Chapter II: Citoyenne Carinne

It was my unhappiness in the black spring-time of the “Terror” to see my old light acquaintance, the Abbé Michau, jogging on his way to the Place de la Bastille. I pitied him greatly. He had pursued Pleasure so fruitlessly all his days; and into this fatal quagmire had the elusive flame at length conducted him. He sat on the rail of the tumbril--a depressed, puzzled look on his face--between innocence and depravity. Both were going the same road as himself--the harmless white girl and the besotted priest, who shrunk in terror from giving her the absolution she asked;--and poor Charles divided them.

He was not ever of Fortune’s favourites. He would make too fine an art of Epicurism, and he sinned so by rule as to be almost virtuous. I remember him with a half-dozen little axioms of his own concocting, that were after all only morality misapplied: “To know how to forget oneself is to be graduate in the school of pleasure.” “Self-consciousness is always a wasp in the peach.” “The art of enjoyment is the art of selection.” On such as these he founded his creed of conduct; and that procured him nothing but a barren series of disappointments. He was never successful but in extricating himself from mishaps. The _ravissantes_ he sighed after played with and insulted him--though they could never debase his spirit. The dishes he designed lacked the last little secret of perfection. He abhorred untidiness, yet it was a condition of his existence; and he could not carry off any situation without looking like a thief. One further turn of the wheel, and he would have been a saint in a monastery.

I can recall him with some tenderness, and his confident maxims with amusement. That “art of selection” of his I found never so applicable as to the choice of one’s Revolutionary landlord. It was Michau’s _logeur_, I understand, who caused the poor Abbé to be arrested and brought before the tribunal miscalled of Liberty, where the advocacy of the chivalrous Chauveau de la Garde was sufficient only to procure him the last grace of an unproductive appeal. It was the atrocity with whom latterly I lodged who brought me to _my_ final pass.

In truth, as the letters of apartments were largely recruited from the _valetaille_ of _émigrés_, the need of caution in choosing amongst them was very real. M. le Marquis could not take flight in a panic without scattering some of his fine feathers--fortunately, indeed, for him sometimes, for they were as sops thrown to the pursuing wolves while he sped on. Then, down would grovel public accusers, police, and committee-men to snap at the fragments; and amongst them Bon-Jean, Monsieur’s _valet de pied_, would secure his share, perhaps, and set up house with it in one of the meaner faubourgs, and trade profitably therein upon the fears of his lodgers.

Simon Mignard was the last who had the honour to entertain me; and to that horrible little grotesque did I owe my subsequent lodgment in La Petite Force. It was a bad choice, and, with my experience, an unpardonable; but I was taken with a certain humour in the creature that put me off my judgment.

For generally, indeed, this faculty of humour I found to be antipathetic to revolution. It was to be looked upon as a mark of social degeneration. The brute “thrown back” to his primordial state is an animal that takes himself with the most laughterless gravity. He resumes himself corrupt, so to speak, as one resumes the endurance of office full of the rebellious grievance of a holiday. He returns to the primary indulgence of instinct with a debased appetite, and that sense of humour does not accompany him. This is why his prejudices have the force of convictions.

“Citizen Simon,” I said one day, “I would put it to you--if revolutionists would reconstitute society by purging the world of the abnormal, should they not offer themselves the first holocausts to their theories?”

“Hey?” he cried, peering over his glasses. His eye-slits were like half-healed wounds; his face was all covered with a grey down, as if he were some old vessel of wrath the Revolution had produced from its mustiest blood-bin in the cellars where its passions were formerly wont to ferment.

“Hey?” he cried. “But explain, Citizen Thibaut.”

“Why, obviously a primal simplicity cannot be taught by those who, by their own showing, are an essential condition of degeneration.”

“You think so, my friend? But is it not he who has hunted with the wolves can best advise the lamb whither not to stray? Set a thief to catch a thief, but not innocence to lead innocence.”

“We are all so disinterested, eh? We must kill to purify--so long as _we_ remain the executioners.”

“The physicians! the physicians! Some day we shall provide the tonic.”

“At this rate the physicians will have to drink it themselves.”

“Meaning the patients will fail us? Rest content. They will last our time. The ills in the constitution of France are many. For the resurrection--_sang Dieu_!” he cried, with a wry face, “but that is no part of _our_ programme!”

Indeed, it was not of his. He was actuated by no passion but the blood-sucker’s. One day he showed me a clumsy model guillotine, a foot high, of his own contriving. The axe was a fragment of table-knife sunk in a finger of lead, and with it he would operate upon a gruesome little doll he had with an adjustable neck. Snip! the blade fell and the head, and a spout of crimson gushed forth and stained the floor.

“That is a waste of good wine,” said I.

His face puckered like a toad’s eyelids.

“Is it not?” he chuckled, “of the brand drunk by the patriot Citoyenne Sombreuil.”

“Blood!”

“_Voyez!_” he cried, with a little shriek of laughter. “It is hollow. Often I fill it from the tap in the Place de la Bastille. My faith, what a fountain! I love it like Dantzic brandy.”

Then it was I found his humour a little excessive to my taste; and I severed my connection with him. He might lie; obviously he did, in fact, about the blood; but one’s sympathies could not embrace so stupid a falsehood. Promptly he denounced me to his section. I had given him the courteous “you,” said he, and amongst my effects was a box of the interdicted hair-powder.

But it is of my earlier landlord, Jacques Crépin, who for a time influenced my fortunes quite admirably, that I desire here to speak.

Upon this rascal I happened on the evening of Lepelletier St Fargeau’s murder in Février’s Coffee-house. It was the interminable week of the votings on the king’s sentence. During the course of it I had many times visited the Hall of Convention, had stayed a while to watch the slow chain of Deputies hitching over the Tribune, with their dreary chant, “La Mort,” that was like the response to an endless litany of fatality intoned by the ushers; had heard the future Dictator, spectacled, marmoset-faced, irrepressible in oratory, drone his sour dithyrambics where a word would have sufficed; had fallen half asleep over the phantom scene, and had imagined myself at the Comédie Française during a performance of “Les Victimes Cloîtrées”--a dreamy fancy to which the incessant sound of feet on boards, high up in the “Mountain” quarter, the reverberating clap of doors, the wide patter of voices and tinkle of laughter from bedizened _chères amies_, pricking down the _ayes_ and _noes_ upon scented cards, the shriller brabble of Mère Duchesse aloft with her priestesses of the Salpêtrière, and the intermittent melodramatic drawl of the actors moving across the stage, gave colour and coherence.

By then, I think, I was come to be graduate in Michau’s school of Pleasure. It was impressed upon me that to think of myself was a little to foretaste my probable martyrdom. It was philosophy more congenial to read in the serene patriot Thibaut a disinterested sheep fattening on the grass about the _abattoir_. My title was a plague-spot to cover; little but the dust of my patrimony remained; I had long disabused my mind of the dogma that manliness is necessarily a triumphant force in the world.

Yet, a month before, I had been conscious of a little run of pity, that was like a sloughing of the old wound of nobility. It was to see the figure of him I had called Sire heavily seated in that same _Salle de Manège_, his attire, appropriately, a drab surtout--the colour of new-turned mould--his powdered hair blotted with a tonsure where he had leaned his weary head back for rest, that lost look on his ineffectual face--“Messieurs! this strange indignity! But doubtless the saints will explain to me of what I am accused.”

Bah! have I not learned the “Rights of Man,” and seen them illustrated, too, on those days of the “severe justice of the people.” The worse the decomposition below, the thicker will be the scum that rises to the top. But there the wholesome air shall deodorise it by-and-by, and the waters of life be sweet to the taste again--for a time. And in the meanwhile I browse by the _abattoir_.

On that Saturday evening, the last of the voting, I dined with distinction at Février’s in the Palais Royal. I could still afford, morally and materially, this little practice of self-indulgence; for they had not yet begun to make bread of dried pease, and many of the ardent Deputies themselves were admirable connoisseurs in meat and wine.

While I was sitting--the whole place being in a ferment of scurry and babble--a couple, who awakened my curious interest, entered and took a vacant table next to mine. A withered old man it was and a young girl, who sauntered with ample grace in his wake.

The first came down the room, prying hither and thither, bowelless and bent like a note of interrogation. He was buttoned up to the throat in a lank dark-green surtout, and his plain hat was tilted back from his forehead, so as to show his eyebrows, each lifted and lost in the creases of a dozen arched wrinkles, and the papery lids beneath them bulging and half closed. His face was all run into grey sharpness, but a conciliatory smile was a habit of his lips. He carried his hands behind his back as if they were manacled there.

The girl who followed was in features and complexion cold and beautiful. Her eyes were stone-grey under well-marked brows; her forehead rounded from her nose like a kitten’s; the curls that escaped from beneath her furred hood were of a rich walnut brown. She had that colourless serenity in her face that is like snow over perfumed flowers. Gazing on such, one longs to set one’s heart to the chill and melt it and see the blossoms break.

Now I had at once recognised in this couple the sustainers of the principal _rôles_ in a certain September tragedy _entr’acte_. In these times of feverish movement the manner in which Casimir had secured their escape was indeed an old story with me; yet, seeing them again under these vastly improved circumstances, and remembering in what way I had sought to assist them, my heart was moved beyond its present custom to a feeling of sympathetic comradeship with one, at least, of the two.

The old man chose his table.

“Sit down, wench,” said he. “My faith! we must dine, though crowns fall.”

She took her seat with a little peevish sigh.

“Though the stars fell in the street like hail, you would dine,” she said.

He cocked his head sideways.

“They have fallen, my Carinne. The ruin of them litters the Temple.”

She said doggedly, “_Vive le roi!_” under her breath.

“My God!” he whispered, and called the waiter.

He eyed her askance and nervously as the man came. Some distraught admiration seemed to mingle with his apprehension of her. She sat languid and indifferent, and even closed her eyes, with a little disdainful smile, as he leaned down to her and ran his finger eagerly over the various items of the bill of fare.

“Ostend oysters, carp fried in milk, sweetbread patty--that is good. Ragout of the kidneys and combs of cocks--that is very good--Carinne, see! the ragout! Holy saints, but my pocket! Slice of calf’s head, turtle fashion--girl, are you listening? Be reckless. Take of all if you will. I bid thee--thy little uncle, _ma mie_. Slice of--Carinne, this is better than the cabbages and fried eggs of _Pierrettes_. I will not care--I will not. Though I have to cut down trees to meet it, the palate shall have its holiday. Slice of--_mon Dieu_, Carinne! I ate of it once before in this very house. It melts like the manna of the Israelites. It does not surfeit, but it forms an easy bed for the repose of ecstasies more acute.”

The girl broke in with a little high-flung laugh.

“Not trees, but a forest,” she said. “There--choose for me. I am indifferent.”

“Indifferent! indifferent?--Oh, undeserving of the fine gifts of the gods!”

He turned to the waiter, his eyes still devouring the _carte_, his lips silently busy with its contents. Presently he gave his order, sat down, and remained fixedly gnawing a finger, his face set half in enjoying contemplation, half in a baffled aggravation of selection.

In only one other direction did the couple appear to arouse curiosity. The great nerve of the town was all charged with a leaping electricity, and citizens, staid enough ordinarily, ate now and drank under an excitement they could barely control.

But, over against me, at a little distance, were two men seated at a table; and of these one seemed to take a like interest with mine in my neighbours.

This individual, unmoved, apparently, by the general ferment, had finished his dinner and sat sipping his Médoc luxuriously. He was a pimple-faced man, well-nourished and sensual-looking, but with an air of tolerant geniality about him. Ugly as Danton, he had yet a single redeeming ornament in the shape of a quantity of rich auburn hair that fell from his head in natural curls. Though his condition was plain to me, and I saw that the restaurateur treated him with obsequious deference, he appeared more self-complacent than self-sufficient, and as if he were rather accustomed to indulge than abuse his position. For I recognised in him the president of some sectional committee, and that by the little plaque, printed small with the Rights of Man, that hung as a pendant from his tricolour neck-ribbon.

Of the other at the table I took but little notice, save to remark that he devoured his meal with the air of a man to whom good digestion is no essential condition of politics.

Now, of a sudden, Jacques Crépin of the pendant lowered his legs, took up his bottle and glass, and, to my extreme surprise, crossed the room to my table and sat down by me.

He did not speak at first, being engaged in watching our neighbours, before whom were placed at the moment the dishes of the uncle’s selection.

Mademoiselle Carinne gave a little _Ouf!_ over hers.

“But what is this?” she said.

“It is a pig’s foot _à la_ St Menehould. Such a dish, _babouine_!”

The old rascal had taken advantage of her insensibility to procure her one of the cheapest entries on the list.

She pushed it from her with an exclamation of disgust.

“Fie, then!” she cried. “The very hoof of a filthy swine! Wouldst thou have me make my hunger a footstool to a pig? Take it away. I will not touch it!”

He protested, voluble and shamefaced. She would not listen. Out of mere wilfulness she now selected the most expensive item of the _menu_--a partridge stewed in wine. He seemed like to cry; but she persisted and gained her point.

“We shall be ruined!” he cried, inconsistently enough. “For a month after our return we shall have to live on bread and boiled nettles.”

“In December, _mon oncle_? Then I am imperious for white wine of Mont Raché.”

The old fellow almost shrieked.

“Carinne! Eight francs the bottle! Consider, my niece. I shall die in Sainte Pélagie!”

The new-comer turned to me with a grin.

“Didst ever hear the like?” said he.

I nodded gravely. I was not then all inured to impertinence.

“He lacks the art of selection,” I said coldly, thinking of Michau.

He showed himself good-humouredly conscious of my manner. He leaned towards me and murmured carelessly--

“There, of a truth, speaks Monseigneur le Comte de la Muette.”

I reached for my glass and sipped from it; but I have no doubt my hand shook.

“The citizen does not recognise me?”

“No, by my faith.”

“I am Jacques Crépin; and formerly I served where I now dine.”

I glanced at him. Some faint remembrance of the fellow woke in me.

“M. le Comte,” he went on, in the same low voice, “once rewarded me with a handsome vail for some trifling service. It was the lucky louis-d’or of my fortunes. Here was a little of the means; the Revolution was my opportunity. Now the masters serve the waiters. I devour with my teeth what I once devoured with my eyes. You see me president of a section; but, _pardieu_! I have no quarrel with aristocrats of a fastidious palate. It was the contemplation of such educated me to a right humour in gastronomy. I am indebted to monsieur for many a delicate hint in selection.”

Again I thought of the poor Michau.

“I am honoured,” I said. “And so, M. Crépin, this is the goal of your high republicanism?”

“My faith!” he said, with a generous chuckle, “I acknowledge it. I have existed forty years that I may live one--perhaps no more. To drink and to eat and to love _en prince_--I have the capacity for it and the will. I have nursed my constitution on broken scraps. This _fesse-Mathieu_ here offends me. Had I a fortune, I would fling it away on a single desired dish if necessary. We have waived the right to think of the morrow. But, how is monsieur known?”

“They call me Citizen Thibaut.”

“Citizen Thibaut, I drink to our better acquaintance. This Médoc--I have not grudged it you in former years. Your refined appreciation of it has many a time glorified to me my supper of stale fragments. But for you, maybe, I had not learned the secret of its fragrance. To my past master in epicurism I gulp a grateful toast.”

He was as good as his word.

“Citizen Crépin,” I said, “where do you live?”

“Rue de Jouy, St Antoine,” he answered.

“I seek a convenient landlord. Will you accommodate me?”

“With all my heart.”

I heard the _vieillard_ at the next table gobble and choke. I turned my head to look, sprang to my feet, and my glass crashed on the boards.

In that instant the room had leaped into uproar--for something immediate, swift, and terrible had happened. It was this:

The fast-eating man at the table opposite, having finished his dinner, was risen to pay his bill. He stood with impatient hand outstretched as Février fumbled in his pocket for the change; and at the moment a fellow, thick-set, stubble-bearded, dressed in a blouse and faded cloak, strode up the room and paused by him.

“Are you Deputy Lepelletier?” said he.

The diner turned and nodded.

“You have voted in this affair of the king?”

“_Mais oui_,” said the other--“for death.”

“_Scélérat--prends ca!_” and with the word he whipped a long blade from under his cloak and passed it into the body of the deputy. I saw the flash and heard the piteous bleat, as also, I swear, the sound of the flesh sucking to the steel.

Février snatched at the murderer, and was spun to the floor like a skittle. I saw startled figures rise, chairs and tables totter, and the one bounding amongst them. He got clear away.

Then, as the mob closed about the fallen, moaning shape, I turned with an instinct of horror to view of my neighbours.

The old gourmet had flung himself back in his chair, his face twisted from the sight; but mademoiselle still picked daintily at her partridge.