Knight of Maison-Rouge

by Alexandre Dumas

  The attitude adopted by the man whose portrait we have just sketched was in the best of taste. Society at the time was split into two classes: the sheep and the wolves. One of them must have frightened the other, since half of society now devoured the other half.

  Our ferocious stroller was short in stature; he brandished the cudgel known as a constitution from a dirty black hand. It is true that the hand that was swinging this terrible weapon so wildly would have looked pretty damn dainty to anyone who wanted to amuse themselves by playing the inquisitor to this strange character, a role he himself had arrogated in relation to others. But no one would have dared question a man who looked so terrible.

  Indeed, with his getup and his attitude, the man with the cudgel sent shock waves of grave anxiety through certain groups of pencil-pushers in their cubbyholes who were holding forth about politics and the state—which, at the time, was starting to go from bad to worse, or from good to better, depending on whether you were a conservative or a revolutionary. From the corners of their eyes, these brave scribes were carefully scanning the man’s long black beard and his greenish eyes, set deep beneath eyebrows as bushy as brushes; and they shuddered each time the terrible patriot came near them as he paced the entire length of the Hall of Lost Footsteps.

  What they were especially terrified of was the fact that, each time they decided to approach him or even to look at him too closely, the man with the cudgel made the flagstones ring with his heavy weapon, which he brought down hard, crashing against stones in the process and dislodging them with a sound now dull and flat, now shrill and resonant.

  But it was not only the fine fellows in the booths of whom we have spoken, who are generally known as the rats of the Palais, who experienced the thrill of fear. So did the various individuals coming into the Hall of Lost Footsteps through its wide main door or through one of its narrow vomitoires, who scuttled past as soon as they spotted the man with the cudgel. But he just continued to cross from one end of the room to the other, undeterred, finding at every moment an excuse to set his cudgel ringing against the flagstone floor.

  If the scribes had been less frightened and the persons coming and going a bit sharper, they would no doubt have discovered that our patriot, capricious like all eccentric or extreme personalities, seemed to have a distinct preference for certain flagstones; those, for example, located a little way from the right-hand wall and more or less in the middle of the room, which gave out the purest and loudest sounds.

  He even wound up concentrating his rage on a mere handful of flagstones, especially those in the center of the room. For a second he even forgot himself enough to stop and measure something like a distance. It is true that this lapse lasted only a second and that the man quickly put back on his face the ferocious scowl that a flash of joy had momentarily replaced.

  Almost that same instant, another patriot—in those days everyone wore their political views emblazoned on their brows, or rather on their sleeves—almost at the same instant, as we were saying, another patriot entered by the gallery door and, without in any way seeming to share the general terror inspired by the original occupant, crossed his path with a step more or less the same as his, so that halfway across the room their paths met.

  Like the first man, the newcomer sported a fur cap, a grey carmagnole, filthy hands, and a cudgel. In addition, he had a huge sword that kept battering his calves. But what made the second man much scarier than the first was that, just as much as the first man looked frightening, the second looked phony, hateful, and low.

  And although the two men looked as though they belonged to the same cause and shared the same views, those present were prepared to risk losing an eye to see what would happen, not from their meeting, for they were not treading the exact same axis, but from their close encounter. Onlookers’ expectations were dashed in the first round, for the two patriots made do with exchanging a look—but what a look! It made the smaller man pale; but by the involuntary twitch of his lips, it was clear that his pallor was occasioned not by fear but by disgust.

  And yet the second time around the patriot’s face, till then so surly and daunting, suddenly brightened, as though he had succeeded in mastering his feelings by some violent effort; something like a would-be gracious smile passed over his lips, and he inclined his path slightly to the left, with the evident aim of stopping the second patriot in his tracks.

  They came together virtually in the center of the hall.

  “I’ll be damned! If it isn’t citizen Simon!” said the first patriot.

  “The man himself! But what do you want with him, old citizen Simon? And who are you, anyway?”

  “You’re not going to pretend you don’t recognize me!”

  “I don’t recognize you, and for the good reason that I’ve never laid eyes on you before.”

  “Pull the other one! You don’t recognize the man who had the honor of parading la Lamballe’s head around on a pike?”

  These words, delivered in a sort of quiet fury, shot hotly from the carmagnole-wearing patriot’s mouth and crackled in the air. Simon started.

  “You!” he said. “You?”

  “That surprises you, does it? Ah, citizen! I thought you were a bit more discerning when it comes to friends, to the faithful! … You wound me.”

  “It’s a good thing, what you did,” said Simon, “but I never met you.”

  “It’s a bit more of an advantage guarding the little Capet, you’re more in the public eye—you see, I know you and I think highly of you.”

  “Oh! Thanks!”

  “Think nothing of it.… So, having a bit of a wander?”

  “Yes, I’m waiting for someone.… What about you?”

  “Me, too.”

  “What’s your name, then? I’ll mention you at the club.”

  “The name’s Théodore.”

  “Théodore what?”

  “That’s all: that not enough for you?”

  “Oh, no, that’s fine! … Who are you waiting for, citizen Théodore?”

  “A friend I’ve got a good little denunciation ready for.”

  “Really! Tell me about it.”

  “A nest of aristocrats.”

  “What are their names?”

  “No, truly; that’s for my friend’s ears alone.”

  “You’re on the wrong tack, for here’s my mate coming toward us, and I reckon this one knows enough about procedure to take care of your business straightaway, eh?”

  “Fouquier-Tinville!” cried the first patriot.

  “No less, my friend.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Of course it’s good.… Hello, citizen Fouquier.”

  Fouquier-Tinville, pale, calm, alert as usual, with beady black eyes set deep below bushy eyebrows, had emerged from a side door and strode into the room, register in hand, bundles of papers under his arm.

  “Hello, Simon,” he said. “What’s new?”

  “Plenty. First, a denunciation by citizen Théodore here—he’s the fellow who carried Lamballe’s head around. Let me introduce you.”

  Fouquier fixed his intelligent gaze on the patriot, who was not exactly happy under the man’s scrutiny, despite the courageous tension of his nerves.

  “Théodore, eh?” said Fouquier. “Who’s this Théodore?”

  “I am,” said the man in the carmagnole.

  “You carried Lamballe’s head, did you?” said the public prosecutor, with an expression of doubt he made no attempt to hide.

  “I did, rue Saint-Antoine.”

  “But I know someone else who boasts he did,” said Fouquier.

  “Me, I know ten!” citizen Théodore bravely retorted. “But those fellows are all asking for something and I’m not, so I hope I get preference.”

  This joke made Simon laugh and even cheered up Fouquier.

  “Right you are,” he said, “and if you didn’t do it, you should have. Leave us, please; Simon has something for me.”

  Théodore moved off, scarce
ly offended by the brusque manner of the citizen public prosecutor.

  “Hang on!” cried Simon. “Don’t send him packing just yet; let’s hear his denunciation first.”

  “Ah!” Fouquier-Tinville said distractedly. “A denunciation?”

  “Yes, a nest of ‘em,” said Simon.

  “Marvelous! Tell me. What are we talking about here?”

  “Oh, it’s practically nothing! Only citizen Maison-Rouge and friends.”

  Fouquier leapt back; Simon raised his arms to the heavens.

  “Really?” the two men chimed.

  “Nothing but the truth. Do you want to nab them?”

  “Immediately. Where are they?”

  “I met Maison-Rouge on the rue de la Grande-Truanderie.”

  “You’re mistaken, he’s not in Paris,” replied Fouquier.

  “I saw him, I tell you.”

  “You can’t have. We put a hundred men on his tail. He’s the last person who’d show up in the street.”

  “It was him, as sure as there’s a nose on your face,” said the patriot. “A brute with brown hair, big, and hairy as a bear’s ass.”

  Fouquier shrugged his shoulders with contempt.

  “Another piece of garbage,” he said. “Maison-Rouge is small and thin and hasn’t a whisker of a beard.”

  The patriot dropped his arms to his sides with a disconcerted air.

  “Never mind, good intentions are always appreciated. Well then, Simon, it’s you and me; get on with it, they’re waiting for me at the clerk’s office; this is the time the carts go out.”

  “Well, nothing new; the kid’s going well.”

  The patriot turned his back so as not to appear indiscreet—and so that he could eavesdrop undeterred.

  “I’ll be off if I’m in your way,” he said.

  “Adieu,” said Simon. “Good-bye,” said Fouquier.

  “Tell your friend you got it wrong,” Simon added.

  “All right, I’ll wait for him.”

  With that, Théodore moved to a spot where he was still within earshot and leaned on his cudgel.

  “Ah! The little fellow’s going well,” Fouquier said. “But what about his morale?”

  “He’s putty in my hands.”

  “So he’s talking?”

  “When I want him to.”

  “Do you think he could testify at Antoinette’s trial?”

  “I don’t think so—I know so!”

  Théodore leaned against a pillar, his eye on the doors. But that eye was sightless, while his ears suddenly pricked up under the vast fur cap. He may well have seen nothing—but he certainly caught an earful.

  “Think carefully,” said Fouquier. “We don’t want to make the Committee look bad—no what they call clerks’ bungles! Are you sure Capet will talk?”

  “He’ll say whatever I want him to.”

  “He talked to you about what we are going to ask him about?”

  “He did.”

  “This is important, citizen Simon, what you are promising here. Such a confession on the part of the child will be fatal for the mother.”

  “I bloody well hope so!”

  “Nothing like it has been seen since Nero’s confession to Narcissus,”2 muttered Fouquier in a somber voice. “Think again, Simon.”

  “You’d think you took me for an idiot, citizen. You keep repeating the same thing. Listen, here’s a comparison for you: when I put the leather in water, does it become supple?”

  “But … I have no idea,” said Fouquier.

  “It becomes supple. Well now, the little Capet becomes as supple in my hands as the softest leather. I’ve got ways and means, you see.”

  “So be it,” stammered Fouquier. “That’s all you wanted to tell me?”

  “That’s all.… Oh, I forgot! Here’s a denunciation.”

  “Another one! You want to kill me with work?”

  “A man’s got to serve his country.”

  With that, Simon presented a piece of paper as black as one of the leather skins he’d just referred to, but decidedly less supple. Fouquier took it and read it.

  “Your citizen Lorin again; you really hate that man, don’t you?”

  “I find he’s always hostile to the law. He said ‘Adieu, madame’ to a woman who waved at him from her window last night.… Tomorrow I hope to give you something about another suspect: that Maurice, who was one of the municipal officers in the Temple at the time of the red carnation.”

  “Details! Details!” cried Fouquier, smiling at Simon. “It’s all in the details!”

  He held out his hand to Simon and turned on his heel with a haste that didn’t augur well for the cobbler.

  “What more bloody details do you want me to come up with? They’ve given people the chop for less.”

  “Patience! Patience!” Fouquier sang out serenely. “We can’t do everything at once.”

  On that note, Fouquier went back through the wickets with a determined stride. Simon looked around for his citizen Théodore for a bit of commiseration. He couldn’t see him anywhere in the room. Yet scarcely had Simon disappeared through the west gate than Théodore reappeared at the corner of a scribe’s booth, the inhabitant of the booth by his side.

  “What time do they shut the gates?” Théodore asked the man.

  “Five o’clock.”

  “And then what happens here?”

  “Nothing; the room’s empty till the next day.”

  “No rounds, no visits?”

  “No, monsieur, our booths are locked.”

  The term monsieur made Théodore frown, and he looked round with concern.

  “The pliers and the pistols are in the booth?” he asked.

  “Yes, under the rug.”

  “Go back to our place.… Speaking of which, show me again the courtroom that doesn’t have bars on the window and that looks over a courtyard near the place Dauphine.”

  “It’s on the left between the pillars, under the lantern.”

  “Good. Off you go and keep the horses at the appointed place!”

  “Oh! Good luck, monsieur, good luck! … You can count on me!”

  “This is the moment.… No one’s looking.… Open your booth.”

  “Done, monsieur; I’ll pray for you!”

  “It’s not for me that we need to pray! Adieu.”

  With a last eloquent look, citizen Théodore slipped so adroitly under the little roof of the booth that he simply dematerialized, like the shadow of the scribe shutting the door.

  The worthy scribe pulled the key out of the lock, stuck some papers under his arm, and left the vast hall with its few remaining employees, flushed out of their offices by the clock striking five like a rear guard of late-returning bees.

  36

  CITIZEN THÉODORE

  Night had enveloped in its greyish cloak this immense hall, whose unhappy echoes were doomed to repeat the sharp words of lawyers and litigants’ supplications.

  Here and there in the gloom, white columns stood straight and un-moving like sentinels keeping watch over the place, or like phantoms protecting some sacred site.

  The only sound that could be heard in the darkness was the gnawing and four-legged galloping of rats, chewing away at all the pap locked away in the scribes’ booths, after having first chewed their way through the wood.

  At times the sound of a carriage could also be heard, penetrating as far as the sanctuary of Themis, the Goddess of Law, as an academic would say, along with the dim clinking of keys that seemed to come from below ground. All of this was just distant rustling, but nothing brings out the opacity of silence as much as remote noise, just as nothing brings out the darkness as much as the appearance of a light in the distance.

  Certainly anyone who had risked being in the vast Palais hall at this hour would have been seized with a dizzying terror; the outside walls were still red with the blood of the victims of September, when the staircases had seen twenty-five dead men walking; and a thickness of only several feet s
eparated the flagstones from the dungeons of the Conciergerie, peopled by the bleached bones of skeletons.

  Yet in the middle of this fearful night, in the middle of this almost solemn silence, a faint grinding noise could be detected: the door of one of the scribes’ booths was opening with a screech of hinges and a shadow, blacker than the shadow of night, slipped carefully out of the bunker.

  Then the patriot enragé, who was called monsieur sotto voce and who claimed out loud to be one Théodore, trod lightly over the uneven flagstones.

  He held a heavy pair of iron pliers in his right hand, and steadied with his left a pistol with two bullets that hung at his belt. Counting his steps as he went, he felt around with the tip of his toe for the crack that time wears between each stone join.

  “Let’s see,” he murmured, pausing. “Did I get my measurements right? Will I be strong enough? Will she have enough courage? Oh, yes! I know how courageous she can be, I’ve seen it. Oh, God! When I take her hand, when I say to her: ‘Madame, you are saved!’ …”

  He stopped dead as though crushed by the weight of such a hope.

  “Oh!” he went on, “what a reckless, insane plan! That’s what others would say as they burrowed under the covers or contented themselves with hanging around the Conciergerie dressed as lackeys. But that’s because they don’t have what it takes for such daring—and I do: it’s not just the Queen in her I want to save, it’s the woman.… So, to work! Let’s go over it one more time. Taking up the flagstone is a piece of cake; leaving it open, a gaping hole—there’s the danger, for a round could turn up.… But they never have rounds patrolling at night. No one suspects anything, for I have no accomplices, and then again, how much time do you need to run down a dark corridor when you feel as passionately as I do? I’ll be underneath her room in three minutes; in five minutes, I’ll take up the stone that serves as the hearthstone in the fireplace. She’ll hear me at work, but she has so much courage and composure, she won’t be afraid! On the contrary, she’ll know it’s her liberator coming.… She is guarded by two men; no doubt these two will come running.… Well, what are two men, after all?” said the patriot with a gloomy smile, glancing from the weapon he held in his hand to the one dangling at his waist. “Two men means two bullets—or two wallops of the iron bar. Poor blighters! … But plenty of others have died—men no more guilty than they are. Let’s go!”