The Knight of Maison-Rouge Read online

“Why not?”

  “You took her home.”

  “She gave me the slip at the pont-Marie …”

  “Gave you the slip—you!” cried Lorin, hooting with laughter. “A woman gave you the slip; pull the other one!

  Does the dove escape

  The vulture, that tyrant of the air,

  Or the gazelle the desert tiger

  When he has pinned her with his stare?”

  “Lorin, can’t you ever resign yourself to talking like everyone else does? You’re really starting to get on my nerves with your atrocious poetry!”

  “What! Talk like everyone else! But I talk better than everyone else, it seems to me. I talk like the citizen-poet Demoustier,9 in prose and in verse. As for my poetry, dear boy, I know a woman called Emily who rather likes it; but let’s get back to yours.”

  “To my poetry? ”

  “No. Your Emily.”

  “I have an Emily?”

  “Oh, please! Your gazelle turned out to be a tigress in disguise; she showed you her teeth and now you’re out of sorts, but in love.”

  “Me, in love!” cried Maurice, shaking his head. “Yes, you, in love.

  Let’s have no more mystery;

  The blows that rain down from Cythera10

  Hit the heart harder, you see,

  Than those of thundering Jupiter.”

  “Lorin,” Maurice warned, grabbing a sort of whistle that was lying on the night table, “if you talk any more poetry at me I’m going to give you the whistle!”

  “All right, so let’s talk politics. Besides, that’s what I came for. Have you heard the news?”

  “I know the Widow Capet tried to escape.”

  “Oh! That’s nothing.”

  “What else is there, then?”

  “The famous Knight of Maison-Rouge11 is in Paris.”

  “Really!” cried Maurice, sitting up.

  “The very same, himself, in person.”

  “But when did he get here? ”

  “Early last night.”

  “How?”

  “Disguised as a chasseur with the National Guard. A woman they think is an aristocrat, decked out like a woman of the people brought him the clothes at the city barrier, and a minute later they entered, arm in arm. It’s only after they were through that the sentry had a few suspicions. He’d seen the woman go by one way with a parcel, then he sees her come back the other way with some sort of military type on her arm. It was fishy, so he gave the alarm and the chase was on. But they disappeared into a hotel on the rue Saint-Honoré when the door opened suddenly, as if by magic. The hotel had a back door on the Champs-Elysées, so that was that! The Knight of Maison-Rouge and his accomplice just vanished into thin air. They’ll demolish the hotel and guillotine the owner, but that won’t stop the Knight from trying again, just as he did the first time, four months ago, and the second time last night.”

  “And they haven’t got him?” asked Maurice.

  “Try and get Proteus,12 dear boy, just try and get Proteus. You know how much trouble Aristides had when he tried.

  Pastor Aristaeus fugiens Peneia Tempe … ”13

  “Look out!” said Maurice, bringing the whistle to his mouth.

  “You look out! This time it’s not me you’d be booing, it’s Virgil.”

  “Ah, you’re right. Well, as long as you don’t try and translate it, I won’t say a word. But getting back to the Knight of Maison-Rouge …”

  “Yes, well, you can’t say he doesn’t cut a dashing figure.”

  “The fact is, to do what he does, you’d have to have a lot of courage.”

  “Or a lot of love.”

  “So you believe in the story of the Knight’s love for the Queen?”

  “I don’t believe it; I’m just saying it like everyone else. Anyway, she’s made plenty of others fall in love with her, so it wouldn’t be surprising if she’s seduced him too, would it? She certainly got to Barnave,14 if you believe what you hear.”

  “However that may be, the Knight must have informers inside the Temple itself.”

  “That’s possible:

  Love breaks bars

  And laughs at locks.”

  “Lorin!”

  “Right.”

  “So, you go along with that like everyone else?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, according to your count, the Queen would have to have had two hundred men pining after her.”

  “Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred. She’s beautiful enough. I’m not saying she’s been in love with them, but they’ve certainly been in love with her. Everyone looks at the sun but the sun doesn’t look on everyone.”

  “So you were saying, the Knight of Maison-Rouge …?”

  “I was saying they’re hunting him a bit seriously at the moment, and if he manages to get away from the bloodhounds of the Republic, then he must be a very clever fox.”

  “And what’s the Commune doing in all this?”

  “The Commune’s about to issue a decree by which every house will put up a list of the names of all the men and women who live there on the outside for all the world to see, like an open register. The dream of the ancients has come to pass: ‘If only there was a window into a man’s heart so everyone could see what goes on there!’ ”

  “What an excellent idea!” Maurice cried.

  “What, to stick a window in men’s hearts?”

  “No, to stick a list on every door.”

  Maurice, of course, was thinking that this would be one way for him to track down his mystery woman, or at least to find a trace of her that could set him on the right track.

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” said Lorin. “I’ve already bet the measure will bring us in a nice batch of around five hundred aristocrats. Speaking of which, we had a delegation of recruits this morning at the club. They were brought in by our adversaries of last night, whom I left dead drunk. They came in, I’m not joking, with garlands of flowers and crowns of everlasting daisies.”

  “Really!” Maurice chuckled. “How many were there?”

  “About thirty. They’d had themselves a shave and popped flowers in their buttonholes. ‘Citizens of the Thermopylae club,’ the orator said, ‘like the good patriots we are, we don’t want the French union to be disturbed by any misunderstanding, so we’ve come to fraternize again.’ ”

  “And so?…”

  “And so we started fraternizing pronto, by repeating ourselves, as Diafoirus15 would say. We made an altar to the homeland out of the secretary’s table and a couple of carafes someone had stuck flowers in. As you were the hero of the festivities, we called you three times to crown you; and as you didn’t answer, since you weren’t there, and as it’s always important to crown something, we crowned the bust of Washington.16 So there you have the marching and the order in which the ceremony took place.”

  As Lorin wound up his accurate account of the proceedings, which in those days had not a whiff of burlesque about them, a commotion was heard in the street and drums, at first distant then closer and closer, sounded the then-familiar note of the tocsin.

  “What’s that?” said Maurice.

  “It’s the proclamation of the Commune decree,” said Lorin.

  “I’m off to the section,” said Maurice, leaping to the foot of the bed and calling his officieux to come and dress him.

  “And I am going home to bed,” said Lorin. “I only slept a couple of hours last night, thanks to the rabid recruits. If they just smack each other around a bit, let me sleep; if they smack each other around a lot, come and get me.”

  “Why have you got yourself all dolled up like that?” Maurice asked, eyeing Lorin as he rose to his feet to leave.

  “Because to get to your place I have to go down the rue Béthisy, and down the rue Béthisy, on the third floor, there’s a window that always shoots open whenever I go by.”

  “And you’re not afraid people will take you for a muscadin?”17

  “A muscadin, me? On the contrar
y, everyone knows I’m an honest to goodness sans culotte. But there are certain sacrifices you just have to make for the fair sex. Worship of the nation doesn’t exclude worship of love. Far from it: one calls for the other:

  The Republic has decreed

  We are to follow in the Greeks’ traces;

  And the altar of Liberty

  Is the twin of that of the Graces.

  You dare hiss at that and I’ll denounce you as an aristocrat and have you shaved so hard you can never wear a wig.18 Adieu, dear friend.”

  Lorin gave Maurice his hand, tenderly, and the young secretary gave it a hearty shake; then Lorin spun on his heels, chewing over a stanza of gallant verse that was to be a bouquet for Chloris.19

  5

  WHAT SORT OF MAN MAURICE LINDEY WAS

  Maurice Lindey threw on his clothes and reported to the section in the rue Lepelletier, where, as we know, he was secretary. While he is busy there, we might try and trace the ancestry of this man who burst on the scene as a result of one of those surges of the heart familiar to powerful and generous natures.

  The young man was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth when he told the mysterious stranger of the day before that his name was Maurice Lindey and that he lived in the rue Roule. He could have added that he was a child of that deminobility to which those belonging to the legal profession—the Robe1—had been promoted. For the past two hundred years, his ancestors had invariably belonged to the parliamentary opposition that had made the names Molé and Maupeou famous. His father, Lindey senior, had spent his life attacking despotism but when, suddenly, on 14 July 1789, the Bastille fell to the hands of the people, he died of shock and horror to see despotism replaced by a militant liberty. His death left his only son independent of fortune and republican by inclination.

  The Revolution that followed hot on the heels of this momentous event thus found Maurice in the prime of that vigor and virility that are only right in an athlete ready and raring to enter the race, with republican education supplemented by fervent participation in the clubs and a heady dose of all the pamphlets of the times. God knows how many pamphlets Maurice must have read. A profound and reasoned contempt for hierarchy, philosophical pondering of the elements that compose the social body, absolute negation of the very notion of a nobility entailing anything other than a personal quality, impartial appreciation of the past, keenness for new ideas, sympathy for the people matched with the most aristocratic of temperaments—such was the nature, not of our hero, but of the newspaper portrait on which we have drawn to produce him.

  Physically, Maurice Lindey was between twenty-five and twenty-six years old; he stood six feet tall and was as muscular as Hercules, and startlingly good-looking, with those peculiarly French looks that derive from a specific race of Franks that include a pure and noble forehead, blue eyes, wavy chestnut hair, ruddy cheeks, and a good set of pearly teeth.

  That’s the portrait of the man; and now for the status of the citizen. Maurice was not rich, but he was at least independent and bore a name that was not only respected but, more important, popular. Maurice was known for his liberal education and for his even more liberal stance, so it was only natural that he had more or less placed himself at the head of a party composed of all the young patriots of the bourgeoisie. You could no doubt argue that, next to the sans culottes, Maurice could look a bit of a wimp—“lukewarm”—and, next to the sectionaries, a bit of a fop. But he was forgiven his lukewarmness by the sans culottes by smashing to smithereens the most gnarled of cudgels as though they were fragile reeds; and he was forgiven his elegance by the sectionaries by sending them reeling twenty feet away with a well-aimed smack between the eyes if those eyes had looked at Maurice in a way he didn’t like.

  As for the physical, the moral, and the social combined, Maurice had taken part in the storming of the Bastille; he had joined in the expedition to Versailles on the fifth and sixth of October 1789;2 he had fought like a lion on the tenth of August, and on that memorable day, to give him his due, he had killed as many patriots3 as Swiss Guards,4 for he was no more prepared to put up with the assassin in the carmagnole than the enemy of the Republic in the red livery.

  It was Maurice who, exhorting the defenders of the Tuileries to give themselves up and prevent bloodshed, threw himself across the mouth of a cannon that a Parisian artilleryman was about to fire; it was Maurice who was first to enter the Louvre, through a window, despite the fusillade of fifty Swiss Guards and as many gentlemen behind the lines, and who already, by the time he saw the signals of capitulation, had torn open more than ten uniforms with his saber; it was Maurice who then, seeing his friends massacring at will prisoners who were throwing down their arms and holding out their hands and pleading for mercy and begging for their lives, began to furiously hack at his friends—all of which had helped to forge a reputation worthy of the great days of Rome or Greece.

  When war was declared, Maurice signed up and left for the front with the rank of lieutenant, in the company of the first fifteen hundred volunteers that Paris pitted against the invaders, which were to be followed each day by fifteen hundred more.

  In the first battle in which he fought, that is, at Jemmapes5 on the sixth of November 1792, he took a bullet that first split open the steel-like muscles of his shoulder before lodging itself in the bone. The people’s representative6 knew Maurice and sent him back to Paris to recover. For a whole month, Maurice thrashed around in bed, devoured by fever and pain, but by January he was back on his feet commanding the Thermopylae club, if not in name then certainly in deed. The club was made up of a hundred young men from the bourgeoisie of Paris, armed to quell all support for the tyrant Capet. There is more: with his brow furrowed by a somber rage, his eyes wild, face pale, heart seized by a singular mix of moral hatred and physical pity, Maurice was there, sword in hand, at the execution of the King; and perhaps alone in all that crowd, he remained silent when the head of this son of Saint Louis,7 whose soul rose to heaven, fell and all his friends cried out: “Long live liberty!” They did not notice that, though Maurice raised his fearsome sword in the air, this time, for once, his voice did not mingle with theirs.

  That is the kind of man that was now making his way toward the rue Lepelletier on the morning of the eleventh of March and whose stormy life, a life typical enough for the times, we’ll visit in detail in the course of our story.

  At about ten o’clock, Maurice arrived at the section where he was secretary. Things were heating up. At issue was a vote on an address to the Convention with the aim of putting down the schemes of the Girondins. Maurice was impatiently awaited.

  All anyone could talk about was the return of the Knight of Maison-Rouge and the audacity with which that dedicated conspirator had entered Paris for the second time, in defiance of the price on his head. The escape attempt at the Temple the day before was linked to his return to town, and each man expressed his hatred for and outrage over all traitors and aristocrats.

  But to everyone’s surprise, Maurice remained unmoved and silent, though he cleverly drew up the proclamation and got through all outstanding work in three hours flat before asking if the session was over; when told it was, he grabbed his hat and turned on his heels, heading for the rue Saint-Honoré.

  Paris looked entirely different to Maurice from the rue Saint-Honoré. He saw once again the corner of the rue du Coq where the beautiful stranger had appeared to him the night before, struggling in the hands of soldiers. Then he followed the rue du Coq down to the pont Marie, as he had done at her side, stopping where the different patrols had stopped them, going over the words they had exchanged, as in those places the words came back to him like an echo; but it was one o’clock in the afternoon and the sun, shining bright as he strolled along, brought home these memories of the night before every step of the way. Maurice crossed over the Seine and was soon in the rue Victor, as it was then known.

  “Poor woman!” murmured Maurice, who the day before hadn’t considered that the ni
ght only lasts twelve hours, and that the woman’s secret would probably not outlast the night. “In daylight I’ll find the door she slipped through, and who knows if I won’t spot the woman herself at a window somewhere?”

  So he turned into the old rue Saint-Jacques, stood where the stranger had placed him the night before, and for a moment he closed his eyes, perhaps feeling—poor fool!—that last night’s kiss would burn his lips once more. But all he felt was the memory of it—though it’s true the memory of it was still burning.

  When Maurice opened his eyes again, he saw two alleyways, one to the right, the other to the left. They were muddy, badly paved, lined with gates and broken up by little bridges thrown across a stream. You could make out arcades with wooden beams, sunless nooks and crannies, something like twenty dubious, rotting doors. It was destitution in all its ugliness. Here and there was a garden, enclosed either by hedges or by fences made of stakes, a few by walls, and there were skins drying out in sheds and giving off that nauseating tannery smell that makes you want to heave. Maurice poked around for two hours and found nothing, gleaned nothing. He retraced his steps a dozen times to reorient himself. But all his efforts were in vain, all his forays fruitless. All traces of the woman seemed to have been erased by fog and rain.

  “So,” Maurice said to himself, “I was dreaming. This cesspit can’t have served my beautiful fairy of last night as a refuge for a single moment.”

  This fierce republican had a poetry in him different from, but just as real as, the poetry of his friend of the old-fashioned anacreontic quatrains, for he carried that idea home with him, so as not to dim the halo shimmering over his mystery woman’s head. True, he went home in despair.