The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 19

Chapter 19 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

While Father Longuemare and the girl Athénaïs were being questioned at the Section, Brotteaux was taken between two gendarmes to the Luxembourg, where the porter refused to admit him, pleading that there was no room left. The old financier was then conducted to the Conciergerie and brought into the registry, a rather small room divided in two by a glazed partition. While the clerk entered his name in the prison registers, Brotteaux saw through the panes two men who lay, each upon a wretched mattress, as motionless as death and, staring fixedly, seemed to see nothing. Plates, bottles, and scraps of bread and meat covered the floor around them. They were condemned men waiting for the cart.

The former Sieur des Ilettes was taken to a dungeon where, by the light of a lantern, he dimly perceived two recumbent figures, one savage, mutilated, hideous, the other graceful and gentle. The two prisoners offered him a little of their rotten, verminous straw, so that he need not lie upon the ground fouled with excrement. Brotteaux sank onto a bench in the stinking darkness and remained with his head against the wall, mute and motionless. His anguish was such that he would have dashed his head against the wall, had he possessed the strength. He could not breathe. A mist veiled his eyes; a long murmur, as tranquil as silence, filled his ears, and he felt his whole being bathed in a delicious nothingness. For one incomparable second, all was harmony, serene light, fragrance, and sweetness. Then he ceased to be.

When he came to himself, the first thought to take possession of his mind was regret for his swoon; and, a philosopher even in the stupor of despair, he reflected that he had been obliged to descend to the bottom of a dungeon, there to await the guillotine, before experiencing the keenest sensation of delight his senses had ever tasted. He tried to lose consciousness again, but could not; on the contrary, little by little, he felt the foul air of the dungeon carry to his lungs, together with the warmth of life, the consciousness of his intolerable misery.

Meanwhile, his two companions regarded his silence as a cruel affront. Brotteaux, who was sociable by nature, tried to satisfy their curiosity; but when they learned that he was what was called “a political,” one of those whose trifling crime consisted of words or thoughts, they felt neither esteem nor sympathy for him. The deeds charged against these two prisoners had greater substance: the older man was a murderer; the other had manufactured counterfeit assignats. Both had accommodated themselves to their condition and even found certain satisfactions in it. Brotteaux suddenly began to think that above his head all was movement, noise, light, and life, and that the pretty shopgirls of the Palais were smiling behind their displays of perfumes and haberdashery at the happy, free passer-by; and the thought deepened his despair.

Night came, unnoticed amid the darkness and silence of the dungeon, yet heavy and mournful nonetheless. With one leg stretched along his bench and his back against the wall, Brotteaux fell into a doze. He saw himself sitting at the foot of a leafy beech in which birds were singing; the setting sun covered the river with liquid flame, and the edges of the clouds were tinged with purple. The night went by. A burning fever consumed him, and he drank greedily from his pitcher a water that worsened his illness.

The next day, the gaoler who brought the soup promised Brotteaux that, for payment, he would put him in the paying ward as soon as there was room, which would not be long. Indeed, on the following day he invited the old financier to leave his dungeon. With every stair he climbed, Brotteaux felt strength and life returning to him; and when, upon the red-tiled floor of a room, he saw a webbed bedstead covered with a shabby woollen blanket, he wept for joy. The gilded bed adorned with billing doves, which he had once had made for the prettiest dancer at the Opéra, had never seemed so agreeable to him nor promised such delights.

This webbed bed stood in a large, fairly clean room containing seventeen others, separated by high wooden partitions. The company lodged there, consisting of former nobles, merchants, bankers, and craftsmen, did not displease the old tax farmer, who could accommodate himself to every sort of person. He observed that these men, deprived like himself of every pleasure and liable to perish by the executioner’s hand, displayed cheerfulness and a lively taste for jesting. Little inclined to admire mankind, he attributed his companions’ good humour to the shallowness of their minds, which prevented them from considering their situation attentively. He found this opinion confirmed when he observed that the most intelligent among them were profoundly sad. He soon perceived that most of them drew from wine and brandy a gaiety which, taking its character from its source, was violent and sometimes a little mad. They were not all courageous; but all made a show of courage. Brotteaux was not surprised: he knew that men readily confess to cruelty, anger, even avarice, but never to cowardice, because such an admission would expose them, among savages and even in polite society, to mortal danger. That was why, he reflected, every nation was a nation of heroes and every army was composed solely of brave men.

Even more than wine and brandy, the clatter of weapons and keys, the grinding of locks, the calls of the sentries, and the stamping of the citizens at the door of the Tribunal intoxicated the prisoners, inspiring melancholy, delirium, or fury. Some cut their throats with a razor or threw themselves from a window.

Brotteaux had been lodged for three days in the paying ward when he learned from a turnkey that Father Longuemare was rotting upon foul straw, amid vermin, with thieves and murderers. He had him admitted to the paying ward, in the room where he himself lived and in which a bed had fallen vacant. Having undertaken to pay for the religious, the old tax farmer, whose purse contained no great treasure, contrived to make portraits at an écu apiece. Through a gaoler he obtained small black frames in which to place little pieces of hairwork that he executed with considerable skill. These objects were much sought after in a gathering of men who were thinking of leaving keepsakes behind them.

Father Longuemare kept his courage and spirits high. While awaiting his appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he prepared his defence. Refusing to separate his own cause from that of the Church, he promised himself that he would lay before his judges the disorders and scandals inflicted upon the Bride of Jesus Christ by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; he undertook to portray the eldest daughter of the Church waging a sacrilegious war upon the Pope; the French clergy despoiled, abused, and odiously subjected to laymen; the regular clergy, Christ’s true militia, plundered and dispersed. He cited Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Irenaeus, brought forward numerous articles of canon law, and quoted entire paragraphs from the decretals.

All day long he scribbled upon his knees at the foot of his bed, dipping stumps of quills worn down to the barbs into ink, soot, or coffee grounds, and covering candle wrappers, packing paper, newspapers, book endpapers, old letters, old invoices, and playing cards with illegible writing; he contemplated using his shirt as well, once he had starched it. He piled sheet upon sheet and, displaying the indecipherable scrawl, would say:

“When I appear before my judges, I shall flood them with light.”

And one day, casting a satisfied glance over his ever-growing defence and thinking of the magistrates whom he burned to confound, he exclaimed:

“I should not care to be in their place!”

The prisoners whom chance had brought together in this cell were either royalists or federalists; there was even a Jacobin among them. They differed in their opinions as to how the affairs of the State should be conducted, but none retained the least vestige of Christian belief. The Feuillants, Constitutionalists, and Girondins, like Brotteaux, considered the good Lord very bad for themselves and excellent for the people. The Jacobins set a Jacobin god in Jehovah’s place, so that Jacobinism might descend upon the world from a loftier source; but since neither party could conceive that anyone might be absurd enough to believe in any revealed religion, and since they saw that Father Longuemare was not lacking in intelligence, they took him for an impostor. Doubtless in order to prepare himself for martyrdom, he professed his faith at every opportunity; and the more sincerity he displayed, the more fraudulent he appeared.

In vain did Brotteaux vouch for the religious’s good faith; Brotteaux himself was thought to believe only part of what he said. His ideas were too singular not to seem affected, and they never entirely pleased anyone. He spoke of Jean-Jacques as a paltry rogue. Voltaire, on the other hand, he ranked among the divine men, though without placing him on a level with the amiable Helvétius, Diderot, or Baron d’Holbach. In his judgement, the greatest genius of the century was Boulanger. He also held in high esteem the astronomer Lalande and Dupuis, author of a Memoir on the Origin of the Constellations. The wits of the room played a thousand jokes upon the poor Barnabite, who never perceived them: his innocence defeated every snare.

To banish the cares that gnawed at them and escape the torments of idleness, the prisoners played draughts, cards, and backgammon. No musical instrument was permitted. After supper they sang and recited verse. Voltaire’s The Maid brought a little gaiety to the hearts of these unhappy men, who never tired of hearing its choicer passages. But, unable to distract themselves from the dreadful thought planted in the midst of their hearts, they sometimes tried to make a diversion of it; and in the room of the eighteen beds, before going to sleep, they played at the Revolutionary Tribunal. The parts were assigned according to taste and ability. Some represented the judges and the prosecutor; others the accused or the witnesses; still others the executioner and his assistants. The trials invariably ended with the execution of the condemned, who were stretched upon a bed with their necks beneath a plank. The scene was then transferred to hell. The most nimble members of the company, wrapped in sheets, played spectres. And a young lawyer from Bordeaux named Dubosc—short, dark, one-eyed, hunchbacked, and lame, the very Lame Devil in person—would come, fully horned, to drag Father Longuemare out of bed by the feet, announcing that he was condemned to eternal flames and damned beyond redemption for having made the creator of the universe into an envious, foolish, and malignant being, an enemy of joy and love.

“Ha! ha! ha!” the devil would cry horribly. “You taught, you old bonze, that God delights in seeing his creatures languish in penitence and abstain from his dearest gifts. Impostor, hypocrite, sanctimonious fraud, sit upon nails and eat eggshells for all eternity!”

Father Longuemare contented himself with replying that, in this speech, the philosopher showed through the devil, and that the least demon in hell would have uttered fewer absurdities, possessing some smattering of theology and certainly being less ignorant than an Encyclopaedist.

But when the Girondin lawyer called him a Capuchin, he grew red with anger and declared that a man incapable of distinguishing a Barnabite from a Franciscan could not see a fly in a bowl of milk.

The Revolutionary Tribunal emptied the prisons, which the committees ceaselessly filled: in three months, half the occupants of the room of the eighteen beds had been replaced. Father Longuemare lost his little devil. The lawyer Dubosc, brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, was condemned to death as a federalist and for conspiring against the unity of the Republic. On leaving the courtroom, he passed, like all the other condemned prisoners, through a corridor that crossed the prison and opened onto the room which for three months he had enlivened with his gaiety. In bidding farewell to his companions, he preserved his customary light tone and cheerful air.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” he said to Father Longuemare, “for dragging you out of bed by the feet. I shall not do it again.”

And, turning to old Brotteaux:

“Farewell. I go before you into nothingness. I willingly surrender to nature the elements of which I am composed, in the hope that she may put them to better use hereafter; for it must be admitted that she made a very poor job of me.”

And he went down to the registry, leaving Brotteaux grief-stricken and Father Longuemare trembling and green as a leaf, more dead than alive at seeing the impious man laugh on the brink of the abyss.

When Germinal brought back the bright days, Brotteaux, who was a lover of pleasure, went down several times a day into the courtyard overlooking the women’s quarters, near the fountain where the female captives came in the morning to wash their linen. A grille separated the two quarters; but its bars were not close enough to prevent hands from joining and mouths from meeting. Beneath the indulgent night, couples crowded there. Brotteaux would then discreetly take refuge on the staircase and, seated upon a step, draw his little Lucretius from the pocket of his flea-coloured frock coat and read, by the light of a lantern, a few austerely consoling maxims: “Sic ubi non erimus… When we have ceased to live, nothing will have power to move us, not even heaven, earth, and sea mingling their ruins…” Yet, even as he savoured his lofty wisdom, Brotteaux envied the Barnabite the madness that concealed the universe from him.

The Terror grew from month to month. Every night, the drunken gaolers, accompanied by their guard dogs, went from cell to cell carrying indictments, howling out names which they mangled, waking the prisoners, and terrifying two hundred of them for every twenty victims designated. Through those corridors filled with blood-red shadows, twenty, thirty, fifty condemned prisoners passed each day without a complaint—old men, women, adolescents—so diverse in station, character, and feeling that one wondered whether they had not been chosen by lot.

And still they played cards, drank Burgundy wine, made plans, and kept appointments at night by the grille. The company, now almost entirely renewed, consisted largely of “Extremists” and “Enragés.” Nevertheless, the room of the eighteen beds remained the abode of elegance and good breeding: apart from two detainees recently transferred there from the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie, Citizens Navette and Bellier, who were suspected of being “stool pigeons”—that is, spies—it contained only decent men who showed one another mutual trust. With cups in hand, they celebrated the victories of the Republic. There were several poets among them, as there are in every gathering of idle men. The ablest composed odes upon the triumphs of the Army of the Rhine and recited them with great emphasis. They were loudly applauded. Brotteaux alone bestowed lukewarm praise upon both the victors and their singers.

“Ever since Homer, poets have suffered from a strange mania for celebrating soldiers,” he said one day. “War is no art, and chance alone decides the fate of battles. When two generals face one another and both are fools, one of them must necessarily be victorious. You may expect that one day one of these sword-bearers whom you deify will swallow you all, as the crane in the fable swallowed the frogs. Then he will truly be a god! For gods are known by their appetites.”

Brotteaux had never been moved by the glory of arms. He took no pleasure in the triumphs of the Republic, which he had foreseen. He did not love the new order that victory was consolidating. He was discontented. And he had cause enough to be so.

One morning it was announced that the commissioners of the Committee of General Security would search the prisoners’ quarters and seize assignats, articles of gold and silver, knives, and scissors; such searches, it was said, had already been made at the Luxembourg, where letters, papers, and books had been carried off.

Everyone then taxed his ingenuity to discover some hiding place for his most precious possessions. Father Longuemare carried his defence, armful by armful, to a gutter; Brotteaux slipped his Lucretius beneath the ashes in the fireplace.

When the commissioners, tricolour ribbons about their necks, came to make their seizures, they found little beyond what the prisoners had thought fit to leave them. After their departure, Father Longuemare hurried to his gutter and recovered as much of his defence as the rain and wind had spared. Brotteaux drew his Lucretius from the fireplace, blackened all over with soot.

“Let us enjoy the present hour,” he thought, “for certain signs lead me to believe that henceforth our time is narrowly measured.”

On a mild night in Prairial, while above the exercise yard the moon displayed its two silver horns in the paling sky, the old financier, who as usual was reading Lucretius on a step of the stone staircase, heard a voice calling him—a woman’s voice, a delightful voice that he did not recognize. He went down into the yard and saw behind the grille a figure as unfamiliar to him as the voice, yet one whose indistinct and charming outlines recalled every woman he had ever loved. The sky bathed her in azure and silver. Brotteaux suddenly recognized the pretty actress from the Rue Feydeau, Rose Thévenin.

“You here, my child! The joy of seeing you here is cruel to me. Since when have you been here, and why?”

“Since yesterday.”

And she added in a very low voice:

“I have been denounced as a royalist. They accuse me of conspiring to free the queen. Since I knew you were here, I sought you out at once. Listen to me, my friend… for you will permit me to call you that, will you not?… I know people in high places; I know that I have sympathizers even within the Committee of Public Safety. I shall set my friends to work: they will free me, and then I in turn shall free you.”

But Brotteaux’s voice grew urgent:

“By all that is dear to you, my child, do nothing of the kind! Do not write, do not petition; ask nothing of anyone. I implore you, make them forget you.”

As she did not seem to grasp the force of what he was saying, he became still more entreating:

“Keep silent, Rose; make them forget you: therein lies safety. Anything your friends might attempt would only hasten your destruction. Gain time. It will take little time, very little, I hope, to save you… Above all, do not try to move the judges, the jurors, a Gamelin. They are not men, they are things; one cannot reason with things. Make them forget you. If you follow my counsel, my friend, I shall die happy to have saved your life.”

She replied:

“I shall obey you… Do not speak of dying.”

He shrugged his shoulders:

“My life is over, my child. Live, and be happy.”

She took his hands and laid them upon her breast:

“Listen to me, my friend… I have seen you for only one day, and yet I am not indifferent to you. And if what I am about to say can bind you once more to life, believe it: I shall be to you… whatever you wish me to be.”

And through the grille they kissed upon the lips.