Évariste gave the door of his lodging a push and it swung open. His poverty saved him the trouble of locks, and when his mother, from habit, pushed back the bolt, he would say to her: ‘What’s the point? People don’t steal second-hand furniture – still less second-rate paintings.’ In his studio, under a thick layer of dust and with their faces turned to the wall, were piled the paintings of his student days, when, according to the fashion, he had portrayed scenes of gallantry, depicting with a sleek, timorous brush, arrowless quivers and birds in flight, hazardous sports and dreams of bliss, all polished off with goose-girls and the breasts of shepherdesses flowering like roses.
But this manner had never suited his temperament. The cold treatment given to these scenes attested to their painter’s uncompromising singleness of heart. His fellow students had not been wrong: Gamelin had never impressed them as a painter of erotic scenes. Today, though he was not yet thirty, these subjects seemed to him dated: relics of a time long past. He recognized in them the degrading effects of the monarchy and the shameful corruptive influences of the Courts. He accused himself of having been taken in by such a contemptible style and of having demeaned his genius by such enslavement. Now a citizen of a free people, he drew strikingly vigorous charcoal sketches of Liberty, of the Rights of Man, of the French laws, of the Republican Virtues, of proletarian Hercules overwhelming the Hydra of Tyranny, and putting into each of them all the ardour of his patriotism. But alas, they brought him not even a pittance. The times were bad for artists. It was certainly not the fault of the Convention – hurling its armies on every frontier against the kings of Europe – proud, calm and resolute in the face of the Coalitions of a Europe, which, false and ruthless to itself, was tearing itself to pieces with its own hands – no, certainly not of the Convention, which was making the Terror the order of the day, which was establishing for punishment of conspirators a pitiless Tribunal to which it would soon be giving its own members to be devoured – no, most certainly not the Convention, which, despite all of this, was calmly, thoughtfully, befriending all things beautiful, was reforming the calendar, building schools, ordering societies of painters and sculptors to be formed, giving prizes to encourage art, organizing annual exhibitions, opening the museum, and, following the example of Athens and of Rome, imparting a sublime distinction to the celebration of festivities and of public obsequies.
But French art, once so widely appreciated in England, Germany, Russia and Poland, now found closed every outlet to foreign countries. Amateurs of painting, dilettanti of the fine arts, great aristocrats and financiers, all were ruined, had emigrated or were in hiding. The men whom the Revolution had enriched, peasants who had bought up national property, speculators, army contractors, gamblers of the Palais-Royal, did not yet dare show their wealth, nor did they care, for painting meant nothing to them. It needed the reputation of Regnault or the adroitness of young Gérard to sell a picture. Greuze, Fragonard, Houin were reduced to poverty. Prud’-hon could scarcely earn bread for his wife and children by drawing subjects which Copia reproduced in stippled engravings. The patriotic painters Hennequin, Wicar, Topino-Lebrun were starving. Gamelin, unable to meet the expenses of a painting, to hire a model or to buy paints, abandoned his vast canvas of The Tyrant Pursued to Hades by the Furies after barely sketching in the main outline. It blocked up half the studio with its half-finished, threatening shapes, huger than life, and with its vast brood of green snakes each darting forth two sharp, forked tongues. In the foreground, to the left, could be discerned Charon in his boat, a wild-looking, haggard figure – a powerful study, well-conceived, but which smelt of the art school. There was far more of genius and originality in a canvas of smaller dimensions, also unfinished, which hung in the best lit corner of the studio. It was of Orestes, whom his sister Electra was holding in her arms on his bed of pain. The girl was putting back with a moving tenderness the matted hair that hung over her brother’s eyes. The head of the hero was tragic and fine, and in it was a marked resemblance to the painter’s own face.
Gamelin cast many mournful glances at this composition; sometimes his fingers itched with the craving to be at work on it, and his arms would stretch longingly towards the boldly sketched figure of Electra, only to fall back again helpless to his sides. The artist in him was burning with enthusiasm, his spirit aspired to great achievements. But he had to exhaust his energy on pot-boilers which he executed indifferently, because he was bound to please the taste of the vulgar and also because he had no skill to impress trivial things with the mark of genius. He drew little allegoricial compositions which his comrade Desmahis engraved cleverly enough in black or in colours and which were bought at a low price by the Citizen Blaise, a print-dealer in the Rue Honoré. But the trade was going from bad to worse, declared Blaise, who for some time now had declined to purchase anything.
This time, however, made inventive by necessity, Gamelin had conceived a new and happy thought, as he at any rate believed – an idea that would make the print-seller’s, the engraver’s and his own fortune: a patriotic pack of cards in which for the king, queen, knave of the old régime he substituted figures of Genius, Liberty, Equality. He had already sketched out all his designs, had finished several and was eager to pass on to Desmahis those which were ready for engraving. The figure which seemed to him to be the most successful represented a volunteer soldier, dressed in the three-cornered hat, blue coat with red facings, yellow breeches and black gaiters, seated on a big drum, his feet on a pile of cannon-balls and his musket between his knees. It was the ‘citizen of hearts’, replacing the knave of hearts. For more than six months Gamelin had been drawing volunteers with loving care. He had sold some of these in the first flush of enthusiasm. Quite a number hung around the wall of the studio. Five or six in water-colour, in gouache, in charcoal and white chalk, lay scattered on the table and chairs. Back in the month of July, 1792, when in all the squares of Paris platforms were erected for enrolling recruits, and when all the taverns were decorated with green foliage and resounded with shouts of ‘Long live the Nation. Live free, or die!’ Gamelin had been unable to cross the Pont-Neuf or pass the Hôtel de Ville without his heart beating at the sight of the beflagged marquee where magistrates in tricolour scarves were inscribing the names of the volunteers to the sound of the Marseillaise. But for him to have joined the army would have meant leaving his mother to starve.
Preceded by the sound of her painfully drawn breath, the widowed Citizeness Gamelin entered the studio, sweating, palpitating, going red in the face, the National cockade hanging untidily from her bonnet and almost dropping off. She placed her basket on a chair and, remaining standing the better to regain her breath, began complaining about the high price of food.
She had been the wife of a cutler in the Rue de Grenelle – Saint-Germain, at the sign of the Ville de Châtellerault until the death of her husband, and now she lived with her son, the artist, trying to keep house for him on almost nothing. He was the elder of her two children. As for her daughter, Julie, formerly a fashionable milliner’s assistant in the Rue Honoré, it was best to forget what she had become: it was not advisable for it to be known that she had emigrated with an aristocrat.
‘Dear God!’ sighed the citizeness, showing to her son a podgy cob of wholemeal bread. ‘With the price of bread what it is, they could at least make it out of pure wheat. And no eggs, no vegetables, no cheese anywhere in the market. If we have to go on eating chestnuts, we’ll end up becoming chestnuts.’
She was silent for a time, and then went on:
‘Out there in the street, I’ve seen women who did not have a thing for their children to eat. The poor are suffering great misery. And it will go on like this until things are back as they were.’
Gamelin frowned and said;
‘Mother, the scarcity we’re suffering from is caused by the monopolists and speculators who starve the people and conspire with our enemies outside the country to turn the citizens against the Republic and to destroy liberty. Th
is is what the plots and treasons of the Brissotins, the Pétions and the Rolands has led to! Perhaps it will be best if the workers in the army do march on Paris and massacre the remaining patriots that the famine’s not destroying quick enough! There’s no time to lose. Flour must be taxed, and any person, whoever he is, who speculates in the food of the people, who foments rebellion or who comes to terms with the enemy, must be guillotined. The Convention has just set up an extraordinary Tribunal to put conspirators on trial. It is made up of patriots – but will they have the devotion to duty to defend our beloved country against all its enemies? We must put our trust in Robespierre; he is incorruptible. Above all, we must trust in Marat. He is the one who really loves the people, who realizes their true interests and serves them. He was always the first to unmask the traitors and frustrate plots. He’s not only incorruptible; he is without fear. He alone is capable of saving the Republic in its peril.’
The Citizeness Gamelin shook her head, causing the carelessly placed cockade to fall out of her bonnet.
‘No more of that, Évariste: your Marat is a man like any other, and no better than any other. You’re young, you’re full of illusions. What you say today about Marat, you said yesterday about Mirabeau, about La Fayette, about Pétion, about Brissot.’
‘Never!’ shouted Gamelin, who had genuinely forgotten.
After clearing the litter of papers, books, brushes and chalks from one end of the table, the citizeness fetched the earthenware soup bowls, two pewter bowls, two iron forks, the cob of wholemeal bread and a jug of poor wine.
Mother and son ate their meal in silence, finishing off with a small scrap of pig’s fat. The mother put hers on her bread, raising each piece solemnly to her mouth on the point of her knife and chewing decorously with her toothless jaws the food that had cost so much.
She had left the best part of the food for her son, who still sat deep in thought with a faraway look in his eyes.
‘Take some and eat, Évariste,’ she kept saying to him with an almost rhythmic regularity. ‘Take and eat.’
And on her lips these words took on the solemnity of a religious command.
She renewed her lament on the cost of food. Gamelin repeated his claim that taxation was the only remedy for these evils.
But she persisted:
‘There isn’t any money. The émigrés have gone off with it all. No one trusts anyone. Everybody’s desperate.’
‘That’s enough mother! Be quiet!’ shouted Gamelin. ‘What’s it matter if we suffer hardships for a short while? The Revolution is going to make the whole human race happy for ever and ever!’
The old woman dipped her bread in her wine: her mood mellowed and a sweet smile lit her face as she recalled the days of her youth, when she had danced on the grass on the King’s birthday. There came into her mind, as it now increasingly did, the day when Joseph Gamelin, master-cutler, had asked for her hand in marriage. And all the little details poured out again. Her mother had said to her, ‘Get dressed. We are going to the Place de Grève, to Monsieur Bienassis, the goldsmith’s shop, to see Damiens drawn and quartered.’ They’d had great difficulty pushing their way through the crowd. And there, in Monsieur Bienassis’ shop, the young girl had found Joseph Gamelin, dressed in a fine rose-pink jacket, and she had known at once what the outcome would be. All the time that she was seated at the window to see the regicide torn with red hot pinchers, drenched with molten lead, pulled apart by four horses and thrown on to the fire, Joseph Gamelin, standing behind her, had showered compliments on her complexion, her hair and her figure.
The old woman drank the last drop of her wine and continued her memories of things long past.
‘I brought you into the world sooner than I expected, Évariste, because of a fright I had on the Pont-Neuf. Yes, I was nearly knocked down by a crowd running to see the execution of Monsieur de Lally. You were so small when you were born the surgeon thought you wouldn’t live. But I knew all right. God would be good to me and preserve you. I brought you up as well as I could – not a care or an expense did I deny you. It’s only fair to say, dear Évariste, that you’ve always shown me you’ve realized that. Yes, even from a child, you’ve always tried to repay me in every way you’ve been able to. You’ve an affectionate and tender nature. Not like your sister. Oh, I know she’s not bad at heart, but she was always selfish and uncontrollable. She never had your feeling of pity for those less fortunate than yourself. Why, when other naughty children used to rob birds’ nests, you’d try to make them give the little birds back to their mother, and many a time you never gave in until you’d been cruelly kicked and beaten. When you were only seven, you’d never start quarrelling with bad boys. You used to walk quietly along the street reciting your catechism; and you’d bring home all the poor people you met to help them, until I had to give you a good beating to make you stop. The sight of anybody suffering used to make you burst into tears. And what a handsome young fellow you became when you got older. It always surprised me you never seemed to realize that – not like most good-looking boys who become conceited coxcombs and only have eyes for the girls.’
What his old mother said was true. When he was twenty Évariste had had a grave, charming face, a beauty at once austere and feminine, the features of a Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Now his gloomy eyes and pale cheeks were evidence of a sad restless spirit. But his glance, when he turned to his mother, took on for a moment the gentleness of his youth.
She went on:
‘You could have made use of your advantages to run after the girls, but it gave you more pleasure to stay with me in the shop, and sometimes I had to tell you to let go of my apron-strings and go and enjoy yourself with your friends. Until the day I die, Évariste, I shall bear witness that you have been a good son. Since your father died, you’ve looked after me without a thought for yourself, though you were able to earn so little, you’ve never let me want for anything, and it’s not your fault if we’re both now miserable and penniless. It’s the Revolution that’s to blame for that.’
He made a reproachful gesture but she shrugged her shoulders and went on:
‘I’m not an aristocrat. I’ve seen those mighty people in all their power and I’ll grant you they abused the privileges their power gave them. I’ve seen your father beaten by the Duc de Canaleilles’ servants because he didn’t get out of their master’s way quick enough. Least of all did I like that Austrian woman:* she was too proud and did nothing but spend money. As for the King, I thought he meant well, and it took his trial and condemnation to make me change my mind about him. All in all, I’ve no regrets for the old régime, though I did have some good times in those days. But don’t you ever tell me the Revolution will bring equality, because men’ll never be equal. It’s just not possible. They can turn the country upside down and inside out, there’ll always be the big people and the little people, the fat ones and the thin ones.’
While she was talking away, she was clearing the plates from the table. The artist had stopped listening. In his mind the vague design was shaping for a sans-culotte, in red cap and carmagnole, which would replace the discredited knave of spades in his pack of cards.
There was a scratching sound on the door and a girl entered, a country lass, fatter than she was tall, red-haired, bandy-legged, her left eye hidden under a wen, her right eye so pale a blue it appeared almost white, her teeth sticking out between enormous lips.
She asked, if he was Gamelin the artist, whether he could make her a portrait of her fiancé, Ferrand (Jules), a volunteer with the army in the Ardennes.
Gamelin answered that he would willingly do it when the gallant warrior returned.
The girl asked with a gentle insistence whether it might be done at once.
Smiling in spite of himself, the artist protested that he could not paint a portrait without seeing the person to be painted.
The poor girl remained silent: she had not foreseen this difficulty. With her head drooping over her left shoulder, her hands clasped
across her stomach, she stayed dulled and dumb, almost as if crushed with grief. Touched and amused by such simpleness, the artist, to take the poor girl’s mind off her misfortune, put into her hand one of the volunteers he had painted in water-colour and asked if that was what he was like, her fiancé in the Ardennes.
She glanced miserably at the paper and gradually her one eye came to life, then glowed, then shone; her wide face expanded into a radiant smile.
At last she exclaimed: ‘It’s him! It’s Ferrand (Jules) to the life! It’s the spitting image of Ferrand (Jules).’
Before the artist had time to think of taking the paper out of her hands, she folded it over carefully with her thick red fingers and made it into quite a little square which she slipped next to her heart between her corsets and her shift, handed the artist an assignat* for five livres, bade them good-night and went out limping and light-hearted.
III
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 4