by Frank Yerby
THE
DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
FRANK YERBY
Inside front cover
THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
FRANK YERBY
Jean Paul Marin, the hero of Frank Yerby’s new novel, is as turbulent and unpredictable, as strange a mixture of idealism and hatred, as the French Revolution itself, in the thick of which he lives and loves and pursues his feuds.
Four years in the Comte de Gravereau’s private prison have left a scar on his forehead and a deeper invisible one in his heart. Indeed the Comte is to be the baleful genius of Jean’s life.
Three women, so utterly different, are caught up in Jean’s passionate career— glamorous, tawny-haired, treacherous Lucienne; Nicole, the Comte’s sister, delicate and blonde, whom Jean loves as much as he hates her brother, and Fleurette, more beautiful than either—beautiful with great calm and sweetness, but blind.
Jean, the public figure who rode high on the tide of a revolution he was finally to regret, and became the intimate of Danton himself, and Jean, the private citizen, with his veerings between good and evil, is Mr. Yerby’s masterpiece; fatally easy to love, hard to understand and harder still to forget. The Devil’s Laughter has all the romance and colour which Yerby’s many admirers would expect from the author of the brilliantly successful A Woman Called Fancy and The Foxes of Harrow.
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Jean Paul Marin is the tall and handsome son of a rich merchant. But he and his father quarrel over Jean’s hot-headed revolutionary writings, and still more bitterly over his sister’s coming marriage to the Comte de Gravereau. For Jean’s face bears a scar—a souvenir of the Comte’s private prison.
Caught up in the Revolution, Jean, the whilom country lawyer, becomes the intimate of Danton himself. And into his life, already passionate and complicated, three women bring their tangled skein of treachery, jealousy—and love.
THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
Books by
FRANK YERBY
THE FOXES OF HARROW
THE VIXENS
THE GOLDEN HAWK
PRIDE’S CASTLE
FLOODTIDE
A WOMAN CALLED FANCY
THE SARACEN BLADE
THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
Copyright 1953 by Frank Yerby
This edition 1955
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED
LONDON AND BECCLES
1
“IT’S been a long time,” Lucienne Talbot said.
Jean Paul looked at her.
“Sorry?” he said.
“Yes!” Lucienne said. “Yes, yes, yes! I’m sick of this. . . .”
Jean looked around the room. All the light came from the fireplace though it was still late afternoon outside. The fire glow flickered on the brown walls, washed the copperware with warmth. He saw the cooking-pot on the fire, smelled the little fish bubbling in the stew. The copper pots gleamed. He could see his own face in them, a little distorted, all planes and angles. His black eyes looked huge.
Lucienne stood up, the motion abrupt but not ungraceful. He could see her tawny hair reflected in the copper pans. Nothing she ever does is ungraceful, he thought. And she should always be washed in firelight—as now.
The firelight made a painting: the crusty loaves on the table with the wine and the cheese; the bellows, the tongs, the andirons in their places; the sudden, yellow-white glow of the pillow-case on the little bed, half hidden behind the screen.
“I like it,” Jean Paul said.
“You like anything! I—I didn’t start out with you for this, Jean Paul Marin! Not to hide in an attic. Not to live in fear of the police. Not to become your mistress. No, something more shameful than even a mistress, because men are sometimes proud of their mistresses.”
“I’m proud of you,” Jean Paul said.
“I doubt it!” Lucienne spat. “You’d think I was old and ugly. You never take me anywhere. You hide me here in this filthy hole. Name of a name! I don’t know why I ever took up with you, Jean!”
“Why did you?” Jean Paul said.
“I don’t know! God knows you’re nothing to look at. And as for brains—a millstone couldn’t be any thicker than whatever that is you have between your ears. Talents? None. Prospects? Many. I’ll name them for you—”
“Don’t bother,” Jean Paul said.
“You don’t want to bear them, do you, Jean Marin? Not very pleasant—your prospects, since they start with being hanged for high treason and end with being drawn and quartered! I still don’t see why I ever . . .”
Jean smiled again. His smile was something. It did things to his face, making it almost handsome.
“You said it was because you loved me,” he said.
“I lied! Or I was a fool. Or both. Yes, both. When I think of my career . . .”
“What career?” Jean Paul said cruelly.
“Oh, you! I would have had a career, but for you. Men looked at me. Noblemen. I didn’t dance badly, and I was improving. . . .”
“Then I came along. Jean Paul Marin, son of Henri Marin, the shipowner. Richest man on the whole Côte d’Azur. Sure that had nothing to do with it, chérie?”
She stared at him. The firelight was in the hazel eyes that changed colour with the weather, or the dress she was wearing, making them yellow. Like a tigress, Jean thought.
“Yes,” she said, “that had something to do with it. That had everything to do with it. I thought I’d wear velvet and be covered with diamonds. Why else would I have accepted you?”
“Sorry I disappointed you,” Jean Paul said.
“I knew your father was a straitlaced old vulture. But you said he’d get used to the idea of your being married to an actress. . . .”
“A dancer,” Jean corrected.
“What’s the difference? Anyhow I didn’t think that two years later I still wouldn’t be married to you, that I’d still be risking disgrace—and for what?”
“My father is—difficult,” Jean sighed.
“Difficult? He’s impossible! But you’re worse. You with your revolutionary cant. You fool! Can’t you see that the world you’re trying to destroy is the only one I can make my way in? Or you—for that matter. Destroy privilege and you rid France of all the men rich enough and grand enough to offer patronage.”
“I don’t need patronage,” Jean Paul said. “All I want is justice.”
“Hang justice! And you’re still depending upon patronage. If it weren’t for your father, you couldn’t even afford this miserable hole.”
Jean Paul stared at her. After two years he still had that feeling, looking at her, He hurt. This tall, tawny one. This untamed one with the grace of a great cat. And the claws.
“I’ve had enough,” she said. “I should be dancing at the Opéra by now—acting at the Comédie Française, and I will, too! In spite of you, Jean Paul!”
“By whose patronage?” Jean said. “The Comte de Gravereau’s? But such men as he demand a price. What are you prepared to pay?”
“That’s my business,” she said flatly. “But as far as the price is concerned, I’ll tell you that. The same price, my Jeannot, I bought you with—Good enough?”
“Too good,” Jean Paul said.
He looked at her, seeing her cheeks flushed in the firelight, the good bones of her face, her cheek-bones high, angular, causing her hazel eyes to slant a little, the mouth full, pouting, so that he could almost feel it, the long, slim, good legs, moulding the peasant’s dress she wore, and suddenly he wanted her. Or rather he wanted her more acutely than usual, because he wanted her all the time.<
br />
He came over to her.
“Don’t touch me!” she snarled at him.
But he put up his big hands and caught her, hurting her arms, and she threw herself backward away from him, turning her face from side to side so that he had to bring one of his hands up and catch her chin, holding it so hard that he bruised her a little.
Her mouth was ice. But it didn’t stay like that. It never did. That was the one thing that was left between them after all the quarrelling.
He could feel it moving under his, forming words that came out muffled, but not fighting any more, not drawing away, whispering: “You beast! Damn your eyes, Jeannot, my Jeannot, I hate you, you know me too well, too well, my Jeannot, oh damn you, let me go!”
But he didn’t let her go and her mouth wasn’t making sounds any more, but it was still moving, softening upon his, moving, clinging, opening under the steady pressure, and the whole of her made one long caress, scalding through the layers of clothing.
She was aware suddenly that he was laughing. He thrust her away from him, hard, holding her at arm’s length, by the shoulders, and his clear baritone laughter rang among the rafters. It was one of the many things he could do that were absolutely fiendish.
“You dog!” she whispered. “Dog and son of a dog! How could you. . . .”
He looked at her and his black eyes were alight with laughter and with malice.
“This way,” he said, “I know you will always be waiting for my return.”
Then he picked up a bundle of manuscripts from the table and started for the door.
Lucienne stared at him.
“But, Jeannot, your supper?” she said, and her voice was almost tender.
“I’m not hungry,” he laughed. “Except, perhaps, for love.
Then he went out of the door and closed it softly behind him.
Lucienne stood there a long time, staring at the door. Then, very slowly, she smiled.
“There has always been more than one purveyor of that commodity, my Jeannot,” she said softly. Then she turned back to the fire.
Jean Paul Marin stopped at the edge of the road leading up to the village and looked at the sky. He stood there only a few minutes, but while he watched, the clouds that had been piling up all afternoon over the Mediterranean ran together so that there wasn’t any blue left and the little talking wind got a noise into it like crying. The colours went out of everything, leaving the world etched in greys, and the wind went searching along the land with a moaning sound until the trees were bending over before it and Jean knew what it was.
The mistral. He hated the mistral with that curious kind of hatred he had for all the things he couldn’t understand. He wasn’t superstitious, but he knew that the mistral did things to people. It was an ugly, nervous wind and it went on day and night without stopping sometimes for weeks and things happened because of that wind. There would be tavern brawls in the village and peasant wives would be beaten, and if, as usually happened this time of year, the supply of white bread failed—there might even be a few minor Jacqueries . . . even—murders. For the mistral always whispered things into a man’s heart that shouldn’t be there.
He stood there a moment, listening to the wind. It tugged at his cloak and whipped his hair about his face, and little prickly things crawled up and down his spine. Every fear he had spoke to him out of it. Every hate. He could hear Lucienne’s voice in it, saying the things she had said to him that night a week ago, when he had come into the Inn and found her seated across the table from the Comte de Gravereau, both her small hands imprisoned in his noble clasp.
Jean had started towards them. But at the last moment Gervais la Moyte, Comte de Gravereau, had stood up, laughing. Lucienne got up more slowly. She was smiling. Then the Comte bowed over her hand and was gone.
Jean came up to her and stood beside her. It was a long time before she noticed he was there. When she did, she saw the pain in his eyes.
She had smiled at him then. Wound her fingers through his hair.
“Don’t be silly, Jean,” she said; “I’m quite accustomed to pleasantries from that sort of gallant. You mustn’t mind. It’s one of the risks of my art. . . .”
“Lucienne,” he had said thickly.
“I prefer,” she murmured, “someone solid and—and real—like you, my Jeannot.”
But all the time her eyes had kept straying towards that door. Hearing the sound of her voice, remembered now in the mistral, the pain Jean Paul felt was physical, real.
“Merde! he screamed aloud into the teeth of the wind, and plodded on, up the hill.
He was twenty years old that November day of 1784, and, physically, he wasn’t very imposing. He was well above average height, but he was very thin. His hands and feet didn’t fit the rest of him. His mouth was too big, too; but he wasn’t ugly. His mouth saved him from that—his big, wide, mobile mouth that always looked as if it was going to laugh—and usually did. But his laughter was strange. It was filled with mockery for all things under earth and heaven, even for himself. His sister, Thérèse, called it devil’s laughter, and hated the sound of it.
He had a good nose, straight and thin and a little arched, and his eyes were very fine. They were big and black and laughing, and they had lights in them—mocking lights. His hair hadn’t any lights. It was black, too, and hung down uncombed and un-powdered to his shoulders. The whole of him made a discordant ensemble that people found vaguely disturbing. Lucienne, for instance, said he was an enragé, a madman, and that he had fierce eyes.
That wasn’t true. They were wild sometimes—with pain, with passion, but most of the time they were filled with malicious glee at the follies of mankind. Sometimes, when he was alone, they were deep and dark and brooding—a little haunted. His walk, his way of carrying himself, was just like the rest of his family’s so that anyone could recognise the Marins even at a distance; but his face was different. Only those men born strangers into their world have faces like that.
He was. He couldn’t accept it.
“Jean Paul,” the Abbé Grégoire said, “will either be destroyed by life—or he’ll change it. There won’t be any compromises.”
As usual, the Abbé Grégoire was right.
He walked on now, into the teeth of the mistral. He hated that wind, but, like all the things he hated, it had for him a perverse fascination. He was like that. Everything he disliked had in it some quality which excited his admiration.
Even Gervais la Moyte, Comte de Gravereau.
I’ll kill him, he thought, bending over against the wind. I’ll stick an épée into his guts and twist it. . . . But at the same time that wickedly honest part of his mind he had no control over whispered: You’d give your soul to be like him, wouldn’t you, Jean Paul Marin? To be tall as he is and fair with laughing blue eyes—to be witty and gay—to ride like him, to dance, to whisper words like little pearls into a woman’s ear. . . . Wouldn’t you, Jean Paul? Wouldn’t you?
And, straightening up, he loosed his laughter. The wind took it, snatching it away from his lips, leaving them moving soundlessly, his whole body jerking with laughter.
“Jean Paul Marin,” he laughed, “you’re a fool!”
He went on then, up the steep path towards the village perched like a crow’s nest on the mountain-top, bending over once more before the wind, holding his tricorne on his head with one hand and gathering his cloak together with the other.
Before he was half-way there, it started to rain. The rain came down in sheets, slanting before the wind, and in two minutes he was soaked to the skin. But he didn’t increase his pace. He took a queer, dark pleasure in his discomfort. The rain was like needles of ice, and the mistral talked through it. Here, higher up, the trees were different from the ones on the shore of the Mediterranean. They had leaves that could change colour, could fall.
The leaves went whipping before the wind, and collected in the roadside ditches, become torrents now, and hurtled down the mountain-side with the water. The roa
d was paved with cobblestones, glistening with the rain, and it was hard to keep his footing. He slipped time and again, but he went on doggedly.
Then he was walking the crooked streets of the little village. Even in that rain there were a few people about, wrapped in their rags, and when they turned at the sound of his good boots on the stones, he could see the hunger in their eyes. Saint Jule, the village, was like many another village in France, rather better off, in fact, than most, but every time Jean Paul saw it he wanted to curse. Or cry. It was the domain of the Comte de Gravereau, usually busy at the elaborate idleness of Versailles.
Except now, Jean thought bitterly, when he has more important things to do!
But the Comte’s bailiffs and the local farmer-general of taxes were not idle. Jean Paul saw an old woman, stooping in the rain, carefully picking up one by one the chicken feathers that the rain had washed from someone else’s yard and left before her door.
It was, he knew, a matter of life and death with her. The feathers meant to the collectors that she could afford to eat fowl, and therefore her assessment could be increased. What she paid now, left her on the edge of starvation. Any increase would be a death sentence. A slow death, but very certain.
He stopped beside her and helped her at the task. His fingers were young and nimble. He made short work of it.
She smiled at him out of her lined face, and part of the wetness of her cheeks was tears.
“My thanks, M’sieur,” she said.
