The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 16

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After sacrificing victims illustrious and obscure to the fatherland every day for three months, Évariste at last had a trial of his own; from among the accused, he made one man his personal quarry.

Ever since he had taken his seat on the Tribunal, he had searched avidly among the throng of persons charged who passed before his eyes for Élodie's seducer, of whom his laborious imagination had formed a picture precise in certain particulars. He conceived him as young, handsome, and insolent, and had persuaded himself that the man had emigrated to England. He believed he had found him in a young émigré named Maubel, who, having returned to France and been denounced by his host, had been arrested at an inn in Passy, and whose case Fouquier-Tinville's office was investigating along with a thousand others. Letters had been seized upon him which the prosecution regarded as evidence of a plot contrived by Maubel and Pitt's agents, but which were in fact merely letters written to the émigré by London bankers with whom he had deposited funds. Maubel, who was young and handsome, seemed chiefly occupied with affairs of gallantry. His notebook revealed traces of dealings with Spain, then at war with France; the letters were, to be sure, of an intimate nature, and if the prosecutor's office did not issue an order dismissing the case, it was by virtue of the principle that justice must never be in haste to release a prisoner.

Gamelin was shown the first examination undergone by Maubel in chambers, and was struck by the character of the young former nobleman, whom he imagined to correspond with the character he attributed to the man who had abused Élodie's trust. Thereafter, shut up for long hours in the clerk's office, he studied the file with ardour. His suspicions increased strangely when, in an old pocketbook belonging to the émigré, he found the address of the Painted Cupid, together, it is true, with those of the Green Monkey, the Portrait of the Former Dauphine, and several other print and picture shops. But when he learned that a few petals of a red carnation had also been found in that same pocketbook, carefully covered with tissue paper, Évariste doubted no longer: the red carnation was Élodie's favourite flower; she grew it at her window, wore it in her hair, and gave it—he knew—as a token of love.

Having thus reached certainty, he resolved to question Élodie, while concealing from her the circumstances that had led him to discover the criminal.

As he climbed the stairs of his house, he caught, even on the lower landings, a heady scent of fruit, and found Élodie in the studio helping Citizen Gamelin make quince preserves. While the old housewife, lighting the stove, pondered how she might economize on coal and brown sugar without impairing the quality of the preserve, Citizen Blaise sat on her rush-bottomed chair, a coarse linen apron round her waist and her lap full of golden fruit, peeling the quinces and tossing them in quarters into a copper pan. The lappets of her cap were thrown back, and black wisps curled over her moist brow; there emanated from her a domestic charm and familiar grace that inspired tender thoughts and tranquil delight.

Without moving, she raised her beautiful molten-gold eyes to her lover and said:

"Look, Évariste, we are working for you. All winter you shall eat delicious quince jelly, which will strengthen your stomach and make your heart glad."

But Gamelin came close to her and spoke this name in her ear:

"Jacques Maubel..."

At that moment the cobbler Combalot showed his red nose through the half-open door. Along with some shoes to which he had fitted new heels, he brought his bill for resoling.

For fear of passing as a bad citizen, he used the new calendar. Citizen Gamelin, who liked her accounts to be clear, lost her way among the Fructidors and Vendémiaires.

She sighed:

"Jesus! They want to change everything—the days, the months, the seasons, the sun and the moon! Dear God, Monsieur Combalot, what is this pair of overshoes dated the eighth of Vendémiaire?"

"Citizen, consult your calendar and you will see."

She took it down, cast her eyes over it, and at once looked away.

"It does not look Christian!" she exclaimed in terror.

"And that is not all, Citizen," said the cobbler. "We now have only three Sundays instead of four. Nor is that the end of it: we shall have to change the way we reckon. There will be no more liards or deniers; everything will be regulated by distilled water."

At these words Citizen Gamelin, her lips trembling, raised her eyes to the ceiling and sighed:

"They go too far!"

And while she lamented, like one of the holy women at a wayside Calvary, a smoking coal, which had kindled in the embers during her absence, filled the studio with a foul vapour that, mingling with the heady scent of the quinces, made the air unbreathable.

Élodie complained that her throat was smarting and asked for the window to be opened. But as soon as the citizen cobbler had taken his leave and Citizen Gamelin had returned to her stove, Évariste repeated the name in Citizen Blaise's ear:

"Jacques Maubel."

She looked at him with some surprise and, quite calmly, without ceasing to quarter a quince, said:

"Well?... Jacques Maubel?..."

"It is he!"

"Who is he?"

"You gave him a red carnation."

She declared that she did not understand and asked him to explain himself.

"That aristocrat! That émigré! That vile wretch!..."

She shrugged her shoulders and denied, with the greatest naturalness, that she had ever known a Jacques Maubel.

And in truth she had never known one.

She denied ever having given red carnations to anyone but Évariste; though on that point her memory may not have been perfectly sound.

He knew women poorly and had not penetrated very deeply into Élodie's character; nevertheless, he thought her quite capable of dissembling and deceiving a cleverer man than himself.

"Why deny it?" he said. "I know."

She again affirmed that she had known no Maubel. Having finished peeling her quinces, she asked for water, because her fingers were sticky.

Gamelin brought her a basin.

And as she washed her hands, she renewed her denials.

He repeated once more that he knew, and this time she remained silent.

She could not see what her lover's questions were tending towards, and was a thousand leagues from suspecting that this Maubel, of whom she had never heard, was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal; she understood nothing of the suspicions with which he plagued her, but she knew they were unfounded. Therefore, having little hope of dispelling them, she had little desire to do so. She ceased defending herself against the charge of having known a Maubel, preferring to let the jealous man wander down a false trail when the slightest incident might at any moment set him upon the true one. Her former little clerk, now a handsome patriotic dragoon, had quarrelled with his aristocratic mistress. Whenever he met Élodie in the street, he looked at her with an eye that seemed to say: "Come now, my beauty; I can feel that I am going to forgive you for my having betrayed you, and that I am very nearly ready to restore my esteem to you." She therefore made no further effort to cure what she called her lover's fancies; Gamelin retained his conviction that Jacques Maubel was Élodie's corrupter.

During the days that followed, the Tribunal laboured without respite to annihilate federalism, which, like a Hydra, had threatened to devour liberty. Those were crowded days; and the jurors, exhausted by fatigue, disposed as rapidly as possible of Madame Roland, the instigator or accomplice of the crimes of the Brissotin faction.

Meanwhile, every morning Gamelin visited the prosecutor's office to press the Maubel case forward. Important documents were in Bordeaux; he obtained an order for a commissioner to fetch them by post-horse. At last they arrived.

The deputy public prosecutor read them, grimaced, and said to Évariste:

"These documents are not much good! There is nothing in them! Mere nonsense!... If only it were certain that this former Count de Maubel had emigrated!..."

At last Gamelin succeeded. Young Maubel received his indictment and was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the nineteenth of Brumaire.

From the opening of the hearing, the president assumed the sombre and terrible countenance he was careful to wear when conducting cases that had been poorly prepared. The deputy public prosecutor stroked his chin with the feathered end of his quill and affected the serenity of a clear conscience. The clerk read the indictment: never had one so hollow been heard.

The president asked the accused whether he had been aware of the laws enacted against émigrés.

"I knew and obeyed them," Maubel replied, "and I left France provided with passports in proper order."

He gave a satisfactory account of his reasons for travelling to England and for returning to France. His face was pleasing, with an air of candour and pride that won favour. The women in the galleries looked kindly upon him.

The prosecution alleged that he had spent time in Spain when that nation was already at war with France; he affirmed that he had not left Bayonne at that period. One point alone remained obscure. Among the papers he had thrown into his fireplace at the time of his arrest, of which only fragments had been recovered, Spanish words could be read, together with the name "Nieves."

Jacques Maubel refused to give the explanations demanded of him on this subject. And when the president told him that it was in his interest to explain himself, he replied that one ought not always to follow one's interest.

Gamelin thought of convicting Maubel of only one crime: three times he pressed the president to ask the accused whether he could explain the carnation whose dried petals he had preserved so carefully in his pocketbook.

Maubel replied that he did not consider himself obliged to answer a question that did not concern justice, since no note had been found concealed within the flower.

The jury withdrew to the deliberation room, favourably disposed towards this young man, whose obscure case seemed above all to conceal mysteries of love. This time, even the good and the pure would willingly have acquitted him. One of them, a former nobleman who had given pledges of loyalty to the Revolution, said:

"Is it his birth that is held against him? I too had the misfortune to be born into the aristocracy."

"Yes, but you came out of it," Gamelin replied, "and he remained in it."

And he spoke with such vehemence against this conspirator, this emissary of Pitt, this accomplice of Coburg, who had crossed mountains and seas to raise up enemies against liberty; he demanded the traitor's condemnation with such ardour, that he reawakened the ever-anxious temper and old severity of the patriotic jurors.

One of them said to him cynically:

"There are favours that colleagues cannot refuse one another."

The verdict of death was returned by a majority of one.

The condemned man heard his sentence with smiling composure. His eyes, as they travelled peacefully around the courtroom, expressed an unspeakable contempt when they encountered Gamelin's face.

No one applauded the sentence.

Taken back to the Conciergerie, Jacques Maubel wrote a letter while awaiting the execution, which was to take place that very evening by torchlight:

My dear sister, the Tribunal sends me to the scaffold, granting me the only joy I have been capable of feeling since the death of my adored Nieves. They have taken from me the only thing of hers that remained to me, a pomegranate blossom which, I do not know why, they called a carnation.

I loved the arts: in happier days in Paris, I collected paintings and engravings which are now in a safe place and will be delivered to you as soon as may be. I beg you, dear sister, to keep them in remembrance of me.

He cut off a lock of his hair, placed it in the letter, folded it, and wrote the address: To Citizen Clémence Dezeimeries, born Maubel.

He gave all the money he had upon him to the turnkey, asking him to see that the letter was delivered, then requested a bottle of wine and drank it in little sips while awaiting the tumbril...

After supper, Gamelin hurried to the Painted Cupid and bounded into the blue room where Élodie awaited him every night.

“You are avenged,” he told her. “Jacques Maubel is no more. The cart bearing him to his death passed beneath your windows, surrounded by torches.”

She understood:

“Wretch! It was you who killed him, and he was not my lover. I did not know him... I never saw him... What manner of man was he? He was young, charming... innocent. And you killed him, wretch! Wretch!”

She fell unconscious. Yet, in the shadows of that brief death, she felt herself flooded at once with horror and delight. She revived by degrees; her heavy lids disclosed the whites of her eyes, her bosom swelled, and her fluttering hands sought her lover. She clasped him in her arms until he could scarcely breathe, drove her nails into his flesh, and gave him, with her torn lips, the most silent, the most stifled, the longest, the most agonizing and the most exquisite of kisses.

She loved him with all her flesh; and the more terrible, cruel, and monstrous he appeared to her, the more she saw him covered in the blood of his victims, the more she hungered and thirsted for him.