The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [184]
“Alas! Yes. It is true!” said the registrar, shaking visibly.
“Well then, you see that with precedents like that, I’d be mad to walk into such a death trap.”
“But I’ll be there, I tell you!”
“And what if you’re called away, what if you’re busy elsewhere—or if you forget?” Dixmer ruthlessly emphasized the last word: “What if you forget that I’m there?”
“But I promise …”
“No. Besides, that would compromise you: you’d be seen talking to me, and then again, in the end, I just don’t like the idea. I’d definitely prefer a pass.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Then, my friend, I will talk, and we will go and take a little turn of the place de la Révolution together.”
In a delirious, catatonic state, the registrar signed a pass, one for “a citizen.” Dixmer threw himself upon it and rushed out to grab a seat in the courtroom, as we have seen.
You know the rest.
From that moment, to avoid any accusation of complicity, the registrar stuck close to Fouquier-Tinville, leaving the management of his office to his chief assistant.
At ten minutes past three, Maurice, armed with the pass, crossed a hedgerow of wicket clerks and gendarmes and reached the fatal door without mishaps of any kind. When we say fatal we are exaggerating a bit, for there were two doors: the main door, through which carriers of passes came and went, and the door of the condemned, through which only those people entered who would be leaving only to walk to the scaffold.
The room into which Maurice had managed to penetrate was divided into two sections. In one section sat the employees whose job it was to register the names of arrivals; in the other, furnished only with a few wooden benches, were placed both those who had just been arrested and those who had just been condemned—which amounted to the same thing.
The room was dark, lit only by the windows of a glass partition taken from the office.
A woman dressed in white reclined in a corner, motionless and semiconscious, with her back to the wall. A man was standing before her, arms folded, shaking his head from time to time and hesitating to speak to her, for fear of bringing her back to a consciousness she seemed to have vacated.
Around these two characters you could see the condemned stirring in bewilderment, sobbing or singing patriotic hymns. Others paced the floor, taking long strides as though seeking some release in movement from the thoughts that devoured them.
This was indeed death’s antechamber, and the furnishings saw to it that it lived up to its name. You could see caskets filled with straw, half-open as though beckoning the living: these served as beds, provisional tombs.
A huge cupboard stood against the wall opposite the glass partition. One of the prisoners opened it out of curiosity and reeled back in horror. The cupboard held the bloodstained clothes of the previous day’s beheaded, and long locks of hair hung here and there: these were the executioner’s perquisites, his tips, which he sold to the relatives when not required by the authorities to burn such precious relics.
Maurice was out of breath and panting in great distress when he opened the door and took in the whole scene at a glance. He took a few steps into the room and then rushed and fell at Geneviève’s feet.
The poor woman gave out a cry that Maurice smothered on her lips. Lorin hugged his friend in his arms, weeping; those were the first tears he had shed.
What was strange was that all the unhappy people gathered together, all of whom were to die together, barely glanced at the moving tableau offered to them by these three unhappy people, their fellows. Everyone had too much on their own mind