.  You wage war as an Ares and love as Hyacinthus.”  Maxime paused.  This pretty speech had robbed his breath and now his chest heaved to recover it.  Antoine waited, patient, though the set of his shoulders spoke a sharp line of argument.  Maxime took a breath.  “Your beauty,” he said, “is both weapon and shield.”

“Thus,” Antoine said.  “You have made thorough account of my limitations.”

Maxime gaped at him.  In all his years at the bar, or even as public prosecutor in Paris, he had never encountered so perplexing an argument.  To suggest this heaping of praise, this unwise rush of language, were an insult…

“My limitation,” Antoine said, his expression as hard and serious as ever Maxime had seen it.  “Is that I am not you.”

“How short you sell yourself, to give me the profit of such admiration.”

“You mistake me.  My argument is this: we are one man, you and I, and all our flaws only the result of having been cut apart by jealous gods.”  He smiled.  “We mend when fit together, like broken bones or torn skin that must be stitched.”

“Terrible was their might and strength,” Maxime murmured, “and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods.”

“Louis Capet claimed the divine right of kings, did he not?”

Maxime might have smiled, once.  Instead his mind turned to Zeus and the lightning bolts with which he sundered man from man.  It wandered, a treacherous thing, to sunlight flashing on a gory steel blade.  He feared it, as if it were a memory of something already come to pass.  As though Plato’s explanation of love, as metaphorical as one might take it, were a fact carried within the body as flesh remembers the cause of old wounds and shies from them.  Antoine leaned forward.  There came the undemanding press of his lips like a schoolboy’s first kiss: wanting everything and seeking nothing.  In gentleness and certainty it seemed at once to heal that ancient wound, to hang a veil across the specter of the guillotine.

“I will continue our work as steadily as ever I have, and the Committee will churn on without you, but it is time, Maxime.”  Antoine sat back, his face composed and still once more.  “You must return.”

*****

Words, only words.  Maxime had not understood ‘til now what power they possessed.  A man spoke some millenia ago and a religion arose that swept empires aside, made kings to spread its power and played them upon the world as upon a great chessboard.  A philosopher wrote of nature and corruption and the social contract, sparking dreams that shaped nations.  Maxime spoke, his voice barely more than the wind amongst the reeds, and men fell. The power terrified him.  
 
There were two factions.  Now there was one.

Danton.  Desmoulins.  Words and words and words.  They would not stop speaking.  With Hébert’s fall their names came more frequently in the Committees.  Maxime felt himself a dog whose ears had been tuned to the whistle.  Each time it came- now from Billaud, now from Collot, and finally even from Antoine- he raised his head to the challenge.

Danton.  Desmoulins.  No.  Danton.  Desmoulins.  No.  Danton.  Desmoulins.  No.

Maxime, Maxime, listen.  My dear friend…  No.

Maxime warned them both: Camille, Danton.   Or attempted to.  The history books must record that, at least.  How cold the call of virtue seemed as he stood before the Convention, still pale and unwell, his voice the only part of him that did not tremble.  As he declared to Danton’s surly, upturned face the utter absurdity of claiming that there had only been one faction.  That he knew of another.  That it, too, must fall for the good of the nation.  Surely, he thought, they would hear in the cold, hard fall of his words that he intended them only love, only the utter and profound forgiveness of siblings who have strayed apart.  Surely they would know how their hearts called to him, how the genial remembrance of their friendship stayed his hand, how even now he delayed upon the path of virtue with no intent other than to gather them to him.  To end it all so they might still pass onward, Death’s shadow no more but a momentary chill upon their necks.

And still they spoke.

*****

The news came fast to the Convention, to the Committee, on 4 Germinal: an ever-expanding, ever-worsening series of details.  Hébert was dead.  Hébert had fainted.  They laughed at that, some of the representatives, the frogs croaking in the marsh.  

Hébert died screaming hysterically, they said.  Like a woman, others added.  Each telling of the story stripped him of another layer.  First he was no patriot, then no hero and finally, not even a man.  Hébert, they said, screamed.  He screamed at the first fall of the blade, but the executioner had not done with him.  He made the blade drop, again and again, stopping it short each time to amuse the people.

The people.  Laughing at a man’s wet-legged terror of death.

“Those are not the People,” Maxime said that night, in the Committee, looking around him at the pale, hollow-eyed faces of the other members.  “Agents.  Reactionaries.”

“Our enemies,” Antoine said, voice firm, gaze settling hardest on Collot.  “Who take pleasure in watching us tear each other apart.”

Billaud was not a handsome man, but a powerful one: sturdy in build, strong in face.  He prowled about now, as tired and weary as any of them, yet still with that look of calculation in his eye.  Now he touched the table, now the back of the chair, a comforting press of his fingertips to Antoine’s shoulder before his broad arm circled them.

“All the more reason,” he said, in a voice like dark, slowly poured honey.  “That we should move upon the remaining faction.”

The silence that greeted the comment, a silence Maxime gave himself over to in all the weight of his exhaustion and his despair, was answer enough.

They left early that night, he and Antoine, slipping outside shortly before midnight.  The other man lived closer now: in rue Caumartin rather than rue Gaillon.  So close that it was easier to deceive himself as to why he passed the entrance to the Duplay’s.  It took a mere handful of minutes now to reach Antoine’s home: one or two more to climb a new set of stairs and enter a larger set of rooms.  Rooms that smelled of fresh linen and newly-shaped wood, brocade and Indian cotton.  Rooms whose varying shades of blue and marbled white made him think of new beginnings and weddings, rather than blood and funerals.

“Thank God, thank God,” he found himself saying, words chopped and shaken apart by tremors that were half laugh, half sob.  “Thank God it is not red.”

There was nothing gentle in his desire, or the way he took Antoine apart that night.  Maxime stretched him out upon a bed that had barely known the younger man’s weight, its layers of down yielding beneath them both.  Its softness made strange counterpoint to their haste, the way they grasped at one another, the hunger of mouths that met and bruised and parted only to find some newly bared stretch of skin.  In the end it was Antoine who turned over onto elbows and knees, offering his back with silent grace and the passing of a small jar of oil.  It was Maxime who pressed a kiss to the line of Antoine’s spine, to the tender indentations at its base: the thumbprints of whatever errant god had crafted him.  Maxime who slicked the younger man’s thighs and pushed between them with a groan like a man come home.

The sounds Antoine made, low and guttural at first, then rasped and pleading, drowned Hébert’s screams.  The way his curls trembled against the broad line of his shoulders drove off the glint of the jailer’s shears.  Maxime wove his fingers with the strands, his other hand clenched upon Antoine’s hip.  How tight he was, how hot and slick.  For the first time in many years, Maxime wanted to be closer still, to press inside and feel the living core of him, to feel the shuddering clench of his body in utmost pleasure and be himself dragged to release by it.  He did not say it though, for fear Antoine might consent too readily, and instead brought his hand to Antoine’s sex.  Here in the safety of this little room, with no one close to hear, Antoine cried out at last.  Maxime managed no more than Antoine’s name, and then no more than a whisper, his hips snapping forward into the flexed pressure of Antoine’s thighs.  He came thus, his own release spattered between the younger man’s pale legs and smeared upon his own wrist, Antoine spilling a moment later into the circle of Maxime’s curled fingertips, panting and shaking with the last tremors of pleasure.

Maxime cleaned them both, and the stains they had made upon the bed.  Lay down opposite Antoine so they touched at the knee, their arms hooked loose ‘round each other’s waists, their foreheads bent together.  Like twin souls, Maxime thought, in the womb of their creation.  Laid out thus, his breathing soft and the pulse of his heart still rapid at the throat, Antoine was all the hoarded treasures of Versailles: in him was ivory and silk and brushed velvet, polished steel and carved whorls of mahogany, a spill of pearls.  How Maxime feared the loss of such treasure so freely and wholeheartedly given him.  Kings feared but the loss of their ill-gotten possessions, a richness made possible only through theft written into law.  How much deeper ran the horror of losing that which is truly ours, got by honest means, and which is no mere object but a part of our very selves?

“Tell me,” Antoine said, without opening those marvelous eyes.

Two words in a voice rendered inflectionless by exhaustion.  Maxime needed neither tone nor expression to understand, however, nor did he require words to respond.  He reached out and stroked Antoine’s loose curls back from his face.  Allowed his fingertips to brush an imaginary line from nape to Adam’s apple.  Antoine shuddered.

“It is only death,” he said, eyes blinking open. 

“No.  You are very wrong, sometimes, Antoine,” Maxime murmured.  He might have felt delight once at the way Antoine’s eyes widened.  Now it only made him feel the full tragedy of Antoine’s years, more aware than ever that there were few lines but those of habitual expression upon his face.  “Your death is the death of worlds: of France, the Republic, the Revolution, of dreams.  It is the end of everything I have ever worked for.”

“Ideas live.  Men die.”

Had they been standing, Antoine might have shrugged.  His voice had the same unfeeling tone of the motion, and his gaze was as steady as if they had been passing the salt over dinner.  Maxime frowned.  They all spoke thus, now: as if death, in its constant companionship, had become a meaningless thing.

“Will you say it to yourself so easily,” Maxime asked. “if I climb the steps before you?”

“Yes.  More so.”

The word emerged like a growl, low in Antoine’s throat and ripped between his teeth.  It was a mournful sound, like the whistling, roaring groan of an autumn storm.  Antoine’s grip closed upon Maxime’s elbow, pulling him close and rolling him under.  This, thought Maxime, who knew utterly nothing of waves but for their description, must be drowning.  He almost laughed at finding himself made a poor man’s Leander, caught and borne down to the ocean’s floor by a force not unlike Neptune himself, everything around him as blue as he imagined the waters of the Hellespont.  And then the illusion broke.  Antoine bent his head to Maxime’s shoulder and Maxime kissed at the locks that spooled against his mouth, tangling legs and arms to hold him.  They were both but men again, and the weight settled over them was not seawater but sadness.  The only salt between them was the sweat where they pressed too tight, too close, utterly inseparable.

“Would you care to live any longer,” Antoine said at last, voice hoarse against Maxime’s ear.  “Without hope?”

*****

Germinal.  One faction remained.

“I did not think we had reached such an impasse that we required hostages,” Maxime remarked, looking all the way up to meet Danton’s gaze.  

They stood in Maxime's study.  As ever, Danton’s bulk seemed almost to fill the room and shut out the light.  Though Paris starved, he had lost nothing of his mass in the winter months.  Unlike the bears he so resembled, who woke from hibernation thin  and angry, Danton seemed perhaps to have grown.  His time in the countryside had served him well, Maxime thought.  That or it was the wine he’d drunk that had left his cheeks so blushing red.

Danton looked blank a moment, though it was ever impossible to tell truth from falsehood with him, then shook his broad head.  “Louise, you mean.  I suppose leaving her downstairs was cruel after all, like leaving  a fawn in the jungles of India.  Your women, Maxime, are veritable tigers.”

If it were not for the necessity of allowing this visit, Maxime might well have seen him out.  Who are you, he thought, to speak of tigers when you make your marriage bed with a child?  When you are known to molest every woman who crosses your path?  How dare you, George Danton, confuse their wit and firm resolve with the petty rivalries of beasts?

All this time, Danton had been moving about, seemingly oblivious to Maxime's silent anger.  He studied Maxime’s small selection of books, the neat stack of papers upon his desk, touching this or that.  Now he leaned in the doorway to the bedchamber itself, peering into the shadows.  Building, Maxime realised, a case against him.  Looking for evidence of even the slightest impropriety, the faintest chink in the armour of incorruptability that Maxime girded himself with.

Maxime’s heart leapt into his throat.  Pulsed there, so large a muscle he could not breathe 'round it.  Did some trace of Antoine’s presence linger, forgotten?  Could even the lines upon his sheets and pillows be read as the twisting of his body.  Did the scent of lovemaking still linger on the air, as the taste of him still seemed to settle thick at the base of Maxime’s tongue?

Danton lifted his head and inhaled, wide nostrils flaring.

“I cannot imagine what interests you in my bedchamber,” Maxime said.

“At present, old friend, everything about you interests me.”  Danton sighed.  “I could only wish you were not as chaste and virtuous as you are.  That I had found spilled wine and lounging harlots.”

“You hope to expose me?”

“No, Maxime.  For the sake of the regard in which we held each other, I hope only to understand you.”

“Understand the Republic, the People, and you understand me.”

“The people out there,” Danton said, waving towards the rue Saint-Honoré.  “Have more to do with wine and women, labour and bread, than they have to do with an educated monk who surrounds himself with Amazons and spoiled brats.”  

“Your words dishonour the People, Danton, and they dishonour my friends.”

Maxime had no doubt of Danton’s fury.  His face was deep red, scored white where rent with bloodless scars.  When he spoke, his deep voice trembled with restraint.

“We were your friends once, Camille and I.”

“Indeed, you wore the mask of friendship well.  Not once did it slip.”  Maxime glared up at him.  “Georges, how can you call yourself my friend when everything you have ever done has deceived not only me, but the Republic?  When you have been the firm companion of liars and schemers.  When have you ever loved me even half so well as Fabre, even when you must have known his duplicitous character.”

He expected Danton to launch into one of his tirades.  To lift his head and set his shoulders.  To rage and mock at him as he was wont to do in the Convention or the Society.  Instead his body sagged, the heaviness of his face gone loose and sallow.  He put his hands upon Maxime’s shoulders, his very fingertips gouging into them through the cloth of Maxime’s coat like fishhooks.  Maxime resisted their pull, the lure of tears in Danton’s eyes.  He felt nothing, he realised suddenly, for the man before him- as though all fellow-feeling had been sweated from him in the course of his fever.  

It was that- this coldness opening like a tomb inside him- that made Maxime stumble forward, made him take Danton in his arms.  An embrace, then, more akin to battling the Nemean Lion.  An embrace that had in it a death- for one or both of them, Maxime could not say.  So accustomed was he to Antoine’s lithe figure, or even the pleasing softness at Camille’s waist and belly, that Danton’s fleshiness, the meat and muscle beneath was a foreign thing.  He smelled of wine and unlaundered clothes, sweat and tears and meat, the traces of a woman’s perfume.  Perhaps Danton himself marked the difference between them, for when they stepped apart his tears had stopped and he looked at Maxime with something like dawning horror.

“You are as cold and hard as a law, old friend,” Danton finally said.  “But even laws have mercy.”

“Not laws.  Men, in their application of them.”

“Can this rift between us, for which I cannot even account, be repaired?”

Maxime hesitated.  A part of him wanted nothing more than to go and straighten his papers again, to sharpen a nib, to do anything but face such brutal questioning.  Only with great effort did he manage to draw himself up, to meet Danton's eyes.  “No.”

“Still, I will try.  For France.  For Camille.”

The power of words, again: Danton had always possessed it.  He wielded Camille's name against him like a sword.  It bit deep.  It cut him to the very bone, cracking them apart, spilling the marrow.  He closed his eyes and smiled.

"You would not be Danton," he said.  "If you did not at least attempt to exceed your rightful limits.”

“And you would not be Robespierre if you thought of men, not abstractions.”

Danton reached out and Maxime allowed it: the hand that clasped his neck, the thumb that drew a line across his throat.

“That such a soul should inhabit so fragile a body,” Danton said with a shake of his head.  “God is cruel."

Now, with no more to be said, he could turn aside.  There were letters that required answers, after all.  There were notes to write.  Danton wept again, he thought he could say, even if it meant he must resist the ache in his own eyes.

"Please," he said.  "You have wasted another visit.  I'm sure you may see yourself out."

Danton gave a gruff laugh, but obeyed.  A shift of light and shadow, the creak of his steps towards the door.  And then a pause, a lingering silence that prickled along the back of Maxime's neck.

"I almost pity you," Danton said, in a voice far gentler than any Maxime had ever imagined him capable of.  "The end will hurt more for you than it ever will for me.”

The words rang in his ears long after the man had left.  Rang like the striking of a great and terrible bell that tolled the death of dreams and men alike.

Chapter Text

Like all boys, Maxime was raised for war and battle. It did not matter that his mother had cherished him as most women cherish their daughters, or that he himself was more mother than father to his siblings after her death (for what, after all, did Maximilien Robespierre really know of fathers?). His poor health, his gentle nature, his distaste for violence, his love of books and learning and poetry: none of it altered his sex. Into his small hands they put toy swords and toy soldiers and expected him to play at battle. His head they filled with Alexander and Achilles, Odysseus and Leonidas and Le Chanson de Roland; his dreams became filled with clashing blades and trumpets, tales of loyalty and the most intimate of friendships torn apart. Such eternal fame echoed down to him, the inheritance of all little boys. His eye came to rest and linger upon every passing Guard, forcing him into a subtle deference of wonder even as he wove tales from their crisp uniforms and fine figures. In Maxime’s little fingers, even the sewing needle was transformed to a sword, for what else to make of a boy whose world was once lace and buttons and stitching?

Such early lessons followed him into this new world they made. He felt it in 1789 as he marched with the procession bringing Louis Capet to the Tuileries, imagining himself caught up in legend. He had been struck then by Lafayette’s grace and ease, before the marquis proved himself nothing but the Ephialtes of France. Though he had railed against the absurd, expansionist wars that Brissot and the Girondins pushed upon them, his heart still thrilled to tales of heroism even as it broke for friends parted as Achilles and Patroclus were parted. The tales Antoine told- tales of battle, camaraderie and betrayal- roused Maxime’s spirit as if he were but a boy again. And then there was that most secret and tender part of Maxime’s soul, the hidden pride he took from clasping, within his very arms, a young David of his very own.

These were all but tales that he believed in as blindly as once he believed in kings and God. Stories told by the hearth and the bedside, read in stolen moments in the secret corners of Louis-le-Grand. Dreams embroidered by a quiet, lonely boy. Memories his mind turned golden and soft at the edges. Epics sung in early hours by Antoine’s hushed, lilting voice. None sang to him of waiting, or long hours rendered sleepless by a fear like the winter’s ache of bone. They told nothing of the rancid smell of blood clinging to the deeper scent of mud and manure in an unseasonably mild spring. They had not told him how soldiers come to see the enemy’s face reflected in the visage of all those around him. They had not told him of those who died screaming and pleading and wetting their breeches. They had taught him to prepare his heart for the loss of friends, but not of how to prepare for his own hand to be the one upon the blade.

Though it lacked its armies and banners and beating of drums, war had descended on Paris. War had descended, and Maxime’s sword was but a fragile needle with which to sew the threads of fate.

*****

Maxime, then, knew little of the practicalities of war.  He understood entirely, however, the concept of a siege:   how an army might ensnare their opponent within his own home, making a hell of that place which should be safest.  Thus the enemy made a man weak, compliant to a will other than his own, though they brought him to submission with no more violence than that inherent to starvation and exhaustion.  So it was that Maxime now found himself besieged by forces far mightier than his own: one man trapped within a tower of his own construction, with naught to eat or drink but cold philosophy.  How meager seemed the meal, how close he now was to ragged bone.  How imprisoned by the immutable laws he had established for himself: the values of loyalty and masculine friendship set now against vertu, against the People, against the entire future he once imagined close at hand.

They wanted Danton.  They wanted Camille.  And what was he to do?

Time moved slow, each day a millenia and every hour a century.  Like a fly alighting upon the surface of warm, red wine Maxime found himself drunk upon a confusion of thoughts and competing impulses, succumbing to torpor.  In the midst of this seeming daze he heard the frantic buzzing of the Committees struggling to rouse him.  Billaud and Collot were loudest.  Antoine was softer with him, yet no less insistent.  It was not that Antoine did not love Man, rather, like all great strategists, he loved them so well as to be capable of seeing certain individuals amongst them as no more than mere abstractions.  Thus could he speak of death, of what must be done and when, yet still seem so weightless and ethereal a creature as to possess the remarkable ability to alight on the surface of such an ugly mire without sinking.

“Justice is not always beautiful, Maxime,” Antoine said once, in whispered conference amongst their sleeping colleagues at the Committee.  “Consider pale Tisiphone in her blood soaked dress.”

“You bear her face, as though she were your mother.  Danton is many things, but he is no parricide.”

“Name for me an act that is counter to patrie and people, which is not therefore also an act of parricide.  If the theft of kings constitutes the murder of his people, then is Danton’s venality not the same, though he claims ignorance?  Did not the king’s apologists also claim he was merely a foolish buffoon?  Is that not always the argument for Danton and Camille: that they are but clowns, the jesters of the Convention?”

Antoine: more offspring of Tisiphone and Eros than child of mortals.  Miraculous and terrifying as a force of nature.

*****

In those long days of Germinal, as the Committees debated the fates of men who once stood amongst them, Antoine alone acted with the rigor and order of a medieval army, his legions arrayed before the walls of Maxime’s mind as the Crusaders once arrayed themselves before Jerusalem.  His arguments stood in neat, obediently ordered lines, devoid of ploy or deceit.  How radiant they were to look upon, and how frightening.  How tempting the lure of each emissary, how coldly logical and warmly inviting.

Camille, however, was something else entirely.  He was both the capricious spirit of the gods and the towering wooden horse at Troy’s gate: striking and awe-inspiring, yet as hollow inside as some Venetian, blown-glass bauble.  Hollow, but for the spirit of Danton that had carved greater and greater space within Camille’s ribs.  That had made something soft and ruddy of his pale and slender, sombre and fierce youth so that he were now blown about by the motives and emotions of others.

In the midst of the night came Camille, slipping from the courtyard shadows that awaited Maxime’s late return.  In the click of Camille’s heels against the cobblestones, the susurration  of cloth, Maxime heard the moan and creak of ancient wheels.  Camille stepped into a patch of wavering lamplight.  Gold glinted upon his tumbled curls, warming the pallor of his face.  Maxime stood as a soldier upon Trojan walls, seeing only the gift before him.  Like those awestruck men, he too would open the gates and give welcome with spread arms, heedless of the threat within.

“Maxime,” Camille said.

How deceptive that voice.  How alluring its wavering timbre: a summons to faded, dusty memory.  How wide Camille spread his arms: to encompass the whole world, to invite a body so much larger than Maxime’s own.  Equo ne credite, Teucri.  Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.  Maxime stepped neatly from the snare before it closed.  And now how innocent Camille looked, blinking at Maxime with wide, dark eyes: the eagle replaced by the lamb.

“Come, Maxime,” Camille said.  “Will you not even embrace me, dear friend?”

“I could embrace Camille,” Maxime replied.  “If he were still Camille and not the petty creature made of him.”

He saw the impact of the words.  The wince.  Yet…

“Maxime,” Camille said, taking a scant half-step closer.  Trembling hands sought to grasp the fleeting place where Maxime had stood but a moment before.  “Let me in.”

Such simple, seductive words.  Camille’s voice was deceptively soft, hoarse with the suggestion of some hidden emotion.  Even so, he knit them with a thread of steel.  Never had Maxime understood Camille’s devotion to Danton: how his gaze followed that lumbering form, how his cheek sought the fraternal kiss.  All Maxime could imagine was that it had something to do with Camille’s pursuit of pain and defeat: Camille, a Pyrrhus of the heart as well as the body.  Danton’s beguilement, conversely, was entirely predictable.  Had Maxime not also been drawn to the fiery ardor of Camille’s speech?  Did he not know well enough how Camille only wore the mask of a child?  How his clever, stuttering tongue turned each word to advantage?  How his gracious yielding to defeat was nothing but a feint to draw close his victim?

“Very well, you despise Georges.”  Camille, relentless, took a step closer.  “But do not despise me, Maxime.”

“I despise everything that is not the Republic,” Maxime said.  Each word felt like grains of sand in the churning gears that worked now to close the gates of his heart and mind to the man before him.  It was easier by far to stand tall and fix Camille with the fire of his gaze, hoping it burned him.  If anything, it seemed only to fuel the other man.

“Am I not the Republic, then?  Am I so easily discarded?”  Camille’s voice pitched up, as it often did in the midst of argument.  A rhetorical flourish?  True feeling?  “Did I not commit my life and pen to our cause?”

“Our cause, Camille?”

“They did not diverge once, Maxime.  We flowed together, as rivers meet to join the sea.  Surely we may find that place again.”

“It is too late,” he said.

A death to boyhood and tin swords; all their pretty wooden horses burned to ash.  Let the letters of widows take flight on folded wings, and clip the winged messengers of peace to ragged pinion and bone.  Let it all be done at last.

*****

In war, so Maxime had often read, conflict came presaged by the ruse, the deceit, the distraction.  In those scant days, those hours, really, that remained between his declaration and the inevitable battle, he wondered: which was the real Camille?  Camille of the shadows, or the Camille of books and green leaves?  Had he been designed thus, from birth, to confuse Maxime in both heart and mind?

Perhaps, Maxime thought, during those inconquerable hours of despair when sleep eluded him, these last five years had been mere delusion.  Perhaps from loneliness and anger and sorrow, from the void of falsehood, shallow ideals and wasted passions, Maxime had crafted a mythology from the Revolution.  Molded the clay of their tale into the tricksters and villains, heroes and gods that he longed for.  And then, upon discovering that the Supreme Being had already crafted, in Antoine, a masculine Galatea, how quickly he saw the flaws in Camille’s design.  How quickly Camille broke apart without him, ground down to be reshaped by Danton’s heavier hands.

Now, within Maxime’s chamber, he and Danton faced one another: creators both, the most deified and despised of the Revolutionary pantheon, the only gods left standing on the battlefield of Paris.  The great man's breadth, ill-framed by the arms of Maxime’s battered chair, seemed to fill the study.  The lamps flickered with his thunderous exhalations, while the cloying smell of a rich supper and excess of good wine filled Maxime’s every breath.  He had come, ostensibly, to make peace.  It seemed to Maxime, however, that Danton was a thing of fire and sulfur and trembling earth.  That he was an unlikely Mars who threatened to wipe them from the map and bury them in ash, as surely as mighty Vesuvius overcame Pompeii with lava and smoke and hail of stones.

“It’s inevitable now, isn’t it old friend?” Danton said, the fullness of his baritone even seeming to rattle the windows.  “The Convention has become our Valley of Elah.”

“And which of us do you suppose is Goliath?”

Danton’s laughter lacked all its customary joy.  He patted the roundness of his belly.  “Can there be a doubt?”  He leaned forward, eyes suddenly bright and hard.  “You imagine yourself David, I suppose, slaying the giant?  Pah.  You’re nothing but a poor man’s Saul.  You will send your dear David out to meet me, I suppose, whilst you shudder and shake in hiding.”

Maxime ignored the remark.  Instead, he studied his shirt cuff where it emerged from his coat, white as fresh snow upon the fields of Arras.  It frayed where it brushed his thumb, fragile threads sundered by age and wear.  Maxime worried the mark with the tip of one nail, no matter that one thread unraveled might make an irreparable tear.

“If I wished you dead, Danton, it would be done,” he finally said, the threads binding them yawning apart, straining to hold the fullness of this moment.  “If we must have a performance now, let it not be a farce.”

“Your arrogance….”

“It is not arrogance to state a fact,” Maxime said, meeting Danton’s wary gaze.  “Consider our positions.  Your standing amongst the Committees.  For months they have been begging me: begging, Georges, for your head.  If not for me, how else do you suppose, behaving as you do, that you kept it so long?”

Danton tossed back that same ragged head he stood to lose and laughed so hard his entire body trembled, the motion exposing the ruddy, loose flesh of his throat.  For a moment, Maxime could not but pity him as one might pity any animal before the axe falls.  How vulnerable he was after all, how thin the wattled skin, how swift the weighted blade: not a giant, just another man destined for the Parisian abattoir.

“How I behave,” Danton crowed at last, tears hovering at the corners of his eyes.  He swiped them away and fixed his wet gaze on Maxime.  “You mean, I suppose, like a man?”

“I am sorry that you accord our sex so shallow and depraved a nature.”

“Our sex?  You are as much a man as the cold, bloodless things crawling about the seafloor.  I could eat you for dinner.”

“The Republic will be untainted by the vices of the past, and so I must hold men to a higher standard.”

“You will make us not snails but angels then, and so there is no more room for poor Danton.”  He rubbed at his thick lower lip, the slickness of spit there, like a hermit scholar contemplating some impossible problem.  “What is it you want in the end, Maxime?  An entire nation of pale echoes?  Terrified acolytes to parrot Saint-Just’s epigrams?”

“What has Saint-Just to do with the matter?”

“Once, Maxime, you were a man of logic.  An admirer of the ancients, a devotee of all that is soft and kind and generous in the world.”  Danton fixed him with that familiar look.  Maxime had seen it before: on the floor of the Convention, in the club.  Once, it might have given him cause for retreat, but no longer.  “Now you have found your Archangel Michael and made a Satan of anyone who stands in opposition to him.”

“What is the point of a revolution that changes nothing?  Did you really suppose that killing a tyrant would put an end to the systems that allowed him to survive so long in the first place?”  Maxime’s voice was sharp in the small room.  He lowered it, more from habit than need.  “Did we not, Danton, set out to make Man better?”

“Man?” Danton spluttered, as if choking on the froth of his own rancor.  “Say, rather, we are beasts.”

“Beasts do not prevaricate over what is right or wrong.  Nor are they unfaithful to those they love, so long as they are treated with a fair hand.”

“And is that hand to be yours, Robespierre?  With which to strike the disobedient or caress the loyal?”

“For unfaithful, say guilty.  For loyal, virtuous.”

“That is all your language now.  I will not speak it.  I confess, I find your dialect unpalatable.”

Maxime blinked.  It was impossible to gauge Danton's purpose here, on what stood to be the eve of his own downfall.  There was much he had come to dislike about the man, it was true, but he had never known him to be reckless with his own comfort, far less his life.

“That is, perhaps, why you are here?” Maxime suggested, not without a certain measure of caution.  The beast, after all, is often most dangerous when it is wounded.  "To discuss matters of language?"

“Yes, you have made me a foreigner within my own nation.  I no longer speak Her tongue.  I am not here for me, however, but for Camille.”

Camille, Maxime thought.  If the unthinkable happened and he failed, if the Republic fell with him, then history would reproach him forever: for years immeasurable the tale would be told of a dictator, a traitor to his friends, while Camille would ever be his helpless martyr.  And if it did not?  If he succeeded long enough to see France reborn?  Then Maxime himself would make of their early years a temple, a shrine to Camille’s youthful promise.  He would have elegies composed in Camille's honour, recalling him as a tragic Judas Iscariot.  David would paint him in all his virile passion, capturing Camille within the Cafe du Foy or petitioning at the Paris Commune, and in those moments of grace preserve him.  He would live on to others as what he was now to Maxime: a bitter reminder of false friendship. 

Of Danton, let nothing remain.

“Camille,” Danton said, when Maxime remained silent.  “Can hardly be held accountable for his actions.”

“Camille is not, as he saw fit to remind me himself, a child.  He is as accountable as…”

“But he is not really a man, is he?  Not in the ways it counts.”

A feeling, like the trickle of winter rain down Maxime’s spine.  Danton’s words pricked like a needle, slipped stitches finding skin and not cloth.  There was a familiar ache in his eyes and he reached for the glasses he had left upon his desk at Danton's arrival.  That thin, green-tinted glass fell like a shield between them. 

“Whatever are you…?”

“Come, Maxime," Danton interjected.  "You know his vices.  How he prefers the sweetness of things, from Mirabeau’s maraschino to Lucile’s milky tits.”

Maxime grimaced at this indelicacy, as if someone had spoken thus of his own sister. 

“I hardly think you can speak of…”

“I can speak of whatever I want.  I fuck, like a man.”

The fierce torrent of Danton's words fell upon him, saying nothing and everything at once, opening poorly mended wounds.  There were times Maxime thought he had been born with it, this scar Danton reopened so carelessly: a deep and secret cut, made even as his body took form within the womb.  This thing so visible to some, and yet so intimate and hidden: that his was the sphere of women, that like Camille he so easily come apart in another man’s hands.  This thing he both welcomed and battled, that he justified by calling upon Athens and Rome and Sparta.

“It is not illegal any longer,” Maxime said.  His voice was that he once gave to his tin soldiers before launching them into some unwinnable war of his own invention.  “What Camille does privately…”

“What Camille does privately is spread his legs faster than a nun released from the convent.  Tell that to your Saint, since he once liked the image well enough.”  Danton glared at him, as though it were Maxime making such allegations.  “Oh, he takes pains to conceal it.  I’m not saying he dresses in skirts, or takes his promenades in the galleries of the Palais de l'Égalité.  But he still…flaunts himself, doesn’t he?”

There was something in those words, the whining breath Danton heaved through to say them.  Maxime could not quite place it, nor the injured tone to his voice.  Danton, meanwhile, had turned aside.  Face flushed, his gaze ticked over every book on Maxime’s shelf.

“He invites…no, begs for it.  Everything he does.  Like a pretty mistress always looking for attention, always twittering silly opinions.”  Danton shook his head.  “He should have been born a woman, then I could treat him like Théroigne de Méricourt: strip him naked, beat him, break him, turn him loose.  That’s what he needs, Maxime: a firm hand.”  Danton’s laugh choked, sputtering like fragile candle flame caught in the draft.  “You know, don’t you Maxime?  You went to school with him.  I remember when we first met, I thought…”

“Stop," Maxime snapped, raising his hand for silence.  "Whatever you thought, you’re speaking nonsense.”

“Camille is…”

Danton paused, eyes wet and mottled red.  Maxime could not say whether it was from wine or emotion.  He cupped his bulbous chin in one hand and swept the pad of his thumb over thick, scarred lips.  Maxime thought of Christ and Judas.  He thought of curiosity and misplaced desires, of all the secret nooks of ancient schools, where boys practiced traditions older than the languages they spoke.  He thought of habit, and the times his own thumb had been allowed to traverse his lips, wiping away the distraction of certain memories.  He thought of Camille's gaze, tracking Danton across every crowded room, and of a cheek turned quickly for kissing.  Maxime brought a hand to his own mouth, if only to hold the sound brewing in his throat from spilling forth.

“Camille needs a firm hand, Maxime,” Danton repeated.  “A firm hand, not a blade.  Let him have Lucile’s kisses in their bedchamber, and not mine in the basket.”

A twisting, roiling sensation in the pit of Maxime’s belly like maggots devouring outward from his very core.  Terror consumed him: terror of Danton, of himself, of this world they had delivered, of love and what either of them would do for it.  Danton’s words, their implication, hollowed him down to skin and bone: just another body on a different battlefield.

“The…frivolity…of Camille’s nature  is irrelevant to this matter," he finally said.

“Good God, Maxime!  Has it not been said numerous times that women have no place in politics!  Should Camille’s womanish nature not be regarded as an impediment to his good sense?”

“We have put women to the blade, you and I.  We have seen women’s blood in rivers in the street, because we had no wish to oppose the righteous anger of the oppressed.”

“Noblewomen and whores do not…”

“The frivolity of noblewomen was not excused by their sex.  How, then, should Camille be excused, no matter how womanly his private nature?”

“Even when he pants like a bitch in the throws of heat?”

“The Revolution does not pardon,” Maxime roared, on his feet without entirely knowing how he got there.  “I do not pardon.”

All of the fight fled Danton then.  Maxime saw it: the exact moment his hope was extinguished, like the snuffing of some internal light.  The great man, the leader, this mighty Agamemnon buried his face in his hands.  Buried them first within his own weighty palms and then lunged forth to seize Maxime by the wrists.  He pulled Maxime forward effortlessly, inexorably, only to burrow his face in their meager breadth.  Thus Danton fell: the gusts of his breath hot on Maxime’s skin, Maxime’s hands wet and warm, salted with Danton’s tears.  Tears that felt like blood.

“Let me die, Maxime,” Danton finally said, raising his great head at last to meet Maxime's gaze.  “I weary of this world we made.  Only spare Camille.  I led him astray.”

Maxime had ever been but a poor Catholic: too much of the pagan ran within his veins.  Yet now he understood the priest’s benediction.  Understood as well how they must meld both profound benevolence with firm resolve.  He set his hand upon Danton’s shaggy, disheveled head and curled his fingertips in those coarse locks.

“How many times have you insulted both the Revolution and its friends?  How many times have you stolen from the People and bent laws to your will?  And how many others have you harboured in doing so?”  Maxime sighed and brushed a tear from the corner of Danton’s eyes.  “You will speak to me of women?  Well, you have made Camille your bride in all that you have made, and the guillotine your marriage bed.  Or perhaps he was no more to you than another mistress to bear your weight.”

“Tonight you are cruel, old friend,” Danton murmured, though he made no move to leave.

“I am just.”

“You claim to be the Revolution, Maxime, but you are only its Terror.”  Danton looked up at him.  There was nothing in his gaze.  “You are nothing except Herod’s daughter, dancing for my head.”

*****

How strange, Maxime thought, to wage war with all nature inclined instead towards the riotous burst of life.  Paris in Germinal seemed on the verge of an almost unnatural summer.  The air spread thick and warm throughout the streets, stirred by an intermittent breeze that brought to Maxime’s room the scent of grass and budding leaves.  Éléonore brought sprays of white and blue and red to fill the vase upon his windowsill.  She brought, too, sprigs of green leaves that Maxime disposed of in haste and secrecy.  Antoine arrived, a stolen flower tucked in his buttonhole; its nacre petals matched the inner shell of his ear, were as smooth against Maxime’s lip as the skin inside Antoine’s thigh.  It seemed a time fitted best to the giving of life and making of peace, yet here they sat amongst flowers and moonlight, authoring the death of men.

How strange, thought Maxime, how strange.

Antoine hunched over Maxime’s desk, his still face illuminated by lamplight and his dark eyes focused on the page before him.  Ink bled from his quill pen in great, fat drops.  Antoine's fine hands, his narrow wrists, the fall of his cuff: all were stained with it.  On he wrote, however, with the haste and inexorable pressure of a man born to action.  Indeed, at times it seemed to Maxime that Antoine treated every page as a battlefield and each word as a soldier; for the sword, his pen.  Nonetheless, Maxime could not prevent the simple happiness he felt each time their knees jolted together beneath the desk.  He thought, then, of schoolboy youth, of another charming, dark-haired boy and the desks he might have shared.  Thus he vacillated between disgust and joy, sorrow and sublime happiness.

“Did he truly weep?  Danton?” Antoine asked at last, without looking up from the page.

Maxime looked down at hands that had cupped the heaviness of flesh, the thickness of stubble.  He felt again the jagged indentation of Danton's infamous scars, and the tears that followed them as new rain follows the dry tracks of a river bed.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, it is too late for all that.  And it is common enough for those who have committed crimes to find tears when it suits them.”

“Speak, rather, of crocodiles.”

Antoine glanced at him, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.  Others might interpret it as a sign of some depraved pleasure in death, but Maxime knew better.  There was about it a tightness that hinted at some stifled misgiving, and its appearance heralded no more than the younger man's habitual love of well-constructed argument and clever turns of phrase.

“You’re right, of course," Antoine said.  "Danton is popular, and it were better to use a more common allusion.”

Turning back to their work, Antoine’s eyes settled at last upon a single sentence marred by Maxime’s hesitant pen.  Maxime knew the moment he had read it.  Knew from the set of his shoulders, the hard line of his mouth, the stillness of his quill.

“A private and shameful vice,” Maxime’s words- words he had chosen for their delicacy as much as for their implication- sounded like pure venom as they dripping from the younger man’s tongue.  Antoine met his gaze, but Maxime saw nothing there: he had composed his face into the habitual mask so many would call emotionless.  “Danton declared this to you?”

“Yes, he said that Camille…”

“I met Camille, if you recall, when I was young.”

A sentence as simple and meaningless as "private and shameful vices", or a man preferring the sweetness of things.  A sentence spoken, yet, in a secret language of implication.  This time, however, Maxime could not quite parse its meaning.

“We will not speak of it,” Antoine said.  “Suffice to say I swiftly learned that he was not all he pretended.  That he was not you, though you were then as inaccessible to me as a god.”

“A flattering remark.”

“Not flattery: truth.  I have flattered you only once, when I was little more than a provincial boy playing at revolution.”  Antoine turned his attention to the page and tapped the line in question.  “Will you let me use this, or did you merely intend me to see it?  To make, perhaps, some common cause with Camille?”

“Perhaps, as Danton claims, it explains…”

“No.  There is both beauty and virtue in the love one man may bear another,” Antoine said.  “So long as it is turned to the correct purpose.  Do you compare what lies between us with what Camille snatches from shadows and alleyways?”

“Will you stand before the Convention, then, and prevail upon the ways of the Greeks and how they have been corrupted by excess of civilisation?”

“I will prevail upon friendship: a man that is false, that would trade in such secrets to plead clemency, has none of the virtues we hold dear.  Let him go to the grave, then, with his own words ringing in his ears.  Camille would have done well to love you as I do.”

“He could not.  Nor, I suppose, could I return such affection as he might offer.”

“His misfortune, then.”

“I fear, Antoine…” Maxime said, when he could no more contain all the things he had left unspoken or partly said.  And then, when Antoine offered no more than the hummed acknowledgment that he had spoken, Maxime took the younger man's chin between his fingers and turned that peerless face to his own.  “My notes…”

“Are incisive as ever.  Why?”

“I fear that we have called you Achilles, when you are Patroclus in this particular battle.”

Antoine smiled.  “Then I advance upon the field, girded by the armour of your words.”

Chapter Text

I

The rooms in which the Committee of Public Safety met existed as a place beyond time.  Peering from its windows, Maxime might find it night or day, dread winter or high summer, raining in Biblical proportions or with gardens bathed by a sun so bright that all cowered from its glory.  This chamber, however, remained exiled in the perpetual green of new grass and budding leaves: printemps, primavera, vere aeternum.  By day the room lived swathed in light from its tall windows; by evening, a second sun reigned supreme, a horde of candles pushing back the clawed hands of night.  

Across that vast field of green cloth, they battled on as if not even a minute of time had altered: a room unchanging, their arguments within it similarly immutable.  ‘Round they swirled on still, warm air, their breathed debates shaking the fragile flames of candles lit against the late hour.  As in nature, their disagreements possessed an inherent cycle.  Springtime renewal gave way ‘neath the fierce blast of summer’s raging tempests,  abated to lingering, autumnal decay.  Now came winter, Maxime was sure, though their brows beaded with sweat, its scent mingling uncomfortably with that of fresh grass and newly-bloomed flowers from outside.  Spring it was, beyond those heavy doors, yet here winter’s vengeful breath whistled past Maxime’s ears: Boreas’ howling, rattled-window voice.  Tonight, the snake-footed god of the north wind took mortal form in Billaud’s proud figure.  Billaud in white shirt, his scarlet vest like blood upon the snow, his hands clutching bleeding words of misery: Danton’s warrant.

Maxime knew the immensity of what lay upon that page, awaiting his hand.  So to, he suspected, did the members of both gathered Committees.  What age was this, where men of such titanic proportions as Louis Capet and Georges Danton could fall beneath a pen’s blade?  On every face, Maxime saw the same god-fearing wonder that had existed in the fatal instant when the divine right of kings was overturned.  It lurked  in Le Bas’ flushed face and parted lips, his wide blue eyes fixed upon the fatal warrant.  Lingered at the pinched corner of David’s mouth, deepening the thick furrow of scar tissue that marred his left cheek.  Only Amar and Vadier appeared unmoved by any sense of momentousness.  Rather, their’s was the lazy pride of noblemen accustomed to hunting game upon the lands they deemed their rightful possession.

“You know what I hold,” Billaud said, the heaviness of each word falling into its appointed place.  His gaze settled on each face in turn, and last upon Maxime.  “No more doubt, my brothers.  No more delay.  If there was a time for mercy, it has long since passed.”

Billaud had always been a master of silences, Maxime had noticed.  He knew their weight, how it might be used to crush or release.  He knew how to cut their size and fill the space between them.  How they might be used to knit close, or stretched thin to breaking point.  Now, Billaud placed the warrant upon the table and signed with a flourish for the only sound.

“There can be no more mercy,” Billaud repeated then, straightening up, “for conspirators.”

Even now, his mind clear and entirely decided, part of Maxime rebelled at the statement.  What was it Danton had said of him?  That he was “a devotee of all that is soft and kind and generous”?  It was true, Maxime supposed, and the most unfortunate part of himself: to his very soul he remained a boy who raised birds and sought, against reason and better judgment, to mend irreparably broken wings.  It was a flaw, the smallest crack to be exploited and thence to break an edifice that ought to be as solid as stone.  A flaw: that fatal love, the very source of his devotion to the People, which yet could not be stopped from encompassing even their betrayers.  A love like the Jesuits preached in the chapel at Louis-le-Grand: a heart enfolding all, and in so doing finding itself perpetually broken.  Could any but some preternatural being close so gaping a wound, or find in His heart the emptiness not to feel at all?  If so, how blessed!

Barère, Maxime was sure, felt nothing.  How else to explain the ease with which he stepped forth, reaching for the quill?  The haste with which he signed?

“We must have unity, tonight, citizens,” Barère said, as he straightened up again.  “We are one, or we are lost.”

David, by Carnot’s side, nodded.  “I am sure no man here is unaware of his duty to the nation,” the artist said, his eyes meeting Robespierre’s as if in reassurance.  “Who but a traitor could remain subject to doubt?”

There was a little moil of confusion at that, no more than a stirring of dust and the rustling of restive beasts.   Looking at David, Robespierre saw again the wild, disheveled hair and bitten fingernails, that thin body hunched over a thousand images of their first martyr, that beloved friend.  He saw the man who, with his own gentle hand, had trammeled the studio’s golden light within Antoine’s curls with such intimate detail that Maxime could never look upon his friend’s portrait without a flushed recollection of how his own lamps produced the same effect.  The man who once roared at his apprentices for failing to capture the precise spirit in Camille’s near-black eyes, his carelessly unbuttoned cuffs: those small details that made the man.  Now it seemed to Maxime that David, having once felt the sting of a blade, had now become its steel: had made of all his wounds a scar that ran deeper than the one marring his cheek.

“Am I, then, a traitor?”  It was Lindet, so quiet and composed a man, who stepped forward to address the joint Committees.  His brow knit as though seized by some invisible pain.  “Is this what we have come to?  Are all to be denounced?”

“If you are not a traitor, Lindet,” Collot growled.  “Then you are at least a fool.”

Couthon leaned forward in his chair.  When, Maxime wondered, had his old friend’s gentle, affable face become so drawn?  When had such deep shadows set in ‘round his eyes, or the set of his gentle mouth become so implacable?

“We should all recall how easily the traitor and the fool overlap,” Couthon said, like the gentlest of schoolmasters.  “What was Louis Capet, if not a fool?”

“A murderer of the People.  I did not come here to continue his work,” Lindet retorted.  “I joined the Committee to feed our citizens, not kill them.”

“Will Danton feed the people then?” Antoine asked, his voice sheathed in its familiar, deceptive softness.  “Or his pockets?  His friends’ bellies, or his own?”

“I cannot discard a man so easily as you.  Not when I know all he has given for the Revolution.”

“You speak of giving: will you ignore what he has taken, then?”

“If so, what then, Saint-Just?” Lindet snapped.  “Will you compose one of your fearsome reports against me, too?”

A damnable silence settled again, stretching so thin it must surely snap.  Maxime knew he must find the words to resolve it.  Find them, or let all be lost.

“We will do what it necessary to succor the People,” Maxime said.  “If we must be merciless to those who have defiled our path- and I contend we must- then we will nonetheless uphold mercy for those of tender heart.”

Perhaps emboldened by such words, though they had only been intended to soothe Lindet, Rühl of the Committee of General Security stepped forward.  Though he was the eldest Convention member, Maxime had always marked Rühl for his strong, hawk-like face and dignified stance.  Ringed, however, by his fellow Committee members, he resembled little so much as an aging, faded lion amongst younger, hungrier beasts: his long grey hair a ragged mane, his worn coat like a scarred pelt, his skin stretched like paper across the bone.  

“Be merciful to mine then, too, Robespierre,” Rühl said, voice thickened by emotion and a heavy, Alsatian accent.  “I will not sign either.”

“How charming to have the luxury of such loyalty.  I am sure Louis Capet would have wished for such devotion in ‘93,” Billaud remarked.  His smile, Maxime thought, was like an actor’s smeared greasepaint.  “Will any more of you deny what is necessary for the nation- for us- to survive?”

A chorus of nays, coupled with grumbled and directionless threats.  Rühl stood by Lindet now, both men with their arms folded, shoulders set in stiff, straight lines.  Maxime could not but be somewhat sympathetic: had he not stood amongst them once and argued clemency?  Had he not been stretched upon the rack by conflicting demands of fraternity and vertu?  If he could not quite admire such loyalty, which had in it the character of idolatry, he could at least understand its temptation.  There were no more now, however, to challenge the arrest: one by one, each man of the Committees stepped forward, each man signed his name.  Maxime felt every signature as a man, waking to find himself buried alive, must feel each echoing clod of dirt fall upon his coffin.  

On the other side of the room, Billaud gathered Amar and Vadier to his side.  He spoke to them as a frightened man speaks in the darkest hours of the night: loudly, and not from lingering confidence, but to push back the encroaching shadows.  Each word, strung in iron links to long and winding sentences, was as a roll of thunder: stirring some primal, primitive fear Maxime had never felt before.  His, then, was as futile as Brount’s terror when he barked at a stormy, glowering sky: as though Nature cared any more than a king did for the howling of Its subjects.

“It would be foolish to think Danton does not have more friends than enemies,” Billaud was saying, one hand upon each man’s shoulder, the better to draw them into his web.  “The warrant must be prosecuted immediately.  We cannot have them in the Convention when the report is read.”

“Absolutely not, Billaud,” Maxime cried, without hesitation, without so much as a cogent thought.  He found his voice driven by impulse alone, by the discordance between all he held dear and the atrocity of justice that Billaud encouraged.  Maxime glanced towards Antoine, poised on the verge of signing.  Interpreted, from his friend’s stillness, their unity of thought and purpose.  “What tyranny is this, to arrest a man before the report against him has even been read?”

“Is this pride I hear, from the mouth of the Incorruptible?” Billaud asked.

“Is it pride, now, to allow a man to hear all he is charged with?”

“Where now, Robespierre, is your virtue?  Where, now, your modesty?”  Billaud’s voice shifted effortlessly into the oratory of the club, of the Convention.  He motioned to the other Committee members as if it were 1789 and this the Palais Royal, where he might stand upon a box to declaim at his hungry audience.  “This is worse than pride, Robespierre: it is vanity.”

“I refuse,” Antoine said.

Two solemn words, spoken with such strength and sincerity as to sunder the straining air.  Maxime turned to Antoine, Billaud echoing the motion.  The younger man set down the quill with habitual grace and economy of motion.  His expression was unreadable, or might have been if it were not for the hardness of the gaze he leveled first at Billaud, then at Amar and Vadier.

“If I am become your blade,” he said, resolved and implacable.  “It is not so I may be plunged in a man’s back.”

The room erupted in noise, each man calling to another so that all their words were lost in a turmoil of argument and debate: the Babel of the Revolution.  Maxime himself, shouting- first at Billaud, then at Collot and Amar- could barely tell his own words.  He knew only the bile of their feeling, the heat and sourness as he brought them forth.  Le Bas and David joined the cause, though they had already signed, their voices fused like the chorus of Tragedy.  If Maxime had begun by thinking of the room as changeless spring, it were now one of that season’s wild squalls: tearing words apart, arguments striking with all the force of lightning.  Only Antoine stood composed in its midst, fixed and unwavering.

“The Convention will rebel if we let them speak!” Couthon hollered.  “Maxime, please, reconsider!”

“It is unity, or it is death!”

And finally, Vadier, words falling into a rare moment’s silence: “If we do not first commit them to the guillotine, it will be we who meet the blade.”

The sentence halted them all.  A deadly calm descended: the passing of a storm once all is lost, leaving nothing to do but mourn.  In his very heart, Maxime knew the truth of Vadier’s words.  It was a dangerous, idolatrous love that many Representatives bore Danton.  A love born of sympathy, from seeing in his imperfections the mark of their own flawed humanity.  In worshiping him, Maxime thought, they worshiped their own reflections.  Thus they need make of themselves, of the nation, nothing more than a soft, indulgent and indolent people.  They need make of themselves nothing but kings in all but name.

Like a child learning his first steps, Maxime took first one step and then another while the Committees watched and waited.  His legs trembled as though he the connecting muscles which made them work had broken or never yet been formed.  He stood at Antoine’s side and took the quill, fingers brushing the side of Antoine’s hand in passing: an idle, invisible apologia of the flesh.  

Maxime closed his eyes.  What, he demanded of himself, will I give for the patrie?  To the People?  For vertu?  The answer came, as it always did: everything. He signed his name, and in that instant felt as if he signed his soul as well: his body felt lighter then, as if that good spirit had fled, only to be followed by a sensation as of some great and heavy object dropped through his very being to settle like a stone in the pit of his belly.  A heavier weight, perhaps, than the loss of merely his own soul: for surely, now, he had also sold Antoine’s into the bargain.  Condemned him either to betrayal, or to the submission of his valiant, antique nature to this ugliness.

As if in answer to a question gone unasked, Antoine bent over the warrant, his back set in a perfect line.  He stood with one hand braced against the table, his fist curled with such force that it trembled.  With his other hand, he slashed his signature across the parchment.

“Cowards,” Antoine spat at Billaud and Vadier, snatching up his hat from where it lay and crushing the brim within his grasp.  He turned on his heel and made towards the door, paused there to lash his gaze upon all but Maxime.  “You are all but actors.  Cowards, playing at being Romans.”

Maxime did not linger at the Committee that night, though they asked it of him.  Billaud and Collot, glutted with victory, now begged his company over the wine.  Couthon, too, pressed him, despite the late hour, to accompany him home and there enjoy the meal his wife would surely have waiting.  Instead, Maxime made a momentary companion of the night’s silence and turned his steps to home.  

In the mere handful of minutes between departing the Committee and reaching the rue Saint-Honoré, Maxime felt them all: Danton, Camille, Fabre, Hérault- all four, and many more besides- clamouring at the edge of his waking thoughts, demanding his attention.  The sound of hastening footsteps at his back reached Maxime’s ears like the march of an invading army.  His own steps quickened: a startled deer hearing the hunter’s steps approach through the underbrush.

What relief, then, to reach the Duplay’s and find the courtyard suffused with the warm, golden light that spilled through the salon windows.  He moved towards it as a ship must track inexorably towards the lighthouse to navigate the sharp reefs that sometimes lurk beneath a calm sea’s dark surface.  How great his surprise, how genuine his delight at finding both Éléonore and Antoine seated together there, heads bent in murmured conference.  They looked up at him: the same dark and solemn gaze mirrored in large and expressive eyes, the same set to their mouths which was half a joy at seeing him and half concerned reproach.  Maxime’s heart swelled so full that it scarce gave his chest room to breathe, blocking even his throat and stopping the entire speech he might have made.  Devoid of words, he reached instead for their hands so that they stood tethered, one to another, in that safe harbour.  Had he ever known gratitude ‘til now?  Éléonore’s hand, in his left, was soft and warm and trembling as a newborn animal; Antoine’s, in his right, as firm and cool and resolute as the grip of some marble soldier.  Oh, Maxime wanted to say, oh you twin halves of my soul.  He said nothing, however, but let the press of his hand speak a more natural language than civilisation allowed.

“Let us finish this, then, Maxime,” Antoine said at last, forgoing any feigned reserve between them.  His fingers, warm and living now, slipped from Maxime’s grasp and he motioned towards the report lying upon the settee.  “Let us go over the matter once more.  If their arrest must be an unnecessary travesty of justice, then I would see to it my report speaks the full truth of the matter.”

Maxime smiled.  Like Pilate, asked, “Quid est veritas?”

“You,” Éléonore replied, glancing at them both as though to impute to them the qualities of a single being.  “A greater, more noble truth than listed dates and recorded events.  Your soul points to it, like the needle of a compass.”

“Éléonore is right, you know,” Antoine said mere moments later, once they were alone in Maxime’s study.  “Our dreams, realised: that is our true North, whatever the hardships.  Does it not take both sacrifice and strength of will to press on to that distant shore?”

“I feel we are far North, then,” Maxime said, his voice a choked and aching laugh.  “Do your lungs not burn with the cold?”

“Do not all who seek unknown lands feel thus?  Do they not know more than any other man may of rage and terror, doubt and sorrow, at seeing weaker men turn back, or plot in mutiny to ruin their cause?”  Antoine’s voice unspooled, calm and steady, a path of thread to follow from this labyrinth.  There was a familiar heat in his gaze, a stroke of lightning to kindle an answering warmth within Maxime’s depths.  His dear friend brushed the tips of his fingers from Maxime’s ear to his cheek, along his jaw and thence to skirt the line of Maxime’s high collar, as light and tender as any of the kisses he had ever pressed there.  “If we suffer in discovery,” Antoine murmured.  “Are we not also rewarded by a great and humbling wonder?”

“To feel all at once is to encroach upon the territory of gods, Antoine,” Maxime said.  As if in testimony to the point, the smile that slipped across his face seared like a brand.  “You burn so brightly, my friend, like Apollo.  At times I feel I chart my course by your light, and have forgotten Camille like a star already fallen from the sky.”      

“He would have led your path astray,” Antoine said.  “Let him fall, then.  If I burn it is for the nation, and for you, alone.  So long as I live.”

Maxime’s breath caught not from tenderness, but from the immensity of those words and the sudden presentiment they gave him.  One day, some rough guard would make of Antoine’s tumbled hair a torn and ragged banner, and sell his shorn locks for trinkets.  The tips of their shears would kiss careless cuts across Antoine’s white shoulders.  They would bind tight the fineness of those wrists, leave them mottled raw and bruised.  Was Danton, Maxime wondered, thinking the same of his own protégé at this very moment?  Did he feel how their shared doom approached, dark as a summer storm upon the horizon?  Did Danton think of scissors while making, from his thick and clumsy fingers, spools ‘round which to wrap Camille’s glossy, ebon’ curls?  Did he force a quarrel between them in these, their dying hours, only so all of Camille’s cuts and bruises would belong to he alone in the very end?

Maxime shuddered, despite the warm night.  “I had not thought,” he said, “to build our Republic upon foundations made of bone.  I do not doubt, rather, I…”

“You mourn,” Antoine said, his mouth adorned with that most beloved of all expressions: the small smile of every portrait.  “I think no less of you for it.”

“I fear what it makes of me.  That I know what is right, that I will do what is right, yet still feel…”

“Did Louis feel for the prisoners tortured to death in his name, or Danton for the people he betrayed?” Antoine asked.  “To renounce your shared humanity: that is to become a king or a tyrant.  But to face your humanity, to master it and turn love towards a greater justice…is that not what we strive for?  It seems to me, Maxime, that you already dwell in that France we are striving for.  Does not all your sorrow stem only from the distance between what we have yet accomplished and the greatness of your heart?  Am I not here because I, too, am wounded and would mend?”

Maxime laughed, a gentle cough into the palm of his hand.  “You honour me too much,” he said.  “You always have.”

“Your excess of humility does you no credit.  I have never lied.”

“I know.  I know it, my beloved friend,” Maxime said.  “Come, then, let me hear your report again.  Let it be done with, and well.”

Long hours afterwards, with the ring of Antoine’s voice faded and the lamps extinguished, Maxime lay locked within the gentle tangle of the younger man’s limbs and stared at the black rectangle of his window.  Somewhere beyond the glass, in midnight streets, they massed and moved, gathered and spread forth, seeking. A new picture presented itself to Maxime’s sleepless mind each time he blinked.  Danton staggering to his feet, shirt untucked and collar flaring wide over his thick breast, his child-wife cowering within a doorway.  Camille stumbling with wide and blinking eyes from his marriage bed, struggling against the grip of his assailants, dragged outside while Horace screamed and Lucile fought them all with her bird-boned hands.  Danton would weep no more, Maxime thought, not now: it was not his way.  Camille, though, would rage and sob ‘til his throat bled.  Did they lie already within a cell at the Luxembourg, wound ‘round one another like fretful children?  He pictured Danton and Camille amongst the scattered straw: bound together much as Maxime and Antoine were bound, a dark and inverted mirror to their love, a jest made by a god as sharp-witted as Voltaire.

II

The Convention was filled with birds.  How they fluttered, in blues and whites and reds, in muted shades of green and brown: alike in plumage alone.  How they railed and cried, as even the smallest finch is wont to: mighty in number, mighty from the safety of high branches.  So it went with these friends of Danton, dormant and silent amongst their orders ‘til now, when of a host they emerged in cacophony as all birds rail at the appearance of the hawk.  Once, Maxime had made the fatal mistake of thinking them all a piece: each representative joined by fraternal love, united in sincerity of commitment to the Republic.  Rather, in uprooting the factions, he had discovered how deep and wide these cancerous roots had dug.

It was Legendre who first took to the floor in Danton’s defense.  He railed at the Committees with such passion that Maxime could not but wonder where this exquisite performance of such aching emotion derived from.  In high and timorous voice, with pleading motions of his hands, he called upon the Convention to witness his unsullied nature, the purity he shared with Danton, the dictatorial nature of accusing a man without his being present.  Others took up the cry.  It rumbled through the floor in stamped feet and pounding fists. Seemed, even, to shake the ceiling above their heads.  Had Danton been present, Maxime supposed, he might have made an army of such cowards: for as birds are emboldened by the presence of their flock, so Man’s weakness turns to shallow bravery of numbers when he sees himself agreed with.

Such raucous chaos brought to Maxime’s mind the earliest days of the Revolution, when the Feuillants still held the Assembly, when they mocked his provincial accent and satirised him in their petty journals, when Lafayette massacred the civilians at the Champ de Mars.  He had risen through it then as he rose through it now, demanding to be heard, refusing the silence they would force upon him.  Only now Maxime had even more to preserve: where then the Revolution had been a conflageration, a torch lit in every breast, now its true nature had more in it of the candle flame, which must be cupped and eternally fanned by force of every breath.  Too strong a gust and it would flare ‘til it devoured itself, too soft and it could be snuffed by an immoderate sigh or the rain of deceit and conspiracy poured upon it.  And so Maxime rose and lifted his voice again and yet again, refusing to sit or to be silenced, until at last his enemies gave way from sheer exhaustion.  

“You speak, Citizen Representatives, as if the Revolution were but this single man,” Maxime called out.  Though he did not have the lungs of a Billaud-Varennes, far less Antoine’s exquisite modulation, his voice carried.  “You speak as if Louis Capet were overthrown merely to make way for the dawning of Georges Danton.”

There was laughter from some quarters at that.  Couthon slapped his arm encouragingly.

“The trial of Louis Capet was not to resolve the question of a man, nor yet of a king: it was to resolve the question of a nation.  So to, the question now is not of Danton as man, nor of particular moments in his career: it is a question of whether we shall allow the interests of a few ambitious hypocrites to triumph over the interests of the entire French people.”  Maxime paused, allowing the argument to settle as one might allow silt to settle before drinking a cup of water.  “Legendre speaks to you of Danton, as though Danton were a special case who must be addressed differently to Desmoulins, to Delacroix, to Brissot, even, or Pétion.  Legendre speaks an idolatrous tongue.  He speaks the very language of demagoguery and false idols.  The question for those true patriots- and I account myself but one among their number- is whether we shall break this idol or whether, in falling, it shall crush both the Convention and the people whom we serve.”

The murmuring grew louder as each man turned to another, the flock seeking reassurance from every member before it could wheel in the high, blue sky.

“I, too, have loved Danton.  I, too, falsely accounted him a patriot.  But my duty is not to Danton’s false friendship, or to any man: it is to virtue and the Revolution.  My life is the patrie, my heart is without fear, and if I die it will be without reproach and without ignominy.  We will have nothing to do with privilege: we will have no idols here.”

A thunderous applause smothered those few voices that rose to follow Maxime’s own.  It was into this milieu, mere moments later, that Antoine ascended: his head high, his back ramrod straight, the report tucked beneath his arm.  It was for a lover’s eyes, and thus Maxime’s alone, to recognise there, beneath Antoine’s eyes, the dark shadows of a night passed in restless sleep; to mark the stark pallor of an exhaustion he would neither confess to or heed.

“Ah,” sighed Collot, from Maxime’s left.  “There is our young athlete.”

Antoine stood upon the rostrum and regarded the Convention with that habitually level gaze.  

“Citizens,” he began.  “The Revolution is in the People.  It is their labour, it is their voice, it is their beating heart.  It is not, as some would rather have it, in the sacrosanct reputations of some few individuals.  It is not in false prophets, or gods or idols.  Hear me, I adjure you, as I unfold to you the truths to which we have blinded ourselves for far too long.”

For all the steadiness of Antoine’s voice, Maxime felt as though he listened to the very sound of his own breaking heart: that testimony of falseness, of hypocrisy, of his own deluded attachment to Danton and to Camille which had so long deceived him.  The eyes of the Convention were upon him now.  Maxime felt a shuddering terror at the realisation.  It passed beneath the surface of his skin, was quelled before it could so much as become a tremor in his hands.  For though there were those who watched him with eyes like that of Le Bas and Couthon- wide and wondering in their earnest devotion to their shared cause- there were many others who gazed upon him with something cool and calculating in the depths of their eyes.

When first he had entered the Convention, he had thought of the representatives as finches: small and trembling, loud in their calls, brave in their numbers.  Now, he thought of them instead as the cuckoo: that canny bird who conceals its egg in the nests of others, whose squalling young usurp and murder its adopted brothers.  

The cuckoo, after all, is ever a watchful bird.

III

Danton, so the notes coming from the Revolutionary Tribunal claimed, was effective.  Brilliant.  Charming.  His voice (which was not at all like Maxime’s, but something deeper, more compelling, possessed of all the familiarity of paternal speech), drifted through open windows.  It summoned crowds.  It wooed and charmed and won over.  His arguments were not made of reason, nor were they the arguments of an impassioned patriot: no, when Danton spoke, he spoke the popular tongue, the language of the seducer.  Like the swaying serpent, he charmed his prey as he charmed women to his bed.

Danton demands witnesses, wrote Fouquier.  The people will wish to know our answer.

“Not the people,” Antoine said.  “The audience.  He was ever good at his performances.”

Danton has made a merry circus of the proceedings, wrote Fouquier, with he its dancing bear. And, Danton rages like an ill wind.

“We had better shut the windows then,” Collot joked, Billaud’s laughter trailing his words.

Of Camille, mercifully, Maxime heard nothing.

IV

The letter arrived late on the night of the 15th of Germinal, crushed in Billaud’s broad, sweaty hand as he thundered through the green room and into the offices beyond, where they sat working.

“I have evidence!” he shouted.  “Here, in my hand!  A plot, my friends, to bring about our destruction!”

Maxime, at this commotion, barely raised his head from signing the daily correspondence.  It was not, after all, the first time such threats were made.  Had there not been the Duke of Brunswick’s threat of summary justice against the people of Paris?  Had the Girondins not openly called for Maxime’s lynching in the very Convention itself?  Corday’s knife buried itself in Marat’s narrow breast?  Was the Committee not perpetually surrounded by threats and alarms upon ever side?  So much so that terror of them had all but fled, and there remained nothing to do but live on in spite of them.  Only faint-hearted Barère showed any sign of genuine concern, while for the rest it was but a mummer’s show: a making of the correct exclamations, of certain gestures made a thousand times before; a sort of symbol of fear rather than its reality.  Even Billaud, roaring, each word forging a chain of denunciation, seemed merely to be reciting his lines.  In his dark eyes, the timbre of his voice, there was yet something else of pleasure: a worm in the heart of the apple, a mote of cloudy rot within the wine.

“They will make an insurrection of criminals, of the very people we have battled these past five years!”  Billaud shouted.  “They will join their cause to every order of traitor and use their popularity amongst credulous fools to sever the very hand of justice.  Friends, they aim for the Tribunal.”

“What, then?” Barère cried out.  “Not content with one September, Danton will make a second of the Committees?”

Like a specter, those red nights rose before them all.  It shook its devilish chains and howled.  Maxime could not quite suppress the prickling shudder that swept across his skin, or how those words struck his heart like the whip of some merciless rider.  Yes, he was saddled by those nights, they all were.  Again, he smelled that rancid stench of aged and drying blood, lingering on autumn air.  He heard the howling rage- a rage that once had seemed like the incandescent light of freedom dawning- sweep down the streets like the fused voices of the Furies.  Saw, as he had then, piled corpses with their stiffly severed limbs, only now they had the form of the men around him.  Was led not by the forces of the People, but rather by their enemies, by those who thought to smother such dearly bought freedom in its cradle.  Glancing ‘round, only Antoine seemed unaffected, and then only because he stood at the window to face the darkness beyond.  To face it, as though he alone would bear the onslaught of the attacks mounted against them.

“Bah,” Collot spat, peering over Billaud’s shoulder.  “It says Camille’s bitch is involved.  Well, she will play the tender mother well, I suppose, and get some sympathy for it.”

“Not only that, but shower the crowd with money!”

Part of Maxime had doubted, recoiling at the ugliness of Collot’s words.  No more. Could Camille’s gentle, rage-filled, petulant heart mount an insurrection?  Could Danton, in the great confidence of popular adulation, seek instead to break into open warfare?  Though neither seemed impossible to him, trapped as they were in this age of impossibilities, there was something in the claims that seemed unlikely.  But Danton scattering his ill-gotten gains?  Turning a man, through the lure of money, into the slaver of his own soul?  Making himself a fisherman, to lure the unwary with a hook baited in gold?  When, after all, had Danton ever done otherwise?  When had his politics been anything but a granted wish for those who tossed a coin into his muddied waters?  And oh, how it hurt Maxime’s heart to see these pieces align, to put them together and behold the entire picture of men he’d once loved.

“An innocent man would not seek to break his chains, after all.  He would trust in innocence to set him free.”  Barère’s voice slithered through the room, its dangerousness disembodied from the white-faced, nervous eyed man at the desk opposite Maxime’s.  “He must be silenced, and the others with him, lest any be swayed to his side.”

Such ideals we all once shared, Maxime thought, now burned to ash and scattered upon the winds.  Well could he recall those early speeches he had made, those halcyon days when the Revolution seemed done and they, still standing, the architects of a new world.  The tables he had sat ‘round, were filled now with no more than ghosts and fond memories.  Their conversations but oaths sworn and broken.

All save one.

Maxime’s eyes found Antoine, not to implore or bend in supplication.  They found him, rather, with a burning wonder he recalled from the lives of saints.  This, then, was faith and love and vision: the ecstasy of the soul.

“I will compose the report,” Antoine said, dark eyes never turning from the dark outside.  

Later, in the sleepless hour before dawn, they stood sheltered by secrecy and shadows, in an abandoned stairwell of a dead regime.  In Maxime’s very depths, such pain: the eagles, not content with liver alone, feasted now upon his heart, spilled the bile of his stomach, cracked open every bone to suck its marrow.  How they devoured him, these twin eagles of despair and fear that had accompanied all his years.  Yet here, where Antoine's mouth met his, where their lips met and pressed- an exchange of breaths, a mingling of souls- such golden warmth.  The union of two candles, touched so close together that they made of their light one light even as all around them fell away into darkness.

V

 
“Have you heard?” Billaud asked, leaning over Maxime’s shoulder.  “When he learned he would not be giving his defence, Camille tore up his papers and threw them at Fouquier.  Will you take a drink?”

A mere politeness: offered water.  Maxime thought rather of wine, and of blood.  He recalled Camille’s words at the Tribunal: thirty-three, the same as the sans-culottes Jesus.  Maxime looked at his hands and found them clean, like Pilate’s.

“How like a child,” Billaud said.

His breath was rank as carrion, and Maxime idly wondered where Billaud found meat when Couthon had been reduced to sucking soup bones.  Or perhaps, like Maxime, Billaud only devoured himself.  Perhaps he merely concealed it better.

“How like Camille,” Maxime replied, turning away.

Despair and Fear, their great, sharp beaks buried in his belly, tearing out all they could reach.

(i)

They are provincial boys, all three: strongly cadenced accents, shabby suits, the scuffed shoes of men accustomed to walking everywhere.  They linger in the gardens of the Palais Royal, in rare moments of forcibly seized rest, only to push their fingers into the drying summer grass and feel the warm give of earth beneath.  Maxime speaks of nature and fences and freedom, Danton speaks of the future and the laying down of arms; Camille simply speaks, unceasing, of nothing and everything all at once.  Does so until these comrades of his, these resting soldiers of the Revolution, laugh and bid him hush.  Maxime and Danton sit propped up by their hands, watchful, minding those who watch them in turn.  Camille lies, heedless, in their midst.  His curls are a river of spilled ink that catch the falling sun: he is the child of some lost muse.  He chatters, twisting as he speaks, stammer gone in the rush.  He foretells wars and the unfettered violence of justice roaring free of its chains, he foretells bodies swinging from lampposts and eyes knocked from skulls, he foretells the dawn of freedom and light, light spreading everywhere.

Danton laughs and the earth trembles with his greatness.  His gaze chases women.  It returns to Camille, lingering.  His eyes find Maxime’s last of all: light meeting light of differing hues.

“He is incendiary, our Camille,” Danton says, and there is an agony in his voice that calls to mind all great fools.  “He lights fires.”

Camille throws his arms to the sky at that, as a babe reaches for its mother’s breast.  “Burn it down!” he cries.  “Burn it all.  Is liberty not the conflagration of our very souls?”  

He is drunk, Camille.  They all are, on one thing or another: Danton on champagne, Maxime on dreams, Camille on the joy that is his native state.  He struggles up and throws his arms around both their necks, dragging them close.  Maxime, in his most private self, is entranced by the summer’s warmth of his hair and the scent of drying grass that clings to his bare neck.  They are rabbits, and Camille’s arms the snare.  Without releasing them, the younger man (who is not much younger at all) points to the summer sky: an arc of pale blue silk shot through with darts of gold, scarlet ‘round the lowering sun.

“Hark,” Camille says, low enough that they must press still closer to hear him.  “Maxime, can you see with those clouded eyes of yours?  It is a good omen: a red sky for a new dawn, a red sky for the blood we spill for freedom.”

And, “Yes,” Maxime says.  “Yes, Camille, I see.”

VII

It was not yet July, the world not yet turned full circle, and so the sun set earlier.  In all other particulars, however, Paris stretched herself out beneath a summer sunset like a youth stretched laughing beneath the sky in a world and time long past.  A sky of blue silk, patterned with silver wisps of gossamer clouds; streaks of gold like the glistening thread in fine damask.

The spreading stain of a blood red sunset.

Maxime would not open the shutters to welcome it.

VIII

As the flooding Seine could not be restrained by its banks, so, too, the shutters could not hold back the veritable deluge of sound from the crowded streets.  The hundreds- nay, thousands, perhaps- come to watch Pierrot and Harlequin make their last dancing performance.  With both doors to his rooms locked against even the tenderest intrusion, with his hands folded upon his desk, Maxime heard without listening.  He knew, then, the moment they passed from the sudden clamour and howl; from the bawling of Danton’s incomparable voice, his words indistinct, yet in tone an imprecation.  Maxime gave, in response, a masterful performance of his own: the mere tightening of his hands, like a man in fervent prayer.  There were none there to see it.

There came a silence, or something like it.  No crowd beyond, no workmen below.  The only sound, in those long-passing minutes, that of his own hastening breath.

Their deaths came like a wave: the roar of it distant, at first, then thunderous enough to rattle even the windows.  It crashed once, receded into rippling breakers, only to rise even higher and crash once more.  Then, nothing.  Both gone from the world.  Maxime, drowning, took a single, shuddering breath.  Another.  He tipped his head back and looked to the ceiling.

Through the thin gaps in the shutters, a band of light fell: the deep red of a summer sunset, or its memory.  The blood they shed for freedom spilled across Maxime’s chamber, falling over his folded hands.

Chapter Text

24 Germinal, Year II

“Any political law that is not based on nature,” Antoine said, dropping- if only for an instant- his manners and punctuating his words with the perilous motion of his soup spoon.  “Is terrible.”

An appreciative sigh went up around the Duplay’s table, as though earnest and honest expression were sufficient to dine on.  As though they were even more delicious than the potée Madame Duplay had prepared for the evening.  Maxime glanced at his friend.  Allowed himself the luxury of a shared look, a moment’s conveyance of admiration before dropping his gaze to his soup bowl.  He had never, after all, outgrown his habitual distraction when it came to the smaller things in life, and was apt to spill his meal out of a more earnest desire to discuss politics than to eat.

“Yet how should any man now living, having been raised amongst the laws of civilisation from birth, come to produce a law based on nature?” Éléonore asked, rising to the challenge.  “Is it not a problem Rousseau has set for us?  That we are, perhaps, defined by our birth and yet must find some manner to counter it?”

In many houses, Maxime knew, a daughter- even a clever, elder daughter well past the traditional age of marriage- would be rebuked for the impolitesse of the remark.  At this kind table, however, only Babet shook her head, and that with mock disapproval.  The men only laughed.  Simon nudged Antoine with one elbow, as though he needed any encouragement to continue a debate.

“She has you, my dear friend,” Georges said, leaning forward as far as his body could accommodate, face flushed with wine and mirth.  “Will you allow it?”

“I confess, Antoine, I would hear your answer too,” Maxime replied, permitting himself the warmth conveyed by speaking his friend's name. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his napkin as if that would remove the smile tugging at his lips.  “If you have one.”

Antoine settled back in his chair.  “I have read that sages in the East pose such problems to their devotees, just as Socrates engaged his students in dialogue.  Are you, Citizeness Duplay, to become Aspasia?”

“We had our Aspasia in Madame Roland.  I had rather be Hipparchia,” she said, swift upon this heels of Antoine’s wit.  “Do you evade me, Citizen Saint-Just?”

“An Hipparchia with the heart of a Paulina, I think.  To your point, then: reason and history provide the structure, our hearts their sensibility,” Antoine said.  His gaze met Maxime’s, as weighty and solid as ever his hands had been.  “It is our hearts, after all, that are closest to what is natural.  For my part, I would see a politics of the public conscience rather than a calamitous list of laws.”

“Une volonté une,” Maxime murmured, words lost in an applause begun by Phillipe and Babet, echoed by the rest of the table.  

Georges heaved back in his seat with a wince, his pain swiftly concealed by the raising of his glass.

“Twenty-six,” he declared. “Yet our Saint-Just remains the paragon of youth we see in Émile.  My dear friend, rather than the musty robes of saints, I am sure the papers shall soon ascribe you wings.”

“And I assure you, Georges: the wine is sweet and you drink too quickly.”  Antoine returned his attention to Éléonore.  “Hipparchia, do I satisfy you?”

“Are you capable of less?  Father, will not object to my saying that France is fortunate in having you,” she said.  Then, with a cunning glance at Maxime, “That we are fortunate in having you.”

Éléonore, Maxime reflected, had always been wise in ways he could not predict and which Rousseau would not entirely have approved of.  Educated and respected, she nonetheless had lived a life circumscribed by her sex.  By books alone, then, rather than experience of some immoderate love affair, had she forged so resolute and knowing a soul, such profound understanding of the nature of men.  Never had she sought Maxime’s reassurance of their engagement, nor would he offer it from misguided pity or vile contempt, but he thought again how well it would be to walk with her.  To take Éléonore’s hand in his, a subtle renewal of that unspoken, provincial oath he first made years ago; to know that, in so doing, she would not cease in speech or debate, that she- like Antoine- was entirely inviolable, as true and constant as the vastness of the heavens.  That two such people should exist on this blighted earth, let alone this wounded nation!  That they should exist and love him, and he them, and in one coming to love the other, so make of love an expansive, all-encompassing thing.  That such a thing existed: absent of luxury, beyond  the performance and games of aristocrats: was it not, he wondered, the closing of a perfect circle?  Were there not precedents in ancient days?  Yes, soon he would invite her to stroll with him along the Champs-Élysées.  He would entreat Antoine to join them on ramblings further afield, to Issy perhaps, and they should all walk apace while he- oh, most daring!- coupled his fingers with theirs in moments where none but they could know of it.  With the honest love of children, then, would they make a chain of their joined hands, unbroken, unbreakable.

Consumed by the sweetness of this day, these hours stolen from toil, Maxime looked down the length of the table at these fine patriots, these good and simple people: his family.  Though the world ‘oft felt to Maxime like a fractured limb, here it was brought into most pleasing alignment and healed.  Here was both patrie  and civisme: the rumble of Simon’s laughter, Jacques’ worshipful eyes upon his uncle’s rough face and Maurice gently chiding both.  It was the heavy bread upon the table, and the potée Madame Duplay had generously filled with what she could get of salt pork and sausage, the better to echo the hearty meals Maxime and Antoine once consumed at home.  It was Victoire’s tender, thoughtful attentions to Georges and the fond, wet-eyed gaze he turned upon her.  It was Babet glowing like a goddess and chatting amiably with her mother; Philippe, her solicitous devotee, resting his hand upon the great arc of her belly as though to console the child within for its misfortune at not yet joining them.  It was Brount taking this opportunity to nose his way onto Maxime’s lap and there rest his great and shaggy head.  It was Antoine and Éléonore, their talk now turned to animated debate on the works of Gluck, and Antoine’s sweetly untrained voice rising: Perché a’ tiranni ride serena l’adulatrice felicità, e i giusti gemono nella catena d’inseparabile avversità? so that Maxime could not but join in, despite the rookish ugliness of his own voice: Tu piangi, Evandro amato, e n’hai ragion.                            

A smattering of applause and delighted laughter followed in the wake of this unintended musical interlude.  Babet, doubtless recalling their journey to the front together, demanded that Philippe and Antoine should sing some airs after dessert.

“I notice,” Maxime said, 'round a chuckle he could not entirely suppress.  “You did not call upon me, Madame Le Bas.”

The entire company laughed at that, though Éléonore attempted a most sympathetic face.  Maxime could hardly bear it: this love and affection, its multiplication in number, this sweet warmth.  His eyes ached.  He stared down into the worn, chipped bowl between his hands and was startled by a fat bead of water dripping into its midst.  He touched his hand to his cheek and discovered the cool streak of tears cutting the arid heat of his skin.  A silence settled over the gathering.  Though he ought to dismiss it with some little jest, he could only think: is this joy, God? Is this sweet ache truly happiness?  Have I given enough to earn so very, very much in return?  I, who have sent men to their deaths?

“Maximilien,” Madame Duplay said, her voice so like his mother’s, or the figment of it.  She closed her hand, delicately lined and worn from household labour, around his and patted it.  

“It is well.”  Maxime's throat felt raw, scraped by the jagged edges of every word he had ever forced from it.  “It is only an expression of my contentment, howsoever strange that may seem.”

Madame Duplay- a woman, he knew, very much sympathetic to tearful joy- smiled gently and squeezed his hand again.

“Well,” she said, motioning to the bowl before him.  “You should eat.  These things tend to cool so quickly, even in the mild weather.”

5 Floréal

Maxime could not bear it: this depth of love in all its many forms, multifaceted as the most precious of cut diamonds; its counterpoint of equal measure: this tangled knot of terror and of rage binding the blackest sorrow like a mantle ‘round Maxime’s shoulders.  There was a tremor to his hands now, Maxime noticed, its permanence marked by an increase of spilled water, toppled ink pots, scattered papers.  In constancy of sensation it was, he thought, like the vibrato of a fly’s wings.  Éléonore captured this nascent flight within her gentle palm when they walked together; with sure and sturdy grip, Antoine crushed it to the pillows by Maxime’s head.  Once released from their care, however, it always returned.

Yes, Maxime thought, in lonely, early hours.  Yes, I am a broken thing.  As well I should be.  In Arras- a world and a century away, it seemed- he had condemned a man to death under the ancien regime.  Now that moment turned back upon him as though, by condemning others- no matter how just the cause, how corrupt the subject- he had created a wheel from their broken bodies on which he himself would be crushed.  One arm of this saltire was constructed of profound and virtuous love, even the other of dying dreams and congealing blood.  The chains that bound to him to it were links formed by betrayal and calumny and deceit, each day adding another.  Where these arms intersected- that is, where their crux formed in the pit of his stomach- there roiled such burning pain, as of the ancient and monstrous tortures devised by Persian kings.  The beggars and the bread lines, the worn and weary faces, the returned soldiers with their maimed features and missing limbs: in short, every hideous sight imaginable, fell upon Maxime’s undefended limbs like the blow of some great hammer.  Like the taunts of a jeering crowd, the words of the People reached his ears: what a beautiful jest is our great Revolution, they said, or fuck the Republic or give me a bottle of wine and a king rather than freedom and suffrage.

Oh, my poor People, he thought, my poor nation.  How you are deceived by scoundrels and intrigues, by foreign powers, by the gods you made of mere men.

But because he would solve it and repair all that was broken, because yes! yes! in spite of all he remained that boy who played father to his siblings, who mended injured birds, he wrote only of prisons and plots.  Let his heart break if it would, let him die if he must, there would be a way free for them all: he had seen it and lived it, they could reach it if only a way could be found through this dense maze of trickery and deceit.  Good and able men, Maxime wrote, in the privacy of his notebook, are the hope of the nation.  Let us appoint them to key positions so they may serve as examples.  Let us be inflexible with the traitor, the foreigner; let us be merciless with our very selves.

Tyranny! The papers and the pamphlets shrieked.  Dictators!

Such words set down their roots in minds made fertile by war and bloodshed, by starvation and overwork, by these endless years of brutality and fear.  Grew fast.  Flowered into poisonous blooms just as nightshade flourishes in dank shadows.  How deep these violent roots ran: as deep as a man’s soul, feeding on what brackish water they encountered there.  If vertu might be compared to a swift, clear-running spring from which all had once drunk, they now sipped from a poisoned well polluted by the piles of corpses heaped in its waters by intriguers and conspirators.

Maxime had thought, in those scant days following Camille and Danton’s death, that it might be done.  That they would be the last sacrifice he must need to make.  Indeed, he felt their passing with the same wondering admixture of relief and terror with which a man might look upon the easing of a mighty storm.  Yet now it came again, in deluge: letters and accusations and pleas, the new police bureau, reports on the movements of the Austrians, the Dutch and the English, still more allegations of Le Bon’s iniquities and the great and bloody theater he had made of Arras.

Men, he wrote, make of themselves gods and kings.  They shelter ambition mistaking it for the tender shoots of modesty, they mimic the language of patriotism as a starling will mimic the hawk, and observe the forms of civisme as the nobility observed the steps of a minuet.  They command the people’s wonder and fear, and thus their obedience.

A memory, long forgotten and fading at its edges: he a youth of seventeen, clad like a sparrow in drab but neatly pressed best and standing before the gates of Louis-le-Grand.  He could recall the abbé Hérivaux’s oration in his hands, and that- though he could not recall a word of it now- he had studied it up until the final moment.  And then?  A confection of golden filigree, a carriage the likes of which appeared in fairytales he once read Henriette and Charlotte, an incongruity of angels and lions, of flesh and divinity.  Louis Capet’s face: youthful, then, handsome in its vitality.  The vague impression of a smile and the benevolent eyes possessed only by those to whom the entire world belongs.  What Maxime truly recalled- what he would always recall- was the sensation of that brief moment when the king recognised his existence: as if Maxime’s soul had been struck from his very body, as if his limbs were naught but ash to be scattered by the king’s very breath, as much terror and awe as he might have experienced had one of the carved angels atop the carriage sprung suddenly to life for some divine pronouncement.  When confronted by the same man many years later, a man for whom he was no more memorable than a single ant among the hordes crushed by his heel, he would resist that same sensation, knowing it for what it was: obedience.

Was it thus, Maxime wondered, that kings first came to be?  Yes, as Rousseau had it there had been trickery and force of some sort involved in the initial claiming of lands and creation of titles.  More than that, however, they had perhaps possessed the same qualities as these false patriots, these fake friends in their midst: a robust and manly form, an intellect and manners designed to charm, a fine veneer of moral rectitude and certainty.  In the possession of such attributes (though they might be as soft and yielding under flame as the waxworks of Madame Tussaud) they thus came to command from even good men an undeserved loyalty and an obedience of spirit that had no place in the Revolution.  

Man, so Maxime wrote, appropriates to himself the nature and qualities of a god.  This is the central fallacy of atheism, and its risk to both patrie and vertu.  When a powerful man makes a god of that immortal part of himself which we call the soul, then on earth, confined to mortal parts, he becomes a king whether in title or in deed.  The weaker man, feeling himself lost in some bleak and featureless wilderness, thus turns his own soul into that of an acolyte rather than an equal.  He forges the links of the chains that bind him- and not only him, but his progeny for untold generations- and though they be chains and fetters, he will wear them proudly as frivolous women wear gold and jewels.  He will make of ugliness a beauty, of oppression a charm, of slavery a brilliant jewel, of his sweat and blood a spill of diamonds and rubies.

How easy it would be, he thought, to become lost in the chaos of these days.  How east to fall prey to every false perception, to the heightened emotions of the mob, to the whiles of those enemies of the Revolution.  To become, like Danton and Camille, a man for whom the call to rest and peace soon became a willingness to sacrifice first one's ideals and then the People.  How easy to succumb to that state of obedience that renders all independent thought, all freedom of choice, all acceptance of responsibility an unbearable weight.  To thence become as one who complains that it is too cold when there is dry wood waiting in the fireplace and a workable flint besides.  How easy, had these scattered notes not come to take on first a pattern and then a shape.  Here in his very writing, then, was the beacon of his soul: so long as it were not extinguished, so long as he was not felled at last, he might walk towards its light and ignore the shadows that fell away on either side of his path.  Even the news, some few days later, that Antoine would be returning to the front would not dissuade him.

We have lost much in order that we may gain from sacrifice, he wrote, we cannot, must not, lose faith as well.

12 Floréal

 “And so you will go now and save France again.  Collot’s young athlete,” Maxime said.  And then more tenderly, to clear this inexplicable note of bitterness in his voice.  “My Leonidas.”

Like so many moments in the Revolution, Maxime thought, they had been here before.  How many times more would he find himself saying adieu with this attendant sense of foreboding?  How many times would he face this unchanging moment?  Here, again, Antoine’s proud and resolute figure encased within his uniform.  Here that same set of the jaw and the resolute gaze that suggested he was already upon the field and facing their enemy.  Here, too, the warmth of Maxime’s pride in him, the thickness to his pulse of a slowly stoked desire, and chained beneath both the chimera of all his fear and sorrow and anger.  And then Antoine broke the shackles of Maxime’s memories.  Rather than open old wounds, he made of this instant a fresh incision: the sudden softness to his face, the haste with which he left the embrasure and came to sit at Maxime’s side on the edge of the bed.  

“Demophilus,” Antoine said, curiously fervent and gentle all at once.

“I should hope not,” Maxime retorted, trying for a jest.  “For both our sakes.”

Antoine studied him with habitual intensity.  He had, Maxime thought, a way of looking at a man as though he could read the very record of his soul.  Once it had seemed disconcerting to be so thoroughly read, to lay open even those unwritten parts of his soul to another.  Now Maxime submitted to it willingly, and to more besides: the careful stroke of Antoine’s long, ink-stained fingers through his sweat-damp hair, the cool of his palm against Maxime’s feverish cheek, that mouth pressed- ah, precieux, delicieux!- against his own, a full lower lip between Maxime’s teeth, a tongue that stole every word and sigh and breath from Maxime’s mouth and made it his own breathed fuller and deeper.

“Let us no longer take our names from dead men and dead ages,” Antoine said, sitting back again.  His eyes narrowed as they always did when his mind espied some distant, yet pertinent thought.  “Though if we must, could Leonidas ask for a better, more honourable friend with which to finish his days?”

“You chide me for speaking of dead men and ages while your mind wanders in graveyards?”

“I do not fear death, Maxime.”

“No.”  That bitterness again, sour as unripe fruit to the tongue.  “You embrace it.”

“I embrace you!" Antoine declared, his voice loud in the small chamber.  His reserve, like Maxime's, fraying at the edges.   "Only you!”

He- they- did then, this interminable state of danger a whetstone on which to sharpen their desire: two soldiers seizing a final moment upon the eve of battle.  Their bodies, for some few moments, spoke the twin languages of loving and of struggle: legs too tangled to part or close, fingers laced tight while hands grappled for hips and thighs.  Antoine’s mouth was both cool water to Maxime’s parched lips and the pyre on which his fever was incinerated.  They parted only far enough to allow Antoine’s grip to close in the tussled folds of Maxime’s nightshirt and drag it up, far enough for Maxime to chant the rosary of his assent against Antoine’s parted lips.  Maxime’s hand settled over his friend’s only to have the pleasure of knowing its path: breast to rib and rib to hip, from hip to the juncture of his thighs.

Maxime sighed the sweetness of Antoine’s name between those beloved lips as the other man’s fingers sought his sex, found him soft though not entirely unstirred.  He tossed beneath the other man's weight, wondering in some vague, directionless manner whether this sensation was akin to what women felt at first advance: a deeper, contained pleasure, a desire more difficult to chase and seize, a rejoicing in the subtlety of fingers that pressed and stroked.  Maxime kept his palm there, just there, draped over the back of Antoine’s hand to chase the ghost of further pleasure: that knowledge of Antoine’s understanding of how to work and shape him, of where to grip and at what pace and pressure.

“Good, my dear friend,” Maxime whispered.  With his free hand he pushed back the tussled fall of Antoine’s hair so that he might look at that face.  “Good, my God you are.”  And then, before this lingering, honeyed state he was suspended in could be chafed to a painful edge, he pressed Antoine’s hand with his own to stop him.  “I won’t tonight,” he murmured.  “Truthfully, I cannot.  Only let me…”

A turnabout in their mutual struggle, then.  Fever momentarily vanquished, and gripped by some frenetic energy that strained the very leash he held it on, Maxime seized Antoine by the lapels.  Bore him back and down onto the pillows, fingers already at the double row of buttons: so cold when the skin beneath burned hot.  Lacking the drive towards his own climax, hanging in a state devoid of finality, Maxime found himself savouring it all in infinitely particular detail.  Never had he been thankful for age and infirmity ‘til now, when it provided the means to measure the smoothness of Antoine’s skin and test the suppleness of muscle beneath.  When it allowed him no purpose but to map all the tender spots that pleased Antoine best: a moment’s pressure there upon his throat, here where Maxime’s desperate fingers found purchase upon the sharp jut of his hipbone.  If, indeed, he often thought of Antoine in martial terms then Maxime, too, could play the soldier and offer no quarter.  Thus he laid him out: booted feet struggling for purchase in tangled sheets, one hand gripping the edge of the mattress while the other clung to the pillow.  The coat he parted wide ‘cross Antoine’s chest, slipped over his shoulders; the waistcoat followed.  He pulled Antoine’s shirt high enough to traipse the ladder of his ribs, to discover the whole of his breast and press his lips above that thundering heart.  

“Hush,” he whispered, setting his own wrist against Antoine’s mouth to forestall any sound that might draw attention.  With his other hand, Maxime flicked loose the buttons on trousers and drawers, but did no more than part and lower the cloth.  He whispered a string of apologetic endearments at finding Antoine painfully strained with the wanting of it.  Then, “Hush, my dear friend.”

For as long as they had loved, Maxime had felt as if Antoine’s body were but an extension of his own.  Thus he closed his hand firm ‘round the girth of Antoine’s sex- for in this act, too, Antoine's austere courage would not tolerate weakness or indecision.  Maxime’s thumb, more gently, found that delightfully sensitive place just beneath the head of Antoine’s sex, stroking it through the fragile layer of skin on each upward glide of his hand.  Antoine made no sound save the roar of an indrawn breath that broadened his chest, revealing the exquisite pattern of his ribs.  His eyes, wide and dark, were fixed upon some indistinct point: a Saint Sebastian with his gaze already turned towards Heaven.  Maxime let his wrist slip from that beloved mouth, from those lips that spoke entire worlds into being, so he might fondly stroke his mussed curls, as if tending him through the very extremity of suffering.  Indeed, the way Antoine’s great eyes slid shut and his brow knit, how his wracked body trembled, had in it all the signs of agony.

“Maxime,” Antoine whispered.

To which, “Shh, it will be over soon,” he murmured, faster now.  “Beloved friend, my dear…”

Antoine’s hand closed over Maxime’s, parting the fingers to slip his own between and so provide a greater depth to penetrate.  Thus they worked together, in pace and pressure a punishing act of greatest mercy.  Maxime’s breath quickened sympathetically.  He propped himself up on one elbow to watch the very moment, so often missed in the midst of his own crisis, that Antoine came apart to his ministrations.  No battlefield, then, could intrude upon that moment: Antoine’s entire body taut and quivering with the strain of remaining still and silent, his head tossed back and lips bitten shut, the frantic beat of his eyelashes like the flutterings of a moth trapped within a fist.  His hand still clung to Maxime’s, eking out the last shudders of pleasure, their fingers slick now.

With a chaste kiss, Maxime slipped from bed to rinse his hands in the wash basin.  Wet his bathing cloth and settled himself to draw it over the pale skin of Antoine’s belly, the dark line of hair upon it, lower and more carefully still to the subsiding weight of his sex.  He took up Antoine’s soiled hand from where it lay curled like a wilting flower upon the sheets, and polished each finger as though they were made of ivory.  Brought them to his mouth to kiss the underside of every knuckle, the carefully rounded tip of each nail.  Only then did he dare look at Antoine’s face: his mouth a calm and settled line once more, but his eyes closed and- wonder!- seamed in dew.  Maxime leaned over him, meaning to say something, to discourse on this undeserved sincerity, when those eyes opened.  Maxime found himself lost, drawn into them as one is drawn into the dark water beneath clear ice: a deep and longing wonder, a deeper terror.  He drowned in them, and in the lingering kiss that followed.

The Greeks, Maxime thought, as he rose and returned the cloth to its place, knew nothing of this.  They imagined only two extremes: the carnal, brutal lust of paiderastia or the chaste, unfulfilled intensity of heroic friendship.  Oh, but where was the language for this form of love that fell between?  No other men had ever shared it, he supposed. Philosophers spoke as if nothing between men could be fragile, and yet here was a thing of winter glass, here a candle lit against a storm, and yet as enduring as the flow of time itself.

He said none of this, of course, but merely turned ‘round again.  He found Antoine already dressed, completing the knot of his cravat as he stared towards the door.

“I will go to see my mother, briefly,” he said, glancing at Maxime over his shoulder.  “In Blérancourt.”

Maxime might have tried, once, for eloquence or metaphor.  Never, after all, had he been given to plain speech.  Now, as though intensity of feeling had burned away his every word, he said only, “Do you go to die, then?  You speak little of your mother.  Is this farewell?”

“Ḕ tā̀n ḕ epì tâs,” Antoine said, with a soft laugh.  "Perhaps it is."

"First you are Leonidas, and now Cassandra."

"Only fools and liars lack fear," he replied.  "It is only that I fear failure more than I fear death.  I am no more than dust..."

Maxime came 'round the end of the bed at that, to step before him.  Looked up and traced his fingers along the flush of colour high upon Antoine's cheek.

"We are dust," he said quietly.  "But I had rather see ours mingled when it scatters." 

17 Floréal

Observe how it is that all things in nature obey this precept: that, upon entering the part of their cycle that is closest to death, they put forth all of their energies.  Is it not so with the trees in an orchard: that reaching their prime, they put forth first an abundance of flowers and then such a mass of fruit that some must, by nature, fall to litter the ground?  And yet, how quickly afterward the leaves curl and fall, giving way to a sleep like death itself.  Is it not so with the humble spider, who spins her most magnificent web only to shelter the infinite offspring of her final days, in hope that her own life continues on in theirs?

Maxime’s mind turned increasingly to such thoughts as his thirty-sixth year hastened its approach.  The years themselves were not so many, it was true: enough to thin his hair ever more at the temples, to notch some strains of silver amongst the pale brown, to etch faint lines that matched his frowns and smiles.  Even so, he felt far older in the aches of his body and the strain upon his soul.  In prior years time had seemed to him as if it passed slowly, now he felt as if each day hurled him further towards some waiting an end: the night which must come at the end of all one’s allotted days.  The night, and what lay beyond it.  And yet, like all of nature, Maxime felt again the rush of blood through his veins, the thawing of a mind he’d feared frozen in despair, the stirring of his very soul.

Let this report, then, be all that he produced.  Let it be the articulation of all his dreams, of the depths of his very soul.  ‘Oft had he begun, and ‘oft started again or destroyed the page with all that he crossed out, as sometimes the flower fails to produce fruit.  Yet now, in the wake of Antoine’s departure for the Army of the North, Maxime could barely stem the flow of his ideas, nor control the pace of his quill enough to give them proper shape.  He wrote of all that had passed, all that was, and all that must be.  He wrote of all the joy of these five years, and all its attendant suffering.  He wrote of impure selfishness, and of self-sacrifice.  He conjured the very image of Sparta, drawn as much from Antoine’s whispered dreams as from Plutarch and Rousseau.        

He wrote of the Supreme Being, of a Divinity beyond the God of kings and priests, outside of the stone walls built like coffins for boys’ fledgling souls.  Of the bleak ingratitude at the heart of atheism, of a great and destructive void opened in the hearts of the People, confronted as they were by attacks upon their gentle faith.

He wrote, then, as a man balanced upon a great precipice.  How far seemed the fall!  How unsure his feet and unsteady his legs!  Yet he must keep this perilous balance, for if he fell who might not come tumbling after him? Georges and Philippe and Claude, Augustin and Charlotte, the Duplays.  Éléonore.  Antoine.

The Stoics cautioned against fear and immoderate displays of emotion.  They reminded one that a body is but an indifferent thing, a loan over which man has little control save this: his appropriate use of it, his actions upon the world.  Yet how cold such logic seemed without the accompanying consolation of some Elysium to follow.  How to bear it without thought to posterity and to the sweetness of reunion beyond the bleak pit of the grave.  Was it the absence of both promised judgment and just reward that so embittered Billaud?  That drove the outrages  of Collot and Fouché?  Did not the tender thought of a freedom beyond the grave, if not before it, allow Maxime to labour, unceasing, fighting even the reason of his own senses?

He was, he acknowledged, but a man.  Thus like any other he could be drawn aside, his unexamined weaknesses turned to weapons used against him.  No more, Maxime assured himself.  In those long days of healing, he received Antoine’s missives from the front- both those destined for the Committee and those more private dispatches arriving directly by courier- with pride and hope, seeing in the soul of his good friend the reflection of his own.  He fortified himself with Éléonore’s devotion and clever conversation, with modest talk of future happiness.  And she, blessed creature, made so bold as to discourse on Alexander’s adoration of both Roxana and Hephaestion and the alliance that might be made between conjugal fidelity and the devotions of brave men.

Did he dream, still, of death?  Yes, but as with Socrates it no longer held fear for him.  For what, Maxime decided, should hold fear for a man but the destruction of his nation and people?  The eradication of a dream and an idea greater than those who espoused it?  He permitted himself, therefore, to make of Elysium no more than this: the Duplay’s humble table and those friends, that family of his soul, gathered ‘round it.  To imagine himself, frail creature that he was, amongst the brave and close-bonded company of Spartans.  So Maxime wrote of the bonds of love and family and the inseparable threads binding them even beyond death.  He wrote of Leonidas’ final, fraternal feast upon the eve of Thermopylae and how he called upon the men he loved to dine with him again in Elysium, when they would be beyond all care and find nothing but the eternal pleasure of one another’s friendship.

“It is, I think, the most sincere you have ever been,” Éléonore said.

It was the morning of his birthday, and Maxime stood in the midst of the salon, triumphant.  Between his hands, trembling with excitement rather than fear, he held the completed copy of his Rapport sur les idées religieuses et morales to be delivered upon his return to the Convention on the ‘morrow.  The air, it seemed, still rang with the dying echoes of his voice: never had he sounded so clear, nor conveyed himself so well by force of intonation and emotion.  Who better than Éléonore, in Antoine’s absence, to hear its first reading?  Who else but these two loves of his soul would understand it with the depth he longed for?  Would know its fullness and meaning, let alone understand its multitude of fond and secret praise?

“Will you think me too bold for saying that I feel it bares your very heart?” Éléonore asked quietly, her gaze fixed upon her needlework, as though such things satisfied her intellect.  “The words you have laid down seem like the very breath of the man I know.”

“Should I chide your boldness now?” he asked, laughing.  “We have known each other too long for that, I think, Cornélie.”

The use of her nickname, however, provoked only a wan smile and not the flush of pleasure he hoped for.  Had they not known one another so well, not been, for all these years, so close in understanding and companionship, he might have thought her response a ploy for his affections.  Instead, with a quick glance towards the kitchen to ensure that Madame Duplay was still occupied therein, he went to sit at Éléonore’s side.  He took her slim hand in his own and hold it upon his knee.

“Is it wise, Maxime,” she asked, in a voice pitched too low for her mother to overhear, “to show your enemies so much of yourself?  Are you not spilling blood before beasts?”  

“I do not fear death so much as I fear weakness and loss of will.  It is love that has strengthened me, all these years: could I hide it?  Should I conceal this wonder?”  He smiled.  “Perhaps, after all, someone will think fondly on it one day.  Even if it is not this day.”

“Forgive me,” she said.  “It is an excellent piece of oratory.  I do not mean to play your Xanthippe.”

“Socrates sent the women of his household away so they would not besmirch his death with their wailing,” Maxime replied softly.  He pressed her hand a little tighter.  “In truth, I think you more an Apollodorus or a Crito.  If the time comes, I will send you no further than you choose to go.”

“If that moment comes, I will have no choice: you will be taken.  Republican that I am, Jacobin that I am, I cannot join you in the tumbril.  I cannot kiss you as Hérault kissed Danton.  I cannot offer my neck.  I cannot be to you, in those last moments, what Citizen Saint-Just will.”  She looked directly at Maxime then, with an expression of such earnest solemnity that he felt her breaking heart as if it were his own.  “I, who am nothing to you by law, will not even be allowed Lucile’s virtuous death, or accorded the Roman end of Madame Roland.”

It seemed too dishonest, too cruel an insult, to put Éléonore off with denials or jests as though she had not lived these last five years almost entirely by his side.  As though she had not witnessed all of its joys and all of its horrors.  To impute to her some petty jealousy was too base by far.  Maxime knew her too well even to deceive himself with such calumny.  Was he to treat her as a fool, then, or as a child?  As someone lower, even, than Camille had sunk in his eyes?  Should he deny the fog of conspiracy and deceit that blanketed all France in these dark days, or the corruption spreading through the Convention and the lesser Committee?  Deny how the People were betrayed and deceived by their representatives?  What manner of man would seek, thus, to convince so gentle a friend that her native intellect were some womanish madness?

Maxime studied her, brushing the hand he still held with his thumb.  She was so close to Antoine in age.  He had no right to their youth, to the years they offered him with such perfect honesty.  Maxime cleared his throat of the ache in it, and ignored the sudden tic that asserted its presence in his left eye.

“Kiss me,” he said, at last.  “As Hérault kissed Danton.  You are a far nobler and deserving a soul, Éléonore, than they.”

She delayed but a moment, and then found courage enough to lean forward.  Her mouth, soft and chaste, lingered barely a moment upon his cheek: less passionate, strangely, than most such motions between men.  Maxime laughed- not unkindly, but loving her all the more for this hesitance- and asked if he might return it.  At her assent he seized her arms as easily as he would have taken another man’s, and pressing forward kissed the smooth of her cheek- first one, then the other- in like manner: his lips parted and firm against her skin, the motion itself not lacking in force.  Éléonore, for her part, turned her head into his touch as she had no doubt seen them do.  As he knew she longed to herself, and more besides.

They sat, for a time, in companionable silence.

“If it comes to all that,” he said at last.  “Know that your place is already set with us in Elysium.”

26 Floréal

Landrecies fallen.  Magistrates of the people murdered in breach of international law.  More French blood on foreign blades, seeping into the soil.  Everywhere the cursed weight of lingering doubt, like a heavy fog settled over the entire land.  Maxime waited.  Thought of Thermopylae.  One hundred thousand Persians.  Such great, enduring, futile bravery.  A table set in Elysium.  Who would join him there.

Is it possible, Maxime wondered, that we shall come so far only to fail?

Antoine and Phillipe returned to Paris shortly before midnight on the 22nd of Floréal.  If Philippe arrived chastened, quiet, then Antoine returned like a storm: his face burned a molten white, his dark eyes fixed and certain.  He tore through the Committee and circled the maps splayed before him, so imposing that even Carnot was forced to adopt a more muted and conciliatory tone.  He raged at the treason in Cambrai and at Pichegru’s failure to provide essential plans, at the soldiers’ lack of discipline, their carousing and womanising, at the inertia of Choudieu and Richard in not following swiftly through on their victory at Mouscron and their repelling of Clairfayt at Courtrai.  

“Lay down your javelin, dear Philombrotos,” Collot teased.  “You are home, and among friends now.”

“Yes,” Antoine growled, his voice hoarse at having spoken and argued for hours.  “And every moment I am here, I wish I were back with the Army.  It is not enough that our generals mean well, we must do well.  We must triumph.”

Maxime could barely recall a time he had loved Antoine more than this: with his constant motion and unyielding focus, his clear-eyed view of the progress of war, his discipline.  Between these long hours of frantic energy, Antoine seemed to halt like an automaton whose key had ceased to turn.  At such times, usually in the early hours at the Committee, Maxime might as easily have stopped himself from breathing as from stealing fond glances at his sleeping friend.  Antoine sprawled on his narrow camp bed in breeches and shirtsleeves, an arm flung over his eyes to block the light.  He woke with familiar, boyish blinks of his eyes until they focused to their familiar resolve.

“How can we not win,” Billaud breathed, fond and familiar on the night of Antoine’s departure.  “With such a man as this on our side?”

Maxime could only feel that familiar rush of pride and joy, coupled with sorrow as long as the train on a dead queen’s gown: he knew too well how many heroes had fallen, and in what manner.  So many, at times, it seemed all of history recorded only the failure of great and virtuous men to triumph over iniquity.

“You spoke well, I imagine,” Antoine said, some few hours later. They strolled in the Jardin National.  Antoine was already clad in his uniform, and these were but some few moments stolen from a greater tale while awaiting arrival of the post horses.  “I have read your the report on religion and morality.  You reminded callow men of their duty and their calling, and have woken them to all that is greater than themselves.”

“I confess, to make words my weapons while you reform our armies feels…”

“Is it to be accounted less a battle to fight for men’s souls than to fight for our land?  Do you still perceive such matters separately?” Antoine demanded, brushing his fingers along the back of Maxime’s hand like a balm for the harshness of his words.  “Everything virtuous is found to be complimentary in nature.”  Their fingers caught, Antoine pulling Maxime back when he had thought to walk ahead.  “That is how I first knew that what lies between us- in politics, in love- was right and good.  Our minds and souls accord too well to produce anything base or false.”

“You are perceptive as ever, dear friend.”

Antoine waved the compliment away.  “We need a victory, Maxime.  A great one.  The People are good, by nature, but they are also practical.”

“By which you mean…?”

“We speak to them of a Supreme Being, beyond the God of priests and kings.  We speak to them of virtue rewarded, and of the Being who perceives our justice of purpose and will reward our labours with victory,” Antoine said.  “And yet we fail.  Their sons and brothers, their lovers and husbands, fall before the forces of tyranny.  An uneducated man does not stand for sophisms.  He does not say to himself: ‘well, it is but a matter of nature that sometimes a sudden frost will destroy my crops, so I will simply accept this suffering with the knowledge some other turn will later alleviate it’.  Therefore, though he may desire freedom and glory, when his son dies for the nation he does not account it the fault of greedy kings and traitors, but looks to the loss both of family and of a source of income and labour.  Out of superstition that we have not yet replaced, he asks himself if it is not true what the refractory priests have said: that God is meting out some punishment for usurping the natural order of things.  He grows tired of promises, Maxime, for promises do not fill bellies and glory does not harvest the wheat.”

Maxime, brave then, pulled Antoine close in the midnight garden.  There was nothing lascivious in their embrace, nor anything untoward.  He only savoured the kisses they pressed upon one another’s cheeks, Antoine’s firm grip against the back of his neck.

“With words and deeds and the institutions that uphold them, as much as with the armies, we will rebuild France,” Antoine said, bowing his forehead to Maxime’s.  “I believe this.”

“Go then,” Maxime said, laughing, moved already to golden dreams of that bright future.  “I will do all I can in Paris.”  And then softer, bolder, “And embrace you when you return victorious.”

“I shall make it a terrific victory then,” Antoine replied, his tone conveying a thousand unspoken promises that sent a pleasant shiver over Maxime's skin.

They had been here before, in another season: mid-winter, with the chill cutting through their clothes and the branches like bared bones above their heads, their mouths hot upon one another.  Their dreams stood no closer then than now, and yet Maxime believed in them no less.  If anything, he believed them more.  Then they had seemed cruel as a mirage, disappearing upon the horizon with each step closer.  Now, he felt as Eurydice must have, following Odysseus from the Underworld.  Antoine, however, would be unturning: his back strong, his shoulders set, his gaze fixed ever upon their future and his faith- in Maxime and in himself, in the nation and its people- absolute and unshakable.

“Be well, my friend,” Antoine said.  “Be safe.”

And turned his back so Maxime might follow.

Chapter Text

Jours de souffrance

Mythology spoke of Orpheus, the father of song, whose sweet voice and skill upon the lyre charmed all hearers.  A man whose grief and longing brought even Hades to tears, so the fell god himself opened the gates of the Underworld to release the soul of Orpheus’ wife, Eurydice.  All but Plato told of the insupportable weight of the task placed upon him: to have the faith and patience, even in extremity of sorrow, to trust the gods and thereby save his beloved.  The fault of her second death, then, was accorded to Orpheus alone: he who looked back, and in doing so condemned Eurydice to the Underworld.

Of Eurydice they said nothing.  She was no more than a ghost of the ghost in her own tale.  Did the Underworld call to her, Maxime wondered, as she trod that unforgiving path with spectral steps?  Did some fatal longing bramble ‘round her white ankles, threatening to drag her back long before Orpheus spared her his ill-fated glance?  Had Death, perhaps, become a more familiar companion than the man she followed?  Perhaps, Maxime thought, Orpheus had a presentiment of such dangers.  Perhaps he felt her fading like the tremble of a dying note on the strings of his lyre.

These foolish thoughts plagued Maxime in the instants of respite between Convention, Committee and Club.  They lingered in repose at the Duplay’s, as the barber attended him, or while he walked to the Convention.  Flared worse, perhaps, at every deluge of letters: the Buissart’s from Arras (We are outraged by your silence…For six months we have been persecuted and governed by every vice), from women demanding his hand or condemning his tyranny, from anonymous Conventionnels (Do not doubt the blows awaiting you, the knives already poised, that you will be left lying in your own blood upon the floor of the Convention some blessed day…it comes…).  

And yet by Maxime’s reckoning, he ought at least to feel some small measure of happiness.  The Fête de l’être suprême neared, signaling that happy moment when Maxime might reassure the People and turn their gaze towards both the nation’s triumphs and the grandeur of the task still before them.  There came Philippe’s letter from Cousolre proclaiming that matters within the Army of the North were improving; Antoine’s familiar, terse note following by courier: My friend, We have achieved some measure of understanding and morale is improved.  Soon we shall bring the battle to our enemies and cross the Sambre.  Doubt is fatal.  Await me.  I embrace you.  Maxime- in a moment of helpless sentiment- could not resist the temptation to brush this missive with his lips, imagining the lingering scent of leather on the parchment came from Antoine’s calfskin gloves rather than the pannier it had been carried in.  There were Maurice’s gentle insinuations regarding preparations he had put in place for Éléonore joyous marriage to a dear, nameless friend she treasured hopes of.  In these moments were the seeds of faith and civic virtue planted, the prospect of enemies driven from their lands and peace restored.  Here too some pleasant thoughts of Antoine’s return, of a wedding long deferred, of the delight of one day cradling a child of his own.

For any man, the prospect of such blessings ought to be enough.  Yet they dissolved into terrors when Maxime looked too hard upon them.  The babe in his arms became Horace: orphaned now, and more alone than ever Maxime had been with his loving grandparents and the siblings he played father to.  Éléonore’s wedding dress became her mourning gown, the dark spill of her hair a fall of silver, grey as grief.  Antoine fell, pierced by Austrian blade, upon the banks of the Sambre and the great river turned red in raging sorrow.  With his mind thus occupied by the forces of his worst imaginings, Maxime could not eat anything but the calumny served to him each day.  He could not sleep, but lay awake upon a plinth of bones and corpses.  He drank nothing but the torrents of chaos and disorder ‘til he felt drunk upon them.  ‘Til he grew wary, even, of this light he followed upward and onward, lest even that be some foreign plot, some enemy’s deception.

Any other man in the world might be permitted some measure of human feeling, some small quota of uncertainty.  Maxime- Robespierre, The Incorruptible- alone was allowed no doubts.  It was only in those dark and private hours beyond midnight that, rest eluding him, he wondered: were the final blows already struck?  Was this the Underworld?  Maxime knew well the sweetness with which Antoine played the flute: perhaps he had braved the palace of Hades and played some longing requiem to summon Maxime home.  Perhaps Maxime stumbled even now along Eurydice’s path: his spectral feet torn and weary, sung downwards again by the shades of the men he had condemned to linger here, beset by liars and schemers, agents and spies.  Each voice, he thought, was a vicious hook to rend some wisp of his soul and reel it back into the depths.  Maxime felt himself a fading, insubstantial thing, though his hungry eyes still fixed upon the distant light of freedom.

Perhaps, Maxime thought as he drifted into sleep, Eurydice was gone long before her husband turned to seek the reassurance of her soul.

*

The weight pressing down upon Maxime’s shoulders, the space between their accomplishments in the Convention and its reality in the streets, had become almost unremarkable.  Yet when Maxime emerged from the Duplay household on the morning of 5 Prairial, he felt immediately that some momentous yet imperceptible shift had occurred.  The world had changed overnight.  Even the bustling thoroughfare of the rue Saint-Honoré seemed subdued, as though all its passing citizenry had by mutual agreement come to speak in hushed tones and walk in subdued steps.  Did Maxime imagine it, or did they avert their faces as he passed?  Did they whisper in the inflectionless tone of shades?  Was Maxime not watched, too, by men who quickly glanced away as soon as he espied their notice?  Though Maxime assured himself all this was of no consequence, that his bleak imaginings were but the transference of last night’s dreams, he held less control over his body: the tremble that reasserted itself in his hands, the hastening of his steps despite the accompanying flare of pain in his ulcerated legs.

This change possessed a nebulous, diaphanous quality in the streets.  In the Convention, however, it knit close and hung over the halls and porticoes like a pall.  The grey-faced representatives, arriving for the morning session, murmured amongst one another in huddled clusters or rushed towards the Salle de Machines, casting glances at every open door, every arrival, every lingering shadow.  Only Billaud and Georges, seated together in the corridor outside, seemed alert.  Georges’ gentle eyes were wide and worried, his usually fastidious habit in disarray.  Billaud’s habitually stern mouth was frozen in a grim line.  Of the two of them, however, it was Billaud- his strong face pale and darkly bristled, his cravat so poorly tied that his collar gaped bare at the neck- that convinced Maxime some calamity had transpired.  His conviction was confirmed the moment Georges spotted his approach.  His old friend seized the solid shoulder of his attendant and used it to brace himself as he struggled to his feet, barely getting even one crutch beneath his arm before stumbling into Maxime’s embrace.

“My friend,” Maxime laughed, pretending not to feel the drumming of his own heart.  “What is this?”

“What it always is,” Billaud growled.  He did not stir, nor did his eyes seek Maxime’s.  Rather, that baleful gaze continued to strike each passing face.  His voice, pleasant in peace but thunderous in rage, swelled to a roar. “Death upon death.  Traitors, enemies!”  This last, it seemed, growled at two hapless frogs of Le Marais.  “Assassins!”

Maxime’s entire body seemed to seize at that dread word. All sound vanished.  The fragile, frozen surface of peace gave way, plunging Maxime into the cold and fearful waters below.  The waves closed over his head and stopped his ears, filled his mouth, his lungs.  A single thought remained: who?  It could not be Antoine, thank God, else Georges would not contain his grief.  Another, then.  Barère?  One of the Prieurs?  No, else Billaud would not be so moved.  It must…

“Some drunken fellow shot Collot…”

“Shot at,” Billaud corrected mildly.  “He was unsuccessful.” And then, voice rolling upward.  “They say the bugger lurked here all day, unnoticed.  He assaulted Collot last night- assaulted a representative, one of us- in his own home.”

“My God,” Maxime murmured, momentarily at a loss for cogent thought.  Death always stalked their steps: the Moerae, after all, made no distinction between just and unjust.  Never had they drawn so near, nor seemed so predatory.

“I confess,” Georges said quietly.  “I thought of Marat.”

“We have enemies.  We have always had enemies,” Billaud said beneath his breath, watchful eyes sweeping the passing deputies.  “Bloodsuckers.  They crawl around amongst us and breed like lice.”

“Or termites,” Georges said softly.

Maxime tilted his head, considering.  “Burrowing in the wood.”

For the first time since their conversation began, Billaud offered them his full attention.  “Weakening it,” he said.

“Yes,” Maxime replied.  “Until the scaffold collapses not from the weight of the wonders we have erected, but from all that undermines them.”

Billaud nodded slowly, gaze shifting back towards the door.  A change passed over those severe features: an open, honest relief.

“My friend!” he exclaimed.

Maxime turned to find Collot behind them, wide-eyed, wan, and looking as though he did not know how he came to be here.  In four, great strides Billaud hauled him by the lapels into the circle of his arms, a barely subdued rage evident even in tenderness.  Collot laughed, clasping his friend at the waist.  He craned his neck to meet Maxime’s gaze over the solid barrier of Billaud’s shoulder.

“From now on you must turn a kinder eye to my proposals, Robespierre,” he said.  “After all, those bullets were meant for you.”

*

Those bullets were meant for you.

How oft’ Maxime’s mind turned to Collot’s lighthearted delivery of these words.  They echoed loudly in his ears as he walked home in the pre-dawn hours, screamed at him from every pooled shadow.  They whispered him to a fitful sleep punctuated by horrors and woke him to deepest night.  His blindness then- without light, without his glasses- left Maxime panting in the dark.

The morning was little better.  It did not matter that Admirat was imprisoned, or that there had been threats upon Maxime’s life- upon all their lives- for years.  It did not matter that he had long understood the plots ceaselessly in motion against the Revolution and its servants.  There was, he thought, a significant difference between knowing a thing was said, and being hunted in the streets like a beast.  Impossible, then, not to feel every lingering gaze as an unspoken threat.  To wonder if every step following too close at heel marked the knife in his back, between his ribs, through his breast.  

"Whichever way he turned confronting blows of weapons aimed at his face and eyes, driven hither and thither like a wild beast, entangled in the hands of all," wrote Plutarch.

Twenty-three blades await you yet, one letter promised.  We will make the Convention your Curia, tyrant.

No, not even the halls of the Convention were safe.  Had Admirat not lingered there?  Could an assassin not join the galleries, awaiting an opportunity to strike?  Behind these external threats, however, lay further truth: Maxime had provoked the ire of every representative who made disunity and immorality their calling.  Danton and Hébert’s sympathisers retained their seats just as they retained their silence during those arrests and trials, moving now with the slithering silence of serpents.  Amongst the representatives were such murderous villains as Fouché, men who mocked Revolutionary principles and poured out blood like a libation.  When they were not murderers, they were indulgent, yielding soft like Tallien: easily intoxicated by the lure of aristocracy or the charms of a talented mistress.  Removing the factions had been a necessary operation, like the removal of a bullet from a wound, yet splintered fragments of ball and bone, of dirt and detritus, remained.  These fragments lay sealed within the body of the Republic, festering, a poison within the blood that pulsed through the beating heart of France.  The question, then, was not of safety alone, but of how best to cure a sickened state.

How Maxime longed for Antoine’s return and rehearsed the conversations they would have.  This was too great a burden for one man, and though Georges was with him in all things, theirs was not the more intimate understanding that Maxime shared with Antoine.  As enduring as their friendship was, it lacked rigour.  Georges might disagree with him occasionally, but never did he rebuke Maxime or challenge him to be a greater man than before.  He and Antoine, however, demanded it of one another.  To Antoine alone could Maxime confess his fear and confusion and have it turned to higher purpose, shaped into something beautiful as plain marble is shaped by the sculptor’s chisel.  

Settling himself at his desk that evening, Maxime took out a piece of parchment and his writing tools.  He stared at that blank page, at a loss for how to begin.  Or rather, he thought, having once begun, how shall I stop?

My dear friend

My dear colleague,

What then?  The mail could not always be trusted, as Antoine’s previous courier had proven.  The likes of Pitt, let alone the nation’s internal enemies, would use the discovery of any immoderate writings to cast Maxime as weak or indecisive, prone to the influence of a favoured friend or plotting as a triumvir.  Maxime would say nothing, then, of his present state.  He would not speak of his growing conviction that even innocuous complaint fed the great machine of conspiracy.  He would not speak of how they were pressed upon all sides until it was impossible to separate fools from knaves.  Far less would Maxime speak of how, in Antoine’s absence, he felt himself cast adrift like a ship in the depths of fog, blinded to all the lurking dangers of the sea.  He would not say: I have followed nothing but my own conscience all these years, but I account it no evil thing to sometimes follow you, for how should I object to the guidance of my very soul?  Do not turn for me, my beloved friend, but reach back your hand that I may take it and be guided.

No, no, he could say nothing of it.

Maxime settled back in his chair.  He had advanced no further than the date and a rather formal salutation.  He was still staring at the empty expanse of parchment when a familiar knock came upon the door.  At his call, Éléonore entered.  

“There is a girl come to see you, a Citizeness Renault,” she said, and fell abruptly silent.

It was not, precisely, this silence that concerned Maxime.  Nor did she wear some particularly troubling expression.  Rather, it was the absence of her familiar ease that made him ask, “What troubles you, my dear?”

“I do not like her manner,” Éléonore replied, without a moment’s hesitation.  

“That is unlike you.”

“There have been other girls, Maxime,” Éléonore said quietly.  “And I would not find myself playing Simonne.  Tell Citizeness Renault that you are busy and will see her another day.  Her response will prove whether I am guilty of some silly fear.”

Maxime got to his feet and went to clasp her hands.  There might indeed be some tigress confined below, yet here stood so vigilant and courageous a guardian!  What a fool Marat had been, Maxime thought, not to obey the goodly concern of the wife who had loved him well.

“You are goodness incarnate, Éléonore,” he said.

“Say, rather, that I am selfish,” she replied, her laugh the ghost of its former self.  “I will not easily give you up to martyrdom.  Besides which, Citizen Saint-Just would never forgive me if I were not your David in his absence.”

“Jonathan was not so fortunate a man as I,” he whispered, ‘round the sudden weight in his throat.  “Go, tell her I am busy and will see her tomorrow during my normal hours.”

With a final press of his hand, Éléonore left him to his work.  Maxime resumed his seat.  How fortunate, he thought, to be surrounded by goodness and loyalty.  Surely, were it not for such good souls as these, he would long ago have succumbed to despair or been driven onto the reef of disappointment that wrecked so many others.  He was still lost in this amazement when, mere moments later, some noise below caught his ear: indistinct, at first, yet rising swiftly to cacophonous proportions.  Maurice’s raised voice, the words indistinct, drowned a sharp, chattering voice he did not recognise.  There came the shuddering crack of a door flung wide, followed by Brount barking outside and Simon’s heavy, dragging steps on the cobblestones as he hollered for a guard.  Maxime leapt to his feet, then froze like a deer hearing the hunter’s tread.  He stood with his trembling hand gripping the back of his chair, his heart thundering within its cage.

It took all of Maxime’s effort to push himself free and stumble for the door.  Were there assassins even here, within the sanctity of his own home?  Was nowhere, then, safe?  No, no, it had never been safe: Marat could attest to that.  But if it were Maxime who had brought death into the Duplay’s midst, then he would not allow them to face it alone and for his sake.  Each step, each tumbling roll of his heart, became Éléonore’s name.  He possessed only the impulse to reach them- his gentle family.  The closer he drew to the source of this noise, the sturdier his step.  He had prepared himself for this, after all, invoked the moment in his speeches.  What terror now that fate loomed before him?   

“Stop!”

It was no assassin.  Rather Éléonore stood atop the stairs, her arms out to ward him away, her pale face lent colour only by the warm glow of the candles.

“Éléonore…”

“The guard is called,” she said.  “And some citizens have assisted.  Only stay a moment…”

The sounds had died away below, though Maxime heard a man- the guard, perhaps- speaking in clipped tones.  He regarded Éléonore silently.  Though her distress called to that softer side of his nature, there was yet another part of him that wished to see this new Corday, and in so doing put face and form to all the ills of the preceding months.  He stepped forward, close enough now to hear the confusion of voices downstairs.

“A moment,” Éléonore said, as he moved to pass her.  “Only.”

Maxime hesitated.  They stood together, unmoving, in the shadows: drawing neither closer together, nor further apart.  Then he descended.

*

Cecile Renault said that she would shed all her blood- if not Maxime’s- to bring about the return of a king.  She had two knives to do it.  Little knives, such as one used to pare fruit.  Did she think it so easy, then?  That to kill a man, to see his blood stream forth upon the ground, was no more than to slice a peach and feel its juice stick upon one’s fingers?  Was the smell of it as sweet to her as the scent of orange blossom in spring?  Oh, but Maxime could tell her a few things of what it was to have a man’s death upon one’s hands.  How broad the gap truly was between declaring an action right, and accepting its burden upon the soul.  Perhaps the divine creator accounted the loss of human life no more than excess fruit fallen from an overabundant tree.  For a human being to appropriate such judgments, however, was to encroach upon the territory of monsters, not gods.

“She said she wished to see what a tyrant looked like.”

Did malice glint in Fouquier-Tinville’s eyes when he conveyed this to Maxime later that same night?  Did he delight in the winced pain Maxime could not quite suppress in time?

How fashionable this word tyranny had become, that a child should use it.  How swiftly the language of the Revolution became that of the conspirator, turning each word to new purpose so no one could tell true from false.  What did this girl, then, know of Nero or Caligula, let alone Sulla or Pisistratos?  By what history and depth of knowledge should she have come to judge him, but for the falsehoods spread by enemies of the state?  Indeed, how could she- a child of no more than fifteen at the outbreak of the Revolution- know aught of kings, or wish to impose on others their vain and empty oppressions, their passive cruelty?  What, Maxime thought, a wasteful thing to die for.  How easily shallow minds were turned to evil ends.

The following night, Maxime returned to his unwritten letter, though this time on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety and not himself.

We are exposed to fresh dangers, he wrote.  The factions reawaken.  In this time of danger, the Committee requires the wisdom and energy of all its members.  Consider whether the Army of the North, which you have powerfully aided thus far by placing our forces on the road to victory, may not get along without your presence for a few days.  We shall replace you by a patriotic representative until your return.  

Later still, Maxime found himself bombarded by well-wishers in the Jacobin Club.  They rushed to be seen embracing him.  They clasped his arms and kissed his cheeks.  Someone seized Maxime’s hand and pressed it to his breast, crying that blood flowed through his heart only because Robespierre yet lived.  Another showed him the dagger he held ready, lest the forces of tyranny should descend upon them all this very night.  Maxime’s ears rang with shouts and cries and cheers.  Yet how many amongst them harboured a secret desire that Renault had accomplished her plan?  It was, after all, easy to mimic honest speech when all mouths moved as one.  Maxime could not but note the warmth of sincerity lacking in certain eyes, or that the tears some spilled were rote as a child’s prayers.  That those whose hands expressed the tenderest solicitude had mouths quick to twist into bitter smiles.

It little surprised Maxime, therefore, when Legendre- the moderate butcher- addressed the Club first.  In ringing tones, he demanded the provision of armed guards for the Committee members.

“I will throw my poor body between the enemy and our representatives upon the Committee,” he declaimed.  His gaze held Maxime’s for a count.  “Robespierre, I will defend you with my life!”

Georges laughed from his place at Maxime’s side.  Maxime’s answering smile was a cold and painful thing, like a bit between his teeth, over his tongue, pulled tight at the corners of his mouth.  How changeable, these men, he thought. In the shared grave where their hair mingled and their heads touched, Danton, Camille, Fabre and Hérault would hardly have begun that process of dissolving into one another.   Meanwhile here stood Legendre, he who had mounted so passionate a defense of the Indulgents, now proclaiming his devotion to a Committee he once rebuked and to Maxime, whom he reviled.  Their memory, still so vivid in Maxime’s mind, had seemingly faded from Legendre’s.  How well he wore his cockade and the red vest of portraiture: yes, here stood the very picture of a revolutionary.

Dumas took to the rostrum to round on Legendre.  The men who had applauded Legendre’s motion but a moment before now nodded frantically at Dumas’ dispute of the very same argument.  No, they all concurred, there was no need of even so much as a guard of friendship.  Representatives were protected by the people.  Georges followed upon the heels of Dumas' weaker points with the measured, cautious intellect for which he was renowned.

"People have spoken about giving us guards," he said.  "I would love believe that this proposal stems from pure intentions; but I would say that only despots have guards."

It was late by the time debate had ceased and the two men left the Jacobin Club, with little resolved but that no guards should be provided to representatives.  Maxime savoured the companionable silence between he and Georges as they journeyed homeward, the peace of their easy familiarity and the dark, pre-dawn hours.  Even the whir and rattle of Georges’ chair possessed a soothing rhythm.  In earlier days, when Georges still walked independently, Maxime would have taken his arm.  Tonight, he rested his hand upon Georges shoulder- careful, lest the touch inhibit his motion- and let his old friend guide them both.  Maxime turned his face to the sky, the stars.  Were there fewer, now?  Did some haze obscure them?

Georges stopped abruptly, leaving Maxime to clutch his shoulder to keep from falling.  The street was nearly silent, its few occupants moving in slow and tired steps.  Before Maxime could voice the question on his tongue, Georges reached up to take his hand.

“You spoke well tonight, old friend,” Maxime said, at a loss to explain this sudden affection.  Georges usually reserved these little touches for Antoine alone.  “If it were I who disputed the motivations and vertu of our fellow Jacobins, I suspect I would find a hundred more assassins at my door tomorrow.”

“I meant it all,” Georges replied.  “Our greatest danger is- has always been, perhaps- from the men surrounding us, appearing in the guise of ardent patriots.  It is an easy costume to obtain these days.”

Maxime hardly dared pierce the silence that fell between them.  Something loomed in the air, invisible yet tangible nonetheless.

“My friend, we have often spoken of virtue and terror,” Georges said at last.  “And you know me to be mild by nature.”

“Of course.”

“Then you will understand my heart, Maxime, when I pronounce it so: we do not need strong guards, but strengthened laws.” 

Jours de joie

“Maxime!”

Philippe smelled of the road: of dust and mud, of hay and horsesweat.  Maxime embraced him as wholeheartedly as he would have embraced Bonbon, relishing that boyish warmth.  All the while, however, his arms awaited a slimmer, firmer figure.  His gaze sought that familiar, longed-for vision over Philippe’s shoulder.

“A pity you must return under these circumstances,” Maxime said politely, pulling back to grip Philippe by the elbows and meet that bright, blue gaze.  “Though I will not begrudge Babet’s joy in it.  Antoine…?”

He read the answer in Philippe’s dropped gaze, the limbs that made stiff withdrawal from his own.

“He remains with the Army,” Philippe said.  “He said you would want…”

“Of course I want,” Maxime replied, already turning away.  “Of course.”

Antoine returned some few mornings later, much to the acclaim of Billaud and Collot, who lauded his martial bearing and shadowed cheeks: neither a boy’s down or a grown man’s stubble, they teased.  Since then, they had been in the Convention or the Committee, locked in discussions of the upcoming festival, of further reordering of the Army of the North, and last upon the creation of new laws to address threats to the Republic’s security.  Throughout these last discussions, though the winds of dispute blew far milder than on many similar occasions, Antoine was curiously subdued: listening, perhaps, but offering little.  Thinking, then, with his dark eyes fixed upon the window.

Now he filled the narrow doorway of Maxime’s study, his attention fixed upon him with singular focus.  Maxime felt himself scraped raw and spread thin.  The intensity of Antoine’s gaze was too bright, like hot water on burned skin, and yet to turn back to composing his speech for the festival would imply a peevish and petty irritation he did not feel.  The only way to counter his brilliance was for Maxime to push his glasses up to their familiar resting point atop his wig, and by so doing make of Antoine’s face no more than an indistinct blur: an impression of passion, rather than its acuteness.

“I feared the question, but I feared the answer more,” Antoine said at last, in a manner that suggested they had already been discussing the matter for some time.  “Therefore I forced myself to submit to it, and know myself once and for all.”

“What question is that?” Maxime asked, attempting levity and succeeding only at timidity.

“I wanted to know that I am truly the man I claim to be,” Antoine replied, his voice dropping to the lower, richer timbre that always made Maxime close his eyes.

“Does even conquering Alexander, then, need reassurance?”

Antoine hummed an inconclusive answer.  Maxime heard him cross the threshold.  His hands settled on Maxime’s shoulders then advanced upon the sides of his neck to remove his wig: an intimate, dangerous gesture that momentarily stopped the older man’s breath.  Even when Antoine slipped the spectacles carefully back onto his face, Maxime dared not open his eyes.

“I had never been tested with the prospect of your death.  I remained to be certain that I would not forsake the entire nation because I love you.”

Antoine said this with such unadorned simplicity, such bland factuality, that Maxime took a moment to comprehend its import.  And then, he was at a loss.  Oh, what new feeling was this that had in it so much of happiness, and yet was knit with sorrow?  How was it that the most painful part of that feeling only served to make the rest more beautiful, as flecks of gold amongst a tapestry lends the whole a shine?  Already he had understood much of Antoine’s reasoning, yet this last came as a revelation.  He had no ready answer, unless a man could be expected to tear out the whole of his heart and offer it to another.

“You speak such mysteries aloud,” Maxime teased.  He sounded as if he was choking.  He was.  He cleared his throat.

Antoine laughed, rich and full and still cocky as a boy.  “I have faced cannons.  Should I fear words?  Or cloak them in pretty metaphors to avoid a simple enough truth?”

“You are good and pure, and I could receive no greater declaration of your own sincerity than that which you made me by remaining,” Maxime said quietly.  “Indeed, I do not think you could love me at all if you would sacrifice even the smallest part of the Revolution for me.”

Lying in bed, many hours later, Maxime could find no rest from the tumult in his mind.  They had, that night, no time for anything but the practical work of the Committee and the Police Bureau before them.  Rather than speak and argue into the early hours, or exhaust their bodies in lovemaking, Antoine had left already for the Bureau and Maxime had returned to refining his speech.  Now Maxime lay staring at the ceiling, attempting to put together the pieces of his thought as one might struggle with completing a puzzle with only unmatched pieces.   Virtue and terror, love and the most inflexible justice: how came these to walk hand in hand, like lovers?  Or were they yet as naturally mated as life and death?

They are equals in nature, yet virtue and love must guide, he imagined the words murmured in his ear by Antoine's rough, sleep-worn voice.

"Yes," he whispered, speaking to a man who was not there.  "For both justice and terror may be blind."

*

It was Thuillier who greeted Maxime’s hesitant knock upon Antoine’s door on the evening of 17 Prairial, at an hour when most men were already taking supper.  Though it was no surprise for either man to run into one another- Thuillier, after all, had stayed at rue Caumartin throughout spring, and Maxime was Antoine’s colleague- they nonetheless stood floundering at one another for some few moments.  It was only when he noticed the mass of flowers clutched in Thuillier’s hand that Maxime accounted rather pleasingly for the young man’s shyness: he must, so Maxime supposed, be in the process of courting some fortunate young woman.  

“Good evening, Citizen Thuillier,” Maxime said, sounding officious.  He blinked and softened his tone from its habitual formality, “I assume you are on a perilous mission.  I won’t trouble you, apart from asking whether Citizen Saint-Just is at home.”

Thuillier, it seemed, could barely wait to free himself of the moment- either because he wished to go and pursue his lady, or because their shared friendship with Antoine relegated them to a rather awkward social relationship with one another.  He stepped aside and swept out the arm bearing its flowers, indicating Maxime should come inside.

“If he is occupied…” Maxime began, noting the lengthening shadows in the room.

“He is in the bath,” Thuillier said.  “Wait here a moment, I'll announce you.”

Maxime decided valiantly against conveying to Thuillier the utter lack of necessity in doing so.  While he waited, he set about lighting the candles in the salon, smiling at the sound of Antoine’s voice: no, my friend, tell Citizen Robespierre he may wait.  I will see him.  Thuillier reappeared only so long as it took to convey this happy message before disappearing on his prior assignation.  Maxime waited some few moments before going to lock the front door behind the departed guest.  And then, not without a sense of lingering shyness, he followed the shadowy corridor until he came at last to stand in the doorway of the little, tiled bathroom.

“Have I some Gallic gladiator before me then,” Maxime asked lightly.  “Or perhaps Alcibiades at his bath, having wrestled already with Socrates?”

Even with his long limbs spilling from the tub and sweat beading on his shoulders, his cheeks flushed pink from the heat of the confined space and its dying fire, Antoine possessed an indefinable grace and command.  He turned his head a fraction, enough to show his smile and the arch of a raised brow.

“Alcibiades was not so victorious as I.”

“You are alike in face and form.  He had none of your finer qualities,” Maxime replied.  “Socrates was untested.”

Antoine hummed thoughtfully at this and settled himself lower in the water, as if to make a finer display of his pale thighs.  A new peace had settled between them since Antoine’s return and, with the Festival but three days hence, Maxime could confine the ugliness of recent weeks, the trepidation he still felt, to a smaller part of his mind.  Here, then, lingered some peaceable final hours and a feeling like the first white light of dawn upon the horizon.  Maxime said nothing of all this, of course, but fetched a chair to take the pressure from his aching legs.  As he sat there, at Antoine’s back, he tried not to envision another man lying in a tub.  Another head drooping upon a bare shoulder, another long line of lily-white neck.  

“Thuillier will be with his mistress, and I have given Villers the night off,” Antoine remarked, a little coyly.  “We might have supper at Le Procope, and then…”

“We might dine here, too.”

The heat slowed Antoine’s smile, though it remained sharp and clever: Alcibiades, victorious again.  He reached back for Maxime’s hand and brought it to his lips.

“Mmn,” the younger man sighed, delivering a series of promissory bites to each of Maxime’s fingertips.  “We shall dine à l'armée, then.  I have some fruit and cheese, some bread and part of a chicken, and some leftover wine besides.”

“A feast, I assure you.”

“Good, I would not leave you hungry.”

Maxime laughed.  The sound of his genuine, uncontained happiness rebounded back upon his ears.  On a whim, he slipped off his coat and rolled his sleeves to the elbow before cupping his hands in the warm water.  Antoine’s hair was so thick that it took some few attempts to work the water through his curls.  Maxime, however, was patient and Antoine submitted to these little ministrations with nothing more than a contented sigh.  Maxime no longer thought of girls with knives or dead men in bathtubs.  He forgot the piercing words of certain representatives.  All his world was bound up, for these moments, in twisting dark locks ‘round his fingers, in working free their knots, in considering that David would never know the precise colour of Antoine’s hair when it was wet or how it coiled on his shoulders like little serpents.

When Maxime finished, he occupied himself by composing some pretty verses comparing his friend’s shoulders to those of Pelops that he would never speak aloud.  Antoine sighed and lay back.  With his damp head resting against Maxime’s knee, he embraced Maxime’s thighs with the crook of one arm.

“You know, Maxime, that I have always contended that the Revolution is at such a point that virtue and terror must walk hand in hand?”

“Of course,” Maxime replied mildly.

“I address you honestly, then: our cause, and we as men, have many enemies now.  Fear, however reasonable, creates haste.”

Did he imagine, then, the chill breath against the back of his neck?  The onrush of some spectral blade?  How cool to the touch Antoine's damp skin was?

“Laws made in haste may oft’ be used to make monsters of their creators.”  Perhaps Antoine knew, instinctively, how the words cut Maxime’s soul for he embraced him all the tighter.  His voice, however, did not alter the strength of its conviction, “Punish political crimes without mercy, Maxime, but be sure that Couthon advances with caution.  Be wary of the weapons you put in the hands of those who already seek your blood.”

"You have my word," he said, bending rather awkwardly to press a fond kiss to his friend's forehead.  And then, boldly, "But I thought to speak to you of love tonight."

Antoine's laughter rang against the tiles, folding them within its warmth.  His wet fingers slipped beneath the buckles at Maxime's knees.

"Oh," he said.  "I meant rather to demonstrate it."

La fête de l’être suprême

“The day forever fortunate has arrived…”

How often Maxime had repeated this sentence, the opening of his initial speech.  He had laboured over and amended every word therein, leaving those initial drafts an almost unreadable mass of lines and corrections.  He had practiced their delivery before Éléonore and Antoine, altering emphasis and eradicating those lines that prompted Maxime’s voice to tilt unfavourably upwards.  Now it remained but to speak them before the People.  He had never possessed Danton’s mighty baritone, drawn from so deep and broad a chest, nor was his voice as melodious as Antoine’s.  Still, Maxime reasoned, did not a shepherd’s humble flute emit a sweet enough tune, though it be made of thin reeds?  He flattered himself to think that his sincerity, at least, might also find some forgiving ear amongst the crowds below.

From Vilate’s rooms in the Pavilion de Flore, Maxime observed the full expanse of the gardens spread out before him.  Had he seen only the beauty of the early morning- the brilliant gold of the summer sun striking wreathes of oak and laurel and fresh blooms, the houses decked in tricolour ribbons and flags- that alone might have fed Maxime’s yearning heart.  Never could he have fully anticipated this day’s glory, or the depth of feeling it roused in his breast: a joyous terror, like the first onrush of love.  To see every section rise and march as one, in greater force than they had been on the fateful journée du 10 août, marching with unity and joy in their hearts: this, surely, was where the path of the Revolution must lead.  What sublime beauty the People possessed!  How well David displayed it: the men with their branches of oak and their loud and sturdy voices, the women bedecked in flowers and between them the youths with their swords.  How sweet and mild was the weather, the sun turned like a radiant eye upon Paris and the wind no more than the sighs of that divine creator they invoked.  

“Here is the whole universe assembled,” he murmured.  “Tyranny should pale at such sights.”

“Or blush in shame, if it possessed any,” Vilate replied, coming to stand at Maxime’s side by the window.  “Come, let us be amongst this universe.”

Oh, the goodness of this blessed day!  How Maxime wished for David’s talent with the brush, to fix these hours forever upon the canvas.  Or to possess one fifth of Fabre’s poetic tongue, that he might turn its evil to the sweetest of hymns.  As it was, he possessed only a store of words that seemed suddenly far too meager to do this moment justice.  And yet, in thinking it so, Maxime tried at every instant to hold each new image, each sound, each scent long enough to imprint it upon his memory that he might write in luminous detail to Antoine.  He would set it all before him, not in haste but in the most careful prose he had ever written, that they might share this moment of triumph together.

By everything I hold dear, he thought, as he mounted the stand to light the hideous beast of Atheism.  By the Supreme Being, let my words speed our nation to victory and you home again.

Doubtless there were, amongst that joyous throng, any number of enemies: men and women alike who wore the painted mask of patriotism as one might don the bauta in Venice.  It did not matter.  Was it not the duty of a man to speak his heart’s truth in the face of mortal peril?  Did Cicero quail before Mark Antony, or did he pen his Philippics and bare his neck for Herennius’ blade?  Maxime’s words, then, were not for these traitors any more than Cicero’s were for the triumvirate.  He spoke instead to all innocent Frenchmen, to these gathered defenders of liberty.  No longer did Maxime fear the loss of his voice, for they heard him with their hearts if not their ears.  He saw it in those upturned faces: their trials and cares absolved, only happiness remained.

As atheism and its attendant evils burned to the ground, Wisdom rose from their ashes to the collective cries and gasps of those assembled.  Maxime had no doubt that David did not intend her form to be singed, yet Maxime could find no better analogy for the Revolution.  Who amongst them could say he had not endured sorrow and privation in these past years?  That it had not left some staining mark upon his heart and soul?  Yet what better wisdom to gain than that which is both fought for and hard won?  Anything less was but the knowledge of books, a learning that lacked fullness and sentiment.  How perfectly, then, this image supported the tenor of his second speech.

“Let us be generous towards the good, compassionate with the unfortunate, inexorable with the evil, just towards everyone,” he said.  “Let us not count on an unmixed prosperity, and on triumphs without attacks, nor on all that depends on fortune or the perversity of others.”

If these enemies heard anything, let them hear the warning in those words.  Let them hear that they had not made him cower in fear with their plots and their assassins.  Let them hear the cannonade of applause, the cry of victory in their cheers.  Yes, in Paris too there was a war played upon a mighty battlefield, though it be one more subtle and insidious.  As Antoine crossed the Sambre again and yet again, dauntless in his courage, Maxime could do no less here.  As the gathering defiled into the Champ de Réunion, let the nation’s enemies look ‘round and see themselves surrounded by the goodness and purity of ready patriots and feel themselves outnumbered for all their intrigues.  Let shaking legs bear them onwards towards the mountain David had constructed.  Let those who lurked amongst the deputies feel the thorns amongst the flowers they carried, and not the softness of their petals.

Maxime’s foot touched the first step of the artificial mountain.  He looked up: beyond its ornaments, beyond the liberty tree at its peak and the French flag fluttering on the wind’s breath.  He looked to the broad blue sky, summer-pale to match his coat, and took each step with renewed purpose and strength.  Oh, how long he had walked in the Underworld!  Indeed, even now voices called from Tartarus to drag him down into their midst: calling him proud and ambitious, heaping scorn and hatred upon the back he turned to them.

“It is not far from here to the Tarpeian Rock.”

or

“It is not enough for him to be master.  He has to be God.”       

These words they slung like rocks fell upon Maxime’s shoulders as if they were nothing at all.  What man, after all, did they speak of?  None but a monster created in their own minds by hatred, failure and lack of will.  He would set his feet like a man so as not to fall, nor even stumble.  Let their calumny weigh him to the ground, he would still crawl onward beneath its burden.  Thus Maxime stood upon the threshold of two worlds, before the assembled sections, the whispers at his back and his mouth open upon a hymn for the dream stretched thin and fragile before him.

*

Maxime sat in the downstairs study where he was accustomed to greeting more impersonal callers, in the very spot where the Renault girl had intended to murder him.  What strange world, Maxime thought, allowed such a moment to pass and then for two men to sit thus, drinking their coffee and pursuing their labours?  

“My speech is worth one final pass, I think,” Georges said.  “Before I present it on the ‘morrow.”

“Do you have some concern for its content?”

“Not at all, I merely understand the importance of our work,” Georges said.  He set down his coffee and reached instead for Maxime’s hand, conveying the heat of the cup with his touch.  “In spirit, these laws conform absolutely to the will of the Committee.  I need not tell you, however, the reaction they will provoke in some quarters of the Convention, not to mention the Committee of General Security.”

Maxime smiled and rested his free hand atop his friend’s.  “What do we do, Georges, with the fragile flames we light at night to vanquish shadows?”

Georges tilted his head and smiled.  Smiled, Maxime suspected, because they had known one another for so long that he was familiar by now with such abstract questions.  Georges took his coffee in speculative sips.        

“We set it within a lantern,” Georges said, “that we might protect it from an ill wind.”

“And to the light are drawn those winged creatures that sleep within the shadows and the darkened cracks in the edifice of civilisation.  They batten on that light.  So many, at times, that they might snuff it with their mass and beating wings…”

“Were it not for the glass,” Georges said, taking up Maxime’s point and smiling at it.  “This is much more delicately expressed than your old poems, dear friend.”

“I have had time to think on it.”

“And your conclusion, in its entirety?”

“That I had thought the light of freedom as something to advance towards, ever-distant, with the shadows gathered ‘round and behind us.”  He smiled.  “Now I see it must be raised like a lantern, and shone into the darkest depths, no matter the beasts it summons.”

Chapter Text

21 Prairial, An II

My Dear Colleague,

By the time my letter reaches you, you will no doubt be embraced again by Levasseur, Gillet and the like.  Nonetheless, write often: the Committee awaits your reports, as we thrill to the bravery and daring displayed by our soldiers at Charleroi and upon the Sambre.  All our hopes are in you: prove now, in tribulation to be the Arminius that I we know you to be.  

For my part, I encourage your efforts at reorganisation and discipline, which have proved so invaluable to our success.  I have the privilege of recalling some words of yours, regarding the importance of social relations to the maintenance of armies.  I make bold to venture that the night you spoke them to me was a revelation to us both, but lest you forget your argument it was thus: that a man’s strength is found in the love he bears his friends.  I wonder: do they, too, know your sweetness, or can it truly be mine alone?  You encourage this as well, I am sure, by your judicious policies and wise discipline.  Though these soldiers may be far from home and family, as you are, I cannot but imagine the loyalty and devotion amongst them.  The Committee will have their own words, of course, but if you feel it worthy of note convey also my praise and encouragement.

There are some words I spoke recently to Couthon, which I would share with you as well: freedom is not merely the light ahead of us, to which we march.  It is the candle flame that we place within glass, that it might be protected from the winds and those foul, nighttime creatures that feast on its brilliance.  Like a lantern, it must be raised and shone into the darkest depths, no matter the beasts it may summon.  You are our light in the north, my friend.  Our enemies will burn their wings in your flames.

Embrace Philippe for me, and assure him Babet is receiving the kindest of attentions from all our her family.  I am certain that the joyous news of fatherhood shall follow shortly.

I embrace you always, dear friend.

Robespierre

22-23 Prairial

A lantern in the depths.  Walls of glass to protect such fragile light.

These words Maxime spoke first to Georges and then sent forth to encourage Antoine upon the battlefield, remained with him.  As his old friend’s voice filled the Convention, presenting his report on the new laws they had composed together, the image strayed into Maxime’s mind again.  Despite the presence of men like Bourdon and Vadier, Tallien and Fouché, he did not doubt the overwhelming goodness of the representatives.  Their goodness, however, was more in the nature of sparks struck from a flint, flaring to life amongst tinder: each man a tiny fragment quick to curl into ash if not swiftly fed upon a sweetness of air and brought into harmony with his brothers, there to grow bright and vigorous.   

These laws themselves were still no more than molten glass being shaped with the fullness of George’s voice.  So careful each breath, then: an idea so hot that to touch it now was to burn down to the very bone, so formless that the slightest pressure would mar its shape into some twisted wreck.  To let it expand and thence to set, therein lay the trick.  Only then might those individual flames be gathered into a single source, sheltered by sound laws, to illuminate the depths and guide the People onward.

Yet even as Georges neared the report’s conclusion, Maxime heard a mighty current of whispers, the rustle and creak of men turning to their neighbours.  He glanced ‘round the room to see heads bowed in urgent conversation, faces set in grim and frozen lines, mouths that gaped as though seized by a rictus of pain.  Billaud heaved so great a sigh that his arm struck Maxime’s, while Barère sat wringing his hands upon his knees.  Amongst these signs of shock and uncertainty sat Thuriot, his broad and saturnine mouth curled into a smile of almost insatiable pleasure.  Thuriot was not alone, his expression not so much shared as doubled, tripled in effect by his companions: Amar, Barras, Douai.

It was no flame that guttered, but Maxime’s heart.  An ache so strange and sweet- sweet, that is, as dying roses or decaying fruit are sweet- filled his breast, so that he lay his hand upon it to reassure himself of that trembling rhythm.  How great the struggle, then, to stand when the call for adjournment came from those cautious, prevaricating members of the Convention.  To depend upon his weary voice to rise again and call instead for a vote upon each clause, so that he must sit and fear the destruction of each of its aims in turn.  How fragile this lantern, the hope of the People and their sacred vows, and how rocky the path they ascended with it.  How, too, was weakness enchained to all the evils of oppression, though it claimed independence.  Like the dog upon his leash, who believes himself to be leading the man and not the other way ‘round, cowardice ever gave slavering obedience to tyranny.

If this was victory, Maxime thought, how cold and hollow it felt to consume it.  How it tasted like the dirt of the grave upon his tongue.

*

Earlier in the Revolution, in those brief days when their dreams seemed so close to being accomplished, Maxime had journeyed with Éléonore to the grounds of the former château of Saint-Cloud.  The day of their journey had been grim and chill, regularly peppering them with lashings of cold rain that slanted in beneath Maxime’s umbrella, yet their fondness made such inconvenience no more than a fine excuse to huddle close.  Indeed, they had laughed at their wet knees, at the incongruous image of a representative half wrapped in a woman’s violently red shawl.  A sudden gust of wind had struck the umbrella from Maxime’s hand, sending it flying across the overgrown lawn as Éléonore gave a laughing cry and chased after .  Maxime, however, had stopped laughing entirely as he realised at last what stood not just before them but behind: towering clouds of smoky black, as though the whole world burned around them, the roll of thunder like a firing of distant canons, the accompanying flash of lightning as bright and sharp as the flare from a pistol.  They had thought themselves at nature’s mercy, Maxime had realised, when really they stood in the sweetest calm that day might offer.

That day came to mind again with the low rumble of Prieur de la Marne’s voice through the Committee, the white flash of Billaud’s hand striking the table for emphasis, Collot howling over his friend’s shoulder at both Prieurs, at Lindet and Saint-André.  Though Georges was notably ferocious upon the battlefield of the green table, tonight his trembling lips moved soundlessly over near-inaudible argument, while his face possessed all the craggy pallor of Auvergne’s mountains. Maxime felt as though he stood again upon that gentle rise at Saint-Cloud, staring at the clouds that bore down upon him.  He had not understood, back then, the mystery of that deep and primitive terror he had felt; indeed, if he had marked it at all, it would only have been with recourse to Rousseau and those profound feelings a man encountered in Nature.  Now, however, he knew: that day had been but a presentiment of this one, these summer storms.

“This is disastrous!”  Billaud’s booming voice left silence in its wake.  A moment later, his balled fist struck the table in front of Maxime, sending glasses and candle flames trembling.  “Robespierre!”

“In what manner do these laws depart from the Committee’s will,” Maxime asked, restraining his voice in quiet counterpoint to their rage, “that Couthon and I should perceive their contents as beyond the discretion granted us originally?  The Convention, after all- you and Barère as well- voted in their favour.”

“Bah,” Carnot spat.  “Lies and excuses.  After all those masks you’ve claimed to strip from others, yours is slipping.”

The laugh that bubbled to Maxime’s lips seared its way from stomach to heart to throat.  It tasted like bile on the tongue.  “What need have I of masks?” he asked.  “I am despised in certain corners regardless.”

“So wails Pisistratus.”

“Yes, Carnot: how effective a tyrant, to share his power with a committee of ten others and wait upon the vote of hundreds.”

“Enough!” Billaud shouted.  And then, sweetly, “Jean, my dear, send someone for a full copy of Diderot’s Encyclopédie?”

Collot raised an eyebrow.  “And why, in the midst of this, would I…?”

“So Carnot may learn to call the men he dislikes some other words than dictator, tyrant, and Pisistratus.”  

A ripple of laughter passed ‘round the room, easing some of its tension.  Even Maxime could not resist the small, tight smile that tugged almost painfully at the corners of his mouth.  Only Carnot remained unmoved by Billaud’s blatant attempt at brokering peace and stood instead with arm folded, a scowl twisting his grim mouth.  He started to speak, but Billaud held up a hand for silence.

“I would not, if I were you, wage this war tonight Carnot,” Billaud said, his voice low in his throat.  “It is poor strategy.”  

Billaud paced then: a careful circuit that allowed the power of his form to bear upon every man in the room like a weight.  Only Collot seemed undisturbed, secure enough in their friendship, Maxime supposed, to know the safety of his place.  Billaud stopped behind Maxime.  Draped heavy hands upon his shoulders, and stood no more than a shadow in the corners of Maxime’s eyes.        

“Robespierre, come,” the older man said.  “You must understand the anger.  The Committee of General Security knew nothing of…”

“Voulland,” Maxime said.  He allowed his eyes to close, though every part of his body rebelled against the intimacy Billaud forced upon him.  “Vadier, Amar, Lacoste…”

“Are these now suspects of yours, Robespierre?” Lindet, normally so soft-spoken, demanded.

This word- ‘suspects’- startled Maxime from his feigned repose.  He blinked like one waking to the intrusion of some harsh light.

“I meant to suggest,” he said, choosing each word with infinite care.  “That when we speak of the Committee of General Security, we are not speaking of all its members.  We are speaking of a…”

“A what?” Carnot sneered.  “Another of your factions?”

“Ah, I believe I understand now,” Georges interjected, before Maxime could so much as gather a breath.  “Your concern is nothing but a farcical performance.  Well, cast aside your antique robes then and admit this is not an attack upon the laws themselves, but upon Robespierre.”

“It is an attack upon the only faction in this room,” Carnot roared, lunging forward to glower at them like some crazed and captive beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage.  “And that is yours.”

“If the People be a faction, then I am for it!”

“They are no faction of yours.  What should the people want of a monk who cannot share their feelings, a childish chevalier playing toy soldiers, and a cripple who cannot even walk amongst them?  Save governance for men, Couthon.”

The room erupted, the mingled thunder of voices so loud that the words themselves became unintelligible and there remained only the electricity of their feeling in the air.  Even Prieur de la Côte-d'Or hollered over his shoulder as he rushed about shutting the windows and drawing the drapes.  Only Maxime sat silent, watching.  Did he feel rage then?  How could any man not, hearing he and his friends so reviled?  Yet how hard and cold it stayed within his chest: a diamond, raw and unpolished, forming at the heart of a dying volcano.  Carnot’s words insulted not they alone, but the People, in presuming such pettiness to be shared by all men.  It seemed suddenly inconceivable to Maxime that the Committee had walked so far together, keeping pace and company, when all within were by their very natures so fundamentally opposed.  

At last, Maxime rose and went to put his hand on Georges’ shoulder, steadying the tremble of contained fury that vibrated through the other man’s body.

“But to rob representatives of their immunity…” Lindet was saying, his words falling over-loud into the sudden quiet that fell.

“Rob?” Maxime asked.  “Is it theft now to seize, from certain enemies of the people, the very shield they hide behind?  Is our duty to the patrie and peuple, or is it to ambition and the new privileges that some have erected in place of the old?”  

“That is not…” Saint-André began to say, then snapped his beakish mouth abruptly shut when Prieur de la Marne gave a shake of his head.

“The innocent,” Maxime said, as he turned his back on them to go and resume his work.  “Have no need of immunity.”

Maxime had read of lands where a man must watch his step, lest the soft dirt open up and swallow him.  Where each motion of escape served only to suck him deeper into the hidden mouth of the earth, til his throat filled with mud and all hope was lost.  Though the stones beneath his feet were solid as ever, Maxime’s own steps felt thus- heavy, sucking things- as he returned home to the Duplay’s in the quiet, shaking hours of the early morning.

*

Babet and Éléonore were awake when he returned, seated close together on the settee in the salon.  An apology clung to the tip of Maxime’s tongue: for disturbing their intimacy, the steady circles Éléonore had been drawing on her sister’s bowed and aching back.  He could not give it, if only because to do so would dislodge a thousand other sorrows.  Would send him to his knees at Babet’s feet, so he might press his cheek to the hard shell of her belly and beg forgiveness of the babe within for allowing it to arrive in a world still trapped in such uncertainty and turmoil.

“I see,” Babet said, rescuing him from speech.  “You do not use your own stairs at night, but contrive it so you may chance upon Éléonore here in the early hours.”

“Babet!” Éléonore hissed.  “For…”

“Hush.  I ache all day, my brave husband is at war, and I do not believe I have had more than an hour’s sleep in the past week.  I will have something to laugh about.”

“I fear, Madame Le Bas, you have caught me as you say,” Maxime replied, thankful that the voice to emerge was passably jovial.

“Poor knight, to be discovered thus.  Well, I for one am glad there is no such thing as gossip between sisters- Éléonore, you will tell me all about this later when we are in bed again.”  

Babet winced then as she shifted until she lay nestled beneath Éléonore’s arm, her cheek upon her sister’s breast.  How beautiful they both were, and yet how different: an image of Aphrodite and Athena posed in loving kinship.  My God, Maxime thought, if I fall, who will live to protect them?  Wise and good and fierce as the Duplay sisters were, he was not so foolish as to suppose them free of being subjected to the whims of men, just as men themselves had been subject to kings.

“Maxime.”

They spoke in unison, though in strange reversal of their normal characters.  Where Éléonore spoke soft, Babet’s voice was firm.  Both recalled Maxime to himself.

“Will you read to me, dear friend?” Babet asked, giving a long and surely exaggerated sigh.  “You always speak so well.”

“Of course, I can deny you nothing.”

He was at the bookshelf, thumbing across the spines to find Corneille, when Babet’s next words fell upon him like the rain of ash that follows some vast conflagration.

“Your voice comforts me,” she said.  “That is how I know all will be well in the end.”

Maxime said nothing to this, and if either woman noticed some unevenness to his voice when he began to read, neither remarked upon it.

24 Prairial

On the day of the Fête de L’être Suprême, Maxime had dared believe he was understood.  That those burgeoning crowds, elated with the genuine spirit of vertu and civisme, would see in those hours the ultimate goal of the Revolution, the final reward of their honest sacrifice.  Maxime himself had dared believe, as he watched the running races and trials of athleticism the formal celebrations gave way to, that he was transported to some new yet not so distant future.  Cleansed of blood, returned to peace and trade, this would be their lasting achievement and the inheritance of all of France.  He had imagined Antoine, lithe and long-limbed as some fine young colt, stripping down to shirtsleeves and casting off shoes and stockings to win these same races against Thuillier, Gateau and Philippe.  Pictured Éléonore laughing as she crowned him with the olive wreath and Antoine bent to press his answering smile to her cheek.  He had, in daring to believe such visions, sought to share and protect their brilliance in the only manner he knew: within that fragile barrier known as Law.

Now he could not but help asking himself whether he had not, instead, truly been alone that day.   Had he and Georges alone, amongst all the representatives, been witness to these wonders?  Was that why so many of their colleagues carried, hidden within their depths, the cracks of guilt that made them battle so hard for this thing they called immunity?  

Upon reaching his chamber the previous night, Maxime had written thus: Who but the agents of tyrants and oppressors require privileges over the people?  If we have declared with the fall of Danton that there will be no idols, then it follows that we must have no special pleading.  If a man is arrested with due cause, he has by default lost the faith of the people and should no more be allowed to claim the same honours as their blameless representatives.

On the floor of the Convention, Georges completed his motion to rescind the right of the National Representation to impeach and try its own members.  Maxime, rising to take the tribune, felt the weight of stillness within the room, the hissed conversations amongst his enemies.  In both, there was something more ominous and warlike than in all those days when he had struggled to be heard at all.

“Citizen Representatives,” Maxime began.  He allowed his gaze to sweep each side of the room before returning to the papers before him.  “Well do I recall the days when we were faced with the petty tyrannies of factionalism and ambition.  Then, the Mountain was the party of those pure, reasonable and sublime patriots who believed only in the good of the nation.  Who would die for the patrie if fate compelled them to pay such a price.  Now the factions are destroyed.  The Convention, the Mountain: all are one.  Every patriotic deputy is a Montagnard.”

Once, in the springtime of the Revolution, had not all those gathered here decked their breasts with simple green leaves, fashioning the first cockades of newborn liberty?  Yet now, as though Maxime’s voice were the chill breath of Vendémiaire’s wind, their colours changed as swiftly as autumn leaves.  Applause trembled throughout the Convention, as if yesterday they had not also applauded the very motion that would have curtailed the laws of 22 Prairial.  How changeable these men.  How, in such times, to tell the false from the sincere?

“And yet,” Maxime continued.  “Upon closer inspection, this happy union is incomplete.  We have amongst us still the good and the bad, the patriots and the counter-revolutionaries.  We have amongst us a party of some few intriguers who see it as their objective to sow discord in the Assembly, to carry away some portion of the Mountain and install it as the head of some new faction.  What crime, I ask those true patriots amongst you, could be worse than to be a source of corruption not only to one’s nation, but to one’s friends?  Who amongst us here would not declare the indivisibility and inviolability of his love of the patrie and the love of his friends?”

“Do you mean to call me a scoundrel, Citizen Robespierre?” Bourdon demanded.  He jumped up as if to descend and seize the floor.  “I have never held such intentions.”

“I demand in the name of the country to be heard, without interruption.  Since I have not named Bourdon, the shame should lie with he who has named himself.”  

A smattering of laughter at that, thin and cold as a pane of newly frozen ice.  Someone called for Maxime to name them.

“I will give them names when it becomes necessary to do so.  Do we now require that names be attached to men who, though they have committed no crime against the laws of the state, nonetheless have caused disunity amongst the representatives?  Those who have shed such torrents of blood that on a daily basis the cries of the people are heard begging for mercy?  Those who have mocked at religion, or defaced its symbols and- though it be a warm blanket for the long winter of our nation’s struggles- would rip their tender faith away and replace it with the thin cloth of atheism?  In short: those who currently pass beneath the notice of the Tribunal but who in every way give succor to enemies of the Republic.  Do these men need names?  Or do we know them already.”

The leaves trembled upon their branches.  They had lost their colour, as if the chill of these late days had dried the sap in their veins.  The slightest breath of wind would suffice to tear them free, to scatter them in the street.  We are all, Maxime thought, unforgivably tired.

“Surely,” he went on, “if the Republic is to triumph it will only be through unity.  Lend the Committee of Public Safety your aid.  Permit no party to come between you and us, since we are merely a part of you.  Can a hand function independently of its body, or the mind that drives its motions?  No?  Then see that we are nothing without you.  Give us the strength to carry the immense burden, almost beyond human effort, that you have imposed on us.”

“You speak of trust, Robespierre,” Tallien cried out.   “But the people no longer think of us as their representatives.  We are mocked in the street.”

“Perhaps they only wondered at a man who dyed his hands in the blood of the simple folk of Bordeaux, washing them clean again by the miracle Our Lady of the Aristocracy’s tears,” Maxime paused.  The effect of the stones he had thrown rippled across Tallien’s proud face, sank into whatever black depths the man possessed.  He was cold as a winter’s ocean.  “What is true, Tallien,” Maxime continued, “is this: you speak of the guillotine only as a means to menace and degrade the Convention.  When you cannot put it to use in deed, as was once your wont, you put it to use in word.  Claiming, for instance, that there are some here who wish to send you to the guillotine, and threatening to slaughter your invented accusers first.”

Even as the words fell from his lips, Maxime knew them for what they were: an open declaration of conflict, devoid of the politics of subterfuge and civility.  There had been a time to make certain sacrifices for the greater good of the nation, to consider carefully the recall of representatives and the methods by which they might be held to account.  Such times had been born from emergency and necessity, to become a subtle, insidious poison working upon the nation.  Now, Maxime could no more compel himself to silence than swallow blades.  Instead, he stood upon the tribune to face the storm.

*

“You have called the Revolution a light.”

Another early hour.  This time he and Éléonore sat alone, her hand clasped in his.  

“I spoke of light and thought of candles,” Maxime replied.  “I spoke of lanterns and imagined only their fragility.  That once the glass protecting them is shattered, the light inside is snuffed.”

“And now?”

“I carry that lantern still, but it is oil upon the wick.  I fear, dear friend, that I shall drop it.”  He sighed, a familiar ache behind his eyes.  “Oil is quick to catch, to spread.  And fire, once started, cannot direct itself: it has nothing to do but devour.  It will burn us all to the ground.”

“Perhaps you have misperceived the issue.”

“Speak, Gorgo.”

Despite his words, Maxime saw the crease of Éléonore’s brow, the momentary hesitation.  And then, brave soul, she lay her palm flat upon his breast.  With her other hand she took up his own and, with a great and shuddering breath, laid it upon her own heart.  They sat thus, still and unspeaking, in this strange intimacy.  A marriage unconsummated, lovers whose touch stirred in the soul before the body.

“The candle is within here, Maxime,” she said at last, tapping his chest with one finger.  “You protect it not with glass, but with your life.”

“My God, Cornélie,” he murmured. “In another age how brightly might your greatness shine?  But how easily are our lives snuffed, and the light with them?”

“Only you can bear your heart onward, Maxime, as I am the only one to bear mine, and Saint-Just is the only one to bear his.”  She said.  “This lantern however: perhaps it is the Revolution, but a different light.  Perhaps it is a wild, combustible thing because it is not only what you would make of it, but because it is all that has been poured in since the very beginning, both the good and the evil, the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary, and until the oil burns pure and unmixed it cannot be more.  But you have many friends whose hands will help you carry it, who will take that burden from you if you can carry it no more.”

She smiled at that.  And then, to his infinite surprise, leaned forward to press her lips to his: modest, and neither offering or demanding more.

“You speak only of what may be extinguished,” she said.  “But candle touched to wick may always spark new light.”

27 Prairial

A memory: Versaille, 1789.  Seeking peace when the tumult of the Estates-General grew too much to bear, their problems too insurmountable, Maxime instead sought the solitude of late hours in those expansive grounds.  At some point, as he wandered through that great park, he had stopped in a place of absolute darkness.  Towering trees formed a canopy of branches between he and the thin beacon of moon and stars.  He was so far from the château that even the glittering, counterfeit brilliance of Versaille’s lighted windows was lost.  For some few moment’s he had stood, not so much fearing the dark as aware of its depth, its all-encompassing nature, how small he was within night’s embrace.

“Citizen Representatives, it is my duty to share with you- on behalf of the Committee of General Security- a unique report on one Catherine Théos and her followers,” Vadier’s voice slithered through the Convention, amongst the galleries.  “It is a most unique sect, of whom we deem five people of significant enough note to arrest.”

On Vadier spoke, of this poor madwoman: this eighty-three year old virgin who would, in such extremity of age, bring forth a new messiah to deliver them.  How he mocked the superstition of her followers, as though it were not eminently understandable that the desperate, the uneducated, should seek simple comfort in a faith that promised some small measure of certainty in the midst of confusion.  Such words, such callow insults and base cruelty, seemed like mortar hurled from the great abyss of Vadier’s own soul.  If there was terror, Maxime thought, it lay less in words and deeds than in the knowledge of the emptiness of another man’s soul.

“This prophet,” Vadier said, tongue flickering licentiously across his lips, “demands from her chosen ones a complete abstinence from earthly pleasures, so they may dwell amongst us like the sexless angels.”       

Across the heavy air of the Convention, Vadier’s gaze met Maxime’s, followed by a number of representatives who began to titter and whisper like the courtiers of old.  They would see, Maxime supposed, what they expected: his rigid posture and reserve, the twist of his lips so redolent of profound disgust.  And indeed, what should any man feel for such a comment but disgust?  What purpose, these words, but to lay him bare in front of the entire Convention?  To perform a surgeon’s office and catalogue Maxime’s body and nature in uncivil remarks, assigning great meaning to every part as: very secret and private: mortuus est virginem.  Has the organs of a man and performed his offices, yet possesses a certain delicacy of form and has not Man’s natural drives.

Oh Vadier, Maxime thought, if you measure a man’s principles by his desire, you will find a surfeit of both in this form you mock.  Yet you, I think, are one who calculates desire from the trail it leaves of bastards and ruined women, or men driven to despair and suicide when their very names are made an insult with which to calumniate others.  Do you, in your corruption, not know how men and women may pleasure each other without risking her disgrace?  That men may as easily twist and groan upon sunlit sheets in modest chambers as some seize one another with subjugating violence in the dirt and muck of midnight alleyways?    

You suppose that I must choose between my principles and my desires, but I say instead that to be a man is to cultivate and assent only to those desires which are obedient to good principles.  I know well the wedding rites, Vadier.  You deem me chaste, but I know what it is to please a woman with these hands, this mouth, these fingers, this tongue.  My lingering thoughts have already imagined the warmth and slickness between my betrothed’s legs and her soft thighs ‘round my hips; have heard the melody of her voice in my ear when I enter her.  More than this: I have mapped the planes of muscle in warlike Ares’ form and discovered those hidden places where he remains tender as a youth.  You will think it is more often I who am vanquished, but there is no battle between us: I have known the flexed muscles of his thighs as often as the joy of his weight, he has been my Ampelos and my Dionysus.  More often- and here is a secret indeed- our loving has been a revolution in itself: rejecting all notions of mastery and aimed instead for a conspiracy of equals.  How should I, who am embraced by Selene and Phoebus both, loved by two who possess between them all the virtues of the Republic and the Revolution, find any desire elsewhere?  What other minds and souls could possess such charms; what bodies offer such fleeting hours of transcendence?

Of course, in thinking this Maxime allowed no part of his expression to change.  Let them think him cold, if they must, and more given to celibacy than the priests who had sworn to it.  His thoughts sat warm in his breast, ‘neath that very spot where Éléonore had lain her hand.  

This too, he thought, Vadier would never know: that some secrets are not kept from shame, but to retain their purity.  They are held close, enclosed by the body and the mind and the mouth, treasured like the last ember on the longest night of winter.

28 Prairial, An II

My Dear Colleague,

There are times I am certain our fortunes and our struggles proceed apace, though we are separated by so many leagues.  Can it be so?  That men so aligned in sentiment and fellow-feeling should, in some manner, act as mirrors for one another? There is much work to be done, with Paris my battlefield: the Convention my Sambre, the factions my foreign troops (for shall we say that these forces, who work so tirelessly against the Republic, are really Frenchmen?).  With what passion I follow the vicissitudes of your fortunes upon the field!  Indeed, I have read your letters a thousand times, and memorised every line you send to the Committee.  Your words are my reinforcements.  They strengthen my resolve.  How lucky those soldiers who rise to battle with your voice still ringing in their ears!  Press on to triumph, Citizen, though do not let concerns for home drive you to haste: I know you will resist such impulses by your very nature, but be sure that Philippe does not allow emotion to overcome him.  He longs to lay eyes upon his son, I am sure- a boy who, even now, shows every sign of combining all the best qualities of his parentage- but assure him that he is well cared for by our most loving family and the finest, most natural of mothers.

There is much to say, and none of it for the post.  You are born of courage, a son of Mars.  I remain certain of your victory and of your wisdom in this, and await that final return, which shall signal the repulsion of our enemies.

I embrace you, dear friend.

Robespierre

8-9 Messidor

Of those laws he had written- laws so rigorous with dissemblers and hard upon enemies, yet so tender and protective of patriots- they made a dull knife with which to butcher simple beasts, a rising tide of blood.  Not all of it was innocent: Maxime spared no grief for the likes of Renault and Admirat, nor, of course, for those who had harboured them.  What man alive, however, could countenance the death of a child, so little connected with Hébert as to have a case as fragile and nebulous as cobweb?    

These are not my laws, Maxime thought, even as more reports were made and more lists drawn.  What brute meaning have you cudgeled from them, so far beyond their intent?  But they had passed from his hand and been taken up by another.  Here was the bloody work of Collot and Vadier and Fouché, those men who would make the Revolution nothing but a charnel house.  Who ought themselves, for the stranglehold they maintained over the nation, wear the red shirts of parricides.  From the flames of atheism rose wisdom, but such men would clip her wings to bleeding stumps and cast her into the gutter so she might crawl onward.  They would cleave the hands of blind justice so she could hold neither scales nor sword, and tear the tongue from her mouth so she could make no cry at this profanation.

As Théot's trial approached, Maxime, returning home one night, flung aside his wig and buried his fingers in his hair, he pulled at the strands and bit his lips in groaning.  He could think only of Antoine’s words to him: Laws made in haste may oft’ be used to make monsters of their creators.  Be wary of the weapons you put in the hands of those who already seek your blood.  Was this, then, what would become of him: all his hope drowned in the wrath of others, atrocities written in his name?  It was with this in mind, then, that he fought for she and her followers in the Committee.  

“I will have no blood!” he shouted at them: at Billaud and Collot and Carnot, at Barère trembling and listless in the shadows.  “Good God, what is this thing that punishes even madwomen and idiots?  I tell you, I will not have it!”

Later, in the dark of his bedchamber, he thought of beasts and how they may be trained by man’s hand to turn one upon the other.  He thought of Billaud’s claws, Collot’s fangs and all the wounds they left him with.  He lay upon his bed, a torn and bleeding thing, and smiled.

“After I have upheld the side of truth,” he whispered, his voice so worn from shouting that even this soft sound made it break, “there is a prize which I cannot fail to win.  I will find it in the depths of my heart.”

10 Messidor

Maxime knew the particular rhythm of those steps as a man might know his own heartbeat.  They had fallen heavy upon the stairs to his chamber and they came now, as they had a thousand times before, on the stairs to the Committee.  One, two, three, four and the half-skipped fifth: they only ever slowed to wait for him.  He had known, of course: the dispatch declaring victory at Fleurus had arrived that very afternoon, auguring Antoine’s return.  And yet to have him so soon!  So close!  With what force of will Maxime restrained the rush of feeling that consumed him, threatening to drive him to his feet.

Who was this soldier who burst into the room now?  Not the Saint-Just of Alsace, who had returned to them wet and tired and pale, a hero of mortal kind.  This Saint-Just burned brighter than the sacred fire of Rome and stood as tall and proud and finely crafted as some marble youth made by ancient hands.  He stood before them as if they had invoked Mars fresh from the battlefield, his long hair torn by the wind and the thin beard crisp upon his cheeks, his dark eyes still lit with the frenzy of battle.  How unsurprising, then, that it should be Billaud and Collot who threw themselves into his arms with vicious joy and biting kisses.  Drew him aside- an arm around his waist, a hand upon his shoulder- to make his report at the green table, leaving Maxime and the others to follow behind.

In the Convention, Antoine’s voice possessed a special kind of passion: governed by restraint and order, modulated to the most exquisite emphasis.  Here the leash slipped somewhat, so that Maxime found himself wondering idly if he were listening to something like the voice of that youth who first wrote him so many years ago.  Antoine’s laughter brightened his face as he spoke of the strange wonder of seeing the compagnie d'aérostiers in action, and glowed with the fervor with which Lefebvre’s men held the centre before leading the counterattack.  Still more exquisite was the potency of his grief as he recounted their casualties, though Antoine was quick to turn to the vengeance they had meted out to Coburg’s forces.  The Committee listened with the raptness of schoolboys hearing some misadventures of their young captain: expressions flickering from joy to fear to sadness and back again.  Maxime, for his part, listened just enough to know the nature of events and copy the expressions of the others.  They were not thinking, but he was: not of adventure, but of its meaning.  Only one battlefield remained now, and Maxime had the eye and ear of Mars.  Oh, how true this latter sentiment proved, when Antoine’s gaze sought his across the table to tell an entirely different story to that his lips spoke.

Later that night, but not so much later- late enough for no one to remark on their mutual disappearance, they walked back to Antoine’s rooms together.  Like the first time, there was with every step a building anticipation, and yet it was so remarkably different.  Then, there had been all the hesitation and shyness of young love, of Maxime’s habitual modesty and Antoine’s inexperience.  Now their talk was calm and measured, certain and familiar even as their breaths grew short with haste and unspoken eagerness.  Came even faster when Antoine mentioned, voice low and urgent, that Thuillier was out and Villers under instruction to bring a late breakfast.  Their hands stole what touches they could: the small of a back, the nape of a neck through that odious noose of a cravat, a clasp of fingers and elbows.  Of the horrors of these past weeks, of his fears and the things that loomed before them, Maxime said nothing: for tonight, if no other, let every lamp shine in the temple of Anteros and the light hold the circling beasts at bay.

Up the steps, then, Antoine taking them two at a time.  Their hushed laughter seemed to echo in the stairwell, along with the ‘hurry, hurry’ that came even as the door gave way.  There was no light in the apartment, but it hardly mattered: they were in each other’s arms the moment the door closed behind them, their shoes and boots kicked away.  Did blindness always amplify sensation so?  How loud their shared and ragged breaths, the sound of the key turned blindly in the lock.  Maxime was sure Antoine’s lips had never felt so full and warm upon his own, nor that the younger man’s tongue had tasted as sweet when it took his mouth.  The scent of war lay thick upon Antoine’s skin, his clothes: dirt and sweat, blood and metal.  It ought to have been unpleasant, but instead only increased the sense that he embraced no mere man, but one of those ancient and capricious deities who sometimes deigned inhabit mortal flesh for these tender purposes.

“Indestructible, doughty, mighty, valiant divinity,” Maxime recited, a prayer breathed into the devouring mouth of a god.  His shaking hands had already pulled free the tricolour sash.  They joined Antoine’s upon the buttons of his uniform.  “Delighting in arms, indestructible, man-killing, stormer of cities…”

Something tore, Maxime thought, hearing the pull of threads.  His cravat, as Antoine pulled it from Maxime’s neck?  Antoine’s shirt, as their hands struggled to peel it up over his head and wrench it from where it bound his wrists?  Neither of them stopped.  Antoine, having already removed Maxime's wig, wrapped a hand ‘round his queue, made of it a rope with which to tether Maxime into a kiss deeper, harder than the last.  Antoine’s free hand was busy at the buttons of Maxime’s coat, working it free one-handed while Maxime himself began on the waistcoat beneath, never parting, his hands trapped between cloth and the warm, smooth skin of Antoine’s chest.  They were laughing, panting, gasping…Maxime could no longer say which, a maelstrom of every hungry sound a man might make.

“Lord Ares,” Maxime teased, as his foot struck Antoine’s fallen sword and sent it clattering amongst their scattered clothes.  He felt the other man’s smile against his mouth, scrawled across his cheek, his neck, bare now…  “Rattling in armour…”

A bite to the neck, then, hard enough for Maxime to cry out and jerk his hips forward against a hand that was suddenly, cleverly upon him through the cloth of his culottes.  Antoine reversed their positions.  His hands settled on Maxime’s hips, bearing him backwards with unwavering confidence through his unlit rooms.

“Yield to the peaceful yearnings of Aphrodite,” Antoine finished, kissing him in shorter bites, as though consuming something made delicious by the savouring.  “And the revels of Dionysus.”

“Will you?” Maxime asked, trying not to stumble over his own feet as they entered the bedchamber.  Wondering whether, if he fell, Antoine would follow and simply have him there upon the floor.  “Yield?”

In the thin light straining through the slight gap in drawn curtains, Maxime could at least see something of his friend’s face: a moment’s speculation before he turned and locked the bedroom door as well.  Maxime had lain upon this bed before, he could do so now, but instead he waited as one transfixed.  And then it came: the certainty of Antoine’s fingers slipping free the buttons of Maxime’s culottes, sliding purposefully against his skin as they undid the drawers beneath.  Maxime stood, he supposed, only because Antoine willed it so and because he knew not what else to do.  Though the desire itself was familiar, this form it took was new.  It burned hot along his neck, his cheeks; centred in his length where it stood hard against his belly.  And then Antoine folded down onto his knees, his breath came soft and moist- painful in its delicacy- against the head of Maxime’s sex even as his hands worked blindly at the ties and buttons at Maxime’s knees.  There was the slick circling of his tongue, followed but a moment later by the full depth of his mouth.  Maxime cried out, his hands finding Antoine’s bowed head, fingers tangling in his curls.  It lasted no more than a few heaved breaths, no longer than it took to ease Maxime’s culottes and drawers, his stockings, down around his ankles and over his feet.  Antoine shifted back, pressing a lingering kiss to the damp shaft.

“I will.  I have,” Antoine said as he gained his feet again, his voice hoarse from his ministrations.  “But the yielding of Ares is no gentle thing.”

Maxime shivered at this, reaching for him so he might unfasten trousers and drawers, smoothing his palms over Antoine's hips and flanks as the younger man shed his clothes like a snake shedding its skin.  For a moment there was a pause: for his hands to relearn the well-shaped muscles of Antoine’s arms, for Antoine to bend and his conquering mouth to vanquish again, for them both to rock against one another, close upon an edge sharp as the blade of a knife.  And then Antoine set a hand upon his heart and pushed him back and,

“Not on your knees,” Antoine said, bending momentarily to remove his stockings. The bed dipped, that same hand falling now between Maxime’s shoulder blades to bear him down.  “Your stomach.”

Maxime groaned, pushing his face against the pillow as he rutted blindly against the sheets, seeking what pressure he could find.  Antoine’s weight settled over him like a cloak, so that everywhere they were fused.  His lips brushed the back of Maxime’s neck, his teeth found the meat of his shoulder.  Antoine’s hands split the cleft of Maxime’s buttocks to settle his erection between them and Maxime half rose, struggling- not because he did not want it, but because there was nothing he wanted more- only to have his wrists pinned to the mattress and his body rocked with the first, forceful thrust of Antoine’s hips.  Maxime gave a cry, unable to move, restrained and caged by stronger limbs than his own, Antoine’s legs twined about his so that he could do no more than curl his toes against the sheets and strain the muscles of his thighs in pushing back against the younger man.  His voice was one long, unending sob and Antoine would not free so much as a hand so Maxime might conceal it.  No, rather he curled their fingers more tightly together, pinning even Maxime’s hands to the bed while he panted and gasped in his ear.

No, the love of Ares was no gentle thing.  It was a tempered blade, something newly forged and still hot to the touch.  Their sweat ran together, so that Antoine’s thrusts grew longer, slid with greater ease in the slick furrow he had made for himself.  At last he pressed down so that Maxime, his legs already trembling with the strain of the position, collapsed at once, the pressure of the bed a welcome relief to his untouched sex.  Maxime’s mouth ran with praises and pleas.

The sudden absence of Antoine’s weight upon him came as a shock then, a momentary wave of confusion as his hand reached back to find him while his body still jerked helplessly against the sheets.  And then Antoine’s hands closed hard upon his hips, gripping at the very bones, it seemed, to drag them up.  An instant later, Antoine’s thighs bracketed Maxime’s own, pressing them close as he entered the space between, hard between Maxime’s legs, against the taut weight of his scrotum.  If the pace was unforgiving, then now as least- positioned thus upon his elbows- Maxime could turn his head for a kiss that mauled his cheeks, his lips, could murmur into Antoine’s mouth that he was close, that Antoine’s hand…that…  

Ares yielded, just so, a hand wrapped firm around Maxime’s length, working him effortlessly while they both groaned and panted into each other’s mouths, against an ear, a shoulder.  Antoine drove relentlessly against him but a moment longer then paused, shuddering and gasping his relief against the side of Maxime’s neck.  Maxime bit his lip, closed his hand tight around Antoine’s as he rode that damp grip, and came with a muffled shout against the hand that Antoine closed quickly over his mouth.

He knew nothing, for a moment, but the faint and fading shocks of pleasure that continued even as they collapsed together: Antoine’s arms around his chest, the both of them wet and chill with sweat, his sex still giving a feeble twitch as if to eke the very last drops from him.  Gentled now, Antoine turned instead to the softness of kissing and the stroke of fingertips, aimless and tender.

“Oh,” Maxime murmured, so overcome by exhaustion that he hardly knew what words he spoke.  “That we had known one another longer.  To have been schoolmates, or to have lain by the Scarpe together in days of wine and poetry…”

“But then we would not be ourselves,” Antoine’s voice was low and quiet, serious enough that it half woke Maxime from this dreamlike state they lingered in.  When they kissed now it was slow, and deep, so very deep.  Emerging, Antoine said, “It is enough: to be ourselves, and joined thus, however long.”

*

The second time, some few hours later, was sweeter.  Languorous, with their passion already blunted.  This time Antoine was lazy, slow to yield, desirous merely of a certain measure of worship so that he parted his thighs with coy reluctance and sighed and demanded ‘til Maxime silenced him with a surfeit of kisses and took him apart with infinite care.

Twice!  Twice!  Maxime thought of writing this small miracle in his notebook even as he tumbled into a sleep more akin to death.

*

“There is a path forward still, Maxime.  I see it, if only you will follow me.”

They lay in bed together well past dawn.  Late enough for the sun to spill into the room and across the bed, a warm light the colour of good butter.  Despite the protest of his aching limbs, Maxime rolled over to find Antoine lying utterly unconcerned atop the coverlets, knees crooked and ankles crossed.  Ares no longer, but a handsome shepherd.  An older Admetus, perhaps, still prone to drawing Apollo’s loving eye.  That, Maxime decided, was why the sun shone so brightly over Antoine’s pale skin, why its prying, golden fingers seemed to settle upon those parts of him best shaped for acts of love.

“And at the end of that path?  Will we be men of peace again?  To live like hermit sages in the mountains?”

Antoine laughed.  “I do not think you would enjoy it there, without your coffee.”

This brightness, this open joy that had always been a curious part of Antoine’s nature, stung like salt in a wound.  Maxime winced, but because he would not lose this morning, he reached out.  Ran his fingers over the dark line of Antoine’s jaw, his marble neck, the shoulder that still bore the slight indentation of Maxime’s clenched teeth.

“What then?” he asked, following the line of his spine and tracing the rise of his buttocks.  “You are the dreamer.  Tell me how it is when we can relent at last.  When your laws are passed.”

Antoine sighed and caught Maxime’s arm effortlessly.  Rolled over onto his back and dragged him with him into such limp embrace as wrestler’s might steal from one another, a leaning together for gathering strength.    Maxime lay with his head upon his friend’s breast, his fingers now finding the opposite nipple, now counting each slat or rib and line of muscle, now circling at his hipbone.  For his part, and though he were still young enough and prone to rise again even at such simple affections, Antoine would not be put off.

“In the first year,” the younger man said, as though reciting some oft-rehearsed catechism.  “During Ventôse, we will go to the temple, you and I.  And in front of everyone I will declare our friendship for all of Paris, all of France, to see.”  As if suddenly frustrated by Maxime’s hands, Antoine caught his arm and hauled Maxime ‘til he lay atop him.  “I will swear only to you.”

Maxime laughed.  “Poor Le Bas, as though he doesn’t already mourn enough for his sister.  You have added insult to injury.  Surely you might add him as well.”

“I will swear only to you.  Do you really not understand how dear you are to me?”

Maxime sighed.  Despite the sweat slicking their skin, the evidence of that brightly intrusive sun, the room felt chill of a sudden.

“I do,” he said.  “It feels too large, too bright a thing ever to be retained.  The gods ask too great a price from mortals they bless Antoine, and I…”

“You?”

“I have been blessed by many things.  But to know you, to have had- even for so brief a time as this- a love such as Plato cautions against and Nonnus celebrates, that is the realm of heroes and gods and I am unworthy of it.”

Antoine frowned.  Maxime half anticipated a remonstrance, but received instead the soft press of his lips.

“There are no gods such as you mean, Maxime,” Antoine murmured.  “We will win.

They both knew, Maxime thought, that this was a lie.  But it was a beautiful lie, and one easy enough to believe on so perfect a morning.