When he returned he was outwardly calm. And he seemed to have forgotten completely that despite losing the beard and mustache, he could still be recognized at the Conciergerie.
He trotted behind the priest, whom two commissioners had come to get while he had been shut away shaving; and with the audacity that removes any suspicion, with the frantic and distorting bravura fever produces, the Knight entered the gate that at the time led to the courtyard of the Palais de Justice.
Like abbé Girard, he was dressed in a black frock coat, ecclesiastical habits having long been abolished.
Inside the office, they found more than fifty people, either prison employees, deputies, or commissioners, getting ready to watch the Queen pass by—either as attorneys and representatives or out of sheer bloody-minded curiosity.
His heart was beating so hard when he found himself facing the wicket that he no longer heard the priest’s conversation with the gendarmes and the concierge. But a man holding enormous scissors and a piece of freshly cut cloth bumped into Maison-Rouge on the landing. Maison-Rouge turned around and recognized the executioner.
“What are you after, citizen?” asked Sanson.
The Knight tried to suppress a shiver that ripped through his veins despite his best efforts.
“Me?” he said. “As you can see, citizen Sanson, I am with the abbé of Saint-Landry.”
“Oh, right!” replied the executioner before stepping aside and barking orders at his aide.
Meanwhile Maison-Rouge went into the registrar’s office. From there he slipped into the compartment where the two gendarmes were.
Those fine men were distraught. As dignified and arrogant as she had been with others, the condemned woman had been goodness itself with them, nothing but sweetness and light: they were more like servants to her than her wardens.
But from where he was the Knight could not see the Queen: the screen was shut. It had been opened only to allow the priest through and then closed behind him. When the Knight entered, the conversation was already under way.
“Monsieur,” the Queen was saying in her shrill and haughty voice, “since you swore an oath to the Republic, in the name of which they are putting me to death, I cannot trust in you. We no longer worship the same God!”
“Madame,” replied Girard, deeply moved by this disdainful profession of faith, “a Christian who is about to die must die without hate in her heart, and she must not turn her back on her God, in whatever form He presents Himself to her.”
Maison-Rouge stepped forward to move the screen, hoping that when she saw him, that when she understood the cause that brought him, she would change her mind about the priest. But the two gendarmes rose as one.
“But,” protested Maison-Rouge, “I’m the priest’s acolyte.…”
“Since she’s rejecting the priest,” said Duchesne, “she doesn’t need his acolyte.”
“But perhaps she will accept me,” said Maison-Rouge, raising his voice. “She can’t possibly not accept.”
But Marie Antoinette was too immersed in her fury to hear and recognize the Knight’s voice.
“Go, monsieur!” she said, addressing herself to Girard still. “Leave me, get out! Since we now live under the reign of freedom in France, I am claiming my freedom to die as I choose.”
Girard tried to resist.
“Leave me, monsieur!” she said. “I’m telling you to go!”
Girard tried to get a word in.
“It is my wish,” said the Queen with a gesture of the hand that was pure Maria Theresa.1
Girard came away. Maison-Rouge tried to see into the gap in the screen, but the prisoner had turned her back. The executioner’s aide crossed the priest’s path; he had arrived bringing ropes.
The two gendarmes pushed the Knight back as far as the door before he could utter a cry or make a move to accomplish his plan, dazed, desperate, and stunned as he was. And so he found himself with Girard in the corridor by the wicket gate. From the corridor they were pushed back as far as the office, where the news of the Queen’s rejection of the juror priest had already spread and where Marie Antoinette’s Austrian arrogance was already the subject of gross abuse for some, and for others a source of secret admiration.
“Off you go,” said Richard to the priest. “Go home, since she’s chasing you away. Let her die the way she wants to.”
“Listen,” said Mother Richard, “she’s right and I’d do the same.”
“And you’d be wrong, citizeness,” said the priest.
“Shut up, woman,” muttered the concierge, raising his eybrows. “It’s got nothing to do with you. Go, Father, go.”
“No,” Girard said. “No. I’ll go with her whether she likes it or not.
A word, just one single word, if she hears it, will remind her of her duties. Besides, the Commune gave me a mission … and I must obey the Commune.”
“So be it, but send your sacristan back, then,” barked the adjudant major commanding the armed forces, a former actor from the Comédie-Française2 named Grammont.3
The eyes of the Knight flashed like twin bolts of lightning and he automatically went for his chest. Girard knew he had a dagger under his vest and stopped him with an imploring look.
“Spare my life,” he said in a very low voice. “You haven’t got a chance, don’t throw away your own life too with hers; I’ll speak to her about you during the procession, I swear to you. I will tell her what you risked to see her one last time.”
These words sobered the young man somewhat. In any case, the usual reaction was in operation, with his whole nervous system undergoing a strange kind of collapse. This man whose will was so heroic, whose might so marvelous, had come to the end of his hope, the end of his will. He floated, irresolute and weary, defeated, in a sort of somnolent state one would have taken for an early warning sign of death.
“Yes,” he said. “This is exactly as it should be: the cross for Jesus, the scaffold for her. Gods and kings drink the chalice men offer them to the last dregs.”
With that thought in mind—so resigned, so passive—the chevalier let himself be pushed and shoved with complete acceptance, without defending himself in any way, though he did make a kind of involuntary groan. He was pushed and shoved right to the outer door without putting up any more resistance than Ophelia,4 that devotee of death, when she saw herself being washed away by the waves.
At the foot of the doors and gates of the Conciergerie, one of those terrifying crowds was milling, the sort of crowd you can’t imagine unless you’ve see one at close range at least once. Impatience dominated every other passion, and every other passion declared itself for all the world to hear, so that the combined noise was voluminous and immensely prolonged—as though all the noise of Paris and its entire population were concentrated on the quartier of the Palais de Justice.
At the head of the crowd an entire army was camped, with cannon aimed at protecting the procession festivities and making everything safe for those who had come for the entertainment.
There was no way anyone could break through this thick rampart, which was building little by little since news of the Queen’s condemnation had spread outside Paris, with patriots from the faubourgs and outlying areas joining in the fray.
Ejected from the Conciergerie, Maison-Rouge naturally found himself in the front row of soldiers. The soldiers asked him who he was. He replied that he was abbé Girard’s curate but that, having sworn allegiance to the Republic like his priest, he too had been rejected by the Queen. It was then the soldiers’ turn to push him back—to the front row of spectators.
There he had no choice but to repeat what he’d told the soldiers. Then the cry went up:
“This fellow’s just left her.… He saw her.… What did she say?… What’s she doing?… Is she still as arrogant as ever?… Has she finally caved in?… Is she weeping?…”
The Knight answered all these questions in a voice that was weak, gentle, and affable all at once, as though this voice was the final
manifestation of the life hanging by his lips.
His response was the simple truth: but this truth was a eulogy to Antoinette’s backbone, and what he said with the simplicity and faith of an evangelist threw anguish and remorse into more than one heart.
When he spoke of the little Dauphin and of Madame Royale, of this Queen without a throne, this wife without a husband, this mother without her children, this woman finally alone and abandoned, without a friend among all the butchers, more than one brow, here and there, became veiled in sadness, more than one tear sprang up, furtive and burning, in eyes previously gleaming with hate.
Eleven o’clock rang out from the Palais clock and all noise ceased on the instant. A hundred thousand people counted each stroke of the hour as it called out and was answered by the beat of their heart.
Then the last vibration of the final stroke died in the ether and a great commotion was heard behind the doors at the very moment that a cart, coming from the quai aux Fleurs, where the flower market was, carved its way through the throng of spectators and guards and parked at the foot of the steps.
Soon the Queen appeared at the top of the immense flight of steps. Every possible passion was concentrated in the crowd’s eyes; their breathing was shallow and quick.
Her hair was cut short; most of it had gone white during her captivity and this silvery tone made her pearly white skin all the more delicate and luminous, made the beauty of this Daughter of the Caesars5 almost celestial in this, her final hour.
She was dressed in white and her hands were tied behind her back.
When she showed herself at the top of the stairs with abbé Girard on her right, accompanying her against her will, and the executioner on her left, both men dressed in black, a murmur ran throughout the crowd—one that God alone, who can see into men’s hearts, could understand and formulate as truth.
At that moment a man passed between Marie Antoinette and the executioner. It was Grammont, intent on pointing out to the Queen the ignoble cart.
In spite of herself, the Queen took a step back in shock.
“Get in,” said Grammont.
Everyone heard him; you could have heard a pin drop in that moment, so great was the emotion.
Then they saw the blood rush to the Queen’s cheeks and right to the roots of her hair. Immediately afterward her face became deathly pale again.
Her white lips parted.
“Why a cart for me,” she said, “when the King went to the scaffold in his carriage?”
Abbé Girard then said a few words to her in a very low voice. No doubt he was battling this final cry of royal pride in the condemned woman.
The Queen closed her mouth and faltered. Sanson held both arms out to steady her, but she stood up straight and tall again before he could touch her and swiftly descended the steps, while the aide righted a wooden footstool at the back of the cart. The Queen climbed up, the priest climbed up after her. Sanson made them both sit down.
When the cart began to pull away, the people surged forward in one tremendous movement. But since the soldiers weren’t sure what the movement meant, they promptly joined forces to hold the crowd back as best they could. As a result, there was a great empty space between the cart and the front rows of onlookers. Within this space a mournful howling rent the air.
The Queen leapt to her feet and scanned the sea of bodies. Then she saw her dog, missing for two months; her little dog, who had not been able to get into the Conciergerie with her and who now hurled himself at the cart, despite all the yelling and kicking and shoving. But almost immediately poor Black, exhausted, emaciated, broken in spirit, disappeared under the horses’ hooves.
The Queen watched him; she could not speak, for her voice was drowned by the din; she could not point him out, for her hands were tied; and even if she had been able to point to him, even if she had been able to be heard, she would no doubt have pleaded for him in vain.
She lost sight of him for a moment, but when she spotted him again he was in the arms of a pale young man, high above the crowd, standing on a cannon, who, made taller by some ineffable exultation, saluted her, pointing heavenward.
Marie Antoinette also looked up to the heavens and sweetly smiled.
The Knight of Maison-Rouge gave out a groan, as though this smile had pierced his heart like a knife, and as the cart turned into the pont-au-Change, he fell back into the crowd and vanished.
49
THE SCAFFOLD
At the place de la Révolution, two men were waiting together with their backs against a streetlamp. What they were waiting for, like the rest of the crowd—which had earlier split among those who had gone to the Palais de Justice, those who had gone to the place de la Révolution, and those who had fanned out to line the whole of the route between those two squares—was for the Queen to arrive at the great death-deliverer. That instrument was already worn, by rain and sun, by the hand of the butcher, and—horrible to say!—by contact with its victims; it dominated with sinister arrogance all the heads below as a queen dominates her people.
Noticeably pale and angry-looking, the two men standing there, talking fitfully in subdued voices, were Maurice and Lorin. Oblivious of the crowd, though in such a way as to make everyone envy them, they were quietly continuing a conversation that was not the least interesting of all the conversations snaking through the huddled groups of spectators, who, as though charged with electricity, were swaying in a human sea that ran from the pont-au-Change to the place de la Révolution.
The idea just expressed, of the guillotine’s dominating all heads, had struck them both.
“See how the ugly monster raises its red arms!” Maurice said. “You’d think it was calling us and leering through some ghastly maw.”
“Ah!” said Lorin. “I must admit I’m not of that school of poetry that sees everything in red. I see things in rose, for my part, and even at the foot of this hideous machine, I’d still sing and have hope. Dum spiro, spero—As I live, I hope.”
“Do you still have hope now that they’re killing women?”
“Ah, Maurice!” said Lorin. “Son of the Revolution, don’t renounce the mother who bore you. Maurice! Stay a true and loyal patriot. The woman who is about to die is not just any woman, Maurice. The woman who is about to die is the bad genie of France.”
“Oh! It’s not her I feel sorry for. It’s not her I weep for!” cried Maurice.
“I know: it’s Geneviève.”
“Ah!” cried Maurice. “You know, there’s one thought that’s driving me mad, and that is that Geneviève is guillotine fodder in the hands of those bastards Hébert and Fouquier-Tinville: the very men who sent poor Héloïse here and now are sending the high and mighty Marie Antoinette.”
“But that’s exactly why I still have hope,” said Lorin. “When the people in their rage have made a grand meal of both tyrants, they’ll be satisfied, for a while at least, like a boa constrictor that takes three months to digest what it has devoured. Then they won’t gobble anyone else up and, as the prophets of the suburbs say, the smallest tidbits will put them off.”
“Lorin, Lorin,” said Maurice, “I’m not as cynical as you are! Just between you and me—though I’m ready to say it out loud—I hate the new queen, the one who looks set to succeed the Austrian woman whom she is about to destroy. It’s a sad queen whose purple robe is made of a fresh supply of blood each day and who has Sanson for prime minister.”
“Bah! We’ll escape her clutches!”
“I don’t think that for a second,” said Maurice, shaking his head. “You see how to avoid being arrested at home, we have no other recourse but to stay out in the street.”
“So what! We can leave Paris, nothing’s stopping us. So let’s not bewail our fate. My uncle’s waiting for us at Saint-Omer—money, passports, the lot. No gendarme is going to arrest us. What do you think? We only stay because we want to.”
“No, that’s rubbish and you know it, my excellent friend, devoted soul that you are.… You stay b
ecause I want to stay.”
“And you want to stay because you want to find Geneviève. Well then, what could be more simple, more right and natural? You think she’s in jail, which is more than likely. You want to look out for her, and to do that you can’t leave Paris.”
Maurice gave a sigh. It was obvious his thoughts were elsewhere.
“You remember the death of Louis XVI?” he asked. “I can still see myself, wan with emotion and pride. I was one of the leaders of the pack I’m hiding among today. I was higher and mightier at the foot of this scaffold than the King who mounted it ever had been. What a difference, Lorin! Who’d have thought it? And when you think it has only taken nine months to bring about such a terrible turnaround!”
“Nine months of love, Maurice! … ‘Love, you sank Troy!’ ”
Maurice sighed once more; his vagabond thoughts took another turn, scanned another horizon.
“That poor Maison-Rouge,” he murmured. “This is a sad day for him.”
“Alas!” said Lorin. “Do you want to know what I think is the saddest thing about revolutions, Maurice?”
“Yes.”
“It’s that your enemies are often people you’d like to have as friends, and your friends people …”
“There’s one thing I have trouble believing,” Maurice cut in.
“Which is?”
“That he won’t come up with some plan, crazy as it may be, to save the Queen.”
“One man against a hundred thousand?”
“I said, crazy as it may be … Me, I know that, to save Geneviève …”
Lorin frowned. “I say again, Maurice, you’re losing the plot. Even if you had to save Geneviève, you wouldn’t become a bad citizen. But that’s enough of that; people can hear us, Maurice, they’re listening. Hey! Heads are starting to sway; wait, there’s citizen Sanson’s valet standing up on his basket and peering into the distance. The Austrian woman is heading for us.”
Knight of Maison-Rouge Page 40