The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [169]
The Queen watched him; she could not speak, for her voice was drowned by the din; she could not point him out, for her hands were tied; and even if she had been able to point to him, even if she had been able to be heard, she would no doubt have pleaded for him in vain.
She lost sight of him for a moment, but when she spotted him again he was in the arms of a pale young man, high above the crowd, standing on a cannon, who, made taller by some ineffable exultation, saluted her, pointing heavenward.
Marie Antoinette also looked up to the heavens and sweetly smiled.
The Knight of Maison-Rouge gave out a groan, as though this smile had pierced his heart like a knife, and as the cart turned into the pont-au-Change, he fell back into the crowd and vanished.
49
THE SCAFFOLD
At the place de la Révolution, two men were waiting together with their backs against a streetlamp. What they were waiting for, like the rest of the crowd—which had earlier split among those who had gone to the Palais de Justice, those who had gone to the place de la Révolution, and those who had fanned out to line the whole of the route between those two squares—was for the Queen to arrive at the great death-deliverer. That instrument was already worn, by rain and sun, by the hand of the butcher, and—horrible to say!—by contact with its victims; it dominated with sinister arrogance all the heads below as a queen dominates her people.
Noticeably pale and angry-looking, the two men standing there, talking fitfully in subdued voices, were Maurice and Lorin. Oblivious of the crowd, though in such a way as to make everyone envy them, they were quietly continuing a conversation that was not the least interesting of all the conversations snaking through the huddled groups of spectators, who, as though charged with electricity, were swaying in a human sea that ran from the pont-au-Change to the place de la Révolution.
The idea just expressed, of the guillotine’s dominating all heads, had struck them both.
“See how the ugly monster raises its red arms!” Maurice said. “You’d think it was calling us and leering through some ghastly maw.”
“Ah!” said Lorin. “I must admit I’m not of that school of poetry that sees everything in red. I see things in rose, for my part, and even at the foot of this hideous machine, I’d still sing and have hope. Dum spiro, spero—As I live, I hope.”
“Do you still have hope now that they’re killing women?”
“Ah, Maurice!” said Lorin. “Son of the Revolution, don’t renounce the mother who bore you. Maurice! Stay a true and loyal patriot. The woman who is about to die is not just any woman, Maurice. The woman who is about to die is the bad genie of France.”
“Oh! It’s not her I feel sorry for. It’s not her I weep for!” cried Maurice.
“I know: it’s Geneviève.”
“Ah!” cried Maurice. “You know, there’s one thought that’s driving me mad, and that is that Geneviève is guillotine fodder in the hands of those bastards Hébert and Fouquier-Tinville: the very men who sent poor Héloïse here and now are sending the high and mighty Marie Antoinette.”
“But that’s exactly why I still have hope,” said Lorin. “When the people in their rage have made a grand meal of both tyrants, they’ll be satisfied, for a while at least, like a boa constrictor that takes three months to digest what it has devoured. Then they won’t gobble anyone else up and, as the prophets of the suburbs say, the smallest tidbits will put them off.”
“Lorin, Lorin,” said Maurice, “I’m not as cynical as you are! Just between you and me—though I’m ready to say it out loud—I hate the new queen, the one who looks set to succeed the Austrian woman whom she is about to destroy. It’s a sad queen whose purple robe is made of a fresh supply of blood each day and who has Sanson for prime minister.”
“Bah! We’ll escape her clutches!”
“I don’t think that for a second,” said Maurice, shaking his head. “You see how to avoid being arrested at