The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 14

Chapter 14 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

Up before dawn, Father Longuemare swept the room and went to say Mass in a chapel in the Rue d’Enfer, served by a nonjuring priest. There were thousands of such retreats in Paris, where the refractory clergy secretly gathered little flocks of the faithful. The police of the Sections, vigilant and suspicious though they were, shut their eyes to these hidden folds, for fear of the angered sheep and from a lingering reverence for holy things. The Barnabite bade farewell to his host, who had great difficulty persuading him to return for dinner, and prevailed at last only by promising that the fare would be neither plentiful nor delicate.

Left alone, Brotteaux lit a little earthenware stove; then, while preparing the dinner of the religious and the Epicurean, he reread Lucretius and meditated upon the condition of mankind.

This sage was not surprised that wretched beings, the vain playthings of natural forces, should most often find themselves in absurd and painful situations; but he had the weakness to believe that revolutionaries were more wicked and more foolish than other men, in which he fell into ideology. For the rest, he was no pessimist and did not think life altogether bad. He admired nature in several of its parts, especially in celestial mechanics and physical love, and accommodated himself to the labours of life while awaiting the near-at-hand day when he would know neither fears nor desires any more.

He carefully coloured several jumping-jacks and made a Zerline who resembled Thévenin. The girl pleased him, and his Epicureanism praised the arrangement of the atoms composing her.

These occupations kept him busy until the Barnabite returned.

“Father,” he said as he opened the door, “I warned you that our meal would be meagre. We have nothing but chestnuts. And even they are far from well seasoned.”

“Chestnuts!” cried Father Longuemare with a smile. “There is no more delicious food. My father, sir, was a poor gentleman of the Limousin whose entire estate consisted of a ruined dovecote, a wild orchard, and a grove of chestnut trees. He and his wife and twelve children lived on large green chestnuts, and we were all strong and sturdy. I was the youngest and the most unruly: my father used to say in jest that I should have to be sent to America to become a buccaneer.… Ah, sir, how fragrant this chestnut soup is! It reminds me of the table ringed with children, where my mother sat smiling.”

When the meal was over, Brotteaux went to Joly, a toy merchant in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, who took the jumping-jacks Caillou had refused and ordered, not twelve dozen at a time as Caillou had done, but a full twenty-four dozen to begin with.

On reaching the street formerly called the Rue Royale, Brotteaux saw a triangle of steel glittering between two wooden uprights in the Place de la Révolution: it was the guillotine. An immense and cheerful crowd of sightseers thronged around the scaffold, awaiting the laden carts. Women with trays slung across their stomachs hawked cakes from Nanterre. Sellers of herbal drinks rang their bells; at the foot of the statue of Liberty, an old man displayed optical prints in a little theatre surmounted by a swing on which a monkey was rocking. Beneath the scaffold, dogs licked the blood shed the day before. Brotteaux turned back towards the Rue Honoré.

Back in his attic, where the Barnabite was reading his breviary, he carefully wiped the table and set upon it his paint box, together with the tools and materials of his trade.

“Father,” he said, “if you do not consider this occupation unworthy of the sacred character with which you are invested, pray help me make jumping-jacks. A certain Joly gave me a fairly large order for them this very morning. While I paint these figures, which are already shaped, you will do me a great service by cutting out heads, arms, legs, and bodies from the patterns here. You could find no better: they are after Watteau and Boucher.”

“I do indeed believe, sir,” said Longuemare, “that Watteau and Boucher were well suited to devising such trifles: it would have been better for their fame had they confined themselves to innocent jumping-jacks like these. I should be happy to help you, but I fear I am not skilful enough.”

Father Longuemare was right to mistrust his dexterity: after several unhappy attempts, it had to be acknowledged that his genius did not lie in cutting pleasing outlines from thin cardboard with the point of a penknife. But when Brotteaux, at his request, had given him some string and a bodkin, he proved highly adept at endowing with movement the little beings he had been unable to fashion, and at teaching them to dance. He made a graceful sight as he tried them afterwards, putting each through a few steps of the gavotte; and when they responded to his efforts, a smile glided over his austere lips.

Once, as he was pulling the string of a Scaramouche in measured time:

“Sir,” he said, “this little masked figure reminds me of a singular story. It was in 1746: I was completing my novitiate under the direction of Father Magitot, an elderly man of profound learning and austere habits. At that time, as you may remember, jumping-jacks, originally intended for the amusement of children, exercised an extraordinary fascination over women and even over men, young and old; they were all the rage in Paris. The shops of fashionable merchants overflowed with them; they were found in the houses of persons of rank, and it was not uncommon to see a grave personage, out walking or in the streets, making his jumping-jack dance. Neither Father Magitot’s age, nor his character, nor his calling protected him from the contagion. Seeing everyone occupied in making a little cardboard man leap, he felt an impatience in his fingers that soon became exceedingly troublesome. One day, when he was visiting Monsieur Chauvel, an advocate before the Parlement, on an important matter concerning the entire order, he noticed a jumping-jack hanging from the mantelpiece and suffered a terrible temptation to pull its string. Only by a great effort did he overcome it. But this frivolous desire pursued him and allowed him no further rest. In his studies, his meditations, his prayers, in church, in chapter, in the confessional and the pulpit, he was obsessed by it. After several days consumed in dreadful turmoil, he laid this extraordinary case before the general of the order, who fortunately happened to be in Paris at the time. He was an eminent doctor and one of the princes of the Church of Milan. He advised Father Magitot to gratify a desire innocent in its origin, troublesome in its consequences, and whose excess threatened to cause the gravest disorders in the soul it devoured. On the advice—or, to speak more exactly, at the command—of the general, Father Magitot returned to Monsieur Chauvel, who received him as before in his study. There, finding the jumping-jack still hanging from the mantelpiece, he went quickly up to it and begged his host to let him pull its string for a moment. The advocate consented most readily and confided that he himself sometimes made Scaramouche dance—for that was the jumping-jack’s name—while preparing his pleadings, and that only the day before he had timed his peroration, in defence of a woman falsely accused of poisoning her husband, to Scaramouche’s movements. Trembling, Father Magitot seized the string and saw Scaramouche writhe beneath his hand like a possessed man undergoing exorcism. His whim thus satisfied, he was delivered from the obsession.”

“Your story does not surprise me, Father,” said Brotteaux. “Such obsessions are known. But they are not always caused by figures of cardboard.”

Father Longuemare, being a religious, never spoke of religion; Brotteaux spoke of it continually. And since he felt some affection for the Barnabite, he took pleasure in embarrassing and troubling him with objections to various articles of Christian doctrine.

Once, while they were making Zerlines and Scaramouches together:

“When I consider,” said Brotteaux, “the events that have brought us to our present pass, and wonder which party, amid the universal madness, was the maddest, I am not far from believing it was the court.”

“Sir,” replied the religious, “all men become senseless, like Nebuchadnezzar, when God abandons them; but no man in our day plunged so deeply into ignorance and error as Monsieur l’Abbé Fauchet, and no man was so ruinous to the kingdom. God must have been fiercely angered against France to send her Monsieur l’Abbé Fauchet!”

“It seems to me that we have other malefactors besides that unfortunate Fauchet.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé Grégoire has also shown great wickedness.”

“And Brissot, and Danton, and Marat, and a hundred others—what do you say of them, Father?”

“Sir, they are laymen: laymen cannot incur the same responsibilities as men of religion. They do not work evil from so exalted a station, and their crimes are not universal.”

“And your God, Father—what do you say of His conduct in the present revolution?”

“I do not understand you, sir.”

“Epicurus said: either God wishes to prevent evil and cannot, or He can and does not wish to, or He neither can nor wishes to, or He both wishes to and can. If He wishes to and cannot, He is powerless; if He can and does not wish to, He is perverse; if He neither can nor wishes to, He is powerless and perverse; if He wishes to and can, why does He not do so, Father?”

And Brotteaux cast a satisfied glance at his interlocutor.

“Sir,” replied the religious, “nothing could be more wretched than the difficulties you raise. When I examine the arguments of unbelief, I seem to see ants opposing a few blades of grass as a dyke against the torrent descending from the mountains. Allow me not to dispute with you: I should have too much reason on my side and too little wit. Besides, you will find your condemnation in the Abbé Guénée and twenty others. I shall merely tell you that what you report from Epicurus is foolishness, for it judges God as though He were a man and possessed a man’s morality. Indeed, sir, unbelievers from Celsus to Bayle and Voltaire have deceived fools with such paradoxes.”

“See, Father,” said Brotteaux, “where your faith leads you. Not content with finding all truth in your theology, you insist on finding none at all in the works of so many fine minds who thought otherwise than you.”

“You are entirely mistaken, sir,” Longuemare retorted. “On the contrary, I believe that nothing in a man’s thought can be altogether false. Atheists occupy the lowest rung of knowledge; even at that level there remain glimmers of reason and flashes of truth, and even when darkness engulfs him, man raises a brow upon which God set intelligence: such is Lucifer’s fate.”

“Well, sir,” said Brotteaux, “I shall not be so generous, and I confess to you that in all the works of the theologians I cannot find one atom of common sense.”

He nevertheless denied any wish to attack religion, which he considered necessary to the people: he merely wished that its ministers had been philosophers rather than controversialists. He deplored the Jacobins’ desire to replace it with a younger and more malignant religion—the religion of liberty, equality, the Republic, and the fatherland. He had observed that religions are most furious and cruel in the vigour of their youth, and grow gentler with age. He therefore wished Catholicism to be retained: it had devoured many victims in the days of its strength, but now, grown sluggish beneath the weight of years and possessed of only a moderate appetite, it contented itself with four or five roasted heretics in a hundred years.

“For the rest,” he added, “I have always got on very well with the god-eaters and the worshippers of Christ. I had a chaplain at the Ilettes: Mass was said there every Sunday, and all my guests attended. The philosophers were the most devoutly attentive, and the girls from the Opéra the most fervent. I was happy then and counted many friends.”

“Friends!” cried Father Longuemare. “Friends!… Ah, sir, do you believe they loved you, all those philosophers and courtesans who have so degraded your soul that God Himself would have difficulty recognising in it one of the temples He built for His glory?”

Father Longuemare continued to live for eight days under the publican’s roof without being molested. As far as he was able, he followed the rule of his community and rose from his straw mattress to recite the night offices, kneeling on the tiles. Though the two of them had nothing to eat but miserable scraps, he observed fast and abstinence. A sorrowful yet smiling witness to these austerities, the philosopher asked him one day:

“Do you truly believe that God takes any pleasure in seeing you endure cold and hunger in this fashion?”

“God Himself,” replied the monk, “has given us the example of suffering.”

On the ninth day of the Barnabite’s stay in the philosopher’s attic, Brotteaux went out at twilight to deliver his jumping-jacks to Joly, the toy merchant in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. He was returning, pleased at having sold them all, when, in what had formerly been the Place du Carrousel, a girl in a blue satin pelisse trimmed with ermine, running with a limp, flung herself into his arms and clung to him after the fashion of suppliants in every age.

She was trembling; the rapid beating of her heart could be heard. Admiring how moving she appeared in her vulgarity, Brotteaux, an old lover of the theatre, reflected that Mademoiselle Raucourt might have watched her with profit.

She spoke in a breathless voice, lowering it for fear of being overheard by passers-by:

“Take me away, Citizen; hide me, for pity’s sake!… They are in my room in the Rue Fromenteau. While they were coming upstairs, I took refuge with Flora, my neighbour, and jumped from her window into the street, so that I sprained my foot.… They are coming; they want to put me in prison and have me killed.… Last week they had Virginie killed.”

Brotteaux understood well enough that she meant the delegates of the Section’s Revolutionary Committee or the commissioners of the Committee of General Security. The Paris Commune then had a virtuous prosecutor, Citizen Chaumette, who pursued prostitutes as the most pernicious enemies of the Republic. He meant to regenerate public morals. To tell the truth, the young ladies of the Palais-Égalité were little inclined to patriotism. They regretted the old order and did not always conceal the fact. Several had already been guillotined as conspirators, and their tragic fate had inspired much emulation among their fellows.

Citizen Brotteaux asked the suppliant what offence had brought a warrant for her arrest upon her.

She swore that she knew nothing of it, that she had done nothing for which anyone could reproach her.

“Well then, my girl,” Brotteaux said to her, “you are not a suspect; you have nothing to fear. Go to bed and leave me in peace.”

Then she confessed everything: “I tore off my cockade and cried, ‘Long live the king!’”

He set off along the deserted quays with her. Clinging to his arm, she said: “It is not that I love the king; you may be sure I never knew him, and perhaps he was not a man very different from other men. But these people are wicked. They are cruel to poor girls. They torment me, harass me, and insult me in every possible way; they want to prevent me from practising my trade. I have no other. You may be sure that if I had another, I should not follow this one.… What do they want? They hound the humble and the weak—the milkman, the charcoal-seller, the water-carrier, the laundress. They will not be satisfied until they have turned all the poor folk against them.”

He looked at her: she had the air of a child. She was no longer afraid. She almost smiled as she went lightly along, limping. He asked her name. She replied that her name was Athénaïs and that she was sixteen.

Brotteaux offered to take her wherever she wished. She knew no one in Paris; but she had an aunt, a servant at Palaiseau, who would shelter her.

Brotteaux made up his mind:

“Come, my child,” he said to her.

And he led her away, leaning upon his arm.

On returning to his garret, he found Father Longuemare reading his breviary.

He showed him Athénaïs, whom he held by the hand:

“Father, here is a girl from the Rue Fromenteau who cried, ‘Long live the king!’ The revolutionary police are on her heels. She has nowhere to sleep. Will you allow her to spend the night here?”

Father Longuemare closed his breviary:

“If I understand you rightly,” he said, “you are asking me, sir, whether this young girl, who, like myself, is under a warrant of arrest, may, for her worldly preservation, spend the night in the same room as I.”

“Yes, Father.”

“By what right should I object? And before I take offence at her presence, can I be sure that I am worthier than she?”

For the night he settled himself in an old, broken-down armchair, declaring that he would sleep well in it. Athénaïs lay down upon the mattress. Brotteaux stretched himself upon the straw pallet and blew out the candle.

The hours and half-hours sounded from the church towers. He did not sleep, but listened to the mingled breathing of the priest and the girl. The moon, image and witness of his former loves, rose and sent into the garret a silver beam that illumined Athénaïs’s fair hair, golden lashes, delicate nose, and round red mouth as she slept with her fists clenched.

“There,” he thought, “is a formidable enemy of the Republic!”

When Athénaïs awoke, it was daylight. The priest had gone. Beneath the skylight Brotteaux was reading Lucretius, learning from the Latin Muse how to live without fear or desire; and yet he was consumed by regrets and anxieties.

Opening her eyes, Athénaïs stared in astonishment at the rafters of a garret above her head. Then she remembered, smiled at her rescuer, and held out her pretty little dirty hands to caress him.

Raising herself upon her bed, she pointed to the dilapidated armchair in which the priest had spent the night.

“Has he gone?… He has not gone to denounce me, has he?”

“No, my child. You could not find a more honourable man than that old madman.”

Athénaïs asked what the good man’s madness was; and when Brotteaux told her it was religion, she gravely reproached him for speaking so, declared that men without religion were worse than beasts, and said that, for her part, she often prayed to God, hoping that He would forgive her sins and receive her into His holy mercy.

Then, noticing that Brotteaux held a book in his hand, she supposed it was a missal and said:

“You see, you say your prayers too! God will reward you for what you have done for me.”

When Brotteaux told her that the book was not a missal, and that it had been written before the idea of the Mass had entered the world, she concluded that it was a Key to Dreams and asked whether it contained the explanation of an extraordinary dream she had had. She could not read and knew, by hearsay, of only those two kinds of book.

Brotteaux replied that this book explained only the dream of life. Finding the answer too difficult, the lovely child gave up trying to understand it and dipped the tip of her nose into the earthenware bowl that served Brotteaux in place of the silver basins he had once used. Then, with minute and solemn care, she arranged her hair before her host’s shaving mirror. Her white arms curved above her head, she uttered a few words at long intervals.

“You—you were once rich.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I do not know. But you were rich, and you are an aristocrat; I am sure of it.”

From her pocket she drew a little silver Blessed Virgin in a round ivory shrine, a lump of sugar, thread, scissors, a tinderbox, and two or three cases; and, after selecting what she needed, she began to mend her skirt, which had been torn in several places.

“For your own safety, my child, put this on your cap!” Brotteaux said, giving her a tricolour cockade.

“I shall gladly do so, sir,” she replied; “but it will be for love of you, not for love of the nation.”

When she had dressed and adorned herself as well as she could, she took her skirt in both hands, made the curtsy she had learned in the village, and said to Brotteaux:

“Sir, I am your most humble servant.”

She was ready to oblige her benefactor in every way, but thought it fitting that he should ask nothing and that she should offer nothing: it seemed charming to her that they should part in this fashion, with all propriety observed.

Brotteaux put a few assignats into her hand so that she might take the coach to Palaiseau. It was half his fortune, and although he was renowned for his prodigality toward women, he had never yet made so equal a division of his possessions with any of them.

She asked his name.

“My name is Maurice.”

Reluctantly, he opened the garret door for her:

“Farewell, Athénaïs.”

She kissed him.

“Monsieur Maurice, when you think of me, call me Marthe: that is my baptismal name, the name they called me by in the village.… Farewell, and thank you.… Your obedient servant, Monsieur Maurice.”