The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 29

Chapter 29 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

The Seine bore along the ice of Nivôse. The basins in the Tuileries, the gutters, and the fountains were frozen. The north wind swept waves of rime through the streets. White vapour streamed from the horses’ nostrils; as they passed, townspeople glanced at the thermometers outside the opticians’ shops. A clerk wiped the mist from the windows of Cupid the Painter, while the curious cast an eye over the fashionable prints: Robespierre squeezing a heart over a cup like a lemon, that he might drink its blood, and large allegorical pieces such as Robespierre’s Tigerocracy, in which hydras, serpents, and hideous monsters were all let loose upon France by the tyrant. There were also to be seen: The Horrible Conspiracy of Robespierre, The Arrest of Robespierre, and The Death of Robespierre.

That day, after the midday meal, Philippe Desmahis entered Cupid the Painter with his portfolio under his arm and brought Citizen Jean Blaise a plate he had just engraved in stipple, The Suicide of Robespierre. The engraver’s roguish burin had made Robespierre as hideous as could be. The French people were not yet glutted with all these monuments consecrating the infamy and horror of the man upon whom every crime of the Revolution had been laid. Nevertheless, the print dealer, who knew his public, warned Desmahis that henceforth he would give him military subjects to engrave.

“What we shall need now is victories and conquests, sabres, plumes, and generals. We are embarked upon glory. I feel it within me; my heart beats at the recital of our valiant armies’ exploits. And when I experience a feeling, it is seldom that everyone else does not experience it at the same moment. What we need is warriors and women, Mars and Venus.”

“Citizen Blaise, I still have at home two or three drawings by Gamelin which you gave me to engrave. Are they urgent?”

“Not in the least.”

“Speaking of Gamelin: yesterday, as I was passing along the Boulevard du Temple, I saw all that unfortunate man’s canvases at a second-hand dealer’s stall opposite Beaumarchais’s house. His Orestes and Electra was there. The head of Orestes, which resembles Gamelin, is truly beautiful, I assure you… the head and the arm are magnificent… The dealer told me he would have no difficulty selling the canvases to artists who would paint over them… Poor Gamelin! He might perhaps have become an artist of the first rank, if he had kept out of politics.”

“He had the soul of a criminal!” Citizen Blaise replied. “I unmasked him, on this very spot, when his bloodthirsty instincts were still held in check. He never forgave me for it… Ah! He was a thorough scoundrel.”

“Poor fellow! He was sincere. It was the fanatics who ruined him.”

“You are not defending him, I trust, Desmahis!… He is indefensible.”

“No, Citizen Blaise, he is indefensible.”

And Citizen Blaise, tapping the handsome Desmahis on the shoulder, said:

“Times have changed. We may call you ‘Barbaroux’ now that the Convention is recalling the proscribed deputies… That reminds me: Desmahis, engrave me a portrait of Charlotte Corday.”

A tall and beautiful dark-haired woman, wrapped in furs, entered the shop and gave Citizen Blaise a discreet little greeting of familiar understanding. It was Julie Gamelin; but she no longer bore that dishonoured name. She called herself “Citizen Widow Chassagne” and, beneath her cloak, wore a red tunic in honour of the red shirts of the Terror.

At first Julie had felt an aversion for Évariste’s mistress: everything that had touched her brother was hateful to her. But after Évariste’s death, Citizen Blaise had taken the unhappy mother into the garrets of the house of Cupid the Painter. Julie too had sought refuge there; later she had found another position at the milliner’s in the Rue des Lombards. Her hair, cut short in the “victim” style, her aristocratic air, and her mourning won her the sympathy of the gilded youth. Jean Blaise, whom Rose Thévenin had half deserted, offered her his attentions, and she accepted them. Julie still liked, however, to wear men’s clothes, as in the tragic days: she had a handsome muscadin’s coat made for herself and would often go, an enormous cudgel in her hand, to sup with a milliner’s girl in some tavern at Sèvres or Meudon. Inconsolable for the death of the young former nobleman whose name she bore, this virile Julie found no solace for her sorrow except in fury; and whenever she encountered Jacobins, she roused the passers-by against them with cries for their death. She had little time left to give her mother, who sat alone in her room saying her rosary all day, too crushed by her son’s tragic end even to feel grief. Rose had become Élodie’s constant companion; Élodie, it seemed, invariably got on well with her stepmothers.

“Where is Élodie?” Citizen Chassagne asked.

Jean Blaise made a sign that he did not know. He never knew: he had made it a rule of conduct.

Julie had come to fetch her so that they might visit Thévenin at Monceaux, where the actress lived in a small house with an English garden.

At the Conciergerie, Thévenin had met a wealthy army contractor, Citizen Montfort. Released before him through Jean Blaise’s intercession, she secured Citizen Montfort’s discharge; as soon as he was free, he supplied provisions to the troops and speculated in land in the Pépinière district. The architects Ledoux, Olivier, and Wailly were building pretty houses there, and in three months the land had tripled in value. Montfort had been Thévenin’s lover since their days in the Luxembourg prison. He gave her a small mansion near Tivoli and the Rue du Rocher, which was worth a great deal and had cost him nothing, since the sale of the neighbouring plots had already repaid him several times over. Jean Blaise was a gentleman; he believed one must endure what one cannot prevent. He surrendered Thévenin to Montfort without falling out with her.

Shortly after Julie’s arrival at Cupid the Painter, Élodie came down to the shop in all her finery. Beneath her cloak, despite the severity of the season, she was naked under her white gown; her face had grown pale, her figure slender, her glances flowed languorously, and her whole person breathed sensuality.

The two women went to Thévenin’s house, where she was expecting them. Desmahis accompanied them: the actress was consulting him about the decoration of her mansion, and he loved Élodie, who by then was more than half resolved not to let him suffer any longer. As the two women passed near Monceaux, where those executed in the Place de la Révolution lay buried beneath a bed of lime:

“That does well enough in cold weather,” Julie said; “but in spring the vapours from that ground will poison half the city.”

Thévenin received her two friends in a classical drawing room whose sofas and armchairs had been designed by David. Roman bas-reliefs, copied in monochrome, ran around the walls above statues, busts, and candelabra painted to resemble bronze. She wore a curled wig of straw-blond hair. Wigs were then the height of fashion: six, twelve, or eighteen of them were placed in bridal baskets. A Cyprian-style gown sheathed her body.

Throwing a cloak over her shoulders, she led her friends and the engraver into the garden, which Ledoux was laying out for her and which was still no more than a chaos of leafless trees and plaster rubble. Nevertheless, she showed them Fingal’s cave, a Gothic chapel with a bell, a temple, and a torrent.

“There,” she said, pointing to a clump of fir trees, “I should like to raise a cenotaph to the memory of that unfortunate Brotteaux des Ilettes. He was not indifferent to me. He was charming. The monsters butchered him; I wept for him. Desmahis, you shall design an urn upon a column for me.”

And almost at once she added:

“It is too vexing… I wanted to give a ball this week, but every violin player is engaged three weeks in advance. There is dancing every evening at Citizen Tallien’s.”

After dinner, Thévenin’s carriage took the three friends and Desmahis to the Théâtre Feydeau. All the elegance of Paris was assembled there.

The women with their hair dressed in the classical or “victim” style, in purple or white gowns cut very low and spangled with gold; the men wearing very high black collars, their chins lost in immense white cravats.

The playbill announced Phaedra and The Dog in the Manger. The entire house demanded the hymn beloved of the muscadins and the gilded youth, The Awakening of the People.

The curtain rose, and a small, thickset man appeared upon the stage: it was the celebrated Lays.

In his fine tenor voice, he sang:

Such tremendous applause burst forth that the crystals of the chandelier rang with it. Then a few murmurs were heard, and from the pit the voice of a citizen in a round hat answered with the hymn of the Marseillais:

The voice was smothered beneath the jeers; cries rang out:

“Down with the terrorists! Death to the Jacobins!”

And Lays, recalled to the stage, sang the Thermidorians’ hymn a second time:

In every theatre the bust of Marat was displayed upon a column or borne upon a pedestal; at the Théâtre Feydeau, the bust stood upon a small plinth at stage left, against the masonry frame enclosing the stage.

While the orchestra played the overture to Phaedra and Hippolytus, a young muscadin pointed at the bust with the end of his cudgel and cried:

“Down with Marat!”

The whole house repeated:

“Down with Marat! Down with Marat!”

And eloquent voices rose above the tumult:

“It is a disgrace that this bust should still be standing!”

“The infamous Marat reigns everywhere, to our dishonour! The number of his busts equals the number of heads he wished to cut off.”

“Venomous toad!”

“Tiger!”

“Black serpent!”

Suddenly an elegant spectator climbs onto the ledge of his box, thrusts at the bust, and topples it. The plaster head falls among the musicians and shatters, to the applause of the house, which rises as one and, standing, launches into The Awakening of the People:

Among the most enthusiastic singers, Élodie recognized the pretty dragoon, the young attorney’s clerk Henry, her first love.

After the performance, the handsome Desmahis summoned a cabriolet and escorted Citizen Blaise back to Cupid the Painter.

In the carriage, the artist took Élodie’s hand between his own:

“Do you believe, Élodie, that I love you?”

“I believe it, since you love all women.”

“I love them all in you.”

She smiled:

“I should be undertaking a heavy burden, despite all the black, blond, and red wigs now in fashion, if I set out to be every kind of woman for you.”

“Élodie, I swear to you…”

“What! Oaths, Citizen Desmahis? Either you possess a great deal of innocence, or you suppose that I do.”

Desmahis could find no answer, and she congratulated herself as upon a triumph for having robbed him of all his wit.

At the corner of the Rue de la Loi, they heard songs and shouts and saw shadows moving around a bonfire. It was a band of dandies who, on leaving the Théâtre-Français, were burning an effigy representing the Friend of the People.

In the Rue Honoré, the coachman’s cocked hat struck a grotesque effigy of Marat hanging from a street lamp.

Delighted by this encounter, the coachman turned towards his fares and told them how, the evening before, the tripe-seller in the Rue Montorgueil had smeared Marat’s head with blood, saying, “That is what he liked”; how ten-year-old boys had thrown the bust into the sewer; and how aptly the citizens had cried, “There is his Panthéon!” Meanwhile, singing could be heard in every eating-house and every café:

On reaching Cupid the Painter:

“Goodbye,” said Élodie, leaping from the cabriolet.

But Desmahis pleaded with her tenderly and pressed her with such gentleness that she had not the heart to leave him at the door.

“It is late,” she said; “you must stay only a moment.”

In the blue room, she took off her cloak and stood revealed in her classical white gown, filled and warmed by the contours of her body.

“Perhaps you are cold,” she said. “I shall light the fire; it is all prepared.”

She struck the tinderbox and placed a lighted spill in the hearth.

Philippe took her in his arms with that gentleness which reveals strength, and she felt a strange sweetness steal over her. And, as she was already yielding beneath his kisses, she drew away:

“Let me go.”

Slowly she took down her hair before the mirror over the fireplace; then she gazed sorrowfully at the ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand, a silver ring on which the likeness of Marat, worn and flattened, could no longer be made out. She gazed at it until tears blurred her sight, gently slipped it off, and cast it into the flames.

Then, radiant with tears and smiles, beautiful in her tenderness and love, she flung herself into Philippe’s arms.

The night was already far advanced when Citizen Blaise opened the door of the apartment for her lover and whispered to him in the darkness:

“Farewell, my love… It is the hour when my father may return: if you hear a sound on the stairs, run quickly up to the floor above and do not come down until there is no longer any danger of being seen. To have the street door opened for you, knock three times on the concierge’s window. Farewell, my life! Farewell, my soul!”

The last embers glowed in the hearth. Élodie let her happy, weary head sink back upon the pillow.