The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 7

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Employing a very old turn of phrase, the widow Gamelin had declared: “If we go on eating chestnuts, chestnuts we shall become.” That day, the thirteenth of July, she and her son had dined at noon on chestnut porridge. As they were finishing this austere meal, a lady pushed open the door and suddenly filled the studio with her brilliance and perfumes. Évariste recognized Citizen Rochemaure. Supposing that she had mistaken the door and was looking for Citizen Brotteaux, her former friend, he was already preparing to direct her to the former nobleman’s garret, or to call Brotteaux down and spare an elegant woman the ascent by a miller’s ladder; but it was clear from the first that her business was with Citizen Évariste Gamelin, for she declared herself delighted to find him and to call herself his servant.

They were not complete strangers to one another: they had met several times in David’s studio, in one of the Assembly galleries, at the Jacobins, and at Vénua’s eating-house; she had noticed his beauty, his youth, and his interesting air.

Wearing a hat beribboned like a toy flute and plumed like the headgear of a representative on mission, Citizen Rochemaure was bewigged, painted, patched, and perfumed with musk, her flesh still fresh beneath all this adornment: these violent artifices of fashion betrayed the haste to live and the fever of those terrible days whose morrows were uncertain. Her bodice, with its broad lapels and sweeping skirts, all gleaming with enormous steel buttons, was blood-red; and since she appeared at once so aristocratic and so revolutionary, it was impossible to tell whether she wore the colours of the victims or those of the executioner. A young soldier, a dragoon, accompanied her.

Tall, handsome, and full-figured, with a generous bosom and a long mother-of-pearl cane in her hand, she made the circuit of the studio; then, raising a double-lensed gold eyeglass to her grey eyes, she examined the painter’s canvases, smiling and exclaiming, disposed to admiration by the artist’s beauty, and flattering in order to be flattered.

“What,” asked the Citizen, “is this noble and touching picture of a gentle, beautiful woman beside a sick young man?”

Gamelin replied that it represented Orestes watched over by his sister Electra, and that, had he been able to finish it, it might perhaps have proved the least poor of his works.

“The subject,” he added, “is taken from the Orestes of Euripides. In a translation of the tragedy, already old, I had read a scene that filled me with admiration: the scene in which the young Electra, lifting her brother upon his bed of pain, wipes away the foam that soils his mouth, brushes from his eyes the hair that blinds him, and begs her beloved brother to listen to what she is about to say in the silence of the Furies… As I read and reread that translation, I felt as though a mist were veiling the Greek forms from me, a mist I could not dispel. I imagined the original text to be more vigorous and differently accented. With a keen desire to form an exact idea of it, I went to ask Monsieur Gail, who then taught Greek at the Collège de France—it was in ’91—to explain the scene to me word by word. He did so, as I had requested, and I discovered that the ancients are far simpler and more familiar than people suppose. Thus Electra says to Orestes: ‘Dear brother, how glad your sleep has made me! Will you let me help you rise?’ And Orestes answers: ‘Yes, help me, take hold of me, and wipe away these remnants of foam clinging about my mouth and eyes. Press your breast against mine and draw my tangled hair away from my face, for it hides my eyes…’ Filled with this poetry, so young and vivid, with these artless and powerful expressions, I sketched the picture you see, Citizen.”

The painter, who ordinarily spoke so sparingly of his work, could not exhaust the subject of this one. Encouraged by a sign from Citizen Rochemaure as she raised her eyeglass, he continued:

“Hennequin treated the frenzies of Orestes with a master’s hand. But Orestes moves us still more in his sorrow than in his frenzy. What a destiny was his! It was through filial piety, through obedience to sacred commands, that he committed the crime of which the Gods must absolve him, but which mankind will never forgive. To avenge outraged justice, he denied nature, made himself inhuman, tore out his own heart. He remains proud beneath the burden of his horrible and virtuous deed… That is what I wished to show in this group of brother and sister.”

He approached the canvas and gazed at it with satisfaction.

“Certain parts,” he said, “are nearly finished: the head and arm of Orestes, for example.”

“It is an admirable piece… And Orestes resembles you, Citizen Gamelin.”

“Do you think so?” said the painter with a grave smile.

She took the chair Gamelin offered her. The young dragoon remained standing beside her, one hand resting on the back of the chair in which she sat. From this it might be seen that the Revolution had been accomplished; for under the old regime a man in company would never so much as have touched with one finger the seat occupied by a lady. Education had trained him to the restraints, sometimes severe enough, of courtesy; and he believed, moreover, that reserve observed in society lent a singular value to secret abandon, and that respect must first be possessed before it could be cast aside.

Louise Masché de Rochemaure, daughter of a lieutenant of the King’s Hunt, widow of an attorney, and for twenty years the devoted mistress of the financier Brotteaux des Ilettes, had embraced the new principles. She had been seen in July 1790 digging the earth on the Champ de Mars. Her decided inclination towards those in power had carried her with ease from the Feuillants to the Girondins and the Montagnards, while a conciliatory temper, an eagerness to embrace every party, and a certain genius for intrigue still attached her to aristocrats and counter-revolutionaries. She moved everywhere in society, frequenting open-air taverns, theatres, fashionable eating-houses, gambling dens, drawing rooms, newspaper offices, and committee antechambers. The Revolution brought her novelties, diversions, smiles, pleasures, affairs, and profitable enterprises. Weaving political and amorous intrigues, playing the harp, sketching landscapes, singing romances, dancing Greek dances, giving suppers, entertaining pretty women such as the Comtesse de Beaufort and the actress Descoings, keeping a table of thirty-one and biribi all night long and setting red and black in motion, she still found time to show compassion to her friends. Inquisitive, active, meddlesome, frivolous, knowing men but ignorant of crowds, as much a stranger to the opinions she professed as to those she was obliged to repudiate, and understanding absolutely nothing of what was taking place in France, she proved enterprising, bold, and full of daring through ignorance of danger and boundless confidence in the power of her charms.

The soldier who accompanied her was in the first flower of youth. A copper helmet trimmed with panther skin, its crest adorned with scarlet chenille, overshadowed his cherubic head and shed a long and terrible mane down his back. His red jacket, cut like a little bodice, carefully stopped short of his loins so as not to conceal their elegant curve. At his belt he wore an enormous sabre whose eagle-beak hilt glittered brightly. Pale-blue fall-front breeches moulded the graceful muscles of his legs, while dark-blue braid traced rich arabesques over his thighs. He looked like a dancer costumed for some martial and gallant role in Achilles on Scyros or The Marriage of Alexander by a pupil of David intent upon defining the form.

Gamelin dimly remembered having seen him before. He was, in fact, the soldier whom he had encountered a fortnight earlier haranguing the people in the galleries of the Théâtre de la Nation.

Citizen Rochemaure introduced him:

“Citizen Henry, a member of the Revolutionary Committee of the Section of the Rights of Man.”

She kept him forever at her skirts, a mirror of love and a living certificate of civic virtue.

The Citizen congratulated Gamelin on his talents and asked whether he would consent to design a trade card for a milliner in whom she took an interest. He might treat some appropriate subject: a woman trying on a scarf before a cheval-glass, for example, or a young seamstress carrying a hatbox beneath her arm.

As artists capable of executing a small work of this kind, she had been told of Fragonard’s son, the young Ducis, and also a certain Prudhomme; but she preferred to apply to Citizen Évariste Gamelin. Yet she came to nothing definite on this matter, and it was evident that she had mentioned the commission merely to open the conversation. She had, in fact, come on quite another errand. She sought a service from Citizen Gamelin: knowing that he was acquainted with Citizen Marat, she had come to ask him to introduce her to the Friend of the People, with whom she wished to have an interview.

Gamelin replied that he was far too insignificant a person to present her to Marat and that, in any case, she had no need of an introducer: Marat, though overwhelmed with business, was not the invisible man he had been said to be.

And Gamelin added:

“He will receive you, Citizen, if you are in distress, for his great heart makes him accessible to misfortune and compassionate towards every suffering. He will receive you if you have some revelation to make that concerns the public safety: he has devoted his days to unmasking traitors.”

Citizen Rochemaure replied that she would be happy to pay her respects in Marat to an illustrious citizen who had rendered great services to the country and was capable of rendering still greater ones; and that she wished to bring that legislator into contact with well-intentioned men, philanthropists favoured by fortune and capable of supplying him with new means of satisfying his ardent love of humanity.

“It is desirable,” she added, “to enlist the rich in the service of public prosperity.”

The truth was that the Citizen had promised the banker Morhardt that she would arrange for him to dine with Marat.

Morhardt, a Swiss like the Friend of the People, had entered into partnership with several deputies to the Convention—Julien of Toulouse, Delaunay of Angers, and the former Capuchin Chabot—to speculate in shares of the East India Company. The scheme was very simple: confiscatory motions were to drive the shares down to 650 livres, so that as many as possible might be bought at that price; reassuring motions would then raise them again to four or five thousand livres. But Chabot, Julien, and Delaunay had been seen through. Lacroix, Fabre d’Églantine, and even Danton were under suspicion. The stockjobber Baron de Batz was seeking new accomplices in the Convention and advised the banker Morhardt to see Marat.

This notion of the counter-revolutionary speculators was not so strange as it appeared at first. Such men were always striving to ally themselves with the powers of the day, and by his popularity, his pen, and his character, Marat was a formidable power. The Girondins were foundering; the Dantonists, battered by the storm, no longer governed. Robespierre, the idol of the people, was jealously incorruptible, suspicious, and unapproachable. It was essential to win Marat round, to secure his goodwill for the day when he became dictator; and everything foretold that he would become one: his popularity, his ambition, his eagerness to recommend drastic measures. And perhaps, after all, Marat would restore order, the finances, and prosperity. Several times he had spoken out against the fanatics who sought to outbid him in patriotism; of late he had denounced demagogues almost as often as moderates. After inciting the people to hang the hoarders in their pillaged shops, he was now exhorting the citizens to calm and prudence; he was becoming a statesman.

Despite certain rumours spread about him, as about every other man of the Revolution, these gold-hunters did not believe him corruptible; but they knew him to be vain and credulous. They hoped to win him by flattery and, above all, by a condescending familiarity which they believed to be the most seductive flattery they could offer. With his help they expected to blow hot and cold upon whatever securities they wished to buy and resell, and to induce him to serve their interests while believing that he acted solely in the public interest.

A great matchmaker, though she was still of an age for love herself, Citizen Rochemaure had undertaken to bring the legislator-journalist together with the banker; and her wild imagination pictured the man of the cellars, his hands still reddened with the blood of September, enlisted in the party of the financiers whose agent she was, and flung by his very sensibility and candour into the midst of stockjobbing, into that world she cherished of hoarders, contractors, foreign agents, gambling partners, and women of pleasure.

She insisted that Citizen Gamelin should conduct her to the Friend of the People, who lived nearby in the Rue des Cordeliers, close to the church. After offering some resistance, the painter yielded to the Citizen’s wish.

The dragoon Henry, invited to accompany them, refused, pleading that he meant to preserve his independence even towards Citizen Marat, who had doubtless rendered services to the Republic but was now growing weak: had he not advised the people of Paris, in his newspaper, to submit?

And young Henry, in a melodious voice and with long sighs, lamented the Republic betrayed by those in whom it had placed its hopes: Danton rejecting the idea of a tax on the rich, Robespierre opposing the permanent sitting of the Sections, and Marat breaking the citizens’ ardour with his faint-hearted counsels.

“Oh!” he cried, “how weak these men appear beside Leclerc and Jacques Roux!… Roux! Leclerc! You are the true friends of the people!”

Gamelin did not hear these remarks, which would have incensed him: he had gone into the adjoining room to put on his blue coat.

“You may be proud of your son,” Citizen Rochemaure said to the widow Gamelin. “He is great in talent and in character.”

In reply, Citizen Gamelin’s widow spoke well of her son, though without displaying pride in him before a lady of high station, for she had learned in childhood that the first duty of the lowly was humility toward the great. She was inclined to complain, having only too much cause, and finding in complaint some relief from her troubles. She poured out her misfortunes freely to those whom she believed capable of alleviating them, and Madame de Rochemaure seemed to her one of these. Taking advantage, therefore, of the favourable moment, she related in a single breath the distress of mother and son, both of whom were dying of hunger. Pictures no longer sold: the Revolution had slain trade as with a knife. Food was scarce and ruinously dear...

And the good woman hurried through her lamentations with all the volubility of her soft lips and thick tongue, so that she might have delivered them all before her son reappeared, for his pride would not have approved of such complaints. She strove, in the shortest possible time, to move a lady whom she judged wealthy and influential, and to interest her in her child’s fate. And she felt that Évariste’s beauty was conspiring with her to soften the heart of a well-born woman.

Citizen Rochemaure did indeed show feeling: she was moved by the thought of Évariste’s sufferings and his mother’s, and sought means of easing them. She would have the painter’s works purchased by wealthy men among her friends.

“For,” she said with a smile, “there is still money in France, but it is in hiding.”

Better still: since art was ruined, she would procure Évariste a position with Morhardt or the Perregaux brothers, or a clerkship with a contractor supplying the armies.

Then she reflected that this was not what a man of his character required; and, after a moment’s thought, she made a sign that she had found the answer:

“Several jurors remain to be appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Juror, magistrate—that is what would suit your son. I have connections with members of the Committee of Public Safety; I know the elder Robespierre; his brother very often sups at my house. I shall speak to them. I shall have a word put in with Montané, Dumas, and Fouquier.”

Citizen Gamelin, moved and grateful, laid a finger to her lips: Évariste was returning to the studio.

He went down with Citizen Rochemaure through the dark stairway, whose wooden steps and tiles were coated with the grime of ages.

On the Pont-Neuf, where the sun, already low, lengthened the shadow of the pedestal that had once borne the Bronze Horse and was now decked in the colours of the nation, a crowd of working men and women, gathered in little groups, listened to citizens speaking in low voices. The stricken crowd kept a silence broken at intervals by groans and cries of anger. Many were hastening toward the rue de Thionville, formerly the rue Dauphine; Gamelin slipped into one of the groups and heard that Marat had just been assassinated.

Little by little the news was confirmed and grew more precise: he had been murdered in his bath by a woman who had come expressly from Caen to commit the crime.

Some believed that she had escaped; but most said that she had been arrested.

They all stood there like a flock without a shepherd.

They thought:

“Marat, tender-hearted, humane, beneficent Marat, is no longer here to guide us—he who was never mistaken, who divined everything, who dared reveal everything!... What are we to do, what is to become of us? We have lost our counsellor, our defender, our friend.” They knew whence the blow had come, and who had guided that woman’s arm. They groaned:

“Marat has been struck down by the criminal hands that seek to exterminate us. His death is the signal for the slaughter of every patriot.”

The circumstances of this tragic death and the victim’s last words were reported in various forms; questions were asked about the assassin, of whom nothing was known except that she was a young woman sent by the federalist traitors. Baring nails and teeth, the women condemned the criminal to torment and, finding the guillotine too merciful, demanded for this monster the lash, the wheel, quartering, and devised new tortures.

Armed National Guards were dragging toward the Section a man of resolute appearance. His clothes were in tatters; trickles of blood ran down his pale face. He had been caught saying that Marat had deserved his fate by continually inciting pillage and murder. Only with the greatest difficulty had the militiamen rescued him from the fury of the people. Fingers pointed him out as an accomplice of the assassin, and threats of death rose as he passed.

Gamelin stood dazed with grief. Scant tears dried in his burning eyes. With his filial sorrow were mingled a patriot’s anxious concern and the people’s devotion, rending his heart.

He thought:

“After Le Peltier, after Bourdon, Marat!... I know the fate reserved for patriots: massacred on the Champ de Mars, at Nancy, in Paris, they will all perish.” And he thought of the traitor Wimpfen, who only recently, at the head of a horde of sixty thousand royalists, had marched upon Paris, and who, had he not been halted at Vernon by brave patriots, would have put the heroic and doomed city to fire and sword.

And how many dangers remained, how many criminal designs, how many betrayals, which Marat’s wisdom and vigilance alone could discover and foil! Who after him would know how to denounce Custine, idling in the camp of César and refusing to relieve Valenciennes; Biron, inactive in Lower Vendée, allowing Saumur to be taken and Nantes besieged; Dillon, betraying the fatherland in the Argonne?...

Meanwhile, around him, the sinister clamour swelled from moment to moment:

“Marat is dead; the aristocrats have killed him!”

As he went, his heart heavy with grief, hatred, and love, to pay the last honours to the martyr of liberty, an old peasant woman in a Limousin cap approached him and asked whether this Monsieur Marat who had been assassinated was not Father Mara, the parish priest of Saint-Pierre-de-Queyroix.