The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  “And that year has come?” Jean smiled.

  “Why, yes, darling,” Lucienne whispered huskily, “I rather think it has.”

  “Now I am flattered,” Jean laughed. “I thought that when Gervais la Moyte fled France with the rest of the émigrés last October you’d begin to cast about for a replacement. Fidelity, my dove, is not one of your virtues. But I hardly thought an insignificant provincial deputy like me would merit your attentions.”

  “Hardly insignificant, Jeannot. They are saying that you will go far—that of all the men in the Assembly only you and Robespierre are absolutely incorruptible. That means something. Besides, it’s a positively fascinating challenge; how perfectly delightful, my Jeannot, to corrupt the incorruptible! By which I mean you, of course; I could scarcely fancy myself in bed with Robespierre—” She stared towards the little lawyer from Arras. “How utterly loathsome he is! I’d sooner touch a snake.”

  “And I,” Jean mocked, “would rather wrestle with the lightnings, like the great American savant, Doctor Franklin, than risk getting singed another time by you.”

  “How sweet,” Lucienne laughed. “Even when you’re being both unfair and unkind, as now, you manage to flatter me. Are you really so frightened of me, Jeannot? After all, I am only a poor harmless girl. . . .”

  “Du Barry and la Pompadour were harmless girls,” Jean said dryly, “but they managed between them to wreck France.”

  Lucienne dropped him the prettiest curtsey imaginable.

  “You don’t know,” she laughed, “how it helps my vanity to be compared to both my ideals at once! Come, take me away from here. You’ve been seen. A thousand idiots will boast tomorrow of having worked cheek by jowl with the Incorruptible Citizen Deputy Marin. And I’m perishing of thirst. . . .”

  “All right,” Jean said, and took her arm. But he had not gone ten feet before he was stopped again. This time it was the Comte de Mirabeau, that strange ex-noble who had deserted his class to sit for the Third Estate of Aix. Mirabeau dominated the whole Assembly, defied the gallery bullies, stood like a lion against all factions, working, Jean believed, truly for the good of France. But a lifelong, well-deserved reputation as a satyr and blackguard stood against him.

  Two men in all France, Jean thought suddenly, could save the crown: Mirabeau and de Lafayette; and no one at court has sense enough to see them as anything but traitors to their class,

  “May I say, M. Marin,” Mirabeau said in his deep oratorical voice, “that I vastly admire your taste?”

  Jean frowned. He had often heard women complain of men who, in the feminine phrase, ‘undressed them with their eyes’. But he had never seen a man accomplish that singular feat before. But this ugly, pock-marked old roué did precisely that, and with such thoroughness that Lucienne reddened to the roots of her hair.

  “Thank you,” Jean said stiffly. “But I think I’d rather be admired for my wit and oratory, like M. le Député from Aix.’’

  “The more fool you, then,” Mimabeau smiled. “Anyone can have lungs of brass; but to be upon pleasant terms with beauty’s self—that, M. Marin, is an accomplishment!”

  “Thank you, M. le Comte,” Lucienne said. She had recovered her poise now; but that this ugly old man had been able to disconcert her rankled still.

  “You are entirely welcome,” Mirabeau chuckled, “though I can see it pains you to accept the compliments of the dirty old man I’m supposed to be. However, M. Marin, though you will scarcely credit this, I did not stop you to get a better view of your fair companion, though truth compels me to confess I’m heartily glad I did, because now I can perhaps combine pleasure with duty. There will be, you know, much social activity during the coming week. Next week, in fact, I’m entertaining a few guests at my house in the Chaussée d’Antin. I’d be honoured to have you join me, M. Marin—the more so if you’ll be so kind as to bring your lady. . . .”

  Jean stared at him. Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, was a strange man. Yet, Jean thought quickly, a just one, I truly believe. All his life he has been waiting for a role worthy of his talents—and the follies and mistakes of his youth were born perhaps of resentment of a world unable to judge his worth. . . . But dare I accept the invitation of a man known to have been penniless upon his arrival in Paris, who has now no visible means of support save his paltry newspaper and his eighteen francs a day salary as a deputy—yet who, despite this, owns today a magnificent home in Paris, an even greater country house at Argenteuil, gives parties that are the scandal of the whole city, spends money like a prince?

  ‘Tis folly perhaps to be proud of the bubble reputation. Yet men call me honest, and respect me for it. Can any reputation, however great, stand such an association? Yet, if Mirabeau accepts money, as is reputed, from the royalists, it is honest coin; for in his way he would preserve the King—all his speeches prove it.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jean!” Lucienne said, “tell him we’ll come! I, for one, would be delighted.”

  “You honour me, Madame,” Mirabeau said, and made her a bow.

  “Mademoiselle,” Lucienne corrected. “M. Marin does not believe in haste. He has yet to honour me with a proposal.”

  “Would you accept him, Mademoiselle—?” Mirabeau paused questioningly after the title.

  “Talbot, Lucienne Talbot. Oh yes! But I begin to despair of ever being asked.”

  “Ah, Mademoiselle Talbot, you desolate me! I find myself in need of M. Marin’s judgment, and you shake my faith in it to the very foundations.”

  “Perhaps his reluctance to quit his bachelorhood,” Lucienne laughed, “is a display of the very judgment you mention, M. le Comte. I fear me that I’m nobody’s prize.”

  “Mademoiselle leaves me no other course open but to disagree with her—violently,” Mirabeau laughed. “But come now, M. Marin—won’t you honour me with your presence?”

  “I gather,” Jean said dryly, “that your invitation involves more than mere sociability?”

  “Yes—a chat afterwards about matters important to France. I cannot speak of them now. But may I reassure you, M. Marin, that they involve no dishonesty? If you undertake what I shall ask of you, you will gain nothing in worldly goods; you will, in fact, risk much—even up to your life. But I think that, as one of the rascals like myself who has brought France to this state, you should be willing to take a few risks to save your country.”

  “Now you interest me,” Jean said. “Yes, M. Mirabeau, you can depend upon our presence.”

  Mirabeau bowed and kissed Lucienne’s hand. For all his democracy, Gabriel Riquetti was every inch a lord.

  Walking into the amphitheatre that morning of July fourteenth, 1790, with Fleurette on his arm, and Pierre and Marianne following a few paces behind him, Jean could not repress a long, slow whistle of astonishment. Though he had worked upon the thing himself, though he had seen it done, the Champs de Mars had become something other than a parade-ground, something more, an exemplification of the genius of the French nation perhaps, combining here the pride, the vainglory, the theatricality of a race essentially proud, vain, and theatrical, to whom the blood and terror of history were not enough, needing always to intensify that which was already unbearably intense, to lift it into pageantry, into drama.

  “What is it, Jean?” Fleurette breathed. “Tell me about it— what it’s like, I mean. . . . Is it really so splendid?”

  Splendid? Jean thought. I wonder. Cheap, and gaudy, and theatrical, and a little obscene. But—splendid? Yes. By God, it is splendid. Splendid and pitiful and funny and awesome; because it adds up to that. With all our folly and blood-lust madness and cruelty we are still a great people, the greatest perhaps, that the world has yet seen or ever will see. We overdo everything, from sacking empty prisons and parading with the heads of harmless, honourable men dripping upon our pikes, to standing magnificently in an Assembly and overturning the wrongs of centuries in one day. . . . We build a Constitution not upon slow, sober experience like the English have
done, but upon logic, forgetting that nothing in life is more foreign to the mind of man than logic, and yet this very abstraction we have made is magnificent, too, a tremendous parade of ideals which never in human history have worked, and never will, because man is forever greedy, grasping, vile, his heroism a comedy of errors, his dying robbed even of tragedy by its uselessness; but it was good to have written it, to have set it down, because though it cannot be so, it ought to be.

  “Jean. . . .” Fleurette said, tugging at his sleeve.

  “Yes, little dove,” Jean said, “it’s splendid. They’ve made an artificial rock, about fifty feet high, so cunningly that it looks real. It has steps cut into it and a cavern, which has a scroll over it labelling it the Temple of Concord. On the top there’s a Statue of Liberty, clad in a red Phrygian cap, with a pike in her hand. . . .”

  “A hell of a bad job, too,” Pierre grumbled. “You can see the cracks in the plaster from here. Besides, I don’t fancy a pike as a symbol of liberty. What’s that column beside her for, Jean?”

  “The Civic Column,” Jean said. “And the altar at her feet is the Altar of the Country. Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, will say Mass there today.”

  “Are there many people?” Fleurette asked; “I seem to hear so many voices. And that music—I’ve never heard anything like it before!”

  “There are three hundred drummers,” Jean said, “and twelve hundred wind-musicians. Besides that, there’s enough cannon here to win a major war. Every height is covered with artillery, and there are still more mounted on barges on the Seine. As for the people, Fleurette, any Parisian not here today is either too old, paralysed or dead.”

  Jean turned his head and looked about the Champs. The whole top of the École Militaire had a new superstructure built over it, galleries and canopies, painted by a score of artists under the great David, showing scenes of the past year, grandiose and allegorical, much improved upon nature, the men whom Paul knew well in all their weakness and puny pride and cupidity become giants, demi-gods, larger than life, finer, now in their uniforms of State and again as antique Romans, toga-clad, possessed of physiques that few, if any, of them had in reality.

  And all of it, the paintings, the arcs de triomphe by the gate and the river, the iron cranes with huge pans of incense swinging beneath them, perfuming the very air, the boom of cannon, the martial music, the roof-tops of every high point in Paris black with men viewing the ceremony through spy-glasses so that the sun glinted upon their uplifted far-seeing tubes making small lightnings from the cupolas of the Invalides to the Windmills lazily turning upon Montmartre, Chaillot bright with silks and cottons of fashionable women, was somehow splendid now, sublime; even the cracked plaster Liberty taking on the aspect of grandeur.

  The music swelled to deafening harmonies, defying the heavens. And through the gates, under the arcs, the Federates came, banners flying, and after them Sieur Motier, formerly Marquis de Lafayette, Generalissimo of France, magnificent upon a white stallion, his red, unpowdered hair glinting in the sun, and after him the nobles of the court, and the royal family, and finally Talleyrand-Perigord, Bishop of Autun, with three hundred priests clad in white with tricolour sashes, marching in to the boom of cannon echoing from all the heights of Paris, brazen-voiced, booming, to be picked up by other cannon on other heights, some of them within Jean’s hearing, so that gun-roar by gun-roar from one village to another lying within the sound of gunfire the echoes of this day passed within mere minutes all over France.

  The cavalry was upon the field now, slow-wheeling, its precision matchless, every manoeuvre in the manuals done perfectly, precisely, and new ones invented for the occasion.

  Now de Lafayette mounted to the altar and, flourishing his sword, swore eternal fealty: “To King, to Law, and to Nation,” in his own name and in the name of the armies of France. And after him, fat and bumbling as usual, Louis mounted and swore in a firm voice to uphold the Constitution, whereupon the people split open the very skies with their cheering and, rising spontaneously, swore the same oath in a hundred thousand hoarse roaring voices, drowning for the moment even the boom of the cannon.

  “It is too much,” Jean said to Fleurette, “I cannot describe it. To me it seems almost blasphemy, as though the people would make of themselves gods. . . .”

  “It is a kind of blasphemy,” Pierre whispered; “I—I believe, but what think you of this!”

  Jean’s gaze followed his pointing finger. Bishop Talleyrand was mounting his altar now to begin the solemn Mass, but above the altar itself the scattered clouds had gathered together suddenly, become black faster than the tricoloured civil priests could mount the stairs, and before the Bishop could even lift his hand for silence, the rain came down in torrents.

  The incense-pots hissed out, the bravely painted scenes began to run their colours, the finery of the Nymphs of the Opéra—Lucienne among them, for Jean Paul had long since found her among the throngs—clinging to their slender limbs, drenched with the sullen torrents, and from everywhere umbrellas appearing, and frock-coats being drawn over carefully coiffed heads.

  Jean pulled off his own coat and wrapped Fleurette in it, for none of them had thought to bring umbrellas; but before he had her half covered, her light silk dress, made for her by Marianne, was soaked through. He stood there holding her, feeling her shivering under the coat, watching the dignitaries and nobles scurrying for cover, and suddenly, irresistibly, the high comedy of this demonstration by Nature of the futility of mankind and all his hopes struck home to him. He loosed the soaring boom of his laughter, peal after peal into the teeth of the rain, all his old mockery caught up once more in that curiously inhuman laughter of his, so that all those within sound of it paused in their headlong fight for shelter and stared at the tall man with face of a scarred angel-fiend, who stood there laughing like a demented devil from hell itself; so that the very timbre of the sound raised the short hairs on the backs of their necks, making them go cold all over suddenly, and the goose pimples rising upon their flesh.

  “Stop it, Jean!” Fleurette screamed at him; “stop it this instant!”

  Jean stared down at her, the sardonic smile upon his face fading slowly into tenderness.

  “Forgive me, love,” he murmured; “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “You—you didn’t,” she stammered, her voice shaking; “you frightened me, Jean. Sometimes, when you laugh like that, I realise I don’t know you really—that you are not one person, but two; and one side of you I don’t know at all.”

  “And that side of me is—evil,” Jean said.

  “Yes— Oh, I don’t know! All I do know is that it is not the man I love.”

  “Take her home, Jean,” Marianne said, “can’t you see she’s blue with cold?”

  “All right,” Jean said.

  “I’m coming with you,” Marianne said; “that child’s going to need some attention. You can stay if you like, Pierre.”

  “No,” Pierre said; “I don’t feel like getting soaked to hear a Mass—especially one said by priests that bowed to civil authority, placing it above the Church. I’m an unbeliever, but if you’re going to believe, why then, damn it, believe and don’t compromise! Come along now.”

  Marianne was right. By the time they got Fleurette home, she was shaking in the grip of a hard chill. But Marianne was designed by nature for crises such as this. In ten minutes she had Fleurette in bed with hot stones wrapped in cloth at her feet, and was pouring steaming grog down her throat. Slowly the warmth crept back into the slender limbs and the hot rum began to take hold of her, so that her lovely, ethereal face glowed once more with colour. . . . Jean sat beside her bed until the great dark eyes drooped into slumber. Then he stood up.

  “I’m going to change,” he said; “she’ll be all right, won’t she, Marianne?”

  “Perfectly. I’ll stay with her just in case she wakes up, which isn’t likely. Run along and get dressed—both of you. Go on out to the Place de la Bastille and dance with all
the poules, as I know you’re going to. But if you, Pierre du Pain, are not in this house by midnight—I’ll take a black iron skillet to you, by all the Saints!”

  “By midnight,” that rogue grinned, “I shall have pleasured myself with at least three of them!”

  “Le coq gaulois!” Jean mocked. “On is it a Riviera rabbit—which, mon vieux?”

  “At least not a scarred-visaged monk of Satan and the black mass!” Pierre shot back at him.

  “You are no good, neither of you,” Marianne declared. “Now get out of here and let the poor child sleep.”

  At the place of the Bastille, for that grim prison was gone now, razed to its very foundations by the people of Paris, they had erected a Tree of Liberty, more than sixty feet high, with a huge red Phrygian cap, lately become the visible symbol of liberty, perched upon the top of it. Among the broken stones they had also put up artificial trees, festooned with lanterns, beneath which a mob of people were dancing.

  Marianne was quite right, Jean said; at least half the filles of the Palais Royal were there. But there were also great ladies, some of them the remnants of the nobility, dancing not only with well-dressed bourgeois gentlemen, but with men clad in the jackets and long trousers of workers, the class called sans culottes, not because they wore no pantaloons, but because they did not wear the knee-breeches of the upper classes. Here the whole of society had been levelled; to be built up again—into what?

  There were numerous stalls of wine-sellers already set up and, from the noise and laughter, they had been patronised freely. Jean stood there a long moment. His mood was strange, even to himself. When it came to both food and drink, Jean Paul was habitually frugal, even abstemious; he had, too, but little desire for the society of his fellows. But tonight, oddly, he found his usual loneliness intolerable. He had a strange desire to drink his fill of wine, to laugh with the others, to dance—to be for this once a human being like other humans, to desert his cynicism, his mockery, and to plunge into life; tomorrow he could come back again into the shadow, into loneliness—but tonight . . .