The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  He stood up.

  “I have to. go,” he said. “I’ll send Marianne. . . .”

  Then he went through the door and down the stairs.

  Pierre came out of the printing shop as he passed. He took one look at Jean’s face and fell into step beside him.

  “Want to tell me about it?” he said.

  “No,” Jean Paul said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Pierre kept on walking beside him. They walked a long time until they came to the Café Victoire, in the Rue de Sèvres, already becoming known as the rendezvous of the moderates.

  “Sit down,” Pierre growled. “Have a drink.”

  “All right,” Jean Paul said.

  The waiter brought the two brandies. Jean downed his at a gulp. “Another,” he said to the waiter.

  “That bad?” Pierre said.

  Jean didn’t answer him.

  “Damn you!” Pierre spat. “Talk! Get it out of your system.”

  “All right,” Jean Paul said wearily. Then he told him. Pierre sat there very quietly for a long moment. Then he began to swear. He swore very quietly and precisely and fluently with deep feeling and great art. Jean listened to him with awe. This was priestly swearing, masterly profanity, for Pierre du Pain did not descend to obscenities; he merely pronounced malediction upon Gervais la Moyte, calling down the wrath of heaven upon his head with an invention and variety that would have done credit to a Prince of the Church.

  Jean put out his hand and caught his friend’s wrist. “Wait, Pierre,” he said. “What of the men and women who actually killed her? La Moyte was guilty of selfishness and cowardice; but it was our people—the people whose representative I am—who killed her. I find myself confused. La Moyte left my sister, and she was murdered—by people whom I spent years in inciting to violence myself. If La Moyte is an accessory after the fact by reason of his cowardly desertion, what am I? Am I not guilty a priori?”

  “You damned provincial lawyer!” Pierre roared. “Must you be for ever splitting hairs?”

  “If I meet La Moyte,” Jean said quietly, “I shall kill him. But what judgment should be meted out upon my own head? Tell me that, Pierre!”

  Pierre smiled at him.

  “You, mon vieux, are an idealist—and therefore a fool. Would you engage in dialects with one trained by the Jesuit Fathers? All right, then. Go to England, where the yeomen, as they call them, are prosperous and happy—where one man considers himself as good as the next. Stand up in the market-place and preach sedition—shout riot until you’re blue in the face. What would happen? I’ll tell you—exactly nothing. You and I and a thousand others like us played our part, a necessary part, Jean, at a certain juncture of history. You think we led the people? Nay, rather we followed them. If you want to find blame for these things, blame the winter of ‘88 which destroyed the grain, blame the hailstorm that smashed the crops—blame the idle, vicious triflers who for two hundred years had despoiled the people until they could bear it no longer.

  “For every riot incited, inspired—there were a hundred spontaneous ones, whose authors were not men but desperation, hunger and despair. The nobles would not give way; they will not give way. They must hold on to their ancient privileges, which once they earned by affording protection and security to their peasants against the brigands who infested the land in the Middle Ages. But the Dark Ages are gone—enlightenment creeps over the land. The nobles collect for services no longer rendered. Ask people to starve so that you may wear silk; ask them to watch their babies die so that you may keep courtesans and ride in fine carriages—take away their bread and their salt, and they riot—it’s as simple as that, my Jean.

  “Your sister died, in her sweet innocence, because she fell in love, and accidentally allied herself with a doomed system. You would not have blamed yourself if she had been run over by a carriage. Her death was as accidental as that.”

  He stopped, staring at Jean’s face.

  “What ails you?” he said.

  “Run over by a carriage,” Jean whispered; “run over by a carriage—like Fleurette. . . .”

  His hand tightened around the brandy glass until his knuckles showed white. He threw back his head and laughed aloud. The men at the other tables turned at the sound of that laughter. It was mirthless, bitter as wormwood, wild.

  “Jean!” Pierre gasped. “Have you gone mad?”

  “No, good Pierre,” Jean whispered, “I have not taken leave of my senses. I merely remembered something. A week after Gervais left my sister and perhaps even his own to be destroyed by the mob, he was in Paris out driving with his favourite daughter of joy. ‘Twas he who ran down Fleurette. And I—I, God help me! I saved his life. . . .”

  Pierre’s lips formed a soundless whistle.

  “Why, Jean?” he said. “Name of God, why?”

  Jean Paul looked his friend in the face and his eyes were clear. “Because,” he said, “the girl with him was Lucienne, Pierre. I could not see her murdered.”

  “And now?” Pierre said.

  “I am clear again,” Jean said. “Ah, yes—I am very clear. La Moyte must be destroyed, and the system which produced him must be ended for ever. The witless, tortured beasts who ran wild and smashed the objects of their hatred, them I can forgive, Pierre—but La Moyte, and his ilk—never!”

  So, Pierre thought, again, you besotted fools, you have driven away another who might have had pity enough to help you. I should not like to be a noble in France now You’ve lived grandly, you great ones; I wonder how you’ll manage the dying?

  However they, individually—all those who had not fled France by then—were to manage it, they had at least managed one last brave display. Walking in the procession, among the other deputies of the Third Estate, on that Monday May fourth 1789, Jean Paul Marin was keenly aware of that. He was, like all the men of his order, soberly and decently attired in black. But the nobles were peacocks, rainbows in the sun. Jean would not, even by choice, have dressed in silks and velvets, in scarlet and sky-blue, with ostrich plumes blowing back from his tricome; but, like every member of the Third Estate, he bitterly resented the fact that royal order had prescribed the dress of each of the three Estates, and by its very prescription seemed bent upon emphasising the quite artificial differences between them.

  He held his irritation in check, however, by the reflection that he was taking part in history. Whatever this new States-General did tomorrow, for good or ill, it was sure to be forever remembered. Even the crowds in the streets seemed aware of that. Every walk, every balcony, every rooftop along that route between the Church of Notre-Dame, where the members of the Assembly had gathered at seven o’clock that morning to wait in silence until the King tardily appeared at ten, and the Church of Saint Louis, where the Mass to bless the proceedings of the States was to be held, was black with people.

  Not only was all Versailles there, but seemingly half the population of Paris had risen before dawn to march, drive, and ride to the ancient seat of kings.

  Jean studied the crowd. He recognised some of them, quite easily. Big, lion-like Georges Danton, with slender Camille Desmoulins at his side, glared at the procession. There was Doctor Marat—a doctor of horses, actually, from Switzerland, his dark face betraying his Italian ancestry, already known to the crowds in the Palais Royal almost as well as firebrand Desmoulins himself. Every one of the two thousand poules from that vast garden enclosure of the Duc d’Orléans seemed to be here at Versailles, watching the deputies file by behind the local clergy. After the priests of Versailles, tendering the religious welcome to the whole States-General, came the deputies of the Third Estate; behind them marched the nobles, so many and so brilliant in their court dress that Jean was unable to pick out Gervais La Moyte among the throng; behind the nobles, the representatives of the clergy; after them, the King and Queen, surrounded by the Princes and Princesses of the Blood Royal.

  From the crowds, they, nobles and priests and royal family, might have read their future; for though the multit
udes screamed themselves hoarse in greeting the Third Estate, they let the nobles and clergy pass in stony silence; a spattering of applause for the King; none for the Princes of the Blood; and for the Queen:

  “Austrian! Foreign woman! We are French, remember! We want no stranger for our Queen!”

  This, and other things less kind, in hoarse mutters, designed to be heard. Actual obscenities now; and she, proud and beautiful, riding there, not deigning to hear.

  Jean looked at the men who marched with him. Of them all, he knew only one, Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, like himself a native of Provence. He studied Mirabeau with some care. Strange to find him here, a noble of ancient lineage, among the men of the Third! Stranger, in fact, was Mirabeau himself: ugly to the point of a perverse attractiveness, pockmarked, scarred with scars and his own dissipations, a blackguard, scoundrel—yet a true man for all that. Jean could feel sympathy for a man who had spent a goodly part of his adult life in one jail or another upon lettres de cachet obtained by his father. Even his crimes were to Jean completely understandable. ‘Tis plaguedly hard not to forgive a man, Jean thought with secret amusement, who has spent three years in the dungeon of Vincennes for the high crime of kidnapping the woman whom he loved.

  Others among the deputies of the Third Estate had been pointed out to him. He glanced at them now, playing the interesting mental game of trying to guess their capabilities:

  Mounier, Malouet, Barnave, Rabaut St. Etienne—silent men, these, wrapped in their own dignity. And behind that dignity, what? Jean had to admit he didn’t know. Pétion, marching with Bailly—birds of a feather, a little too self-consciously proud. Showy types—frothy mediocrities, Jean guessed. The Abbé Sieyès—a rapier blade of a man, like Mirabeau sitting in opposition to the order to which he rightfully belonged; a doubting priest obviously, that lean face all intelligence, the line of a mouth acid with sarcasm even in repose. And last, walking alone, that strange little lawyer from Arras, whom everybody sneered at; a bewigged head too large for his tiny body, white-skinned with that whiteness that is without health . . . like, Jean mused, the belly of a toad. . . . The only colour in that face a hint of greenishness.

  This man turned now, perhaps sensing Jean’s steady gaze, and his cold eyes, of some indistinguishable colour behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, swept over Jean with a flick like—like a whip-lash? No—rather like the tongue of a snake.

  They are wrong, Jean Paul decided at that instant. This one could be deadly. Ah, yes—this Maximiien Robespierre is a man to be watched. . . .

  They had almost reached the Church of Saint Louis now. Jean, wearying of his bootless game of trying to catalogue his colleagues, turned his attention to the spectators.

  A ripple of feminine laughter washed over him. He raised his eyes towards the low balcony on which five or six young women sat. They were all exquisitely dressed; but something in their manner told him at once that they were not of the noblesse. A certain bold directness, perhaps; something, even about their sacques and habits, finer cut, more tastefully beautiful than even those of the noblewomen. Their faces, too, betrayed more art: for though rice powder, rouge, and red lip-salve were in common use among the ladies of the court, these stunning creatures had applied it with such skill that, had he not been so close to them, Jean Paul would have sworn these marvellous complexions were their own. An over-profusion of patches and artificial beauty spots, that he marked—a dizzy cloud of exciting perfumes. . . .

  “A parade of crows “ one of them laughed scornfully as the black-gowned Commons went by.

  “Being watched,” the Abbé Sieyès replied instantly, “by a roost of poules! Verily we have the kingdom of fowls in full session!”

  Jean envied the Abbé his remark, and the readiness of wit that had brought it so aptly to his lips. I, he mused sadly, would have thought of that an hour too late. . . .

  The laughter on the balcony stopped. Some of the women—actresses and dancers from the Opéra, Jean guessed—stood up to see who had tossed them back so bitter a jibe. Jean looked up once more, and met her eyes.

  “Jean!” she whispered, saying the word so softly that he guessed it from the shape of her lips. Then she said it again aloud:

  “Jean! You—here? I must see you! After the service, perhaps?”

  “D’accord,” Jean murmured, miserably aware of the gaze of the other deputies.

  “Ah, Marin,” the Abbé Sieyès quipped, “I see you have your depths!”

  Jean stared at him.

  “So you know my name, M’sieur?” he said; “I am flattered.”

  “I know everyone’s names,” Sieyès answered, smiling his dry smile, “and most of their histories. Yours, I must confess, has eluded me. We must talk soon, you and I. Not today, however. I fear me that you have far more interesting plans.”

  “It may be,” Jean smiled, “that you are right, M’sieur l’Abbé.”

  It was difficult, after that, to pay attention to the service. The Bishop exhausted his art in describing the misery of the people. Jean, to whom this was all too familiar, stopped listening. From where he sat he could see the King and Queen clearly. Louis XVI appeared half asleep, his pudgy hands clasped across his brocaded, fat middle.

  I have seldom seen a man, Jean thought, who looked less kingly! He studied the King with some care. Small, grey-blue eyes sunk in mounds of fat, a loose, weak mouth, under the great Capet nose. A face, Jean decided, that lacks evil, but not good; except that the good is overshadowed by the feebleness. God help France, to have at this juncture a dullard for a King!

  The Queen was more rewarding. A stately woman, not without beauty. Young still, but already grey-haired from worry, from care; for the Dauphin lay at that moment at the doors of death. More, the sea of unearned hatred with which the poor woman was surrounded was enough to madden a stouter soul. Jean glanced towards Count Fersen, the gallant Swede, already linked by the tongue of scandal to the Queen. Count Axel Fersen’s gaze was warm, tender; his eyes never left Marie Antoinette’s face. How much of it was true?

  What difference does it make? Jean thought with Gallic clarity. She is young and fair. Such a one has need of love. When a marriage is an affair of State, an extension of foreign policy, what can one expect? Look at him now. His Royal Majesty! Is he awake or asleep—or even entirely alive? I think I’ve never seen a forehead more aptly designed for horns. If you, my Queen, are not guilty of this, you should be—and have my blessing. . . .

  But the Bishop’s words had caught him again. He was telling the Third Estate that they should not expect too much, that the surrender of privilege must be a thing of grace, not ever of compulsion. . . .

  Jean stiffened angrily, but when he gazed at his colleagues, his dark eyes widened in astonishment. Most of them were visibly moved. Several had tears in their eyes.

  For what? Jean wondered; because you’ve been told that the people starve, that the taxes are intolerable, that privilege has become a burden, all of which you know, else you would not be here? Why do you weep, my friends? Because after all his windy mouthings, my lord, his Grace, the Bishop of Versailles, advises you to sit upon your haunches and wait until men like the Comte D’Artois or even Gervais la Moyte voluntarily surrender their privileges? I tell you that you will see Hell frozen over from stem to shore and a legion of fiends disporting themselves on skates upon the ice before such a thing comes to pass.

  The Abbé Sieyès caught his eye and smiled at him. Jean clenched his fist and pointed his thumb downward in the ancient gesture of the Romans. The Abbé’s smile broadened. He nodded. We two, he seemed to be saying, are not fooled by all this.

  Then it was all over. The deputies gathered in little knots outside the church to discuss the sermon. Jean did not join any of the groups. What I think of it, he thought bitterly, is scarcely likely to be popular among you facile ones.

  He started to walk away, towards that balcony on which he had seen Lucienne. He had gone scarcely ten yards when he saw her coming tow
ards him, her tawny hair unpowdered, piled high upon her head. She had always been graceful, but the way she walked now was poetry, music—her steps small, light, so that they seemed almost not to touch the stones of the street, her body willow-slender above the great bell of her brocaded skirts, swaying a little, as though she were impelled toward him by the lightest, gentlest of breezes. He felt something moving in the region near his heart. Something deep and harsh—like pain.

  I don’t love her, he told himself with bitter clarity. I don’t think I ever have. What I feel for Lucienne is something more primitive than love—something ancient and terrible and—and ugly— But whatever it is, I am not free of it. Not yet—dear God, not yet!

  She put out a bejewelled hand.

  “Jean!” she breathed, “how fine you look!”

  “With this face?” Jean snorted. “Spare me your lies, Lucienne.”

  “Oh,” she laughed, “I didn’t mean your face. You are a monster, aren’t you? But such a monster as any woman should delight in keeping chained in the cellar for the pleasure of taming—if, indeed, you could be tamed. No matter, it might be even pleasanter to fail to tame you, is it not so?”

  “And your mockery,” Jean added bitterly.

  “Oh, I mean it,” Lucienne said. “Come, let us go sit in the sun at a café—where we can talk. It has been such a long time, hasn’t it? You must have a lot to tell me. . . .”

  “I,” Jean said flatly, “have nothing to tell you.”

  “Don’t try to live up to your face, Jeannot!” Lucienne laughed. “You aren’t like that, you know.”

  “And how am I?” Jean growled.

  “As soft as butter—in the proper hands. Oh, come along!”

  Even her voice had changed. She no longer spoke with the accent of the Côte. Her speech was Parisian now, low, cultivated, exact. Listening to her was a pleasure. Almost as much of a pleasure, Jean thought, as looking at her.

  She sat facing him across the small table over the coffee-cups and smiled at him. Her smile was enchanting. He felt ill at ease, like a boy.