Julie could not go on; sobs choked her.
She threw her hat on the floor and fell on her knees at her mother’s feet.
‘They took him away this morning to the Luxembourg prison. Maman, maman, help me to save him! Have pity on your daughter!’
With her tears streaming down her face, she threw open her greatcoat and, the better to prove herself a daughter and a woman in love, she bared her bosom; and, taking her mother’s hand, she pressed them on her palpitating breasts.
‘Oh, my dearest daughter, my Julie, my little Julie!’ sobbed the Widow Gamelin.
And for some moments she held her face, wet with tears, tight against the girl’s cheek.
Neither of them then said a word. The poor mother was searching for some way of helping her daugher, and Julie was watching hopefully the look in those eyes now full of tears.
‘Perhaps,’ Évariste’s mother thought to herself, ‘perhaps, if I speak to him, he will relent. He is good, he has a kind heart. If all this political work hadn’t hardened him, if he hadn’t been influenced by these Jacobins, he would never have started having these cruel feelings which frighten me so because I can’t understand them.’
She took Julie’s head between her hands:
‘Listen, my child. I will speak to Évariste. I’ll prepare him for you, so you can talk to each other. The sight of you would be enough to anger him and I’m frightened of how to begin with him… And, you see, I know him: anything that offends against morals or the conventions makes him hard. Even I was a little taken aback to see my Julie wearing man’s clothes.’
‘But, maman, these disguises have become quite common through the terrible state of things making people try to get out of the country. They’re used just to escape being recognized, or to get a borrowed passport approved. In London, I saw young Girey dressed as a girl and quite a pretty girl he made as well; and you must admit, maman, his disguise is a more scandalous one than mine is.’
‘My poor child, you’ve no need to try to justify yourself to me, whatever you’re wearing. I am your mother; for me you will always be my innocent child. I will speak to Évariste, I will say…’
She stopped. She knew in her heart of hearts what her son had become; she knew it, but she did not want to believe it, she did not want to admit it to herself.
‘He is good. He will do it for me… If I ask him, he will do it for you.’
And the two women, weary to the point of death, fell silent. Julie dropped off to sleep, her head pillowed on her mother’s knees as when she was a child, whilst the mother, the rosary between her hands, wept, another mater dolorosa, over the calamities she felt creeping closer and closer in the silence of this snow-covered day when everything, footsteps, carriage-wheels, life itself, had become noiseless.
Suddenly, with a quickness of hearing sharpened by anxiety, she heard her son coming up the stairs.
‘It’s Évariste!…’ she said. ‘You must hide!’
And she pushed the girl into the bedroom.
‘How are you today, mother dear?’
Évariste hung his hat on the hat-rack, changed his blue coat for a working jacket and seated himself in front of his easel. For some days he had been working at a sketch in charcoal of Victory laying a wreath on the brow of a soldier who had died fighting for the fatherland. Such a subject would once have called forth all his enthusiasm, but the Tribunal now occupied all his days and absorbed his whole being, whilst his hand had lost its knack from lack of practice and had grown heavy and lazy.
He hummed the Ça ira.
‘You are singing, my son,’ said the Citizeness Gamelin. ‘You must be happy.’
‘We’ve reason to be, mother: there’s been good news. La Vendée has been crushed, the Austrians defeated; the army of the Rhine has broken through at Lautern and Wissembourg. The day is coming when the triumphant Republic will show its mercy. But why is it that, as the Republic grows in strength, the conspirators have to increase their audacity, and traitors plot in the dark to strike blows against our country just as she is overwhelming the enemies that strike at her openly?’
The Citizeness Gamelin, as she knitted a sock, was watching her son’s face over her spectacles.
‘Your old model, Berzelius, came to ask for the ten livres you owed him, so I paid him. Little Joséphine had had a stomach ache from eating too much of the jam the joiner gave her. I made some herb tea for her… Desmahis has been to see you; he was sorry not to find you in. He wanted to make an engraving of one of your sketches. The good fellow had a look round at your work and was admiring it.’
‘When peace comes and the conspiracies are all suppressed,’ the artist went on, ‘I shall start on my Orestes again. I don’t usually flatter myself; but that head is worthy of David.’
And with a majestic sweep he outlined the arm of Victory in the sketch he was working on.
‘She holds out her palms,’ he said. ‘But it would be more beautiful if her arms themselves were palms.’
‘Évariste!’
‘Yes, maman?’
‘I’ve just had some news… guess who about…’
‘I don’t know.’
‘About Julie… your sister… She is not happy.’
‘It would be scandalous if she were.’
‘My son, don’t speak like that: she is your sister. Julie is not bad; there is much good in her and misfortune has increased her goodness. She loves you. Believe me, Évariste, she only wants to live a good, hard-working life and her dearest wish is to be reconciled to us. There’s nothing now need stop you seeing her. She has married Fortuné Chassagne.’
‘She has written to you?’
‘No.’
‘How have you had news of her, mother?’
‘It has not been by letter, my child; it…’
He rose and interrupted her in a terrible voice:
‘No more, mother! Never tell me they have both returned to France… Since they must die, let it at least not be at my hands. For them, for you, for me, let me remain ignorant if they are in Paris… Do not force meto knowit; otherwise…’
‘What are you saying, my child? You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t dare?’
‘Mother, listen to me: If I knew my sister Julie was there in that room…’, and he pointed to the closed door, ‘I would go immediately and denounce her to the Committee of Vigilance of our Section.’
The poor mother, white as her coif, let her knitting fall from her trembling hands and murmured in a sighing voice, fainter than the faintest whisper:
‘I did not want to believe it, but I see it is true: he is a monster…’
And as pale as she, with frothy saliva running from his lips, Évariste fled from the room and ran to find with Élodie oblivion, sleep, the delicious foretaste of nothingness.
XIX
WHILE Father Longuemare and the girl Athénaïs were being interrogated at the Section, Brotteaux was taken by two gendarmes to the Luxembourg prison, where the warder at the door refused to admit him, alleging that there was no room for any more. The old aristocrat was then taken to the Conciergerie and brought into the jailer’s office, quite a small room, divided in two by a glass partition. While the jailer was entering his name in the prison register, Brotteaux saw through the window two men, each lying on a tattered mattress, both of them as still as death with glazed eyes that seemed to see nothing. Plates, bottles, and pieces of bread and meat lay around them. They were prisoners condemned to death and awaiting the tumbril to take them to the guillotine.
The ci-devant Monsieur des Ilettes was thrown into a dungeon, where from the light of a lantern he could just discern two figures lying on the ground, one brutal in appearance and hideously mutilated, the other gracious and gentle-looking. These two prisoners offered him a share of their straw, and rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, this was better than having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement. Brotteaux sank down on to a bench in the evil-smelling darkness and sat there, his head against t
he wall, silent and motionless. His misery was such that if he had had the strength he could have beaten his head against he wall until he was dead. He could not breathe. His eyes swam. A prolonged sound, soothing as silence, filled his ears, and he felt his whole being bathed in a delicious nothingness. During one ineffable moment, all became for him a harmony, a serene clarity, a fragrant content. Then he lost consciousness.
When he came to himself, his first thought was to regret having come out of his faint, and philosophical even in the depths of despair, he reflected how he had had to plunge to the depths of a stinking dungeon awaiting execution, in order to enjoy the most exquisite of all the voluptuous sensations he had ever experienced. He tried to lose consciousness again, without success; little by little, on the contrary, he felt the poisonous air of the dungeon filling his lungs and restoring gradually the feeling of being alive, the full consciousness of his unbearable wretchedness.
His two companions, however, were taking his silence as a personal insult. So Brotteaux, sociable as ever, attempted to satisfy their curiosity; but when they discovered he was only what they called ‘a political’, one of those whose crime was only a matter of words and opinions, they lost all respect and sympathy for him. The offences with which these two prisoners were charged had more solid worth: the elder was a murderer, the other a forger of counterfeit assignats. Both were making the best of their situation and were even finding some satisfaction in it. The thought suddenly struck Brotteaux that above his head the world went on, with its movement, noise, light and life, with the pretty shop-assistants smiling behind their counters piled with perfume and other merchandise, with passers-by happy and at liberty, and the thought deepened his despair.
Night fell, unperceived in the darkness and silence of the dungeon, yet somehow increasing the gloom and oppression. With one leg stretched on his bench and his back against the wall, Brotteaux fell into a deep sleep. And in it he saw himself seated at the foot of a beech tree in full leaf and swarming with singing birds; the setting sun was bathing the river with liquid fire and edging the clouds with deep purple. The night passed. He found himself burning with fever and greedily drained his pitcher of fetid water which only made him feel more wretched and ill.
The jailer who brought the food that day promised to give Brotteaux, if he could afford the cost, the privileges of a prisoner who pays for his accommodation, as soon as there was room, which was not likely to be long. Nor was it; two days later he invited the old aristocrat to leave his dungeon.
With every step he took upwards, Brotteaux felt life and vigour coming back to him, and when he saw a room with a red-tiled floor and in it a bed of sacking covered with a dingy counterpane, he wept for joy. The carved bed ornamented with gilt doves billing and cooing, which he had had made once for the prettiest of the dancers at the Opéra, had not seemed so desirable or promised such delights.
This bed of sacking was in a large room, quite clean, where there were seventeen others like it, each separated by a high partition of planks. The men who occupied these quarters were ci-devant aristocrats, bankers, tradesmen and working men, and this suited the old Publican’s taste well enough, since he could adapt himself to people of all classes. He noticed that men, cut off like himself from all the pleasures of life and doomed to perish at the hand of the executioner, were joking and laughing and frequently revealing a high degree of wit and humour. Since he was always inclined to take a cynical view of mankind, he attributed the high spirits of his companions to their frivolous bent of mind, which prevented them from taking their situation seriously. He was indeed strengthened in this opinion by observing how the more intelligent among them looked profoundly sad. He noticed before long that wine and brandy largely inspired their gaiety: a gaiety whose source was betrayed by its violent and sometimes almost insane nature. Not all of them possessed courage; but all made display of it. Brotteaux found nothing to surprise him in this: he knew that men willingly boast of their cruelty, their anger, their greed even, but never of their cowardice, because to admit such a thing would put them, whether in a primitive or a civilized society, in mortal peril. ‘That is why,’ he reflected, ‘all nations are nations of heroes and all armies consist only of brave men.’
What contributed even more than the wine and brandy to intoxicate the prisoners and drive them to a frenzy of insanity, was the clanging of weapons and keys, the clash of locks and bolts, the stamping of feet through the door of the Tribunal. There were some who cut their throats with razors or threw themselves out of a window.
Brotteaux had been lodged three days in these privileged quarters when he learnt from the turnkey that Father Longuemare was lying in the filth on the verminous putrefying straw with the thieves and murderers. He had him brought up to the privileged quarters in the same room as himself where a bed had become vacant. Having promised to pay for the monk, the old Publican, who had no large sum of money with him, struck on the idea of making portraits at a crown each. With the help of a jailer, he obtained a supply of small, black frames in which to put the fine little designs made out of hair which he executed with considerable ingenuity. These sold well, being much appreciated by people whose main thoughts were centred on leaving some souvenir to their friends.
Father Longuemare kept cheerful and in good spirits. While he awaited his summons to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he prepared his defence. Though drawing no distinction between his own case and that of the Church, he promised himself he would expose to his judges the scandals and oppressions to which the Church of Christ was subjected by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; he intended to depict the eldest daughter of the Church in France waging sacrilegious war upon the Pope, the French clergy being robbed, outraged and subjected to the hateful domination of the laity; Christ’s true army being despoiled and scattered. He cited Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Irenaeus, quoted numerous articles of canon law and entire paragraphs from the Decretals.
All day long he sat at the foot of his bed, scribbling on his knees, covering with illegible writing candle wrappers, packing paper, newspapers, playing cards, even considering using his shirt after starching it, and dipping stumps of pens worn to the feathers in ink, soot or coffee-grindings. He piled leaf upon leaf, sheet on sheet, and, pointing to this mass of indecipherable scribblings, he would say:
‘When I appear before my judges, I shall floor them with the light of understanding.’
And, one day, casting a look of satisfaction at his defence which was growing thicker and thicker, and thinking of these magistrates he was burning to confound with his arguments, he exclaimed:
‘I wouldn’t like to be in their place!’
The prisoners whom fate had brought together in this jail were either Royalists or Federalists; there was even one Jacobin there; they all held widely differing views as to the right way of government, but not a single one of them possessed the slightest belief in Christianity. Feuillants, Constitutionals, Girondists, all of them, like Brotteaux, considered the Christian God to be a bad thing for themselves but a very good thing for the ordinary people; as for the Jacobins, they were for installing a Jacobin god so that they might justify the rule of Jacobinism on earth by reference to a higher source. But since none of them could believe anybody but a fool could take the conventional revealed religion seriously, and perceiving that Father Longuemare was no fool, they took him for a knave. In order, no doubt, to prepare himself for his martyrdom, he made confession whenever he could, and the more sincerely he did this, the more they judged him an impostor.
It was in vain that Brotteaux assured them of the monk’s good faith; Brotteaux himself was judged by them as only believing part of all he said. His ideas were too unusual and so appeared to be an affectation and satisfied nobody. He spoke of Rousseau as a boring rogue. Voltaire, on the other hand, he held to be a man of genius equal to rank with Hel-vétius, Diderot, or the Baron d’Holbach. In his opinion, the greatest genius of the century was Boulanger. He also thought highly
of the astronomer Lalande, and of Dupuis, author of A Memoir on the Origin of Constellations.
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