The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 25

Chapter 25 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

While the carts rolled, surrounded by gendarmes, towards the Square of the Overturned Throne, bearing Brotteaux and his accomplices to their death, Évariste sat deep in thought on a bench in the Tuileries garden. He was waiting for Élodie. The sun, sinking towards the horizon, pierced the dense horse chestnuts with its flaming arrows. At the garden gate, Fame, mounted on her winged horse, raised her eternal trumpet to her lips. Newspaper sellers cried the great victory of Fleurus.

“Yes,” Gamelin reflected, “the victory is ours. We have paid its price.”

He saw the condemned shades of the incompetent generals dragging through the bloodstained dust of that Square of the Revolution where they had perished. And he smiled proudly, thinking that, but for the severities in which he had taken part, Austrian horses would that day be gnawing the bark of these trees.

He cried out within himself:

“Salutary Terror, O holy Terror! At this same season last year, our defenders were heroic, ragged men forever suffering defeat; the soil of the fatherland was invaded, two-thirds of the departments were in revolt. Now our armies, well equipped, well trained, commanded by able generals, are taking the offensive, ready to carry liberty throughout the world. Peace reigns over the whole territory of the Republic… Salutary Terror! O holy Terror! Beloved guillotine! At this same season last year, the Republic was torn apart by factions; the hydra of federalism threatened to devour it. Now Jacobin unity extends its strength and wisdom over the realm…”

Yet he was sombre. A deep furrow crossed his brow; bitterness was on his lips. He thought: “We used to say: Victory or death. We were mistaken; we should have said: Victory and death.”

He looked about him. Children were making heaps of sand. Women citizens, seated on wooden chairs at the foot of the trees, embroidered or sewed. Passers-by, in coats and breeches of a strange elegance, thinking of their business or their pleasures, were making their way home. And Gamelin felt alone among them: he was neither their compatriot nor their contemporary. What, then, had happened? How had the enthusiasm of the glorious years given way to indifference, weariness, and perhaps disgust? Plainly these people no longer wished to hear of the Revolutionary Tribunal and turned their faces from the guillotine. When it became too troublesome a presence in the Square of the Revolution, it had been sent away to the far end of the Faubourg Antoine. Even there, people murmured when the carts passed. Some voices, it was said, had cried: “Enough!”

Enough, when traitors and conspirators still remained! Enough, when the committees had to be renewed and the Convention purged! Enough, when scoundrels dishonoured the national representation! Enough, when even within the Revolutionary Tribunal men were plotting the destruction of the Just Man! For—horrible as it was to conceive, and all too true—Fouquier himself was weaving intrigues, and it was in order to destroy Maximilien that he had offered him the pompous sacrifice of fifty-seven victims, dragged to their death in the red shirts of parricides. To what criminal pity was France yielding? She must be saved in spite of herself, and when she cried for mercy, one must stop one’s ears and strike. Alas! The fates had decreed it: the fatherland cursed its saviours. Let her curse us, so long as she is saved!

“It is too little to sacrifice obscure victims—aristocrats, financiers, publicists, poets—a Lavoisier, a Roucher, an André Chénier. We must strike those all-powerful scoundrels who, their hands full of gold and dripping with blood, are preparing the ruin of the Mountain: the Fouchés, the Talliens, the Rovères, the Carriers, the Bourdons. The State must be delivered from all its enemies. Had Hébert triumphed, the Convention would have been overthrown and the Republic hurled into the abyss; had Desmoulins and Danton triumphed, a Convention devoid of virtue would have surrendered the Republic to aristocrats, stockjobbers, and generals. If the Talliens and the Fouchés, monsters bloated with blood and plunder, triumph, France will drown in crime and infamy… You sleep, Robespierre, while criminals drunk with fury and terror plot your death and the burial of liberty. Couthon, Saint-Just, why do you delay in denouncing the conspiracies?

“What! The old State, the royal monster, secured its dominion by imprisoning four hundred thousand men each year, hanging fifteen thousand, and breaking three thousand on the wheel; and would the Republic still hesitate to sacrifice a few hundred heads to its security and power? Let us drown in blood and save the fatherland…”

While he was thinking thus, Élodie came running to him, pale and distraught:

“Évariste, what have you to tell me? Why did you not come to the Painter Cupid, to the blue room? Why did you make me come here?”

“To bid you an eternal farewell.”

She murmured that he was mad, that she could not understand…

He stopped her with the slightest motion of his hand:

“Élodie, I can no longer accept your love.”

“Be silent, Évariste, be silent!”

She begged him to move farther away: here they were being watched and listened to.

He walked some twenty paces and continued, very calmly:

“I have sacrificed my life and my honour to my fatherland. I shall die infamous, and all I shall have to bequeath to you, unhappy woman, is an accursed memory… Love one another, we two? Can anyone still love me?… Can I love?”

She told him that he was mad; that she loved him and would always love him. She spoke passionately and sincerely; but she felt, as well as he did—better than he did—that he was right. And she struggled against the evidence.

He went on:

“I have nothing with which to reproach myself. What I have done, I would do again. I have made myself anathema for the sake of the fatherland. I am accursed. I have placed myself beyond the bounds of humanity; I shall never return within them. No! The great task is not finished. Ah, mercy, forgiveness!… Do the traitors forgive? Are the conspirators merciful? The parricidal scoundrels multiply without cease; they spring from beneath the earth and flock in from every frontier: young men who would have done better to perish in our armies, old men, children, women, wearing the masks of innocence, purity, and grace. And when they have been sacrificed, more are found… You see clearly that I must renounce love, every joy, every sweetness of life, life itself.”

He fell silent. Made for the enjoyment of tranquil pleasures, Élodie had for more than a day been frightened to mingle bloody images with voluptuous sensations beneath the kisses of a tragic lover; she made no answer. Évariste drank the young woman’s silence like a bitter cup.

“You see it clearly, Élodie: we are being swept headlong; our work devours us. Our days, our hours, are years. Soon I shall have lived a century. Look at this brow! Is it the brow of a lover? To love!…”

“Évariste, you are mine; I shall keep you. I will not give you back your freedom.”

She spoke in the accents of self-sacrifice. He felt it; she felt it herself.

“Élodie, will you be able to bear witness one day that I lived faithful to my duty, that my heart was upright and my soul pure, that I had no passion but the public good; that I was born sensitive and tender? Will you say: ‘He did his duty’? No! You will not say it. And I do not ask you to say it. Let my memory perish! My glory lies within my heart; shame surrounds me. If you loved me, keep an eternal silence over my name.”

At that moment a child of eight or nine, who was playing with a hoop, ran into Gamelin’s legs.

Gamelin abruptly lifted him in his arms:

“Child! You will grow up free and happy, and you will owe it to the infamous Gamelin. I am atrocious so that you may be happy. I am cruel so that you may be good; I am pitiless so that tomorrow all Frenchmen may embrace one another with tears of joy.”

He pressed the child to his breast:

“Little child, when you are a man, you will owe me your happiness and your innocence; and if ever you hear my name spoken, you will abhor it.”

Then he set the child on the ground, and the boy, terrified, flung himself into the skirts of his mother, who had hurried over to rescue him.

The young mother, who was pretty and possessed an aristocratic grace in her white lawn dress, led her little boy away with a haughty air.

Gamelin turned a savage gaze upon Élodie:

“I have kissed that child; perhaps I shall send his mother to the guillotine.”

And he strode away beneath the ordered avenues of trees.

Élodie remained motionless for a moment, her eyes fixed upon the ground. Then suddenly she rushed after her lover and, furious, dishevelled, like a Maenad, seized him as though to tear him to pieces and cried in a voice choked with blood and tears:

“Very well! Send me too to the guillotine, my beloved; have my head cut off too!”

And at the thought of the blade upon the nape of her neck, all her flesh melted in horror and voluptuous delight.