The carriage disappeared. Évariste’s disturbed mind gradually grew calmer: but a dull anguish remained and he felt that the hours of tenderness and forgetfulness, which he had just experienced, he would never know again.
He passed by the Champs-Élysées, where women in bright dresses were sitting on wooden chairs, talking or sewing, while their children played under the trees. A woman selling ‘pleasures’, though the box she carried was shaped like a drum, recalled to him the old woman with her box in the Allée des Veuves, and it seemed as if a whole epoch of his life had passed away between his meeting with this one and that one. He crossed the Place de la Révolution.* In the Tuileries Gardens he heard the distant roar of many voices, that tremendous sound of men all shouting together, so familiar in the great early days of the Revolution but which its enemies pretended would never be heard again. He hastened his steps as the roar grew louder and louder, reached the Rue Honoré and found it thronged with a crowd of men and women shouting: ‘Vive la République! Vive la Liberté!’ The walls of the gardens, the windows, the balconies, the roofs were packed with spectators waving their hats and handkerchiefs. Preceded by a sapper who was clearing a way for the procession, and surrounded by municipal officers, National Guards, gunners, gendarmes, hussars, there was advancing slowly, borne above the heads of the citizens, a man with a morose complexion, his forehead encircled with a crown of oak leaves, his body enveloped in an old green indoor coat with an ermine collar. The women were throwing him flowers. As he was carried along he darted all around him the piercing look of his jaundiced eyes, as if, in that enthusiastic multitude, he was still seeking out enemies of the people to denounce, traitors to punish. As he went by, Gamelin took off his hat, and joining his voice to a hundred thousand others, shouted:
‘Vive Marat!’
Like the personification of Fate itself, the conquering hero entered the Hall of the Convention. Whilst the crowd slowly dispersed, Gamelin sat on a stone post in the Rue Honoré, pressing his hand over his heart to contain its wild beating. What he had just seen had filled him with an emotion unearthly in its blazing enthusiasm.
He venerated, he worshipped Marat who, sick, feverish and devoured by ulcers, was exhausting the last remnants of his strength in the service of the Republic, and who, in his poor house, open to all, always welcomed Gamelin with open arms, always spoke to him afire with enthusiasm about public affairs, sometimes questioned him about the plans of scoundrels. So now Gamelin was rejoicing that the enemies of ‘The Friend of the People’, in plotting his downfall had achieved his triumph; he blessed the Revolutionary Tribunal which, in acquitting the Friend of the People, had given back to the Convention the most vehement, the most uncompromising of its legislators: In his mind he saw again that head burning with fever, garlanded with the civic crown, those features alive with intransigent pride and pitiless love, that powerful face, worn and ravaged, that clenched mouth, that broad chest, the agony-racked strength of this man who from up on his living chariot of triumph had seemed to be saying to his fellow-citizens: ‘Follow my example! Be you all patriots to the death!’
The street was deserted, invaded by the shadows of the approaching night; the lamp-lighter passed with hand-lantern and pole, and Gamelin murmured:
‘To the death!’
V
AT nine o’clock in the morning Évariste found Élodie waiting for him on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Ever since they had exchanged their vows of love a month ago they had seen each other every day, either at the Amour Peintre or at the studio in the Place de Thionville. Yet the tenderness of their intimacy had a certain reserve about it, imposed by the serious and virtuous young lover, who, though ready to make his dear mistress his own before the law or with God alone for witness, according as circumstances demanded, was prepared to do so only in public and in the full light of day. Élodie knew quite well that this resolution was all that was honourable; but, despairing of a marriage which everything made impossible and refusing to brave social conventions, she secretly hoped for a liaison which could be kept hidden until time had given it respectability. She thought she would one day overcome the scruples of her too respectable lover and not wanting to delay any longer certain necessary revelations about her past, she had asked him to come for an hour’s talk with her in the deserted gardens, near the Carthusian convent.
She gave him a tender, open-hearted look, took his hand, sat him on the bench beside her and spoke to him choosing her words carefully:
‘I respect you too much, Évariste, to hide anything from you. I think I am worthy of you but I would not be if I did not tell you everything. Hear me and be my judge. I have nothing base nor vile to reproach myself with, nothing selfish even. I have been weak and credulous… Take into account, dear friend, the difficult circumstances I was in. You know them; I lost my mother; I was left in the care of a young father who thought only of his own amusement and couldn’t be bothered with me. I was sensitive; by nature I was open and generous. I’d plenty of common sense as well. But in the past I have let myself be ruled by my feelings and not by my reason. I know, also, it would be the same today if the two were not now more in harmony, and I would give myself to you, Évariste, completely and forever!’
She explained herself clearly and firmly. Her words were prepared; for a long time she had resolved to make her confession, because she was open-hearted, because it pleased her to imitate Rousseau, and because she told herself with reason: ‘Some day Évariste will find out secrets which I’m not the only one to know: it will be best and to my credit to tell him of my own free will what he would one day discover to my shame.’ And, being naturally tender-hearted and easily led, she did not feel she was much to blame herself and this made her confession the easier; she certainly intended, as well, to tell only the minimum necessary.
‘Ah, dear Évariste,’ she sighed, ‘Why could we not have met in those days when I was alone, forsaken…’
Évariste had taken literally Élodie’s request that he should be her judge. Inclined by nature and his literary proclivities to indulge in private judgements, he prepared himself to receive Élodie’s confessions.
As she hesitated, he indicated he was waiting for her to proceed.
She said very simply:
‘A young man, who showed me a few of the good among the many bad qualities he possesses, found I attracted him a little and courted me with a perseverance surprising in such a person: he was full of the charm of youth and the idol of many attractive women who made no effort to hide their adoration from him. It was neither his good looks nor his youthful charm that appealed to me… He knew how to touch my heart by tokens of love and I believed that he truly loved me. He was passionate and yet so tender. I asked nothing more binding than his love, and his love was fickle. I blame only myself; this is my confession I’m making, not his. I am not complaining about him, for he is now a complete stranger to me. That I swear to you, Évariste! He is now to me as if he had never existed!’
She was silent. Évariste made no reply. He crossed his arms; in his eyes was a fixed, sombre look. He was thinking of both of them: of Élodie, his mistress, and of Julie, his sister. Julie too had listened to a lover, but, he thought, unlike the unfortunate Élodie she had let herself be carried away, not by the mistakes of an over-sensitive heart, but in order to find luxury and pleasure far away from those who loved her. His rigid morality had condemned his sister and was now ready to condemn his mistress.
Élodie continued, her voice very low:
‘I had read so much philosophy; I believed men were naturally honest. My misfortune was to have met a lover who had not studied in the same school of Nature and morality, and whom class prejudice, ambition, self-love, and a false sense of honour had made selfish and treacherous.’
Her carefully calculated words produced their desired effect. Gamelin’s eyes softened. He asked:
‘Who was your seducer? Do I know him?’
‘You do not know him.�
�
‘Tell me his name.’
She had foreseen this and was determined not to tell it.
She gave her reasons.
‘I beg you, spare me that. For both our sakes. I’ve already said too much.’
And, as he insisted:
‘For the sake of our love, which is more sacred to me than anything else, I will tell you nothing more precise about this… stranger. I refuse to give you the least shadow for your jealousy to exaggerate. I will not bring this unimportant ghost back to haunt us both. And I am most certainly not going to acquaint you with this man’s name when I have forgotten him.’
Gamelin insisted she surrendered to him the name of her seducer: that was the term he persisted in using, for to him there was no doubt that Élodie had been seduced, deceived, taken advantage of. He did not even conceive that it could possibly have been otherwise, that she had obeyed the desire, the irresistible desire, of her own flesh and blood; he did not conceive that this tender, voluptuous creature, this lovely victim, had offered herself; it was necessary, to satisfy his ideal, that she had been taken by force or by guile, ravished, unable to turn to anyone for help. He questioned her in guarded terms, but with a sharp, embarrassing insistency. He asked her how this liaison had begun, if it had been long or short, tranquil or troubled, and how it had been broken off. And he came back unceasingly to the means this man had used to seduce her, as if these must unquestionably have been strange and outrageous. Everything he asked proved in vain. With a gently, beseeching stubbornness, she remained silent, her mouth compressed and her eyes full of tears.
Yet, when Évariste asked where this man was now, she replied:
‘He has left the kingdom.’
She quickly corrected herself:
‘… France.’
‘An émigré!’ Gamelin exclaimed.
She looked at him, speechless, at the same time reassured and dismayed to see him create for himself a truth which conformed with his political passions, and give of his own volition a Jacobin twist to his jealousy.
In actual fact Élodie’s lover was a lawyer’s under-clerk, a very pretty little lad, an angelic guttersnipe, whom she had adored and whose memory after three years still made her body thrill. He had always been on the look-out for rich, old women: he left Élodie for a lady of wide experience who rewarded his merits. After the abolition of offices, he had been given a post in the Mairie of Paris, and was now a sansculotte dragoon and the kept lover of a ci-devant aristocrat
‘An aristocrat! An émigré!’ repeated Gamelin, whom she took good care not to undeceive, having never wished him to know the whole truth. ‘And he shamefully abandoned you?’
She nodded her head.
He pressed her to his heart.
‘Dearest victim of tyrannical corruption, I will avenge this infamy for you by my love. But, by heavens, if ever I meet him, I shall now know him!’
She turned her head away, saddened and amused, and disappointed, all at the same time. She would have preferred him wiser in matters of love, more natural, more brutal. She felt he pardoned so quickly only because his imagination was cold and the secrets she had just revealed to him awoke in him none of those mental images which torture the sensually inclined, and that indeed he only saw in this seduction a moral and social fact.
They had risen and were following the green paths of the garden. He told her that he esteemed her all the more because of the wrong she had suffered. Élodie felt that that was more than she required but, such as he was, she loved him, and she admired the artistic genius she saw so brilliantly in him.
As they came out of the Luxembourg Gardens, they met great crowds in the Rue de l’Égalité and all around the Théâtre des Nations, which did not at all surprise them: since, for several days, great excitement had been agitating the most patriotic Sections; everybody was denouncing the Orléans faction and the accomplices of Brissot who were plotting, it was said, the fall of Paris and the massacre of all Republicans. And Gamelin himself, only a short time ago, had signed a petition from the Commune demanding the expulsion of the Twenty-one.
Just before they passed under the arcade which joined the theatre to the neighbouring house, they had to make their way through a group of citizens clad in their carmagnoles who were being harangued, from up on the gallery, by a young soldier, looking in his helmet of panther-skin as handsome as the Eros of Praxiteles. This attractive-looking soldier was accusing the Friend of the People of laziness. He was saying:
‘You are sleeping, Marat, and the Federalists are forging chains for us!’
No sooner had Élodie seen who it was than she said quickly:
‘Come, Évariste!’
The crowd, she said, was frightening her and she was afraid of fainting in the crush.
They parted in the Place de la Nation, swearing their eternal love to each other.
That morning, very early, the Citizen Brotteaux had made the Citizeness Gamelin the magnificent gift of a capon. It would have been imprudent on his part to say how he had come by it: for he had been given it by a certain lady of the market at the Pointe Eustache, whose letters he occasionally wrote for her, and it was well known that the ladies of the market cherished Royalist sympathies and were in touch by correspondence with the émigrés. The Citizeness Gamelin had accepted the capon with deep gratitude. Such things were scarcely ever seen now; food of all kinds became more expensive every day. The people feared a famine: everybody said that that was what the aristocrats wanted, and that the food-grabbers were preparing for it.
Invited to eat his share of the capon at the midday meal, the Citizen Brotteaux duly appeared and congratulated his hostess on the rich aroma of her cooking. For indeed the artist’s studio was filled with the smell of a savoury meat soup.
‘You are a true gentleman, monsieur,’ replied the good lady. ‘As an appetizer for your capon, I’ve made some vegetable soup with a slice of bacon and a big beef bone. There’s nothing gives soup a flavour better than a marrow bone.’
‘A praiseworthy maxim, citizeness,’ replied old Brotteaux. ‘And you will do wisely, if tomorrow, and the next day, and all the rest of the week, you put this precious bone back into the pot, so that it will continue to flavour it. The wise woman of Panzoust used to do that: she made a soup of green cabbages with a rind of bacon and an old savorados. That is what they call the tasty and succulent medullary bone in her country, which is also my country.’
‘This lady you speak of, monsieur,’ the Citizeness Gamelin put in, ‘wasn’t she a little on the careful side, making the same bone last so long?’
‘She did not live on a grand scale,’ Brotteaux replied. ‘She was poor, even though she was a prophetess.’
At that moment Évariste Gamelin came in, still deeply affected by the confession he had just heard and promising himself he would discover the identity of Élodie’s seducer, so that he might wreak on him the vengeance of the Republic and of himself.
After the usual politenesses, the Citizen Brotteaux resumed the thread of his discourse:
‘Those who make a trade out of foretelling the future rarely grow rich. Their attempts to deceive are too easily found out and arouse detestation. And yet it would be necessary to detest them much, much more if they foretold the future correctly. For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.’
The Citizeness Gamelin put the soup on the table, said the Benedicite, seated her son and her guest, and began to eat standing up, declining the chair which Brotteaux offered her next to him, since, she said, she knew what courtesy required of her.
TEN O’CLOCK in the morning. Not a breath of air. It was the hottest July anyone had known. In the narrow Rue de Jérusalem about a hundred citizens of the Section were queuing at the baker’s door, under the watchful eyes of four National Guards standing at ease smoking their pipes.
The Convention had decreed the maximum: hence corn and flour had instantly disappeared. Like the Israelites in the desert, the people had to get up before dawn if they wanted to eat. All these people, tightly packed together beneath a sky of molten lead, whose heat made the foulness in the gutters steam and spread everywhere the stench of dirty, sweating humanity, all of them, men, women and children, were pushing each other, insulting each other, giving each other looks of hate, disgust, interest, desire or indifference. They had learnt, through bitter experience, that there was not enough bread for everybody: so the last to arrive were always trying to push to the front; those who had to move back were always complaining, losing their tempers and vainly claiming their disregarded rights. The women savagely jabbed with their elbows and pushed with their bosoms to keep their place or gain a better one. When the pressure became too suffocating, shouts always arose: ‘Stop pushing!’ And everybody would protest that it was someone else pushing them.
To avoid these daily disorders, the officials appointed by the Section had had the idea of attaching a rope to the baker’s door for each person to take hold of in an orderly line; but hands too close together would meet each other on the rope and a fight would follow. Whoever lost hold, could never regain it. Those malevolently or mischievously inclined would cut it, and so the idea had to be abandoned.
In this particular queue, some were suffocating, some believed themselves dying, some made jokes, some flung obscene remarks, some hurled abuse at the aristocrats and the Federalists, the authors of all evil. When a dog went by, the wits hailed it by the name of Pitt. Occasionally a loud slap resounded, the hand of a citizeness meeting the cheek of someone attempting to be over familiar; while, pressed hard against by her neighbour, a young servant girl, with her eyes half-shut and her mouth half-open, kept gasping softly. Any word, any gesture, any attitude likely to arouse the broad humour of the ordinary amiable Frenchman, would cause a group of young ruffians to strike up the Ça ira, regardless of the protests of an old Jacobin indignant that an obscenely equivocal meaning should be attached to a refrain which expressed the Republican faith in a future of justice and happiness.
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 7