Twelve old men dressed in Roman togas, with palms in their hands, twelve young girls wearing long veils and holding flowers, stood round the funeral bed. At the feet of the dead man, two children each held an inverted torch. Évariste recognized one of them as his concierge’s little daughter Joséphine, and in her childish gravity and her charming beauty she reminded him of those sculptured figures of Love and Death on Roman tombs.
The funeral procession made its way to the cemetery of Saint-André-des-Arts to the singing of the Marseillaise and the Ça ira.
As he placed his kiss of farewell on Fortuné Trubert’s brow, Évariste wept. He wept for himself, envying him who reposed there, his task accomplished.
On returning home, he received notice that he was appointed a member of the General Council of the Commune. After standing as candidate for four months he had been elected unopposed, after several ballots, by some thirty voters. No one voted now; the Section meetings were deserted; the one thought of rich and poor was to avoid the performance of public duties. The most momentous events no longer aroused either enthusiasm or curiosity; the newspapers were never read. Out of the seven hundred thousand inhabitants of Paris, Évariste doubted whether even three of four thousand still maintained the old Republican spirit
That same day the Twenty-one came up for trial.
Despite everything, despite their innocence or guilt of the misfortunes of the Republic, despite their vanity, ambition and impetuosity, despite their quickness to declare war and their feebleness in waging it, despite the fact that they were being hauled before the Tribunal simply for the example they had given, they were nonetheless the first and the most brilliant leaders of the Revolution, whose delight and glory they had once been. The judge, who will question them with biassed artfulness; the pale accuser, who as he sits there behind his little table is planning their dishonour and death; the magistrates who will soon put to nought all the attempts of the defence to save them; the people in the galleries who are overwhelming them with howls of insult and abuse, all of them, judge, magistrates and people, only yesterday applauded their eloquence, extolled their talents and their virtues. But they no longer remember.
Once Évariste had made Vergniaud his god, Brissot his oracle. But he had forgotten; if any trace of his former worship remained in his memory, it served only to increase their monstrosity in deceiving such fine citizens as himself.
On returning home after the sitting of the Tribunal, Gamelin heard heart-rending cries as he entered the house. It was the little Joséphine whom her mother was whipping for having played in the square with some urchins and dirtied the beautiful white dress which she had worn for the funeral of the Citizen Trubert.
XVI
HAVING for three months participated in the daily sacrifice to the State of victims, both illustrious and obscure, Évariste found a case all for himself; an accused against whom he had his own personal accusation.
Ever since he had sat on the Tribunal, he had watched eagerly, among the mass of culprits who appeared before him, for the man who had seduced Élodie. In his vivid imagination he had painted a portrait of this man, some of the details being indeed accurate. He pictured him as young, handsome, haughty, and had convinced himself that the man had fled to England. He believed he had now found him in a young émigré named Maubel who had come back to France, been denounced by an innkeeper and arrested at an inn at Passy. His case, like a thousand others, was presented by the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. Letters had been found on him which Fouquier-Tinville regarded as proof of a plot between Maubel and Pitt’s agents, but which actually were only letters written to the émigré by a banking-house in London where he had deposited certain funds. Maubel, who was young and good-looking, seemed mainly interested in various love affairs. Evidence of some connection he had with Spain was found in his pocket-book. Spain was then at war with France, but actually these letters were only of a purely private nature, and if the court of preliminary inquiry had not registered a note of insufficient evidence on these scores, it was only on the grounds that justice should never be in too great a hurry to release a prisoner.
Gamelin had a report of Maubel’s first interrogation and he was struck by what it revealed of the young man’s character, which he considered fitted that of Élodie’s betrayer. He then spent many hours in the private room of the clerk of the court, poring eagerly over the papers relating to the case. His suspicions received a remarkable confirmation on his discovering in an old note-book of the émigré the address of the Amour Peintre, together though with those of the Singe Vert and several other shops which sold prints and paintings. But when he was informed that in this same note-book had been found some red carnation petals carefully wrapped in a piece of silk, he remembered that the red carnation was Élodie’s favourite flower, the one she had in the pot on her window-sill, wore in her hair, and, as he had good reason to know, gave as a love token, and his last doubts vanished. Convinced now that he was right, he resolved to question Élodie, though without letting her know the circumstances which had led him to discover the culprit.
As he climbed the stairs to his lodgings, he noticed even on the lower landing a strong smell of fruit, and on reaching the studio, he found Élodie helping the Citizeness Gamelin to make quince jam. Whilst the old housewife was kindling the stove and considering ways of saving fuel and moist sugar without spoiling the quality of the jam, the Citizeness Blaise, seated on a straw-bottomed chair, wearing an apron of brown holland and with her lap full of the golden fruit, was peeling the quinces, quartering them and throwing them into a shallow, copper basin. The strings of her coif were thrown back over her shoulders, the strands of her black hair coiled above her moist forehead; from her whole person there breathed an air of domestic charm and intimate grace which aroused gentle thoughts and tranquil desire.
Without moving from her chair, she gave her lover her beautiful smouldering look as of molten gold and said:
‘You see, Évariste, we are working for you. You’re going to have a delicious store of quince jelly for the winter which will do you good and make your heart joyful.’
But Gamelin went up to her and said quietly in her ear a name:
‘Jacques Maubel…’
At the moment Combalot the cobbler showed his red nose at the half-open door. He had brought some shoes he had repaired, together with the bill for them.
For fear of being taken for a bad citizen he always used the new calendar. The Citizeness Gamelin, who always examined her bills carefully, was all mixed up by the Fructidors and Vendémiaires.
She sighed:
‘Jesus! They want to change everything – days, months, seasons, the sun and the moon! Dear God, what is this pair of shoes down here for the 8 Vendémiaire, Monsieur Combalot?’
‘Citizeness, just have a look at your calendar and you’ll understand it.’
She took the calendar down from the wall, glanced at it and turned her head away with a shudder.
‘It doesn’t look Christian!’ she exclaimed in a shocked voice.
‘Not only that, citizeness,’ said the cobbler, ‘but now we’ve only three Sundays in the month instead of four. And not only that: we’ll soon have to change our ways of counting. There’ll be no more liards and demers, everything’ll be measured by distilled water.’
At these words, the Citizeness Gamelin her lips trembling, looked up at the ceiling and sighed:
‘They’re going too far!’
And, while she was lamenting, looking like one of the female saints in wayside shrines, a piece of coal began to smoke and, together with the stifling smell of the quinces, made the air in the studio unbreathable.
Élodie complained it was hurting her throat and asked for the window to be opened. As soon as the cobbler had left and the Citizeness Gamelin gone back to her stove, Évariste repeated the name in the ear of the Citizeness Blaise:
‘Jacques Maubel.’
She looked at him as if a little surprised, and said very ca
lmly as she went on cutting a quince in quarters:
‘Well?… Jacques Maubel what?…’
‘It was he.’
‘Who?’
‘The one you gave a red carnation to.’
She declared she did not know what he was talking about and asked him to explain himself.
‘That aristocrat! That émigré! That scoundrel!’
She shrugged her shoulders and denied with the most candid air that she had ever known a Jacques Maubel.
And truly she had never known a man of that name.
She denied ever having given red carnations to anyone but Évariste; but, on this point, her memory was perhaps not so good.
Évariste had had little experience of women and he was far from fully understanding Élodie’s character; nevertheless he thought her quite capable of pretence and of deceiving a cleverer man than he.
‘Why deny it?’ he said. ‘I know.’
She asserted again having known nobody named Maubel. And having finished peeling the quinces, she asked for some water to rinse her sticky fingers.
Gamelin brought her a basin of water.
As she washed her hands, she renewed her denials.
He repeated again that he knew, and, this time, she kept silent.
She did not see where her lover’s question was leading and was a thousand miles from suspecting that this Maubel, whom she had never heard of, was to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal; she understood nothing of the suspicions which obsessed him, but she knew they were baseless. And for that reason, since she saw she had little hope of dissipating them, she had little wish to. She stopped defending herself from having known Maubel, preferring to leave her lover lost on a false trail, when at any moment, the least word might start him on the right one. Her little lawyer’s clerk of former days, now become a handsome, patriotic dragoon, had since quarrelled with his aristocratic mistress. Whenever he met Elodie in the street, his eyes seemed to say: ‘Come my beauty! I feel sure I’m ready to forgive you for having abandoned you and to take you back again.’ So she made no further attempt to cure what she called her lover’s whims; Gamelin remained convinced that Jacques Maubel was Élodie’s seducer.
During the days that followed, the Tribunal devoted itself to crushing Federalism which, like a hydra, had threatened to devour Liberty. This meant busy days; and the magistrates, worn out with fatigue, despatched with as much haste as possible the case of the woman Roland, the instigator and accomplice of Brissot and his party.
Meanwhile Gamelin spent every morning in the room of the clerk of the court in order to hasten the Maubel trial. Some important pieces of evidence were at Bordeaux: he arranged for a Commissioner to be sent by post-coach to fetch them. At last they arrived.
The Deputy Public Prosecutor read them, made a grimace and said to Évariste:
‘This isn’t much use! There’s nothing here any good! Just trifles! If we could only prove that this ci-devant Comte de Maubel ever went to England without a passport!…’
Gamelin finally succeeded. The young Maubel received his writ of accusation and was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 19 Brumaire.
From the first day of the sitting the President wore the gloomy and dreadful face he took care to assume for the hearing of cases in which the evidence was weak. The Deputy Prosecutor stroked his chin with the feather of his pen and affected the serenity of a conscience at ease. The clerk read out the writ of accusation: never yet had the court heard anything so shallow.
The President asked the accused if he had not been aware of the laws passed against the émigrés.
‘I was aware of them and I observed them,’ answered Maubel. ‘I left France provided with the proper passports.’
He had satisfactory explanations to give for his reasons for going to England and for returning to France. His face was pleasant, with a frankness and confidence that impressed. The women in the gallery looked at the young man with favourable eyes. The prosecution maintained that he had gone to Spain when that nation was at war with France: he affirmed he had never left Bayonne during that period. One point only remained obscure. Among the papers he had thrown into the fire at the time of his arrest, only a few fragments had remained on which some words in Spanish had been deciphered together with the name of ‘Nieves’.
On this subject Jacques Maubel refused to give any explanations. And, when the President told him that it was in his own interest to clear up the point, he replied that a man should not do always what was in his own interest.
Gamelin’s only aim was to get Maubel convicted of a crime: three times he pressed the President to ask the accused to explain the dried carnation petals so carefully kept in his pocket book.
Maubel replied that he did not consider himself obliged to answer a question which had no concern with the case, since no letter had been found concealed with the petals.
The magistrates retired to the Hall of Deliberations, favourably impressed by the young man whose mysterious conduct appeared to be chiefly concerned to hide a lover’s secret. This time the good patriots, feeling themselves the purest of the pure, would gladly have voted for acquittal. One of them, a ci-devant aristocrat. Who had proved his loyalty to the Revolution said:
‘Is it his birth that is being brought against him? I also had the misfortune to be born into the aristocracy.’
‘Yes, but you left them,’ Gamelin retorted, ‘and he didn’t.’
And he spoke with such vehemence against this conspirator, this agent of Pitt, this accomplice of Coburg, who had voyaged over land and sea in order to stir up the enemies of liberty: he demanded so forcibly this traitor’s condemnation that he awoke the always restless impulsiveness, the old stern implacability of the patriotic magistrates.
One of them said to him, cynically:
‘There are favours which cannot be refused between colleagues.’
The verdict of death was passed by a solid majority.
The condemned man heard his sentence with a quiet smile.
His eyes, which had been gazing unconcernedly about the hall, fell on Gamelin’s face, and took on an expression of unutterable contempt.
Nobody applauded the sentence.
On being taken back to the Conciergerie, Jacques Maubel wrote a letter while a waiting the hour of execution which was to take place the same evening, by torchlight:
My dear sister, the Tribunal sends me to the scaffold, giving me the only joy I have been able to feel since the death of my beloved Nieves. They have taken from me the only thing I had left of her, a pomegranate flower, which they insisted on calling, I don’t know why, a carnation.
I loved all beautiful things: in Paris, in happier times, I collected paintings and engravings which are now in a safe place and which will be delivered to you as soon as it is possible. I beg you, my dear sister, to keep them in memory of me.
He cut a lock from his hair, enclosed it in the letter, which he folded, and wrote on the back the address:
To the Citizeness Clemence Dezeimeries
née Maubel
LaRéole
He gave all the money on him to the turnkey, begging him to see that this letter was despatched. Then he asked for a bottle of wine and drank it in little sips as he awaited the arrival of the tumbril…
After supper, Gamelin ran to the Amour Peintre and burst into the blue bedroom where every night Élodie was waiting for him.
‘You are avenged,’ he told her. ‘Jacques Maubel is no more. The cart which was taking him to his death has passed under your windows, surrounded by torches.’
She understood:
‘You miserable creature! It is you who have killed him, and he was not my lover!… I didn’t know him… I’d never set eyes on him… What had he done? He was young, kind… and innocent. And you have killed him! You monster! You wretched monster!’
She fell into a half-swoon. But, amid the shades of this faint death, she felt herself as if drowning in a strangely mixed flood of horr
or and ecstatic lust. Slowly she returned to consciousness, her eyes opened wide showing the whites and enlarged pupils, her breasts swelled up, her impatient hands groped for her lover. She pressed him to her as if choking the life out of him, she thrust her nails into his flesh, and with her bleeding lips she gave him the most silent, most forceful, most long, most painful and most delicious of kisses.
She gave him her love with her whole body, and the more he seemed to her terrible, cruel and atrocious, the more he seemed to her covered with the blood of his victims, the more she hungered and thirsted for him.
XVII
ON the 24 Frimaire,* at ten in the morning, under a clear pink-blue sky that was melting the ice of the night, the Citizens Guénot and Delourmel, delegates of the Committee of General Safety, went to the Barnabites and asked to be taken to the Committee of Surveillance of the Section, in the capitular room, whose only occupant at that moment was the Citizen Beauvisage, who was busy piling logs on the fire. Owing to his short squat figure, they did not notice him at first.
In the cracked voice of hunchbacks, the Citizen Beauvisage begged the delegates to seat themselves and put himself entirely at their service.
Guénot then asked if he knew a ci-devant Monsieur des Ilettes, residing near the Pont-Neuf.
‘He is an individual,’ he added, ‘whose arrest I am instructed to effect.’
And he produced the order from the Committee of General Safety.
Beauvisage, after searching in his memory for some time, replied that he knew no individual named des Ilettes, that the suspect in question might not be an inhabitant of his Section, since certain parts of other Sections met in the near neighbourhood of the Pont-Neuf; and that, if he did live in his Section, it must be under another name than that shown on the Committee’s order; that, nevertheless, it would not be long before they discovered his whereabouts.
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