Knight of Maison-Rouge

  “I reckon it’s you who’ll be paying back the whole nation,” gloated the cobbler, rubbing his grubby black hands together.

  “Citizen Maurice,” said Santerre, “keep yourself at the disposal of the Commune—they’ll need to question you.”

  “I am at your orders, commandant; but I’ve already asked to be arrested and I’ll ask again.”

  “Wait, wait,” Simon muttered slyly, “since you’re so keen, we’ll see what we can do.”

  With that, he went off to find Mother Tison.

  23

  THE GODDESS OF REASON

  All day they scoured the courtyard, the garden, and the surroundings for the tiny piece of paper that was causing all the commotion and which, no one doubted any longer, must contain a whole plot.

  The Queen was separated from her sister and her daughter and interrogated; but she did not answer except to say that on the stairs she had met a young woman carrying a bouquet and that she had been happy just to pick one flower. And that she had only picked that flower with the consent of municipal officer Maurice. She had nothing else to say, it was the truth in all its simplicity and in all its force.

  All of this was reported to Maurice when his turn came, and he confirmed that the Queen’s deposition was frank and exact.

  “But,” said the president, “there was a plot, then?”

  “That’s not possible,” said Maurice. “It was I who offered over dinner at Madame Dixmer’s place to take her to see the prisoner, since she had never seen her. But nothing was arranged either as to the day or how we would do it.”

  “But she came equipped with flowers,” said the president. “That bouquet was made up in advance, wasn’t it?”

  “Not at all. I was the one who bought the flowers, from a flower girl who came and offered them to us at the corner of the rue des Vieilles-Audriettes.”

  “But at least this flower girl presented you with the bouquet? ”

  “No, citizen, I chose it myself from among ten or twelve of them; it’s true that I chose the most beautiful one.”

  “But the note could have been slipped in on the way?”

  “It couldn’t possibly have been, citizen. I didn’t leave Madame Dixmer for a minute, and to perform the operation you’re suggesting in each one of the flowers—for you know Simon claims each one of the flowers would have held a similar note—you’d need at least half a day.”

  “But in the end, couldn’t someone have slipped a couple of notes all ready to go among the flowers?”

  “But it was before my very eyes that the prisoner selected one at random, after having refused to take the whole bouquet.”

  “So then, in your opinion, citizen Lindey, there is no conspiracy?”

  “There most certainly is a conspiracy,” Maurice countered, “and I’m not the first not only to believe that but to confirm it; but this conspiracy does not originate with my friends. However, as the nation must not be exposed to any fear whatever, I’m standing security and turning myself in as a prisoner.”

  “No, you’re not!” Santerre replied. “Do you think this is how we treat tried-and-true patriots like you? If you turned yourself in to answer for your friends, I’d turn myself in to answer for you. So it’s all pretty straightforward. There is no positive denunciation, isn’t that right? No one knows what happened. Let’s be doubly vigilant, you especially, and we’ll manage to get to the bottom of this without going public.”

  “Thank you, commandant,” said Maurice. “But I’ll say to you what you would say to me in my place. We can’t let it rest there; we have to find the flower girl.”

  “The flower girl is long gone by now; but don’t worry, we’ll look for her. You, you keep a close eye on your friends; I’ll check all prison correspondence.”

  Simon had been forgotten. But Simon had his little scheme. He popped up at the end of the session we have just recounted to ask the latest, and so learned of the Commune’s decision.

  “Ha! All that’s needed is a formal denunciation to do the job,” he said. “Hang about for a few minutes and I’ll bring it.”

  “What’s going on, then?” asked the president.

  “What’s going on,” said the cobbler, “is that the brave citizeness Tison is about to denounce the underhanded machinations of this partisan of the aristocracy, this Maurice, and the ramifications involving another false patriot among his pals who answers to the name of Lorin.”

  “Go steady, Simon! Your zeal for the nation may well be leading you astray,” said the president. “Maurice Lindey and Hyacinthe Lorin are true-blue patriots.”

  “We’ll see about that in court,” replied Simon.

  “Think about it, Simon, the trial will be scandalous for all good patriots.”

  “Scandalous or not, what’s that to me? Do you think I’m frightened of a bit of a scandal, me? At least we’ll know the whole truth about those who are traitors.”

  “So you persist with this denunciation on behalf of Mother Tison?”

  “I’ll make the denunciation myself tonight at the Cordeliers’ club, you make it with the others, citizen president, if you don’t want to declare the arrest of the traitor Maurice.”

  “Well then, so be it,” said the president, who, as was usually the case in those unhappy times, cowered before whoever yelled the loudest. “Well then, so be it; we’ll arrest him.”

  While the decision was being delivered against him, Maurice had returned to the Temple, where the following note was waiting for him:

  Our watch being violently interrupted, I probably won’t see you again until tomorrow morning: come and have breakfast with me. While we’re eating you can bring me up to date about the intrigues and conspiracies uncovered by master Simon.

  They say that Simon claims

  That a carnation is to blame;

  For my part, heaven knows,

  I’d lay bets on a rose.

  Tomorrow, too, I’ll tell you what Artemisia told me.

  Your friend

  LORIN

  Maurice dashed off his reply:

  Nothing new this end; sleep in peace tonight and eat without me in the morning; in view of today’s incidents, I probably won’t be up and about before midday.

  I wish I were a zephyr to have the right to send a kiss to the rose of whom you speak.

  I’ll allow you to boo my prose as I boo your poetry.

  Your friend

  MAURICE

  P.S. I think the conspiracy was just a false alarm, anyway.

  Lorin had in fact left at eleven ahead of the rest of his battalion, thanks to the abrupt motion of the cobbler. He’d consoled himself for this humiliation with a quatrain and, as announced in this quatrain, he went straight to Artemisia’s.

  Artemisia was delighted to see Lorin. The weather was wonderful, as we noted earlier, and so she suggested a stroll along the banks of the Seine, and Lorin gladly agreed.

  They ambled along the coal port chatting about politics, Lorin recounting his expulsion from the Temple and trying to figure out the circumstances that might have provoked it, when, having gotten as far as the rue des Barres, they spotted a flower girl who, like them, was following the right bank of the Seine upstream.

  “Ah! Citizen Lorin,” said Artemisia. “You will, I hope, offer me a bouquet.”

  “Why stop at one!” said Lorin. “You can have two if that’s what your heart desires.”

  And they both picked up the pace to catch up to the flower girl, who was herself racing ahead as fast as she could go. When she reached the pont Marie, the girl stopped, leaned over the parapet, and emptied her basket into the river.

  Single flowers spun for a moment in the air, while clusters fell more rapidly, dragged down by their weight; then both bouquets and individual flowers bobbed on the surface of the water and sped away with the current.

  “Hey!” said Artemisia, looking at the flower girl who had such an original way of plying her trade. “It looks like … no, it can’t be … yes, it can …
no … yes, it is … Hmmm. How odd!”

  The flower girl put a finger to her lips, as though entreating Artemisia to say nothing, and disappeared.

  “What is it, then?” said Lorin. “Do you know that mortal, goddess?”

  “No. I thought at first … But obviously I was mistaken.”

  “Yet she signaled to you,” Lorin insisted.

  “Why is she being a flower girl this morning?” Artemisia wondered out loud.

  “So you admit you know her, Artemisia?” asked Lorin.

  “Yes,” said Artemisia. “She’s just a flower girl I sometimes buy from.”

  “Whatever the case,” said Lorin, “your flower girl has a strange way of getting rid of her goods.”

  They both took a last look at the flowers, which were already whirling past the wooden footbridge, propelled by a second arm of the river that passes under the arches there; then they continued walking toward La Rapée, where they were planning to dine tête-à-tête.

  For the moment the incident rested there. But because it was strange and smacked of a certain mysteriousness, it burned itself into Lorin’s poetic imagination.

  Meanwhile, Mother Tison’s denunciation, brought against Maurice and Lorin, caused a great stir at the Jacobin club. Maurice, at the Temple, received the advice of the Commune that his liberty was threatened by public indignation. This was an invitation to the young municipal officer to hide if he was guilty. But Maurice remained at the Temple, since he had nothing to hide, and when they came to arrest him they found him at his post.

  Maurice was interrogated on the spot. While sticking to the firm resolution not to implicate friends of whom he was sure, Maurice was not a man to sacrifice himself ridiculously by remaining silent like some hero in a romantic novel, and so he demanded that the flower girl be called to account.

  It was five o’clock in the evening when Lorin got home. He learned that instant of Maurice’s arrest and the demand that the latter had made. The flower girl of the pont Marie, throwing her flowers into the Seine, immediately sprang to mind as sharply as a sudden revelation. This strange woman, the nearness of the neighborhoods in question, Artemisia’s half-confession, everything screamed that there lay the explanation of the mystery Maurice demanded be clarified.

  Lorin bolted from his room, flew down the four flights of stairs as though he had wings, and ran to the Goddess of Reason’s, where he found her embroidering gold stars on a dress of blue gauze. This was to be her dress as a divinity.

  “Enough stars, dear friend,” said Lorin. “They arrested Maurice this morning and I’ll probably be arrested tonight.”

  “Maurice, arrested?”

  “Yes, by God! These days what could be more common than major calamities; no one pays any attention anymore because they now come in droves, that’s just how it is. But nearly all these major events are brought about by totally trivial things. Let’s not neglect the totally trivial. Who was that flower girl we saw this morning, dear friend?”

  Artemisia jumped.

  “What flower girl?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud! The one who was tossing her flowers so extravagantly into the Seine.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said Artemisia. “Is that such a serious matter that you have to keep harping on it?”

  “So serious, dear friend, that I beseech you to answer my question this very instant.”

  “My friend, I can’t.”

  “Goddess, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

  “I’m honor-bound not to say.”

  “And I am honor-bound to make you say.”

  “But why are you so insistent?”

  “Because … Christ! So Maurice doesn’t get the chop!”

  “Oh, my God! Maurice guillotined!” cried the young woman in fright.

  “To say nothing of myself, though I’m not sure I can honestly say I’ve still got my head screwed on to begin with.”

  “Oh! No. No,” said Artemisia. “It would mean losing your head, without fail.”

  At that moment, Lorin’s officieux rushed into Artemisia’s room.

  “Ah, citizen!” he cried. “Run! Run!”

  “Why would I do that?” asked Lorin.

  “Because the gendarmes have come for you. While they were breaking down the door, I managed to get through to the house next door over the rooftops so I could come and warn you.”

  Artemisia gave out a terrible cry. She really loved Lorin, after all.

  “Artemisia,” said Lorin, facing her squarely, “are you saying the life of a flower girl is worth more than that of Maurice—and that of your lover? If that’s how it is, I declare that I cease to take you for the Goddess of Reason and proclaim you the Goddess of Unreason.”

  “Poor Héloïse!” cried the erstwhile Opera dancer. “It’s not my fault if I betray you.”

  “Good! Good! Dear friend,” said Lorin, handing Artemisia a sheet of paper, “you’ve already gratified me with a Christian name; now how about giving me the surname and address.”

  “Oh, no. I can’t write it down! Never!” cried Artemisia. “You win:

  I’ll tell you.”

  “So tell me and don’t worry, I won’t forget.”

  Artemisia then gave Lorin the name and address of the phony flower girl in a voice that did not waver.

  Her name was Héloïse Tison and she lived at 24, rue des Non-nandières.

  At the name, Lorin gave a cry and darted off at full speed. He hadn’t gone as far as the end of the street when a letter arrived at Artemisia’s. The letter contained only these three lines:

  Not a word about me, dear friend; the revelation of my name would finish me off without fail.… Wait till tomorrow to name me, for tonight I will have left Paris.

  YOUR HÉLOÏSE

  “Oh, my God!” cried the future Goddess. “If only I’d realized, I’d have waited till tomorrow.”

  She dashed to the window to call Lorin back, if there was still time; but Lorin had vanished.

  24

  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

  We have already said that in a few hours the news of this event was all over Paris. Indeed, in those days, leaks and lapses in discretion were only too easy to understand on the part of a government whose policies were made and unmade in the street.

  And so the rumor, terrible and threatening, reached the old rue Saint-Jacques, and two hours after Maurice’s arrest they knew all about it there.

  Thanks to Simon’s industry, the details of the plot had promptly broken through the confines of the Temple. But as everyone had had their little embellishments to add to the basic story, the truth arrived at the master tanner’s a little altered. It was a poisoned flower, they said, that had been handed to the Queen, with which the Austrian woman was to put the guards to sleep in order to make her escape from the Temple.… This version neatly dovetailed with certain suspicions about the loyalty of the battalion that had been sent packing the day before by Santerre. What it all came to was that a number of victims had already been identified for the people to hate.

  But at the old rue Saint-Jacques, they were under no illusions about the real nature of events—and with good reason. Morand immediately dashed out one side of the house and Dixmer the other, leaving Geneviève in the grip of the most violent despair.

  Indeed, if anything were to happen to Maurice, Geneviève would be to blame. It was she who had led the blind young man by the nose right up to the cell he would be locked up in, and which he would not be leaving except for a short trip to the scaffold.

  But, whatever happened, Geneviève was determined that Maurice would not pay with his head for his determination to please her. If Maurice was condemned, Geneviève was going to accuse herself at the Tribunal; she would confess all. She would take the responsibility upon herself as a matter of course and she would save Maurice even if it meant losing her own life.

  Instead of trembling at the thought of dying for Maurice, Geneviève, on the contrary, savored it with a kind of bittersweet
relish. She loved him. She loved him more than was right for a woman who was not free. For her it was a way of remitting to God’s care her pure and stainless soul just as she had received it from Him.

  On leaving the house, Morand and Dixmer had gone their separate ways. Dixmer wended his way toward the rue de la Corderie and

  Morand ran to the rue des Nonnandières. When he reached the far end of the pont Marie, Morand saw the usual horde of idlers and gawkers that flock to Paris during or after a major event and plunk themselves down wherever the event took place, the way crows flock to a battlefield.

  The sight caused Morand to stop in his tracks. His legs turned to jelly and he was forced to lean against the parapet of the bridge. After a few seconds, though, he got back his energy, that fabulous power that he had over himself in momentous circumstances, and he began to mingle among various clusters of people, asking questions and getting answers. He learned, for example, that ten minutes previously they had nabbed a young woman from 24, rue des Nonnandières, and that this young woman was most certainly guilty of the crime of which she was accused, since she had been caught in the act of packing her bags.

  Morand found out what club the poor girl was to be interrogated in and learned that she had been brought to the main section, the Jacobins’ club. He set off without further ado.

  The club was packed to the rafters by the time Morand got there, yet he managed to elbow and punch his way into one of the galleries. The first thing he saw was the tall and noble figure and disdainful countenance of Maurice, standing in the dock glaring witheringly at Simon as the cobbler held forth.

  “Yes, citizens,” cried Simon, “yes, citizeness Tison accuses citizen Lindey and citizen Lorin. Citizen Lindey talks of some flower girl whom he wants to blame for his crime. But I can tell you now, the flower girl won’t be found. We’re dealing with a conspiracy hatched by a ring of aristocrats who keep pointing fingers at one another like the cowards they are. You saw how citizen Lorin flew the coop as soon as he was called on. Well, you won’t run into him now any more than you will the flower girl.”