France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English; War stories
The _citoyens_ Remacle, tailor and door-keeper, and Dupont senior,
joiner, of the Place de Thionville, member of the Committee of
Surveillance of the Section du Pont-Neuf, identified Gamelin (Evariste),
painter, ex-juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal, ex-member of the
Council General of the Commune. For their services they received an
assignat of a hundred _sols_ from the funds of the Section; but, having
been neighbours and friends of the outlaw, they found it embarrassing to
meet his eye. Anyhow, it was a hot day; they were thirsty and in a hurry
to be off and drink a glass of wine.
Gamelin found difficulty in mounting the tumbril; he had lost a great
deal of blood and his wounds pained him cruelly. The driver whipped up
his jade and the procession got under way amid a storm of hooting.
Some women recognized Gamelin and yelled:
"Go your ways, drinker of blood! murderer at eighteen francs a day!...
He doesn't laugh now; look how pale he is, the coward!"
They were the same women who used in other days to insult conspirators
and aristocrats, extremists and moderates, all the victims sent by
Gamelin and his colleagues to the guillotine.
The cart turned into the Quai des Morfondus, made slowly for the
Pont-Neuf and the Rue de la Monnaie; its destination was the Place de la
Revolution and Robespierre's scaffold. The horse was lame; every other
minute the driver's whip whistled about its ears. The crowd of
spectators, a merry, excited crowd, delayed the progress of the escort,
fraternizing with the gendarmes, who pulled in their horses to a walk.
At the corner of the Rue Honore, the insults were redoubled. Parties of
young men, at table in the fashionable restaurateurs' rooms on the
mezzanine floor, ran to the windows, napkin in hand, and howled:
"Cannibals, man-eaters, vampires!"
The cart having plunged into a heap of refuse that had not been removed
during the two days of civil disorder, the gilded youth screamed with
delight:
"The waggon's mired.... Hurrah! The Jacobins in the jakes!"
Gamelin was thinking, and truth seemed to dawn on him.
"I die justly," he reflected. "It is just we should receive these
outrages cast at the Republic, for we should have safeguarded her
against them. We have been weak; we have been guilty of supineness. We
have betrayed the Republic. We have earned our fate. Robespierre
himself, the immaculate, the saint, has sinned from mildness,
mercifulness; his faults are wiped out by his martyrdom. He was my
exemplar, and I, too, have betrayed the Republic; the Republic perishes;
it is just and fair that I die with her. I have been over sparing of
blood; let my blood flow! Let me perish! I have deserved ..."
Such were his reflections when suddenly he caught sight of the signboard
of the _Amour peintre_, and a torrent of bitter-sweet emotions swept
tumultuously over his heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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