Les Dieux ont soif. English Read online

  III

  On the afternoon of the same day Evariste set out to see the _citoyen_Jean Blaise, printseller, as well as dealer in ornamental boxes, fancygoods and games of all sorts, in the Rue Honore, opposite the Oratoireand near the office of the Messageries, at the sign of the _Amourpeintre_. The shop was on the ground floor of a house sixty years old,and opened on the street by a vaulted arch the keystone of which bore agrotesque head with horns. The semicircle beneath the arch was occupiedby an oil-painting representing "the Sicilian or Cupid the Painter,"after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise's father had put up in1770 and which sun and rain had been doing their best to obliterate eversince. On either side of the door a similar arched opening, with anymph's head on the keystone arch glazed with the largest panes to begot, exhibited for the benefit of the public the prints in vogue at thetime and the latest novelties in coloured engravings. To-day's displayincluded a series of scenes of gallantry by Boilly, treated in hisgraceful, rather stiff way, _Lecons d'amour conjugal_, _Doucesresistances_ and the like, which scandalized the Jacobins and which therigid moralists denounced to the Society of Arts, Debucourt's _Promenadepublique_, with a dandy in canary-coloured breeches lounging on threechairs, a group of horses by the young Carle Vernet, pictures of airballoons, the _Bain de Virginie_ and figures after the antique.

  Amid the stream of citizens that flowed past the shop it was theraggedest figures that loitered longest before the two fascinatingwindows. Easily amused, delighting in pictures and bent on getting theirshare, if only through the eyes, of the good things of this world, theystood in open-mouthed admiration, whereas the aristocrats merely glancedin, frowned and passed on.

  The instant he came within sight of the house, Evariste fixed his eyeson one of the row of windows above the shop, the one on the left hand,where there was a red carnation in a flower-pot behind a balcony oftwisted ironwork. It was the window of Elodie's chamber, Jean Blaise'sdaughter. The print-dealer lived with his only child on the first floorof the house.

  Evariste, after halting a moment as if to get his breath in front of the_Amour peintre_, turned the hasp of the shop-door. He found the_citoyenne_ Elodie within; she had just sold a couple of engravings byFragonard _fils_ and Naigeon, carefully selected from a number ofothers, and before locking up the _assignats_ received in payment in thestrong-box, was holding them one after the other between her fine eyesand the light, to scrutinize the delicate lines and intricate curves ofengraving and the watermark. She was naturally suspicious, for as muchforged paper was in circulation as true, which was a great hindrance tocommerce. As in former days, in the case of such as copied the King'ssignature, forgers of the national currency were punished by death; yetplates for printing _assignats_ were to be found in every cellar, theSwiss smuggled in counterfeits by the million, whole packets were put incirculation in the inns, the English landed bales of them every day onour coasts, to ruin the Republic's credit and bring good patriots todestitution. Elodie was in terror of accepting bad paper, and still morein terror of passing it and being treated as an accomplice of Pitt,though she had a firm belief in her own good luck and felt pretty sureof coming off best in any emergency.

  Evariste looked at her with the sombre gaze that speaks more movingly oflove than the most smiling face. She returned his gaze with a mockingcurl of the lips and an arch gleam in the dark eyes,--an expression shewore because she knew he loved her and liked to know it and because sucha look provokes a lover, makes him complain of ill-usage, brings him tothe speaking point, if he has not spoken already, which was Evariste'scase.

  Before depositing the _assignats_ in the strong-box, she produced fromher work-basket a white scarf, which she had begun to embroider, and setto work on it. At once industrious and a coquette, she knewinstinctively how to ply her needle so as to fascinate an admirer andmake a pretty thing for her wearing at one and the same time; she hadquite different ways of working according to the person watching her,--anonchalant way for those she would lull into a gentle languor, acapricious way for those she was fain to see in a more or lessdespairing mood. For Evariste, she bent with an air of painstakingabsorption over her scarf, for she wanted to stir a sentiment of seriousaffection in his heart.

  Elodie was neither very young nor very pretty. She might have beendeemed plain at the first glance. She was a brunette, with an olivecomplexion; under the broad white kerchief knotted carelessly about herhead, from which the dark lustrous ringlets escaped, her eyes of firegleamed as if they would burn their orbits. Her round face with itsprominent cheek-bones, laughing lips and rather broad nose, that gave ita wild-wood, voluptuous expression, reminded the painter of the faun ofthe Borghese, a cast of which he had seen and been struck withadmiration for its freakish charm. A faint down of moustache accentuatedthe curve of the full lips. A bosom that seemed big with love wasconfined by a crossed kerchief in the fashion of the year. Her supplewaist, her active limbs, her whole vigorous body expressed in everymovement a wild, delicious freedom. Every glance, every breath, everyquiver of the warm flesh called for love and promised passion. There,behind the tradesman's counter, she seemed rather a dancing nymph, abacchante of the opera, stripped of her lynx skin and thyrsus,imprisoned, and travestied by a magician's spell under the modesttrappings of a housewife by Chardin.

  "My father is not at home," she told the painter; "wait a little, hewill not be long."

  In the small brown hands the needle travelled swiftly over the finelawn.

  "Is the pattern to your taste, Monsieur Gamelin?"

  It was not in Gamelin's nature to pretend. And love, exaggerating hisconfidence, encouraged him to speak quite frankly.

  "You embroider cleverly, _citoyenne_; but, if I am to say what I think,the pattern you have traced is not simple enough or bold enough, andsmacks of the affected taste that in France governed too long theornamentation of dress and furniture and woodwork; all those rosettesand wreaths recall the pretty, finikin style that was in favour underthe tyrant. There is a new birth of taste. Alas! we have much leeway tomake up. In the days of the infamous Louis XV the art of decoration hadsomething Chinese about it. They made pot-bellied cabinets with drawerhandles grotesque in their contortions, good for nothing but to bethrown on the fire to warm good patriots. Simplicity alone is beautiful.We must hark back to the antique. David designs beds and chairs from theEtruscan vases and the wall-paintings of Herculaneum."

  "Yes, I have seen those beds and chairs," said Elodie, "they are lovely.Soon we shall want no other sort. I am like you, I adore the antique."

  "Well, then, _citoyenne_," returned Evariste, "if you had limited yourpattern to a Greek border, with ivy leaves, serpents or crossed arrows,it would have been worthy of a Spartan maiden ... and of you. But youcan still keep this design by simplifying it, reducing it to the plainlines of beauty."

  She asked her preceptor what should be picked out.

  He bent over the work, and the girl's ringlets swept lightly over hischeek. Their hands met and their breaths mingled. For an instantEvariste tasted an ecstatic bliss, but to feel Elodie's lips so close tohis own filled him with fear, and dreading to alarm her modesty, he drewback quickly.

  The _citoyenne_ Blaise was in love with Evariste Gamelin; she thoughthis great ardent eyes superb no less than the fine oval of his paleface, and his abundant black locks, parted above the brow and fallingin showers about his shoulders; his gravity of demeanour, his coldreserve, his severe manner and uncompromising speech which nevercondescended to flattery, were equally to her liking. She was in love,and therefore believed him possessed of supreme artistic genius thatwould one day blossom forth in incomparable masterpieces and make hisname world-famous,--and she loved him the better for the belief. The_citoyenne_ Blaise was no prude on the score of masculine purity and herscruples were not offended because a man should satisfy his passions andfollow his own tastes and caprices; she loved Evariste, who wasvirtuous; she did not love him because he was virtuous, albeit sheappreciated the advantage of his being so in that
she had no cause forjealousy or suspicion or any fear of rivals in his affections.

  Nevertheless, for the time being, she deemed his reserve a littleoverdone. If Racine's "Aricie," who loved "Hippolyte," admired theyouthful hero's untameable virtue, it was with the hope of winning avictory over it, and she would quickly have bewailed a sternness ofmoral fibre that had refused to be softened for her sake. At the firstopportunity she more than half declared her passion to constrain him tospeak out himself. Like her prototype the tender-hearted "Aricie," the_citoyenne_ Blaise was much inclined to think that in love the woman isbound to make the advances. "The fondest hearts," she told herself, "arethe most fearful; they need help and encouragement. Besides, they are sosimple a woman can go half way and even further without their evenknowing it, if only she lets them fancy the credit is theirs of the boldattack and the glorious victory." What made her more confident ofsuccess was the fact that she knew for a certainty (and indeed there wasno doubt about it) that Evariste, before ever the Revolution had madehim a hero, had loved a mistress like any ordinary mortal, a veryunheroic creature, no other than the _concierge_ at the Academy ofPainting. Elodie, who was a girl of some experience, quite realised thatthere are different sorts of love. The sentiment Evariste inspired inher heart was profound enough for her to dream of making him the partnerof her life. She was very ready to marry him, but hardly expected herfather would approve the union of his only daughter with a poor andunknown artist. Gamelin had nothing, while the printseller turned overlarge sums of money. The _Amour peintre_ brought him in large profits,the share market larger still, and he was in partnership with an armycontractor who supplied the cavalry of the Republic with rushes in placeof hay and mildewed oats. In a word, the cutler's son of the RueSaint-Dominique was a very insignificant personage beside the publisherof engravings, a man known throughout Europe, related to the Blaizots,Basans and Didots, and an honoured guest at the houses of the _citoyens_Saint-Pierre and Florian. Not that, as an obedient daughter should, sheheld her father's consent to be an indispensable preliminary to hersettlement in life. The latter, early left a widower, and a man of aself-indulgent, volatile temper, as enterprising with women as he was inbusiness, had never paid much heed to her and had left her to develop ather own sweet will, untrammelled whether by parental advice or parentalaffection, more careful to ignore than to safeguard the girl'sbehaviour, whose passionate temperament he appreciated as a connoisseurof the sex and in whom he recognized charms far and away more seductivethan a pretty face. Too generous-hearted to be circumspect, too cleverto come to harm, cautious even in her caprices, passion had never madeher forget the social proprieties. Her father was infinitely gratefulfor this prudent behaviour, and as she had inherited from him a goodhead for business and a taste for money-making, he never troubledhimself as to the mysterious reasons that deterred a girl so eminentlymarriageable from entering that estate and kept her at home, where shewas as good as a housekeeper and four clerks to him. At twenty-seven shefelt old enough and experienced enough to manage her own concerns andhad no need to ask the advice or consult the wishes of a father still ayoung man, and one of so easy-going and careless a temper. But for herto marry Gamelin, Monsieur Blaise must needs contrive a future for ason-in-law with such poor prospects, give him an interest in thebusiness, guarantee him regular work as he did to several artistsalready--in fact, one way or another, provide him with a livelihood; andsuch a favour was out of the question, she considered, whether for theone to offer or the other to accept, so small was the bond of sympathybetween the two men.

  The difficulty troubled the girl's tender heart and wise brain. She sawnothing to alarm her in a secret union with her lover and in taking theauthor of nature for sole witness of their mutual troth. Her creed foundnothing blameworthy in such a union, which the independence of her modeof life made possible and which Evariste's honourable and virtuouscharacter gave her good hopes of forming without apprehension as to theresult. But Gamelin was hard put to it to live and provide his oldmother with the barest necessaries, and it did not seem as though in sostraitened an existence room could well be found for an amour even whenreduced to the simplicity of nature. Moreover, Evariste had not yetspoken and declared his intentions, though certainly the _citoyenne_Blaise hoped to bring him to this before long.

  She broke off her meditations, and the needle stopped at the samemoment.

  "_Citoyen_ Evariste," she said, "I shall not care for the scarf, unlessyou like it too. Draw me a pattern, please. Meanwhile, I will copyPenelope and unravel what I have done in your absence."

  He answered in a tone of sombre enthusiasm:

  "I promise you I will, _citoyenne_. I will draw you the brand of thetyrannicide Harmodius,--a sword in a wreath,"--and pulling out hispencil, he sketched in a design of swords and flowers in the sober,unadorned style he admired. And as he drew, he expounded his views ofart:

  "A regenerated People," he declared, "must repudiate all the legacies ofservitude, bad taste, bad outline, bad drawing. Watteau, Boucher,Fragonard worked for tyrants and for slaves. Their works show no feelingfor good style or purity of line, no love of nature or truth. Masks,dolls, fripperies, monkey-tricks,--nothing else! Posterity will despisetheir frivolous productions. In a hundred years all Watteau's pictureswill be banished to the garrets and falling to pieces from neglect; in1893 struggling painters will be daubing their studies over Boucher'scanvases. David has opened the way; he approaches the Antique, but hehas not yet reached true simplicity, true grandeur, bare and unadorned.Our artists have many secrets still to learn from the friezes ofHerculaneum, the Roman bas-reliefs, the Etruscan vases."

  He dilated at length on antique beauty, then came back to Fragonard,whom he abused with inexhaustible venom:

  "Do you know him, _citoyenne_?"

  Elodie nodded.

  "You likewise know good old Greuze, who is ridiculous enough, to besure, with his scarlet coat and his sword. But he looks like a wise manof Greece beside Fragonard. I met him, a while ago, the miserable oldman, trotting by under the arcades of the Palais-Egalite, powdered,genteel, sprightly, spruce, hideous. At sight of him, I longed that,failing Apollo, some sturdy friend of the arts might hang him up to atree and flay him alive like Marsyas as an everlasting warning to badpainters."

  Elodie gave him a long look out of her dancing, wanton eyes.

  "You know how to hate, Monsieur Gamelin, are we to conclude you knowalso how to lo...?"

  "Is that you, Gamelin?" broke in a tenor voice; it was the _citoyen_Blaise just come back to his shop. He advanced, boots creaking, charmsrattling, coat-skirts flying, an enormous black cocked hat on his head,the corners of which touched his shoulders.

  Elodie, picking up her work-basket, retreated to her chamber.

  "Well, Gamelin!" inquired the _citoyen_ Blaise, "have you brought meanything new?"

  "May be," declared the painter,--and proceeded to expound his ideas.

  "Our playing cards present a grievous and startling contrast with ourpresent ways of thinking. The names of knave and king offend the ears ofa patriot. I have designed and executed a reformed, Revolutionary packin which for kings, queens, and knaves are substituted Liberties,Equalities, Fraternities; the aces in a border of fasces, are calledLaws.... You call Liberty of clubs, Equality of spades, Fraternity ofdiamonds, Law of hearts. I venture to think my cards are drawn with somespirit; I propose to have them engraved on copper by Desmahis, and totake out letters of patent."

  So saying and extracting from his portfolio some finished designs inwater-colour, the artist handed them to the printseller.

  The _citoyen_ Blaise declined to take them, and turning away:

  "My lad," he sneered, "take 'em to the Convention; they will perhapsaccord you a vote of thanks. But never think to make a _sol_ by your newinvention which is not new at all. You're a day behind the fair. YourRevolutionary pack of cards is the third I've had brought me. Yourcomrade Dugourc offered me last week a picquet set with four Geniuses ofthe People, four Liberties, fo
ur Equalities. Another was suggested, withSages and Heroes, Cato, Rousseau, Hannibal,--I don't know what all!...And these cards had the advantage over yours, my friend, in beingcoarsely drawn and cut on wood blocks--with a penknife. How little youknow the world to dream that players will use cards designed in thetaste of David and engraved a la Bartolozzi! And then again, what astrange mistake to think it needs all this to-do to suit the old packsto the new ideas. Out of their own heads, the good sansculottes can finda corrective for what offends them, saying, instead of 'king'--'TheTyrant!' or just 'The fat pig!' They go on using the same old filthycards and never buy new ones. The great market for playing-cards is thegaming-hells of the Palais-Egalite; well, I advise you to go there andoffer the croupiers and punters there your Liberties, your Equalities,your ... what d'ye call 'em?... Laws of hearts ... and come back andtell me what sort of a reception they gave you!"

  The _citoyen_ Blaise sat down on the counter, filliped away sundrygrains of snuff from his nankeen breeches and looking at Gamelin with anair of gentle pity:

  "Let me give you a bit of advice, _citoyen_; if you want to make yourliving, drop your patriotic packs of cards, leave your revolutionarysymbols alone, have done with your Hercules, your hydras, your Furiespursuing guilt, your Geniuses of Liberty, and paint me pretty girls. Thepeople's ardour for regeneration grows lukewarm with time, but men willalways love women. Paint me women, all pink and white, with little feetand tiny hands. And get this into your thick skull that nobody cares afig about the Revolution or wants to hear another word about it."

  But Evariste drew himself up in indignant protest:

  "What! not hear another word of the Revolution!... But, why surely, therestoration of liberty, the victories of our armies, the chastisement oftyrants are events that will startle the most remote posterity. Howcould we not be struck by such portents?... What! the sect of the_sansculotte_ Jesus has lasted well-nigh eighteen centuries, and thereligion of Liberty is to be abolished after barely four years ofexistence!"

  But Jean Blaise resumed in a tone of superiority:

  "You walk in a dream; _I_ see life as it is. Believe me, friend, theRevolution is a bore; it lasts over long. Five years of enthusiasm, fiveyears of fraternal embraces, of massacres, of fine speeches, of_Marseillaises_, of tocsins, of 'hang up the aristocrats,' of headspromenaded on pikes, of women mounted astride of cannon, of trees ofLiberty crowned with the red cap, of white-robed maidens and old mendrawn about the streets in flower-wreathed cars; of imprisonments andguillotinings, of proclamations, and short commons, of cockades andplumes, swords and _carmagnoles_--it grows tedious! And then folk arebeginning to lose the hang of it all. We have gone through too much, wehave seen too many of the great men and noble patriots whom you have ledin triumph to the Capitol only to hurl them afterwards from the Tarpeianrock,--Necker, Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, Petion, Manuel, and howmany others! How can we be sure you are not preparing the same fate foryour new heroes?... Men have lost all count."

  "Their names, _citoyen_ Blaise; name them, these heroes we are makingready to sacrifice!" cried Gamelin in a tone that recalled theprint-dealer to a sense of prudence.

  "I am a Republican and a patriot," he replied, clapping his hand on hisheart. "I am as good a Republican as you, as ardent a patriot as you,_citoyen_ Gamelin. I do not suspect your zeal nor accuse you of anybacksliding. But remember that my zeal and my devotion to the State areattested by numerous acts. Here you have my principles: I give myconfidence to every individual competent to serve the Nation. Before themen whom the general voice elects to the perilous honour of theLegislative office, such as Marat, such as Robespierre, I bow my head; Iam ready to support them to the measure of my poor ability and offerthem the humble co-operation of a good citizen. The Committees can bearwitness to my ardour and self-sacrifice. In conjunction with truepatriots, I have furnished oats and fodder to our gallant cavalry, bootsfor our soldiers. This very day I am despatching from Vernon a convoy ofsixty oxen to the Army of the South through a country infested withbrigands and patrolled by the emissaries of Pitt and Conde. I do nottalk; I act."

  Gamelin calmly put back his sketches in his portfolio, the strings ofwhich he tied and then slipped it under his arm.

  "It is a strange contradiction," he said through his clenched teeth, "tosee men help our soldiers to carry through the world the liberty theybetray in their own homes by sowing discontent and alarm in the soul ofits defenders.... Greeting and farewell, _citoyen_ Blaise."

  Before turning down the alley that runs alongside the Oratoire, Gamelin,his heart big with love and anger, wheeled round for a last look at thered carnations blossoming on a certain window-sill.

  He did not despair; the fatherland would yet be saved. Against JeanBlaise's unpatriotic speeches he set his faith in the Revolution. Stillhe was bound to recognize that the tradesman had some show of reasonwhen he asserted that the people of Paris had lost its old interest inpublic events. Alas! it was but too manifest that to the enthusiasm ofthe early days had little by little succeeded a widespread indifference,that never again would be seen the mighty crowds, unanimous in theirardour, of '89, never again the millions, one in heart and soul, that in'90 thronged round the altar of the _federes_. Well, good citizens mustshow double zeal and courage, must rouse the people from its apathy,bidding it choose between liberty and death.

  Such were Gamelin's thoughts, and the memory of Elodie was a spur to hisconfidence.

  Coming to the Quais, he saw the sun setting in the distant west behindlowering clouds that were like mountains of glowing lava; the roofs ofthe city were bathed in a golden light; the windows flashed back athousand dazzling reflections. And Gamelin pictured the Titans forgingout of the molten fragments of by-gone worlds Dike, the city of brass.

  Not having a morsel of bread for his mother or himself, he was dreamingof a place at the limitless board that should have all the world forguests and welcome regenerated humanity to the feast. Meantime, he triedto persuade himself that the fatherland, as a good mother should, wouldfeed her faithful child. Shutting his mind against the gibes of theprintseller, he forced himself to believe that his notion of aRevolutionary pack of cards was a novel one and a good one, and thatwith these happily conceived sketches of his he held a fortune in theportfolio under his arm. "Desmahis," he told himself, "shall engravethem. We will publish for ourselves the new patriotic toy and we aresure to sell ten thousand packs in a month, at twenty _sols_ apiece."

  In his impatience to realize the project, he strode off at once for theQuai de la Ferraille, where Desmahis lived over a glazier's shop.

  The entrance was through the shop. The glazier's wife informed Gamelinthat the _citoyen_ Desmahis was not in, a fact that in no wise surprisedthe painter, who knew his friend was of a vagabond and dissipated humourand who marvelled that a man could engrave so much and so well as he didwhile showing so little perseverance. Gamelin made up his mind to wait awhile for his return and the woman offered him a chair. She was in ablack mood and began to grumble at the badness of trade, though she hadalways been told that the Revolution, by breaking windows, was makingthe glaziers' fortunes.

  Night was falling; so abandoning his idea of waiting for his comrade,Gamelin took his leave of his hostess of the moment. As he was crossingthe Pont-Neuf, he saw a detachment of National Guards debouch from theQuai des Morfondus. They were mounted and carried torches. They weredriving back the crowd, and amid a mighty clatter of sabres escorting acart driving slowly on its way to the guillotine with a man whose nameno one knew, a _ci-devant_ noble, the first prisoner condemned by thenewly constituted Revolutionary Tribunal. He could be seen by glimpsesbetween the guardsmen's hats, sitting with hands tied behind his back,his head bared and swaying from side to side, his face to the cart'stail. The headsman stood beside him lolling against the rail. Thepassers-by had stopped to look and were telling each other it was likelyone of the fellows who starved the people, and staring with eyes ofindifference. Gamelin, coming closer, caught sight of Desmahis among the
spectators; he was struggling to push a way through the press and cutacross the line of march. He called out to him and clapped a hand on hisshoulder,--and Desmahis turned his head. He was a young man with ahandsome face and a stalwart person. In former days, at the Academy,they used to say he had the head of Bacchus on the torso of Hercules.His friends nicknamed him "Barbaroux" because of his likeness to thatrepresentative of the people.

  "Come here," Gamelin said to him, "I have something of importance to sayto you, Desmahis."

  "Leave me alone," the latter answered peevishly, muttering somehalf-heard explanation, looking out as he spoke for a chance of dartingacross:

  "I was following a divine creature, in a straw hat, a milliner's wench,with her flaxen hair down her back; that cursed cart has blocked myway.... She has gone on ahead, she is at the other end of the bridge bynow!"

  Gamelin endeavoured to hold him back by his coat skirts, swearing hisbusiness was urgent.

  But Desmahis had already slipped away between horses, guards, swords andtorches, and was in hot pursuit of the milliner's girl.