‘There goes Robespierre’s spying jackass!’
Hearing this, Julie laughed loudly.
But a moustached patriot took offence:
‘Anyone who says that is a flaming aristocrat, and I’d like to see him sneeze into Samson’s basket!* General Hanriot is a good patriot and if Paris and the Convention ever need defending, he’s the one who’ll do it. That’s what the Royalists can’t forgive him.’
He glared at Julie who was still laughing:
‘You, you young puppy, take care I don’t kick your backside to teach you respect for good patriots!’
But others began to join it:
‘Hanriot’s a fool and a drunkard!’
‘Hanriot’s a good Jacobin! Vive Hanriot!’
Sides were taken. Fists began flying. Hats were battered, tables overturned, glasses shattered, the lights went out, the women began to scream. Attacked by several of the patriots, Julie armed herself with a bench, but was knocked to the ground biting and scratching her assailants. From her open greatcoat and her torn shirt her panting breasts appeared. A patrol came running up at the noise, and the young girl aristocrat escaped between the legs of the gendarmes.
Each day tumbrils passed full of victims for the guillotine.
‘But I cannot let him die! I love him!’ Julie used to say to her mother.
She determined to beg for his life, to go to the Committees and the Section Headquarters, to deputies, to magistrates, to everyone if necessary. She had no woman’s clothes to wear. Her mother borrowed a striped gown, a kerchief, a lace coif from the Citizeness Blaise, and Julie, attired as a woman and a patriot, set out to visit one of the judges, Renaudin, in the damp, dismal house in the Rue Mazarine, where he lived.
With trembling steps she climbed the wooden, tiled stairs and was received by the judge in a squalid office, furnished with a deal table and two straw-bottomed chairs. On the walls, the paper was hanging loose. Renaudin, whose black hair was plastered across his forehead, gazed at her with dark eyes, his lips tight above his protruding chin and, signing to her to speak, listened in silence.
She told him she was the sister of the Citizen Chassagne, a prisoner in the Luxembourg, explained as plausibly as she could the circumstances under which he had been arrested, represented him as an innocent man who had been the victim of misfortune, and pleaded for the judge’s intervention as urgently as she could.
He remained silent and immovable.
In desperate supplication, she fell weeping at his feet.
The moment he saw her in tears, his face changed: the black pupils of his blood-shot eyes distended and his enormous blue jaws began moving as if drawing saliva into his dry throat.
‘Citizeness, what is necessary will be done. Do not upset yourself.’
And, opening a door, he pushed his petitioner into a little sitting-room, decorated in rose-pink colours, with painted panels, porcelain figures, a hanging wall-clock, gilt candelabra, easy chairs, and a sofa covered in tapestry showing a Boucher pastoral. Julie was prepared to do anything to save her lover.
Renaudin was brutal and rapid. When she got up and was readjusting the beautiful dress of Citizeness Élodie, she saw the man’s cruel, mocking look, and knew immediately her sacrifice had been useless.
‘You promised me my brother’s freedom,’ she said.
He laughed derisively.
‘I said to you, citizeness, that what was necessary would be done, which meant that the law, neither more nor less, would have its way. I said not to upset yourself, and why should you? The Revolutionary Tribunal is always just.’
She thought of throwing herself on the man, biting him, scratching his eyes out. But, realizing this would only result in Fortuné Chassagne’s ruin, she rushed from the house and ran to her garret to take off Élodie’s besmirched dress. And, there alone, all the night long, she wept and howled with rage and sorrow.
The following day, when she went to the Luxembourg, she found the Gardens occupied by gendarmes, who were turning out the women and children. Sentinels were being posted in the avenues to prevent anyone from communicating with the prisoners. The young woman, who came every day carrying her child, told Julie there was talk of plots in the prison and that the women were being blamed for by meeting in the Gardens they roused people’s pity for aristocrats and traitors.
XXII
SUDDENLY a mountain has been piled up in the Tuileries Gardens. Under a cloudless sky, Maximilien Robespierre marches, at the head of his colleagues, wearing a blue coat and yellow breeches, and bearing in his hand a bouquet of wheat-ears, cornflowers and poppies. He clambers up the mountain and proclaims the God of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the vast, emotionally-roused crowds of Republicans. All is nowpurity! Sweetness! Truth! Antique simplicity! Piteous tears! Bounteous mercy! Human brotherhood!
In vain does atheism still raise its hideous face: Maximilien seizes a torch; flames devour the monster of atheism and in its place appears Reason, with one hand pointing to the sky and the other holding a crown of stars.
On the platform built outside the Palace of the Tuileries, Évariste weeps silently and gives thanks to God. He sees opening before him a future of universal joy.
He sighs:
‘At last we shall be happy, pure and innocent, if the traitorous scoundrels permit it.’
Alas! The traitorous scoundrels have not permitted it. There must be still more executions; still more torrents of tainted blood must flow. Three days after the celebration of the new alliance and reconciliation between heaven and earth, the Convention passes the Law of Prairial which suppresses, with a kind of ferocious brotherliness, all the traditional forms of law, all that had been devised since the times of Roman jurists to protect the innocent until proved guilty. No more sifting of evidence, no more questioning of the accused, no more witnesses, no more counsel for the defence: all disappear in the name of love of the fatherland. The accused, who bears locked up in himself his guilt or his innocence, is not allowed to say a word before the patriot magistrates, and yet it is in this brief moment that they must decide his case, often complicated and obscure. How can judgment be made now? How recognize in one brief moment the honest man and the scoundrel, the patriot and the enemy of the fatherland?…
Gamelin was troubled only for a moment. Quickly he understood his new duties and accommodated himself to them. He saw that these cuts in procedure were indeed inherent in this new and terrible, yet salutary, form of justice, which would no longer be administered by gowned pedants weighing pros and cons at their leisure in their gothic balances, but by sans-culottes judging by patriotic inspiration and seeing the truth in a flash of illumination. Where deliberations and precautions would have lost everything, the impulses of an upright soul would save all. The promptings of Nature, the good mother who never deceives, had to be followed; the heart alone was the true judge, and Gamelin invoked the shade of Rousseau:
‘Man of virtue, inspire me with the love of mankind, with the ardour to regenerate all men everywhere!’
His colleagues, mostly, felt the same as he did. They were, for the most part, simple people; and when the law was simplified, they felt more at their ease. Justice, thus curtailed, satisfied them; the pace was quickened and no obstacles were left to confuse them. They confined themselves to inquiring into the opinions of the accused, not conceiving it possible that anyone, except from pure perversity, could think differently from themselves. Believing themselves to possess a monopoly of truth, wisdom and goodness, they attributed to their opponents all error, stupidity and evil. They felt themselves omnipotent: their eyes had seen God.
Their eyes had seen God, these magistrates of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Supreme Being, acknowledged by Robespierre, flooded them with His pure light. They worshipped, they had faith.
The chair of the accused had now been replaced by a vast platform able to accommodate fifty prisoners: batches only were dealt with now. The Public Prosecutor would often confuse under the same accusation, or implica
te as accomplices, individuals who had never met each other before. The Tribunal, taking advantage of the terrible powers given it by the Law of Prairial, sat in judgment on the supposed prison plots which, coming so soon after the proscription of Danton and the Commune, were made by cunning adversaries to appear to be its result. In fact, to make apparent to the world the two primary characteristics of a conspiracy fomented by foreign gold against the Republic: excessive moderation on the one hand and excessive zeal on the other, both self-interested, they had brought together under the same accusation two very different women, the widow of Camille Desmoulins, the lovable and charming Lucille, and the widow of the Hébertist Momoro, the complaisant friend of all. Both of them, to further the analogy, had been placed in the same prison, where they had wept together on the same stone bench; both of them, to complete the analogy, had climbed the scaffold together. The symbol was too ingenious, a masterpiece of equilibrium doubtless conceived by some lay brain, but credited to Robespierre. This representative of the people was honoured with being the author of every incident, happy or unhappy, that happened in the Republic, with every eventuality connected with laws, morals, manners, weather, harvests or epidemics. Unjust of course, but an injustice not unmerited, for this man, this little, spruce, cat-faced dandy was all-powerful in the eyes of the people…
One particular day the Tribunal was despatching a batch of prisoners involved in the great plot, thirty or more from the Luxembourg, all of whom had been submissive victims but were not pronounced Royalists or Federalists of the most heinous type. The prosecution relied almost entirely upon the evidence of a single informer. Gamelin, glancing along the prisoner’s benches, recognized Fortuné Chassagne among the accused. Julie’s lover, pale and thin through long confinement and his face appearing less handsome in the glare of light that filled the hall, still maintained something of his former presence and proud bearing. His eyes met Gamelin’s and they filled with a look of contempt.
Overcome by a cold fury, Gamelin rose, asked in a calm voice permission to speak, and, fixing his eyes on the bust of the Roman Brutus, which gazed down on the Tribunal, he said:
‘Citizen President, although there may exist between one of the accused and myself ties which, if they were acknowledged, would be ties of relationship by marriage, I hereby declare that I shall not refuse to act in this case. The two great Romans did not decline to do their duty when for the salvation of their country and the cause of freedom, one of them had to condemn his son, and the other to strike down his adopted father.’
He sat down again.
‘There’s a scoundrel if there ever was one,’ Chassagne muttered, bitterly.
The public remained unmoved, either because it was tired of high-flown rhetoric, or because it thought that Gamelin had triumphed too easily over feelings of natural human affection.
‘Citizen Gamelin,’ said the President, ‘by law, a refusal by a magistrate to act in any case should be handed in writing twenty-four hours before the opening of the case. Anyway, you have no reason to withdraw: a patriotic magistrate is above human passions.’
Each prisoner was questioned for three of four minutes, and in every instance the verdict of death resulted. The magistrates gave their decision without speaking, simply by a nod of the head. When Gamelin’s turn came, however, he rose to pronounce his opinion.
‘All the accused,’ he declared, ‘are guilty, and the law must take its course.’
As Gamelin was descending the staircase of the Palais de Justice, a young man wearing a bottle-green greatcoat and who looked about seventeen or eighteen years of age, stopped him abruptly. The lad wore a round hat, tilted on the back of his head and framing his fine pale face in a dark aureole.
Facing the magistrate, in a terrible voice filled with passion and despair, he shrieked:
‘Monster! Murderer! I am a woman, so strike me, you coward! Have me arrested 1 Have me guillotined! Your name is Cain! I am your sister!’
And Julie spat in his face.
The crowd of tricoteuses and sans-culottes was relaxing its revolutionary viligance by this time; its civic ardour was becoming much cooler: with the result that Gamelin and his aggressor found themselves surrounded only by a confused uncertainty. Julie fought her way through the crowd and escaped into the dusk.
XXIII
ÉVARISTE GAMELIN was tired but could not relax; twenty times a night he would awake with a jump from sleep full of nightmares. It was only in the blue bedroom, in Élodie’s arms, he was able to find a few hours’ sleep. He talked and cried out in his sleep and often awoke her; but she could make nothing of what he said.
One morning, after a night when he had seen the Eumeni-des, he woke terror-stricken and weak as a child. The dawn was piercing the bedroom’s windows with its pale arrows. Évariste’s hair, tangled across his forehead, covered his eyes with a black veil: Élodie, beside his pillow, was gently smoothing it straight. She was looking at him, this time with a sister’s tenderness, as she wiped with her handkerchief the sweat from the unhappy man’s ice-cold brow. At that moment he recalled the beautiful scene in the Orestes of Euripides, which he had tried to portray and which, if he could have finished it, would have been his masterpiece: the scene where the unhappy Electra wipes away the saliva that froths on her brother’s lips. And it seemed to him that he was hearing Élodie also saying in a gentle voice: ‘Listen to me, my dear brother, whilst the Furies still leave you master of your reason…’
And he kept thinking:
‘All the same, I am certainly no parricide. On the contrary, I have acted like a pious son in shedding the impure blood of the enemies of my fatherland.’
XXIV
THE trials of those accused of plotting whilst in prison seemed endless. Forty-nine more of the accused filled the benches. Maurice Brotteaux occupied the right-hand corner of the top row, the place of honour. He was dressed in his puce-coloured coat, which he had brushed carefully the day before and mended the pocket which his Lucretius had frayed a little. Next to him sat the woman Rochemaure, painted, and powdered, brilliant yet horrible. Father Longuemare had been placed between her and the girl Athénaïs, who had regained, at the Madelonettes prison, the freshness of youth.
On the benches other prisoners, unknown to these four, had been packed by the gendarmes: lawyers, journalists, ci-devant aristocrats, and others of the former bourgeois class. The Citizeness Rochemaure caught sight of Gamelin on the magistrate’s bench. Although he had not replied to her urgent letters and repeated messages, she had not given up hope and threw him a look of supplication, attempting to appear fascinating and pathetic at the same time. But the cold look he gave her dispelled any illusion she might still have.
The clerk of the court read out the writ of accusation, which, brief in its reference to each individual, was still a lengthy document owing to the large number of the accused. It began by giving a general outline of the plot concocted in the prisons to drown the Republic in a blood-bath by the slaughter of the Representatives and of the people of Paris, and then, taking each in turn, it went on:
‘One of the most pernicious authors of this abominable conspiracy is the man named Brotteaux, ci-devant des Ilettes, collector of taxes under the tyrant. This individual, who was remarkable even in the days of the tyranny for his dissolute conduct, is a living proof that immorality and bad living are the greatest enemies of Liberty, and of the happiness of the people: in brief, after misappropriating the public revenue and wasting in debauchery a large part of the people’s money, this individual connived with his former concubine, the woman Rochemaure, to enter into correspondence with émigrés and with traitorous intent to inform agents of foreign countries of the state of our finances, the movements of our troops, and the fluctuations of public opinion.
‘Brotteaux, at this period of his despicable existence, was living in concubinage with a prostitute he had picked out of the mud in the Rue Fromenteau, the girl Athénaïs. He had easily won her to his purposes and employed her to
foment the counter-revolution by insolent shouts and indecent speeches.
‘Several remarks made by this nefarious man will clearly indicate to you his pitiful opinions and his pernicious aims. Speaking of this patriotic Tribunal, today called upon to punish him, he declared insultingly:
The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal, with their black hats and plumes, are modelling themselves on that William Shakespeare, so admired by Englishmen, who introduces crude buffoonery in the midst of his most tragic scenes.
‘He was also forever preaching atheism, as the best means to degrade the people and drive them into immorality. In the Conciergerie prison, where he was confined, he used to deplore the victories of our valiant armies as being the worst of calamities, and he used to try to throw suspicion on the most patriotic generals, crediting them with tyrannous ambitions.
‘The woman Rochemaure, a ci-devant aristocrat and concubine of Brotteaux, is no less culpable than he. Not only was she in correspondence with foreign agents and in the pay of Pitt himself, but in complicity with swindlers, such as Jullien (of Toulouse) and Chabot, both associates of the ci-devant Baron de BatZ. She also helped that reprobate Brotteaux in all sorts of cunning ways to depreciate the shares of the Company of the Indies, by buying them at cheap prices, and then by equally cunning ways raising the market price to the ruin of private and public funds. Confined at La Bourbe and at the Madelonettes, she continued in prison to conspire, to play the market in stocks and shares, and to do all she could by corrupt means to suborn judges and magistrates.
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