The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 15

Chapter 15 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

The prisons, crammed to overflowing, had to be emptied; men had to judge, to judge without rest or respite. Seated against walls hung with fasces and red caps, as their counterparts had once sat amid fleurs-de-lis, the judges preserved the solemnity, the terrible composure, of their royal predecessors. The public prosecutor and his deputies, exhausted by fatigue, scorched by sleeplessness and brandy, could shake off their torpor only by a violent effort; and their ill health lent them a tragic air. The jurors, differing in origin and character—some educated, others ignorant, cowardly or generous, mild or violent, hypocritical or sincere—but all of whom, amid the peril of the country and the Republic, felt or pretended to feel the same anguish and to burn with the same fires, all made atrocious by virtue or by fear, formed but a single being, a single deaf and angry head, a single soul, a mystical beast which, through the natural exercise of its functions, brought forth death in abundance. Kindly or cruel through sensibility, suddenly shaken by an abrupt impulse of pity, they would acquit with tears a defendant whom, an hour earlier, they would have condemned with sarcasms. The further they advanced in their task, the more impetuously they followed the promptings of their hearts.

They judged in the fever and drowsiness brought on by excessive labour, under pressure from without and at the sovereign’s command, beneath the threats of the sans-culottes and the knitting-women packed into the galleries and the public enclosure, on the strength of frenzied testimony and frantic indictments, in a pestilential air that weighed upon the brain, set the ears humming and the temples throbbing, and drew a veil of blood across the eyes. Vague rumours circulated among the public of jurors corrupted by the gold of the accused. But the jury as a whole answered those rumours with indignant protests and pitiless condemnations. After all, they were men, neither worse nor better than others. Innocence is most often a piece of good fortune, not a virtue: anyone who had consented to take their place would have acted as they did and, with an ordinary soul, performed those appalling tasks.

Antoinette, so long awaited, came at last, dressed in black, to take her seat in the fatal chair, amid such a chorus of hatred that only the certainty of the verdict’s outcome preserved the forms of justice. To the questions that meant her death, the accused replied now with the instinct of self-preservation, now with her customary haughtiness, and once, thanks to the infamy of one of her accusers, with the majesty of a mother. Insult and calumny alone were permitted to the witnesses; the defence was frozen with terror. The Tribunal, constraining itself to judge according to the rules, waited only for the proceedings to end before flinging the Austrian woman’s head to Europe.

Three days after the execution of Marie-Antoinette, Gamelin was summoned to Citizen Fortuné Trubert, who lay dying thirty paces from the military office where he had worn out his life, on a webbed bed in the cell of some expelled Barnabite. His livid head sank into the pillow. His eyes, already sightless, turned their glassy pupils towards Évariste; his withered hand seized his friend’s and gripped it with unexpected strength. In two days he had vomited blood three times. He tried to speak; his voice, muffled at first and faint as a murmur, swelled and grew stronger:

“Wattignies! Wattignies!… Jourdan has forced the enemy from his camp… relieved Maubeuge… We have retaken Marchiennes. It will go on… it will go on…”

And he smiled.

These were no sick man’s dreams; it was a clear vision of reality, illuminating the brain upon which eternal darkness was now descending. The invasion seemed halted at last: the generals, terror-stricken, had discovered that nothing served them better than victory. What voluntary enlistment had failed to provide—a numerous and disciplined army—the requisition was supplying. One effort more, and the Republic would be saved.

After half an hour of utter prostration, Fortuné Trubert’s face, already hollowed by death, came to life again, and his hands rose.

He pointed out to his friend the only piece of furniture in the room, a small walnut escritoire.

Then, in his faint, breathless voice, guided by a lucid mind, he said:

“My friend, like Eudamidas, I bequeath you my debts: three hundred and twenty livres, the account of which you will find… in that red notebook… Farewell, Gamelin. Do not fall asleep. Watch over the defence of the Republic. It will go on.”

The shadow of night was descending into the cell. They heard the dying man draw a laboured breath, and his hands scratching at the sheet.

At midnight he uttered disjointed words:

“More saltpetre… Have the muskets delivered… My health? Very good… Take down those bells…”

He died at five in the morning.

By order of the Section, his body was laid out in the nave of the former Barnabite church, at the foot of the altar of the Fatherland, upon a camp bed, his body covered with a tricolour flag and his brow encircled by a wreath of oak leaves.

Twelve old men dressed in Roman togas, each holding a palm, and twelve young girls trailing long veils and carrying flowers, surrounded the funeral bed. At the dead man’s feet, two children each held an inverted torch. In one of them Évariste recognized his concierge’s daughter, Joséphine, whose childish gravity and charming beauty reminded him of those genii of love and death which the Romans carved upon their sarcophagi.

The procession made its way to the Saint-André-des-Arts cemetery to the strains of the Marseillaise and the Ça ira.

As he pressed the farewell kiss upon Fortuné Trubert’s brow, Évariste wept. He wept for himself, envying the man who rested now, his task accomplished.

On returning home, he received notice that he had been appointed a member of the General Council of the Paris Commune. A candidate for four months, he had been elected without opposition, after several ballots, by some thirty votes. No one voted any longer: the Sections were deserted; rich and poor alike sought only to escape public duties. The greatest events no longer aroused either enthusiasm or curiosity; no one read the newspapers now, and Évariste doubted whether, of the capital’s seven hundred thousand inhabitants, as many as three or four thousand still possessed a republican soul.

That day, the Twenty-One appeared before the Tribunal.

Innocent or guilty of the Republic’s disasters and crimes, vain, imprudent, ambitious and frivolous, moderate and violent at once, weak in terror as in clemency, quick to declare war and slow to wage it, dragged before the Tribunal by the precedent they themselves had set, they were nonetheless the Revolution’s brilliant youth; they had been its charm and its glory. This judge, who is about to question them with studied partiality; this pallid prosecutor who, there at his little table, prepares their death and their dishonour; these jurors, who will presently seek to stifle their defence; this public in the galleries, covering them with abuse and jeers—judge, jurors, people—all had once applauded their eloquence and celebrated their talents and their virtues. But they remembered no longer.

Évariste had once made a god of Vergniaud and an oracle of Brissot. He remembered nothing of it now; and if some vestige of his former admiration remained in his memory, it served only to show him that these monsters had seduced the finest citizens.

Returning home after the hearing, Gamelin heard heartrending screams. It was little Joséphine, whom her mother was whipping for having played in the square with a pack of scamps and soiled the beautiful white dress she had been given to wear in Citizen Trubert’s funeral procession.