The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

That afternoon, Évariste went to the premises of Citizen Jean Blaise, a printseller who also sold boxes, cardboard wares, and games of every kind, in the rue Honoré, opposite the Oratory, near the coach offices, at the sign of Love the Painter. The shop occupied the ground floor of a sixty-year-old house and opened through a wide entrance whose arch bore a horned mask upon its keystone. The space within the arch was filled by an oil painting representing “The Sicilian, or Love the Painter,” after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise’s father had put up in 1770 and which sun and rain had been effacing ever since. On either side of the door, a similar opening, with a nymph’s head for its keystone and glazed with the largest panes that could be procured, displayed the fashionable prints and the latest novelties in colour engraving. That day there were gallant scenes treated by Boilly with a somewhat dry grace, Lessons in Conjugal Love and Sweet Resistance, which scandalized the Jacobins and which the purists denounced to the Society of Arts; Debucourt’s Public Promenade, with a fop in canary-yellow breeches sprawling across three chairs; horses by the young Carle Vernet; balloons; Virginia Bathing; and figures after the antique.

Among the citizens whose tide flowed past the shop, the most ragged were those who lingered longest before the two fine windows, quick to welcome a diversion, hungry for pictures, and eager to claim, if only with their eyes, their share of the good things of this world. They gazed open-mouthed, while the aristocrats cast a glance, knitted their brows, and passed on.

As soon as the house came into view, Évariste raised his eyes towards one of the windows above the shop, the window on the left, where a pot of red carnations stood behind the shell-patterned iron balcony. It lighted the room of Élodie, Jean Blaise’s daughter. The printseller and his only child occupied the first floor of the house.

After pausing for a moment, as though to draw breath before Love the Painter, Évariste turned the latch. He found Citizen Élodie examining the assignats she had just received for some engravings—two compositions by the younger Fragonard and by Naigeon, carefully chosen from a great many others. Before locking the notes in the cashbox, she held them one by one between her beautiful eyes and the light to inspect their chain lines, laid lines, and watermark. She was anxious, for as much counterfeit paper circulated as genuine, greatly injuring trade. Like those who had once forged the king’s signature, counterfeiters of the national currency were punished with death; nevertheless, assignat plates were to be found in every cellar. The Swiss brought in false assignats by the million; bundles of them were thrown into inns; every day the English landed bales of them upon our shores to discredit the Republic and reduce the patriots to destitution. Élodie feared accepting bad paper, and feared still more passing it and being treated as an accomplice of Pitt, though she trusted to her luck and felt certain she could extricate herself from any predicament.

Évariste looked at her with that sombre expression which conveys love better than any smile. She returned his gaze with a faintly mocking pout that tilted her black eyes upwards. The expression came partly from knowing that she was loved and not being displeased by it, and partly because such a look exasperates a lover, provokes him to complaint, and induces him to declare himself if he has not yet done so—which was Évariste’s case.

Having placed the assignats in the cashbox, she took from her workbasket a white scarf on which she had begun to embroider and set to work. She was industrious and coquettish; and since instinct taught her to wield her needle for the pleasure of others as well as for her own adornment, she embroidered differently according to who was watching her. For those to whom she wished to impart a gentle languor, she embroidered languidly; for those whom it amused her to drive a little to despair, she embroidered capriciously. For Évariste, in whom she wished to foster a serious attachment, she began to embroider with care.

Élodie was neither very young nor very pretty. At first sight she might even have been thought ugly. She was dark, with an olive complexion; beneath the large white kerchief loosely knotted around her head, blue-black curls escaped from her hair, and her fiery eyes seemed to char their sockets. In her round face, with its prominent cheekbones—laughing, slightly snub-nosed, rustic, and voluptuous—the painter recognized the head of the Borghese Faun, whose divine mischief he admired in a plaster cast. A faint moustache lent emphasis to her ardent lips. A bosom that seemed swollen with tenderness raised the fichu crossed over it in that year’s fashion. Her supple waist, her nimble legs, her whole robust body moved with a wild and delicious grace. Her gaze, her breath, the tremors of her flesh—everything in her demanded the heart and promised love. Behind the shop counter she suggested a dancing nymph, an Opera bacchante stripped of her lynx skin, her thyrsus, and her ivy garlands, confined and concealed by enchantment within the modest guise of a housewife by Chardin.

“My father is not at home,” she told the painter. “Wait for him a moment; he will not be long.”

Her small brown hands sent the needle darting through the lawn.

“Is this design to your taste, Monsieur Gamelin?”

Gamelin was incapable of pretence. And love, while setting his courage aflame, exalted his candour.

“You embroider skilfully, Citizen; but, if you wish me to speak plainly, the design traced for you is neither simple nor spare enough, and bears the mark of the affected taste that reigned too long in France in the decoration of fabrics, furniture, and panelling. These knots and garlands recall the petty, paltry style favoured under the tyrant. Taste is being reborn. Alas, we have come back from a great distance! In the days of the infamous Louis XV, decoration had something Chinese about it. They made bulging chests of drawers with twisted handles, ridiculous to behold, fit only to be thrown on the fire to warm the patriots. Simplicity alone is beautiful. We must return to the antique. David designs beds and armchairs after Etruscan vases and the paintings of Herculaneum.”

“I have seen some of those beds and armchairs,” said Élodie. “They are beautiful! Soon no one will want any others. Like you, I adore the antique.”

“Well then, Citizen,” Évariste resumed, “if you had adorned this scarf with a Greek fret, ivy leaves, serpents, or crossed arrows, it would have been worthy of a Spartan woman—and of you. You may still retain this pattern, however, if you simplify it and reduce it to the straight line.”

She asked him what ought to be removed.

He bent over the scarf; his cheek brushed Élodie’s curls. Their hands met upon the lawn, their breaths mingled. At that moment Évariste tasted infinite joy; but, feeling Élodie’s lips close to his own, he feared he had offended the young woman and drew abruptly away.

Citizen Blaise loved Évariste Gamelin. She thought him magnificent, with his large, ardent eyes, his handsome oval face, his pallor, his abundant black hair parted over the brow and falling in waves upon his shoulders, his grave bearing, his cold manner, his stern approach, and his firm speech, which never flattered. And because she loved him, she credited him with a proud artistic genius that would one day blaze forth in masterpieces and make his name renowned; and for this she loved him all the more. Citizen Blaise did not worship masculine chastity; her moral sense was not offended when a man yielded to his passions, tastes, and desires. She loved Évariste, who was chaste; she did not love him because he was chaste, but she found in his chastity the advantage that it spared her jealousy and suspicion and gave her no rivals to fear.

At that moment, however, she judged him a little too reserved. If Racine’s Aricia, who loved Hippolytus, admired the young hero’s untamed virtue, it was in the hope of triumphing over it, and she would soon have lamented an austerity of conduct that he refused to soften for her sake. So, at the first opportunity, Élodie declared herself more than halfway, in order to compel him to declare himself in turn. Like that tender Aricia, Citizen Blaise was not far from believing that in love a woman was bound to make advances. “Those who love most,” she told herself, “are the most timid; they need help and encouragement. Their innocence, moreover, is such that a woman may travel half the road, and even farther, without their noticing, provided she preserves for them the appearance of a daring assault and the glory of conquest.” What reassured her as to the outcome was her certain knowledge—and indeed there was no doubt on the subject—that before the Revolution had made a hero of Évariste, he had loved a woman in a very human fashion: a humble creature, the porteress at the Academy.

Élodie, who was no innocent, could conceive of several kinds of love. The feeling Évariste inspired in her was deep enough for her to consider pledging her life to him. She was entirely willing to marry him, but expected her father to disapprove of his only daughter’s union with an obscure and impoverished artist. Gamelin possessed nothing; the printseller handled large sums of money. Love the Painter brought him a substantial income, speculation in currency still more, and he had entered into partnership with a contractor who supplied the Republic’s cavalry with rush-woven boots and watered oats. In short, the son of the cutler in the rue Saint-Dominique was an insignificant person beside a publisher of prints known throughout Europe, related to the Blaizots, the Basans, and the Didots, and a visitor at the homes of Citizens Saint-Pierre and Florian. Not that, as an obedient daughter, she considered her father’s consent necessary to her establishment in life. Widowed early, grasping and flighty by nature, a great pursuer of women and a great promoter of schemes, her father had never concerned himself with her. He had allowed her to grow up freely, without counsel or affection, anxious not to watch over his daughter’s conduct but to know nothing of it, though with a connoisseur’s appreciation of her ardent temperament and of powers of seduction far more potent than a pretty face. Too generous to guard herself, too intelligent to ruin herself, prudent in her follies, her taste for love had never made her forget the social proprieties. Her father was infinitely grateful for this discretion; and since she had inherited from him both a head for trade and a taste for enterprise, he did not trouble himself over the mysterious reasons that kept so marriageable a daughter from marrying and retained her at home, where she was worth a housekeeper and four clerks. At twenty-seven, she felt herself old and experienced enough to shape her own life, and had no need to ask the advice or obey the will of a father who was youthful, indulgent, and inattentive. But for her to marry Gamelin, Monsieur Blaise would have had to provide for his penniless son-in-law, give him a stake in the business, secure commissions for him as he did for several other artists—in short, create resources for him in one way or another. And this she judged impossible: the one man would never offer it, nor the other accept it, so little sympathy existed between them.

This difficulty perplexed the tender and prudent Élodie. She contemplated without alarm the idea of uniting herself to her beloved by secret bonds and taking the Author of Nature as the sole witness of their mutual vows. Her philosophy found nothing reprehensible in such a union, which the independence of her life made possible and to which Évariste’s honest and virtuous character would lend a reassuring strength. But Gamelin could scarcely support himself and keep his aged mother alive; there seemed no room in so straitened an existence for love, even when reduced to the simplicity of nature. Besides, Évariste had not yet declared his feelings or disclosed his intentions. Citizen Blaise fully intended to compel him to do so before long.

She brought both her meditations and her needle to a halt.

“Citizen Évariste,” she said, “this scarf will please me only if it pleases you. Draw me a pattern, I beg you. Until it is ready, I shall undo like Penelope all that was done in your absence.”

He answered with sombre enthusiasm:

“I promise you, Citizen. I shall draw you the sword of Harmodius: a blade set within a garland.”

And, taking out his pencil, he sketched swords and flowers in the sober, spare style he loved. At the same time, he expounded his doctrines.

“The regenerated French,” he said, “must repudiate every legacy of servitude: bad taste, bad form, bad design. Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard worked for tyrants and slaves. In their works there is no feeling for noble style or purity of line; nowhere is there nature or truth. Masks, dolls, rags, apish antics. Posterity will despise their frivolous productions. In a hundred years, every painting by Watteau will have perished, scorned and forgotten in attics; in 1893, students of painting will cover Boucher’s canvases with their sketches. David has opened the way: he draws nearer to the antique, but he is not yet simple enough, grand enough, spare enough. Our artists still have many secrets to learn from the friezes of Herculaneum, the Roman bas-reliefs, and the Etruscan vases.”

He spoke at length of antique beauty, then returned to Fragonard, whom he pursued with an undying hatred.

“Do you know him, Citizen?”

Élodie nodded.

“You also know old Greuze, who is certainly ridiculous enough in his scarlet coat and sword. Yet beside Fragonard he has the air of a Greek sage. Some time ago I encountered that wretched old man trotting beneath the arcades of the Palais-Égalité, powdered, gallant, twitching, lecherous, hideous. At the sight of him, I wished that, failing Apollo, some vigorous friend of the arts would hang him from a tree and flay him like Marsyas, as an everlasting warning to bad painters.”

Élodie fixed upon him the gaze of her merry, voluptuous eyes.

“You know how to hate, Monsieur Gamelin; am I to believe that you also know how to lo—”

“Is that you, Gamelin?” cried a tenor voice—the voice of Citizen Blaise, returning to his shop with creaking boots, jingling trinkets, and flying coat-tails, beneath an enormous black hat whose corners drooped to his shoulders.

Élodie took up her basket and went upstairs to her room.

“Well, Gamelin!” Citizen Blaise asked. “Have you brought me anything new?”

“Perhaps,” said the painter.

And he explained his idea:

“Our playing cards present a shocking contrast with the state of public morals. The names knave and king offend a patriot’s ears. I have designed and executed a new revolutionary pack in which the kings, queens, and knaves are replaced by Liberties, Equalities, and Fraternities; the aces, encircled by fasces, are called Laws… You announce the Liberty of clubs, the Equality of spades, the Fraternity of diamonds, the Law of hearts… I believe these cards are drawn with sufficient boldness; I intend to have Desmahis engrave them in intaglio and to take out a patent.”

And, taking several figures finished in watercolour from his portfolio, the artist held them out to the print dealer.

Citizen Blaise refused to take them and turned his head away.

“My dear boy, take those to the Convention, which will grant you the honours of the sitting. But do not expect to make a single sol from your new invention, which is not new. You have risen too late. Your revolutionary pack is the third I have been offered. Your fellow artist Dugourc brought me a piquet pack last week with four Geniuses, four Liberties, and four Equalities. Another was proposed to me containing sages and heroes—Cato, Rousseau, Hannibal, and who knows whom else!… And those cards had this advantage over yours, my friend: they were crudely drawn and engraved on wood with a penknife. How little you know mankind if you suppose that gamblers will use cards drawn in David’s taste and engraved in Bartolozzi’s manner! And it is another strange delusion to imagine that so much ceremony is needed to bring the old playing cards into conformity with present ideas. The good sans-culottes correct their incivism themselves by calling out, ‘The tyrant!’ or simply, ‘The fat swine!’ They use their filthy cards and never buy new ones. Most packs are consumed in the gaming dens of the Palais-Égalité: I advise you to go there and offer the croupiers and gamblers your Liberties, your Equalities, your… what do you call them?… your Laws of hearts… and then come back and tell me how they received you!”

Citizen Blaise seated himself on the counter, flicked the grains of tobacco from his nankeen breeches, and looked at Gamelin with gentle pity.

“Allow me to give you a piece of advice, Citizen painter: if you wish to earn your living, put aside your patriotic cards, put aside your revolutionary symbols, your Herculeses, your hydras, your Furies pursuing crime, your geniuses of Liberty, and paint me pretty girls. The citizens’ ardour for regenerating themselves cools with time, whereas men will always love women. Give me rosy women, with little feet and little hands. And get it into your head that no one is interested in the Revolution any longer and no one wishes to hear another word about it.”

At that, Évariste Gamelin bridled.

“What! Hear no more of the Revolution!… But the establishment of liberty, the victories of our armies, the punishment of tyrants—are these not events that will astonish the remotest posterity? How could we fail to be stirred by them?… What! The sect of Jesus the sans-culotte has endured for nearly eighteen centuries, and the worship of Liberty is to be abolished after scarcely four years!”

But Jean Blaise answered with an air of superiority:

“You live in dreams; I live in the world. Believe me, my friend, the Revolution has grown tiresome: it has lasted too long. Five years of enthusiasm, five years of embraces, massacres, speeches, the Marseillaise, alarm bells, aristocrats strung from lampposts, heads carried on pikes, women astride cannon, trees of Liberty crowned with the red cap, young girls and old men drawn in white robes upon flower-laden chariots; imprisonments, the guillotine, rationing, proclamations, cockades, plumes, sabres, carmagnoles—it is a long time! And people are beginning to understand nothing at all. We have seen too many of those great citizens whom you escorted to the Capitol only to hurl them afterwards from the Tarpeian Rock: Necker, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, Pétion, Manuel, and so many others. Who can tell us that you are not preparing the same fate for your new heroes?… No one knows any longer.”

“Name them, Citizen Blaise; name those heroes whom we are preparing to sacrifice!” said Gamelin, in a tone that recalled the print dealer to prudence.

“I am a republican and a patriot,” he replied, placing a hand upon his heart. “I am as much a republican as you are, as much a patriot as you are, Citizen Évariste Gamelin. I do not question your civic virtue, nor do I accuse you in the least of fickleness. But you should know that my own civic virtue and devotion to the public weal are attested by numerous deeds. Here are my principles: I place my trust in every individual capable of serving the nation. Before the men whom the voice of the people summons to the perilous honour of legislative power—men such as Marat and Robespierre—I bow; I am ready to assist them to the extent of my slender means and to offer them the humble support of a good citizen. The committees can testify to my zeal and devotion. In partnership with true patriots, I have supplied oats and fodder to our brave cavalry, and shoes to our soldiers. This very day I am having sixty oxen sent from Vernon to the Army of the South, through a countryside infested with brigands and overrun by the agents of Pitt and Condé. I do not talk; I act.”

Gamelin calmly replaced his watercolours in his portfolio, tied its cords, and tucked it beneath his arm.

“It is a strange contradiction,” he said through clenched teeth, “to help our soldiers carry liberty throughout the world while betraying it at home by sowing turmoil and anxiety in the souls of its defenders… Farewell, Citizen Blaise.”

Before entering the narrow street beside the Oratory, Gamelin, his heart swollen with love and anger, turned to cast a glance at the red carnations flowering on a window ledge.

He did not despair of the country’s salvation. Against Jean Blaise’s uncivic talk he set his revolutionary faith. Yet he was forced to admit that the dealer had some appearance of reason for claiming that the people of Paris were henceforth losing interest in events. Alas! it was only too certain that the enthusiasm of the first hour was giving way to general indifference, and that the great, united crowds of ’89 would never be seen again, nor the millions of souls beating in harmony that had thronged in ’90 around the altar of the federates. Well then! Good citizens would redouble their zeal and daring; they would awaken the slumbering people by offering them the choice between liberty and death.

Thus Gamelin reflected, and the thought of Élodie sustained his courage.

On reaching the quays, he saw the sun sinking towards the horizon beneath ponderous clouds like mountains of incandescent lava; the roofs of the city were bathed in golden light, and the windowpanes flashed fire. And Gamelin imagined Titans forging Dicé, the brazen city, from the glowing wreckage of old worlds.

Though he had not a morsel of bread for his mother or himself, he dreamed of sitting at the table without end to which the universe would be invited and where regenerated humanity would take its place. Meanwhile, he persuaded himself that the country, like a good mother, would feed her faithful child. Steeling himself against the print dealer’s scorn, he urged himself to believe that his idea for a revolutionary pack was both new and good, and that with his successful watercolours he held a fortune beneath his arm. “Desmahis will engrave them,” he thought. “We shall publish the new patriotic pack ourselves, and we are certain to sell ten thousand at twenty sols apiece within a month.”

And, impatient to put this plan into effect, he strode towards the Quai de la Ferraille, where Desmahis lodged above the glazier’s shop.

One entered through the shop. The glazier’s wife informed Gamelin that Citizen Desmahis was not at home, which could scarcely surprise the painter, who knew his friend to be restless and dissipated and wondered how, with so little application, he could engrave so much and so well. Gamelin resolved to wait for him awhile. The glazier’s wife offered him a seat. She was gloomy and complained that trade was poor, although people said the Revolution, by smashing windows, was making the glaziers rich.

Night was falling; abandoning his wait for his comrade, Gamelin took leave of the glazier’s wife. As he crossed the Pont-Neuf, he saw mounted National Guards emerge from the Quai des Morfondus, driving back the passers-by and carrying torches; amid a great clatter of sabres, they escorted a cart that was slowly bearing to the guillotine a man whose name no one knew—a former noble, the first person condemned by the new Revolutionary Tribunal. He could be dimly glimpsed between the guards’ hats, seated with his hands bound behind his back, his bare, lolling head turned towards the rear of the cart. The executioner stood beside him, leaning against the sideboard. The halted passers-by told one another that he was probably some man who had starved the people, and watched with indifference. Drawing closer, Gamelin recognized Desmahis among the spectators, struggling to force his way through the crowd and cut across the procession. He called to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder; Desmahis turned his head. He was a handsome, vigorous young man. They used to say at the Academy that he bore the head of Bacchus upon the body of Hercules. His friends called him “Barbaroux” because of his resemblance to that representative of the people.

“Come with me,” Gamelin said. “I have an important matter to discuss with you.”

“Let me go!” Desmahis replied sharply.

And, watching for the moment to dart forward, he flung out a few indistinct words:

“I was following a divine woman in a straw hat—a milliner—with her fair hair hanging down her back. That cursed cart separated me from her… She got across ahead of it; she is at the end of the bridge already!”

Gamelin tried to hold him by the coat, swearing that the matter was important.

But Desmahis had already slipped among the horses, guards, sabres, and torches, and was pursuing the young milliner.