The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 22

Chapter 22 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

A mountain had suddenly risen in the garden of the Tuileries. The sky was cloudless. Maximilien walked before his colleagues in a blue coat and yellow breeches, carrying a bouquet of wheat-ears, cornflowers, and poppies. He climbed the mountain and proclaimed the God of Jean-Jacques to the tender-hearted Republic. O purity! O gentleness! O faith! O antique simplicity! O tears of compassion! O fruitful dew! O clemency! O brotherhood of man!

In vain atheism still reared its hideous face: Maximilien seized a torch; the flames devoured the monster, and Wisdom appeared, pointing to heaven with one hand and holding a crown of stars in the other.

On the platform erected before the Tuileries Palace, Évariste, amid the deeply moved crowd, shed gentle tears and gave thanks to God. He saw an age of felicity dawning.

He sighed:

“At last we shall be happy, pure, and innocent—if the villains permit it.”

Alas! the villains did not permit it. More punishments were needed; more torrents of impure blood must be shed. Three days after the festival of the new covenant and the reconciliation of heaven and earth, the Convention promulgated the Law of Prairial, which, with a kind of terrible good humour, swept away all the traditional forms of law, everything devised since the days of the just Romans to safeguard suspected innocence. No more investigations, no more examinations, no more witnesses, no more defenders: love of country supplied the place of all. The accused, bearing his guilt or innocence locked within him, passed mute before the patriotic juror. And it was then that his case, sometimes difficult, often burdened and obscured, had to be discerned. How was one to judge now? How, in a single instant, distinguish the honest man from the villain, the patriot from the enemy of the nation?…”

After a moment of uncertainty, Gamelin understood his new duties and accommodated himself to his new functions. In this curtailment of procedure he recognized the true character of that salutary and terrible justice whose ministers were not furred cats weighing the pros and cons at leisure in their Gothic scales, but sans-culottes judging by patriotic illumination and seeing all things in a flash. At a time when guarantees and precautions would have ruined everything, the impulses of an upright heart saved everything. One must follow the promptings of nature, that good mother who is never mistaken; one must judge with the heart, and Gamelin invoked the shades of Jean-Jacques:

“Virtuous man, inspire me, together with the love of mankind, with the ardour to regenerate it!”

Most of his colleagues felt as he did. They were simple souls above all; and when the forms were simplified, they found themselves at ease. A shortened justice contented them. Nothing in its accelerated progress troubled them any longer. They inquired only into the opinions of the accused, unable to conceive that anyone could think differently from themselves without wickedness. Believing themselves to possess truth, wisdom, and the sovereign good, they ascribed error and evil to their adversaries. They felt strong: they saw God.

They saw God, those jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Supreme Being, acknowledged by Maximilien, flooded them with His flames. They loved; they believed.

The accused man’s chair had been replaced by a vast platform capable of holding fifty persons: henceforth they were tried only in batches. The public prosecutor joined in a single case, and charged as accomplices, people who often met for the first time in court. With the terrible facilities afforded by the Law of Prairial, the Tribunal tried those alleged prison conspiracies which, following upon the proscriptions of the Dantonists and the Paris Commune, were connected with them by the contrivances of subtle reasoning. In order that the two essential marks of a plot fomented with foreign gold against the Republic might be recognized in them—untimely moderation and calculated excess—and that both the Dantonist crime and the Hébertist crime might again be seen, two opposed heads had been placed there, two women’s heads: Camille’s widow, the charming Lucile, and the widow of the Hébertist Momoro, a goddess for a day and a merry gossip. By symmetry, both had been confined in the same prison, where they had wept together upon the same stone bench; by symmetry, both had mounted the scaffold. It was too ingenious a symbol, a masterpiece of balance doubtless conceived by a prosecutor’s soul, and Maximilien was given the credit for it. To this representative of the people were attributed all the fortunate or unfortunate events that befell the Republic: laws, morals, the course of the seasons, harvests, diseases. A deserved injustice, for this slight, neat, puny, cat-faced man held great power over the people…”

That day the Tribunal was disposing of a portion of the great prison conspiracy: some thirty conspirators from the Luxembourg, very submissive captives, but decided royalists or federalists. The entire accusation rested on the testimony of a single informer. The jurors knew not a word of the affair; they did not even know the conspirators’ names. Casting his eyes over the defendants’ bench, Gamelin recognized Fortuné Chassagne among them. Julie’s lover, grown thin from long captivity, pale, his features hardened by the harsh light that flooded the hall, still retained something of his grace and pride. His eyes met Gamelin’s and filled with contempt.

Possessed by a tranquil fury, Gamelin rose and asked leave to speak; then, his eyes fixed upon the bust of Brutus the Elder which presided over the court, he said:

“Citizen President, although there may exist between one of the accused and myself ties which, if acknowledged, would be ties of kinship by marriage, I declare that I shall not recuse myself. Neither of the two Brutuses recused himself when, for the salvation of the republic or the cause of liberty, the one was called upon to condemn a son, the other to strike down an adoptive father.”

He sat down again.

“There is a fine villain for you,” Chassagne muttered between his teeth.

The public remained cold, whether because it had at last grown weary of sublime characters, or because Gamelin had triumphed too easily over natural feeling.

“Citizen Gamelin,” said the president, “under the law, every recusal must be submitted in writing within the twenty-four hours preceding the opening of the proceedings. Besides, you have no grounds for recusing yourself: a patriotic juror is above the passions.”

Each accused person was questioned for three or four minutes. The prosecutor’s address demanded the death penalty for them all. The jurors voted for it with a word, a nod, or an acclamation. When Gamelin’s turn came to give his opinion:

“All the accused have been proved guilty,” he said, “and the law is explicit.”

As he was descending the staircase of the Palais, a young man in a bottle-green carrick, apparently seventeen or eighteen years old, abruptly barred his way. He wore a round hat pushed back upon his head, its brim forming a black halo around his handsome, pale face. Standing before the juror, terrible in anger and despair, he cried out:

“Villain! Monster! Murderer! Strike me, coward! I am a woman! Have me arrested, have me guillotined, Cain! I am your sister.”

And Julie spat in his face.

The crowd of knitting-women and sans-culottes had by then relaxed its revolutionary vigilance; its civic ardour had greatly cooled. Around Gamelin and his assailant there were only uncertain, confused movements. Julie forced her way through the gathering and vanished into the twilight.