Les Dieux ont soif. English

by Anatole France

  XIX

  While the Pere Longuemare and the girl Athenais were examined at theSection, Brotteaux was led off between two gendarmes to the Luxembourg,where the door-keeper refused to admit him, declaring he had no roomleft. The old financier was next taken to the Conciergerie and broughtinto the Gaoler's office, quite a small room, divided in two by a glazedpartition. While the clerk was inscribing his name in the prisonregisters, Brotteaux could see through the panes two men lying each on atattered mattress, both as still as death and with glazed eyes thatseemed to see nothing. Plates, bottles and bits of broken bread and meatlittered the floor round them. They were prisoners condemned to deathand waiting for the cart to arrive.

  The _ci-devant_ Monsieur des Ilettes was thrust into a dungeon, where bythe light of a lantern he could just make out two figures stretched onthe ground, one savage-looking and hideously mutilated, the othergraceful and pleasing. The two prisoners offered him a share of theirstraw, and this, rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, was betterthan having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement.Brotteaux sank down on a bench in the pestiferous darkness and satthere, his head against the wall, speechless and motionless. So intensewas his agony of mind he would have dashed out his brains against thestones if he had had the strength. He could not breathe. His eyes swam,and a long-drawn murmur, as soft as silence, filled his ears. He felthis whole being bathed in a delicious semi-consciousness. For oneincomparable moment everything was harmony, serenity, light, fragrance,sweetness. Then he ceased to know or feel anything.

  When he returned to himself, the first notion that entered his head wasto regret his coma and, a philosopher even in the stupor of despair, hereflected how he had had to plunge to the depths of an undergrounddungeon, there to await execution, to enjoy the most exquisite of allvoluptuous sensations he had ever tasted. He tried hard to loseconsciousness again, but without success; on the contrary, little bylittle he felt the poisonous air of the dungeon fill his lungs and bringwith it, along with the fever of life, a full consciousness of hisintolerable wretchedness.

  Meantime his two companions regarded his silence as a cruel personalinsult. Brotteaux, who was of a sociable turn, endeavoured to satisfytheir curiosity; but when they discovered he was only what they called"a political," one of the mild sort whose crime was only a matter ofwords and opinions, they lost all respect and sympathy for him. Theoffences charged against these two prisoners had more grit; the older ofthe men was a murderer, the other had been manufacturing forgedassignats. Both made the best of their situation and even found somealleviations in it. Brotteaux's thoughts suddenly turned to the worldabove him,--how over his head all was noise and bustle, light and life,while the pretty shopwomen in the Palais de Justice behind theircounters, loaded with perfumery and pretty knicknacks, smiled on theircustomers, happy people free to go where they pleased,--and the picturedoubled his despair.

  Night fell, unmarked in the darkness and silence of the dungeon, but yetgloomy and oppressive. One leg extended on his bench and his backpropped against the wall, Brotteaux fell into a doze. And lo! he sawhimself seated at the foot of a leafy beech, in which the birds weresinging; the setting sun bathed the river in liquid fire and the cloudswere edged with purple. The night wore through. A burning fever consumedhim and he greedily drained his pitcher to the dregs, but the fetidwater only increased his distress.

  Next day the gaoler who brought the food promised Brotteaux, if he couldafford the cost, to give him the privileges of a prisoner who pays forhis accommodation, so soon as there should be room, and it was notlikely to be long first. And so it turned out; two days later he invitedthe old financier to leave his dungeon. At every step he took upwards,Brotteaux felt life and vigour coming back to him, and when he saw aroom with a red-tiled floor and in it a bed of sacking covered with adingy woollen counterpane, he wept for joy. The gilded bed carved withdoves billing and cooing that he had once had made for the prettiest ofthe dancers at the Opera had not seemed so desirable or promised himsuch delights.

  This bed of sacking was in a large hall, very fairly clean, which heldseventeen others like it, separated by high partitions of planks. Thecompany that occupied these quarters, composed of ex-nobles, tradesmen,bankers, working-men, hit the old publican's taste well enough, for hecould accommodate himself to persons of all qualities. He noticed thatthese, cut off like himself from every opportunity of pleasure andforedoomed to perish at the hand of the executioner, were of a verymerry humour and showed a marked taste for wit and raillery. His bentwas to think lightly of mankind, so he attributed the high spirits ofhis companions to the frivolity of their minds, which prevented themfrom looking seriously at their situation. Moreover, he was strengthenedin his opinion by observing how the more intelligent among them wereprofoundly sad. He remarked before long, that, for the most part, wineand brandy supplied the inspiration of a gaiety that betrayed its sourceby its violent and sometimes almost insane character. They did not allpossess courage; but all made a display of it. This caused Brotteaux nosurprise; he was well aware how men will readily enough avow cruelty,passion, even avarice, but never cowardice, because such an admissionwould bring them, among savages and even in civilized society, intomortal danger. That is the reason, he reflected, why all nations arenations of heroes and all armies are made up of brave men only.

  More potent, even, than wine and brandy were the rattle of weapons andkeys, the clash of locks and bolts, the cry of sentries, the stamping offeet at the door of the Tribunal, to intoxicate the prisoners and filltheir minds with melancholy, insanity, or frenzy. Some there were whocut their throat with a razor or threw themselves from a window.

  Brotteaux had been living for three days in these privileged quarterswhen he learned through the turnkey that the Pere Longuemare waslanguishing on the rotten verminous straw of the common prison with thethieves and murderers. He had him put on paying terms in the same roomas himself, where a bed had fallen vacant. Having promised to pay forthe monk, the old publican, who had no large sum of money about him,struck out the idea of making portraits at a crown apiece. By the helpof a gaoler, he procured a supply of small black frames in which to putpretty little designs in hair which he executed with considerablecleverness. These productions sold well, being highly appreciated amongpeople whose thoughts were set on leaving souvenirs to their friends.

  The Pere Longuemare kept a good heart and a high spirit. While waitinghis summons to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he waspreparing his defence. Drawing no distinction between his own case andthat of the Church, he promised himself to expose to his judges thedisorders and scandals to which the Spouse of Christ was exposed by theCivil Constitution of the Clergy; he proposed to depict the eldestdaughter of the Church waging sacrilegious war upon the Pope, the Frenchclergy robbed, outraged, subjected to the odious domination of laics,the regulars, Christ's true army, despoiled and scattered. He cited St.Gregory the Great and St. Irenaeus, quoted numerous articles of the CanonLaw and whole paragraphs from the Decretals.

  All day long he sat scribbling on his knees, at the foot of his bed,dipping stumps of pens worn to the feathers in ink, soot,coffee-grounds, covering with illegible writing candle-wrappers,packing-paper, newspapers, playing cards, even thinking of using hisshirt for the same purpose after starching it. Leaf by leaf the pilegrew; pointing to this mass of undecipherable scrawls, he would say:

  "Ah! when I appear before my judges, I will inundate them with light."

  Another day, casting a look of satisfaction on his defence, which grewbulkier day by day, and thinking of these magistrates he was burning toconfound, he cried:

  "I wouldn't like to be in _their_ shoes!"

  The prisoners whom fate had brought together in this prison-room wereRoyalists or Federalists, there was even a Jacobin amongst the rest;they held widely different views as to the right way of conducting thebusiness of the State, but not one of them all preserved the smallestvestige of Christian beliefs. Feuillants, Constitutionals, Girondists
,all, like Brotteaux, considered the Christians' God a very bad thing forthemselves and an excellent one for the people; as for the Jacobins,they were for installing in the place of Jehovah a Jacobin god, anxiousto refer the dispensation of Jacobinism on earth to a higher source. Butas they could not conceive, either one or the other, of anybody being soabsurd as to believe in any revealed religion, seeing that the PereLonguemare was no fool, they took him to be a knave. By way, no doubt,of preparing for martyrdom, he made confession of faith at everyopportunity, and the more sincerity he displayed, the more like animpostor he seemed.

  In vain Brotteaux stood surety for the monk's good faith; Brotteauxhimself was reputed to believe only a part of what he said. His ideaswere too singular not to appear affected and satisfied nobody entirely.He dubbed Jean-Jacques a dull, paltry rascal. Voltaire, on the otherhand, he accounted among the divinely-gifted men, though not on thesame level as the amiable Helvetius, or Diderot, or the Baron d'Holbach.In his opinion the greatest genius of the century was Boulanger. He alsothought highly of the astronomer Lalande and of Dupuis, author of a_Memoir on the origin of the Constellations_.

  The wits of the company made a thousand jokes at the poor Barnabite'sexpense, the point of which he never saw; his simplicity saved him fromevery pitfall. To drown the suspense that racked them and escape thetorments of idleness, the prisoners played at draughts, cards andbackgammon. No instrument of music was allowed. After supper they wouldsing, or recite verses. Voltaire's _La Pucelle_ brought a littlecheerfulness to these aching hearts, and the company never wearied ofhearing the telling passages repeated. But, unable to distract theirthoughts from the appalling vision that always loomed before theirmind's eye, they strove sometimes to make a diversion of it, and in thechamber of the eighteen beds, before turning in for the night, theywould play the game of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The parts weredistributed according to tastes and aptitudes. While some representedthe judges and prosecutor, others were the accused or the witnesses,others again the headsman and his men. The trials invariably wound upwith the execution of the condemned, who were laid at full length on abed, the neck underneath a plank. The scene then shifted to the infernalregions. The most agile of the troop, wrapped in white sheets, playedspectres. There was a young _avocat_ from Bordeaux, a man named Dubosc,short, dark, one-eyed, humpbacked, bandy-legged, the very black deuce inperson, who used to come all horned and hoofed, to drag the PereLonguemare feet first out of his bed, announcing to the culprit that hewas condemned to the everlasting flames of hell and doomed pastredemption for having made of the Creator of the Universe a jealousbeing, a blockhead, and a bully, an enemy of human happiness and love.

  "Ah! ha! ha!" the devil would scream discordantly, "so you taught, youold bonze, that God delights to see His creatures languish in contritionand deny themselves His dearest gifts. Impostor, hypocrite, sneak, siton nails and eat egg-shells for all eternity!"

  The Pere Longuemare, for all reply, would observe that the speech showedthe philosopher's cloven hoof behind the devil's and that the meanestimp of hell would never have talked such foolishness, having at leastrubbed shoulders with Theology and for certain being less ignorant thanan Encyclopaedist.

  But when the Girondist _avocat_ called him a Capuchin, he turned scarletwith anger and declared that a man incapable of distinguishing aBarnabite from a Franciscan was too blind to see a fly in milk.

  The Revolutionary Tribunal was always draining the prisons, which theCommittees were as unceasingly replenishing; in three months the chamberof the eighteen was half full of new faces. The Pere Longuemare lost histormentor. The _avocat_ Dubosc was haled before the RevolutionaryTribunal and condemned to death as a Federalist and for having conspiredagainst the unity of the Republic. On leaving the court, he returned, asthe prisoners always did, by a corridor that ran through the prison andopened on the room he had enlivened for three months with his gaiety.As he made his farewells to his companions, he maintained the same lighttone and cheerful air that were habitual with him.

  "Forgive me, sir," he said to the Pere Longuemare, "for having hauledyou feet foremost from your bed. I will never do it again."

  Then, turning to old Brotteaux:

  "Good-bye, I go before you into the land of nowhere. I gladly return toNature the atoms of my composition, only hoping she will make a betteruse of them for the future, for it must be owned she did not make muchof a job of me."

  So he went on his way to the gaoler's room, leaving Brotteaux sorrowfuland the Pere Longuemare trembling and green as a leaf, more dead thanalive to see the impious wretch laugh on the brink of the abyss.

  When Germinal brought back the bright days, Brotteaux, who was of anardent temperament, tramped down several times every day to thecourtyard giving on the women's quarters, near the fountain where thefemale prisoners used to come of a morning to wash their linen. An ironrailing separated the two barracks; but the bars were not so closetogether as to hinder hands joining and lips meeting. Under the kindlyshade of night loving couples would press against the obstacle. At suchtimes Brotteaux would retire discreetly to the staircase and, sitting ona step, would draw from the pocket of his plum-coloured surtout hislittle Lucretius and read, by the light of a lantern, some of theauthor's sternly consolatory maxims: "_Sic ubi non erimus_.... When weshall have ceased to be, nothing will have power to move us, not eventhe heavens and earth and sea confounding their shatteredfragments...." But, in the act of enjoying his exalted wisdom, Brotteauxwould find himself envying the Barnabite this craze that veiled theuniverse from his eyes.

  Month by month terror grew more intense. Every night the tipsy gaolers,their watch-dogs at their heels, would march from cell to cell,delivering acts of accusation, howling out names they mutilated, wakingthe prisoners and for twenty victims marked on their list terrifying twohundred. Along these corridors, reeking with bloody memories, passedevery day, without a murmur, twenty, thirty, fifty condemned prisoners,old men, women, young men and maidens, so widely different in rank andcharacter and opinion that the question rose involuntarily to thelips,--had they not been chosen by lot?

  And the card playing went on, the Burgundy drinking, the making ofplans, the assignations for after dark at the rails. The company, newalmost to a man, now consisted in great part of "extremists" and"irreconcilables." But still the room of the eighteen beds remained thehome of elegance and good breeding; barring two prisoners recentlytransferred from the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie and added to thecompany, by whom they were suspected of being spies, the _citoyens_Navette and Bellier by name, there were none but honest folk there whoreposed a mutual trust in each other. Glass in hand, the victories ofthe Republic were celebrated by all. Amongst the rest were severalpoets, as there always are in any gathering of people with nothing todo. The most accomplished composed odes on the triumphs of the Army ofthe Rhine, which they recited with much mouthing. They wereuproariously applauded. Brotteaux was the only lukewarm admirer of thevictors and the bards who sang their victories.

  "Since Homer began it," he observed one day, "it has always been a maniawith poets, this extolling the powers of fighting-men. War is not anart, and luck alone decides the fate of battles. With two generals, bothblockheads, face to face, one of them must inevitably be victorious.Wait till some day one of these warriors you make gods of swallows youall up like the stork in the fable who gobbles up the frogs. Ah! then hewould be really and truly a God! For you can always tell the gods bytheir appetite."

  Brotteaux's head had never been turned by the glamour of arms. He feltno triumph at the victories of the Republic, which he had foreseen. Hedid not like the new regime, which military success confirmed. He was amalcontent. Another would have been the same for less cause.

  One morning it was announced that the Commissaries of the Committee ofGeneral Security were going to institute a search in the prisoners'quarters, that they would seize assignats, articles of gold and silver,knives, scissors; that similar proceedings had been taken at theLuxembourg, where letters, pape
rs, and books had been taken possessionof.

  Thereupon everyone tried to think of some hiding place in which tosecure whatever he held most precious. The Pere Longuemare carried awayhis defence in armfuls to a rain-gutter, while Brotteaux slipped hisLucretius among the ashes on the hearth.

  When the Commissaries, wearing tricolour ribands at their necks,arrived to carry out their perquisition, they found scarcely anythingbut such trifles as it had been deemed judicious to let them discover.On their departure, the Pere Longuemare ran to his rain-pipe and rescuedas much of his defence as wind and water had spared. Brotteaux pulledout his Lucretius from the fireplace all black with soot.

  "Let us make the best of the present," he thought, "for I augur fromsundry tokens that our time is straitly measured from henceforth."

  One soft night in Prairial, while over the prison yard the moon ridinghigh in a pale sky showed her two silver horns, the ex-financier, who,as his way was, sat reading Lucretius on a step of the stone stairs,heard a voice call him, a woman's voice, a delightful voice, which hedid not know. He went down into the court and saw behind the railing aform which he recognized as little as he did the voice, but whichreminded him, in its half-seen fascinating outlines, of all the women hehad loved. A flood of silvery blue moonlight fell on it. Next instantBrotteaux recognized the pretty actress of the Rue Feydeau, RoseThevenin.

  "You here, my child! It is a joy to see you, but it stabs my heart.Since when have you been here, and why?"

  "Since yesterday,"--and she added very low:

  "I have been denounced as a Royalist. They accuse me of conspiring toset free the Queen. Knowing you were here, I tried at once to see you.Listen to me, dear friend ... you will let me call you so?... I knowpeople in power; I have sympathizers, I am sure of it, on the Committeeof Public Safety itself. I will set my friends to work; they willdeliver me, and _I_ will deliver you."

  But Brotteaux in a voice that took on an accent of urgency:

  "By everything you hold dear, my child, do nothing of the sort! Do notwrite, do not petition; ask nothing of anybody, I conjure you, letyourself be forgotten."

  As she appeared unconvinced by what he said, he went on morebeseechingly still:

  "Not a word, Rose, let them forget you; there lies safety. Anything yourfriends might attempt would only hasten your undoing. Time iseverything; only a short delay, a very short one, I hope, is needed tosave you.... Above all, never try to melt the judges, the jurors, aGamelin. They are not men, they are things; there is no arguing withthings. Let them forget you; if you take my advice, sweetheart, I shalldie happy, happy to have saved your life."

  She answered:

  "I will do as you say.... Never talk of dying...."

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  "My life is ended, my child. Do you live and be happy."

  She took his hands and laid them on her bosom:

  "Hear what I say, dear friend.... I have only seen you once for a day,and yet you are not indifferent to me. And if what I am going to tellyou can renew your attachment to life, oh! believe my promise,--I willbe for you ... whatever you shall wish me to be."

  And they exchanged a kiss on the mouth through the bars.