They've forgotten what the revolution was for, haven't they? This is all about power play - and settling old scores. And sex, of course. But how does any of this help the man in the street? Of course, it doesn't. I think I'm probably beginning to side with Gabrielle.
My favourite line makes a link to the Wolf Crawl: "his emotions, or those emotions that might be worn" seems to be relative to 'arranging your face'. In many ways, what Mantel is doing in both is showing what goes on behind the history we know, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
And this is yet another section where we see how tough things are for women - in a variety of ways. Manon is held to different standards from men; Lucile seems to get very little back from Camille; and Gabrielle has Danton (which may be the worst position of the three).
When they were talking about how to change the law to get what they want, Thomas More's speech from 'A Man For All Seasons' cam to mind. When Rich says he would cut down every law in England to get to the Devil, More responds:
"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
I can helping thinking that our three 'heroes' should have taken note of that.
These two chapters were full of scenes showing how the different factions are evolving and complicating things - without this slow read I’d be fully lost! The book is so dense that for someone like me without much prior knowledge of the events and personalities involved in the revolution, it would be extremely challenging to make it cohere as a whole story without the help of the weekly context provided here. Am pleased to have persisted and gotten this far though - I am loving the writing and how she writes about power, intrigue and the little (or great) moral compromises those leading have to make. Thank you and keep up the good work.
A bold writing prompt for any fiction teacher: write a sex scene between Robespierre and Éléonore Duplay—from Robespierre’s point of view. On the surface, it sounds ill-advised, maybe even ridiculous. And yet, Mantel attempts it—and somehow pulls it off. The scene is masterful. It can only be called satirical. It works because it’s plausible, and because it’s funny. You realize, in reading it, just how close Robespierre—and much of the French Revolution—is to dark comedy already. One wonders if “The Death of Stalin” took a page from “A Place of Greater Safety.”
Mantel moves briskly through a lot of history in this section, and it’s worth reading carefully. She covers the reconfiguration of the Convention: the Mountain, the Plain, the Gironde. The mounting anxiety over the September Massacres—who orchestrated them, who tacitly approved them. Robespierre’s emergence as a central figure, even as he’s accused of aspiring to dictatorship. Danton’s public defense of Robespierre, even while Robespierre privately begins to distance himself from Danton and Camille—disapproving of their libertinism and suspecting Danton of corruption. Brissot’s expulsion from the Jacobin Club.
Saint-Just rises here too, replacing Camille as Robespierre’s primary confidant and protégé. Saint-Just—who may have despised Camille ever since Camille mocked his adolescent pornographic epic—is fast becoming one of the Revolution’s most enigmatic and dangerous figures. The expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention looms.
But from Mantel’s narrative, it can be difficult to trace exactly how Robespierre became so central—or so feared. After all, he wasn’t present at the Revolution’s key flashpoints: not the Bastille, not the October march on Versailles, not August 10, not the September Massacres. And yet, somehow, he dominates the narrative. I think the answer lies in his role in the Jacobin Club, which by now had become a powerful shadow institution and Mantel has not yet much developed. The Louvet-Robespierre confrontation Mantel stages is a composite—a dramatization of multiple confrontations between Robespierre and the Girondins over time.
Saint-Just, in particular, deserves more narrative development. He’s among the most fascinating and contradictory figures of the Revolution—ascetic, cold, idealistic, lethal. Mantel gives us glimpses, but I found myself wanting more.
There are also moments she lets pass—good grist for another novelist. Joseph Fouché, who will eventually help bring down Robespierre and lead the Thermidorian Reaction, is introduced here almost in passing. The novel notes, intriguingly, that he once had a romantic involvement with Robespierre’s sister, Charlotte—a woman who despises the other women in Robespierre’s life, and whom Robespierre in turn seems to spurn. There’s real dramatic potential there that Mantel only hints at.
One further thought: Simon describes Saint-Just as, amongst other things, "handsome and articulate". That may be true, but when I look at the picture my immediate thought is "there is a face that you'd never tire of slapping".
And, of course, the Germans have a word for it: Backpfeifengesicht. I feel it is something the English language is sadly lacking.
Love it. I should have perhaps articulated it better: he thought himself supremely handsome and articulate. A bit of a boy genius, too. I suppose some people agreed, while others stiffened their hands into slapping mode.
This week was a case of reading the newsletter to confirm that what I thought was going on in the story was correct. It's all very entertaining but the constant changes in perspective are sometimes difficult to follow and I'm not always clear about which character is talking about what or who. It's an interesting style to tell the story and perhaps the idea is to make the reader almost as confused about events as the general populace must have been at the time. I definitely found Wolf Hall a much more straightforward read but perhaps this book becomes clearer on a second read through.
And third and fourth reading! I like the energy that the multi-vocal approach gives it – the dizzying effect of it all. It suits the rollercoaster of the revolution, and makes it leap from the page. Glad the post helped!
These chapters were without question the most troublesome for me in some time as far as coherence. While I felt like momentum had been building with some phenomenal preceding chapters, these felt like a step aside, or even astray at points.
Hoping for that momentum to pick back up in what is forthcoming...
That raises an interesting point Marcus about whether a story must always maintain momentum and pace (or even coherence!) – I rather like how it ebs and flows. We're in a bit of lull this week, where I note no one even dies! Not much the novelist can do about that!
I don't think it is as much about events, though—I also appreciate the ebbing and flowing of the plot as far as momentum.
The coherence, though, seems to be a really tricky needle to thread with the style in which APOGS is written, and at least for me it felt like the fragmented storytelling style was much more obstructive in this reading than in previous ones. (Again, could just be me as a reader!)
It's a fine line to walk when attaching a structure of writing to a text in order to mimic the "incoherence of the times," and from a craft perspective this just didn't do it for me—but I'm confident that it will veer back with what's ahead.
Gosh, so much going on in this week's reading! I think I need to read it again. All of these scenes, piling upon each other, wherein our characters convince each other to go further and further into the violent imaginary. The conversation between Robespierre and Danton about massaging the law to more easily convict traitors had me clutching my pearls and shrieking, "Sirs! Please!"
Lucille's soliloquy about her ever-expanding, crushing love for Camille also just about crushed me. Poor everyone!
Oh please no. The revolutionary calendar is pretentious and annoying and makes me feel temporally disoriented about the years in which it was official.
Americans are welcome to adopt the metric system, though, because that’s an undisputedly good outcome of the revolution.
Sabine, when I was in 2nd grade (around age 7?) I learned that we Americans were on the verge of adopting the metric system. I’m turning 60 in a few months. 😂 Someday maybe!
Yes, in the 1970's it was widely expected that the US would go metric over the next few years. Us school kids had to learn metric anyway for our science classes, so it seemed only natural. I remember the backlash expressed by letters to the editor in our local newspaper, fulminating about the "Communistic Metric System". Oddly enough we did adopt metric units for one thing, the volume of bottled beverages: what used to be a "fifth" of whiskey became a 750 ml, a "pint" 200 ml, and the standard large size bottles of soft drinks are 2 liters.
I cannot grasp Robespierre, he eludes me as he does everyone else, as far as I can tell—except for a while his appalling sister, before he falls permanently prey to the lumpish Éléonore. I didn’t expect this vulnerability from Max, his inability to cope with difficult determined unattractive women. His successful elusiveness towards the rest of the world is I assume Hilary’s deliberate take on him, and of course one trusts her. But isn’t it frustrating for him to be so slippery, never there when you want him, turning up when he does turn up always unexpectedly, and never very helpful? At the moment I am unable to understand why Camille stands by him, but I suppose reasons may emerge more clearly. It is all horrible and getting horribler. It’s enough to put you off politics, let alone revolutions.
It is part of his character to be slippery and evasive isn't it? Interestingly he is morally absent like Danton was physically absent earlier in the novel. He has thesr lofty ideas of virtue and does not want to confront the reality of the revolution.
I was amused by his delusions of being a self-effacing revolutionary: „I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.“
That appears not to have worked, Max. I bet if you asked any even vaguely educated people whose name they associate with the revolution, he‘d be right up there in the top three.
Two logistical matters: first, my (first edition hbk 1992) copy has words missing—blank space, in fact, at the foot of p550. At the foot of the page it reads “behind hands, stray voices in the street that call”—and ends, no full stop, comma, nothing, and resumes at the top of p551 “pass on. Danton has heard them too.” &c. Could anyone provide me with few words, please?
And secondly, the link (I suppose it is) to the clip of Alan Rickman as Jacques Roux is not there on my machines: there’s just a big white space. If you’re in the same case, I found it on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXZqq2smuHs. The loss of Mr Rickman still hurts, such a fine actor. I was once unknowingly in the same restaurant as him, and when he spoke (not to me, to his friends at his table) I dropped my cutlery on the floor. That’s a Mantel-type moment.
Not sure why the YouTube link isn't working for you – it works at my end. But thank you for providing an alternative for anyone else having any problems.
Thank you for the missing words! I’d never have guessed them. And it isn’t that the link doesn’t work—it’s simply not there. Not on my iPhone, or my iPad.
Bizarrely the link works for me (on an iPhone) but stops suddenly at 8 minutes whereas your link has the whole thing. The wonders of technology! And what a wonderful voice Alan Rickman had…
That's because the first link links to a video divided into three parts. Susan found a version that has the whole thing. I couldn't find that when I looked! 👍
I have fallen behind again - I'm keeping up with the reading, but I've been struggling to distill my response into a weekly comment. I feel as though events are building to a crescendo and each section builds on what's come before so much that all the thematic links and callbacks are getting denser and thicker and I find myself highlighting something on almost every line...
That said, if I had to pick just one thing that struck me about this section it would be the painful shift from the abstract to the real concluding with the idealist Robespierre being drawn into advocating for a death sentence. I like the way that Mantel plays with this theme in unlikely ways: as well as the more obvious set-piece debates on political violence between Marat & Camille or Danton & Robespierre, the chapter opens with Manon enjoying "the delicate satisfactions of a relationship between a chaste woman and an honourable man" but being drawn into considering "the grossly physical" by the sight of Danton, and also Robespierre's realisation after his excruciating encounter with Eléonore that "when pleasures you deny yourself turn out not to be pleasures, you're doubly destroyed, for not only do you lose an illusion, you also feel futile".
I also thought it was brilliantly unsettling how we were seeing events through Max's eyes when he "gathered her head against his shoulder so that he did not have to see her face and would not know if it hurt her" - a telling echo of the horrible scene where Manon's abuser "had held her deliberately backwards so that he did not need to see whether she was pleased or horrified, whether she was laughing or whether she was too stunned to scream". Another variation on Mantel’s frequent theme of things that people choose not to know.
I'm behind on reading and writing too, but have finally got to the end of these 2 chapters. I marked a fair few passages as being hilarious and was struck by Robespierre saying in his exchange with Danton that he's not a theorist. He's an idealist, isn't he? More closely related to theory than to practice?
They've forgotten what the revolution was for, haven't they? This is all about power play - and settling old scores. And sex, of course. But how does any of this help the man in the street? Of course, it doesn't. I think I'm probably beginning to side with Gabrielle.
My favourite line makes a link to the Wolf Crawl: "his emotions, or those emotions that might be worn" seems to be relative to 'arranging your face'. In many ways, what Mantel is doing in both is showing what goes on behind the history we know, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
And this is yet another section where we see how tough things are for women - in a variety of ways. Manon is held to different standards from men; Lucile seems to get very little back from Camille; and Gabrielle has Danton (which may be the worst position of the three).
When they were talking about how to change the law to get what they want, Thomas More's speech from 'A Man For All Seasons' cam to mind. When Rich says he would cut down every law in England to get to the Devil, More responds:
"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
I can helping thinking that our three 'heroes' should have taken note of that.
Reading next week's chapters, I note that the expression "arrange your face" makes its first appearance.
It's like an old friend turning up. 😁
It's interesting though who uses the expression and at whom. 👀
Now, I’m tempted to read ahead…
Sorry... this is the way at the moment. Mondays and I'm working on next week's post.
These two chapters were full of scenes showing how the different factions are evolving and complicating things - without this slow read I’d be fully lost! The book is so dense that for someone like me without much prior knowledge of the events and personalities involved in the revolution, it would be extremely challenging to make it cohere as a whole story without the help of the weekly context provided here. Am pleased to have persisted and gotten this far though - I am loving the writing and how she writes about power, intrigue and the little (or great) moral compromises those leading have to make. Thank you and keep up the good work.
Fantastic, Rosalind. Really glad it is helping!
A bold writing prompt for any fiction teacher: write a sex scene between Robespierre and Éléonore Duplay—from Robespierre’s point of view. On the surface, it sounds ill-advised, maybe even ridiculous. And yet, Mantel attempts it—and somehow pulls it off. The scene is masterful. It can only be called satirical. It works because it’s plausible, and because it’s funny. You realize, in reading it, just how close Robespierre—and much of the French Revolution—is to dark comedy already. One wonders if “The Death of Stalin” took a page from “A Place of Greater Safety.”
Mantel moves briskly through a lot of history in this section, and it’s worth reading carefully. She covers the reconfiguration of the Convention: the Mountain, the Plain, the Gironde. The mounting anxiety over the September Massacres—who orchestrated them, who tacitly approved them. Robespierre’s emergence as a central figure, even as he’s accused of aspiring to dictatorship. Danton’s public defense of Robespierre, even while Robespierre privately begins to distance himself from Danton and Camille—disapproving of their libertinism and suspecting Danton of corruption. Brissot’s expulsion from the Jacobin Club.
Saint-Just rises here too, replacing Camille as Robespierre’s primary confidant and protégé. Saint-Just—who may have despised Camille ever since Camille mocked his adolescent pornographic epic—is fast becoming one of the Revolution’s most enigmatic and dangerous figures. The expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention looms.
But from Mantel’s narrative, it can be difficult to trace exactly how Robespierre became so central—or so feared. After all, he wasn’t present at the Revolution’s key flashpoints: not the Bastille, not the October march on Versailles, not August 10, not the September Massacres. And yet, somehow, he dominates the narrative. I think the answer lies in his role in the Jacobin Club, which by now had become a powerful shadow institution and Mantel has not yet much developed. The Louvet-Robespierre confrontation Mantel stages is a composite—a dramatization of multiple confrontations between Robespierre and the Girondins over time.
Saint-Just, in particular, deserves more narrative development. He’s among the most fascinating and contradictory figures of the Revolution—ascetic, cold, idealistic, lethal. Mantel gives us glimpses, but I found myself wanting more.
There are also moments she lets pass—good grist for another novelist. Joseph Fouché, who will eventually help bring down Robespierre and lead the Thermidorian Reaction, is introduced here almost in passing. The novel notes, intriguingly, that he once had a romantic involvement with Robespierre’s sister, Charlotte—a woman who despises the other women in Robespierre’s life, and whom Robespierre in turn seems to spurn. There’s real dramatic potential there that Mantel only hints at.
I love it when a writer leaves you wanting more! No mean feat in such a huge book.
One further thought: Simon describes Saint-Just as, amongst other things, "handsome and articulate". That may be true, but when I look at the picture my immediate thought is "there is a face that you'd never tire of slapping".
And, of course, the Germans have a word for it: Backpfeifengesicht. I feel it is something the English language is sadly lacking.
Love it. I should have perhaps articulated it better: he thought himself supremely handsome and articulate. A bit of a boy genius, too. I suppose some people agreed, while others stiffened their hands into slapping mode.
Love this English definition of “Backpfeifengesicht” ! — boy genius face that compels the stiffening of hands into slapping mode :)
This week was a case of reading the newsletter to confirm that what I thought was going on in the story was correct. It's all very entertaining but the constant changes in perspective are sometimes difficult to follow and I'm not always clear about which character is talking about what or who. It's an interesting style to tell the story and perhaps the idea is to make the reader almost as confused about events as the general populace must have been at the time. I definitely found Wolf Hall a much more straightforward read but perhaps this book becomes clearer on a second read through.
And third and fourth reading! I like the energy that the multi-vocal approach gives it – the dizzying effect of it all. It suits the rollercoaster of the revolution, and makes it leap from the page. Glad the post helped!
Likewise…. And I often have to read the dialogue scenes multiple times.
These chapters were without question the most troublesome for me in some time as far as coherence. While I felt like momentum had been building with some phenomenal preceding chapters, these felt like a step aside, or even astray at points.
Hoping for that momentum to pick back up in what is forthcoming...
That raises an interesting point Marcus about whether a story must always maintain momentum and pace (or even coherence!) – I rather like how it ebs and flows. We're in a bit of lull this week, where I note no one even dies! Not much the novelist can do about that!
I don't think it is as much about events, though—I also appreciate the ebbing and flowing of the plot as far as momentum.
The coherence, though, seems to be a really tricky needle to thread with the style in which APOGS is written, and at least for me it felt like the fragmented storytelling style was much more obstructive in this reading than in previous ones. (Again, could just be me as a reader!)
It's a fine line to walk when attaching a structure of writing to a text in order to mimic the "incoherence of the times," and from a craft perspective this just didn't do it for me—but I'm confident that it will veer back with what's ahead.
It might be a lull, but if so, it’s a very tense lull, full of foreboding.
Gosh, so much going on in this week's reading! I think I need to read it again. All of these scenes, piling upon each other, wherein our characters convince each other to go further and further into the violent imaginary. The conversation between Robespierre and Danton about massaging the law to more easily convict traitors had me clutching my pearls and shrieking, "Sirs! Please!"
Lucille's soliloquy about her ever-expanding, crushing love for Camille also just about crushed me. Poor everyone!
Should we start using the Revolutionary Calendar in these comment threads? I believe today is 19 Thermidor. :-)
Oh please no. The revolutionary calendar is pretentious and annoying and makes me feel temporally disoriented about the years in which it was official.
Americans are welcome to adopt the metric system, though, because that’s an undisputedly good outcome of the revolution.
Sabine, when I was in 2nd grade (around age 7?) I learned that we Americans were on the verge of adopting the metric system. I’m turning 60 in a few months. 😂 Someday maybe!
Yes, in the 1970's it was widely expected that the US would go metric over the next few years. Us school kids had to learn metric anyway for our science classes, so it seemed only natural. I remember the backlash expressed by letters to the editor in our local newspaper, fulminating about the "Communistic Metric System". Oddly enough we did adopt metric units for one thing, the volume of bottled beverages: what used to be a "fifth" of whiskey became a 750 ml, a "pint" 200 ml, and the standard large size bottles of soft drinks are 2 liters.
Ha, perhaps we should. But I don't think we need to make the situation any more confusing!
I cannot grasp Robespierre, he eludes me as he does everyone else, as far as I can tell—except for a while his appalling sister, before he falls permanently prey to the lumpish Éléonore. I didn’t expect this vulnerability from Max, his inability to cope with difficult determined unattractive women. His successful elusiveness towards the rest of the world is I assume Hilary’s deliberate take on him, and of course one trusts her. But isn’t it frustrating for him to be so slippery, never there when you want him, turning up when he does turn up always unexpectedly, and never very helpful? At the moment I am unable to understand why Camille stands by him, but I suppose reasons may emerge more clearly. It is all horrible and getting horribler. It’s enough to put you off politics, let alone revolutions.
It is part of his character to be slippery and evasive isn't it? Interestingly he is morally absent like Danton was physically absent earlier in the novel. He has thesr lofty ideas of virtue and does not want to confront the reality of the revolution.
I was amused by his delusions of being a self-effacing revolutionary: „I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.“
That appears not to have worked, Max. I bet if you asked any even vaguely educated people whose name they associate with the revolution, he‘d be right up there in the top three.
Two logistical matters: first, my (first edition hbk 1992) copy has words missing—blank space, in fact, at the foot of p550. At the foot of the page it reads “behind hands, stray voices in the street that call”—and ends, no full stop, comma, nothing, and resumes at the top of p551 “pass on. Danton has heard them too.” &c. Could anyone provide me with few words, please?
And secondly, the link (I suppose it is) to the clip of Alan Rickman as Jacques Roux is not there on my machines: there’s just a big white space. If you’re in the same case, I found it on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXZqq2smuHs. The loss of Mr Rickman still hurts, such a fine actor. I was once unknowingly in the same restaurant as him, and when he spoke (not to me, to his friends at his table) I dropped my cutlery on the floor. That’s a Mantel-type moment.
The missing words are "September and".
Not sure why the YouTube link isn't working for you – it works at my end. But thank you for providing an alternative for anyone else having any problems.
Thank you for the missing words! I’d never have guessed them. And it isn’t that the link doesn’t work—it’s simply not there. Not on my iPhone, or my iPad.
Ah interesting. Must be something to do with the apple app maybe? I don't thank an apple device so can't check it.
I’m on apple and it worked for me from the email version (although it did look odd). So many routes in to the same spot!
Bizarrely the link works for me (on an iPhone) but stops suddenly at 8 minutes whereas your link has the whole thing. The wonders of technology! And what a wonderful voice Alan Rickman had…
That's because the first link links to a video divided into three parts. Susan found a version that has the whole thing. I couldn't find that when I looked! 👍
I have fallen behind again - I'm keeping up with the reading, but I've been struggling to distill my response into a weekly comment. I feel as though events are building to a crescendo and each section builds on what's come before so much that all the thematic links and callbacks are getting denser and thicker and I find myself highlighting something on almost every line...
That said, if I had to pick just one thing that struck me about this section it would be the painful shift from the abstract to the real concluding with the idealist Robespierre being drawn into advocating for a death sentence. I like the way that Mantel plays with this theme in unlikely ways: as well as the more obvious set-piece debates on political violence between Marat & Camille or Danton & Robespierre, the chapter opens with Manon enjoying "the delicate satisfactions of a relationship between a chaste woman and an honourable man" but being drawn into considering "the grossly physical" by the sight of Danton, and also Robespierre's realisation after his excruciating encounter with Eléonore that "when pleasures you deny yourself turn out not to be pleasures, you're doubly destroyed, for not only do you lose an illusion, you also feel futile".
I also thought it was brilliantly unsettling how we were seeing events through Max's eyes when he "gathered her head against his shoulder so that he did not have to see her face and would not know if it hurt her" - a telling echo of the horrible scene where Manon's abuser "had held her deliberately backwards so that he did not need to see whether she was pleased or horrified, whether she was laughing or whether she was too stunned to scream". Another variation on Mantel’s frequent theme of things that people choose not to know.
I'm behind on reading and writing too, but have finally got to the end of these 2 chapters. I marked a fair few passages as being hilarious and was struck by Robespierre saying in his exchange with Danton that he's not a theorist. He's an idealist, isn't he? More closely related to theory than to practice?
That's right I think. He is an idealist and Danton is a pragmatist
Yes, my note said, 'He's hardly a pragmatist!'
Wow! Alan Rickman. A personal favourite and so missed.
That soliloquy made sense in Revolutionary France, and still rings true today!!