“And so you persist in your decision, gentlemen?”
“Of course we do, and I hope you’re not going to oppose us.”
“I have only one vote, gentlemen, and it was in favor of giving him back his liberty. You have six votes, all six in favor of death. So death wins.”
The sweat pouring down Maurice’s forehead suddenly turned to ice.
“He’ll cry out, scream,” said the voice. “I hope you’ve at least taken Madame Dixmer out of hearing?”
“She knows nothing, she’s in the pavilion across the way.”
“Madame Dixmer,” murmured Maurice. “I’m beginning to see the light. I’m at that master tanner’s place, the one who spoke to me in the old rue Saint-Jacques, who sneered at me when I couldn’t tell him what my friend’s name was. But why on earth does a master tanner want to assassinate me? In any case, before they assassinate me, I’ll dispatch more than one of them.”
And with that, Maurice bounded toward the inoffensive implement that would soon become a terrible weapon in his hands. Then he stood behind the door so that he would be shielded by it when it opened. His heart was beating fit to burst, and in the silence his heartbeat thundered out. Suddenly a chill ran down his spine as a voice said:
“If you take my advice, you’ll just smash in a window and shoot him through the bars with a rifle.”
“No, no, no; no explosions,” said another voice. “An explosion could give us away. Ah! There you are, Dixmer. What about your wife?”
“I’ve just had a look through the shutters. She has no idea what’s happening, she’s reading.”
“Dixmer, you decide. Are you for a rifle or a dagger?”
“I say the dagger. Let’s go!”
“Let’s go,” the five or six other voices chorused.
Maurice was a child of the Revolution, with a heart of gold and a soul given to atheism, like so many young men at the time. But when he heard the words “Let’s go” from behind the door that alone stood between him and death, he remembered the sign of the cross that his mother had taught him when he was just a little boy made to say his prayers on his knees at bedtime.
Footsteps drew near, then stopped; the key ground in the lock and the door slowly opened. In the minute it took, Maurice had said to himself: “If I waste time lashing out, I’ll be killed. By rushing at my assassins, I’ll take them by surprise; I’ll reach the garden, the alleyway, I may just get away.”
Immediately he sprang like a lion, giving a wild yell in which he managed to pack more menace than fear. He felled the first two men, who thought he was tied up blindfolded and so were far from expecting an onslaught; he then drove through the rest and covered thirty feet in one second flat, thanks to his calves of steel. He could see a door to the garden standing wide open at the end of a hallway and he flew at it, vaulted ten steps, and landed in the garden; getting his bearings as best he could, he ran to the outside door.
But this door was well and truly locked. Maurice tugged at the twin locks, tried to wrench the door open, but there was no key. Meanwhile, his pursuers had reached the back steps and spotted him.
“There he is. Shoot, Dixmer, shoot! Kill him! Kill him!”
Maurice let out a roar: he was trapped in the garden. At a glance he estimated that the surrounding walls were ten feet high.
All this happened in a flash as his assassins flew after him. Maurice was about thirty feet ahead of them. He looked around with the eyes of a doomed man who asks only to be able to slip through a crack in the ground.
He spotted the pavilion, the shutters, the light behind the shutters. It took only one bound, a leap of ten feet, for him to grab one of the shutters, rip it off, smash his way through the window, and fall into the illuminated room where a woman sat reading by the fire.
The woman shot to her feet in fright and screamed for help.
“Out of the way, Geneviève, out of the way,” cried the voice of Dixmer. “Out of the way so I can kill the man!”
Maurice saw the barrel of the rifle level at him about ten feet away. But as soon as the woman laid eyes on him, she let out a terrible cry, and instead of getting out of the way as her husband had ordered she threw herself between Maurice and the barrel of the gun. That gesture focused Maurice’s attention squarely on the generous creature whose first impulse was to protect him.
It was his turn to let out a cry, for it was none other than the mysterious woman he’d been trying so hard to find.
“You! … You!…” he cried.
“Quiet!” she said; turning to the assassins who had gathered at the window, with different weapons in their hands, she cried, “Oh, no you don’t! You will not kill this man!”
“He’s a spy!” cried Dixmer, whose soft placid face had taken on an expression of implacable determination. “He’s a spy and he has to die.”
“Him? A spy?” said Geneviève. “A spy, him? Come here, Dixmer, I have something to say to you that will prove you are peculiarly mistaken.”
Dixmer approached the window and Geneviève went over to him, bent down, and whispered a few words in his ear. The master tanner shot his head up.
“Him?” he said.
“The very one,” Geneviève replied.
“Are you sure?”
This time the young woman did not reply but turned to Maurice and held out her hand, smiling. Dixmer’s features settled into a bizarre mix of kindly indulgence and disdain. He brought the butt of the rifle down hard against the ground.
“Well, then, that’s a different matter,” he said.
Then he signaled to his cohorts to follow him and they moved off into the dark.
“Hide the ring,” Geneviève murmured meanwhile. “Everyone here knows it.”
Maurice swiftly slipped the ring from his finger and into his vest pocket. An instant later, the door of the pavilion opened and Dixmer, unarmed, came toward him.
“Forgive me, citizen,” he said, “for not acknowledging earlier the debt I owe you! My wife remembered the service you did for her the night of the tenth of March, but she’d forgotten your name. So we had no idea who we were dealing with. If we had, believe me, we would never for a moment have doubted your honor or suspected your intentions. And so forgive me, once again!”
Maurice was stupefied. He remained on his feet only by some miracle as he felt his head spin and sensed he was about to fall. He leaned against the mantelpiece for support.
“But what did you want to kill me for, anyway?” he said.
“I’ll let you in on the secret, citizen,” said Dixmer. “I trust your loyalty. I am, as you already know, the master tanner and manager of this tannery. Most of the acids I use in the preparation of my skins are prohibited goods. Now, the smugglers I employ got wind of a delegation made to the general council of the Commune. When I saw you taking down information, I panicked. My smugglers panicked even more than I did when they saw your red cap and how businesslike you looked, and I won’t pretend we didn’t vote to kill you.”
“I’m well aware of that, thank you,” Maurice said. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. I heard the debate, I saw your gun.”
“I’ve already asked your forgiveness,” Dixmer continued with an air of touching bonhomie. “You must understand that, thanks to these turbulent times, we—my associate, Monsieur Morand, and I—are sitting on a gold mine. We have been commissioned to supply bags for the army; every day we have fifteen hundred to two thousand of them made. Thanks to the happy state of affairs in which we live, the Council, which has its hands full, doesn’t have the time to check our accounts thoroughly, so that, I must admit, we are sort of fishing in troubled waters; all the more so since, as I’ve told you, the preparatory stuff we smuggle in allows us to make two hundred percent.”1
“Well!” said Maurice. “That seems to me to be an honest enough profit, and now I understand why you were afraid it would dry up if I denounced you. But now you know who I am, surely you are reassured?”
“Now,�
�� said Dixmer, “I wouldn’t even ask you for your word of honor.” He put his hand on Maurice’s shoulder and beamed at him. “Come. Now we’ve had a bit of a talk and are among friends, tell me what you’re really here for, young man. Of course,” the master tanner added, “if you don’t want to say, you’re perfectly at liberty not to.”
“But I think I told you,” stammered Maurice.
“Yes, something about a woman,” said the burgher. “I know there was talk of a woman.”
“My God! Forgive me, citizen,” said Maurice. “I’m only too well aware that I owe you an explanation. So, I was looking for a woman who told me, the other night—she was wearing a mask at the time—that she lived somewhere in this neighborhood. I don’t know her name or her social standing or which house she lives in. I only know that I’m madly in love with her and that she was short.”
Geneviève was tall.
“She was blond and pert.…”
Geneviève was dark with great soulful eyes.
“A working-class lass, I’d say.… That’s why I’m decked out like a real man of the people like this—I thought she’d approve.”
“So that explains everything,” said Dixmer with an angelic naïveté not belied by even the slightest sly glimmer in his eye. Geneviève, though, had blushed and, feeling herself blush, turned away.
“Poor citizen Lindey,” said Dixmer, laughing. “What a nasty hour we put you through, and you’re the last person I’d have wanted to harm. Such a good patriot, such a brother! … But I truly thought someone with evil intentions had usurped your name.”
“Let’s say no more about it,” said Maurice, who realized it was time to get cracking. “Point me in the right direction and we’ll forget it ever happened.…”
“Point you in the right direction?” cried Dixmer. “Send you packing? Not on your life! This evening I, or rather my partner and I, are hosting a supper for the brave boys who wanted to cut your throat a moment ago. I’m counting on you to eat with them so that you can see they’re not quite as diabolical as they seem.”
“But,” protested Maurice, full of joy at the prospect of spending a few hours close to Geneviève, “I don’t know if I really ought to accept.”
“Why not! I think you really ought to accept,” said Dixmer. “They’re all good solid patriots like you; besides, I won’t believe you’ve forgiven me until we’ve broken bread together.”
Geneviève didn’t say a word. Maurice was in agony.
“If the truth be known,” he stammered, “I’m afraid of imposing on you, citizen.… In this getup, I look … pretty rough.…”
Geneviève gave him a timid glance.
“Our invitation is sincere,” she said.
“I accept then, citizeness,” Maurice said with a bow.
“Well then, I’ll go and reassure our companions,” said the master tanner. “Warm up a bit, meanwhile, dear friend.”
He left. Maurice and Geneviève were alone.
“Ah, monsieur!” said the young woman with a woeful attempt at a rebuke. “You didn’t keep your word, you’ve been indiscreet.”
“What!” cried Maurice. “Oh, madame, have I compromised you? Please forgive me if I have; you won’t see me again.…”
“My God!” she cried, getting to her feet. “You’ve been wounded in the chest! Your shirt is stained with blood!”
Indeed, on Maurice’s amazingly fine and amazingly white cambric shirt, a shirt that contrasted oddly with the rest of his coarse clothes, a large red blotch had spread and dried.
“Oh! Don’t worry, madame. One of the smugglers scratched me with his dagger.”
Geneviève went pale as she took his hand.
“Forgive me,” she murmured, “for the wrong they have done you; you saved my life and I nearly brought about your death.”
“Don’t I have my reward in finding you again? You didn’t think for a moment that I was looking for anyone else, did you?”
“Come with me,” Geneviève broke in. “I’ll get you some linen.… Our guests must not see you in this state. It would be too terrible a reproach to them.”
“I really am imposing on you, aren’t I?” Maurice replied with a sigh. “Not at all; I’m just doing my duty.” She added: “And doing it with great pleasure.”
Geneviève led Maurice to a great linen cupboard of an elegance and distinction he wasn’t expecting to find in the house of a master tanner. True, this particular master tanner seemed to be a millionaire. She flung open the cupboard doors. “Help yourself,” she said. “Make yourself at home.”
And with that, she withdrew.
When Maurice reappeared, he found Dixmer back on deck.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Dinner’s ready! We’re only waiting for you.”
9
SUPPER
When Maurice entered the dining room along with Dixmer and Geneviève, the table had been set and dinner laid out, but the room, which was in the main building, where he had first been conducted, was still empty.
He watched each guest file in one by one; there were six of them. They all looked nice enough on the outside, most of them young and dressed in the fashion of the day. Two or three even sported the carmagnole and red cap. Dixmer introduced Maurice around, grandly announcing his title and credentials. Then he turned to Maurice.
“You see before you, citizen Lindey, all the men who help me in my business. Thanks to the times in which we live, thanks to the revolutionary principles that have eliminated distance, we all live on a footing of the most sacred equality. The same table brings us together and
I’m glad you agreed to share our family meal with us. So please sit down, citizen, and eat!”
“What about … Monsieur Morand,” Geneviève timidly ventured. “Aren’t we waiting for him?”
“Oh yes, right,” replied Dixmer. “Citizen Morand, of whom I’ve already spoken to you, citizen Lindey, is my partner. He is the one charged with the moral side of the business, if I may use that term. He does all the bookkeeping, does the accounts, pays the bills, doles out and receives the money. Of all of us, he definitely has the most to do. The result is that he is sometimes late. I’ll go and alert him.”
At that very moment, the door opened and in came citizen Morand.
He was a short man with dark hair and bushy eyebrows; green glasses, the sort worn by people who work so hard their eyes get tired, screened his black eyes but did not obscure their twinkle. At his first words, Maurice recognized the voice, at once gentle and imperious, that had consistently urged clemency in the terrible deliberations of which he had been the victim. Morand was dressed in a brown suit with great big buttons and a vest of white silk. His rather fine jabot was often agitated over dinner, tormented by a hand whose whiteness and delicacy Maurice was impressed by, no doubt because it belonged to a merchant tanner.
Everyone took their place. Citizen Morand was seated on Gene-viève’s right, Maurice on her left; Dixmer sat down opposite his wife and the other guests sat anywhere they liked around the rectangular table.
The supper was refined. Dixmer had the appetite of an industrialist and did the honors of his table with a heavy dose of jollity. The workers, or those who passed for workers, made him good cheery company as such. Citizen Morand spoke little, ate even less, scarcely drank a drop, and laughed rarely. Maurice, perhaps because of the memories his voice recalled to mind, soon felt a strong liking for him. But he couldn’t figure out the man’s age and this gnawed at him. At times, Morand looked to him to be in his early forties; at other times, he seemed very young.
Dixmer, sitting down to dinner, felt obliged to offer his guests some kind of reason for admitting a stranger into their little circle. He did so in the guise of a naïve man little given to lying; but the guests weren’t too demanding as far as explanations went, it seemed, for, despite the awkwardness with which the manufacturer of skins introduced the young man, his little opening speech seemed to satisfy everyone.
Maurice looked at h
im in amazement.
“Upon my word,” he said to himself, “I must have got it wrong. Can this be the same man who, steely-eyed, voice threatening, pursued me with a rifle in hand, absolutely determined to kill me, three quarters of an hour ago? Then I’d have taken him for a hero or a killer. Good Lord! Looks like a love of skins can do something to a man!”
While he was busy making these observations, his heart was filled with such a profound mix of pain and joy that the young man would have been hard-pressed to tell the state of his soul. Here he was, finally, next to the beautiful stranger he’d sought so desperately. Just as he had dreamed, she had a soft and lovely name, and Maurice was intoxicated with happiness to feel her by his side; he drank in her every word, and the sound of her voice, every time it rang out, made his heart sing. But his heart broke at what he saw.
Geneviève was indeed everything he’d glimpsed: the reality had not destroyed that dream of a stormy night. She was indeed the same woman—elegant, sad-eyed, high-minded. It was a case of what so often happened in those years before the notorious year of ‘93 in which they found themselves: she was the perfect young woman of distinction obliged, because of the ruin into which the nobility was sinking deeper and deeper, to ally herself with the bourgeoisie, with mercantile interests. Dixmer seemed like a good sort of fellow. He was incontestably rich; his manners toward Geneviève seemed to be those of a man who makes it his job to make his wife happy. But this bonhomie, this wealth, these excellent intentions, could they really bridge the immense gap between the wife and the husband, between the poetic young girl, distinguished and charming, and the man of material occupations and such common appearance? With what feelings did Geneviève bridge the gulf?… Alas! As luck would have it, the answer was now clear to Maurice: with love. And he was forced to revise the initial opinion he’d had of the woman, that is, that she was returning home from a lovers’ tryst the night he’d met her.
The idea that Geneviève loved another man sickened Maurice to his soul. So he sighed and regretted having come only to let himself in for an even stronger dose of that poison they call love.
Knight of Maison-Rouge Page 8