The wits of the company made a thousand jokes at the expense of the poor Barnabite, the point of which he never saw; his simplicity saved him from every snare. To dispel the suspense which tortured them and to escape the torment of idleness, the prisoners played at draughts, cards and backgammon. No musical instrument was allowed. After supper they would sing or recite verses. Voltaire’s La Pucelle brought some cheerfulness to their aching hearts and they never tired of hearing their favourite passage repeated. But, unable totally to keep their thought from the appalling vision of what lay before them, they sometimes tried to turn it into an amusement, and in that room of eighteen beds, before they turned in for the night, they would play a game called Revolutionary Tribunal. The parts were allocated according to tastes and aptitudes. While some represented the judges and prosecutors, others were the accused or the witnesses, and others again the executioner and his assistants. The trials invariably ended with the execution of the condemned person, who was laid full length on a bed with his neck under a plank. The scene then moved to hell itself. The most agile of the prisoners, wrapped in white sheets, played the parts of spectral devils. There was a young lawyer from Bordeaux, named Dubosc, short, dark, hunchbacked, bandy-legged, a very devil in appearance himself, who used to come, horned and hoofed, to drag Father Longuemare feet first from his bed, announcing to the culprit that he was condemned to the everlasting flames of hell and doomed past redemption for having set up as the Creator of the universe a Being who was a jealous, vindictive fool and the enemy of human happiness.
‘Ha, Ha! Ha, ha!’ the devil would shriek horribly. ‘So, you old dodderer, you taught that it pleases God to see His creatures wallow in penitence and deny themselves His most beautiful gifts. Imposter, hypocrite, canting humbug, for all eternity you will sit on nails and eat egg-shell crockery.’
Father Longuemare would content himself with replying that such a statement revealed the philosopher’s cloven hoof beneath the devil’s and that the least imp in hell would know better than talk such foolishness, having at least a passing knowledge of theology and being certainly less ignorant than an encyclopaedist.
But when the ugly Girondist lawyer called him a Capuchin, he turned red with anger and said that a man incapable of distinguishing between a Barnabite and a Franciscan would not know how to see a fly in milk.
The Revolutionary Tribunal was emptying the prisons as quickly as the Committees were filling them; in three months the room containing the eighteen was half-full of new faces. Father Longuemare lost his tormentor. The lawyer Dubosc was hauled before the Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned to death as a Federalist and for having conspired against the unity of the Republic. On leaving the Tribunal, he returned, as prisoners always did, along a corridor that ran through the prison and opened on the room which for three months he had enlivened with his gaiety. As he made his farewells to his companions, he maintained the same air of light persiflage habitual to him.
‘Forgive me, monsieur,’ he said to Father Longuemare, ‘for having hauled you out of bed by your feet. I will never do it again.’
And turning to old Brotteaux, he said:
‘Good-bye, monsieur. I go before you into nothingness. I gladly return to Nature the atoms with which she composed me, hoping she will make better use of them in the future, for it must be admitted she didn’t make much of a job of me.’
And he went on down to the jailer’s room, leaving Brotteaux grieving and Father Longuemare trembling and green as a leaf, more dead than alive to see the ungodly laughing on the edge of the abyss.
When Germinal brought back brighter days, Brotteaux, sensual as ever, tramped down several times each day to the courtyard next to the women’s quarters, as near as he could get to the fountain where the female prisoners used to come every morning to wash their linen. An iron railing separated the two quarters; but the bars were not so close together as to prevent hands joining or lips meeting. Beneath the kindly shades of night, loving couples would press against the obstacles between them. At such times, Brotteaux would retire discreetly to the staircase and, seated on a step, he would take his little Lucretius from the pocket of his puce-coloured coat and read, by the light of a lantern, some of that author’s stoically consolatory maxims: ‘Sic ubi non erimtts… When we shall have ceased to be, nothing will be able to move our emotions not even the broken mingled fragments of sky and earth and sea…’ But, even as he savoured the joy of this deep wisdom, Brotteaux was envying the Barnabite the foolish belief which hid reality from him.
Month by month, the Terror increased. Every night the tipsy jailers with their watchdogs at their heels, would march from cell to cell, howling out names they deliberately mutilated, waking the prisoners and for every twenty victims marked on their list terrifying two hundred. Along these corridors, crammed with blood-stained ghosts, there passed each day without a murmur, twenty, thirty, fifty condemned prisoners, old men, women, young people almost still children, and all of them so widely different in rank and character and opinion that it was impossible not to wonder whether they had not been chosen by a toss of the dice.
And so they went on playing cards, drinking Burgundy, making plans, arranging assignations for after dark at the iron railings. The company, new almost to a man, was now made up largely of ‘extremists’ and ‘irreconcilables’. But still the room of the eighteen beds remained the home of elegance and good breeding: except for two prisoners, named Navette and Bellier, recently transferred from the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie and suspected by the other sixteen of being spies, all were honest men who trusted one another. Glass in hand, they would celebrate the victories of the Republic. Amongst them were several poets, as there always are in any group of people who have nothing to do. The most accomplished of these composed odes on the triumphs of the army of the Rhine, which they recited with great gusto. They were loudly applauded. Only Brotteaux gave feeble acclamation to the victories and to the poets who celebrated them in verse.
‘Ever since Homer,’ he said one day, ‘it’s been a strange obsession with poets to celebrate men who fight each other. War is not an art. It’s only luck that decides battles. When two generals, both of them imbeciles, face each other, one of them must inevitably be the victor. Just wait! Some day one of these warriors you make a god of, may swallow you all up, like the stork in the fable who gobbles up the frogs.* Ah, then he would be truly a god! For you can always tell the gods by their appetite.’
Brotteaux had never felt himself moved by the glamour of war. He felt no triumph at the victories of the Republic, which he had foreseen. He liked nothing about the new régime, which had been strengthened by military successes. He was a malcontent. Others would have been so with less reason.
One morning it was announced that the Commissaries of the Committee of General Safety were going to make a search of the prisoners’ quarters, that they would seize assignats, articles of gold and silver, knives, scissors, that similar proceedings had been taken at the Luxembourg, where letters, papers and books had been appropriated.
Everyone therefore tried to think of somewhere to hide securely whatever he held most precious. Father Longuemare carried off his defence in armfuls and hid it in a rain-gutter, while Brotteaux slipped his Lucretius under the dead ashes in the hearth.
When the Commissaries, wearing tricolour ribands around their necks, arrived they found hardly anything except such trifles which it had been considered judicious to let them discover. On their departure, Father Longuemare ran to his rain-gutter and rescued as much of his defence as wind and water had left. Brotteaux pulled out his Lucretius from the fireplace all black with soot.
‘Let us make the best of the present,’ he said to himself, ‘for the auguries indicate that our time here is now to be short.’
One warm night in Prairial, while above the prison yard the moon floating high in a softly lit sky showed her two silver horns, the ci-devant aristocrat was sitting, as was his custom, reading his Lucretius on a step of the stone
stairs, when he heard a voice calling to him, a woman’s voice, a beautiful voice, and one which he did not recognize. He went down into the courtyard and saw, behind the iron railing, a figure he recognized as little as he had the voice, but which reminded him, in its dim fascinating curves, of all the women he had loved. A flood of silver-blue moonlight fell on the figure and at that moment Brotteaux saw it was Rose Thévenin, the pretty actress from the Rue Feydeau.
‘You here, my dear! What a joy for me to see you, but what a misfortune for you. How long have you been here? And why?’
‘Since yesterday.’
And she continued very softly:
‘I have been denounced as a Royalist. They’re accusing me of having conspired to help the Queen escape. As I knew you were here, I’ve tried to see you at once. Listen, my dear friend… for that is what you would so much like me to call you, isn’t it?… I have powerful friends; I have sympathizers on the Committee of Public Safety itself, I know I have. I will get my friends to help us; they will free me, and then I will get them to set you free.’
But Brotteaux replied urgently:
‘By everything you hold dear, my child, do not do anything! Do not write, do not petition; ask nothing of anybody, I beg it of you, let yourself be forgotten.’
As she did not seem to understand what he was saying, he went on more beseechingly still:
‘Keep silent, Rose, let yourself be forgotten: in that only lies safety. All that your friends could do would only make things worse for you. Let time work for you. You’ll only need to wait a little, a very little I hope, in order to be saved… Above all, do not appeal to the magistrates, to a Gamelin. They are not men, they are things: you cannot explain yourself to things. Let yourself be forgotten. If you follow my advice, my dearest friend, I shall die happy knowing I have saved your life.’
She answered:
‘I will obey you… Do not speak of dying.’
He shrugged his shoulders:
‘My life is finished, my child. You must live and be happy.’
She took hold of his hands and laid them on her breasts:
‘Listen to me carefully, my friend… I only met you once just for a day, and yet I know you are not indifferent to me. And if what I am going to say to you can make you want to live, believe that I say it with all my heart! I will do for you… I will be for you… whatever you would like me to do or to be.’
And their mouths met in a kiss between the iron railings.
XX
ONE day, as he was sitting on the magistrates’ bench in the stiflingly hot courtroom, when there was a particularly long and tedious case before the Tribunal, Évariste Gamelin shut his eyes and allowed his thoughts to wander:
’Evil men, by forcing Marat to hide in holes and corners, turned him into a bird of night, the bird of Minerva, whose dark penetrating eye pierced the recesses where conspirators lurked. Today it is a blue eye, cold and calm, that pierces the dark recesses to discover the enemies of State and denounce them with a cunning unknown even to Marat, the Friend of the People, who now sleeps for ever in the garden of the Cordeliers. The new saviour of our country, as zealous and yet more keen-sighted than the first, sees what no other man can see and when he lifts his finger he spreads terror all around him. He distinguishes the fine shades that almost imperceptibly divide evil from good, vice from virtue, and which but for him would have been confused, to the ruin of liberty and our country; he sees before him always that thin inflexible line he must follow, knowing that on either side of it lie error, evil and crime. The Incorruptible Robespierre shows us how we can help the enemy both by excess of zeal and by lack of it, by persecuting the religious in the name of reason just as much as by using religion to fight the laws of the Republic. Just as much as the villains who murdered Le Peltier and Marat, do those of us harm to the Republic who decree Le Peltier and Marat divide honours, because by doing so we compromise their memory. Our enemy is whoever repudiates the idea of order, wisdom, opportunity; our enemy is whoever outrages public morals, scandalizes virtue, and in the foolishness of his heart, denies God. Yes, fanatic priests deserve to die, but there is also an anti-revolutionary way of fighting fanaticism: adjurers too may be guilty of crime. By moderation, men can destroy the Republic; by violence, they can also destroy it.
‘Oh, how terrible are the duties of a judge, dictated by the wisest of men! It is not only open enemies, aristocrats, Federalists, the Orléans scoundrels, we must strike down. There is also the conspirator: the agent of the foreigner is a Proteus, he assumes all shapes and disguises; sometimes he pretends to be a patriot, a revolutionary, an enemy of kings; he pretends to a boldness of heart that beats only for freedom; his voice roars and the foes of the Republic mistakenly tremble. His name was Danton:* his violence was a poor disguise for his hateful moderation and in his base corruption he was revealed at last as our enemy. And that conspirator with the fluent stammer, that man who put into his hat the first cockade of the revolution, that pamphleteer who in his patriotic sarcastic irony nicknamed himself ‘The Procureur of the Guillotine’. And his name was Camille Desmoulins.* He revealed himself as a traitor by defending the generals, traitors themselves to their country, and asking clemency for them. And there was Père Duchesne. That vile demagogue who degraded liberty and whose filthy lies raised sympathy for Marie Antoinette herself, he too was a traitor and an agent of the foreigner. There was Chaumette, that mild little man, so popular, so moderate, so well-intentioned and efficient in the administration of the Commune. And he was an atheist! Conspirators and foreign agents, all of them, all those patriotic sans-culottes in red caps and carmagnoles who tried to outdo even the Jacobins in their patriotism.
‘And now all these traitors, violent or moderate, all these evil men, Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, Chaumette, have perished under the axe of the guillotine. The Republic is saved; choruses of praise rise from all the Committees and all the Assemblies for Maximilien Robespierre and the Mountain. All good citizens are raising their voices in homage: “Worthy representative of a free people, blessed Mountain, Sinai, in vain have the children of Baal raised their presumptuous heads: thou hast struck them down with thy thunderbolt of tumultuous wrath…”
‘And the Tribunal has its share in this chorus of praise. How sweet it is to be virtuous and how dear to the heart of the upright is the knowledge of public gratitude!
‘Yet what food for thought, what grounds for anxiety, all these things give! Think! It was not enough that a Mirabeau, a La Fayette, a Bailly, a Pétion should betray the people! There must needs be also the men who denounce these traitors. Think! All these men who made the Revolution did so only to betray her! These heroes of the first great days of the Revolution were planning with Pitt and Coberg to restore the monarchy in alliance with the Orléans faction and to set up a Regency under Louis XVII. Think! Danton, he was another Monk! Think! Chaumette and the Hébertists, more perfidious than the Federalists who sent them to the guillotine, had conspired the ruin of our country! But what if Robespierre’s cold blue eyes discover more traitors, even among those very patriots who sent the traitor Danton and the traitor Chaumette to the guillotine? Where will it stop, this hideous procession of betrayed traitors and this piercing, all-revealing insight of Robespierre the Incorruptible?…’
XXI
MEANWHILE Julie Gamelin, still wearing the bottle-green greatcoat, was going every day to the Luxembourg Gardens, where she used to sit on a bench at the end of one of the avenues, waiting for the moment when her lover would appear at one of the windows of the palace. They would make signs to each other and talk together in the silent language they had invented. In this way she learnt that the prisoner had quite a good room and pleasant companions, that he could do with a blanket for his bed, and a kettle, and that he loved his mistress with all his heart.
She was not alone in watching for a beloved face to appear at one of the windows of the palace now turned prison. Not far from her a young mother kept her eyes fixed on a closed win
dow; then immediately she saw it open, she would lift the little child in her arms above her head. An old lady in a lace veil sat for long hours on a folding chair, vainly hoping to catch a glimpse of her son, who, in order not to be overcome at the sight of her, would never stop playing quoits in the prison courtyard until the Gardens were closed and she had to leave.
During these long hours when people took up their position and waited, whatever the weather was like, a middleaged man, rather stout and very neatly dressed, was always to be seen on a neighbouring bench, playing with his snuffbox or the charms hanging from his watch-guard or unfolding a newspaper which he never read. He was dressed like a bourgeois of the old school in a gold-laced cocked hat, a plum-coloured coat and a blue waistcoat embroidered with silver. He had a respectable air about him, and was musically inclined, to judge from a flute which stuck out of his pocket. Not for one moment did he take his eyes off this apparently good-looking young lad on the nearby bench, smiling at him continually, and when he saw him leave his bench, he would rise himself and follow at a distance. Julie, in her loneliness and misery, was touched by the discreet sympathy shown her by this good man.
One day, as she was leaving the Gardens, it began to rain. The good man came up to her and, opening his huge red umbrella, asked permission to shelter her under it. She answered sweetly, in her clear voice, that she would be very glad to. But at the sound of this voice, and warned perhaps by the subtle smell of a woman, he took himself off quickly, leaving the young woman exposed to the heavy downpour of rain. She suddenly understood, and despite her worries could not prevent herself from smiling.
Julie was living in an attic in the Rue du Cherche-Midi and passing herself off as a draper’s shop-boy in search of employment. The Widow Gamelin had been persuaded at last that the girl would be running less risk anywhere else than at her home, had got her away from the Place de Thionville and the Section du Pont-Neuf, and was giving her all the help she could in the way of food and linen. Julie looked after herself, went to the Luxembourg to see her beloved prisoner, and returned to her garret; the monotony of this daily round became a balm to her grief, and, being young and strong, each night she slept soundly and well. She was courageous by nature and accustomed to living adventurously; the dress she wore added perhaps a further spice of excitement, and sometimes she would venture out at night to visit a restaurant in the Rue du Four, at the sign of the Red Cross, frequented by both men and women of all types. There she used to read the newspaper or play backgammon with some tradesman’s clerk or citizen-soldier, who would puff the smoke of his pipe in her face. Drinking, gambling, love-making, flourished and fights were frequent. One evening a customer, hearing the sound of hoofs on the pavingstones outside, lifted the curtain, and, seeing the Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, a certain Citizen Hanriot,* riding past with his adjutant, muttered savagely:
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 21