The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 2

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On leaving the Barnabites, Évariste Gamelin made his way towards Place Dauphine, now renamed Place de Thionville in honour of an impregnable city.

Situated in the busiest quarter of Paris, the square had lost its noble symmetry nearly a century before. The mansions built on its three sides in the time of Henri IV, uniformly of red brick with courses of white stone and intended for magnificent magistrates, had exchanged their stately slate roofs for two or three wretched storeys of plasterwork, or else had been razed to the ground and ingloriously replaced by ill-whitewashed houses; they now presented nothing but irregular façades, poor and dirty, pierced by countless narrow windows of unequal size, enlivened by flowerpots, birdcages, and drying linen. A multitude of artisans lodged there—jewellers, engravers, watchmakers, opticians, printers, seamstresses, milliners, laundresses—and a few old men of law whom the downfall of royal justice had not swept away in the storm.

It was morning, and it was spring. Young shafts of sunlight, intoxicating as sweet wine, laughed upon the walls and slipped merrily into the garrets. Every sash window stood raised, revealing beneath it the tousled heads of housewives. The clerk of the Revolutionary Tribunal, emerging from the house on his way to his post, gave a playful tap to the cheeks of the children beneath the trees. From the Pont-Neuf came the cries announcing the treason of the infamous Dumouriez.

Évariste Gamelin lived, on the Quai de l’Horloge side of the square, in a house dating from the reign of Henri IV, which would still have made a respectable appearance but for a little tiled garret added to its height under the tyrant before last. To adapt some old parliamentary magistrate’s residence to the needs of the bourgeois and working families who lodged there, partitions and lofts had been multiplied. Thus Citizen Remacle, concierge and tailor, nestled in a mezzanine much curtailed in height as well as breadth, where he could be seen through the glazed door, cross-legged on his workbench, the nape of his neck almost against the ceiling, sewing a National Guard uniform; meanwhile Citizen Remacle, whose stove had no chimney but the staircase, poisoned the tenants with the smoke of her stews and frying, while on the threshold little Joséphine, their daughter, smeared with molasses and lovely as the day, played with Mouton, the carpenter’s dog. Citizen Remacle, ample of heart, bosom, and haunch, was reputed to bestow her favours upon her neighbour, Citizen Dupont the elder, one of the twelve members of the Committee of Surveillance. Her husband, at any rate, vehemently suspected her of it, and the Remacles filled the house by turns with the outbursts of their quarrels and reconciliations. The upper floors were occupied by Citizen Chaperon, a goldsmith whose shop stood on the Quai de l’Horloge, a health officer, a man of law, a gold-beater, and several employees of the Palais.

Évariste Gamelin climbed the ancient staircase to the fourth and topmost floor, where he had his studio and a room for his mother. There ended the wooden, tile-covered steps that had succeeded the broad stone stairs of the lower storeys. A ladder resting against the wall led to a garret, from which at that moment a stout, elderly man with a handsome, rosy, florid face was descending, clasping an enormous bundle with difficulty, yet humming all the while: “I have lost my servant.”

He broke off his humming to bid Gamelin a courteous good morning. Gamelin greeted him fraternally and helped him lower his bundle, for which the old man thanked him.

“What you see here,” he said, taking up his burden again, “are jumping-jacks which I am about to deliver to a toy dealer in the Rue de la Loi. There is a whole people of them here: they are my creatures; from me they have received a perishable body, exempt from joys and sufferings. I did not give them thought, for I am a good God.”

This was Citizen Maurice Brotteaux, a former tax farmer and ci-devant nobleman. His father, enriched by tax contracts, had bought one of those offices that washed away the stain of common birth. In the good days Maurice Brotteaux had called himself Monsieur des Ilettes and given exquisite suppers at his mansion in the Rue de la Chaise, illuminated by the eyes of the beautiful Madame de Rochemaure, a prosecutor’s wife and an accomplished woman, whose honourable fidelity never faltered so long as the Revolution left Maurice Brotteaux des Ilettes his offices, his annuities, his mansion, his lands, and his name. The Revolution took them all from him. He earned his living by painting portraits beneath carriage archways, making pancakes and fritters on the Quai de la Mégisserie, composing speeches for the representatives of the people, and giving dancing lessons to young women. Now, in his garret, which one entered by squeezing up a ladder and where it was impossible to stand upright, Maurice Brotteaux, rich in a pot of paste, a bundle of string, a box of watercolours, and a few scraps of paper, manufactured jumping-jacks which he sold to wholesale toy dealers; they resold them to hawkers, who carried them through the Champs-Élysées at the end of a pole, glittering objects of desire to little children. Amid the public turmoil and the great misfortune that had overwhelmed him personally, he preserved a serene spirit, refreshing himself with his Lucretius, which he carried constantly in the gaping pocket of his flea-coloured frock coat.

Évariste Gamelin pushed open the door of his lodging, which yielded at once. His poverty spared him all concern for locks, and whenever his mother drew the bolt from habit, he would say: “What is the use? No one steals cobwebs… nor my canvases either.” In his studio, beneath a thick layer of dust or turned face to the wall, were heaped the paintings of his early days, when, in obedience to fashion, he treated gallant scenes, caressing with a smooth and timid brush emptied quivers and flown birds, dangerous games and dreams of happiness, hitching up the skirts of goose girls and strewing the breasts of shepherdesses with roses.

But this manner did not suit his temperament. These coldly treated scenes bore witness to the painter’s incurable chastity. Connoisseurs had not been deceived, and Gamelin had never been regarded as an erotic artist. Today, although he had not yet reached thirty, such subjects seemed to him to belong to time immemorial. In them he recognised monarchical depravity and the shameful effects of corruption at court. He accused himself of having succumbed to this contemptible genre and displayed a genius debased by servitude. Now, as a citizen of a free people, he drew in vigorous charcoal strokes figures of Liberty, Rights of Man, French Constitutions, Republican Virtues, and popular Herculeses crushing the Hydra of Tyranny, and poured into all these compositions the full ardour of his patriotism. Alas, he could not earn his living by them. The times were bad for artists. This was certainly not the fault of the Convention, which sent armies on every side against the kings; which, proud, impassive, and resolute before a Europe leagued against it, treacherous and cruel towards itself, tore itself apart with its own hands; which made Terror the order of the day and instituted for the punishment of conspirators a pitiless tribunal to which it would soon give its own members to devour; and which, at the same time, calm, reflective, and friendly to science and beauty, reformed the calendar, created special schools, decreed competitions in painting and sculpture, founded prizes to encourage artists, organised annual Salons, opened the Museum, and, following the example of Athens and Rome, stamped a sublime character upon the celebration of public festivals and public mourning. But French art, once so widely distributed in England, Germany, Russia, and Poland, no longer found markets abroad. Lovers of painting and collectors of art, great lords and financiers, had been ruined, had emigrated, or were in hiding. Those whom the Revolution had enriched—peasants who had purchased national property, speculators, army contractors, and croupiers of the Palais-Royal—did not yet dare display their opulence and, besides, cared nothing for painting. A man needed Regnault’s reputation or the young Gérard’s skill to sell a picture. Greuze, Fragonard, and Houin had been reduced to penury. Prud’hon could scarcely feed his wife and children by drawing subjects which Copia engraved in stipple. The patriotic painters Hennequin, Wicar, and Topino-Lebrun went hungry. Unable to meet the expense of a painting, to pay a model, or to buy colours, Gamelin had left his vast canvas, The Tyrant Pursued through Hell by the Furies, scarcely more than sketched. Half the studio was covered by its unfinished and terrible figures, larger than life, and by a multitude of green serpents, each darting two sharp, curved tongues. In the left foreground one could distinguish a gaunt and savage Charon in his boat, a powerful and finely drawn piece, though it smacked of the academy. Far more genius and natural feeling appeared in a smaller canvas, likewise unfinished, which hung in the best-lit part of the studio. It showed Orestes being raised upon his bed of suffering by his sister Electra. With a touching gesture, the young woman swept aside the tangled hair that veiled her brother’s eyes. The head of Orestes was tragic and beautiful, and in it could be recognised a likeness to the painter’s own face.

Gamelin often gazed sadly at this composition. Sometimes his arms, trembling with the desire to paint, reached towards the broadly sketched figure of Electra, only to fall helplessly again. The artist was filled with enthusiasm, and his soul strained towards great things. Yet he was forced to exhaust himself upon commissioned work, which he executed indifferently because he had to satisfy vulgar taste, and also because he did not know how to stamp the smallest things with the character of genius. He drew little allegorical compositions, which his comrade Desmahis engraved with some skill in black or in colours, and which Citizen Blaise, a print dealer in the Rue Honoré, bought cheaply. But the print trade was going from bad to worse, Blaise said, and for some time past he had refused to buy anything.

This time, however, necessity had made Gamelin inventive, and he had conceived a fortunate and novel idea—or so at least he believed—which was to make the fortunes of the print dealer, the engraver, and himself: a patriotic pack of cards in which the kings, queens, and knaves of the old regime were replaced by Genii, Liberties, and Equalities. He had already sketched all his figures and finished several of them, and he was eager to deliver to Desmahis those that were ready to be engraved. The figure he considered the most successful represented a volunteer in a tricorn hat, a blue coat with red facings, yellow breeches, and black gaiters, seated on a chest, his feet resting upon a pile of cannonballs and his musket between his legs. This was the “Citizen of Hearts,” replacing the Knave of Hearts. For more than six months Gamelin had been drawing volunteers, always with love. He had sold a few in the days of enthusiasm. Several hung on the studio wall. Five or six, in watercolour, gouache, or the two chalks, lay scattered over the table and chairs. In July of ’92, when recruiting platforms rose in every square in Paris, when all the taverns, decked with greenery, rang with the cries of “Long live the Nation! Live free or die!” Gamelin could not cross the Pont-Neuf or pass before the Town Hall without his heart leaping towards the flag-decked tent beneath which magistrates wearing sashes enrolled the volunteers to the sound of the Marseillaise. But had he joined the armies, he would have left his mother without bread.

Preceded by the sound of her laboured breathing, Citizen Gamelin, the widow, entered the studio, sweating, flushed, and panting, the national cockade hanging loosely from her cap and ready to fall. She set her basket on a chair and, remaining upright to breathe more freely, lamented the dearness of provisions.

A cutler in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, under the sign of “The City of Châtellerault,” while her husband lived, and now a poor housekeeper, Citizen Gamelin lived in retirement with her son, the painter. He was the elder of her two children. As for her daughter Julie, until lately a milliner in the Rue Honoré, it was best not to know what had become of her, for it would not do to say that she had emigrated with an aristocrat.

“Lord God!” sighed the Citizen, showing her son a loaf of heavy brown dough. “Bread is ruinously dear, and even then it is far from being pure wheat. There are neither eggs, vegetables, nor cheeses to be found at the market. If we go on eating chestnuts, we shall turn into chestnuts ourselves.”

After a long silence, she resumed:

“I saw women in the street who had nothing with which to feed their little children. There is terrible misery among the poor. And so it will remain until affairs are set right again.”

“Mother,” said Gamelin, knitting his brow, “the scarcity from which we suffer is the work of monopolists and speculators who starve the people and conspire with our enemies abroad to make the Republic hateful to its citizens and destroy liberty. Such is the outcome of the Brissotins’ plots and the treasons of Pétion and Roland! We shall be fortunate if the armed federalists do not come to Paris and massacre those patriots whom famine has failed to destroy quickly enough! There is no time to lose: a fixed price must be set upon flour, and anyone who speculates in the people’s food, foments insurrection, or makes common cause with foreigners must be guillotined. The Convention has just established an extraordinary tribunal to judge conspirators. It is composed of patriots; but will its members possess sufficient vigour to defend the fatherland against all its enemies? Let us place our hopes in Robespierre: he is virtuous. Above all, let us place our hopes in Marat. He loves the people, understands where their true interests lie, and serves them. He was always the first to unmask traitors and thwart conspiracies. He is incorruptible and fearless. He alone is capable of saving the Republic in its peril.”

Citizen Gamelin shook her head, dislodging the loosely fastened cockade from her cap.

“Come now, Évariste: your Marat is a man like all the others, and no better than the rest. You are young; you have your illusions. What you say today of Marat, you once said of Mirabeau, La Fayette, Pétion, and Brissot.”

“Never!” cried Gamelin, in sincere forgetfulness.

Having cleared one end of the bare wooden table, which was cluttered with papers, books, brushes, and pencils, the Citizen set upon it an earthenware soup tureen, two pewter bowls, two iron forks, the loaf of brown bread, and a jug of thin wine.

Mother and son ate their soup in silence and ended their dinner with a small piece of bacon. The mother placed her portion upon her bread and, with grave care, carried each morsel to her toothless mouth on the point of her pocketknife, chewing with respect the food that had cost so dear.

She had left the best of it in the dish for her son, who remained thoughtful and distracted.

“Eat, Évariste,” she told him at regular intervals. “Eat.”

And on her lips these words took on the solemnity of a religious precept.

She began lamenting once more over the high price of food. Gamelin again demanded price controls as the sole remedy for these evils.

But she said:

“There is no money left. The émigrés have carried it all away. There is no confidence left. It is enough to make one despair of everything.”

“Be silent, Mother, be silent!” cried Gamelin. “What do our privations matter, our sufferings for a moment? The Revolution will secure the happiness of humankind for centuries to come.”

The good lady dipped her bread in her wine: her mind grew clearer, and she smiled as she thought of her youth, when she had danced upon the grass at the King’s fête. She remembered, too, the day when Joseph Gamelin, a cutler by trade, had asked for her hand in marriage. And she related in minute detail how it had all come about. Her mother had said to her: “Get dressed. We are going to the Place de Grève, to Monsieur Bienassis’s goldsmith’s shop, to watch Damiens being drawn and quartered.” They had had the greatest difficulty making their way through the crowd of sightseers. At Monsieur Bienassis’s shop the young woman had found Joseph Gamelin, dressed in his fine pink coat, and had understood at once what was afoot. All the while she stood at the window watching the regicide torn with pincers, drenched with molten lead, pulled apart by four horses, and cast into the fire, Monsieur Joseph Gamelin, standing behind her, had never ceased complimenting her on her complexion, her coiffure, and her figure.

She drained her glass and continued recalling her life.

“I brought you into the world, Évariste, sooner than I expected, because of a fright I suffered while pregnant on the Pont-Neuf, where I was nearly knocked down by people running to the execution of Monsieur de Lally. You were so small at birth that the surgeon thought you would not live. But I knew that God would grant me the grace of keeping you. I brought you up as well as I could, sparing neither care nor expense. It is only fair to say, my Évariste, that you showed me your gratitude and, from childhood onward, sought to repay me as best you could. You were affectionate and gentle by nature. Your sister did not have a bad heart, but she was selfish and violent. You had more pity than she for the unfortunate. When the young scamps of the neighbourhood robbed nests in the trees, you tried to snatch the fledglings from their hands and return them to their mother, and often you would not give up until you had been trampled underfoot and cruelly beaten. At seven, instead of quarrelling with bad companions, you would walk quietly through the street reciting your catechism; and every poor person you met you brought home to be helped, until I was forced to whip you out of the habit. You could not see any creature suffer without shedding tears. When you were fully grown, you became very handsome. To my great surprise, you did not seem aware of it, differing in that from most pretty boys, who are vain and make a display of their looks.”

The old mother spoke the truth. At twenty Évariste had possessed a grave and charming countenance, a beauty at once austere and feminine, the features of a Minerva. Now his dark eyes and pale cheeks expressed a sorrowful and violent soul. But when he turned his gaze upon his mother, it regained for a moment the gentleness of his earliest youth.

She continued:

“You might have used your advantages to chase after girls, but you preferred staying beside me in the shop, and sometimes I had to tell you to get out from under my skirts and go stretch your legs a little with your companions. Even on my deathbed I shall bear this witness for you, Évariste: you are a good son. After your father died, you bravely took me into your care; though your profession brings you very little, you have never let me want for anything, and if today we are both destitute and miserable, I cannot blame you for it: the fault lies with the Revolution.”

He made a reproachful gesture; but she shrugged her shoulders and went on.

“I am no aristocrat. I knew the great when they were at the height of their power, and I can say that they abused their privileges. I saw your father beaten with sticks by the Duke de Canaleilles’s lackeys because he did not step aside quickly enough for their master to pass. I had no love for the Austrian woman: she was too proud and spent too much. As for the King, I believed him good, and it took his trial and condemnation to change my mind. In short, I do not regret the old regime, though I enjoyed some pleasant moments under it. But do not tell me that the Revolution will establish equality, because men will never be equal; it is impossible, and no matter how thoroughly the country is turned upside down, there will always be the high and the low, the fat and the lean.”

As she spoke, she put away the dishes. The painter was no longer listening. He was seeking the outline of a sans-culotte, in a red cap and carmagnole, who was to replace the condemned jack of spades in his pack of cards.

There was a scratching at the door, and a country girl appeared, broader than she was tall, red-haired and bandy-legged, with a growth concealing her left eye, while the right was of so pale a blue that it seemed white; her lips were enormous, and her teeth protruded beyond them.

She asked Gamelin whether he was the painter and whether he could make a portrait of her betrothed, Ferrand (Jules), a volunteer in the Army of the Ardennes.

Gamelin replied that he would gladly make the portrait when the brave warrior returned.

With gentle insistence, the girl asked him to do it at once.

Smiling despite himself, the painter objected that he could do nothing without the sitter.

The poor creature made no reply: she had not foreseen this difficulty. Her head inclined towards her left shoulder, her hands clasped over her belly, she stood motionless and mute, seemingly crushed by sorrow. Touched and amused by such simplicity, the painter, wishing to distract the unhappy lover, placed in her hand a watercolour he had painted of a volunteer and asked whether her betrothed in the Ardennes looked like that.

She fixed the gaze of her dull eye upon the paper; slowly it came alive, then brightened and shone resplendent, while her broad face opened into a radiant smile.

“That is his very likeness,” she said at last. “That is Ferrand (Jules) to the life; it is Ferrand (Jules) himself.”

Before the painter thought to take the sheet from her hands, she carefully folded it with her thick red fingers into a tiny square, slipped it over her heart between her busk and her shift, handed the artist an assignat for five livres, wished the company good evening, and went out limping, light of step.