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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gods are Athirst, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Gods are Athirst
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Translator: Mrs. Wilfrid Jackson
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2007 [EBook #24010]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GODS ARE ATHIRST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Camille Francois, Henry Craig and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
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+
+
+
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+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
+IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
+EDITED BY FREDERIC CHAPMAN
+
+THE GODS ARE ATHIRST
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE GODS ARE
+ATHIRST
+
+BY ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+A TRANSLATION BY
+MRS. WILFRID JACKSON
+
+[Illustration]
+
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN MCMXIV
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1913 by
+JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+THE GODS ARE ATHIRST
+
+I
+
+
+Evariste Gamelin, painter, pupil of David, member of the Section du
+Pont-Neuf, formerly Section Henri IV, had betaken himself at an early
+hour in the morning to the old church of the Barnabites, which for three
+years, since 21st May 1790, had served as meeting-place for the General
+Assembly of the Section. The church stood in a narrow, gloomy square,
+not far from the gates of the Palais de Justice. On the facade, which
+consisted of two of the Classical orders superimposed and was decorated
+with inverted brackets and flaming urns, blackened by the weather and
+disfigured by the hand of man, the religious emblems had been battered
+to pieces, while above the doorway had been inscribed in black letters
+the Republican catchword of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death."
+Evariste Gamelin made his way into the nave; the same vaults which had
+heard the surpliced clerks of the Congregation of St. Paul sing the
+divine offices, now looked down on red-capped patriots assembled to
+elect the Municipal magistrates and deliberate on the affairs of the
+Section. The Saints had been dragged from their niches and replaced by
+the busts of Brutus, Jean-Jacques and Le Peltier. The altar had been
+stripped bare and was surmounted by the Table of the Rights of Man.
+
+It was here in the nave that twice a week, from five in the evening to
+eleven, were held the public assemblies. The pulpit, decorated with the
+colours of the Nation, served as tribune for the speakers who harangued
+the meeting. Opposite, on the Epistle side, rose a platform of rough
+planks, for the accommodation of the women and children, who attended
+these gatherings in considerable numbers.
+
+On this particular morning, facing a desk planted underneath the pulpit,
+sat in red cap and _carmagnole_ complete the joiner from the Place
+Thionville, the _citoyen_ Dupont senior, one of the twelve forming the
+Committee of Surveillance. On the desk stood a bottle and glasses, an
+ink-horn, and a folio containing the text of the petition urging the
+Convention to expel from its bosom the twenty-two members deemed
+unworthy.
+
+Evariste Gamelin took the pen and signed.
+
+"I was sure," said the carpenter and magistrate, "I was sure you would
+come and give in your name, _citoyen_ Gamelin. You are the real thing.
+But the Section is lukewarm; it is lacking in virtue. I have proposed to
+the Committee of Surveillance to deliver no certificate of citizenship
+to any one who has failed to sign the petition."
+
+"I am ready to sign with my blood," said Gamelin, "for the proscription
+of these federalists, these traitors. They have desired the death of
+Marat: let them perish."
+
+"What ruins us," replied Dupont senior, "is indifferentism. In a Section
+which contains nine hundred citizens with the right to vote there are
+not fifty attend the assembly. Yesterday we were eight and twenty."
+
+"Well then," said Gamelin, "citizens must be obliged to come under
+penalty of a fine."
+
+"Oh, ho!" exclaimed the joiner frowning, "but if they all came, the
+patriots would be in a minority.... _Citoyen_ Gamelin, will you drink a
+glass of wine to the health of all good sansculottes?..."
+
+On the wall of the church, on the Gospel side, could be read the words,
+accompanied by a black hand, the forefinger pointing to the passage
+leading to the cloisters: "_Comite civil, Comite de surveillance, Comite
+de bienfaisance._" A few yards further on, you came to the door of the
+erstwhile sacristy, over which was inscribed: _Comite militaire_.
+
+Gamelin pushed this door open and found the Secretary of the Committee
+within; he was writing at a large table loaded with books, papers, steel
+ingots, cartridges and samples of saltpetre-bearing soils.
+
+"Greeting, _citoyen_ Trubert. How are you?"
+
+"I?... I am perfectly well."
+
+The Secretary of the Military Committee, Fortune Trubert, invariably
+made this same reply to all who troubled about his health, less by way
+of informing them of his welfare than to cut short any discussion on the
+subject. At twenty-eight, he had a parched skin, thin hair, hectic
+cheeks and bent shoulders. He was an optician on the Quai des Orfevres,
+and owned a very old house which he had given up in '91 to a
+superannuated clerk in order to devote his energies to the discharge of
+his municipal duties. His mother, a charming woman, whose memory a few
+old men of the neighbourhood still cherished fondly, had died at twenty;
+she had left him her fine eyes, full of gentleness and passion, her
+pallor and timidity. From his father, optician and mathematical
+instrument maker to the King, carried off by the same complaint before
+his thirtieth year, he inherited an upright character and an industrious
+temperament.
+
+Without stopping his writing:
+
+"And you, _citoyen_," he asked, "how are you?"
+
+"Very well. Anything new?"
+
+"Nothing, nothing. You can see,--we are all quiet here."
+
+"And the situation?"
+
+"The situation is just the same."
+
+The situation was appalling. The finest army of the Republic blockaded
+in Mayence; Valenciennes besieged; Fontenay taken by the Vendeens; Lyons
+rebellious; the Cevennes in insurrection, the frontier open to the
+Spaniards; two-thirds of the Departments invaded or revolted; Paris
+helpless before the Austrian cannon, without money, without bread!
+
+Fortune Trubert wrote on calmly. The Sections being instructed by
+resolution of the Commune to carry out the levy of twelve thousand men
+for La Vendee, he was drawing up directions relating to the enrolment
+and arming of the contingent which the "Pont-Neuf," erstwhile "Henri
+IV," was to supply. All the muskets in store were to be handed over to
+the men requisitioned for the front; the National Guard of the Section
+would be armed with fowling-pieces and pikes.
+
+"I have brought you here," said Gamelin, "the schedule of the
+church-bells to be sent to the Luxembourg to be converted into cannon."
+
+Evariste Gamelin, albeit he had not a penny, was inscribed among the
+active members of the Section; the law accorded this privilege only to
+such citizens as were rich enough to pay a contribution equivalent in
+amount to three days' work, and demanded a ten days' contribution to
+qualify an elector for office. But the Section du Pont-Neuf, enamoured
+of equality and jealous of its independence, regarded as qualified both
+for the vote and for office every citizen who had paid out of his own
+pocket for his National Guard's uniform. This was Gamelin's case, who
+was an _active_ citizen of his Section and member of the Military
+Committee.
+
+Fortune Trubert laid down his pen:
+
+"_Citoyen_ Evariste," he said, "I beg you to go to the Convention and
+ask them to send us orders to dig up the floor of cellars, to wash the
+soil and flag-stones and collect the saltpetre. It is not everything to
+have guns, we must have gunpowder too."
+
+A little hunchback, a pen behind his ear and a bundle of papers in his
+hand, entered the erstwhile sacristy. It was the _citoyen_ Beauvisage,
+of the Committee of Surveillance.
+
+"_Citoyens_," he announced, "we have bad news: Custine has evacuated
+Landau."
+
+"Custine is a traitor!" cried Gamelin.
+
+"He shall be guillotined," said Beauvisage.
+
+Trubert, in his rather breathless voice, expressed himself with his
+habitual calmness:
+
+"The Convention has not instituted a Committee of Public Safety for fun.
+It will enquire into Custine's conduct. Incompetent or traitor, he will
+be superseded by a General resolved to win the victory,--and _ca ira!_"
+
+He turned over a heap of papers, scrutinizing them with his tired eyes:
+
+"That our soldiers may do their duty with a quiet mind and stout heart,
+they must be assured that the lot of those they leave behind at home is
+safeguarded. If you are of the same opinion, _citoyen_ Gamelin, you will
+join me in demanding, at the next assembly, that the Committee of
+Benevolence concert measures with the Military Committee to succour the
+families that are in indigence and have a relative at the front."
+
+He smiled and hummed to himself: "_Ca ira! ca ira!..._"
+
+Working twelve and fourteen hours a day at his table of unpainted deal
+for the defence of the fatherland in peril, this humble Secretary of the
+Sectional Committee could see no disproportion between the immensity of
+the task and the meagreness of his means for performing it, so filled
+was he with a sense of the unity in a common effort between himself and
+all other patriots, so intimately did he feel himself one with the
+Nation at large, so merged was his individual life in the life of a
+great People. He was of the sort who combine enthusiasm with
+long-suffering, who, after each check, set about organizing the victory
+that is impossible, but is bound to come. And verily they _must_ win the
+day. These men of no account, who had destroyed Royalty and upset the
+old order of things, this Trubert, a penniless optician, this Evariste
+Gamelin, an unknown dauber, could expect no mercy from their enemies.
+They had no choice save between victory and death. Hence both their
+fervour and their serenity.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Quitting the Barnabites, Evariste Gamelin set off in the direction of
+the Place Dauphine, now renamed the Place de Thionville in honour of a
+city that had shown itself impregnable.
+
+Situated in the busiest quarter of Paris, the _Place_ had long lost the
+fine stateliness it had worn a hundred years ago; the mansions forming
+its three sides, built in the days of Henri IV in one uniform style, of
+red brick with white stone dressings, to lodge splendour-loving
+magistrates, had had their imposing roofs of slate removed to make way
+for two or three wretched storeys of lath and plaster or had even been
+demolished altogether and replaced by shabby whitewashed houses, and now
+displayed only a series of irregular, poverty-stricken, squalid fronts,
+pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows enlivened with
+flowers in pots, birdcages, and rags hanging out to dry. These were
+occupied by a swarm of artisans, jewellers, metal-workers, clockmakers,
+opticians, printers, laundresses, sempstresses, milliners, and a few
+grey-beard lawyers who had not been swept away in the storm of
+revolution along with the King's courts.
+
+It was morning and springtime. Golden sunbeams, intoxicating as new
+wine, played on the walls and flashed gaily in at garret casements.
+Every sash of every window was thrown open, showing the housewives'
+frowsy heads peeping out. The Clerk of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who
+had just left his house on his way to Court, distributed amicable taps
+on the cheeks of the children playing under the trees. From the
+Pont-Neuf came the crier's voice denouncing the treason of the infamous
+Dumouriez.
+
+Evariste Gamelin lived in a house on the side towards the Quai de
+l'Horloge, a house that dated from Henri IV and would still have
+preserved a not unhandsome appearance but for a mean tiled attic that
+had been added on to heighten the building under the last but one of the
+_tyrants_. To adapt the lodging of some erstwhile dignitary of the
+_Parlement_ to the exigencies of the bourgeois and artisan households
+that formed its present denizens, endless partitions and false floors
+had been run up. This was why the _citoyen_ Remacle, concierge and
+jobbing tailor, perched in a sort of 'tween-decks, as low ceilinged as
+it was confined in area. Here he could be seen through the glass door
+sitting cross-legged on his work-bench, his bowed back within an inch of
+the floor above, stitching away at a National Guard's uniform, while the
+_citoyenne_ Remacle, whose cooking stove boasted no chimney but the well
+of the staircase, poisoned the other tenants with the fumes of her
+stew-pots and frying-pans, and their little girl Josephine, her face
+smudged with treacle and looking as pretty as an angel, played on the
+threshold with Mouton, the joiner's dog. The _citoyenne_, whose heart
+was as capacious as her ample bosom and broad back, was reputed to
+bestow her favours on her neighbour the _citoyen_ Dupont senior, who was
+one of the twelve constituting the Committee of Surveillance. At any
+rate her husband had his strong suspicions, and from morning to night
+the house resounded with the racket of the alternate squabbles and
+reconciliations of the pair. The upper floors were occupied by the
+_citoyen_ Chaperon, gold and silver-smith, who had his shop on the Quai
+de l'Horloge, by a health officer, an attorney, a goldbeater, and
+several employes at the Palais de Justice.
+
+Evariste Gamelin climbed the old-fashioned staircase as far as the
+fourth and last storey, where he had his studio together with a bedroom
+for his mother. At this point ended the wooden stairs laid with tiles
+that took the place of the grand stairway of the more important floors.
+A ladder clamped to the wall led to a cock-loft, from which at that
+moment emerged a stout man with a handsome, florid, rosy-cheeked face,
+climbing painfully down with an enormous package clasped in his arms,
+yet humming gaily to himself: _J'ai perdu mon serviteur_.
+
+Breaking off his song, he wished a polite good-day to Gamelin, who
+returned him a fraternal greeting and helped him down with his parcel,
+for which the old man thanked him.
+
+"There," said he, shouldering his burden again, "you have a batch of
+dancing-dolls which I am going to deliver straight away to a
+toy-merchant in the Rue de la Loi. There is a whole tribe of them
+inside; I am their creator; they have received of me a perishable body,
+exempt from joys and sufferings. I have not given them the gift of
+thought, for I am a benevolent God."
+
+It was the _citoyen_ Brotteaux, once farmer of taxes and _ci-devant_
+noble; his father, having made a fortune in these transactions, had
+bought himself an office conferring a title on the possessor. In the
+good old times Maurice Brotteaux had called himself Monsieur des Ilettes
+and used to give elegant suppers which the fair Madame de Rochemaure,
+wife of a King's _procureur_, enlivened with her bright glances,--a
+finished gentlewoman whose loyal fidelity was never impugned so long as
+the Revolution left Maurice Brotteaux in possession of his offices and
+emoluments, his hotel, his estates and his noble name. The Revolution
+swept them all away. He made his living by painting portraits under the
+archways of doors, making pancakes and fritters on the Quai de la
+Megisserie, composing speeches for the representatives of the people and
+giving dancing lessons to the young _citoyennes_. At the present time,
+in his garret into which you climbed by a ladder and where a man could
+not stand upright, Maurice Brotteaux, the proud owner of a glue-pot, a
+ball of twine, a box of water-colours and sundry clippings of paper,
+manufactured dancing-dolls which he sold to wholesale toy-dealers, who
+resold them to the pedlars who hawked them up and down the
+Champs-Elysees at the end of a pole,--glittering magnets to draw the
+little ones' eyes. Amidst the calamities of the State and the disaster
+that overwhelmed himself, he preserved an unruffled spirit, reading for
+the refreshment of his mind in his Lucretius, which he carried with him
+wherever he went in the gaping pocket of his plum-coloured surtout.
+
+Evariste Gamelin pushed open the door of his lodging. It offered no
+resistance, for his poverty spared him any trouble about lock and key;
+when his mother from force of habit shot the bolt, he would tell her:
+"Why, what's the good? Folks don't steal spiders'-webs,--nor my
+pictures, neither." In his workroom were piled, under a thick layer of
+dust or with faces turned to the wall, the canvases of his student
+years,--when, as the fashion of the day was, he limned scenes of
+gallantry, depicting with a sleek, timorous brush emptied quivers and
+birds put to flight, risky pastimes and reveries of bliss, high-kilted
+goose-girls and shepherdesses with rose-wreathed bosoms.
+
+But it was not a genre that suited his temperament. His cold treatment
+of such like scenes proved the painter's incurable purity of heart.
+Amateurs were right: Gamelin had no gifts as an erotic artist. Nowadays,
+though he was still short of thirty, these subjects struck him as dating
+from an immemorial antiquity. He saw in them the degradation wrought by
+Monarchy, the shameful effects of the corruption of Courts. He blamed
+himself for having practised so contemptible a style and prostituted his
+genius to the vile arts of slavery. Now, citizen of a free people, he
+occupied his hand with bold charcoal sketches of Liberties, Rights of
+Man, French Constitutions, Republican Virtues, the People as Hercules
+felling the Hydra of Tyranny, throwing into each and all his
+compositions all the fire of his patriotism. Alas! he could not make a
+living by it. The times were hard for artists. No doubt the fault did
+not lie with the Convention, which was hurling its armies against the
+kings gathered on every frontier, which, proud, unmoved, determined in
+the face of the coalesced powers of Europe, false and ruthless to
+itself, was rending its own bosom with its own hands, which was setting
+up terror as the order of the day, establishing for the punishment of
+plotters a pitiless tribunal to whose devouring maw it was soon to
+deliver up its own members; but which through it all, with calm and
+thoughtful brow, the patroness of science and friend of all things
+beautiful, was reforming the calendar, instituting technical schools,
+decreeing competitions in painting and sculpture, founding prizes to
+encourage artists, organizing annual exhibitions, opening the Museum of
+the Louvre, and, on the model of Athens and Rome, endowing with a
+stately sublimity the celebration of National festivals and public
+obsequies. But French Art, once so widely appreciated in England, and
+Germany, in Russia, in Poland, now found every outlet to foreign lands
+closed. Amateurs of painting, dilettanti of the fine arts, great
+noblemen and financiers, were ruined, had emigrated or were in hiding.
+The men the Revolution had enriched, peasants who had bought up National
+properties, speculators, army-contractors, gamesters of the
+Palais-Royal, durst not at present show their wealth, and did not care a
+fig for pictures, either. It needed Regnault's fame or the youthful
+Gerard's cleverness to sell a canvas. Greuze, Fragonard, Houin were
+reduced to indigence. Prud'hon could barely earn bread for his wife and
+children by drawing subjects which Copia reproduced in stippled
+engravings. The patriot painters Hennequin, Wicar, Topino-Lebrun were
+starving. Gamelin, without means to meet the expenses of a picture, to
+hire a model or buy colours, abandoned his vast canvas of _The Tyrant
+pursued in the Infernal Regions by the Furies_, after barely sketching
+in the main outlines. It blocked up half the studio with its
+half-finished, threatening shapes, greater than life-size, and its vast
+brood of green snakes, each darting forth two sharp, forked tongues. In
+the foreground, to the left, could be discerned Charon in his boat, a
+haggard, wild-looking figure,--a powerful and well conceived design, but
+of the schools, schooly. There was far more of genius and less of
+artificiality in a canvas of smaller dimensions, also unfinished, that
+hung in the best lighted corner of the studio. It was an Orestes whom
+his sister Electra was raising in her arms on his bed of pain. The
+maiden was putting back with a moving tenderness the matted hair that
+hung over her brother's eyes. The head of the hero was tragic and fine,
+and you could see a likeness in it to the painter's own countenance.
+
+Gamelin cast many a mournful look at this composition; sometimes his
+fingers itched with the craving to be at work on it, and his arms would
+be stretched longingly towards the boldly sketched figure of Electra, to
+fall back again helpless to his sides. The artist was burning with
+enthusiasm, his soul aspired to great achievements. But he had to
+exhaust his energy on pot-boilers which he executed indifferently,
+because he was bound to please the taste of the vulgar and also because
+he had no skill to impress trivial things with the seal of genius. He
+drew little allegorical compositions which his comrade Desmahis engraved
+cleverly enough in black or in colours and which were bought at a low
+figure by a print-dealer in the Rue Honore, the _citoyen_ Blaise. But
+the trade was going from bad to worse, declared Blaise, who for some
+time now had declined to purchase anything.
+
+This time, however, made inventive by necessity, Gamelin had conceived a
+new and happy thought, as _he_ at any rate believed,--an idea that was
+to make the print-seller's fortune, and the engraver's and his own to
+boot. This was a "patriotic" pack of cards, where for the kings and
+queens and knaves of the old style he meant to substitute figures of
+Genius, of Liberty, of Equality and the like. He had already sketched
+out all his designs, had finished several and was eager to pass on to
+Desmahis such as were in a state to be engraved. The one he deemed the
+most successful represented a soldier dressed in the three-cornered hat,
+blue coat with red facings, yellow breeches and black gaiters of the
+Volunteer, seated on a big drum, his feet on a pile of cannon-balls and
+his musket between his knees. It was the _citizen of hearts_ replacing
+the _ci-devant_ knave of hearts. For six months and more Gamelin had
+been drawing soldiers with never-failing gusto. He had sold some of
+these while the fit of martial enthusiasm lasted, while others hung on
+the walls of the room, and five or six, water-colours, colour-washes and
+chalks in two tints, lay about on the table and chairs. In the days of
+July, '92, when in every open space rose platforms for enrolling
+recruits, when all the taverns were gay with green leaves and resounded
+to the shouts of "Vive la Nation! freedom or death!" Gamelin could not
+cross the Pont-Neuf or pass the Hotel de Ville without his heart beating
+high at sight of the beflagged marquee in which magistrates in tricolour
+scarves were inscribing the names of volunteers to the sound of the
+_Marseillaise_. But for him to join the Republic's armies would have
+meant leaving his mother to starve.
+
+Heralded by a grievous sound of puffing and panting the old _citoyenne_,
+Gamelin's widowed mother, entered the studio, hot, red and out of
+breath, the National cockade hanging half unpinned in her cap and on the
+point of falling out. She deposited her basket on a chair and still
+standing, the better to get her breath, began to groan over the high
+price of victuals.
+
+A shopkeeper's wife till the death of her husband, a cutler in the Rue
+de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, at the sign of the Ville de Chatellerault,
+now reduced to poverty, the _citoyenne_ Gamelin lived in seclusion,
+keeping house for her son the painter. He was the elder of her two
+children. As for her daughter Julie, at one time employed at a
+fashionable milliner's in the Rue Honore, the best thing was not to know
+what had become of her, for it was ill saying the truth, that she had
+emigrated with an aristocrat.
+
+"Lord God!" sighed the _citoyenne_, showing her son a loaf baked of
+heavy dun-coloured dough, "bread is too dear for anything; the more
+reason it should be made of pure wheat! At market neither eggs nor
+green-stuff nor cheese to be had. By dint of eating chestnuts, we're
+like to grow into chestnuts."
+
+After a long pause, she began again:
+
+"Why, I've seen women in the streets who had nothing to feed their
+little ones with. The distress is sore among poor folks. And it will go
+on the same till things are put back on a proper footing."
+
+"Mother," broke in Gamelin with a frown, "the scarcity we suffer from is
+due to the unprincipled buyers and speculators who starve the people and
+connive with our foes over the border to render the Republic odious to
+the citizens and to destroy liberty. This comes of the Brissotins' plots
+and the traitorous dealings of your Petions and Rolands. It is well if
+the federalists in arms do not march on Paris and massacre the patriot
+remnant whom famine is too slow in killing! There is no time to lose;
+we must tax the price of flour and guillotine every man who speculates
+in the food of the people, foments insurrection or palters with the
+foreigner. The Convention has set up an extraordinary tribunal to try
+conspirators. Patriots form the court; but will its members have energy
+enough to defend the fatherland against our foes? There is hope in
+Robespierre; he is virtuous. There is hope above all in Marat. He loves
+the people, discerns its true interests and promotes them. He was ever
+the first to unmask traitors, to baffle plots. He is incorruptible and
+fearless. He, and he alone, can save the imperilled Republic."
+
+The _citoyenne_ Gamelin shook her head, paying no heed to the cockade
+that fell out of her cap at the gesture.
+
+"Have done, Evariste; your Marat is a man like another and no better
+than the rest. You are young and your head is full of fancies. What you
+say to-day of Marat, you said before of Mirabeau, of La Fayette, of
+Petion, of Brissot."
+
+"Never!" cried Gamelin, who was genuinely oblivious.
+
+After clearing one end of the deal table of the papers and books,
+brushes and chalks that littered it, the _citoyenne_ laid out on it the
+earthenware soup-bowl, two tin porringers, two iron forks, the loaf of
+brown bread and a jug of thin wine.
+
+Mother and son ate the soup in silence and finished their meal with a
+small scrap of bacon. The _citoyenne_, putting _her_ titbit on her
+bread, used the point of her pocket knife to convey the pieces one by
+one slowly and solemnly to her toothless jaws and masticated with a
+proper reverence the victuals that had cost so dear.
+
+She had left the best part on the dish for her son, who sat lost in a
+brown study.
+
+"Eat, Evariste," she repeated at regular intervals, "eat,"--and on her
+lips the word had all the solemnity of a religious commandment.
+
+She began again with her lamentations on the dearness of provisions, and
+again Gamelin demanded taxation as the only remedy for these evils.
+
+But she shrilled:
+
+"There is no money left in the country. The _emigres_ have carried it
+all off with them. There is no confidence left either. Everything is
+desperate."
+
+"Hush, mother, hush!" protested Gamelin. "What matter our privations,
+our hardships of a moment? The Revolution will win for all time the
+happiness of the human race."
+
+The good dame sopped her bread in her wine; her mood grew more cheerful
+and she smiled as her thoughts returned to her young days, when she used
+to dance on the green in honour of the King's birthday. She well
+remembered too the day when Joseph Gamelin, cutler by trade, had asked
+her hand in marriage. And she told over, detail by detail, how things
+had gone,--how her mother had bidden her: "Go dress. We are going to the
+Place de Greve, to Monsieur Bienassis' shop, to see Damiens drawn and
+quartered," and what difficulty they had to force their way through the
+press of eager spectators. Presently, in Monsieur Bienassis' shop, she
+had seen Joseph Gamelin, wearing his fine rose-pink coat and had known
+in an instant what he would be at. All the time she sat at the window to
+see the regicide torn with red-hot pincers, drenched with molten lead,
+dragged at the tail of four horses and thrown into the flames, Joseph
+Gamelin had stood behind her chair and had never once left off
+complimenting her on her complexion, her hair and her figure.
+
+She drained the last drop in her cup and continued her reminiscences of
+other days:
+
+"I brought you into the world, Evariste, sooner than I had expected, by
+reason of a fright I had when I was big. It was on the Pont-Neuf, where
+I came near being knocked down by a crowd of sightseers hurrying to
+Monsieur de Lally's execution. You were so little at your birth the
+surgeon thought you would not live. But I felt sure God would be
+gracious to me and preserve your life. I reared you to the best of my
+powers, grudging neither pains nor expense. It is fair to say, my
+Evariste, that you showed me you were grateful and that, from childhood
+up, you tried your best to recompense me for what I had done. You were
+naturally affectionate and tender-hearted. Your sister was not bad at
+heart; but she was selfish and of unbridled temper. Your compassion was
+greater than ever was hers for the unfortunate. When the little
+ragamuffins of the neighbourhood robbed birds' nests in the trees, you
+always fought hard to rescue the nestlings from their hands and restore
+them to the mother, and many a time you did not give in till after you
+had been kicked and cuffed cruelly. At seven years of age, instead of
+wrangling with bad boys, you would pace soberly along the street saying
+over your catechism; and all the poor people you came across you
+insisted on bringing home with you to relieve their needs, till I was
+forced to whip you to break you of the habit. You could not see a living
+creature suffer without tears. When you had done growing, you turned out
+a very handsome lad. To my great surprise, you appeared not to know
+it,--how different from most pretty boys, who are full of conceit and
+vain of their good looks!"
+
+His old mother spoke the truth. Evariste at twenty had had a grave and
+charming cast of countenance, a beauty at once austere and feminine, the
+countenance of a Minerva. Now his sombre eyes and pale cheeks revealed a
+melancholy and passionate soul. But his gaze, when it fell on his
+mother, recovered for a brief moment its childish softness.
+
+She went on:
+
+"You might have profited by your advantages to run after the girls, but
+you preferred to stay with me in the shop, and I had sometimes to tell
+you not to hang on always to my apron-strings, but to go and amuse
+yourself with your young companions. To my dying day I shall always
+testify that you have been a good son, Evariste. After your father's
+death, you bravely took me and provided for me; though your work barely
+pays you, you have never let me want for anything, and if we are at this
+moment destitute and miserable, I cannot blame you for it. The fault
+lies with the Revolution."
+
+He raised his hand to protest; but she only shrugged and continued:
+
+"I am no aristocrat. I have seen the great in the full tide of their
+power, and I can bear witness that they abused their privileges. I have
+seen your father cudgelled by the Duc de Canaleilles' lackeys because he
+did not make way quick enough for their master. I could never abide _the
+Austrian_--she was too haughty and too extravagant. As for the King, I
+thought him good-hearted, and it needed his trial and condemnation to
+alter my opinion. In fact, I do not regret the old regime,--though I
+have had some agreeable times under it. But never tell me the Revolution
+is going to establish equality, because men will never be equal; it is
+an impossibility, and, let them turn the country upside down to their
+heart's content, there will still be great and small, fat and lean in
+it."
+
+As she talked, she was busy putting away the plates and dishes. The
+painter had left off listening. He was thinking out a design,--for a
+sansculotte, in red cap and _carmagnole_, who was to supersede the
+discredited knave of spades in his pack of cards.
+
+There was a sound of scratching on the door, and a girl appeared,--a
+country wench, as broad as she was long, red-haired and bandy-legged, a
+wen hiding the left eye, the right so pale a blue it looked white, with
+monstrous thick lips and teeth protruding beyond them.
+
+She asked Gamelin if he was Gamelin the painter and if he could do her a
+portrait of her betrothed, Ferrand (Jules), a volunteer serving with the
+Army of the Ardennes.
+
+Gamelin replied that he would be glad to execute the portrait on the
+gallant warrior's return.
+
+But the girl insisted gently but firmly that it must be done at once.
+
+The painter protested, smiling in spite of himself as he pointed out
+that he could do nothing without the original.
+
+The poor creature was dumfounded; she had not foreseen the difficulty.
+Her head drooping over the left shoulder, her hands clasped in front of
+her, she stood still and silent as if overwhelmed by her disappointment.
+Touched and diverted by so much simplicity, and by way of distracting
+the poor, lovesick creature's grief, the painter handed her one of the
+soldiers he had drawn in water-colours and asked her if he was like
+that, her sweetheart in the Ardennes.
+
+She bent her doleful look on the sketch, and little by little her eye
+brightened, sparkled, flashed, and her moon face beamed out in a radiant
+smile.
+
+"It is his very likeness," she cried at last. "It is the very spit of
+Jules Ferrand, it is Jules Ferrand to the life."
+
+Before it occurred to the artist to take the sheet of paper out of her
+hands, she folded it carefully with her coarse red fingers into a tiny
+square, slipped it over her heart between her stays and her shift,
+handed the painter an _assignat_ for five livres, and wishing the
+company a very good day, hobbled light-heartedly to the door and so out
+of the room.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+On the afternoon of the same day Evariste set out to see the _citoyen_
+Jean Blaise, printseller, as well as dealer in ornamental boxes, fancy
+goods and games of all sorts, in the Rue Honore, opposite the Oratoire
+and near the office of the Messageries, at the sign of the _Amour
+peintre_. The shop was on the ground floor of a house sixty years old,
+and opened on the street by a vaulted arch the keystone of which bore a
+grotesque head with horns. The semicircle beneath the arch was occupied
+by an oil-painting representing "the Sicilian or Cupid the Painter,"
+after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise's father had put up in
+1770 and which sun and rain had been doing their best to obliterate ever
+since. On either side of the door a similar arched opening, with a
+nymph's head on the keystone arch glazed with the largest panes to be
+got, exhibited for the benefit of the public the prints in vogue at the
+time and the latest novelties in coloured engravings. To-day's display
+included a series of scenes of gallantry by Boilly, treated in his
+graceful, rather stiff way, _Lecons d'amour conjugal_, _Douces
+resistances_ and the like, which scandalized the Jacobins and which the
+rigid moralists denounced to the Society of Arts, Debucourt's _Promenade
+publique_, with a dandy in canary-coloured breeches lounging on three
+chairs, a group of horses by the young Carle Vernet, pictures of air
+balloons, the _Bain de Virginie_ and figures after the antique.
+
+Amid the stream of citizens that flowed past the shop it was the
+raggedest figures that loitered longest before the two fascinating
+windows. Easily amused, delighting in pictures and bent on getting their
+share, if only through the eyes, of the good things of this world, they
+stood in open-mouthed admiration, whereas the aristocrats merely glanced
+in, frowned and passed on.
+
+The instant he came within sight of the house, Evariste fixed his eyes
+on one of the row of windows above the shop, the one on the left hand,
+where there was a red carnation in a flower-pot behind a balcony of
+twisted ironwork. It was the window of Elodie's chamber, Jean Blaise's
+daughter. The print-dealer lived with his only child on the first floor
+of the house.
+
+Evariste, after halting a moment as if to get his breath in front of the
+_Amour peintre_, turned the hasp of the shop-door. He found the
+_citoyenne_ Elodie within; she had just sold a couple of engravings by
+Fragonard _fils_ and Naigeon, carefully selected from a number of
+others, and before locking up the _assignats_ received in payment in the
+strong-box, was holding them one after the other between her fine eyes
+and the light, to scrutinize the delicate lines and intricate curves of
+engraving and the watermark. She was naturally suspicious, for as much
+forged paper was in circulation as true, which was a great hindrance to
+commerce. As in former days, in the case of such as copied the King's
+signature, forgers of the national currency were punished by death; yet
+plates for printing _assignats_ were to be found in every cellar, the
+Swiss smuggled in counterfeits by the million, whole packets were put in
+circulation in the inns, the English landed bales of them every day on
+our coasts, to ruin the Republic's credit and bring good patriots to
+destitution. Elodie was in terror of accepting bad paper, and still more
+in terror of passing it and being treated as an accomplice of Pitt,
+though she had a firm belief in her own good luck and felt pretty sure
+of coming off best in any emergency.
+
+Evariste looked at her with the sombre gaze that speaks more movingly of
+love than the most smiling face. She returned his gaze with a mocking
+curl of the lips and an arch gleam in the dark eyes,--an expression she
+wore because she knew he loved her and liked to know it and because such
+a look provokes a lover, makes him complain of ill-usage, brings him to
+the speaking point, if he has not spoken already, which was Evariste's
+case.
+
+Before depositing the _assignats_ in the strong-box, she produced from
+her work-basket a white scarf, which she had begun to embroider, and set
+to work on it. At once industrious and a coquette, she knew
+instinctively how to ply her needle so as to fascinate an admirer and
+make a pretty thing for her wearing at one and the same time; she had
+quite different ways of working according to the person watching her,--a
+nonchalant way for those she would lull into a gentle languor, a
+capricious way for those she was fain to see in a more or less
+despairing mood. For Evariste, she bent with an air of painstaking
+absorption over her scarf, for she wanted to stir a sentiment of serious
+affection in his heart.
+
+Elodie was neither very young nor very pretty. She might have been
+deemed plain at the first glance. She was a brunette, with an olive
+complexion; under the broad white kerchief knotted carelessly about her
+head, from which the dark lustrous ringlets escaped, her eyes of fire
+gleamed as if they would burn their orbits. Her round face with its
+prominent cheek-bones, laughing lips and rather broad nose, that gave it
+a wild-wood, voluptuous expression, reminded the painter of the faun of
+the Borghese, a cast of which he had seen and been struck with
+admiration for its freakish charm. A faint down of moustache accentuated
+the curve of the full lips. A bosom that seemed big with love was
+confined by a crossed kerchief in the fashion of the year. Her supple
+waist, her active limbs, her whole vigorous body expressed in every
+movement a wild, delicious freedom. Every glance, every breath, every
+quiver of the warm flesh called for love and promised passion. There,
+behind the tradesman's counter, she seemed rather a dancing nymph, a
+bacchante of the opera, stripped of her lynx skin and thyrsus,
+imprisoned, and travestied by a magician's spell under the modest
+trappings of a housewife by Chardin.
+
+"My father is not at home," she told the painter; "wait a little, he
+will not be long."
+
+In the small brown hands the needle travelled swiftly over the fine
+lawn.
+
+"Is the pattern to your taste, Monsieur Gamelin?"
+
+It was not in Gamelin's nature to pretend. And love, exaggerating his
+confidence, encouraged him to speak quite frankly.
+
+"You embroider cleverly, _citoyenne_; but, if I am to say what I think,
+the pattern you have traced is not simple enough or bold enough, and
+smacks of the affected taste that in France governed too long the
+ornamentation of dress and furniture and woodwork; all those rosettes
+and wreaths recall the pretty, finikin style that was in favour under
+the tyrant. There is a new birth of taste. Alas! we have much leeway to
+make up. In the days of the infamous Louis XV the art of decoration had
+something Chinese about it. They made pot-bellied cabinets with drawer
+handles grotesque in their contortions, good for nothing but to be
+thrown on the fire to warm good patriots. Simplicity alone is beautiful.
+We must hark back to the antique. David designs beds and chairs from the
+Etruscan vases and the wall-paintings of Herculaneum."
+
+"Yes, I have seen those beds and chairs," said Elodie, "they are lovely.
+Soon we shall want no other sort. I am like you, I adore the antique."
+
+"Well, then, _citoyenne_," returned Evariste, "if you had limited your
+pattern to a Greek border, with ivy leaves, serpents or crossed arrows,
+it would have been worthy of a Spartan maiden ... and of you. But you
+can still keep this design by simplifying it, reducing it to the plain
+lines of beauty."
+
+She asked her preceptor what should be picked out.
+
+He bent over the work, and the girl's ringlets swept lightly over his
+cheek. Their hands met and their breaths mingled. For an instant
+Evariste tasted an ecstatic bliss, but to feel Elodie's lips so close to
+his own filled him with fear, and dreading to alarm her modesty, he drew
+back quickly.
+
+The _citoyenne_ Blaise was in love with Evariste Gamelin; she thought
+his great ardent eyes superb no less than the fine oval of his pale
+face, and his abundant black locks, parted above the brow and falling
+in showers about his shoulders; his gravity of demeanour, his cold
+reserve, his severe manner and uncompromising speech which never
+condescended to flattery, were equally to her liking. She was in love,
+and therefore believed him possessed of supreme artistic genius that
+would one day blossom forth in incomparable masterpieces and make his
+name world-famous,--and she loved him the better for the belief. The
+_citoyenne_ Blaise was no prude on the score of masculine purity and her
+scruples were not offended because a man should satisfy his passions and
+follow his own tastes and caprices; she loved Evariste, who was
+virtuous; she did not love him because he was virtuous, albeit she
+appreciated the advantage of his being so in that she had no cause for
+jealousy or suspicion or any fear of rivals in his affections.
+
+Nevertheless, for the time being, she deemed his reserve a little
+overdone. If Racine's "Aricie," who loved "Hippolyte," admired the
+youthful hero's untameable virtue, it was with the hope of winning a
+victory over it, and she would quickly have bewailed a sternness of
+moral fibre that had refused to be softened for her sake. At the first
+opportunity she more than half declared her passion to constrain him to
+speak out himself. Like her prototype the tender-hearted "Aricie," the
+_citoyenne_ Blaise was much inclined to think that in love the woman is
+bound to make the advances. "The fondest hearts," she told herself, "are
+the most fearful; they need help and encouragement. Besides, they are so
+simple a woman can go half way and even further without their even
+knowing it, if only she lets them fancy the credit is theirs of the bold
+attack and the glorious victory." What made her more confident of
+success was the fact that she knew for a certainty (and indeed there was
+no doubt about it) that Evariste, before ever the Revolution had made
+him a hero, had loved a mistress like any ordinary mortal, a very
+unheroic creature, no other than the _concierge_ at the Academy of
+Painting. Elodie, who was a girl of some experience, quite realised that
+there are different sorts of love. The sentiment Evariste inspired in
+her heart was profound enough for her to dream of making him the partner
+of her life. She was very ready to marry him, but hardly expected her
+father would approve the union of his only daughter with a poor and
+unknown artist. Gamelin had nothing, while the printseller turned over
+large sums of money. The _Amour peintre_ brought him in large profits,
+the share market larger still, and he was in partnership with an army
+contractor who supplied the cavalry of the Republic with rushes in place
+of hay and mildewed oats. In a word, the cutler's son of the Rue
+Saint-Dominique was a very insignificant personage beside the publisher
+of engravings, a man known throughout Europe, related to the Blaizots,
+Basans and Didots, and an honoured guest at the houses of the _citoyens_
+Saint-Pierre and Florian. Not that, as an obedient daughter should, she
+held her father's consent to be an indispensable preliminary to her
+settlement in life. The latter, early left a widower, and a man of a
+self-indulgent, volatile temper, as enterprising with women as he was in
+business, had never paid much heed to her and had left her to develop at
+her own sweet will, untrammelled whether by parental advice or parental
+affection, more careful to ignore than to safeguard the girl's
+behaviour, whose passionate temperament he appreciated as a connoisseur
+of the sex and in whom he recognized charms far and away more seductive
+than a pretty face. Too generous-hearted to be circumspect, too clever
+to come to harm, cautious even in her caprices, passion had never made
+her forget the social proprieties. Her father was infinitely grateful
+for this prudent behaviour, and as she had inherited from him a good
+head for business and a taste for money-making, he never troubled
+himself as to the mysterious reasons that deterred a girl so eminently
+marriageable from entering that estate and kept her at home, where she
+was as good as a housekeeper and four clerks to him. At twenty-seven she
+felt old enough and experienced enough to manage her own concerns and
+had no need to ask the advice or consult the wishes of a father still a
+young man, and one of so easy-going and careless a temper. But for her
+to marry Gamelin, Monsieur Blaise must needs contrive a future for a
+son-in-law with such poor prospects, give him an interest in the
+business, guarantee him regular work as he did to several artists
+already--in fact, one way or another, provide him with a livelihood; and
+such a favour was out of the question, she considered, whether for the
+one to offer or the other to accept, so small was the bond of sympathy
+between the two men.
+
+The difficulty troubled the girl's tender heart and wise brain. She saw
+nothing to alarm her in a secret union with her lover and in taking the
+author of nature for sole witness of their mutual troth. Her creed found
+nothing blameworthy in such a union, which the independence of her mode
+of life made possible and which Evariste's honourable and virtuous
+character gave her good hopes of forming without apprehension as to the
+result. But Gamelin was hard put to it to live and provide his old
+mother with the barest necessaries, and it did not seem as though in so
+straitened an existence room could well be found for an amour even when
+reduced to the simplicity of nature. Moreover, Evariste had not yet
+spoken and declared his intentions, though certainly the _citoyenne_
+Blaise hoped to bring him to this before long.
+
+She broke off her meditations, and the needle stopped at the same
+moment.
+
+"_Citoyen_ Evariste," she said, "I shall not care for the scarf, unless
+you like it too. Draw me a pattern, please. Meanwhile, I will copy
+Penelope and unravel what I have done in your absence."
+
+He answered in a tone of sombre enthusiasm:
+
+"I promise you I will, _citoyenne_. I will draw you the brand of the
+tyrannicide Harmodius,--a sword in a wreath,"--and pulling out his
+pencil, he sketched in a design of swords and flowers in the sober,
+unadorned style he admired. And as he drew, he expounded his views of
+art:
+
+"A regenerated People," he declared, "must repudiate all the legacies of
+servitude, bad taste, bad outline, bad drawing. Watteau, Boucher,
+Fragonard worked for tyrants and for slaves. Their works show no feeling
+for good style or purity of line, no love of nature or truth. Masks,
+dolls, fripperies, monkey-tricks,--nothing else! Posterity will despise
+their frivolous productions. In a hundred years all Watteau's pictures
+will be banished to the garrets and falling to pieces from neglect; in
+1893 struggling painters will be daubing their studies over Boucher's
+canvases. David has opened the way; he approaches the Antique, but he
+has not yet reached true simplicity, true grandeur, bare and unadorned.
+Our artists have many secrets still to learn from the friezes of
+Herculaneum, the Roman bas-reliefs, the Etruscan vases."
+
+He dilated at length on antique beauty, then came back to Fragonard,
+whom he abused with inexhaustible venom:
+
+"Do you know him, _citoyenne_?"
+
+Elodie nodded.
+
+"You likewise know good old Greuze, who is ridiculous enough, to be
+sure, with his scarlet coat and his sword. But he looks like a wise man
+of Greece beside Fragonard. I met him, a while ago, the miserable old
+man, trotting by under the arcades of the Palais-Egalite, powdered,
+genteel, sprightly, spruce, hideous. At sight of him, I longed that,
+failing Apollo, some sturdy friend of the arts might hang him up to a
+tree and flay him alive like Marsyas as an everlasting warning to bad
+painters."
+
+Elodie gave him a long look out of her dancing, wanton eyes.
+
+"You know how to hate, Monsieur Gamelin, are we to conclude you know
+also how to lo...?"
+
+"Is that you, Gamelin?" broke in a tenor voice; it was the _citoyen_
+Blaise just come back to his shop. He advanced, boots creaking, charms
+rattling, coat-skirts flying, an enormous black cocked hat on his head,
+the corners of which touched his shoulders.
+
+Elodie, picking up her work-basket, retreated to her chamber.
+
+"Well, Gamelin!" inquired the _citoyen_ Blaise, "have you brought me
+anything new?"
+
+"May be," declared the painter,--and proceeded to expound his ideas.
+
+"Our playing cards present a grievous and startling contrast with our
+present ways of thinking. The names of knave and king offend the ears of
+a patriot. I have designed and executed a reformed, Revolutionary pack
+in which for kings, queens, and knaves are substituted Liberties,
+Equalities, Fraternities; the aces in a border of fasces, are called
+Laws.... You call Liberty of clubs, Equality of spades, Fraternity of
+diamonds, Law of hearts. I venture to think my cards are drawn with some
+spirit; I propose to have them engraved on copper by Desmahis, and to
+take out letters of patent."
+
+So saying and extracting from his portfolio some finished designs in
+water-colour, the artist handed them to the printseller.
+
+The _citoyen_ Blaise declined to take them, and turning away:
+
+"My lad," he sneered, "take 'em to the Convention; they will perhaps
+accord you a vote of thanks. But never think to make a _sol_ by your new
+invention which is not new at all. You're a day behind the fair. Your
+Revolutionary pack of cards is the third I've had brought me. Your
+comrade Dugourc offered me last week a picquet set with four Geniuses of
+the People, four Liberties, four Equalities. Another was suggested, with
+Sages and Heroes, Cato, Rousseau, Hannibal,--I don't know what all!...
+And these cards had the advantage over yours, my friend, in being
+coarsely drawn and cut on wood blocks--with a penknife. How little you
+know the world to dream that players will use cards designed in the
+taste of David and engraved a la Bartolozzi! And then again, what a
+strange mistake to think it needs all this to-do to suit the old packs
+to the new ideas. Out of their own heads, the good sansculottes can find
+a corrective for what offends them, saying, instead of 'king'--'The
+Tyrant!' or just 'The fat pig!' They go on using the same old filthy
+cards and never buy new ones. The great market for playing-cards is the
+gaming-hells of the Palais-Egalite; well, I advise you to go there and
+offer the croupiers and punters there your Liberties, your Equalities,
+your ... what d'ye call 'em?... Laws of hearts ... and come back and
+tell me what sort of a reception they gave you!"
+
+The _citoyen_ Blaise sat down on the counter, filliped away sundry
+grains of snuff from his nankeen breeches and looking at Gamelin with an
+air of gentle pity:
+
+"Let me give you a bit of advice, _citoyen_; if you want to make your
+living, drop your patriotic packs of cards, leave your revolutionary
+symbols alone, have done with your Hercules, your hydras, your Furies
+pursuing guilt, your Geniuses of Liberty, and paint me pretty girls. The
+people's ardour for regeneration grows lukewarm with time, but men will
+always love women. Paint me women, all pink and white, with little feet
+and tiny hands. And get this into your thick skull that nobody cares a
+fig about the Revolution or wants to hear another word about it."
+
+But Evariste drew himself up in indignant protest:
+
+"What! not hear another word of the Revolution!... But, why surely, the
+restoration of liberty, the victories of our armies, the chastisement of
+tyrants are events that will startle the most remote posterity. How
+could we not be struck by such portents?... What! the sect of the
+_sansculotte_ Jesus has lasted well-nigh eighteen centuries, and the
+religion of Liberty is to be abolished after barely four years of
+existence!"
+
+But Jean Blaise resumed in a tone of superiority:
+
+"You walk in a dream; _I_ see life as it is. Believe me, friend, the
+Revolution is a bore; it lasts over long. Five years of enthusiasm, five
+years of fraternal embraces, of massacres, of fine speeches, of
+_Marseillaises_, of tocsins, of 'hang up the aristocrats,' of heads
+promenaded on pikes, of women mounted astride of cannon, of trees of
+Liberty crowned with the red cap, of white-robed maidens and old men
+drawn about the streets in flower-wreathed cars; of imprisonments and
+guillotinings, of proclamations, and short commons, of cockades and
+plumes, swords and _carmagnoles_--it grows tedious! And then folk are
+beginning to lose the hang of it all. We have gone through too much, we
+have seen too many of the great men and noble patriots whom you have led
+in triumph to the Capitol only to hurl them afterwards from the Tarpeian
+rock,--Necker, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, Petion, Manuel, and how
+many others! How can we be sure you are not preparing the same fate for
+your new heroes?... Men have lost all count."
+
+"Their names, _citoyen_ Blaise; name them, these heroes we are making
+ready to sacrifice!" cried Gamelin in a tone that recalled the
+print-dealer to a sense of prudence.
+
+"I am a Republican and a patriot," he replied, clapping his hand on his
+heart. "I am as good a Republican as you, as ardent a patriot as you,
+_citoyen_ Gamelin. I do not suspect your zeal nor accuse you of any
+backsliding. But remember that my zeal and my devotion to the State are
+attested by numerous acts. Here you have my principles: I give my
+confidence to every individual competent to serve the Nation. Before the
+men whom the general voice elects to the perilous honour of the
+Legislative office, such as Marat, such as Robespierre, I bow my head; I
+am ready to support them to the measure of my poor ability and offer
+them the humble co-operation of a good citizen. The Committees can bear
+witness to my ardour and self-sacrifice. In conjunction with true
+patriots, I have furnished oats and fodder to our gallant cavalry, boots
+for our soldiers. This very day I am despatching from Vernon a convoy of
+sixty oxen to the Army of the South through a country infested with
+brigands and patrolled by the emissaries of Pitt and Conde. I do not
+talk; I act."
+
+Gamelin calmly put back his sketches in his portfolio, the strings of
+which he tied and then slipped it under his arm.
+
+"It is a strange contradiction," he said through his clenched teeth, "to
+see men help our soldiers to carry through the world the liberty they
+betray in their own homes by sowing discontent and alarm in the soul of
+its defenders.... Greeting and farewell, _citoyen_ Blaise."
+
+Before turning down the alley that runs alongside the Oratoire, Gamelin,
+his heart big with love and anger, wheeled round for a last look at the
+red carnations blossoming on a certain window-sill.
+
+He did not despair; the fatherland would yet be saved. Against Jean
+Blaise's unpatriotic speeches he set his faith in the Revolution. Still
+he was bound to recognize that the tradesman had some show of reason
+when he asserted that the people of Paris had lost its old interest in
+public events. Alas! it was but too manifest that to the enthusiasm of
+the early days had little by little succeeded a widespread indifference,
+that never again would be seen the mighty crowds, unanimous in their
+ardour, of '89, never again the millions, one in heart and soul, that in
+'90 thronged round the altar of the _federes_. Well, good citizens must
+show double zeal and courage, must rouse the people from its apathy,
+bidding it choose between liberty and death.
+
+Such were Gamelin's thoughts, and the memory of Elodie was a spur to his
+confidence.
+
+Coming to the Quais, he saw the sun setting in the distant west behind
+lowering clouds that were like mountains of glowing lava; the roofs of
+the city were bathed in a golden light; the windows flashed back a
+thousand dazzling reflections. And Gamelin pictured the Titans forging
+out of the molten fragments of by-gone worlds Dike, the city of brass.
+
+Not having a morsel of bread for his mother or himself, he was dreaming
+of a place at the limitless board that should have all the world for
+guests and welcome regenerated humanity to the feast. Meantime, he tried
+to persuade himself that the fatherland, as a good mother should, would
+feed her faithful child. Shutting his mind against the gibes of the
+printseller, he forced himself to believe that his notion of a
+Revolutionary pack of cards was a novel one and a good one, and that
+with these happily conceived sketches of his he held a fortune in the
+portfolio under his arm. "Desmahis," he told himself, "shall engrave
+them. We will publish for ourselves the new patriotic toy and we are
+sure to sell ten thousand packs in a month, at twenty _sols_ apiece."
+
+In his impatience to realize the project, he strode off at once for the
+Quai de la Ferraille, where Desmahis lived over a glazier's shop.
+
+The entrance was through the shop. The glazier's wife informed Gamelin
+that the _citoyen_ Desmahis was not in, a fact that in no wise surprised
+the painter, who knew his friend was of a vagabond and dissipated humour
+and who marvelled that a man could engrave so much and so well as he did
+while showing so little perseverance. Gamelin made up his mind to wait a
+while for his return and the woman offered him a chair. She was in a
+black mood and began to grumble at the badness of trade, though she had
+always been told that the Revolution, by breaking windows, was making
+the glaziers' fortunes.
+
+Night was falling; so abandoning his idea of waiting for his comrade,
+Gamelin took his leave of his hostess of the moment. As he was crossing
+the Pont-Neuf, he saw a detachment of National Guards debouch from the
+Quai des Morfondus. They were mounted and carried torches. They were
+driving back the crowd, and amid a mighty clatter of sabres escorting a
+cart driving slowly on its way to the guillotine with a man whose name
+no one knew, a _ci-devant_ noble, the first prisoner condemned by the
+newly constituted Revolutionary Tribunal. He could be seen by glimpses
+between the guardsmen's hats, sitting with hands tied behind his back,
+his head bared and swaying from side to side, his face to the cart's
+tail. The headsman stood beside him lolling against the rail. The
+passers-by had stopped to look and were telling each other it was likely
+one of the fellows who starved the people, and staring with eyes of
+indifference. Gamelin, coming closer, caught sight of Desmahis among the
+spectators; he was struggling to push a way through the press and cut
+across the line of march. He called out to him and clapped a hand on his
+shoulder,--and Desmahis turned his head. He was a young man with a
+handsome face and a stalwart person. In former days, at the Academy,
+they used to say he had the head of Bacchus on the torso of Hercules.
+His friends nicknamed him "Barbaroux" because of his likeness to that
+representative of the people.
+
+"Come here," Gamelin said to him, "I have something of importance to say
+to you, Desmahis."
+
+"Leave me alone," the latter answered peevishly, muttering some
+half-heard explanation, looking out as he spoke for a chance of darting
+across:
+
+"I was following a divine creature, in a straw hat, a milliner's wench,
+with her flaxen hair down her back; that cursed cart has blocked my
+way.... She has gone on ahead, she is at the other end of the bridge by
+now!"
+
+Gamelin endeavoured to hold him back by his coat skirts, swearing his
+business was urgent.
+
+But Desmahis had already slipped away between horses, guards, swords and
+torches, and was in hot pursuit of the milliner's girl.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It was ten o'clock in the forenoon. The April sun bathed the tender
+leafage of the trees in light. A storm had cleared the air during the
+night and it was deliciously fresh and sweet. At long intervals a
+horseman passing along the Allee des Veuves broke the silence and
+solitude. On the outskirts of the shady avenue, over against a rustic
+cottage known as _La Belle Lilloise_, Evariste sat on a wooden bench
+waiting for Elodie. Since the day their fingers had met over the
+embroidery and their breaths had mingled, he had never been back to the
+_Amour peintre_. For a whole week his proud stoicism and his timidity,
+which grew more extreme every day, had kept him away from Elodie. He had
+written her a letter conceived in a key of gravity, at once sombre and
+ardent, in which, explaining the grievance he had against the _citoyen_
+Blaise, but saying no word of his love and concealing his chagrin, he
+announced his intention of never returning to her father's shop, and was
+now showing greater steadfastness in keeping this resolution than a
+woman in love was quite likely to approve.
+
+A born fighter whose bent was to defend her property under all
+circumstances, Elodie instantly turned her mind to the task of winning
+back her lover. At first she thought of going to see him at the studio
+in the Place de Thionville. But knowing his touchy temper and judging
+from his letter that he was sick and sore, she feared he might come to
+regard daughter and father with the same angry displeasure and make a
+point of never seeing her again; so she deemed it wiser to invite him to
+a sentimental, romantic rendezvous which he could not well decline,
+where she would have ample time to cajole and charm him and where
+solitude would be her ally to fascinate his senses and overcome his
+scruples.
+
+At this period, in all the English gardens and all the fashionable
+promenades, rustic cottages were to be found, built by clever
+architects, whose aim it was to flatter the taste of the city folk for a
+country life. The _Belle Lilloise_ was occupied as a house of light
+refreshment; its exterior bore a look of poverty that was part of the
+_mise en scene_ and it stood on the fragments, artistically imitated, of
+a fallen tower, so as to unite with the charm of rusticity the
+melancholy appeal of a ruined castle. Moreover, as though a peasant's
+cot and a shattered donjon were not enough to stir the sensibilities of
+his customers, the owner had raised a tomb beneath a weeping-willow,--a
+column surmounted by a funeral urn and bearing the inscription:
+"Cleonice to her faithful Azor." Rustic cots, ruined keeps, imitation
+tombs,--on the eve of being swept away, the aristocracy had erected in
+its ancestral parks these symbols of poverty, of decadence and of death.
+And now the patriot citizen found his delight in drinking, dancing,
+making love in sham hovels, under the broken vaults, a sham in their
+very ruin, of sham cloisters and surrounded by a sham graveyard; for was
+not he too, like his betters, a lover of nature, a disciple of
+Jean-Jacques? was not his heart stuffed as full as theirs with
+sensibility and the philosophy of humanity?
+
+Reaching the rendezvous before the appointed time, Evariste waited,
+measuring the minutes by the beating of his heart as by the pendulum of
+a clock. A patrol passed, guarding a convoy of prisoners. Ten minutes
+after a woman dressed all in pink, carrying a bouquet as the fashion
+was, escorted by a gentleman in a three-cornered hat, red coat, striped
+waistcoat and breeches, slipped into the cottage, both so very like the
+gallants and dames of the ancien regime one was bound to think with the
+_citoyen_ Blaise that mankind possesses characteristics Revolutions
+cannot change.
+
+A few minutes later, coming from Rueil or Saint-Cloud, an old woman
+carrying a cylindrical box, painted in brilliant colours, arrived and
+sat down beside Gamelin, on his bench. She put down her box in front of
+her, and he saw that the lid had a turning needle fixed on it; the poor
+woman's trade was to hold a lottery in the public gardens for the
+children to try their luck at. She also dealt in "ladies' pleasures," an
+old-fashioned sweetmeat which she sold under a new name; whether because
+the time-honoured title of "forget-me-nots" called up inappropriate
+ideas of unhappiness and retribution or that folks had just got tired of
+it in course of time, "forget-me-nots" were now yclept "ladies'
+pleasures."
+
+The old dame wiped the sweat from her forehead with a corner of her
+apron and broke out into railings against heaven, upbraiding God for
+injustice when he made life so hard for his creatures. Her husband kept
+a tavern on the river-bank at Saint-Cloud, while she came in every day
+to the Champs Elysees, sounding her rattle and crying: "_Ladies'
+pleasures_, come buy, come buy!" And with all this toil the old couple
+could not scrape enough together to end their days in comfort.
+
+Seeing the young man beside her disposed to commiserate with her, she
+expounded at great length the origin of her misfortunes. It was all the
+Republic; by robbing the rich, it was taking the bread out of poor
+people's mouths. And there was no hoping for a better state of affairs.
+Things would only go from bad to worse,--she knew that from many tokens.
+At Nanterre a woman had had a baby born with a serpent's head; the
+lightning had struck the church at Rueil and melted the cross on the
+steeple; a were-wolf had been seen in the woods of Chaville. Masked men
+were poisoning the springs and throwing plague powders in the air to
+cause diseases....
+
+Evariste saw Elodie spring from a carriage and run forward. The girl's
+eyes flashed in the clear shadow cast by her straw hat; her lips, as red
+as the carnations she held in her hand, were wreathed in smiles. A scarf
+of black silk, crossed over the bosom, was knotted behind the back. Her
+yellow gown displayed the quick movements of the knees and showed a pair
+of low-heeled shoes below the hem. The hips were almost entirely
+unconfined; the Revolution had enfranchised the waists of its
+_citoyennes_. For all that, the skirts, still puffed out below the
+loins, marked the curves by exaggerating them and veiled the reality
+beneath an artificial amplitude of outline.
+
+He tried to speak but could not find his voice, and was chagrined at his
+failure, which Elodie preferred to the most eloquent greeting. She
+noticed also and looked upon it as a good omen, that he had tied his
+cravat with more than usual pains.
+
+She gave him her hand.
+
+"I wanted to see you," she began, "and talk to you. I did not answer
+your letter; I did not like it and I did not think it worthy of you. It
+would have been more to my taste if it had been more outspoken. It would
+be to malign your character and common sense to suppose you do not mean
+to return to the _Amour peintre_ because you had a trifling altercation
+there about politics with a man many years your senior. Rest assured you
+have no cause to fear my father will receive you ill whenever you come
+to see us again. You do not know him; he has forgotten both what he said
+to you and what you said in reply. I do not say there is any great bond
+of sympathy between you two; but he bears no malice; I tell you frankly
+he pays no great heed to you ... nor to me. He thinks only of his own
+affairs and his own pleasures."
+
+She stepped towards the shrubberies surrounding the _Belle Lilloise_,
+and he followed her with something of repugnance, knowing it to be the
+trysting-place of mercenary lovers and amours of a day. She selected the
+table furthest out of sight.
+
+"How many things I have to tell you, Evariste. Friendship has its
+rights; you do not forbid me to exercise them? I have much to say about
+you ... and something about myself, if you will let me."
+
+The landlord having brought a carafe of lemonade, she filled their
+glasses herself with the air of a careful housewife; then she began to
+tell him about her childhood, described her mother's beauty, which she
+loved to dilate upon both as a tribute to the latter's memory and as
+the source of her own good looks, and boasted of her grandparents'
+sturdy vigour, for she was proud of her bourgeois blood. She related how
+at sixteen she had lost this mother she adored and had entered on a life
+without anyone to love or rely upon. She painted herself as she was, a
+vehement, passionate nature, full of sensibility and courage, and
+concluded:
+
+"Oh, Evariste, my girlhood was so sad and lonely I cannot but know what
+a prize is a heart like yours, and I will not surrender, I give you fair
+warning, of my own free will and without an effort to retain it, a
+sympathy on which I trusted I might count and which I held dear."
+
+Evariste gazed at her tenderly.
+
+"Can it be, Elodie, that I am not indifferent to you? Can I really
+think...?"
+
+He broke off, fearing to say too much and thereby betray so trusting a
+friendliness.
+
+She gave him a little confiding hand that half-peeped out of the long
+narrow sleeve with its lace frillings. Her bosom rose and fell in
+long-drawn sighs.
+
+"Credit me, Evariste, with all the sentiments you would have me feel for
+you, and you will not be mistaken in the dispositions of my heart."
+
+"Elodie, Elodie, you say that? will you still say it when you know
+..."--he hesitated.
+
+She dropped her eyes; and he finished the sentence in a whisper:
+
+"... when you know I love you?"
+
+As she heard the declaration, she blushed,--with pleasure. Yet, while
+her eyes still spoke of a tender ecstasy, a quizzical smile flickered in
+spite of herself about one corner of her lips. She was thinking:
+
+"And he imagines he proposed first!... and he is afraid perhaps of
+offending me!..."
+
+Then she said to him fondly:
+
+"So you had never seen, dear heart, that I loved you?"
+
+They seemed to themselves to be alone, the only two beings in the
+universe. In his exaltation, Evariste raised his eyes to the firmament
+flashing with blue and gold:
+
+"See, the sky is looking down at us! It is benign; it is adorable, as
+you are, beloved; it has your brightness, your gentleness, your smile."
+
+He felt himself one with all nature, it formed part and parcel of his
+joy and triumph. To his eyes, it was to celebrate his betrothal that the
+chestnut blossoms lit their flaming candles, the poplars burned aloft
+like giant torches.
+
+He exulted in his strength and stature. She, with her softer as well as
+finer nature, more pliable and more malleable, rejoiced in her very
+weakness and, his subjection once secured, instantly bowed to his
+ascendancy; now she had brought him under her slavery, she acknowledged
+him for the master, the hero, the god, burned to obey, to admire, to
+offer her homage. In the shade of the shrubbery he gave her a long,
+ardent kiss, which she received with head thrown back and, clasped in
+Evariste's arms, felt all her flesh melt like wax.
+
+They went on talking a long time of themselves, forgetful of the
+universe. Evariste abounded mainly in vague, high thoughts, which filled
+Elodie with ecstasy. She spoke sweetly of things of practical utility
+and personal interest. Then, presently, when she felt she could stay no
+longer, she rose with a decided air, gave her lover the three red
+carnations from the flower in her balcony and sprang lightly into the
+cabriolet in which she had driven there. It was a hired carriage,
+painted yellow, hung on very high wheels and certainly had nothing out
+of the common about it, or the coachman either. But Gamelin was not in
+the habit of hiring carriages and his friends were hardly more used to
+such an indulgence. To see the great wheels whirling her away gave him a
+strange pang and a painful presentiment assailed him; by a sort of
+hallucination of the mind, the hack horse seemed to be carrying Elodie
+away from him beyond the bounds of the actual world and present time
+towards a city of wealth and pleasure, towards abodes of luxury and
+enjoyment, which he would never be able to enter.
+
+The carriage disappeared. Evariste recovered his calm by degrees; but a
+dull anguish remained and he felt that the hours of tender abandonment
+he had just lived would never be his again.
+
+He returned by the Champs Elysees, where women in light summer dresses
+were sitting on wooden chairs, talking or sewing, while their children
+played under the trees. A woman selling "ladies' pleasures,"--_her_ box
+was shaped like a drum--reminded him of the one he had spoken to in the
+Allee des Veuves, and it seemed as if a whole epoch of his life had
+elapsed between the two encounters. He crossed the Place de la
+Revolution. In the Tuileries gardens he caught the distant roar of a
+host of men, a sound of many voices shouting in accord, so familiar in
+those great days of popular enthusiasm which the enemies of the
+Revolution declared would never dawn again. He quickened his pace as the
+noise grew louder and louder, reached the Rue Honore and found it
+thronged with a crowd of men and women yelling: "Vive la Republique!
+Vive la Liberte!" The walls of the gardens, the windows, the balconies,
+the very roofs were black with lookers-on waving hats and handkerchiefs.
+Preceded by a sapper, who cleared a way for the procession, surrounded
+by Municipal Officers, National Guards, gunners, gendarmes, huzzars,
+advanced slowly, high above the backs of the citizens, a man of a
+bilious complexion, a wreath of oak-leaves about his brow, his body
+wrapped in an old green surtout with an ermine collar. The women threw
+him flowers, while he cast about him the piercing glance of his
+jaundiced eyes, as though, in this enthusiastic multitude he was still
+searching out enemies of the people to denounce, traitors to punish. As
+he went by, Gamelin bent his head and joining his voice to a hundred
+thousand others, shouted his:
+
+"Vive Marat!"
+
+The triumphant hero entered the Hall of the Convention like Fate
+personified. While the crowd slowly dispersed Gamelin sat on a stone
+post in the Rue Honore and pressed his hand over his heart to check its
+wild beating. What he had seen filled him with high emotion and burning
+enthusiasm.
+
+He loved and worshipped Marat, who, sick and fevered, his veins on fire,
+eaten up by ulcers, was wearing out the last remnants of his strength in
+the service of the Republic, and in his own poor house, closed to no
+man, welcomed him with open arms, conversed eagerly with him of public
+affairs, questioned him sometimes on the machinations of evil-doers. He
+rejoiced that the enemies of _the Just_, conspiring for his ruin, had
+prepared his triumph; he blessed the Revolutionary Tribunal, which
+acquitting the Friend of the People had given back to the Convention
+the most zealous and most immaculate of its legislators. Again his eyes
+could see the head racked with fever, garlanded with the civic crown,
+the features instinct with virtuous pride and pitiless love, the worn,
+ravaged, powerful face, the close-pressed lips, the broad chest, the
+strong man dying by inches who, raised aloft in the living chariot of
+his triumph, seemed to exhort his fellow-citizens: "Be ye like
+me,--patriots to the death!"
+
+The street was empty, darkening with the shadows of approaching night;
+the lamplighter went by with his cresset, and Gamelin muttered to
+himself:
+
+"Yes, to the death!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+By nine in the morning Evariste reached the gardens of the Luxembourg,
+to find Elodie already there seated on a bench waiting for him.
+
+It was a month ago they had exchanged their vows and since then they had
+seen each other every day, either at the _Amour peintre_ or at the
+studio in the Place de Thionville. Their meetings had been very tender,
+but at the same time characterized by a certain reserve that checked
+their expansiveness,--a reserve due to the staid and virtuous temper of
+the lover, a theist and a good citizen, who, while ready to make his
+beloved mistress his own before the law or with God alone for witness
+according as circumstances demanded, would do nothing save publicly and
+in the light of day. Elodie knew the resolution to be right and
+honourable; but, despairing of a marriage that seemed impossible from
+every point of view and loath to outrage the prejudices of society, she
+contemplated in her inmost heart a liaison that could be kept a secret
+till the lapse of time gave it sanction. She hoped one day to overcome
+the scruples of a lover she could have wished less scrupulous, and
+meantime, unwilling to postpone some necessary confidences as to the
+past, she had asked him to meet her for a lover's talk in a lonely
+corner of the gardens near the Carthusian Priory.
+
+She threw him a tender look, took his hand frankly, invited him to share
+the bench and speaking slowly and thoughtfully:
+
+"I esteem you too well, Evariste, to hide anything from you. I believe
+myself worthy of you; I should not be so were I not to tell you
+everything. Hear me and be my judge. I have no act to reproach myself
+with that is degrading or base, or even merely selfish. I have only been
+weak and credulous.... Do not forget, dear Evariste, the difficult
+circumstances in which I found myself. You know how it was with me; I
+had lost my mother, my father, still a young man, thought only of his
+own amusement and neglected me. I had a feeling heart, nature has
+dowered me with a loving temper and a generous soul; it was true she had
+not denied me a firm will and a sound judgment, but in those days what
+ruled my conduct was passion, not reason. Alas! it would be the same
+again to-day, if the two were not in harmony; I should be driven to give
+myself to you, beloved, heart and soul, and for ever!"
+
+She expressed herself in firm, well-balanced phrases. She had well
+thought over what she would say, having long ago made up her mind to
+this confession for several reasons--because she was naturally candid,
+because she found pleasure in following Rousseau's example, and because,
+as she told herself reasonably enough:
+
+"One day Evariste must fathom a secret which is known to others as well
+as myself. A frank avowal is best. It is unforced and therefore to my
+credit, and only tells him what some time or other he would discover to
+my shame."
+
+Soft-hearted as she was and amenable to nature's promptings, she did
+not feel herself to be very much to blame, and this made her confession
+the easier; besides which, she had no intention of telling more than was
+absolutely requisite.
+
+"Ah!" she sighed, "why did I not know you, Evariste, in the days when I
+was alone and forsaken?"
+
+Gamelin had taken her request quite literally when Elodie asked him to
+be her judge. Primed at once by nature and the education of books for
+the exercise of domestic justice, he sat ready to receive Elodie's
+admissions.
+
+As she still hesitated, he motioned to her to proceed. Then she began
+speaking very simply:
+
+"A young man, who with many defects of character combined some good
+qualities, and only showed the latter, found me to his taste and courted
+me with a perseverance that was surprising in such a case; he was in the
+flower of his youth, full of charm and the idol of a bevy of charming
+women who made no attempt to hide their adoration. It was not his good
+looks nor even his brilliance that appealed to me.... He touched my
+heart by the tokens of true love he gave me, and I do think he loved me
+truly. He was tender, impassioned. I asked no pledge save of his heart,
+and alas! his heart was fickle.... I blame no one but myself; it is my
+confession I am making, not his. I lay nothing to his charge, for indeed
+he is become a stranger to me. Ah! believe me, Evariste, I swear it, he
+is no more to me than if he had never existed."
+
+She had finished, but Gamelin vouchsafed no answer. He folded his arms,
+a steadfast, sombre look settling in his eyes. His mistress and his
+sister Julie were running together in his thoughts. Julie too had
+hearkened to a lover; but, unlike, altogether unlike, he thought, the
+unhappy Elodie, _she_ had let him have his will and carry her off, not
+misled by the promptings of a tender heart, but to enjoy, far from her
+home and friends, the sweets of luxury and pleasure. He was a stern
+moralist; he had condemned his sister and he was half inclined to
+condemn his mistress.
+
+Elodie resumed in a very pleading voice:
+
+"I was full of Jean-Jacques' philosophy; I believed men were naturally
+honest and honourable. My misfortune was to have encountered a lover who
+was not formed in the school of nature and natural morality, and whom
+social prejudice, ambition, self-love, a false point of honour had made
+selfish and treacherous."
+
+The words produced the effect she had calculated on. Gamelin's eyes
+softened. He asked:
+
+"Who was your seducer? Is he a man I know?"
+
+"You do not know him."
+
+"Tell me his name."
+
+She had foreseen the question and was firmly resolved not to answer it.
+
+She gave her reasons:
+
+"Spare me, I beseech you. For your peace of mind as for my own, I have
+already said too much."
+
+Then, as he still pressed her:
+
+"In the sacred name of our love, I refuse to tell you anything to give
+you a definite notion of this stranger. I will not give your jealousy a
+shape to feed on; I will not bring a harassing shadow between you and
+me. I have not forgotten the man's name, but I will never let you know
+it."
+
+Gamelin insisted on knowing the name of the seducer,--that was the word
+he employed all through, for he felt no doubt Elodie had been seduced,
+cajoled, trifled with. He could not so much as conceive any other
+possibility,--that she had obeyed an overmastering desire, an
+irresistible craving, listened to the tempter's voice in the shape of
+her own flesh and blood; he could not find it credible that the fair
+victim, a creature of hot passion and a fond heart, had offered herself
+a willing sacrifice; to satisfy his ideal, she must needs have been
+overborne by force or fraud, constrained by sheer violence, caught in
+snares spread about her steps on every side. He questioned her in
+guarded terms, but with a close, searching, embarrassing persistency. He
+asked her how the liaison began, if it was long or short, tranquil or
+troubled, under what circumstances it was broken off. And his enquiries
+came back again and again to the means the fellow had used to cajole
+her, as if these must surely have been extraordinary and unheard of. But
+all his cross-examination was in vain. She kept her own counsel with a
+gentle, deprecatory obstinacy, her lips tightly pressed together and
+tears welling in her eyes.
+
+Presently, however, Evariste having asked where the man was now, she
+told him:
+
+"He has left the Kingdom--France, I mean," she corrected herself in an
+instant.
+
+"An _emigre_!" ejaculated Gamelin.
+
+She looked at him, speechless, at once reassured and disheartened to see
+him create in his own mind a truth in accordance with his political
+passions and of his own motion give his jealousy a Jacobin complexion.
+
+In actual fact Elodie's lover was a little lawyer's clerk, a very pretty
+lad, half Adonis, half guttersnipe, whom she had adored and the thought
+of whom, though three years had gone by since, still thrilled her
+nerves. Rich old women were his particular game, and he deserted Elodie
+for a woman of the world of a certain age who could and did recompense
+his merits. Having, after the abolition of offices, attained a post in
+the Mairie of Paris, he was now a _sansculotte_ dragoon and the
+hanger-on of a _ci-devant_ Countess.
+
+"A noble! an _emigre_!" muttered Gamelin, whom she took good care not to
+undeceive, never having been desirous he should know the whole truth.
+"And he deserted you like a dastard?"
+
+She nodded in answer. He clasped her to his heart:
+
+"Dear victim of the vile corruption of monarchies, my love shall avenge
+his villainy! Heaven grant, I may meet the scoundrel! I shall not fail
+to know him!"
+
+She turned away, at one and the same time saddened and smiling,--and
+disappointed. She would fain have had him wiser in the lore of love,
+with more of the natural man about him, more perhaps even of the brute.
+She felt he forgave so readily only because his imagination was cold and
+the secret she had revealed awoke in him none of the mental pictures
+that torture sensuous natures,--in a word, that he saw her seduction
+solely under a moral and social aspect.
+
+They had risen, and while they walked up and down the shady avenues of
+the gardens, he informed her that he only esteemed her the more because
+she had suffered wrong, Elodie entertained no such high claims; however,
+take him as he was, she loved him, and admired the brilliant artistic
+genius she divined in him.
+
+As they left the Luxembourg, they came upon crowds thronging the Rue de
+l'Egalite and the whole neighbourhood of the Theatre de la Nation. There
+was nothing to surprise them in this; for several days great excitement
+had prevailed in the most patriotic Sections; denunciations were rife
+against the Orleans faction and the Brissotin plotters, who were
+conspiring, it was said, to bring about the ruin of Paris and the
+massacre of good Republicans. Gamelin himself a short time back had
+signed a petition from the Commune demanding the expulsion of the
+Twenty-one.
+
+Just before passing under the arcade, joining the theatre to the
+neighbouring house, they had to find their way through a group of
+citizens _en carmagnole_ who were listening to a harangue from a young
+soldier mounted on the top of the gallery. He looked as beautiful as the
+Eros of Praxiteles in his helmet of panther-skin. This fascinating
+warrior was charging the People's Friend with indolence:
+
+"Marat, you are asleep," he was crying, "and the federalists are forging
+fetters to bind us."
+
+Hardly had Elodie cast eyes on the orator before she turned rapidly to
+Evariste and begged him to get her away. The crowd, she declared,
+frightened her and she was afraid of fainting in the crush.
+
+They parted in the Place de la Nation, swearing an oath of eternal
+fidelity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That same morning early the _citoyen_ Brotteaux had made the _citoyenne_
+Gamelin the magnificent present of a capon. It would have been an act of
+indiscretion for him to mention how he had come by it; as a fact, he had
+it of a _Dame de la Halle_ at the Pointe Eustache for whom he sometimes
+acted as amanuensis, and as everybody knows, these "Ladies of the
+Market" cherished Royalist sympathies and were in correspondence with
+the _emigres_. The _citoyenne_ Gamelin had received the gift with
+heartfelt gratitude. Such dainties were scarce ever seen then; victuals
+grew dearer every day. The people feared a famine; the aristocrats, they
+said, wished it, and the "corner" makers were at work to bring it about.
+
+The _citoyen_ Brotteaux, being invited to eat his share of the capon at
+the midday dinner, appeared in due course and congratulated his hostess
+on the rich aroma of cooking that assailed his nostrils. Indeed a noble
+smell of rich, savoury broth filled the painter's studio.
+
+"You are very obliging, sir," replied the good dame. "To prepare the
+digestion for your capon, I have made a vegetable soup with a slice of
+fat bacon and a big beef bone. There's nothing like a marrowbone, sir,
+to give soup a flavour."
+
+"The maxim does you honour, _citoyenne_," returned the old man. "And you
+will be doing wisely to put back again to-morrow and the day after, all
+the week, in fact, to put back again, I say, this precious bone in the
+pot, which it will continue to flavour. The wise woman of Panzoust
+always did so; she used to make a soup of green cabbages with a rind of
+rusty bacon and an old _savorados_. That is what in her country, which
+is also mine, they call the medullary bone, the most tasty and most
+succulent of all bones."
+
+"This lady you speak of, sir," remarked the _citoyenne_ Gamelin, "was
+she not rather a saving soul, to make the same bone serve so many times
+over?"
+
+"Oh! she lived in a small way," explained Brotteaux, "she was poor,
+albeit a prophetess."
+
+At that moment, Evariste Gamelin returned, agitated by the confession he
+had heard and determined to know who was Elodie's betrayer, to avenge at
+one and the same time the Republic's wrong and his own on the miscreant.
+
+After the usual greetings had been exchanged, the _citoyen_ Brotteaux
+resumed the thread of his discourse:
+
+"It is seldom those who make a trade of foretelling the future grow
+rich. Their impostures are too soon found out and their trickery renders
+them odious. But indeed we should be bound to detest them much worse if
+they prophesied truly. A man's life would be intolerable if he knew what
+is to befall him. He would be aware of calamities to come and suffer
+their pains in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings
+whose end he would foresee. Ignorance is a necessary condition of human
+happiness, and it must be owned that in most cases we fulfil it well. We
+know almost nothing about ourselves; absolutely nothing about our
+neighbours. Ignorance constitutes our peace of mind; self-deception our
+felicity."
+
+The _citoyenne_ Gamelin set the soup on the table, said the Benedicite
+and seated her son and her guest at the board. She stood up herself to
+eat, declining the chair the _citoyen_ Brotteaux offered her beside him;
+she said she knew what good manners required of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Ten o'clock in the forenoon. Not a breath of wind. It was the hottest
+July ever known. In the narrow Rue de Jerusalem a hundred or so citizens
+of the Section were waiting in queue at the baker's door, under the eye
+of four National Guards who stood at ease smoking their pipes.
+
+The National Convention had decreed the _maximum_,--and instantly corn
+and flour had disappeared. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, the
+Parisians had to rise before daybreak if they wished to eat. The crowd
+was lined up, men, women and children tightly packed together, under a
+sky of molten lead. The heat beat down on the rotting foulness of the
+kennels and exaggerated the stench of unwashed, sweating humanity. All
+were pushing, abusing their neighbours, exchanging looks fraught with
+every sort of emotion one human being can feel for another,--dislike,
+disgust, interest, attraction, indifference. Painful experience had
+taught them there was not bread enough for everybody; so the late comers
+were always trying to push forward, while those who lost ground
+complained bitterly and indignantly and vainly claimed their rights.
+Women shoved and elbowed savagely to keep their place or squeeze into a
+better. When the press grew too intolerable, cries rose of "Stop pushing
+there!" while each and all protested they could not help it--it was
+someone else pushing them.
+
+To obviate these daily scenes of disorder, the officials appointed by
+the Section had conceived the notion of fastening a rope to the
+shop-door which each applicant held in his proper order; but hands at
+such close quarters _would_ come in contact on the rope and a struggle
+would result. Whoever lost hold could never recover it, while the
+disappointed and the mischievously inclined sometimes cut the cord. In
+the end the plan had to be abandoned.
+
+On this occasion there was the usual suffocation and confusion. While
+some swore they were dying, others indulged in jokes or loose remarks;
+all abused the aristocrats and federalists, authors of all the misery.
+When a dog ran by, wags hailed the beast as Pitt. More than once a loud
+slap showed that some _citoyenne_ in the line had resented with a
+vigorous hand the insolence of a lewd admirer, while, pressed close
+against her neighbour, a young servant girl, with eyes half shut and
+mouth half open, stood sighing in a sort of trance. At any word, or
+gesture, or attitude of a sort to provoke the sportive humour of the
+coarse-minded populace, a knot of young libertines would strike up the
+_Ca-ira_ in chorus, regardless of the protests of an old Jacobin, highly
+indignant to see a dirty meaning attached to a refrain expressive of the
+Republican faith in a future of justice and happiness.
+
+His ladder under his arm, a billsticker appeared to post up on a blank
+wall facing the baker's a proclamation by the Commune apportioning the
+rations of butcher's-meat. Passers-by halted to read the notice, still
+sticky with paste. A cabbage vendor going by, basket on back, began
+calling out in her loud cracked voice:
+
+"They'm all gone, the purty oxen! best rake up the guts!"
+
+Suddenly such an appalling stench of putrefaction rose from a sewer near
+by that several people were turned sick; a woman was taken ill and
+handed over in a fainting condition to a couple of National Guards, who
+carried her off to a pump a few yards away. All held their noses, and
+fell to growling and grumbling, exchanging conjectures each more ghastly
+and alarming than the last. What was it? a dead animal buried
+thereabouts, a dead fish, perhaps, put in for mischief's sake, or more
+likely a victim of the September massacres, some noble or priest, left
+to rot in a cellar.
+
+"They buried them in cellars, eh?"
+
+"They got rid of 'em anywhere and anyhow."
+
+"It will be one of the Chatelet prisoners. On the 2nd I saw three
+hundred in a heap on the Port au Change."
+
+The Parisians dreaded the vengeance of these aristocrats who were like
+to poison them with their dead bodies.
+
+Evariste Gamelin joined the line; he was resolved to spare his old
+mother the fatigues of the long wait. His neighbour, the _citoyen_
+Brotteaux, went with him, calm and smiling, his Lucretius in the baggy
+pocket of his plum-coloured coat.
+
+The good old fellow enjoyed the scene, calling it a bit of low life
+worthy the brush of a modern Teniers.
+
+"These street-porters and goodwives," he declared, "are more amusing
+than the Greeks and Romans our painters are so fond of nowadays. For my
+part, I have always admired the Flemish style."
+
+One fact he was too sensible and tactful to mention--that he had
+himself owned a gallery of Dutch masters rivalled only by Monsieur de
+Choiseul's in the number and excellence of the examples.
+
+"Nothing is beautiful save the Antique," returned the painter, "and what
+is inspired by it. Still, I grant you these low-life scenes by Teniers,
+Jan Steen or Ostade are better stuff than the frills and furbelows of
+Watteau, Boucher, or Van Loo; humanity is shown in an ugly light, but it
+is not degraded as it is by a Baudouin or a Fragonard."
+
+A hawker went by bawling:
+
+"_Bulletin of the Revolutionary Tribunal!_... list of the condemned!"
+
+"One Revolutionary Tribunal is not enough," said Gamelin, "there should
+be one in every town ... in every town, do I say?--nay, in every
+village, in every hamlet. Fathers of families, citizens, one and all,
+should constitute themselves judges. At a time when the enemy's cannon
+is at her gates and the assassin's dagger at her throat, the Nation must
+hold mercy to be parricide. What! Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux in
+insurrection, Corsica in revolt, La Vendee on fire, Mayence and
+Valenciennes in the hands of the Coalition, treason in the country, town
+and camp, treason sitting on the very benches of the National
+Convention, treason assisting, map in hand, at the council board of our
+Commanders in the field!... The fatherland is in danger--and the
+guillotine must save her!"
+
+"I have no objection on principle to make to the guillotine," replied
+Brotteaux. "Nature, my only mistress and my only instructress, certainly
+offers me no suggestion to the effect that a man's life is of any value;
+on the contrary, she teaches in all kinds of ways that it is of none.
+The sole end and object of living beings seems to be to serve as food
+for other beings destined to the same end. Murder is of natural right;
+therefore, the penalty of death is lawful, on condition it is exercised
+from no motives either of virtue or of justice, but by necessity or to
+gain some profit thereby. However, I must have perverse instincts, for I
+sicken to see blood flow, and this defect of character all my philosophy
+has failed so far to correct."
+
+"Republicans," answered Evariste, "are humane and full of feeling. It is
+only despots hold the death penalty to be a necessary attribute of
+authority. The sovereign people will do away with it one day.
+Robespierre fought against it, and all good patriots were with him; the
+law abolishing it cannot be too soon promulgated. But it will not have
+to be applied till the last foe of the Republic has perished beneath the
+sword of law and order."
+
+Gamelin and Brotteaux had by this time a number of late comers behind
+them and amongst these several women of the Section, including a
+stalwart, handsome _tricoteuse_, in head-kerchief and sabots, wearing a
+sword in a shoulder belt, a pretty girl with a mop of golden hair and a
+very tumbled neckerchief, and a young mother, pale and thin, giving the
+breast to a sickly infant.
+
+The child, which could get no milk, was screaming, but its voice was
+weak and stifled by its sobs. Pitifully small, with a pallid, unhealthy
+skin and inflamed eyes, the mother gazed at it with mingled anxiety and
+grief.
+
+"He is very young," observed Gamelin, turning to look at the unhappy
+infant groaning just at his back, half stifled amid the crowd of new
+arrivals.
+
+"He is six months, poor love!... His father is with the army; he is one
+of the men who drove back the Austrians at Conde. His name is Dumonteil
+(Michel), a draper's assistant by trade. He enlisted at a booth they had
+established in front of the Hotel de Ville. Poor lad, he was all for
+defending his country and seeing the world.... He writes telling me to
+be patient. But pray, how am I to feed Paul (he's called Paul, you know)
+when I can't feed myself?"
+
+"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the pretty girl with the flaxen hair, "we've got
+another hour before us yet, and to-night we shall have to repeat the
+same ceremony over again at the grocer's. You risk your life to get
+three eggs and a quarter of a pound of butter."
+
+"Butter!" sighed the _citoyenne_ Dumonteil, "why, it's three months
+since I've seen a scrap!"
+
+And a chorus of female voices rose, bewailing the scarcity and dearness
+of provisions, cursing the _emigres_ and devoting to the guillotine the
+Commissaries of Sections who were ready to give good-for-nothing minxes,
+in return for unmentionable services, fat hens and four-pound loaves.
+Alarming stories passed round of cattle drowned in the Seine, sacks of
+flour emptied in the sewers, loaves of bread thrown into the
+latrines.... It was all those Royalists, and Rolandists, and Brissotins,
+who were starving the people, bent on exterminating every living thing
+in Paris!
+
+All of a sudden the pretty, fair-haired girl with the rumpled
+neckerchief broke into shrieks as if her petticoats were afire. She was
+shaking these violently and turning out her pockets, vociferating that
+somebody had stolen her purse.
+
+At news of the petty theft, a flood of indignation swept over this crowd
+of poor folks, the same who had sacked the mansions of the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain and invaded the Tuileries without appropriating the
+smallest thing, artisans and housewives, who would have burned down the
+Palace of Versailles with a light heart, but would have thought it a
+dire disgrace if they had stolen the value of a pin. The young rakes
+greeted the pretty girl's loss with some ribald jokes, that were
+immediately drowned under a burst of public indignation. There was some
+talk of instant execution--hanging the thief to the nearest lamp-post,
+and an investigation was begun, where everyone spoke at once and nobody
+would listen to a word of reason. The tall _tricoteuse_, pointing her
+finger at an old man, strongly suspected of being an unfrocked monk,
+swore it was the "Capuchin" yonder who was the cut-purse. The crowd
+believed her without further evidence and raised a shout of "Death!
+death!"
+
+The old man so unexpectedly exposed to the public vengeance was standing
+very quietly and soberly just in front of the _citoyen_ Brotteaux. He
+had all the look, there was no denying it, of a _ci-devant_ cleric. His
+aspect was venerable, though the face was changed and drawn by the
+terrors the poor man had suffered from the violence of the crowd and the
+recollection of the September days that were still vivid in his
+imagination. The fear depicted on his features stirred the suspicion of
+the populace, which is always ready to believe that only the guilty
+dread its judgments, as if the haste and recklessness with which it
+pronounces them were not enough to terrify even the most innocent.
+
+Brotteaux had made it a standing rule never to go against the popular
+feeling of the moment, above all when it was manifestly illogical and
+cruel, "because in that case," he would say, "the voice of the people
+was the voice of God." But Brotteaux proved himself untrue to his
+principles; he asseverated that the old man, whether he was a Capuchin
+or not, could not have robbed the _citoyenne_, having never gone near
+her for one moment.
+
+The crowd drew its own conclusion,--the individual who spoke up for the
+thief was of course his accomplice, and stern measures were proposed to
+deal with the two malefactors, and when Gamelin offered to guarantee
+Brotteaux' honesty, the wisest heads suggested sending _him_ along with
+the two others to the Sectional headquarters.
+
+But the pretty girl gave a cry of delight; she had found her purse
+again. The statement was received with a storm of hisses, and she was
+threatened with a public whipping,--like a Nun.
+
+"Sir," said the ex-monk, addressing Brotteaux, "I thank you for having
+spoken in my defence. My name is of no concern, but I had better tell
+you what it is; I am called Louis de Longuemare. I am in truth a
+Regular; but not a Capuchin, as those women would have it. There is the
+widest difference; I am a monk of the Order of the Barnabites, which has
+given Doctors and Saints without number to the Church. It is only a
+half-truth to refer its origin to St. Charles Borromeo; we must account
+as the true founder the Apostle St. Paul, whose cipher it bears on its
+arms. I have been compelled to quit my cloister, now headquarters of the
+Section du Pont-Neuf, and adopt a secular habit.
+
+"Nay, Father," said Brotteaux, scrutinizing Monsieur de Longuemare's
+frock, "your dress is token enough that you have not forsworn your
+profession; to look at it, one might think you had reformed your Order
+rather than forsaken it. It is your good heart makes you expose yourself
+in these austere habiliments to the insults of a godless populace."
+
+"Yet I cannot very well," replied the ex-monk, "wear a blue coat, like a
+roisterer at a dance!"
+
+"What I mention, Father, about your dress is by way of paying homage to
+your character and putting you on your guard against the risks you run."
+
+"On the contrary, sir, it would be much better to inspirit me to confess
+my faith. For indeed, I am only too prone to fear danger. I have
+abandoned my habit, sir, which is a sort of apostasy; I would fain not
+have deserted, had it been possible, the House where God granted me for
+so many years the grace of a peaceable and retired life. I got leave to
+stay there, and I still continued to occupy my cell, while they turned
+the church and cloister into a sort of petty _hotel de ville_ they
+called the Section. I saw, sir, I saw them hack away the emblems of the
+Holy Verity; I saw the name of the Apostle Paul replaced by a convicted
+felon's cap. Sometimes I was actually present at the confabulations of
+the Section, where I heard amazing errors propounded. At last I quitted
+this place of profanation and went to live on the pension of a hundred
+pistoles allowed me by the Assembly in a stable that stood empty, the
+horses having been requisitioned for the service of the armies. There I
+sing Mass for a few of the faithful, who come to the office to bear
+witness to the eternity of the Church of Jesus Christ."
+
+"For my part, Father," replied the other, "if you care to know my name,
+I am called Brotteaux, and I was a publican in former days."
+
+"Sir," returned the Pere Longuemare, "I was aware by St. Matthew's
+example that one may look for good counsel from a publican."
+
+"Father, you are too obliging."
+
+"_Citoyen_ Brotteaux," remarked Gamelin, "pray admire the virtues of the
+people, more hungry for justice than for bread; consider how everyone
+here is ready to lose his place to chastise the thief. These men and
+women, victims of such poverty and privation, are of so stern a probity
+they cannot tolerate a dishonest act."
+
+"It must indeed be owned," replied Brotteaux, "that in their hearty
+desire to hang the pilferer, these folks were like to do a mischief to
+this good cleric, to his champion and to his champion's champion. Their
+avarice itself and their selfish eagerness to safeguard their own
+welfare were motives enough; the thief in attacking one of them
+threatened all; self-preservation urged them to punish him.... At the
+same time, it is like enough the most part of these workmen and
+goodwives are honest and keep their hands off other folk's goods. From
+the cradle these sentiments have been instilled in them by their father
+and mother, who have whipped them well and soundly and inculcated the
+virtues through their backside."
+
+Gamelin did not conceal the fact from his old neighbour that he deemed
+such language unworthy of a philosopher.
+
+"Virtue," said he, "is natural to mankind; God has planted the seed of
+it in the heart of mortals."
+
+Old Brotteaux was a sceptic and found in his atheism an abundant source
+of self-satisfaction.
+
+"I see this much, _citoyen_ Gamelin, that, while a Revolutionary for
+what is of this world, you are, where Heaven is concerned, of a
+conservative, or even a reactionary temper. Robespierre and Marat are
+the same to you. For me, I find it strange that Frenchmen, who will not
+put up with a mortal king any longer, insist on retaining an immortal
+tyrant, far more despotic and ferocious. For what is the Bastille, or
+even the _Chambre Ardente_[1] beside Hellfire? Humanity models its gods
+on its tyrants, and you, who reject the original, preserve the copy!"
+
+"Oh! _citoyen!_" protested Gamelin, "are you not ashamed to hold such
+language? how can you confound the dark divinities born of ignorance and
+fear with the Author of Nature? Belief in a benevolent God is necessary
+for morality. The Supreme Being is the source of all the virtues and a
+man cannot be a Republican if he does not believe in God. Robespierre
+knew this, who, as we all remember, had the bust of the philosopher
+Helvetius removed from the Hall of the Jacobins, because he had taught
+Frenchmen the lessons of slavery by preaching atheism.... I hope, at
+least, _citoyen_ Brotteaux, that, as soon as the Republic has
+established the worship of Reason, you will not refuse your adhesion to
+so wise a religion!"
+
+"I love reason, but I am no fanatic in my love," was Brotteaux's answer.
+"Reason is our guide and beacon-light; but when you have made a divinity
+of it, it will blind you and instigate you to crime,"--and he proceeded
+to develop his thesis, standing both feet in the kennel, as he had once
+been used to perorate, seated in one of Baron d'Holbach's gilt
+armchairs, which, as he was fond of saying, formed the basis of natural
+philosophy.
+
+"Jean Jacques Rousseau," he proceeded, "who was not without talents,
+particularly in music, was a scampish fellow who professed to derive his
+morality from Nature while all the time he got it from the dogmas of
+Calvin. Nature teaches us to devour each other and gives us the example
+of all the crimes and all the vices which the social state corrects or
+conceals. We should love virtue; but it is well to know that this is
+simply and solely a convenient expedient invented by men in order to
+live comfortably together. What we call morality is merely a desperate
+enterprise, a forlorn hope, on the part of our fellow creatures to
+reverse the order of the universe, which is strife and murder, the blind
+interplay of hostile forces. She destroys herself, and the more I think
+of things, the more convinced I am that the universe is mad. Theologians
+and philosophers, who make God the author of Nature and the architect of
+the universe, show Him to us as illogical and ill-conditioned. They
+declare Him benevolent, because they are afraid of Him, but they are
+forced to admit that His acts are atrocious. They attribute a malignity
+to him seldom to be found even in mankind. And that is how they get
+human beings to adore Him. For our miserable race would never lavish
+worship on just and benevolent deities from which they would have
+nothing to fear; they would feel only a barren gratitude for their
+benefits. Without purgatory and hell, your good God would be a mighty
+poor creature."
+
+"Sir," said the Pere Longuemare, "do not talk of Nature; you do not know
+what Nature is."
+
+"Egad, I know it as well as you do, Father."
+
+"You cannot know it, because you have not religion, and religion alone
+teaches us what Nature is, wherein it is good, and how it has been made
+evil. However, you must not expect me to answer you; God has vouchsafed
+me, to refute your errors, neither eloquence nor force of intellect. I
+should only be afraid, by my inadequate replies, of giving you occasion
+to blaspheme and further reasons for hardening your heart. I feel a
+strong desire to help you; yet the sole fruit of my importunate efforts
+would be to...."
+
+The discussion was cut short by a tremendous shout coming from the head
+of the column to warn the whole regiment of famished citizens that the
+baker was opening his doors. The line began to push forward, but very,
+very slowly. A National Guard on duty admitted the purchasers one by
+one. The baker, his wife and boy presided over the sale, assisted by two
+Civil Commissaries. These, wearing a tricoloured riband round the left
+arm, saw that the customers belonged to the Section and were given their
+proper share in proportion to the number of mouths to be filled.
+
+The _citoyen_ Brotteaux made the quest of pleasure the one and only aim
+of life, holding that the reason and the senses, the sole judges when
+gods there were none, were unable to conceive any other. Accordingly,
+finding the painter's remarks somewhat overfull of fanaticism, and the
+Monk's of simplicity, to please his taste, this wise man, bent on
+squaring his behaviour with his views and relieving the tedium of
+waiting, drew from the bulging pocket of his plum-coloured coat his
+Lucretius, now as always his chiefest solace and faithful comforter. The
+binding of red morocco was chafed by hard wear, and the _citoyen_
+Brotteaux had judiciously erased the coat of arms that once embellished
+it,--three islets or, which his father the financier had bought for
+good money down. He opened the book at the passage where the poet
+philosopher, who is for curing men of the futile and mischievous passion
+of love, surprises a woman in the arms of her serving-women in a state
+bound to offend all a lover's susceptibilities. The _citoyen_ Brotteaux
+read the lines, though not without casting a surreptitious glance at the
+golden pate of the pretty girl in front of him and enjoying a sniff of
+the heady perfume of the little slut's hot skin. The poet Lucretius was
+a wise man, but he had only one string to his bow; his disciple
+Brotteaux had several.
+
+So he read on, taking two steps forward every quarter of an hour. His
+ear, soothed by the grave and cadenced numbers of the Latin Muse, was
+deaf to the women's scolding about the monstrous prices of bread and
+sugar and coffee, candles and soap. In this calm and unruffled mood he
+reached the threshold of the bakehouse. Behind him, Evariste Gamelin
+could see over his head the gilt cornsheaf surmounting the iron grating
+that filled the fanlight over the door.
+
+When his turn came to enter the shop, he found the hampers and lockers
+already emptied; the baker handed him the only scrap of bread left,
+which did not weigh two pounds. Evariste paid his money, and the gate
+was slammed on his heels, for fear of a riot and the people carrying the
+place by storm.
+
+But there was no need to fear; these poor folks, trained to obedience
+alike by their old-time oppressors and by their liberators of to-day,
+slunk off with drooping heads and dragging feet.
+
+As he reached the corner of the street, Gamelin caught sight of the
+_citoyenne_ Dumonteil, seated on a stone post, her nursling in her
+arms. She sat there quite still; her face was colourless and her
+tearless eyes seemed to see nothing. The infant was sucking her finger
+voraciously. Gamelin stood a while in front of her, abashed and
+uncertain what to do. She did not appear to see him.
+
+He stammered something, then pulled out his pocket-knife, a clasp-knife
+with a horn handle, cut his loaf in two and laid half on the young
+mother's knee. She looked up at him in wonder; but he had already turned
+the corner of the street.
+
+On reaching home, Evariste found his mother sitting at the window
+darning stockings. With a light laugh he put his half of the bread in
+her hand.
+
+"You must forgive me, mother dear; I was tired out with standing about
+and exhausted by the heat, and out in the street there as I trudged
+home, mouthful by mouthful I have gobbled up half of our allowance.
+There's barely your share left,"--and as he spoke, he made a pretence of
+shaking the crumbs off his jacket.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Chambre Ardente_,--under the ancien regime, a tribunal charged with
+the investigation of heinous crimes and having power to burn those found
+guilty.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Employing a very old-fashioned locution, the _citoyenne_ Gamelin had
+declared: "that by dint of eating chestnuts they would be turning into
+chestnuts." As a matter of fact, on that day, the 13th July, she and her
+son had made their midday dinner on a basin of chestnut porridge. As
+they were finishing this austere repast, a lady pushed open the door and
+the room was flooded in an instant with the splendour of her presence
+and the fragrance of her perfumes. Evariste recognised the _citoyenne_
+Rochemaure. Thinking she had mistaken the door and meant her visit for
+the _citoyen_ Brotteaux, her friend of other days, he was already
+preparing to point her out the _ci-devant_ aristocrat's garret or
+perhaps summon Brotteaux and so spare an elegant woman the task of
+scrambling up a mill-ladder; but she made it clear at once that the
+_citoyen_ Evariste Gamelin and no other was the person she had come to
+see by announcing that she was happy to find him at home and was his
+servant to command.
+
+They were not entirely strangers to each other, having met more than
+once in David's studio, in a box at the Assembly Hall, at the Jacobins,
+at Venua's restaurant. On these occasions she had been struck by his
+good looks and youth and interesting air.
+
+Wearing a hat beribboned like a fairing and plumed like the head-piece
+of a Representative on mission, the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure was wigged,
+painted, patched and scented. But her complexion was young and fresh
+behind all these disguises; these extravagant artificialities of fashion
+only betokened a frantic haste to enjoy life and the feverishness of
+these dreadful days when the morrow was so uncertain. Her corsage, with
+wide facings and enormous basques and all ablaze with huge steel
+buttons, was blood-red, and it was hard to tell, so aristocratic and so
+revolutionary at one and the same time was her array, whether it was the
+colours of the victims or of the headsman that she sported. A young
+officer, a dragoon, accompanied her.
+
+Dandling her long cane by its handle of mother-o'-pearl, a tall, fine
+woman, of generous proportions and ample bosom, she made the circuit of
+the studio, and putting up to her grey eyes her double quizzing-glasses
+of gold, examined the painter's canvases with many smiles and
+exclamations of delight, admiring the handsome artist and flattering him
+in hopes of a return in kind.
+
+"What," asked the _citoyenne_, "is that picture--it is so nobly
+conceived, so touching--of a gentle, beautiful woman standing by a young
+man lying sick?"
+
+Gamelin told her it was meant to represent _Orestes tended by his sister
+Electra_, and that, had he been able to finish it, it might perhaps have
+been the least unsatisfactory of his works.
+
+"The subject," he went on to say, "is taken from the _Orestes_ of
+Euripides. I had read, in a translation of this tragedy made years ago,
+a scene that filled me with admiration,--the one where the young
+Electra, raising her brother on his bed of pain, wipes away the froth
+that gathers on his lips, puts aside the locks that blind his eyes and
+beseeches the brother she loves to hearken to what she will tell him
+while the Furies are at peace for the moment.... As I read and re-read
+this translation, I seemed to be aware of a kind of fog that shrouded
+the forms of Greek perfection, a fog I could not drive away. I pictured
+the original text to myself as more nervous and pitched in a different
+accent. Feeling a keen desire to get a precise idea of the thing, I went
+to Monsieur Gail, who was the Professor of Greek at the College de
+France (this was in '91), and begged him to expound the scene to me word
+by word. He did what I asked, and I then saw that the Ancients are much
+more simple and homely than people think. Thus, for instance, Electra
+says to Orestes: 'Dear brother, what joy it gave me to see thee sleep!
+Shall I help thee to rise?' And Orestes answers: 'Yes, help me, take me
+in thy arms, and wipe away the spume that still clings about my mouth
+and eyes. Put thy bosom against mine and part from my brow my tangled
+hair, for it blinds my eyes....' My mind still full of this poetry, so
+young and vivid, ringing with these simple, strong phrases, I sketched
+the picture you see there, _citoyenne_."
+
+The painter, who, as a rule, spoke so sparingly of his works, waxed
+eloquent on the subject of this one. At an encouraging gesture from the
+_citoyenne_ Rochemaure, who lifted her quizzing-glasses in token of
+attention, he continued:
+
+"Hennequin has depicted the madness of Orestes in masterly fashion. But
+Orestes appeals to us still more poignantly in his sorrow than when he
+is distraught. What a fate was his! It was filial piety, obedience to a
+sacred obligation, drove him to commit his dreadful deed,--a sin the
+gods cannot but pardon, but which men will never condone. To avenge
+outraged justice, he has repudiated Nature, has made himself a monster,
+has torn out his own heart. But his spirit remains unbroken under the
+weight of his horrible, yet innocent crime.... That is what I would fain
+have exhibited in my group of brother and sister." He stepped up to the
+canvas and looked at it not without satisfaction.
+
+"Parts of the picture," he said, "are pretty nearly finished; the head
+and arm of Orestes, for instance."
+
+"It is an admirable composition.... And Orestes reminds me of you,
+_citoyen_ Gamelin."
+
+"You think he is like me?" exclaimed the painter, with a grave smile.
+
+She took the chair Gamelin offered her. The young dragoon stood beside
+her, his hand on the back of the chair on which she sat. Which showed
+plainly that the Revolution was an accomplished fact, for under the
+ancien regime, no man would ever, in company, have touched so much as
+with the tip of a finger, the seat occupied by a lady. In those days a
+gentleman was trained and broken in to the laws of politeness, sometimes
+pretty hard laws, and taught to understand that a scrupulous
+self-restraint in public places gives a peculiar zest to the sweet
+familiarity of the boudoir, and that to lose your respectful awe of a
+woman, you must first have that feeling.
+
+Louise Masche de Rochemaure, daughter of a Lieutenant of the King's
+Hunt, widow of a Procureur and, for twenty years, the faithful mistress
+of the financier Brotteaux des Ilettes, had fallen in with the new
+ideas. She was to be seen, in July, 1790, digging the soil of the Champ
+de Mars. Her strong inclination to side with the powers that be had
+carried her readily enough along a political path that started with the
+Feuillants and led by way of the Girondins to end on the summit of _the
+Mountain_, while at the same time a spirit of compromise, a passion for
+conversion and a certain aptitude for intrigue still attached her to the
+aristocratic and anti-revolutionary party. She was to be met
+everywhere,--at coffee houses and theatres, fashionable restaurants,
+gaming-saloons, drawing-rooms, newspaper offices and ante-chambers of
+Committees. The Revolution yielded her a hundred satisfactions,--novelty
+and amusement, smiles and pleasures, business ventures and profitable
+speculations. Combining political with amorous intrigue, playing the
+harp, drawing landscapes, singing ballads, dancing Greek dances, giving
+supper parties, entertaining pretty women, such as the Comtesse de
+Beaufort and the actress Mademoiselle Descoings, presiding all night
+long over a _trente-et-un_ or _biribi_ table and an adept at _rouge et
+noir_, she still found time to be charitable to her friends. Inquisitive
+and interfering, giddy-pated and frivolous, she understood men but knew
+nothing of the masses; as indifferent to the creed she professed as to
+the opinions she felt bound to repudiate, understanding nothing whatever
+of all that was happening in the country, she was enterprising,
+intrepid, and full of audacity from sheer ignorance of danger and an
+unbounded confidence in the efficacy of her charms.
+
+The soldier who escorted her was in the heyday of youth. A brazen helmet
+decorated with a panther skin and the crest set off with a crimson
+cock's-comb shaded his fresh young face and displayed a long and
+terrific mane that swept his back. His red jacket was cut short and
+square, barely reaching to the waist, the better to show off his elegant
+figure. In his girdle he carried an enormous sabre, the hilt of which
+was a glittering eagle's beak. A pair of flapped breeches of sky blue
+moulded the fine muscles of his legs and was braided in rich arabesques
+of a darker blue on the thighs. He might have been a dancer dressed for
+some warlike and dashing role, in _Achilles at Scyros_ or _Alexander's
+Wedding-feast_, in a costume designed by a pupil of David with the one
+idea of accentuating every line of the shape.
+
+Gamelin had a vague recollection of having seen him before. He was, in
+fact, the same young soldier he had come upon a fortnight previously
+haranguing the people from the arcades of the Theatre de la Nation.
+
+The _citoyenne_ Rochemaure introduced him by name:
+
+"The _citoyen_ Henry, Member of the Revolutionary Committee of the
+Section of the Rights of Man."
+
+She had him always at her heels,--a mirror of gallantry and a living and
+walking guarantee of patriotism.
+
+The _citoyenne_ complimented Gamelin on his talents and asked him if he
+would be willing to design a card for a protegee of hers, a fashionable
+milliner. He would, of course, choose an appropriate _motif_,--a woman
+trying on a scarf before a cheval glass, for instance, or a young
+workwoman carrying a band-box on her arm.
+
+She had heard several artists mentioned as competent to execute a little
+matter of the sort,--Fragonard _fils_, young Ducis, as well as a certain
+Prudhomme; but she would rather apply to the _citoyen_ Evariste
+Gamelin. However, she made no definite proposal on this head and it was
+evident she had mentioned the commission merely by way of starting the
+conversation. In truth she had come for something quite different. She
+wanted the _citoyen_ Gamelin to do her a favour; knowing he was a friend
+of the _citoyen_ Marat, she had come to ask him to introduce her to the
+Friend of the People, with whom she desired an interview.
+
+Gamelin replied that he was too insignificant an individual to present
+her to Marat, besides which, she had no need of anyone to be her
+sponsor; Marat, albeit overwhelmed with business, was not the
+inaccessible person he was said to be,--and, added Gamelin:
+
+"He will receive you, _citoyenne_, if you are in distress; his great
+heart makes him compassionate to all who suffer. He will likewise
+receive you if you have any revelation to make concerning the public
+weal; he has vowed his days to the unmasking of traitors."
+
+The _citoyenne_ Rochemaure answered that she would be happy to greet in
+Marat an illustrious citizen, who had rendered great services to his
+country, who was capable of rendering greater still, and that she was
+anxious to bring the legislator in question into relation with friends
+of hers of good repute and good will, philanthropists favoured by
+fortune and competent to provide him with new means of satisfying his
+ardent affection for humanity.
+
+"It is very desirable," she concluded, "to make the rich co-operate in
+securing public prosperity."
+
+In actual fact, the _citoyenne_ had promised the banker Morhardt to
+arrange a dinner where he and Marat should meet.
+
+Morhardt, a Swiss like the Friend of the People, had entered into a
+combination with several deputies of the Convention, Julien (of
+Toulouse), Delaunay (of Angers) and the ex-Capuchin Chabot, to speculate
+in the shares of the _Compagnie des Indes_. The game was very
+simple,--to bring down the price of these shares to 650 livres by
+proposing motions pointing in the direction of confiscation, in order to
+buy up the greatest possible number at this figure and then push them up
+to 4,000 or 5,000 livres by dint of proposals of a reassuring nature.
+But for Chabot, Julien, Delaunay, their little ways were too notorious,
+while suspicions were rife of Lacroix, Fabre d'Eglantine, and even
+Danton. The arch-speculator, the Baron de Batz, was looking for new
+confederates in the Convention and had advised Morhardt to sound Marat.
+
+This idea of the anti-revolutionary speculators was not so extravagant
+as might have been supposed at the first blush. It was always the way of
+these gentry to form alliance with those in power at the moment, and by
+virtue of his popularity, his pen, his character, Marat was a power to
+be reckoned with. The Girondists were near shipwreck; the Dantonists,
+battered by the hurricane, had lost their hold on the helm. Robespierre,
+the idol of the people, was a man jealous of his scrupulous honesty,
+full of suspicion, impossible to approach. The great thing was to get
+round Marat, to secure his good will against the day when he should be
+dictator--and everything pointed to this consummation,--his popularity,
+his ambition, his eagerness to recommend heroic measures. And it might
+be, after all, Marat would re-establish order, the finances, the
+prosperity of the country. More than once he had risen in revolt
+against the zealots who were for outbidding him in fanaticism; for some
+time past he had been denouncing the demagogues as vehemently as the
+moderates. After inciting the people to sack the "cornerers'" shops and
+hang them over their own counters, he was now exhorting the citizens to
+be calm and prudent. He was growing into an administrator.
+
+In spite of certain rumours disseminated against him as against all the
+other chiefs of the Revolution, these pirates of the money-market did
+not believe he could be corrupted, but they did know him to be vain and
+credulous, and they hoped to win him over by flattery and still more by
+a condescending friendliness which they looked upon as the most
+seductive form of flattery from men like themselves. They counted,
+thanks to him, on blowing hot and cold on all the securities they might
+wish to buy and sell, and making him serve their interests while
+supposing himself to be acting solely for the public good.
+
+Great as a go-between, albeit she was still of an age for amours on her
+own account, the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure had made it her mission to bring
+together the legislator-journalist and the banker, and in her
+extravagant imagination she already saw the man of the underworld, the
+man whose hands were yet red with the blood of the September massacres,
+a partner in the game of the financiers whose agent she was; she
+pictured him drawn by his very warmth of feeling and unsophisticated
+candour into the whirlpool of speculation, a recruit to the coterie she
+loved of "corner" makers, contractors, foreign emissaries, gamblers, and
+women of gallantry.
+
+She insisted on the _citoyen_ Gamelin taking her to see the Friend of
+the People, who lived quite near, in the Rue des Cordeliers, near the
+church. After some little show of reluctance, the painter acceded to the
+_citoyenne's_ wishes.
+
+The dragoon Henry was invited to join them in the visit, but declined,
+declaring he meant to keep his liberty of action, even towards the
+_citoyen_ Marat, who, he felt no doubt, had rendered services to the
+Republic, but was weakening nowadays; had he not, in his news sheet,
+counselled resignation as the proper thing for the people of Paris?
+
+And the young man, in a sweet voice, broken by long-drawn sighs,
+deplored the fate of the Republic, betrayed by the men in whom she had
+put her trust,--Danton rejecting the notion of a tax on the rich,
+Robespierre opposing the permanence of the Sections, Marat, whose
+pusillanimous counsels were paralyzing the enthusiasm of the citizens.
+
+"Ah!" he cried, "how feeble such men appear beside Leclerc and Jacques
+Roux!... Roux! Leclerc! _ye_ are the true friends of the people!"
+
+Gamelin did not hear these remarks, which would have angered him; he had
+gone into the next room to don his blue coat.
+
+"You may well be proud of your son," observed the _citoyenne_
+Rochemaure, addressing the _citoyenne_ Gamelin. "He is a great man;
+talent and character both make him so."
+
+In answer, the widow Gamelin gave a good account of her son, yet without
+making much boast of him before a lady of high station, for she had been
+taught in her childhood that the first duty of the lowly is humility
+towards the great. She was of a complaining bent, having indeed only too
+good cause and finding in such jeremiads a salve for her griefs. She was
+garrulous in her revelations of all the hardships she had to bear to
+any whom she supposed in a position to relieve them, and Madame de
+Rochemaure seemed to belong to that class. She made the most, therefore,
+of this favourable opportunity and told a long and breathless story of
+their distresses,--how mother and son were both dying of slow
+starvation. Pictures could not be sold any more; the Revolution had
+killed business dead. Victuals were scarce and too dear for words....
+
+The good dame poured out her lamentations with all the loose-lipped
+volubility her halting tongue was capable of, so as to get them all
+finished by the time her son, whose pride would not brook such whining,
+should reappear. She was bent on attaining her object in the shortest
+possible time,--that of touching a lady whom she deemed rich and
+influential, and enlisting her sympathy in her boy's future. She felt
+sure that Evariste's good looks were an asset on her side to move the
+heart of a well-born lady. And so they were; the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure
+proved tender-hearted and was melted to think of Evariste's and his
+mother's sufferings. She made plans to alleviate them; she had rich men
+amongst her friends and would get them to buy the artist's pictures.
+
+"The truth is," she added, with a smile, "there is still money in
+France, but it keeps in hiding."
+
+Better still, now Art was ruined, she would obtain Evariste a post in
+Morhardt's bank or with the Brothers Perregaux, or a place as clerk in
+the office of an army contractor.
+
+Then she reflected that this was not what a man of his character needed;
+and, after a moment's thought, she nodded in sign that she had hit the
+nail on the head:
+
+"There are still several jurymen left to be appointed on the
+Revolutionary Tribunal. Juryman, magistrate, that is the thing to suit
+your son. I have friendly relations with the Committee of Public Safety.
+I know Robespierre the elder personally; his brother frequently sups at
+my house. I will speak to them. I will get a word said to Montane,
+Dumas, Fouquier."
+
+The _citoyenne_ Gamelin, bursting with excitement and gratitude, put a
+finger to her lip; Evariste was coming back into the studio.
+
+He escorted the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure down the gloomy staircase, the
+steps of which, whether of wood or tiled, were coated with an ancient
+layer of dirt.
+
+On the Pont-Neuf, where the sun, now near its setting, threw a
+lengthened shadow from the pedestal that had borne the Bronze Horse and
+was now gay with the National colours, a crowd of men and women of the
+people gathered in little groups were listening to some tale that was
+being told them. Consternation reigned and a heavy silence, broken at
+intervals by groans and fierce cries. Many were making off at a rapid
+pace in the direction of the Rue de Thionville, erstwhile Rue Dauphine;
+Gamelin joined one of these groups and heard the news--that Marat had
+just been assassinated.
+
+Little by little the tidings were confirmed and particulars became
+known; he had been murdered in his bath by a woman who had come
+expressly from Caen to commit the crime.
+
+Some thought she had escaped; but the majority declared she had been
+arrested.
+
+There they stood like sheep without a shepherd, thinking sadly:
+
+"Marat, the tender-hearted, the humane, Marat our benefactor, is no
+longer there to guide us, Marat who was never deceived, who saw through
+every subterfuge and never feared to reveal the truth!... What can we
+do, what is to become of us? We have lost our adviser, our champion, our
+friend." They knew very well whence the blow had come, and who had
+directed the woman's arm. They groaned aloud:
+
+"Marat has been struck down by the same criminal hands that are bent on
+our extermination. His death is the signal for the slaughter of all good
+patriots."
+
+Different reports were current, as to the circumstances of the tragic
+event and the last words of the victim; endless questions were asked
+concerning the assassin, all that anyone knew was that it was a young
+woman sent by those traitors, the federalists. Baring teeth and nails,
+the _citoyennes_ devoted the culprit to condign punishment; deeming the
+guillotine too merciful a death, they demanded this monster of iniquity
+should be scourged, broken on the wheel, torn limb from limb, and racked
+their brains to invent new tortures.
+
+An armed body of National Guards was haling to the Section headquarters
+a man of determined mien. His clothes were in tatters, and streams of
+blood trickled down his white face. He had been overheard saying that
+Marat had earned his fate by his constant incitements to pillage and
+massacre, and it was only with great difficulty that the Guards had
+saved him from the fury of the populace. A hundred fingers pointed him
+out as the accomplice of the assassin, and threats of death followed him
+as he was led away.
+
+Gamelin was stunned by the blow. A few hot tears blistered his burning
+eyes. With the grief he felt as a disciple mingled solicitude for the
+popular idol, and these combined feelings tore at his heart-strings. He
+thought to himself:
+
+"After Le Peltier, after Bourdon, Marat!... I foresee the fate of the
+patriots; massacred on the Champ de Mars, at Nancy, at Paris, they will
+perish one and all." And he thought of Wimpfen, the traitor, who only a
+while before was marching on Paris, and who, had he not been stopped at
+Vernon, by the gallant patriots, would have devoted the heroic city to
+fire and slaughter.
+
+And how many perils still remained, how many criminal designs, how many
+treasonable plots, which only Marat's perspicacity and vigilance could
+unravel and foil! Now he was dead, who was there to denounce Custine
+loitering in idleness in the Camp of Caesar and refusing to relieve
+Valenciennes, Biron tarrying inactive in the Lower Vendee letting Saumur
+be taken and Nantes blockaded, Dillon betraying the Fatherland in the
+Argonne?...
+
+Meantime, all about him, rose momentarily higher the sinister cry:
+
+"Marat is dead; the aristocrats have killed him!"
+
+As he was on his way, his heart bursting with grief and hate and love,
+to pay a last mark of respect to the martyr of liberty, an old
+countrywoman, wearing the coif of the Limousin peasantry, accosted him
+to ask if the Monsieur Marat who had been murdered was not Monsieur le
+Cure Mara, of Saint-Pierre-de-Queyroix.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+It was the eve of the Festival, a calm, bright evening, and Elodie
+hanging on Evariste's arm, was strolling with him about the _Champ de la
+Federation_. Workmen were hastily completing their task of erecting
+columns, statues, temples, a "mountain," an altar of the Fatherland.
+Huge symbolic figures, Hercules (representing the people) brandishing
+his club, Nature suckling the Universe from her inexhaustible breasts,
+were rising at a moment's notice in the capital that, tortured by famine
+and fear, was listening for the dreaded sound of the Austrian cannon on
+the road from Meaux. La Vendee was making good its check before Nantes
+by a series of startling victories. A ring of fire and flame and hate
+was drawn about the great revolutionary city.
+
+And meantime, she was preparing a superb welcome, like the sovereign
+state of a vast empire, for the deputies of the primary Assemblies which
+had accepted the Constitution. Federalism was on its knees; the
+Republic, one and indivisible, would surely vanquish all its enemies.
+
+Waving his arm towards the thronged expanse:
+
+"There it was," cried Evariste, "that on the 17th July, '91, the
+infamous Bailly ordered the people to be shot down at the foot of the
+altar of the fatherland. Passavant, the grenadier, who witnessed the
+massacre, returned to his house, tore his coat from his back and cried:
+'I have sworn to die with Liberty; Liberty is no more, and I fulfil my
+oath,'--and blew out his brains."
+
+All this time artists and peaceful citizens were examining the
+preparations for the festival, their faces showing as joyless a joy in
+life as their lives were dull and joyless; to their minds the mightiest
+events shrank into insignificance and grew as insipid as they were
+themselves. Couple by couple they went, carrying in their arms or
+holding by the hand or letting them run on in front children as
+unprepossessing as their parents and promising to grow up no whit
+happier, who in due course would give birth to children of their own as
+poor in spirit and looks as they. Yet now and again a young girl would
+pass, tall and fair and desirable, rousing in young men a not ignoble
+passion to possess, and in the old regret for the bliss they had missed.
+
+Near the _Ecole Militaire_ Evariste pointed out to his companion the
+Egyptian statues designed by David on Roman models of the age of
+Augustus, and they overheard a Parisian, an old man with powdered hair,
+ejaculate to himself:
+
+"Egad! you might think yourself on the banks of the Nile!"
+
+It was three days since Elodie had seen her lover, and serious events
+had befallen meantime at the _Amour peintre_. The _citoyen_ Blaise had
+been denounced to the Committee of General Security for fraudulent
+dealings in the matter of supplies to the armies. Fortunately for
+himself, the print-dealer was well known in his Section; the Committee
+of Surveillance of the _Section des Piques_ had stood guarantee of his
+patriotism with the general committee and had completely justified his
+conduct.
+
+This alarming incident Elodie now recounted in trembling accents,
+concluding:
+
+"We are quiet now, but the alarm was a hot one. A little more and my
+father would have been clapped in prison. If the danger had lasted a few
+hours more, I should have come to you, Evariste, to make interest for
+him among your influential friends."
+
+Evariste vouchsafed no reply to this, but Elodie was very far from
+realizing all his silence portended.
+
+They went on hand in hand along the banks of the river, discoursing of
+their mutual fondness in the phrases of Julie and Saint-Preux; the good
+Jean-Jacques gave them the colours to paint and prank their love withal.
+
+The Municipality of Paris had wrought a miracle,--abundance reigned for
+a day in the famished city. A fair was installed on the _Place des
+Invalides_, beside the Seine, where hucksters in booths sold sausages,
+saveloys, chitterlings, hams decked with laurels, Nanterre cakes,
+gingerbreads, pancakes, four-pound loaves, lemonade and wine. There were
+stalls also for the sale of patriotic songs, cockades, tricolour
+ribands, purses, pinchbeck watch-chains and all sorts of cheap gewgaws.
+Stopping before the display of a petty jeweller, Evariste selected a
+silver ring having a head of Marat in relief with a silk handkerchief
+wound about the brows, and put it on Elodie's finger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The same evening Gamelin proceeded to the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec to call on
+the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure, who had sent for him on pressing business.
+She received him in her bedchamber, reclining on a couch in a seductive
+dishabille.
+
+While the _citoyenne's_ attitude expressed a voluptuous languor,
+everything about her spoke of her accomplishments, her diversions, her
+talents,--a harp beside an open harpsichord, a guitar on a chair, an
+embroidering frame with a square of satin stretched on it, a
+half-finished miniature on a table among papers and books, a bookcase in
+dire disorder as if rifled by the hand of a fair reader as eager to know
+as to feel.
+
+She gave him her hand to kiss, and addressed him:
+
+"Greeting, sir juryman!... This very day Robespierre the elder gave me a
+letter in your favour to be handed to the President Herman, a very well
+turned letter, pretty much to this effect:
+
+"I bring to your notice the _citoyen_ Gamelin, commendable alike for his
+talents and for his patriotism. I have made it my duty to make known to
+you a patriot whose principles are good and his conduct steadfast in the
+right line of revolution. You will not let slip the opportunity of being
+useful to a Republican.... This letter I carried there and then to the
+President Herman, who received me with an exquisite politeness and
+signed your appointment on the spot. The thing is done."
+
+After a moment's pause:
+
+"_Citoyenne_," said Gamelin, "though I have not a morsel of bread to
+give my mother, I swear on my honour I accept the duties of a juror only
+to serve the Republic and avenge her on her foes."
+
+The _citoyenne_ thought this but a cold way of expressing gratitude and
+considered the sentiment high-flown. The young man was no adept, she
+suspected, at graceful courtesies. But she was too great an admirer of
+youth not to excuse some little lack of polish. Gamelin was a handsome
+fellow, and that was merit enough in her eyes. "We will form him," she
+said to herself. So she invited him to her suppers to which she welcomed
+her friends every evening after the theatre.
+
+"You will meet at my house men of wit and talent,--Elleviou, Talma, the
+_citoyen_ Vigee, who turns bouts-rimes with a marvellous aptitude. The
+_citoyen_ Francois read us his 'Pamela' the other day, the piece
+rehearsing at the present moment at the _Theatre de la Nation_. The
+style is elegant and chaste, as everything is that comes from the
+_citoyen_ Francois' pen. The plot is touching; it brought tears to all
+our eyes. It is the young _citoyenne_ Lange who is to take the part of
+'Pamela.'"
+
+"I believe it if you say so, _citoyenne_," answered Gamelin, "but the
+_Theatre de la Nation_ is scarcely National and it is hard on the
+_citoyen_ Francois that his works should be produced on the boards
+degraded by the contemptible verses of a Laya; the people has not
+forgotten the scandal of the _Ami des Lois_...."
+
+"Nay, _citoyen_ Gamelin, say what you will of Laya; he is none of my
+friends."
+
+It was not purely out of kindness that the _citoyenne_ had employed her
+credit to get Gamelin appointed to a much envied post; after what she
+had done for him and what peradventure she might come to do for him in
+the future, she counted on binding him closely to her interests and in
+that way securing for herself a protector connected with a tribunal she
+might one day or another have to reckon with; for the fact is, she was
+in constant correspondence with the French provinces and foreign
+countries, and at that date such a circumstance was ground enough for
+suspicion.
+
+"Do you often go to the theatre, _citoyen_?"
+
+As she asked the question, Henry, the dragoon, entered the room, looking
+more charming than the youthful Bathyllus. A brace of enormous pistols
+was passed through his belt.
+
+He kissed the fair _citoyenne's_ hand. Turning to him:
+
+"There stands the _citoyen_ Evariste Gamelin," she said, "for whose sake
+I have spent the day at the Committee of General Security, and who is an
+ungrateful wretch. Scold him for me."
+
+"Ah! _citoyenne_," cried the young soldier, "you have seen our
+Legislators at the Tuileries. What an afflicting sight! Is it seemly the
+Representatives of a free people should sit beneath the roof of a
+despot? The same lustres that once shone on the plots of Capet and the
+orgies of Antoinette now illumine the deliberations of our law-makers.
+'Tis enough to make Nature shudder."
+
+"Pray, congratulate the _citoyen_ Gamelin," was all her answer, "he is
+appointed juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunal."
+
+"My compliments, _citoyen_!" said Henry. "I am rejoiced to see a man of
+your character invested with these functions. But, to speak truth, I
+have small confidence in this systematic justice, set up by the
+moderates of the Convention, in this complaisant Nemesis that is
+considerate to conspirators and merciful to traitors, that hardly dares
+strike a blow at the Federalists and fears to summon _the Austrian_ to
+the bar. No, it is not the Revolutionary Tribunal will save the
+Republic. They are very culpable, the men who, in the desperate
+situation we are in, have arrested the flowing torrent of popular
+justice!"
+
+"Henry," interrupted the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure, "pass me that scent
+bottle, please...."
+
+On reaching home, Gamelin found his mother and old Brotteaux playing a
+game of piquet by the light of a smoky tallow-candle. At the moment the
+old woman was calling "sequence of kings" without the smallest scruple.
+
+When she heard her son was appointed juryman, she kissed him in a
+transport of triumph, thinking what an honour it was for both of them
+and that henceforth they would have plenty to eat every day.
+
+"I am proud and happy," she declared, "to be the mother of a juryman.
+Justice is a fine thing, and of all the most necessary; without justice
+the weak would be harassed every moment of their lives. And I think you
+will give right judgment, Evariste, my own boy; for from a child I have
+found you just and kind-hearted in all concerns. You could never endure
+wrong-doing and always tried what you could to hinder violence. You
+compassionated the unfortunate and that is the finest jewel in a juror's
+crown.... But tell me, Evariste, how are you dressed in your grand
+tribunal?"
+
+Gamelin informed her that the judges wore a hat with black plumes, but
+that the jury had no special costume, that they were dressed in their
+every-day attire.
+
+"It would be better," returned the good woman, "if they wore wig and
+gown; it would inspire more respect. Though you are mostly dressed
+carelessly, you are a handsome man and you set off your clothes; but the
+majority of men need some fine feathers to make them look imposing; yes,
+the jury should have wigs and gowns."
+
+The _citoyenne_ had heard say that the duties of a juror of the Tribunal
+carried a salary; and she had no hesitation in asking the question
+whether the emoluments were enough to live respectably on, for a
+juryman, she opined, ought to cut a good figure in the world.
+
+She was pleased to hear that each juror received an allowance of
+eighteen livres for every sitting and that the multiplicity of crimes
+against the security of the State obliged the court to sit very
+frequently.
+
+Old Brotteaux gathered up the cards, rose from the table and addressing
+Gamelin:
+
+"_Citoyen_," he said, "you are invested with an august and redoubtable
+office. I congratulate you on lending the light of your integrity to a
+tribunal more trustworthy and less fallible perhaps than any other,
+because it searches out good and evil, not in themselves and in their
+essence, but solely in relation to tangible interests and plain and
+obvious sentiments. You will have to determine betwixt hate and love,
+which is done spontaneously, not betwixt truth and falsehood, to
+discriminate which is impossible for the feeble mind of man. Giving
+judgment after the impulses of your heart, you will run no risk of
+mistake, inasmuch as the verdict will be good provided it satisfy the
+passions that are your sacred law. But, all the same, if I was your
+President, I should imitate Bridoie, I should appeal to the arbitrament
+of the dice. In matters of justice it is still the surest plan."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Evariste Gamelin was to enter on his duties on the 14th September, when
+the reorganization of the Tribunal was complete, according to which it
+was henceforth subdivided into four sections with fifteen jurors for
+each. The prisons were full to overflowing; the Public Prosecutor was
+working eighteen hours a day. Defeats in the field, revolts in the
+provinces, conspiracies, plots, betrayals, the Convention had one
+panacea for them all,--terror. The Gods were athirst.
+
+The first act of the new juror was to pay a visit of ceremony to the
+President Herman, who charmed him by the amiability of his conversation
+and the courtesy of his bearing. A compatriot and friend of
+Robespierre's, whose sentiments he shared, he showed every sign of a
+feeling and virtuous temper. He was deeply attached to those humane
+sentiments, too long foreign to the heart of our judges, that redound to
+the everlasting glory of a Dupaty and a Beccaria. He looked with
+complacency on the greater mildness of modern manners as evidenced, in
+judicial matters, by the abolition of torture and of ignominious or
+cruel forms of punishment. He was rejoiced to see the death penalty,
+once so recklessly inflicted and employed till quite lately for the
+repression of the most trifling offences, applied less frequently and
+reserved for heinous crimes. For his own part, he agreed with
+Robespierre and would gladly have seen it abolished altogether, except
+only in cases touching the public safety. At the same time, he would
+have deemed it treason to the State not to adjudge the punishment of
+death for crimes against the National Sovereignty.
+
+All his colleagues were of like mind; the old Monarchical idea of
+reasons of State still inspired the Revolutionary Tribunal. Eight
+centuries of absolute power had moulded the magisterial conscience, and
+it was by the principles of Divine Right that the Court even now tried
+and sentenced the enemies of Liberty.
+
+The same day Evariste Gamelin sought an interview with the Public
+Prosecutor, the _citoyen_ Fouquier, who received him in the Cabinet
+where he used to work with his clerk of the court. He was a sturdily
+built man, with a rough voice, catlike eyes, bearing in his pock-marked
+face and leaden complexion marks of the mischief wrought by a sedentary
+and indoor life on a vigorous constitution adapted to the open air and
+violent exercise. Towering piles of papers shut him in like the walls of
+a tomb, and it was plain to see he was in his element amid all these
+dreadful documents that seemed like to bury him alive. His conversation
+was that of a hard-working magistrate, a man devoted to his task and
+whose mind never left the narrow groove of his official duties. His
+fiery breath reeked of the brandy he took to keep up his strength; but
+the liquor seemed never to fly to his brain, so clear-headed, albeit
+entirely commonplace, was every word he uttered.
+
+He lived in a small suite of rooms in the Palais de Justice with his
+young wife, who had given him twin boys. His wife, an aunt Henriette and
+the maid-servant Pelagie made up the whole household. He was good and
+kind to these women. In a word, he was an excellent person in his family
+and professional relations, with a scarcity of ideas and a total lack of
+imagination.
+
+Gamelin could not help being struck unpleasantly by the close
+resemblance in temper and ways of thought between the new magistrates
+and their predecessors under the old regime. In fact, they were of the
+old regime; Herman had held the office of Advocate General to the
+Council of Artois; Fouquier was a former Procureur at the Chatelet. They
+had preserved their character, whereas Gamelin believed in a
+Revolutionary palingenesis.
+
+Quitting the precincts of the court, he passed along the great gallery
+of the Palace and halted in front of the shops where articles of every
+sort and kind were exposed for sale in the most attractive fashion.
+Standing before the _citoyenne_ Tenot's stall, he turned over sundry
+historical, political, and philosophical works:--"The Chains of
+Slavery," "An Essay on Despotism," "The Crimes of Queens." "Very good!"
+he thought, "here is Republican stuff!" and he asked the woman if she
+sold a great many of these books. She shook her head:
+
+"The only things that sell are songs and romances,"--and pulling a
+duodecimo volume out of a drawer:
+
+"Here," she told him, "here we have something good."
+
+Evariste read the title: "La Religieuse en chemise," "The Nun in
+dishabille!"
+
+Before the next shop he came upon Philippe Desmahis, who, with a tender,
+conquering-hero air, among the _citoyenne_ Saint-Jorre's perfumes and
+powders and sachets, was assuring the fair tradeswoman of his undying
+love, promising to paint her portrait and begging her to vouchsafe him a
+moment's talk that evening in the Tuileries gardens. There was no
+resisting him; persuasion sat on his lips and beamed from his eye. The
+_citoyenne_ Saint-Jorre was listening without a word, her eyes on the
+ground, only too ready to believe him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wishing to familiarize himself with the awful duties imposed on him, the
+new juror resolved to mingle with the throng and look on at a case
+before the Tribunal as a member of the general public. He climbed the
+great stairs on which a vast crowd was seated as in an amphitheatre and
+pushed his way into the ancient Hall of the Parlement of Paris.
+
+This was crammed to suffocation; some General or other was taking his
+trial. For in those days, as old Brotteaux put it, "the Convention,
+copying the example of His Britannic Majesty's Government, made a point
+of arraigning beaten Generals, in default of traitorous Generals, the
+latter taking good care not to stand their trial. Not that a beaten
+General," Brotteaux would add, "is necessarily criminal, for in the
+nature of things there must be one in every battle. But there's nothing
+like condemning a General to death for giving encouragement to others."
+
+Several had already appeared before the Tribunal; they were all alike,
+these empty-headed, opinionated soldiers with the brains of a sparrow in
+an ox's skull. This particular commander was pretty nearly as ignorant
+of the sieges and battles of his own campaign as the magistrates who
+were questioning him; both sides, prosecution and defence, were lost in
+a fog of effectives, objectives, munitions and ammunitions, marches and
+counter-marches. But the mass of citizens listening to these obscure and
+never-ending details could see behind the half-witted soldier the bare
+and bleeding breast of the fatherland enduring a thousand deaths; and by
+look and voice urged the jurymen, sitting quietly on their bench, to use
+their verdict as a club to fell the foes of the Republic.
+
+Evariste was firmly convinced of one thing,--what they had to strike at
+in the pitiful creature was the two dread monsters that were battening
+on the fatherland, revolt and defeat. What a to-do to discover if this
+particular soldier was innocent or guilty! When La Vendee was recovering
+heart, when Toulon was surrendering to the enemy, when the army of the
+Rhine was recoiling before the victors of Mayence, when the Army of the
+North, cowering in Caesar's Camp, might be taken at a blow by the
+Imperialists, the English, the Dutch, now masters of Valenciennes, the
+one important thing was to teach the Generals of the Republic to conquer
+or to die. To see yonder feeble-witted muddle-pated veteran losing
+himself under cross-examination among his maps as he had done before in
+the plains of Northern France, Gamelin longed to yell "death! death!"
+with the rest, and fled from the Hall of Audience to escape the
+temptation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the meeting of the Section, the newly appointed juryman received the
+congratulations of the President Olivier, who made him swear on the old
+high altar of the Barnabites, now altar of the fatherland, to stifle in
+his heart, in the sacred name of humanity, every human weakness.
+
+Gamelin, with uplifted right hand, invoked as witness of his oath the
+august shade of Marat, martyr of Liberty, whose bust had lately been set
+up against a pillar of the erstwhile church, facing that of Le Peltier.
+
+There was some applause, interrupted by cries of protest. The meeting
+was a stormy one; at the entrance of the nave stood a group of members
+of the Section, armed with pikes and shouting clamorously:
+
+"It is anti-republican," declared the President, "to carry arms at a
+meeting of free citizens,"--and he ordered the muskets and pikes to be
+deposited there and then in the erstwhile sacristy.
+
+A hunchback, with blazing eyes and lips drawn back so as to show the
+teeth, the _citoyen_ Beauvisage, of the Committee of Vigilance, mounted
+to the pulpit, now become the speakers' tribune and surmounted by a red
+cap of liberty.
+
+"The Generals are betraying us," he vociferated, "and surrendering our
+armies to the enemy. The Imperialists are pushing forward their cavalry
+around Peronne and Saint-Quentin. Toulon has been given up to the
+English, who are landing fourteen thousand men there. The foes of the
+Republic are busy with plots in the very bosom of the Convention. In the
+capital conspiracies without number are afoot to deliver _the Austrian_.
+At this very moment while I speak there runs a rumour that the Capet
+brat has escaped from the Temple and is being borne in triumph to
+Saint-Cloud by those who would fain re-erect the tyrant's throne in his
+favour. The dearness of food, the depreciation of the _assignats_ are
+the direct result of manoeuvres carried out in our own homes, beneath
+our very eyes, by the agents of the foreigners. In the name of public
+safety I call upon the new juryman, our fellow-citizen, to show no pity
+to conspirators and traitors."
+
+As he left the tribune, cries rose among the audience: "Down with the
+Revolutionary Tribunal! Down with the Moderates!"
+
+A stout, rosy-faced man, the _citoyen_ Dupont senior, a joiner living in
+the Place de Thionville, mounted the Tribune, announcing that he wished
+to ask a question of the new juror. Then he demanded of Gamelin what
+attitude he meant to take up in the matter of the Brissotins and of the
+widow Capet.
+
+Evariste was timid and unpractised in public speaking. But indignation
+gave him eloquence. He rose with a pale face and said in a voice of
+suppressed emotion:
+
+"I am a magistrate. I am responsible to my conscience only. Any promise
+I might make you would be against my duty, which is to speak in the
+Court and hold my peace elsewhere. I have ceased to know you. It is mine
+to give judgment; I know neither friends nor enemies."
+
+The meeting, made up like all meetings of divers elements and subject to
+sudden and incalculable moods, approved these sentiments. But the
+_citoyen_ Dupont returned to the charge; he could not forgive Gamelin
+for having secured a post he had coveted himself.
+
+"I understand," he said, "I even approve the juror's scruples. They say
+he is a patriot; it is for him to examine his conscience and see if it
+permits him to sit on a tribunal intended to destroy the enemies of the
+Republic and resolved to spare them. There are circumstances in which a
+good citizen is bound to repudiate all complicity. Is it not averred
+that more than one juror of this tribunal has let himself be corrupted
+by the gold of the accused, and that the President Montane falsified the
+procedure to save the head of the woman Corday?"
+
+At the words the hall resounded with vehement applause. The vaults were
+still reverberating with the uproar when Fortune Trubert mounted the
+tribune. He had grown thinner than ever in the last few months. His face
+was pale and the cheek-bones seemed ready to pierce the reddened skin;
+his eyes had a glassy look under the inflamed lids.
+
+"_Citoyens_," he began, in a weak, breathless voice that yet had a
+strangely penetrating quality, "we cannot suspect the Revolutionary
+Tribunal without at the same time suspecting the Convention and the
+Committee of Public Safety from which it derives its powers. The
+_citoyen_ Beauvisage has alarmed us, showing us the President Montane
+tampering with the course of justice in favour of a culprit. Why did he
+not add, to relieve our fears, that on the denunciation of the Public
+Prosecutor, Montane has been dismissed his office and thrown into
+prison?... Is it impossible to watch over the public safety without
+casting suspicion on all and sundry? Is there no talent, no virtue left
+in the Convention? Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, are not these
+honest men? It is a notable thing that the most violent language is held
+by individuals who have never been known to fight for the Republic. They
+could speak no otherwise if they wish to render her hateful. _Citoyens_,
+less talk, say I, and more work! It is with shot and shell and not with
+shouting that France will be saved. One-half the cellars of the Section
+have not been dug up. Not a few citizens still hold considerable
+quantities of bronze. We would remind the rich that patriotic gifts are
+for them the most potent guarantees. I recommend to your generosity the
+wives and daughters of our soldiers who are covering themselves with
+glory on the frontiers and on the Loire. One of these, the hussar
+Pommier (Augustin), formerly a cellarman's lad in the Rue de Jerusalem,
+on the 10th of last month, before Conde, when watering the troop horses,
+was set upon by six Austrian cavalrymen; he killed two of them and
+brought in the others prisoners. I ask the Section to declare that
+Pommier (Augustin) has done his duty."
+
+This speech was applauded and the Sectionaries dispersed with cries of
+"Vive la Republique!"
+
+Left alone in the nave with Trubert, Gamelin pressed the latter's hand.
+
+"Thank you. How are you?"
+
+"I? Oh! Very well, very well!" replied Trubert, coughing and spitting
+blood into his handkerchief. "The Republic has many enemies without and
+within, and our own Section counts a not inconsiderable number of them.
+It is not with loud talk but with iron and laws that empires are founded
+... good night, Gamelin; I have letters to write."
+
+And he disappeared, his handkerchief pressed to his lips, into the
+old-time sacristy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The widow Gamelin, her cockade now and henceforth fastened more
+carefully in her hood, had from one day to the next assumed a fine,
+consequential air, a Republican haughtiness and the dignified carriage
+suitable to the mother of a juror of the State.
+
+The veneration for the law in which she had been brought up, the
+admiration with which the magistrate's gown and cassock had from a child
+inspired her, the holy terror she had always experienced at sight of
+those to whom God had delegated on earth His divine right of life and
+death, these feelings made her regard as an august and worshipful and
+holy being the son whom till yesterday she had thought of as little more
+than a child. To her simple mind the conviction of the continuity of
+justice through all the changes of the Revolution was as strong as was
+that of the legislators of the Convention regarding the continuity of
+the State under varying systems of government, and the Revolutionary
+Tribunal appeared to her every whit as majestic as any of the
+time-honoured jurisdictions she had been taught to revere.
+
+The _citoyen_ Brotteaux showed the young magistrate an interest mingled
+with surprise and a reluctant deference. His views were the same as the
+widow Gamelin's as to the continuity of justice under successive
+governments; but, in flat contradiction to that good lady's attitude,
+his scorn for the Revolutionary Tribunals was on a par with his contempt
+for the courts of the ancien regime. Not daring to express his opinions
+openly and unable to make up his mind to say nothing, he indulged in a
+string of paradoxes which Gamelin understood just well enough to suspect
+the anti-patriotism that underlay them.
+
+"The august tribunal whereon you are soon to take your seat," he told
+him on one occasion, "was instituted by the French Senate for the
+security of the Republic; and it was for certain a magnanimous thought
+on the part of our legislators to set up a court to try our enemies. I
+appreciate its generosity, but I doubt its wisdom. It would have shown
+greater astuteness, it seems to me, if they had struck down in the dark
+the more irreconcilable of their adversaries and won over the rest by
+gifts and promises. A tribunal strikes slowly and effects more harm than
+it inspires fear; its first duty is to make an example. The mischief
+yours does is to unite together all whom it terrifies and make out of a
+mass of contradictory interests and passions a great party capable of
+common and effective action. You sow fear broadcast, and it is terror
+more than courage that produces heroes; I pray, _citoyen_, you may not
+one day see prodigies of terror arrayed against you!"
+
+The engraver Desmahis, in love that week with a light o' love of the
+Palais-Egalite named Flora, a brown-locked giantess, had nevertheless
+found five minutes to congratulate his comrade and tell him that such an
+appointment was a great compliment to the fine arts.
+
+Elodie herself, though without knowing it she detested everything
+revolutionary and who dreaded official functions as the most dangerous
+of rivals, the most likely to estrange her lover's affections, the
+tender Elodie was impressed by the glamour attaching to a magistrate
+called upon to pronounce judgment in matters of life and death. Besides
+which, Evariste's promotion as a juryman was followed by other fortunate
+results that filled her loving heart with satisfaction; the _citoyen_
+Jean Blaise made a point of calling at the studio in the Place de
+Thionville and embraced the young juror affectionately in a burst of
+manly sympathy.
+
+Like all the anti-revolutionaries, he had a great respect for the
+authorities established by the Republic, and ever since he had been
+denounced for fraud in connection with his supplies for the army, the
+Revolutionary Tribunal had inspired him with a wholesome dread. He felt
+himself to be a person too much in the public eye and mixed up in too
+many transactions to enjoy perfect security; so the _citoyen_ Gamelin
+struck him as a friend worth cultivating. When all was said, one was a
+good citizen and on the side of justice.
+
+He gave the painter magistrate his hand, declaring himself his true
+friend and a true patriot, a well-wisher of the arts and of liberty.
+Gamelin forgot his injuries and pressed the hand so generously offered.
+
+"_Citoyen_ Evariste Gamelin," said Jean Blaise, "I appeal to you as a
+friend and as a man of talent. I am going to take you to-morrow for two
+days' jaunt in the country; you can do some drawing and we can enjoy a
+talk."
+
+Several times every year the print-dealer was in the habit of making a
+two or three days' expedition of this sort in the company of artists who
+made drawings, according to his suggestions, of landscapes and ruins. He
+was quick to see what would please the public and these little journeys
+always resulted in some picturesque bits which were then finished at
+home and cleverly engraved; prints in red or colours were struck off
+from these, and brought in a good profit to the _citoyen_ Blaise. From
+the same sketches he had over-doors and panels executed, which sold as
+well or better than the decorative works of Hubert Robert.
+
+On this occasion he had invited the _citoyen_ Gamelin to accompany him
+to sketch buildings after nature, so much had the juror's office
+increased the painter's importance in his eyes. Two other artists were
+of the party, the engraver Desmahis, who drew well, and an almost
+unknown man, Philippe Dubois, an excellent designer in the style of
+Robert. According to custom, the _citoyenne_ Elodie with her friend the
+_citoyenne_ Hasard accompanied the artists. Jean Blaise, an adept at
+combining pleasure with profit, had also extended an invitation to the
+_citoyenne_ Thevenin, an actress at the Vaudeville, who was reputed to
+be on the best of terms with him.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+On Saturday at seven in the morning the _citoyen_ Blaise, in a black
+cocked-hat, scarlet waistcoat, doe-skin breeches, and boots with yellow
+tops, rapped with the handle of his riding-whip at the studio door. The
+_citoyenne_ Gamelin was in the room in polite conversation with the
+_citoyen_ Brotteaux, while Evariste stood before a bit of looking-glass
+knotting his high white cravat.
+
+"A pleasant journey, Monsieur Blaise!" the _citoyenne_ greeted him.
+"But, as you are going to paint landscapes, why don't you take Monsieur
+Brotteaux, who is a painter?"
+
+"Well, well," said Jean Blaise, "will you come with us, _citoyen_
+Brotteaux?"
+
+On being assured he would not be intruding, Brotteaux, a man of a
+sociable temper and fond of all amusements, accepted the invitation.
+
+The _citoyenne_ Elodie had climbed the four storeys to embrace the widow
+Gamelin, whom she called her good mother. She was in white from head to
+foot, and smelt of lavender.
+
+An old two-horsed travelling _berline_ stood waiting in the Place, with
+the hood down. Rose Thevenin occupied the back seat with Julienne
+Hasard. Elodie made the actress sit on the right, took the left-hand
+place herself and put the slim Julienne between the two of them.
+Brotteaux settled himself, back to the horses, facing the _citoyenne_
+Thevenin; Philippe Dubois, opposite the _citoyenne_ Hasard; Evariste
+opposite Elodie. As for Philippe Desmahis, he planted his athletic
+figure on the box, on the coachman's left, and proceeded to amaze that
+worthy with a traveller's tale about a country in America where the
+trees bore chitterlings and saveloys by way of fruit.
+
+The _citoyen_ Blaise, who was a capital rider, took the road on
+horseback, going on in front to escape the dust from the _berline_.
+
+As the wheels rattled merrily over the suburban roads the travellers
+began to forget their cares, and at sight of the green fields and trees
+and sky, their minds turned to gay and pleasant thoughts. Elodie dreamed
+she was surely born to rear poultry with Evariste, a country justice, to
+help her, in some village on a river bank beside a wood. The roadside
+elms whirled by as they sped along. Outside the villages the peasants'
+mastiffs dashed out to intercept the carriage and barked at the horses,
+while a fat spaniel, lying in the roadway, struggled reluctantly to its
+feet; the fowls scattered and fled; the geese in a close-packed band
+waddled slowly out of the way. The children, with their fresh morning
+faces, watched the company go by. It was a hot day and a cloudless sky.
+The parched earth was thirsting for rain. They alighted just outside
+Villejuif. On their way through the little town, Desmahis went into a
+fruiterer's to buy cherries for the overheated _citoyennes_. The
+shop-keeper was a pretty woman, and Desmahis showed no signs of
+reappearing. Philippe Dubois shouted to him, using the nickname his
+friends constantly gave him:
+
+"Ho there! Barbaroux!... Barbaroux!"
+
+At this hated name the passers-by pricked up their ears and faces
+appeared at every window. Then, when they saw a young and handsome man
+emerge from the shop, his jacket thrown open, his neckerchief flying
+loose over a muscular chest, and carrying over his shoulder a basket of
+cherries and his coat at the end of a stick, taking him for the
+proscribed girondist, a posse of _sansculottes_ laid violent hands on
+him. Regardless of his indignant protests, they would have haled him to
+the town-hall, had not old Brotteaux, Gamelin, and the three young women
+borne testimony that the _citoyen_ was named Philippe Desmahis, a
+copper-plate engraver and a good Jacobin. Even then the suspect had to
+show his _carte de civisme_, which he had in his pocket by great good
+luck, for he was very heedless in such matters. At this price he escaped
+from the hands of these patriotic villagers without worse loss than one
+of his lace ruffles, which had been torn off; but this was a trifle
+after all. He even received the apologies of the National Guards who had
+hustled him the most savagely and who now spoke of carrying him in
+triumph to the Hotel de Ville.
+
+A free man again and with the _citoyennes_ Elodie, Rose, and Julienne
+crowding round him, Desmahis looked at Philippe Dubois--he did not like
+the man and suspected him of having played him a practical joke--with a
+wry smile, and towering above him by a whole head:
+
+"Dubois," he told him, "if you call me Barbaroux again, I shall call you
+Brissot; he is a little fat man with a silly face, greasy hair, an oily
+skin and damp hands. They'll be perfectly sure you are the infamous
+Brissot, the people's enemy; and the good Republicans, filled with
+horror and loathing at sight of you, will hang you from the nearest
+lamp-post. You hear me?"
+
+The _citoyen_ Blaise, who had been watering his horse, announced that he
+had arranged the affair, though it was quite plain to everybody that it
+had been arranged without him.
+
+The company got in again, and as they drove on, Desmahis informed the
+coachman that in this same plain of Longjumeau several inhabitants of
+the Moon had once come down, in shape and colour much like frogs, only
+very much bigger. Philippe Dubois and Gamelin talked about their art.
+Dubois, a pupil of Regnault, had been to Rome, where he had seen
+Raphael's tapestries, which he set above all the masterpieces of the
+world. He admired Correggio's colouring, Annibale Caracci's invention,
+Domenichino's drawing, but thought nothing comparable in point of style
+with the pictures of Pompeio Battoni. He had been in touch at Rome with
+Monsieur Menageot and Madame Lebrun, who had both pronounced against the
+Revolution; so the less said of them the better. But he spoke highly of
+Angelica Kauffmann, who had a pure taste and a fine knowledge of the
+Antique.
+
+Gamelin deplored that the apogee of French painting, belated as it was,
+for it only dated from Lesueur, Claude and Poussin and corresponded with
+the decadence of the Italian and Flemish schools, had been succeeded by
+so rapid and profound a decline. This he attributed to the degraded
+state of manners and to the Academy, which was the expression of that
+state. But the Academy had been happily abolished, and under the
+influence of new canons, David and his school were creating an art
+worthy of a free people. Among the young painters, Gamelin, without a
+trace of envy, gave the first place to Hennequin and Topino-Lebrun.
+Philippe Dubois preferred his own master Regnault to David, and founded
+his hopes for the future of painting on that rising artist Gerard.
+
+Meantime Elodie complimented the _citoyenne_ Thevenin on her red velvet
+toque and white gown. The actress repaid the compliment by
+congratulating her two companions on their toilets and advising them how
+to do better still; the thing, she said, was to be more sparing in
+ornaments and trimmings.
+
+"A woman can never be dressed too simply," was her dictum. "We see this
+on the stage, where the costume should allow every pose to be
+appreciated. That is its true beauty and it needs no other."
+
+"You are right, my dear," replied Elodie. "Only there is nothing more
+expensive in dress than simplicity. It is not always out of bad taste we
+add frills and furbelows; sometimes it is to save our pockets."
+
+They discussed eagerly the autumn fashions,--frocks entirely plain and
+short-waisted.
+
+"So many women disfigure themselves through following the fashion!"
+declared Rose Thevenin. "In dressing every woman should study her own
+figure."
+
+"There is nothing beautiful save draperies that follow the lines of the
+figure and fall in folds," put in Gamelin. "Everything that is cut out
+and sewn is hideous."
+
+These sentiments, more appropriate in a treatise of Winckelmann's than
+in the mouth of a man talking to Parisiennes, met with the scorn they
+deserved, being entirely disregarded.
+
+"For the winter," observed Elodie, "they are making quilted gowns in
+Lapland style of taffeta and muslin, and coats _a la Zulime_,
+round-waisted and opening over a stomacher _a la Turque_."
+
+"Nasty cheap things," declared the actress, "you can buy them ready
+made. Now I have a little seamstress who works like an angel and is not
+dear; I'll send her to see you, my dear."
+
+So they prattled on trippingly, eagerly discussing and appraising
+different fine fabrics--striped taffeta, self-coloured china silk,
+muslin, gauze, nankeen.
+
+And old Brotteaux, as he listened to them, thought with a pensive
+pleasure of these veils that hide women's charms and change
+incessantly,--how they last for a few years to be renewed eternally like
+the flowers of the field. And his eyes, as they wandered from the three
+pretty women to the cornflowers and the poppies in the wheat, were wet
+with smiling tears.
+
+They reached Orangis about nine o'clock and stopped before the inn, the
+_Auberge de la Cloche_, where the Poitrines, husband and wife, offered
+accommodation for man and beast. The _citoyen_ Blaise, who had repaired
+any disorder in his dress, helped the _citoyennes_ to alight. After
+ordering dinner for midday, they all set off, preceded by their
+paintboxes, drawing-boards, easels, and parasols, which were carried by
+a village lad, for the meadows near the confluence of the Orge and the
+Yvette, a charming bit of country giving a view over the verdant plain
+of Longjumeau and bounded by the Seine and the woods of
+Sainte-Genevieve.
+
+Jean Blaise, the leader of the troop of artists, was bandying funny
+stories with the _ci-devant_ financier, tales that brought in without
+rhyme or reason Verboquet the Open-handed, Catherine Cuissot the pedlar,
+the demoiselles Chaudron, the fortune-teller Galichet, as well as
+characters of a later time like Cadet-Rousselle and Madame Angot.
+
+Evariste, inspired with a sudden love of nature, as he saw a troop of
+harvesters binding their sheaves, felt the tears rise to his eyes, while
+visions of concord and affection filled his heart. For his part,
+Desmahis was blowing the light down of the seeding dandelions into the
+_citoyennes'_ hair. All three loved posies, as town-bred girls always
+do, and were busy in the meadows plucking the mullein, whose blossoms
+grow in spikes close round the stem, the campanula, with its little
+blue-bells hanging in rows one above another, the slender twigs of the
+scented vervain, wallwort, mint, dyer's weed, milfoil--all the wild
+flowers of late summer. Jean-Jacques had made botany the fashion among
+townswomen, so all three knew the name and symbolism of every flower. As
+the delicate petals, drooping for want of moisture, wilted in her hands
+and fell in a shower about her feet, the _citoyenne_ Elodie sighed:
+
+"They are dying already, the poor flowers!"
+
+All set to work and strove to express nature as they saw her; but each
+saw her through the eyes of a master. In a short time Philippe Dubois
+had knocked off in the style of Hubert Robert a deserted farm, a clump
+of storm-riven trees, a dried-up torrent. Evariste Gamelin found a
+landscape by Poussin ready made on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe
+Desmahis was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of
+Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux who piqued himself on imitating the
+Flemings, was drawing a cow with infinite care. Elodie was sketching a
+peasant's hut, while her friend Julienne, who was a colourman's
+daughter, set her palette. A swarm of children pressed about her,
+watching her paint, whom she would scold out of her light at intervals,
+calling them pestering gnats and giving them lollipops. The _citoyenne_
+Thevenin, picking out the pretty ones, would wash their faces, kiss them
+and put flowers in their hair. She fondled them with a gentle air of
+melancholy, because she had missed the joy of motherhood,--as well as to
+heighten her fascinations by a show of tender sentiment and to practise
+herself in the art of pose and grouping.
+
+She was the only member of the party neither drawing nor painting. She
+devoted her attention to learning a part and still more to charming her
+companions, flitting from one to another, book in hand, a bright,
+entrancing creature.
+
+"No complexion, no figure, no voice, no nothing," declared the
+women,--and she filled the earth with movement, colour and harmony.
+Faded, pretty, tired, indefatigable, she was the joy of the expedition.
+A woman of ever-varying moods, but always gay, sensitive, quick-tempered
+and yet easy-going and accommodating, a sharp tongue with the most
+polished utterance, vain, modest, true, false, delightful; if Rose
+Thevenin enjoyed no triumphant success, if she was not worshipped as a
+goddess, it was because the times were out of joint and Paris had no
+more incense, no more altars for the Graces. The _citoyenne_ Blaise
+herself, who made a face when she spoke of her and used to call her "my
+step-mother," could not see her and not be subjugated by such an array
+of charms.
+
+They were rehearsing _Les Visitandines_ at the Theatre Feydeau, and Rose
+was full of self-congratulation at having a part full of "naturalness."
+It was this quality she strove after, this she sought and this she
+found.
+
+"Then we shall not see 'Pamela'?" asked Desmahis.
+
+The Theatre de la Nation was closed and the actors packed off to the
+Madelonnettes and to Pelagie.
+
+"Do you call that liberty?" cried Rose Thevenin, raising her beautiful
+eyes to heaven in indignant protest.
+
+"The players of the Theatre de la Nation are aristocrats, and the
+_citoyen_ Francois' piece tends to make men regret the privileges of the
+noblesse."
+
+"Gentlemen," said Rose Thevenin, "have you patience to listen only to
+those who flatter you?"
+
+As midday approached everybody began to feel pangs of hunger and the
+little band marched back to the inn.
+
+Evariste walked beside Elodie, smilingly recalling memories of their
+first meetings:
+
+"Two young birds had fallen out of their nests on the roof on to the
+sill of your window. You brought the little creatures up by hand; one of
+them lived and in due time flew away. The other died in the nest of
+cotton-wool you had made him. 'It was the one I loved best,' I remember
+you said. That day, Elodie, you were wearing a red bow in your hair."
+
+Philippe Dubois and Brotteaux, a little behind the rest, were talking of
+Rome, where they had both been, the latter in '72, the other towards the
+last days of the Academy. Brotteaux indeed had never forgotten the
+Princess Mondragone, to whom he would most certainly have poured out
+his plaints but for the Count Altieri, who always followed her like her
+shadow. Nor did Philippe Dubois fail to mention that he had been invited
+to dine with Cardinal de Bernis and that he was the most obliging host
+in the world.
+
+"I knew him," said Brotteaux, "and I may add without boasting that I was
+for some while one of his most intimate friends; he had a taste for low
+society. He was an amiable man, and for all his affectation of telling
+fairy tales, there was more sound philosophy in his little finger than
+in the heads of all you Jacobins, who are for making us virtuous and
+God-fearing by Act of Parliament. Upon my word I prefer our
+simple-minded theophagists who know not what they say nor yet what they
+do, to these mad law-menders, who make it their business to guillotine
+us in order to render us wise and virtuous and adorers of the Supreme
+Being who has created them in His likeness. In former days I used to
+have Mass said in the Chapel at Les Ilettes by a poor devil of a Cure
+who used to say in his cups: 'Don't let's speak ill of sinners; we live
+by 'em, we priests, unworthy as we are!' You must agree, sir, this
+prayer-monger held sound maxims of government. We should adopt his
+principles, and govern men as being what they are and not what we should
+like them to be."
+
+Rose Thevenin had meantime drawn closer to the old man. She knew he had
+lived on a grand scale, and the thought of this gilded the _ci-devant_
+financier's present poverty, which she deemed less humiliating as being
+due to general causes, the result of the public bankruptcy. She saw in
+him, with curiosity not unmixed with respect, the survival of one of
+those open-handed millionaires of whom her elder comrades of the stage
+spoke with sighs of unfeigned regret. Besides, the old fellow in his
+plum-coloured coat, so threadbare and so well brushed, pleased her by
+his agreeable address.
+
+"Monsieur Brotteaux," she said to him, "we know how once upon a time, in
+a noble park, on moonlight nights, you would slip into the shade of
+myrtle groves with actresses and dancing-girls to the far-off shrilling
+of flutes and fiddles.... Alas! they were more lovely, were they not,
+your goddesses of the Opera and the Comedie-Francaise, than we of
+to-day, we poor little National actresses?"
+
+"Never think it, Mademoiselle," returned Brotteaux, "but believe me, if
+one like you had been known in those days, she would have moved alone,
+as sovereign queen without a rival (little as she would have desired
+such solitude), in the park you are obliging enough to form so
+flattering a picture of...."
+
+It was quite a rustic inn, this Hotel de la Cloche. A branch of holly
+hung over the great waggon doors that opened on a courtyard where fowls
+were always pecking about in the damp soil. On the far side of this
+stood the house itself, consisting of a ground floor and one storey
+above, crowned by a high-pitched tiled roof and with walls almost hidden
+under old climbing rose-trees covered with blossom. To the right,
+trimmed fruit-trees showed their tops above the low garden wall. To the
+left was the stable, with an outside manger and a barn supported by
+wooden pillars. A ladder leaned against the wall. Here again, under a
+shed crowded with agricultural implements and stumps of trees, a white
+cock was keeping an eye on his hens from the top of a broken-down
+cabriolet. The courtyard was enclosed on this side by cow-sheds, in
+front of which rose in mountainous grandeur a dunghill which at this
+moment a girl as broad as she was long, with straw-coloured hair, was
+turning over with a pitchfork. The liquid manure filled her sabots and
+bathed her bare feet, and you could see the heels rise out of her shoes
+every now and then as yellow as saffron. Her petticoats were kilted and
+revealed the filth on her enormous calves and thick ankles. While
+Philippe Desmahis was staring at her, surprised and tickled by the
+whimsicalities of nature in framing this odd example of breadth without
+length, the landlord shouted:
+
+"Ho, there! Tronche, my girl! go fetch some water!"
+
+She turned her head, showing a scarlet face and a vast mouth in which
+one huge front tooth was missing. It had needed nothing less than a
+bull's horn to effect a breach in that powerful jaw. She stood there
+grinning, pitchfork on shoulder. Her sleeves were rolled up and her
+arms, as thick as another woman's thighs, gleamed in the sun.
+
+The table was laid in the farm kitchen, where a brace of fowls was
+roasting,--they were almost done to a turn,--under the hood of the open
+fireplace, above which hung two or three old fowling-pieces by way of
+ornament. The bare whitewashed room, twenty feet long, was lighted only
+through the panes of greenish glass let into the door and by a single
+window, framed in roses, near which the grandmother sat turning her
+spinning-wheel. She wore a coif and a lace frilling in the fashion of
+the Regency. Her gnarled, earth-stained fingers held the distaff. Flies
+clustered about her lids without her trying to drive them away. As a
+child in her mother's arms, she had seen Louis XIV go by in his coach.
+
+Sixty years ago she had made the journey to Paris. In a weak sing-song
+voice she told the tale to the three young women, standing in front of
+her, how she had seen the Hotel de Ville, the Tuileries and the
+Samaritaine, and how, when she was crossing the Pont-Royal, a barge
+loaded with apples for the Marche du Mail had broken up, the apples had
+floated down the current and the river was all red with the rosy-cheeked
+fruit.
+
+She had been told of the changes that had occurred of late in the
+kingdom, and in particular of the coil there was betwixt the cures who
+had taken the oath and the nonjuring cures. She knew likewise there had
+been wars and famines and portents in the sky. She did not believe the
+King was dead. They had contrived his escape, she _would_ have it, by a
+subterranean passage, and had handed over to the headsman in his stead a
+man of the common people.
+
+At the old woman's feet, in his wicker cradle, Jeannot, the last born of
+the Poitrines, was cutting his teeth. The _citoyenne_ Thevenin lifted
+the cradle and smiled at the child, which moaned feebly, worn out with
+feverishness and convulsions. It must have been very ill, for they had
+sent for the doctor, the _citoyen_ Pelleport, who, it is true, being a
+deputy-substitute to the Convention, asked no payment for his visits.
+
+The _citoyenne_ Thevenin, an innkeeper's daughter herself, was in her
+element; not satisfied with the way the farm-girl had washed the plates
+and dishes, she gave an extra wipe to the crockery and glass, an extra
+polish to the knives and forks. While the _citoyenne_ Poitrine was
+attending to the soup, which she tasted from time to time as a good cook
+should, Elodie was cutting up into slices a four-pound loaf hot from the
+oven. Gamelin, when he saw what she was doing, addressed her:
+
+"A few days ago I read a book written by a young German whose name I
+have forgotten, and which has been very well translated into French. In
+it you have a beautiful young girl named Charlotte, who, like you,
+Elodie, was cutting bread and butter, and like you, cutting it
+gracefully, and so prettily that at the sight the young Werther fell in
+love with her."
+
+"And it ended in their marrying?" asked Elodie.
+
+"No," replied Evariste; "it ended in Werther's death by violence."
+
+They dined well, they were all very hungry; but the fare was
+indifferent. Jean Blaise complained bitterly; he was a great trencherman
+and made it a rule of conduct to feed well; and no doubt what urged him
+to elaborate his gluttony into a system was the general scarcity. In
+every household the Revolution had overturned the cooking pot. The
+common run of citizens had nothing to chew upon. Clever folks like Jean
+Blaise, who made big profits amid the general wretchedness, went to the
+cookshop where they showed their astuteness by stuffing themselves to
+repletion. As for Brotteaux who, in this year II of liberty, was living
+on chestnuts and bread-crusts, he could remember having supped at Grimod
+de la Reyniere's at the near end of the Champs Elysees. Eager to win the
+repute of an accomplished gourmand he reeled off, sitting there before
+Dame Poitrine's bacon and cabbages, a string of artful kitchen recipes
+and wise gastronomic maxims. Presently, when Gamelin protested that a
+Republican scorns the pleasures of the table, the old financier, always
+a lover of antiquity, gave the young Spartan the true recipe for the
+famous black broth.
+
+After dinner, Jean Blaise, who never forgot business, set his itinerant
+academy to make studies and sketches of the inn, which struck him as
+quite romantic in its dilapidation. While Philippe Desmahis and Philippe
+Dubois were drawing the cow-houses the girl Tronche came out to feed the
+pigs. The _citoyen_ Pelleport, officer of health, who at the same moment
+appeared at the door of the farm kitchen where he had been bestowing his
+professional services on the Poitrine baby, stepped up to the artists
+and after complimenting them on their talents, which were an honour to
+the whole nation, pointed to the Tronche girl in the middle of her
+porkers:
+
+"You see that creature," he said, "it is not one girl, it is two girls.
+I speak by the letter, understand that. I was amazed at the
+extraordinary massiveness of her bony framework and I examined her, to
+discover she had most of the bones in duplicate--in each thigh two
+femurs welded together, in each shoulder a double humerus. Some of her
+muscles are likewise in duplicate. It is a case, in my view, of a pair
+of twins associated or rather confounded together. It is an interesting
+phenomenon. I notified Monsieur Saint-Hilaire of the facts, and he
+thanked me. It is a monster you see before you, _citoyens_. The people
+here call her 'the girl Tronche'; they should say 'the girls Tronches,'
+for there are two of them. Nature has these freaks.... Good evening,
+_citoyens_; we shall have a storm to-night...."
+
+After supper by candle-light, the Academy Blaise adjourned to the
+courtyard where they were joined by a son and daughter of the house in
+a game of blindman's-buff, in which the young folks, both men and women,
+displayed a feverish energy sufficiently accounted for by the high
+spirits proper to their age without seeking an explanation in the wild
+and precarious times in which they lived. When it was quite dark, Jean
+Blaise proposed children's games in the farm kitchen. Elodie suggested
+the game of "hunt my heart," and this was agreed to unanimously. Under
+the girl's direction Philippe Desmahis traced in chalk, on different
+pieces of furniture, on doors and walls, seven hearts, that is to say
+one less than there were players, for old Brotteaux had obligingly
+joined the rest. They danced round in a ring singing "La Tour, prends
+garde!" and at a signal from Elodie, each ran to put a hand on a heart.
+Gamelin in his absent-minded clumsiness was too late to find one vacant,
+and had to pay a forfeit, the little knife he had bought for six sous at
+the fair of Saint-Germain and with which he had cut the loaf for his
+mother in her poverty. The game went on, and one after the other Blaise,
+Elodie, Brotteaux and Rose Thevenin failed to touch a heart; each paid a
+forfeit in turn--a ring, a reticule, a little morocco-bound book, a
+bracelet. Then the forfeits were raffled on Elodie's lap, and each
+player had to redeem his property by showing his society
+accomplishments--singing a song or reciting a poem. Brotteaux chose the
+speech of the patron saint of France in the first canto of the
+_Pucelle_:
+
+    "Je suis Denis et saint de mon metier,
+    J'aime la Gaule,..."[2]
+
+
+The _citoyen_ Blaise, though a far less well-read man, replied without
+hesitation with Richemond's ripost:
+
+    "Monsieur le Saint, ce n'etait pas la peine
+    D'abandonner le celeste domaine...."[3]
+
+
+At that time everybody was reading and re-reading with delight the
+masterpiece of the French Ariosto; the most serious of men smiled over
+the loves of Jeanne and Dunois, the adventures of Agnes and Monrose and
+the exploits of the winged ass. Every man of cultivation knew by heart
+the choice passages of this diverting and philosophical poem. Evariste
+Gamelin himself, stern-tempered as he was, when he recovered his
+twopenny knife from Elodie's lap, recited the going down of Grisbourdon
+into hell, with a good deal of spirit. The _citoyenne_ Thevenin sang
+without accompaniment Nina's ballad:
+
+"_Quand le bien-aime reviendra._"
+
+Desmahis sang to the tune of _La Faridondaine_:
+
+    "Quelques-uns prirent le cochon
+      De ce bon saint Antoine,
+    Et lui mettant un capuchon,
+      Ils en firent un moine.
+    Il n'en coutait que la facon...."[4]
+
+All the same Desmahis was in a pensive mood. For the moment he was
+ardently in love with all the three women with whom he was playing
+forfeits, and was casting burning looks of soft appeal at each in turn.
+He loved Rose Thevenin for her grace, her supple figure, her clever
+acting, her roving glances, and her voice that went straight to a man's
+heart; he loved Elodie, because he recognized instinctively her rich
+endowment of temperament and her kind, complaisant humour; he loved
+Julienne Hasard, despite her colourless hair, her pale eyelashes, her
+freckles and her thin bust, because, like Dunois in Voltaire's
+_Pucelle_, he was always ready, in his generosity, to give the least
+engaging a token of love--and the more so in this instance because she
+appeared to be for the moment the most neglected, and therefore the most
+amenable to his attentions. Without a trace of vanity, he was never sure
+of these being agreeable; nor yet was he ever sure of their not being.
+So he never omitted to offer them on the chance. Taking advantage of the
+opportunities offered by the game of forfeits, he made some tender
+speeches to Rose Thevenin, who showed no displeasure, but could hardly
+say much in return under the jealous eyes of the _citoyen_ Jean Blaise.
+He spoke more warmly still to the _citoyenne_ Elodie, whom he knew to be
+pledged to Gamelin, but he was not so exacting as to want a heart all to
+himself. Elodie could never care for him; but she thought him a handsome
+fellow and did not altogether succeed in hiding the fact from him.
+Finally, he whispered his most ardent vows in the ear of the _citoyenne_
+Hasard, which she received with an air of bewildered stupefaction that
+might equally express abject submission or chill indifference. And
+Desmahis did not believe she was indifferent to him.
+
+The inn contained only two bedrooms, both on the first floor and opening
+on the same landing. That to the left, the better of the two, boasted a
+flowered paper and a looking-glass the size of a man's hand, the gilt
+frame of which had been blackened by generations of flies since the days
+when Louis XIV was a child. In it, under sprigged muslin curtains, stood
+two beds with down pillows, coverlets and counterpanes. This room was
+reserved for the three _citoyennes_.
+
+When the time came to retire, Desmahis and the _citoyenne_ Hasard, each
+holding a bedroom candlestick, wished each other good-night on the
+landing. The amorous engraver quickly passed a note to the colourman's
+daughter, beseeching her to come to him, when everybody was asleep, in
+the garret, which was over the _citoyennes'_ chamber.
+
+With judicious foresight, he had taken care in the course of the day to
+study the lie of the land and explore the garret in question, which was
+full of strings of onions, apples and pears left there to ripen with a
+swarm of wasps crawling over them, chests and old trunks. He had even
+noticed an old bed of sacking, decrepit and now disused, as far as he
+could see, and a palliasse, all ripped up and jumping with fleas.
+
+Facing the _citoyennes'_ room was another of very modest dimensions
+containing three beds, where the men of the party were to sleep, in such
+comfort as they might. But Brotteaux, who was a Sybarite, betook himself
+to the barn to sleep among the hay. As for Jean Blaise, _he_ had
+disappeared. Dubois and Gamelin were soon asleep. Desmahis went to bed;
+but no sooner had the silence of night, like a stagnant pool, enveloped
+the house, than the engraver got up and climbed the wooden staircase,
+which creaked under his bare feet. The door of the garret stood ajar.
+From within came a breath of stifling hot air, mingled with the acrid
+smell of rotting fruit. On the broken-down bed of sacking lay the girl
+Tronche, fast asleep with her mouth open.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+       *       *       *       *       *
+       *       *       *       *       *
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmahis returned to his room, where he slept soundly and peacefully
+till daybreak.
+
+On the morrow, after a last day's work, the itinerant Academy took the
+road back to Paris. When Jean Blaise paid mine host in assignats, the
+_citoyen_ Poitrine complained bitterly that he never saw what he called
+"square money" nowadays, and promised a fine candle to the beggar who'd
+bring back the "yellow boys" again.
+
+He offered the _citoyennes_ their pick of flowers. At his orders, the
+girl Tronche mounted on a ladder in her sabots and kilted skirts, giving
+a full view of her noble, much-bespattered calves, and was indefatigable
+in cutting blossoms from the climbing roses that covered the wall. From
+her huge hands the flowers fell in showers, in torrents, in avalanches,
+into the laps of Elodie, Julienne, and Rose Thevenin, who held out their
+skirts to catch them. The carriage was full of them. The whole party,
+when they got back at nightfall, carried armfuls home, and their
+sleeping and waking were perfumed with their fragrance.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2]
+
+    "I am Denis, and sainthood is my trade,
+    I love the land of Gaul,... etc."
+
+
+
+[3]
+
+    "Well, well, sir Saint, 'twas hardly worth your pains
+    Thus to forsake the heavenly domains...."
+
+
+
+[4]
+
+    "Some ribalds took the pig,
+      Of the good St. Anthony,
+    And clapping a cowl on's head,
+      They made the brute a monk.
+    'Twas all a matter of dress...."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+In the forenoon of the 7th September the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure, on her
+way to visit Gamelin, the new juror, whose interest she wished to
+solicit on behalf of an acquaintance, who had been denounced as a
+suspect, encountered on the landing the _ci-devant_ Brotteaux des
+Ilettes, who had been her lover in the old happy days. Brotteaux was
+just starting to deliver a gross of dancing-dolls of his manufacture to
+the toy-merchant in the Rue de la Loi; for their more convenient
+carriage he had hit on the idea of tying them at the end of a pole, as
+the street hawkers do with their commodities. His manners were always
+chivalrous towards women, even to those whose fascination for him had
+been blunted by long familiarity, as could hardly fail to be the case
+with Madame de Rochemaure,--unless indeed he found her appetizing with
+the added seasoning of betrayal, absence, unfaithfulness and fat. Be
+this as it may, he now greeted her on the sordid stairs with their
+cracked tiles as courteously as he had ever done on the steps before the
+entrance-door of Les Ilettes, and begged her to do him the honour of
+entering his garret. She climbed the ladder nimbly enough and found
+herself under a timbering, the sloping beams of which supported a tiled
+roof pierced with a skylight. It was impossible to stand upright. She
+sat down on the only chair there was in the wretched place; after a
+brief glance at the broken tiling, she asked in a tone of surprise and
+sorrow:
+
+"Is this where you live, Maurice? You need have little fear of
+intruders. One must be an imp or a cat to find you here."
+
+"I am cramped for space," returned the _ci-devant_ millionaire; "and I
+do not deny the fact that sometimes it rains on my pallet. It is a
+trifling inconvenience. And on fine nights I can see the moon, symbol
+and confidant of men's loves. For the moon, Madame, since the world
+began, has been apostrophized by lovers, and at her full, with her pale
+round face, she recalls to the fond swain's mind the object of his
+desires."
+
+"I know," sighed the _citoyenne_.
+
+"When their time comes the cats make a fine pandemonium in the rain
+gutter yonder. But we must forgive love if it makes them caterwaul and
+swear on the tiles, seeing how it fills the lives of men with torments
+and villanies."
+
+Both had had the tact to greet each other as friends who had parted the
+night before to take their night's rest, and though grown strangers to
+each other, they conversed with a good grace and on a footing of
+friendliness.
+
+At the same time Madame de Rochemaure seemed pensive. The Revolution,
+which had for a long while been pleasant and profitable to her, was now
+a source of anxiety and disquietude; her suppers were growing less
+brilliant and less merry. The notes of her harp no longer charmed the
+cloud from sombre faces. Her play-tables were forsaken by the most
+lavish punters. Many of her cronies, now numbered among the suspects,
+were in hiding; her lover, Morhardt the financier, was under arrest,
+and it was on his behalf she had come to sound the juror Gamelin. She
+was suspect herself. A posse of National Guards had made a search at her
+house, had turned out the drawers of her cabinets, prised up boards in
+her floor, thrust their bayonets into her mattresses. They had found
+nothing, had made their apologies and drunk her wine. But they had come
+very near lighting on her correspondence with an _emigre_, Monsieur
+d'Expilly. Certain friends he had among the Jacobins had warned her that
+Henry, her handsome favourite, was beginning to compromise his party by
+his violent language, which was too extravagant to be sincere.
+
+Elbows on knees and head on fist, she sat buried in thought; then
+turning to her old lover sitting on the palliasse, she asked:
+
+"What do you think of it all, Maurice?"
+
+"I think these good gentry give a philosopher and an amateur of the
+shows of life abundant matter for reflection and amusement; but that it
+would be better for you, my dear, if you were out of France."
+
+"Maurice, where will it land us?"
+
+"That is what you asked me, Louise, one day we were driving on the banks
+of the Cher, on the road to Les Ilettes; the horse, you remember, had
+taken the bit in his teeth and was galloping off with us at a frantic
+pace. How inquisitive women are! to-day, for the second time, you want
+to know where we are going to. Ask the fortune-tellers. I am not a
+wizard, sweetheart. And philosophy, even the soundest, is of small help
+for revealing the future. These things will have an end; everything has.
+One may foresee divers issues. The triumph of the Coalition and the
+entry of the allies into Paris. They are not far off; yet I doubt if
+they will get there. These soldiers of the Republic take their beatings
+with a zest nothing can extinguish. It may be Robespierre will marry
+Madame Royale and have himself proclaimed Protector of the Kingdom
+during the minority of Louis XVII."
+
+"You think so!" exclaimed the _citoyenne_, agog to have a hand in so
+promising an intrigue.
+
+"Again it may be," Brotteaux went on, "that La Vendee will win the day
+and the rule of the priests be set up again over heaps of ruins and
+piles of corpses. You cannot conceive, dear heart, the empire the clergy
+still wields over the masses of the foolish,... I beg pardon, I meant to
+say,--of 'the Faithful'; it was a slip of the tongue. The most likely
+thing, in my poor opinion, is that the Revolutionary Tribunal will bring
+about the destruction of the regime it has established; it is a menace
+over too many heads. Those it terrifies are without number; they will
+unite together, and to destroy it they will destroy the whole system of
+government. I think you have got our young friend Gamelin posted to this
+court. He is virtuous; he will be implacable. The more I think of it,
+fair friend, the more convinced I am that this Tribunal, set up to save
+the Republic, will destroy it. The Convention has resolved to have, like
+Royalty, its _Grands Jours_,[5] its _Chambre Ardente_, and to provide
+for its security by means of magistrates appointed by itself and by it
+kept in subjection. But how inferior are the Convention's _Grands Jours_
+to those of the Monarchy, and its _Chambre Ardente_ to that of Louis
+XIV! The Revolutionary Tribunal is dominated by a sentiment of
+mean-spirited justice and common equality that will quickly make it
+odious and ridiculous and will disgust everybody. Do you know, Louise,
+that this tribunal, which is about to cite to its bar the Queen of
+France and twenty-one legislators, yesterday condemned a servant-girl
+convicted of crying: 'Vive le Roi!' with malicious intent and in the
+hope of destroying the Republic? Our judges, with their black hats and
+plumes, are working on the model of that William Shakespeare, so dear to
+the heart of Englishmen, who drags in coarse buffooneries in the middle
+of his most tragic scenes."
+
+"Ah, well! Maurice," asked the _citoyenne_, "are you still as fortunate
+as ever with women?"
+
+"Alas!" replied Brotteaux, "the doves flock to the bright new dovecote
+and light no more on the ruined tower."
+
+"You have not changed.... Good-bye, dear friend,--till we meet again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The same evening the dragoon Henry, paying a visit uninvited at Madame
+de Rochemaure's, found her in the act of sealing a letter on which he
+read the address of the _citoyen_ Rauline at Vernon. The letter, he
+knew, was for England. Rauline used to receive Madame de Rochemaure's
+communications by a postilion of the posting-service and send them on to
+Dieppe by the hands of a fishwife. The master of a fishing-smack
+delivered them under cover of night to a British ship cruising off the
+coast; an _emigre_, Monsieur d'Expilly, received them in London and
+passed them on, if he thought it advisable, to the Cabinet of Saint
+James's.
+
+Henry was young and good looking; Achilles was not such a paragon of
+grace and vigour when he donned the armour Ulysses offered him. But the
+_citoyenne_ Rochemaure, once so enraptured by the charms of the young
+hero of the Commune, now looked askance at him; her mood had changed
+since the day she was told how the young soldier had been denounced at
+the Jacobins as one whose zeal outran discretion and that he might
+compromise and ruin her. Henry thought it might not break his heart
+perhaps to leave off loving Madame de Rochemaure; but he was piqued to
+have fallen in her good graces. He counted on her to meet sundry
+expenses in which the service of the Republic had involved him. Last but
+not least, remembering to what extremities women will proceed and how
+they go in a flash from the most ardent tenderness to the coldest
+indifference, and how easy they find it to sacrifice what once they held
+dear and destroy what once they adored, he began to suspect that some
+day his fascinating mistress might have him thrown into prison to get
+rid of him. Common prudence urged him to regain his lost ascendancy and
+to this end he had come armed with all his fascinations. He came near,
+drew away, came near again, hovered round her, ran from her, in the
+approved fashion of seduction in the ballet. Then he threw himself in an
+armchair and in his irresistible voice, his voice that went straight to
+women's hearts, he extolled the charms of nature and solitude and with a
+lovelorn sigh proposed an expedition to Ermenonville.
+
+Meanwhile she was striking chords on her harp and looking about her with
+an expression of impatience and boredom. Suddenly Henry got up with a
+gesture of gloomy resolution and informed her that he was starting for
+the army and in a few days would be before Maubeuge.
+
+Without a sign either of scepticism or surprise she nodded her approval.
+
+"You congratulate me on my decision?"
+
+"I do indeed."
+
+She was expecting a new admirer who was infinitely to her taste and from
+whom she hoped to reap great advantages,--a contrast in every way to the
+old, a Mirabeau come to life again, a Danton rehabilitated and turned
+army-contractor, a lion who talked of pitching every patriot into the
+Seine. She was on tenter-hooks, thinking to hear the bell ring at any
+moment.
+
+To hasten Henry's departure, she fell silent, yawned, fingered a score,
+and yawned again. Seeing he made no move to go, she told him she had to
+go out and withdrew into her dressing-room.
+
+He called to her in a broken voice:
+
+"Farewell, Louise!... Shall I ever see you again?"--and his hands were
+busy fumbling in the open writing-desk.
+
+When he reached the street, he opened the letter addressed to the
+_citoyen_ Rauline and read it with absorbed attention. Indeed it drew a
+curious picture of the state of public feeling in France. It spoke of
+the Queen, of the actress Rose Thevenin, of the Revolutionary Tribunal
+and a host of confidential remarks emanating from that worthy, Brotteaux
+des Ilettes, were repeated in it.
+
+Having read to the end and restored the missive to his pocket, he stood
+hesitating a few moments; then, like a man who has made up his mind and
+says to himself "the sooner the better," he turned his steps to the
+Tuileries and found his way into the antechamber of the Committee of
+General Security.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The same day, at three o'clock of the afternoon, Evariste Gamelin was
+seated on the jurors' bench along with fourteen colleagues, most of whom
+he knew, simple-minded, honest, patriotic folks, savants, artists or
+artisans,--a painter like himself, an artist in black-and-white, both
+men of talent, a surgeon, a cobbler, a _ci-devant_ marquis, who had
+given high proofs of patriotism, a printer, two or three small
+tradesmen, a sample lot in a word of the inhabitants of Paris. There
+they sat, in the workman's blouse or bourgeois coat, with their hair
+close-cropped _a la Titus_ or clubbed _a la catogan_; there were
+cocked-hats tilted over the eyes, round hats clapped on the back of the
+head, red caps of liberty smothering the ears. Some were dressed in
+coat, flapped waistcoat and breeches, as in olden days, others in the
+_carmagnole_ and striped trousers of the sansculottes. Wearing top-boots
+or buckled shoes or sabots, they offered in their persons every variety
+of masculine attire prevalent at that date. Having all of them occupied
+their places on several previous occasions, they seemed very much at
+their ease, and Gamelin envied them their unconcern. His own heart was
+thumping, his ears roaring; a mist was before his eyes and everything
+about him took on a livid tinge.
+
+When the usher announced the opening of the sitting, three judges took
+their places on a raised platform of no great size in front of a green
+table. They wore hats cockaded and crowned with great black plumes and
+the official cloak with a tricolour riband from which a heavy silver
+medal was suspended on the breast. In front of them at the foot of the
+dais, sat the deputy of the Public Prosecutor, similarly attired. The
+clerk of the court had a seat between the judges' bench and the
+prisoner's chair, at present unoccupied. To Gamelin's eyes these men
+wore a different aspect from that of every day; they seemed nobler,
+graver, more alarming, albeit their bearing was commonplace enough as
+they turned over papers, beckoned to an usher or leant back to listen to
+some communication from a juryman or an officer of the court.
+
+Above the judges' heads hung the tables of the Rights of Man; to their
+right and left, against the old feudal walls, the busts of Le Peltier
+Saint-Fargeau and Marat. Facing the jury bench, at the lower end of the
+hall, rose the public gallery. The first row of seats was filled by
+women, who all, fair, brown and grey-haired alike, wore the high coif
+with the pleated tucker shading their cheeks; the breast, which
+invariably, as decreed by the fashion of the day, showed the amplitude
+of the nursing mother's bosom, was covered with a crossed white kerchief
+or the rounded bib of a blue apron. They sat with folded arms resting on
+the rail of the tribune. Behind them, scattered about the rising tiers,
+could be seen a sprinkling of citizens dressed in the varied garb which
+at that date gave every gathering so striking and picturesque a
+character. On the right hand, near the doors, behind a broad barrier, a
+space was reserved where the public could stand. On this occasion it was
+nearly empty. The business that was to occupy the attention of this
+particular section of the tribunal interested only a few spectators,
+while doubtless the other sections sitting at the same hour would be
+hearing more exciting cases.
+
+This fact somewhat reassured Gamelin; his heart was like to fail him as
+it was, and he could not have endured the heated atmosphere of one of
+the great days. His eyes took in the most trifling details of the
+scene,--the cotton-wool in the _greffier's_ ear and a blot of ink on the
+Deputy Prosecutor's papers. He could see, as through a magnifying glass,
+the capitals of the pillars sculptured at a time when all knowledge of
+the classical orders was forgotten and which crowned the Gothic columns
+with wreaths of nettle and holly. But wherever he looked, his gaze came
+back again and again to the fatal chair; this was of an antiquated make,
+covered in red Utrecht velvet, the seat worn and the arms blackened with
+use. Armed National Guards stood guarding every door.
+
+At last the accused appeared, escorted by grenadiers, but with limbs
+unbound, as the law directed. He was a man of fifty or thereabouts, lean
+and dry, with a brown face, a very bald head, hollow cheeks and thin
+livid lips, dressed in an out-of-date coat of a sanguine red. No doubt
+it was fever that made his eyes glitter like jewels and gave his cheeks
+their shiny, varnished look. He took his seat. His legs, which he
+crossed, were extraordinarily spare and his great knotted hands met
+round the knees they clasped. His name was Marie-Adolphe Guillergues,
+and he was accused of malversation in the supply of forage to the
+Republican troops. The act of indictment laid to his charge numerous and
+serious offences, of which no single one was positively certain. Under
+examination, Guillergues denied the majority of the charges and
+explained the rest in a light favourable to himself. He spoke in a
+cold, precise way, with a marked ability and gave the impression of
+being a dangerous man to have business dealings with. He had an answer
+for everything. When the judge asked him an embarrassing question, his
+face remained unmoved and his voice confident, but his two hands, folded
+on his breast, kept twitching in an agony. Gamelin was struck by this
+and whispered to the colleague sitting next him, a painter like himself:
+
+"Watch his thumbs!"
+
+The first witness to depose alleged a number of most damaging facts. He
+was the mainstay of the prosecution. Those on the other hand who
+followed showed themselves well disposed to the prisoner. The Deputy of
+the Public Prosecutor spoke strongly, but did not go beyond
+generalities. The advocate for the defence adopted a tone of bluff
+conviction of his client's innocence that earned the accused a sympathy
+he had failed to secure by his own efforts. The sitting was suspended
+and the jury assembled in the room set apart for deliberation. There,
+after a confused and confusing discussion, they found themselves divided
+in two groups about equal in number. On the one side were the
+unemotional, the lukewarm, the men of reason, whom no passion could
+stir, on the other the kind who let their feelings guide them, who prove
+all but inaccessible to argument and only consult their heart. These
+always voted guilty. They were the true metal, pure and unadulterated;
+their only thought was to save the Republic and they cared not a straw
+for anything else. Their attitude made a strong impression on Gamelin
+who felt he was of the same kidney himself.
+
+"This Guillergues," he thought to himself, "is a cunning scamp, a
+villain who has speculated in the forage supplied to our cavalry. To
+acquit him is to let a traitor escape, to be false to the fatherland, to
+devote the army to defeat." And in a flash Gamelin could see the Hussars
+of the Republic, mounted on stumbling horses, sabred by the enemy's
+cavalry.... "But if Guillergues was innocent...?"
+
+Suddenly he remembered Jean Blaise, likewise suspected of bad faith in
+the matter of supplies. There were bound to be many others acting like
+Guillergues and Blaise, contriving disaster, ruining the Republic! An
+example must be made. But if Guillergues was innocent...?
+
+"There are no proofs," said Gamelin, aloud.
+
+"There never are," retorted the foreman of the jury, shrugging his
+shoulders; he was good metal, pure metal!
+
+In the end, there proved to be seven votes for condemnation, eight for
+acquittal.
+
+The jury re-entered the hall and the sitting was resumed. The jurors
+were required to give reasons for their verdict, and each spoke in turn
+facing the empty chair. Some were prolix, others confined themselves to
+a sentence; one or two talked unintelligible gabble.
+
+When Gamelin's turn came, he rose and said:
+
+"In presence of a crime so heinous as that of robbing the defenders of
+the fatherland of the sinews of victory, we need formal proofs which we
+have not got."
+
+By a majority of votes the accused was declared not guilty.
+
+Guillergues was brought in again and stood before his judges amid a hum
+of sympathy from the spectators which conveyed the news of his acquittal
+to him. He was another man. His features had lost their harshness, his
+lips were relaxed again. He looked venerable; his face bore the
+impression of innocence. The President read out in tones of emotion the
+verdict releasing the prisoner; the audience broke into applause. The
+gendarme who had brought Guillergues in threw himself into his arms. The
+President called him to the dais and gave him the embrace of
+brotherhood. The jurors kissed him, while Gamelin's eyes rained hot
+tears.
+
+The courtyard of the Palais, dimly lighted by the last rays of the
+setting sun, was filled with a howling, excited crowd. The four sections
+of the Tribunal had the day before pronounced thirty sentences of death,
+and on the steps of the Great Stairway a throng of _tricoteuses_
+squatted to see the tumbrils start. But Gamelin, as he descended the
+steps among the press of jurors and spectators, saw nothing, heard
+nothing but his own act of justice and humanity and the
+self-congratulation he felt at having recognized innocence. In the
+courtyard stood Elodie, all in white, smiling through her tears; she
+threw herself into his arms and lay there half fainting. When she had
+recovered her voice, she said to him:
+
+"Evariste, you are noble, you are good, you are generous! In the hall
+there, your voice, so gentle and manly, went right through me with its
+magnetic waves. It electrified me. I gazed at you on your bench, I could
+see no one but you. But you, dear heart, you never guessed I was there?
+Nothing told you I was present? I sat in the gallery in the second row
+to the right. By heaven! how sweet it is to do the right! you saved
+that unhappy man's life. Without you, it was all over with him; he was
+as good as dead. You have given him back to life and the love of his
+friends. At this moment he must bless you. Evariste, how happy I am and
+how proud to love you!"
+
+Arm in arm, pressed close to one another, they went along the streets;
+their bodies felt so light they seemed to be flying.
+
+They went to the _Amour peintre_. On reaching the Oratoire:
+
+"Better not go through the shop," Elodie suggested.
+
+She made him go in by the main coach-door and mount the stairs with her
+to the suite of rooms above. On the landing she drew out of her reticule
+a heavy iron key.
+
+"It might be the key of a prison," she exclaimed, "Evariste, you are
+going to be my prisoner."
+
+They crossed the dining-room and were in the girl's bedchamber.
+
+Evariste felt upon his the ardent freshness of Elodie's lips. He pressed
+her in his arms; with head thrown back and swooning eyes, her hair
+flowing loose over her relaxed form, half fainting, she escaped his hold
+and ran to shoot the bolt....
+
+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!"
+
+When he found himself in the street, he saw the window of Elodie's
+chamber half unclose and a little hand pluck a red carnation, which fell
+at his feet like a drop of blood.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] _Grands Jours_,--under the ancien regime, an extraordinary assize
+held by judges specially appointed by the King and acting in his name.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+One evening when old Brotteaux arrived in the Rue de la Loi bringing a
+gross of dancing-dolls for the _citoyen_ Caillou, the toy-merchant, the
+latter, a soft-spoken, polite man as a rule, stood there stiff and stern
+among his dolls and punch-and-judies and gave him a far from gracious
+welcome.
+
+"Have a care, _citoyen_ Brotteaux," he began, "have a care! There is a
+time to laugh, and a time to be serious; jokes are not always in good
+taste. A member of the Committee of Security of the Section, who
+inspected my establishment yesterday, saw your dancing-dolls and deemed
+them anti-revolutionary."
+
+"He was jesting!" declared Brotteaux.
+
+"Not so, _citoyen_, not at all. He is not the man to joke. He said in
+these little fellows the National representatives were insidiously
+mimicked, that in particular one could discover caricatures of Couthon,
+Saint-Just and Robespierre, and he seized the lot. It is a dead loss to
+me, to say nothing of the grave risks to which I am exposed."
+
+"What! these Harlequins, these Gilles, these Scaramouches, these Colins
+and Colinettes, which I have painted the same as Boucher used to fifty
+years ago, how should they be parodies of Couthons and Saint-Justs? No
+sensible man could imagine such a thing."
+
+"It is possible," replied the _citoyen_ Caillou, "that you acted
+without malice, albeit we must always distrust a man of parts like you.
+But it is a dangerous game. Shall I give you an instance? Natoile, who
+runs a little outdoor theatre in the Champs Elysees, was arrested the
+day before yesterday for anti-patriotism, because he made Polichinelle
+poke fun at the Convention."
+
+"Now listen to me," Brotteaux urged, raising the cloth that covered his
+little dangling figures; "just look at these masks and faces, are they
+anything else whatever but characters in plays and pastorals? How could
+you let yourself be persuaded, _citoyen_ Caillou, that I was making fun
+of the National Convention?"
+
+Brotteaux was dumfounded. While allowing much for human folly, he had
+not thought it possible it could ever go so far as to suspect his
+Scaramouches and Colinettes. Repeatedly he protested their innocence and
+his; but the _citoyen_ Caillou would not hear a word.
+
+"_Citoyen_ Brotteaux, take your dolls away. I esteem you, I honour you,
+but I do not mean to incur blame or get into trouble because of you. I
+intend to remain a good citizen and to be treated as such. Good evening,
+_citoyen_ Brotteaux; take your dolls away."
+
+The old man set out again for home, carrying his suspects over his
+shoulder at the end of a pole, an object of derision to the children,
+who took him for the hawker of rat-poison. His thoughts were gloomy. No
+doubt, he did not live only by his dancing-dolls; he used to paint
+portraits at twenty _sols_ apiece, under the archways of doors or in one
+of the market halls, among the darners and old-clothes menders, where he
+found many a young recruit starting for the front and wanting to leave
+his likeness behind for his sweetheart. But these petty tasks cost him
+endless pains, and he was a long way from making as good portraits as he
+did dancing-dolls. Sometimes, too, he acted as amanuensis for the
+Market dames, but this meant mixing himself up in Royalist plots, and
+the risks were heavy. He remembered there lived in the Rue
+Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, near the erstwhile Place Vendome, another
+toy-merchant, Joly by name, and he resolved to go next day to offer him
+the goods the chicken-hearted Caillou had declined.
+
+A fine rain began to fall. Brotteaux who feared its effects on his
+marionettes, quickened his pace. As he crossed the Pont-Neuf and was
+turning the corner of the Place de Thionville, he saw by the light of a
+street-lamp, sitting on a stone post, a lean old man who seemed utterly
+exhausted with fatigue and hunger, but still preserved his venerable
+appearance. He was dressed in a tattered surtout, had no hat and
+appeared over sixty. Approaching the poor wretch, Brotteaux recognised
+the Pere Longuemare, the same he had saved from hanging six months
+before while both of them were waiting in queue in front of the bakery
+in the Rue de Jerusalem. Feeling bound to the monk by the service he had
+already done him, Brotteaux stepped up to him and made himself known as
+the publican who had stood beside him among the common herd, one day of
+great scarcity, and asked him if he could not be of some use to him.
+
+"You seem wearied, Father. Take a taste of cordial,"--and Brotteaux drew
+from the pocket of his plum-coloured coat a flask of brandy, which lay
+there alongside his Lucretius.
+
+"Drink. And I will help you to get back to your house."
+
+The Pere Longuemare pushed away the flask with his hand and tried to
+rise, but only to fall back again in his seat.
+
+"Sir," he said in a weak but firm voice, "for three months I have been
+living at Picpus. Being warned they had come to arrest me at my lodging,
+yesterday at five o'clock of the afternoon, I did not return home. I
+have no place to go to; I am wandering the streets and am a little
+fatigued."
+
+"Very well, Father," proposed Brotteaux, "do me the honour to share my
+garret."
+
+"Sir," replied the Barnabite, "you know, I suppose, I am a suspect."
+
+"I am one too," said Brotteaux, "and my marionettes into the bargain,
+which is the worst thing of all. You see them exposed under this flimsy
+cloth to the fine rain that chills our bones. For, I must tell you,
+Father, that after having been a publican, I now make dancing-dolls for
+a living."
+
+The Pere Longuemare took the hand the _ci-devant_ financier extended to
+him and accepted the hospitality offered. Brotteaux, in his garret,
+served him a meal of bread and cheese and wine, which last he had put to
+cool in the rain-gutter, for was he not a Sybarite?
+
+Having appeased his hunger:
+
+"Sir," said the Pere Longuemare, "I ought to inform you of the
+circumstances that led to my flight and left me to die on yonder post
+where you found me. Driven from my cloister, I lived on the scanty
+allowance the Assembly had assigned to me; I gave lessons in Latin and
+Mathematics and I wrote pamphlets on the persecution of the Church of
+France. I have even composed a work of some length, to prove that the
+Constitutional oath of the Priests is subversive of Ecclesiastical
+discipline. The advances made by the Revolution deprived me of all my
+pupils, while I could not get my pension because I had not the
+certificate of citizenship required by law. This certificate I went to
+the Hotel de Ville to claim, in the conviction I was well entitled to
+it. Member of an order founded by the Apostle Paul himself, who boasted
+the title of Roman citizen, I always piqued myself on behaving after his
+example as a good French citizen, a respecter of all human laws which
+are not in opposition to the Divine. I presented my demand to Monsieur
+Colin, pork-butcher and Municipal officer, in charge of the delivery of
+certificates of the sort. He questioned me as to my calling. I told him
+I was a Priest. He asked me if I was married, and on my answering that I
+was not, he told me that was the worse for me. Finally, after a variety
+of questions, he asked me if I had proved my citizenship on the 10th
+August, the 2nd September and the 31st May. 'No certificates can be
+given,' he added, 'except to such as have proved their patriotism by
+their behaviour on these three occasions.' I could not give him an
+answer that would satisfy him. However, he took down my name and address
+and promised me to make prompt enquiry into my case. He kept his word,
+and as the result of his enquiry two Commissioners of the Committee of
+General Security of Picpus, supported by an armed band, presented
+themselves at my lodging in my absence to conduct me to prison. I do not
+know of what crime I am accused. But you will agree with me one must
+pity Monsieur Colin, whose wits are so clouded he holds it a reproach
+to an ecclesiastic not to have made display of his patriotism on the
+10th August, the 2nd September, and the 31st May. A man capable of such
+a notion is surely deserving of commiseration."
+
+"_I_ am in the same plight, I have no certificate," observed Brotteaux.
+"We are both suspects. But you are weary. To bed, Father. We will
+discuss plans to-morrow for your safety."
+
+He gave the mattress to his guest and kept the palliasse for himself;
+but the monk in his humility demanded the latter with so much urgency
+that his wish had to be complied with; otherwise he would have slept on
+the boards.
+
+These arrangements completed, Brotteaux blew out the candle both to save
+tallow and as a wise precaution.
+
+"Sir," the monk addressed him, "I am thankful for what you are doing for
+me; but alas! it is of small moment to you whether I am grateful or no.
+May God account your act meritorious! _That_ is of infinite concern for
+you. But God pays no heed to what is not done for his glory and is
+merely the outcome of purely natural virtue. Wherefore I beseech you,
+sir, to do for Him what you were led to do for me."
+
+"Father," answered Brotteaux, "never trouble yourself on this head and
+do not think of gratitude. What I am doing now, the merit of which you
+exaggerate,--is not done for any love of you; for indeed, albeit you are
+a lovable man, Father, I know you too little to love you. Nor yet do I
+act so for love of humanity; for I am not so simple as to think with
+'Don Juan' that humanity has rights; indeed this prejudice, in a mind so
+emancipated as his, grieves me. I do it out of that selfishness which
+inspires mankind to perform all their deeds of generosity and
+self-sacrifice, by making them recognize themselves in all who are
+unfortunate, by disposing them to commiserate their own calamities in
+the calamities of others and by inciting them to offer help to a mortal
+resembling themselves in nature and destiny, so that they think they are
+succouring themselves in succouring him. I do it also for lack of
+anything better to do; for life is so desperately insipid we must find
+distraction at any cost, and benevolence is an amusement, of a mawkish
+sort, one indulges in for want of any more savoury; I do it out of pride
+and to get an advantage over you; I do it, in a word, as part of a
+system and to show you what an atheist is capable of."
+
+"Do not calumniate yourself, sir," replied the Pere Longuemare. "I have
+received of God more marks of grace than He has accorded you hitherto;
+but I am not as good a man as you, and am greatly your inferior in
+natural merits. But now let me take an advantage too over you. Not
+knowing me, you cannot love me. And I, sir, without knowing you, I love
+you better than myself; God bids me do so."
+
+Having so said, the Pere Longuemare knelt down on the floor, and after
+repeating his prayers, stretched himself on his palliasse and fell
+peacefully asleep.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Evariste Gamelin occupied his place as juror of the Tribunal for the
+second time. Before the opening of the sitting, he discussed with his
+colleagues the news that had arrived that morning. Some of it was
+doubtful, some untrue; but part was authentic--and appalling; the armies
+of the coalition in command of all the roads and marching _en masse_ on
+Paris, La Vendee triumphant, Lyons in insurrection, Toulon surrendered
+to the English, who were landing fourteen thousand men there.
+
+For him and his fellow magistrates these were not only events of
+interest to all the world, but so many matters of domestic concern.
+Foredoomed to perish in the ruin of the fatherland, they made the public
+salvation their own proper business. The Nation's interests, thus
+entangled with their own, dictated their opinions and passions and
+conduct.
+
+Gamelin, where he sat on the jury bench, was handed a letter from
+Trubert, Secretary of the Committee of Defence; it was to notify his
+appointment as Commissioner of Supplies of Powder and Saltpetre:
+
+     _"You will excavate all the cellars in the Section in order to
+     extract the substances necessary for the manufacture of powder.
+     To-morrow perhaps the enemy will be before Paris; the soil of the
+     fatherland must provide us with the lightning we shall launch
+     against our aggressors. I send you herewith a schedule of
+     instructions from the Convention regarding the manipulation of
+     saltpetres. Farewell and brotherly greeting."_
+
+At that moment the accused was brought in. He was one of the last of the
+defeated Generals whom the Convention delivered over one after the other
+to the Tribunal, and the most insignificant. At sight of him Gamelin
+shuddered; once again he seemed to see the same soldier whom three weeks
+before, looking on as a spectator, he had seen sentenced and sent to the
+guillotine. The man was the same, with his obstinate, opinionated look;
+the procedure was the same. He gave his answers in a cunning, brutish
+way that ruined the effect even of the most convincing. His cavilling
+and chicanery and the accusations he levelled against his subordinates,
+made you forget he was fulfilling the honourable task of defending his
+honour and his life. Everything was uncertain, every statement
+disputed,--position of the armies, total of forces engaged, munitions of
+war, orders given, orders received, movements of troops; nobody knew
+anything. It was impossible to make head or tail of these confused,
+nonsensical, aimless operations which had ended in disaster; defending
+counsel and the accused himself were as much in the dark as were
+accuser, judges, and jury, and strange to say, not a soul would admit,
+whether to himself or to other people, that this was the case. The
+judges took a childish delight in drawing plans and discussing problems
+of tactics and strategy, while the prisoner constantly betrayed his
+inborn predilection for crooked ways.
+
+The arguments dragged on endlessly. And all the time Gamelin could see
+on the rough roads of the north the ammunition wagons stogged in the
+mire and the guns capsized in the ruts, and along all the ways the
+broken and beaten columns flying in disorder, while from all sides the
+enemy's cavalry was debouching by the abandoned defiles. And from this
+host of men betrayed he could hear a mighty shout going up in accusation
+of the General. When the hearing closed, darkness was falling on the
+hall, and the head of Marat gleamed half-seen like a phantom above the
+President's head. The jury was called upon to give judgment, but was of
+two minds. Gamelin, in a hoarse, strangled voice, but in resolute
+accents, declared the accused guilty of treason against the Republic,
+and a murmur of approval rose from the crowd, a flattering unction to
+his youthful virtue. The sentence was read by the light of torches which
+cast a lurid, uncertain gleam on the prisoner's hollow temples beaded
+with drops of sweat. Outside the doors, on the steps crowded with the
+customary swarm of cockaded harridans, Gamelin could hear his name,
+which the habitues of the Tribunal were beginning to know, passed from
+mouth to mouth, and was assailed by a bevy of _tricoteuses_ who shook
+their fists in his face, demanding the head of _the Austrian_.
+
+The next day Evariste had to give judgment on the fate of a poor woman,
+the widow Meyrion. She distributed bread from house to house and tramped
+the streets pushing a little hand-cart and carrying a wooden tally hung
+at her waist, on which she cut notches with her knife representing the
+number of the loaves she had delivered. Her gains amounted to eight sous
+a day. The deputy of the Public Prosecutor displayed an extraordinary
+virulence towards the wretched creature, who had, it appears, shouted
+"Vive le Roi!" on several occasions, uttered anti-revolutionary remarks
+in the houses where she called to leave the daily dole of bread, and
+been mixed up in a plot for the escape of the woman Capet. In answer to
+the Judge's question she admitted the facts alleged against her; whether
+fool or fanatic, she professed Royalist sentiments of the most
+enthusiastic sort and waited her doom.
+
+The Revolutionary Tribunal made a point of proving the triumph of
+Equality by showing itself just as severe for street-porters and servant
+maids as for the aristocrats and financiers. Gamelin could conceive no
+other system possible under a popular government. He would have deemed
+it a mark of contempt, an insult to the people, to exclude it from
+punishment. That would have been to consider it, so to speak, as
+unworthy of chastisement by the law. Reserved for aristocrats only, the
+guillotine would have appeared to him in the light of an iniquitous
+privilege. In his thoughts he was beginning to erect chastisement into a
+religious and mystic dogma, to assign it a virtue, a merit of its own;
+he conceived that society owes punishment to criminals and that it is
+doing them an injustice to cheat them of this right. He declared the
+woman Meyrion guilty and deserving of death, only regretting that the
+fanatics, more culpable than herself, who had brought her to her ruin,
+were not there to share her fate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every evening almost Evariste attended the meetings of the Jacobins, who
+assembled in the former chapel of the Dominicans, commonly known as
+Jacobins, in the Rue Honore. In a courtyard, in which stood a tree of
+Liberty, a poplar whose leaves shook and rustled all day in the wind,
+the chapel, built in a poor, clumsy style and surmounted by a heavy roof
+of tiles, showed its bare gable, pierced by a round window and an
+arched doorway, above which floated the National colours, the flagstaff
+crowned with the cap of Liberty. The Jacobins, like the Cordeliers, and
+the Feuillants, had appropriated the premises and taken the name of the
+dispossessed monks. Gamelin, once a regular attendant at the sittings of
+the Cordeliers, did not find at the Jacobins the familiar sabots,
+carmagnoles and rallying cries of the Dantonists. In Robespierre's club
+administrative reserve and bourgeois gravity were the order of the day.
+The Friend of the People was no more, and since his death Evariste had
+followed the lessons of Maximilien whose thought ruled the Jacobins, and
+thence, through a thousand affiliated societies was disseminated over
+all France. During the reading of the minutes, his eyes wandered over
+the bare, dismal walls, which, after sheltering the spiritual sons of
+the arch-inquisitor of heresy, now looked down on the assemblage of
+zealous inquisitors of crimes against the fatherland.
+
+There, without pomp or ceremony, sat the body that was the chiefest
+power of the State and ruled by force of words. It governed the city,
+the empire, dictated its decrees to the Convention itself. These
+artisans of the new order of things, so respectful of the law that they
+continued Royalists in 1791 and would fain have been Royalists still on
+the King's return from Varennes, so obstinate in their attachment to the
+Constitution, friends of the established order of the State even after
+the massacres of the Champ-de-Mars, and never revolutionaries against
+the Revolution, heedless of popular agitation, cherished in their dark
+and puissant soul a love of the fatherland that had given birth to
+fourteen armies and set up the guillotine. Evariste was lost in
+admiration of their vigilance, their suspicious temper, their reasoned
+dogmatism, their love of system, their supremacy in the art of
+governing, their sovereign sanity.
+
+The public that formed the audience gave no token of their presence save
+a low, long-drawn murmur as of one voice, like the rustling of the
+leaves of the tree of Liberty that stood outside the threshold.
+
+That day, the 11th Vendemiaire, a young man, with a receding brow, a
+piercing eye, a sharp prominent nose, a pointed chin, a pock-marked
+face, a look of cold self-possession, mounted the tribune slowly. His
+hair was white with powder and he wore a blue coat that displayed his
+slim figure. He showed the precise carriage and moved with the cadenced
+step that made some say in mockery that he was like a dancing-master and
+earned him from others the name of the "French Orpheus." Robespierre,
+speaking in a clear voice, delivered an eloquent discourse against the
+enemies of the Republic. He belaboured with metaphysical and
+uncompromising arguments Brissot and his accomplices. He spoke at great
+length, in free-flowing harmonious periods. Soaring in the celestial
+spheres of philosophy, he launched his lightnings at the base
+conspirators crawling on the ground.
+
+Evariste heard and understood. Till then he had blamed the Gironde; were
+they not working for the restoration of the monarchy or the triumph of
+the Orleans faction, were they not planning the ruin of the heroic city
+that had delivered France from her fetters and would one day deliver the
+universe? Now, as he listened to the sage's voice, he discerned truths
+of a higher and purer compass; he grasped a revolutionary metaphysic
+which lifted his mind above coarse, material conditions into a region of
+absolute, unqualified convictions, untrammelled by the errors of the
+senses. Things are in their nature involved and full of confusion; the
+complexity of circumstances is such that we lose our way amongst them.
+Robespierre simplified them to his mind, put good and evil before him in
+clear and precise formulas. Federalism,--indivisibility; unity and
+indivisibility meant salvation, federalism, damnation. Gamelin tasted
+the ineffable joy of a believer who knows the word that saves and the
+word that destroys the soul. Henceforth the Revolutionary Tribunal, as
+of old the ecclesiastical courts, would take cognizance of crime
+absolute, of crime definable in a word. And, because he had the
+religious spirit, Evariste welcomed these revelations with a sombre
+enthusiasm; his heart swelled and rejoiced at the thought that,
+henceforth, he had a talisman to discern betwixt crime and innocence, he
+possessed a creed! Ye stand in lieu of all else, oh, treasures of faith!
+
+The sage Maximilien enlightened him further as to the perfidious intent
+of those who were for equalizing property and partitioning the land,
+abolishing wealth and poverty and establishing a happy mediocrity for
+all. Misled by their specious maxims, he had originally approved their
+designs, which he deemed in accord with the principles of a true
+Republican. But Robespierre, in his speeches at the Jacobins, had
+unmasked their machinations and convinced him that these men,
+disinterested as their intentions appeared, were working to overthrow
+the Republic, that they were alarming the rich only to rouse against the
+lawful authority powerful and implacable foes. Once private property
+was threatened, the whole population, the more ardently attached to its
+possessions the less of these it owned, would turn suddenly against the
+Republic. To terrify vested interests is to conspire against the State.
+These men who, under pretence of securing universal happiness and the
+reign of justice, proposed a system of equality and community of goods
+as a worthy object of good citizens' endeavours, were traitors and
+malefactors more dangerous than the Federalists.
+
+But the most startling revelation he owed to Robespierre's wisdom was
+that of the crimes and infamies of atheism. Gamelin had never denied the
+existence of God; he was a deist and believed in a Providence that
+watches over mankind; but, admitting that he could form only a very
+vague conception of the Supreme Being and deeply attached to the
+principle of freedom of conscience, he was quite ready to allow that
+right-thinking men might follow the example of Lamettrie, Boulanger, the
+Baron d'Holbach, Lalande, Helvetius, the _citoyen_ Dupuis, and deny
+God's existence, on condition they formulated a natural morality and
+found in themselves the sources of justice and the rules of a virtuous
+life. He had even felt himself in sympathy with the atheists, when he
+had seen them vilified and persecuted. Maximilien had opened his mind
+and unsealed his eyes. The great man by his virtuous eloquence had
+taught him the true character of atheism, its nature, its objects, its
+effects; he had shown him how this doctrine, conceived in the
+drawing-rooms and boudoirs of the aristocracy, was the most perfidious
+invention the enemies of the people had ever devised to demoralize and
+enslave it; how it was a criminal act to uproot from the heart of the
+unfortunate the consoling thought of a Providence to reward and
+compensate and give them over without rein or bit to the passions that
+degrade men and make vile slaves of them; how, in fine, the monarchical
+Epicureanism of a Helvetius led to immorality, cruelty, and every
+wickedness. Now that he had learnt these lessons from the lips of a
+great man and a great citizen, he execrated the atheists--especially
+when they were of an open-hearted, joyous temper, like his old friend
+Brotteaux.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the days that followed Evariste had to give judgment one after the
+other on a _ci-devant_ convicted of having destroyed wheat-stuffs in
+order to starve the people, three _emigres_ who had returned to foment
+civil war in France, two ladies of pleasure of the Palais-Egalite,
+fourteen Breton conspirators, men, women, old men, youths, masters, and
+servants. The crime was proven, the law explicit. Among the guilty was a
+girl of twenty, adorable in the heyday of her young beauty under the
+shadow of the doom so soon to overwhelm her, a fascinating figure. A
+blue bow bound her golden locks, her lawn kerchief revealed a white,
+graceful neck.
+
+Evariste was consistent in casting his vote for death, and all the
+accused, with the one exception of an old gardener, were sent to the
+scaffold.
+
+The following week Evariste and his section mowed down sixty-three
+heads--forty-five men and eighteen women.
+
+The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal drew no distinction between men
+and women, in this following a principle as old as justice itself. True,
+the President Montane, touched by the bravery and beauty of Charlotte
+Corday, had tried to save her by paltering with the procedure of the
+trial and had thereby lost his seat, but women as a rule were shown no
+favour under examination, in strict accordance with the rule common to
+all the tribunals. The jurors feared them, distrusting their artful
+ways, their aptitude for deception, their powers of seduction. They were
+the match of men in resolution, and this invited the Tribunal to treat
+them in the same way. The majority of those who sat in judgment, men of
+normal sensuality or sensual on occasion, were in no wise affected by
+the fact that the prisoner was a woman. They condemned or acquitted them
+as their conscience, their zeal, their love, lukewarm or vehement, for
+the Republic dictated. Almost always they appeared before the court with
+their hair carefully dressed and attired with as much elegance as the
+unhappy conditions allowed. But few of them were young and still fewer
+pretty. Confinement and suspense had blighted them, the harsh light of
+the hall betrayed their weariness and the anguish they had endured,
+beating down on faded lids, blotched and pimpled cheeks, white, drawn
+lips. Nevertheless, the fatal chair more than once held a young girl,
+lovely in her pallor, while a shadow of the tomb veiled her eyes and
+made her beauty the more seductive. That the sight had the power to melt
+some jurymen and irritate others, who should deny? That, in the secret
+depraved heart of him, one of these magistrates may have pried into the
+most sacred intimacies of the fair body that was to his morbid fancy at
+the same moment a living and a dead woman's, and that, gloating over
+voluptuous and ghoulish imaginings he may have found an atrocious
+pleasure in giving over to the headsman those dainty, desirable
+limbs,--this is perhaps a thing better left unsaid, but one which no one
+can deem impossible who knows what men are. Evariste Gamelin, cold and
+pedantic in his artistic creed, could see no beauty but in the Antique;
+he admired beauty, but it hardly stirred his senses. His classical taste
+was so severe he rarely found a woman to his liking; he was as
+insensible to the charms of a pretty face as he was to Fragonard's
+colouring and Boucher's drawing. He had never known desire save under
+the form of deep passion.
+
+Like the majority of his colleagues in the Tribunal, he thought women
+more dangerous than men. He hated the _ci-devant_ princesses, the
+creatures he pictured to himself in his horrified dreams in company with
+Elisabeth and _the Austrian_ weaving plots to assassinate good patriots;
+he even hated all those fair mistresses of financiers, philosophers, and
+men of letters whose only crime was having enjoyed the pleasures of the
+senses and the mind and lived at a time when it was sweet to live. He
+hated them without admitting the feeling to himself, and when he had one
+before him at the bar, he condemned her out of pique, convinced all the
+while that he was dooming her justly and rightly for the public good.
+His sense of honour, his manly modesty, his cold, calculated wisdom, his
+devotion to the State, his virtues in a word, pushed under the knife
+heads that might well have moved men's pity.
+
+But what is this, what is the meaning of this strange prodigy? Once the
+difficulty was to find the guilty, to search them out in their lair, to
+drag the confession of their crime from reluctant lips. Now, there is no
+hunting with a great pack of sleuth-hounds, no pursuing a timid prey;
+lo! from all sides come the victims to offer themselves a voluntary
+sacrifice. Nobles, virgins, soldiers, courtesans, flock to the Tribunal,
+dragging their condemnation from dilatory judges, claiming death as a
+right which they are impatient to enjoy. Not enough the multitude with
+which the zeal of the informers has crowded the prisons and which the
+Public Prosecutor and his myrmidons are wearing out their lives in
+haling before the Tribunal; punishment must likewise be provided for
+those who refuse to wait. And how many others, prouder and more pressing
+yet, begrudging their judges and headsmen their death, perish by their
+own hand! The mania of killing is equalled by the mania to die. Here, in
+the Conciergerie, is a young soldier, handsome, vigorous, beloved; he
+leaves behind him in the prison an adorable mistress; she bade him "Live
+for me!"--he will live neither for her nor love nor glory. He lights his
+pipe with his act of accusation. And, a Republican, for he breathes
+liberty through every pore, he turns Royalist that he may die. The
+Tribunal tries its best to save him, but the accused proves the
+stronger; judges and jury are forced to let him have his way.
+
+Evariste's mind, naturally of an anxious, scrupulous cast, was filled to
+overflowing through the lessons he learned at the Jacobins and the
+contemplation of life with suspicions and alarms. At night, as he paced
+the ill-lighted streets on his way to Elodie's, he fancied through every
+cellar-grating he passed he caught a glimpse of a plate for printing off
+forged assignats; in the dark recesses of the baker's and grocer's empty
+shops he imagined storerooms bursting with provisions fraudulently held
+back for a rise in prices; looking in at the glittering windows of the
+eating-houses, he seemed to hear the talk of the speculators plotting
+the ruin of the country as they drained bottles of Beaune and Chablis;
+in the evil-smelling alleys he could see the very prostitutes trampling
+underfoot the National cockade to the applause of elegant young
+roisterers; everywhere he beheld conspirators and traitors. And he
+thought: "Against so many foes, secret or declared, oh! Republic thou
+hast but one succour; Saint Guillotine, save the fatherland!..."
+
+Elodie would be waiting for him in her little blue chamber above the
+_Amour peintre_. To let him know he might come in, she used to set on
+the window-sill her little watering-can beside the pot of carnations.
+Now he filled her with horror, he seemed like a monster to her; she was
+afraid of him,--and she adored him. All the night, clinging together in
+a frantic embrace, the bloody-minded lover and the amorous girl
+exchanged in silence frenzied kisses.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+Rising at dawn, the Pere Longuemare, after sweeping out the room,
+departed to say his Mass in a chapel in the Rue d'Enfer served by a
+nonjuring priest. There were in Paris thousands of similar retreats,
+where the refractory clergy gathered together clandestinely little
+troops of the faithful. The police of the Sections, vigilant and
+suspicious as they were, kept their eyes shut to these hidden folds,
+from fear of the exasperated flock and moved by some lingering
+veneration for holy things. The Barnabite made his farewells to his host
+who had great difficulty in persuading him to come back to dine, and
+only succeeded in the end by promising that the cheer would be neither
+plentiful nor delicate.
+
+Brotteaux, when left to himself, kindled a little earthenware stove;
+then, while he busied himself with preparations for the Monk's and the
+Epicurean's meal, he read in his Lucretius and meditated on the
+conditions of human beings.
+
+As a sage and a philosopher, he was not surprised that these wretched
+creatures, silly playthings of the forces of nature, found themselves
+more often than not in absurd and painful situations; but he was weak
+and illogical enough to believe that the Revolutionaries were more
+wicked and more foolish than other men, thereby falling into the error
+of the metaphysician. At the same time he was no Pessimist and did not
+hold that life was altogether bad. He admired Nature in several of her
+departments, especially the celestial mechanism and physical love, and
+accommodated himself to the labours of life, pending the arrival of the
+day, which could not be far off, when he would have nothing more either
+to fear or to desire.
+
+He coloured some dancing-dolls with painstaking care and made a Zerline
+that was very like Rose Thevenin. He liked the girl and his Epicureanism
+highly approved of the arrangement of the atoms of which she was
+composed.
+
+These tasks occupied him till the Barnabite's return.
+
+"Father," he announced, as he opened the door to admit him, "I told you,
+you remember, that our fare would be meagre. We have nothing but
+chestnuts. The more reason, therefore, they should be well seasoned."
+
+"Chestnuts!" cried Pere Longuemare, smiling, "there is no more delicious
+dish. My father, sir, was a poor gentleman of the Limousin, whose whole
+estate consisted of a pigeon-cote in ruins, an orchard run wild and a
+clump of chestnut-trees. He fed himself, his wife and his twelve
+children on big green chestnuts, and we were all strong and sturdy. I
+was the youngest and the most turbulent; my father used to declare, by
+way of jesting, he would have to send me to America to be a
+filibuster.... Ah! sir, how fragrant your chestnut soup smells! It takes
+me back to the table where my mother sat smiling, surrounded by her
+troop of little ones."
+
+The repast ended, Brotteaux set out for Joly's, the toy-merchant in the
+Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, who took the dancing-dolls Caillou had
+refused, and ordered--not another gross of them like the latter, but a
+round twenty-four dozen to begin with.
+
+On reaching the erstwhile Rue Royale and turning into the Place de la
+Revolution, Brotteaux caught sight of a steel triangle glittering
+between two wooden uprights; it was the guillotine. An immense crowd of
+light-hearted spectators pressed round the scaffold, waiting the arrival
+of the loaded carts. Women were hawking Nanterre cakes on a tray hung in
+front of them and crying their wares; sellers of cooling drinks were
+tinkling their little bells; at the foot of the Statue of Liberty an old
+man had a peep-show in a small booth surmounted by a swing on which a
+monkey played its antics. Underneath the scaffold some dogs were licking
+yesterday's blood, Brotteaux turned back towards the Rue Honore.
+
+Regaining his garret, where the Barnabite was reading his breviary, he
+carefully wiped the table and arranged his colour-box on it alongside
+the materials and tools of his trade.
+
+"Father," he said, "if you do not deem the occupation unworthy of the
+sacred character with which you are invested, I will ask you to help me
+make my marionettes. A worthy tradesman, Joly by name, has this very
+morning given me a pretty heavy order. Whilst I am painting these
+figures already put together, you will do me a great service by cutting
+out heads, arms, legs, and bodies from the patterns here. Better you
+could not find; they are after Watteau and Boucher."
+
+"I agree with you, sir," replied Longuemare, "that Watteau and Boucher
+were well fitted to create such-like baubles; it had been more to their
+glory if they had confined themselves to innocent figures like these. I
+should be delighted to help you, but I fear I may not be clever enough
+for that."
+
+The Pere Longuemare was right to distrust his own skill; after sundry
+unsuccessful attempts, the fact was patent that his genius did not lie
+in the direction of cutting out pretty shapes in thin cardboard with the
+point of a penknife. But when, at his suggestion, Brotteaux gave him
+some string and a bodkin, he showed himself very apt in endowing with
+motion the little creatures he had failed to make and teaching them to
+dance. He had a happy knack, by way of trying them afterwards, of making
+them each execute three or four steps of a gavotte, and when they
+rewarded his pains, a smile would flicker on his stern lips.
+
+One time when he was pulling the string of a Scaramouch to a dance tune:
+
+"Sir," he observed, "this little travesty reminds me of a quaint story.
+It was in 1746, when I was completing my noviciate under the care of the
+Pere Magitot, a man well on in years, of deep learning and austere
+morals. At that period, you perhaps remember, dancing figures, intended
+in the first instance to amuse children, exercised over women and even
+over men, both young and old, an extraordinary fascination; they were
+all the rage in Paris. The fashionable shops were crammed with them;
+they were to be found in the houses of people of quality, and it was
+nothing out of the way to see a grave and reverend senior dancing his
+doll in the streets and public gardens. The Pere Magitot's age,
+character, and sacred profession did not avail to guard him against
+infection. Every time he saw anyone busy jumping his cardboard mannikin,
+his fingers itched with impatience to be at the same game,--an
+impatience that soon grew well nigh intolerable. One day when he was
+paying a visit of importance on a matter involving the interests of the
+whole Order to Monsieur Chauvel, advocate in the courts of the
+Parlement, noticing one of these dancers hanging from the chimney-piece,
+he felt a terrible temptation to pull its string, which he only resisted
+at the cost of a tremendous effort. But this frivolous ambition pursued
+him everywhere and left him no peace. In his studies, in his
+meditations, in his prayers, at church, at chapter, in the confessional
+and in the pulpit, he was possessed by it. After some days of dreadful
+agony of mind, he laid bare his extraordinary case to the General of the
+Order, who happened fortunately to be in Paris at the moment. He was an
+eminent ecclesiastic of Milan, a Doctor and Prince of the Church. His
+counsel to the Pere Magitot was to satisfy a craving, innocent in its
+inception, importunate in its consequences and inordinate in its excess,
+which threatened to super induce the gravest disorders in the soul which
+was afflicted with it. On the advice, or more strictly by the order of
+the General, the Pere Magitot returned to Monsieur Chauvel's house,
+where the advocate received him, as on the first occasion, in his
+cabinet. There, finding the dancing figure still fastened in the same
+place, he ran excitedly to the chimney-piece and begged his host to do
+him a favour,--to let him pull the string. The lawyer gave him his
+permission very readily, and informed him in confidence that sometimes
+he set Scaramouch (that was the doll's name) dancing while he was
+studying his briefs, and that, only the night before, he had modulated
+on Scaramouch's movements the peroration of his speech in defence of a
+woman falsely accused of poisoning her husband. The Pere Magitot seized
+the string with trembling fingers and saw Scaramouch throw his limbs
+wildly about under his manipulation like one possessed of devils in the
+agonies of exorcism."
+
+"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 Pere 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 Abbe 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'Abbe Fauchet!"
+
+"I imagine we have seen other evil-doers besides poor, unhappy Fauchet."
+
+"The Abbe 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 Abbe Guenee 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 Pere 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 Pere 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-Egalite 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 Athenais 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 Pere Longuemare in the garret reading his
+breviary.
+
+Holding Athenais 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 Pere 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. Athenais 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 Athenais, who lay sound asleep.
+
+"Truly," he thought to himself, "a terrible enemy for the Republic!"
+
+When Athenais 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, Athenais 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."
+
+Athenais 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, Athenais."
+
+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 excitement 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.
+
+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_ Fortune 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 Evariste'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, _ca
+ira_ ... _ca 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, Fortune 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. _Ca 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 Evariste recognized as his _concierge's_
+little daughter Josephine, 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-Andre-des-Arts to the strains of the _Marseillaise_ and the
+_Ca-ira_.
+
+As he laid the kiss of farewell on Fortune Trubert's brow, Evariste
+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 Evariste 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 Evariste 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 Josephine; 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, Evariste 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
+Elodie'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 _emigre_ 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 _emigre_ 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 Elodie'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 _emigre_, 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 Elodie'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, Evariste's last doubts vanished. Being now convinced he
+knew the facts, he resolved to question Elodie, 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 Elodie 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, Evariste, 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
+_Vendemiaires_. 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 Vendemiaire?"
+
+"_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.
+
+Elodie 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, Evariste
+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 _emigre_! 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 Evariste;
+but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good.
+
+He had little experience of women and was far from having fully fathomed
+Elodie'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 Elodie 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 Elodie'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 Evariste:
+
+"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 _emigres_.
+
+"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.
+
+     I loved the arts; at Paris, in happier times, I made a collection
+     of paintings and engravings, which are now in a sure place, and
+     which will be delivered to you so soon as this is possible. I pray
+     you, dear sister, to keep them in memory of me._
+
+He cut a lock of his hair, enclosed it in the letter, which he folded
+and wrote outside:
+
+_To the citoyenne Clemence Dezeimeries, nee Maubel,
+
+La Reole._
+
+He gave all the silver he had on him to the turnkey, begging him to
+forward this letter to its destination, asked for a bottle of wine,
+which he drank in little sips while waiting for the cart....
+
+After supper Gamelin ran to the _Amour Peintre_ and burst into the blue
+chamber where every night Elodie was waiting for him.
+
+"You are avenged," he told her. "Jacques Maubel is no more. The cart
+that took him to his death has just passed beneath your window, escorted
+by torch-bearers."
+
+She understood:
+
+"Wretch! it is you have killed him, and he was not my lover. I did not
+know him.... I have never seen him.... What was this man? He was young,
+amiable ... innocent. And you have killed him, wretch! wretch!"
+
+She fell in a faint. But, amid the shadows of this momentary death, she
+felt herself overborne by a flood at once of horror and voluptuous
+ecstasy. She half revived; her heavy lids lifted to show the whites of
+the eyes, her bosom swelled, her hands beat the air, seeking for her
+lover. She pressed him to her in a strangling embrace, drove her nails
+into the flesh, and gave him with her bleeding lips, without a word,
+without a sound, the longest, the most agonized, the most delicious of
+kisses.
+
+She loved him with all her flesh, and the more terrible, cruel,
+atrocious she thought him, the more she saw him reeking with the blood
+of his victims, the more consuming was her hunger and thirst for him.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+The 24 Frimaire, at ten in the forenoon, under a clear bright sun that
+was melting the ice formed in the night, the _citoyens_ Guenot and
+Delourmel, delegates of the Committee of General Security, proceeded to
+the Barnabites and asked to be conducted to the Committee of
+Surveillance of the Section, in the Capitular hall, whose only occupant
+for the moment was the _citoyen_ Beauvisage, who was piling logs on the
+fire. But they did not see him just at first because of his short,
+thickset stature.
+
+In a hunchback's cracked voice the _citoyen_ Beauvisage begged the
+delegates to seat themselves and put himself entirely at their service.
+
+Guenot then asked him if he knew a _ci-devant_ Monsieur des Ilettes,
+residing near the Pont-Neuf.
+
+"It is an individual," he added, "whose arrest I am instructed to
+effect,"--and he exhibited the order from the Committee of General
+Security.
+
+Beauvisage, after racking his memory for a while, replied that he knew
+no individual of that name, that the suspect in question might not be an
+inhabitant of his Section, certain portions of the _Sections du Museum_,
+_de l'Unite_, _de Marat-et-Marseille_ being likewise in the near
+neighbourhood of the Pont-Neuf; that, if he did live in the Section, it
+must be under another name than that borne on the Committee's order;
+that, nevertheless, it would not be long before they laid hands on him.
+
+"Let's lose no time," urged Guenot. "Our vigilance was aroused in this
+case by a letter from one of the man's accomplices that was intercepted
+and put into the hands of the Committee a fortnight ago, but which the
+_citoyen_ Lacroix took action upon only yesterday evening. We are
+overdone with business; denunciations flow in from every quarter in such
+abundance one does not know which to attend to."
+
+"Denunciations," replied Beauvisage proudly, "are coming in freely, too,
+to the Committee of Vigilance of our Section. Some make these
+revelations out of patriotism, others lured by the bait of a bank-bill
+for a hundred _sols_. Many children denounce their parents, whose
+property they covet."
+
+"This letter," resumed Guenot, "emanates from a _ci-devant_ called
+Rochemaure, a woman of gallantry, at whose house they played _biribi_,
+and is addressed to one _citoyen_ Rauline; but is really for an _emigre_
+in the service of Pitt. I have brought it with me to communicate to you
+the portion relating to this man des Ilettes."
+
+He drew the letter from his pocket.
+
+"It begins with copious details as to those members of the Convention
+who might, according to the woman's tale, be gained over by the offer of
+a sum of money or the promise of a well-paid post under a new
+Government, more stable than the present. Then comes the following
+passage:
+
+     _"I have just returned from a visit to Monsieur des Ilettes, who
+     lives near the Pont-Neuf in a garret where you must be either a cat
+     or an imp to get at him; he is reduced to earning a living by
+     making punch-and-judies. He is a man of judgment, for which reason
+     I report to you, sir, the main gist of his conversation. He does
+     not believe that the existing state of things will last long. Nor
+     does he foresee its being ended by the victory of the coalition,
+     and events appear to justify his opinion; for, as you are aware,
+     sir, for some time past tidings from the front have been bad. He
+     would rather seem to believe in the revolt of the poor and the
+     women of the humbler classes, who remain still deeply attached to
+     their religion. He holds that the widespread alarm caused by the
+     Revolutionary Tribunal will soon reunite all France against the
+     Jacobins. 'This tribunal,' he said, in his joking way, 'which
+     sentences the Queen of France and a bread-hawker, is like that
+     William Shakespeare the English admire so much, etc....' He thinks
+     it not impossible that Robespierre may marry Madame Royale and have
+     himself named Protector of the Kingdom.
+
+     "I should be grateful to you, sir, if you would transmit me the
+     amount owing to me, that is to say one thousand pounds sterling, by
+     the channel you are in the habit of using; but whatever you do, do
+     not write to Monsieur Morhardt; he has lately been arrested, thrown
+     into prison, etc., etc...."_
+
+"This worthy des Ilettes makes dancing-dolls, it appears," observed
+Beauvisage, "that is a valuable clue ... though certainly there are many
+petty trades of the sort carried on in the Section."
+
+"That reminds me," said Delourmel, "I promised to bring home a doll for
+my little girl Nathalie, my youngest, who is ill with scarlatina. The
+fever is not a dangerous one, but it demands careful nursing, and
+Nathalie, a very forward child for her age, and with a very active
+brain, has but delicate health."
+
+"I," remarked Guenot, "I have only a boy. He plays hoop with
+barrel-hoops and makes little montgolfier balloons by inflating paper
+bags."
+
+"Very often," Beauvisage put in his word, "it is with articles that are
+not toys at all that children like best to play. My nephew Emile, a
+little chap of seven, a very intelligent child, amuses himself all day
+long with little wooden bricks with which he builds houses.... Do you
+snuff, _citoyens_?"--and Beauvisage held out his open snuff-box to the
+two delegates.
+
+"Now we must set about nabbing our rascal," said Delourmel, who had long
+moustaches and great eyes that rolled in his head. "I feel quite in the
+mood this morning for a dish of aristocrat's lights and liver, washed
+down with a glass of white wine."
+
+Beauvisage suggested to the delegates going to the Place Dauphine to see
+if his colleague Dupont senior was at his shop there; he would be sure
+to know this man, des Ilettes.
+
+So they set off in the keen morning air, accompanied by four grenadiers
+of the Section.
+
+"Have you seen '_The Last Judgment of Kings_' played?" Delourmel asked
+his companions; "the piece is worth seeing. The author shows you all the
+Kings of Europe on a desert island where they have taken refuge, at the
+foot of a volcano which swallows them up. It is a patriotic work."
+
+At the corner of the Rue du Harlay Delourmel's eye was caught by a
+little cart, as brilliantly painted as a reliquary, which an old woman
+was pushing, wearing over her coif a hat of waxed cloth.
+
+"What is that old woman selling?" he asked.
+
+The old dame answered for herself:
+
+"Look, gentlemen, make your choice. I have beads and rosaries, crosses,
+St. Anthonys, holy cerecloths, St. Veronica handkerchiefs, _Ecce homos_,
+_Agnus Deis_, hunting-horns and rings of St. Hubert, and articles of
+devotion of every sort and kind."
+
+"Why, it is the very arsenal of fanaticism!" cried Delourmel in
+horror,--and he proceeded to a summary examination of the poor woman,
+who made the same answer to every question:
+
+"My son, it's forty years I have been selling articles of devotion."
+
+Another Delegate of the Committee of General Security, noticing a
+blue-coated National Guard passing, directed him to convey the
+astonished old woman to the Conciergerie.
+
+The _citoyen_ Beauvisage pointed out to Delourmel that it would have
+been more in the competence of the Committee of Surveillance to arrest
+the woman and bring her before the Section; that in any case, one never
+knew nowadays what attitude to take up towards the old religion so as to
+act up to the views of the Government, and whether it was best to allow
+everything or forbid everything.
+
+On nearing the joiner's shop, the delegates and the commissary could
+hear angry shouts mingling with the hissing of the saw and the grinding
+of the plane. A quarrel had broken out between the joiner, Dupont
+senior, and his neighbour Remacle, the porter, because of the
+_citoyenne_ Remacle, whom an irresistible attraction was for ever
+drawing into the recesses of the workshop, whence she would return to
+the porter's lodge all covered with shavings and saw-dust. The injured
+porter bestowed a kick on Mouton, the carpenter's dog, which at that
+very moment his own little daughter Josephine was nursing lovingly in
+her arms. Josephine was furious and burst into a torrent of imprecations
+against her father, while the carpenter shouted in a voice of
+exasperation:
+
+"Wretch! I tell you you shall not beat my dog."
+
+"And I," retorted the porter brandishing his broom, "I tell you you
+shall _not_...."
+
+He did not finish the sentence; the joiner's plane had hurtled close
+past his head.
+
+The instant he caught sight of the _citoyen_ Beauvisage and the
+attendant delegates, he rushed up to him and cried:
+
+"_Citoyen_ Commissary you are my witness, this villain has just tried to
+murder me."
+
+The _citoyen_ Beauvisage, in his red cap, the badge of his office, put
+out his long arms in the attitude of a peacemaker, and addressing the
+porter and the joiner:
+
+"A hundred _sols_," he announced, "to whichever of you will inform us
+where to find a suspect, wanted by the Committee of General Security, a
+_ci-devant_ named des Ilettes, a maker of dancing-dolls."
+
+With one accord porter and carpenter designated Brotteaux's lodging, the
+only quarrel now between them being who should have the assignat for a
+hundred _sols_ promised the informer.
+
+Delourmel, Guenot, and Beauvisage, followed by the four grenadiers,
+Remacle the porter, Dupont the carpenter, and a dozen little scamps of
+the neighbourhood filed up the stairs which shook under their tread, and
+finally mounted the ladder to the attics.
+
+Brotteaux was in his garret busy cutting out his dancing figures, while
+the Pere Longuemare sat facing him, stringing their scattered limbs on
+threads, smiling to himself to see rhythm and harmony thus growing under
+his fingers.
+
+At the sound of muskets being grounded on the landing, the monk trembled
+in every limb, not that he was a whit less courageous than Brotteaux,
+who never moved a muscle, but the habit of respect for human conventions
+had never disciplined him to assume an attitude of self-composure.
+Brotteaux gathered from the _citoyen_ Delourmel's questions the quarter
+from which the blow had come and saw too late how unwise it is to
+confide in women. He obeyed the _citoyen_ Commissary's order to go with
+him, first picking up his Lucretius and his three shirts.
+
+"The _citoyen_," he said, pointing to the Pere Longuemare, "is an
+assistant I have taken to help me make my marionettes. His home is
+here."
+
+But the monk failing to produce a certificate of citizenship, was put
+under arrest along with Brotteaux.
+
+As the procession filed past the porter's door, the _citoyenne_ Remacle,
+leaning on her broom, looked at her lodger with the eyes of virtue
+beholding crime in the clutches of the law. Little Josephine, dainty and
+disdainful, held back Mouton by his collar when the dog tried to fawn on
+the friend who had often given him a lump of sugar. A gaping crowd
+filled the Place de Thionville.
+
+At the foot of the stairs Brotteaux came face to face with a young
+peasant woman who was on the point of going up. She carried a basket on
+her arm full of eggs and in her hand a flat cake wrapped in a napkin. It
+was Athenais, who had come from Palaiseau to present her saviour with a
+token of her gratitude. When she observed a posse of magistrates and
+four grenadiers and "Monsieur Maurice" being led away a prisoner, she
+stopped in consternation and asked if it was really true; then she
+stepped up to the Commissary and said in a gentle voice:
+
+"You are not taking him to prison? it can't be possible.... Why! you
+don't know him! God himself is not better or kinder."
+
+The _citoyen_ Delourmel pushed her away and beckoned to the grenadiers
+to come forward. Then Athenais let loose a torrent of the foulest abuse,
+the filthiest and most abominable invective, at the magistrates and
+soldiers, who thought that all the rinsings of the Palais-Royal and the
+Rue Fromenteau were being emptied over their devoted heads. After which,
+in a voice that filled the whole Place de Thionville and sent a shudder
+through the throng of curious onlookers:
+
+"Vive le roi! Vive le roi!" she yelled.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+The _citoyenne_ Gamelin was devoted to old Brotteaux, and taking him
+altogether, thought him the best and greatest man she had ever known.
+She had not bidden him good-bye when he was arrested, because she would
+not have dared to defy the powers that be and because in her lowly
+estate she looked upon cowardice as a duty. But she had received a blow
+she could not recover from.
+
+She could not eat and lamented she had lost her appetite just when she
+had at last the means to satisfy it. She still admired her son; but she
+durst not let her mind dwell on the appalling duties he was engaged upon
+and congratulated herself she was only an ignorant woman who had no call
+to judge his conduct.
+
+The poor mother had found a rosary at the bottom of a trunk; she hardly
+knew how to use it, but often fumbled the beads in her trembling
+fingers. She had lived to grow old without any overt exercise of her
+religion, but she had always been a pious woman, and she would pray to
+God all day long, in the chimney corner, to save her boy and that good,
+kind Monsieur Brotteaux. Elodie often came to see her; they durst not
+look each other in the eyes, and sitting side by side they would talk at
+random of indifferent matters.
+
+One day in Pluviose, when the snow, falling in heavy flakes, darkened
+the sky and deadened the noises of the city, the _citoyenne_ Gamelin,
+who was alone in the lodging heard a knock at the door. She started
+violently; for months now the slightest noise had set her trembling. She
+opened the door. A young man of eighteen or twenty walked in, his hat on
+his head. He was dressed in a bottle-green box-coat, the triple collar
+of which covered his bust and descended to the waist. He wore top-boots
+of an English cut. His chestnut hair fell in ringlets about his
+shoulders. He stepped into the middle of the studio, as if wishful that
+all the light admitted by the snow-encumbered skylight might fall on
+him, and stood there some moments without moving or speaking.
+
+At last, in answer to the _citoyenne_ Gamelin's look of amazement:
+
+"Don't you know your daughter?"
+
+The old dame clasped her hands:
+
+"Julie!... It is you.... Good God! is it possible?..."
+
+"Why, yes, it is I. Kiss me, mother."
+
+The _citoyenne_ Gamelin pressed her daughter to her bosom, and dropped a
+tear on the collar of the box-coat. Then she began again in an anxious
+voice:
+
+"You, in Paris!..."
+
+"Ah! mother, but why did I not come alone! For myself, they will never
+know me in this dress."
+
+It was a fact the box-coat sufficiently disguised her shape, and she did
+not look very different from a great many very young men, who, like her,
+wore their hair long and parted in two masses on the forehead. Her
+features, which were delicately cut and charming, but burnt by the sun,
+drawn with fatigue, worn with anxiety, had a bold, masculine
+expression. She was slim, with long straight limbs and an easy
+carriage; only the clear treble of her voice could have betrayed her
+sex.
+
+Her mother asked her if she was hungry. She said she would be glad of
+something to eat, and when bread, wine and ham had been set before her,
+she fell to, one elbow on the table, with a pretty gluttony, like Ceres
+in the hut of the old woman Baubo.
+
+Then, the glass still at her lips:
+
+"Mother," she asked, "do you know when my brother will be back? I have
+come to speak to him."
+
+The good woman looked at her daughter in embarrassment and said nothing.
+
+"I must see him. My husband was arrested this morning and taken to the
+Luxembourg."
+
+By this name of "husband" she designated Fortune de Chassagne, a
+_ci-devant_ noble and officer in Bouille's regiment. He had first loved
+her when she was a work-girl at a milliner's in the Rue des Lombards,
+and had carried her away with him to England, whither he had fled after
+the 10th August. He was her lover; but she thought it more becoming to
+speak of him as her husband before her mother. Indeed, she told herself
+that the hardships they had shared had surely united them in a wedlock
+consecrated by suffering.
+
+More than once they had spent the night side by side on a bench in one
+of the London parks and gathered up scraps of broken bread under the
+table in the taverns in Piccadilly.
+
+Her mother could find no answer and gazed at her mournfully.
+
+"Don't you hear what I say, mother? Time presses, I must see Evariste
+at once; he, and he only, can save Fortune's life."
+
+"Julie," answered her mother at last, "it is better you should not speak
+to your brother."
+
+"Why, what do you mean, mother?"
+
+"I mean what I say, it is better you do not speak to your brother about
+Monsieur de Chassagne."
+
+"But, mother, I must!"
+
+"My child, Evariste can never forgive Monsieur de Chassagne for his
+treatment of you. You know how angrily he used to speak of him, what
+names he called him."
+
+"Yes, he called him seducer," said Julie with a little hissing laugh,
+shrugging her shoulders.
+
+"My child, it was a mortal blow to his pride. Evariste has vowed never
+again to mention Monsieur de Chassagne's name, and for two years now he
+has not breathed one word of him or of you. But his feelings have not
+altered; you know him, he can never forgive you."
+
+"But, mother, as Fortune has married me ... in London...."
+
+The poor mother threw up her eyes and hands:
+
+"Fortune is an aristocrat, an _emigre_, and that is cause enough to make
+Evariste treat him as an enemy."
+
+"Mother, give me a direct answer. Do you mean that if I ask him to go to
+the Public Prosecutor and the Committee of General Security and take the
+necessary steps to save Fortune's life, do you mean that he will not
+consent?... But, mother, he would be a monster if he refused!"
+
+"My child, your brother is an honest man and a good son. But do not ask
+him, oh! do not ask him to intercede for Monsieur de Chassagne....
+Listen to me, Julie. He does not confide his thoughts to me and, no
+doubt, I should not be competent to understand them ... but he is a
+juror; he has principles; he acts as his conscience dictates. Do not ask
+him anything, Julie."
+
+"Ah! I see you know him now. You know that he is cold, callous, that he
+is a bad man, that ambition and vainglory are his only guides. And you
+always loved him better than me. When we lived together, all three of
+us, you set him up as my pattern to copy. His staid demeanour and grave
+speech impressed you; you thought he possessed all the virtues. And me,
+me you always blamed, you gave me all the vices, because I was frank and
+free, and because I climbed trees. You could never endure me. You loved
+nobody but him. There, I hate him, your model Evariste; he is a
+hypocrite."
+
+"Hush, Julie! I have been a good mother to you as well as to him. I had
+you taught a trade. It has been no fault of mine that you are not an
+honest woman and did not marry in your station. I loved you tenderly and
+I love you still. I forgive you and I love you. But do not speak ill of
+Evariste. He is a good son. He has always taken care of me. When you
+left me, my child, when you abandoned your trade and forsook your shop,
+to go and live with Monsieur de Chassagne, what would have become of me
+without him? I should have died of hunger and wretchedness."
+
+"Do not talk so, mother; you know very well we would have cherished you
+with all affection, Fortune and I, if you had not turned your face from
+us, at Evariste's instigation. Never tell me! he is incapable of a
+kindly action. It was to make me odious in your eyes that he made a
+pretence of caring for you. He! love you?... Is he capable of loving
+anyone? He has neither heart nor head. He has no talent, not a scrap. To
+paint, a man must have a softer, tenderer nature than his."
+
+She threw a glance round the canvases in the studio, which she found to
+be no better and no worse than when she left her home.
+
+"There you see his soul! he has put it in his pictures, cold and sombre
+as it is. His Orestes, his Orestes with the dull eye and cruel mouth,
+and looking as if he had been impaled, is himself all over.... But,
+mother, cannot you understand at all? I cannot leave Fortune in prison.
+You know these Jacobins, these patriots, all Evariste's crew. They will
+kill him. Mother, little mother, darling mother, I cannot have them kill
+him. I love him! I love him! He has been so good to me, and we have been
+so unhappy together. Look, this box-coat is one of his coats. I had
+never a shift left. A friend of Fortune's lent me a jacket and I got a
+post with an eating-house keeper at Dover, while he worked at a
+barber's. We knew quite well that to return to France was to risk our
+lives; but we were asked if we would go to Paris to carry out an
+important mission.... We agreed,--we would have accepted a mission to
+hell! Our travelling expenses were paid and we were given a letter of
+exchange on a Paris banker. We found the offices closed; the banker is
+in prison and going to be guillotined. We had not a brass farthing. All
+the individuals with whom we were in correspondence and to whom we could
+appeal are fled or imprisoned. Not a door to knock at. We slept in a
+stable in the Rue de la Femme-sans-tete. A charitable bootblack, who
+slept on the same straw with us there, lent my lover one of his boxes, a
+brush and a pot of blacking three quarters empty. For a fortnight
+Fortune made his living and mine by blacking shoes in the Place de
+Greve.
+
+"But on Monday a Member of the Commune put his foot on the box to have
+his boots polished. He had been a butcher once, a man Fortune had before
+now given a kick behind to for selling meat of short weight. When
+Fortune raised his head to ask for his two sous, the rascal recognized
+him, called him aristocrat, and threatened to have him arrested. A crowd
+collected, made up of honest folks and a few blackguards, who began to
+shout "_Death to the emigre!_" and called for the gendarmes. At that
+moment I came up with Fortune's bowl of soup. I saw him taken off to the
+Section and shut up in the church of Saint-Jean. I tried to kiss him,
+but they hustled me away. I spent the night like a dog on the church
+steps.... They took him away this morning...."
+
+Julie could not finish, her sobs choked her.
+
+She threw her hat on the floor and fell on her knees at her mother's
+feet.
+
+"They took him away this morning to the Luxembourg prison. Mother,
+mother, help me to save him; have pity on your child!"
+
+Drowned in her tears, she threw open her box-coat and, the better to
+prove herself a woman and a wife, bared her bosom; seizing her mother's
+hands, she held them close over her throbbing breasts.
+
+"My darling, my daughter, Julie, my Julie!" sobbed the widow
+Gamelin,--and pressed her streaming cheeks to the girl's.
+
+For some moments they clung together without a word. The poor mother
+was racking her brains for some way of helping her daughter, and Julie
+was watching the kind look in those tearful eyes.
+
+"Perhaps," thought Evariste's mother, "perhaps, if I speak to him, he
+will be melted. He is good, he is tender-hearted. If politics had not
+hardened him, if he had not been influenced by the Jacobins, he would
+never have had these cruel feelings, that terrify me because I cannot
+understand them."
+
+She took Julie's head in her two hands:
+
+"Listen, my child. I will speak to Evariste. I will sound him, get him
+to see you and hear your story. The sight of you might anger him; his
+first impulse might be to turn against you.... And then, I know him;
+this costume would offend him; he is uncompromising in everything that
+touches morals, that shocks the proprieties. _I_ was a bit startled to
+see my Julie dressed as a man."
+
+"Oh! mother, the emigration and the fearful disorders of the kingdom
+have made these disguises quite a common thing. They are adopted in
+order to follow a trade, to escape recognition, to get a borrowed
+passport or a certificate approved. In London I saw young Girey dressed
+as a girl,--and he made a very pretty girl; you must own, mother, _that_
+is a more scandalous disguise than mine."
+
+"My poor child, you have no need to justify yourself in my eyes, whether
+in this or any other thing. I am your mother; for me you will always be
+blameless. I will speak to Evariste, I will say...."
+
+She broke off. She knew what her son was; she felt it in her heart, but
+she would not believe it, she _would_ not know it.
+
+"He is kind-hearted. He will do it for my sake ... for your sake, he
+will do what I ask him."
+
+The two women, weary to the death, fell silent. Julie sank asleep, her
+head pillowed on the knees where she had rested as a child, while the
+mother, the rosary between her hands, wept, like another _mater
+dolorosa_, over the calamities she felt drawing stealthily nearer and
+nearer in the silence of this day of snow when everything was hushed,
+footsteps and carriage wheels and the very heaven itself.
+
+Suddenly, with a keenness of hearing sharpened by anxiety, she caught
+the sound of her son's steps on the stairs.
+
+"Evariste!" she cried. "Hide"--and she hurried the girl into the
+bedroom.
+
+"How are you to-day, mother dear?"
+
+Evariste hung up his hat on its peg, changed his blue coat for a working
+jacket and sat down before his easel. For some days he had been working
+at a sketch in charcoal of a Victory laying a wreath on the brow of a
+dead soldier, who had died for the fatherland. Once the subject would
+have called out all his enthusiasm, but the Tribunal consumed all his
+days and absorbed his whole soul, while his hand had lost its knack from
+disuse and had grown heavy and inert.
+
+He hummed over the _Ca ira_.
+
+"I hear you singing," said the _citoyenne_ Gamelin; "you are
+light-hearted, Evariste?"
+
+"We have reason to be glad, mother; there is good news. La Vendee is
+crushed, the Austrians beaten, the Army of the Rhine has forced the
+lines of Lautern and of Wissembourg. The day is at hand when the
+Republic triumphant will show her clemency. Why must the conspirators'
+audacity increase the mightier the Republic waxes in strength, and
+traitors plot to strike the fatherland a blow in the dark at the very
+moment her lightnings overwhelm the enemies that assail her openly?"
+
+The _citoyenne_ Gamelin, as she sat knitting a stocking, was watching
+her son's face over her spectacles.
+
+"Berzelius, your old model, has been to ask for the ten livres you owed
+him; I paid him. Little Josephine has had a belly-ache from eating too
+much of the preserves the carpenter gave her. So I made her a drop of
+herb tea.... Desmahis has been to see you; he was sorry he did not find
+you in. He wanted to engrave a design by you. He thinks you have great
+talent. He is a fine fellow; he looked at your sketches and admired
+them."
+
+"When peace is re-established and conspiracy suppressed," said the
+painter, "I shall begin on my Orestes again. It is not my way to flatter
+myself; but that head is worthy of David's brush."
+
+He outlined with a majestic sweep the arm of his Victory.
+
+"She holds out palms," he said. "But it would be finer if her arms
+themselves were palms."
+
+"Evariste!"
+
+"Mother?"
+
+"I have had news ... guess, of whom...."
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"Of Julie ... of your sister.... She is not happy."
+
+"It would be a scandal if she were."
+
+"Do not speak so, my son, she is your sister. Julie is not a bad woman;
+she had a good disposition, which misfortune has developed. She loves
+you. I can assure you, Evariste, that she only desires a hard-working,
+exemplary life and her fondest wish is to be reconciled to her friends.
+There is nothing to prevent your seeing her again. She has married
+Fortune Chassagne."
+
+"She has written to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"How, then, have you had news of her, mother?"
+
+"It was not by letter, Evariste; it was...."
+
+He sprang up and stopped her with a savage cry:
+
+"Not another word, mother! Do not tell me they have both returned to
+France.... As they are doomed to perish, at least let it not be at my
+hands. For their own sake, for yours, for mine, let me not know they are
+in Paris.... Do not force the knowledge on me; otherwise...."
+
+"What do you mean, my son? you would think, you would dare...?"
+
+"Mother, hear what I say; if I knew my sister Julie to be in that room
+..." (and he pointed at the closed door), "I should go instantly to
+denounce her to the Committee of Vigilance of the Section."
+
+The poor mother, her face as white as her coif, dropped her knitting
+from her trembling hands and sighed in a voice fainter than the faintest
+whisper:
+
+"I would not believe it, but I see it now; my boy is a monster...."
+
+As pale as she, the froth gathering on his lips, Evariste fled from the
+house and ran to find at Elodie's side forgetfulness, sleep, the
+delicious foretaste of extinction.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+While the Pere Longuemare and the girl Athenais were examined at the
+Section, Brotteaux was led off between two gendarmes to the Luxembourg,
+where the door-keeper refused to admit him, declaring he had no room
+left. The old financier was next taken to the Conciergerie and brought
+into the Gaoler's office, quite a small room, divided in two by a glazed
+partition. While the clerk was inscribing his name in the prison
+registers, Brotteaux could see through the panes two men lying each on a
+tattered mattress, both as still as death and with glazed eyes that
+seemed to see nothing. Plates, bottles and bits of broken bread and meat
+littered the floor round them. They were prisoners condemned to death
+and waiting for the cart to arrive.
+
+The _ci-devant_ Monsieur des Ilettes was thrust into a dungeon, where by
+the light of a lantern he could just make out two figures stretched on
+the ground, one savage-looking and hideously mutilated, the other
+graceful and pleasing. The two prisoners offered him a share of their
+straw, and this, rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, was better
+than having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement.
+Brotteaux sank down on a bench in the pestiferous darkness and sat
+there, his head against the wall, speechless and motionless. So intense
+was his agony of mind he would have dashed out his brains against the
+stones if he had had the strength. He could not breathe. His eyes swam,
+and a long-drawn murmur, as soft as silence, filled his ears. He felt
+his whole being bathed in a delicious semi-consciousness. For one
+incomparable moment everything was harmony, serenity, light, fragrance,
+sweetness. Then he ceased to know or feel anything.
+
+When he returned to himself, the first notion that entered his head was
+to regret his coma and, a philosopher even in the stupor of despair, he
+reflected how he had had to plunge to the depths of an underground
+dungeon, there to await execution, to enjoy the most exquisite of all
+voluptuous sensations he had ever tasted. He tried hard to lose
+consciousness again, but without success; on the contrary, little by
+little he felt the poisonous air of the dungeon fill his lungs and bring
+with it, along with the fever of life, a full consciousness of his
+intolerable wretchedness.
+
+Meantime his two companions regarded his silence as a cruel personal
+insult. Brotteaux, who was of a sociable turn, endeavoured to satisfy
+their curiosity; but when they discovered he was only what they called
+"a political," one of the mild sort whose crime was only a matter of
+words and opinions, they lost all respect and sympathy for him. The
+offences charged against these two prisoners had more grit; the older of
+the men was a murderer, the other had been manufacturing forged
+assignats. Both made the best of their situation and even found some
+alleviations in it. Brotteaux's thoughts suddenly turned to the world
+above him,--how over his head all was noise and bustle, light and life,
+while the pretty shopwomen in the Palais de Justice behind their
+counters, loaded with perfumery and pretty knicknacks, smiled on their
+customers, happy people free to go where they pleased,--and the picture
+doubled his despair.
+
+Night fell, unmarked in the darkness and silence of the dungeon, but yet
+gloomy and oppressive. One leg extended on his bench and his back
+propped against the wall, Brotteaux fell into a doze. And lo! he saw
+himself seated at the foot of a leafy beech, in which the birds were
+singing; the setting sun bathed the river in liquid fire and the clouds
+were edged with purple. The night wore through. A burning fever consumed
+him and he greedily drained his pitcher to the dregs, but the fetid
+water only increased his distress.
+
+Next day the gaoler who brought the food promised Brotteaux, if he could
+afford the cost, to give him the privileges of a prisoner who pays for
+his accommodation, so soon as there should be room, and it was not
+likely to be long first. And so it turned out; two days later he invited
+the old financier to leave his dungeon. At every step he took upwards,
+Brotteaux felt life and vigour coming back to him, and when he saw a
+room with a red-tiled floor and in it a bed of sacking covered with a
+dingy woollen counterpane, he wept for joy. The gilded bed carved with
+doves billing and cooing that he had once had made for the prettiest of
+the dancers at the Opera had not seemed so desirable or promised him
+such delights.
+
+This bed of sacking was in a large hall, very fairly clean, which held
+seventeen others like it, separated by high partitions of planks. The
+company that occupied these quarters, composed of ex-nobles, tradesmen,
+bankers, working-men, hit the old publican's taste well enough, for he
+could accommodate himself to persons of all qualities. He noticed that
+these, cut off like himself from every opportunity of pleasure and
+foredoomed to perish at the hand of the executioner, were of a very
+merry humour and showed a marked taste for wit and raillery. His bent
+was to think lightly of mankind, so he attributed the high spirits of
+his companions to the frivolity of their minds, which prevented them
+from looking seriously at their situation. Moreover, he was strengthened
+in his opinion by observing how the more intelligent among them were
+profoundly sad. He remarked before long, that, for the most part, wine
+and brandy supplied the inspiration of a gaiety that betrayed its source
+by its violent and sometimes almost insane character. They did not all
+possess courage; but all made a display of it. This caused Brotteaux no
+surprise; he was well aware how men will readily enough avow cruelty,
+passion, even avarice, but never cowardice, because such an admission
+would bring them, among savages and even in civilized society, into
+mortal danger. That is the reason, he reflected, why all nations are
+nations of heroes and all armies are made up of brave men only.
+
+More potent, even, than wine and brandy were the rattle of weapons and
+keys, the clash of locks and bolts, the cry of sentries, the stamping of
+feet at the door of the Tribunal, to intoxicate the prisoners and fill
+their minds with melancholy, insanity, or frenzy. Some there were who
+cut their throat with a razor or threw themselves from a window.
+
+Brotteaux had been living for three days in these privileged quarters
+when he learned through the turnkey that the Pere Longuemare was
+languishing on the rotten verminous straw of the common prison with the
+thieves and murderers. He had him put on paying terms in the same room
+as himself, where a bed had fallen vacant. Having promised to pay for
+the monk, the old publican, who had no large sum of money about him,
+struck out the idea of making portraits at a crown apiece. By the help
+of a gaoler, he procured a supply of small black frames in which to put
+pretty little designs in hair which he executed with considerable
+cleverness. These productions sold well, being highly appreciated among
+people whose thoughts were set on leaving souvenirs to their friends.
+
+The Pere Longuemare kept a good heart and a high spirit. While waiting
+his summons to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he was
+preparing his defence. Drawing no distinction between his own case and
+that of the Church, he promised himself to expose to his judges the
+disorders and scandals to which the Spouse of Christ was exposed by the
+Civil Constitution of the Clergy; he proposed to depict the eldest
+daughter of the Church waging sacrilegious war upon the Pope, the French
+clergy robbed, outraged, subjected to the odious domination of laics,
+the regulars, Christ's true army, despoiled and scattered. He cited St.
+Gregory the Great and St. Irenaeus, quoted numerous articles of the Canon
+Law and whole paragraphs from the Decretals.
+
+All day long he sat scribbling on his knees, at the foot of his bed,
+dipping stumps of pens worn to the feathers in ink, soot,
+coffee-grounds, covering with illegible writing candle-wrappers,
+packing-paper, newspapers, playing cards, even thinking of using his
+shirt for the same purpose after starching it. Leaf by leaf the pile
+grew; pointing to this mass of undecipherable scrawls, he would say:
+
+"Ah! when I appear before my judges, I will inundate them with light."
+
+Another day, casting a look of satisfaction on his defence, which grew
+bulkier day by day, and thinking of these magistrates he was burning to
+confound, he cried:
+
+"I wouldn't like to be in _their_ shoes!"
+
+The prisoners whom fate had brought together in this prison-room were
+Royalists or Federalists, there was even a Jacobin amongst the rest;
+they held widely different views as to the right way of conducting the
+business of the State, but not one of them all preserved the smallest
+vestige of Christian beliefs. Feuillants, Constitutionals, Girondists,
+all, like Brotteaux, considered the Christians' God a very bad thing for
+themselves and an excellent one for the people; as for the Jacobins,
+they were for installing in the place of Jehovah a Jacobin god, anxious
+to refer the dispensation of Jacobinism on earth to a higher source. But
+as they could not conceive, either one or the other, of anybody being so
+absurd as to believe in any revealed religion, seeing that the Pere
+Longuemare was no fool, they took him to be a knave. By way, no doubt,
+of preparing for martyrdom, he made confession of faith at every
+opportunity, and the more sincerity he displayed, the more like an
+impostor he seemed.
+
+In vain Brotteaux stood surety for the monk's good faith; Brotteaux
+himself was reputed to believe only a part of what he said. His ideas
+were too singular not to appear affected and satisfied nobody entirely.
+He dubbed Jean-Jacques a dull, paltry rascal. Voltaire, on the other
+hand, he accounted among the divinely-gifted men, though not on the
+same level as the amiable Helvetius, or Diderot, or the Baron d'Holbach.
+In his opinion the greatest genius of the century was Boulanger. He also
+thought highly of the astronomer Lalande and of Dupuis, author of a
+_Memoir on the origin of the Constellations_.
+
+The wits of the company made a thousand jokes at the poor Barnabite's
+expense, the point of which he never saw; his simplicity saved him from
+every pitfall. To drown the suspense that racked them and escape the
+torments of idleness, the prisoners played at draughts, cards and
+backgammon. No instrument of music was allowed. After supper they would
+sing, or recite verses. Voltaire's _La Pucelle_ brought a little
+cheerfulness to these aching hearts, and the company never wearied of
+hearing the telling passages repeated. But, unable to distract their
+thoughts from the appalling vision that always loomed before their
+mind's eye, they strove sometimes to make a diversion of it, and in the
+chamber of the eighteen beds, before turning in for the night, they
+would play the game of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The parts were
+distributed according to tastes and aptitudes. While some represented
+the judges and prosecutor, others were the accused or the witnesses,
+others again the headsman and his men. The trials invariably wound up
+with the execution of the condemned, who were laid at full length on a
+bed, the neck underneath a plank. The scene then shifted to the infernal
+regions. The most agile of the troop, wrapped in white sheets, played
+spectres. There was a young _avocat_ from Bordeaux, a man named Dubosc,
+short, dark, one-eyed, humpbacked, bandy-legged, the very black deuce in
+person, who used to come all horned and hoofed, to drag the Pere
+Longuemare feet first out of his bed, announcing to the culprit that he
+was condemned to the everlasting flames of hell and doomed past
+redemption for having made of the Creator of the Universe a jealous
+being, a blockhead, and a bully, an enemy of human happiness and love.
+
+"Ah! ha! ha!" the devil would scream discordantly, "so you taught, you
+old bonze, that God delights to see His creatures languish in contrition
+and deny themselves His dearest gifts. Impostor, hypocrite, sneak, sit
+on nails and eat egg-shells for all eternity!"
+
+The Pere Longuemare, for all reply, would observe that the speech showed
+the philosopher's cloven hoof behind the devil's and that the meanest
+imp of hell would never have talked such foolishness, having at least
+rubbed shoulders with Theology and for certain being less ignorant than
+an Encyclopaedist.
+
+But when the Girondist _avocat_ called him a Capuchin, he turned scarlet
+with anger and declared that a man incapable of distinguishing a
+Barnabite from a Franciscan was too blind to see a fly in milk.
+
+The Revolutionary Tribunal was always draining the prisons, which the
+Committees were as unceasingly replenishing; in three months the chamber
+of the eighteen was half full of new faces. The Pere Longuemare lost his
+tormentor. The _avocat_ Dubosc was haled before the Revolutionary
+Tribunal and condemned to death as a Federalist and for having conspired
+against the unity of the Republic. On leaving the court, he returned, as
+the prisoners always did, by a corridor that ran through the prison and
+opened on the room he had enlivened for three months with his gaiety.
+As he made his farewells to his companions, he maintained the same light
+tone and cheerful air that were habitual with him.
+
+"Forgive me, sir," he said to the Pere Longuemare, "for having hauled
+you feet foremost from your bed. I will never do it again."
+
+Then, turning to old Brotteaux:
+
+"Good-bye, I go before you into the land of nowhere. I gladly return to
+Nature the atoms of my composition, only hoping she will make a better
+use of them for the future, for it must be owned she did not make much
+of a job of me."
+
+So he went on his way to the gaoler's room, leaving Brotteaux sorrowful
+and the Pere Longuemare trembling and green as a leaf, more dead than
+alive to see the impious wretch laugh on the brink of the abyss.
+
+When Germinal brought back the bright days, Brotteaux, who was of an
+ardent temperament, tramped down several times every day to the
+courtyard giving on the women's quarters, near the fountain where the
+female prisoners used to come of a morning to wash their linen. An iron
+railing separated the two barracks; but the bars were not so close
+together as to hinder hands joining and lips meeting. Under the kindly
+shade of night loving couples would press against the obstacle. At such
+times Brotteaux would retire discreetly to the staircase and, sitting on
+a step, would draw from the pocket of his plum-coloured surtout his
+little Lucretius and read, by the light of a lantern, some of the
+author's sternly consolatory maxims: "_Sic ubi non erimus_.... When we
+shall have ceased to be, nothing will have power to move us, not even
+the heavens and earth and sea confounding their shattered
+fragments...." But, in the act of enjoying his exalted wisdom, Brotteaux
+would find himself envying the Barnabite this craze that veiled the
+universe from his eyes.
+
+Month by month terror grew more intense. Every night the tipsy gaolers,
+their watch-dogs at their heels, would march from cell to cell,
+delivering acts of accusation, howling out names they mutilated, waking
+the prisoners and for twenty victims marked on their list terrifying two
+hundred. Along these corridors, reeking with bloody memories, passed
+every day, without a murmur, twenty, thirty, fifty condemned prisoners,
+old men, women, young men and maidens, so widely different in rank and
+character and opinion that the question rose involuntarily to the
+lips,--had they not been chosen by lot?
+
+And the card playing went on, the Burgundy drinking, the making of
+plans, the assignations for after dark at the rails. The company, new
+almost to a man, now consisted in great part of "extremists" and
+"irreconcilables." But still the room of the eighteen beds remained the
+home of elegance and good breeding; barring two prisoners recently
+transferred from the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie and added to the
+company, by whom they were suspected of being spies, the _citoyens_
+Navette and Bellier by name, there were none but honest folk there who
+reposed a mutual trust in each other. Glass in hand, the victories of
+the Republic were celebrated by all. Amongst the rest were several
+poets, as there always are in any gathering of people with nothing to
+do. The most accomplished composed odes on the triumphs of the Army of
+the Rhine, which they recited with much mouthing. They were
+uproariously applauded. Brotteaux was the only lukewarm admirer of the
+victors and the bards who sang their victories.
+
+"Since Homer began it," he observed one day, "it has always been a mania
+with poets, this extolling the powers of fighting-men. War is not an
+art, and luck alone decides the fate of battles. With two generals, both
+blockheads, face to face, one of them must inevitably be victorious.
+Wait till some day one of these warriors you make gods of swallows you
+all up like the stork in the fable who gobbles up the frogs. Ah! then he
+would be really and truly a God! For you can always tell the gods by
+their appetite."
+
+Brotteaux's head had never been turned by the glamour of arms. He felt
+no triumph at the victories of the Republic, which he had foreseen. He
+did not like the new regime, which military success confirmed. He was a
+malcontent. Another would have been the same for less cause.
+
+One morning it was announced that the Commissaries of the Committee of
+General Security were going to institute a search in the prisoners'
+quarters, that they would seize assignats, articles of gold and silver,
+knives, scissors; that similar proceedings had been taken at the
+Luxembourg, where letters, papers, and books had been taken possession
+of.
+
+Thereupon everyone tried to think of some hiding place in which to
+secure whatever he held most precious. The Pere Longuemare carried away
+his defence in armfuls to a rain-gutter, while Brotteaux slipped his
+Lucretius among the ashes on the hearth.
+
+When the Commissaries, wearing tricolour ribands at their necks,
+arrived to carry out their perquisition, they found scarcely anything
+but such trifles as it had been deemed judicious to let them discover.
+On their departure, the Pere Longuemare ran to his rain-pipe and rescued
+as much of his defence as wind and water had spared. Brotteaux pulled
+out his Lucretius from the fireplace all black with soot.
+
+"Let us make the best of the present," he thought, "for I augur from
+sundry tokens that our time is straitly measured from henceforth."
+
+One soft night in Prairial, while over the prison yard the moon riding
+high in a pale sky showed her two silver horns, the ex-financier, who,
+as his way was, sat reading Lucretius on a step of the stone stairs,
+heard a voice call him, a woman's voice, a delightful voice, which he
+did not know. He went down into the court and saw behind the railing a
+form which he recognized as little as he did the voice, but which
+reminded him, in its half-seen fascinating outlines, of all the women he
+had loved. A flood of silvery blue moonlight fell on it. Next instant
+Brotteaux recognized the pretty actress of the Rue Feydeau, Rose
+Thevenin.
+
+"You here, my child! It is a joy to see you, but it stabs my heart.
+Since when have you been here, and why?"
+
+"Since yesterday,"--and she added very low:
+
+"I have been denounced as a Royalist. They accuse me of conspiring to
+set free the Queen. Knowing you were here, I tried at once to see you.
+Listen to me, dear friend ... you will let me call you so?... I know
+people in power; I have sympathizers, I am sure of it, on the Committee
+of Public Safety itself. I will set my friends to work; they will
+deliver me, and _I_ will deliver you."
+
+But Brotteaux in a voice that took on an accent of urgency:
+
+"By everything you hold dear, my child, do nothing of the sort! Do not
+write, do not petition; ask nothing of anybody, I conjure you, let
+yourself be forgotten."
+
+As she appeared unconvinced by what he said, he went on more
+beseechingly still:
+
+"Not a word, Rose, let them forget you; there lies safety. Anything your
+friends might attempt would only hasten your undoing. Time is
+everything; only a short delay, a very short one, I hope, is needed to
+save you.... Above all, never try to melt the judges, the jurors, a
+Gamelin. They are not men, they are things; there is no arguing with
+things. Let them forget you; if you take my advice, sweetheart, I shall
+die happy, happy to have saved your life."
+
+She answered:
+
+"I will do as you say.... Never talk of dying...."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"My life is ended, my child. Do you live and be happy."
+
+She took his hands and laid them on her bosom:
+
+"Hear what I say, dear friend.... I have only seen you once for a day,
+and yet you are not indifferent to me. And if what I am going to tell
+you can renew your attachment to life, oh! believe my promise,--I will
+be for you ... whatever you shall wish me to be."
+
+And they exchanged a kiss on the mouth through the bars.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Evariste Gamelin, as he sat, one day that a long, tedious case was
+before the Tribunal, on the jury-bench in the stifling court, closed his
+eyes and thought:
+
+"Evil-doers, by forcing Marat to hide in holes and corners, had turned
+him into a bird of night, the bird of Minerva, whose glance pierced the
+dark recesses where conspirators lurked. Now it is a blue eye, cold and
+calm, that discovers the enemies of the State and denounces traitors
+with a subtlety unknown even to the Friend of the People, now asleep for
+ever in the garden of the Cordeliers. The new saviour of the country, as
+zealous and more keen-sighted than the first, sees what no man before
+had seen and with a lifted finger spreads terror broadcast. He discerns
+the fine, imperceptible shades of difference that divide evil from good,
+vice from virtue, which but for him would have been confounded, to the
+hurt of the fatherland and freedom, he marks out before him the thin,
+inflexible line outside which lies, to the right hand and to the left,
+only error, crime, and wickedness. The Incorruptible teaches how men
+serve the foreigner equally by excess of zeal and by supineness, by
+persecuting the religious in the name of reason no less than by fighting
+in the name of religion against the laws of the Republic. Every whit as
+much as the villains who immolated Le Peltier and Marat, do they serve
+the foreigner who decree them divine honours, to compromise their
+memory. Agent of the foreigner whosoever repudiates the ideas of order,
+wisdom, opportunity; agent of the foreigner whosoever outrages morals,
+scandalizes virtue, and, in the foolishness of his heart, denies God.
+Yes, fanatic priests deserve to die; but there is an anti-revolutionary
+way of combating fanaticism; abjurers, too, may be guilty of a crime. By
+moderation men destroy the Republic; by violence they do the same.
+
+"August and terrible the functions of a judge,--functions defined by the
+wisest of mankind! It is not aristocrats alone, federalists, scoundrels
+of the Orleans faction, open enemies of the fatherland, that we must
+strike down. The conspirator, the agent of the foreigner is a Proteus,
+he assumes all shapes, he puts on the guise of a patriot, a
+revolutionary, an enemy of Kings; he affects the boldness of a heart
+that beats only for freedom; his voice swells, and the foes of the
+Republic tremble. His name is Danton; his violence is a poor cloak to
+his odious moderatism, and his base corruption is manifest at last. The
+conspirator, the agent of the foreigner is that fluent stammerer, the
+man who clapped the first cockade of revolution in his hat, that
+pamphleteer who, in his ironical and cruel patriotism, nicknamed
+himself, 'The procureur of the Lantern.' _His_ name is Camille
+Desmoulins. He threw off the mask by defending the Generals, traitors to
+their country, and claiming measures of clemency criminal at such a
+time. There was Philippeaux, there was Herault, there was the despicable
+Lacroix. There was the Pere Duchesne, he, too, a conspirator and agent
+of the foreigner, the vile demagogue who degraded liberty, and whose
+filthy calumnies stirred sympathy for Antoinette herself. There was
+Chaumette, who yet was a mild man, popular, moderate, well-intentioned,
+and virtuous in the administration of the Commune; but he was an
+atheist! Conspirators, agents of the foreigner,--such were all those
+sansculottes in red cap and carmagnole and sabots who recklessly outbid
+the Jacobins in patriotism. Conspirator and agent of the foreigner was
+Anacharsis Cloots, 'orator of the human race,' condemned to die by all
+the Monarchies of the world; but everything was to be feared of him,--he
+was a Prussian.
+
+"Now violent or moderate, all these evil-doers, all these
+traitors,--Danton, Desmoulins, Hebert, Chaumette,--have perished under
+the axe. The Republic is saved; a chorus of praises rises from all the
+Committees and the popular assemblies one and all to greet Maximilien
+and _the Mountain_. Good citizens cry aloud: 'Worthy representatives of
+a free people, in vain have the sons of the Titans lifted their proud
+heads; oh! mountain of blessing, oh! protecting Sinai, from thy
+tumultuous bosom has issued the saving lightning....'
+
+"In this chorus the Tribunal has its meed of praise. How sweet a thing
+it is to be virtuous, and how dear to public gratitude, to the heart of
+the upright judge!
+
+"Meanwhile, for a patriot heart, what food for amazement, what motives
+for anxiety! What! to betray the people's cause, it was not enough to
+have a Mirabeau, a La Fayette, a Bailly, a Petion, a Brissot? We must
+likewise have the men who denounced these traitors. Can it be that all
+the patriots who made the Revolution only wrought to ruin her? that
+these heroes of the great days were but contriving with Pitt and Coburg
+to give the kingdom to the Orleans and set up a Regency under Louis
+XVII? What! Danton was another Monk. What! Chaumette and the Hebertists,
+falser than the Federalists who sent them to the guillotine, had
+conspired to destroy the State! But among those who hurried to their
+death the traitor Danton and the traitor Chaumette, will not the blue
+eye of Robespierre discover anon more perfidious traitors yet? What will
+be the end of this hideous concatenation of traitors betrayed and the
+revelations of the keen-sighted Incorruptible?..."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Meantime Julie Gamelin, in her bottle-green box-coat, went every day to
+the Luxembourg Gardens and there, on a bench at the end of one of the
+avenues, sat waiting for the moment when her lover should show his face
+at one of the dormers of the Palace. Then they would beckon to each
+other and talk together in a language of signs they had invented. In
+this way she learned that the prisoner occupied a fairly good room and
+had pleasant companions, that he wanted a blanket for his bed and a
+kettle and loved his mistress fondly.
+
+She was not the only one to watch for the sight of a dear face at a
+window of the Palace now turned into a prison. A young mother not far
+from her kept her eyes fixed on a closed casement; then directly she saw
+it open, she would lift her little one in her arms above her head. An
+old lady in a lace veil sat for long hours on a folding-chair, vainly
+hoping to catch a momentary glimpse of her son, who, for fear of
+breaking down, never left his game of quoits in the courtyard of the
+prison till the hour when the gardens were closed.
+
+During these long hours of waiting, whether the sky were blue or
+overcast, a man of middle age, rather stout and very neatly dressed, was
+constantly to be seen on a neighbouring bench, playing with his
+snuff-box and the charms on his watch-guard or unfolding a newspaper,
+which he never read. He was dressed like a bourgeois of the old school
+in a gold-laced cocked hat, a plum-coloured coat and blue waistcoat
+embroidered in silver. He looked well-meaning enough, and was something
+of a musician to judge by a flute, one end of which peeped from his
+pocket. Never for a moment did his eyes wander from the supposed
+stripling, on whom he bestowed continual smiles, and when he saw him
+leave his seat, he would get up himself and follow him at a distance.
+Julie, in her misery and loneliness, was touched by the discreet
+sympathy the good man manifested.
+
+One day, as she was leaving the gardens, it began to rain; the old
+fellow stepped up to her and, opening his vast red umbrella, asked
+permission to offer her its shelter. She answered sweetly, in her clear
+treble, that she would be very glad. But at the sound of her voice and
+warned perhaps by a subtle scent of womanhood, he strode rapidly away,
+leaving the girl exposed to the rain-storm; she took in the situation,
+and, despite her gnawing anxieties, could not restrain a smile.
+
+Julie lived in an attic in the Rue du Cherche-Midi and represented
+herself as a draper's shop-boy in search of employment; the widow
+Gamelin, at last convinced that the girl was running smaller risks
+anywhere else than at her home, had got her away from the Place de
+Thionville and the Section du Pont-Neuf, and was giving her all the help
+she could in the way of food and linen. Julie did her trifle of cooking,
+went to the Luxembourg to see her beloved prisoner and back again to her
+garret; the monotony of the life was a balm to her grief, and, being
+young and strong, she slept well and soundly the night through. She was
+of a fearless temper and broken in to an adventurous life; the costume
+she wore added perhaps a further spice of excitement, and she would
+sometimes sally out at night to visit a restaurateur's in the Rue du
+Four, at the sign of the Red Cross, a place frequented by men of all
+sorts and conditions and women of gallantry. There she read the papers
+or played backgammon with some tradesman's clerk or citizen-soldier, who
+smoked his pipe in her face. Drinking, gambling, love-making were the
+order of the day, and scuffles were not unfrequent. One evening a
+customer, hearing a trampling of hoofs on the paved roadway outside,
+lifted the curtain, and recognizing the Commandant-in-Chief of the
+National Guard, the _citoyen_ Hanriot, who was riding past with his
+Staff, muttered between his teeth:
+
+"There goes Robespierre's jackass!"
+
+Julie overheard and burst into a loud guffaw.
+
+But a moustachioed patriot took up the challenge roundly:
+
+"Whoever says that," he shouted, "is a bl--sted aristocrat, and I should
+like to see the fellow sneeze into Samson's basket. I tell you General
+Hanriot is a good patriot who'll know how to defend Paris and the
+Convention at a pinch. That's why the Royalists can't forgive him."
+
+Glaring at Julie, who was still laughing, the patriot added:
+
+"You there, greenhorn, have a care I don't land you a kick in the
+backside to learn you to respect good patriots."
+
+But other voices were joining in:
+
+"Hanriot's a drunken sot and a fool!"
+
+"Hanriot's a good Jacobin! Vive Hanriot!"
+
+Sides were taken, and the fray began. Blows were exchanged, hats
+battered in, tables overturned, and glasses shivered; the lights went
+out and the women began to scream. Two or three patriots fell upon
+Julie, who seized hold of a settle in self-defence; she was brought to
+the ground, where she scratched and bit her assailants. Her coat flew
+open and her neckerchief was torn, revealing her panting bosom. A patrol
+came running up at the noise, and the girl aristocrat escaped between
+the gendarmes' legs.
+
+Every day the carts were full of victims for the guillotine.
+
+"But I cannot, I cannot let my lover die!" Julie would tell her mother.
+
+She resolved to beg his life, to take what steps were possible, to go to
+the Committees and Public Departments, to canvas Representatives,
+Magistrates, to visit anyone who could be of help. She had no woman's
+dress to wear. Her mother borrowed a striped gown, a kerchief, a lace
+coif from the _citoyenne_ Blaise, and Julie, attired as a woman and a
+patriot, set out for the abode of one of the judges, Renaudin, a damp,
+dismal house in the Rue Mazarine.
+
+With trembling steps she climbed the wooden, tiled stairs and was
+received by the judge in his squalid cabinet, furnished with a deal
+table and two straw-bottomed chairs. The wall-paper hung in strips.
+Renaudin, with black hair plastered on his forehead, a lowering eye,
+tucked-in lips, and a protuberant chin, signed to her to speak and
+listened in silence.
+
+She told him she was the sister of the _citoyen_ Chassagne, a prisoner
+at the Luxembourg, explained as speciously as she could the
+circumstances under which he had been arrested, represented him as an
+innocent man, the victim of mischance, pleaded more and more urgently;
+but he remained callous and unsympathetic.
+
+She fell at his feet in supplication and burst into tears.
+
+No sooner did he see her tears than his face changed; his dark
+blood-shot eyes lit up, and his heavy blue jowl worked as if pumping up
+the saliva in his dry throat.
+
+"_Citoyenne_, we will do what is necessary. You need have no
+anxiety,"--and opening a door, he pushed the petitioner into a little
+sitting-room, with rose-pink hangings, painted panels, Dresden china
+figures, a time-piece and gilt candelabra; for furniture it contained
+settees, and a sofa covered in tapestry and adorned with a pastoral
+group after Boucher. Julie was ready for anything to save her lover.
+
+Renaudin had his way,--rapidly and brutally. When she got up,
+readjusting the _citoyenne's_ pretty frock, she met the man's cruel
+mocking eye; instantly she knew she had made her sacrifice in vain.
+
+"You promised me my brother's freedom," she said.
+
+He chuckled.
+
+"I told you, _citoyenne_, we would do what was necessary,--that is to
+say, we should apply the law, neither more nor less. I told you to have
+no anxiety,--and why should you be anxious? The Revolutionary Tribunal
+is always just."
+
+She thought of throwing herself upon the man, biting him, tearing out
+his eyes. But, realizing she would only be consummating Fortune
+Chassagne's ruin, she rushed from the house, and fled to her garret to
+take off Elodie's soiled and desecrated frock. All night she lay,
+screaming with grief and rage.
+
+Next day, on returning to the Luxembourg, she found the gardens occupied
+by gendarmes, who were turning out the women and children. Sentinels
+were posted in the avenues to prevent the passers-by from communicating
+with the prisoners. The young mother, who used to come every day,
+carrying her child in her arms, told Julie that there was talk of
+plotting in the prisons and that the women were blamed for gathering in
+the gardens in order to rouse the people's pity in favour of aristocrats
+and traitors.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+A mountain has suddenly sprung up in the garden of the Tuileries. Under
+a cloudless sky, Maximilien heads the procession of his colleagues in a
+blue coat and yellow breeches, carrying in his hand a bouquet of
+wheatears, cornflowers and poppies. He ascends the mountain and
+proclaims the God of Jean-Jacques to the Republic, which hears and
+weeps. Oh purity! oh sweetness! oh faith! oh antique simplicity! oh
+tears of pity! oh fertilizing dew! oh clemency! oh human fraternity!
+
+In vain Atheism still lifts its hideous face; Maximilien grasps a torch;
+flames devour the monster and Wisdom appears, with one hand pointing to
+the sky, in the other holding a crown of stars.
+
+On the platform raised against the facade of the Tuileries, Evariste,
+standing amid a throng of deeply-stirred spectators, sheds tears of joy
+and renders thanks to God. An era of universal felicity opens before his
+eyes.
+
+He sighs:
+
+"At last we shall be happy, pure, innocent, if the scoundrels suffer
+it."
+
+Alas! the scoundrels have not suffered it. There must be more
+executions; more torrents of tainted blood must be shed. Three days
+after the festival celebrating the new alliance and the reconciliation
+of heaven and earth, the Convention promulgates the Law of Prairial
+which suppresses, with a sort of ferocious good-nature, all the
+traditional forms of Law, whatever has been devised since the time of
+the Roman jurisconsults for the safeguarding of innocence under
+suspicion. No more sifting of evidence, no more questioning of the
+accused, no more witnesses, no more counsel for the defence; love of the
+fatherland supplies everything that is needful. The prisoner, who bears
+locked up in his bosom his guilt or innocence, passes without a word
+allowed before the patriot jury, and it is in this brief moment they
+must unravel his case, often complicated and obscure. How is justice
+possible? How distinguish in an instant between the honest man and the
+villain, the patriot and the enemy of the fatherland...?
+
+Disconcerted for the moment, Gamelin quickly learned his new duties and
+accommodated himself to his new functions. He recognized that this
+curtailment of formalities was genuinely characteristic of the new
+justice, at once salutary and terrifying, the administrators of which
+were no longer ermined pedants leisurely weighing the _pros_ and
+_contras_ in their Gothic balances, but good sansculottes judging by
+inspiration and seeing the whole truth in a flash. When guarantees and
+precautions would have undone everything, the impulses of an upright
+heart saved the situation. We must follow the promptings of Nature, the
+good mother who never deceives; the heart must teach us to do judgment,
+and Gamelin made invocation to the manes of Jean-Jacques:
+
+"Man of virtue, inspire me with the love of men, the ardent desire to
+regenerate humankind!"
+
+His colleagues, for the most part, felt with him. They were, first and
+foremost, simple people; and when the forms of law were simplified,
+they felt more comfortable. Justice thus abbreviated satisfied them; the
+pace was quickened, and no obstacles were left to fret them. They
+limited themselves to an inquiry into the opinions of the accused, not
+conceiving it possible that anyone could think differently from
+themselves except in pure perversity. Believing themselves the exclusive
+possessors of truth, wisdom, the quintessence of good, they attributed
+to their opponents nothing but error and evil. They felt themselves
+all-powerful; they envisaged God.
+
+They saw God, these jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Supreme
+Being, acknowledged by Maximilien, flooded them with His flames of
+light. They loved, they believed.
+
+The chair of the accused had been replaced by a vast platform able to
+accommodate fifty persons; the court only dealt with batches now. The
+Public Prosecutor would often confound under the same charge or
+implicate as accomplices individuals who met each other for the first
+time before the Tribunal. The latter, taking advantage of the terrible
+facilities accorded by the law of Prairial, sat in judgment on those
+supposed prison plots which, coming after the proscriptions of the
+Dantonists and the Commune, were made to seem their outcome by the
+insinuations of cunning adversaries. In fact, to let the world
+appreciate the two essential characteristics of a conspiracy fomented by
+foreign gold against the Republic,--to wit inopportune moderation on the
+one hand and self-interested excess of zeal on the other, they had
+united in the same condemnation two very different women, the widow of
+Camille Desmoulins, poor lovable Lucille, and the widow of the Hebertist
+Momoro, goddess of a day and jolly companion all her life. Both, to
+make the analogy complete, had been shut up in the same prison, where
+they had mingled their tears on the same bench; both, to round off the
+resemblance, had climbed the scaffold. Too ingenious the symbol,--a
+masterpiece of equilibrium, conceived doubtless by a lawyer's brain, and
+the honour of which was given to Maximilien. This representative of the
+people was accredited with every eventuality, happy or unhappy, that
+came about in the Republic, every change that was effected in the laws,
+in manners and morals, the very course of the seasons, the harvests, the
+incidence of epidemics. Unjust of course, but not unmerited the
+injustice, for indeed the man, the little, spruce, cat-faced dandy, was
+all powerful with the people....
+
+That day the Tribunal was clearing off a batch of prisoners involved in
+the great plot, thirty or more conspirators from the Luxembourg,
+submissive enough in gaol, but Royalists or Federalists of the most
+pronounced type. The prosecution relied almost entirely on the evidence
+of a single informer. The jurors did not know one word of the
+matter,--not so much as the conspirators' names. Gamelin, casting his
+eye over the prisoners' bench, recognized Fortune Chassagne among the
+accused. Julie's lover, pale-faced and emaciated by long confinement and
+his features showing coarser in the glare of light that flooded the
+hall, still retained traces of his old grace and proud bearing. His eyes
+met Gamelin's and filled with scorn.
+
+Gamelin, possessed by a calm fury, rose, asked leave to speak, and,
+fixing his eyes on the bust of Roman Brutus, which looked down on the
+Tribunal:
+
+"_Citoyen_ President," he said, "although there may exist between one of
+the accused and myself ties which, if they were made public, would be
+ties of married kinship, I hereby declare I do not decline to act. The
+two Bruti did not decline their duty, when for the salvation of the
+state and the cause of freedom, the one had to condemn a son, the other
+to strike down an adoptive father."
+
+He resumed his seat.
+
+"A fine scoundrel that," muttered Chassagne between his teeth.
+
+The public remained cold, whether because it was tired of high-flown
+characters, or thinking that Gamelin had triumphed too easily over his
+feelings of family affection.
+
+"_Citoyen_ Gamelin," said the President, "by the terms of the law, every
+refusal must be formulated in writing within the twenty-four hours
+preceding the opening of the trial. In any case, you have no reason to
+refuse; a patriot jury is superior to human passions."
+
+Each prisoner was questioned for three or four minutes, the examination
+resulting in a verdict of death in every instance. The jurors voted
+without a word said, by a nod of the head or by exclamation. When
+Gamelin's turn came to pronounce his opinion:
+
+"All the accused," he declared, "are convicted, and the law is
+explicit."
+
+As he was descending the stairway of the Palais de Justice, a young man
+dressed in a bottle-green box-coat, and who looked seventeen or eighteen
+years of age, stopped him abruptly as he went by. The lad wore a round
+hat, tilted on the back of his head, the brim framing his fine pale face
+in a dark aureole. Facing the juror, in a terrible voice vibrating with
+passion and despair:
+
+"Villain, monster, murderer!" he screamed. "Strike me, coward! I am a
+woman! Have me arrested, have me guillotined, Cain! I am your
+sister,"--and Julie spat in his face.
+
+The throng of _tricoteuses_ and _sansculottes_ was relaxing by this time
+in its Revolutionary vigilance; its civic zeal had largely cooled;
+Gamelin and his assailant found themselves the centre of nothing worse
+than uproar and confusion. Julie fought a way through the press and
+disappeared in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Evariste Gamelin was worn out and could not rest; twenty times in the
+night he would awake with a start from a sleep haunted by nightmares. It
+was only in the blue chamber, in Elodie's arms, that he could snatch a
+few hours' slumber. He talked and cried out in his sleep and used often
+to awake her; but she could make nothing of what he said.
+
+One morning, after a night when he had seen the Eumenides, he started
+awake, broken with terror and weak as a child. The dawn was piercing the
+window curtains with its wan arrows. Evariste's hair, lying tangled on
+his brow, covered his eyes with a black veil; Elodie, by the bedside,
+was gently parting the wild locks. She was looking at him now, with a
+sister's tenderness, while with her handkerchief she wiped away the icy
+sweat from the unhappy man's forehead. Then he remembered that fine
+scene in the _Orestes_ of Euripides, which he had essayed to represent
+in a picture that, if he could have finished it, would have been his
+masterpiece--the scene where the unhappy Electra wipes away the spume
+that sullies her brother's lips. And he seemed to hear Elodie also
+saying in a gentle voice:
+
+"Hear me, beloved brother, while the Furies leave you master of your
+reason ..."
+
+And he thought:
+
+"And yet I am no parricide. Far from it, it is filial piety has made me
+shed the tainted blood of the enemies of my fatherland."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+There seemed no end to these trials for conspiracy in the prisons.
+Forty-nine accused crowded the tiers of seats. Maurice Brotteaux
+occupied the right-hand corner of the topmost row,--the place of honour.
+He was dressed in his plum-coloured surtout, which he had brushed very
+carefully the day before and mended at the pocket where his little
+Lucretius had ended by fretting a hole. Beside him sat the woman
+Rochemaure, painted and powdered and patched, a brilliant and ghastly
+figure. They had put the Pere Longuemare between her and the girl
+Athenais, who had recovered her look of youthful freshness at the
+Madelonnettes.
+
+On the platform the gendarmes massed a number of other prisoners unknown
+to any of our friends, and who, as likely as not, knew nothing of each
+other,--yet accomplices one and all,--lawyers, journalists, _ci-devant_
+nobles, citizens, and citizens' wives. The _citoyenne_ Rochemaure caught
+sight of Gamelin on the jurors' bench. He had not answered her urgent
+letters and repeated messages; still she had not abandoned hope and
+threw him a look of supplication, trying to appear fascinating and
+pathetic for him. But the young juror's cold glance robbed her of any
+illusion she might have entertained.
+
+The Clerk read the act of accusation, which, succinct as was its
+reference to each individual, was a lengthy document because of the
+great number accused. It began by exposing in general outline the plot
+concocted in the prisons to drown the Republic in the blood of the
+Representatives of the nation and the people of Paris; then, coming to
+each severally, it went on:
+
+"One of the most mischievous authors of this abominable conspiracy is
+the man Brotteaux, once known as des Ilettes, receiver of imposts under
+the tyrant. This person, who was remarkable, even in the days of
+tyranny, for his libertine behaviour, is a sure proof how dissoluteness
+and immorality are the greatest enemies of the liberty and happiness of
+peoples; as a fact, after misappropriating the public revenues and
+wasting in debauchery a noticeable part of the people's patrimony, the
+person in question connived with his former concubine, the woman
+Rochemaure, to enter into correspondence with the _emigres_ and
+traitorously keep the faction of the foreigner informed of the state of
+our finances, the movements of our troops, the fluctuations of public
+opinion.
+
+"Brotteaux, who, at this period of his despicable life, was living in
+concubinage with a prostitute he had picked up in the mud of the Rue
+Fromenteau, the girl Athenais, easily suborned her to his purposes and
+made use of her to foment the counterrevolution by impudent and
+unpatriotic cries and indecent and traitorous speeches.
+
+"Sundry remarks of this ill-omened individual will afford you a clear
+indication of his abject views and pernicious purpose. Speaking of the
+patriotic tribunal now called upon to punish him, he declared
+insultingly,--'The Revolutionary Tribunal is like a play of William
+Shakespeare, who mixes up with the most bloodthirsty scenes the most
+trivial buffooneries.' Then he was forever preaching atheism, as the
+surest means of degrading the people and driving it into immorality. In
+the prison of the Conciergerie, where he was confined, he used to
+deplore as among the worst of calamities the victories of our valiant
+armies, and tried to throw suspicion on the most patriotic Generals,
+crediting them with designs of tyrannicide. 'Only wait,' he would say in
+atrocious language which the pen is loath to reproduce, 'only wait till,
+some day, one of these warriors, to whom you owe your salvation,
+swallows you all up as the stork in the fable gobbled up the frogs.'
+
+"The woman Rochemaure, a _ci-devant_ noble, concubine of Brotteaux, is
+not less culpable than he. Not only was she in correspondence with the
+foreigner and in the pay of Pitt himself, but in complicity with
+swindlers, such as Jullien (of Toulouse) and Chabot, associates of the
+_ci-devant_ Baron de Batz, she seconded that reprobate in all sorts of
+cunning machinations to depreciate the shares of the Company of the
+Indies, buy them in at a cheap price, and then raise the quotation by
+artifices of an opposite tendency, to the confusion and ruin of private
+fortunes and of the public funds. Incarcerated at La Bourbe and the
+Madelonnettes, she never ceased in prison to conspire, to dabble in
+stocks and shares and to devote herself to attempts at corruption, to
+suborn judges and jury.
+
+"Louis Longuemare, ex-noble, ex-capuchin, had long been practised in
+infamy and crime before committing the acts of treason for which he has
+to answer here. Living in a shameful promiscuity with the girl Gorcut,
+known as Athenais, under Brotteaux's very roof, he is the accomplice of
+the said girl and the said _ci-devant_ nobleman. During his
+imprisonment at the Conciergerie he has never ceased for one single day
+writing pamphlets aimed at the subversion of public liberty and
+security.
+
+"It is right to say, with regard to Marthe Gorcut, known as Athenais,
+that prostitutes are the greatest scourge of public morality, which they
+insult, and the opprobrium of the society which they disgrace. But why
+speak at length of revolting crimes which the accused confesses
+shamelessly...?"
+
+The accusation then proceeded to pass in review the fifty-four other
+prisoners, none of whom either Brotteaux, or the Pere Longuemare, or the
+_citoyenne_ Rochemaure, were acquainted with, except for having seen
+several of them in the prisons, but who were one and all included with
+the first named in "this odious plot, with which the annals of the
+nation can furnish nothing to compare."
+
+The piece concluded by demanding the penalty of death for all the
+culprits.
+
+Brotteaux was the first to be examined:
+
+"You were in the plot?"
+
+"No, I have been in no plots. Every word is untrue in the act of
+accusation I have just heard read."
+
+"There, you see; you are plotting still, at this moment, to discredit
+the Tribunal,"--and the President went on to the woman Rochemaure, who
+answered with despairing protestations of innocence, tears and
+quibblings.
+
+The Pere Longuemare referred himself purely and entirely to God's will.
+He had not even brought his written defence with him.
+
+All the questions put to him he answered in a spirit of resignation.
+Only, when the President spoke of him as a Capuchin, did the old Adam
+wake again in him:
+
+"I am not a Capuchin," he said, "I am a priest and a monk of the Order
+of the Barnabites."
+
+"It is the same thing," returned the President good-naturedly.
+
+The Pere Longuemare looked at him indignantly:
+
+"One cannot conceive a more extraordinary error," he cried, "than to
+confound with a Capuchin a monk of this Order of the Barnabites which
+derives its constitutions from the Apostle Paul himself."
+
+The remark was greeted with a burst of laughter and hooting from the
+spectators, at which the Pere Longuemare, taking this derision to
+betoken a denial of his proposition, announced that he would die a
+member of this Order of St. Barnabas, the habit of which he wore in his
+heart.
+
+"Do you admit," asked the President, "entering into plots with the girl
+Gorcut, known as Athenais, the same who accorded you her despicable
+favours?"
+
+At the question, the Pere Longuemare raised his eyes sorrowfully to
+heaven, but made no answer; his silence expressed the surprise of an
+unsophisticated mind and the gravity of a man of religion who fears to
+utter empty words.
+
+"You, the girl Gorcut," the President asked, turning to Athenais, "do
+you admit plotting in conjunction with Brotteaux?"
+
+Her answer was softly spoken:
+
+"Monsieur Brotteaux, to my knowledge, has done nothing but good. He is a
+man of the sort we should have more of; there is no better sort. Those
+who say the contrary 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, as she did
+not understand it. But, directly she gathered what the question meant,
+she answered, that would only have depended on him, but he had never
+asked her.
+
+There was a laugh in the public galleries, and the President threatened
+the girl Gorcut to refuse her a hearing if she answered in such a
+cynical sort again.
+
+At this she broke out, calling him sneak, sour face, cuckold, and
+spewing out over him, judges, and jury a torrent of invective, till the
+gendarmes dragged her from her bench and hustled her out of the hall.
+
+The President then proceeded to a brief examination of the rest of the
+accused, taking them in the order in which they sat on the tiers of
+benches.
+
+One, a man named Navette, pleaded that he could not have plotted in
+prison where he had only spent four days. The President observed that
+the point deserved to be considered, and begged the _citoyens_ of the
+jury to make a note of it. A certain Bellier said the same, and the
+President made the same remark to the jury in his favour. This mildness
+on the judge's part was interpreted by some as the result of a
+praiseworthy scrupulosity, by others as payment due in recognition of
+their talents as informers.
+
+The Deputy of the Public Prosecutor spoke next. All he did was to
+amplify the details of the act of accusation and then to put the
+question:
+
+"Is it proven that Maurice Brotteaux, Louise Rochemaure, Louis
+Longuemare, Marthe Gorcut, known as Athenais, Eusebe Rocher, Pierre
+Guyton-Fabulet, Marcelline Descourtis, etc., etc., are guilty of
+forming a conspiracy, the means whereof are assassination, starvation,
+the making of forged assignats and false coin, the depravation of morals
+and public spirit; the aim and object, civil war, the abolition of the
+National representation, the re-establishment of Royalty?"
+
+The jurors withdrew into the chamber of deliberation. They voted
+unanimously in the affirmative, only excepting the cases of the
+afore-named Navette and Bellier, whom the President, and following his
+lead, the Public Prosecutor, had put, as it were, in a separate class by
+themselves.
+
+Gamelin stated the motives for his decision thus:
+
+"The guilt of the accused is self-evident; the safety of the Nation
+demands their chastisement, and they ought themselves to desire their
+punishment 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 called back again to hear their judgment read, no doubt for
+fear of the effects of despair on so large a number of prisoners. A
+needless apprehension, so extraordinary and so general was the
+submissiveness of the victims in those days! The Clerk of the Court came
+down to the cells to read the verdict, which was listened to with such
+silence and impassivity as made it a common comparison to liken the
+condemned of Prairial to trees marked down for felling.
+
+The _citoyenne_ Rochemaure declared herself pregnant. A surgeon, who was
+likewise one of the jury, was directed to see her. She was carried out
+fainting to her dungeon.
+
+"Ah!" sighed the Pere Longuemare, "these judges and jurors are men very
+deserving of pity; their state of mind is truly deplorable. They mix up
+everything and confound a Barnabite with a Franciscan."
+
+The execution was to take place the same day at the _Barriere du
+Trone-Renverse_. The condemned, their toilet completed, hair cropped and
+shirt cut down at the neck, waited for the headsman, packed like cattle
+in the small room separated off from the Gaoler's office by a glazed
+partition.
+
+When presently the executioner and his men arrived, Brotteaux, who was
+quietly reading his Lucretius, put the marker at the page he had begun,
+shut the book, stuffed it in the pocket of his coat, and said to the
+Barnabite:
+
+"What enrages me, Reverend Father, is that I shall never convince you.
+We are going both of us to sleep our last sleep, and I shall not be able
+to twitch you by the sleeve and tell you: 'There you see; you have
+neither sensation nor consciousness left; you are inanimate. What comes
+after life is like what goes before.'"
+
+He tried to smile; but an atrocious spasm of pain wrung his heart and
+vitals, and he came near fainting.
+
+He resumed, however:
+
+"Father, I let you see my weakness. I love life and I do not leave it
+without regret."
+
+"Sir," replied the monk gently, "take heed, you are a braver man than I,
+and nevertheless death troubles you more. What does that mean, if not
+that I see the light, which you do not see yet?"
+
+"Might it not also be," said Brotteaux, "that I regret life because I
+have enjoyed it better than you, who have made it as close a copy of
+death as possible?"
+
+"Sir," said the Pere Longuemare, his face paling, "this is a solemn
+moment. God help me! It is plain we shall die without spiritual aid. It
+must be that in other days I have received the sacraments lukewarmly and
+with a thankless heart, for Heaven to refuse me them to-day, when I have
+such pressing need of them."
+
+The carts were waiting. The condemned were loaded into them pell-mell,
+with hands tied. The woman Rochemaure, whose pregnancy had not been
+verified by the surgeon, was hoisted into one of the tumbrils. She
+recovered a little of her old energy to watch the crowd of onlookers,
+hoping against hope to find rescuers amongst them. The throng was less
+dense than formerly, and the excitement less extreme. Only a few women
+screamed, "Death! death!" or mocked those who were to die. The men
+mostly shrugged their shoulders, looked another way, and said nothing,
+whether out of prudence or from respect of the laws.
+
+A shudder went through the crowd when Athenais emerged from the wicket.
+She looked a mere child.
+
+She bowed her head before the monk:
+
+"Monsieur le Cure," she asked him, "give me absolution."
+
+The Pere Longuemare gravely recited the sacramental words in muttered
+tones; then:
+
+"My daughter!" he added, "you have fallen into great disorders of
+living; but can I offer the Lord a heart as simple as yours? Would I
+were sure!"
+
+She climbed lightly into the cart. And there, throwing out her bosom and
+proudly lifting her girlish head, she cried "Vive le Roi!"
+
+She made a little sign to Brotteaux to show him there was a vacant place
+beside her. Brotteaux helped the Barnabite to get in and came and
+placed himself between the monk and the simple-hearted girl.
+
+"Sir," said the Pere Longuemare to the Epicurean philosopher, "I ask you
+a favour; this God in whom you do not yet believe, pray to Him for me.
+It is far from sure you are not nearer to Him than I am myself; a moment
+can decide this. A second, and you may be called by the Lord to be His
+highly favoured son. Sir, pray for me."
+
+While the wheels were grinding over the pavement of the long Faubourg
+Antoine, the monk was busy, with heart and lips, reciting the prayers of
+the dying. Brotteaux's mind was fixed on recalling the lines of the poet
+of nature: _Sic ubi non erimus_.... Bound as he was and shaken in the
+vile, jolting cart, he preserved his calm and even showed a certain
+solicitude to maintain an easy posture. At his side, Athenais, proud to
+die like the Queen of France, surveyed the crowd with haughty looks, and
+the old financier, noting as a connoisseur the girl's white bosom, was
+filled with regret for the light of day.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+While the carts, escorted by gendarmes, were rumbling along on their way
+to the Place du Trone Renverse, carrying to their death Brotteaux and
+his "accomplices," Evariste sat pensive on a bench in the garden of the
+Tuileries. He was waiting for Elodie. The sun, nearing its setting, shot
+its fiery darts through the leafy chestnuts. At the gate of the garden,
+Fame on her winged horse blew her everlasting trumpet. The newspaper
+hawkers were bawling the news of the great victory of Fleurus.
+
+"Yes," thought Gamelin, "victory is ours. We have paid full price for
+it."
+
+He could see the beaten Generals, disconsolate shades, trailing in the
+blood-stained dust of yonder Place de la Revolution where they perished.
+And he smiled proudly, reflecting that, but for the severities in which
+he had borne his share, the Austrian horses would to-day be gnawing the
+bark of the trees beside him.
+
+He soliloquized:
+
+"Life-giving terror, oh! blessed terror! Last year at this time, our
+heroic defenders were beaten and in rags, the soil of the fatherland was
+invaded, two-thirds of the departments in revolt. Now our armies, well
+equipped, well trained, commanded by able generals, are taking the
+offensive, ready to bear liberty through the world. Peace reigns over
+all the territory of the Republic.... Life-giving terror, oh! blessed
+terror! oh! saintly guillotine! Last year at this time, the Republic was
+torn with factions, the hydra of Federalism threatened to devour her.
+Now a united Jacobinism spreads over the empire its might and its
+wisdom...."
+
+Nevertheless, he was gloomy. His brow was deeply lined, his mouth
+bitter. His thoughts ran: "We used to say: _To conquer or to die._ We
+were wrong; it is _to conquer and to die_ we ought to say."
+
+He looked about him. Children were building sand-castles. _Citoyennes_
+in their wooden chairs under the trees were sewing or embroidering. The
+passers-by, in coat and breeches of elegant cut and strange fashion,
+their thoughts fixed on their business or their pleasures, were making
+for home. And Gamelin felt himself alone amongst them; he was no
+compatriot, no contemporary of theirs. What was it had happened? How
+came the enthusiasm of the great years to have been succeeded by
+indifference, weariness, perhaps disgust? It was plain to see, these
+people never wanted to hear the Revolutionary Tribunal spoken of again
+and averted their eyes from the guillotine. Grown too painful a sight in
+the Place de la Revolution, it had been banished to the extremity of the
+Faubourg Antoine. There even, the passage of the tumbrils was greeted
+with murmurs. Voices, it was said, had been heard to shout: "Enough!"
+
+Enough, when there were still traitors, conspirators! Enough, when the
+Committees must be reformed, the Convention purged! Enough, when
+scoundrels disgraced the National representation. Enough, when they were
+planning the downfall of _The Just!_ For, dreadful thought, but only too
+true! Fouquier himself was weaving plots, and it was to ruin Maximilien
+that he had sacrificed with solemn ceremony fifty-seven victims haled to
+death in the red sheet of parricides. France was giving way to pity--and
+pity was a crime! Then we should have saved her in spite of herself, and
+when she cried for mercy, stopped our ears and struck! Alas! the fates
+had decided otherwise; the fatherland was for cursing its saviours.
+Well, let it curse, if only it may be saved!
+
+"It is not enough to immolate obscure victims, aristocrats, financiers,
+publicists, poets, a Lavoisier, a Roucher, an Andre Chenier. We must
+strike these all-puissant malefactors who, with hands full of gold and
+dripping with blood, are plotting the ruin of _the Mountain_--the
+Fouchers, Talliens, Roveres, Carriers, Bourdons. We must deliver the
+State from all its enemies. If Hebert had triumphed, the Convention was
+overthrown, the Republic hastening to the abyss; if Desmoulins and
+Danton had triumphed, the Convention had lost its virtue, ready to
+surrender the Republic to the aristocrats, the money-jobbers and the
+Generals. If men like Tallien and Foucher, monsters gorged with blood
+and rapine, triumph, France is overwhelmed in a welter of crime and
+infamy ... Robespierre, awake; when criminals, drunken with fury and
+affright, plan your death and the death of freedom! Couthon, Saint-Just,
+make haste; why tarry ye to denounce the plots?
+
+"Why! the old-time state, the Royal monster, assured its empire by
+imprisoning every year four hundred thousand persons, by hanging fifteen
+thousand, by breaking three thousand on the wheel--and the Republic
+still hesitates to sacrifice a few hundred heads for its security and
+domination! Let us drown in blood and save the fatherland...."
+
+He was buried in these thoughts when Elodie hurried up to him,
+pale-faced and distraught:
+
+"Evariste, what have you to say to me? Why not come to the _Amour
+peintre_ to the blue chamber? Why have you made me come here?"
+
+"To bid you an eternal farewell."
+
+He had lost his wits, she faltered, she could not understand....
+
+He stopped her with a very slight movement of the hand:
+
+"Elodie, I cannot any more accept your love."
+
+She begged him to walk on further; people could see them, overhear them,
+where they were.
+
+He moved on a score of yards, and resumed, very quietly:
+
+"I have made sacrifices to my country of my life and my honour. I shall
+die infamous; I shall have naught to leave you, unhappy girl, save an
+execrated memory.... We, love? Can anyone love me still?... Can I love?"
+
+She told him he was mad; that she loved him, that she would always love
+him. She was ardent, sincere; but she felt as well as he, she felt
+better than he, that he was right. But she fought against the evidence
+of her senses.
+
+He went on:
+
+"I blame myself for nothing. What I have done, I would do again. I have
+made myself anathema for my country's sake. I am accursed. I have put
+myself outside humanity; I shall never re-enter its pale. No, the great
+task is not finished. Oh! clemency, forgiveness!--Do the traitors
+forgive? Are the conspirators clement? scoundrels, parricides multiply
+unceasingly; they spring up from underground, they swarm in from all our
+frontiers,--young men, who would have done better to perish with our
+armies, old men, children, women, with every mark of innocence, purity,
+and grace. They are offered up a sacrifice,--and more victims are ready
+for the knife!... You can see, Elodie, I must needs renounce love,
+renounce all joy, all sweetness of life, renounce life itself."
+
+He fell silent. Born to taste tranquil joys, Elodie not for the first
+time was appalled to find, under the tragic kisses of a lover like
+Evariste, her voluptuous transports blended with images of horror and
+bloodshed; she offered no reply. To Evariste the girl's silence was as a
+draught of a bitter chalice.
+
+"Yes, you can see, Elodie, we are on a precipice; our deeds devour us.
+Our days, our hours are years. I shall soon have lived a century. Look
+at this brow! Is it a lover's? Love!..."
+
+"Evariste, you are mine, I will not let you go; I will not give you back
+your freedom."
+
+She was speaking in the language of sacrifice. He felt it; she felt it
+herself.
+
+"Will you be able, Elodie, one day to bear witness that I lived faithful
+to my duty, that my heart was upright and my soul unsullied, that I knew
+no passion but the public good; that I was born to feel and love? Will
+you say: 'He did his duty'? But no! You will not say it and I do not ask
+you to say it. Perish my memory! My glory is in my own heart; shame
+beleaguers me about. If you love me, never speak my name; eternal
+silence is best."
+
+A child of eight or nine, trundling its hoop, ran just then between
+Gamelin's legs.
+
+He lifted the boy suddenly in his arms:
+
+"Child, you will grow up free, happy, and you will owe it to the
+infamous Gamelin. I am ferocious, that you may be happy. I am cruel,
+that you may be kind; I am pitiless, that to-morrow all Frenchmen may
+embrace with tears of joy."
+
+He pressed the child to his breast.
+
+"Little one, when you are a man, you will owe your happiness, your
+innocence to me; and, if ever you hear my name uttered, you will
+execrate it."
+
+Then he put down the child, which ran away in terror to cling to its
+mother's skirts, who had hurried up to the rescue. The young mother, who
+was pretty and charming in her aristocratic grace, with her gown of
+white lawn, carried off the boy with a haughty look.
+
+Gamelin turned his eyes on Elodie:
+
+"I have held the child in my arms; perhaps I shall send the mother to
+the guillotine,"--and he walked away with long strides under the ordered
+trees.
+
+Elodie stood a moment motionless, her eyes fixed on the ground. Then,
+suddenly, she darted after her lover, and frenzied, dishevelled, like a
+Maenad, she gripped him as if to tear him in pieces and cried in a voice
+choked with blood and tears:
+
+"Well, then! me too, my beloved, send me to the guillotine; me too, lay
+me under the knife!"
+
+And, at the thought of the knife at her neck, all her flesh melted in an
+ecstasy of horror and voluptuous transport.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+The sun of Thermidor was setting in a blood-red sky, while Evariste
+wandered, gloomy and careworn, in the Marbeuf gardens, now a National
+park frequented by the Parisian idlers. There were stalls for the sale
+of lemonade and ices; wooden horses and shooting-galleries were provided
+for the younger patriots. Under a tree, a little Savoyard in rags, with
+a black cap on his head, was making a marmot dance to the shrill notes
+of his hurdy-gurdy. A man, still young, slim-waisted, wearing a blue
+coat and his hair powdered, with a big dog at his heels, stopped to
+listen to the rustic music. Evariste recognized Robespierre. He found
+him paler, thinner, his face harder and drawn in folds of suffering. He
+thought to himself:
+
+"What fatigues, how many griefs have left their imprint on his brow! How
+grievous a thing it is to work for the happiness of mankind! What are
+his thoughts at this moment? Does the sound of this mountain music
+perhaps distract him from the cares of government? Is he thinking that
+he has made a pact with Death and that the hour of reckoning is coming
+close? Is he dreaming of a triumphant return to the Committee of Public
+Safety, from which he withdrew, weary of being held in check, with
+Couthon and Saint-Just, by a seditious majority? Behind that
+impenetrable countenance what hopes are seething or what fears?"
+
+But Maximilien smiled at the lad, in a gentle, kind voice asked him
+several questions about his native valley, the humble home and parents
+the poor child had left behind, tossed him a small piece of silver and
+resumed his stroll. After taking a few steps, he turned round again to
+call his dog; sniffing at the marmot, it was showing its teeth at the
+little creature that bristled up in defiance.
+
+"To heel, Brount!" he called, "to heel!"--and he plunged among the dark
+trees.
+
+Gamelin, out of respect, did not interrupt his lonely walk; but, as he
+gazed after the slender form disappearing in the darkness, he mentally
+addressed his hero in these impassioned words:
+
+"I have seen thy sadness, Maximilien; I have understood thy thought. Thy
+melancholy, thy fatigue, even the look of fear that stamps thy face,
+everything says: 'Let the reign of terror end and that of fraternity
+begin! Frenchmen, be united, be virtuous, be good and kind. Love ye one
+another....' Well then, I will second your designs; that you, in your
+wisdom and goodness, may be able to put an end to our civil discord, to
+our fratricidal hate, turn the headsman into a gardener who will
+henceforth cut off only the heads of cabbages and lettuces. I will pave
+the way with my colleagues of the Tribunal that must lead to clemency by
+exterminating conspirators and traitors. We will redouble our vigilance
+and our severity. No culprit shall escape us. And when the head of the
+last enemy of the Republic shall have fallen under the knife, then it
+will be given thee to be merciful without committing a crime, then thou
+canst inaugurate the reign of innocence and virtue in all the land, oh!
+father of thy country!"
+
+The Incorruptible was already almost out of sight. Two men in round hats
+and nankeen breeches, one of whom, a tall, lean man of a wild, unkempt
+aspect, had a blur on one eye and resembled Tallien, met him at the
+corner of an avenue, looked at him askance and passed on, pretending not
+to recognize him. When they had gone far enough to be out of hearing,
+they muttered under their breath:
+
+"So there he goes, the King, the Pope, the God. For he is God; and
+Catherine Theot is his prophetess."
+
+"Dictator, traitor, tyrant! the race of Brutus is not extinct."
+
+"Tremble, malefactor! the Tarpeian rock is near the Capitol!"
+
+The dog Brount ran towards the pair. They said no more and quickened
+their pace.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Robespierre, awake! The hour is come, time presses,... soon it will be
+too late....
+
+At last, on the 8 Thermidor, in the Convention, the Incorruptible rises,
+he is going to speak. Sun of the 31st May, is this to be a second
+day-spring? Gamelin waits and hopes. His mind is made up then!
+Robespierre is to drag from the benches they dishonour these legislators
+more guilty than the federalists, more dangerous than Danton.... No! not
+yet. "I cannot," he says, "resolve to clear away entirely the veil that
+hides this mystery of iniquity."
+
+It is mere summer lightning that flashes harmlessly and without striking
+any one of the conspirators, terrifies all. Sixty of them at least for a
+fortnight had not dared sleep in their beds. Marat's way was to denounce
+traitors by their name, to point the finger of accusation at
+conspirators. The Incorruptible hesitates, and from that moment he is
+the accused....
+
+That evening at the Jacobins, the hall is filled to suffocation, the
+corridors, the courtyard are crowded.
+
+They are all there, loud-voiced friends and silent enemies. Robespierre
+reads them the speech the Convention had heard in affrighted silence,
+and the Jacobins greet it with excited applause.
+
+"It is my dying testament," declares the orator. "You will see me drain
+the hemlock undismayed."
+
+"I will drink it with you," answered David.
+
+"All, we all will!" shout the Jacobins, and separate without deciding
+anything.
+
+Evariste, while the death of _The Just_ was preparing, slept the sleep
+of the Disciples in the garden of Gethsemane. Next day, he attended the
+Tribunal where two sections were sitting. That on which he served was
+trying twenty-one persons implicated in the conspiracy of the Lazare
+prison. The case was still proceeding when the tidings arrived:
+
+"The Convention, after a six-hours' session, has decreed Maximilien
+Robespierre accused,--with him Couthon and Saint-Just; add Augustin
+Robespierre, and Lebas, who have demanded to share the lot of the
+accused. The five outlaws stand at the bar of the house."
+
+News is brought that the President of the Section sitting in the next
+court, the _citoyen_ Dumas, has been arrested on the bench, but that the
+case goes on. Drums can be heard beating the alarm, and the tocsin peals
+from the churches.
+
+Evariste is still in his place when he is handed an order from the
+Commune to proceed to the Hotel de Ville to sit in the General Council.
+To the sound of the rolling drums and clanging church bells, he and his
+colleagues record their verdict; then he hurries home to embrace his
+mother and snatch up his scarf of office. The Place de Thionville is
+deserted. The Section is afraid to declare either for or against the
+Convention. Wayfarers creep along under the walls, slip down
+side-streets, sneak indoors. The call of the tocsin and alarm-drums is
+answered by the noise of barring shutters and bolting doors. The
+_citoyen_ Dupont senior has secreted himself in his shop; Remacle the
+porter is barricaded in his lodge. Little Josephine holds Mouton
+tremblingly in her arms. The widow Gamelin bemoans the dearness of
+victuals, cause of all the trouble. At the foot of the stairs Evariste
+encounters Elodie; she is panting for breath and her black locks are
+plastered on her hot cheek.
+
+"I have been to look for you at the Tribunal; but you had just left.
+Where are you going?"
+
+"To the Hotel de Ville."
+
+"Don't go there! It would be your ruin; Hanriot is arrested ... the
+Sections will not stir. The _Section des Piques_, Robespierre's Section,
+will do nothing, I know it for a fact; my father belongs to it. If you
+go to the Hotel de Ville, you are throwing away your life for nothing."
+
+"You wish me to be a coward?"
+
+"No! the brave thing is to be faithful to the Convention and to obey the
+Law."
+
+"The law is dead when malefactors triumph."
+
+"Evariste, hear me; hear your Elodie; hear your sister. Come and sit
+beside her and let her soothe your angry spirit."
+
+He looked at her; never had she seemed so desirable in his eyes; never
+had her voice sounded so seductive, so persuasive in his ears.
+
+"A couple of paces, only a couple of paces, dear Evariste!"--and she
+drew him towards the raised platform on which stood the pedestal of the
+overthrown statue. It was surrounded by benches occupied by strollers of
+both sexes. A dealer in fancy articles was offering his laces, a seller
+of cooling drinks, his portable cistern on his back, was tinkling his
+bell; little girls were showing off their airs and graces. The parapet
+was lined with anglers, standing, rod in hand, very still. The weather
+was stormy, the sky overcast. Gamelin leant on the low wall and looked
+down on the islet below, pointed like the prow of a ship, listening to
+the wind whistling in the tree-tops, and feeling his soul penetrated
+with an infinite longing for peace and solitude.
+
+Like a sweet echo of his thoughts, Elodie's voice sighed in his ear:
+
+"Do you remember, Evariste, how, at sight of the green fields, you
+wanted to be a country justice in a village? Yes, that would be
+happiness."
+
+But above the rustling of the trees and the girl's voice, he could hear
+the tocsin and alarm-drums, the distant tramp of horses, and rumbling of
+cannon along the streets.
+
+Two steps from them a young man, who was talking to an elegantly attired
+_citoyenne_, remarked:
+
+"Have you heard the latest?... The Opera is installed in the Rue de la
+Loi."
+
+Meantime the news was spreading; Robespierre's name was spoken, but in a
+shuddering whisper, for men feared him still. Women, when they heard the
+muttered rumour of his fall, concealed a smile.
+
+Evariste Gamelin seized Elodie's hand, but dropped it again swiftly next
+moment:
+
+"Farewell! I have involved you in my hideous fortunes, I have blasted
+your life for ever. Farewell! I pray you may forget me!"
+
+"Whatever you do," she warned him, "do not go back home to-night. Come
+to the _Amour peintre_. Do not ring; throw a pebble at my shutters. I
+will come and open the door to you myself; I will hide you in the
+loft."
+
+"You shall see me return triumphant, or you shall never see me more.
+Farewell!"
+
+On nearing the Hotel de Ville, he caught the well-remembered roar of the
+old great days rising to the grey heavens. In the Place de Greve a clash
+of arms, the glitter of scarfs and uniforms, Hanriot's cannon drawn up.
+He mounts the grand stairs and, entering the Council Hall, signs the
+attendance book. The Council General of the Commune, by the unanimous
+voice of the 491 members present, declares for the outlawed patriots.
+
+The Mayor sends for the Table of the Rights of Man, reads the clause
+which runs, "When the Government violates the Rights of the people,
+insurrection is for the people the most sacred and the most
+indispensable of duties," and the first magistrate of Paris announces
+that the Commune's answer to the Convention's act of violence is to
+raise the populace in insurrection.
+
+The members of the Council General take oath to die at their posts. Two
+municipal officers are deputed to go out on the Place de Greve and
+invite the people to join with their magistrates in saving the
+fatherland and freedom.
+
+There is an endless looking for friends, exchanging news, giving advice.
+Among these Magistrates, artisans are the exception. The Commune
+assembled here is such as the Jacobin purge has made it,--judges and
+jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal, artists like Beauvallet and
+Gamelin, householders living on their means and college professors, cosy
+citizens, well-to-do tradesmen, powdered heads, fat paunches, and gold
+watch-chains, very few sabots, striped trousers, carmagnole smocks and
+red caps.
+
+These bourgeois councillors are numerous and determined, but, when all
+is said, they are pretty well all Paris possesses of true Republicans.
+They stand on guard in the city mansion-house, as on a rock of liberty,
+but an ocean of indifference washes round their refuge.
+
+However, good news arrives. All the prisons where the proscribed had
+been confined open their doors and disgorge their prey. Augustin
+Robespierre, coming from La Force, is the first to enter the Hotel de
+Ville and is welcomed with acclamation.
+
+At eight o'clock it is announced that Maximilien, after a protracted
+resistance, is on his way to the Commune. He is eagerly expected; he is
+coming; he is here; a roar of triumph shakes the vault of the old
+Municipal Palace.
+
+He enters, supported by twenty arms. It is he, the little man there,
+slim, spruce, in blue coat and yellow breeches. He takes his seat; he
+speaks.
+
+At his arrival the Council orders the facade of the Hotel de Ville to be
+illuminated there and then. It is there the Republic resides. He speaks
+in a thin voice, in picked phrases. He speaks lucidly, copiously. His
+hearers who have staked their lives on his head, see the naked truth,
+see it to their horror. He is a man of words, a man of committees, a
+wind-bag incapable of prompt action, incompetent to lead a Revolution.
+
+They draw him into the Hall of Deliberation. Now they are all there,
+these illustrious outlaws,--Lebas, Saint-Just, Couthon. Robespierre has
+the word. It is midnight and past, he is still speaking. Meantime
+Gamelin in the Council Hall, his bent brow pressed against a window,
+looks out with a haggard eye and sees the lamps flare and smoke in the
+gloom. Hanriot's cannon are parked before the Hotel de Ville. In the
+black Place de Greve surges an anxious crowd, in uncertainty and
+suspense. At half past twelve torches are seen turning the corner of the
+Rue de la Vannerie, escorting a delegate of the Convention, clad in the
+insignia of office, who unfolds a paper and reads by the ruddy light the
+decree of the Convention, the outlawry of the members of the insurgent
+Commune, of the members of the Council General who are its abettors and
+of all such citizens as shall listen to its appeal.
+
+Outlawry, death without trial! The mere thought pales the cheek of the
+most determined. Gamelin feels the icy sweat on his brow. He watches the
+crowd hurrying with all speed from the Place. Turning his head, he finds
+that the Hall, packed but now with Councillors, is almost empty. But
+they have fled in vain; their signatures attest their attendance.
+
+It is two in the morning. The Incorruptible is in the neighbouring Hall,
+in deliberation with the Commune and the proscribed representatives.
+
+Gamelin casts a despairing look over the dark Square below. By the light
+of the lanterns he can see the wooden candles above the grocer's shop
+knocking together like ninepins; the street lamps shiver and swing; a
+high wind has sprung up. Next moment a deluge of rain comes down; the
+Place empties entirely; such as the fear of the Convention and its dread
+decree had not put to flight scatter in terror of a wetting. Hanriot's
+guns are abandoned, and when the lightning reveals the troops of the
+Convention debouching simultaneously from the Rue Antoine and from the
+Quai, the approaches to the Hotel de Ville are utterly deserted.
+
+At last Maximilien has resolved to make appeal from the decree of the
+Convention to his own Section,--the _Section des Piques_.
+
+The Council General sends for swords, pistols, muskets. But now the
+clash of arms, the trampling of feet and the shiver of broken glass fill
+the building. The troops of the Convention sweep by like an avalanche
+across the Hall of Deliberation, and pour into the Council Chamber. A
+shot rings out; Gamelin sees Robespierre fall; his jaw is broken. He
+himself grasps his knife, the six-sous knife that, one day of bitter
+scarcity, had cut bread for a starving mother, the same knife that, one
+summer evening at a farm at Orangis, Elodie had held in her lap, when
+she cried the forfeits. He opens it, tries to plunge it into his heart,
+but the blade strikes on a rib, closes on the handle, the catch giving
+way, and two fingers are badly cut. Gamelin falls, the blood pouring
+from the wounds. He lies quite still, but the cold is cruel, and he is
+trampled underfoot in the turmoil of a fearful struggle. Through the
+hurly-burly he can distinctly hear the voice of the young dragoon Henry,
+shouting:
+
+"The tyrant is no more; his myrmidons are broken. The Revolution will
+resume its course, majestic and terrible."
+
+Gamelin fainted.
+
+At seven in the morning a surgeon sent by the Convention dressed his
+hurts. The Convention was full of solicitude for Robespierre's
+accomplices; it would fain not have one of them escape the guillotine.
+
+The artist, ex-juror, ex-member of the Council General of the Commune,
+was borne on a litter to the Conciergerie.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+On the 10th, when Evariste, after a fevered night passed on the
+pallet-bed of a dungeon, awoke with a start of indescribable horror,
+Paris was smiling in the sunshine in all her beauty and immensity;
+new-born hope filled the prisoners' hearts; tradesmen were blithely
+opening their shops, citizens felt themselves richer, young men happier,
+women more beautiful, for the fall of Robespierre. Only a handful of
+Jacobins, a few _Constitutional_ priests and a few old women trembled to
+see the Government pass into the hands of the evil-minded and corrupt.
+Delegates from the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Public Prosecutor and two
+judges, were on their way to the Convention to congratulate it on having
+put an end to the plots. By decree of the Assembly the scaffold was
+again to be set up in the Place de la Revolution. They wanted the
+wealthy, the fashionable, the pretty women to see, without putting
+themselves about, the execution of Robespierre, which was to take place
+that same day. The Dictator and his accomplices were outlawed; it only
+needed their identity to be verified by two municipal officers for the
+Tribunal to hand them over immediately to the executioner. But a
+difficulty arose; the verifications could not be made in legal form, the
+Commune as a body having been put outside the pale of law. The Assembly
+authorized identification by ordinary witnesses.
+
+The triumvirs were haled to death, with their chief accomplices, amidst
+shouts of joy and fury, imprecations, laughter and dances.
+
+The next day Evariste, who had recovered some strength and could almost
+stand on his legs, was taken from his cell, brought before the Tribunal,
+and placed on the platform where so many victims, illustrious or
+obscure, had sat in succession. Now it groaned under the weight of
+seventy individuals, the majority members of the Commune, some jurors,
+like Gamelin, outlawed like him. Again he saw the jury-bench, the seat
+where he had been accustomed to loll, the place where he had terrorized
+unhappy prisoners, where he had affronted the scornful eyes of Jacques
+Maubel and Maurice Brotteaux, the appealing glances of the _citoyenne_
+Rochemaure, who had got him his post as juryman and whom he had
+recompensed with a sentence of death. Again he saw, looking down on the
+dais where the judges sat in three mahogany armchairs, covered in red
+Utrecht velvet, the busts of Chalier and Marat and that bust of Brutus
+which he had one day apostrophized. Nothing was altered, neither the
+axes, the fasces, the red caps of Liberty on the wall-paper, nor the
+insults shouted by the _tricoteuses_ in the galleries to those about to
+die, nor yet the soul of Fouquier-Tinville, hard-headed, painstaking,
+zealously turning over his murderous papers, and, in his character of
+perfect magistrate, sending his friends of yesterday to the scaffold.
+
+The _citoyens_ Remacle, tailor and door-keeper, and Dupont senior,
+joiner, of the Place de Thionville, member of the Committee of
+Surveillance of the Section du Pont-Neuf, identified Gamelin (Evariste),
+painter, ex-juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal, ex-member of the
+Council General of the Commune. For their services they received an
+assignat of a hundred _sols_ from the funds of the Section; but, having
+been neighbours and friends of the outlaw, they found it embarrassing to
+meet his eye. Anyhow, it was a hot day; they were thirsty and in a hurry
+to be off and drink a glass of wine.
+
+Gamelin found difficulty in mounting the tumbril; he had lost a great
+deal of blood and his wounds pained him cruelly. The driver whipped up
+his jade and the procession got under way amid a storm of hooting.
+
+Some women recognized Gamelin and yelled:
+
+"Go your ways, drinker of blood! murderer at eighteen francs a day!...
+He doesn't laugh now; look how pale he is, the coward!"
+
+They were the same women who used in other days to insult conspirators
+and aristocrats, extremists and moderates, all the victims sent by
+Gamelin and his colleagues to the guillotine.
+
+The cart turned into the Quai des Morfondus, made slowly for the
+Pont-Neuf and the Rue de la Monnaie; its destination was the Place de la
+Revolution and Robespierre's scaffold. The horse was lame; every other
+minute the driver's whip whistled about its ears. The crowd of
+spectators, a merry, excited crowd, delayed the progress of the escort,
+fraternizing with the gendarmes, who pulled in their horses to a walk.
+At the corner of the Rue Honore, the insults were redoubled. Parties of
+young men, at table in the fashionable restaurateurs' rooms on the
+mezzanine floor, ran to the windows, napkin in hand, and howled:
+
+"Cannibals, man-eaters, vampires!"
+
+The cart having plunged into a heap of refuse that had not been removed
+during the two days of civil disorder, the gilded youth screamed with
+delight:
+
+"The waggon's mired.... Hurrah! The Jacobins in the jakes!"
+
+Gamelin was thinking, and truth seemed to dawn on him.
+
+"I die justly," he reflected. "It is just we should receive these
+outrages cast at the Republic, for we should have safeguarded her
+against them. We have been weak; we have been guilty of supineness. We
+have betrayed the Republic. We have earned our fate. Robespierre
+himself, the immaculate, the saint, has sinned from mildness,
+mercifulness; his faults are wiped out by his martyrdom. He was my
+exemplar, and I, too, have betrayed the Republic; the Republic perishes;
+it is just and fair that I die with her. I have been over sparing of
+blood; let my blood flow! Let me perish! I have deserved ..."
+
+Such were his reflections when suddenly he caught sight of the signboard
+of the _Amour peintre_, and a torrent of bitter-sweet emotions swept
+tumultuously over his heart.
+
+The shop was shut, the sun-blinds of the three windows on the mezzanine
+floor were drawn right down. As the cart passed in front of the window
+of the blue chamber, a woman's hand, wearing a silver ring on the
+ring-finger, pushed aside the edge of the blind and threw towards
+Gamelin a red carnation which his bound hands prevented him from
+catching, but which he adored as the token and likeness of those red and
+fragrant lips that had refreshed his mouth. His eyes filled with
+bursting tears, and his whole being was still entranced with the glamour
+of this farewell when he saw the blood-stained knife rise into view in
+the Place de la Revolution.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+It was Nivose. Masses of floating ice encumbered the Seine; the basins
+in the Tuileries garden, the kennels, the public fountains were frozen.
+The North wind swept clouds of hoar frost before it in the streets. A
+white steam breathed from the horses' noses, and the city folk would
+glance in passing at the thermometer at the opticians' doors. A shop-boy
+was wiping the fog from the window-panes of the _Amour peintre_, while
+curious passers-by threw a look at the prints in vogue,--Robespierre
+squeezing into a cup a heart like a pumpkin to drink the blood, and
+ambitious allegorical designs with such titles as the Tigrocracy of
+Robespierre; it was all hydras, serpents, horrid monsters let loose on
+France by the tyrant. Other pictures represented the Horrible Conspiracy
+of Robespierre, Robespierre's Arrest, The Death of Robespierre.
+
+That day, after the midday dinner, Philippe Desmahis walked into the
+_Amour peintre_, his portfolio under his arm, and brought the _citoyen_
+Jean Blaise a plate he had just finished, a stippled engraving of the
+Suicide of Robespierre. The artist's picaresque burin had made
+Robespierre as hideous as possible. The French people were not yet
+satiated with all the memorials which enshrined the horror and
+opprobrium felt for the man who was made scapegoat of all the crimes of
+the Revolution. For all that, the printseller, who knew his public,
+informed Desmahis that henceforward he was going to give him military
+subjects to engrave.
+
+"We shall all be wanting victories and conquests,--swords, waving
+plumes, triumphant generals. Glory is to be the word. I feel it in me;
+my heart beats high to hear the exploits of our valiant armies. And when
+I have a feeling, it is seldom all the world doesn't have the same
+feeling at the same time. What we want is warriors and women, Mars and
+Venus."
+
+"_Citoyen_ Blaise, I have still two or three drawings of Gamelin's by
+me, which you gave me to engrave. Is it urgent?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+"By-the-bye, about Gamelin; yesterday, strolling in the Boulevard du
+Temple, I saw at a dealer's, who keeps a second-hand stall opposite the
+House of Beaumarchais, all that poor devil's canvases, amongst the rest
+his _Orestes and Electra_. The head of Orestes, who's like Gamelin, is
+really fine, I assure you.... The head and arm are superb.... The man
+told me he found no difficulty in getting rid of these canvases to
+artists who want to paint over them.... Poor Gamelin! He might have been
+a genius of the first order, perhaps, if he hadn't taken to politics."
+
+"He had the soul of a criminal!" replied the _citoyen_ Blaise. "I
+unmasked him, on this very spot, when his sanguinary instincts were
+still held in check. He never forgave me.... Oh! he was a choice
+blackguard."
+
+"Poor fellow! he was sincere enough. It was the fanatics were his
+ruin."
+
+"You don't defend him, I presume, Desmahis!... There's no defending
+him."
+
+"No, _citoyen_ Blaise, there's no defending him."
+
+The _citoyen_ Blaise tapped the gallant Desmahis' shoulder amicably, and
+observed:
+
+"Times are changed. We can call you _Barbaroux_ now the Convention is
+recalling the proscribed.... Now I think of it, Desmahis, engrave me a
+portrait of Charlotte Corday, will you?"
+
+A woman, a tall, handsome brunette, enveloped in furs, entered the shop
+and bestowed on the _citoyen_ Blaise a little discreet nod that implied
+intimacy. It was Julie Gamelin; but she no longer bore that dishonoured
+name, she preferred to be called the _citoyenne_ widow Chassagne, and
+wore, under her mantle, a red tunic in honour of the red shirts of the
+terror. Julie had at first felt a certain repulsion towards Evariste's
+mistress; anything that had come near her brother was odious to her. But
+the _citoyenne_ Blaise, after Evariste's death, had found an asylum for
+the unhappy mother in the attics of the _Amour peintre_. Julie had also
+taken refuge there; then she had got employment again at the fashionable
+milliner's in the Rue des Lombards. Her short hair _a la victime_, her
+aristocratic looks, her mourning weeds had won the sympathies of the
+gilded youth. Jean Blaise, whom Rose Thevenin had pretty well thrown
+over, offered her his homage, which she accepted. Still Julie was fond
+of wearing men's clothes, as in the old tragic days; she had a fine
+_Muscadin_ costume made for her and often went, huge baton and all
+complete, to sup at some tavern at Sevres or Meudon with a girl friend,
+a little assistant in a fashion shop. Inconsolable for the loss of the
+young noble whose name she bore, this masculine-minded Julie found the
+only solace to her melancholy in a savage rancour; every time she
+encountered Jacobins, she would set the passers-by on them, crying
+"Death, death!" She had small leisure left to give to her mother, who
+alone in her room told her beads all day, too deeply shocked at her
+boy's tragic death to feel the grief that might have been expected. Rose
+was now the constant companion of Elodie who certainly got on amicably
+with her step-mothers.
+
+"Where is Elodie?" asked the _citoyenne_ Chassagne.
+
+Jean Blaise shook his head; he did not know. He never did know; he made
+it a point of honour not to.
+
+Julie had come to take her friend with her to see Rose Thevenin at
+Monceaux, where the actress lived in a little house with an English
+garden.
+
+At the Conciergerie Rose Thevenin had made the acquaintance of a big
+army-contractor, the _citoyen_ Montfort. She had been released first, by
+Jean Blaise's intervention, and had then procured the _citoyen_
+Montfort's pardon, who was no sooner at liberty than he started his old
+trade of provisioning the troops, to which he added speculation in
+building-lots in the Pepiniere quarter. The architects Ledoux, Olivier
+and Wailly were erecting pretty houses in that district, and in three
+months the land had trebled in value. Montfort, since their imprisonment
+together in the Luxembourg, had been Rose Thevenin's lover; he now gave
+her a little house in the neighbourhood of Tivoli and the Rue du Rocher,
+which was very expensive,--and cost him nothing, the sale of the
+adjacent properties having already repaid him several times over. Jean
+Blaise was a man of the world, so he deemed it best to put up with what
+he could not hinder; he gave up Mademoiselle Thevenin to Montfort
+without ceasing to be on friendly terms with her.
+
+Julie had not been long at the _Amour peintre_ before Elodie came down
+to her in the shop, looking like a fashion plate. Under her mantle,
+despite the rigours of the season, she wore nothing but her white frock;
+her face was even paler than of old, and her figure thinner; her looks
+were languishing, and her whole person breathed voluptuous invitation.
+
+The two women set off for Rose Thevenin's, who was expecting them.
+Desmahis accompanied them; the actress was consulting him about the
+decoration of her new house and he was in love with Elodie, who had by
+this time half made up her mind to let him sigh no more in vain. When
+the party came near Monceaux, where the victims of the Place de la
+Revolution lay buried under a layer of lime:
+
+"It is all very well in the cold weather," remarked Julie; "but in the
+spring the exhalations from the ground there will poison half the town."
+
+Rose Thevenin received her two friends in a drawing-room furnished _a
+l'antique_, the sofas and armchairs of which were designed by David.
+Roman bas-reliefs, copied in monochrome, adorned the walls above
+statues, busts and candelabra of imitation bronze. She wore a curled wig
+of a straw colour. At that date wigs were all the rage; it was quite
+common to include half a dozen, a dozen, a dozen and a half in a bride's
+trousseau. A gown _a la Cyprienne_ moulded her body like a sheath.
+Throwing a cloak over her shoulders, she led her two friends and the
+engraver into the garden, which Ledoux was laying out for her, but which
+as yet was a chaos of leafless trees and plaster. She showed them,
+however, Fingal's grotto, a gothic chapel with a bell, a temple, a
+torrent.
+
+"There," she said, pointing to a clump of firs, "I should like to raise
+a cenotaph to the memory of the unfortunate Brotteaux des Ilettes. I was
+not indifferent to him; he was a lovable man. The monsters slaughtered
+him; I bewailed his fate. Desmahis, you shall design me an urn on a
+column."
+
+Then she added almost without a pause:
+
+"It is heart-breaking.... I wanted to give a ball this week; but all the
+fiddles are engaged three weeks in advance. There is dancing every night
+at the _citoyenne_ Tallien's."
+
+After dinner Mademoiselle Thevenin's carriage took the three friends and
+Desmahis to the Theatre Feydeau. All that was most elegant in Paris was
+gathered in the house--the women with hair dressed _a l'antique_ or _a
+la victime_, in very low dresses, purple or white and spangled with
+gold, the men wearing very tall black collars and the chin disappearing
+in enormous white cravats.
+
+The bill announced _Phedre_ and the _Chien du Jardinier_,--The
+Gardener's Dog. With one voice the audience demanded the hymn dear to
+the _muscadins_ and the gilded youth, the _Reveil du peuple_,--The
+Awakening of the People.
+
+The curtain rose and a little man, short and fat, took the stage; it was
+the celebrated Lays. He sang in his fine tenor voice:
+
+_Peuple francais, peuple de freres!..._
+
+Such storms of applause broke out as set the lustres of the chandelier
+jingling. Then some murmurs made themselves heard, and the voice of a
+citizen in a round hat answered from the pit with the hymn of the
+Marseillaise:
+
+_Allons, enfants de la patrie...._
+
+The voice was drowned by howls, and shouts were raised:
+
+"Down with the Terrorists! Death to the Jacobins!"
+
+Lays was recalled and sang a second time over the hymn of the
+Thermidorians.
+
+_Peuple francais, peuple de freres!..._
+
+In every play-house was to be seen the bust of Marat, surmounting a
+column or raised on a pedestal; at the Theatre 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 _Phedre 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 _Reveil du Peuple_:
+
+_Peuple francais, peuple de freres!..._
+
+Among the most enthusiastic singers Elodie 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 Elodie's hand between his:
+
+"You know, Elodie, 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."
+
+"Elodie, 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 Theatre Francais and were
+burning a guy representing the Friend of the People.
+
+In the Rue Honore 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 Pantheon for him!"
+
+Meanwhile, from every eating-house and restaurateur's voices could be
+heard singing:
+
+_Peuple francais, peuple de freres!..._
+
+"Good-bye," said Elodie, 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 _a 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 Elodie, tired and
+happy, dropped her head on the pillow.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gods are Athirst, by Anatole France
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