The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [55]
And so Maurice remained intransigent in his resolution. But it must be said that being deprived of his daily visit to the old rue Saint-Jacques left a huge hole in his life. And when first the hour struck when he would normally have set off toward the Saint-Victor neighborhood, he fell into a profound melancholy, and from that moment went through all the stages of waiting in vain and regret.
Every morning he woke expecting to find a letter from Dixmer, and he finally admitted to himself that although he had resisted the man’s insistence face-to-face he would yield to a letter; every day he went out in the hope of running into Geneviève, his head full of opening lines he’d rehearsed in case it happened. Every evening, he came home in the hope of finding the messenger who had unwittingly one morning brought him pain, pain that had since become his eternal companion.
Often enough, too, in his hours of despair, this force of nature flared up and raged at the idea of suffering such torture without inflicting any back on the man responsible, since the primary cause of all his woes was Morand. Then he thought about going and picking a fight with Morand. But Dixmer’s partner was so frail, so inoffensive, that to insult or provoke him would be an act of cowardice coming from a colossus like Maurice.
Naturally Lorin had come to pull his friend out of the doldrums, though Maurice was stubbornly remaining mum, without, however, denying that he was down. Lorin had done everything he could, in practice and in theory, to bring back to the fold of the nation a heart aching all over with another love. But though the situation was serious, though in any other frame of mind Maurice would have thrown himself body and soul into the political whirlwind, even the crisis in public life was unable to goad our young republican into resuming the original activism that had made him a hero of the fourteenth of July and the tenth of August.
In effect, the two political factions, which had been operating in tandem for close to ten months, only grazing each other slightly in that time and sparking only small skirmishes, were gearing up to tackle each other head-on. It was clear that the struggle, once begun, would be mortal for one side or the other. Both systems sprang from the Revolution itself, but one promoted moderation, as represented by the Girondins—that is, by Brissot, Pétion, Vergniaud, Valazé, Lanjuinais, Barbaroux, and so on; the other, the Terror or the Mountain, as represented by Danton, Robespierre, Chénier, Fabre, Marat, Collot d’Herbois, Hébert, and the rest, promoted terror and death.
After the tenth of August the moderate party seemed to gain the upper hand, as happens after any bout of action. A ministry had been cobbled together out of the rubble of the former ministry, with a few extras added. The former ministers Roland, Servan, and Clavières were recalled; Danton, Monge, and Le Brun were freshly appointed. With the exception of one man, who represented the energetic element among his colleagues, all the other ministers belonged to the moderate party.
When I say moderate, you understand I mean relatively speaking.
But the tenth of August created waves abroad as well, and the coalition hastened to move, to rescue not Louis XVI personally but the principle of royalty, which had been shaken to its foundations. That is when Brunswick’s threatening words7 rang out, and like a terrible embodiment of these words Longwy and Verdun8 fell to the enemy. This was followed by the terrorist reaction and Danton’s terrible September dream, which he made real with real blood, revealing to the enemy that all of France was complicit in an immense massacre and ready to fight for its compromised existence with all the energy of despair. That September saved France but placed it outside the law in doing so.
With France saved, activism became