Agesilaus went back down the stairs.
“Run! Faster!” cried Maurice. “Can’t you see I’m on tenterhooks?”
Maurice waited for five or six minutes at the top of the stairs, then, when Agesilaus did not return, he went back into the apartment to hang out the window again. He spotted Agesilaus going in and out of two or three shops, apparently without result.
He shouted to him in his frustration. Agesilaus looked up and saw his master leaning impatiently out of the window. Maurice made a sign for him to come back up.
“She can’t have gone out, it’s not possible!” Maurice said to himself. And he called out again: “Geneviève! Geneviève!” Everything was dead quiet. The lonely room even seemed to have lost its echo. Agesilaus reappeared.
“Well, the concierge is the only one who’s seen her.”
“The concierge saw her?”
“Yes; the neighbors know nothing about her.”
“The concierge saw her, you say? How come?”
“He saw her go out.”
“So she went out?”
“It looks like it.”
“Alone? I don’t believe Geneviève went out alone.”
“She wasn’t alone, citizen; she was with a man.”
“What! With a man?”
“That’s what the citizen concierge reckons.”
“Go and get him. I must know who this man is.”
Agesilaus took two steps toward the door, then turned around.
“Wait a moment,” he said, apparently thinking.
“What? What is it? Say something, you’re killing me.”
“Maybe it’s the fellow who ran after me.”
“A man ran after you?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“To ask me for the key on your behalf.”
“What key, you idiot? Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me!”
“The key to your apartment.”
“You gave the key to my apartment to a stranger?” Maurice shrieked, seizing the officieux by the collar with his two hands.
“But it wasn’t a stranger, monsieur—it was one of your friends.”
“Oh, right, one of my friends? So it must have been Lorin, then. That’s it, she’s gone out with Lorin.”
Maurice tried to smile through his sick feeling; he mopped his forehead, bathed in sweat, with his handkerchief.
“No, no, no, monsieur, it’s not Lorin!” said Agesilaus. “Cripes! I reckon I know Monsieur Lorin pretty well by now!”
“Then who is it?”
“You know, citizen, that man, the one who came round that day …”
“What day?”
“The day you were so down in the dumps and he took you off and you came back gay as a lark.”
Agesilaus had registered all this. Maurice stared at him in fright. A shiver ran through his entire body. After a long silence, he said:
“Dixmer?”
“Oh, yes, heavens, I think that’s it, citizen,” said the officieux.
Maurice tottered and fell backward into a chair. His eyes clouded over and he nearly blacked out.
“Oh, my God!” he murmured.
When he opened his eyes again, he looked straight at the bouquet of violets, forgotten, or rather left behind, by Geneviève. He fell upon it, kissed the violets, and then suddenly took in the space where they had been placed.
“Ah, it’s all becoming clear now,” he said. “These violets … her last farewell!”
Maurice spun around then, and only then did he notice that the chest was only half-packed, the rest of the linen lying on the floor or in the cupboard hanging open. No doubt the linen on the floor had fallen from Geneviève’s hands when she’d sighted Dixmer.
He could see that moment in all its gruesome detail. The scene loomed up before him, vivid and terrible, between these four walls that had previously witnessed so much happiness. Until that moment, Maurice had sat defeated, crushed. Now his arousal was fearful, the young man’s surging anger terrifying.
He shot up, closed the window, grabbed two pistols that were lying on his desk fully loaded for the journey, checked their caps, and, seeing that they were in working order, shoved the pistols in his pockets.
Then he slipped two rolls of louis into his purse—despite his patriotism, he had judged it prudent to keep the louis in the bottom of a drawer—then he grabbed his saber in its scabbard and said:
“Agesilaus, you are quite fond of me, I believe; you’ve served my father and me for fifteen years.”
“Yes, citizen,” said the officieux, seized with fright at the sight of a marblelike pallor and nervous tremor he had never remarked in his master before, his master passing rightly for the most fearless and unshakable of men. “Yes, what are you asking me to do?”
“Listen! If the woman who was living here …”
He broke off, his voice trembling so much as he said these words that he could not go on.
“If she comes back,” he resumed after a moment, “let her in. Close the door behind her. Take this rifle, place yourself on the stairs, and, on your head, on your life, on your soul, do not let anyone in. If they try to break down the door, defend it. Shoot! Kill! Kill! And don’t worry, Agesilaus, I’ll take the blame.”
The young man’s tone, his vehement assurance galvanized Agesilaus.
“Not only will I kill,” he said, “but I’d get myself killed for citizeness Geneviève.”
“Thank you.… Now listen. I loathe this apartment now. I never want to climb back up those stairs again—not until I’ve found her. If she is able to escape, if she comes back, stick that great big Japanese vase at your window, filled with the daisies she loved so much. That’s in the day. At night, put a lantern there instead. Every time I go past the end of the street, I’ll get the message; as long as I don’t see the vase or the lantern, I’ll keep searching.”
“Oh, monsieur, be careful, be careful!” cried Agesilaus.
Maurice didn’t even answer. He dashed out of the room, flew down the stairs and over to Lorin’s. It would be hard to describe the stupefaction, the anger, the rage of the worthy poet when he learned the news—we would have to revert to the relentlessly moving elegies Orestes inspired in his friend Pylades.
“So you don’t know where she is?” he kept saying, over and over.
“Lost, disappeared!” howled Maurice in a paroxysm of despair. “He’s killed her, Lorin, he’s killed her!”
“Oh, no, my friend, no, my dear Maurice. He hasn’t killed her. No, you don’t assassinate a woman like Geneviève after so many days of reflection. No, if he was going to kill her he’d have killed her on the spot and left her body at your place as a sign of revenge. No, don’t you see? He’s run away with her, all too happy to have got hold of his treasure again.”
“You don’t know him, Lorin; you don’t know him,” said Maurice. “That man had something ugly in his eyes.”
“No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong; he always gave me the impression of being a good sort of burgher—that’s what I thought, anyhow. He’s taken her to sacrifice her. He’ll get himself arrested with her and they’ll be killed together. Ah! Now that’s the danger,” said Lorin.
His words threw fat on the fire of Maurice’s delirium.
“I’ll find her! I’ll find her or die!” he cried.
“Well, as for that, we’ll find her, that’s for sure,” said Lorin. “Just calm down. Now look, Maurice, my good Maurice, believe me, you’ll waste your time looking if you don’t go about it the right way and you can’t go about it the right way while you’re so worked up.”
“Adieu, Lorin, adieu!”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going.”
“You’re leaving me? Why?”
“Because this is my concern alone; because I’m the only one who should risk his life to save Geneviève’s.”
“Are you tired of living?”
“I’ll take what comes: I’ll go and find the
president of the local Surveillance Committee, I’ll talk to Hébert, to Danton, to Robespierre. I’ll confess all if they’ll just give her back to me.”
“All right,” said Lorin.
Without another word he rose, adjusted his sword belt, clapped the regulatory hat on his head, and, as Maurice had done before him, took two loaded pistols and shoved them in his pockets.
“Let’s go,” he said simply.
“But you’re compromising yourself!” cried Maurice.
“So what?
When, my friend, the play is done,
We should go back to having fun.”
“Where will we look first?” asked Maurice.
“Let’s look in the old quartier first—you know, the old rue Saint-Jacques. We’ll watch out for Maison-Rouge; wherever he is, Dixmer won’t be far behind. Then we’ll go over to the houses at the Vieille-Corderie. You know they’re talking about transfering Antoinette back to the Temple! Believe me, men like that won’t give up hope of saving her till the very last.”
“Yes,” Maurice agreed, “actually, you’re right.… Maison-Rouge, do you really think he’s still in Paris, then?”
“Dixmer certainly is.”
“True, true; they must have teamed up again,” said Maurice, whose wits were returning with the odd vague flicker.
From that moment, the two pals began to search. Endlessly. In vain. Paris is big and it casts a dense shadow. No fathomless pit is as dark and deep as Paris when it conceals a crime or misdemeanor entrusted to it.
Lorin and Maurice went past the place de Grève a hundred times; a hundred times they unwittingly skirted the cramped house in which Geneviève had most recently lived under Dixmer’s constant surveillance, the way priests of yore used to watch girls destined to become sacrificial virgins.
On her side, seeing herself doomed to die, Geneviève, like all generous souls, accepted the sacrifice and wished to die without any commotion. Besides, she feared any publicity that Maurice’s revenge would not fail to attract, less for Dixmer than for the Queen’s cause. And so she maintained a silence as profound as if death had already sealed her mouth shut.
Yet without saying anything to Lorin, Maurice had pleaded with the members of the terrible Committee of Public Safety; and Lorin, without discussing it with Maurice, had frantically explored the same avenues.
And so, the very same day, a red cross was drawn by Fouquier-Tinville beside both their names, and the word SUSPECT joined them in a bloody accolade.
46
THE JUDGMENT
The twenty-third day of the first month of the year II1 of the French Republic, one and indivisible, the day corresponding to the fourteenth of October 1793 old style, as they used to say at the time, a curious crowd invaded the galleries of the chamber where the revolutionary séances were held, and they stayed there from early morning.
The corridors of the Palais and the avenues of the Conciergerie were overflowing with avid and excited spectators, who passed noises and passions on down the line to one another just as the ocean passes on its roaring and its foam as it surges in to shore.
Despite the frenzied curiosity that had each spectator jumping up and down, and perhaps even because of this curiosity, each wave of the turbulent sea was compressed between two barriers, with the outside pushing in and the inside pushing back. The net result of all this ebb and flow was that everyone remained more or less stationary. But those in the best spots knew that they had to get themselves forgiven for their felicity, and they aimed to do so by telling their less well placed neighbors, who then passed on the original news, what they could see and hear.
But right next to the door to the gallery a group of men all squashed together were battling fiercely over two inches of horizontal or vertical space—for two inches in breadth was enough to see a corner of the room and the faces of the jurors between two shoulders, and two inches in height was enough to see the whole room and the face of the accused over the top of someone’s head.
Unfortunately, this passage leading into the room from one of the corridors, this narrow defile, was occupied almost entirely by one man with very broad shoulders who held his arms out like flying buttresses, thereby shoring up the vacillating crowd ready to burst into the room if only they could somehow get past this rampart of flesh.
This immovable rock of a man blocking the door of the gallery was young and handsome. At every ever-more-determined surge of the crowd at his back, he shook his thick hair like a horse shaking its mane; below his hair his eyes shone with a grim and resolute gleam. A living breakwater, every time he repelled the throng—by a look, by a ripple of muscle—he would simply resume his focused immobility.
The compact mass had tried to topple him a hundred times, for he was tall and it was impossible to see anything from behind him; but no rock could have been more immovable, as I think we might have said.
Yet at the other end of the human tide, among the densely packed throng, another man had carved out a path with a determination that bordered on ferocity. Nothing managed to stop him in his relentless advance, neither the kicks of those he left behind, nor the curses of those he winded in passing, nor the tongue-lashings of women, for there were many women in the crowd that day.
He responded to kicks with kicks, to curses with a look that withered the most foolhardy, to complaints with an imperturbability bordering on contempt. Finally, he had gotten as far as the vigorous young man sealing off, so to speak, the entrance to the door. Everyone was keen to see how things would pan out between these two tough antagonists, and so, with everyone holding their breath in expectation, the latecomer tried out his technique, which consisted of wedging his elbows between two spectators and torpedoing bodies that seemed virtually welded together with his own, thereby splitting them asunder.
Yet the man was young and small, with a pale face and spindly legs that revealed a constitution as puny as his fiery eyes revealed an impressively strong will. But his elbow had scarcely brushed the side of the young man planted in front of him than this latter, amazed at such naked aggression, spun round with a raised fist that threatened to come crashing down to crush a man so fearless.
The two antagonists thus found themselves face-to-face; they both let out a stifled cry at the same time, for they recognized each other.
“Oh, citizen Maurice!” said the frail young man in a tone of inexpressible pain. “Let me through; let me see! Please! You can kill me later!”
Maurice, for it was in fact he, felt pierced to the quick with tenderness and admiration for such eternal devotion, for such indestructible determination.
“You,” he murmured. “You, here! How can you be so reckless!”
“Yes, I’m here! But I’m exhausted.… Oh, God! She’s speaking! Let me see her! Let me hear her!”
Maurice moved aside and let the young man through. Since Maurice was at the head of the crowd, nothing now encumbered the view of the man who had suffered so many blows and rebuffs to get there.
This whole episode and the whispering and muttering it occasioned excited the jurors’ curiosity. The accused as well glanced in their direction from the front of the court, and she saw and recognized the Knight. Something like a frisson shook the Queen for a moment as she sat in her iron chair.
The examination was conducted by President Herman, interpreted by Fouquier-Tinville and debated by Chauveau-Lagarde,2 the Queen’s counsel; it went on as long as the jurors’ strength and that of the accused held out.
During all this time, Maurice remained in his place without moving, though spectators had already come and gone several times over in the courtroom and the corridors beyond.
The Knight had found a column for support and leaned back against it, looking no less pale than the white stucco.
Day had been followed by darkest night: a few candles burned on the jury’s tables, a few lamps smoked in sconces on the chamber walls, lighting up with a sinister red reflection the noble visage of this woman who had once looked so be
autiful under the splendid lights of parties at Versailles.
She was on her own here, giving short noncommittal replies to the president’s questions, sometimes leaning over to whisper a few words in her defense counsel’s ear. Her polished white forehead had lost none of its habitual hauteur, and she was wearing the black striped dress of mourning she had refused to change out of since the death of the King.
The jurors adjourned to deliberate. The session was over.
“I hope I wasn’t too disdainful, monsieur?” the Queen asked Chauveau-Lagarde. “Was I all right?”
“Ah, madame!” he replied. “You only have to be yourself and you will always be all right.”
“Look how arrogant she is!” cried a woman in the audience, as though a stranger’s voice were answering the question the unhappy Queen had just put to her lawyer.
The Queen turned her head to look at the woman.
“Yes, you heard me,” the woman went on. “I said you’re arrogant, Antoinette—and look where it’s got you!”
The Queen went bright red.
The Knight turned toward the woman who had pronounced that judgment and replied gently:
“She was Queen.”
Maurice grabbed him by the wrist.
“Please!” he said to him in a lowered voice. “Have the courage not to give yourself away.”
“Oh, Monsieur Maurice,” replied the Knight, “you are a man and you know you are speaking to a man. Tell me, do you think they can condemn her?”
“I don’t think it,” said Maurice. “I know it.”
“But a woman!” cried Maison-Rouge with a sob.
“No, a queen,” countered Maurice. “You yourself just said so.”
The Knight in turn grabbed Maurice’s wrist, and with a force you would not have thought he had in him pulled Maurice down to his level. It was three-thirty in the morning; great empty gaps were visible among the spectators. A few lights went out here and there, throwing whole areas of the chamber into darkness. One of the darkest areas was where the Knight and Maurice were, Maurice totally attentive to what the Knight had to say.
“Why are you here, then, and what have you come to do?” asked the Knight. “You, monsieur, who do not have the heart of a bloodthirsty tiger?”