The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

Ten o’clock in the morning. Not a breath of air stirred; it was the hottest July within living memory. In the narrow Rue de Jérusalem, a hundred citizens of the Section stood in line outside the baker’s door, watched over by four National Guardsmen who rested on their arms and smoked their pipes.

The National Convention had decreed the maximum price: grain and flour had promptly vanished. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, Parisians rose before daybreak if they wished to eat. All these people, men, women, and children, packed close together beneath a sky of molten lead, which heated the filth in the gutters and sharpened the reek of sweat and grime, jostled and called out to one another, regarding their neighbours with every feeling human beings can experience toward their kind: dislike, disgust, interest, desire, indifference. Painful experience had taught them that there was not enough bread for everyone; the latest arrivals therefore tried to slip farther forward, while those who lost ground complained, grew angry, and vainly invoked their disregarded rights. The women plied elbows and hips furiously to keep their places or gain better ones. Whenever the crush grew more suffocating, cries arose: “Don’t push!” And everyone protested that it was he who was being pushed.

To prevent these daily disorders, the commissioners delegated by the Section had devised the expedient of fastening a rope to the baker’s door, which each person held in turn; but hands crowded too closely together met upon the rope and struggled for possession of it. Whoever let go could never regain his hold. The discontented or the mischievous cut it, and the device had to be abandoned.

In that line people choked, believed themselves dying, cracked jokes, exchanged lewd remarks, and hurled abuse at the aristocrats and federalists, the authors of every evil. Whenever a dog passed, the wags called it Pitt. At times a resounding slap was heard, bestowed by a female citizen upon the cheek of some insolent fellow, while a young servant girl, pressed against her neighbour, sighed languidly with half-closed eyes and parted lips. At every word, gesture, or posture capable of awakening the bawdy humour of the amiable French, a group of young libertines struck up the Ça ira, despite the protests of an old Jacobin, indignant that a refrain expressing the republican faith in a future of justice and happiness should be compromised by filthy innuendoes.

With his ladder under his arm, a bill-poster came and pasted upon a wall opposite the bakery a notice from the Paris Commune rationing butcher’s meat. Passers-by stopped to read the sheet, still glistening with paste. A cabbage seller, trudging along with her basket on her back, said in her loud, cracked voice:

“The fine oxen are gone! Let us scrape our guts clean.”

Suddenly such a blast of burning stench rose from a sewer that several people were seized with nausea; a woman fainted and was handed unconscious to two National Guardsmen, who carried her a few paces away and laid her beneath a pump. People stopped their noses; a murmur swelled; anxious and terrified words passed from mouth to mouth. They wondered whether some animal had been buried there, whether poison had been maliciously planted, or rather whether one of those massacred in September, nobleman or priest, had been forgotten in a neighbouring cellar.

“Did they put some of them there, then?”

“They put them everywhere!”

“It must be one of those from the Châtelet. On the second, I saw three hundred of them heaped upon the Pont au Change.”

The Parisians feared the vengeance of those former grandees who, even in death, were poisoning them.

Évariste Gamelin came to take his place in the line: he had wished to spare his aged mother the weariness of so long a wait. His neighbour, Citizen Brotteaux, accompanied him, calm and smiling, with his Lucretius in the gaping pocket of his flea-coloured frock coat.

The kindly old man praised the scene as a bambochade worthy of the brush of a modern Teniers.

“These porters and market-women,” he said, “are more diverting than the Greeks and Romans now so dear to our painters. For my part, I have always had a taste for the Flemish manner.”

What wisdom and good taste kept him from recalling was that he had once possessed a gallery of Dutch pictures equalled only by M. de Choiseul’s collection in the number and distinction of its paintings.

“Nothing is beautiful but the antique,” replied the painter, “and what draws its inspiration from it. Yet I grant you that the bambochades of Teniers, Steen, or Ostade are worth more than the fripperies of Watteau, Boucher, or Van Loo: in them humanity is made ugly, but not degraded as it is by a Baudouin or a Fragonard.”

A news hawker passed, crying:

“The Bulletin of the Revolutionary Tribunal!… The list of the condemned!”

“One Revolutionary Tribunal is not enough,” said Gamelin. “There must be one in every town… What am I saying? In every commune, in every canton. Every father of a family, every citizen, must set himself up as a judge. When the nation stands beneath the cannon of its enemies and the dagger of traitors, indulgence is parricide. What! Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux in insurrection; Corsica in revolt; the Vendée in flames; Mainz and Valenciennes fallen into the coalition’s power; treason in the countryside, in the towns, in the camps; treason occupying the benches of the National Convention; treason seated, map in hand, in our generals’ councils of war!… Let the guillotine save the fatherland!”

“I have no fundamental objection to the guillotine,” replied old Brotteaux. “Nature, my sole mistress and instructor, gives me no indication whatever that a man’s life has any value; on the contrary, she teaches in all manner of ways that it has none. The sole end of living creatures seems to be to become food for other creatures destined to the same end. Murder is a natural right; consequently, capital punishment is legitimate, provided it is inflicted neither from virtue nor from justice, but from necessity or in the hope of deriving some profit from it. Yet my instincts must be perverse, for I shrink from seeing blood flow; and that is a depravity which all my philosophy has not yet succeeded in correcting.”

“Republicans,” Évariste resumed, “are humane and compassionate. Only despots maintain that capital punishment is a necessary attribute of authority. The sovereign people will one day abolish it. Robespierre opposed it, and with him all the patriots; the law suppressing it cannot be promulgated too soon. But it must not come into force until the last enemy of the Republic has perished beneath the sword of the law.”

Gamelin and Brotteaux now had latecomers behind them, among whom were several women of the Section: notably a tall, handsome knitting-woman in a kerchief and wooden shoes, with a sabre slung across her body; a pretty, dishevelled blonde girl whose neckerchief was badly crumpled; and a young mother, thin and pale, suckling a sickly infant.

The child, finding no more milk, cried; but its cries were feeble and choked by sobs. Pitifully small, with a sallow, mottled complexion and inflamed eyes, it was watched by its mother with anguished solicitude.

“He is very young,” said Gamelin, turning toward the wretched infant, who was whimpering against his back amid the suffocating crush of the latest arrivals.

“He is six months old, the poor darling!… His father is with the army: he was among those who drove back the Austrians at Condé. His name is Dumonteil—Michel—and he is a draper’s clerk by trade. He enlisted in a booth they had put up before the Hôtel de Ville. The poor dear wanted to defend his country and see something of the world… He writes telling me to be patient. But how am I to feed Paul… Paul is his name… when I cannot feed myself?”

“Ah!” cried the pretty blonde girl, “we shall be here another hour, and this evening the same ceremony must begin again outside the grocer’s. One risks death for three eggs and a quarter-pound of butter.”

“Butter,” sighed Citizen Dumonteil, “I have not seen any for three months!”

And the chorus of women lamented the scarcity and high price of provisions, cursed the émigrés, and consigned to the guillotine those Section commissioners who, in return for shameful favours, gave loose women fattened hens and four-pound loaves. Alarming tales went round of oxen drowned in the Seine, sacks of flour emptied into sewers, loaves thrown into privies… It was the royalist hunger-makers, the Rolandists and Brissotins, pursuing their extermination of the people of Paris.

Suddenly the pretty blonde girl with the crumpled neckerchief began shrieking as though her skirts were on fire, shaking them violently and turning out their pockets as she proclaimed that her purse had been stolen.

At the news of this theft, great indignation swept through those humble people, who had pillaged the mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and stormed the Tuileries without carrying anything away: artisans and housewives who would gladly have burned the Palace of Versailles, yet would have thought themselves dishonoured had they stolen a pin from it. The young libertines ventured a few spiteful jokes upon the fair child’s misadventure, but these were immediately drowned by the public clamour. There was already talk of hanging the thief from the nearest lamp-post. A tumultuous and prejudiced inquiry began. The tall knitting-woman, pointing to an old man suspected of being an unfrocked monk, swore that “the Capuchin” had done it. The crowd, instantly convinced, raised cries of death.

The old man thus briskly denounced to popular vengeance was standing very modestly before Citizen Brotteaux. In truth, he had every appearance of a former member of a religious order. His bearing was venerable enough, though disturbed by the alarm which the violence of the crowd and his still vivid memory of the September Days caused the poor man. The fear written on his face rendered him suspect to the populace, who readily believe that only the guilty fear their judgments—as though the reckless haste with which they deliver them were not enough to terrify even the most innocent.

Brotteaux had made it a rule never to oppose popular feeling, especially when it showed itself absurd and ferocious, “because then,” he would say, “the voice of the people was the voice of God.” But Brotteaux was inconsistent: he declared that this man, whether or not he was a Capuchin, could not have robbed the female citizen, since he had not once gone near her.

The crowd concluded that whoever defended the thief must be his accomplice, and there was now talk of dealing severely with both malefactors; and when Gamelin vouched for Brotteaux, the more prudent proposed sending him with the other two before the Section.

But the pretty girl suddenly cried out with joy that she had found her purse. At once she was assailed with jeers and threatened with a public whipping, like a nun.

“Monsieur,” the cleric said to Brotteaux, “I thank you for coming to my defence. My name is of little consequence, but I owe it to you to tell it: I am Louis de Longuemare. I am indeed a regular cleric, but not a Capuchin, as those women asserted. Far from it: I am a clerk regular of the Order of Barnabites, which gave doctors and saints in abundance to the Church. It is not enough to trace its origin to Saint Charles Borromeo: its true founder must be considered the Apostle Saint Paul, whose monogram it bears upon its coat of arms. I was obliged to leave my convent, which became the headquarters of the Pont-Neuf Section, and assume secular dress.”

“Father,” said Brotteaux, examining M. de Longuemare’s ragged garment, “your attire bears sufficient witness that you have not renounced your calling: to look at you, one would suppose that you had reformed your order rather than left it. And in this austere guise you freely expose yourself to the insults of an impious rabble.”

“Yet I cannot,” replied the cleric, “wear a blue coat like a dancer!”

“Father, what I say of your clothing is meant to pay homage to your character and warn you of the dangers you incur.”

“Monsieur, on the contrary, you should encourage me to confess my faith. For I am only too prone to fear danger. I have cast off my habit, monsieur, which is a form of apostasy; I should at least have wished not to leave the house where for so many years God granted me the grace of a peaceful and secluded life. I obtained permission to remain there and kept my cell while the church and cloister were transformed into a sort of little town hall which they called the Section. I saw, monsieur, I saw the emblems of holy truth hammered away; I saw the name of the Apostle Paul replaced by a convict’s cap. At times I even attended the Section’s secret councils and heard astonishing errors proclaimed there. At last I left that profaned dwelling and went to live, on the pension of one hundred pistoles granted me by the Assembly, in a stable whose horses had been requisitioned for the service of the armies. There I say Mass before a few of the faithful, who come to bear witness to the eternity of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

“As for me, Father,” replied the other, “if you wish to know, my name is Brotteaux, and I was once a publican.”

“Monsieur,” Father Longuemare replied, “I knew from the example of Saint Matthew that a good word may be expected from a publican.”

“Father, you are too kind.”

“Citizen Brotteaux,” said Gamelin, “admire these good people, hungrier for justice than for bread: everyone here was ready to surrender his place in order to punish the thief. These men and women, so poor and subjected to so many privations, possess a stern integrity and cannot tolerate a dishonest act.”

“It must be admitted,” Brotteaux replied, “that, in their eagerness to hang the thief, these people would have dealt harshly with the good friar, his defender, and his defender’s defender. Their very greed, and the selfish love they bear their possessions, urged them on: by attacking one of them, the thief threatened them all; in punishing him, they were protecting themselves… For the rest, most of these labourers and housewives are probably honest and respectful of other people’s property. Such sentiments were instilled into them in childhood by fathers and mothers who thrashed them soundly and drove virtue into them through the backside.”

Gamelin did not conceal from old Brotteaux that he considered such language unworthy of a philosopher.

“Virtue,” he said, “is natural to man: God has planted its seed in the hearts of mortals.”

Old Brotteaux was an atheist, and drew from his atheism an abundant source of delight.

“I see, Citizen Gamelin, that, revolutionary in earthly matters, you are conservative, even reactionary, where heaven is concerned. Robespierre and Marat are as much so as you. And I find it singular that the French, who will no longer endure a mortal king, obstinately retain an immortal one, far more tyrannical and ferocious. For what are the Bastille and even the Burning Chamber beside hell? Mankind models its gods upon its tyrants, and you, who reject the original, preserve the copy!”

“Oh, Citizen!” cried Gamelin. “Are you not ashamed to speak in this way? And can you confound the sombre divinities conceived by ignorance and fear with the Author of nature? Belief in a benevolent God is necessary to morality. The Supreme Being is the source of every virtue, and no man is a republican unless he believes in God. Robespierre knew this well when he had the bust of the philosopher Helvétius removed from the Jacobins’ hall, for Helvétius was guilty of disposing the French to servitude by teaching them atheism… At least I hope, Citizen Brotteaux, that when the Republic has instituted the worship of Reason, you will not refuse your allegiance to so wise a religion.”

“I love reason; I have no fanaticism for it,” Brotteaux replied. “Reason guides and enlightens us; once you have made it a divinity, it will blind you and persuade you to commit crimes.”

And Brotteaux continued his discourse, his feet in the gutter, just as he had formerly done in one of Baron d’Holbach’s gilded armchairs, which, as he put it, served as the foundation of natural philosophy:

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” he said, “who displayed some talent, chiefly in music, was a sorry jackanapes who claimed to derive his morality from nature, though in truth he derived it from the principles of Calvin. Nature teaches us to devour one another and sets us the example of every crime and every vice that the social state corrects or conceals. Virtue must be loved; but it is well to know that it is merely an expedient devised by men so that they may live comfortably together. What we call morality is nothing but a desperate undertaking by our fellow creatures against the universal order, which consists of struggle, slaughter, and the blind play of opposing forces. It destroys itself, and the more I consider the matter, the more convinced I become that the universe is raving mad. The theologians and philosophers who make God the author of nature and the architect of the universe cause Him to appear absurd and wicked. They call Him good because they fear Him, but they are forced to admit that He acts atrociously. They attribute to Him a malignity rare even among men. And it is by this means that they make Him worthy of worship on earth. For our wretched race would offer no worship to just and benevolent gods from whom it had nothing to fear; nor would it preserve a useless gratitude for their blessings. Without purgatory and hell, the good God would be a sorry figure.”

“Sir,” said Father Longuemare, “do not speak of nature: you do not know what it is.”

“By God, I know as well as you do, Father!”

“You cannot know, since you have no religion, and religion alone teaches us what nature is, in what respect it is good, and how it was corrupted. For the rest, do not expect me to answer you: God has given me neither warmth of speech nor strength of mind with which to refute your errors. I should fear that my inadequacy might merely afford you occasions for blasphemy and cause your heart to harden; and though I feel an ardent desire to serve you, the only fruit I should reap from my indiscreet charity would be…”

His words were interrupted by an immense clamour which, rising from the head of the column, informed the whole line of hungry people that the bakery was opening its doors. They began to move forward, but with extreme slowness. A National Guard on duty admitted the purchasers one at a time. The baker, his wife, and his boy were assisted in selling the loaves by two civil commissioners who, wearing tricolour ribbons on their left arms, made certain that each customer belonged to the Section and received no more than the share proportionate to the number of mouths he had to feed.

Citizen Brotteaux made the pursuit of pleasure the sole end of life: he held that reason and the senses, the only judges in the absence of the gods, could conceive no other. Now, finding rather too much fanaticism in the painter’s remarks and rather too much simplicity in the friar’s to take much pleasure in either, this wise man, wishing to conform his conduct to his doctrine in the present circumstances and beguile the long wait still before him, drew from the gaping pocket of his flea-coloured frock coat his Lucretius, which remained his dearest delight and his true consolation. The red morocco binding was worn at the corners, and Citizen Brotteaux had prudently scraped away the coat of arms—the three golden islets purchased for good hard cash by his tax-farming father. He opened the book at the passage where the philosopher-poet, seeking to cure men of love’s vain torments, surprises a woman in the arms of her maidservants, in a condition that would offend every sense of a lover. Citizen Brotteaux read the verses, though not without glancing at the golden nape of his pretty neighbour or voluptuously breathing in the damp skin of the little slattern. Lucretius the poet possessed but one wisdom; his disciple Brotteaux possessed several.

He read, advancing two steps every quarter of an hour. His ear, rejoicing in the grave and ample cadences of the Latin muse, remained deaf to the shrill clamour of the gossips over the rising price of bread, sugar, coffee, candles, and soap. Thus he reached the threshold of the bakery in perfect serenity. Behind him, Évariste Gamelin could see above his head the gilded sheaf upon the iron grille that closed the transom.

When his turn came, he entered the shop: the baskets and shelves were empty; the baker gave him the only piece of bread remaining, which weighed less than two pounds. Évariste paid, and the grille was closed at his heels for fear that the people, now in tumult, might invade the bakery. But there was no cause for fear: those poor creatures, schooled in obedience by their ancient oppressors and their liberators of the day, went away with bowed heads and dragging feet.

As Gamelin reached the street corner, he saw Citizen Dumonteil sitting upon a bollard with her infant in her arms. She was motionless, colourless, tearless, her eyes vacant. The child was sucking ravenously at her finger. Gamelin stood before her for a moment, timid and uncertain. She did not appear to see him.

He stammered a few words, then drew his knife from his pocket, a clasp knife with a horn handle, cut his bread in two, and placed one half upon the young mother’s lap. She looked up in astonishment; but he had already turned the corner.

On returning home, Évariste found his mother sitting by the window, darning stockings. Cheerfully, he placed what remained of the bread in her hand.

“You will forgive me, my dear mother: weary from standing so long, exhausted by the heat, I ate half our ration, mouthful by mouthful, as I came home through the streets. There is scarcely your share left.”

And he made a show of brushing the crumbs from his coat.