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“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 contrary, 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