Author: Hilary Mantel
Quotes of Author: Hilary Mantel
The visitor sees the hospital as needles and knives, metal teeth, metal bars; sees the foggy meeting between the damp summer air outside and the overheated exhalations of the sick room. But the patient sees no such contrast. She cannot imagine the street, the motorway. To her the hospital is this squashed pillow, this water glass: this bell pull, and the nice judgement required to know when to ring it. For the visitor everything points outwards, to the release of the end of the visiting hour, and to the patient everything points inwards, and the furthest extension of her consciousness is not the rattle of car keys, the road home, the first drink of the evening, but the beep and plip-plop of monitors and drips, the flashing of figures on screens; these are how you register your existence, these are the way you matter." book-quoteHe stepped back, looked up. Cut into the stone above his head were the words RUE MARAT.
For a moment he had the urge to turn back around the corner, climb the stairs, shout to the servants not to bother unpacking, they'd be returning to Arcis in the morning. He looked up to the lighted windows above his head. If I go up there, he thought, I'll never be free again. If I go up there I commit myself to Max, to joining with him to finish Hébert, and perhaps to governing with him. I commit myself to fishing Fabre out of trouble-though God alone knows how that's to be managed. I put myself once more under the threat of assassination; I recommence the blood feuds, the denunciations. His face hardened. You can't stand in the street calling into question the last five years of your life, just because they've changed the street name; you can't let it alter the future. No, he thought-and he saw it clearly, for the first time-it's an illusion, about quitting, about going back to Arcis to farm. I've been lying to Louise: once in, never out. book-quotepoliticsicsHérault, Fabre thinks: and his mind drifts back-as it tends to, these days- to the Café du Foy. He'd been giving readings from his latest-Augusta was dying the death at the Italiens-and in came this huge, rough-looking boy, shoe-horned into a lawyer's black suit, whom he'd made a sketch of in the street, ten years before. The boy had developed this upper-class drawl, and he'd talked about Hérault-"his looks are impeccable, he's well traveled, he's pursued by all the ladies at Court"-and beside Danton had been this fey wide-eyed egotist who had turned out to be half the city's extramarital
interest. The years pass … plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose … book-quotereminiscenceI think back to those days after the Bastille fell, the Mercure Nationale run from the back of the shop, that little Louise sticking her well-bred nose in the air and flouncing off to bawl out their printer-and you know, he was a good lad, François. I'd say, 'Go and do this, this, this, go and tie some bricks to your boots and jump in the Seine,' and he'd"- Danton touched an imaginary forelock-'right away, Georges-Jacques, and do you need any shopping while I'm out?' Jesus, what a way to end up. When you see him, tell him I'd be obliged if he forgets he knows me. book-quotehumour
