A mountain has suddenly sprung up in the garden of the Tuileries. Under
a cloudless sky, Maximilien heads the procession of his colleagues in a
blue coat and yellow breeches, carrying in his hand a bouquet of
wheatears, cornflowers and poppies. He ascends the mountain and
proclaims the God of Jean-Jacques to the Republic, which hears and
weeps. Oh purity! oh sweetness! oh faith! oh antique simplicity! oh
tears of pity! oh fertilizing dew! oh clemency! oh human fraternity!
In vain Atheism still lifts its hideous face; Maximilien grasps a torch;
flames devour the monster and Wisdom appears, with one hand pointing to
the sky, in the other holding a crown of stars.
On the platform raised against the façade of the Tuileries, Évariste,
standing amid a throng of deeply-stirred spectators, sheds tears of joy
and renders thanks to God. An era of universal felicity opens before his
eyes.
He sighs:
"At last we shall be happy, pure, innocent, if the scoundrels suffer
it."
Alas! the scoundrels have not suffered it. There must be more
executions; more torrents of tainted blood must be shed. Three days
after the festival celebrating the new alliance and the reconciliation
of heaven and earth, the Convention promulgates the Law of Prairial
which suppresses, with a sort of ferocious good-nature, all the
traditional forms of Law, whatever has been devised since the time of
the Roman jurisconsults for the safeguarding of innocence under
suspicion. No more sifting of evidence, no more questioning of the
accused, no more witnesses, no more counsel for the defence; love of the
fatherland supplies everything that is needful. The prisoner, who bears
locked up in his bosom his guilt or innocence, passes without a word
allowed before the patriot jury, and it is in this brief moment they
must unravel his case, often complicated and obscure. How is justice
possible? How distinguish in an instant between the honest man and the
villain, the patriot and the enemy of the fatherland...?
Disconcerted for the moment, Gamelin quickly learned his new duties and
accommodated himself to his new functions. He recognized that this
curtailment of formalities was genuinely characteristic of the new
justice, at once salutary and terrifying, the administrators of which
were no longer ermined pedants leisurely weighing the _pros_ and
_contras_ in their Gothic balances, but good sansculottes judging by
inspiration and seeing the whole truth in a flash. When guarantees and
precautions would have undone everything, the impulses of an upright
heart saved the situation. We must follow the promptings of Nature, the
good mother who never deceives; the heart must teach us to do judgment,
and Gamelin made invocation to the manes of Jean-Jacques:
"Man of virtue, inspire me with the love of men, the ardent desire to
regenerate humankind!"
His colleagues, for the most part, felt with him. They were, first and
foremost, simple people; and when the forms of law were simplified,
they felt more comfortable. Justice thus abbreviated satisfied them; the
pace was quickened, and no obstacles were left to fret them. They
limited themselves to an inquiry into the opinions of the accused, not
conceiving it possible that anyone could think differently from
themselves except in pure perversity. Believing themselves the exclusive
possessors of truth, wisdom, the quintessence of good, they attributed
to their opponents nothing but error and evil. They felt themselves
all-powerful; they envisaged God.
They saw God, these jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Supreme
Being, acknowledged by Maximilien, flooded them with His flames of
light. They loved, they believed.
The chair of the accused had been replaced by a vast platform able to
accommodate fifty persons; the court only dealt with batches now. The
Public Prosecutor would often confound under the same charge or
implicate as accomplices individuals who met each other for the first
time before the Tribunal. The latter, taking advantage of the terrible
facilities accorded by the law of Prairial, sat in judgment on those
supposed prison plots which, coming after the proscriptions of the
Dantonists and the Commune, were made to seem their outcome by the
insinuations of cunning adversaries. In fact, to let the world
appreciate the two essential characteristics of a conspiracy fomented by
foreign gold against the Republic,--to wit inopportune moderation on the
one hand and self-interested excess of zeal on the other, they had
united in the same condemnation two very different women, the widow of
Camille Desmoulins, poor lovable Lucille, and the widow of the Hébertist
Momoro, goddess of a day and jolly companion all her life. Both, to
make the analogy complete, had been shut up in the same prison, where
they had mingled their tears on the same bench; both, to round off the
resemblance, had climbed the scaffold. Too ingenious the symbol,--a
masterpiece of equilibrium, conceived doubtless by a lawyer's brain, and
the honour of which was given to Maximilien. This representative of the
people was accredited with every eventuality, happy or unhappy, that
came about in the Republic, every change that was effected in the laws,
in manners and morals, the very course of the seasons, the harvests, the
incidence of epidemics. Unjust of course, but not unmerited the
injustice, for indeed the man, the little, spruce, cat-faced dandy, was
all powerful with the people....
That day the Tribunal was clearing off a batch of prisoners involved in
the great plot, thirty or more conspirators from the Luxembourg,
submissive enough in gaol, but Royalists or Federalists of the most
pronounced type. The prosecution relied almost entirely on the evidence
of a single informer. The jurors did not know one word of the
matter,--not so much as the conspirators' names. Gamelin, casting his
eye over the prisoners' bench, recognized Fortuné Chassagne among the
accused. Julie's lover, pale-faced and emaciated by long confinement and
his features showing coarser in the glare of light that flooded the
hall, still retained traces of his old grace and proud bearing. His eyes
met Gamelin's and filled with scorn.
Gamelin, possessed by a calm fury, rose, asked leave to speak, and,
fixing his eyes on the bust of Roman Brutus, which looked down on the
Tribunal:
"_Citoyen_ President," he said, "although there may exist between one of
the accused and myself ties which, if they were made public, would be
ties of married kinship, I hereby declare I do not decline to act. The
two Bruti did not decline their duty, when for the salvation of the
state and the cause of freedom, the one had to condemn a son, the other
to strike down an adoptive father."
He resumed his seat.
"A fine scoundrel that," muttered Chassagne between his teeth.
The public remained cold, whether because it was tired of high-flown
characters, or thinking that Gamelin had triumphed too easily over his
feelings of family affection.
"_Citoyen_ Gamelin," said the President, "by the terms of the law, every
refusal must be formulated in writing within the twenty-four hours
preceding the opening of the trial. In any case, you have no reason to
refuse; a patriot jury is superior to human passions."
Each prisoner was questioned for three or four minutes, the examination
resulting in a verdict of death in every instance. The jurors voted
without a word said, by a nod of the head or by exclamation. When
Gamelin's turn came to pronounce his opinion:
"All the accused," he declared, "are convicted, and the law is
explicit."
As he was descending the stairway of the Palais de Justice, a young man
dressed in a bottle-green box-coat, and who looked seventeen or eighteen
years of age, stopped him abruptly as he went by. The lad wore a round
hat, tilted on the back of his head, the brim framing his fine pale face
in a dark aureole. Facing the juror, in a terrible voice vibrating with
passion and despair:
"Villain, monster, murderer!" he screamed. "Strike me, coward! I am a
woman! Have me arrested, have me guillotined, Cain! I am your
sister,"--and Julie spat in his face.
The throng of _tricoteuses_ and _sansculottes_ was relaxing by this time
in its Revolutionary vigilance; its civic zeal had largely cooled;
Gamelin and his assailant found themselves the centre of nothing worse
than uproar and confusion. Julie fought a way through the press and
disappeared in the dark.