The Devil’s Laughter
Page 33
“I have not detained you,” he said; but the next instant she was in his arms.
He tasted her mouth, sweet and tear-salt at the same time, wild, swift-moving, terrible, tender, whispering muffled words against his own:
“Jean, my Jean, mine! How and when and where I do not know—but mine! I am a beast, a she-thing beast, unworthy to touch poor Fleur’s finger-tips, but Jean, Jean, Jean. . . .”
The door opened quietly.
“You’ll forgive the intrusion,” Renoir Gerade said quietly; “but this is truly important, Jean. . . .”
They sprang apart. The slow red started at the line of Jean Paul’s jaw and crawled upward into the roots of his hair.
“Oh, come now, Jean!” Renoir laughed; “I’m not the public censor; besides there is no time. Mademoiselle will excuse us, I know. . . .”
Nicole snatched her hat from the little table, and fled wildly through the door.
“You certainly have good taste,” Renoir said with tolerant amusement.
“Look, Renoir,” Jean Paul spluttered: “I didn’t, I wouldn’t. . . .”
“I would,” Renoir mocked. “Besides, you were both fully clothed in the petit salon, so what’s the odds? Of course, in your own house with a chance that your wife might return any moment—I’m afraid I must condemn your folly; your morals I haven’t any right to—mine are far worse!”
“What did you come to see me about?” Jean growled.
“The mob has invaded the Tuileries. They’re holding both the King and Queen prisoners, trying to provoke them into doing something, I think, that will give those fiends from hell an excuse to assassinate them. The guards are unreliable—except the Swiss; so some of us are going there to try to talk them out of it and foil the Jacobins and Girondins; if not, we can die, if need be, in their defence.”
Jean walked out of the salon and mounted the stairs. When he came down, two minutes later, he had his hat, his pistols, and his cane.
“I’m ready,” he said.
He was one of the small group who assigned themselves to the apartment of the Queen. By so doing he missed Louis’ quiet heroism in refusing to revoke his vetos, in accepting the sword and waving it above his head, shouting “Vive la Nation!” with perfect dignity, wearing even the red cap without seeming a fool, until he melted them finally, sending them away after Pétion’s base and cowardly speech, without having budged an inch from his principles.
But Jean saw Marie Antoinette demonstrate what greatness was. A prostitute, one of the worst poules of the Palais Royal, stopped before her and screamed at her:
“Autrichienne! Etrangére! Sale putaine, ordure de toutes les choses sales, béte et fille de sottise, vieille poule!”
The Queen looked at her steadily.
“Have I ever done you any harm?” she said.
“No, but it is you who do so much harm to the nation!” the poule shrieked.
“You have been deceived,” the Queen said quietly. “I married the King of France. I am the mother of the Dauphin. I am a Frenchwoman. I shall never again see my own country. I shall never be happy or miserable anywhere but in France. When you loved me, I was happy then.”
To Jean’s vast astonishment, the poule burst into great tears.
“Ah, Madame,” she sobbed; “forgive me! I did not know you. I see you’ve been very good . . .”
Santerre, the revolutionary brewer of Saint-Antoine section, seized her roughly by the arm.
“The girl’s drunk!” he growled, and shoved her away from the Queen with all his force.
Jean Paul stepped over to him.
“Santerre,” he murmured, through half-closed lips; “I know why you did that. You don’t want them swayed, do you?”
“Hell, no!” the brewer spat.
“I do. Open those flabby lips of yours again, and I’ll put a double ounce of lead through your guts. And don’t tell me your friends will tear me to pieces; I don’t cane about that. I came here prepared to die.”
Santerre stared at him.
“And whatever they do,” Jean measured out the words, flat, calm, expressionless, “will aid you not at all. For by then, my friend, you will be dead.”
Santerre moved away from him quickly. The last Jean saw of him, he was moving through the doorway.
Jean came back to the Queen’s side.
“Thank you, M. Marin,” Marie Antoinette said.
When the ordeal was over at last, after endless hours, Jean Paul sought out Renoir Gerade.
“Renoir,” he said tiredly, “enrol me in your company. I’ll report for drill tomorrow.”
“Good!” Renoir smiled. Then: “I’d wager that half the army is made of men who are running away from something.”
“What the devil do you mean?” Jean said.
“You know as well as I do,” Renoir mocked, “so why should I bother to tell you?”
By the time they left Paris finally, marching away northward towards death and glory, Jean Paul had become truly a soldier. They marched down the Champs Elysées that thirteenth day of July, and behind them, entering the city, came the formidable Marseillaise, brigands all, roaring Rouget de Lisle’s new “Song of War for the Army of the Rhine.”
Jean heard the sound of it like a trumpet call, roaring through his blood:
“Aux armes, ciloyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons . . .”
It was great, stirring, sublime. He could just make out Fleurette’s dark head, with Nicole’s fair one resting against her shoulder.
But he was already too far away to see their tears.
15
JEAN PAUL MARIN lay on his filthy bed in the military hospital atop Montmartre, staring out of his window at the windmills. He had arrived in Paris two days ago, on October first, 1793, a year and two months after he had marched away towards death on glory. He stared at the windmills, paying no attention to the shrieks and groans and curses of the wounded men around him. The windmills reminded him of the heroic defence of Valmy, for there had been a windmill on top of that historic hill. Valmy was the only battle which he remembered well, because it was his first. After that, all the others ran together in the flux of time, so that he could never remember whether he had done a thing at Jemappes, or Neerwinden, or Mainz, or Verdun, or even Hondeschoote. It didn’t matter really; the mind had a way of insulating itself away from horror.
Like Nicole, he mused. She saw her children killed—and Marie, her maid. Strange that I didn’t remember that the girl was blonde, too; a wisp of hair, and immediately I accepted, despaired. I never really looked at Marie. I know she was fair, fat; but that one cannot tell from a skeleton. Poor Marie, there was devotion in that—sacrifice. Why was she weaning Nicole’s clothes? Why else indeed except to lead those hounds of hell astray and give her mistress a chance to escape. God bless you, poor Marie; if there is a God who appreciates devotion, and rewards sacrifice.
No one will ever know, I think, what happened to her between the time the château was burned and the morning that Claude Bethune found her sleeping in his stable, a pitiful wreck of a woman who knew not even her name. . . .
Fleurette will come for me, as soon as she gets my letter. The orderly posted it yesterday—she should have it by now. I wonder if she’s changed—everything else has. . . . Strange to have left a kingdom, and return to a republic. A republic of regicides. Poor Louis! ‘Tis said he died bravely—after all those terrible months with his family at the Tower of the Temple Prison, he could still manage it. I wonder if it’s true that they’ve taken the Queen away from her children at the Temple and lodged her at La Conciergerie? If so—it’s the end of her, too. . . .
God, God, how changed everything is! The King guillotined, Dumouniez, a traitor, fled to Austria, Marat murdered in his bath by a chit of a girl—bless her, whoever she is! And Robespierre master of France, with even Danton unable to stand against him.
And I, coming back to it all, not because of my twenty-three hono
unable scars—I walked off the field at Hondeschoote with those scratches, but from wound fever, and this persistent sickness—la grippe, they call it.
He took the medal that General Houchard had given him on the field for conspicuous gallantry in action, and looked at it. Then he drew back his arm and tossed it weakly through the window. He hadn’t been gallant, but merely foolhardy, leading a wild charge of skirmishers against the enemy’s flank because he thought he recognised the officer opposing him as Gervais de la Moyte. He turned the flank, but he never reached la Moyte, or his double, because one of the Austrian batteries laid a barrage dead centre on his company, and only five of them came out alive, and of that five he was the only one who hadn’t been badly hurt.
He had got twenty-three small pieces of shrapnel in his body. He had been quite impressively bloody, but the wounds actually were only surface wounds, because he had been further away from the blast than anyone else. It had been the infections and the chill afterwards that had got him—not the wounds themselves. Once the sickness had gone, he would be as good as new. He couldn’t quite forgive himself that, for although his charge had turned the flank against the Austrians and the English (who had come into the war in February, 1793, along with the Spanish and the Dutch, making the ring of fire around France complete, and ruining Jean’s shipping business into the bargain with their blockades) and contributed to winning the notable victory at Hondeschoote, he had lost almost his entire company.
“Murderer,” he snarled at himself, and turned away from the window. The military hospital atop Montmartre was like any military hospital in the 1790s; if a man survived it, he was obviously born to be guillotined. The food, what there was of it, would have disgraced a pigsty. The bed they had put Jean Paul into had still on its tattered sheets the rusty stains of the blood of the last poor devil who had coughed out his life there. But the worst thing of all was the stench. It was compounded of the smell of gangrene, the foulness of human excreta, and the fetid odours of sick, unwashed bodies. All day and all night there was a ceaseless parade of corpse-men removing the bodies of the men who had died, to make room for the wounded being brought home from the front.
In three days Jean Paul got rapidly worse; on the fourth Fleurette appeared, with Pierre and Marianne, having only that morning received the letter that Jean had sent her the day after he arrived. The hospital authorities were only too glad to release a wounded man into the custody of his wife; they needed every available bed.
Fleurette was superb. She didn’t even cry. She sat in the hired carriage and cradled his filthy, vermin-infested head against her shoulder, and stroked his bearded face with an almost maternal joy. She talked to him with her soft, sweet voice, but he did not hear her; he had slipped into a state somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness, coming out of it long enough to mutter a few unintelligible words as he was lifted from the carriage and carried up the stairs.
When he did awake, finally, it was the afternoon of the next day, and the sunlight was pouring in through the window. Fleurette was sitting beside his bed, but he came awake so quietly that she was not aware of it. He lay very still and looked at her, seeing her changed a little by sorrow, by loneliness; but seeing too that it was merely a change, not a diminution of beauty. She has gained in dignity, he thought; but there is something strange about her.
After a time, he saw what it was: the clothes she was wearing were of poor quality, such as any Parisian housewife of the lower classes would wear; and, looking quickly away from the clothes, he saw that it was not to the magnificent hôtel particulier he had bought for Fleurette that they had brought him, but to his old, dingy flat.
He shifted his weight a little to ease the dull ache in his body. Small as the motion was, the sound of it came over to Fleurette.
“Jean?” she whispered.
“Yes, love,” he said gently.
“Jean,” she whispered, “my Jean—you’re back now, really back—and I’ll never let you go again!”
She groped across the coverlet until she found his face, and bending across him kissed him slowly, lingeringly, tenderly, as if all of life were to be found upon his mouth. He brought up his arms and drew her to him, holding her against him, like that, stroking her head with one hand and smiling at her as though she could see him.
“You’re stronger,” she said. “You were so weak last night that I quite despaired. But Pierre insisted that you’d be all right. I held your head while Pierre shaved off that horrible beard; but it took all four of us to bathe you. Pierre did most of the work; he turned you this way and that, while we women scrubbed you as gently as we could.”
“Four of you?” Jean gasped; “women?”
“Of course, silly! Marianne and Nicole Bethune and I. Three women, and Pierre. That makes four, doesn’t it?”
“Nicole!” Jean whispered; “Name of God!”
“Oh, don’t be so modest,” Fleurette laughed. “We’re all old married women, remember. And you really aren’t anything so much to look at any more, my Jean. You’re just skin and bones—and not too much skin either, from what they tell me.
Marianne says you’re as full of holes as a sieve.”
“What did Nicole say?” Jean growled.
“Nothing much. She just cried. She’s very tender-hearted; and besides, I don’t think she’s ever really got over being in love with you. I can understand that. ‘Tis a fatal sickness from which one rarely recovers.”
“And you,” Jean muttered; “have you recovered from it?”
She put her mouth so close to his that he could feel the stirring of her breath.
“No,” she whispered; “it is the disease that I shall die of. . . .”
She lay there very quietly against him. They didn’t talk any more. They just lay there very quietly and watched the sunlight pour through the window, and heard the noises from the Rue Saint-Antoine, far off and faint as though they came from another world.
“I hope,” Fleurette said quietly, “that I shall never learn to hate Nicole Bethune. . . .”
“Could you?” Jean said.
“No—not now. That is, nothing she could ever do would ever make me hate her. Only you could make me do that. . . .”
“I?” Jean said; “how, Fleurette?”
“By forgetting a vow you made. The best, the most beautiful on earth—’Forsaking all others. . . .”
“I have not forgotten it,” Jean said. He looked at her gravely, tenderly. “Fleurette, why are we here?” he said.
“Because of those terrible men: Robespierre, but more than he, Chaumette and Hébert. It has become dangerous in France to have a nice house, and pretty dresses, and money. I—I closed our house, Jean. Pierre advised me to. When they want to get rid of a man, nowadays, all they have to do is to accuse him of ‘incivisme’—a term that includes everything from dressing neatly to owning a carriage and hiring servants. The ideal now is to be slovenly, dress like a dock hand, like the Montagnards, and use foul language to prove you’re of the people. A person can be attacked in the streets for dressing too well. So I packed away our things and gave up the house. Besides, we really can’t afford it now.”
“And the business?” Jean whispered.
“Gone. The English blockade ended it months ago. We have only your rents to live upon now, Jean—and only a few of those; because it has become common practice to denounce one’s landlord as a monopolist, a capitalist, or for the all-embracing crime of incivisme, when one doesn’t want to pay one’s rent. It doesn’t matter, really—with money or without it, one starves. There is no bread to be bought; business of all kinds is at a standstill; Paris has become a hell.
“Pierre manages to keep a few men working; but Claude Bethune has lost everything; were it not for Pierre’s charity, and mine, he and Nicole would have starved long ago. Alors—enough of sadness; everything is going to be all right, now that you’re home again. . . .”
“I hope so,” Jean Paul whispered. “God knows I hope so.”
“Dear God, let him control himself! Please God, don’t let him say anything!”
The prayer was futile, and they knew it. From the moment that Hébert rose and made his monstrous accusations, to which the Queen refused with regal contempt to even reply, Nicole and Marianne could see that nothing on earth or from the bowels of hell itself was going to restrain Jean Paul from speaking out in defence of this great lady he had come to venerate. But Marie Antoinette needed not even Jean’s help.
The indictment read, she answered it regally, calmly, making ridiculous every charge that besotted satyr made. But to that one hideous charge she made no reply. Fleurette could hear the quickening of Jean Paul’s breathing. A juryman stood, snarling:
“Widow Capet, why have you not answered this charge, too?”
The Queen stared at him.
“I have not replied,” she said slowly, “because Nature itself refuses to answer to such a charge brought against a mother.” Then, turning towards the women seated in the galleries, she threw up her arms and cried out: “I appeal to every woman here who has ever borne a child!”
And the whole gallery was loud with the sobbing of the women seated there.
At once Herman, President of the Tribunal, shouted for silence; and began to roar out the charges in his coarse, brutal voice.
Before he was half done, they heard the creak of Jean Paul’s wheel-chair as he pushed it back. He stood up, tottering, his face white as death with rage and weakness; but before he could open his mouth to get a word out, Nicole hurled herself upon him, hurling him back into his chain, clamping both her small hands over his mouth, crying: