Antoinette, so long expected, sat at last in the fatal chair, in a black gown, the centre of such a concentration of hate that only the certainty of what the sentence would be made the court observe the forms of law. To the deadly questions the accused replied sometimes with the instinct of self-preservation, sometimes with her wonted haughtiness, and once, thanks to the hideous suggestion of one of her accusers, with the noble dignity of a mother. The witnesses were confined to outrage and calumny; the defence was frozen with terror. The tribunal, forcing itself to respect the rules of procedure, was only waiting till all formalities were completed to hurl the head of the Austrian in the face of Europe.
Three days after the execution of Marie Antoinette Gamelin was called to the bedside of the citoyen Fortuné Trubert, who lay dying, within thirty paces of the Military Bureau where he had worn out his life, on a pallet of sacking, in the cell of some expelled Barnabite father. His livid face was sunk in the pillow. His eyes, which already were almost sightless, turned their glassy pupils upon his visitor; his parched hand grasped Évariste’s and pressed it with unexpected vigour. Three times he had vomited blood in two days. He tried to speak; his voice, at first hoarse and feeble as a whisper, grew louder, deeper:
“Wattignies! Wattignies!... Jourdan has forced the enemy into their camp ... raised the blockade at Maubeuge.... We have retaken Marchiennes, ça ira ... ça ira ...” and he smiled.
These were no dreams of a sick man, but a clear vision of the truth that flashed through the brain so soon to be shrouded in eternal darkness. Hereafter the invasion seemed arrested; the Generals were terrorized and saw that the one best thing for them to do was to be victorious. Where voluntary recruiting had failed to produce what was needed, a strong and disciplined army, compulsion was succeeding. One effort more, and the Republic would be saved.
After a half hour of semi-consciousness, Fortuné Trubert’s face, hollow-cheeked and worn by disease, lit up again and his hands moved.
He lifted his finger and pointed to the only piece of furniture in the room, a little walnut-wood writing-desk. The voice was weak and breathless, but the mind quite unclouded:
“Like Eudamidas,” he said, “I bequeath my debts to my friend, — three hundred and twenty livres, of which you will find the account ... in that red book yonder ... good-bye, Gamelin. Never rest; wake and watch over the defence of the Republic. Ça ira.”
The shades of night were deepening in the cell. The difficult breathing of the dying man was the only sound, and his hands scratching on the sheet.
At midnight he uttered some disconnected phrases:
“More saltpetre.... See the muskets are delivered. Health? Oh! excellent.... Get down the church-bells....”
He breathed his last at five in the morning.
By order of the Section his body lay in state in the nave of the erstwhile church of the Barnabites, at the foot of the Altar of the Fatherland, on a camp bed, covered with a tricolour flag and the brow wreathed with an oak crown.
Twelve old men clad in the Roman toga, with palms in their hands, twelve young girls wearing long veils and carrying flowers, surrounded the funeral couch. At the dead man’s feet stood two children, each holding an inverted torch. One of them Évariste recognized as his concierge’s little daughter Joséphine, who in her childish gravity and beauty reminded him of those charming genii of Love and Death the Romans used to sculpture on their tombs.
The funeral procession made its way to the Cemetery of Saint-André-des-Arts to the strains of the Marseillaise and the Ça-ira.
As he laid the kiss of farewell on Fortuné Trubert’s brow, Évariste wept. His tears flowed in self-pity, for he envied his friend who was resting there, his task accomplished.
On reaching home, he received notice that he was posted a member of the Council General of the Commune. After standing as candidate for four months, he had been elected unopposed, after several ballots, by some thirty suffrages. No one voted nowadays; the Sections were deserted; rich and poor alike only sought to shirk the performance of public duties. The most momentous events had ceased to rouse either enthusiasm or curiosity; the newspapers were left unread. Out of the seven hundred thousand inhabitants of the capital Évariste doubted if as many as three or four thousand still preserved the old Republican spirit.
The same day the Twenty-one came up for trial. Innocent or guilty of the calamities and crimes of the Republic, vain, incautious, ambitious and impetuous, at once moderate and violent, feeble in their fear as in their clemency, quick to declare war, slow to carry it out, haled before the Tribunal to answer for the example they had given, they were not the less the first and the most brilliant children of the Revolution, whose delight and glory they had been. The judge who will question them with artful bias; the pallid accuser yonder who, where he sits behind his little table, is planning their death and dishonour; the jurors who will presently try to stifle their defence; the public in the galleries which overwhelms them with howls of insult and abuse, — all, judge, jury, people, have applauded their eloquence in other days, extolled their talents and their virtues. But judge, jury, people have short memories now.
Once Évariste had made Vergniaud his god, Brissot his oracle. But he had forgotten; if any vestige of his old wonder still lingered in his memory, it was to think that these monsters had seduced the noblest citizens.
Returning to his lodging after the sitting, Gamelin heard heart-breaking cries as he entered the house. It was little Joséphine; her mother was whipping her for playing in the Place with good-for-nothing boys and dirtying the fine white frock she had worn for the obsequies of the citoyen Trubert.
XVI
After three months during which he had made a daily holocaust of victims, illustrious or insignificant, to the fatherland, Évariste had a case that interested him personally; there was one prisoner he made it his special business to track down to death.
Ever since he had sat on the juror’s bench, he had been eagerly watching, among the crowd of culprits who appeared before him, for Élodie’s seducer; of this man he had elaborated in his busy fancy a portrait, some details of which were accurate. He pictured him as young, handsome, haughty, and felt convinced he had fled to England. He thought he had discovered him in a young émigré named Maubel, who, having come back to France and been denounced by his host, had been arrested in an inn at Passy; Fouquier-Tinville was in charge of the prosecution, — among a thousand others. Letters had been found on him which the accusation regarded as proofs of a plot concocted between Maubel and the agents of Pitt, but which were in fact only letters written to the émigré by a banking-house in London which he had entrusted with certain funds. Maubel, who was young and good-looking, seemed to be mainly occupied in affairs of gallantry. His pocket-book afforded a clue to some correspondence with Spain, then at war with France; but these communications were really of a purely private nature, and if the court of preliminary enquiry did not ignore the bill, it was only in virtue of the maxim that justice should never be in too great a hurry to release a prisoner.
Gamelin was handed a report of Maubel’s first semi-private examination and he was struck by what it revealed of the young man’s character, which he took to agree with what he believed to be that of Élodie’s betrayer. Thereafter he spent long hours in the private room of the Clerk of the Court, poring eagerly over the papers relating to this case. His suspicion received a remarkable confirmation on his discovering in a note-book belonging to the émigré, but long out of date, the address of the Amour peintre, in company, it is true, with those of the Green Monkey, the Dauphin’s Head, and several more print and picture shops. But when he was informed that in this same note-book had been found three or four petals of a red carnation carefully wrapped in a piece of silk paper, remembering how the red carnation was Élodie’s favourite flower, the one she cultivated on her window-sill, wore in her hair and used to give (he had reason to know) as a love-token, Évariste’s last doubts vanished. Being now convinced he knew the
facts, he resolved to question Élodie, though without letting her know the circumstances that had led him to discover the culprit.
As he was climbing the stairs to his lodgings, he perceived even on the lower landings a stifling smell of fruit, and on reaching the studio, found Élodie helping the citoyenne Gamelin to make quince preserve. While the old housewife was kindling the stove and turning over in her mind ways of saving the fuel and moist sugar without prejudicing the quality of the preserves, the citoyenne Blaise, seated in a straw-bottomed chair, with an apron of brown holland and her lap full of the golden fruit, was peeling the quinces, quartering and throwing them into a shallow copper basin. The strings of her coif were thrown back over her shoulders, the meshes of her black hair coiled above her moist forehead; from her whole person breathed a domestic charm and an intimate grace that induced gentle thoughts and voluptuous dreams of tranquil pleasures.
Without stirring from her seat, she lifted her beautiful eyes, that gleamed like molten gold, to her lover’s face, and said:
“See, Évariste, we are working for you. We mean you to have a store of delicious quince jelly to last you the winter; it will settle your stomach and make your heart merry.”
But Gamelin, stepping nearer, uttered a name in her ear:
“Jacques Maubel....”
At that moment Combalot the cobbler showed his red nose at the half-open door. He had brought, along with some pairs of shoes he had re-heeled, the bill for the repairs.
For fear of being taken for a bad citizen, he made a point of using the new calendar. The citoyenne Gamelin, who liked to see clearly what was what in her accounts, was all astray among the Fructidors and Vendémiaires. She heaved a sigh.
“Jesus!” she complained, “they want to alter everything, — days, months, seasons of the year, the sun and the moon! Lord God, Monsieur Combalot, what ever is this pair of over-shoes down for the 8 Vendémiaire?”
“Citoyenne, just cast your eye over your almanac, and you’ll get the hang of it.”
She took it down from the wall, glanced at it and immediately turning her head another way.
“It hasn’t a Christian look!” she cried in a shocked tone.
“Not only that, citoyenne,” said the cobbler, “but now we have only three Sundays in the month instead of four. And that’s not all; we shall soon have to change our ways of reckoning. There will be no more farthings and half-farthings, everything will be regulated by distilled water.”
At the words the citoyenne Gamelin, whose lips were trembling, threw up her eyes to the ceiling and sighed out:
“They are going too far!”
And, while she was lost in lamentations, looking like the holy women in a wayside calvary, a bad coal that had caught alight in the fire when her attention was diverted, began to fill the studio with a poisonous smother which, added to the stifling smell of quinces, was like to make the air unbreathable.
Élodie complained that her throat was tickling her and begged to have the window opened. But, directly the citoyen Combalot had taken his leave and the citoyenne Gamelin had gone back to her stove, Évariste repeated the same name in the girl’s ear:
“Jacques Maubel,” he reiterated.
She looked up at him in some surprise, and very quietly, still going on cutting a quince in quarters:
“Well!... Jacques Maubel...?”
“He is the man.”
“The man! what man?”
“You once gave him a red carnation.”
She declared she did not understand and asked him to explain himself.
“That aristocrat! that émigré! that scoundrel!”
She shrugged her shoulders, and denied with the most natural air that she had never known a Jacques Maubel.
It was true; she had never known anyone of the name.
She denied she had ever given red carnations to anybody but Évariste; but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good.
He had little experience of women and was far from having fully fathomed Élodie’s character; still, he deemed her quite capable of cajoling and deceiving a cleverer man than himself.
“Why deny?” he asked. “I know all.”
Again she asseverated she had never known anybody called Maubel. And, having done peeling the quinces, she asked for a basin of water, because her fingers were sticky. This Gamelin brought her, and, as she washed her hands, she repeated her denials.
Again he repeated that he knew, and this time she made no reply.
She did not guess the object of her lover’s question and she was a thousand miles from suspecting that this Maubel, whom she had never heard spoken of before, was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal; she could make nothing of the suspicions with which she was assailed, but she knew them to be unfounded. For this reason, having very little hope of dissipating them, she had very little wish to do so either. She ceased to deny having known Maubel, preferring to leave her jealous lover to go astray on a false trail, when from one moment to the next, the smallest incident might start him on the right road. Her little lawyer’s clerk of former days, now grown into a patriot dragoon and lady-killer, had quarrelled by now with his aristocratic mistress. Whenever he met Élodie in the street, he would gaze at her with a glance that seemed to say:
“Come, my beauty! I feel sure I am going to forgive you for having betrayed you, and I am really quite ready to take you back into favour.” She made no further attempt therefore to cure what she called her lover’s crotchets, and Gamelin remained firm in the conviction that Jacques Maubel was Élodie’s seducer.
Through the days that ensued the Tribunal devoted its undivided attention to the task of crushing Federalism, which, like a hydra, had threatened to devour Liberty. They were busy days; and the jurors, worn out with fatigue, despatched with the utmost possible expedition the case of the woman Roland, instigator and accomplice of the crimes of the Brissotin faction.
Meantime Gamelin spent every morning at the Courts to press on Maubel’s trial. Some important pieces of evidence were to be found at Bordeaux; he insisted on a Commissioner being sent to ride post to fetch them. They arrived at last. The deputy of the Public Prosecutor read them, pulled a face and told Évariste:
“It is not good for much, your new evidence! there is nothing in it! mere fiddle-faddle.... If only it was certain that this ci-devant Comte de Maubel ever really emigrated...!”
In the end Gamelin succeeded. Young Maubel was served with his act of accusation and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 19 Brumaire.
From the first opening of the sitting the President showed the gloomy and dreadful face he took care to assume for the hearing of cases where the evidence was weak. The Deputy Prosecutor stroked his chin with the feather of his pen and affected the serenity of a conscience at ease. The Clerk read the act of accusation; it was the hollowest sham the Court had ever heard so far.
The President asked the accused if he had not been aware of the laws passed against the émigrés.
“I was aware of them and I observed them,” answered Maubel, “and I left France provided with passports in proper form.”
As to the reasons for his journey to England and his return to France he had satisfactory explanations to offer. His face was pleasant, with a look of frankness and confidence that was agreeable. The women in the galleries looked at the young man with a favourable eye. The prosecution maintained that he had made a stay in Spain at the time that Nation was at war with France; he averred he had never left Bayonne at that period. One point alone remained obscure. Among the papers he had thrown in the fire at the time of his arrest, and of which only fragments had been found, some words in Spanish had been deciphered and the name of “Nieves.”
On this subject Jacques Maubel refused to give the explanations demanded; and, when the President told him that it was in the accused’s own interest to clear up the point, he answered that a man ought not always to do what his own interest requires.
Gamelin only
thought of convicting Maubel of a crime; three times over he pressed the President to ask the accused if he could explain about the carnation the dried petals of which he hoarded so carefully in his pocket-book.
Maubel replied that he did not consider himself obliged to answer a question that had no concern with the case at law, as no letter had been found concealed in the flower.
The jury retired to the hall of deliberations, favourably impressed towards the young man whose mysterious conduct appeared chiefly connected with a lover’s secrets. This time the good patriots, the purest of the pure themselves, would gladly have voted for acquittal. One of them, a ci-devant noble, who had given pledges to the Revolution, said:
“Is it his birth they bring up against him? I, too, I have had the misfortune to be born in the aristocracy.”
“Yes, but you have left them,” retorted Gamelin, “and he has not.”
And he spoke with such vehemence against this conspirator, this emissary of Pitt, this accomplice of Coburg, who had climbed the mountains and sailed the seas to stir up enemies to Liberty, he demanded the traitor’s condemnation in such burning words, that he awoke the never-resting suspicions, the old stern temper of the patriot jury.
One of them told him cynically:
“There are services that cannot well be refused between colleagues.”
The verdict of death was recorded by a majority of one.
The condemned man heard his sentence with a quiet smile. His eyes, which had been gazing unconcernedly about the hall, as they fell on Gamelin’s face, took on an expression of unspeakable contempt.
No one applauded the decision of the court.
Jacques Maubel was taken back to the Conciergerie; here he wrote a letter while he waited the hour of execution, which was to take place the same evening, by torchlight:
My dear sister, — The tribunal sends me to the scaffold, affording me the only joy I have been able to appreciate since the death of my adored Nieves. They have taken from me the only relic I had left of her, a pomegranate flower, which they called, I cannot tell why, a carnation.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 254