by Frank Yerby
“Ah, that will be, will be, will be,
The aristocrats to the lantern!
Ah, that will be, will be, will be,
The aristocrats, we’ll hang them!
Ah—that will be!”
They surged up in long lines to sign the petition. The chief authors of it, Robert, Chaumette, Henriot, the infamous Hébert, Coffinhal, and Momoro, stood beside the wooden altar watching. But Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, all of whom, Jean Paul knew well, had profoundly influenced the form of the petition, were either not present or had hidden themselves in the crowd.
Sniff the wind, ye hounds of hell! Jean Paul mocked them in his mind; scent whither it drifts before you show your fangs. . . .
He stood a little aside, watching. A group of young women mounted the altar. They were young, lovely. With a pang Jean recognised them as former colleagues of Lucienne’s from the Opéra. They were about their usual business of letting themselves be seen, making a show of their patriotism, because, since their noble lovers had fled, it behooved them to make the public forget as quickly as possible their well-deserved reputations as the playthings of the noblesse.
How many of you, Jean thought, are also spies and traitors? I wonder if— But he never finished his thought. One of the girls shrieked suddenly, piercingly. She had, Jean saw, lifted her left foot and was hopping about on her right.
The crowd surged forward, roaring. In two minutes they had half wrecked the altar and dragged from beneath it two miserable individuals, one of whom still had the awl in his hand.
“Spies!” they bellowed; “spies of Sieur Motier! General de Lafayette’s henchmen! Kill them!”
Fools! Jean thought, cannot they see that those stinking grub-worms were possessed of no other intent than a desire to peek at fair feminine flesh—and ‘twas for this they were boring holes? Poor devils—one half blind, and the other with a wooden leg—how else would they ever get a glimpse of a pair of shapely limbs? But what an imbecility to die for!
That they would die for it was now quite certain. The two filthy old men were not to be given a chance to even explain their impotent lechery. What had kept them alive even so long was the surplus of would-be executioners. The Parisian ruffians fought like beasts for the privilege of killing the two harmless old fools. They were snatched from group to group, their rags torn, bloodied by a hundred blows.
Finally half a hundred Saint-Antoine Quartier roughs broiled through. In two minutes the two Peeping Toms were kicking their miserable lives out on the ends of ropes suspended from the same lantern-post. There was a macabre ridiculousness about their antics; they bumped against each other, twirled, their hairy jaws sagging, their dirty greyish faces turning slowly blue, because their murderers had not known how to tie the knot properly so that it would break the necks cleanly and bring instant death. So the two men strangled to death slowly, while the mob hooted and roared with laughter.
Jean Paul turned away from the sight. He felt sick down to the bottom of his guts. Though he had seen mob violence many times in Paris, it still sickened him. He did not want to watch the rest of it, but remained there with his back turned until another shout told him that it was done, finished in the only way la foule de Paris knew how to finish anything; and when he looked again the mob was bearing the two heads away, dripping, upon the ends of their pikes.
The crowd opened to let the pike-bearers through with their gruesome trophies. Jean saw a man reach out and snatch a young woman aside who had remained squarely in their way. He wondered at her action for barely a moment before he saw who she was.
“Fleurette,” he murmured. “Pray God that neither Pierre nor Marianne sees me here. . . .
The slow, far-off boom of a cannon cut through his words. He lifted his head and listened, frowning. As he expected, a few moments later he heard the muffled roll of drums.
The Civil Guard, coming to put down the disturbance. The warning gun, sounding its brass-throated invocation of martial law. Jean glanced once more at Fleurette. There might be bloodshed here. Pierre must realise that. He should take the two women away at once. Jean started working his way towards them, but it was hard going. When he was close enough he waited. He didn’t want to talk to them now; above all things he wanted to avoid that. But he had to stay near them. In case of an outbreak they would need him. He waited.
He had not long to wait. Bailly, Mayor of Paris, came riding behind a colour guard bearing le drapeau rouge, the red flag by which a civic or national emergency was proclaimed. At Bailly’s side rode de Lafayette, and, behind the general, rank after rank of the National Guard.
Even the artillery. The crowd made way for them in sullen silence. Then a woman shrilled:
“Down with the red flag! Down with the bayonets!”
A hundred voices took it up at once, screaming it, shouting it, roaring: “A bas le drapeau rouge! A bas les baionnettes!” until they were all splitting the very heavens open with their cries.
Bailly was mounting the tottering platform now, reading the proclamation. Jean could see his lips moving, but he couldn’t hear the words; the mob did not cease its bull bellow long enough.
Someone picked up a stone, threw it. A shower of missiles followed, raining upon the Guard.
The soldiers lifted their muskets. Jean started towards Fleurette. Then the volley, crisp, crackling, the air smoke-plumed, but not a man falling, because the Guard had aimed above their heads.
The mob fell back, then surged forward again, emboldened by the Guards’ clemency. The rain of stones redoubled. Jean saw the soldiers bring their pieces down smartly and begin to reload. The crowd pressed forward furiously. There was a spattering of pistol-shots; General de Lafayette’s aide-de-camp reeled in the saddle, wounded through the shoulder. No one, neither Bailly nor de Lafayette, gave the order to fire. When the troops loosed their next volley, they did so only in defence of their lives. A few of the mob went down, sprawling grotesquely upon the ground, the life pumping out of their torn bodies. The rest of them reeled back, recoiling from the gunfire, then, wheeling like a herd of sheep before the winding horns of a great coach, they stampeded.
Jean saw the artillerymen, their matches lit, running for the touch-holes of the cannon. But de Lafayette, with beautifully precise horsemanship, danced his charger between the fleeing mob and the guns, pressing the flank of his mount against the muzzle of one of the cannons.
The mob plunged on, trampling women, children, the old, and the infirm under foot in its terror. Jean fought his way towards Fleurette. Just before he reached her, he saw her torn away from Pierre’s grasp and knocked to the earth by the herd of beasts from whom all semblance of humanity had fled.
Jean lifted his heavy cane, swung it in a circle, battering his way forward. His blows cleared a path for him like magic, and in a moment he was at her side. He knelt down and picked her up. She was not hurt, he saw, only dazed and breathless.
“My thanks, M’sieur,” she whispered; “you can put me down now—I—I’m quite all right. . . .”
“No, Fleurette,” Jean said gravely. “It’s too dangerous. Come, I’ll get you out of here.”
He saw her great, sightless eyes widening endlessly in her tiny face. Then all the light in the world got into them, soft-glowing warm, unfocused.
“Jean!” she breathed, “oh, my dearest. . . .” Then she swept both her arms up about his neck and hid her face against his collar.
Jean marched with her like that until they were out of the crowd. He lifted his cane to signal a fiacre, and saw to his astonishment that only a stump of it was left. He had broken it against the heads of the mob without even realising it.
It took a long time to get a fiacre. Everyone who could afford it was trying to engage one. So it was that Pierre and Marianne were able to make their way out of the diminishing mob and join them.
Marianne’s face was tear-streaked. She hugged Fleurette fiercely, babbling:
“Thank God you’re safe! Oh, thank God! I thought the
y’d trampled you. . . .”
“They would have,” Fleurette said proudly, her voice lilting, flute-like, warm, “but for Jean—”
Marianne turned her face towards Jean.
“As for you, Jean Marin,” she snapped, “have you decided to behave yourself and come back to us?”
“I,” Jean laughed, “have no choice in the matter. Yes, Marianne, I’m moving back to my old place tomorrow.”
Pierre stared at his friend. Then suddenly he put out his hand. Jean gripped it hard.
“I’m glad, Jean,” Pierre said gravely; “you don’t know how glad I am.”
Fleurette touched his arm shyly.
“Jean,” she whispered; “it’s over, then? The—the other, I mean? You’re not with her any more?”
“No, little dove,” Jean said, “she’s no longer here—not in Paris any more; not even in France.”
The joy that flared in Fleurette’s dark eyes was almost blinding. Jean felt something inside his heart rise up and fly away. It had been there a long time, dark and heavy and formless, but it was gone now. “You’re not with her any more?” Fleurette had asked; and now at last, at long, long last he wasn’t. He was free. He stood there very still, savouring the feeling. It was a good one, very deep and strong and quiet—and the name of it was—peace.
Riding home with them in the fiacre that Pierre finally stopped, Jean marvelled at how easy it had all been. He had been dreading this meeting. He had expected tears, recriminations, laborious explanations, apologies. Only it wasn’t going to be like that at all. He had given all the explanations he was ever going to have to give. Pierre’s gaze was steady, warm; and Marianne seemed to be regarding them with something of that peculiar satisfaction with which an artist views the work of his own hands.
But there were still things to be done, and for a time it seemed to Jean Paul that they could be accomplished. After the so-called Massacre of the Champs de Mars, the Assembly tardily showed courage: a measure of direct reprimand against the seditious journals was voted and, for the time being, Marat’s Friend of the People, Freron’s Orator of the People, and Camille Desmoulins’ Revolutions of France and Brabant ceased to appear. More, as the tide of moderation rose, Desmoulins, Legendre, and Santerre went into hiding, while Danton fled to England. Robespierre, who had prudently concealed his part in the whole affair, contented himself with accepting the hospitality of the rich M. Duplay and staying away from his old lodgings.
Lafayette, Barnave, Lameth, Le Chapelier, Duport, Sieyès, Talleyrand founded a new club, which met in the Convent of the Feuillants, and came to bear that name. Many of these founders of the Feuillant Club had been Jacobins, but as the extremists moved to the fore, their influence there had vanished. Jean attended many of the meetings of the Feuillants, whose politics he found more or less congenial; but he refused to actually become a member.
“If the Assembly were wise,” he said to Pierre, “it would close all the clubs. A deputy should not be subjected to pressure from without. ‘Tis the ruination of democracy.”
But the Assembly was far from wise. On September 3, 1791, it voted a Constitution armed with provisions to keep the power in the hands of the bourgeoisie; but on the thirteenth of the same month it brought itself to an end, voting almost unanimously for the most monumental piece of political stupidity ever born of the warped mind of a singularly warped man:
Maximilien Robespierre, out of a fantastic desire to display his famed “Incorruptibility”, urged that members of the National Assembly vote themselves ineligible to sit in the new or Legislative Assembly. Thus, by the stroke of a pen, was France robbed of all the dearly bought experience of two terrible years, and turned over to novices once more. . . .
Jean Paul voted with the rest. ‘Tis madness and worse, he thought; but I have done what I could. I think that the rest of them are tired, too—as tired, perhaps, as I am. They want to go back to homes they have not seen in years, to take up the threads of their lives once more and weave them into a more acceptable pattern.
That night he had already begun to pack his clothes when Fleurette came into the room, and stood there listening to the sounds he made.
“You—you’re going away,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, Fleurette,” Jean said, forcing cheerfulness into his voice; “but I shall come back—as soon as possible. . . .”
“How long will you be away, Jean?” Fleurette whispered.
“Two months—perhaps three. I’m going to try to revive my father’s old business. It’s a good time now—for such a thing. Since the revolt of the negroes of Saint-Dominique, sugar and coffee are plaguedly hard to come by; I think I can start shipping those commodities again—from Louisiana, perhaps, or Martinique. I have the ships—’twill be only a matter of refitting them and finding crews. . . .”
He chattered on, desperately searching her face. It was blank, expressionless. He was aware after a time that she wasn’t even listening.
She came close to him, her great, dark eyes so fixed upon his face that he had the momentary illusion that she could see him after all, that her gaze probed beyond the surface into his brain.
“Jean,” she said simply, “don’t tell me all those things. They are men’s affairs, and no concern of mine. Tell me just one thing, my Jean—the truth. When you come back to Paris, are you coming back—to me?”
He stood there, staring at her. It’s the one thing I cannot cope with, he thought—this simplicity of hers. Being blind has done this for her, I think. She had never had to concern herself with non-essentials. And this thing she has asked, what is the answer to it? What can I say? That I will come back, poor waif, sweet child, sweet, lovely child, if the woman I seek is dead. That is what it amounts to, but I cannot say that, can I? Dear God, what can I say?
He put out his big hand and touched her soft cheek, letting his hand rest there as lightly as a breath.
“If,” he murmured, “I do not come back to you, Fleurette—I shall not come back at all. . . .”
She brought her own hand up slowly and closed it over his fingers. She drew them down and away from her face, turning them over until she held his hand, palm up. She stood there, like that, holding it.
“I think that you’re being kind,” she said, “or that you love me a little, I don’t know which. . . .” She smiled, and the tears were there, bright and sudden, in her eyes. She lifted his big hand and pressed a kiss against the palm; then she closed his fingers over it.
“This keep—in remembrance of me,” she said, and ran from the room.
Jean stood very still, looking after her. I have many things to keep in memory of you, little Fleurette, he thought, all the good, gentle things—all the flowers of quietness. . . . Then he bent once more to the task of packing.
It was difficult, damnably difficult. In the first place, the journey down to Marseilles, which had been a matter of some five or six days by fast diligence under the Kings of France, took more than two dreary weeks, due to the disorder into which transportation, like all else in France, had fallen. In the second, the recruiting of crews wasn’t easy. The seamen were as idle as Jean had expected them to be, but they were not really suffering from their idleness; too many opportunities for pillage, blackguardism, and plain thievery existed in the France of 1791. And even worse than the task of finding ordinary seamen was the labour of discovering anyone with experience who wanted to serve as an officer.
“’Tis like this, Jean Marin, lad,” one old salt after another explained to him, “I knew your father, sailed under his colours often enough, ye ken; but ‘tis different nowadays. These fools don’t comprehend that a vessel’s no place for politics. When I give an order, I want my lads to jump to it and look alive! What’s more, their lives and mine are in danger every time they don’t; if I tell the helmsman to take a starboard tack because I plainly see white water and reefs to port, I’m not going to argue the matter with him save with a marlin-spike or a belaying-pin! But thes
e republican idiots want to put every matter to a vote—even up to electing their own officers aboard a merchantman. And seamanship and the ability to command don’t make a man popular.”
But if there was any one thing his political career had taught Jean Paul, it was the art of persuasion. By dint of a ready tongue and a lavish expenditure of money he got three of his father’s vessels fitted out again: two great ships, and one smart brig which made up for its lack of tonnage by its agility as a sailer.
He bribed, bullied, pleaded with, flattered, and shamed most of his father’s old seamen to sign aboard; even so, the ship sailed short-handed because of his steadfast refusal to accept landlubbers and unruly louts among the crews.
As he fully expected, the warehouses had been pillaged; what the thieves had been unable to take away they had destroyed. But somehow, out of respect for his father, Jean guessed, they had refrained from burning them. Jean found artisans to equip the windows with stout iron bars, and had locksmiths change all the smashed and useless locks. Now, when his vessels returned with his goods, he would have a place to store them.
He hired one Joseph Cocteau, a stern and honest man, and put him in charge, with the power to employ and discharge men as he saw fit.
Now, he thought, ‘tis all done, and there is nothing to do but to wait, it’s a gamble, and any failure could ruin me—the loss of a ship, the failure to obtain the goods in the troubled Antilles—anything at all. But let me win this time, and I am made. The demand for coffee, sugar, rum is greater than at any time in history. From this one voyage I will be able to open Marin et Fils in Calais as well, and spend my whole time between there and Paris. . . . For there is nothing left here—nothing at all.
He was riding along the high-road that led towards Saint Jule and Villa Marin as he thought these things; a moment later, rounding a bend in the road, he saw his thoughts had been right.
He got down from his horse and walked towards the fire-blackened ruins. The walls still stood, but the windows opened upon nothing but the heavens; floors and roof had crashed into rubble, from which rank weeds grew; vines climbed the streaked and sooty walls, and at his footsteps a horde of bats flitted wildly into the starlit sky.
