On the 10th, when Évariste, after a fevered night passed on the
pallet-bed of a dungeon, awoke with a start of indescribable horror,
Paris was smiling in the sunshine in all her beauty and immensity;
new-born hope filled the prisoners' hearts; tradesmen were blithely
opening their shops, citizens felt themselves richer, young men happier,
women more beautiful, for the fall of Robespierre. Only a handful of
Jacobins, a few _Constitutional_ priests and a few old women trembled to
see the Government pass into the hands of the evil-minded and corrupt.
Delegates from the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Public Prosecutor and two
judges, were on their way to the Convention to congratulate it on having
put an end to the plots. By decree of the Assembly the scaffold was
again to be set up in the Place de la Révolution. They wanted the
wealthy, the fashionable, the pretty women to see, without putting
themselves about, the execution of Robespierre, which was to take place
that same day. The Dictator and his accomplices were outlawed; it only
needed their identity to be verified by two municipal officers for the
Tribunal to hand them over immediately to the executioner. But a
difficulty arose; the verifications could not be made in legal form, the
Commune as a body having been put outside the pale of law. The Assembly
authorized identification by ordinary witnesses.
The triumvirs were haled to death, with their chief accomplices, amidst
shouts of joy and fury, imprecations, laughter and dances.
The next day Évariste, who had recovered some strength and could almost
stand on his legs, was taken from his cell, brought before the Tribunal,
and placed on the platform where so many victims, illustrious or
obscure, had sat in succession. Now it groaned under the weight of
seventy individuals, the majority members of the Commune, some jurors,
like Gamelin, outlawed like him. Again he saw the jury-bench, the seat
where he had been accustomed to loll, the place where he had terrorized
unhappy prisoners, where he had affronted the scornful eyes of Jacques
Maubel and Maurice Brotteaux, the appealing glances of the _citoyenne_
Rochemaure, who had got him his post as juryman and whom he had
recompensed with a sentence of death. Again he saw, looking down on the
daïs where the judges sat in three mahogany armchairs, covered in red
Utrecht velvet, the busts of Chalier and Marat and that bust of Brutus
which he had one day apostrophized. Nothing was altered, neither the
axes, the fasces, the red caps of Liberty on the wall-paper, nor the
insults shouted by the _tricoteuses_ in the galleries to those about to
die, nor yet the soul of Fouquier-Tinville, hard-headed, painstaking,
zealously turning over his murderous papers, and, in his character of
perfect magistrate, sending his friends of yesterday to the scaffold.
The _citoyens_ Remacle, tailor and door-keeper, and Dupont senior,
joiner, of the Place de Thionville, member of the Committee of
Surveillance of the Section du Pont-Neuf, identified Gamelin (Évariste),
painter, ex-juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal, ex-member of the
Council General of the Commune. For their services they received an
assignat of a hundred _sols_ from the funds of the Section; but, having
been neighbours and friends of the outlaw, they found it embarrassing to
meet his eye. Anyhow, it was a hot day; they were thirsty and in a hurry
to be off and drink a glass of wine.
Gamelin found difficulty in mounting the tumbril; he had lost a great
deal of blood and his wounds pained him cruelly. The driver whipped up
his jade and the procession got under way amid a storm of hooting.
Some women recognized Gamelin and yelled:
"Go your ways, drinker of blood! murderer at eighteen francs a day!...
He doesn't laugh now; look how pale he is, the coward!"
They were the same women who used in other days to insult conspirators
and aristocrats, extremists and moderates, all the victims sent by
Gamelin and his colleagues to the guillotine.
The cart turned into the Quai des Morfondus, made slowly for the
Pont-Neuf and the Rue de la Monnaie; its destination was the Place de la
Révolution and Robespierre's scaffold. The horse was lame; every other
minute the driver's whip whistled about its ears. The crowd of
spectators, a merry, excited crowd, delayed the progress of the escort,
fraternizing with the gendarmes, who pulled in their horses to a walk.
At the corner of the Rue Honoré, the insults were redoubled. Parties of
young men, at table in the fashionable restaurateurs' rooms on the
mezzanine floor, ran to the windows, napkin in hand, and howled:
"Cannibals, man-eaters, vampires!"
The cart having plunged into a heap of refuse that had not been removed
during the two days of civil disorder, the gilded youth screamed with
delight:
"The waggon's mired.... Hurrah! The Jacobins in the jakes!"
Gamelin was thinking, and truth seemed to dawn on him.
"I die justly," he reflected. "It is just we should receive these
outrages cast at the Republic, for we should have safeguarded her
against them. We have been weak; we have been guilty of supineness. We
have betrayed the Republic. We have earned our fate. Robespierre
himself, the immaculate, the saint, has sinned from mildness,
mercifulness; his faults are wiped out by his martyrdom. He was my
exemplar, and I, too, have betrayed the Republic; the Republic perishes;
it is just and fair that I die with her. I have been over sparing of
blood; let my blood flow! Let me perish! I have deserved ..."
Such were his reflections when suddenly he caught sight of the signboard
of the _Amour peintre_, and a torrent of bitter-sweet emotions swept
tumultuously over his heart.
The shop was shut, the sun-blinds of the three windows on the mezzanine
floor were drawn right down. As the cart passed in front of the window
of the blue chamber, a woman's hand, wearing a silver ring on the
ring-finger, pushed aside the edge of the blind and threw towards
Gamelin a red carnation which his bound hands prevented him from
catching, but which he adored as the token and likeness of those red and
fragrant lips that had refreshed his mouth. His eyes filled with
bursting tears, and his whole being was still entranced with the glamour
of this farewell when he saw the blood-stained knife rise into view in
the Place de la Révolution.