After three months during which he had made a daily holocaust of
victims, illustrious or insignificant, to the fatherland, Évariste had a
case that interested him personally; there was one prisoner he made it
his special business to track down to death.
Ever since he had sat on the juror's bench, he had been eagerly
watching, among the crowd of culprits who appeared before him, for
Élodie's seducer; of this man he had elaborated in his busy fancy a
portrait, some details of which were accurate. He pictured him as young,
handsome, haughty, and felt convinced he had fled to England. He thought
he had discovered him in a young _émigré_ named Maubel, who, having come
back to France and been denounced by his host, had been arrested in an
inn at Passy; Fouquier-Tinville was in charge of the prosecution,--among
a thousand others. Letters had been found on him which the accusation
regarded as proofs of a plot concocted between Maubel and the agents of
Pitt, but which were in fact only letters written to the _émigré_ by a
banking-house in London which he had entrusted with certain funds.
Maubel, who was young and good-looking, seemed to be mainly occupied in
affairs of gallantry. His pocket-book afforded a clue to some
correspondence with Spain, then at war with France; but these
communications were really of a purely private nature, and if the court
of preliminary enquiry did not ignore the bill, it was only in virtue of
the maxim that justice should never be in too great a hurry to release a
prisoner.
Gamelin was handed a report of Maubel's first semi-private examination
and he was struck by what it revealed of the young man's character,
which he took to agree with what he believed to be that of Élodie's
betrayer. Thereafter he spent long hours in the private room of the
Clerk of the Court, poring eagerly over the papers relating to this
case. His suspicion received a remarkable confirmation on his
discovering in a note-book belonging to the _émigré_, but long out of
date, the address of the _Amour peintre_, in company, it is true, with
those of the _Green Monkey_, the _Dauphin's Head_, and several more
print and picture shops. But when he was informed that in this same
note-book had been found three or four petals of a red carnation
carefully wrapped in a piece of silk paper, remembering how the red
carnation was Élodie's favourite flower, the one she cultivated on her
window-sill, wore in her hair and used to give (he had reason to know)
as a love-token, Évariste's last doubts vanished. Being now convinced he
knew the facts, he resolved to question Élodie, though without letting
her know the circumstances that had led him to discover the culprit.
As he was climbing the stairs to his lodgings, he perceived even on the
lower landings a stifling smell of fruit, and on reaching the studio,
found Élodie helping the _citoyenne_ Gamelin to make quince preserve.
While the old housewife was kindling the stove and turning over in her
mind ways of saving the fuel and moist sugar without prejudicing the
quality of the preserves, the _citoyenne_ Blaise, seated in a
straw-bottomed chair, with an apron of brown holland and her lap full of
the golden fruit, was peeling the quinces, quartering and throwing them
into a shallow copper basin. The strings of her coif were thrown back
over her shoulders, the meshes of her black hair coiled above her moist
forehead; from her whole person breathed a domestic charm and an
intimate grace that induced gentle thoughts and voluptuous dreams of
tranquil pleasures.
Without stirring from her seat, she lifted her beautiful eyes, that
gleamed like molten gold, to her lover's face, and said:
"See, Évariste, we are working for you. We mean you to have a store of
delicious quince jelly to last you the winter; it will settle your
stomach and make your heart merry."
But Gamelin, stepping nearer, uttered a name in her ear:
"Jacques Maubel...."
At that moment Combalot the cobbler showed his red nose at the half-open
door. He had brought, along with some pairs of shoes he had re-heeled,
the bill for the repairs.
For fear of being taken for a bad citizen, he made a point of using the
new calendar. The _citoyenne_ Gamelin, who liked to see clearly what was
what in her accounts, was all astray among the _Fructidors_ and
_Vendémiaires_. She heaved a sigh.
"Jesus!" she complained, "they want to alter everything,--days, months,
seasons of the year, the sun and the moon! Lord God, Monsieur Combalot,
what ever is this pair of over-shoes down for the 8 Vendémiaire?"
"_Citoyenne_, just cast your eye over your almanac, and you'll get the
hang of it."
She took it down from the wall, glanced at it and immediately turning
her head another way.
"It hasn't a Christian look!" she cried in a shocked tone.
"Not only that, _citoyenne_," said the cobbler, "but now we have only
three Sundays in the month instead of four. And that's not all; we shall
soon have to change our ways of reckoning. There will be no more
farthings and half-farthings, everything will be regulated by distilled
water."
At the words the _citoyenne_ Gamelin, whose lips were trembling, threw
up her eyes to the ceiling and sighed out:
"They are going too far!"
And, while she was lost in lamentations, looking like the holy women in
a wayside calvary, a bad coal that had caught alight in the fire when
her attention was diverted, began to fill the studio with a poisonous
smother which, added to the stifling smell of quinces, was like to make
the air unbreathable.
Élodie complained that her throat was tickling her and begged to have
the window opened. But, directly the _citoyen_ Combalot had taken his
leave and the _citoyenne_ Gamelin had gone back to her stove, Évariste
repeated the same name in the girl's ear:
"Jacques Maubel," he reiterated.
She looked up at him in some surprise, and very quietly, still going on
cutting a quince in quarters:
"Well!... Jacques Maubel...?"
"He is the man."
"The man! what man?"
"You once gave him a red carnation."
She declared she did not understand and asked him to explain himself.
"That aristocrat! that _émigré_! that scoundrel!"
She shrugged her shoulders, and denied with the most natural air that
she had never known a Jacques Maubel.
It was true; she _had_ never known anyone of the name.
She denied she had ever given red carnations to anybody but Évariste;
but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good.
He had little experience of women and was far from having fully fathomed
Élodie's character; still, he deemed her quite capable of cajoling and
deceiving a cleverer man than himself.
"Why deny?" he asked. "I know all."
Again she asseverated she had never known anybody called Maubel. And,
having done peeling the quinces, she asked for a basin of water, because
her fingers were sticky. This Gamelin brought her, and, as she washed
her hands, she repeated her denials.
Again he repeated that he knew, and this time she made no reply.
She did not guess the object of her lover's question and she was a
thousand miles from suspecting that this Maubel, whom she had never
heard spoken of before, was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal;
she could make nothing of the suspicions with which she was assailed,
but she knew them to be unfounded. For this reason, having very little
hope of dissipating them, she had very little wish to do so either. She
ceased to deny having known Maubel, preferring to leave her jealous
lover to go astray on a false trail, when from one moment to the next,
the smallest incident might start him on the right road. Her little
lawyer's clerk of former days, now grown into a patriot dragoon and
lady-killer, had quarrelled by now with his aristocratic mistress.
Whenever he met Élodie in the street, he would gaze at her with a glance
that seemed to say:
"Come, my beauty! I feel sure I am going to forgive you for having
betrayed you, and I am really quite ready to take you back into favour."
She made no further attempt therefore to cure what she called her
lover's crotchets, and Gamelin remained firm in the conviction that
Jacques Maubel was Élodie's seducer.
* * * * *
Through the days that ensued the Tribunal devoted its undivided
attention to the task of crushing Federalism, which, like a hydra, had
threatened to devour Liberty. They were busy days; and the jurors, worn
out with fatigue, despatched with the utmost possible expedition the
case of the woman Roland, instigator and accomplice of the crimes of the
Brissotin faction.
Meantime Gamelin spent every morning at the Courts to press on Maubel's
trial. Some important pieces of evidence were to be found at Bordeaux;
he insisted on a Commissioner being sent to ride post to fetch them.
They arrived at last. The deputy of the Public Prosecutor read them,
pulled a face and told Évariste:
"It is not good for much, your new evidence! there is nothing in it!
mere fiddle-faddle.... If only it was certain that this _ci-devant_
Comte de Maubel ever really emigrated...!"
In the end Gamelin succeeded. Young Maubel was served with his act of
accusation and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 19
Brumaire.
From the first opening of the sitting the President showed the gloomy
and dreadful face he took care to assume for the hearing of cases where
the evidence was weak. The Deputy Prosecutor stroked his chin with the
feather of his pen and affected the serenity of a conscience at ease.
The Clerk read the act of accusation; it was the hollowest sham the
Court had ever heard so far.
The President asked the accused if he had not been aware of the laws
passed against the _émigrés_.
"I was aware of them and I observed them," answered Maubel, "and I left
France provided with passports in proper form."
As to the reasons for his journey to England and his return to France he
had satisfactory explanations to offer. His face was pleasant, with a
look of frankness and confidence that was agreeable. The women in the
galleries looked at the young man with a favourable eye. The prosecution
maintained that he had made a stay in Spain at the time that Nation was
at war with France; he averred he had never left Bayonne at that period.
One point alone remained obscure. Among the papers he had thrown in the
fire at the time of his arrest, and of which only fragments had been
found, some words in Spanish had been deciphered and the name of
"Nieves."
On this subject Jacques Maubel refused to give the explanations
demanded; and, when the President told him that it was in the accused's
own interest to clear up the point, he answered that a man ought not
always to do what his own interest requires.
Gamelin only thought of convicting Maubel of a crime; three times over
he pressed the President to ask the accused if he could explain about
the carnation the dried petals of which he hoarded so carefully in his
pocket-book.
Maubel replied that he did not consider himself obliged to answer a
question that had no concern with the case at law, as no letter had been
found concealed in the flower.
The jury retired to the hall of deliberations, favourably impressed
towards the young man whose mysterious conduct appeared chiefly
connected with a lover's secrets. This time the good patriots, the
purest of the pure themselves, would gladly have voted for acquittal.
One of them, a _ci-devant_ noble, who had given pledges to the
Revolution, said:
"Is it his birth they bring up against him? I, too, I have had the
misfortune to be born in the aristocracy."
"Yes, but you have left them," retorted Gamelin, "and he has not."
And he spoke with such vehemence against this conspirator, this emissary
of Pitt, this accomplice of Coburg, who had climbed the mountains and
sailed the seas to stir up enemies to Liberty, he demanded the traitor's
condemnation in such burning words, that he awoke the never-resting
suspicions, the old stern temper of the patriot jury.
One of them told him cynically:
"There are services that cannot well be refused between colleagues."
The verdict of death was recorded by a majority of one.
The condemned man heard his sentence with a quiet smile. His eyes, which
had been gazing unconcernedly about the hall, as they fell on Gamelin's
face, took on an expression of unspeakable contempt.
No one applauded the decision of the court.
Jacques Maubel was taken back to the Conciergerie; here he wrote a
letter while he waited the hour of execution, which was to take place
the same evening, by torchlight:
_My dear sister,--The tribunal sends me to the scaffold, affording
me the only joy I have been able to appreciate since the death of
my adored Nieves. They have taken from me the only relic I had left
of her, a pomegranate flower, which they called, I cannot tell why,
a carnation.
I loved the arts; at Paris, in happier times, I made a collection
of paintings and engravings, which are now in a sure place, and
which will be delivered to you so soon as this is possible. I pray
you, dear sister, to keep them in memory of me._
He cut a lock of his hair, enclosed it in the letter, which he folded
and wrote outside:
_To the citoyenne Clémence Dezeimeries, née Maubel,