The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  He caught her wrist cruelly and twisted it, forcing-her to the floor.

  “You’ve betrayed every man you’ve ever known, haven’t you?” he whispered. “Me—a thousand times; that poor beggar Marin. You betrayed the revolutionists to me, and the royalists to the Revolution! You sold your body for prices you thought high, but that were cheaper, actually, than the sous a poule would accept. . . . But now to make an end of you; but slowly, my sweet, so that I can listen to your screams a long time. You’re very vain, but when I have done with you, people will vomit at the sight of what’s left of your face. . . .”

  “That,” Jean Paul said quietly, “is quite enough, M. la Moyte. Release her.”

  Gervais turned, and stared into the muzzle of Jean’s pistol.

  “Still enchanted, eh, Marin?” he mocked. “If you knew the truth . . .”

  “I do,” Jean began, but his words were silenced by the thunder of booted feet upon the stairs.

  “Ah, Marin!” Fouquien-Tinville said; “I see you’ve exceeded us in your zeal! A citizenly arrest, eh? Who is this man?”

  “Not him!” Lucienne screamed; “Marin himself! he is your royalist-Dantonist conspirator!”

  “Don’t lie!” la Moyte said sharply; then turning to the others: “Permit me to introduce myself, Messieurs. I am Gervais Hugue Robert Roget Marie la Moyte, Comte de Gravereau, late officer in the army of his Majesty of Austria, a loyal subject of the late murdered King of France, and this woman is my mistress and a paid spy in the employ of Austria.”

  Jean stared at him in pure astonishment.

  Gervais put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Now we are quits, my brother,” he said gently. “I have nothing left but mine honour; and I am tired of life. ‘Tis good to go thus, as long as I can take her with me.”

  “Brother?” Fouquier-Tinville said suspiciously.

  “All men are brothers, are they not, M’sieur?” Gervais smiled; ‘tis one of your credos, is it not?”

  “You’ll testify against this precious pair, Citizen Marin?” Tinville growled.

  “No!” Jean snapped; “I want no part in any further deaths!”

  “But, Citizen,” Fouquier-Tinville said ominously, “your duty—”

  “M. Marin has done his duty and more by capturing us,” Gervais said; “his testimony is unnecessary, as he is in possession of few of the facts. This woman was attempting to dupe him because he spurned her love. I shall freely give you a full confession that covers everything; you have no need of him.”

  “Very well, then, Marin,” Tinville growled; “you can go.”

  But his murderous little eyes followed Jean as he left the room.

  Mounting the stairs to his own flat was pure agony to Jean. When Fleurette opened the door for him, he collapsed in a heap in his chair.

  She came over to him, and stroked his head.

  “You came back quickly,” she whispered. “Are you rid of her for good?”

  “Yes,” Jean groaned.

  His tone caught her attention; she ran her fingers over his face.

  “My God!” she murmured, “your face is a death-mask!”

  “I know,” Jean said; “I have seen too much of death this day.”

  “Rest, my love,” Fleurette said tenderly. “Here, let me help you off with your shoes. . . .”

  A vagrant memory stirred in the tired recesses of his mind. “You were going to tell me something,” he said; “what was it, ma petite?”

  She looked up from where she knelt before him, tugging at the buckles of his shoes. The last rays of the setting sun came in at the window, pouring all the ifiumination in the world into her face.

  “Only—that I am with child, my Jean,” she said.

  17

  THE whole world is drowning in blood, Jean Paul thought, and I shall never sleep again.

  “You are so still,” Fleurette said; “what was in that letter that so disturbed you?”

  “Nothing,” Jean lied; “‘tis from a friend in Marseilles, telling of conditions there. Things there are very grave. It did, I confess, make me a little sad.”

  “Don’t be sad, my love,” Fleurette said; “we have each other, and soon we’ll have our son or our daughter—Jean, do you care which it is? A boy on a girl, I mean?”

  “No,” Jean said; “I don’t care. . . .”

  “Nor I. It’s yours, so it will be very fine. There is only one thing that worries me. . .

  “What is that, Fleur?” Jean said. He had caught the edge of hysteria in her voice.

  “Its eyes, Jean,” she whispered. “I was born like this. Jean, do you think—”

  Jean put an arm about her shoulder and drew her to him. “No, sweet,” he said; “I don’t think that. He is going to be perfect, our son.”

  “Ah, so!” Fleurette laughed; “you do want a boy! I’ll have to concentrate on masculine things like strength and courage and wisdom. I shan’t disappoint you, love.”

  “Thank you,” Jean said.

  The letter had fallen to the floor when he put his arms around her. Now it caught his attention again:

  “I was arrested for incivisme the moment I entered Marseilles. You know what trials are today. I defended myself as best I could; but I was condemned from the moment they laid hands on me. My crime was, I think, that of having been successful, of having lived well—which is treason to the spirit of the mob. At any rate, Marin, by the time this reaches you, I shall be dead. I only hope I can manage it well and with dignity.

  “Take care of my poor Nicole. As long as you can, keep the news of my death from her. Another such shock would, I believe, destroy her reason. But if ever she comes to know, tell her I died with her name on my lips, thanking God for the happiness I had with her. I shall be waiting for her wherever God provides a place for the souls of the harmless and the just, knowing that she must come to me one day, never again to leave my side.

  “Adieu, dear friend; I pray you to accept my most tender farewells for both yourself and your angel of a wife. . . .”

  It was signed, “Claude Bethune.”

  Dear God, Jean whispered inside his heart, dear, kind, sweet, merciful God!

  “Now you’ve become too still again,” Fleurette complained; “what ails you today, my Jean?”

  “Nothing. Fleurette, love, I have to visit a man now. He is in prison awaiting trial. He was my brother-in-law, and ever since I’ve known him I’ve hated him. . . .”

  “Then why must you visit him?” Fleurette said.

  “Because I was wrong. My poor, dead sister adored him. I could never understand that; but now I do. For at the end he proved himself as gallant a gentleman as ever drew the breath of life. People are strange, Fleur, love; they’re hellishly complicated, and always we make the mistake of trying to reduce them to some one noticeable element in their characters. In September, ‘92, Danton was merciless; but Danton died because in December, ‘93, he wanted with all his heart to show mercy. Only madmen are all of a piece. Marat and Hébert were always perfectly consistent; because the pair of them belonged in a home for lunatics.”

  “And your brother-in-law?”

  “Was gay, careless, a little heartless—your typical noble. He was frequently unfaithful to my sister; but he always loved her, I think. He was sick with grief the day I told him of her death. The day he was arrested, he could possibly have escaped by denouncing me as a Dantonist—which I was. But he would not. The many wrongs he had done me compelled him not to. He accepted his fate like the real gentleman he is, going so far as to deny any relationship to me—which again could have dragged me in with him. You see why I must go?”

  “Oh yes!” Fleurette breathed; “go by all means! And tell him that I thank him with all my heart.”

  The stench inside the Conciergenie was indescribable. The prisoners were huddled together in a huge common cell, waiting for the guillotine to clear enough of the smaller cells for them to be separated. Gervais la Moyte came forward to greet Jean, a wan smile up
on his face. His clothes were disarranged, through a rent in his fine shirt his lean, athletic body showed, his blond hair had not been combed and hung loose about his shoulders.

  But in this miserable state he was magnificent; robbed of the trappings of nobility, the man showed. And the man, Jean thought, freed of his wasted life, of the miseducation given his class, is quite something. . . .

  “Behold your republic!” Gervais laughed, waving an airy hand. “You should be proud of yourself, Jean. For here, at least you have really succeeded in levelling the classes!”

  “I am not proud,” Jean said; “this was never what I wanted. I was too young, and too much a fool to realise that revolution is never a justifiable instrument of policy. Only those changes made gradually last—to overturn the world is to place the bottom-most scum on the top, and the scum remains scum no matter where it is placed!”

  “Bravo!” Gervais said; “now you’re talking sense. But aren’t you being a bit foolhardy to visit me? Men have been condemned for less.”

  “I know. But I was honour-bound to come. To come and take your hand and ask your pardon. Not that you were right, for you were not. Oppression is never right, even when it is elegant. But then I, too, was wrong. In trying to end oppression I played into the hands of worse oppressors, so that the blood of ten thousand innocents is upon my soul. I want to say this while you still live, and while I live; I have no doubt that I shall follow you, and soon; unless by some miracle I can escape France. My friends are dead; my life hangs under the blade because at any moment they can discover that I was a Dantonist.”

  “I shall not betray you,” Gervais said.

  “I know; but Lucienne will; not that it matters—except to my unborn child.”

  “I think you wrong her. She has changed. Go see her when you leave. You’ll find her walking in the women’s yard.”

  “Have I your pardon?” Jean said.

  “Freely, gladly given,” Gervais said. “And I yours?”

  “Yes,” Jean murmured, and embraced him through the bars.

  He found her as Gervais had predicted, walking in the tiny paved courtyard where the women prisoners were allowed to exercise. She came up to him very quietly and thrust her hands through the bars.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” she said.

  “Lucienne—” Jean muttered; but something got in the way of his speech. A knot formed at the base of his throat, shutting off his words. And, leaning forward, Lucienne saw the tears in his eyes.

  “You weep for me?” she whispered. “How strange!”

  Jean found his voice again.

  “Strange?” he got out; “no, Lucienne—not strange. You will die—and I shall follow you. The dying is nothing, for all men come to that. . . .”

  She brought her hands up and gently stroked his face. “Then what do you weep for, my Jean?” she said.

  “For what we had together. For the real tragedy of living that comes long before the blessed relief of dying. . . .” He caught her hands in his own, and held them so hard that he hurt her. “I weep for the miracle we had and lost: each other, together, believing, hoping, loving under the sun—It was good then, wasn’t it? In the days of youth, of—of our innocence even. . . .”

  “Innocence?” Lucienne smiled.

  “Yes, yes—innocence! Before our eyes were opened and we saw our nakedness! Before we were cast out of our enchanted garden into a world of lies, disenchantment, poverty of spirit, where not even love can keep its integrity. . . .”

  He released her quite suddenly, and brought his knuckles up, dashing the hot tears from his eyes.

  “Yes,” he husked, “I weep for you too. For you, and all the lost souls upon earth—for myself, for what we might have had together if your ambitions, and my revolutionary folly, and life itself had not got in the way.”

  “Life itself, more than anything else,” Lucienne said. “Don’t blame yourself, my darling—here, give me your hand again.

  Jean thrust his hand through the bars, and she took it, fondling it, her face strange, her voice far away—sad.

  “Yes, life itself,” she whispered; “and my overwhelming belief in mine own cleverness. With all the examples I had had set before me, I could not see that treachery never works. The betrayer always betrays himself, doesn’t he, Jeannot?”

  “Yes,” Jean growled, “and by the very act of betrayal. . . .”

  “I was always a cheat,” Lucienne sighed, “but one cannot cheat life, can one? My monstrous vanity prompted me to think I could. You, poor Jeannot, were the first victim of my infidelity; but I am myself the chief one. I die because vows, honour, my pledged word, meant nothing to me—dust to be flicked aside, while I followed the will-of-the-wisps of my desires.”

  “You are eloquent,” Jean said.

  “I have become so, listening to you, my Jean,” Lucienne smiled. “How many things I have learned too late! I had a hunger, a lust for life. I knew it would pour its treasures into my lap: fame, riches, great love . . . while I, the queen, would smile and accept them as my due, and less, never asking myself what I’d done to deserve them.”

  “You had those things,” Jean said, his eyes brooding over her face. “Dear God, Lucienne—why weren’t you ever content?”

  “A great love,” she whispered; “I had that from you. But I had to have the other things as well. You became an obstacle—I betrayed you. Riches and fame—Gervais supplied them. Then he became tiresome and poor—so I betrayed him. . . . The others—they were nothing—designed by nature to have a heel ground into their faces. . . .”

  “Nobody,” Jean said flatly, “is designed for that.”

  “I know that now,” she said, her voice so low that he had to strain his ears to hear her. Then she came up hard against the bars, thrusting herself close to him, crying:

  “Jean, Jean—I don’t want to die! I can’t die, I can’t, I can’t—”

  He pulled her to him, embracing her through the bars. Slowly she quieted.

  “That was unworthy of me,” she whispered. “It’s a hard thing, Jean—I know now that I will die without ever really knowing what happiness was. What is it, Jean? How does one find it?”

  Jean looked across the barred courtyard, his eyes above the bright, sun-touched halo of her hair, and his voice, when he spoke, was endlessly deep.

  “By not looking for it,” he said. “By always giving, never trying to get. . . .” His fingers moved, toying with the auburn hair. He looked down at her gravely.

  “Go on,” she murmured.

  “By loving, Lucienne—which is the thing you never understood. By loving every man and woman under God’s heaven as brothers and more, so that death itself becomes easier than betrayal—so that one cannot violate what a man is, so that one respects him so, living, breathing, suffering, that not only can one not harm a hair of his head, but one cannot sneer at the most pitiful of his dreams, knowing them dear to him.”

  She looked up at him, and the tears caught in her lashes like jewels.

  “Jean,” she said slowly, “you never would have turned me in, would you?”

  “I,” Jean said flatly, “would have died first.”

  “I know. And because I couldn’t believe that anyone given a chance to take vengeance, to betray, would refrain, I lived for months in terror of you. I tried to seduce you, not because your love mattered much to me—I have, truly, no heart, and a man’s love to me was no more than the natural idolatry to which I was entitled for merely being me—I have always been the goddess of mine own idolatry. When you would not be faithless to your wife—you’ve always been true to her, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jean said.

  “I thought so. But when you spurned me, I knew I had to kill you that I might live. It never even entered my head that in the scale of things your life is even so much more important than mine; that you will one day make things better for all the people of France, while I can be nothing but a gilded parasite. But nothing existed for me outside myself,
my precious, precious, beautiful self that I have loved as no man ever could!”

  “A man might see the flaws,” Jean said dryly. “One does not stay blind for ever, Lucienne.”

  “You’re better than Gervais, nobler, really. You have never needed to revenge yourself upon me.”

  “Revenge is God’s business,” Jean said, “not man’s. When one takes upon one’s self the right to be judge, jury, executioner, one has exceeded one’s functions, I think. I could not play God, Lucienne. I could only leave you, in sorrow, truly— and I did.”

  “Thank you for that. Jeannot—”

  “Yes, Lucienne?”

  “People cannot change—not entirely. I hate my vanity; but I have it still. I’m not afraid of death. It would come some day; better now, like this, before I grow old and men no longer run their desiring gaze over my body. But this I do hate—that this head of mine be dropped into that smelly, bloody basket! That I be mutilated in death. I—I want to look as though I were asleep, so that people seeing me will shake their heads and whisper: ‘What a pity that so much loveliness had to die! ’”

  “What is it you want?” Jean said, catching her drift.

  “There is a chemist’s shop near the Place de Grève. Go there and buy a small vial for me. Tell him it’s for rats; he’ll know the truth; he has delivered many another from the tender mercies of Samson’s knife. . . . Bring it to me here. Then I shall look as though I were asleep, and the tricoteuses shall not count my head, nor the canalille spit at me as I pass in that dreadful cart, and call me all the dreadful things I perhaps was, but which I never considered myself.”

  “Nor were you,” Jean said. “Tomorrow, then?”

  “Yes, Jeannot—tomorrow. I won’t ask your forgiveness; I have it, I know, without the asking. Au ‘voir, mon Jeannot— till tomorrow. . . .”

  Going home, it seemed to Jean Paul that his tired limbs could no longer support the weight of his heart.