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You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted
--TS Eliot, “Preludes”
“Do you know,” Camille says, “We all try to conveniently forget that you’re related to the Duchess de Polignac, but you don’t make it easy for us, with that expression of frosted hauteur.”
Hérault wants to say, you’ve never met the Duchess de Polignac, you little brat.
He has many things he’d like to say to Camille, these days—he files them neatly away in the recesses of his mind, for future reference. He imagines dispassionately rummaging through delicate locked cabinets, to find a suitable comment. Excuse me, Citizen Desmoulins; you are an unreliable, unaccountably spiteful, dissolute , ridiculous person. Also, I would very much like to fuck your wife.
Camille knows about that, of course. Why else would he have brought Dillon here as well?
“More wine,” says Dillon, his handsome face flushed with color, his customary fine gloss of refinement and civility somehow stripped away. In such a state of intoxication, one could do anything, say anything: you could disavow it in the morning, because we are all friends, we are all patriots here. “Don’t be rude, Camille,” he says. “I cannot abide rudeness.”
Hérault thinks, this might be what Dillon looks like when he’s killing people.
Camille is going in for the kill too, although he’s smooth, languorous; as he drinks to excess, his movements become more languid, more artfully unhurried.
“So you come to the aid of your fellow aristocrat. How delightfully novel.” He flicks his hair back with a delicate wrist—does he know, Hérault wonders, does he know what sort of effect that gesture has on people? You might say, of course he does, he’s really a bit of a slut, to be frank about it; he enjoys dangling people on a string, like that wife of his. But sometimes the gesture is entirely unaffected, as if he is looking for comfort. You want to comfort him, despite yourself.
“You’re just put out because you’ve lost a small fortune to me tonight,” Hérault points out.
“You can afford it.”
“So can you, my dear.”
“I suppose I can. I had forgotten.” Camille seems to sink into his chair, like a small child at a tedious state dinner. Dillon coughs, mutters that he feels ill, that this was, perhaps, not his most inspired idea? The room, with its perfumed curtains and empty wine bottles and velvet cushions, seems impossibly claustrophobic.
This would be the time to go home, to give it up, to avoid embarrassing oneself. We have duties—I am president of the Convention, Jesus pity me; Camille, you are a journalist and patriot of some distinction; Dillon, you are doing something tomorrow, are you not?
Camille says, “I should go home to Lucile.”
It is a fairly low blow—but then, what else do we have for entertainment, these days?
Dillon takes the bait. “Speaking of which,” he drawls, “you will be pleased to know that your wife remains an irreproachable pillar of virtue. All my best efforts have been met with bitter rejection.”
Camille laughs. “And you, Hérault?”
“Oh, I slept with her last week. Did she not tell you?”
Dillon spits a mouthful of wine back into his drink. “Disgusting,” he says apologetically, looking around for someone to assist him.
Camille raises his eyebrows.
“I am really very surprised that she didn’t inform you, “ says Hérault. “I was under the impression that you shared all the details of each other’s conquests, that it excited you in some way. I, of course, am not one to judge.” He slowly drains his glass, meeting Camille’s gaze.
Camille stands and walks to the window, unbuttoning his shirt. The cold air is bracing, almost painful, and Hérault shivers.
“Do you intend to jump out the window?”
“Oh do shut up, Hérault,” says Dillon. “Do you know, I think you’re lying. She wouldn’t, really—I know women, and I know a lost cause when I see one.”
“Then why do you persist, Arthur?” From the window, Camille’s voice is soft, cajoling; Hérault thinks, if I had said that, his tone would not have been quite so pleasant. He would have mocked me. But Camille has always taken an undue amount of pleasure in Dillon’s company. It is remarked upon, in the restaurants and cheap souvenir shops and jewelers and brothels and gambling dens of the Palais-Royal. They observe the Lanterne Attorney’s adoring eyes, his nervous demeanor, the way his little hands tremble. They nudge each other, and whisper.
“It keeps the faculties sharp, I suppose. But it’s really very tiring. Too tiring. In any case, congratulations on your conquest, Hérault, real or imagined. She’s a lovely girl.”
“She is. Very lovely.” Camille leans his cheek on the cool glass of the windowpane. Hérault is disappointed; he had hoped for more of a reaction. He might, at some level, have wanted to fight him, although the idea is absurd. He has a moment of wild fantasy: dragging Camille from his window perch, in full view of Dillon, and covering his pale skin with bruises, clutching viciously at his long black curls. There is no middle ground, with Camille: you either want to inflict physical violence on him or stroke him.
He should like Camille, really. They have no difference of policy—at least, not that he can think of at the moment, in his present state.
Dillon sighs. “Another round, gentlemen? And come back from the window, Camille, before you hurt yourself.”
The red-brown liquid sloshes in their glasses; he tastes cinnamon and saffron, to soften the bitter taste. Camille drinks eagerly, desperately. His eyes are unbearably dark, and he groans and lies down.
******
You have to wonder, really, where Camille comes from. Lucile he can comprehend, Lucile he understands: she is one of those pretty and clever bourgeois girls, with a tiresome civil servant father and a rather juicy mother—he would have had her and dropped her in the space of a month in the old days, as she well knows. She has no illusions. But Camille—where does he come from, with this black gaze and unfathomable expression? Not Guise, you think. Not such an earthly place, where other people have also come from. It is entirely possible that he never came from anywhere at all: that he sprung, fully-formed, from his father’s head, like Athena.
Hérault thinks, tonight I have said and thought things I regret. My tongue, loosened by exhaustion and laudanum, has run ahead of me. I have made uncouth comments. I am possessed by a vague sense of disgust, with myself and everyone around me.
He is stroking Camille’s hair. Camille lets him do it, with the ghost of an ironical smile: or perhaps it is a grimace? Dillon is asleep, his boots and hat cast aside, the tricolor sash thrown carelessly across the table, his mouth artlessly agape. Camille’s eyes are clouded, far-away. Hérault has the urge to gather him in his arms, to press his lips against his mouth, neck, forehead, to run his hands across his collarbone and down his chest, slowly.
He holds Camille’s head in his hands gingerly, tenderly, feeling the shape of the bones under that impossibly soft skin. It is like holding the skull of a small animal, when the flesh has melted away.
“Tell me you want this.”
“I don’t think I will,” says Camille.
Hérault takes a fistful of dark curls and jerks back, savagely; Camille gives a little whimper, but seems to stare right through him. Why is this room so small and cramped? It occurs to him that they might wake Dillon, which would be mortifying.
“You are ridiculous,” he says, trembling.
“Don’t be self-aggrandizing,” Camille snaps. “I know what you want, and you don’t need my permission.”
“Still, I try to observe the proprieties. May I touch you?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”
Dear Lord, he thinks, is this what I’ve come to? In the old days, at least a man could get his cock sucked without engaging in confrontation. Camille seems compliant enough—more than compliant, actually; his affect usually suggests that he would like nothing more than to accommodate you. But then you’re wrong: you somehow find yourself outwitted and humiliated. It’s the same with Lucile. There should be a law against it.
Camille reaches again for the amber liquid, takes a long swig. “No,” Hérault says, “don’t do that, Camille, please—” but then the little wonder is on his knees, terribly businesslike. Hérault closes his eyes, and thinks that he might pass out, at this moment of gratification. He breathes in shallow, rapid breaths, and strokes Camille’s hair.
After a while, Camille says politely, “Do you mind if I stop? My patience is not infinite.”
Hérault wants to say, don’t stop, please don’t ever stop. Camille stands, leaving him to ignominiously fasten his breeches, and goes to the window. It is as if he had never moved—the last hour might have been a fever dream, a torrid fantasy.
“You’re a terrible liar, Hérault,” Camille says. “You should write a novel.”
“I don’t know what you’re implying,” he says slowly. He thinks, Camille would have preferred that Dillon had been in my place.
As if on cue, Dillon stirs. Hérault is conscious of a potent nausea, an impending sense of disaster. There is nothing for it: he has to dash to the window beside Camille, and vomit into the courtyard. Camille laughs, not unkindly, and holds his hair back, whispering encouraging words.
“Jesus,” says Dillon. “What have I missed?”
“I think,” Camille says, “that it is time to go home. Lucile will be wondering where I am.”
******
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.