Liberty: The Lives And Times Of Six Women In Revolutionary France - Plot & Excerpts
‘Ferocious in face and probably of heart,’ she wrote of him. ‘I could not apply the idea of a good man to that face.’Danton represented to Manon the antithesis of all that she valued: discipline, discretion, virtue, self-sacrifice. She imagined him, dagger in hand, inciting the mob on to still greater deeds of butchery. She found Danton’s boldness misplaced, his bonhomie and openness contrived and his extravagant physicality repellent. Her prim disapproval of the easy-going womanizer was heightened by her awareness of her own unfulfilled sensuality; this was a woman, after all, who would write of herself that ‘no one so obviously made for voluptuous pleasure has known so little of it’.Danton made every effort to win Manon over. He visited her almost daily during the last weeks of August, arriving at the Hôtel de l’Intérieur early before Council meetings or inventing excuses to stay late afterwards to chat to her of patriotism, and asking himself to dinner on evenings when no one else was invited.
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