It is not until the elections to the National Convention in 1792 that all three become representatives in the legislative body. We have countless women who for the most part just wait while the men execute their opportunistic and not overtly well thought out plans. We have casual talk of murders and loss of life, the immorality of the situation of a country besieged from all sides and almost bankrupt, generals being replaced at breathtaking pace and a lack of clear predefined plans. In a fascinating passage, Mantel’s omniscient narrator lists the ways in which people can be complicit in a crime, including standing by and doing nothing when a crime is committed, so we can tell that she believes Robespierre is complicit, although not directly involved. My first book was pure wish fulfilment, about a girl who became a dancer, and with the recent publication of a ballet trilogy – Born to Dance, Star Quality and Showtime – I seem to have come full circle.

Le lycée Louis-le-Grand is on la rue Saint-Jacques which traces the route of le cardo maximus de Lutèce, the great Roman south-to-north axis road of Paris. I am not entirely sure why that was, but I think it might have had to do with Mantel’s unusual style, which I was not used to, and prevented me from enjoying the book very much. 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. The society to which Fréron proposed to introduce him is some huge poisonous organism limping to its death; people like you, he said to Maximilien, are the only fit people to run a country.The New York Times praised Mantel, but not the book, wondering if "more novel and less history might not better suit this author's unmistakable talent.

The narrative focuses on three men who are central to the Revolution: the hard-headed pragmatist, Georges-Jacques Danton; the passionate rabble-rouser, Camille Desmoulins and the fanatic ideologue, Maximilien Robespierre. Camille," he says, "get down from there, if you drop out onto the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. Supposedly, the twelve members are equals, but Robespierre becomes their clear leader, at least for a while. There is sexual freedom/decadence, like being best friends with your wife’s lover, which brings enormous subplots and intrigue with it.Throughout the book, I had to keep reminding myself that this actually happened and that Hilary Mantel had based the story on factual evidence. He coughed sputum stained with blood, and a scraping, crackling noise came from his chest, quite audible to anyone in the room. In 1767--when Armand was able to walk, and Anne-Clothilde was the baby of the household--Jean-Nicolas said to his wife:"Camille ought to go away to school, you know.

They weren’t particularly nice people but I actually felt quite sorry for them when they are executed. It was only an act of faith – I came to it direct from the spellbinding Wolf Hall – which kept me going. I’m not at all sure that I can even begin to do justice to Hilary Mantel’s great sprawling novel about the French Revolution. Mantel has a way with words, wringing out of them, both the absurd and ironic that makes the reader take notice. This is not a distortion of facts, a filling in of detail that is missing in the historical accounts: this is fiction, and fiction is licensed to do what academics may not.It is to this grammar school that both the young de Robespierre and Desmoulins are sent in the story. He had a strong sympathy with the poor, which made him very popular, at first in his hometown of Arras and, later, as a deputy to the Estates General and the National Assembly at Versailles and Paris. As I said, the book starts with each of the three main characters’ childhoods and continues through their early careers as lawyers in the early 1780s, and then through the Revolution. He made her think of his mother, sometimes; he had those sea-colored eyes that seemed to trap and hold the light.

His mother's body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. In the Cromwell novels, Mantel funnels everything through Cromwell's POV; here, we're endlessly shifting, a habit I decry in many novels but Mantel pulls it off.They pretended--knowing that he could hardly disabuse them--that it was a kind of flattering oversight; that a man in his position, with steady work coming in, would hardly notice the last few hundred. I know that, in real life, there has been much speculation about Robespierre’s relationship with Eléonore Duplay and whether or not it was sexual in nature. I was sometimes quite amazed that Robespierre and Danton were sick and showed some humanity through this, showing they did have a body to take care for. As a young man, Desmoulins falls in love with Annette, the mother, who refuses to have sexual relations with him. Two are ambitious young lawyers; the first – George-Jacques Danton – zealous, energetic and debit-ridden, the second – Maximillian Robespierre – small, diligent and terrified of violence.