‘The tyrant is no more! His slaves are broken! The Revolution can continue in majesty and terror!’
Gamelin fainted.
At seven in the morning, a surgeon sent by the Convention dressed his wounds. The Convention was full of solicitude for Robespierre’s accomplices: it did not want any of them to escape the guillotine. Gamelin, artist, ex-magistrate, ex-member of the General Council of the Commune, was carried on a stretcher to the Conciergerie prison.
XXVIII
ON the 10 Thermidor, while Évariste, after a feverish sleep on a palliasse in a dungeon, was awakening to a sudden realization of indescribable horror, Paris in all her spacious beauty lay smiling in the sunshine; hope was surging once more in prisoners’ hearts; tradesmen were light-heartedly opening their shops, the bourgeois were feeling themselves wealthier, young men happier, women more beautiful, all as a result of the fall of Robespierre. Only a handful of Jacobins, a few constitutional priests and some old women were trembling to see the Government taken over by the wicked and the corrupt. A delegation from the Revolutionary Tribunal, composed of the Public Prosecutor and two judges, was on its way to the Convention to congratulate it on having put an end to the plots. The Assembly had decided that the guillotine was to be set up again in the Place de la Révolution. It did not want the wealthy, the fashionable, the pretty women to have to go out of their way to witness the execution of Robespierre, which was to take place that day. The dictator and his accomplices had been outlawed: it sufficed therefore that their identity should be verified by two officers of the Commune and they could then be handed over immediately by the Tribunal to the executioner. But a difficulty arose: the verifications could not be put into legal form, since the whole Commune itself had been outlawed. The Assembly therefore authorized identification by ordinary witnesses.
The accused were dragged to their death, accompanied by their chief accomplices, amid shouts of joy and of fury, amid curses, laughter and dancing.
The next day, Évariste, who had regained some of his strength and could almost stand, was taken from his cell, brought before the Tribunal and put on the platform where so many victims, illustrious or obscure, had previously sat. Now it groaned under the weight of seventy persons, most of them members of the Commune, and some of them magistrates, like Gamelin, who had also been outlawed. Again he saw the magistrates’ bench, where he had been accustomed to lean at ease, the place where he had terrorized unhappy prisoners, the place where he had had to endure the look in the eyes of Jacques Maubel, of Fortuné Chassagne, of Maurice Brotteaux, and the pleading eyes of the Citizeness Roche-maure who had secured for him the position of magistrate and whom he had rewarded with a sentence of death. Again he saw, dominating the dais where the judges sat, the busts of Chalier and Marat and that same bust of Brutus which he had once invoked. Nothing was altered, neither the axes, the fasces, the red caps of Liberty on the wallpaper, nor the insults shouted by the tricoteuses in the galleries to those about to die, nor the soul of Fouquier-Turville, implacable, laboriously leafing through his deadly papers, the perfect Public Prosecutor, sending his friends of the day before to the scaffold.
The Citizen Remade, porter and tailor, and the Citizen Dupont aîné, joiner, of the Place de Thionville, member of the Committee of Surveillance of the Section du Pont-Neuf, identified Gamelin (Évariste), artist, ex-magistrate of the Revolutionary Tribunal, ex-member of the General Council of the Commune. For so witnessing, they received an assignat of a hundred sols from the funds of the section; but since they had had ties of neighbourliness and friendliness with the accused, they found it embarrassing to meet his eyes. Anyway, it was a hot day: they were thirsty and in a hurry to get away to drink a glass of wine.
Gamelin found it an effort to climb into the tumbril: he had lost a lot of blood and his wound was giving him great pain. The driver whipped up his old horse and the procession began amidst a storm of booing.
Some women recognized Gamelin and shouted at him:
‘Now it’s your turn to have a drink of blood! Mass-murderer for eighteen francs a day!… He’s not laughing now: just look how pale he is, the coward!’
They were the same women who had used to mock at the conspirators and the aristocrats, the extremists and the moderates whom Gamelin and his colleagues had sent daily to the guillotine.
The tumbril turned into the Quai des Morfondus, and proceeded slowly towards the Pont-Neuf and the Rue de la Monnaie: they were being taken to the Place de la Révolution, to the scaffold where Robespierre had died. The horse was lame; every minute the driver had to flick him about the ears with his whip. The crowd of spectators, happy and excited, kept delaying the progress of the escort. Everybody wanted to congratulate the gendarmes, who had to keep reining back their horses. At the corner of the Rue Honoré, the insults increased two-fold. Young people, seated at tables in the fashionable restaurants, ran to the windows, their napkins in their hands, and shouted:
‘Cannibals! Man-eaters! Vampires!’
The tumbril having plunged into a pile of garbage which had not been removed during the two days of disorder, the jeunesse dorée exploded with delight.
‘The waggon’s bogged down!… That’s where they belong, stinking Jacobins!’
Gamelin was thinking, and it seemed to him that he understood.
‘I die a just death,’ he thought. ‘It is just that we should receive these insults hurled at the Republic, for we should have safeguarded her against them. We have been weak; we have allowed ourselves to be too indulgent. We have betrayed the Republic. We have deserved our fate. Even Robespierre, pure and saintly as he was, sinned by being too mild, too merciful; his faults are wiped out by his martyrdom. By following his example, I have betrayed the Republic; she perishes: it is just that I die with her. I did not shed enough blood: let my own blood flow! Let me perish! I have deserved it…’
As he was thinking thus, he caught sight of the sign of the Amour Peintre, and a flood of bitter-sweet memories overwhelmed him.
The shop was shut, the venetian blinds of the three windows on the first floor were drawn tight. As the tumbril passed in front of the window of the blue bedroom, a woman’s hand, wearing a silver ring, pushed aside the edge of the blind and threw towards Gamelin a red carnation. His bound hands prevented him from catching it but all his heart went out to it as the symbol and likeness of those sweet red lips whose fragrance had used to refresh his mouth. His eyes filled with tears and his whole being was still suffused with the charm of this farewell when he saw rising into sight in the Place de la Révolution the knife of the guillotine dripping with blood.
XXIX
IT was Nivôse.* Five months had passed and summer had turned to winter. Masses of floating ice blocked the Seine, the basins of the fountains in the Tuileries Gardens were frozen. The north wind swept waves of hoarfrost along the streets. White steam breathed from the horses’ nostrils, and people would glance as they passed at the thermometers at the doors of the opticians. A shop-boy was wiping the condensation from inside the windows of the Amour Peintre and the curious glanced in at the prints on show: the vogue was for Robespierre squeezing a heart, shaped like a lemon, into a cup to drink the blood, and for huge allegorical designs with such titles as the Tigrocratie de Robespierre: representing hydras, serpents and other horrible monsters let loose on France by the tyrant. Other were entitled the Horrible Conspiration de Robespierre, the Arrestation de Robespierre, the Mort de Robespierre.
One day, after the midday dinner, Philippe Desmahis entered the Amour Peintre, his portfolio beneath his arm, and handed to. the Citizen Jean Blaise a stippled engraving, the Suicide de Robespierre, which he had just finished. The engraver had sardonically etched Robespierre as hideously as he could. The French people were still not satiated with memorials enshrining the hate and horror felt for the man who had been made the scapegoat for all the crimes of the Revolution. However, the print-seller, who knew his customers, informed Desmahis that in future he was going to give him mil
itary subjects to engrave.
‘We shall be all demanding conquests and victories, swords, generals; waving plumes. We are out for glory. I feel it; my heart beats wildly when I hear of the exploits of our brave armies. And when I feel something, everybody else usually feels the same. What we need now is warriors and women, Mars and Venus.’
‘Citizen Blaise, I’ve still two or three of Gamelin’s drawings at my lodging, the ones you gave me to engrave. Are they urgent?’
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘Talking about Gamelin, I saw all the poor devil’s canvases yesterday on a second-hand dealer’s stall in the Boulevard du Temple. There was even his Orestes and his Electro. The head of Orestes is very like Gamelin’s and it’s really very fine. The arm as well is superb. The dealer told me he had no difficulty in getting rid of such canvases to artists to paint over them… Poor Gamelin! He could have been an outstanding genius, perhaps, if he hadn’t taken to politics.’
‘He’d the soul of a criminal!’ replied the Citizen Blaise. ‘I proved that, on the very spot where you’re standing, when his craving for bloodshed was still held in check. He never forgave me for it… Oh, he was a real scoundrel!’
‘Poor fellow! He was certainly sincere. It was those fanatics who ruined him.’
‘You are not defending him, I hope, Desmahis!… A man like that!’
‘No, Citizen Blaise, I’m not defending him.’
The Citizen Blaise tapped the handsome Desmahis on the shoulder:
‘Times have changed. We can call you “Barbaroux”, now the Convention is pardoning those still standing accused… I’ve been thinking, Desmahis. You’d better do me an engraving of Charlotte Corday.’
A tall, beautiful, brown-haired woman wrapped in furs, entered the shop and gave the Citizen Blaise a little intimate and discreet nod. It was Julie Gamelin; but she no longer used that dishonoured name: she now called herself the ‘Citizeness Widow Chassagne’ and wore, under her cloak of fur, a red tunic in honour of the red shirts of the Terror.
Julie had at first felt a certain distaste for Évariste’s mistress; anything to do with her brother was hateful to her. But the Citizeness Blaise, after Évariste’s death, had given refuge to his unfortunate mother in the attics of the Amour Peintre. Julie had also found safety there; then she had obtained employment again at the fashionable milliner’s shop in the Rue des Lombards. Her short hair, à la victime, her aristocratic air, her mourning attire, had gained her the sympathies of the jeunesse dorée. Jean Blaise, whom Rose Thévenin had now almost finished with, offered her his affections, which she accepted. Julie, however, still had a liking for wearing men’s clothes, as she had done during the tragic days only a few months past. She had had a fine muscadin outfit made for her and often went, with an enormous baton in her hand, to have supper at some tavern at Sèvres or Meudon with one of the girl assistants from the milliner’s shop. Inconsolable after the death of the young aristocrat whose name she had taken, this masculine Julie found the only solace for her sadness in outbursts of savage fury, and whenever she met any Jacobins, she would set the passers-by on to them with threatening shouts of death. She found little time left to give to her mother, who told her beads all day alone in her room, too overcome by the tragic end of her son even to feel sorrow. Rose Thévenin had now become the constant companion of Élodie, who got on very well indeed with both her two stepmothers.
‘Where is Élodie?’ asked the Citizeness Chassagne.
Jean Blaise indicated that he did not know. He never did: he made it a point of honour not to.
Julie had come to take Élodie to visit Rose Thévenin at Monceaux, where the actress now lived in a little house with an English garden.
At the Conciergerie prison, Rose Thévenin had made the acquaintance of a big army contractor, the Citizen Montfort. After being released by the intervention of Jean Blaise, she had obtained a pardon for the Citizen Montfort who, no sooner free, began provisioning the troops again and speculating in land in the Pépinière district. The architects Ledour, Olivier and Wailly were building good houses there, and the land tripled in value in three months. Since the time of their imprisonment together in the Luxembourg prison, Montfort had been Rose Thévenin’s lover: he had now given her a little house near the Tivoli and the Rue du Rocher, which was extremely expensive but cost him nothing, the sale of the neighbouring properties having already reimbursed him several times over. Jean Blaise was a man of the world; he thought it best to put up with what he could not prevent: he abandoned Rose Thévenin to Montfort without quarrelling with her.
Soon after Julie had arrived at the Amour Peintre, Élodie came down into the shop dressed in her best clothes, but under her cloak, despite the coldness of the weather, she was naked except for her white dress; her face had become paler than it used to be, her figure thinner, her eyes had a languidly inviting look and her whole body spoke of sensual pleasure.
The two women set off to visit Rose Thévenin, who was expecting them. Desmahis accompanied them: the actress was consulting him about the decoration of her new town-house and he was in love with Élodie who had by this time more than half decided to put an end to his suffering. When the two women passed near Monceaux, where the victims from the Place de la Révolution were buried under a layer of lime, Julie said:
‘It’s all right during this cold weather, but in the spring the smell from this ground will poison half the city.’
Rose Thévenin received her two friends in a drawing-room decorated à l’antique, the couches and chairs being designed by David. Roman bas-reliefs copied in monochrome adorned the walls, above statues, busts and candelabra of imitation bronze. Rose was wearing a straw-coloured, curled wig. At that time wigs were all the fashion: six, twelve or eighteen being included in a bride’s trousseau. A dress à la Cyprienne clung to her body like a sheath.
Throwing a cloak over her shoulders, she led her friends and the engraver into the garden, which Ledoux was designing for her, but which as yet was only a chaos of bare trees and plaster. She showed them, all the same, Fingal’s grotto, a Gothic chapel, with a bed, a temple, and a waterfall.
‘Over there,’ she said, pointing to a clump of fir trees, ‘I would like to raise a memorial to that unfortunate Brotteaux des Ilettes. I was not indifferent to him. He was a lovable man. The monsters slaughtered him: I wept for him. Desmahis, you will design me an urn on a column for him.’
And she continued, almost without a pause:
‘It is really too bad… I wanted to give a ball this week; but all the violins are booked up three weeks in advance. They have dancing every evening at the Citizeness Tallien’s.’
After dinner, Rose Thevénin’s carriage took the three friends and Desmahis to the Théâtre Feydeau. All the most elegant in Paris were there. The women, hair à l’antique or à la victime, in very open dresses, purple or white and spangled with gold; the men in very tall, black collars, their chins disappearing into enormous white cravats.
The bill announced Phèdre and the Chien du Jardinier. The entire audience demanded the hymn dear to the muscadins* and the jeunesse dorée, the Réveil du Peuple.
The curtain rose and a little man, short and fat, appeared on the stage: it was the celebrated Lays. He sang in a fine, tenor voice:
‘Peuple français, peuple de frères!…’
The wild storm of applause that broke out set the crystals on the chandeliers tinkling. Then murmurs were heard and the voice of a citizen in a round hat in the pit replied with the Hymne des Marseillais:
‘Allons, enfants de la patrie!…’
His voice was drowned with howls; voices shouted:
‘Down with the Terrorists! Death to the Jacobins!’
And Lays was recalled to sing for a second time the hymn of the Thermidorians, who had brought Robespierre to the scaffold:
‘Peuple français, peuple de frères!…’
In every theatre the bust of Marat was to be seen, on a column or a pedestal. At the Théâtre Feyde
au his bust stood on a small pillar, on the ‘prompt’ side, against the masonry which formed the stage.
While the orchestra was playing the overture to Phèdre, a young muscadin pointed his cane at the bust and shouted:
‘Down with Marat!’
The whole audience took up the cry:
‘Down with Marat! Down with Marat!’
Some with louder voices dominated the tumult:
‘It’s a disgrace to have that bust still standing there!’
‘Shame on us that we allow that infamous Marat to reign everywhere! His busts are as numerous as the heads he wanted to cut off!’
‘Venomous toad!’
‘Blood-thirsty tiger!’
‘Vile serpent!’
Suddenly an elegantly dressed member of the audience climbs on to the edge of his box, gives the bust a push, and knocks it to the ground. The plaster head shatters into pieces amongst the musicians in the orchestra, amid the cheers of the audience, who jump to their feet and burst forth singing the Réveil du Peuple:
‘Peuple fratifais, peuple de frères!…’
Among the most enthusiastic singers, Élodie recognized the pretty dragoon, the little lawyer’s clerk, Henry, her first love.
After the performance, the handsome Desmahis summoned a cabriolet and escorted the Citizeness Blaise back to the Amour Peintre.
In the carriage, the artist took Élodie’s hand between his and said:
‘You know very well, Élodie, I love you.’
‘I know, because you love all women.’
‘I love them in you.’
She smiled:
‘I should be taking on a huge task, despite all the black, blond and red wigs that are the fashion, if I tried to be all sorts of woman for you.’
‘Élodie, I swear to you…’
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