On the afternoon of the same day Évariste set out to see the _citoyen_
Jean Blaise, printseller, as well as dealer in ornamental boxes, fancy
goods and games of all sorts, in the Rue Honoré, opposite the Oratoire
and near the office of the Messageries, at the sign of the _Amour
peintre_. The shop was on the ground floor of a house sixty years old,
and opened on the street by a vaulted arch the keystone of which bore a
grotesque head with horns. The semicircle beneath the arch was occupied
by an oil-painting representing "the Sicilian or Cupid the Painter,"
after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise's father had put up in
1770 and which sun and rain had been doing their best to obliterate ever
since. On either side of the door a similar arched opening, with a
nymph's head on the keystone arch glazed with the largest panes to be
got, exhibited for the benefit of the public the prints in vogue at the
time and the latest novelties in coloured engravings. To-day's display
included a series of scenes of gallantry by Boilly, treated in his
graceful, rather stiff way, _Leçons d'amour conjugal_, _Douces
résistances_ and the like, which scandalized the Jacobins and which the
rigid moralists denounced to the Society of Arts, Debucourt's _Promenade
publique_, with a dandy in canary-coloured breeches lounging on three
chairs, a group of horses by the young Carle Vernet, pictures of air
balloons, the _Bain de Virginie_ and figures after the antique.
Amid the stream of citizens that flowed past the shop it was the
raggedest figures that loitered longest before the two fascinating
windows. Easily amused, delighting in pictures and bent on getting their
share, if only through the eyes, of the good things of this world, they
stood in open-mouthed admiration, whereas the aristocrats merely glanced
in, frowned and passed on.
The instant he came within sight of the house, Évariste fixed his eyes
on one of the row of windows above the shop, the one on the left hand,
where there was a red carnation in a flower-pot behind a balcony of
twisted ironwork. It was the window of Élodie's chamber, Jean Blaise's
daughter. The print-dealer lived with his only child on the first floor
of the house.
Évariste, after halting a moment as if to get his breath in front of the
_Amour peintre_, turned the hasp of the shop-door. He found the
_citoyenne_ Élodie within; she had just sold a couple of engravings by
Fragonard _fils_ and Naigeon, carefully selected from a number of
others, and before locking up the _assignats_ received in payment in the
strong-box, was holding them one after the other between her fine eyes
and the light, to scrutinize the delicate lines and intricate curves of
engraving and the watermark. She was naturally suspicious, for as much
forged paper was in circulation as true, which was a great hindrance to
commerce. As in former days, in the case of such as copied the King's
signature, forgers of the national currency were punished by death; yet
plates for printing _assignats_ were to be found in every cellar, the
Swiss smuggled in counterfeits by the million, whole packets were put in
circulation in the inns, the English landed bales of them every day on
our coasts, to ruin the Republic's credit and bring good patriots to
destitution. Élodie was in terror of accepting bad paper, and still more
in terror of passing it and being treated as an accomplice of Pitt,
though she had a firm belief in her own good luck and felt pretty sure
of coming off best in any emergency.
Évariste looked at her with the sombre gaze that speaks more movingly of
love than the most smiling face. She returned his gaze with a mocking
curl of the lips and an arch gleam in the dark eyes,--an expression she
wore because she knew he loved her and liked to know it and because such
a look provokes a lover, makes him complain of ill-usage, brings him to
the speaking point, if he has not spoken already, which was Évariste's
case.
Before depositing the _assignats_ in the strong-box, she produced from
her work-basket a white scarf, which she had begun to embroider, and set
to work on it. At once industrious and a coquette, she knew
instinctively how to ply her needle so as to fascinate an admirer and
make a pretty thing for her wearing at one and the same time; she had
quite different ways of working according to the person watching her,--a
nonchalant way for those she would lull into a gentle languor, a
capricious way for those she was fain to see in a more or less
despairing mood. For Évariste, she bent with an air of painstaking
absorption over her scarf, for she wanted to stir a sentiment of serious
affection in his heart.
Élodie was neither very young nor very pretty. She might have been
deemed plain at the first glance. She was a brunette, with an olive
complexion; under the broad white kerchief knotted carelessly about her
head, from which the dark lustrous ringlets escaped, her eyes of fire
gleamed as if they would burn their orbits. Her round face with its
prominent cheek-bones, laughing lips and rather broad nose, that gave it
a wild-wood, voluptuous expression, reminded the painter of the faun of
the Borghese, a cast of which he had seen and been struck with
admiration for its freakish charm. A faint down of moustache accentuated
the curve of the full lips. A bosom that seemed big with love was
confined by a crossed kerchief in the fashion of the year. Her supple
waist, her active limbs, her whole vigorous body expressed in every
movement a wild, delicious freedom. Every glance, every breath, every
quiver of the warm flesh called for love and promised passion. There,
behind the tradesman's counter, she seemed rather a dancing nymph, a
bacchante of the opera, stripped of her lynx skin and thyrsus,
imprisoned, and travestied by a magician's spell under the modest
trappings of a housewife by Chardin.
"My father is not at home," she told the painter; "wait a little, he
will not be long."
In the small brown hands the needle travelled swiftly over the fine
lawn.
"Is the pattern to your taste, Monsieur Gamelin?"
It was not in Gamelin's nature to pretend. And love, exaggerating his
confidence, encouraged him to speak quite frankly.
"You embroider cleverly, _citoyenne_; but, if I am to say what I think,
the pattern you have traced is not simple enough or bold enough, and
smacks of the affected taste that in France governed too long the
ornamentation of dress and furniture and woodwork; all those rosettes
and wreaths recall the pretty, finikin style that was in favour under
the tyrant. There is a new birth of taste. Alas! we have much leeway to
make up. In the days of the infamous Louis XV the art of decoration had
something Chinese about it. They made pot-bellied cabinets with drawer
handles grotesque in their contortions, good for nothing but to be
thrown on the fire to warm good patriots. Simplicity alone is beautiful.
We must hark back to the antique. David designs beds and chairs from the
Etruscan vases and the wall-paintings of Herculaneum."
"Yes, I have seen those beds and chairs," said Élodie, "they are lovely.
Soon we shall want no other sort. I am like you, I adore the antique."
"Well, then, _citoyenne_," returned Évariste, "if you had limited your
pattern to a Greek border, with ivy leaves, serpents or crossed arrows,
it would have been worthy of a Spartan maiden ... and of you. But you
can still keep this design by simplifying it, reducing it to the plain
lines of beauty."
She asked her preceptor what should be picked out.
He bent over the work, and the girl's ringlets swept lightly over his
cheek. Their hands met and their breaths mingled. For an instant
Évariste tasted an ecstatic bliss, but to feel Élodie's lips so close to
his own filled him with fear, and dreading to alarm her modesty, he drew
back quickly.
The _citoyenne_ Blaise was in love with Évariste Gamelin; she thought
his great ardent eyes superb no less than the fine oval of his pale
face, and his abundant black locks, parted above the brow and falling
in showers about his shoulders; his gravity of demeanour, his cold
reserve, his severe manner and uncompromising speech which never
condescended to flattery, were equally to her liking. She was in love,
and therefore believed him possessed of supreme artistic genius that
would one day blossom forth in incomparable masterpieces and make his
name world-famous,--and she loved him the better for the belief. The
_citoyenne_ Blaise was no prude on the score of masculine purity and her
scruples were not offended because a man should satisfy his passions and
follow his own tastes and caprices; she loved Évariste, who was
virtuous; she did not love him because he was virtuous, albeit she
appreciated the advantage of his being so in that she had no cause for
jealousy or suspicion or any fear of rivals in his affections.
Nevertheless, for the time being, she deemed his reserve a little
overdone. If Racine's "Aricie," who loved "Hippolyte," admired the
youthful hero's untameable virtue, it was with the hope of winning a
victory over it, and she would quickly have bewailed a sternness of
moral fibre that had refused to be softened for her sake. At the first
opportunity she more than half declared her passion to constrain him to
speak out himself. Like her prototype the tender-hearted "Aricie," the
_citoyenne_ Blaise was much inclined to think that in love the woman is
bound to make the advances. "The fondest hearts," she told herself, "are
the most fearful; they need help and encouragement. Besides, they are so
simple a woman can go half way and even further without their even
knowing it, if only she lets them fancy the credit is theirs of the bold
attack and the glorious victory." What made her more confident of
success was the fact that she knew for a certainty (and indeed there was
no doubt about it) that Évariste, before ever the Revolution had made
him a hero, had loved a mistress like any ordinary mortal, a very
unheroic creature, no other than the _concierge_ at the Academy of
Painting. Élodie, who was a girl of some experience, quite realised that
there are different sorts of love. The sentiment Évariste inspired in
her heart was profound enough for her to dream of making him the partner
of her life. She was very ready to marry him, but hardly expected her
father would approve the union of his only daughter with a poor and
unknown artist. Gamelin had nothing, while the printseller turned over
large sums of money. The _Amour peintre_ brought him in large profits,
the share market larger still, and he was in partnership with an army
contractor who supplied the cavalry of the Republic with rushes in place
of hay and mildewed oats. In a word, the cutler's son of the Rue
Saint-Dominique was a very insignificant personage beside the publisher
of engravings, a man known throughout Europe, related to the Blaizots,
Basans and Didots, and an honoured guest at the houses of the _citoyens_
Saint-Pierre and Florian. Not that, as an obedient daughter should, she
held her father's consent to be an indispensable preliminary to her
settlement in life. The latter, early left a widower, and a man of a
self-indulgent, volatile temper, as enterprising with women as he was in
business, had never paid much heed to her and had left her to develop at
her own sweet will, untrammelled whether by parental advice or parental
affection, more careful to ignore than to safeguard the girl's
behaviour, whose passionate temperament he appreciated as a connoisseur
of the sex and in whom he recognized charms far and away more seductive
than a pretty face. Too generous-hearted to be circumspect, too clever
to come to harm, cautious even in her caprices, passion had never made
her forget the social proprieties. Her father was infinitely grateful
for this prudent behaviour, and as she had inherited from him a good
head for business and a taste for money-making, he never troubled
himself as to the mysterious reasons that deterred a girl so eminently
marriageable from entering that estate and kept her at home, where she
was as good as a housekeeper and four clerks to him. At twenty-seven she
felt old enough and experienced enough to manage her own concerns and
had no need to ask the advice or consult the wishes of a father still a
young man, and one of so easy-going and careless a temper. But for her
to marry Gamelin, Monsieur Blaise must needs contrive a future for a
son-in-law with such poor prospects, give him an interest in the
business, guarantee him regular work as he did to several artists
already--in fact, one way or another, provide him with a livelihood; and
such a favour was out of the question, she considered, whether for the
one to offer or the other to accept, so small was the bond of sympathy
between the two men.
The difficulty troubled the girl's tender heart and wise brain. She saw
nothing to alarm her in a secret union with her lover and in taking the
author of nature for sole witness of their mutual troth. Her creed found
nothing blameworthy in such a union, which the independence of her mode
of life made possible and which Évariste's honourable and virtuous
character gave her good hopes of forming without apprehension as to the
result. But Gamelin was hard put to it to live and provide his old
mother with the barest necessaries, and it did not seem as though in so
straitened an existence room could well be found for an amour even when
reduced to the simplicity of nature. Moreover, Évariste had not yet
spoken and declared his intentions, though certainly the _citoyenne_
Blaise hoped to bring him to this before long.
She broke off her meditations, and the needle stopped at the same
moment.
"_Citoyen_ Évariste," she said, "I shall not care for the scarf, unless
you like it too. Draw me a pattern, please. Meanwhile, I will copy
Penelope and unravel what I have done in your absence."
He answered in a tone of sombre enthusiasm:
"I promise you I will, _citoyenne_. I will draw you the brand of the
tyrannicide Harmodius,--a sword in a wreath,"--and pulling out his
pencil, he sketched in a design of swords and flowers in the sober,
unadorned style he admired. And as he drew, he expounded his views of
art:
"A regenerated People," he declared, "must repudiate all the legacies of
servitude, bad taste, bad outline, bad drawing. Watteau, Boucher,
Fragonard worked for tyrants and for slaves. Their works show no feeling
for good style or purity of line, no love of nature or truth. Masks,
dolls, fripperies, monkey-tricks,--nothing else! Posterity will despise
their frivolous productions. In a hundred years all Watteau's pictures
will be banished to the garrets and falling to pieces from neglect; in
1893 struggling painters will be daubing their studies over Boucher's
canvases. David has opened the way; he approaches the Antique, but he
has not yet reached true simplicity, true grandeur, bare and unadorned.
Our artists have many secrets still to learn from the friezes of
Herculaneum, the Roman bas-reliefs, the Etruscan vases."
He dilated at length on antique beauty, then came back to Fragonard,
whom he abused with inexhaustible venom:
"Do you know him, _citoyenne_?"
Élodie nodded.
"You likewise know good old Greuze, who is ridiculous enough, to be
sure, with his scarlet coat and his sword. But he looks like a wise man
of Greece beside Fragonard. I met him, a while ago, the miserable old
man, trotting by under the arcades of the Palais-Égalité, powdered,
genteel, sprightly, spruce, hideous. At sight of him, I longed that,
failing Apollo, some sturdy friend of the arts might hang him up to a
tree and flay him alive like Marsyas as an everlasting warning to bad
painters."
Élodie gave him a long look out of her dancing, wanton eyes.
"You know how to hate, Monsieur Gamelin, are we to conclude you know
also how to lo...?"
"Is that you, Gamelin?" broke in a tenor voice; it was the _citoyen_
Blaise just come back to his shop. He advanced, boots creaking, charms
rattling, coat-skirts flying, an enormous black cocked hat on his head,
the corners of which touched his shoulders.
Élodie, picking up her work-basket, retreated to her chamber.
"Well, Gamelin!" inquired the _citoyen_ Blaise, "have you brought me
anything new?"
"May be," declared the painter,--and proceeded to expound his ideas.
"Our playing cards present a grievous and startling contrast with our
present ways of thinking. The names of knave and king offend the ears of
a patriot. I have designed and executed a reformed, Revolutionary pack
in which for kings, queens, and knaves are substituted Liberties,
Equalities, Fraternities; the aces in a border of fasces, are called
Laws.... You call Liberty of clubs, Equality of spades, Fraternity of
diamonds, Law of hearts. I venture to think my cards are drawn with some
spirit; I propose to have them engraved on copper by Desmahis, and to
take out letters of patent."
So saying and extracting from his portfolio some finished designs in
water-colour, the artist handed them to the printseller.
The _citoyen_ Blaise declined to take them, and turning away:
"My lad," he sneered, "take 'em to the Convention; they will perhaps
accord you a vote of thanks. But never think to make a _sol_ by your new
invention which is not new at all. You're a day behind the fair. Your
Revolutionary pack of cards is the third I've had brought me. Your
comrade Dugourc offered me last week a picquet set with four Geniuses of
the People, four Liberties, four Equalities. Another was suggested, with
Sages and Heroes, Cato, Rousseau, Hannibal,--I don't know what all!...
And these cards had the advantage over yours, my friend, in being
coarsely drawn and cut on wood blocks--with a penknife. How little you
know the world to dream that players will use cards designed in the
taste of David and engraved à la Bartolozzi! And then again, what a
strange mistake to think it needs all this to-do to suit the old packs
to the new ideas. Out of their own heads, the good sansculottes can find
a corrective for what offends them, saying, instead of 'king'--'The
Tyrant!' or just 'The fat pig!' They go on using the same old filthy
cards and never buy new ones. The great market for playing-cards is the
gaming-hells of the Palais-Égalité; well, I advise you to go there and
offer the croupiers and punters there your Liberties, your Equalities,
your ... what d'ye call 'em?... Laws of hearts ... and come back and
tell me what sort of a reception they gave you!"
The _citoyen_ Blaise sat down on the counter, filliped away sundry
grains of snuff from his nankeen breeches and looking at Gamelin with an
air of gentle pity:
"Let me give you a bit of advice, _citoyen_; if you want to make your
living, drop your patriotic packs of cards, leave your revolutionary
symbols alone, have done with your Hercules, your hydras, your Furies
pursuing guilt, your Geniuses of Liberty, and paint me pretty girls. The
people's ardour for regeneration grows lukewarm with time, but men will
always love women. Paint me women, all pink and white, with little feet
and tiny hands. And get this into your thick skull that nobody cares a
fig about the Revolution or wants to hear another word about it."
But Évariste drew himself up in indignant protest:
"What! not hear another word of the Revolution!... But, why surely, the
restoration of liberty, the victories of our armies, the chastisement of
tyrants are events that will startle the most remote posterity. How
could we not be struck by such portents?... What! the sect of the
_sansculotte_ Jesus has lasted well-nigh eighteen centuries, and the
religion of Liberty is to be abolished after barely four years of
existence!"
But Jean Blaise resumed in a tone of superiority:
"You walk in a dream; _I_ see life as it is. Believe me, friend, the
Revolution is a bore; it lasts over long. Five years of enthusiasm, five
years of fraternal embraces, of massacres, of fine speeches, of
_Marseillaises_, of tocsins, of 'hang up the aristocrats,' of heads
promenaded on pikes, of women mounted astride of cannon, of trees of
Liberty crowned with the red cap, of white-robed maidens and old men
drawn about the streets in flower-wreathed cars; of imprisonments and
guillotinings, of proclamations, and short commons, of cockades and
plumes, swords and _carmagnoles_--it grows tedious! And then folk are
beginning to lose the hang of it all. We have gone through too much, we
have seen too many of the great men and noble patriots whom you have led
in triumph to the Capitol only to hurl them afterwards from the Tarpeian
rock,--Necker, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, Pétion, Manuel, and how
many others! How can we be sure you are not preparing the same fate for
your new heroes?... Men have lost all count."
"Their names, _citoyen_ Blaise; name them, these heroes we are making
ready to sacrifice!" cried Gamelin in a tone that recalled the
print-dealer to a sense of prudence.
"I am a Republican and a patriot," he replied, clapping his hand on his
heart. "I am as good a Republican as you, as ardent a patriot as you,
_citoyen_ Gamelin. I do not suspect your zeal nor accuse you of any
backsliding. But remember that my zeal and my devotion to the State are
attested by numerous acts. Here you have my principles: I give my
confidence to every individual competent to serve the Nation. Before the
men whom the general voice elects to the perilous honour of the
Legislative office, such as Marat, such as Robespierre, I bow my head; I
am ready to support them to the measure of my poor ability and offer
them the humble co-operation of a good citizen. The Committees can bear
witness to my ardour and self-sacrifice. In conjunction with true
patriots, I have furnished oats and fodder to our gallant cavalry, boots
for our soldiers. This very day I am despatching from Vernon a convoy of
sixty oxen to the Army of the South through a country infested with
brigands and patrolled by the emissaries of Pitt and Condé. I do not
talk; I act."
Gamelin calmly put back his sketches in his portfolio, the strings of
which he tied and then slipped it under his arm.
"It is a strange contradiction," he said through his clenched teeth, "to
see men help our soldiers to carry through the world the liberty they
betray in their own homes by sowing discontent and alarm in the soul of
its defenders.... Greeting and farewell, _citoyen_ Blaise."
Before turning down the alley that runs alongside the Oratoire, Gamelin,
his heart big with love and anger, wheeled round for a last look at the
red carnations blossoming on a certain window-sill.
He did not despair; the fatherland would yet be saved. Against Jean
Blaise's unpatriotic speeches he set his faith in the Revolution. Still
he was bound to recognize that the tradesman had some show of reason
when he asserted that the people of Paris had lost its old interest in
public events. Alas! it was but too manifest that to the enthusiasm of
the early days had little by little succeeded a widespread indifference,
that never again would be seen the mighty crowds, unanimous in their
ardour, of '89, never again the millions, one in heart and soul, that in
'90 thronged round the altar of the _fédérés_. Well, good citizens must
show double zeal and courage, must rouse the people from its apathy,
bidding it choose between liberty and death.
Such were Gamelin's thoughts, and the memory of Élodie was a spur to his
confidence.
Coming to the Quais, he saw the sun setting in the distant west behind
lowering clouds that were like mountains of glowing lava; the roofs of
the city were bathed in a golden light; the windows flashed back a
thousand dazzling reflections. And Gamelin pictured the Titans forging
out of the molten fragments of by-gone worlds Diké, the city of brass.
Not having a morsel of bread for his mother or himself, he was dreaming
of a place at the limitless board that should have all the world for
guests and welcome regenerated humanity to the feast. Meantime, he tried
to persuade himself that the fatherland, as a good mother should, would
feed her faithful child. Shutting his mind against the gibes of the
printseller, he forced himself to believe that his notion of a
Revolutionary pack of cards was a novel one and a good one, and that
with these happily conceived sketches of his he held a fortune in the
portfolio under his arm. "Desmahis," he told himself, "shall engrave
them. We will publish for ourselves the new patriotic toy and we are
sure to sell ten thousand packs in a month, at twenty _sols_ apiece."
In his impatience to realize the project, he strode off at once for the
Quai de la Ferraille, where Desmahis lived over a glazier's shop.
The entrance was through the shop. The glazier's wife informed Gamelin
that the _citoyen_ Desmahis was not in, a fact that in no wise surprised
the painter, who knew his friend was of a vagabond and dissipated humour
and who marvelled that a man could engrave so much and so well as he did
while showing so little perseverance. Gamelin made up his mind to wait a
while for his return and the woman offered him a chair. She was in a
black mood and began to grumble at the badness of trade, though she had
always been told that the Revolution, by breaking windows, was making
the glaziers' fortunes.
Night was falling; so abandoning his idea of waiting for his comrade,
Gamelin took his leave of his hostess of the moment. As he was crossing
the Pont-Neuf, he saw a detachment of National Guards debouch from the
Quai des Morfondus. They were mounted and carried torches. They were
driving back the crowd, and amid a mighty clatter of sabres escorting a
cart driving slowly on its way to the guillotine with a man whose name
no one knew, a _ci-devant_ noble, the first prisoner condemned by the
newly constituted Revolutionary Tribunal. He could be seen by glimpses
between the guardsmen's hats, sitting with hands tied behind his back,
his head bared and swaying from side to side, his face to the cart's
tail. The headsman stood beside him lolling against the rail. The
passers-by had stopped to look and were telling each other it was likely
one of the fellows who starved the people, and staring with eyes of
indifference. Gamelin, coming closer, caught sight of Desmahis among the
spectators; he was struggling to push a way through the press and cut
across the line of march. He called out to him and clapped a hand on his
shoulder,--and Desmahis turned his head. He was a young man with a
handsome face and a stalwart person. In former days, at the Academy,
they used to say he had the head of Bacchus on the torso of Hercules.
His friends nicknamed him "Barbaroux" because of his likeness to that
representative of the people.
"Come here," Gamelin said to him, "I have something of importance to say
to you, Desmahis."
"Leave me alone," the latter answered peevishly, muttering some
half-heard explanation, looking out as he spoke for a chance of darting
across:
"I was following a divine creature, in a straw hat, a milliner's wench,
with her flaxen hair down her back; that cursed cart has blocked my
way.... She has gone on ahead, she is at the other end of the bridge by
now!"
Gamelin endeavoured to hold him back by his coat skirts, swearing his
business was urgent.
But Desmahis had already slipped away between horses, guards, swords and
torches, and was in hot pursuit of the milliner's girl.