The Knight of Maison-Rouge
Page 25
“Yes, citizen,” said Agesilaus. “It makes you tremble in your bed, it does. Just thinking about it gives good patriots goose bumps.”
“So what sort of plot was it?” asked Maurice.
“The Austrian woman nearly got away.”
“Hmph!” Maurice snorted, starting to get interested.
“It seems,” said Agesilaus, “that the Widow Capet was involved with the Tison girl they’re going to guillotine today. She asked for it, poor thing.”
“And how could the Queen be mixed up with that girl?” asked Maurice, who could feel himself breaking out in a sweat.
“It was all done with a carnation. Imagine, citizen, they passed her the instructions in a carnation!”
“In a carnation! … Who did?”
“Monsieur, the Knight of … wait a sec … You know the name as well as anything.… I never can remember names.… A Knight of Château … Strike! I’m a goose! There are no more châteaux.…1 A Knight of Maison …”
“Maison-Rouge?”
“That’s it!”
“It can’t be.”
“What do you mean, it can’t be? I’m telling you they found a trapdoor, an underground tunnel, coaches.”
“Hold your horses—you haven’t told me a thing yet.”
“Oh, well then, I’ll tell you all about it, then.”
“Get on with it: if it’s a tall tale, at least it’s a good one.”
“No, citizen, it’s not a tall tale, not by a long shot, and the proof is I got it from the citizen porter. The aristocrats dug a mine; this mine started at the rue de la Corderie and went as far as the cellar of the citizeness Plumeau’s canteen, and even she was nearly compromised for complicity, was citizeness Plumeau. You know her, I hope?”
“Yes, I do,” said Maurice, “but go on.”
“Well, the Widow Capet was supposed to get away through this underground tunnel. She already had one foot on the stairs going down, can you imagine! It was citizen Simon who yanked her back by her dress. Hold on, they’re sounding the alarm in town and the summons in the sections. Can you hear the drums over there? They say the
Prussians are at Dammartin and that their reconnaissance is practically at the border.”
In all this barrage of words—some true, some false; some possible, some absurd—Maurice more or less got ahold of the main thread. Everything began with that carnation given to the Queen under his own nose and bought by him from the unfortunate flower girl. That carnation contained the instructions of a plot that had just been dismantled, more or less precisely as elaborated by Agesilaus.
That moment the sound of the drums drew near and Maurice heard shouting in the street:
“Major plot uncovered in the Temple by citizen Simon! Major plot in support of the Widow Capet uncovered in the Temple!”
“Yes, yes,” said Maurice, “it’s just as I thought. There is some truth in all that. And Lorin’s in the middle of these jubilant hordes.… He could very well hold out his hand to that girl and get himself hacked to pieces.…”
Maurice grabbed his hat, buckled on his sword, and was in the street in two bounds.
“Where is he?” Maurice wondered. “No doubt on the road to the Conciergerie.”
And so he bolted off toward the quai de l’Horloge.
At the far end of the quai de la Mégisserie, pikes and bayonets caught his eye, spiking the air over a mob of people’s heads. He thought he could make out the uniform of a National Guard in the middle of what was clearly a hostile crowd jostling around him. He ran, his heart lurching, toward the mob blocking the waterfront.
The National Guard pressed by the troop from Marseilles was Lorin … and he was pale, his mouth tight, eyes glowering menacingly, hand on the hilt of his sword, busy calculating where to place the blows he was preparing to strike. Two paces from Lorin was Simon, cackling away with a spine-chilling sound and pointing out Lorin to the Marseillais and the rabble at large.
“Hey! Hey! You see that guy there? He’s one of the aristocrats I flushed out of the Temple yesterday! He’s one of the ones who like to put mail in carnations. He’s the accomplice of the Tison girl, who’ll be coming by shortly. So, you see him? He’s taking a quiet stroll along the Seine while his accomplice is about to walk to the guillotine. And maybe she was more than his accomplice, eh? Maybe she was his mistress and he came here to bid her farewell—or try and help her escape!”
Lorin was not a man to put up with this sort of talk for long. He drew his sword from its scabbard. At the same time, the crowd parted before a man barreling his way into them headfirst, knocking three or four onlookers aside with his broad shoulders, just as they were gearing up to have a go at Lorin.
“You’ll be happy now, Simon,” said Maurice. “I bet you were sorry I wasn’t here before with my friend so you could do a proper job as the Great Denouncer. Denounce away, Simon, denounce! I’m here now.”
“My word, yes,” said Simon with his hideous sneer, “and you’re here just in time. This one,” he said to the mob, “is the handsome Maurice Lindey. He was accused at the same time as the Tison girl, but he managed to wriggle out of it because he’s rich.”
“String ‘em up, string ‘em up!” cried the imports from Marseilles.
“Go on, just you try it!” said Maurice.
With that he took a step forward and pricked one of the most savage of the cutthroats right in the middle of the forehead as though testing his aim; the man was immediately blinded by blood.
“Murder!” he screamed.
The Marseillais put down their pikes and took up their machetes or loaded their pistols. The crowd scattered in fear, leaving the two friends isolated and exposed, like a double target to be attacked by all comers.
They gave each other one last sublime smile, for they fully expected to be devoured by this storm of iron and flame threatening to break over them, when suddenly the door of the house they had backed into swung open and a swarm of young muscadins in fancy regalia, every one of them armed with a saber and every one of them sporting a pair of pistols at his belt, fell upon the Marseillais and began to wade into them.
“Hooray!” cried Lorin and Maurice as one, recharged by this shot in the arm, without reflecting for a moment that by fighting in the ranks of the muscadins they were proving Simon’s accusations true.
“Hooray!”
But if they weren’t thinking of their salvation, someone else was doing it for them. A short young man of twenty-five or twenty-six, with blue eyes and the hands of a woman, began wielding a sapper’s saber with great vigor, although he looked too fragile to be able to lift the thing. Seeing that Maurice and Lorin had failed to flee through the door he seemed to have left open deliberately and were fighting by his side, he turned to them and spoke in a lowered voice:
“Get away through the door; what we’re doing here doesn’t concern you—you are compromising yourselves for no reason.”
The two friends hesitated.
“Get back!” he cried to Maurice. “No patriots with us. Municipal officer Lindey, only aristocrats here, please!”
At that name and at the incredible gall of a man who openly boasted of belonging to a caste that at the time spelled certain death, the crowd gave out a great roar.
But the young blond man and three or four of his foppish friends, far from being daunted by the mob, pushed Maurice and Lorin into the alley and shut the door on them before turning back to throw themselves into the fray with gusto once more. By then the numbers had swelled due to the approach of the cart.
Miraculously saved, Maurice and Lorin looked at each other in amazement. The exit they had been pushed through looked built for the purpose. It led to a courtyard with a small door hidden on the far side, giving onto the rue Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.
At that moment, a detachment of gendarmes appeared from the Pont-au-Change and would soon have swept through the quai, despite the fact that from the cross street where our friends were a fierce battle could be hear
d raging.
The gendarmes preceded the cart that was taking poor Héloïse to the guillotine.
“Faster!” cried a voice. “Faster!”
The cart bolted forward at a gallop. Lorin could see the poor girl, standing, a smile on her lips and a glimmer of pride in her eye. But he could not even exchange a wave with her; she passed without seeing him through a crazed storm of people, all shouting:
“Death to the aristocrat! Death!”
The noise grew more distant until it receded as far as the Tuileries. At the same time, the door Maurice and Lorin had initially taken opened again and three or four muscadins, their clothes torn and bloodstained, emerged. They were probably all that remained of the small troop.
The young man with blond hair emerged last.
“Alas!” he said. “It looks like our cause is doomed.”
And throwing his chipped and bloody sword down on the ground, he rushed toward the rue des Lavandières.
28
THE KNIGHT OF MAISON-ROUGE
Maurice hurried back to the section to bring a complaint against Simon. It is true that before separating from Maurice Lorin had come up with a more effective plan, which was to assemble a few Thermopylae members, wait till Simon was due to leave the Temple, and kill him in an orderly battle. But Maurice put paid to the scheme.
“You’re finished,” he said to Lorin, “once you descend to battery. We’ll crush that bastard Simon all right, but let’s crush him legally. Lawyers would have a field day with him.”
And so Maurice went off to the section next morning to make his official complaint. He was perfectly stunned when the president of the section turned a deaf ear, declaring himself unable to act and saying he could not take sides between two good citizens both motivated by love of the nation.
“Right!” said Maurice. “Now I know what you have to do to merit the reputation of being a good citizen. Ha! All you have to do is gather a bunch of thugs together to assassinate a man you don’t like! You call that being motivated by love of the nation? I’m quickly coming round to Lorin’s view, which I was silly enough to rule out. From today I’ll practice patriotism as you understand it, and I’ll start by experimenting on Simon.”
“Citizen Maurice,” replied the president, “Simon may well be less in the wrong than you in this matter. He uncovered a plot without being called upon to do so by the terms of his employment. Furthermore, you have either chance or deliberate dealings—which? That we don’t know; we just know you have them—with the enemies of our nation.”
“Me!” cried Maurice. “Ah, this is novel, I’ll grant you that. And with whom then, citizen president?”
“With citizen Maison-Rouge.”
“Me?” said Maurice, stunned. “Me? I have dealings with the Knight of Maison-Rouge? I don’t even know him, I have never …”
“You were seen talking to him.”
“Me?”
“Shaking his hand.”
“Me?”
“Yes—you.”
“Where? When? … Citizen president, you are making it up!” said Maurice, carried away by the conviction of his innocence.
“You’re taking your zeal for the nation a bit far, citizen Maurice,” said the president. “And you’ll be sorry in a moment that you said what you just said, when I give you proof that I’ve spoken nothing but the truth. Here are three different reports accusing you.”
“Well, you wouldn’t credit it!” said Maurice. “Do you really think I’m naïve enough to believe in your Knight of Maison-Rouge?”
“And why wouldn’t you believe in him?”
“Because he is a conspirator bogeyman you always keep up your sleeve, ready to overpower your enemies with talk of some dreadful plot or other.”
“Read the denunciations.”
“I won’t read anything,” said Maurice. “I protest that I have never seen the Knight of Maison-Rouge and that I have never spoken to him. Let anyone who doesn’t believe my word of honor come forward and tell me to my face. I know what I’ll say to him.”
The president gave a shrug. Maurice, not wanting to be outdone by anyone, did the same.
There was something sinister and reserved about the rest of the session, and afterward the president, a brave and good patriot who had been elevated to the first rank of the district by the vote of his fellow citizens, approached Maurice:
“Come with me, Maurice, I’ve got something to say to you.”
Maurice followed the president, who led him to a small cabinet adjacent to the room in which meetings were held. Once they were there, he looked him in the face and put his hand on his shoulder:
“Maurice, I knew and esteemed your father, which means that I esteem you and feel great fondness for you. Believe me, Maurice, you are running a grave danger if you let yourself lose faith—that’s the first sign of decadence in a truly revolutionary mind. Maurice, my friend, once you lose faith, you lose faithfulness. You don’t believe in the enemies of the nation: from that stems the fact that you brush past them without seeing them and you become the instrument of their plots without realizing it.”
“What the devil!” said Maurice. “I know myself, I’m a man who acts from the heart, a zealous patriot. But my zeal doesn’t make me a fanatic: there are twenty so-called plots that the Republic all attributes to the same man. I’d like to see the author of these plots, once and for all.”
“You don’t believe the conspirators exist, Maurice?” said the president. “Well, then, tell me, do you believe in the red carnation for which they guillotined the Tison girl yesterday?”
Maurice started.
“Do you believe in the underground tunnel dug under the Temple garden, running from citizeness Plumeau’s cellar to a certain house in the rue de la Corderie?”
“No,” said Maurice.
“Well, then, do as doubting Thomas did and go and see for yourself.”
“I’m not on guard duty at the Temple and they probably won’t let me in.”
“Anyone can get into the Temple now.”
“How come?”
“Read this report; since you’re so incredulous, I’ll only proceed further by showing you official documentation.”
“What!” said Maurice, reading the report. “It’s gone this far!”
“Keep reading.”
“They’re taking the Queen to the Conciergerie?”
“What of it?” said the president.
“Oh! Oh!” Maurice groaned.
“Do you think it’s on the basis of some dream, what you call imagination, some nonsense, that the Committee of Public Safety has adopted such a serious measure?”
“This measure has been adopted, but it won’t be carried out, like a whole host of measures I’ve seen taken, that’s all.…”
“Read to the end,” said the president.
And he handed Maurice one last report.
“The receipt of Richard, jailer of the Conciergerie!” cried Maurice. “She was committed to prison there at two o’clock this morning.” This time Maurice remained thoughtful.
“The Commune, you know,” the president continued, “acts on the bigger picture. It has carved out a broad and straight course for itself; its measures are not childish games, you know; it has put into practice Cromwell’s1 dictum Kings should be hit only on the head. Read this secret police memo.”
Maurice read:
Given that we are certain that the former Knight of Maison-Rouge is in Paris; that he has been seen about town in sundry places; that he has left traces of his passage in several plots happily dismantled, I invite all the heads of sections to redouble their vigilance.
“What do you make of that?” said the president. “I’m forced to believe you, citizen president,” cried Maurice. He continued to read:
Profile of the Knight of Maison-Rouge: five foot three inches tall, blond hair, blue eyes, straight nose, chestnut-colored beard, round chin, softly spoken, hands of a woman. Thirty-five to thirty-six years old.
“Good grief!” murmured Maurice. “Could that be him? In that case, the denunciation that says I’ve been seen talking to him would not be wrong. But I don’t remember shaking his hand.”
“Well then, Maurice,” said the president, “what do you say to all that now, my friend?”
“I say I believe you,” replied Maurice, slipping into a contemplative melancholy, for without knowing what evil influence was making his life so sad, he had felt gloom descending all around him for some little time now.
“Don’t toy with your popularity like this, Maurice,” the president advised. “Today popularity means life. Watch out: unpopularity means suspicion of treason, and citizen Lindey can’t be suspected of being a traitor.”
Maurice had nothing with which to counter a doctrine he recognized as his own. He thanked his old friend and left the section.
“Ah,” he murmured, “I need to breathe for a bit. That’s enough suspicion and combat for one day. Let’s take the straight road to rest, innocence, and joy. Let’s go directly to Geneviève.”
And so Maurice opted for the way to the old rue Saint-Jacques. When he arrived at the master tanner’s, Dixmer and Morand were supporting Geneviève, who had fallen victim to an attack of nerves. Instead of allowing him free passage as usual, a domestic servant barred his way.
“Announce me anyway,” said Maurice anxiously. “If Dixmer can’t see me, I’ll leave.”
The servant went into the little pavilion while Maurice stayed in the garden. It seemed to him that something strange was going on in the house. The tannery workers were not at their work, scurrying instead across the garden looking deeply anxious. Dixmer himself came to the door.
“Come in,” he said, “dear Maurice, come in. You aren’t one of those to whom the door is closed.”
“But what’s going on? “the young man asked.
“Geneviève is ill,” said Dixmer. “Worse than ill, she’s delirious.”