‘Monsieur l’Abbé Grégoire was also a man full of malice.’
‘And Brissot, and Danton, and Marat, and a hundred others. What have you to say about them, Father?’
‘They were laymen, monsieur. The laity can never incur the same responsibility as the clergy. The evil they do does not have such universal repercussions.’
‘And your God, Father? What have you to say about His behaviour towards this Revolution?’
‘I do not understand you, monsieur.’
‘Epicurus said: “God either wishes to prevent evil and cannot, or can and does not wish to, or cannot and does not wish to, or wishes to and can. If He wishes to and cannot, He is impotent; if He can and does not wish to, He is perverse; if He cannot and does not wish to, He is impotent and perverse; if He does wish to and can, then why doesn’t He?” Tell me that, Father!’
And Brotteaux threw a look of satisfaction at his companion.
‘Monsieur,’ replied the monk, ‘there is nothing that saddens me more than these difficulties you raise. When I look into the reasoning of non-believers, it seems as though I am looking at ants piling up a few blades of grass in an attempt to dam back a torrent that sweeps down from the mountains. Permit me not to argue with you. I would have too many arguments and too little ability to present them. Besides, you will find yourself refuted in the Abbé Guénée and twenty others. I will only say that what you quote from Epicurus is foolishness: for God is judged in it as if He were a man and had a man’s morals. Ah, well, monsieur, the unbelievers, from Celsus down to Bayle and Voltaire, have deluded fools with similar paradoxes.’
‘Don’t you see, Father,’ Brotteaux replied, ‘into what errors your faith leads you? Not content with finding all truth in your theology, you even refuse to find any in the works of so many noble minds who think differently from you.’
‘You are completely mistaken, monsieur,’ Longuemare protested. ‘On the contrary, I believe that nothing can be altogether false in a man’s thought. The atheists occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of understanding; but even with them, gleams of sense are to be found and flashes of truth, and, even where the shadows are darkest, men possess a mind into which God can put understanding: that was what happened to Lucifer.’
‘Well, monsieur,’ Brotteaux said, ‘I will not be so generous and I swear to you that I don’t find one atom of sense in all the works of your theologians.’
At the same time he would repudiate any wish to attack religion, considering it necessary for people; he only desired that its ministers were philosophers instead of controversialists. He deplored the fact that the Jacobins were for replacing it with a newer and more malignant religion, the cult of Liberty and Equality, of the Republic and the State. He had noticed that religions are fiercest and most cruel in the vigour of their youth and that they grow milder as they grow older. He was anxious, therefore, to see Catholicism preserved, since though it had devoured many victims in its youth, it was now, burdened by the weight of years and an enfeebled appetite, content with roasting four or five heretics every hundred years.
‘For the rest,’ he added, ‘I have always got on very well with your God-eaters and Christ-breeders. I used to keep a chaplain at Les Ilettes, where Mass was said every Sunday; all my guests used to come along to it. The philosophers were the most assiduous and the girls from the opera the most fervent. I was fortunate then and had numerous friends.’
‘Friends!’ exclaimed Father Longuemare. ‘Friends! Do you really believe, monsieur, they liked you, all your philosophers and all your courtesans, who have degraded your soul so that God Himself would have difficulty in recognizing it as one of the temples He built for His glory?’
Father Longuemare continued to live another week with the Publican without being troubled. As far as possible he observed the discipline of his Order and every night at the canonical hours he would get up from his palliasse to kneel on the bare floor and recite his offices. Though they were both reduced to eating scraps, he duly observed fasts and abstinences. A smiling but pitiful spectator of these austerities, Brotteaux asked him one day:
‘Do you really believe God finds any pleasure in seeing you endure cold and hunger like this?’
‘God Himself,’ the monk replied, ‘gave us the example of suffering.’
On the ninth day after the Barnabite had come to share the philosopher’s garret, Brotteaux went out at dusk to deliver his dancing dolls to Joly, the toy merchant of the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. He was on his way back, pleased at having sold them all, when, as he was crossing the former Place du Carrousel, a girl wearing a blue satin pelisse bordered with ermine, ran towards him limping, threw herself into his arms and held him in the embrace peculiar to suppliants from time immemorial.
She was trembling; it was even possible to feel the fast beat of her heart. Moved by her look of pathetic vulgarity, Brotteaux, veteran amateur of the theatre, thought how Mademoiselle Raucourt could have profited by seeing her.
She spoke breathlessly, lowering her voice for fear of being overheard by passers-by:
‘Take me with you, citizen, and hide me, for pity’s sake!… They are in my room in the Rue Fromenteau. As they were coming upstairs, I ran into Flora’s room – next to mine – and jumped out of the window into the street. That’s how I’ve sprained my foot… They were coming for me; they want to put me in prison and put me to death… Last week they put Virginie to death.’
Brotteaux understood well that she was talking of the delegates of the Revolutionary Committee of the Section or of the Commissaries of the Committee of General Safety. At that time, the Commune had a virtuous procureur, the Citizen Chaumette, who hunted down prostitutes as being the most deadly enemies of the Republic. He wanted to reform their morals. The young ladies of the Palais-Égalité, were, indeed, no great patriots. They regretted the old ways and did not always hide the fact. Several had been guillotined already as conspirators.
The Citizen Brotteaux asked her what she had done to bring down on her a warrant of arrest.
She swore that she had no idea, she had done nothing she could be blamed for.
‘Well, then, my child,’ Brotteaux told her, ‘you are certainly not a suspect: you have nothing to fear. Go back to bed and leave me in peace.’
At that, she confessed everything:
‘I tore out my cockade and I shouted: “Vive le Roi!’”
He took her along the deserted quais. Clinging to his arm, she continued:
‘It’s not that I liked him, the King; I never met him, you know, but he probably wasn’t much different from other men.
But these lot are wicked. They are cruel to us poor girls. They torment me, annoy me, hurt me in every kind of way; they want to prevent me carrying on my trade. I have no other. You can be quite sure if I had, I wouldn’t be doing what I do… What do they want? They’re so hard on ordinary people, the milkman, the charcoalman, the water-carrier, the laundress. They won’t be happy till they set all poor folks against them.’
He looked at her: she seemed only a child. She was no longer shaking with fear. She was almost smiling, as she limped along lightly beside him. He asked her her name. She replied that it was Athénaïs and that she was sixteen.
Brotteaux offered to see her safely to anywhere she wanted to go. She knew no one at all in Paris; but she had an aunt, a servant at Palaiseau, who would take her in.
Brotteaux made up his mind.
‘Come along, my child,’ he said to her.
And he led her away, leaning on his arm.
Back in his garret, he found Father Longuemare reading in his breviary.
He showed Athénaïs to him, holding her by the hand:
‘Father, here is a girl from the Rue Fromenteau who has shouted “Vive le Roil” The Revolutionary police are after her. She has nowhere to go. Will you allow her to spend the might here?’
Father Longuemare closed his breviary.
‘If I understand you correctly,’ he said, ‘you are as
king me, monsieur, if this young girl who is, like myself, threatened with a warrant for arrest, may for her secular salvation spend the night in the same room as I.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘By what right should I object? Should I consider myself offended by her presence? Should I be so sure that I am of more value than she in the sight of God?’
He ensconced himself, for the night, in an old broken-down armchair, declaring he would sleep well in it. Athénaïs lay on the mattress. Brotteaux stretched himself on the palliasse and blew out the candle.
The hours and half-hours rang from the clocks of the churches: he slept not and heard the mingled breathing of the monk and the prostitute. The moon, symbol and witness of ancient loves, rose and poured into the garret a beam of silver which aureoled with light the fair hair, the golden eyelashes, the delicate nose and the curved red mouth of Athénaïs, asleep with her fists clenched.
‘There lies,’ he thought to himself, ‘a terrible enemy indeed for the Republic.’
When Athénaïs awoke, it was day. The monk had disappeared. Brotteaux was reading his Lucretius under the skylight, learning from the Latin poet how to live without fear and without desire; and yet he was filled with a regret and an unease.
On opening her eyes, Athénaïs was stupefied to see above her head the roof-beams of a garret. Then she remembered, smiled at her preserver, and reaching out her arms caressed him with her pretty little dirty hands.
Sitting up on the mattress, she pointed to the dilapidated armchair in which the monk had passed the night.
‘He has gone?… He hasn’t gone to denounce me, has he?’
‘No, my child. You couldn’t find anywhere a more honest person than that old madman.’
Athénaïs asked in what way the old man was mad; and, when Brotteaux told her it was religion, she reproached him gravely for saying such a thing and declared that men without religion were worse than beasts and that, for herself, she prayed to God often, hoping He would forgive her sins and receive her into His blessed mercy.
Then, noticing that Brotteaux was holding a book in his hand, she took it to be a book of the Mass and said:
‘And there, you see, you say your prayers tool God will reward you for what you have done for me.’
Brotteaux told her the book was not a book of the Mass and that it had been written long before the Mass had been introduced into the world. She then thought it must be a Key to Dreams and asked if it contained an explanation of an extraordinary dream she had had. She could not read and had heard of only these two books.
Brotteaux replied that this book only explained the dream of life. Finding this beyond her, the pretty child did not try to understand it and gave her face a cursory wash in the earthenware pot which had replaced the silver basins Brotteaux had once been accustomed to. Then she arranged her hair before her host’s shaving mirror with scrupulous care and gravity. Her slender white arms raised above her head, she made an occasional remark between long intervals:
‘You… You were rich once?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I don’t know. But you were. And you were an aristocrat, I’m sure.’
From her pocket she took a little Holy Virgin made of silver in a round ivory shrine, a piece of sugar, some thread, scissors, a flint and steel, a few cases of needles and other odds and ends, and after selecting what she required, she sat down and began mending her skirt which had been torn in several places.
‘For your own safety, child, put this in your cap!’ Brotteaux told her, giving her a tricolour cockade.
‘I will gladly, monsieur’, she agreed. ‘But it’ll be for love of you and not for love of the Republic.’
When she was dressed and had made herself as presentable as possible, she took her skirts in both hands and dropped a curtsey as she had been taught to do in her village, saying as she did so:
‘Monsieur, I am your most humble servant.’
Though she was ready to oblige her benefactor in any way he wished, she decided it was more becoming when he demanded nothing and that it would also become her better to offer nothing herself. It seemed to her a romantic way to part, and indeed what good manners required.
Brotteaux slipped a few assignats into her hand to pay her coach fare to Palaiseau. It was half of all he had, and although he had been famous for his lavish generosity to women, it was the first time he had ever made an equal partition of all he owned with any woman.
She asked him his name.
‘I am called Maurice.’
He opened the garret door for her reluctantly.
‘Good-bye, Athénaïs.’
She kissed him.
‘Monsieur Maurice,’ she said, ‘when you think of me, if you ever do, think of me as Marthe. That is the name I was christened and the name they call me in my village… Goodbye and thank you… Your very humble servant, Monsieur Maurice.’
XV
THE prisons were full to bursting and must be emptied; the work of judging and judgment had to go on without rest or respite. Seated against the tapestried walls with their fasces and their red caps of liberty, the judges maintained the same gravity, the same awesome calm, as their Royal predecessors. The Public Prosecutor and his Deputies, worn out with fatigue, feverish with brandy and lack of sleep, could only shake off their exhaustion with a violent effort; their shattered health made them tragic figures. The magistrates, all so different in character and origins, educated or ignorant, generous or mean, gentle or violent, sincere or hypocritical, but all of them men who, knowing the Republic to be in danger, suffered or pretended to suffer the same anguish, to be afire with the same ardour; all were poised ready for atrocities primed by conscience or fear, and thus they formed one living organism, one single, unthinking, irritable mind, one single apocalyptic, bestial soul which could, by the mere exercise of its natural functions, produce a teeming progeny of death. By turn capriciously cruel or kind-hearted, they would, when momentarily overcome by a sudden pang of pity, acquit with tears in their eyes a prisoner whom only an hour before they would have mocked as they condemned him to the guillotine. As day followed day, the more impetuously they followed their impulses.
Judges and magistrates worked, feverish and half-asleep with exhaustion, distracted by the excited shouts of the sovereign people outside, threatened by the sans-culottes and tricoteuses who crowded the galleries and public enclosure, influenced by insane evidence, relying on the denunciations of madmen, in a poisonous atmosphere which dulled their brains, set their ears hammering and temples beating and covered their eyes with a veil of blood. Vague rumours were rife among the people of magistrates being bribed by the gold of the accused. To these, the magistrates replied as a body with indignant protests and merciless condemnations. They were, in fact, neither better not worse than their fellow men. Freedom from sin is more often than not a piece of good fortune rather than a virtue: any person who might have agreed to take their place would have acted as they did, and performed to the best of his mediocre soul their appalling tasks.
Antoinette, the Queen, so long awaited, sat at last in the fatal chair, in a black gown and the object of such concentrated hate that it was only the certainty of her fate which made the court observe the forms of law. To the mortally conclusive questions hurled at her she replied sometimes with the instinct of self-preservation, sometimes with her usual haughtiness, and once, owing to a hideous suggestion by one of her accusers, with the noble dignity of a mother. The witnesses against her confined themselves completely to venom and calumny; her defence witnesses were frozen with terror. The Tribunal, forcing itself to follow the rules of procedure, waited as patiently as it could till all the formalities were completed, before hurling against the nations of Europe the head of the Austrian-born Queen of France.
Three days after the execution of Marie Antoinette, Gamelin was called to the bedside of the Citizen Fortuné Trubert, who lay dying on a bed of sacks in the cell of an expelled Barnabite father, withi
n thirty steps of the office where he had worn out his life. His white head was sunk deep in the pillow. His eyes, already almost sightless, turned their glassy pupils towards his visitor; his hot, dry hand grasped Évariste’s and pressed it with unexpected strength. Three times in the last two days he had vomited blood. He tried to speak: his voice, hoarse and weak as a whisper at first, grew louder, deeper:
‘Wattignies! Wattignies!… Jourdan has encircled the enemy… he has raised the blockage at Mauberge… We have recaptured Marchiennes, ça ira… ça ira…’
And he smiled.
These were not dreams of a sick man, but a clear vision of events to be that flashed through a brain soon to be enveloped in eternal night. Trubert foresaw the outcome of the policy of terror. Where voluntary recruitment had failed, compulsion had succeeded in producing a strong disciplined army; in their terror the generals had realized the best thing for them was to be victorious. One final effort, and the Republic would be saved.
After half an hour of semi-consciousness, Fortuné Truber’t face, hollow and worn with disease, lighted up again and his hands moved.
He lifted his finger and pointed to the only piece of furniture in the room, a small, walnut desk. His voice was weak and breathless, but his mind still unclouded.
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘like Eudamidas I leave my debts to you, my friend: three hundred and twenty livres… the account is in that red book over there… Adieu, Gamelin. Be vigilant. Watch over the defence of the Republic. Ça ira.’
The shadow of night was filling the cell. All that could be heard was the painful breathing of the dying man and the scratching of his hands on the sheet.
At midnight, he uttered some disconnected words:
‘More saltpetre… Get the guns delivered… My health? Excellent!… Full down all the bells!…
He died at 5 o’clock in the morning.
By order of the Section his body lay in state in the nave of the former church of the Barnabites, at the foot of the Altar of the Nation, on a camp bed covered with a tricolour flag and with his forehead encircled with a crown of oak leaves.
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 17