Part 2 — VIII LA FÊTE DE LA RAISON

On the 20th of Brumaire, day of the Feast of Reason, maddest day the world has ever known, the Revolution, having overturned the social order, abolished the clergy, introduced the monetary system, instituted fraternal banquets, established popular education, and renamed the calendar, now, as though unwilling that aught should exist save in its image, decreed the abolition of religion and set up the cult of Reason. The neighborhood of the Prêtre Pendu, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of its tyrants, was yet astounded at the pitch of frenzy to which exultation stirred the Marseillais and his companions.

The ecstasy of Javogues terrified all with its frantic joy; for him the consummation of the human race had arrived. He spent the morning before the cabaret, astride a vat, dispensing wine and hand-shakes, his arms in the air haranguing the crowd that trembled to be present and dared not stay away.

"Religion is dead!" he bellowed to all comers. "The farce is ended! The impudent bubble is pricked!"

Boudgoust and Jambony, on either side, imitated his fury and his gestures, while Cramoisin, twisting in the crowd, made all he met shout to the cry of:

"Vive la Raison!"

The listeners for the most part simulated enthusiasm, with an eye to escape. A few echoed:

"Down with superstition!"

La Mère Corniche, hobbling into the midst of them, extended her hand to Javogues in rough familiarity, crying:

"Well, my big fellow, are you happy? What a day, hanh? No more superstitions for us! Touch hands."

"Touch there, mother!" Their hands met with a clap. "Didn't I tell you, from the first, there is no God?"

"Aye, you did. He never feared, that man!"

"I say it now," Javogues cried, and thrice he shouted: "There is no God!"

Suddenly, flinging from the vat, he cleared a space about him with his arm, and, seizing Geneviève by the shoulder to steady himself, cried:

"If there is a God, let him strike me down. Let the moment decide between us. I defy him!"

He raised his fist to the sky and remained waiting, while more than one closed their eyes in terror. Then as the skies disgorged no thunderbolt, his arm relaxed, descending to his side, and the scornful lips with a sneer pronounced:

"Bah!"

"Vive Javogues!"

It was the voice of Cramoisin that acclaimed the victor.

Abandoning Geneviève, Javogues caught from the crowd a bakeress and a fille de joie and forced them into each other's arms, crying:

"Embrace; the Revolution declares you sisters!"

Leaving the frightened women cowering, he again seized Geneviève as a prop, and clearing the throng, rolled up the street, invoking each window with the exulting shout:

"Vive la Raison!"

While Cramoisin and Boudgoust combated for the relinquished vat, Jambony, serving the spigot, impudent and mocking, bellowed:

"Citoyens, it is not enough to wipe out cults: we must level the steeples. Steeples are aristocratic. What's the use of making Temples of Reason of the ci-devant churches if steeples are to lord it over us. Steeples are the princes of the city!"

"Citoyen, the Section des Bonnes Nouvelles has already done so!" a woman cried.

"Then Vive la Section des Bonnes Nouvelles!"

With the departure of Javogues the crowd grew noisy, disputing and haranguing. From the top of the vat, which he had gained, Cramoisin bellowed in vain to them to listen to his ideas on the primeval innocence and the community of women. The throng had turned to another who, applauding the laws of burial, declared, beyond interring each citoyen under the simple tricolor flag, perfect equality could be obtained only by identical tombstones.

All at once la Mère Corniche, who had remained on the fringe of the crowd, shrank into it with an exclamation of fear. At the entrance of No. 38 appeared Nicole. On her face was the brooding and the color of death. For a moment she leaned against the wall, searching uneasily among the crowd. Then, still seeking, she approached, swaying from side to side, and her eye fell on la Mère Corniche—and passed.

"It is not I," the old woman muttered, still trembling from the suspense. "It's Cramoisin."

Then as Nicole, shaking her head, turned wearily and went down the street, rubbing from time to time against the wall, la Mère Corniche said to herself, "Ah, it is Javogues!"

She sought the eye of Cramoisin. He was still on the vat, struck dumb in the midst of a furious harangue, following the girl as she disappeared from sight.

The concierge, in her fear, had guessed rightly: Nicole sought the Marseillais. Her doubts of Barabant, dispelled on the instant of his arrest, had given place to bitter reproaches, to self-accusation, and to an immense, confused hatred of the man who had betrayed him. The separation was irrevocable; she could see nothing ahead. In the desolation of her hopes her anger turned against the Revolution. Barabant guilty! Barabant, the generous, impulsive advocate of great ideas, a traitor! At such a thought her whole being rose in revolt against the Revolution that would destroy him. Without distinguishing its abuses from its truths, reasoning from men to ideas, revolting at the doctrine of the community of women that menaced her pure ambitions, she saw the Revolution only in the furious figure of Javogues, brutal, despotic, and mad. Shrinking from her comrades, without faith, without hope, adrift, with the figure of Charlotte Corday ever before her, tormented with the thought of martyrdom, she followed Javogues, restlessly keeping him under her eye, seeking him with an instinctive impulse that gradually and fearfully shaped itself in her resolution.

The streets where she wandered were filled with barbaric processions from the sack of the churches. Unshaven heads crowned with gorgeous miters, ragged bodies clothed in purple robes, smudgy arms brandishing golden chalices, crucifixes, and relics swept by with exultant, mocking chorus. In the churchyards troops of beggars demolished monuments and leveled the tombs, while still others beheaded the stone images in the niches of the doors.

Toward night the lowest elements of the social order were unchained. The drunkards, the thieves, the idiots, the pariahs, the beggars, the destitute, the morbidly curious, the shrews, the hags, the harlots; all who hated the good and many who had been taught to regard religion as the shackles that fastened them to servitude, erupted into the night, to mock the Church and dishonor it.

Listless, troubled, and uneasy, through the demented city Nicole continued her search, stopping neither for lunch nor for supper, sorting, without success, each successive throng, while every scene of license and sacrilege that inflamed her anger steadied her resolve.

In the church of St. Gervais she stopped, appalled at the riot. Within, shrieks of laughter mingled with hoarse shouts of men and the surging rhythm of music. Horror and rage possessed her, and she plunged in, seeking Javogues, while her hand went nervously to her breast.

The church was dim with the smoky glimmer of lamps, which veiled the interior in a mantle of fog. The fishwives from the Marché St. Jean offered salted herrings to all comers, poisoning the air and disgusting the nostrils, while on their track followed limonadiers with overtopping tanks, rattling their cups and hawking their beverage.

In the Chapel of the Virgin a hundred couples were dancing, bumping into one another, hilarious with wine and hoarse with shouting; while above the carnival, enthroned on the altar, a blue and white Goddess of Reason, a girl of fifteen, watched the rout, arranging her scarlet liberty-cap or extending her hand with conscious smiles to those who acclaimed her.

Among these women whirling with closed eyes and tumbled hair, among the reeling men, Nicole glided until satisfied that the Marseillais was absent; then she left the unholy halls and ran, panting, to St. Eustache.

There, inside the entrance, the uproar halted her, and she remained, in bewilderment, gazing down the enormous length, asking herself if her senses had departed.

The great vista was transformed into a country-side; at her elbow were rustic huts and clumps of trees, while in the distance, hidden under the foliage of thickets, rose mounds that echoed to the creaking of planks under the rush of feet. Suddenly a hand caught her arm and Dossonville's voice cried:

"Nicole, are you mad!"

Angry at this interruption to her plans, she turned with a gesture of impatience; but Dossonville, without relinquishing his grasp, continued sternly:

"You cannot stay, you cannot!"

"I am going to."

The next moment some one seized her by the waist; she turned with a scream. It was Cramoisin who, unaware of her identity, had caught her.

At the sight of Nicole he relaxed his hold, in such utter terror that he stumbled and fell on his back, when a band of women seized him by the arms and legs and bore him raging into the crowd.

"Diable!" Dossonville muttered to himself. "If the beast recognized me, I am done for." Then taking the girl's arm, he repeated: "Nicole, you cannot remain; it is impossible."

"I can protect myself," she said savagely.

"Nicole—"

"I must stay!"

In a moment Dossonville guessed something of her design, and withdrawing a step, said sternly:

"Whom are you seeking?"

"No one."

"You are meditating something desperate."

"No."

"You will not come?"

She shook her head impatiently.

"Then my life is in your hands; I will not leave you."

Satisfied with this solution, that offered her a certain protection, Nicole inclined her head, and caring little how far she betrayed herself to him, hastened feverishly into the throng. The loathing and hatred which communicated itself to her body banished all other senses; her breast rose tumultuously, her forehead grew ugly with anger, while her restless eyes beheld the saturnalia without comprehension.

Silently she dragged him about the great space. On the altars of the chapels were spilled bouquets and bottles of wine pell-mell with sausages, pâtés, vegetables, and meats. A score of hands clutched the food, scattering it over the steps, splashing the altars with the red stains of wine. The people gorged, drank, embraced, and fell sprawling; while at times, with a drunken cheer, some one in the tangle would hurl a sausage or a ball of dripping bread at the statues and portraits above, crying:

"There's for you, ci-devant Virgin!"

"Eat a little and become a good republican!"

Out of the scramble, boys and girls were thrust forward to plunge their tiny hands into the food in sign of liberty, while bottles of wine, snatched from the famished lips of beggars, were held out to them, until in their intoxication they furnished amusement to the ribald crowd.

"Pass on, pass on," cried Nicole.

A rush of women brushed them against the wall. In the procession were tossing a dozen statues capped with liberty-bonnets. In front of them, a woman, leaping forward, embraced a statue in her arms and bore it crashing to the floor.

At the next chapel, Dossonville felt a sudden tension on his arm. Within, a band of madmen and crazy women were performing a mockery of a mass. Before a half-naked girl in stupor on the altar Boudgoust was kneeling, while Jambony, insolent and sneering, swung a chain of sausages to and fro as censers.

Below the figure of the Goddess of Reason had been placed a hastily constructed guillotine, which Boudgoust elevated and replaced, pouring over it a libation of red wine, announcing:

"The blood of aristocrats we offer thee!"

Then turning, he led the uproarious congregation, crouching below, in a litany:

"Pass on, pass on," Nicole cried, after the unavailing search.

"If it is not they, it is Javogues," thought Dossonville, who had been wondering whom she was seeking.

They left the chapels and emerged into the aisle, where no sound predominated and everything was heard; where it seemed that Hell, having overturned Heaven, was struggling to annihilate itself in the need of venting its wickedness.

For a moment Nicole forgot herself, aghast at the frenzy of her kind. She raised her eyes in terror to the deep vaults stretching upward undisturbed, serene and awful, as though from the dim regions, which in her childhood she had peopled with visions, the avenging thunderbolt was about to smite the scoffers.

On every side the shouts grew wilder. Vile women, dropping the mask of their sex, pursued men in long, haggard, furious lines over the artificial mounds that groaned under the chase. The half-naked figure of Cramoisin appeared, surrounded by bacchantes, exhorting the crowd to return to the primitive innocence. Forms meaningless and confused flitted, whirled, reeled before them in an unending danse Macabre, while mingled with the tempest came the ever-exultant shout:

"Vive la Raison! Vive la Raison!"

Suddenly, by the catch of her breath and by the involuntary "Ah!" Dossonville knew that Nicole had found Javogues.

Without awaiting her leap, he hurled himself on her and bore her back into a thicket, struggling and pleading and burying her teeth in the hand that muffled her screams. Then when the mad struggles had snapped the bonds of consciousness, he picked her up in his arms and bore her quickly out through the unbridled mob, who broke into applause, believing her overcome with drunkenness.