The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  “Excellent!” Pierre said; “and to think she never told me!”

  “She wanted to surprise you. We’ll have the business under way in a few weeks now, after all the excitement of the Fête of the Federation is finished.”

  “Strange,” Fleurette whispered, “to think that it is already a year since the Bastille fell.”

  “Time goes quickly,” Jean said, “when something is happening every minute. You, Pierre, are to head the concern. Marianne will manage the seamstresses; and Fleurette, who is wonderfully quick with figures, will keep books. That is the best part of the whole scheme, to me; that it will make it possible for Fleurette to earn her living without exposing herself to danger and inclement weather.”

  There is another way to protect her from those things, Pierre thought bitterly, if you only had sense enough to see it.

  But he didn’t say it. All he said was:

  “And you?”

  Jean laughed.

  “I cannot fancy myself in the role of a manufacturer of clothing,” he said; “I have other plans. I’ve protected myself already with my rents; but I must confess, as my father’s son, my ideas are rather grandiose. I mean to revive Marin et Fils. As soon as I’ve resigned from the Assembly, I shall go south and see what can be done. But I’m going to transfer the shipping to Calais, because I’d rather live in Paris. Then, since you need armed convoys to get anything into the city unpillaged, it will be much easier to bring goods in through the northern ports.”

  Pierre looked at one of his watches. He carried two, as was the custom. Then he pulled out the other and looked at it. They both agreed within a matter of minutes.

  “I wonder what the devil’s keeping Marianne?” he said Worriedly. “She should have been back hours ago.”

  Jean glanced out of the window. It was rapidly growing dusk.

  “We’d better have a look,” he said. “You’ll be all right Fleurette?”

  “Yes, Jean,” Fleurette said; “I’ll be all right.” Even saying his name she made of it a caress.

  The two men picked up their pistols and examined them. Then they went down the stairs together.

  “Jean,” Pierre said, as soon as they had reached the Rue Saint-Antoine, “I’m going to interfere in your private affairs. I’ve tried not to, but, by God’s name, I cannot help it! That’s why I suggested coming to look for Marianne. I know where she is—standing in line before the baker’s trying to get a piece of bread for us. That always takes hours, as you know.”

  Jean stared at him.

  “Speak your piece,” he said quietly.

  “Fleurette,” Pierre said. “That poor child loves you, Jean.”

  “I know,” Jean said sadly.

  “Look, I know she’s blind. But name of a name, man! She’s as pretty as a picture. On top of that, she’s good; which, after that Talbot wench, should have some appeal to you. You’re kind to her—all right. You rented rooms next to ours for her, so that Marianne could look in upon her—she really has no need for care; her self-sufficiency is astonishing. You treat her well—but like a child, a beloved adopted child. Sacré bleu! When are you going to see that she’s a woman—a woman who needs you?”

  “Are you suggesting,” Jean said, “that I marry Fleurette?”

  “Yes. Not suggesting—urging. There, I’ve said it. Now I feel better. Now you can tell me to go to hell.”

  Jean smiled at him.

  “No, my old one,” he said gently, “I won’t tell you that. You see, I have almost every intention in the world of doing precisely what you suggest.”

  “I heard you,” Pierre growled; “you said ‘almost’. . . .”

  “True. I know, from Bertrand’s letters, that the Marquis de Saint Gravert is in Austria. My brother, Bertrand, has seen him.”

  “So?” Pierre said.

  “Nicole isn’t with him. Gervais thinks she’s dead, too. He made some sort of investigation through agents. I—I also believe it, God help me! With my mind, Pierre. But only with my mind. In my heart I keep on hoping. . . .”

  “So poor Fleurette must wait,” Pierre said grimly, “until you make up your mind whether another man’s wife, whom you couldn’t marry anyhow, is dead or alive?”

  “You’re too damned logical!” Jean snapped. “I’m going down there to ferret out the facts myself. No agents, like the ones her precious brother employed. If she’s dead—I’ll accept that, though I’ll never forget her. If she’s not, I’ll find her. She married Lamont in the first place because she thought I had been killed. History repeats itself, but only if you let it. I mean to make sure.”

  “And if you find her alive?” Pierre said.

  “There’s already been discussion in the Assembly over the question of divorce. I’ll see that the question’s brought up again; I could even, by compromising on some matters that I’ve managed to put a stop to almost single-handed, get a law of divorce established.”

  “Very fine!” Pierre mocked. “But if you’ll pardon a further exercise of my logic: though any of these things singly are perhaps possible of attainment, all of them together are quite impossible.”

  “Why?” Jean said.

  “You resign from the Assembly the day after tomorrow. Hence no bills of divorcement introduced by you. Or, conversely, you don’t resign. Therefore you cannot leave Paris to find out whether Nicole la Moyte, Marquise de Saint Gravert, is alive or not. You have need of a little of my Jesuitical training, Jean.”

  “Morbleu!” Jean swore. “You’re right! But I’ll think of something. . . . By the way, here comes Marianne now. . . . See to her, Pierre; she looks positively ill!”

  Pierre ran towards his wife. Marianne’s plump, usually rosy face was now as white as a sheet. She leaned against her husband, half fainting.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so horrible in my life,” she whispered.

  Jean, who was only a step behind his friend, caught Marianne’s other hand.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Look!” Marianne got out, her voice shuddering with pure loathing, “behind me—look. . . .”

  Jean’s gaze followed her trembling finger. Down the street came a parade of children, street urchins, the gamins of Paris. They were beating a small keg for a drum, playing home-made flutes. And on the ends of improvised pikes they bore the heads of three cats, still dripping blood.

  “She’s right,” Pierre got out, “it is the most horrible . . .”

  Jean stood there, looking at the filthy children. How many times now had he seen human heads paraded on the ends of pikes in the last year? De Launay’s; Flesselles’; Foulon’s; Berthier’s; those two poor devils of Swiss Guards who had tried to protect the Queen from the mob of Parisian women at Versailles last October. He remembered then with an almost physical disgust how, walking with the other members of the Assembly in that crowd, prisoners really, as much, in fact, as the royal family itself, being dragged, though they had had to make shameful protestations of willingness, back to Paris and that room in the Riding School of the Tuileries where the howling mob in the galleries could control their every action—he had witnessed things that had seemed to him the very nadir of degradation. The mob, bearing the heads of the heroic Swiss Guardsmen on pikes, had stopped at a hairdresser’s. There they had forced the barbers to curl and powder the hair of the warm and dripping heads. One barber’s assistant had fainted.

  And I thought, Jean mused bitterly, that life could hold no worse horror than that. But it can—witness this. . . . He tried to analyse what it was about this blind, imitative cruelty of the children that sickened him so. It is, he guessed, that murder has become a daily commonplace. God in Glory! To what pass have we brought France that her children make of death a game?

  Then he turned with Pierre and helped the sickened Marianne back towards their abode.

  Fleurette made the supper. Marianne wasn’t able to. Jean and Pierre helped as much as they could. But the evening was ruined. Constraint lay like a
blight on every attempt at conversation. They couldn’t discuss this thing before Fleurette. They did not want to talk about it anyway, but the silence in Pierre’s dining-room was oppressive.

  “I think,” Pierre said at last, “that you and I should go out and show ourselves at the Champs de Mars. Throw a few shovelfuls of dirt around the amphitheatre. Doesn’t pay not to appear public-spirited these days.”

  Jean glared at him. He was about to say that he gave less than a damn whether he appeared public-spirited or not, but he thought the better of it. Anything, after all, was better than sitting in this funereal silence, or returning to his own lonely rooms, and the blackness of his thoughts.

  “All right,” he said wearily, “I’ll go.”

  It was no small journey across the Bridge of Henry IV and along the left bank of the Seine, past both the islands, the Ile Saint-Louis and the Ile de la Cité, seeing the soaring spires of Notre-Dame and the grim round towers of the Conciergerie winding through the small streets of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés section, now choked with people, all bent upon the same errand, but during that long walk neither of them spoke a word.

  The Champs de Mars was black with people, all digging, hauling barrows of earth, working as though their lives depended upon the outcome of their labours. Tomorrow was to be the day. One full year since the Bastille had been taken by the heroic people of Paris. Delegations were expected from all over France; there would be no end of pageantry, and the grandiose earthen amphitheatre must be ready. Paid labourers had begun the work a month ago, but Desmoulins and other journalists had called to the attention of la foule, the mob, the people, that the work lagged, and a thrill of patriotic fervour had electrified all Paris.

  “They are children,” Jean said quietly to Pierre; “as excitable as children, and as thoughtlessly cruel. . . . Well, we’d best lend a hand. . . .”

  They moved on towards the thick of the work. A gentleman of evident quality rushed past them, throwing off his coat as he came. He stood up, rolling up his sleeves, taking off his waistcoat, from which the fobs of his two watches showed.

  “Your watches!” several workmen cried to him.

  The man drew himself up proudly.

  “Does one distrust his brothers?” he flung back at them, and marched off, leaving his fine clothing and gold watches where they lay.

  “They’ll be there when he comes back, I’ll warrant you,” Pierre declared. “You’re right; they are children. Touch them at the right place and you can do wonders with them.”

  A brewer’s cart drew up, loaded with wine casks. The brewer, a big man, stood up in the cart crying:

  “This wine is for the patriot workers, given by me, free of all charge! But I beg you, Citizens, to drink it only as you have need—so that more may share of it, and that it may last longer!”

  Then he and his helpers began to unload the cart. The hundreds of people within the sound of his voice could have emptied the barrels in less than ten minutes. Jean had seen them perform prodigies of drinking while pillaging the monasteries and the private hôtels of the noblesse. But now, to his astonishment, they merely cheered the brewer to the echo, but not one of them broke ranks to touch the casks.

  It was, Jean found, good to swing a pick again, to feel the prison-developed muscles of his arms bunch and release, the pick whistling down to bite deeply into the earth. In half an hour he had left Pierre far behind, feeling the good rivulets sweat running down his back. It was dark now, but the whole Champs was illuminated with thousands of torches.

  My God, Jean thought, all Paris is here!

  “Ah, Marin!” a light, dry voice called, a little breathless with exertion, ‘tis good to see you here!”

  And Jean turned to see the Abbé Sieyès pulling a cart along with Beauharnais. The load was far too heavy for that wraith-like man, so Jean fell to with good will, pushing behind them. They passed the Marquis de Lafayette, digging alongside Bailly, Mayor of Paris. Sweat dripped out of the Marquis’ red hair and ran down his long nose.

  It was funny, ridiculous, but also curiously inspiring. Here, Jean realised, was the closest approach to real democracy the world had yet seen. Here a whole family worked, mother, father, and children, with the ancient grandsire holding the youngest infant in his arms.

  Burly, gigantic Danton moved small mountains, assisted but badly by slender, too handsome, Camille Desmoulins Desmoulins, Jean noted, was rather busier with his notebook than his spade.

  “A word with you, Citizen Marin,” Danton rumbled. “A moment only—I shan’t detain you from your patriotic labours. . . .”

  Jean stopped, overcome with astonishment. From the first day he had seen Georges Danton at the Café Charpentier there had been little friendship between him and the huge man. Desmoulins, Danton’s satellite, had taken occasion several times to sneer at Jean Paul’s moderation in his Revolutions of France and Brabant. But Danton’s bass voice now was curiously mild, his big face bland and conciliatory.

  “I am at your service, M. Danton,” Jean said. “Citizen Danton,” the big man corrected. “None of your aristocratic airs. . . .” Yet even this rebuke was delivered mildly, and accompanied by a conspiratorial wink. Jean waited.

  “I’d like to extend you an invitation to visit us at the Cordeliers’ Club,” Danton said. “Whether you know it or not, we Cordeliers have followed your career with interest. To us the strangest part about it has been your stubborn refusal to identify yourself with any faction. On some issues—the religious question, for instance—you’ve been as far to the Left as the wildest Jacobin; on certain others you seem almost a royalist.”

  “I am a royalist,” Jean smiled. “A constitutional royalist—like most of my colleagues of the Left. I’d retain the kingship as a largely ceremonial and symbolic office, shorn of much of its powers. The people, Citizen Danton, need a visible symbol round which to rally.”

  “I don’t agree,” Danton rumbled, “but your argument has your usual force and clarity. That’s why we want you in the Cordeliers. Once you’ve seen the light, politically, your unblemished reputation and incisive oratorical style could be valuable to us. Only Sieyès, and perhaps Robespierre, can equal you for clarity, and Robespierre is a dullard, Sieyès a vain fool. All the rest of them are compromised, windy, and unclear. Come sit through one of our sessions—debate against us if you will; and I’ll warrant we’ll convince you!”

  Despite himself, Jean Paul could not repress a chuckle.

  “Yet,” he laughed, “your friend here, Citizen Desmoulins has two or three times suggested that the nation might profit if I were stretched from the nearest lamp-post!”

  Desmoulins smiled.

  “But that, Citizen,” he said, “was before I learned that you were selling your press and retiring from combating me in the journalistic arena. Those things indicate to me that you are beginning to think more clearly. Like Citizen Danton, I’ve always respected your intelligence; and I am too good a patriot to deprive the nation of it, if it can be bent to useful ends.”

  “I thank you for your invitation,” Jean said; “’tis very flattering. Perhaps I shall accept—I’ll send you word.”

  “Do!” Danton rumbled; and Jean walked on, after the retreating cart of the Abbé Sieyès. He was aware as he did so that several groups of workers stopped their work to stare at him. In one of them horse-doctor Marat stood, tearing with frantic fingers at his itching skin, which his own skill could not cure; reason enough, men said, for his venom; from another, Maximilien Robespierre watched Jean with his icy, colourless eyes.

  Strange, Jean thought, how little it takes to become a marked man in Paris these days. A word from Georges Danton, President of the Cordeliers—said to be the most powerful man in Paris—and I am noted of those who will presently come to ask favours; but also by those who measure my neck for the hangman’s noose. Dear God, but what a juggler’s act life has become!

  He was close to the cart now before which the vain little Abbé Struggled. Sieyès, who had
said: “Politics is an art I believe myself to have completed,” believing that all France would stand or fall upon his skill. Jean smiled, thinking of it; then another curiosity caught his eye.

  A group of nuns were labouning on a hill-side, digging, shovelling, pushing barrows. But it was not the Holy Sisters w rooted Jean to the spot, his jaw sagging foolishly; rather it was the group of young women who worked with them, clad in garments as light as air, and almost as transparent, their long hair in lovely dishevelment, tricolour sashes about their tiny waists, laughing and chattering as they worked.

  Jean stood there a long moment; then he drew back his head and roared. To see the dancers of the Opéra, among the most notorious wantons of Paris, working side by side in perfect harmony with the chaste Sisters of the Church was too much. The sound of his laughter came over to them, soaring and booming in curiously unearthly mirth. They stopped and stared at him. Then one of them broke away from the others and came skipping down the hill.

  “Jean!” she laughed; “I thought I recognised that idiotic laughter of yours. . . .”

  “Couldn’t help it,” Jean chuckled; “to see you, Lucienne, in such exalted company was vastly amusing.”

  Lucienne half turned towards the busy nuns.

  “They are such dears,” she smiled; “all evening I’ve been repressing a desire to shock them quite out of their robes; but they’ve been so sweet, I hadn’t the heart. One of them has been questioning me all the afternoon about my life. I’m sure she was inwardly panting for some really wicked details. In about ten more minutes I was going to oblige her, if you hadn’t appeared. Poor thing, I’ll wager she’d have to do penance for years for the thoughts I’d put in her head.”

  “You are incorrigible,” Jean said.

  “I know. And you love it. But really, Jeannot, darling—I came here chiefly because I was sure that sooner or later I’d see you.”

  “How flattering,” Jean mocked. “Or rather it would be if every word of it weren’t a pure, unmitigated lie.”

  “Why, Jeannot,” Lucienne said, her tone of injury only a little exaggerated; “how distrustful you are! You know I told you long ago that I might find you interesting again—one of these years. . . .”