A Place of Greater Safety

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This is a magnificent achievement, gripping and engrossing, and a strident demonstration of how historical fiction can compliment the academic. Lucile is in love with him from the beginning, even though she knows the nature of his relationship with her mother. It might have been the trauma of the separation from his family that caused it, even though he is never particularly close to his family, and his father often seems disappointed in him.

She has no need to invent subplots of horror: the horror is all around, part of the everyday landscape, and the reader lives through it along with her characters. Maximilien's tone was very respectful, the principal thought; he offers a due deference to the opinions of others, then takes no notice of them at all.There are cousins all over the Laon district, all over Picardy: a bunch of nerveless crooks, always talking. Robespierre joins the powerful Committee of Public Safety, and it is the members of this committee that become the real leaders of France. Already we can see the stylistic quirks and techniques that Mantel has made her own: the sardonic view of history, the arch wit (too arch in too many places, here), the adoption of positively anachronistic speech so that characters feel like our contemporaries (a comment on how we always read 'history' via the horizons of our present? Here, though, her approach is more diffuse as she follows her triad: volatile and vulnerable Camille Desmoulins, bold and fleshy Danton with his charisma and his grubby morals, and the troubled intellectual fervour of Maximilien Robespierre.

In the year 1770, when Camille was ten years old, the priests advised his father to remove him from the school, since they were unable to give him the attention his progress merited. He was drawn by her myopic green eyes, wide-open eyes that could soften or sharpen like the eyes of a cat. Madeleine is insulting the laundry girl with a fluency and venom that belie her gravid state, her genteel education.As a young man, Desmoulins falls in love with Annette, the mother, who refuses to have sexual relations with him. The Godards' name lacks the coveted particle of nobility; for all that, they tend to get on in life, and when you attend in Guise and environs a musical evening or a funeral or a Bar Association dinner, there is always one present to whom you can genuflect.