And he admitted to Frank Harris that even in his old age writing remained for him ‘horribly difficult’. How difficult, is amusingly illustrated by an incident related by the sculptor, Bourdelle. Whilst working on his bronze bust of France, Bourdelle had one of those spells of discouragement which every artist knows. France then showed him one of his own manuscripts, its pages covered with erasions, alterations, corrections, and whispered to Bourdelle: ‘Only idiots think themselves perfect.’
Though France took special care to avoid repetition of a word or words, he knew well what he was doing – and what he was making Élodie Blaise do in the eyes of the reader – when he made her use the same words to her new lover as she had used to Gamelin.
This search for perfection had its dangers: it was, to some, too successful. Critics have found his novels too well written, almost monotonous in their perfection. Yet the testimony of others far outweighs them. Maurice Barrés1 wrote:’ Say what you like, first and foremost Anatole France has preserved the French language.’ And in France’s own lifetime, Gregh2 wrote: ‘He is already a classic, and with reason. No one has ever written better in the French language.’
The paradox of France, the man, is thus reflected in his books. For though their content and thought became increasingly of the Left in their social and political implications, his style in its constant defence and maintenance of all that was best and traditional in the French language increasingly belonged to the Right. This paradox is aptly epitomized in an anecdote concerning Emma Laprevotte. After twenty years as the dominant voice in his country’s literature, France had become the ‘Grand Old Man’ of literature. Literary pilgrimages were made to the house, La Bechellerie, near Tours, where he had made his last home and where he was always addressed as ‘Master’ by his admirers. Emma Laprevotte, who had once been Anatole France’s mistress’s maid and now was Madame France, would mutter on hearing this: ‘Master 1 Master! Why do you call him Master? He’s only master of his soup, when he eats it, and even then only when it’s in his mouth.’
The reaction against him was more against the inflated reputation bestowed upon him in his lifetime than against his books. In these troubled, confused, permissive times, no books would be more appreciated than his if their intelligence and humour were more widely known.
Historical Note
This novel begins in April 1793, just before the final crisis in the struggle for power between the Girondists and the Jacobins.
The Girondists, so named because many of their members in the Convention came from the Department of the Gironde, had been the guiding power in the course of the Revolution during the previous three years. But, with the need to repel the invading armies of Austria and Prussia and to subdue the revolt against the Revolution in La Vendée, the people of Paris, the sans-culottes, began, through their elected representatives in the Paris Commune, to accuse the Girondists of ‘moderatism’ in the prosecution of the war, and even of treason after General Dumouriez, who had been a Girondist minister, had deserted to the enemy. It had become known, also, that several of the leading Girondists had tried to save the King from the guillotine.
All this increased the influence of the Jacobin Club, the main stronghold of the Republicans led by Danton, Robespierre and Marat, over the people of Paris who, through their Paris Commune, constituted a force which could make or break the ministers in power at the National Convention.
When, therefore, the Girondists using their majority in the Convention had Marat impeached before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which the Convention had instituted just before the novel begins and which, with its arbitrary power to impose death-penalties, was to become the main instrument of the Terror, the sans-culottes of Paris celebrated Marat’s acquittal by a popular insurrection, which Anatole France omits from the novel. This was followed by the troops of the Paris Commune besieging the Convention and refusing to allow its members to leave until they had agreed to the arrest of the Girondist ministers.
The Girondists’ hold over the Convention was thus broken and replaced by that of the Jacobins. How the Jacobins, led by Danton and then by Robespierre, dealt with the critical situation which faced them and France, how they saved Europe from despotism by means of despotism and were themselves finally destroyed, is the essential background to this novel.
THE GODS WILL HAVE BLOOD
(Les Dieux ont soif)
I
VERY early one morning, Évariste Gamelin – artist, pupil of David,* member of the Section du Pont-Neuf, formerly Section Henri IV – was to be seen approaching the ancient church of the Barnabites, which had served for three years, since the 21st May, 1790, as the meeting-place for the general assembly of the Section.* The church towered high above a pinched gloomy square close to the iron-barred Palais de Justice.* On its classical façade, decorated with inverted corbels and ornamental capitals, battered by weather and mutilated by man, the symbols of religion had been smashed with hammers and above the door was inscribed in black letters the slogan of the Republic: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – or Death’.
Évariste Gamelin strode purposefully up the nave: the arches, which for so long had heard the holy offices of the day chanted by the surplice-clad brothers of the community of St Paul, saw now the red-capped patriots gather to elect the municipal magistrates and to discuss the daily affairs of the Section. The saints, pulled from their niches, had been replaced by the busts of Brutus, Rousseau and Le Peltier. The tablet of the Rights of Man stood on the plundered altar.
In this nave on two evenings each week the public meetings were held, from five o’clock until eleven o’clock. The pulpit, decorated with the tricolour, served as a rostrum for the speakers’ harangues. Opposite, on the Epistle side, for the women and children who came to these gatherings in quite large numbers, rose a high, rough-planked platform.
On this particular morning there was seated before a desk at the foot of the altar, wearing his red cap and carmagnole,* one of the twelve members of the Committee of Surveillance – the Citizen Dupont aîné, a joiner from the Place de Thionville. On the desk were some glasses and a bottle, an inkwell and a pen, and a sheaf of papers containing the text of a petition urging the Convention to expel forthwith the twenty-one unworthy members.
Évariste Gamelin picked up the pen and signed. The working-class magistrate said,
‘I knew you’d come and put your name to it, Citizen Gamelin. Made of the right stuff, you are. That’s the trouble with this Section; there aren’t enough like you. Lukewarm most of them. No moral backbone. I’ve put it to the Committee of Surveillance that all those who don’t sign this petition don’t get their certificate of citizenship.’
‘I’d sign with my blood,’ said Gamelin, ‘to get these Federalist* traitors banished. They were behind Marat’s impeachment. Let them all be done away with.’
‘Apathy – that’s what’s wrong with this Section,’ Dupont aine went on. ‘We’ve nine hundred citizens with the right to vote, yet there aren’t fifty who attend the Assembly. Yesterday, there were only twenty-eight of us.’
‘Then the citizens will have to be made to come,’ said Gamelin. ‘Fine them, if they don’t.’
The joiner frowned and said quckily, ‘Ah, yes! But if they all came, the militant patriots would be outnumbered… Come, Citizen Gamelin, won’t you join me in a glass of wine to the health of all good sans-culottes?…’*
Gamelin turned away. On the walls of the church, on the Gospel side, were the words: ‘Comité civil, Comité de surveillance, Comité de bienfaisance’. Beside them had been painted in black a hand whose forefinger pointed along the passage leading to the cloisters. A few yards beyond this passage, he came to the door to what had been the sacristy and on which was inscribed: ‘Comité militaire’.
Gamelin pushed it open and found the secretary of the Committee seated writing at a large table laden with books, papers, steel ingots, cartridges and samples of soils containing saltpetre.
‘Salut, Citizen Trube
rt. How are you?’
‘Me?… I couldn’t be better.’
The secretary of the Military Committee, Fortuné Trubert, invariably made this reply to those who troubled themselves about his health, less to inform them of his welfare than to cut short all conversation on the subject. At the age of twenty-eight, he was dry-skinned, thin-haired, hectic-cheeked and bent-shouldered. An optician on the Quai des Orfèvres, in 1791 he had given up the very old house he owned to an ageing clerk so that he could devote himself to his municipal duties. He had inherited from a charming mother – who had died when he was twenty and whose memory was still cherished by a few old men of the district – her beautiful, gentle, yet smouldering eyes, her pallor and her timidity. To his father, who had been carried off by the same illness before he was thirty, he owed his industry and integrity. Without ceasing writing, he said:
‘And you, citizen, how are you?’
‘Quite well. Anything new?’
‘Not a thing. As you see: all’s quiet here.’
‘And the situation?’
‘The situation is still the same.’
The situation was disastrous. The first army of the Republic surrounded at Mayence; Valenciennes besieged; Fonteray taken by the Vendéens; Lyons in revolt; insurrection throughout the Cévennes with the frontier open to the Spaniards; two-thirds of France either invaded or in revolt; Paris within reach of the Austrian cannon, without money, without bread.
Fortuné Trubert went on writing calmly. The Sections had been instructed by decree of the Commune to arrange the levy of twelve thousand men for the Vendée and he was making out orders for the enrolling and arming of the contingent that the Section Pont-Neuf, ci-devant Section Henri IV, was required to contribute. All muskets had to be handed over to the requisitioned men. The National Guard of the Section would be armed with pikes and fowling pieces.
‘I’ve brought you the list of the bells which must be sent to the Luxembourg for converting into cannon,’ said Gamelin.
Évariste Gamelin, though without a penny to his name, was on the list of militant members of the Section; the law allowed this privilege only to citizens rich enough to pay a contribution equivalent to the value of three days’ work; and a further ten days were demanded for an elector to be eligible for office. But the Section Pont-Neuf, obsessed with equality and jealous for its autonomy, held that every citizen who had paid for his National Guard uniform out of his own pocket should be eligible to vote and to hold office. Thus it was that Gamelin was a militant citizen of his Section and a member of the Military Committee.
Fortuné Trubert put down his pen.
‘Citizen Évariste,’ he said, using the familiar form of address now compulsory, ‘kindly go to the Convention and ask for orders to be sent us for the digging up of the cellar floors and for the washing of the soil and flagstones for saltpetre. It’s not enough to have cannons. Cannons need gunpowder.’
A little hunchback, pen behind ear and papers in hand, entered the former sacristy. He was the Citizen Beauvisage, of the Committee of Surveillance.
‘Citizens,’ he said, ‘we’ve had bad news: Custine has evacuated Landau’.
‘Custine’s a traitor!’ exclaimed Gamelin.
‘He will be guillotined,’ Beauvisage said.
Trubert, in his usual gasping voice, reacted with his usual calm:
‘The Convention has not created a Committee of Public Safety for nothing. Custine’s conduct will be the subject of an inquiry. But whether an incompetent or a traitor, he will be replaced by a general resolute for victory, and ça ira!’*
He leafed through some papers, glancing over them with his tired eyes:
‘In order that our soldiers may do their duty without any unease or worry, they must feel sure that those they have left behind them are being cared for. If you are of this opinion, Citizen Gamelin, you will demand with me, at the next assembly, that the Benevolence Committee joins with the Military Committee to help indigent families which have a relative in the army.’
He smiled and hummed:
‘Ça ira! ça ira!…’
Working twelve and fourteen hours a day at his plain wood table in defence of his imperilled country, this humble secretary of one of the Section’s committees saw no disproportion between the immensity of the task and the paucity of his means, so much did he feel himself at one with the common effort of all patriots, so much did he identify himself with the nation, so much was his own life part of the life of a great people. He was one of those who after each defeat prepared, with fantastic patience, the impossible yet certain victory. For victory had to be theirs. These little men, who had demolished the throne itself and turned upside down the old order of things, this Trubert, a little optical mechanic, this Évariste Gamelin, an unknown artist, did not expect the least mercy from their enemies. For them the alternatives were victory or death. Hence their serene fanaticism.
II
ON leaving the church of the Barnabites, Évariste Gamelin proceeded towards the Place Dauphine, renamed the Place de Thionville in honour of that impregnable city.
Situated in the most frequented quarter of Paris, this square had lost for nearly a century now the stately beauty it had once possessed: the large houses on three of its sides, built uniformly of red brick surmounted by a chain-like series of white stone arches for the luxurious splendour of officers of State in the reign of Henri IV, had had their imposing slate roofs replaced by two or three miserable plaster storeys, or had even been demolished for the ignoble construction of shabby whitewashed houses, and there could now be seen only a series of irregular, squalid, poverty-stricken façades, pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows brightened by flowerpots, birdcages and washing hung out to dry. A multitude of working people lived there: jewellers, metal workers, clock-makers, opticians, printers, laundresses, seamstresses, milliners and a few elderly lawyers who had not been swept away in the tempest which had destroyed the royal courts of justice.
It was morning and it was spring time. The early sunshine, heady as sweet wine, laughed against the walls and slid gaily through garret windows. The sash of every casement window had been raised, and below each could be seen a housewife’s dishevelled head. The clerk of the Revolutionary Tribunal, stepping out of his house on his way to work, patted the cheeks of the children playing under the trees as he passed them. From the direction of the Pont-Neuf could be heard the crier’s voice denouncing the treason of Dumouriez.
Évariste Gamelin lived on the side of the square next to the Quai de l’Horloge in a house dating from the time of Henry IV which would still have had a handsome appearance but for a small, tiled attic which had been added during the reign of the last but one of the tyrants. To adapt this building, owned by some former dignitary, to the convenience of the bourgeois and artisan families which it now housed, numerous partitions and false floors had been constructed. This was why the Citizen Remacle, concierge-cum-tailor, lived in an entresol as confined in height as it was in width, where he could be seen sitting cross-legged on his work-bench, his bent head almost touching the ceiling, stitching away at a National Guard uniform, whilst his wife whose stove had no chimney apart from the well of the staircase, poisoned the other tenants with the reek of her stews and fried fish, and whilst their little daughter Joséphine, her cheeks smeared with molasses and beautiful as a little angel, sat in the open doorway playing with Mouton, the joiner’s dog. The Citizeness Remacle, as big-hearted as her back was broad and her bosom ample, was thought to bestow her favours on her neighbour, the Citizen Dupont the elder, one of the dozen members of the Committee of Surveillance. Her husband, at least, strongly suspected it and the whole house used to be filled with the noise of their alternate quarrels and reconciliations. The upper floors of the house were occupied by the Citizen Chaperon, gold- and silversmith, who had his shop on the Quai de l’Horloge, by a health inspector, by a lawyer, by a gold-beater and by several employees at the Palais de Justice.
Évariste Game
lin climbed the old-fashioned staircase as far as the fourth and last floor where he had his studio and a bedroom for his mother. Here ended the wooden stairs laid with tiles which succeeded the grand stone staircase of the first floors. A ladder, fastened to the wall, led to an attic. At that moment, climbing down it, was a large man, rather elderly but with a handsome pink and florid face, who was holding with difficulty an enormous package of wares, yet singing to himself, ‘I have gone and lost my servant!’ He stopped his song to bid a polite good day to Gamelin who greeted him fraternally and helped him down with his package, for which the old man thanked him.
‘You see here,’ he said, taking up again his burden, ‘some puppets I’m going to sell to a toy merchant in the Rue de la Loi. I’ve a whole village of people in there. They are my creatures. From me they have received a perishable body, free from joy and sorrow. I’ve not given them the power of thought since I’m a benevolent God.’
He was the Citizen Brotteaux, ci-devant aristocrat and collector of revenue and taxes.* His father, having enriched himself by the latter means, had bought himself the former: a title. In the good old days, Maurice Brotteaux had styled himself Monsieur des Ilettes and had given elegant suppers which the fair Madame de Rochemaure, wife of a Public Prosecutor, had often enlivened with her bright glances – a finished gentlewoman whose loyal fidelity was never impugned so long as the Revolution left Maurice Brotteaux in possession of his offices and emoluments, his hotel, his estates and his noble name. The Revolution swept all of them away. Now he had to earn his living by sitting under the arches of doors painting portraits, by making pancakes and fritters on the Quai de la Mégisserie, by composing speeches for members of the Assembly, by giving dancing lessons to the young citizenesses. At the moment, up in his garret which could be reached only by climbing the ladder and in which it was impossible to stand upright, Maurice Brotteaux, enriched by a pot of glue, a ball of string, a box of water-colours and numerous scraps of paper, was constructing puppets which he sold to wholesale toy merchants who resold them to the pedlars who hawked them up and down the Champs-Élysées at the end of a pole, glittering attractions for young children’s eyes. In the midst of public disorder and of the great misfortune that had overwhelmed him, he still kept his serenity, finding recreation and amusement in reading his Lucretius which he carried constantly in the capacious pocket of his puce-coloured frock-coat.
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 3