Lays was recalled and sang a second time over the hymn of the Thermidorians.
Peuple français, peuple de frères!...
In every play-house was to be seen the bust of Marat, surmounting a column or raised on a pedestal; at the Théâtre Feydeau this bust stood on a dwarf pillar on the “prompt” side, against the masonry-framing in the stage.
While the orchestra was playing the Overture of Phèdre et Hippolyte, a young Muscadin, pointing his cane at the bust, shouted:
“Down with Marat!” — and the whole house took up the cry: “Down with Marat! Down with Marat!”
Urgent voices rose above the uproar:
“It is a black shame that bust should still be there!”
“The infamous Marat lords it everywhere, to our dishonour! His busts are as many as the heads he wanted to cut off.”
“Venomous toad!”
“Tiger!”
“Vile serpent!”
Suddenly an elegantly dressed spectator clambers on to the edge of his box, pushes the bust, oversets it. The plaster head falls in shivers on the musicians’ heads amid the cheers of the audience, who spring to their feet and strike up the Réveil du Peuple:
Peuple français, peuple de frères!...
Among the most enthusiastic singers Élodie recognized the handsome dragoon, the little lawyer’s clerk, Henry, her first love.
After the performance the gallant Desmahis called a cabriolet and escorted the citoyenne Blaise back to the Amour peintre.
In the carriage the artist took Élodie’s hand between his:
“You know, Élodie, I love you?”
“I know it, because you love all women.”
“I love them in you.”
She smiled:
“I should be assuming a heavy task, spite of the wigs black, blonde and red, that are the rage, if I undertook to be all women, all sorts of women, for you.”
“Élodie, I swear....”
“What! oaths, citoyen Desmahis? Either you have a deal of simplicity, or you credit me with overmuch.”
Desmahis had not a word to say, and she hugged herself over the triumph of having reduced her witty admirer to silence.
At the corner of the Rue de la Loi they heard singing and shouting and saw shadows flitting round a brazier of live coals. It was a band of young bloods who had just come out of the Théâtre Français and were burning a guy representing the Friend of the People.
In the Rue Honoré the coachman struck his cocked hat against a burlesque effigy of Marat swinging from the cord of a street lantern.
The fellow, heartened by the incident, turned round to his fares and told them how, only last night, the tripe-seller in the Rue Montorgueil had smeared blood over Marat’s head, declaring: “That’s the stuff he liked,” and how some little scamps of ten had thrown the bust into the sewer, and how the spectators had hit the nail on the head, shouting:
“That’s the Panthéon for him!”
Meanwhile, from every eating-house and restaurateur’s voices could be heard singing:
Peuple français, peuple de frères!...
“Good-bye,” said Élodie, jumping out of the cabriolet.
But Desmahis begged so hard, he was so tenderly urgent and spoke so sweetly, that she had not the heart to leave him at the door.
“It is late,” she said; “you must only stay an instant.”
In the blue chamber she threw off her mantle and appeared in her white gown à l’antique, which displayed all the warm fulness of her shape.
“You are cold, perhaps,” she said, “I will light the fire; it is already laid.”
She struck the flint and put a lighted match to the fire.
Philippe took her in his arms with the gentleness that bespeaks strength, and she felt a strange, delicious thrill. She was already yielding beneath his kisses when she snatched herself from his arms, crying:
“Let me be.”
Slowly she uncoiled her hair before the chimney-glass; then she looked mournfully at the ring she wore on the ring-finger of her left hand, a little silver ring on which the face of Marat, all worn and battered, could no longer be made out. She looked at it till the tears confused her sight, took it off softly and tossed it into the flames.
Then, her face shining with tears and smiles, transfigured with tenderness and passion, she threw herself into Philippe’s arms.
The night was far advanced when the citoyenne Blaise opened the outer door of the flat for her lover and whispered to him in the darkness:
“Good-bye, sweetheart! It is the hour my father will be coming home. If you hear a noise on the stairs, go up quick to the higher floor and don’t come down till all danger is over of your being seen. To have the street-door opened, give three raps on the concierge’s window. Good-bye, my life, good-bye, my soul!”
The last dying embers were glowing on the hearth when Élodie, tired and happy, dropped her head on the pillow.
THE END
THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS
Translated by Mrs. Wilfred Jackson
France’s last novel was first translated into English in 1914 and published the same year in France and Britain. The Revolt of the Angels is work of religious and social satire, focusing on fallen angels, and a revolt against a God that is depicted as vain, capricious and tyrannical. The angel Arcade decides to visit Maurice d’Esparvieu’s library in order to educate himself; he soon determines to gather the necessary material to join the revolution and replace God in heaven. Arcade is also Maurice’s guardian angel, but if the former is to dedicate his energies to the revolution then he will no longer have the time to fulfil his role to Maurice. There is a darkly funny and ironic segment involving Arcade challenging Maurice to a duel over the latter’s lover. The mortal being stabbed by his immortal guardian angel is a somewhat bleak and humorous scenario. Arcade joins with hundreds of other fallen angels to make an army and dispose of a cunning God, who has created a hierarchical order amongst his angels. France manages to use this organisation of the angelic realm to satirise the European class system.
Satan is depicted as an inspiration for creativity, education, happiness and human development. The goal of the revolution is to replace an authoritarian and despotic regime with an egalitarian, peaceful democracy, and an environment that cultivates curiosity in its inhabitants. However, as the novel is an indictment of the old hierarchical order, France does not express optimism that this revolution would lead to the lofty aims of those participating in the overthrow. The author expresses the idea that power corrupts even those with the greatest intentions and it leads to a loss of empathy or compassion. France lambastes how the powerful use war to instil discipline and he also highlights and condemns the fact that ultimately war is a business; it is clear that certain people profit from death and destruction; a haunting message from an author writing at the commencement of the First World War.
The original title page
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
Illustration by Frank C Pape in the 1924 edition
CONTAINING IN A FEW LINES THE HISTORY OF A FRENCH FAMILY FROM 1789 TO THE PRESENT DAY
BENEATH the shadow of St. Sulpice the ancient mansion of the d’Esparvieu family rears its austere three stories between a moss-grown fore-court and a garden hemmed in, as the years have elapsed, by ever loftier and more intrusive buildings, wherein, nevertheless, two tall chestnut trees still lift their withered heads.
Here from 1825 to 1857 dwelt the great man of the family, Alexandre Bussart d’Esparvieu, Vice-President of the Council of State under the Government of July, Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and author of an Essay on the Civil and Religious Institutions of Nations, in three octavo volumes, a work unfortunately left incomplete.
This eminent theorist of a Liberal monarchy left as heir to his name his fortune and his fame, Fulgence-Adolphe Bussart d’Esparvieu, senator under the Second Empire, who added largely to his patrimony by buying land over which the Avenue de l’Impératice was destined ultimately to pass, and who made a remarkable speech in favour of the temporal power of the popes.
Fulgence had three sons. The eldest, Marc-Alexandre, entering the army, made a splendid career for himself: he was a good speaker. The second, Gaétan, showing no particular aptitude for anything, lived mostly in the country, where he hunted, bred horses, and devoted himself to music and painting. The third son, René, destined from his childhood for the law, resigned his deputyship to avoid complicity in the Ferry decrees against the religious orders; and later, perceiving the revival under the presidency of Monsieur Fallières of the days of Decius and Diocletian, put his knowledge and zeal at the service of the persecuted Church.
From the Concordat of 1801 down to the closing years of the Second Empire all the d’Esparvieus attended mass for the sake of example. Though sceptics in their inmost hearts, they looked upon religion as an instrument of government.
Mark and René were the first of their race to show any sign of sincere devotion. The General, when still a colonel, had dedicated his regiment to the Sacred Heart, and he practised his faith with a fervour remarkable even in a soldier, though we all know that piety, daughter of Heaven, has marked out the hearts of the generals of the Third Republic as her chosen dwelling-place on earth.
Faith has its vicissitudes. Under the old order the masses were believers, not so the aristocracy or the educated middle class. Under the First Empire the army from top to bottom was entirely irreligious. To-day the masses believe nothing. The middle classes wish to believe, and succeed at times, as did Marc and René d’Esparvieu. Their brother Gaétan, on the contrary, the country gentleman, failed to attain to faith. He was an agnostic, a term commonly employed by the modish to avoid the odious one of freethinker. And he openly declared himself an agnostic, contrary to the admirable custom which deems it better to withhold the avowal.
In the century in which we live there are so many modes of belief and of unbelief that future historians will have difficulty in finding their way about. But are we any more successful in disentangling the condition of religious beliefs in the time of Symmachus or of Ambrose?
A fervent Christian, René d’Esparvieu was deeply attached to the liberal ideas his ancestors had transmitted to him as a sacred heritage. Compelled to oppose a Jacobin and atheistical Republic, he still called himself Republican. And it was in the name of liberty that he demanded the independence and sovereignty of the Church.
During the long debates on the Separation and the quarrels over the Inventories, the synods of the bishops and the assemblies of the faithful were held in his house. While the most authoritatively accredited leaders of the Catholic party: prelates, generals, senators, deputies, journalists, were met together in the big green drawing-room, and every soul present turned towards Rome with a tender submission or enforced obedience; while Monsieur d’Esparvieu, his elbow on the marble chimney-piece, opposed civil law to canon law, and protested eloquently against the spoliation of the Church of France, two faces of other days, immobile and speechless, looked down on the modern crowd; on the right of the fire-place, painted by David, was Romain Bussart, a working-farmer at Esparvieu in shirt-sleeves and drill trousers, with a rough-and-ready air not untouched with cunning. He had good reason to smile: the worthy man laid the foundation of the family fortunes when he bought Church lands. On the left, painted by Gérard in full-dress bedizened with orders, was the peasant’s son, Baron Emile Bussart d’Esparvieu, prefect under the Empire, Keeper of the Great Seal under Charles X, who died in 1837, churchwarden of his parish, with couplets from La Pucelle on his lips.
René d’Esparvieu married in 1888 Marie-Antoinette Coupelle, daughter of Baron Coupelle, ironmaster at Blainville (Haute Loire). Madame René d’Esparvieu had been president since 1903 of the Society of Christian Mothers. These perfect spouses, having married off their eldest daughter in 1908, had three children still at home — a girl and two boys.
Léon, the younger, aged seven, had a room next to his mother and his sister Berthe. Maurice, the elder, lived in a little pavilion comprising two rooms at the bottom of the garden. The young man thus gained a freedom which enabled him to endure family life. He was rather good-looking, smart without too much pretence, and the faint smile which merely raised one corner of his mouth did not lack charm.
At twenty-five Maurice possessed the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Doubting whether a man hath any profit of all his labour which he taketh under the sun he never put himself out about anything. From his earliest childhood this young hopeful’s sole concern with work had been considering how he might best avoid it, and it was through his remaining ignorant of the teaching of the École de Droit that he became a doctor of law and a barrister at the Court of Appeal.
He neither pleaded nor practised. He had no knowledge and no desire to acquire any; wherein he conformed to his genius whose engaging fragility he forbore to overload; his instinct fortunately telling him that it was better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
As Monsieur l’Abbé Patouille expressed it, Maurice had received from Heaven the benefits of a Christian education. From his childhood piety was shown to him in the example of his home, and when on leaving college he was entered at the École de Droit, he found the lore of the doctors, the virtues of the confessors, and the constancy of the nursing mothers of the Church assembled around the paternal hearth. Admitted to social and political life at the time of the great persecution of the Church of France, Maurice did not fail to attend every manifestation of youthful Catholicism; he lent a hand with his parish barricades at the time of the Inventories, and with his companions he unharnessed the archbishop’s horses when he was driven out from his palace. He showed on all these occasions a modified zeal; one never saw him in the front ranks of the heroic band exciting soldiers to a glorious disobedience or flinging mud and curses at the agents of the law.
He did his duty, nothing more; and if he distinguished himself on the occasion of the great pilgrimage of 1911 among the stretcher-bearers at Lourdes, we have reason to fear it was but to please Madame de la Verdelière, who admired men of muscle. Abbé Patouille, a friend of the family and deeply versed in the knowledge of souls, knew that Maurice had only moderate aspirations to martyrdom. He reproached him with his lukewarmness, and pulled his ear, calling him a bad lot. Anyway, Maurice remained a believer.
Amid the distractions of youth his faith remained intact, since he left it severely alone. He had never examined a single tenet. Nor had he enquired a whit more closely into the ideas of morality current in the grade of society to which he belonged. He took them just as they came. Thus in every situation that arose he cut an eminently respectable figure which he would have assuredly failed to do, had he been given to meditating on the foundations of morality. He was irritable and hot-tempered and possessed of a sense of honour which he was at great pains to cultivate. He was neither vain nor ambitious. Like the majority of Frenchmen, he disliked parting with his money. Women would never have obtained any
thing from him had they not known the way to make him give. He believed he despised them; the truth was he adored them. He indulged his appetites so naturally that he never suspected that he had any. What people did not know, himself least of all, — though the gleam that occasionally shone in his fine, light-brown eyes might have furnished the hint — was that he had a warm heart and was capable of friendship. For the rest, he was, in the ordinary intercourse of life, no very brilliant specimen.
CHAPTER II
WHEREIN USEFUL INFORMATION WILL BE FOUND CONCERNING A LIBRARY WHERE STRANGE THINGS WILL SHORTLY COME TO PASS
DESIROUS of embracing the whole circle of human knowledge, and anxious to bequeath to the world a concrete symbol of his encyclopædic genius and a display in keeping with his pecuniary resources, Baron Alexandre d’Esparvieu had formed a library of three hundred and sixty thousand volumes, both printed and in manuscript, whereof the greater part emanated from the Benedictines of Ligugé.
By a special clause in his will he enjoined his heirs to add to his library, after his death, whatever they might deem worthy of note in natural, moral, political, philosophical, and religious science.
He had indicated the sums which might be drawn from his estate for the fulfilment of this object, and charged his eldest son, Fulgence-Adolphe, to proceed with these additions. Fulgence-Adolphe accomplished with filial respect the wishes expressed by his illustrious father.
After him, this huge library, which represented more than one child’s share of the estate, remained undivided between the Senator’s three sons and two daughters; and René d’Esparvieu, on whom devolved the house in the Rue Garancière, became the guardian of the valuable collection. His two sisters, Madame Paulet de Saint-Fain and Madame Cuissart, repeatedly demanded that such a large but unremunerative piece of property should be turned into money. But René and Gaétan bought in the shares of their two co-legatees, and the library was saved. René d’Esparvieu even busied himself in adding to it, thus fulfilling the intentions of its founder. But from year to year he lessened the number and importance of the acquisitions, opining that the intellectual output in Europe was on the wane.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 262