The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 18

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Citizen Gamelin was fond of old Brotteaux, and esteemed him at once the most amiable and the most distinguished man she had ever known. She had not said farewell to him when he was arrested, for she would have feared to defy the authorities, and in her humble station regarded cowardice as a duty. But the blow had struck her down, and she never recovered from it.

She could not eat, and lamented that she had lost her appetite just when at last she had the means to satisfy it. She still admired her son; but she no longer dared think of the dreadful tasks he performed, and was thankful to be only an ignorant woman, under no obligation to judge him.

The poor mother had found an old rosary at the bottom of a trunk; she scarcely knew how to use it, but it gave occupation to her trembling fingers. Having reached old age without practising her religion, she was becoming devout: all day long, beside the fire, she prayed to God for the salvation of her child and of that good Mr Brotteaux. Élodie often came to see her: they dared not look at each other and, sitting side by side, talked at random of things that mattered nothing.

One day in Pluviôse, when the snow falling in great flakes darkened the sky and muffled every sound in the city, Citizen Gamelin, alone at home, heard a knock at the door. She started: for several months the slightest noise had made her shudder. She opened the door. A young man of eighteen or twenty entered without removing his hat. He wore a bottle-green carrick whose three capes covered his breast and waist, and boots with turned-down tops in the English fashion. His chestnut hair fell in curls upon his shoulders. He advanced to the middle of the studio, as though to receive all the light the glazed roof could send through the snow, and remained there for several moments, motionless and silent.

At last, while Citizen Gamelin stared at him in bewilderment, he said:

"Do you not recognize your daughter?…"

The old lady clasped her hands:

"Julie!… Is it you?… Can it be possible!…"

"Why, yes, it is I! Kiss me, Mamma."

The widowed Citizen Gamelin clasped her daughter in her arms and shed a tear upon the cape of the carrick. Then she asked anxiously:

"You, in Paris!…"

"Ah, Mamma, if only I had come alone!… No one will recognize me in these clothes."

Indeed, the carrick concealed her figure, and she appeared no different from many very young men who, like her, wore their hair long and divided into two flowing masses. Her features, delicate and charming but sunburnt, hollowed by fatigue and hardened by care, had a bold and masculine expression. She was slender, with long, straight legs and easy gestures; only her clear voice might have betrayed her.

Her mother asked whether she was hungry. She replied that she would gladly eat, and when bread, wine, and ham had been set before her, she fell to with one elbow on the table, beautiful and ravenous as Ceres in old Baubo's hut.

Then, with the glass still at her lips, she said:

"Mamma, do you know when my brother will be home? I have come to speak to him."

The good mother looked at her daughter uneasily and made no answer.

"I must see him. My husband was arrested this morning and taken to the Luxembourg."

She bestowed the name of husband upon Fortuné de Chassagne, a former nobleman and an officer in Bouillé's regiment. He had fallen in love with her when she was a milliner in the Rue des Lombards, carried her off, and taken her to England, where he had emigrated after the tenth of August. He was her lover; but before her mother she thought it more seemly to call him her husband. And she told herself that poverty had married them soundly enough, and that misfortune itself was a sacrament.

More than once they had passed the night together on a bench in the London parks, and gathered scraps of bread from beneath the tavern tables in Piccadilly.

Her mother said nothing and regarded her with a mournful eye.

"Do you not hear me, Mamma? There is no time to lose. I must see Évariste at once: he alone can save Fortuné."

"Julie," her mother replied, "it would be better if you did not speak to your brother."

"What? What are you saying, Mother?"

"I say it would be better if you did not speak to your brother about Mr de Chassagne."

"But, Mamma, I must!"

"My child, Évariste has never forgiven Mr de Chassagne for carrying you off. You know how angrily he used to speak of him, and the names he called him."

"Yes, he called him a seducer," Julie said with a little hissing laugh and a shrug of her shoulders.

"My child, he was mortally offended. Évariste has compelled himself never to speak of Mr de Chassagne again. For two years he has not uttered a word about either him or you. But his feelings have not changed; you know him: he has not forgiven either of you."

"But, Mamma, Fortuné married me… in London…"

The poor mother raised her eyes and arms:

"It is enough that Fortuné is an aristocrat and an émigré for Évariste to treat him as an enemy."

"Answer me, Mamma. Do you think that if I ask him to take the necessary steps with the Public Prosecutor and the Committee of General Security to save Fortuné, he will refuse?… But, Mamma, he would be a monster if he did!"

"My child, your brother is an honourable man and a good son. But do not ask him—oh, do not ask him—to concern himself with Mr de Chassagne… Listen to me, Julie. He never confides his thoughts to me and, no doubt, I should be incapable of understanding them… but he is a judge; he has his principles; he acts according to his conscience. Ask nothing of him, Julie."

"I see that you know him now. You know he is cold and unfeeling, that he is a wicked man, with nothing in him but ambition and vanity. Yet you always preferred him to me. When the three of us lived together, you held him up to me as an example. His measured gait and grave manner of speaking impressed you: you discovered every virtue in him. But you always disapproved of me and attributed every vice to me because I was frank and climbed trees. You could never endure me. You loved only him. Well, I hate your Évariste: he is a hypocrite."

"Be silent, Julie. I was as good a mother to you as I was to him. I had you taught a trade. It was no fault of mine that you did not remain a respectable girl and marry within your station. I loved you tenderly, and I love you still. I forgive you, and I love you. But do not speak ill of Évariste. He is a good son. He has always taken care of me. When you left me, my child, when you abandoned your trade and your shop to go and live with Mr de Chassagne, what would have become of me without him? I should have died of want and hunger."

"Do not speak like that, Mamma. You know very well that Fortuné and I would have surrounded you with every care if you had not turned away from us at Évariste's urging. Leave me alone! He is incapable of a good action; he made a show of caring for you merely to make you hate me. He, love you?… Is he capable of loving anyone? He has neither heart nor intelligence. He has no talent—none at all. To paint, a man needs a nature more tender than his."

She cast her eyes over the canvases in the studio and found them just as she had left them.

"There is his soul! He has put it on his canvases, cold and sombre. His Orestes—his Orestes, with his stupid eyes and vicious mouth, looking like a man impaled—is Évariste through and through… Mamma, can you understand nothing? I cannot leave Fortuné in prison. You know them—the Jacobins, the patriots, all the train of Évariste's followers. They will put him to death. Mamma, my dear Mamma, my own little Mamma, I will not let them kill him. I love him! I love him! He has been so good to me, and we have suffered so much together! Look, this carrick belongs to him. I had no shirt left. One of Fortuné's friends lent me a jacket, and I found work with a drinks-seller in Dover while he worked for a barber. We knew very well that by returning to France we were risking our lives; but we were asked whether we would go to Paris to carry out an important mission… We agreed; we would have undertaken a mission for the devil. They paid our travelling expenses and gave us a bill of exchange upon a Paris banker. We found his offices closed: the banker is in prison and is to be guillotined. We had not a red liard between us. Everyone with whom we were associated and to whom we might have turned had either fled or been imprisoned. There was not a door at which we could knock. We slept in a stable in the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête. A charitable shoeblack who slept there on the straw beside us lent my lover one of his boxes, a brush, and a pot of blacking three-quarters empty. For a fortnight Fortuné earned enough to keep us both by polishing shoes on the Place de Grève. But on Monday a member of the Paris Commune planted his foot upon the box and had Fortuné polish his boots. He was a former butcher whom Fortuné once kicked in the backside for selling meat short weight. When Fortuné raised his head to ask for his two sous, the rogue recognized him, called him an aristocrat, and threatened to have him arrested. A crowd gathered; it was made up of decent people and a few scoundrels who cried, 'Death to the émigré!' and called for the gendarmes.

"Just then I was bringing Fortuné his soup. I saw them take him to the Section and lock him in Saint-Jean church. I tried to kiss him, but they thrust me back. I spent the night like a dog on one of the church steps… This morning they took him…"

Julie could say no more; sobs choked her.

She flung her hat upon the floor and knelt at her mother's feet:

"This morning they took him to the Luxembourg prison. Mamma, Mamma, help me save him; have pity on your daughter!"

Weeping bitterly, she opened her carrick and, the better to make herself known as both lover and daughter, bared her bosom; then, taking her mother's hands, she pressed them against her throbbing breasts.

"My darling child, my Julie, my Julie!" sighed the widow Gamelin.

And she pressed her tear-wet face against the young woman's cheeks.

For several moments they remained silent. The poor mother searched her mind for some means of helping her daughter, while Julie watched for a sign in those eyes drowned in tears.

"Perhaps," Évariste's mother thought, "perhaps if I speak to him, he will allow himself to be moved. He is good; he is tender-hearted. If politics had not hardened him, if he had not fallen under the influence of the Jacobins, he would never have shown those severities that frighten me because I cannot understand them."

She took Julie's head between her hands:

"Listen, my child. I shall speak to Évariste. I shall prepare him to see you and hear you. The sight of you might anger him, and I should fear his first impulse… Besides, I know him: those clothes would offend him; he is strict in all matters touching morals and propriety. I myself was a little startled to see my Julie dressed as a boy."

"Ah, Mamma, emigration and the dreadful disorders of the kingdom have made such disguises very common. People assume them to practise a trade, to escape recognition, or to match a borrowed passport or certificate. In London I saw young Girey dressed as a girl, and he looked like a very pretty one; and you must admit, Mamma, that his disguise was more questionable than mine."

"My poor child, you need not justify yourself in my eyes, either for this or for anything else. I am your mother: to me you will always be innocent. I shall speak to Évariste; I shall say…"

She broke off. She sensed what her son had become; she sensed it, but would not believe it, would not know it.

"He is good. For my sake… for yours, he will do whatever I ask of him."

And the two women, infinitely weary, fell silent. Julie went to sleep with her head upon the knees where it had rested in childhood. Meanwhile, rosary in hand, the grieving mother wept over the evils she felt drawing silently near, amid the stillness of that snowy day when all things were hushed—the footsteps, the wheels, the sky.

Suddenly, with the keenness of hearing sharpened by anxiety, she heard her son climbing the stairs.

"Évariste!…" she said. "Hide yourself."

And she pushed her daughter into her bedroom.

"How are you today, my dear mother?"

Évariste hung his hat upon the rack, exchanged his blue coat for a working jacket, and sat down before his easel. For several days he had been making a charcoal sketch of Victory placing a wreath upon the brow of a soldier who had died for the fatherland. He would have treated the subject with enthusiasm, but the Tribunal devoured all his days and possessed his whole soul, while his hand, grown unused to drawing, was becoming heavy and sluggish.

He hummed the Ça ira.

“You are singing, my child,” said Citizen Gamelin. “Your heart is light.”

“We ought to rejoice, Mother: there is good news. The Vendée has been crushed, the Austrians defeated; the Army of the Rhine has forced the lines of Lautern and Wissembourg. The day is near when the Republic, triumphant, will show its clemency. Why must the conspirators grow bolder as the Republic grows stronger, and traitors strive to strike the fatherland from the shadows while it blasts the enemies who attack it openly?”

Citizen Gamelin, knitting a stocking, observed her son over the rims of her spectacles.

“Berzélius, your old model, came to claim the ten livres you owed him: I paid them. Little Joséphine had a stomach ache from eating too much jam the carpenter had given her. I made her some herbal tea… Desmahis came to see you; he was sorry not to find you at home. He would like to engrave a subject of your devising. He thinks you have great talent. The good fellow looked at your sketches and admired them.”

“When peace has been restored and the conspiracy stifled,” said the painter, “I shall return to my Orestes. I am not in the habit of flattering myself; but there is a head in it worthy of David.”

With a majestic stroke, he drew the arm of his Victory.

“She is holding out palms,” he said. “But it would be finer if her arms themselves were palms.”

“Évariste!”

“Mother?…”

“I have had news… guess of whom…”

“I do not know…”

“Of Julie… your sister… She is unhappy.”

“It would be a scandal if she were not.”

“Do not speak so, my child: she is your sister. Julie is not wicked; she has good feelings, and misfortune has deepened them. She loves you. I can assure you, Évariste, that she longs to lead an industrious, exemplary life and thinks only of drawing closer to her family. There is nothing to prevent you from seeing her again. She has married Fortuné Chassagne.”

“Has she written to us?”

“No.”

“How have you had news of her, Mother?”

“Not by letter, my child; it was…”

He rose and interrupted her in a terrible voice:

“Be silent, Mother! Do not tell me that they have both returned to France… Since they must perish, let it at least not be through me. For their sake, for yours, and for mine, see to it that I remain ignorant of their being in Paris. Do not force me to know it; otherwise…”

“What do you mean, my child? You would—you would dare?…”

“Mother, listen to me: if I knew that my sister Julie was in this room…”—and he pointed to the closed door—“I should go at once and denounce her to the Vigilance Committee of the Section.”

The poor mother, as white as her cap, let her knitting fall from her trembling hands and sighed in a voice fainter than the faintest whisper:

“I would not believe it, but now I see: he is a monster…”

As pale as she, with foam upon his lips, Évariste fled and ran to seek beside Élodie forgetfulness, sleep, and the delicious foretaste of nothingness.