The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [160]
And so, the very same day, a red cross was drawn by Fouquier-Tinville beside both their names, and the word SUSPECT joined them in a bloody accolade.
46
THE JUDGMENT
The twenty-third day of the first month of the year II1 of the French Republic, one and indivisible, the day corresponding to the fourteenth of October 1793 old style, as they used to say at the time, a curious crowd invaded the galleries of the chamber where the revolutionary séances were held, and they stayed there from early morning.
The corridors of the Palais and the avenues of the Conciergerie were overflowing with avid and excited spectators, who passed noises and passions on down the line to one another just as the ocean passes on its roaring and its foam as it surges in to shore.
Despite the frenzied curiosity that had each spectator jumping up and down, and perhaps even because of this curiosity, each wave of the turbulent sea was compressed between two barriers, with the outside pushing in and the inside pushing back. The net result of all this ebb and flow was that everyone remained more or less stationary. But those in the best spots knew that they had to get themselves forgiven for their felicity, and they aimed to do so by telling their less well placed neighbors, who then passed on the original news, what they could see and hear.
But right next to the door to the gallery a group of men all squashed together were battling fiercely over two inches of horizontal or vertical space—for two inches in breadth was enough to see a corner of the room and the faces of the jurors between two shoulders, and two inches in height was enough to see the whole room and the face of the accused over the top of someone’s head.
Unfortunately, this passage leading into the room from one of the corridors, this narrow defile, was occupied almost entirely by one man with very broad shoulders who held his arms out like flying buttresses, thereby shoring up the vacillating crowd ready to burst into the room if only they could somehow get past this rampart of flesh.
This immovable rock of a man blocking the door of the gallery was young and handsome. At every ever-more-determined surge of the crowd at his back, he shook his thick hair like a horse shaking its mane; below his hair his eyes shone with a grim and resolute gleam. A living breakwater, every time he repelled the throng—by a look, by a ripple of muscle—he would simply resume his focused immobility.
The compact mass had tried to topple him a hundred times, for he was tall and it was impossible to see anything from behind him; but no rock could have been more immovable, as I think we might have said.
Yet at the other end of the human tide, among the densely packed throng, another man had carved out a path with a determination that bordered on ferocity. Nothing managed to stop him in his relentless advance, neither the kicks of those he left behind, nor the curses of those he winded in passing, nor the tongue-lashings of women, for there were many women in the crowd that day.
He responded to kicks with kicks, to curses with a look that withered the most foolhardy, to complaints with an imperturbability bordering on contempt. Finally, he had gotten as far as the vigorous young man sealing off, so to speak, the entrance to the door. Everyone was keen to see how things would pan out between these two tough antagonists, and so, with everyone holding their breath in expectation, the latecomer tried out his technique, which consisted of wedging his elbows between two spectators and torpedoing bodies that seemed virtually welded together with his own, thereby splitting them asunder.
Yet the man was young and small, with a pale face and spindly legs that revealed a constitution as puny as his fiery eyes revealed an impressively strong will. But his elbow had scarcely brushed the side of the young man planted in front of him than this latter,