The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 4

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It was ten in the morning; the April sun bathed the tender leaves of the trees in light. Freshened by the night's storm, the air was deliciously mild. At long intervals, a horseman passing along the Widows' Walk broke the silence of the solitude. At the edge of the shaded avenue, beside the cottage of La Belle Lilloise, Évariste sat on a wooden bench awaiting Élodie. Since the day when their fingers had met upon the cambric scarf, when their breaths had mingled, he had not returned to Cupid the Painter. For a whole week his proud stoicism and his timidity, which grew ever more intractable, had kept him away from Élodie. He had written her a grave, sombre, ardent letter in which, setting forth his grievances against Citizen Blaise while saying nothing of his love and concealing his pain, he announced his resolve never to return to the print shop, and displayed in adhering to this resolve more firmness than a woman in love could approve.

Élodie, being of a contrary nature and disposed on every occasion to defend what was hers, immediately considered how she might win back her friend. At first she thought of going to see him at his studio on the Place de Thionville. But knowing his melancholy temper, judging from his letter that his spirit was embittered, and fearing that he might embrace father and daughter in the same resentment and deliberately avoid seeing her again, she thought it better to appoint a tender and romantic meeting which he could not evade, where she would have ample leisure to persuade and please him, and where solitude would conspire with her to charm and conquer him.

At that time, in every English garden and along every fashionable promenade, there were cottages built by accomplished architects to flatter the townsman's taste for rural life. The cottage of La Belle Lilloise, occupied by a refreshment-seller, rested its counterfeit poverty against the artfully imitated ruins of an ancient tower, thus joining the melancholy of ruins to rustic charm. And, as though a cottage and a fallen tower were not enough to move sensitive souls, the refreshment-seller had raised a tomb beneath a willow: a column surmounted by a funerary urn and bearing this inscription: “Cléonice to her faithful Azor.” Cottages, ruins, tombs: on the eve of its destruction, the aristocracy had erected in its hereditary parks these symbols of poverty, extinction, and death. And now patriotic townspeople delighted in drinking, dancing, and making love in sham cottages, beneath the shadow of sham cloisters shamelessly ruined, and among sham tombs; for they, like their predecessors, were lovers of nature and disciples of Jean-Jacques, and possessed the same sensitive hearts, filled with philosophy.

Having arrived before the appointed hour, Évariste waited, measuring time by the beating of his heart as though by the pendulum of a clock. A patrol passed, escorting prisoners. Ten minutes later, a woman dressed entirely in pink, carrying the customary bouquet of flowers and accompanied by a gentleman in a three-cornered hat, a red coat, and striped waistcoat and breeches, slipped into the cottage. They both looked so like the gallants of the old regime that one was forced to agree with Citizen Blaise that men possess traits which revolutions do not alter.

A few moments later, an old woman who had come from Rueil or Saint-Cloud, carrying at the end of her arm a cylindrical box painted in bright colours, sat down on the bench where Gamelin was waiting. She set the box before her; on its lid was a pointer for drawing lots. For the poor woman offered little children games of chance in the gardens. She was a seller of “pleasures,” vending an ancient pastry under a new name; for whether the age-old name of “oblivions” carried an unwelcome suggestion of offerings and dues, or whether people had simply tired of it through caprice, “oblivions” were then known as “pleasures.”

The old woman wiped the sweat from her brow with a corner of her apron and poured out her complaints to heaven, accusing God of injustice for making life so hard for His creatures. Her husband kept a tavern by the river at Saint-Cloud, and every day she climbed to the Champs-Élysées, shaking her rattle and crying: “Here are pleasures, ladies!” And all this labour did not bring them enough to support them in their old age.

Seeing that the young man on the bench was inclined to pity her, she expounded at length upon the cause of her misfortunes. It was the Republic which, by stripping the rich, took the bread from the mouths of the poor. Nor was there any hope that matters would improve. On the contrary, she knew from several signs that they could only grow worse. At Nanterre, a woman had given birth to a child with a viper's head; lightning had struck the church at Rueil and melted the cross on the steeple; a werewolf had been seen in the woods of Chaville. Masked men were poisoning the springs and scattering powders through the air that caused diseases…

Évariste saw Élodie alight from the carriage. He ran to meet her. The young woman's eyes shone beneath the translucent shadow of her straw hat; her lips, as red as the carnations she held in her hand, were smiling. A black silk scarf crossed over her breast and was tied behind her back. Her yellow dress revealed the quick movement of her knees and left visible her feet in flat shoes. Her hips were almost entirely unconfined, for the Revolution had set free the waists of its female citizens; yet the skirt, still swelling beneath the small of her back, disguised her figure by exaggerating it and veiled reality beneath its enlarged image.

He tried to speak, but could not find the words, and reproached himself for an awkwardness which Élodie preferred to the sweetest welcome. She also observed, and took it for a favourable sign, that he had tied his cravat with more care than usual. She held out her hand to him.

“I wanted to see you,” she said, “and to talk with you. I did not answer your letter: it displeased me; I did not recognize you in it. It would have been more agreeable had it been more natural. It would be an injustice to your character and intelligence to believe that you refuse to return to Cupid the Painter merely because you had a slight political dispute there with a man much older than yourself. Be assured that you have no reason to fear a poor reception from my father when you come back to us. You do not know him: he remembers neither what he said to you nor what you answered. I do not claim that there is any great sympathy between you; but he bears no grudges. To speak frankly, he does not concern himself greatly with you… or with me. He thinks only of his business and his pleasures.”

She made her way towards the arbours beside the cottage, and he followed with some reluctance, knowing that they were the trysting-place of venal love and fleeting tenderness. She chose the most secluded table.

“How many things I have to tell you, Évariste! Friendship has its rights: will you allow me to exercise them? I shall speak a great deal about you… and a little about myself, if you permit me.”

When the refreshment-seller had brought a carafe and glasses, she poured the drinks herself, like a capable housewife; then she told him of her childhood. She spoke of her mother's beauty, which she delighted in celebrating both from filial devotion and as the source of her own; she praised the vigour of her grandparents, for she was proud of her bourgeois blood. She told him how, having lost that adored mother at sixteen, she had lived without affection or support. She portrayed herself as she was—spirited, sensitive, courageous—and added:

“Évariste, my youth was too melancholy and too solitary for me not to know the worth of a heart such as yours; and I warn you that I shall not willingly, and without an effort, surrender a sympathy upon which I believed I could rely and which was dear to me.”

Évariste looked tenderly at her:

“Can it be, Élodie, that I am not indifferent to you? May I believe?…”

He stopped, afraid of saying too much and thereby abusing a friendship so trustingly offered.

She held out to him a small, honest hand, half emerging from the long, narrow sleeves trimmed with lace. Her breast rose with deep sighs.

“Attribute to me, Évariste, every feeling you wish me to have for you, and you will not be mistaken about the disposition of my heart.”

“Élodie, Élodie, will you repeat what you have just said when you learn…”

He hesitated.

She lowered her eyes.

He concluded in a softer voice:

“…that I love you?”

At these last words she blushed—with pleasure. And while her eyes expressed a tender delight, despite herself an amused smile lifted one corner of her lips. She was thinking:

“And he believes he was the first to declare himself!… Perhaps he is even afraid of offending me!…”

And she said to him kindly:

“Then you had not seen, my dear, that I loved you?”

They believed themselves alone in the world. In his exaltation, Évariste raised his eyes towards the firmament, sparkling with light and azure:

“Look: heaven is watching us! It is adorable and benevolent like you, my beloved; it has your radiance, your gentleness, your smile.”

He felt himself united with all nature and made it a partner in his joy and glory. Before his eyes, as though to celebrate his betrothal, the blossoms of the horse chestnuts kindled like candelabra, and the gigantic torches of the poplars burst into flame.

He rejoiced in his strength and greatness. She, more tender and also subtler, more supple and yielding, made weakness her advantage and, as soon as she had conquered him, submitted herself to him; now that she had brought him under her dominion, she acknowledged him as master, hero, and god, and burned to obey, admire, and offer herself. Beneath the shade of the arbour, he gave her a long, ardent kiss under which she let her head fall back; and in Évariste's arms she felt all her flesh melt like wax.

They continued for a long while to speak of themselves, forgetting the universe. Évariste chiefly expressed vague and pure ideas that filled Élodie with rapture. Élodie said things that were sweet, useful, and particular. Then, when she judged that she could delay no longer, she rose decisively, gave her friend the three red carnations that had blossomed at her window, and sprang lightly into the cabriolet that had brought her. It was a hired carriage painted yellow, set very high upon its wheels, and there was certainly nothing extraordinary about it or its driver. But Gamelin did not ride in carriages, nor did those about him often do so. At the sight of her borne away on those tall, swift wheels, his heart contracted and he felt assailed by a painful foreboding: in a kind of purely intellectual hallucination, it seemed to him that the hired horse was carrying Élodie beyond present things and present time, towards a rich and joyous city, towards dwellings of luxury and pleasure which he would never enter.

The carriage disappeared. Évariste's agitation subsided; but a dull anguish remained, and he felt that he would never again live through the hours of tenderness and oblivion he had just known.

He went by way of the Champs-Élysées, where women in pale dresses sat on wooden chairs sewing or embroidering while their children played beneath the trees. A seller of pleasures, carrying her drum-shaped box, reminded him of the seller on the Widows' Walk, and it seemed to him that a whole age of his life had elapsed between those two encounters. He crossed the Place de la Révolution. In the Tuileries gardens he heard in the distance the immense rumour of great days, those unanimous voices which the enemies of the Revolution claimed had been silenced for ever. He quickened his pace as the clamour swelled, reached the Rue Honoré, and found it covered with a crowd of men and women shouting: “Long live the Republic! Long live Liberty!” The garden walls, the windows, balconies, and roofs were crowded with spectators waving hats and handkerchiefs. Preceded by a sapper clearing the way for the procession, surrounded by municipal officers, National Guardsmen, artillerymen, gendarmes, and hussars, a sallow-faced man advanced slowly above the heads of the citizens, his brow encircled by a wreath of oak leaves and his body wrapped in an old green frock coat with an ermine collar. The women threw flowers to him. He cast the piercing gaze of his yellow eyes all around him, as though even amid that enthusiastic multitude he were still searching for enemies of the people to denounce and traitors to punish. As he passed, Gamelin, bareheaded, mingling his voice with a hundred thousand others, cried:

“Long live Marat!”

The triumphant man entered the hall of the Convention like Fate itself. While the crowd slowly dispersed, Gamelin sat upon a bollard in the Rue Honoré, holding a hand against his beating heart. What he had just witnessed filled him with sublime emotion and ardent enthusiasm.

He revered and cherished Marat, who, sick, his veins aflame, devoured by ulcers, spent the last of his strength in the service of the Republic and, in his poor house, open to all, received him with open arms, spoke to him with zeal for the public good, and sometimes questioned him about the designs of scoundrels. He marvelled that the enemies of the just man, in conspiring to destroy him, had prepared his triumph; he blessed the Revolutionary Tribunal which, by acquitting the Friend of the People, had restored to the Convention the most zealous and purest of its legislators. Before his eyes he saw again that fevered head crowned with the civic wreath, that face stamped with virtuous pride and pitiless love, that ravaged, disfigured, powerful countenance, that contracted mouth, that broad chest, that robust dying man who, from the height of the living chariot of his triumph, seemed to say to his fellow citizens: “Follow my example: be patriots unto death.”

The street was deserted; night covered it with shadow. The lamplighter passed with his lantern, and Gamelin murmured:

“Unto death!…”