A bill-sticker appeared, his ladder under his arm to post up a proclamation by the Commune on a blank wall opposite the baker’s shop, rationing the supplies of butcher’s meat. Passers-by stopped to read the notice, still sticky with paste. An old woman selling cabbages, with a basketful of them on her back, called out in her loud, cracked voice:
‘No more good meat for the likes of us! We’ll have to make do with the guts!’
Suddenly there came from a sewer such a strong stench that several people were taken sick. A woman was found to be so ill she was handed over in a faint to two National Guards who carried her a few paces to a pump and put her head under it. Everybody held their noses; grumbling growls arose; ghastly and alarming rumours passed from one person to the next. People began asking each other whether some animal was buried there, or even some poisonous substance placed by some ill-disposed person, or more likely still some victim of the September massacres, an aristocrat or a priest, left in some neighbouring cellar.
‘Is that where they put them then?’
‘They left them everywhere!’
‘It must be one of those prisoners from the Châtelet. On the 2nd September I saw three hundred of them piled up in a heap on the Pont au Change.’
The Parisians feared the vengeance of these aristocrats who, though dead, could still poison them.
Évariste Gamelin joined the queue, wanting to spare his old mother the fatigue of a long wait. His neighbour, the Citizen Brotteaux, accompanied him, tranquil, smiling, his Lucretius in the wide pocket of his coat.
The good old fellow enjoyed the sight around him, saying it was like a scene of low life worthy of the brush of a modern Téniers.
‘These street-porters and good wives, are more amusingly quaint than the Greeks and Romans so dear to our artists nowadays. For myself, I’ve always favoured the Flemish manner.’
What he was too tactful and polite to mention was that he himself had once possessed a gallery full of Dutch masters equalled only by Monsieur Choiseul’s collection in number and excellence.
‘There is no beauty except in the Antique,’ replied Gamelin, ‘and in what is inspired by it: but I grant you those scenes of low-life by Téniers, Steen or Ostade are far better than the frills and fripperies of Watteau, Boucher or Van Loo: they make humanity look ugly but they do not degrade it like a Baudouin or a Fragonard.’
A street-hawker passed, shouting:
‘Bulletin of the Revolutionary Tribunal!… list of the condemned!’
‘It’s not enough, just one Revolutionary Tribunal’, said Gamelin. ‘There should be one in each town… no, even more, one in every village, in every hamlet. Every father of a family, every citizen, should constitute themselves judges. It’s nothing less than parricide to show mercy when our country is threatened by the cannons of the enemy and the daggers of traitors. Think of it! Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux in revolt, insurrection in Corsica, the Vendée in flames, Mayence and Valenciennes in the hands of the enemy, treason everywhere – in the countryside, in the towns, in the camps, treason seated on the very benches of the National Convention, treason even in the councils of war of our generals!… Only the guillotine can save our country!’
‘I’ve no objection, fundamentally, to the guillotine,’ replied old Brotteaux. ‘Nature is my only guide and teacher and she has certainly never given me evidence to believe that a man’s life has any value; indeed, on the contrary, she shows in many ways that it has none. The sole destiny of all living beings seems only to become the fodder of other living beings fated also to the same end. Murder is a law of nature: consequently the death-penalty is lawful, provided it is exercised neither from virtuous nor judicial motives, but from necessity or in order to gain some profit from it. However, I must have perverse instincts, since the sight of blood is repugnant to me, a fault of character which all my philosophy has not yet been able to rectify.’
‘Republicans are sensitive and humane,’ Gamelin pursued. ‘It’s only the despots who believe the death penalty is a natural attribute of authority. One day the sovereign people will abolish it. Robespierre was against, and so were all good patriots; a law to abolish it cannot come too soon. But that won’t be possible until the last enemy of the Republic has perished beneath the sword of justice.’
By now there were a number of late-comers behind Gamelin and Brotteaux, amongst them being several women from the Section: one a handsome buxom tricoteuse, wearing sabots and a kerchief and with a sword dangling from a shoulder belt; another a fair-haired, pretty girl in a worn little shawl looking very nervous; still another was a young mother, thin and pale, giving suck to a sickly-looking infant.
Unable to get more milk, the baby was trying to scream, but his cries were weak and his sobs choking gasps. He was pitifully small with a pallid and unhealthy skin and inflamed eyes; his mother kept gazing at him with sad, anxious eyes.
‘He is very young,’ said Gamelin, turning to look at the unfortunate child pressed wailing against his back amongst the packed crowd of late arrivals.
‘He is six months old, the poor little darling!… His father is away with the army; he is one of the men who drove back the Austrians at Condé. His name is Dumonteil (Michel), a draper’s assistant by trade. He enlisted at a booth they’d put up infront of the Hôtel de Ville. The poor boy wanted to defend his countty and to see the world. He writes to me telling me to be patient. But how d’you think I can feed Paul… that’s what we call him… when I can’t feed myself?’
‘We’ll be here for another hour at least,’ exclaimed the pretty, fair-haired girl, ‘and this evening we’ll have to go through the same ceremony all over again outside the grocer’s. You risk your life just to get three eggs and a quarter pound of butter.’
‘Butter,’ the Citizeness Dumonteil sighed. ‘It’s three months since I saw any!’
And a chorus of women’s voices rose, bewailing the scarcity and cost of food, cursing the émigrés and consigning to the guillotine the commissaires of the Sections who gave shameless hussies fine table fowl and four-pound loaves of bread in return for their shameful services. Alarming stories swept round of cattle drowned in the Seine, of sacks of flour emptied in the sewers, of loaves of bread thrown into the latrines… It was all being done by the Royalists, the Rolandists, the Brissotins, who were determined to exterminate the people of Paris.
Suddenly the pretty, fair-haired girl with the tattered shawl burst out shrieking as if her skirts were on fire, for she started shaking them violently and turning out her pockets, proclaiming to all and sundry that her purse had been stolen.
The announcement of such a theft caused a wave of deep indignation to sweep through this crowd of common people, who had pulled down the fine houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, who had invaded the Tuileries, without taking away a thing, ordinary working men and women who would have had no compunction in burning down the Palace of Versailles itself, but would have considered their honour lost if they had stolen even so much as a pin. The young hooligans in the queue greeted the pretty girl’s loss with vulgar jokes but these were immediately put a stop to by the outburst of public indignation. There was talk of hanging the thief from the nearest lamp-post. An investigation began in which everybody spoke at once and nobody was prepared to listen to a reason. The big tricoteuse, pointing to an old man suspected of being a defrocked monk, swore it was the ‘Capuchin’ who was the thief. The crowd, immediately persuaded, began shouting for his death.
The old man, so speedily denounced by the public spite, was standing very humbly in front of the Citizen Brotteaux. There was no denying he had all the appearance of a ci-devant monk. He had a venerable enough air, though it obviously bore evidence of the sufferings he had endured from the violence of the crowd and of the memories of the horrors of the September days. The fear on his face encouraged the suspicions of the crowd which is always ready to believe that only the guilty dread its judgments, as though the reckless haste with which it comes to them was not sufficient t
o terrify the most innocent.
Brotteaux had made it a rule never to oppose himself to popular feeling, above all when it showed itself at its most illogical and cruel, because, at such moments, he would say to himself, the voice of the people was the voice of God. But Brotteaux now proved inconsistent: he asserted that this man, whether Capuchin or not, could not have robbed the citizeness, since he had never for one single moment gone anywhere near her.
The crowd concluded that any one who defended the thief must be his accomplice, and now it was proposed to treat the two of them in the same violent manner, and, when Gamelin offered himself as a guarantor for Brotteaux, the wiseacres in the crowd proposed sending him along with the other two to the Section’s headquarters.
But the pretty girl suddenly cried out joyfully that she had found her purse. The crowd immediately turned on her and, with a storm of hisses, threatened her with a public whipping, like a nun.
‘Monsieur,’ said the monk to Brotteaux, ‘I thank you for defending me. My name is of no importance, but I owe it you to tell you that it is Louis de Longuemare. I am indeed a religious, but not a Capuchin, as these women have said. There is a world of difference, since I am a monk of the Order of Barnabites, which gave countless doctors and saints to the Church. Some people believe our Order originated with St Charles Borromeo: in actual fact, we must consider the apostle St Paul as our true founder since our arms bear his monogram. I have been forced to leave my convent, now the headquarters of the Section Pont-Neuf, and to wear secular dress.’
‘Father,’ Brotteaux replied, examining Monsieur de Long-uemare’s shabby old servant’s coat, ‘your dress bears sufficient witness that you have not forgotten your vocation: to look at it, one would think you had reformed your Order rather than abandoned it. What is more, it is obviously the goodness of your heart that impels you to expose yourself in these austere garments to the insults of this ungodly mob.’
‘I cannot very well dress in the fashion, as if I were a gay n’er-do-well!’
‘Father, what I am saying about your attire is to pay tribute to your character and to put you on your guard against the risks you are running.’
‘Monsieur, you would, on the contrary, do better to encourage me to confess my faith. For I’m only too ready to fear danger. I have abandoned my monk’s habit, monsieur, which is itself a form of apostasy. The last thing I wished was to desert the Convent where God had granted me for so many years the grace of a peaceful and retired life. I obtained permission to stay on there, and I continued to occupy my cell while they turned the church and the cloisters into some sort of town hall which they call the Section headquarters. I saw, monsieur, I actually saw them hack away the holy symbols. I saw the name of the Apostle Paul covered by a convict’s cap. Sometimes I was present at the meetings of the Section and I heard amazing errors propounded. In the end I left that profaned place and have since lived, on a pension of a hundred pistoles allowed me by the Assembly, in a stable which was empty because the army had requisitioned the horses. I celebrate Mass there every day for a few of the faithful who come to bear witness to the eternal Church of Christ.’
‘As for me, Father,’ Brotteaux replied, ‘if you care to know my name, it is Brotteaux and in former times I was what you would call a Publican.’
‘Monsieur,’ answered Father Longuemare, ‘the example of St Matthew taught me that one can learn from a Publican.’
‘You are too kind, Father.’
Gamelin interrupted: ‘Citizen Brotteaux, you surely can’t help admiring the qualities of these people. See how everybody here was prepared to lose his place in the queue to punish the thief. Although they’re victims of such poverty and misery, their integrity is such that they cannot tolerate any form of dishonesty.’
‘It certainly must be admitted,’ agreed Brotteaux, ‘that in their desire to hang the thief, these people were ready to do violence to the good Father here. Their greed, and their selfish determination to safeguard their own interests, were sufficient motives: by attacking one of them, the thief threatened all of them: self-preservation demanded his punishment… At the same time it’s not improbable that most of these working men and women are honest enough and keep their hands off other people’s property. They’ve had these sentiments inculcated into them since infancy by their fathers and mothers, who smacked their bottoms soundly and injected the virtues into them through their backsides.’
Gamelin did not conceal from his old neighbour that he considered such language unworthy of a philosopher.
‘Man,’ he said, ‘is naturally good. God has planted the seed of virtue in the hearts of all men.’
Old Brotteaux was a sceptic and found in his atheism a sufficient satisfaction.
‘I know this much, Citizen Gamelin, that while you are a revolutionary in the things of this world, you’re a conservative, a reactionary even, where heaven is concerned. Robespierre and Marat are just the same. As for me. I find it odd that, though Frenchmen aren’t prepared to put up with a mortal king, they insist on holding on to an immortal tyrant who is far more ferocious and despotic. For what is the Bastille or even the Chambre Ardente compared with hell-fire? Humanity models its gods on its tyrants and you reject the original yet preserve the copy.’
‘Oh, citizen!’ Gamelin protested. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to talk in such a way? How can you compare the dark gods born of fear and ignorance, with the Creator of Nature? Belief in a benevolent God is a moral necessity. The Supreme Being is the source of all virtue and a man cannot be a good Republican if he doesn’t believe in God. Robespierre understood this, for, as we all remember, he had the bust of the philosopher Helvetius removed from the Hall of the Jacobins because he had preached atheism… I hope, at least, Citizen Brotteaux, that when the Republic establishes the worship of Reason, you will not withhold your acceptance of so wise a religion?’
‘I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic,’ Brotteaux answered. ‘Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.’ And, standing in the street gutter, he proceeded to develop this thesis, just as he had been used to do seated in one of Baron d’Holbach’s gilt armchairs, which, as he was fond of saying, were the seats of natural philosophy.
‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’ he continued, ‘who was not without talent, especially in music, was a young rascal who professed to derive his morality from Nature while all the time he had got it from the dogmas of Calvin. Nature teaches us to prey on one another and gives us examples of all the crimes and vices which the social state tries to correct or conceal. We ought to love virtue; but it is well to realize that we ought to only because it is a convenient expedient invented by men in order that they may live comfortably together. What we call morality is simply and solely a desperate enterprise, a forlorn hope on the part of our fellow men to reverse the order of the Universe, which is constant strife and murder, blind, ceaseless and implacable. All is self-destruction, and the more I think of it, the more I am convinced that the Universe is mad. Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear; they would only feel an empty and thankless gratitude for their benefits. Without purgatory and hell, your God would indeed be a useless creature.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Father Longuemare, ‘do not talk about nature. You do not know what it is.’
‘Come now, I know it as well as you, Father.’
‘You cannot know it, because you deny religion, and religion alone teaches us what nature is, and how its original goodness was made evil. How
ever, you must not expect me to answer you. God has granted me neither the eloquence nor the intellect to refute your errors. I would be afraid, by my inadequate defence, to give you occasion to blaspheme and more cause to harden your heart. I wish very deeply I could help you; yet the only result of my unworthy efforts might be to…’
The discussion was curtailed by loud shouts from the front of the queue to warn the long line of famished citizens that the baker was opening his doors. The queue began to move forward, very, very slowly. A National Guard on duty admitted the customers one by one. The, baker, his wife and young son superintended the sale, assisted by two Civil Commissaries. These, with a tricoloured band around the left arm, made sure that the purchasers belonged to the Section and were given their proper share proportionate to the number of mouths to be fed.
The Citizen Brotteaux made the pursuit of pleasure the one and only aim of his life, believing that reason and the senses could justify no other, in the absence of a God to give subjective values any objective criteria. Accordingly, since he found the artist’s opinions somewhat too fanatical and the monk’s too simple, this wise man, intent on matching his behaviour with his opinions and on relieving the tedium of waiting, took out from the bulging pocket of his pucecoloured coat his Lucretius, now as always his faithful solace, companion and comforter. The binding of red morocco was worn by much use and the Citizen Brotteaux had wisely removed the coat of arms that had once embellished it. He opened the book at the passage where the poet and philosopher, wishing to cure men of the useless and troublesome passion of love, surprises a woman enfolded in the arms of her servant women in a state which would offend the sensibilities of any lover. The Citizen Brotteaux read these verses, not without continually casting surreptitious glances at the golden down on the back of the neck of the pretty girl in front of him and breathing voluptuously the smell of the moist skin of this little scullery wench. The poet Lucretius was a wise man, but he fished in select waters; his disciple Brotteaux cast his net more widely.
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 8