The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 11

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On the morning of 7 September, Citizen Rochemaure, on her way to see Juror Gamelin, whose interest she wished to enlist on behalf of a suspect of her acquaintance, encountered on the landing the former nobleman Brotteaux des Ilettes, whom she had loved in happier days. Brotteaux was setting out to deliver twelve dozen jumping-jacks of his own making to the toy merchant in the Rue de la Loi. To carry them more easily, he had resolved to fasten them to the end of a pole, after the fashion of street vendors. He behaved gallantly toward all women, even those whose charms long familiarity had dulled for him, as must have been the case with Madame de Rochemaure—unless, seasoned by betrayal, absence, infidelity, and plumpness, he found her appetising. At all events, he received her on the squalid landing, with its ill-joined tiles, as once he had received her on the steps of the terrace at Les Ilettes, and begged her to do him the honour of visiting his garret. She climbed the ladder quite nimbly and found herself beneath a framework whose sloping beams supported a tiled roof pierced by a dormer window. It was impossible to stand upright there. She sat down on the only chair in the little room and, after letting her gaze wander for a moment over the ill-fitting tiles, asked in surprise and sorrow:

“Is this where you live, Maurice? You have little cause to fear intruders here. One would need to be a devil or a cat to find you.”

“I have little space,” replied the former nobleman. “And I will not conceal from you that the rain sometimes falls upon my pallet. It is a slight inconvenience. And on clear nights I see the moon, image and witness of the loves of men. For the moon, madame, has in every age been invoked by lovers, and when full, pale and round, she reminds the lover of the object of his desires.”

“I understand,” said the Citizen.

“In their season,” Brotteaux continued, “the cats make a splendid uproar in that gutter. But love must be forgiven for mewing and swearing upon the rooftops when it fills the lives of men with torments and crimes.”

Both had shown the wisdom to greet each other like friends who had parted the evening before to go to sleep; and although they had become strangers to one another, they conversed with ease and familiarity.

Madame de Rochemaure, however, appeared preoccupied. The Revolution, which had long been cheerful and profitable for her, was now bringing her cares and anxieties; her suppers were becoming less brilliant and less merry. The strains of her harp no longer brightened sombre faces. Her gaming tables had been deserted by the wealthiest punters. Several of her intimates, now under suspicion, were in hiding; her friend, the financier Morhardt, had been arrested, and it was on his behalf that she had come to solicit Juror Gamelin. She herself was a suspect. National Guards had searched her house, turned out the drawers of her chests, prised up the boards of her floor, and thrust their bayonets into her mattresses. They had found nothing, apologised to her, and drunk her wine. But they had come very close to discovering her correspondence with an émigré, M. d’Expilly. Certain friends she had among the Jacobins had warned her that the handsome Henry, her young lover, was becoming dangerous to know, because his excesses were too extravagant to seem sincere.

Her elbows on her knees and her fists pressed to her cheeks, she sat deep in thought and asked her old friend, who was seated on the straw mattress:

“What do you make of all this, Maurice?”

“I think these people provide a philosopher and a lover of spectacles with abundant matter for reflection and amusement; but it would be better for you, my dear friend, if you were out of France.”

“Maurice, where will it all lead us?”

“That is what you asked me one day, Louise, as we drove along the banks of the Cher on the road to Les Ilettes, while our horse, having taken the bit between its teeth, swept us away at a furious gallop. How curious women are! Even today you want to know where we are going. Ask the card-readers. I am no prophet, my dear. And philosophy, even the soundest, is of little assistance in discerning the future. These things will end, for everything ends. Several outcomes may be foreseen. The victory of the coalition and the entry of the Allies into Paris. They are not far away; yet I doubt they will arrive. These soldiers of the Republic contrive to be beaten with an ardour nothing can extinguish. Robespierre may marry Madame Royale and have himself appointed protector of the kingdom during the minority of Louis XVII.”

“Do you think so?” cried the Citizen, impatient to take part in so fine an intrigue.

“It may also happen,” Brotteaux continued, “that the Vendée will prevail and the government of the priests be restored upon heaps of ruins and piles of corpses. You cannot conceive, my dear friend, the dominion the clergy retains over the multitude of asses... I meant to say ‘souls’; my tongue slipped. The most likely outcome, to my mind, is that the Revolutionary Tribunal will bring about the destruction of the regime that established it: it threatens too many heads. Those whom it terrifies are countless; they will unite, and to destroy the Tribunal they will destroy the regime. I believe it was through you that young Gamelin was appointed to this court. He is virtuous: he will be terrible. The more I consider it, my fair friend, the more firmly I believe that this Tribunal, established to save the Republic, will ruin it. The Convention wished to possess, like the monarchy, its Grands Jours, its Burning Chamber, and to secure its own safety through magistrates whom it appointed and kept dependent upon it. But how inferior the Convention’s Grands Jours are to those of the monarchy, and how much less politic its Burning Chamber than that of Louis XIV! A spirit of mean justice and vulgar equality prevails in the Revolutionary Tribunal, which will soon make it hateful and ridiculous and disgust everyone. Do you know, Louise, that this Tribunal, which is about to summon the Queen of France and twenty-one legislators before its bar, yesterday condemned a servant for having cried, ‘Long live the King!’ with malicious intent and with the design of destroying the Republic? Our judges, all plumed in black, work in the manner of that William Shakespeare so dear to the English, who introduces coarse buffoonery into the most tragic scenes of his theatre.”

“Well, Maurice,” the Citizen asked, “are you still fortunate in love?”

“Alas!” replied Brotteaux. “The doves fly to the white dovecote and no longer alight upon the ruined tower.”

“You have not changed... Farewell, my friend!”

That evening, the dragoon Henry, having called uninvited upon Madame de Rochemaure, found her sealing a letter on which he read the address of Citizen Rauline, at Vernon. It was, as he knew, a letter intended for England. Rauline received Madame de Rochemaure’s correspondence from a postilion employed by the mail-coach service and had it carried to Dieppe by a fishwife. Under cover of night, a boatmaster delivered it to a British vessel cruising off the coast; an émigré, M. d’Expilly, received it in London and communicated it, if he thought it useful, to the Cabinet of St James’s.

Henry was young and handsome: Achilles himself did not unite such grace with such vigour when he put on the armour Ulysses presented to him. But Citizen Rochemaure, once susceptible to the charms of the young hero of the Paris Commune, had turned both her eyes and her thoughts away from him since she had been warned that this young soldier, denounced to the Jacobins as an extremist, might compromise and ruin her. Henry felt that it might not be beyond his strength to cease loving Madame de Rochemaure; but it displeased him that she no longer singled him out. He relied upon her to meet certain expenses into which the service of the Republic had drawn him. Finally, reflecting on the extremes to which women may be driven, on the rapidity with which they pass from the most ardent tenderness to the coldest indifference, and on how easily they sacrifice what they have cherished and destroy what they have adored, he suspected that the enchanting Louise might one day have him thrown into prison in order to be rid of him. Wisdom counselled him to reconquer the beauty he had lost. He had therefore come armed with all his charms. He approached her, withdrew, approached again, brushed against her, and fled from her, according to all the rules of seduction practised in ballets. Then he flung himself into an armchair and, in his irresistible voice, the voice that spoke to the very entrails of women, extolled nature and solitude to her and, with a sigh, proposed an excursion to Ermenonville.

Meanwhile, she drew a few chords from her harp and cast impatient, weary glances about her. Suddenly Henry rose, sombre and resolute, and announced that he was leaving for the army and would be before Maubeuge within a few days.

Without showing either doubt or surprise, she nodded her approval.

“You congratulate me on this decision?”

“I do congratulate you.”

She was expecting a new friend who pleased her immensely and from whom she hoped to derive great advantages; a very different creature from this one—a Mirabeau risen from the dead, a Danton scrubbed clean and turned army contractor, a lion who talked of throwing every patriot into the Seine. At every moment she thought she heard the bell and gave a start.

To dismiss Henry, she fell silent, yawned, leafed through a score, and yawned again. Seeing that he did not leave, she told him that she had to go out and passed into her dressing room.

He called after her in an impassioned voice:

“Farewell, Louise!... Shall I ever see you again?”

And his hands were searching the open escritoire.

As soon as he was in the street, he opened the letter addressed to Citizen Rauline and read it with interest. It did indeed contain a curious account of the state of public opinion in France. It spoke of the Queen, of Thévenin, of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and reported many confidential remarks made by good Brotteaux des Ilettes.

When he had finished reading, he put the letter into his pocket and hesitated for a few moments; then, like a man who has made up his mind and tells himself that the sooner it is done the better, he set off toward the Tuileries and entered the antechamber of the Committee of General Security.

That day, at three in the afternoon, Évariste Gamelin took his seat on the jurors’ bench in the company of fourteen colleagues, most of whom he knew: simple, honest, patriotic men—scholars, artists, or artisans. There was a painter like himself, a draughtsman, both highly gifted, a surgeon, a shoemaker, a former marquis who had given signal proofs of civic virtue, a printer, and small tradesmen: in short, a cross-section of the people of Paris. They sat there in workingmen’s or bourgeois dress, their hair cropped à la Titus or tied in a queue, a cocked hat pulled down over the eyes, a round hat tilted back upon the head, or a red cap covering the ears. Some wore waistcoat, coat, and breeches, as in former times; others the carmagnole and striped trousers after the fashion of the sans-culottes. Shod in boots, buckled shoes, or wooden clogs, they displayed upon their persons every variety of masculine attire then in use. As they had all sat several times already, they appeared perfectly at ease upon their bench, and Gamelin envied their composure. His heart was pounding, his ears rang, a mist clouded his eyes, and everything around him assumed a livid hue.

When the usher announced the Tribunal, three judges took their places upon a rather small dais behind a green-covered table. They wore hats adorned with cockades and surmounted by tall black plumes, and judicial robes with tricolour ribbons from which heavy silver medals hung upon their breasts. Before them, at the foot of the dais, sat the deputy public prosecutor in similar attire. The clerk took his seat between the Tribunal and the empty chair of the accused. To Gamelin these men appeared different from what he had seen them until then: nobler, graver, more fearsome, although they assumed familiar attitudes, leafing through papers, summoning an usher, or leaning back to hear some communication from a juror or an officer on duty.

Above the judges hung the tablets of the Rights of Man; to their right and left, against the ancient feudal walls, stood the busts of Le Peltier Saint-Fargeau and Marat. Facing the jurors’ bench, at the far end of the hall, rose the public gallery. Women filled its front row—fair-haired, dark-haired, or grey, all wearing the tall cap whose pleated lappets shaded their cheeks; over their bosoms, which fashion endowed uniformly with the fullness of a nursing breast, a white fichu was crossed or the bib of a blue apron curved upward. They rested their folded arms upon the ledge of the gallery. Behind them, scattered over the tiers, could be seen citizens dressed with that diversity which then lent crowds so strange and picturesque an aspect. On the right, near the entrance, behind a solid barrier, lay an area where the public stood. On this occasion there were few people in it. The case about to be heard by this section of the Tribunal interested only a small number of spectators, and no doubt the other sections, sitting at the same time, had more stirring cases before them.

This afforded Gamelin some reassurance, for his faltering heart could not have endured the heated atmosphere of the great trials. His eyes fastened upon the smallest details: he noticed the cotton wool in the clerk’s ear and an ink stain on the deputy prosecutor’s papers. As though through a magnifying glass, he saw the capitals carved in an age when all knowledge of the classical orders had been lost, crowning the Gothic columns with garlands of nettle and holly. But his gaze returned ceaselessly to that chair, antiquated in form and upholstered in red Utrecht velvet, worn thin on the seat and blackened upon the arms. Armed National Guards stood at every exit.

At last the accused appeared, escorted by grenadiers, though with his limbs unfettered, as the law prescribed. He was a man of about fifty, lean, spare, dark-complexioned, and very bald, with hollow cheeks and thin, purplish lips, dressed in the old fashion in an oxblood coat. No doubt because he was feverish, his eyes glittered like jewels and his cheeks seemed glazed. He sat down. The legs he crossed were excessively thin, and his large, knotty hands encircled them completely. His name was Marie-Adolphe Guillergues, and he was charged with embezzlement in the Republic’s fodder supplies. The indictment laid numerous and serious acts to his charge, none of which was conclusively established. Under examination, Guillergues denied most of them and explained the rest to his own advantage. His language was precise and cold, remarkably adroit, and suggested a man with whom it would be unwise to transact business. He had an answer for everything. When the judge put an awkward question to him, his face remained calm and his speech assured, but his two hands, clasped over his breast, clenched in anguish. Gamelin noticed this and whispered to his neighbour, a painter like himself:

“Look at his thumbs!”

The first witness to be heard testified to damning facts. The whole accusation rested upon him. Those called afterward, on the contrary, proved favourable to the accused. The deputy public prosecutor spoke vehemently, but remained vague. Counsel for the defence spoke with an accent of truth that won the accused sympathies he had been unable to win for himself. The hearing was suspended, and the jurors assembled in the deliberation room. There, after an obscure and confused discussion, they divided into two groups of almost equal size. On one side were the indifferent, the lukewarm, the reasoners, animated by no passion; on the other, those who let themselves be guided by feeling, were little moved by argument, and judged with their hearts. These always voted to condemn. They were the good men, the pure: they thought only of saving the Republic and troubled themselves about nothing else. Their bearing made a powerful impression on Gamelin, who felt himself in communion with them.

“This Guillergues,” he thought, “is a cunning rogue, a scoundrel who has speculated in the fodder meant for our cavalry. To acquit him is to let a traitor escape, to betray the fatherland, to doom the army to defeat.” And Gamelin already saw the hussars of the Republic, on their stumbling mounts, being sabred by the enemy cavalry… “But what if Guillergues were innocent?…”

He suddenly thought of Jean Blaise, who likewise was suspected of dishonesty in his contracts. How many others must be acting like Guillergues and Blaise, preparing defeat, ruining the Republic! An example must be made. But what if Guillergues were innocent?…

“There is no proof,” Gamelin said aloud.

“There is never any proof,” replied the foreman of the jury, one of the good men, one of the pure, with a shrug of his shoulders.

In the end, there were seven votes for conviction and eight for acquittal.

The jury returned to the courtroom and the hearing resumed. The jurors were required to give the grounds for their verdict; each spoke in turn before the empty chair. Some were prolix; others contented themselves with a word; several uttered unintelligible remarks.

When his turn came, Gamelin rose and said:

“Faced with so great a crime as depriving the defenders of the fatherland of the means of victory, formal proofs are demanded, and these we do not possess.”

By a majority of votes, the accused was declared not guilty.

Guillergues was brought back before the judges, accompanied by the kindly murmur of the spectators, which told him of his acquittal. He was another man. The harshness of his features had melted away; his lips had softened. He looked venerable; his face expressed innocence. In a voice full of emotion, the president read the verdict discharging the person charged; the courtroom burst into applause. The gendarme who had brought Guillergues flung himself into his arms. The president summoned him and gave him the fraternal embrace. The jurors kissed him. Gamelin wept hot tears.

In the courtyard of the Palais, lit by the last rays of day, a howling multitude surged to and fro. The four sections of the Tribunal had pronounced thirty death sentences the day before, and on the steps of the great staircase the knitting women crouched, awaiting the departure of the carts. But as Gamelin descended the steps amid the stream of jurors and spectators, he saw nothing and heard nothing but his own act of justice and humanity, and the congratulations he bestowed upon himself for having recognized innocence. In the courtyard Élodie, all pale, tearful and smiling, threw herself into his arms and lay there swooning. And when she had recovered her voice, she said to him:

“Évariste, you are beautiful, you are good, you are generous! In that courtroom, the sound of your voice, manly and gentle, sent its magnetic waves through my whole being. I was electrified. I gazed at you on your bench. I saw no one but you. But you, my dear, did you not sense that I was there? Did nothing warn you of my presence? I was in the gallery, in the second row, on the right. My God! How sweet it is to do good! You saved that unhappy man. Without you, all would have been over for him: he would have perished. You restored him to life, to the love of his family. At this very moment he must be blessing you. Évariste, how happy and proud I am to love you!”

Arm in arm, pressed close against each other, they went through the streets feeling so light that they thought they were flying.

They were bound for Cupid the Painter. When they reached the Oratoire:

“Let us not go through the shop,” said Élodie.

She took him in through the carriage entrance and led him upstairs with her to the apartment. On the landing, she drew a large iron key from her reticule.

“It looks like a prison key,” she said. “Évariste, you are going to be my prisoner.”

They crossed the dining room and entered the young woman’s bedchamber.

Évariste felt upon his lips the burning freshness of Élodie’s lips. He clasped her in his arms. Her head thrown back, her eyes languishing, her hair unbound, her body yielding, half fainting, she slipped from his embrace and ran to shoot the bolt…

The night was already far advanced when Citizen Élodie opened the apartment door for her lover and whispered to him in the darkness:

“Farewell, my love! It is the hour when my father will be coming home. If you hear any noise on the stairs, hurry up to the floor above and do not come down until there is no longer any danger of being seen. To have the street door opened, knock three times on the concierge’s window. Farewell, my life, farewell, my soul!”

When he reached the street, he saw the window of Élodie’s room open a little, and a small hand pluck a red carnation, which fell at his feet like a drop of blood.