‘Louis Longuemare, ci-devant aristocrat, ci-devant Capuchin, had had a long career of crime before committing the acts of treason for which he has to answer here. He lived in shameful promiscuity with the girl Gorcut, known as Athénaïs, under the same roof as Brotteaux, and he is the accomplice of the said girl and the said ci-devant aristocrat. During his imprisonment at the Conciergerie, he continued every day to write pamphlets aimed at subversion of public liberty and order.
‘It can be stated with regard to Marthe Gorcut, known as Athénaïs, without fear of contradiction, that prostitutes such as she are the greatest cause of public immorality and that they area disgrace and insult to society, abhorred by all right-thinking people. But what purpose is served by speaking at length of these revolting crimes which all the accused confess to so shamelessly?…’
The prosecution then proceeded to pass under review the forty-five other prisoners, none of whom were known by Brotteaux, Father Longuemare, or the Citizeness Rochemaure, except for their having seen several of them in the prisons, yet who were all included with the four first-named in ‘this odious plot, unequalled in the history of our country’.
The writ of accusation concluded by demanding the death-penalty for all involved.
Brotteaux was the first to be questioned.
‘You confess to conspiracy?’
‘No, I have never conspired in any plots. Every word in that writ of accusation I have just heard is false.’
‘You see: you are conspiring still, at this very moment, against the Tribunal.’
And the President passed on to the woman Rochemaure, who answered with quibbling, tearful and despairing protestations.
Father Longuemare said he stood entirely in the hands of God. He had not even brought his written defence.
To all the questions put to him he replied with an air of resignation. Only when the President referred to him as a Capuchin did his old spirit flash out:
‘I am not a Capuchin,’ he said. ‘I am a priest and a monk of the Order of Barnabites.’
‘That’s the same thing,’ the President replied, jovially.
Father Longuemare looked at him indignantly:
‘One cannot conceive a more extraordinary error,’ he exclaimed, ‘than to confuse a Capuchin with a monk of the Order of Barnabites, which derives its constitution from the Apostle Paul himself.’
This was greeted with bursts of laughter and hooting from the public.
Father Longuemare, taking this derision to mean a denial of his assertion, announced that he would die a member of the Order of St Barnabas, whose habit he wore in his heart.
‘Do you admit,’ the President demanded, ‘having conspired with the girl Gorcut, known as Athénaïs, who accorded you her miserable favours?’
At this question, Father Longuemare raised his eyes sorrowfully heavenwards and replied with a silence which conveyed the astonishment of a naïve heart and the gravity of a man of religion who fears to utter empty words.
‘You, the girl Gorcut,’ demanded the President of the young Athénaïs, ‘do you admit having conspired with Brotteaux?’
She replied gently:
‘Monsieur Brotteaux, as far as I know, has never done anything but what is good. There should be more, many more, men like him, because there cannot be any better. Those who say the opposite are mistaken. That is all I have to say.’
The President asked her if she admitted having lived in concubinage with Brotteaux. The expression had to be explained to her since she did not understand it. But, when she did gather its implication, she replied that that had rested only with him, but that he had never asked it of her.
The public galleries roared with laughter and the President threatened the girl Gorcut that he would refuse to hear her if she answered again in such a cynical way.
So she called him a lying, sour-faced, old cuckold and spewed out such a torrent of abuse at him, the judges and the magistrates, that the gendarmes had to drag her from the bench and push her out of the hall.
The President then proceeded to question briefly the rest of the accused, taking them in the order in which they were seated on the benches. One, named Navette, pleaded that he could not possibly have plotted in prison since he had only been there four days. The President observed that the point deserved consideration, and begged the citizen magistrates to make a note of it. A certain Bellier said the same, and again the President commented in his favour to the magistrates. His mildness was interpreted by some as a praiseworthy scrupulousness, by others as payment in recognition of these men’s talents as informers.
The Deputy Public Prosecutor spoke next. All he did was to amplify the details of the writ of accusation and then to put to the magistrates the question:
‘Has it been proved that Maurice Brotteaux, Louis Rochemaure, Louis Longuemare, Marthe Gorcut, known as Athénaïs, Eusèbe Rocher, Pierre Guyton-Fabulet, Marceline Descourtis, etc., etc., are guilty of a conspiracy whose aims were assassination, starvation, the forging of assignats and counterfeit coin, in order to bring about civil war, the abolition of representative government and the restoration of the monarchy?’
The magistrates withdrew into the chamber of deliberation. Their vote was unanimous: guilty; except in the cases of Navette and Bellier, whom the President, and following his lead, the Public Prosecutor, had separated from the rest. Gamelin explained his decision thus:
‘The guilt of the accused is self-evident: their punishment is necessary for the safety of the nation and they themselves ought to desire to be punished as the only means of expiating their crimes.’
The President pronounced sentence in the absence of those it concerned. In these great days, contrary to what the law prescribed, the condemned were not recalled to hear the verdict read, no doubt for fear of the effects which their despair might have on such a large number of people. A needless fear, so wide and general had become the submissiveness of the victims! The clerk of the court went down to the cells to read the verdict, which was listened to with such silent impassivity that it had become common to compare those condemned during Prairial to trees marked down for felling.
The Citizeness Rochemaure declared herself to be pregnant. A surgeon, who was also one of the magistrates, was ordered to examine her. She was carried out fainting.
‘Ah!’ sighed Father Longuemare. ‘These judges and magistrates deserve all our pity: the condition of their souls is truly deplorable. Their confusion is such that they even mistake a Barnabite for a Franciscan.’
The executions were to take place the same day at the Barrière de Trône Renversé.* The condemned, their toilet completed, their hair cropped and their shirts cut away at the neck, were packed like cattle in the small room separated from the jailer’s office by a glass partition, to await the executioner.
When presently he and his assistants arrived, Brotteaux, who was quietly reading his Lucretius, placed the marker at the page he had reached, shut the book, put it in the pocket of his coat, and said to the Barnabite:
‘Reverend Father, what enrages me is that I shall never now convince you. We are both of us going to sleep our last sleep, and I shall not be able to pull you by the sleeve and wake you and say to you: “You see: you no longer can know or feel; you are inanimate. That which follows life is like that which precedes it.”’
He wanted to smile; but a terrible despair gripped his heart, filled his whole body with pain, and he came near to fainting.
He went on, all the same:
‘Father, I have let you witness my weakness. I love life and I cannot leave it without regret.’
‘Monsieur,’ replied the monk very gently, ‘be mindful, then, of the fact that you, who are a braver man than I, are troubled more by death than I. What does that mean, if not that I see the light which you do not yet see?’
‘It could also mean,’ said Brotteaux ‘that I regret leaving life because I have enjoyed it more than you, who have made it resemble death.’
‘Monsieur,’ s
aid Father Longuemare, his face going even paler, ‘this is a solemn moment. May God help me! It is certain we shall die without spiritual comfort. It must be that in time past I have received the Sacraments with a lukewarm and thankless heart, that heaven should deny me them today, when I have so great a need of them.’
The tumbrils were waiting. The condemned were piled into them, with their hands tied. The woman Rochemaure, whose pregnancy had not been confirmed by the surgeon, was hoisted into one of the tumbrils. She recovered sufficiently to watch the crowd of onlookers, hoping against hope to find someone to save her. The crowd was less dense than formerly, and the excitement less extreme. Only a few women screamed: ‘Death! Death!’ or mocked those about to die. The men mostly shrugged their shoulders, looked away and kept silent, either out of prudence or respect for the law.
A shudder passed through the crowd as Athénaïs appeared. She looked like a child.
She bowed her head in front of the monk:
‘Monsieur le Curé,’ she said to him, ‘give me absolution.’
Father Longuemare gravely murmured the words of the Sacrament, and then said:
‘My daughter, you have fallen into grave spiritual peril; but how can I not offer to the Lord a heart as simple as yours!’
She climbed lightly into the cart. And there, with breasts flaunted and childish head held high, she shouted:
‘Vive le Roil’
She made a little sign to Brotteaux to sit beside her. Brot - teaux helped the Barnabite climb up and seated himself between the monk and the innocent prostitute.
‘Monsieur,’ Father Longuemare said to the philosophical epicurean, ‘I ask you one favour: this God in whom you do not yet believe, pray to Him for me. It is possible that you may be nearer to Him than I am myself: a moment and we shall know. Only one second, and you may have become one of the Lord’s most dearly beloved children. Monsieur, pray for me.’
While the wheels of the tumbrils rolled on, making a grinding noise on the pavingstones of the long Faubourg-Antoine, the monk was reciting in his heart and with his lips the prayers for those dying in agony.
Brotteaux was recalling the lines of the poet of nature: Sic ubi non erimus… Tied up as he was and shaken by the jolting of the infamous cart, he maintained his tranquil air and even succeeded in appearing so much at his ease as to be without a care. Beside him, Athénaïs, proud to die thus like the Queen of France, gazed haughtily at the crowd, and the old aristocrat, contemplating with a connoisseur’s eyes the young woman’s white breasts, was filled with regret for the light of day.
XXV
WHILE the tumbrils, surrounded by gendarmes, were rumbling along on their way to the Place du Trône Renversé, taking Brotteaux and his accomplices to their death, Évariste sat, deep in thought, on a bench in the Garden of the Tuileries. He was waiting for Élodie. The sun, low on the horizon, was piercing the thickly leafed chestnut trees with its golden arrows. At the gate of the Gardens, seated on its winged horse, the statue of Fame blew its everlasting trumpet. The newspaper boys were shouting the news of the great victory at Fleurus.
‘Yes,’ Gamelin was thinking, ‘victory is ours. And we have paid a heavy price for it.’
In his mind he could see those defeated generals wandering about over there, like lost ghosts, in the blood-stained dust of the Place de la Révolution where they had perished. And he smiled, reflecting proudly that, but for the severities in which he had taken his share, the Austrian horses would today be eating the bark of the very trees beside him.
He exclaimed to himself:
‘Beneficent Terror 1 Oh, blessed Terror! At this very moment last year, our heroic armies were defeated, the soil of the fatherland invaded, two-thirds of the country in revolt. Today, our armies, well-equipped, well-trained, commanded by able generals, are on the offensive, ready to spread Liberty throughout the whole world. Peace reigns over all the Republic… Oh, beneficent Terror! Saintly Terror! Holy Guillotine! At this very moment last year, the Republic was torn by opposing factions, the hydra of Federalism threatened to devour her. Today, a united Jacobinism spreads its might and wisdom throughout the Republic…’
He was, nevertheless, filled with gloom. His forehead had become deeply lined; his mouth bitter. He thought to himself: ‘Once we used to say: To conquer or to die. We were mistaken, it was To conquer and to die, we should have said.’
He looked around him. The children were building sandcastles. The citizenesses, on their wooden chairs under the trees, were sewing or embroidering. The passers-by, in coats and breeches of strange elegance, busy thinking of their business or pleasures, were making for home. And Gamelin felt himself alone among them: he was neither their compatriot not their contemporary. What had happened to them? How was it that indifference, weariness, disgust even, had replaced the enthusiasm of those first beautiful years? It was obvious that all these people around him never wanted to hear the Revolutionary Tribunal mentioned again and turned their eyes away at the sight of the guillotine. Having become too provocative in the Place de la Révolution, it had been banished to the far end of the Faubourg Antoine. Even there the passage of the tumbrils was greeted with murmurings. It was even said that voices had shouted: ‘Enough!’
‘Enough, when there were still traitors and conspirators! Enough, when the Committees had to be reformed and the Convention purged! Enough, when scoundrels were disgracing the name of National Representative! Enough, when they were even plotting in the Revolutionary Tribunal itself to bring about the downfall of Robespierre! For, though to even think of it was horror, it was yet only too true! Fouquier himself was weaving the plots, and it was simply to ruin Robespierre that he had sacrificed fifty-seven victims with solemn ceremony, having them led to their death each wearing the red shirt of a parricide. To what sort of criminal pity was France yielding? It would be necessary to save her from it in spite of herself, and when she cried: ‘Have mercy!’ to stop our ears and to strike. Alas! Fate had decided that the fatherland should curse its saviours. Well, let it curse us, so long as we save it!
‘It is not enough to sacrifice aristocrats, financiers, poets, a Lavoisier, a Roucher, or an André Chénier. It is not enough to sacrifice other more obscure victims. We must strike at these all-powerful criminals who with their hands full of gold and dripping with blood are plotting the downfall of Robespierre, those are the men we must remove: the Fouchers, the Talliens, the Roveres, the Carriers, the Bourdons. We must deliver the fatherland from all its enemies. If Hébert had triumphed, the Convention would have been overthrown and the Republic hastened to the abyss; if Desmoulins and Danton had triumphed, the Convention would have been ready to surrender the Republic to the aristocrats, the financiers and the generals. If the Fouchés and the Talliens, and such monsters gorged with blood, should triumph, France will be overwhelmed in a flood of infamy and crime… You are sleeping, Robespierre, while criminals drunk with fury and fear plan your death and the death of Liberty. Couthon, Saint-Just, what delays you from denouncing these plots?
‘In the old days the Royal monster kept his power by imprisoning four hundred thousand people, by hanging fifteen thousand, by breaking three thousand on the wheel every year and yet the Republic hesitates to sacrifice a few hundred heads to secure its domination. Let us shed rivers of blood and save the fatherland…’
While he was thinking such thoughts, Élodie came running up to him, pale and agitated:
‘Évariste, what is it you have to tell me? Why couldn’t you have come to the Amour Peintre? Why have you made me come here?’
‘In order to say good-bye to you forever.’
She said she didn’t understand, he must be out of his mind…
He stopped her with a very slight gesture of his hand:
‘Élodie, I am no longer able to accept your love.’
‘Stop it, Évariste! Don’t say such things!’
She begged him to walk with her: people could see them, overhear them, where they were.
He walke
d beside her for about twenty paces and then went on, very calmly:
‘I have dedicated my life and my honour to my country. I shall die hated by many, and I shall leave you nothing except
the memory of a man despised and execrated… How can we love each other? Is it possible that I am able to love anyone?’
She said he was mad; that she loved him, would always love him. She was ardently sincere; yet she also knew as well as he, better than he, that he was right. But she refused to recognize it.
He continued:
‘I have nothing to reproach myself with. What I’ve done, I’d do again. For the sake of my country, I’ve put myself beyond the pale of humanity: I can never belong again. No. I cannot! Because my great task is not yet finished. If you say I can still forgive, still show mercy – I say, do conspirators show mercy, do traitors forgive? Scoundrels who betray their fatherland are multiplying unceasingly; they come out from below ground, from across our frontiers: young men, who would have done better to perish with our armies, old men, children, women, all appearing on the surface so innocent and so pure. And when we have sacrificed them on the altar of the fatherland, more of them appear, and more, and more… So you must see there is no other course for me but to renounce love, joy, all the sweetness of life, even life itself.’*
He fell silent. Made for the joys of peaceful pleasures, Élodie had for many a day now found herself horrified to discover, under the kisses of her tragic lover, that she was obtaining a voluptuous delight out of the thought of the blood he shed: she made no reply. Évariste drank as from a bitter chalice the silence of the young woman.
The Gods Will Have Blood Page 23