‘Les us lose no time!’ Guénot said. ‘Our vigilance was aroused in this case by a letter from one of the man’s accomplices which was intercepted and placed in the hands of the Committee a fortnight ago, but which the Citizen Lacroix took action upon only last evening. We are overwhelmed with business; denunciations are piling in on us from all sides, in such abundance one doesn’t know which to attend to first.’
‘It is the same with us,’ replied Beauvisage proudly. ‘Denunciations are flowing into the Committee of Vigilance of our Section. Some are made out of patriotism, some as a result of the bait of a hundred sols’ reward. Lots of children denounce their own parents, just to get their inheritance the sooner.’
‘This letter,’ Guénot resumed, ‘emanates from a ci-devant named Rochemaure, a woman who liked entertaining people at her house, where they played biribi, and it is addressed to a certain Citizen Rauline; but its intended recipient is really an émigré in the service of Pitt. I have brought it with me to read you the portion relating to this man des Ilettes.’
He drew the letter from his pocket.
’It begins with copious details about those members of the Convention who might, according to this woman, be won over by the offer of money or the promise of a remunerative post under a new government, more stable than the present. Then follows this passage:
I have just returned from visiting Monsieur des Ilettes, who lives near the Pont-Neuf in a garret where one has to be either a cat or an imp to reach him: he is reduced to earning a living by making marionettes. He is a man of sound judgement, for which reason I am transmitting to you, monsieur, the main points of his conversation. He does not believe the existing state of affairs will last long. Nor does he foresee it being ended by the victory of the Coalition, and events appear to justify his opinion; for as you are aware, monsieur, news from the front has been bad for some time now. He would seem rather to believe in the revolt of the poor, especially of the women of the lower classes who remain deeply attached still to their religion. He believes that the widespread alarm caused by the Revolutionary Tribunal will soon unite all France against the Jacobins. ‘This Tribunal,’ he said, jokingly, ‘which imprisons the Queen of France and a baker, is like that William Shakespeare so admired by the English, etc.…’ He thinks it not impossible that Robespierre may marry Madame Royale, and have himself named Protector of the Kingdom.
I should be grateful to you, monsieur, if you would send me the sums owing to me, that is to say one thousand pounds sterling, by the way you are accustomed to, but on no account write to Monsieur Morbardt: he has just been arrested, put in prison, etc., etc.
‘This Sieur des Ilettes makes marionettes, it seems,’ Beauvisage said. ‘That’s a valuable clue… though there are many cheap trades like that carried on in the Section.’
‘That reminds me,’ said Delourmel, ‘I promised to bring a doll home for my little daughter Nathalie, my youngest. She is ill with scarlatina. The spots appeared yesterday. It’s nothing to worry about, but she needs careful nursing. And Nathalie’s very advanced for her age, very intelligent, but her health has always been delicate.’
‘I’ve only one boy,’ said Guénot. ‘He plays rolling barrel-hoops and makes little montgolfier balloons by blowing into paper bags.’
‘Very often,’ Beauvisage contributed, ‘it’s with objects that aren’t toys that children enjoy playing with most. My nephew, Émile, who’s only seven, but very intelligent, amuses himself all day long with little squares of wood, with which he constructs buildings… Do you partake, citizen?…’
And Beauvisage held out his open snuff-box to the two delegates.
‘Now we really must set about nabbing our rascal,’ Delournel said. He had long moustaches and huge eyes which rolled about. ‘I feel just the appetite this morning for a nice piece of aristocratic steak, washed down with a glass of white wine.’
Beauvisage suggested to the delegates that they all went to see his colleague Dupont aÎné in his shop in the Place Dauphine. He would be sure to know this man, des Ilettes.
So they set off in the keen, morning air, followed by four grenadiers of the Section.
‘Have you seen the play The Last Judgement of the Kings? Delourmel asked his companions. ‘It’s worth seeing. The author shows you all the kings of Europe taking refuge on a desert island, at the foot of a volcano which engulfs them all. It’s a patriotic work.’
At the corner of the Rue du Harlay, Delourmel spotted a little cart, painted as brilliantly as a chapel, being pushed along by an old woman wearing over her coif a hat of waxed cloth.
‘What’s that old woman selling?’ he asked.
The old dame replied herself:
‘See messieurs, take your choice. I’ve beads and rosaries, crosses, images of St Anthony, holy cerecloths, St Veronica handkerchiefs, Ecce Homos, Agnus Deis, St Hubert rings and hunting horns, and all kinds of articles of devotion.’
‘It’s an arsenal of fanaticism!’ Delourmel exclaimed.
And he proceeded to a summary interrogation of the poor woman who gave the same answer to every question:
‘My son, for forty years I’ve been selling objects of devotion!’
The other delegate of the Committee of General Safety, noticing a National Guard passing, asked him to conduct the astonished old woman to the Conciergerie.
The Citizen Beauvisage pointed out to Delourmel that it should rather have been the Committee of Surveillance which had arrested the woman who would then have been brought before the Section; that in addition one never knew nowadays what attitude to adopt towards the old religion so as to be in accord with the views of the government, nor whether it was best to allow everything or forbid everything.
As they approached the joiner’s shop, the delegates and the commissary heard angry shouts rising above the hissing of the saw and the grinding of the plane. A quarrel had broken out between the joiner, Dupont aîné, and his neighbour the porter Remacle, on account of the Citizeness Remade, who was continually being attracted irresistibly into the joiner’s workshop, whence she would return to the porter’s lodge covered with shavings and sawdust. The injured porter went over and kicked the joiner’s dog, Mouton, which his own little daugher, Joséphine, was sitting nursing lovingly in her arms. Joséphine was furious and poured a torrent of abuse at her father, while the joiner yelled:
‘Miserable coward! That’s all you can do – kick a dog!’
The porter picked up his broom and advanced threateningly: ‘And I tell you, you’re not going to…’
He did not finish the sentence since the joiner’s plane hurtled close past his head.
At that moment he also caught sight of the Citizen Beau-visage and the waiting delegates. He rushed up to them, shouting:
‘Citizen Commissary! You are my witness! You saw this villain just try to murder me!’
The Citizen Beauvisage, in his red cap, the badge of his office, extended his long arms in the attitude of a peace-maker, and said to the porter and the joiner:
‘If either of you wants one hundred sols, he has only to inform me where to find a suspect wanted by the Committee of General Safety, a ci-devant aristocrat named des Ilettes who is at present earning his living by making marionettes.’
The porter and the joiner both immediately pointed up to Brotteaux’s lodging, their only quarrel now being the division of the promised one hundred sols.
Delourmel, Guénot, and Beauvisage, followed by the four grenadiers, by Remade the porter, Dupont the joiner, and a dozen little ragamuffins of the neighbourhood, filed up the stairs which shook beneath their tread, and finally climbed up the ladder to the attic.
Brotteaux was busy in his garret cutting out dancing figures, whilst Father Longuemare sat opposite him, stringing their limbs on threads and smiling to himself to see form and harmony thus growing under his fingers.
At the sound of the muskets thudding to the floor on the landing, the monk began trembling, not that he was at all the less courageou
s than Brotteaux, who never moved a muscle, but the monk’s habitual respect for conventions had never disciplined him to display assumed self-composure. From the questions put to him by the Citizen Delourmel, Brotteaux understood whence the blow had come and realized a little late how unwise it is to confide in women. Invited to follow the citizen Commissary, he gathered together his Lucretius and three shirts.
‘This citizen,’ he said, pointing to Father Longuemare, ‘is an assistant I have taken on to help me make my marionettes. This is his home.’
But the monk, being unable to produce a certificate of citizenship, was put under arrest with Brotteaux.
As the procession passed in front of the porter’s door, the Citizeness Remacle leaning on her broom gave her lodger a look of the virtuous who sees the law dealing out his just deserts to a criminal. The little Joséphine, daintily disdainful, held Mouton back by his collar when the dog wanted to welcome the friend who had given him sugar. A crowd of curious onlookers was filling the Place de Thionville.
At the bottom of the staircase, Brotteaux found himself facing a young peasant girl who was about to go up. She carried a basket full of eggs on her arm and in her hand a flat cake wrapped in a napkin. It was Athénaïs, who had come from Palaiseau to give a token of gratitude to her saviour. When she saw the delegates, the four grenadiers and ‘Monsieur Maurice’ being taken away a prisoner, she stopped, stupefied, asked if it were true, went up to the commissary and said gently to him:
‘You’re not taking him away? But it’s not possible!… You can’t know him! He’s a good man, good as the good Lord Himself!’
The Citizen Delourmel pushed her out of the way and motioned to the grenadiers to go ahead. Then Athénaïs vomited forth at the delegates and the grenadiers a torrent of such foul abuse, of such obscene invective that they could have believed all the closet-pans of the Palais-Royal and the Rue Fromenteau were being emptied on top of their heads. After which, in a voice which filled the entire Place de Thionville and sent a shudder through the crowd of curious onlookers, she yelled:
‘Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!’
XVIII
THE Citizeness Gamelin liked old Brotteaux, and taking him all round regarded him as the most charming and finest man she had ever known. She had not said good-bye to him when he was taken away because she would have feared it would offend the authorities and in her humble condition she had become used to regarding cowardice as a duty. But she had received a blow which had completely overwhelmed her.
She could not eat and lamented that she should have lost her appetitie just when she at last had the means to satisfy it. She still admired her son; but she no longer dared think of the terrible tasks he was carrying out and was thankful she was only an ignorant woman not called upon to judge him.
The poor mother had found an old rosary at the bottom of a trunk; she did not know how to use it properly, but she kept fumbling it in her trembling fingers. Having lived to old age without practising her religion, she was coming to feel the need of it: she was now praying to God all day long, in her chimney corner, for her child Évariste and for that kind Monsieur Brotteaux. Élodie often used to come to see her: they did not dare look at each other and, sitting side by side, would talk randomly of things of little interest.
One day in Pluviôse when the snow, falling in heavy flakes, was darkening the sky and deadening the noises of the city, the Citizeness Gamelin, who was alone in their lodging heard a knock on the door. She jumped with fright: for several months the slightest noise had set her trembling. She opened the door. A young man of about eighteen to twenty years of age entered, his hat on his head. He was wearing a bottle-green greatcoat, the three long collars of which covered his chest and descended to his waist. He wore top-boots in the English fashion. His chestnut hair fell in ringlets on to his shoulders. He advanced into the middle of the studio, as if in order that all the light through the snow-covered skylight might fall on him, and then stood for some moments motionless and silent.
At last, as the Citizeness Gamelin continued to look at him speechless:
‘You don’t recognize your daughter?…’
The old woman clasped her hands tightly.
‘Julie!… It is you… Oh, God, is it possible!’
‘Yes, it’s me! Oh, kiss me, maman.’
The Citizeness Gamelin clasped her daughter in her arms and one tear fell on the collar of the greatcoat. Then she went on anxiously:
‘But – you – here in Paris!…’
‘Oh, mother, if only I had come alone!… Nobody would have known me dressed like this.’
The greatcoat did indeed disguise her figure and she did not look very different from a great many young men, who, like her, wore their hair long and parted on the forehead. The delicately cut and charming features of her face, though weary, drawn and weather-beaten, had a bold masculine expression. She was slim, with long slender legs, and she carried herself with an easy poise of distinction; only her light clear voice would have betrayed her.
Her mother asked if she was hungry. She replied she would be very glad of something to eat, and when bread, ham and wine had been set before her, she began eating, one elbow on the table, with the glutton-like beauty of Ceres in the hut of the old woman Baubo.
Then, the glass still at her lips:
‘Maman, when will my brother be back? I have come to speak to him.’
The good mother gave her daughter an embarrassed look and did not reply.
‘I must see him. My husband was arrested this morning and taken to the Luxembourg.’
The ‘husband’ she referred to was Fortuné de Chassagne, ci-devant aristocrat and officer in Bouilé’s regiment. He had fallen in love with her when she was a milliner’s assistant in the Rue des Lombards, and had carried her off with him to England where he had fled after the 10th August. He was her lover; but she deemed it better to speak of him as her husband before her mother. Indeed she had come to tell herself that their misfortunes had united them in a bond as strong as wedlock and that theirs was a marriage consecrated by suffering.
More than once they had spent the night sitting together on a bench in one of the London parks, and more than once had they gathered scraps of bread from under the tables of the inns in Piccadilly.
Her mother still made no reply but kept looking at her sadly.
‘Don’t you hear me, maman? There’s no time to lose. I must see Évariste quickly: he’s the only one who can save Fortuné.’
‘Julie,’ her mother said at last, ‘it is better you do not speak to your brother.’
‘What do you mean? Why not?’
‘I mean what I say. It is better you do not speak to your brother about Monsieur de Chassagne.’
‘But I must, maman!’
‘My child, Évariste has never forgiven Monsieur de Chassagne for his treatment of you. You know how violently he used to speak about him, the names he called him.’
‘Yes, he called him my seducer,’ Julie answered, with a bitter little laugh, shrugging her shoulders.
‘It was his pride that was hurt, my dear. Terribly. He has vowed never to mention Monsieur de Chassagne’s name again, and for two years now he hasn’t spoken of him or of you. But his feelings are still the same; you know him, he will never forgive you…’
‘But, maman, Fortuné has married me… in London…’
The poor mother made a despairing movement with her eyes and hands:
‘Fortuné is an aristocrat, an émigré, and that is enough to make Évariste think of him as an enemy.’
‘Maman, say what you mean. If I ask him to go to the Public Prosecutor and the Committee of General Safety and arrange for Fortuné to be released, do you mean he will refuse?… But, maman, he couldn’t be such a monster as to do that!’
‘My child, your brother is an honest man and a good son. But do not ask him. Oh, do not ask him to try to help Monsieur de Chassagne… Listen to me, Julie. He does not tell me much, and no doubt I wouldn’t understa
nd all he has to do… but he is a magistrate: he has principles; he does as his conscience tells him. Do not ask him anything, Julie.’
‘I see. Yes, I see you have come to know him now. You know what he is, cruel, vicious, you know he is an evil man, that all he lives for is to satisfy his own vanity and ambition. But you always loved him better than me. When the three of us lived together, you set him up as my pattern, my model. His serious voice always impressed you: to you he had all the virtues. But you always used to blame me; to you I had all the vices, just because I spoke my mind, because I was a bit wild, because I used to go out and climb trees. You could never endure me. It was only him you loved. Well, I hate him, your perfect model! Évariste was always a hypocrite!’
‘Julie, Julie, hush! I have been a good mother to you as well. I had you taught a trade. It’s not my fault you weren’t an honest woman and married out of your station in life. I loved you always and I do still. But you must not speak badly of Évariste. He is a good son. He has always taken care of me. When you left me, my child, when you gave up your work at the shop and went to live with Monsieur de Chassagne, what would have become of me without him? I would have died of hunger and misery.’
‘Don’t talk like that to me, mother. You know quite well Fortuné and I would have taken care of you, with all our affection, if Évariste hadn’t turned you against us. Don’t try to justify him! He doesn’t know the meaning of kindness. It was just to make me seem hateful to you that he pretended to be kind to you. Him! Love you?… Could he love anyone? He’s neither the heart nor the mind to. And he’s got no talent, not one scrap. To be a good artist, a man must know how to feel tenderness. And he’s incapable of that.’
She looked round the studio at the canvases and found them to be neither better nor worse than when she had left home.
‘There’s his soul! You can see it in his paintings, cold and empty. Look at his Orestes there, with those dull eyes and cruel mouth. That’s Évariste himself to the life… Oh, maman, maman! Can’t you understand at all? I can’t leave Fortuné in prison without trying to help him. You knew these Jacobins, these patriots, all Évariste’s friends. They will kill Fortuné. Oh, maman, little maman, darling maman, I cannot let them kill him! I love him! I love him! He has been so good to me and life has not been kind to us. Look, this greatcoat is one of his. I’ve no longer a thing to wear. A friend of Fortuné’s lent me a jacket and I sold lemonade at Dover while Fortuné worked in a barber’s shop. We knew quite well we were risking our lives by coming back to France. But somebody asked us if we would come to Paris on an important mission for them… We agreed; we would have agreed to carry out a mission for the devil himself if we got paid for it. All our travelling expenses were paid and we were given a banker’s draft on a Paris banker. We found his offices closed: the banker is in prison and is going to be guillotined. We hadn’t a sou. Everybody we had known and whom we could have asked to help us have fled or are in prison. Not a place we could go to. We slept in a stable in the Rue de la Femme-sans-tête. A kindly boot-black, who slept there on the straw with us, lent Fortuné one of his boxes, a brush and a pot of blacking three-quarters empty. For the last fortnight Fortuné has been keeping himself and me by blacking shoes in the Place de Grève. But on Monday a member of the Commune put his foot on the box to have his boots polished. He’d once been a butcher whom Fortuné had given many a kick on the behind for selling meat at short weight. When Fortuné raised his head to ask for his two sous, this rogue recognized him, called him an aristocrat and threatened him with arrest. A crowd gathered, made up of honest folk with a few scoundrels who started to shout “Death to the émigré!’ and called for the gendarmes. Just then I came up with Fortune’s bowl of soup. I saw him being taken away to be imprisoned in the old church of Saint-Jean. I tried to kiss him but they pushed me away. I spent the night on the steps of the church, like a dog… They took him away this morning…’
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