When we enter the last part of the book it becomes ever more clear that the revolution is eating the frontrunners that claimed to support it at a breakneck pace. 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. 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. He made her think of his mother, sometimes; he had those sea-colored eyes that seemed to trap and hold the light. There is sexual freedom/decadence, like being best friends with your wife’s lover, which brings enormous subplots and intrigue with it.

The College stood on the rue Saint-Jacques, cut off from the city by high solid walls and iron gates. Mantel began writing the novel in 1975 and completed it in 1979, but was unable to find a publisher. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. I'd say it's a book that needs time and concentration (plus Google open at the side unless you're an aficionado of the French Revolution and the various and shifting factions). I wouldn’t have found A Place of Greater Safety so approachable if Mantel had written thirty-odd to sixty-odd pages of continuous dense prose.I had my first book published while I was still at school and have been at it ever since, writing mainly for children and young adults.

JULES MICHELET CHAPTER 1 Life as a Battlefield N ow that the dust has settled, we can begin to look at our situation. This is a book in which the pleasures are all intellectual, even textual, lying not so much in the story as in the way it is told.He had the knack of getting himself into the company of the older, well-connected pupils, of making himself in some way fashionable. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.

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. However, I didn’t need to, as I had no difficulty following the plot and (more or less) keeping track of who's who. He, as well as the other three protagonists, votes for the king’s death, in spite of his horror of the death penalty. To be sure," he said, "it would be a pity to let your clever little boy come to nothing for the want of a little cash.

An ambitious, gripping epic and a tour de force of historical fiction, A Place of Greater Safety tells the story of three young men who find themselves in Paris in 1789, at the dawn of the French Revolution. It’s the little bits into between the well-documented events that made A Place of Greater Safety such an enjoyable read. At six years old he had been taken to Versailles, where he had recited a poem for Mesdames Adelaide, Sophie and Victoire, the old King's daughters; they had made a fuss of him and given him sweets. Mantel’s view of the Revolution, it seems, is that the events were stronger than any one character, and that her three protagonists began with good intentions, but were overtaken by events. He indulges himself a little: places himself on the steps of the Châtelet court with a hard-wrung acquittal and a knot of congratulatory colleagues.