But the greatest revelation given him by the wisdom of Robespierre concerned the crimes and infamies of atheism. Gamelin had never denied the existence of God; he was a deist and believed in a Providence which watches over mankind; but he admitted he had only a very vague conception of this Supreme Being and, being deeply attached to the principle of freedom of conscience, he was quite prepared to allow that right-thinking citizens might follow the example of Lamettrie, Boulanger, Baron d’Hollach, Lolande, Helvétius, the Citizen Dupis, and deny the existence of God, if at the same time they accepted a moral order and were able to find in themselves the resources necessary to lead a virtuous life. He had even felt sympathy for these atheists when he had seen them attacked and persecuted. Robespierre cleared his mind and opened his eyes. By his virtuous eloquence, the great man showed him the true character of atheism, its nature, its aims, its effects; he demonstrated how that doctrine, born in the salons and boudoirs of the aristocracy, was the most insidious invention which the enemies of the people have ever devised to demoralize and enslave the people; how it was a crime to deprive the unfortunate of the consoling thought of a benevolent Providence which would reward and compensate them, so rendering them easy victims of the vile passions that degrade and enslave men; how in short, the monarchical epicureanism of a Helvétius led to immorality, cruelty and every form of licentiousness. Now that Gamelin had heard these sentiments from the lips of a great man and a great citizen, he swore eternal enmity towards all atheists, especially when they carried the infection of a joyous and open heart, like old Brotteaux.
In the days which followed, Évariste had to give judgment, one after the other, upon a ci-devant aristocrat convicted of having destroyed grain in order to starve the people, three émigrés who had returned to foment civil war in France, two prostitutes from the Palais-Égalité, and fourteen Breton conspirators, women, old men, adolescents, masters and servants. The evidence was incontrovertible, the law explicit. Among the guilty was a girl of twenty, in her young beauty a fascinatingly adorable figure when seen under the shadow of the fate awaiting her. Her golden hair was bound with a blue ribbon; her fine linen kerchief gave a glimpse of her neck, white and supple.
Évariste was consistent in his decision: death. And all the accused, with the exception of an old gardener, were sent to the guillotine.
The following week, Évariste and his Section moved off the heads of forty-five men and eighteen women.
The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal followed the principle as old as justice itself of drawing no distinction between men and women. President Montaré, moved by the bravery and beauty of Charlotte Corday, had indeed tried to save her by altering the procedure of her trial, but he had lost his seat as a result. Women, almost invariably, were shown no favour under examination, in strict accordance with the rule common to all tribunals. The magistrates feared them, distrusting their artfulness, their tendency to deception, their powers of seduction. Their determination and resolution equalled those of men and this encouraged the Tribunal to treat them equally. Most of the magistrates were men of mediocre sensuality and never allowed themselves to be affected by the prisoner being a woman. They condemned or acquitted as their conscience and their zeal dictated. The women almost always appeared before the Tribunal with their hair carefully arranged and dressed with as much elegance as their unfortunate conditions permitted. But few of them were young and fewer pretty. Prison and anxiety had withered them, the harsh light of the Assembly Hall betrayed their weariness and anguish, accentuating their pallid eyelids, their blotched, pimpled cheeks, their white, drawn lips. However, more than once the fatal chair had held a young girl, palely beautiful, over whose eyes the shadow of death had drawn like a voluptuous veil a liquid film of tears. At such a sight, which magistrates might not be affected, either by tenderness or by irritation? Which might not, in his secret, depraved heart, have imagined the sacred intimacies of the beautiful body before him, which represented to his morbid fancy at one and the same time the body of a living woman and the body of a dead woman? Which magistrate might not have gloated, with voluptuous yet ghoulish imaginings, over the atrocious plessure he felt in handing over to the executioner that beautiful, desirable body? Such possibilities, perhaps best not dwelt on, cannot be denied by anyone who knows mankind. Évariste Gamelin, as an artist cold and pedantic, could see beauty only in the Antique: it inspired his admiration rather than stirred his senses. His classical taste was so severe that he rarely found a woman who lived up to it; he was as insensible to the charms of a pretty face as he was to Fragonard’s colouring and Boucher’s figures. He had never known desire except when he was deeply in love.
Like most of his colleagues on the Tribunal, he considered women more dangerous than men. He hated the ci-devant princesses, creatures he imagined to himself in his horrified dreams as weaving plots in company with the Queen to assassinate good patriots; he hated even all those beautiful mistresses of financiers, philosophers and men of letters, guilty only of having enjoyed the pleasures of the senses and of the mind and of having lived at a time when to be alive had been very heaven. He hated them without admitting to himself his hate, and when he had to pass judgement on one of them, he condemned her with resentment, yet thoroughly convinced in himself that he was condemning her justly for the public good. And his honesty, his complete modesty, his cold intelligence, his devotion to his country, his very virtues themselves, pushed beneath the blade of the guillotine heads which might well have aroused his pity.
But how is this and what is the significance of this strange prodigy? Only yesterday it had been necessary to seek out the guilty, to force oneself to discover their hiding-places and to make them confess their crime. Today there is no longer the hunt with a pack of hounds, no longer the pursuit of a frightened prey: now from all sides come victims freely offering themselves. Aristocrats, virgins, soldiers, prostitutes flock to the Tribunal, dragging too slowly their own condemnation from the judges, claiming death as a right they are impatient to enjoy. This multitude which the zeal of the informers has crowded into the prisons, and wears out the lives of the Public Prosecutor and his assistants in bringing before the Tribunal, is not enough: punishment must also be provided for those who do not wish to wait. And so many others, still prouder and more impatient, begrudging their death to the judges and the executioner, take their lives themselves! The fury to kill inspires a fury to die. Here, in the Conciergerie, a young soldier, handsome, strong, and beloved; he has left in the prison an adorable girl who loves him and who has said to him: ‘Live for me!’ He wants neither to live for her nor for love nor for glory. He has lit his pipe with his writ of accusation. He is a Republican, breathing Liberty with every breath he takes, yet he turns Royalist so that he may die. The Tribunal tries its hardest to save him, but he proves the stronger; judges and magistrates are forced to let him have his way.
Évariste, naturally of an anxious and scrupulous turn of mind, became increasingly so as he learnt the lessons of the Jacobins and watched everybody becoming more suspicious, more alarmed. At night, as he walked the dark streets on his way to Élodie, he imagined a printing-press for forging assignats below every cellar grating; in the dark corners of every empty baker’s hop he imagined mountains of hidden food fraudulently held back for a rise in prices; through the glittering windows of the restaurants he imagined he heard speculators plotting the ruin of his country as they quaffed bottles of Beaune and Chablis; in the evil-smelling alley-ways he could actually see prostitutes trampling under their feet the National cockade to the applauding shouts of elegant young scoundrels; he was coming to see conspirators and traitors everywhere he looked. And his thought became continually: ‘Oh, Republic! Against so many secret or declared enemies, only one thing can help you! Saint Guillotine, save my country!…’
Élodie used to wait for him in her little blue bedroom above the Amour Peintre. To warn him he could come up, she used to put her little watering-can on the window-sill next to the pot
of carnations. Nowadays his coming filled her with horror, he was appearing more and more to her to be something vilely monstrous: she feared him and adored him. All the night long, pressing ferociously against each other, the bloody-minded lover and the sensually mad girl made savage and silent love.
XIV
FATHER LONGUEMARE got up at dawn, and after sweeping the room went off to say his Mass in a little chapel in the Rue d’Enfer, served by a non-juring priest. There were thousands of similar retreats in Paris, where the rebellious clergy clandestinely gathered together little focks of the faithful. The police of the Sections, though vigilant and suspicious, shut their eyes to these hidden folds from fear of exasperating the flocks and from some remnant of veneration for sacred things. The Barnabite bade farewell to his host who had great difficulty in persuading him to come back for dinner, and in the end only succeeded by promising that the food would be neither plentiful nor delicate.
Left to himself, Brotteaux lit a small earthenware stove; then, as he busied himself preparing the meal for the monk and the epicurean, he read his Lucretius and pondered on the human condition.
This wise man had never been surprised that miserable humans, foolish puppets at the mercy of the forces of Nature, should find themselves more often than not in absurd and painful situations; but where he failed in wisdom was in believing that the Revolutionaries were more foolish and more wicked than other men, thereby falling into the error of the ideologue. Nevertheless, he was by no means a pessimist and did not believe that life was wholly bad. He admired Nature in many ways, especially in its manifestation in the astronomological system and in the act of physical love, and so he adapted himself to the daily routine, pending the day, which could not now be far off, when he would no longer know fear or desire.
He carefully coloured some dancing dolls and made a Zerline which resembled Rose Thévenin. He liked the girl and his epicureanism highly approved of the arrangements of the atoms of which she was composed.
These tasks kept him occupied until the return of the Barnabite.
‘Father,’ he said as he opened the door for him, ‘I told you, you remember, that our meal would be meagre. We have nothing but chestnuts. All the more reason, therefore, that they should be well cooked.’
‘Chestnuts!’ exclaimed Father Longuemare with a smile. ‘There is no more delicious a dish. My father, monsieur, was a poor gentleman of the Limousin, whose entire estate consisted of a ruined pigeon-cote, an uncared-for orchard, and a clump of chestnut trees. He fed himself, his wife and his twelve children on big, green chestnuts, and we all grew up strong and sturdy. I was the youngest and the wildest; my father used to declare, by way of a joke, that he would have to send me to America to be a pirate… Ah, monsieur! How fragrant your chestnut soup smells! It takes me back to the table where my mother used to sit smiling, with her little ones all around her.’
The meal over, Brotteaux set off for Joly’s, the toy merchant in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, who took the dancing dolls which Caillon had rejected and ordered not just another gross of similar ones but two gross to begin with.
On reaching the former Rue Royale Brotteaux saw gleaming in the Place de la Révolution a steel triangle between the top of two upright beams: it was the guillotine. An immense crowd of joyfully curious spectators pressed round the scaffold awaiting the arrival of the laden tumbrils. Women were hawking Nanterre cakes on trays hung in front of them and shouting their wares; sellers of cooling drinks were ringing their little bells; an old man at the foot of the Statue of Liberty had put up a peep-show surmounted by a swing* on which a monkey was playing antics. Underneath the scaffold, dogs were licking up yesterday’s blood. Brotteaux turned back towards the Rue Honoré.
Back once more in his garret, where he found the Barnabite reading his breviary, he carefully wiped the table and arranged his colour-box on it together with the materials and tools on his trade.
‘Father,’ he said, ‘if you should not consider the occupation unworthy of the sacred calling with which you are invested, I would ask you to help me make my marionettes. A worthy tradesman, Joly by name, has given me a rather large order this morning. Whilst I am painting these figures already constructed, you would be doing me a great service if you would cut out heads, arms, legs and bodies from the patterns here. You could not find better; they are modelled on Watteau and Boucher.’
‘I agree with you, monsieur,’ replied Longuemare. ‘Watteau and Boucher were well equipped to create such baubles. It would have been more to their credit if they had confined themselves to such innocent figures. I shall be delighted to help you, but I fear I may not be expert enough.’
Father Longuemare was right to doubt his own skill; after several unsuccessful attempts, it was obvious that his genius did not lie in cutting out pretty shapes in thin cardboard with the point of a penknife. But when Brotteaux gave him, at his suggestion, some string and a bodkin, he proved himself very capable in endowing with movement the little creations he had failed to make, and in teaching them to dance. When trying them afterwards, he found he had a happy knack of making them execute three or four steps of a gavotte, and when they thus rewarded his pains, a smile would flicker on his stern lips.
Once, as he pulled the strings of a Scaramouche to a dance tune, he observed:
‘Monsieur, this little travesty reminds me of an unusual story. It was in 1746, when I was completing my novitiate under the care of Father Magitot, an elderly man of great learning and austere morals. At that time, you may remember, dancing figures which had of course been intended to amuse children had come to exercise an extraordinary fascination over women and even over men, both young and old. Indeed, they were all the rage in Paris. The fashionable shops were full of them; they were to be found in the houses of people of quality, and it was nothing unusual to see some grave and reverend old gentleman dancing his doll in the street or in a public garden. Father Magitot’s age, character and sacred calling did not avail to guard him against infection. Every time he saw anyone jumping his cardboard marionette, his fingers itched to be doing the same – an impatience that soon became almost intolerable.
‘One day he was paying a visit, on an important matter involving the interests of the whole Order, to Monsieur Chauvel, advocate in the courts of Parliament, and he noticed one of these dancers hanging from the chimney-piece. He had a terrific temptation to pull its string, but managed to resist it with a tremendous effort. But this frivolous ambition pursued him everywhere and gave him no peace. In his studies, in his meditations, in his prayers, at church, at chapter, in the confessional and in the pulpit, he was possessed by it. After days of unbearable agony of mind, he presented his extraordinary case before the General of the Order who happened fortunately to be in Paris at that time. He was an eminent ecclesiastic from Milan, a Doctor and a Prince of the Church. His advice to Father Magitot was to satisfy a craving which was innocent in its inception, importunate in its consequences and inordinate in its excesses, and which threatened to impose the gravest disorders in the soul which was afflicted by it. On the advice, or more strictly, on the order of the General, Father Magitot returned to Monsieur Chauvel’s house, where the lawyer received him, as on the first occasion, in his study. There, seeing the dancing doll still in the same place, he ran excitedly to it and begged his host to do him the favour of allowing him to pull the string. The lawyer gave him permission most willingly, and informed him in confidence that sometimes he made Scaramouche (that was the doll’s name) dance while he was preparing his briefs, and that, only the night before, he had practised modulating on Scaramouche’s movements the peroration of his speech in defence of a woman falsely accused of poisoning her husband. Father Magitot seized the string tremblingly, and saw Scaramouche under his manipulation twitching madly like one possessed being exorcized.’
‘Your story does not surprise me, Father,’ Brotteaux said. ‘One sees such obsessions. But it is not always cardboard figures that cause them.’
Fath
er Longuemare, who was a man of religion, never talked about religion; Brotteaux was constantly talking about it. And, since he felt a bond of sympathy between himself and the Barnabite, it amused him to embarrass the monk and to disturb him with objections to various articles of the Christian faith. Once, when they were working together making Zerlines and Scaramouches, he remarked:
‘When I consider the events which have brought us to our present condition, I doubt if I know which party has shown most madness in the general insanity. Sometimes I am greatly tempted to believe it was the monarchy.’
‘Monsieur,’ the monk replied, ‘when God forsakes them, all men like Nebuchadnezzar lose their wits, but no man has been so fatal to the kingdom as the Abbé Fauchet, no man has ever fallen so deeply into ignorance and error as he. France must surely have greatly exasperated God that He should send her Monsieur l’Abbé Fauchet.’
It seems to me we have seen other wrong-doers than this unfortunate Fauchet.’.
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 16