The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 13

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Évariste Gamelin sat in judgment at the Tribunal for the second time. Before the hearing opened, he discussed with his fellow jurors the news that had arrived that morning. Some reports were uncertain, others false; but what could be accepted was terrible: the allied armies, masters of every road, advancing in concert; the Vendée victorious; Lyon in revolt; Toulon delivered to the English, who were landing fourteen thousand men there.

To these magistrates, such matters were domestic concerns as much as events affecting the entire world. Certain that they would perish if the fatherland perished, they made the public safety their own affair. And the interest of the nation, merged with their own, dictated their feelings, their passions, and their conduct.

At his bench Gamelin received a letter from Trubert, secretary of the Defence Committee; it informed him of his appointment as commissioner of gunpowder and saltpetre.

You will search every cellar in the Section to extract the substances required for the manufacture of gunpowder. Tomorrow, perhaps, the enemy will stand before Paris: the soil of the fatherland must furnish us with the thunderbolt we shall hurl against its assailants. I enclose an instruction from the Convention concerning the treatment of saltpetre. Health and fraternity.

At that moment the accused was brought in. He was one of the last of those defeated generals whom the Convention delivered to the Tribunal, and the most obscure among them. At the sight of him, Gamelin shuddered: he thought he saw again the officer whom, mingling with the spectators, he had watched tried and sent to the guillotine three weeks earlier. It was the same man, with the same stubborn, narrow look; it was the same trial. He answered with a surly brutality that spoiled even his best replies. His quibbles and sophistries, the accusations he heaped upon his subordinates, made men forget that he was performing the honourable task of defending his honour and his life. Everything in the case was uncertain and disputed: the positions of the armies, the strength of their forces, their ammunition, the orders given and received, the movements of the troops; nothing was known. No one understood anything of those confused, absurd, aimless operations which had ended in disaster—neither counsel for the defence nor the accused himself, any more than the prosecutor, the judges, or the jurors; and, strangely enough, no one admitted, either to others or to himself, that he did not understand. The judges took pleasure in drawing up plans and discoursing on tactics and strategy; the accused betrayed his natural bent for disputation.

The wrangling went on without end. And throughout these arguments Gamelin saw, upon the harsh roads of the North, ammunition wagons sunk in the mud and cannon overturned in the ruts; along every road he saw the defeated columns straggling past in disorder, while the enemy cavalry poured from every quarter through the abandoned passes. And from that betrayed army he heard an immense clamour rise, accusing the general. When the proceedings closed, shadows filled the hall, and the dim figure of Marat appeared like a ghost above the president’s head. The jury called upon to decide was divided. In a muffled voice that caught in his throat, but in a resolute tone, Gamelin declared the accused guilty of treason against the Republic; and an approving murmur rose from the crowd to caress his youthful virtue. The sentence was read by torchlight, whose livid gleam trembled upon the condemned man’s hollow temples, where beads of sweat could be seen forming. As he went out, upon the steps thronged with cockaded gossips, hearing his name murmured by the regular attendants of the Tribunal, who were beginning to know him, Gamelin was beset by knitting-women who shook their fists at him and demanded the Austrian woman’s head.

The next day, Évariste had to pronounce upon the fate of a poor woman, the widow Meyrion, a bread carrier. She went through the streets pushing a little cart and wore at her waist a strip of white wood upon which, with her knife, she cut notches recording the loaves she had delivered. She earned eight sous a day. The deputy public prosecutor displayed a singular violence towards this unfortunate woman, who had, it appeared, repeatedly cried, “Long live the King!” uttered counter-revolutionary remarks in the houses where she delivered the daily bread, and taken part in a conspiracy whose object was the escape of the woman Capet. Questioned by the judge, she admitted the acts imputed to her; whether from simplicity or fanaticism, she professed royalist sentiments of the most exalted kind and brought about her own ruin.

The Revolutionary Tribunal made equality triumphant by showing itself as severe towards porters and servants as towards aristocrats and financiers. Gamelin could not conceive that it should be otherwise under a popular government. He would have thought it contemptuous and insulting to the people to exclude them from punishment. It would have been, so to speak, to regard them as unworthy of chastisement. Had the guillotine been reserved for aristocrats alone, it would have seemed to him a kind of unjust privilege. Gamelin was beginning to form a religious and mystical conception of punishment, to invest it with a virtue and merits of its own. He believed that punishment was owed to criminals and that to deprive them of it was to do them a wrong. He declared the woman Meyrion guilty and deserving of the supreme penalty, regretting only that the fanatics who had ruined her, and who were guiltier than she, were not there to share her fate.

Almost every evening Évariste went to the Jacobins, who met in the former chapel of the Dominicans, commonly called Jacobins, in Honoré Street. Facing a courtyard in which rose a tree of Liberty—a poplar whose stirring leaves made a perpetual murmur—the chapel, poor and sullen in style and ponderously roofed with tiles, presented its bare gable, pierced by a bull’s-eye window and an arched doorway, above which flew the flag in the national colours, crowned with the cap of Liberty. The Jacobins, like the Cordeliers and the Feuillants, had taken the dwellings and the names of dispersed monks. Gamelin, formerly a faithful attendant at the meetings of the Cordeliers, did not find among the Jacobins the wooden shoes, the carmagnoles, or the cries of the Dantonists. In Robespierre’s club there reigned administrative caution and bourgeois gravity. Since the Friend of the People was no more, Évariste had followed the teachings of Maximilien, whose thought ruled the Jacobins and from there, through a thousand affiliated societies, spread over all France. During the reading of the minutes, he let his eyes wander over the bare and mournful walls which, after sheltering the spiritual sons of the great inquisitor of heresy, now beheld the zealous inquisitors of crimes against the fatherland assembled within them.

There, without pomp, exercised through speech, resided the greatest of the powers of the State. It governed the city and the empire; it dictated its decrees to the Convention. These craftsmen of the new order had such respect for the law that they remained royalists in 1791 and still wished to remain so after the return from Varennes, through an obstinate attachment to the Constitution; friends of established order even after the massacres of the Champ-de-Mars, never revolutionary against the Revolution, and strangers to popular upheavals, they nourished in their sombre and powerful souls a love of the fatherland which had brought forth fourteen armies and erected the guillotine. Évariste admired in them their vigilance, suspicious temper, dogmatic thought, love of rule, art of command, and imperial wisdom.

The public filling the hall gave forth only a unanimous, measured rustling, like the foliage of the tree of Liberty rising at the threshold.

That day, 11 Vendémiaire, a young man with a receding brow, piercing eyes, a pointed nose and sharp chin, a pockmarked face and a cold expression, slowly mounted the rostrum. His hair was powdered snow-white, and he wore a blue coat fitted closely about the waist. He possessed that prim bearing and measured gait which led some to say mockingly that he looked like a dancing master, while others hailed him as the “French Orpheus.” In a clear voice Robespierre delivered an eloquent speech against the enemies of the Republic. With metaphysical and terrible arguments he struck at Brissot and his accomplices. He spoke at length, copiously and harmoniously. Soaring through the celestial spheres of philosophy, he hurled thunderbolts upon the conspirators crawling over the earth.

Évariste heard and understood. Until then, he had accused the Gironde of preparing the restoration of the monarchy or the triumph of the Orléans faction, and of plotting the ruin of the heroic city which had delivered France and would one day deliver the universe. Now, at the voice of the sage, he discovered truths loftier and purer; he conceived a revolutionary metaphysics which raised his mind above gross contingencies and beyond the reach of the errors of the senses, into the realm of absolute certainties. Things in themselves are mingled and full of confusion; the complexity of facts is such that one loses one’s way among them. Robespierre simplified them for him and presented good and evil in plain and lucid formulas. Federalism, indivisibility: in unity and indivisibility lay salvation; in federalism, damnation. Gamelin tasted the profound joy of the believer who knows the word that saves and the word that condemns. Henceforth the Revolutionary Tribunal, like the ecclesiastical courts of former times, would take cognizance of absolute crime, of crime committed in words. And because his was a religious mind, Évariste received these revelations with sombre enthusiasm; his heart was exalted and rejoiced at the thought that henceforth, in order to distinguish guilt from innocence, he possessed a creed. You take the place of all things, O treasures of faith!

The sage Maximilien also enlightened him concerning the treacherous intentions of those who wished to equalize fortunes and divide the land, abolish wealth and poverty, and establish a happy modest competence for all. Seduced by their maxims, he had at first approved their designs, which he judged consonant with the principles of a true republican. But through his speeches at the Jacobins, Robespierre had revealed their intrigues to him and shown that these men, whose intentions appeared pure, aimed at the subversion of the Republic and alarmed the rich only in order to raise up powerful and implacable enemies against the lawful authority. Indeed, the moment property was threatened, the whole population, the more attached to its possessions because it possessed so little, turned abruptly against the Republic. To alarm private interests is to conspire. Under the appearance of preparing universal happiness and the reign of justice, those who proposed equality and the common ownership of goods as an object worthy of the citizens’ efforts were traitors and villains more dangerous than the federalists.

But the greatest revelation that Robespierre’s wisdom had brought him concerned the crimes and infamies of atheism. Gamelin had never denied the existence of God; he was a deist and believed in a providence watching over mankind. But, admitting to himself that his conception of the Supreme Being was exceedingly indistinct, and being strongly attached to freedom of conscience, he readily allowed that honest men might, after the example of Lamettrie, Boulanger, Baron d’Holbach, Lalande, Helvétius, and Citizen Dupuis, deny the existence of God, provided they established a natural morality and found within themselves the sources of justice and the rules of a virtuous life. He had even felt sympathy with atheists when he saw them insulted or persecuted. Maximilien had opened his mind and unsealed his eyes. Through his virtuous eloquence, that great man had revealed to him the true character of atheism—its nature, its intentions, and its effects. He had demonstrated that this doctrine, fashioned in the salons and boudoirs of the aristocracy, was the most perfidious invention the enemies of the people had devised to demoralize and enslave them; that it was criminal to tear from the hearts of the unfortunate the consoling thought of a providence which rewards virtue, and to abandon them, without guide or restraint, to the passions that degrade man and make him a base slave; and, finally, that the monarchical Epicureanism of a Helvétius led to immorality, cruelty, and every crime. And since the teachings of a great citizen had instructed him, he abhorred atheists, especially when they were atheists with an open and cheerful heart, like old Brotteaux.

In the days that followed, Évariste had to judge in rapid succession a former noble convicted of destroying grain in order to starve the people; three émigrés who had returned to France to foment civil war; two girls of the Palais-Égalité; and fourteen Breton conspirators—women, old men, adolescents, masters, and servants. The crime was established, the law explicit. Among the guilty was a woman of twenty, charming, adorned with all the splendour of youth beneath the shadow of her approaching end. A blue ribbon held her golden hair; her muslin kerchief disclosed a white and supple neck.

Évariste invariably voted for death, and all the accused, with the exception of an old gardener, were sent to the scaffold.

The following week, Évariste and his panel mowed down forty-five men and eighteen women.

The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal made no distinction between men and women, being guided in this by a principle as ancient as justice itself. And though President Montané, moved by Charlotte Corday’s courage and beauty, had attempted to save her by falsifying the procedure, and had lost his seat for it, women were generally questioned without favour, according to the rule common to all tribunals. The jurors feared them and mistrusted their cunning, their habit of dissimulation, and their powers of seduction. By equalling men in courage, they invited the Tribunal to treat them as men. Most of those who judged them, being only moderately sensual or sensual merely in their appointed hours, were in no way disturbed by them. They condemned or acquitted these women according to their conscience, their prejudices, their zeal, and their lukewarm or violent love of the Republic. Almost all appeared with their hair carefully arranged and dressed with as much elegance as their unhappy condition allowed. But few were young, and fewer still were pretty. Prison and anxiety had withered them; the harsh light of the courtroom betrayed their weariness and anguish, revealing their faded eyelids, mottled complexions, and white, contracted lips. Yet more than once the fatal chair received a young woman, beautiful in her pallor, while a funereal shadow, like the veils of voluptuousness, drowned her gaze. That some jurors may at such a sight have been moved to pity or anger; that, in the secrecy of his corrupted senses, one of these magistrates may have searched the most intimate mysteries of a creature whom he imagined at once living and dead, and, stirring within himself voluptuous and bloody images, may have savoured the atrocious pleasure of delivering the desired body to the executioner—this, perhaps, ought to be left unsaid, but cannot be denied by anyone who knows mankind. Évariste Gamelin, a cold and learned artist, acknowledged no beauty but the antique, and beauty inspired in him less agitation than reverence. His classical taste was so severe that he rarely found a woman to his liking; he was as insensible to the charms of a pretty face as to Fragonard’s colouring and Boucher’s forms. He had never known desire except in profound love.

Like most of his colleagues on the Tribunal, he believed women more dangerous than men. He hated the former princesses, whom, in dreams filled with horror, he pictured chewing bullets with Élisabeth and the Austrian woman, to assassinate the patriots; he hated, too, all those beautiful friends of financiers, philosophers, and men of letters, guilty of having enjoyed the pleasures of the senses and the mind, and of having lived in an age when life was sweet. He hated them without acknowledging his hatred to himself, and whenever one of them came before him for judgment, he condemned her out of resentment, believing that he condemned her justly for the public safety. And his integrity, his manly modesty, his cold wisdom, his devotion to the State—in short, his virtues—sent heads worthy of pity beneath the axe.

But what is this, and what can this strange prodigy mean? Only lately the guilty had to be sought out, tracked to their hiding places, and forced to confess their crime. Now there is no longer any hunting with a multitude of hounds, any pursuit of timid prey: victims offer themselves on every side. Nobles, maidens, soldiers, prostitutes rush upon the Tribunal, wrest from the judges the sentence that is too slow in coming, and demand death as a right they are impatient to enjoy. The multitude with which the zeal of informers has filled the prisons, and which the public prosecutor and his acolytes exhaust themselves in bringing before the Tribunal, is not enough: the execution must also be provided for those who refuse to wait. And so many others, still more eager and proud, begrudging judges and executioners the privilege of their death, strike themselves down with their own hands! The frenzy to kill is answered by the frenzy to die. Here, in the Conciergerie, is a young soldier, handsome, vigorous, beloved; in the prison he has left an adorable mistress who said to him, “Live for me!” He will live neither for her, nor for love, nor for glory. He lit his pipe with his indictment. And though a republican—for he breathes liberty through every pore—he declares himself a royalist so that he may die. The Tribunal strives to acquit him; the accused proves the stronger; judges and jurors are compelled to yield.

Évariste's mind, naturally anxious and scrupulous, grew full of suspicions and alarms under the lessons of the Jacobins and the spectacle of life. At night, as he made his way to Élodie's through the dimly lighted streets, he fancied that through every cellar window he could see the plate for printing counterfeit assignats; at the back of the baker's or grocer's empty shop he divined storerooms overflowing with hoarded provisions; through the glittering windows of the eating-houses, he seemed to hear the talk of speculators plotting the country's ruin as they emptied bottles of Beaune or Chablis; in fetid alleys he saw prostitutes ready to trample the national cockade underfoot to the applause of fashionable young men; everywhere he saw conspirators and traitors. And he thought: “Republic! Against so many enemies, secret or avowed, you have but one recourse. Holy guillotine, save the fatherland!…”

Élodie awaited him in her little blue room above the Painter Cupid. To let him know that he might enter, she placed her little green watering can on the window ledge beside the pot of carnations. Now he filled her with horror; he appeared to her as a monster: she feared him and adored him. All night long, clasped desperately together, the bloodthirsty lover and the voluptuous girl exchanged furious kisses in silence.