Quitting the Barnabites, Évariste Gamelin set off in the direction of
the Place Dauphine, now renamed the Place de Thionville in honour of a
city that had shown itself impregnable.
Situated in the busiest quarter of Paris, the _Place_ had long lost the
fine stateliness it had worn a hundred years ago; the mansions forming
its three sides, built in the days of Henri IV in one uniform style, of
red brick with white stone dressings, to lodge splendour-loving
magistrates, had had their imposing roofs of slate removed to make way
for two or three wretched storeys of lath and plaster or had even been
demolished altogether and replaced by shabby whitewashed houses, and now
displayed only a series of irregular, poverty-stricken, squalid fronts,
pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows enlivened with
flowers in pots, birdcages, and rags hanging out to dry. These were
occupied by a swarm of artisans, jewellers, metal-workers, clockmakers,
opticians, printers, laundresses, sempstresses, milliners, and a few
grey-beard lawyers who had not been swept away in the storm of
revolution along with the King's courts.
It was morning and springtime. Golden sunbeams, intoxicating as new
wine, played on the walls and flashed gaily in at garret casements.
Every sash of every window was thrown open, showing the housewives'
frowsy heads peeping out. The Clerk of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who
had just left his house on his way to Court, distributed amicable taps
on the cheeks of the children playing under the trees. From the
Pont-Neuf came the crier's voice denouncing the treason of the infamous
Dumouriez.
Évariste Gamelin lived in a house on the side towards the Quai de
l'Horloge, a house that dated from Henri IV and would still have
preserved a not unhandsome appearance but for a mean tiled attic that
had been added on to heighten the building under the last but one of the
_tyrants_. To adapt the lodging of some erstwhile dignitary of the
_Parlement_ to the exigencies of the bourgeois and artisan households
that formed its present denizens, endless partitions and false floors
had been run up. This was why the _citoyen_ Remacle, concierge and
jobbing tailor, perched in a sort of 'tween-decks, as low ceilinged as
it was confined in area. Here he could be seen through the glass door
sitting cross-legged on his work-bench, his bowed back within an inch of
the floor above, stitching away at a National Guard's uniform, while the
_citoyenne_ Remacle, whose cooking stove boasted no chimney but the well
of the staircase, poisoned the other tenants with the fumes of her
stew-pots and frying-pans, and their little girl Joséphine, her face
smudged with treacle and looking as pretty as an angel, played on the
threshold with Mouton, the joiner's dog. The _citoyenne_, whose heart
was as capacious as her ample bosom and broad back, was reputed to
bestow her favours on her neighbour the _citoyen_ Dupont senior, who was
one of the twelve constituting the Committee of Surveillance. At any
rate her husband had his strong suspicions, and from morning to night
the house resounded with the racket of the alternate squabbles and
reconciliations of the pair. The upper floors were occupied by the
_citoyen_ Chaperon, gold and silver-smith, who had his shop on the Quai
de l'Horloge, by a health officer, an attorney, a goldbeater, and
several employés at the Palais de Justice.
Évariste Gamelin climbed the old-fashioned staircase as far as the
fourth and last storey, where he had his studio together with a bedroom
for his mother. At this point ended the wooden stairs laid with tiles
that took the place of the grand stairway of the more important floors.
A ladder clamped to the wall led to a cock-loft, from which at that
moment emerged a stout man with a handsome, florid, rosy-cheeked face,
climbing painfully down with an enormous package clasped in his arms,
yet humming gaily to himself: _J'ai perdu mon serviteur_.
Breaking off his song, he wished a polite good-day to Gamelin, who
returned him a fraternal greeting and helped him down with his parcel,
for which the old man thanked him.
"There," said he, shouldering his burden again, "you have a batch of
dancing-dolls which I am going to deliver straight away to a
toy-merchant in the Rue de la Loi. There is a whole tribe of them
inside; I am their creator; they have received of me a perishable body,
exempt from joys and sufferings. I have not given them the gift of
thought, for I am a benevolent God."
It was the _citoyen_ Brotteaux, once farmer of taxes and _ci-devant_
noble; his father, having made a fortune in these transactions, had
bought himself an office conferring a title on the possessor. In the
good old times Maurice Brotteaux had called himself Monsieur des Ilettes
and used to give elegant suppers which the fair Madame de Rochemaure,
wife of a King's _procureur_, enlivened with her bright glances,--a
finished gentlewoman whose loyal fidelity was never impugned so long as
the Revolution left Maurice Brotteaux in possession of his offices and
emoluments, his hôtel, his estates and his noble name. The Revolution
swept them all away. He made his living by painting portraits under the
archways of doors, making pancakes and fritters on the Quai de la
Mégisserie, composing speeches for the representatives of the people and
giving dancing lessons to the young _citoyennes_. At the present time,
in his garret into which you climbed by a ladder and where a man could
not stand upright, Maurice Brotteaux, the proud owner of a glue-pot, a
ball of twine, a box of water-colours and sundry clippings of paper,
manufactured dancing-dolls which he sold to wholesale toy-dealers, who
resold them to the pedlars who hawked them up and down the
Champs-Élysées at the end of a pole,--glittering magnets to draw the
little ones' eyes. Amidst the calamities of the State and the disaster
that overwhelmed himself, he preserved an unruffled spirit, reading for
the refreshment of his mind in his Lucretius, which he carried with him
wherever he went in the gaping pocket of his plum-coloured surtout.
Évariste Gamelin pushed open the door of his lodging. It offered no
resistance, for his poverty spared him any trouble about lock and key;
when his mother from force of habit shot the bolt, he would tell her:
"Why, what's the good? Folks don't steal spiders'-webs,--nor my
pictures, neither." In his workroom were piled, under a thick layer of
dust or with faces turned to the wall, the canvases of his student
years,--when, as the fashion of the day was, he limned scenes of
gallantry, depicting with a sleek, timorous brush emptied quivers and
birds put to flight, risky pastimes and reveries of bliss, high-kilted
goose-girls and shepherdesses with rose-wreathed bosoms.
But it was not a genre that suited his temperament. His cold treatment
of such like scenes proved the painter's incurable purity of heart.
Amateurs were right: Gamelin had no gifts as an erotic artist. Nowadays,
though he was still short of thirty, these subjects struck him as dating
from an immemorial antiquity. He saw in them the degradation wrought by
Monarchy, the shameful effects of the corruption of Courts. He blamed
himself for having practised so contemptible a style and prostituted his
genius to the vile arts of slavery. Now, citizen of a free people, he
occupied his hand with bold charcoal sketches of Liberties, Rights of
Man, French Constitutions, Republican Virtues, the People as Hercules
felling the Hydra of Tyranny, throwing into each and all his
compositions all the fire of his patriotism. Alas! he could not make a
living by it. The times were hard for artists. No doubt the fault did
not lie with the Convention, which was hurling its armies against the
kings gathered on every frontier, which, proud, unmoved, determined in
the face of the coalesced powers of Europe, false and ruthless to
itself, was rending its own bosom with its own hands, which was setting
up terror as the order of the day, establishing for the punishment of
plotters a pitiless tribunal to whose devouring maw it was soon to
deliver up its own members; but which through it all, with calm and
thoughtful brow, the patroness of science and friend of all things
beautiful, was reforming the calendar, instituting technical schools,
decreeing competitions in painting and sculpture, founding prizes to
encourage artists, organizing annual exhibitions, opening the Museum of
the Louvre, and, on the model of Athens and Rome, endowing with a
stately sublimity the celebration of National festivals and public
obsequies. But French Art, once so widely appreciated in England, and
Germany, in Russia, in Poland, now found every outlet to foreign lands
closed. Amateurs of painting, dilettanti of the fine arts, great
noblemen and financiers, were ruined, had emigrated or were in hiding.
The men the Revolution had enriched, peasants who had bought up National
properties, speculators, army-contractors, gamesters of the
Palais-Royal, durst not at present show their wealth, and did not care a
fig for pictures, either. It needed Regnault's fame or the youthful
Gérard's cleverness to sell a canvas. Greuze, Fragonard, Houin were
reduced to indigence. Prud'hon could barely earn bread for his wife and
children by drawing subjects which Copia reproduced in stippled
engravings. The patriot painters Hennequin, Wicar, Topino-Lebrun were
starving. Gamelin, without means to meet the expenses of a picture, to
hire a model or buy colours, abandoned his vast canvas of _The Tyrant
pursued in the Infernal Regions by the Furies_, after barely sketching
in the main outlines. It blocked up half the studio with its
half-finished, threatening shapes, greater than life-size, and its vast
brood of green snakes, each darting forth two sharp, forked tongues. In
the foreground, to the left, could be discerned Charon in his boat, a
haggard, wild-looking figure,--a powerful and well conceived design, but
of the schools, schooly. There was far more of genius and less of
artificiality in a canvas of smaller dimensions, also unfinished, that
hung in the best lighted corner of the studio. It was an Orestes whom
his sister Electra was raising in her arms on his bed of pain. The
maiden was putting back with a moving tenderness the matted hair that
hung over her brother's eyes. The head of the hero was tragic and fine,
and you could see a likeness in it to the painter's own countenance.
Gamelin cast many a mournful look at this composition; sometimes his
fingers itched with the craving to be at work on it, and his arms would
be stretched longingly towards the boldly sketched figure of Electra, to
fall back again helpless to his sides. The artist was burning with
enthusiasm, his soul aspired to great achievements. But he had to
exhaust his energy on pot-boilers which he executed indifferently,
because he was bound to please the taste of the vulgar and also because
he had no skill to impress trivial things with the seal of genius. He
drew little allegorical compositions which his comrade Desmahis engraved
cleverly enough in black or in colours and which were bought at a low
figure by a print-dealer in the Rue Honoré, the _citoyen_ Blaise. But
the trade was going from bad to worse, declared Blaise, who for some
time now had declined to purchase anything.
This time, however, made inventive by necessity, Gamelin had conceived a
new and happy thought, as _he_ at any rate believed,--an idea that was
to make the print-seller's fortune, and the engraver's and his own to
boot. This was a "patriotic" pack of cards, where for the kings and
queens and knaves of the old style he meant to substitute figures of
Genius, of Liberty, of Equality and the like. He had already sketched
out all his designs, had finished several and was eager to pass on to
Desmahis such as were in a state to be engraved. The one he deemed the
most successful represented a soldier dressed in the three-cornered hat,
blue coat with red facings, yellow breeches and black gaiters of the
Volunteer, seated on a big drum, his feet on a pile of cannon-balls and
his musket between his knees. It was the _citizen of hearts_ replacing
the _ci-devant_ knave of hearts. For six months and more Gamelin had
been drawing soldiers with never-failing gusto. He had sold some of
these while the fit of martial enthusiasm lasted, while others hung on
the walls of the room, and five or six, water-colours, colour-washes and
chalks in two tints, lay about on the table and chairs. In the days of
July, '92, when in every open space rose platforms for enrolling
recruits, when all the taverns were gay with green leaves and resounded
to the shouts of "Vive la Nation! freedom or death!" Gamelin could not
cross the Pont-Neuf or pass the Hôtel de Ville without his heart beating
high at sight of the beflagged marquee in which magistrates in tricolour
scarves were inscribing the names of volunteers to the sound of the
_Marseillaise_. But for him to join the Republic's armies would have
meant leaving his mother to starve.
Heralded by a grievous sound of puffing and panting the old _citoyenne_,
Gamelin's widowed mother, entered the studio, hot, red and out of
breath, the National cockade hanging half unpinned in her cap and on the
point of falling out. She deposited her basket on a chair and still
standing, the better to get her breath, began to groan over the high
price of victuals.
A shopkeeper's wife till the death of her husband, a cutler in the Rue
de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, at the sign of the Ville de Châtellerault,
now reduced to poverty, the _citoyenne_ Gamelin lived in seclusion,
keeping house for her son the painter. He was the elder of her two
children. As for her daughter Julie, at one time employed at a
fashionable milliner's in the Rue Honoré, the best thing was not to know
what had become of her, for it was ill saying the truth, that she had
emigrated with an aristocrat.
"Lord God!" sighed the _citoyenne_, showing her son a loaf baked of
heavy dun-coloured dough, "bread is too dear for anything; the more
reason it should be made of pure wheat! At market neither eggs nor
green-stuff nor cheese to be had. By dint of eating chestnuts, we're
like to grow into chestnuts."
After a long pause, she began again:
"Why, I've seen women in the streets who had nothing to feed their
little ones with. The distress is sore among poor folks. And it will go
on the same till things are put back on a proper footing."
"Mother," broke in Gamelin with a frown, "the scarcity we suffer from is
due to the unprincipled buyers and speculators who starve the people and
connive with our foes over the border to render the Republic odious to
the citizens and to destroy liberty. This comes of the Brissotins' plots
and the traitorous dealings of your Pétions and Rolands. It is well if
the federalists in arms do not march on Paris and massacre the patriot
remnant whom famine is too slow in killing! There is no time to lose;
we must tax the price of flour and guillotine every man who speculates
in the food of the people, foments insurrection or palters with the
foreigner. The Convention has set up an extraordinary tribunal to try
conspirators. Patriots form the court; but will its members have energy
enough to defend the fatherland against our foes? There is hope in
Robespierre; he is virtuous. There is hope above all in Marat. He loves
the people, discerns its true interests and promotes them. He was ever
the first to unmask traitors, to baffle plots. He is incorruptible and
fearless. He, and he alone, can save the imperilled Republic."
The _citoyenne_ Gamelin shook her head, paying no heed to the cockade
that fell out of her cap at the gesture.
"Have done, Évariste; your Marat is a man like another and no better
than the rest. You are young and your head is full of fancies. What you
say to-day of Marat, you said before of Mirabeau, of La Fayette, of
Pétion, of Brissot."
"Never!" cried Gamelin, who was genuinely oblivious.
After clearing one end of the deal table of the papers and books,
brushes and chalks that littered it, the _citoyenne_ laid out on it the
earthenware soup-bowl, two tin porringers, two iron forks, the loaf of
brown bread and a jug of thin wine.
Mother and son ate the soup in silence and finished their meal with a
small scrap of bacon. The _citoyenne_, putting _her_ titbit on her
bread, used the point of her pocket knife to convey the pieces one by
one slowly and solemnly to her toothless jaws and masticated with a
proper reverence the victuals that had cost so dear.
She had left the best part on the dish for her son, who sat lost in a
brown study.
"Eat, Évariste," she repeated at regular intervals, "eat,"--and on her
lips the word had all the solemnity of a religious commandment.
She began again with her lamentations on the dearness of provisions, and
again Gamelin demanded taxation as the only remedy for these evils.
But she shrilled:
"There is no money left in the country. The _émigrés_ have carried it
all off with them. There is no confidence left either. Everything is
desperate."
"Hush, mother, hush!" protested Gamelin. "What matter our privations,
our hardships of a moment? The Revolution will win for all time the
happiness of the human race."
The good dame sopped her bread in her wine; her mood grew more cheerful
and she smiled as her thoughts returned to her young days, when she used
to dance on the green in honour of the King's birthday. She well
remembered too the day when Joseph Gamelin, cutler by trade, had asked
her hand in marriage. And she told over, detail by detail, how things
had gone,--how her mother had bidden her: "Go dress. We are going to the
Place de Grève, to Monsieur Bienassis' shop, to see Damiens drawn and
quartered," and what difficulty they had to force their way through the
press of eager spectators. Presently, in Monsieur Bienassis' shop, she
had seen Joseph Gamelin, wearing his fine rose-pink coat and had known
in an instant what he would be at. All the time she sat at the window to
see the regicide torn with red-hot pincers, drenched with molten lead,
dragged at the tail of four horses and thrown into the flames, Joseph
Gamelin had stood behind her chair and had never once left off
complimenting her on her complexion, her hair and her figure.
She drained the last drop in her cup and continued her reminiscences of
other days:
"I brought you into the world, Évariste, sooner than I had expected, by
reason of a fright I had when I was big. It was on the Pont-Neuf, where
I came near being knocked down by a crowd of sightseers hurrying to
Monsieur de Lally's execution. You were so little at your birth the
surgeon thought you would not live. But I felt sure God would be
gracious to me and preserve your life. I reared you to the best of my
powers, grudging neither pains nor expense. It is fair to say, my
Évariste, that you showed me you were grateful and that, from childhood
up, you tried your best to recompense me for what I had done. You were
naturally affectionate and tender-hearted. Your sister was not bad at
heart; but she was selfish and of unbridled temper. Your compassion was
greater than ever was hers for the unfortunate. When the little
ragamuffins of the neighbourhood robbed birds' nests in the trees, you
always fought hard to rescue the nestlings from their hands and restore
them to the mother, and many a time you did not give in till after you
had been kicked and cuffed cruelly. At seven years of age, instead of
wrangling with bad boys, you would pace soberly along the street saying
over your catechism; and all the poor people you came across you
insisted on bringing home with you to relieve their needs, till I was
forced to whip you to break you of the habit. You could not see a living
creature suffer without tears. When you had done growing, you turned out
a very handsome lad. To my great surprise, you appeared not to know
it,--how different from most pretty boys, who are full of conceit and
vain of their good looks!"
His old mother spoke the truth. Évariste at twenty had had a grave and
charming cast of countenance, a beauty at once austere and feminine, the
countenance of a Minerva. Now his sombre eyes and pale cheeks revealed a
melancholy and passionate soul. But his gaze, when it fell on his
mother, recovered for a brief moment its childish softness.
She went on:
"You might have profited by your advantages to run after the girls, but
you preferred to stay with me in the shop, and I had sometimes to tell
you not to hang on always to my apron-strings, but to go and amuse
yourself with your young companions. To my dying day I shall always
testify that you have been a good son, Évariste. After your father's
death, you bravely took me and provided for me; though your work barely
pays you, you have never let me want for anything, and if we are at this
moment destitute and miserable, I cannot blame you for it. The fault
lies with the Revolution."
He raised his hand to protest; but she only shrugged and continued:
"I am no aristocrat. I have seen the great in the full tide of their
power, and I can bear witness that they abused their privileges. I have
seen your father cudgelled by the Duc de Canaleilles' lackeys because he
did not make way quick enough for their master. I could never abide _the
Austrian_--she was too haughty and too extravagant. As for the King, I
thought him good-hearted, and it needed his trial and condemnation to
alter my opinion. In fact, I do not regret the old régime,--though I
have had some agreeable times under it. But never tell me the Revolution
is going to establish equality, because men will never be equal; it is
an impossibility, and, let them turn the country upside down to their
heart's content, there will still be great and small, fat and lean in
it."
As she talked, she was busy putting away the plates and dishes. The
painter had left off listening. He was thinking out a design,--for a
sansculotte, in red cap and _carmagnole_, who was to supersede the
discredited knave of spades in his pack of cards.
There was a sound of scratching on the door, and a girl appeared,--a
country wench, as broad as she was long, red-haired and bandy-legged, a
wen hiding the left eye, the right so pale a blue it looked white, with
monstrous thick lips and teeth protruding beyond them.
She asked Gamelin if he was Gamelin the painter and if he could do her a
portrait of her betrothed, Ferrand (Jules), a volunteer serving with the
Army of the Ardennes.
Gamelin replied that he would be glad to execute the portrait on the
gallant warrior's return.
But the girl insisted gently but firmly that it must be done at once.
The painter protested, smiling in spite of himself as he pointed out
that he could do nothing without the original.
The poor creature was dumfounded; she had not foreseen the difficulty.
Her head drooping over the left shoulder, her hands clasped in front of
her, she stood still and silent as if overwhelmed by her disappointment.
Touched and diverted by so much simplicity, and by way of distracting
the poor, lovesick creature's grief, the painter handed her one of the
soldiers he had drawn in water-colours and asked her if he was like
that, her sweetheart in the Ardennes.
She bent her doleful look on the sketch, and little by little her eye
brightened, sparkled, flashed, and her moon face beamed out in a radiant
smile.
"It is his very likeness," she cried at last. "It is the very spit of
Jules Ferrand, it is Jules Ferrand to the life."
Before it occurred to the artist to take the sheet of paper out of her
hands, she folded it carefully with her coarse red fingers into a tiny
square, slipped it over her heart between her stays and her shift,
handed the painter an _assignat_ for five livres, and wishing the
company a very good day, hobbled light-heartedly to the door and so out
of the room.