In the Name of Liberty: A Story of the Terror

  XIII

  DAUGHTER OF THE GUILLOTINE

  "Certainly, he is demented," Le Corbeau cried when, after a dozenzigzags, Dossonville continued to plunge furiously ahead up streetafter street.

  "Decidedly so," grumbled Sans-Chagrin. "Here's three times we've passedthe Tour St. Jacques."

  "What the devil could have happened?"

  "You know Lajoie?"

  "Why, of course--a little insignificant man."

  "It was perhaps his brother."

  "He hadn't the look."

  "Anyhow, I say it's time to rest."

  "My legs are worn out."

  "If we suggested a halt?"

  "I don't dare."

  "Neither do I."

  Oblivious to their fatigue, Dossonville wandered on in absurd circles,heedless of his surroundings, while if he passed a corner three timeshe did not notice it once. Vain and proud in his imperturbability,for the first time he was completely unnerved by this vision of theexecutioner that rose up at the side of the girl whom he had been onthe verge of loving. All at once the mystery of her character wasrevealed, the insensibility to suffering, the unnatural curiosity, andthe sang-froid beyond a woman.

  "What an inheritance! What a curse!" he repeated.

  Under the broken silhouettes of the housetops across the luminous sky,from out the mysterious, vague corners of the night, there started up,more ghostly and more sinister, the shadowy dynasty of the Sansons,the pariahs accursed, isolated, loathed, flinging themselves invain against the barriers of prejudice, striving to escape into theobscurity of their fellows, always discovered, always driven back onthe fingers of the crowd, that shrank away even as it pursued.

  Back of the furtive figure of Sanson appeared the troop of malignancestors, masked in scarlet or in black, nonchalant in their bloodservice, while behind hovered the red cloud of victims,--men, women,priests, nuns, children and gray-heads,--in long danse macabre aroundthe ax, the gallows, and the guillotine; and among the Sansons, hesaw, calm and uncomprehending, the figure of Louison.

  Suddenly above his head rose the twin shafts of the guillotine,dominating the desert of the night. Then trembling, aghast at thissinister menace, Dossonville, with a cry of horror, turned and fledfrom the inanimate thing that waited there relentlessly the coming ofthe day.

  * * * * *

  In the first recoil from his personal association, he had promisedhimself never again to encounter Louison; but with the morning sheseemed so expelled from his past that, yielding to an overpoweringdesire to study her in the light of his new knowledge, he drifted,almost unconsciously, to the Place de la Revolution.

  The crowd in which he sheltered himself was loose, not very attentive,nor very large: the spectacle was old; there was not enough variety inthe performers. In front, scores of women, seated indolently on theirchairs, suspended their knitting at each fall of the ax, counting:

  "Twenty."

  "Twenty-one."

  At each execution a murmur wandered through the crowd--a conventional,listless, slurred cry:

  "Vive la Nation!"

  Louison, never still, moved among the tricoteuses, nodding andchatting. As each hum announced the arrival of a victim on the scaffoldshe turned for a momentary, prying glance; then, without interest,wheeling about, she cried her cockades, seeking in the crowd a likelycustomer.

  Absorbed in the girl, marveling at the strange and terrible forces thatdrew her back to the parent scaffold, Dossonville fell into so deep anabstraction that it cost him his concealment. Before he could retirewith the departing crowd, Louison, perceiving him, had hastened to hisside.

  "What happened last night?" she said, with an imperious gesture. "Whatdid you say to my mother?"

  "How do you know I saw her?" he said, unable to control a slightmovement of recoil.

  "I know it. What happened?" she demanded impatiently. "I was there thismorning, but she was gone--gone during the night. What passed betweenyou?"

  "You have been misinformed."

  "Dossonville, you are deceiving me," she said, looking in his face."You saw her, and you learned the name of my father."

  Without allowing time for denial, she took his arm and led him towardthe Cours la Reine, turning among the bypaths of the luxuriant woods.There, amid the joyous gaiety of the spring, under the soft foliage ofthe chestnuts, she faced him with a peremptory question:

  "You saw her?"

  "No."

  "She told you?"

  "No."

  Louison examined his face attentively.

  "What is the matter with you to-day, and why do you conceal it from me?Did you not promise to tell me?"

  "Yes."

  "Then?"

  "Nothing has happened."

  "Dossonville, you are lying lamely," she said; then she added, with afrown: "My father was a great scoundrel, then?"

  Dossonville did not reply.

  "How stupid you are! You think it would make a difference. How does itaffect me? Come, I am not responsible, no matter who it is. Tell me. Itcannot affect me."

  "It will."

  "Then you know," she said instantly.

  Dossonville shrugged his shoulders. He desired the appearance ofresistance more than to resist, for his curiosity was stronger than hispity. But having thus betrayed himself, he added impressively:

  "Do not force me to tell you."

  She began to laugh.

  "Louison, I warn you, do not demand to know."

  "I do demand it. I insist."

  "You will curse me."

  "No."

  "I cannot tell you."

  "Who is it?" she cried, with a laugh. "Philippe Egalite, afarmer-general, Bailly, Capet even,--I mention the worst."

  "Louison," he said shortly, "they call you the daughter of theguillotine."

  She stopped, perplexed.

  "You are well named."

  "Don't return to that," she said irritably. "It was agreed we were notto mention that. Come, don't keep me waiting. I tell you it will makeno difference."

  "You absolve me?"

  "Of course."

  "Even if Sanson were your father?"

  Louison burst out laughing, but suddenly she broke off at the sight ofhis face.

  "Is that serious?"

  "Yes."

  She repeated, "Is that serious?"

  "Yes."

  "I am the daughter of Sanson?"

  Dossonville inclined his head, awaiting the explosion. To his surprise,she remained quiet, withdrawing a little, while her eyes still waitedon him, as though expecting a denial.

  "How curious!" she said at length. "I never thought of that. Ah, Iunderstand why she hid it. Now tell me all."

  Seeing that she did not realize the extent of the revelation,Dossonville quickly related the facts, astonished at her calm,wondering what force was working beneath the surface.

  Louison, in fact, unable immediately to comprehend the situation,continued to watch Dossonville, as though to estimate from his behaviorthe force of the change to her. Remembering his attempted escape on thePlace de la Revolution, and alarmed at a new reserve in his manner, sheasked herself angrily, albeit anxiously, what difference the knowledgewould make in him. To test him, she advanced a step and said, holdingout her arms as though to embrace him:

  "Thanks, my friend; you have kept your promise."

  He withdrew but a step and only for an instant, but that involuntaryshrinking was her sentence.

  With a cry of despair, she bounded back, transformed with hot,revolting anger, her fingers struggling against the temptation of thedagger, crying to him:

  "Go! Go quickly! Go now!"

  Then, distrusting the murder in her heart, she fled into the woods;but in a moment, crazed with the cruel injustice of her fate, she camerunning back, her lips trembling with passion, her breath cut andquick. With his accustomed prudence, Dossonville had retired by anotherdirection, leaving Loui
son to tire herself out among the fragrant pathsin fruitless, maddened rushings.

  * * * * *

  Gradually among the tricoteuses, the bouquetieres, and the clientele ofthe Cabaret de la Guillotine it began to be whispered that somethingextraordinary had happened to Louison. Her manner had changed. Shewas no longer indifferent, mocking, and careless under the scaffold.Instead, her companions began to be alarmed at the cloud on her brow,the brooding fixity of her glance, the abruptness and the poverty ofher speech. Her questions were even stranger than her moods. One dayshe asked of her companion, thrusting her hand toward the guillotine:

  "Does that affect you to see them die like that?"

  "I dream sometimes at nights," the girl answered.

  Then Louison, turning on her an uncomprehending glance, exclaimed:

  "True?"

  Another time she said:

  "Doesn't that make you curious?"

  "Of what?"

  "Curious to know what you would do."

  Those who repeated her remarks exclaimed in apprehension and tappedtheir foreheads. As a natural consequence, the most extraordinaryrumors arose. One declared that she had been seen thrice at midnightprowling about the vicinity of the scaffold. Another affirmed that heon whom she looked with anger would perish. Others, scorning theseabsurd rumors, gave it as their opinion that her mind was shaken by herunnatural obsession. The girl did not fail to notice the change in thedemeanor of her companions, and, in her tortured imagination, ascribedto it a different cause.

  "Why do they draw away from me?" she said once.

  "It's your imagination."

  "Are you superstitious?" she said disjointedly.

  "I? A little."

  "Why do they call me the daughter of the guillotine? Doesn't thatstrike you as odd?"

  And she threw upon her companion a quick, cunning glance, as though tosurprise the momentary confusion that would expose her real knowledge.

  Thermidor began with the hecatombs from the pretended Conspiracy of thePrisons, and the transfer of the guillotine to the Barriere du TroneRenverse. The great rolling biers, attended by the scum of the city,bore each day to the scaffold their thirty, forty, sixty victims. Eventhe Faubourg St. Antoine, satiated and appalled, began to grumble,while from time to time voices broke out in protestation, willing frommere lassitude to end the spectacle by their own sacrifice.

  On the 6th of Thermidor, almost at the side of Louison, a bouquetiere,her comrade, cried out:

  "I am sick of it! Robespierre is a scoundrel. They kill too manypeople. I want to die."

  The next day she was on the scaffold, looking down indifferently,contented to end the fatigue of surfeited disgust.

  Louison laughed aloud.

  "Why do you laugh?" her neighbor said. "What has she done to you?"

  "I do not laugh at her," she answered impatiently. "I laughed becauseI told her I would go first."

  Her companion edged away. The tricoteuses, stopping their needles,counted:

  "Forty-eight!"

  At that moment Louison beheld Dossonville on the outskirts of thecrowd. Seizing the girl nearest to her, a child of fifteen, by theshoulder, she cried, with a furious gesture:

  "Jeanneton, do you see that fellow over there? He thinks I can't seehim, the fool! As though I cared!"

  The child struggled to free herself, but Louison, without relaxing herhold, transferred her look to the scaffold. Twice again the murmur rose:

  "Forty-nine!"

  "Fifty!"

  "Do you know what I am wondering?" Louison said suddenly to the childwhimpering in her clutch. "How strange it must feel to be there."

  All at once, releasing the frightened Jeanneton, she advanced towardthe guillotine, as though irresistibly sucked into the maelstrom,stopped, drew her hand across her forehead, then, facing the crowd,flung away her basket of flowers and shouted:

  "Vive le Roi!"

  In an instant she was surrounded, while everywhere the cries went up:

  "She is mad!"

  "She is drunk!"

  "We have seen it for weeks."

  "She is not responsible."

  "She is a patriot."

  Others insisted:

  "Arrest her!"

  "The Nation is insulted!"

  "No favor!"

  About the fringes of the crowd they questioned excitedly, running toand fro:

  "Who is it?"

  "Louison."

  "Impossible!"

  "Yes, Louison."

  "She is mad!"

  About her the mass struggled and swayed, some crying to her to simulatedrunkenness, others clamoring for her arrest. In the center, Louison,alone calm and indifferent, secure in the knowledge of what mustfollow, continued to regard the silhouette of the guillotine, whileabout her lips was that curious smile which is seen only on the face ofthe martyr or the insane.