Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d‘Anton’s temples. “Put your fingers here,” he said. “Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here.” He jabbed at d’Anton’s face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. “I’ll teach you like an actor,” he said. “This city is our stage.”
Camille said: “Book of Ezekiel. ‘This city is the cauldron, and we the flesh’ ...”
Fabre turned. “This stutter,” he said. “You don’t have to do it.” Camille put his hands over his eyes. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Even you.” Fabre’s face was incandescent. “Even you, I am going to teach.” He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. “You’re going to talk properly,” Fabre said. “Even if it kills one of us.” Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d’Anton was too tired to intervene.
Tags: humour public-speaking
1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:
The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.
I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.
Hilary MantelTags: humour revolution
The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.
Hilary MantelTags: history
God knows,” Charpentier said, “I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours.”
“Reform?” Camille said. “I’m not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer.
Tags: french-revolution
This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.
Hilary MantelTags: law
Mirabeau: “If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all await death; but he need not hope that we shall separate until we have made the constitution.”
Audible only to his neighbor, he adds, “If they come, we bugger off, quick.
Inside his copy of The Social Contract he keeps a letter from a young Picard, an enthusiast called Antoine Saint-Just: “I know you, Robespierre, as I know God, by your works.”
When he suffers, as he does increasingly, from a distressing tightness of the chest and shortness of breath, and when his eyes seem too tired to focus on the printed page, the thought of the letter urges the weak flesh to more Works.
Tags: inspiration
The Revolution is your bride,” he said. “As the Church is the Bride of Christ.
Hilary MantelTags: french-revolution
Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You’re afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it’s because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?
Hilary MantelTags: revolution duty patria
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