Cambridge, England. April 1971. 3 p.m. 14°C. The punt glides downstream, a friend standing on the stern and casually manipulating the two–meter pole. The college buildings of honey stone that we pass seem to embody intellectual superiority. Nothing here but ideas has any real importance. The river implies otherwise, its languid flow evoking Rupert Brooke’s “stream mysterious . . . / Green as a dream and deep as Death.”
ONCE FABRE D’ÉGLANTINE BECAME KNOWN AS A POLITICIAN AND speculator, he discarded the image of a poet, rebranding himself as a man–about–town. His open shirt and casual jacket gave way to a silk cravat, surcoat, and vest. A coiffeur fluffed his hair into a bouffant. He also took to carrying a lorgnette, a pair of eyeglasses on a handle, through which he would peer at the proceedings of the Convention and the Club des Cordeliers as if they were stage comedies performed for his amusement, a habit that irritated his fellow members.
He had his portrait painted by the aging but fashionable Jean–Baptiste Greuze, and promptly parodied the painter in one of his verse comedies. His last work, The Proud Fool, presented in August 1792, went even further—mocking the revolution, or at least its more pompous poseurs. Few were amused.
Fabre had already begun accumulating a personal fortune by speculating in shares of the Compagnie Française des Indes Orientales. Inspired by the British and Dutch East India Companies, which gave those nations access to the wealth of India and East Asia, Louis XIV started this French equivalent to build trading posts on the subcontinent and import its spices and fabrics. The revolution’s leaders planned to stamp out such survivals from the bad old days of the monarchy, but until they got around to it the company continued to generate a healthy income for its stockholders.
Danton helped Fabre gain a place on the commission charged with supplying the army, a notorious pork barrel that Fabre exploited recklessly. By buying inferior goods but billing the government at top price, he pocketed 40,000 livres, a small fortune. A disgusted Robespierre claimed that the boots supplied to the troops were of such poor quality that they barely lasted half a day before falling to pieces.
For the moment, Fabre’s association with Danton protected him, but his mentor was also under attack, suspected of skimming from the fortunes of those aristocrats sent to the guillotine. Each time Danton rose in the Convention to speak, opponents shouted, “The accounts, the accounts!”
Busy with business deals, Fabre didn’t have time to publicize his involvement in the calendar project. Instead, he had others do it for him. At his instigation, Michel de Cubières, a prolific self–styled poète de la révolution, composed an eleven–page ode celebrating the new calendar and hinting broadly that all involved, but in particular Fabre, deserved some honor and even a little profit:
The illustrious citizen deserves his reward.
Kings offer gold, popes forgiveness,
But the ordinary citizen, recognizing victory,
Places laurel on the warrior’s brow.
This true brightness puts crowns to shade.
On September 23, 1793, Charles–Gilbert Romme, technically head of the calendar commission, formally presented it to the Convention. After some perfunctory debate, it was adopted on October 24.
Barely anyone took any notice. That year had become the first annus horribilis of the new France. In May and June, the Jacobins, supporters of Robespierre and opponents of Danton, won a majority in the Convention. On July 13, Jean–Paul Marat, a leader of the Montagnards and one of Danton’s most effective colleagues, was murdered, stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a supporter of the moderate Girondin party.
Marat’s tirades in his newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, had fanned a growing sense of desperation throughout France as foreign armies threatened its borders. With almost unlimited powers to convict and execute without trial, the Committee of Public Safety crushed even the slightest expressions of dissent.
Fabre had been one of those who supported Marat in denouncing a “foreign plot” against the Republic. The denunciation set off a barrage of accusations that heightened the prevailing paranoia and accelerated the frequency of public executions, now a daily occurrence across the country.
Fabre continued to speculate in East India Company shares. When in 1793 the Committee of Public Safety finally got around to banning all joint–stock companies, he smelled an even greater profit in winding up its affairs. Officials, their palms well greased, allowed its directors, rather than the government, to liquidate the company. In this fire sale of assets, the insiders cleaned up.
This was a swindle too far. When Robespierre made the details public, a heckler at the Club des Cordeliers pointed at Fabre and shouted, “To the guillotine with him!” Paling, Fabre dropped his lorgnette. For the first time he realized that his influential friends didn’t make him immune. He hurriedly resigned his seat in the Convention, but it was too late. Robespierre launched a campaign to discredit him and the other so–called indulgents who urged an end to revolutionary extremism. The stage was set for the last act not only of the life of Fabre d’Églantine but also of the revolution itself.