The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  “Have you never heard of—pity, M. Reveillon?” he sighed.

  “Forgive me,” M. Reveillon said; “I have lived in Paris too long, I think. ‘Tis unlikely that our effete corruptions should be widespread in the provinces. There is, you understand, a certain type of mind that would delight in her blindness—and her innocence—the better to lead her into practices of nameless vileness. I know a high police official with whom I’d leave my wife, but not a girl child under ten years. One great noble has twenty pages, all pretty boys of tender years. . . .”

  “Please!” Jean said. He felt sick just listening to it.

  “Sorry. Perhaps there is a God, after all. It’s no accident, I think, that so many troubles should be visited upon this modern Sodom we have created. The wrath of God, M. Marin! Another cup, perhaps?”

  “No, thank you,” Jean said; “I’d best be getting back now. I have a thousand things to do.”

  He had. All his days were filled, which was a good thing, for it left him no time for thinking. He bought the clothes for Fleurette—good, warm, serviceable things, which were really not too pretty, but which delighted her good, simple heart. Marianne altered them for her, because she was so thin it was impossible to fit her. They were used clothes, cast-offs of some great lady, for in those days ready-made clothes did not exist. Jean had no objection to having clothes made for this protégée except for the fact that the times were out of joint. A dress that ordinarily would have been finished by the dressmaker in a week to ten days now required three to five weeks, due to the difficulty in obtaining materials. In the meantime, poor Fleurette might die of the inclement March weather.

  The ritual between them was now firmly established. Every day he bought a flower from her, paying her far more than it was worth. She stopped protesting about this after a while. She seemed to be more grateful for his company, for the few gentle words he exchanged with her each day, than for the money. He learned many things about her: She was an orphan, living alone. She did not suffer too much, really; there were always kind ladies and gentlemen among the throngs of Paris. In the wintertime, when she could get no flowers, she made artificial ones of feathers, or of paper dipped in wax. The old woman who was concierge of the house where she lived mixed the colours for her. But she made more money when she had real flowers. . . .

  Not that she needed very much money. She could live on five sous a day, as she had really very little appetite. Clothes were out of the question. These were the first she had ever had bought for her. All the rest of her rags were cast-offs from the noble ladies. But since all the troubles, the noble ladies didn’t come any more; and since she couldn’t sew, her things had gradually been reduced to rags.

  Talking to her did things for Jean Paul Marin. He had suffered—more perhaps than the common run of men. But what, actually, were his sufferings compared to this? He had lost the woman who loved him; but some day, if the wound in his heart ever healed, there might be another. This blind girl had never known love, a home, friends—or any of the thousands of things that he took as a matter of course.

  It troubled him to discover how much he meant to her. She would begin smiling while he was still yards away from her, whether or not he were alone or walking in the midst of a crowd. He asked her about that.

  “I know your footsteps, M’sieur Jean,” she said. “Everybody’s footsteps sound different from everyone else’s—didn’t you know that? I think that we blind people hear better than people who have sight. Our sense of smell is keener, too. Nature, I think, tries to make up to us for our lack of eyes.”

  Jean stared at her.

  “How do I smell?” he laughed.

  “Good. So—so clean. There is a kind of soap you use that has a wonderful smell—and then there is your tobacco, mingled with the smell of the wool in your clothes. Your clothes are very fine, because only the best wool smells like that. Yet you don’t use perfumes. That’s strange. Most other great gentlemen do.”

  “I’m not a great gentleman,” Jean told her.

  “Oh yes, you are! Perhaps you are not of noble birth, because you talk French very plainly—no La! La’s and other such foolishness. But it’s very beautiful, the way you talk. Your voice is like music—very deep and rich, with no harshness in it at all. I think that you haven’t any harshness in you at all. You help me because you are kind, really kind—not, as so many do, because it makes them feel powerful and important to aid a beggar.”

  “I help you because I like you,” Jean said.

  “And I like you. I wake up in the night dreading the day that you’ll leave Paris. I—I shall be so lonely then. I was always lonely, I suppose; but I never thought about it much before now . . .” She sighed. “Strange, I dreamed of having a friend one day—a real friend, like you are to me. I thought it would make me so happy. . . .”

  “Well, doesn’t it?” Jean said.

  “Yes, oh, yes! Wonderfully happy; but sad, too—at the same time. You see, it makes the other things worse: the being alone so much, and the thinking. . . .”

  “What do you think about, little Fleurette?”

  “You, mostly,” she said, and it touched him, because he knew she was entirely without guile. “About you, and about the future, which was a thing I never permitted myself to think about before. Now I think about it all the time, and that’s what makes me sad. What will happen to me when you go back to your own town?”

  “I’m not going back, Fleurette,” Jean said; “I’m going to stay here—”

  He stopped without finishing what he had intended to say, for the radiance in her face startled him. He had to remind himself of her blindness, because she kept her great, dark eyes fixed upon his face the whole time they were talking, following, he presumed, the sound of his voice; but he remembered it now. The glow in her eyes was unfocused, and when he moved his head quickly aside, her gaze did not follow him. He often did things like that now, almost subconsciously; for the better he came to know Fleurette, the more intolerable he found her blindness.

  There is absolutely no justice in the universe, he was thinking, when he saw that her face had become sad again.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  “I just remembered that even if you do stay here, you’ll probably get married. And no wife would put up with your spending so much time talking to a blind beggar.”

  “How do you know I’m not already married?” Jean teased.

  “Oh, I know you aren’t. You don’t talk or act anything like a married man. You’re too calm and free and unworried. Married men are never like that.”

  “Mlle Fleurette, la clairvoyante,” Jean laughed. “What makes you so sure that any woman would have me?—even if I wanted to get married, which I don’t.”

  “Women aren’t all fools,” Fleurette said seriously; “one of them will be sure to realise soon how lucky she’d be to have you.”

  “Lucky?” Jean mocked.

  “Yes. You are so kind, that’s everything. For another, you’re tall—”

  “How the devil do you know that?”

  “I hear where your voice comes from—from above my head. And then, you’re strong. I can tell that from the way you walk, and the way your hand grips my elbow when you help me across streets. Also, I think you’re probably very handsome.”

  “Handsome!” Jean growled. He had remembered suddenly the street-walker in Marseilles, and the curious effect the sight of his broken face had had upon her. “Now, you’re wrong,” he laughed; “I’m as ugly as sin—no, uglier.”

  “Let me see,” Fleurette whispered, and put up her delicate finger-tips to touch his face.

  “No!” Jean got out; “by God’s love, no!”

  “My—my hands are clean,” Fleurette whispered; “it’s the only way I can tell what people really are like.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jean said gently; “but let that be one secret between us, Fleurette—how I look, I mean. I’d rather you didn’t know.”

  “Why?” Fleurette s
aid.

  “Because I really am ugly—uglier than you can possibly imagine. It’s better like this. If you knew, it might make a difference.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Fleurette said; “but if M’sieur prefers . . .”

  “M’sieur prefers,” Jean said. “Au ‘voir, Fleurette.”

  “Au revoir, M’sieur Jean,” Fleurette whispered. “You—you aren’t angry with me?”

  “No,” Jean laughed; “I could never be angry with you, little Fleurette.”

  “I’m glad,” she said gravely; “till tomorrow, then. . . .”

  He was surprised at the force of the emotion that had prompted him to conceal his face from Fleurette. What difference did it make? he asked himself, what earthly difference if that poor blind waif knows I’m ugly or not? Yet I didn’t want her to know. I desperately didn’t want her to. Is that why I cling to this curious friendship? I think perhaps it is. I have sunk so far as to gain warmth and comfort from the admiration of this child—basking in the fact that she cannot be repelled by this horror of a face. Still, it has gone too far to be ended now—besides, the poor child depends upon it, too. Not too much harm in that, I guess—two forlorn ones clinging together against the indifference of the world. . . .

  He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he missed a step at the top landing and almost plunged through the broken railing. Have to fix that, he thought; now—been putting it off too long. . . . Thereupon he gathered up a few tools and, having bought wood from the shop on the ground floor, he put up a new railing. When he had finished it, he had to laugh. It was, he had to admit, a miserable job. All it would serve for would be to warn a person in the darkness, in time to draw back from the danger, for it certainly would not support even the weight of a child.

  Strange, he mused, we bourgeois are the really helpless ones. The peasants have strength and skill gained from their work. The nobles, come to think of it, are usually powerful men because of their training in sports, riding, warfare; only we bourgeois are wedded to the pen and the ledger, growing up pale and thin and studious with no manual dexterity at all. I’m strong—by grace of the Toulon bagne—but the only two things I know how to do with my hands are breaking rocks and writing letters.

  He and Pierre were well along now with their newspaper. They called it the Mercury of the Third Estate, and from the first it was popular. There were other papers much more popular, however—all of them extremist sheets, really nothing more than pamphlets, bearing such grotesque titles as: Le Gloria in Excelsis du Peuple, Le De Profundis de la Noblesse et du Clergé, La Semaine Sainte ou les Lamentations du Tiers État—and written in language so high-flown as to be utterly ridiculous. But the lackeys, unemployed hairdressers, fishwives, stone-cutters, vagabonds and criminals who swarmed the streets of Paris those first weeks of April, 1789, literally devoured them. They had only one thing in common: their bloodthirstiness. For already, in the court of the Palais Royal, under the protection of the treasonable Duc d’Orléans, who hoped to profit by all the confusion that he permitted, and often even paid for, by making himself King, men like Camille Desmoulins were making themselves heard with both tongue and pen.

  It was, strangely, the very moderation of Jean Paul Marin’s writings that gained him a solid audience. Real moderates had practically no other sheet to read. Pierre and Jean were making a handsome profit, for their clients came from the wealthy bourgeoisie without notable exception. And Pierre, canny peasant that he was, insisted upon instantly converting every franc they earned into gold.

  Jean worked hard. He saw Fleurette every day. He sat every evening in one or another of the cafés and talked politics with M. Reveillon and his friends. The unvarying ritual of his life pleased him. Unvarying, that is, up to the twenty-seventh of April. For after that he never saw M. Reveillon again.

  He heard about it first on Saturday, the twenty-fifth. He came down into the Rue Saint-Antoine to find a mob of more than five hundred people collected before the paper works.

  “Down with Reveilon!” they were roaring. “Kill the traitor! Burn the place down!”

  Jean moved among the fringes of the crowd.

  “What is it?” he asked of a man rather better dressed than the others.

  “ ‘Tis said that Reveillon spoke badly of the people in Assembly yesterday,” the man said.

  Jean stared at him.

  “Reveillon?” Jean said. “I don’t believe that. Why, the people have no better friend. What, precisely, did he say?”

  A bearded rough standing beside the man to whom Jean had spoken turned upon him.

  “What’s it to you, you dandy?” he snarled. “I’ll tell you, if you want to know. That fat bloodsucker said that a workman with a family could live on fifteen sous a day!”

  “That’s a lie,” Jean snapped; “Reveillon’s a friend of mine. I happen to know he pays the man who sweeps up the cuttings twenty-five sous a day.”

  “A friend of yours, hein?” the bearded villain roared. “Look, boys! Here’s one of the bloodsucker’s friends! Regard his clothes—a damned aristocrat or I miss my guess!”

  Twenty sticks were lifted before the echoes of his shout had died away.

  Jean stood there, smiling his icy smile.

  “You rat,” he said quietly, “you ordure of scum and unspeakable vileness. Lay a finger on me and I’ll break every bone in your unwashed body.”

  The rough hesitated.

  Jean started walking towards him, straight towards him and the twenty other scoundrels at his back. The sticks wavered. They weren’t prepared for this. Nothing in their previous experience had prepared them to deal with a man who wouldn’t run when outnumbered twenty to one.

  When he was close enough, Jean’s left hand shot out suddenly and caught the man by his shirt-front. The muscles of his arms bunched. Inch by inch he lifted the man up with his left hand until only the toes of his ragged boots were dragging in the dirt. Then Jean stiffened his arm suddenly, straight out, and the man went flying backward to crash into the circle of his friends. The impact knocked several of them to the earth. They came up roaring, only to stare straight into the muzzle of Jean Paul’s pistol.

  “Don’t follow me,” he said pleasantly; “I haven’t done any rat-hunting lately, but ‘tis a sport I always enjoy.”

  Then he spun on his heel and walked away from them, moving quietly, but without haste. They didn’t follow him. He had known that they wouldn’t. The one trait that all mobs possess in common is cowardice.

  All day Sunday the rioting grew worse. By Monday, the twenty-seventh, the mobs were completely out of hand. Jean put on workman’s clothes and mingled with them. He was troubled by the fact that neither Saturday nor Sunday had he seen Fleurette. He guessed that she must be staying at home, out of fear of the ceaseless uproar. He cursed the fact that he had never troubled to find out where her room was.

  The mob was screaming curses at every priest who passed. They came pouring into the Place de Grève, bearing an effigy of M. Reveillon. They had decorated the effigy with the ribbon of the Order of St. Michael. There with much howling and buffoonery they proceeded to have a mock trial. The effigy was condemned and burned on the spot.

  “His house!” they roared now; “burn the scoundrel’s house!” They boiled back into the Rue Saint-Antoine. But the Guard was already there, drawn up before M. Reveillon’s dwelling. The mob, Jean saw at once, had no stomach for gunfire. They recoiled from the levelled muskets of the guards, muttering obscenities. But five minutes later they gave Jean a demonstration of how dangerous it had become in Paris to be even known as a friend of anyone who had fallen out of favour.

  Five houses down the street they stopped again. A man lived here, a manufacturer of saltpetre, whom Jean had often seen in Reveillon’s company. This guilt by association was quite enough for the mob. Within the hour they had stripped the house of Reveillon’s friend, piling his effects and furniture up in the street before it. Then they made a bonfire of all the innocent man’s possessions
.

  Jean left the crowd then and went back to his printing-shop. He sat there all night, with his loaded pistols close at hand. But the mob passed his establishment by. It came to him, finally, that all the time he had spent in M. Reveillon’s company had been in one or another café away from the Faubourg of Saint-Antoine, and that most of the trouble-makers came from other sections of Paris, anyway. Except for his own mistake in identifying himself as one of Reveillon’s friends, he was in little danger from the mob. Whatever danger existed lay in the chance of his scarred face being recognised by the small group of men he had fought. That was a serious enough danger if it happened, but the chances of its happening were not very great.

  Tuesday was the same as Monday—only worse. The crowds in the quartier were thicker than ever. The rumours had spread, gaining new additions with every telling. What troubled Jean most of all was the fact that most of the new recruits were good, solid folk, grim in their belief that they were somehow fighting for the Third Estate. Looters, bandits, madmen, scum were actually less dangerous, he realised, than good, determined men fighting for an ideal, however mistaken.

  “We shall be lost,” a sturdy baker told Jean, “if we don’t all stick together.”

  The organisation was better now. Crowds of stern men moved off into the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. When they came back their numbers had tripled. They, Jean learned, had been enrolling new recruits—willingly, for the most part, but under the threat of lifted clubs, if need be.

  Reveillon was gone. He had fled Paris during the night. Jean was glad of that. The Paris mob was capable of killing him without giving him a chance to prove how absurd the charges against him were.

  There was no point in trying to work. Pierre du Pain kept to his flat, pistols ready, to defend Marianne. Jean wandered with the mob, seeing it all, recording it all in his mind, so that he could set it down when the city had quieted.

  At the Porte Saint-Antoine he saw the noblesse get their first lesson in what their changed status was going to be. With their usual arrogant indifference to the tumults of the people, hundreds of them, with many wealthy bourgeois as well, had left the city that morning to go to the races. When they returned that evening, the mob stopped them at the Saint-Antoine Gate. Burly fellows seized the reins of the horses, and around the doors of each carriage knots of men and women gathered with clubs and rude pikes ready.