Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

  “Your tale does not surprise me, father,” Brotteaux told him, “We see such cases of obsession; but it is not always cardboard figures that occasion it.”

  The Père Longuemare, who was religious by profession, never talked about religion, while Brotteaux was for ever harping on the subject. He was conscious of a bond of sympathy between himself and the Barnabite, and took a delight in embarrassing and disturbing his peace of mind with objections against divers articles of the Christian faith.

  Once when they were working together making Zerlines and Scaramouches:

  “When I consider,” remarked Brotteaux, “the events which have brought us to the point at which we stand, I am in doubt as to which party, in the general madness, has been the most insane; sometimes, I am greatly tempted to believe it was that of the Court.”

  “Sir,” answered the Monk, “all men lose their wits like Nebuchadnezzar, when God forsakes them; but no man in our days ever plunged so deep in ignorance and error as the Abbé Fauchet, no man was so fatal as he to the kingdom. God must needs have been sorely exasperated against France to send her Monsieur l’Abbé Fauchet!”

  “I imagine we have seen other evil-doers besides poor, unhappy Fauchet.”

  “The Abbé Gregoire too, was full of malice.”

  “And Brissot, and Danton, and Marat, and a hundred others, what of them, Father?”

  “Sir, they are laics; the laity could never incur the same responsibilities as the clergy. They do not work evil from so high a standpoint, and their crimes are not of universal bearing.”

  “And your God, Father, what say you of His behaviour in the present Revolution?”

  “I do not understand you, sir.”

  “Epicurus said: Either God wishes to hinder evil and cannot, or He can and does not wish to, or He cannot nor does he wish to, or He does wish to and can. If He wishes to and cannot, He is impotent; if He can and does not wish to, He is perverse; if He cannot nor does He wish to, He is impotent and perverse; if He does wish to and can, why does He not, tell me that, Father!” — and Brotteaux cast a look of triumph at his interlocutor.

  “Sir,” retorted the Monk, “there is nothing more contemptible than these difficulties you raise. When I look into the reasoning of infidels, I seem to see ants piling up a few blades of grass as a dam against the torrent that sweeps down from the mountains. With your leave, I had rather not argue with you; I should have too many excellent reasons and too few wits to apply them. Besides, you will find your refutation in the Abbé Guénée and twenty other apologists. I will only say that what you quote from Epicurus is foolishness; because God is arraigned in it as if he was a man, with a man’s moral code. Well! sir, the sceptics, from Celsus down to Bayle and Voltaire, have cajoled fools with such-like paradoxes.”

  “See, Father,” protested Brotteaux, “to what lengths your faith makes you go. Not satisfied with finding all truth in your Theology, you likewise refuse to discover any in the works of so many noble intellects who thought differently from yourselves.”

  “You are entirely mistaken, sir,” replied Longuemare. “On the contrary, I believe that nothing could ever be altogether false in a man’s thoughts. The atheists stand on the lowest rung of the ladder of knowledge; but even there, gleams of sense are to be found and flashes of truth, and even when darkness is thick about him, a man may lift up his eyes to God, and He will put understanding in his heart; was it not so with Lucifer?”

  “Well, sir,” said Brotteaux, “I cannot match your generosity and I am bound to tell you I cannot find in all the works of the Theologians one atom of good sense.”

  At the same time he would repudiate any desire to attack religion, which he deemed indispensable for the nations; he could only wish it had for its ministers philosophers instead of controversialists. He deplored the fact that the Jacobins were for replacing it by a newer and more pestilent religion, the cult of liberty, equality, the republic, the fatherland. He had observed this, that it is in the vigour of their youth religions are the fiercest and most cruel, and grow milder as they grow older. He was anxious, therefore, to see Catholicism preserved; it had devoured many victims in the times of its vigour, but nowadays, burdened by the weight of years and with enfeebled appetite, it was content with roasting four or five heretics in a hundred years.

  “As a matter of fact,” he concluded, “I have always got on very well with your God-eaters and Christ-worshippers. I kept a chaplain at Les Ilettes, where Mass was said every Sunday and all my guests attended. The philosophers were the most devout while the opera girls showed the most fervour. I was prosperous then and had crowds of friends.”

  “Friends,” exclaimed the Père Longuemare, “friends! Ah! sir, do you really think they loved you, all these philosophers and all these courtesans, who have degraded your soul in such wise that God himself would find it hard to know it for one of the temples built by Him for His glory?”

  The Père Longuemare lived for a week longer at the publican’s without being interfered with. As far as possible he observed the discipline of his House and every night at the canonical hours would rise from his palliasse to kneel on the bare boards and recite the offices. Though both were reduced to a diet of wretched scraps, he duly observed fasts and abstinence. A smiling but pitiful spectator of these austerities, Brotteaux one day asked him:

  “Do you really believe that God finds any satisfaction in seeing you endure cold and hunger as you do?”

  “God himself,” was the Monk’s answer, “has given us the example of suffering.”

  On the ninth day since the Barnabite had come to share the philosopher’s garret, the latter sallied forth at twilight to deliver his dancing-dolls to Joly, the toy-merchant of the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. He was on his way back overjoyed at having sold them all, when, as he was crossing the erstwhile Place du Carrousel, a girl in a blue satin pelisse trimmed with ermine, running by with a limping gait, threw herself into his arms and held him fast in the way suppliants have had since the world began.

  She was trembling and her heart was beating so fast and loud it could be plainly heard. Wondering to see one of her common sort look so pathetic, Brotteaux, a veteran amateur of the stage, thought how Mademoiselle Raucourt, if she could have seen her, might have learnt something from her bearing.

  She spoke in breathless tones, lowering her voice to a whisper for fear of being overheard by the passers-by:

  “Take me with you, citoyen, and hide me, for the love of pity!... They are in my room in the Rue Fromenteau. While they were coming upstairs, I ran for refuge into Flora’s room, — she is my next-door neighbour, — and leapt out of the window into the street, that is how I sprained my ankle.... They are coming; they want to put me in prison and kill me.... Last week they killed Virginie.”

  Brotteaux understood, of course, that the child was speaking of the delegates of the Revolutionary Committee of the Section or else the Commissaries of the Committee of General Security. At that time the Commune had as procureur a man of virtue, the citoyen Chaumette who regarded the ladies of pleasure as the direct foes of the Republic and harassed them unmercifully in his efforts to regenerate the Nation’s morals. To tell the truth, the young ladies of the Palais-Égalité were no great patriots. They regretted the old state of things and did not always conceal the fact. Several had been guillotined already as conspirators, and their tragic fate had excited no little emulation among their fellows.

  The citoyen Brotteaux asked the suppliant what offence she had been guilty of to bring down on herself a warrant of arrest.

  She swore she had no notion, that she had done nothing anyone could blame her for.

  “Well then, my girl,” Brotteaux told her, “you are not suspect; you have nothing to fear. Be off with you to bed and leave me alone.”

  At this she confessed everything:

  “I tore out my cockade and shouted: ‘Vive le roi!’”

  He walked down to the river-side and she kept by his side along the deserted quais
. Clinging to his arm she went on:

  “It is not that I care for him particularly, the King, you know; I never knew him, and I daresay he wasn’t very much different from other men. But they are bad people. They are cruel to poor girls. They torment and vex and abuse me in every kind of way; they want to stop me following my trade. I have no other trade. You may be sure, if I had, I should not be doing what I do.... What is it they want? They are so hard on poor humble folks, the milkman, the charcoalman, the water carrier, the laundress. They won’t rest content till they’ve set all poor people against them.”

  He looked at her; she seemed a mere child. She was no longer afraid; she was almost smiling, as she limped along lightly at his side. He asked her her name. She said she was called Athenaïs and was sixteen.

  Brotteaux offered to see her safe to anywhere she wished to go. She did not know a soul in Paris; but she had an aunt, in service at Palaiseau, who would take her in.

  Brotteaux made up his mind at once.

  “Come with me, my child,” he ordered, and led the way home, with her hanging on his arm.

  On his arrival, he found the Père Longuemare in the garret reading his breviary.

  Holding Athenaïs by the hand, he drew the other’s attention to her:

  “Father,” he said, “here is a girl from the Rue Fromenteau who has been shouting: ‘Vive le roi!’ The revolutionary police are on her track. She has nowhere to lay head. Will you allow the girl to pass the night here?”

  The Père Longuemare closed his breviary.

  “If I understand you right,” he said, “you ask me, sir, if this young girl, who is like myself subject to be molested under a warrant of arrest, may be suffered, for her temporal salvation, to spend the night in the same room as I?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “By what right should I object? and why must I suppose myself affronted by her presence? am I so sure that I am any better than she?”

  He established himself for the night in an old broken-down armchair, declaring he should sleep excellently in it. Athenaïs lay on the mattress. Brotteaux stretched himself on the palliasse and blew out the candle.

  The hours and half-hours sounded one after the other from the church towers, but the old man could not sleep; he lay awake listening to the mingled breathing of the man of religion and the girl of pleasure. The moon rose, symbol and witness of his old-time loves, and threw a silvery ray into the attic, illuminating the fair hair and golden lashes, the delicate nose and round, red mouth of Athenaïs, who lay sound asleep.

  “Truly,” he thought to himself, “a terrible enemy for the Republic!”

  When Athenaïs awoke, the day was breaking. The Monk had disappeared. Brotteaux was reading Lucretius under the skylight, learning from the maxims of the Latin poet to live without fears and without desires; but for all this he felt himself at the moment devoured with regrets and disquietudes.

  Opening her eyes, Athenaïs was dumfounded to see the roof beams of a garret above her head. Then she remembered, smiled at her preserver and extended towards him with a caressing gesture her pretty little dirty hands.

  Rising on her elbow, she pointed to the dilapidated armchair in which the Monk had passed the night.

  “He is not there?... He has not gone to denounce me, has he?”

  “No, no, my child. You could not find a more honest soul than that old madman.”

  Athenaïs asked in what the old fellow’s madness consisted; and when Brotteaux informed her it was religion, she gravely reproached him for speaking so, declaring that men without faith were worse than the beasts that perish and that for her part she often prayed to God, hoping He would forgive her her sins and receive her in His blessed mercy.

  Then, noticing that Brotteaux held a book in his hand, she thought it was a book of the Mass and said:

  “There you see, you too, you say your prayers! God will reward you for what you have done for me.”

  Brotteaux having told her that it was not a Mass-book, and that it had been written before ever the Mass had been invented in the world, she opined it was an Interpretation of Dreams, and asked if it did not contain an explanation of an extraordinary dream she had had. She could not read and these were the only two sorts of books she had heard tell of.

  Brotteaux informed her that this book was only by way of explaining the dream of life. Finding this a hard saying, the pretty child did not try to understand it and dipped the end of her nose in the earthenware crock that replaced the silver basins Brotteaux had once been accustomed to use. Next, she arranged her hair before her host’s shaving-glass with scrupulous care and gravity. Her white arms raised above her head, she let fall an observation from time to time with long intervals between:

  “You, you were rich once.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know. But you were rich, — and you are an aristocrat, I am certain of it.”

  She drew from her pocket a little Holy Virgin of silver in a round ivory shrine, a bit of sugar, thread, scissors, a flint and steel, two or three cases for needles and the like, and after selecting what she required, sat down to mend her skirt, which had got torn in several places.

  “For your own safety, my child, put this in your cap!” Brotteaux bade her, handing her a tricolour cockade.

  “I will do that gladly, sir,” she agreed, “but it will be for the love of you and not for love of the Nation.”

  When she was dressed and had made herself look her best, taking her skirt in both hands, she dropped a curtsey as she had been taught to do in her village, and addressing Brotteaux:

  “Sir,” she said, “I am your very humble servant.”

  She was prepared to oblige her benefactor in all ways he might wish, but she thought it more becoming that he asked for no favour and she offered none; it seemed to her a pretty way to part so, and what good manners required.

  Brotteaux slipped a few assignats into her hand to pay her coach-hire to Palaiseau. It was the half of his fortune, and, albeit he was notorious for his lavishness towards women, it was the first time he had ever made so equal a partition of his goods with any of the sex.

  She asked him his name.

  “I am called Maurice.”

  It was with reluctance he opened the garret door for her:

  “Good-bye, Athenaïs.”

  She kissed him. “Monsieur Maurice,” she said, “when you think of me, if ever you do, call me Marthe; that is the name I was christened, the name they called me by in the village.... Good-bye and thank you.... Your very humble servant, Monsieur Maurice.”

  XV

  The prisons were full to bursting and must be emptied; the work of judging, judging, must go on without truce or respite. Seated against the tapestried walls with their fasces and red caps of liberty, like their fellows of the fleurs-de-lis, the judges preserved the same gravity, the same dreadful calm, as their Royal predecessors. The Public Prosecutor and his Deputies, worn out with fatigue, consumed with the fever of sleeplessness and brandy, could only shake off their exhaustion by a violent effort; their broken health made them tragic figures to look upon. The jurors, divers in character and origin, some educated, others ignorant, craven or generous, gentle or violent, hypocritical or sincere, but all men who, knowing the fatherland and the Republic in danger, suffered or feigned to suffer the same anguish, to burn with the same ardour; all alike primed to atrocities of virtue or of fear, they formed but one living entity, one single head, dull and irritable, one single soul, a beast of the apocalypse that by the mere exercise of its natural functions produced a teeming brood of death. Kind-hearted or cruel by caprice of sensibility, when shaken momentarily by a sudden pang of pity, they would acquit with streaming eyes a prisoner whom an hour before they would have condemned to the guillotine with taunts. The further they proceeded with their task, the more impetuously did they follow the impulses of their heart.

  Judge and jury toiled, fevered and half asleep with overwork, distracted by the excite
ment outside and the orders of the sovereign people, menaced by the threats of the sansculottes and tricoteuses who crowded the galleries and the public enclosure, relying on insane evidence, acting on the denunciations of madmen, in a poisonous atmosphere that stupefied the brain, set ears hammering and temples beating and darkened the eyes with a veil of blood. Vague rumours were current among the public of jurors bought by the gold of the accused. But to these the jury as a body replied with indignant protest and merciless condemnations. In truth they were men neither worse nor better than their fellows. Innocence more often than not is a piece of good fortune rather than a virtue; any other who should have consented to put himself in their place would have acted as they did and accomplished to the best of his commonplace soul these appalling tasks.