The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 5

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At nine in the morning, Évariste found Élodie waiting for him on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens.

In the month since they had confessed their love to each other, they had met every day, at Cupid the Painter or at the studio on the Place de Thionville, with great tenderness, yet with a reserve imposed upon their intimacy by the character of a grave and virtuous lover, a deist and good citizen, who, though ready to unite himself with his dear mistress before the law or before God alone, as circumstances might dictate, would do so only openly and in the sight of all. Élodie acknowledged how honourable this resolve was; but, despairing of a marriage which everything rendered impossible, and unwilling to defy social convention, she privately contemplated a liaison which secrecy would make decent until duration made it respectable. She hoped one day to overcome the scruples of an over-respectful lover; and, not wishing to delay the necessary disclosures, she had asked him for an hour's conversation in the deserted garden near the Carthusian convent.

She looked at him with tenderness and candour, took his hand, made him sit beside her, and spoke with solemn composure:

“I esteem you too highly to conceal anything from you, Évariste. I believe myself worthy of you; I should not be so if I did not tell you everything. Hear me, and be my judge. I have no vile, base, or even self-interested action with which to reproach myself. I was weak and trusting… Do not lose sight, my dear, of the difficult circumstances in which I was placed. You know them: I had lost my mother; my father, still young, thought only of his pleasures and paid no heed to me. I was sensitive; nature had endowed me with a tender heart and a generous soul; and, though she had not denied me a firm and sound judgement, feeling then prevailed in me over reason. Alas! it would prevail even now, did they not both agree, Évariste, in giving me to you wholly and for ever!”

She expressed herself with restraint and firmness. Her words had been prepared; she had long resolved to make her confession, because she was candid, because she delighted in imitating Jean-Jacques, and because she sensibly told herself: “Évariste will one day learn secrets of which I am not the sole keeper; better that a freely offered confession, which does me nothing but honour, should tell him what he might otherwise discover one day to my shame.” Tender as she was and obedient to nature, she did not feel herself very guilty, and her confession was the less painful for it; moreover, she fully intended to say no more than was necessary.

“Ah!” she sighed, “why did you not come to me, dear Évariste, in those days when I was alone and forsaken?…”

Gamelin had taken literally Élodie's request that he should be her judge. Fitted by temperament and literary education for the exercise of domestic justice, he prepared himself to receive her confession.

When she hesitated, he motioned to her to speak.

She said quite simply:

“A young man, who among many bad qualities possessed some good ones and showed me only those, found me not without attraction and devoted himself to me with a constancy surprising in him: he was in the flower of youth, full of charm, and intimate with delightful women who made no secret of adoring him. It was not his beauty, nor even his wit, that interested me… He knew how to touch me by showing me love, and I believe he truly loved me. He was tender and attentive. I asked no pledge of anything but his heart, and his heart was changeable… I accuse no one but myself; it is my confession I am making, not his. I do not complain of him, since he has become a stranger to me. Ah! I swear to you, Évariste, to me it is as though he had never existed!”

She fell silent. Gamelin made no reply. His arms were folded; his gaze was fixed and sombre. He was thinking at once of his mistress and of his sister Julie. Julie too had listened to a lover; but, very unlike the unfortunate Élodie, he thought, she had allowed herself to be carried off, not through the error of a sensitive heart, but in order to find luxury and pleasure far from her family. In his severity he had condemned his sister, and he was inclined to condemn his mistress.

Élodie resumed in a very gentle voice:

“I was steeped in philosophy; I believed men to be naturally honest. My misfortune was to meet a lover who had not been trained in the school of nature and morality, and whom social prejudices, ambition, vanity, and a false sense of honour had made selfish and treacherous.”

These calculated words produced the desired effect. Gamelin's eyes softened. He asked:

“Who was your seducer? Do I know him?”

“You do not know him.”

“Tell me his name.”

She had foreseen this request and was resolved not to satisfy it.

She gave her reasons.

“Spare me, I beg you. For your sake as well as mine, I have already said too much.”

And when he persisted:

“For the sacred sake of our love, I shall tell you nothing that might give this… stranger a definite shape in your mind. I will not cast a spectre before your jealousy; I will not set a troublesome shadow between you and me. Now that I have forgotten this man, I shall not make him known to you.”

Gamelin pressed her to surrender the seducer's name: this was the term he obstinately employed, for he had no doubt that Élodie had been seduced, deceived, and betrayed. He could not even conceive that it might have been otherwise, that she might have obeyed desire, irresistible desire, and listened to the intimate counsels of flesh and blood; he could not conceive that this tender and voluptuous creature, this lovely victim, might have offered herself. To satisfy the bent of his mind, she must have been taken by force or cunning, violated, driven headlong into snares laid beneath her every step. His questions were restrained in expression, but precise, searching, and embarrassing. He asked how the liaison had begun, whether it had been long or brief, peaceful or troubled, and in what manner it had ended. And he returned incessantly to the means this man had employed to seduce her, as though they must have been strange and unheard-of. All these questions he asked in vain. With gentle, pleading obstinacy, she remained silent, her lips pressed tight and her eyes brimming with tears.

Yet when Évariste asked where the man was now, she answered:

“He has left the kingdom.”

She corrected herself quickly:

“… France.”

“An émigré!” cried Gamelin.

She looked at him in silence, at once reassured and saddened to see him fashion for himself a truth suited to his political passions and gratuitously lend his jealousy a Jacobin hue.

In fact, Élodie's lover had been a junior attorney's clerk, a very pretty fellow, a cherubic errand boy whom she had adored and whose memory, after three years, still brought warmth to her breast. He pursued rich and elderly women; he left Élodie for an experienced lady who rewarded his merits. Having entered the Paris municipal administration after the abolition of the old offices, he was now a sans-culotte dragoon and the kept lover of a former noblewoman.

“A nobleman! An émigré!” repeated Gamelin, whom she took good care not to undeceive, for she had never wished him to know the whole truth. “And he basely abandoned you?”

She bowed her head.

He clasped her to his heart:

“Dear victim of monarchical corruption, my love shall avenge you upon that villain. May heaven bring him across my path! I shall know him when I see him!”

She turned her head away, saddened, smiling, and disappointed all at once. She would have liked him to understand the ways of love better, to be more natural, more brutal. She felt that he forgave so readily only because his imagination was cold and the confession she had just made awakened in him none of those images that torture the voluptuous, and because, in the end, he saw in this seduction nothing but a moral and social fact.

They had risen and were walking along the garden's green avenues. He told her that he esteemed her the more for having suffered. Élodie asked no such thing of him; but she loved him as he was, and admired the genius for art which she saw shining within him.

On leaving the Luxembourg, they encountered gatherings in the Rue de l'Égalité and all around the Théâtre de la Nation, which did not surprise them: for several days there had been great agitation in the most patriotic Sections; the Orléans faction and Brissot's accomplices were being denounced there for conspiring, it was said, to ruin Paris and massacre the republicans. Gamelin himself had recently signed the Paris Commune's petition demanding the expulsion of the Twenty-one.

As they were about to pass beneath the arcade connecting the theatre with the neighbouring house, they had to make their way through a group of citizens in carmagnoles, whom a young soldier was haranguing from the gallery, as beautiful beneath his panther-skin helmet as the Love of Praxiteles. This charming soldier was accusing the Friend of the People of indolence. He was saying:

“You sleep, Marat, while the federalists forge our chains!”

Élodie had scarcely turned her eyes upon him when she said:

“Come, Évariste!” she cried hastily.

The crowd frightened her, she said, and she feared she might faint in the crush.

They parted on the Place de la Nation, swearing eternal love to each other.

Early that same morning, Citizen Brotteaux had presented the widow Gamelin with the magnificent gift of a capon. It would have been imprudent of him to say how he had obtained it, for it came from a market-woman for whom he sometimes acted as secretary at the Pointe Eustache, and the market-women were known to harbour royalist sentiments and correspond with the émigrés. Citizen Gamelin had received the capon with a grateful heart. Such birds were rarely seen in those days: provisions were growing dear. The people feared famine; the aristocrats, it was said, desired it, and the forestallers were preparing it.

Citizen Brotteaux, invited to eat his share of the capon at the midday dinner, accepted and congratulated his hostess on the delicious savour of cooking that filled her rooms. And indeed, the painter's studio smelt of rich broth.

“You are very kind, sir,” replied the good lady. “To prepare the stomach for your capon, I have made a herb soup with a piece of bacon rind and a large beef bone. Nothing perfumes a soup like a marrow bone.”

“That is a commendable maxim, Citizen,” replied old Brotteaux. “And you will do wisely to put that precious bone back into the pot tomorrow, the day after, and every other day of the week, for it will not fail to lend its fragrance. The Sibyl of Panzoust proceeded in just that fashion: she made a soup of green cabbages with a piece of yellow bacon rind and an old savorados. That is the name given in her country, which is also mine, to that most savoury and succulent marrow bone.”

“Was not the lady you speak of a little close-fisted, sir,” said Citizen Gamelin, “to make the same bone serve for so long?”

“She lived modestly,” replied Brotteaux. “She was poor, though a prophetess.”

At that moment Évariste Gamelin returned, still deeply stirred by the confession he had just received and resolving to discover Élodie's seducer, so that he might avenge upon him both the Republic and his love.

After the customary civilities, Citizen Brotteaux resumed the thread of his discourse:

“Those who make a profession of predicting the future seldom grow rich. Their tricks are discovered too quickly. Their imposture makes them hateful. But they ought to be detested far more if they truly foretold the future. For a man's life would be intolerable if he knew what must befall him. He would discover future evils and suffer them in advance, while he would cease to enjoy present blessings because he could see their end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it must be admitted that men, for the most part, fulfil it admirably. Of ourselves we know almost nothing; of others, nothing at all. Ignorance gives us peace; falsehood gives us felicity.”

Citizen Gamelin set the soup on the table, said the Benedicite, seated her son and her guest, and began to eat standing up, refusing the place Citizen Brotteaux offered her beside him, for she knew, she said, what politeness required of her.