Les Dieux ont soif. English

by Anatole France

  XIII

  Evariste Gamelin occupied his place as juror of the Tribunal for thesecond time. Before the opening of the sitting, he discussed with hiscolleagues the news that had arrived that morning. Some of it wasdoubtful, some untrue; but part was authentic--and appalling; the armiesof the coalition in command of all the roads and marching _en masse_ onParis, La Vendee triumphant, Lyons in insurrection, Toulon surrenderedto the English, who were landing fourteen thousand men there.

  For him and his fellow magistrates these were not only events ofinterest to all the world, but so many matters of domestic concern.Foredoomed to perish in the ruin of the fatherland, they made the publicsalvation their own proper business. The Nation's interests, thusentangled with their own, dictated their opinions and passions andconduct.

  Gamelin, where he sat on the jury bench, was handed a letter fromTrubert, Secretary of the Committee of Defence; it was to notify hisappointment as Commissioner of Supplies of Powder and Saltpetre:

  _"You will excavate all the cellars in the Section in order to extract the substances necessary for the manufacture of powder. To-morrow perhaps the enemy will be before Paris; the soil of the fatherland must provide us with the lightning we shall launch against our aggressors. I send you herewith a schedule of instructions from the Convention regarding the manipulation of saltpetres. Farewell and brotherly greeting."_

  At that moment the accused was brought in. He was one of the last of thedefeated Generals whom the Convention delivered over one after the otherto the Tribunal, and the most insignificant. At sight of him Gamelinshuddered; once again he seemed to see the same soldier whom three weeksbefore, looking on as a spectator, he had seen sentenced and sent to theguillotine. The man was the same, with his obstinate, opinionated look;the procedure was the same. He gave his answers in a cunning, brutishway that ruined the effect even of the most convincing. His cavillingand chicanery and the accusations he levelled against his subordinates,made you forget he was fulfilling the honourable task of defending hishonour and his life. Everything was uncertain, every statementdisputed,--position of the armies, total of forces engaged, munitions ofwar, orders given, orders received, movements of troops; nobody knewanything. It was impossible to make head or tail of these confused,nonsensical, aimless operations which had ended in disaster; defendingcounsel and the accused himself were as much in the dark as wereaccuser, judges, and jury, and strange to say, not a soul would admit,whether to himself or to other people, that this was the case. Thejudges took a childish delight in drawing plans and discussing problemsof tactics and strategy, while the prisoner constantly betrayed hisinborn predilection for crooked ways.

  The arguments dragged on endlessly. And all the time Gamelin could seeon the rough roads of the north the ammunition wagons stogged in themire and the guns capsized in the ruts, and along all the ways thebroken and beaten columns flying in disorder, while from all sides theenemy's cavalry was debouching by the abandoned defiles. And from thishost of men betrayed he could hear a mighty shout going up in accusationof the General. When the hearing closed, darkness was falling on thehall, and the head of Marat gleamed half-seen like a phantom above thePresident's head. The jury was called upon to give judgment, but was oftwo minds. Gamelin, in a hoarse, strangled voice, but in resoluteaccents, declared the accused guilty of treason against the Republic,and a murmur of approval rose from the crowd, a flattering unction tohis youthful virtue. The sentence was read by the light of torches whichcast a lurid, uncertain gleam on the prisoner's hollow temples beadedwith drops of sweat. Outside the doors, on the steps crowded with thecustomary swarm of cockaded harridans, Gamelin could hear his name,which the habitues of the Tribunal were beginning to know, passed frommouth to mouth, and was assailed by a bevy of _tricoteuses_ who shooktheir fists in his face, demanding the head of _the Austrian_.

  The next day Evariste had to give judgment on the fate of a poor woman,the widow Meyrion. She distributed bread from house to house and trampedthe streets pushing a little hand-cart and carrying a wooden tally hungat her waist, on which she cut notches with her knife representing thenumber of the loaves she had delivered. Her gains amounted to eight sousa day. The deputy of the Public Prosecutor displayed an extraordinaryvirulence towards the wretched creature, who had, it appears, shouted"Vive le Roi!" on several occasions, uttered anti-revolutionary remarksin the houses where she called to leave the daily dole of bread, andbeen mixed up in a plot for the escape of the woman Capet. In answer tothe Judge's question she admitted the facts alleged against her; whetherfool or fanatic, she professed Royalist sentiments of the mostenthusiastic sort and waited her doom.

  The Revolutionary Tribunal made a point of proving the triumph ofEquality by showing itself just as severe for street-porters and servantmaids as for the aristocrats and financiers. Gamelin could conceive noother system possible under a popular government. He would have deemedit a mark of contempt, an insult to the people, to exclude it frompunishment. That would have been to consider it, so to speak, asunworthy of chastisement by the law. Reserved for aristocrats only, theguillotine would have appeared to him in the light of an iniquitousprivilege. In his thoughts he was beginning to erect chastisement into areligious and mystic dogma, to assign it a virtue, a merit of its own;he conceived that society owes punishment to criminals and that it isdoing them an injustice to cheat them of this right. He declared thewoman Meyrion guilty and deserving of death, only regretting that thefanatics, more culpable than herself, who had brought her to her ruin,were not there to share her fate.

  * * * * *

  Every evening almost Evariste attended the meetings of the Jacobins, whoassembled in the former chapel of the Dominicans, commonly known asJacobins, in the Rue Honore. In a courtyard, in which stood a tree ofLiberty, a poplar whose leaves shook and rustled all day in the wind,the chapel, built in a poor, clumsy style and surmounted by a heavy roofof tiles, showed its bare gable, pierced by a round window and anarched doorway, above which floated the National colours, the flagstaffcrowned with the cap of Liberty. The Jacobins, like the Cordeliers, andthe Feuillants, had appropriated the premises and taken the name of thedispossessed monks. Gamelin, once a regular attendant at the sittings ofthe Cordeliers, did not find at the Jacobins the familiar sabots,carmagnoles and rallying cries of the Dantonists. In Robespierre's clubadministrative reserve and bourgeois gravity were the order of the day.The Friend of the People was no more, and since his death Evariste hadfollowed the lessons of Maximilien whose thought ruled the Jacobins, andthence, through a thousand affiliated societies was disseminated overall France. During the reading of the minutes, his eyes wandered overthe bare, dismal walls, which, after sheltering the spiritual sons ofthe arch-inquisitor of heresy, now looked down on the assemblage ofzealous inquisitors of crimes against the fatherland.

  There, without pomp or ceremony, sat the body that was the chiefestpower of the State and ruled by force of words. It governed the city,the empire, dictated its decrees to the Convention itself. Theseartisans of the new order of things, so respectful of the law that theycontinued Royalists in 1791 and would fain have been Royalists still onthe King's return from Varennes, so obstinate in their attachment to theConstitution, friends of the established order of the State even afterthe massacres of the Champ-de-Mars, and never revolutionaries againstthe Revolution, heedless of popular agitation, cherished in their darkand puissant soul a love of the fatherland that had given birth tofourteen armies and set up the guillotine. Evariste was lost inadmiration of their vigilance, their suspicious temper, their reasoneddogmatism, their love of system, their supremacy in the art ofgoverning, their sovereign sanity.

  The public that formed the audience gave no token of their presence savea low, long-drawn murmur as of one voice, like the rustling of theleaves of the tree of Liberty that stood outside the threshold.

  That day, the 11th Vendemiaire, a young man, with a receding brow, apiercing eye, a sharp prominent nose, a pointed ch
in, a pock-markedface, a look of cold self-possession, mounted the tribune slowly. Hishair was white with powder and he wore a blue coat that displayed hisslim figure. He showed the precise carriage and moved with the cadencedstep that made some say in mockery that he was like a dancing-master andearned him from others the name of the "French Orpheus." Robespierre,speaking in a clear voice, delivered an eloquent discourse against theenemies of the Republic. He belaboured with metaphysical anduncompromising arguments Brissot and his accomplices. He spoke at greatlength, in free-flowing harmonious periods. Soaring in the celestialspheres of philosophy, he launched his lightnings at the baseconspirators crawling on the ground.

  Evariste heard and understood. Till then he had blamed the Gironde; werethey not working for the restoration of the monarchy or the triumph ofthe Orleans faction, were they not planning the ruin of the heroic citythat had delivered France from her fetters and would one day deliver theuniverse? Now, as he listened to the sage's voice, he discerned truthsof a higher and purer compass; he grasped a revolutionary metaphysicwhich lifted his mind above coarse, material conditions into a region ofabsolute, unqualified convictions, untrammelled by the errors of thesenses. Things are in their nature involved and full of confusion; thecomplexity of circumstances is such that we lose our way amongst them.Robespierre simplified them to his mind, put good and evil before him inclear and precise formulas. Federalism,--indivisibility; unity andindivisibility meant salvation, federalism, damnation. Gamelin tastedthe ineffable joy of a believer who knows the word that saves and theword that destroys the soul. Henceforth the Revolutionary Tribunal, asof old the ecclesiastical courts, would take cognizance of crimeabsolute, of crime definable in a word. And, because he had thereligious spirit, Evariste welcomed these revelations with a sombreenthusiasm; his heart swelled and rejoiced at the thought that,henceforth, he had a talisman to discern betwixt crime and innocence, hepossessed a creed! Ye stand in lieu of all else, oh, treasures of faith!

  The sage Maximilien enlightened him further as to the perfidious intentof those who were for equalizing property and partitioning the land,abolishing wealth and poverty and establishing a happy mediocrity forall. Misled by their specious maxims, he had originally approved theirdesigns, which he deemed in accord with the principles of a trueRepublican. But Robespierre, in his speeches at the Jacobins, hadunmasked their machinations and convinced him that these men,disinterested as their intentions appeared, were working to overthrowthe Republic, that they were alarming the rich only to rouse against thelawful authority powerful and implacable foes. Once private propertywas threatened, the whole population, the more ardently attached to itspossessions the less of these it owned, would turn suddenly against theRepublic. To terrify vested interests is to conspire against the State.These men who, under pretence of securing universal happiness and thereign of justice, proposed a system of equality and community of goodsas a worthy object of good citizens' endeavours, were traitors andmalefactors more dangerous than the Federalists.

  But the most startling revelation he owed to Robespierre's wisdom wasthat of the crimes and infamies of atheism. Gamelin had never denied theexistence of God; he was a deist and believed in a Providence thatwatches over mankind; but, admitting that he could form only a veryvague conception of the Supreme Being and deeply attached to theprinciple of freedom of conscience, he was quite ready to allow thatright-thinking men might follow the example of Lamettrie, Boulanger, theBaron d'Holbach, Lalande, Helvetius, the _citoyen_ Dupuis, and denyGod's existence, on condition they formulated a natural morality andfound in themselves the sources of justice and the rules of a virtuouslife. He had even felt himself in sympathy with the atheists, when hehad seen them vilified and persecuted. Maximilien had opened his mindand unsealed his eyes. The great man by his virtuous eloquence hadtaught him the true character of atheism, its nature, its objects, itseffects; he had shown him how this doctrine, conceived in thedrawing-rooms and boudoirs of the aristocracy, was the most perfidiousinvention the enemies of the people had ever devised to demoralize andenslave it; how it was a criminal act to uproot from the heart of theunfortunate the consoling thought of a Providence to reward andcompensate and give them over without rein or bit to the passions thatdegrade men and make vile slaves of them; how, in fine, the monarchicalEpicureanism of a Helvetius led to immorality, cruelty, and everywickedness. Now that he had learnt these lessons from the lips of agreat man and a great citizen, he execrated the atheists--especiallywhen they were of an open-hearted, joyous temper, like his old friendBrotteaux.

  * * * * *

  In the days that followed Evariste had to give judgment one after theother on a _ci-devant_ convicted of having destroyed wheat-stuffs inorder to starve the people, three _emigres_ who had returned to fomentcivil war in France, two ladies of pleasure of the Palais-Egalite,fourteen Breton conspirators, men, women, old men, youths, masters, andservants. The crime was proven, the law explicit. Among the guilty was agirl of twenty, adorable in the heyday of her young beauty under theshadow of the doom so soon to overwhelm her, a fascinating figure. Ablue bow bound her golden locks, her lawn kerchief revealed a white,graceful neck.

  Evariste was consistent in casting his vote for death, and all theaccused, with the one exception of an old gardener, were sent to thescaffold.

  The following week Evariste and his section mowed down sixty-threeheads--forty-five men and eighteen women.

  The judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal drew no distinction between menand women, in this following a principle as old as justice itself. True,the President Montane, touched by the bravery and beauty of CharlotteCorday, had tried to save her by paltering with the procedure of thetrial and had thereby lost his seat, but women as a rule were shown nofavour under examination, in strict accordance with the rule common toall the tribunals. The jurors feared them, distrusting their artfulways, their aptitude for deception, their powers of seduction. They werethe match of men in resolution, and this invited the Tribunal to treatthem in the same way. The majority of those who sat in judgment, men ofnormal sensuality or sensual on occasion, were in no wise affected bythe fact that the prisoner was a woman. They condemned or acquitted themas their conscience, their zeal, their love, lukewarm or vehement, forthe Republic dictated. Almost always they appeared before the court withtheir hair carefully dressed and attired with as much elegance as theunhappy conditions allowed. But few of them were young and still fewerpretty. Confinement and suspense had blighted them, the harsh light ofthe hall betrayed their weariness and the anguish they had endured,beating down on faded lids, blotched and pimpled cheeks, white, drawnlips. Nevertheless, the fatal chair more than once held a young girl,lovely in her pallor, while a shadow of the tomb veiled her eyes andmade her beauty the more seductive. That the sight had the power to meltsome jurymen and irritate others, who should deny? That, in the secretdepraved heart of him, one of these magistrates may have pried into themost sacred intimacies of the fair body that was to his morbid fancy atthe same moment a living and a dead woman's, and that, gloating overvoluptuous and ghoulish imaginings he may have found an atrociouspleasure in giving over to the headsman those dainty, desirablelimbs,--this is perhaps a thing better left unsaid, but one which no onecan deem impossible who knows what men are. Evariste Gamelin, cold andpedantic in his artistic creed, could see no beauty but in the Antique;he admired beauty, but it hardly stirred his senses. His classical tastewas so severe he rarely found a woman to his liking; he was asinsensible to the charms of a pretty face as he was to Fragonard'scolouring and Boucher's drawing. He had never known desire save underthe form of deep passion.

  Like the majority of his colleagues in the Tribunal, he thought womenmore dangerous than men. He hated the _ci-devant_ princesses, thecreatures he pictured to himself in his horrified dreams in company withElisabeth and _the Austrian_ weaving plots to assassinate good patriots;he even hated all those fair mistresses of financiers, philosophers, andmen of letters whose only crime was having enjoyed the pl
easures of thesenses and the mind and lived at a time when it was sweet to live. Hehated them without admitting the feeling to himself, and when he had onebefore him at the bar, he condemned her out of pique, convinced all thewhile that he was dooming her justly and rightly for the public good.His sense of honour, his manly modesty, his cold, calculated wisdom, hisdevotion to the State, his virtues in a word, pushed under the knifeheads that might well have moved men's pity.

  But what is this, what is the meaning of this strange prodigy? Once thedifficulty was to find the guilty, to search them out in their lair, todrag the confession of their crime from reluctant lips. Now, there is nohunting with a great pack of sleuth-hounds, no pursuing a timid prey;lo! from all sides come the victims to offer themselves a voluntarysacrifice. Nobles, virgins, soldiers, courtesans, flock to the Tribunal,dragging their condemnation from dilatory judges, claiming death as aright which they are impatient to enjoy. Not enough the multitude withwhich the zeal of the informers has crowded the prisons and which thePublic Prosecutor and his myrmidons are wearing out their lives inhaling before the Tribunal; punishment must likewise be provided forthose who refuse to wait. And how many others, prouder and more pressingyet, begrudging their judges and headsmen their death, perish by theirown hand! The mania of killing is equalled by the mania to die. Here, inthe Conciergerie, is a young soldier, handsome, vigorous, beloved; heleaves behind him in the prison an adorable mistress; she bade him "Livefor me!"--he will live neither for her nor love nor glory. He lights hispipe with his act of accusation. And, a Republican, for he breathesliberty through every pore, he turns Royalist that he may die. TheTribunal tries its best to save him, but the accused proves thestronger; judges and jury are forced to let him have his way.

  Evariste's mind, naturally of an anxious, scrupulous cast, was filled tooverflowing through the lessons he learned at the Jacobins and thecontemplation of life with suspicions and alarms. At night, as he pacedthe ill-lighted streets on his way to Elodie's, he fancied through everycellar-grating he passed he caught a glimpse of a plate for printing offforged assignats; in the dark recesses of the baker's and grocer's emptyshops he imagined storerooms bursting with provisions fraudulently heldback for a rise in prices; looking in at the glittering windows of theeating-houses, he seemed to hear the talk of the speculators plottingthe ruin of the country as they drained bottles of Beaune and Chablis;in the evil-smelling alleys he could see the very prostitutes tramplingunderfoot the National cockade to the applause of elegant youngroisterers; everywhere he beheld conspirators and traitors. And hethought: "Against so many foes, secret or declared, oh! Republic thouhast but one succour; Saint Guillotine, save the fatherland!..."

  Elodie would be waiting for him in her little blue chamber above the_Amour peintre_. To let him know he might come in, she used to set onthe window-sill her little watering-can beside the pot of carnations.Now he filled her with horror, he seemed like a monster to her; she wasafraid of him,--and she adored him. All the night, clinging together ina frantic embrace, the bloody-minded lover and the amorous girlexchanged in silence frenzied kisses.