A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel Page A

interests me more is Lafayette’s proposal for an investigation into tax frauds.”
    “And shady underhand speculation,” d’Anton said. “The dirty workings of the market as a whole.”
    “Always this vehemence,” Perrin said, “among people who don’t hold bonds and wish they did.”
    Something distracted M. Charpentier. He looked over d’Anton’s shoulder and smiled. “Here is a man who could clarify matters for us.” He moved forward and held out his hands. “M. Duplessis, you’re a stranger, we never see you. You haven’t met my daughter’s fiancé. M. Duplessis is a very old friend of mine, he’s at the Treasury.”
    “For my sins,” M. Duplessis said, with a sepulchral smile. He acknowledged d’Anton with a nod, as if perhaps he had heard his name. He was a tall man, fiftyish, with vestigial good looks; he was carefully and plainly dressed. His gaze seemed to rest a little behind and beyond its object, as if his vision were unobstructed by the marble-topped tables and gilt chairs and the black limbs of city barristers.
    “So Gabrielle is to be married. When is the happy day?”
    “We’ve not named it. May or June.”
    “How time flies.”
    He patted out his platitudes as children shape mud pies; he smiled again, and you thought of the muscular effort involved.
    M. Charpentier handed him a cup of coffee. “I was sorry to hear about your daughter’s husband.”
    “Yes, a bad business, most upsetting and unfortunate. My daughter Adèle,” he said. “Married and widowed, and only a child.” He addressed Charpentier, directing his gaze over his host’s left shoulder. “We shall keep Lucile at home for a while longer. Although she’s fifteen, sixteen. Quite a little lady. Daughters are a worry. Sons, too, though I haven’t any. Sons-in-law are a worry, dying as they do. Although not you, Maître d’Anton. I don’t intend it personally. You’re not a worry, I’m sure. You look quite healthy. In fact, excessively so.”
    How can he be so dignified, d’Anton wondered, when his talk is so random and wild? Was he always like this, or had the situation made him so, and was it the Deficit that had unhinged him, or was it his domestic affairs?
    “And your dear wife?” M. Charpentier inquired. “How is she?”
    M. Duplessis brooded on this question; he looked as if he could not quite recall her face. At last he said, “Much the same.”
    “Won’t you come and have supper one evening? The girls, too, of course, if they’d like to come?”
    “I would, you know … but the pressure of work … I’m a good deal at Versailles during the week now, it was only that today I had some business to attend to … sometimes I work through the weekend too.” He turned to d’Anton. “I’ve been at the Treasury all my life. It’s been a rewarding career, but every day gets a little harder. If only the Abbé Terray …”
    Charpentier stifled a yawn. He had heard it before; everyone had heard it. The Abbé Terray was Duplessis’s all-time Top Comptroller, his fiscal hero. “If Terray had stayed, he could have saved us; every scheme put forward in recent years, every solution, Terray had worked it out years ago.” That had been when he was a younger man, and the girls were babies, and his work was something he looked forward to with a sense of the separate venture and progress of each day. But the Parlements had opposed the abbé; they had accused him of speculating in grain, and induced the silly people to burn him in effigy. “That was before the situation was so bad; the problems were manageable then. Since then I’ve seen them come along with the same old bright ideas—” He made a gesture of despair. M. Duplessis cared most deeply about the state of the royal Treasury; and since the departure of the Abbé Terray his work had become a kind of daily official heartbreak.
    M. Charpentier leaned forward to refill his cup. “No, I must be off,” Duplessis said. “I’ve brought papers home.