As children, he and Robespierre, both from not particularly wealthy families in northern France, attend Louis-le-Grand, one of the most prestigious boarding schools in Paris, as scholarship students. Mantel appears to be interested in the workings of power and the way it intersects with personality - a topic which looks forward to the later Cromwell books. At first Danton, who is a powerful speaker, is one of the leaders of the Convention, and extremely popular with the common people of Paris. They didn't feel like real people till the end chapter, when we have the main characters being dragged into a show trial and send to the guillotine. Well, thanks to the ministrations of Hilary Mantel, I now feel that I have the start of an understanding of the French Revolution and some of its key players.

He had the knack of getting himself into the company of the older, well-connected pupils, of making himself in some way fashionable. While A Place of Greater Safety is an acknowledged historical fiction, it is peopled with historical figures who lived the revolution, wrote its new laws and newspapers, created and were victims of its blood-lust. Madeleine is insulting the laundry girl with a fluency and venom that belie her gravid state, her genteel education. It concerns the events of the French Revolution, focusing on the lives of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre from their childhood through the execution of the Dantonists, and also featuring hundreds of other historical figures. One de Viefville is Mayor of Guise, another is a member of that august judicial body, the Parlement of Paris.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. 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. Because her lover had now cooled towards her, because her father was a choleric man, she let out the bodices of her dresses, and kept herself very quietly. He was awed by her translucent skin, by the skin inside her wrists which showed greenish marble veins. When you are thirty, he thinks, you will sit at this desk and, turning from your account books to the piffling local business on which you are employed, you will draft,for perhaps the tenth time in your career, a deed of mortgage on the manor house at Wiège; and that will wipe the look of surprise off your face.

JULES MICHELET CHAPTER 1 Life as a Battlefield N ow that the dust has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady's hand to Augustin's cradle, rocking, rocking. In a year of scarcity (they were not uncommon then) he was hunting as usual in the Forest of Sénart. During the Revolution, Danton, as well as the other two protagonists, Desmoulins and Robespierre, join the radical Jacobin faction.

Desmoulins is a brilliant man, but not usually a great public speaker, because he has a stutter, which, according to Mantel, began when he was sent to boarding school at seven. 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. If you had told me earlier," her lover said, "we would have only had the row about a brewer's daughter marrying into the de Robespierre family. I even learnt all the words of the Marseillaise and drove my husband half demented by breaking into song as we drove the dogs up to the park every morning.

When Charlotte told him, she hiccupped and sobbed with remorse; but in five minutes, he knew, she would run out into the sunshine and forget it. He knew that under the terms of his scholarship the boy must take his degree in medicine, theology or jurisprudence. He would stand in front of a mirror to scrutinize his face, to see if his teeth stuck out or if he looked timid. The New House smells of resin and wax polish; it has the sulphurous odour of family quarrels brewing. A turning point in Robespierre’s views occurs with the September massacres in 1792, shortly after the fall of the monarchy, when many prisoners in Paris were massacred by the mob.

I found it hard to get my groundings with the book and the story in the beginning – I was waiting for the main event, the Revolution. I avoided googling to find out what happened so the end was a surprise (ish) to me – you won’t be surprised to know that some people lose their heads at the end! Camille," he says, "get down from there, if you drop out onto the cobbles and damage your brain you will never make an alderman. The wet nurse pushed past them, the baby Augustin tossed against her shoulder, held with one hand as if he were a sack.