It was the night of the fifteenth. It may have been eleven o’clock. Corentin was sleeping. Someone knocked loudly on the door, on Rue des Haudriettes — he was still living in that small mansion, the main building of which opened to the street and which he had bought with the large commission from the Marquis de Marigny for the Louveciennes château, twenty-five thousand pounds from the king, almost twenty years earlier. The little girl (he no longer had servants living in), the little girl heard them before he did and ran frightened to his bedside. He went over to the window alone, opened it, and saw the three Sans Culottes below, peaceable, respectful in so far as was possible for Sans Culottes, who told him that he was wanted à la section at that very moment. From his extended arm, one of them raised a large square guardroom lantern. Their voices and the raised faces aglow in its full light were familiar to him. He signaled for the little girl to climb very quietly to the safety of the garret. He got dressed and went down.
There was a biting frost, the bright stars glistened in the dark night. Surely it was not the great off-white cloak that he wore, but the one that appears in legend, the greatcoat the color of the smoke of hell, impossible to tell if it is black, red, charcoal gray, or chocolate brown, and which is repeatedly mentioned in memoirs of those times. The Sans Culottes, who were shivering in their rags — they were already walking quickly, all four of them, through the empty streets — told him it was Léonard Bourdon who wanted to see him. He knew Bourdon, who held the neighboring section of Gravilliers since Jacques Roux had been imprisoned. He did not like him very much. They walked a short distance up Rue du Temple, they turned left: they were indeed headed toward the erstwhile Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs church, now the Nicolas church, headquarters of the Gravilliers section.
They had arrived. They were already climbing the little steps.
The doors were wide open.
Under the porch they skirted around the bells, which had been taken down but not yet carried off to the foundry, the monstrous pendants of the eternal Father, silenced. The nave was icy and stripped of all objects of worship — Bourdon, who was very busy with defanaticization and regeneration, had gotten rid of everything that could not be melted down or reused. Quickly they walked the length of the whole darkened building to the apse. Beside the aisle to the left the lantern revealed an improvised stable, with straw bedding and an indistinct rack, where the shadows of two or three horses were stirring. Close to the stable along the left wall, they opened the door of the sacristy, heated and illuminated by a good fire in the hearth: the section had withdrawn there because of the cold. The guardroom lantern was placed, still lit, on a large table. There was another Sans Culotte in the room who had taken off his wooden clogs and was warming his bare feet by the fire. Corentin knew him as well, it was Ducroquet, the clerk for the wine merchant whose store was at the corner of Rue des Haudriettes and Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. On Corentin’s arrival he rose (he seemed good-natured, and he was; a little mad, and he was), he said that Bourdon and the others would not be long; and with a knowing look and a deferential tone of familiarity in which a hint of mockery heightened the deference, he nodded that they were up there. Corentin understood that they were at the Jacobins, in the great sound box of the erstwhile Dominicans’ chapter room between here and the Seine, the great oratory vault filled, for the last four years, with the roar of emotion and opinion, the best and the worst, the stone drum from which the stamping and cheering was heard each night from one end to the other of Rue Saint-Honoré. He looked at Ducroquet’s bare feet on the stone. He was asked to take a seat and wait. The other four sat down to play cards, paying no more attention to him.
Corentin made himself comfortable. He knew the place, he had come here as neighbor, as painter, as citizen as well, since that was the mask one wore then, and which he had been willing to adopt, like everyone else. On the floor near the fire, the other four played their hands. Corentin glanced about. On the large table on either side of the lantern there were four-pound loaves of bread, a plate of bacon, and wine in carafes, all of it untouched; and on the other side, a little cloth bag, half open, that intrigued Corentin. He moved closer and, opening it wider, he saw and felt under his fingers small fragile brownish things that he recognized to be very old human remains, vertebrae and a few broken long bones. He asked what those remains were doing there. Without looking up, one player answered between deals that they were the remains of an erstwhile saint whose reliquary the section members had taken and melted down that very day at the Mint, and that had been left there, who knows why, before being tossed into the fire, since they were not burning them any longer on the Place de Grève (Robespierre, or rather the Robespierrots, had indeed put a stop to those official excesses since the end of the summer, prompted by distaste or politics, for they were already secretly preparing to counter those holocausts to the goddess Reason, the pale queen of hearts exalted by the Factions, by playing the Supreme Being). The men played on; Corentin ran the little bones under his fingers; from the other side of the wall in the nave he heard the horses making their usual horse noises, snorting and breathing, warm and comforting, vaguely frightening. Corentin wondered for a moment what had become of the old bones of the two saints he had martyred, under the earth in Combleux. Then he thought again of the little girl, who must have been terrified at that moment in the garret. It all gradually merged, the bones, the old women, the little girl. He thought of other women, dead, gone off, left behind. Then he no longer thought of women, because the men were there.
It was well past midnight. They hurried into the warmth, all three of them, greatcoats pulled up to their noses, two-cornered hats pulled down over their eyes, cockades, boots; the third man more self-assured than the others. As they entered, they threw their greatcoats and hats next to the bust of Marat on the little table, as Corentin had done with the coat the color of the smoke of hell. Corentin had placed them immediately, as they turned toward him, he fully recognized the features that loomed up in the glow from the fire and the great lantern: the ugly look and flat hair of the first; the thick, light blond Flemish hair, the bulging, astonished but impassive Flemish eyes of the second; the equally flat, straight hair, the small gold earring, the copper complexion and vertiginous self-assurance, despite being rather short, of the third. There they were, in order: Léonard Bourdon, the squealer, the erstwhile schoolmaster, now champion of the goddess Reason, defanaticizer and regenerator, melter of bells and reliquaries — the little runt whose yelping made him a pack all by himself; Proli, the man with the golden touch, the banker of the patriots — Corentin was surprised he was there, he thought there was a warrant out for his arrest, that he had fled; the third man was Collot d’Herbois. He knew all three of them, but Collot he knew differently.
It had been a long time since he had seen him. They were friends in a certain respect, since 1784 in Combleux the year of the Sibylles, when Collot was preparing a play for the theater in Orléans where he was director and Corentin had set up the scenery and designed the costumes for him for a Shakespeare production, dulcified as only those times knew how, translated and adapted by Jean-François Ducis or by Collot himself; they had seen each other often because they greatly appreciated one another on points I may relate to you; Collot, with whom, in short, he had done the whole revolution, the good years, who had introduced him everywhere to those newly in power before things took a strange turn, before Collot, in this strange turn, came into his own and took wing, after which they no longer saw one another.