The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [119]
“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.
As he got closer, Maurice sped up in his crazed anxiety, leaving Lorin to keep pace with him as best he could; but Lorin loved him too much to leave him on his own at such a moment.
The show was almost over when they got there. The fire had spread from the shed where the soldier had thrown his flaming torch to the workshops, built of weatherboard and so assembled as to leave decent air vents; all the stock and merchandise had burned to ash, and now the house itself was starting to go up.
“Oh, my God!” Maurice said to himself. “What if she came back, what if she was in one of the rooms, encircled by flames, waiting for me, calling out to me.…”
And, half out of his mind with misery, preferring to believe in the madness of the woman he loved rather than in her treachery, Maurice launched himself headfirst at the pavilion door, which he could just make out through the smoke.
Lorin was still following behind; he would have followed Maurice to hell.
The roof was ablaze; the fire was beginning to spread to the stairs.
Maurice, panting, combed the first floor, the salon, Geneviève’s bedroom, the bedroom of the Knight of Maison-Rouge, the hallways, calling out in a choking voice:
“Geneviève! Geneviève!”
No one answered.
Going back to the first room, the two friends saw gusts of flames lapping around the door. Despite Lorin shouting directions to the window, Maurice passed through the flames.
Then he ran to the house and crossed the courtyard strewn with broken furniture, found the dining room, Dixmer’s salon, the cabinet of Morand the chemist; all of it full of smoke, debris, shattered glass, but Maurice would stop for nothing. The fire had just reached this part of the house too, and swiftly began to devour it.
He did what he had done in the pavilion, searching every room, every hall and recess, and then went down to the cellars, imagining perhaps that Geneviève had taken refuge from the fire below ground.
But there was no one.
“Damn!” cried Lorin. “You can see for yourself that no one could hold out here, except perhaps for a few salamanders, and I don’t think that’s the fabulous creature you’re looking for. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll ask around, we’ll find out from all these gawkers whether anyone has seen her.”
Wild