They opened the door at the back, which was no more locked than the first had been, and found themselves opposite the door to the Knight’s apartment. Maurice had seen this door twenty times and had never asked where it led. For him, the world was centered on the salon where Geneviève received him.
“Oh! Oh!” Lorin whispered. “Here we change our tune; there is no key and the door is locked.”
“But,” croaked Maurice, barely able to speak, “are you sure this is the one?”
“If the plan is correct, this must be it,” replied the man from the police. “Anyway, we’ll soon see. Grenadiers, break the door down. And you, citizens, stand ready; as soon as the door’s down, run into the room.”
Four men designated by the police envoy raised the butts of their rifles and, at a sign from the man directing the show, struck the door with a single blow each: the door splintered and fell apart.
“Give yourself up or you’re dead!” shouted Lorin, hurling himself into the room.
No one replied: the curtains on the bed were closed.
“The alley! Watch the alley!” cried the man from the police. “Take aim at the bed, and at the first signs of movement from behind the curtains, fire.”
“Wait!” said Maurice. “I’ll draw them.”
With that, apparently in the hope that Maison-Rouge was hiding behind the curtains and that the first thrust of a dagger or shot of a pistol would have done him in, Maurice rushed at the curtains and flung them back squealing on their rod.
The bed was empty.
“Damn!” cried Lorin. “No one!”
“He must have got away,” stammered Maurice.
“He can’t have, citizens! It’s not possible!” cried the grey man. “I tell you he was seen entering an hour ago and no one saw him come out; all the exits are guarded.”
Lorin opened cabinets and cupboards and poked around everywhere, even where it was plainly impossible for a man to hide.
“No one! You see for yourself: no one!”
“No one,” repeated Maurice with an emotion easy to understand. “You can see for yourself, in fact, there is no one.”
“Citizeness Dixmer’s room!” said the man from the police. “Maybe he’s there?”
“Oh!” Maurice protested. “Surely we should respect a woman’s bedroom.”
“What are you talking about?” said Lorin. “Certainly we’ll respect it, and citizeness Dixmer too, but we’ll enter all the same.”
“Enter citizeness Dixmer?” snickered one of the grenadiers, delighted to crack a rude joke.
“No,” said Lorin, “just the room.”
“Well then,” said Maurice, “let me go first.”
“Go on,” said Lorin, “you’re the captain: honor where honor is due.”
They left two men behind to guard the room and went back to the room where they had lit the torches. Maurice approached the door leading to Geneviève’s bedroom.
It was the first time he would be entering it. His heart was beating like a hammer. The key was in the door. Maurice brought his hand to the key, but then hesitated.
“Well then,” said Lorin, “open it!”
“But what if citizeness Dixmer is asleep in bed?”
“We’ll look in her bed, under her bed, up her chimney, and in her cupboards,” said Lorin. “After that, if there’s no one but her, we’ll wish her good night.”
“No, we won’t,” said the man from the police. “We’ll arrest her. Citizeness Geneviève Dixmer was an aristocrat who has been recognized as the accomplice of the Tison girl and the Knight of Maison-Rouge.”
“You open up then,” said Maurice, handing over the key. “I don’t arrest women.”
The man from the police gave Maurice a sidelong glance, and the grenadiers muttered among themselves.
“Oh! So you’re whispering now?” said Lorin. “Whisper for the two of us, then, while you’re at it. I share Maurice’s view.” And he took a step back.
The grey man grabbed the key and turned it sharply, and the door yielded. The soldiers rushed into the room. Two candles were burning on a small table, but Geneviève’s room, like that of the Knight of Maison-Rouge, was uninhabited.
“Empty!” cried the man from the police.
“Empty!” cried Maurice, turning pale. “Where can she be?”
Lorin looked at Maurice in shock.
“Search!” said the man from the police. With the militia in tow, he began to turn the entire house upside down, from the cellars to the workshops.
Scarcely had they turned their backs when Maurice, who had watched them go with great impatience, also launched himself into the bedroom, opening cupboards he had already opened and calling in a voice full of anguish, “Geneviève! Geneviève!”
But Geneviève did not reply. Her room really was empty. Maurice also began to comb the entire house in a sort of frenzy. Hothouses, sheds, outhouses, he went through the lot, but in vain.
Suddenly a great commotion was heard: a troop of armed men presented themselves at the door, exchanged the password with the sentry, and immediately invaded the garden before spreading through the house. At the head of the reinforcements shone the plumed panache of Santerre.
“Well then!” he said to Lorin. “Where is the conspirator?”
“What do you mean, where is the conspirator?”
“I’m asking you what you’ve done with him!”
“I might ask you yourself: if your detachment had been guarding the exits properly they would surely have arrested him, since he was no longer in the house when we went in.”
“What are you saying, there?” cried the furious general. “You mean you let him get away?”
“We couldn’t let him get away, since we never had him to begin with.”
“Then I don’t get it,” said Santerre.
“What?”
“What you said to me through your envoy.”
“We sent you an envoy, did we?”
“Of course you did. That fellow with the brown coat and the black hair and green glasses who came to alert us on your behalf that you were on the point of nabbing Maison-Rouge but that he was defending himself like a lion. When I heard that, I came running.”
“A fellow in a brown coat, black hair, and green glasses?” Lorin repeated.
“No doubt about it, with a woman on his arm.”
“Young, pretty?” cried Maurice rushing over to the general.
“Young, pretty. Yes.”
“It was the man himself and citizeness Dixmer.”
“What man?”
“Maison-Rouge … Oh! Miserable wretch that I am not to have killed both of them!”
“Come, come, citizen Lindey,” said Santerre. “We’ll catch up with them.”
“But how the hell did you let them pass?” said Lorin.
“Hell’s bells!” said Santerre. “I let them pass because they had the password.”
“They had the password!” cried Lorin. “But that means there’s a traitor among us!”
“No, no, citizen,” said Santerre. “Everyone knows who you are, and we know there are no traitors among you.”
Lorin looked all around him as though searching for the traitor whose existence he had just proclaimed. He met the somber brow and vacillating gaze of Maurice.
“Oh!” he murmured to himself. “What can this this mean?”
“The man can’t be far,” said Santerre. “Turn the neighborhood inside out. Maybe he’s fallen into the hands of some patrol cleverer than us who won’t have let themselves be had.”
“Yes, yes; we’ll keep looking,” said Lorin.
He grabbed Maurice by the arm and dragged him out of the garden on the pretext of continuing the search.
“Yes, we’ll keep looking,” chimed the soldiers, “but before we go …”
And with that, one of them chucked his torch under the shed where the chopped wood was piled along with stacks of kindling.
“Come away,” said Lorin. “Come.”
Maurice put up no resistance. He followed Lorin like a child; they both ran as far as the bridge without exchanging a single word further. There they stopped and Maurice turned around. The sky was red at the horizon of the faubourg, and thousands of sparks could be seen dancing over the houses.
32
FAITH SWORN
Maurice shuddered from head to toe and pointed to the rue Saint-Jacques.
“Fire!” he cried. “Fire!”
“Well, yes,” said Lorin. “Fire. So?”
“Oh, my God! My God! What if she came back?”
“If who came back?”
“Geneviève.”
“Geneviève: that’s Madame Dixmer, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s her.”
“There’s no danger of that, she didn’t leave just to come back again.”
“Lorin, I’ve got to find her, I’ve got to avenge myself.”
“Oh, no!” said Lorin.
“Love, tyrant of gods and mortals,
It’s no longer incense you need on your altars.”
“You’ll help me find her, won’t you, Lorin?”
“Good heavens! That won’t be hard
How do you mean?”
“Obviously, if you’re so interested in the fate of citizeness Dixmer, and it certainly looks like you are from where I’m standing, you must know her; and if you know her, you must know who her closest friends are. She won’t have left Paris; they’re all desperate to stay in town. She’s taken refuge with some confidante, and tomorrow morning you’ll receive via some Rose or some Chrysanthemum a little note more or less along these lines:
“If Mars wants to see Cythera again
Let him borrow Night’s azured shawl.
And let him present himself at the concierge’s office at such and such a number of such and such a street and ask for Madame Trois-Etoiles. Voilà.”
Maurice shrugged his shoulders. He knew only too well that Geneviève had nowhere to go.
“We won’t find her,” he murmured.
“Allow me to tell you something, Maurice,” said Lorin.
“What?”
“That it may not be such a bad thing if we don’t find her.”
“If we don’t find her, Lorin,” said Maurice bleakly, “I will die.”
“Oh, Christ!” said the young man. “So this is the woman you nearly died of love for?”
“Yes,” answered Maurice.
Lorin thought for a moment.
“Maurice,” he said, “it must be about eleven o’clock, the place is deserted, there’s a bench over there that looks as though it was made for a couple of pals like us to sit on. Grant me the favor of an intimate interview, as they used to say under the ancien régime. I give you my word I’ll speak only in prose.”
Maurice looked around him and finally plunked down next to his friend.
“Speak,” said Maurice, dropping his heavy head into his hands.
“Listen, dear friend, without exordium, without periphrasis, without commentary, I’ll tell you something: we are sinking, or rather you are sinking us.”
“How do you mean?”
“There is, tenderhearted friend,” Lorin went on, “a certain decree of the Committee of Public Safety that declares a traitor to the nation anyone who maintains relations with the enemies of said nation. Eh? You are familiar with this decree?”
“Naturally,” said Maurice.
“You’re sure you know the one?”
“Yes.”
“Well then! It seems to me you’re not a bad candidate as a traitor to your nation. What do you say to that, as Manlius Capitolinus would say?”
“Lorin!”
“Seems fairly cut and dried—unless you regard as idolizing the nation those who give bed and board to Monsieur the Knight of Maison-Rouge, who is not quite the zealous republican, it would seem; not actually accused, for the moment at least, of having carried out the September massacres.”
“Ah, Lorin!” Maurice sighed.
“So it looks to me,” the moralist continued, “like you have been, and still are, a little too chummy with the enemy of the nation. Wake up, Maurice, don’t give up the fight, dear friend. You’re like old Enceladus1—you’d move a mountain if you rolled over. So I repeat, don’t give up the fight, just admit openly you’re no longer a zealot.”
Lorin had said these words with all the gentleness he was capable of, glossing over the whole thing with an artfulness worthy of Cicero. Maurice contented himself with a gesture of protest. But the gesture was declared null and void, and Lorin continued:
“Oh! If we lived in some controlled hothouse climate, a forthright, honest climate, where the barometer invariably sat on sixteen degrees Celsius according to the laws of botany, I’d say to you, my dear Maurice, how elegant, how just the ticket; let’s be a bit aristocratic from time to time, it does you good and it smells so nice. But we’re frying today in thirty-five to forty degree heat! The tablecloth is burning—next to it anyone is merely lukewarm; compared with that kind of heat anyone looks cold. And when one is cold, one is suspect. You know that as well as I do, Maurice. And when one is suspect—you have too much intelligence not to see, my dear Maurice, not to know what one is shortly after that. Or, rather, what one no longer is.”
“Well then! So! Let them kill me and get it over with!” cried Maurice. “I’m tired of living anyway.”
“For the last quarter of an hour!” said Lorin. “Actually, we don’t have enough time left for me to let you have your way; then again, when a person dies these days, you understand, it has to be as a republican, whereas you would die an aristocrat.”
“Oh! Christ!” Maurice exploded, his blood beginning to boil thanks to the agonizing pain caused by consciousness of his own guilt. “Christ! You’re going too far, my friend.”
“I’ll go further still, for, I warn you, if you turn yourself into an aristocrat …”
“You’ll denounce me?”
“Honestly! No! But I’ll lock you in a cellar and make them search for you to the sound of drums, like some missing object. Then I’ll declare that the aristocrats, knowing what you had in store for them, have sequestered you, starved you, martyred you; so that when they find you, you’ll be crowned publicly with flowers, like the Provost de Beaumont, Monsieur Latude, et al., by the ladies of Les Halles2 and the ragpickers of the Victor section. So hurry up and start acting like Aristides again or the outcome is a foregone conclusion.”
“Lorin, Lorin, I know you’re right, but I’m being dragged down, I’m sliding downhill. Do you hold it against me if fate is dragging me down?”
“I don’t hold it against you, but I will pull you back up. Remember the trouble Pylades kicked up for Orestes on a daily basis? Proving triumphantly that friendship is nothing if not a paradox, since such model friends bicker and fight from morning to night.”
“Forget me, Lorin, you’d be better off.”
“Never!”
“Then let me love and go insane at my leisure; I may even be a criminal, for if I see her again I feel I might well murder her.”
“Or fall at her feet … Ah, Maurice! Maurice in love with an aristocrat: who’d have thought it! You’re like that pathetic Osselin, member of the Convention, who fell in love with the marquise de Charny.”3
“That’s enough, Lorin, please.”
“Maurice, I’ll get you over it or rot in hell. I don’t want you to win Sainte Guillotine’s lottery, that I do not, as the grocer of the rue des Lombards would say. Watch you don’t push me too far, Maurice. You’ll turn me into a blood drinker. Maurice, I feel the need to set fire to the île Saint Louis: a torch, a firebrand!
“But no, I should just quiet down.
Why demand a torch, a flambeau?
Your fire’s enough, Maurice, you beau
To burn your soul, this place, the town.”
Maurice couldn’t help but smile in spite of himself.
“You know we agreed to speak only in pros
e?” he said.
“Yes, but you exasperate me with your madness,” said Lorin. “And … here, come and have a drink, Maurice. Let’s get sozzled, let’s move motions, and study political economics. But for the love of Jupiter, don’t let’s be in love, let’s love only liberty.”
“Or Reason.”
“Ah! Good point! By the way, the goddess sends you her greetings and finds you a charming mortal.”
“And you’re not jealous?”
“Maurice, to save a friend, I feel myself capable of any sacrifice.”
“Thank you, my poor Lorin, I do appreciate your devotion. But the best way for me to console myself, you see, is to drown in my suffering. Adieu, Lorin, go and see Artemisia.”
“What about you? Where are you going?”
“I’m going home.”
Maurice did take a few steps toward the bridge.
“So you’ve moved to the old rue Saint-Jacques now, have you?”
“No, but that’s the way I feel like going.”
“To see where your inhuman friend used to live one more time?”
“To see if she’s come back where she knows I’ll be waiting for her. Oh, Geneviève! Geneviève! I would never have believed you capable of such betrayal!”
“Maurice, a tyrant who knew the fair sex well,4 since he died from having loved too many of them, once said:
“Woman is so apt to change
Whoever trusts her is completely deranged.”
Maurice gave a sigh and the two friends walked back toward the old rue Saint-Jacques. The closer they got, the louder the noise; they saw the light grow brighter, they heard the patriotic songs that, in daylight, in full sunshine, in the atmosphere of combat, came across as heroic hymns, but which at night, by the light of a raging inferno, took on the lugubrious tones of some cannibalistic intoxication rite.
“Oh, my God! My God!” cried Maurice, forgetting God had been abolished.
And he forged ahead, sweat streaming from his brow. Lorin watched him go and murmured between clenched teeth:
“Love, Love, when you take hold of us:
We might as well say adieu prudence.”
All of Paris seemed to be flocking to the theater of the events we have just described. Maurice was forced to plow through a hedgerow of grenadiers, ranks of section members, and then the pushing and shoving throngs of a populace that, in those days, was always in a fury, always on the alert, hurtling, screaming, from one spectacle to the next.