XIII

Évariste Gamelin occupied his place as juror of the Tribunal for the

second time. Before the opening of the sitting, he discussed with his

colleagues the news that had arrived that morning. Some of it was

doubtful, some untrue; but part was authentic--and appalling; the armies

of the coalition in command of all the roads and marching _en masse_ on

Paris, La Vendée triumphant, Lyons in insurrection, Toulon surrendered

to the English, who were landing fourteen thousand men there.

For him and his fellow magistrates these were not only events of

interest to all the world, but so many matters of domestic concern.

Foredoomed to perish in the ruin of the fatherland, they made the public

salvation their own proper business. The Nation's interests, thus

entangled with their own, dictated their opinions and passions and

conduct.

Gamelin, where he sat on the jury bench, was handed a letter from

Trubert, Secretary of the Committee of Defence; it was to notify his

appointment as Commissioner of Supplies of Powder and Saltpetre:

_"You will excavate all the cellars in the Section in order to

extract the substances necessary for the manufacture of powder.

To-morrow perhaps the enemy will be before Paris; the soil of the

fatherland must provide us with the lightning we shall launch

against our aggressors. I send you herewith a schedule of

instructions from the Convention regarding the manipulation of

saltpetres. Farewell and brotherly greeting."_

At that moment the accused was brought in. He was one of the last of the

defeated Generals whom the Convention delivered over one after the other

to the Tribunal, and the most insignificant. At sight of him Gamelin

shuddered; once again he seemed to see the same soldier whom three weeks

before, looking on as a spectator, he had seen sentenced and sent to the

guillotine. The man was the same, with his obstinate, opinionated look;

the procedure was the same. He gave his answers in a cunning, brutish

way that ruined the effect even of the most convincing. His cavilling

and chicanery and the accusations he levelled against his subordinates,

made you forget he was fulfilling the honourable task of defending his

honour and his life. Everything was uncertain, every statement

disputed,--position of the armies, total of forces engaged, munitions of

war, orders given, orders received, movements of troops; nobody knew

anything. It was impossible to make head or tail of these confused,

nonsensical, aimless operations which had ended in disaster; defending

counsel and the accused himself were as much in the dark as were

accuser, judges, and jury, and strange to say, not a soul would admit,

whether to himself or to other people, that this was the case. The

judges took a childish delight in drawing plans and discussing problems

of tactics and strategy, while the prisoner constantly betrayed his

inborn predilection for crooked ways.

The arguments dragged on endlessly. And all the time Gamelin could see

on the rough roads of the north the ammunition wagons stogged in the

mire and the guns capsized in the ruts, and along all the ways the

broken and beaten columns flying in disorder, while from all sides the

enemy's cavalry was debouching by the abandoned defiles. And from this

host of men betrayed he could hear a mighty shout going up in accusation

of the General. When the hearing closed, darkness was falling on the

hall, and the head of Marat gleamed half-seen like a phantom above the

President's head. The jury was called upon to give judgment, but was of

two minds. Gamelin, in a hoarse, strangled voice, but in resolute

accents, declared the accused guilty of treason against the Republic,

and a murmur of approval rose from the crowd, a flattering unction to

his youthful virtue. The sentence was read by the light of torches which

cast a lurid, uncertain gleam on the prisoner's hollow temples beaded

with drops of sweat. Outside the doors, on the steps crowded with the

customary swarm of cockaded harridans, Gamelin could hear his name,

which the habitués of the Tribunal were beginning to know, passed from

mouth to mouth, and was assailed by a bevy of _tricoteuses_ who shook

their fists in his face, demanding the head of _the Austrian_.

The next day Évariste had to give judgment on the fate of a poor woman,

the widow Meyrion. She distributed bread from house to house and tramped

the streets pushing a little hand-cart and carrying a wooden tally hung

at her waist, on which she cut notches with her knife representing the

number of the loaves she had delivered. Her gains amounted to eight sous

a day. The deputy of the Public Prosecutor displayed an extraordinary

virulence towards the wretched creature, who had, it appears, shouted

"Vive le Roi!" on several occasions, uttered anti-revolutionary remarks

in the houses where she called to leave the daily dole of bread, and

been mixed up in a plot for the escape of the woman Capet. In answer to

the Judge's question she admitted the facts alleged against her; whether

fool or fanatic, she professed Royalist sentiments of the most

enthusiastic sort and waited her doom.

The Revolutionary Tribunal made a point of proving the triumph of

Equality by showing itself just as severe for street-porters and servant

maids as for the aristocrats and financiers. Gamelin could conceive no

other system possible under a popular government. He would have deemed

it a mark of contempt, an insult to the people, to exclude it from

punishment. That would have been to consider it, so to speak, as

unworthy of chastisement by the law. Reserved for aristocrats only, the

guillotine would have appeared to him in the light of an iniquitous

privilege. In his thoughts he was beginning to erect chastisement into a

religious and mystic dogma, to assign it a virtue, a merit of its own;

he conceived that society owes punishment to criminals and that it is

doing them an injustice to cheat them of this right. He declared the

woman Meyrion guilty and deserving of death, only regretting that the

fanatics, more culpable than herself, who had brought her to her ruin,

were not there to share her fate.

* * * * *

Every evening almost Évariste attended the meetings of the Jacobins, who

assembled in the former chapel of the Dominicans, commonly known as

Jacobins, in the Rue Honoré. In a courtyard, in which stood a tree of

Liberty, a poplar whose leaves shook and rustled all day in the wind,

the chapel, built in a poor, clumsy style and surmounted by a heavy roof

of tiles, showed its bare gable, pierced by a round window and an

arched doorway, above which floated the National colours, the flagstaff

crowned with the cap of Liberty. The Jacobins, like the Cordeliers, and

the Feuillants, had appropriated the premises and taken the name of the

dispossessed monks. Gamelin, once a regular attendant at the sittings of

the Cordeliers, did not find at the Jacobins the familiar sabots,

carmagnoles and rallying cries of the Dantonists. In Robespierre's club

administrative reserve and bourgeois gravity were the order of the day.

The Friend of the People was no more, and since his death Évariste had

followed the lessons of Maximilien whose thought ruled the Jacobins, and

thence, through a thousand affiliated societies was disseminated over

all France. During the reading of the minutes, his eyes wandered over

the bare, dismal walls, which, after sheltering the spiritual sons of

the arch-inquisitor of heresy, now looked down on the assemblage of

zealous inquisitors of crimes against the fatherland.

There, without pomp or ceremony, sat the body that was the chiefest

power of the State and ruled by force of words. It governed the city,

the empire, dictated its decrees to the Convention itself. These

artisans of the new order of things, so respectful of the law that they

continued Royalists in 1791 and would fain have been Royalists still on

the King's return from Varennes, so obstinate in their attachment to the

Constitution, friends of the established order of the State even after

the massacres of the Champ-de-Mars, and never revolutionaries against

the Revolution, heedless of popular agitation, cherished in their dark

and puissant soul a love of the fatherland that had given birth to

fourteen armies and set up the guillotine. Évariste was lost in

admiration of their vigilance, their suspicious temper, their reasoned

dogmatism, their love of system, their supremacy in the art of

governing, their sovereign sanity.

The public that formed the audience gave no token of their presence save

a low, long-drawn murmur as of one voice, like the rustling of the

leaves of the tree of Liberty that stood outside the threshold.

That day, the 11th Vendémiaire, a young man, with a receding brow, a

piercing eye, a sharp prominent nose, a pointed chin, a pock-marked

face, a look of cold self-possession, mounted the tribune slowly. His

hair was white with powder and he wore a blue coat that displayed his

slim figure. He showed the precise carriage and moved with the cadenced

step that made some say in mockery that he was like a dancing-master and

earned him from others the name of the "French Orpheus." Robespierre,

speaking in a clear voice, delivered an eloquent discourse against the

enemies of the Republic. He belaboured with metaphysical and

uncompromising arguments Brissot and his accomplices. He spoke at great

length, in free-flowing harmonious periods. Soaring in the celestial

spheres of philosophy, he launched his lightnings at the base

conspirators crawling on the ground.

Évariste heard and understood. Till then he had blamed the Gironde; were

they not working for the restoration of the monarchy or the triumph of

the Orleans faction, were they not planning the ruin of the heroic city

that had delivered France from her fetters and would one day deliver the

universe? Now, as he listened to the sage's voice, he discerned truths

of a higher and purer compass; he grasped a revolutionary metaphysic

which lifted his mind above coarse, material conditions into a region of

absolute, unqualified convictions, untrammelled by the errors of the

senses. Things are in their nature involved and full of confusion; the

complexity of circumstances is such that we lose our way amongst them.

Robespierre simplified them to his mind, put good and evil before him in

clear and precise formulas. Federalism,--indivisibility; unity and

indivisibility meant salvation, federalism, damnation. Gamelin tasted

the ineffable joy of a believer who knows the word that saves and the

word that destroys the soul. Henceforth the Revolutionary Tribunal, as

of old the ecclesiastical courts, would take cognizance of crime

absolute, of crime definable in a word. And, because he had the

religious spirit, Évariste welcomed these revelations with a sombre

enthusiasm; his heart swelled and rejoiced at the thought that,

henceforth, he had a talisman to discern betwixt crime and innocence, he

possessed a creed! Ye stand in lieu of all else, oh, treasures of faith!

The sage Maximilien enlightened him further as to the perfidious intent

of those who were for equalizing property and partitioning the land,

abolishing wealth and poverty and establishing a happy mediocrity for

all. Misled by their specious maxims, he had originally approved their

designs, which he deemed in accord with the principles of a true

Republican. But Robespierre, in his speeches at the Jacobins, had

unmasked their machinations and convinced him that these men,

disinterested as their intentions appeared, were working to overthrow

the Republic, that they were alarming the rich only to rouse against the

lawful authority powerful and implacable foes. Once private property

was threatened, the whole population, the more ardently attached to its

possessions the less of these it owned, would turn suddenly against the

Republic. To terrify vested interests is to conspire against the State.

These men who, under pretence of securing universal happiness and the

reign of justice, proposed a system of equality and community of goods

as a worthy object of good citizens' endeavours, were traitors and

malefactors more dangerous than the Federalists.

But the most startling revelation he owed to Robespierre's wisdom was

that of the crimes and infamies of atheism. Gamelin had never denied the

existence of God; he was a deist and believed in a Providence that

watches over mankind; but, admitting that he could form only a very

vague conception of the Supreme Being and deeply attached to the

principle of freedom of conscience, he was quite ready to allow that

right-thinking men might follow the example of Lamettrie, Boulanger, the

Baron d'Holbach, Lalande, Helvétius, the _citoyen_ Dupuis, and deny

God's existence, on condition they formulated a natural morality and

found in themselves the sources of justice and the rules of a virtuous

life. He had even felt himself in sympathy with the atheists, when he

had seen them vilified and persecuted. Maximilien had opened his mind

and unsealed his eyes. The great man by his virtuous eloquence had

taught him the true character of atheism, its nature, its objects, its

effects; he had shown him how this doctrine, conceived in the

drawing-rooms and boudoirs of the aristocracy, was the most perfidious

invention the enemies of the people had ever devised to demoralize and

enslave it; how it was a criminal act to uproot from the heart of the

unfortunate the consoling thought of a Providence to reward and

compensate and give them over without rein or bit to the passions that

degrade men and make vile slaves of them; how, in fine, the monarchical

Epicureanism of a Helvétius led to immorality, cruelty, and every

wickedness. Now that he had learnt these lessons from the lips of a

great man and a great citizen, he execrated the atheists--especially

when they were of an open-hearted, joyous temper, like his old friend

Brotteaux.

* * * * *

In the days that followed Évariste had to give judgment one after the

other on a _ci-devant_ convicted of having destroyed wheat-stuffs in

order to starve the people, three _émigrés_ who had returned to foment

civil war in France, two ladies of pleasure of the Palais-Égalité,

fourteen Breton conspirators, men, women, old men, youths, masters, and

servants. The crime was proven, the law explicit. Among the guilty was a

girl of twenty, adorable in the heyday of her young beauty under the

shadow of the doom so soon to overwhelm her, a fascinating figure. A

blue bow bound her golden locks, her lawn kerchief revealed a white,

graceful neck.

Évariste was consistent in casting his vote for death, and all the

accused, with the one exception of an old gardener, were sent to the

scaffold.

The following week Évariste and his section mowed down sixty-three

heads--forty-five men and eighteen women.

The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal drew no distinction between men

and women, in this following a principle as old as justice itself. True,

the President Montané, touched by the bravery and beauty of Charlotte

Corday, had tried to save her by paltering with the procedure of the

trial and had thereby lost his seat, but women as a rule were shown no

favour under examination, in strict accordance with the rule common to

all the tribunals. The jurors feared them, distrusting their artful

ways, their aptitude for deception, their powers of seduction. They were

the match of men in resolution, and this invited the Tribunal to treat

them in the same way. The majority of those who sat in judgment, men of

normal sensuality or sensual on occasion, were in no wise affected by

the fact that the prisoner was a woman. They condemned or acquitted them

as their conscience, their zeal, their love, lukewarm or vehement, for

the Republic dictated. Almost always they appeared before the court with

their hair carefully dressed and attired with as much elegance as the

unhappy conditions allowed. But few of them were young and still fewer

pretty. Confinement and suspense had blighted them, the harsh light of

the hall betrayed their weariness and the anguish they had endured,

beating down on faded lids, blotched and pimpled cheeks, white, drawn

lips. Nevertheless, the fatal chair more than once held a young girl,

lovely in her pallor, while a shadow of the tomb veiled her eyes and

made her beauty the more seductive. That the sight had the power to melt

some jurymen and irritate others, who should deny? That, in the secret

depraved heart of him, one of these magistrates may have pried into the

most sacred intimacies of the fair body that was to his morbid fancy at

the same moment a living and a dead woman's, and that, gloating over

voluptuous and ghoulish imaginings he may have found an atrocious

pleasure in giving over to the headsman those dainty, desirable

limbs,--this is perhaps a thing better left unsaid, but one which no one

can deem impossible who knows what men are. Évariste Gamelin, cold and

pedantic in his artistic creed, could see no beauty but in the Antique;

he admired beauty, but it hardly stirred his senses. His classical taste

was so severe he rarely found a woman to his liking; he was as

insensible to the charms of a pretty face as he was to Fragonard's

colouring and Boucher's drawing. He had never known desire save under

the form of deep passion.

Like the majority of his colleagues in the Tribunal, he thought women

more dangerous than men. He hated the _ci-devant_ princesses, the

creatures he pictured to himself in his horrified dreams in company with

Elisabeth and _the Austrian_ weaving plots to assassinate good patriots;

he even hated all those fair mistresses of financiers, philosophers, and

men of letters whose only crime was having enjoyed the pleasures of the

senses and the mind and lived at a time when it was sweet to live. He

hated them without admitting the feeling to himself, and when he had one

before him at the bar, he condemned her out of pique, convinced all the

while that he was dooming her justly and rightly for the public good.

His sense of honour, his manly modesty, his cold, calculated wisdom, his

devotion to the State, his virtues in a word, pushed under the knife

heads that might well have moved men's pity.

But what is this, what is the meaning of this strange prodigy? Once the

difficulty was to find the guilty, to search them out in their lair, to

drag the confession of their crime from reluctant lips. Now, there is no

hunting with a great pack of sleuth-hounds, no pursuing a timid prey;

lo! from all sides come the victims to offer themselves a voluntary

sacrifice. Nobles, virgins, soldiers, courtesans, flock to the Tribunal,

dragging their condemnation from dilatory judges, claiming death as a

right which they are impatient to enjoy. Not enough the multitude with

which the zeal of the informers has crowded the prisons and which the

Public Prosecutor and his myrmidons are wearing out their lives in

haling before the Tribunal; punishment must likewise be provided for

those who refuse to wait. And how many others, prouder and more pressing

yet, begrudging their judges and headsmen their death, perish by their

own hand! The mania of killing is equalled by the mania to die. Here, in

the Conciergerie, is a young soldier, handsome, vigorous, beloved; he

leaves behind him in the prison an adorable mistress; she bade him "Live

for me!"--he will live neither for her nor love nor glory. He lights his

pipe with his act of accusation. And, a Republican, for he breathes

liberty through every pore, he turns Royalist that he may die. The

Tribunal tries its best to save him, but the accused proves the

stronger; judges and jury are forced to let him have his way.

Évariste's mind, naturally of an anxious, scrupulous cast, was filled to

overflowing through the lessons he learned at the Jacobins and the

contemplation of life with suspicions and alarms. At night, as he paced

the ill-lighted streets on his way to Élodie's, he fancied through every

cellar-grating he passed he caught a glimpse of a plate for printing off

forged assignats; in the dark recesses of the baker's and grocer's empty

shops he imagined storerooms bursting with provisions fraudulently held

back for a rise in prices; looking in at the glittering windows of the

eating-houses, he seemed to hear the talk of the speculators plotting

the ruin of the country as they drained bottles of Beaune and Chablis;

in the evil-smelling alleys he could see the very prostitutes trampling

underfoot the National cockade to the applause of elegant young

roisterers; everywhere he beheld conspirators and traitors. And he

thought: "Against so many foes, secret or declared, oh! Republic thou

hast but one succour; Saint Guillotine, save the fatherland!..."

Élodie would be waiting for him in her little blue chamber above the

_Amour peintre_. To let him know he might come in, she used to set on

the window-sill her little watering-can beside the pot of carnations.

Now he filled her with horror, he seemed like a monster to her; she was

afraid of him,--and she adored him. All the night, clinging together in

a frantic embrace, the bloody-minded lover and the amorous girl

exchanged in silence frenzied kisses.