While the Père Longuemare and the girl Athenaïs were examined at the
Section, Brotteaux was led off between two gendarmes to the Luxembourg,
where the door-keeper refused to admit him, declaring he had no room
left. The old financier was next taken to the Conciergerie and brought
into the Gaoler's office, quite a small room, divided in two by a glazed
partition. While the clerk was inscribing his name in the prison
registers, Brotteaux could see through the panes two men lying each on a
tattered mattress, both as still as death and with glazed eyes that
seemed to see nothing. Plates, bottles and bits of broken bread and meat
littered the floor round them. They were prisoners condemned to death
and waiting for the cart to arrive.
The _ci-devant_ Monsieur des Ilettes was thrust into a dungeon, where by
the light of a lantern he could just make out two figures stretched on
the ground, one savage-looking and hideously mutilated, the other
graceful and pleasing. The two prisoners offered him a share of their
straw, and this, rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, was better
than having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement.
Brotteaux sank down on a bench in the pestiferous darkness and sat
there, his head against the wall, speechless and motionless. So intense
was his agony of mind he would have dashed out his brains against the
stones if he had had the strength. He could not breathe. His eyes swam,
and a long-drawn murmur, as soft as silence, filled his ears. He felt
his whole being bathed in a delicious semi-consciousness. For one
incomparable moment everything was harmony, serenity, light, fragrance,
sweetness. Then he ceased to know or feel anything.
When he returned to himself, the first notion that entered his head was
to regret his coma and, a philosopher even in the stupor of despair, he
reflected how he had had to plunge to the depths of an underground
dungeon, there to await execution, to enjoy the most exquisite of all
voluptuous sensations he had ever tasted. He tried hard to lose
consciousness again, but without success; on the contrary, little by
little he felt the poisonous air of the dungeon fill his lungs and bring
with it, along with the fever of life, a full consciousness of his
intolerable wretchedness.
Meantime his two companions regarded his silence as a cruel personal
insult. Brotteaux, who was of a sociable turn, endeavoured to satisfy
their curiosity; but when they discovered he was only what they called
"a political," one of the mild sort whose crime was only a matter of
words and opinions, they lost all respect and sympathy for him. The
offences charged against these two prisoners had more grit; the older of
the men was a murderer, the other had been manufacturing forged
assignats. Both made the best of their situation and even found some
alleviations in it. Brotteaux's thoughts suddenly turned to the world
above him,--how over his head all was noise and bustle, light and life,
while the pretty shopwomen in the Palais de Justice behind their
counters, loaded with perfumery and pretty knicknacks, smiled on their
customers, happy people free to go where they pleased,--and the picture
doubled his despair.
Night fell, unmarked in the darkness and silence of the dungeon, but yet
gloomy and oppressive. One leg extended on his bench and his back
propped against the wall, Brotteaux fell into a doze. And lo! he saw
himself seated at the foot of a leafy beech, in which the birds were
singing; the setting sun bathed the river in liquid fire and the clouds
were edged with purple. The night wore through. A burning fever consumed
him and he greedily drained his pitcher to the dregs, but the fetid
water only increased his distress.
Next day the gaoler who brought the food promised Brotteaux, if he could
afford the cost, to give him the privileges of a prisoner who pays for
his accommodation, so soon as there should be room, and it was not
likely to be long first. And so it turned out; two days later he invited
the old financier to leave his dungeon. At every step he took upwards,
Brotteaux felt life and vigour coming back to him, and when he saw a
room with a red-tiled floor and in it a bed of sacking covered with a
dingy woollen counterpane, he wept for joy. The gilded bed carved with
doves billing and cooing that he had once had made for the prettiest of
the dancers at the Opera had not seemed so desirable or promised him
such delights.
This bed of sacking was in a large hall, very fairly clean, which held
seventeen others like it, separated by high partitions of planks. The
company that occupied these quarters, composed of ex-nobles, tradesmen,
bankers, working-men, hit the old publican's taste well enough, for he
could accommodate himself to persons of all qualities. He noticed that
these, cut off like himself from every opportunity of pleasure and
foredoomed to perish at the hand of the executioner, were of a very
merry humour and showed a marked taste for wit and raillery. His bent
was to think lightly of mankind, so he attributed the high spirits of
his companions to the frivolity of their minds, which prevented them
from looking seriously at their situation. Moreover, he was strengthened
in his opinion by observing how the more intelligent among them were
profoundly sad. He remarked before long, that, for the most part, wine
and brandy supplied the inspiration of a gaiety that betrayed its source
by its violent and sometimes almost insane character. They did not all
possess courage; but all made a display of it. This caused Brotteaux no
surprise; he was well aware how men will readily enough avow cruelty,
passion, even avarice, but never cowardice, because such an admission
would bring them, among savages and even in civilized society, into
mortal danger. That is the reason, he reflected, why all nations are
nations of heroes and all armies are made up of brave men only.
More potent, even, than wine and brandy were the rattle of weapons and
keys, the clash of locks and bolts, the cry of sentries, the stamping of
feet at the door of the Tribunal, to intoxicate the prisoners and fill
their minds with melancholy, insanity, or frenzy. Some there were who
cut their throat with a razor or threw themselves from a window.
Brotteaux had been living for three days in these privileged quarters
when he learned through the turnkey that the Père Longuemare was
languishing on the rotten verminous straw of the common prison with the
thieves and murderers. He had him put on paying terms in the same room
as himself, where a bed had fallen vacant. Having promised to pay for
the monk, the old publican, who had no large sum of money about him,
struck out the idea of making portraits at a crown apiece. By the help
of a gaoler, he procured a supply of small black frames in which to put
pretty little designs in hair which he executed with considerable
cleverness. These productions sold well, being highly appreciated among
people whose thoughts were set on leaving souvenirs to their friends.
The Père Longuemare kept a good heart and a high spirit. While waiting
his summons to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he was
preparing his defence. Drawing no distinction between his own case and
that of the Church, he promised himself to expose to his judges the
disorders and scandals to which the Spouse of Christ was exposed by the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy; he proposed to depict the eldest
daughter of the Church waging sacrilegious war upon the Pope, the French
clergy robbed, outraged, subjected to the odious domination of laics,
the regulars, Christ's true army, despoiled and scattered. He cited St.
Gregory the Great and St. Irenæus, quoted numerous articles of the Canon
Law and whole paragraphs from the Decretals.
All day long he sat scribbling on his knees, at the foot of his bed,
dipping stumps of pens worn to the feathers in ink, soot,
coffee-grounds, covering with illegible writing candle-wrappers,
packing-paper, newspapers, playing cards, even thinking of using his
shirt for the same purpose after starching it. Leaf by leaf the pile
grew; pointing to this mass of undecipherable scrawls, he would say:
"Ah! when I appear before my judges, I will inundate them with light."
Another day, casting a look of satisfaction on his defence, which grew
bulkier day by day, and thinking of these magistrates he was burning to
confound, he cried:
"I wouldn't like to be in _their_ shoes!"
The prisoners whom fate had brought together in this prison-room were
Royalists or Federalists, there was even a Jacobin amongst the rest;
they held widely different views as to the right way of conducting the
business of the State, but not one of them all preserved the smallest
vestige of Christian beliefs. Feuillants, Constitutionals, Girondists,
all, like Brotteaux, considered the Christians' God a very bad thing for
themselves and an excellent one for the people; as for the Jacobins,
they were for installing in the place of Jehovah a Jacobin god, anxious
to refer the dispensation of Jacobinism on earth to a higher source. But
as they could not conceive, either one or the other, of anybody being so
absurd as to believe in any revealed religion, seeing that the Père
Longuemare was no fool, they took him to be a knave. By way, no doubt,
of preparing for martyrdom, he made confession of faith at every
opportunity, and the more sincerity he displayed, the more like an
impostor he seemed.
In vain Brotteaux stood surety for the monk's good faith; Brotteaux
himself was reputed to believe only a part of what he said. His ideas
were too singular not to appear affected and satisfied nobody entirely.
He dubbed Jean-Jacques a dull, paltry rascal. Voltaire, on the other
hand, he accounted among the divinely-gifted men, though not on the
same level as the amiable Helvétius, or Diderot, or the Baron d'Holbach.
In his opinion the greatest genius of the century was Boulanger. He also
thought highly of the astronomer Lalande and of Dupuis, author of a
_Memoir on the origin of the Constellations_.
The wits of the company made a thousand jokes at the poor Barnabite's
expense, the point of which he never saw; his simplicity saved him from
every pitfall. To drown the suspense that racked them and escape the
torments of idleness, the prisoners played at draughts, cards and
backgammon. No instrument of music was allowed. After supper they would
sing, or recite verses. Voltaire's _La Pucelle_ brought a little
cheerfulness to these aching hearts, and the company never wearied of
hearing the telling passages repeated. But, unable to distract their
thoughts from the appalling vision that always loomed before their
mind's eye, they strove sometimes to make a diversion of it, and in the
chamber of the eighteen beds, before turning in for the night, they
would play the game of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The parts were
distributed according to tastes and aptitudes. While some represented
the judges and prosecutor, others were the accused or the witnesses,
others again the headsman and his men. The trials invariably wound up
with the execution of the condemned, who were laid at full length on a
bed, the neck underneath a plank. The scene then shifted to the infernal
regions. The most agile of the troop, wrapped in white sheets, played
spectres. There was a young _avocat_ from Bordeaux, a man named Dubosc,
short, dark, one-eyed, humpbacked, bandy-legged, the very black deuce in
person, who used to come all horned and hoofed, to drag the Père
Longuemare feet first out of his bed, announcing to the culprit that he
was condemned to the everlasting flames of hell and doomed past
redemption for having made of the Creator of the Universe a jealous
being, a blockhead, and a bully, an enemy of human happiness and love.
"Ah! ha! ha!" the devil would scream discordantly, "so you taught, you
old bonze, that God delights to see His creatures languish in contrition
and deny themselves His dearest gifts. Impostor, hypocrite, sneak, sit
on nails and eat egg-shells for all eternity!"
The Père Longuemare, for all reply, would observe that the speech showed
the philosopher's cloven hoof behind the devil's and that the meanest
imp of hell would never have talked such foolishness, having at least
rubbed shoulders with Theology and for certain being less ignorant than
an Encyclopædist.
But when the Girondist _avocat_ called him a Capuchin, he turned scarlet
with anger and declared that a man incapable of distinguishing a
Barnabite from a Franciscan was too blind to see a fly in milk.
The Revolutionary Tribunal was always draining the prisons, which the
Committees were as unceasingly replenishing; in three months the chamber
of the eighteen was half full of new faces. The Père Longuemare lost his
tormentor. The _avocat_ Dubosc was haled before the Revolutionary
Tribunal and condemned to death as a Federalist and for having conspired
against the unity of the Republic. On leaving the court, he returned, as
the prisoners always did, by a corridor that ran through the prison and
opened on the room he had enlivened for three months with his gaiety.
As he made his farewells to his companions, he maintained the same light
tone and cheerful air that were habitual with him.
"Forgive me, sir," he said to the Père Longuemare, "for having hauled
you feet foremost from your bed. I will never do it again."
Then, turning to old Brotteaux:
"Good-bye, I go before you into the land of nowhere. I gladly return to
Nature the atoms of my composition, only hoping she will make a better
use of them for the future, for it must be owned she did not make much
of a job of me."
So he went on his way to the gaoler's room, leaving Brotteaux sorrowful
and the Père Longuemare trembling and green as a leaf, more dead than
alive to see the impious wretch laugh on the brink of the abyss.
When Germinal brought back the bright days, Brotteaux, who was of an
ardent temperament, tramped down several times every day to the
courtyard giving on the women's quarters, near the fountain where the
female prisoners used to come of a morning to wash their linen. An iron
railing separated the two barracks; but the bars were not so close
together as to hinder hands joining and lips meeting. Under the kindly
shade of night loving couples would press against the obstacle. At such
times Brotteaux would retire discreetly to the staircase and, sitting on
a step, would draw from the pocket of his plum-coloured surtout his
little Lucretius and read, by the light of a lantern, some of the
author's sternly consolatory maxims: "_Sic ubi non erimus_.... When we
shall have ceased to be, nothing will have power to move us, not even
the heavens and earth and sea confounding their shattered
fragments...." But, in the act of enjoying his exalted wisdom, Brotteaux
would find himself envying the Barnabite this craze that veiled the
universe from his eyes.
Month by month terror grew more intense. Every night the tipsy gaolers,
their watch-dogs at their heels, would march from cell to cell,
delivering acts of accusation, howling out names they mutilated, waking
the prisoners and for twenty victims marked on their list terrifying two
hundred. Along these corridors, reeking with bloody memories, passed
every day, without a murmur, twenty, thirty, fifty condemned prisoners,
old men, women, young men and maidens, so widely different in rank and
character and opinion that the question rose involuntarily to the
lips,--had they not been chosen by lot?
And the card playing went on, the Burgundy drinking, the making of
plans, the assignations for after dark at the rails. The company, new
almost to a man, now consisted in great part of "extremists" and
"irreconcilables." But still the room of the eighteen beds remained the
home of elegance and good breeding; barring two prisoners recently
transferred from the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie and added to the
company, by whom they were suspected of being spies, the _citoyens_
Navette and Bellier by name, there were none but honest folk there who
reposed a mutual trust in each other. Glass in hand, the victories of
the Republic were celebrated by all. Amongst the rest were several
poets, as there always are in any gathering of people with nothing to
do. The most accomplished composed odes on the triumphs of the Army of
the Rhine, which they recited with much mouthing. They were
uproariously applauded. Brotteaux was the only lukewarm admirer of the
victors and the bards who sang their victories.
"Since Homer began it," he observed one day, "it has always been a mania
with poets, this extolling the powers of fighting-men. War is not an
art, and luck alone decides the fate of battles. With two generals, both
blockheads, face to face, one of them must inevitably be victorious.
Wait till some day one of these warriors you make gods of swallows you
all up like the stork in the fable who gobbles up the frogs. Ah! then he
would be really and truly a God! For you can always tell the gods by
their appetite."
Brotteaux's head had never been turned by the glamour of arms. He felt
no triumph at the victories of the Republic, which he had foreseen. He
did not like the new régime, which military success confirmed. He was a
malcontent. Another would have been the same for less cause.
One morning it was announced that the Commissaries of the Committee of
General Security were going to institute a search in the prisoners'
quarters, that they would seize assignats, articles of gold and silver,
knives, scissors; that similar proceedings had been taken at the
Luxembourg, where letters, papers, and books had been taken possession
of.
Thereupon everyone tried to think of some hiding place in which to
secure whatever he held most precious. The Père Longuemare carried away
his defence in armfuls to a rain-gutter, while Brotteaux slipped his
Lucretius among the ashes on the hearth.
When the Commissaries, wearing tricolour ribands at their necks,
arrived to carry out their perquisition, they found scarcely anything
but such trifles as it had been deemed judicious to let them discover.
On their departure, the Père Longuemare ran to his rain-pipe and rescued
as much of his defence as wind and water had spared. Brotteaux pulled
out his Lucretius from the fireplace all black with soot.
"Let us make the best of the present," he thought, "for I augur from
sundry tokens that our time is straitly measured from henceforth."
One soft night in Prairial, while over the prison yard the moon riding
high in a pale sky showed her two silver horns, the ex-financier, who,
as his way was, sat reading Lucretius on a step of the stone stairs,
heard a voice call him, a woman's voice, a delightful voice, which he
did not know. He went down into the court and saw behind the railing a
form which he recognized as little as he did the voice, but which
reminded him, in its half-seen fascinating outlines, of all the women he
had loved. A flood of silvery blue moonlight fell on it. Next instant
Brotteaux recognized the pretty actress of the Rue Feydeau, Rose
Thévenin.
"You here, my child! It is a joy to see you, but it stabs my heart.
Since when have you been here, and why?"
"Since yesterday,"--and she added very low:
"I have been denounced as a Royalist. They accuse me of conspiring to
set free the Queen. Knowing you were here, I tried at once to see you.
Listen to me, dear friend ... you will let me call you so?... I know
people in power; I have sympathizers, I am sure of it, on the Committee
of Public Safety itself. I will set my friends to work; they will
deliver me, and _I_ will deliver you."
But Brotteaux in a voice that took on an accent of urgency:
"By everything you hold dear, my child, do nothing of the sort! Do not
write, do not petition; ask nothing of anybody, I conjure you, let
yourself be forgotten."
As she appeared unconvinced by what he said, he went on more
beseechingly still:
"Not a word, Rose, let them forget you; there lies safety. Anything your
friends might attempt would only hasten your undoing. Time is
everything; only a short delay, a very short one, I hope, is needed to
save you.... Above all, never try to melt the judges, the jurors, a
Gamelin. They are not men, they are things; there is no arguing with
things. Let them forget you; if you take my advice, sweetheart, I shall
die happy, happy to have saved your life."
She answered:
"I will do as you say.... Never talk of dying...."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"My life is ended, my child. Do you live and be happy."
She took his hands and laid them on her bosom:
"Hear what I say, dear friend.... I have only seen you once for a day,
and yet you are not indifferent to me. And if what I am going to tell
you can renew your attachment to life, oh! believe my promise,--I will
be for you ... whatever you shall wish me to be."
And they exchanged a kiss on the mouth through the bars.