He remembers a beautiful morning when, as the two of them were strolling along the great levee toward Combleux, searching for ideas for the play, Collot was moved to pity for a woman collapsed under the Saint-Jean-le-Blanc bridge, famished and hysterical; that he had squatted down beside her and spoken to her for a long time; that during this time he, Corentin, had listened to the chiming bells answering one another along the length of the Loire from Saint-Jean to Combleux, from Combleux to Chécy — perhaps it was noon, or Angelus, or a holiday. He had been drawn from that joyous pealing by shouts: the girl was crying out, she had risen and thrown herself on Collot, baring her claws. There had been a brief semblance of a struggle, Collot was healthy and well fed, the girl was weak; very quickly he had her firmly by the wrists, in his power. He was smiling, in his smile there was always a shadow of compassionate zeal, but otherwise it was the mask of lust and its accompanying cruelty. Eventually he had calmed the poor creature down and taken her away with him. Corentin can still see the girl clearly — she had a red birthmark on her face that she tried to hide with a kind of mechanical coquetry, despite being famished. Collot had taken her in, fed and no doubt bedded her, had comforted her and set her back on her feet; he had found her lively and not without intelligence, and had eventually given her a small, silent part in the play, as one of the monstrous creatures leaping about at the witches’ feet on the moor in Macbeth; and she was ashamed of it, rightly or wrongly convinced that it was her birthmark and not her liveliness or her poverty that had brought her salvation and employment. Looking at Collot now in the night of wolves, Corentin is thinking that it is a strange and marvelous thing, that all that compassionate zeal for the unfortunate should have come to this, to the witches of Macbeth, to the Brotteaux plain, to the pikes and the carts, to the moor from Macbeth reappearing under the great cutting machine on the Place de la Révolution. (He is also thinking that he, Corentin, is completely familiar with such marvels, feats of magic, that he has performed them many times: that is how his mother and grandmother, lovesick creatures, became the terrible Sibylles by his hand, five times as there are five sibyls.) All the while his thoughts are thus wandering, Collot is speaking, with his dark cheer, the little plume of his breath. He is saying: “Yes, we have pulled through for the moment. But now it is in God’s hands. And we are going to need a holy hell of a hand to get us out of this. A hand of iron. Yours, perhaps?”
Collot laughs, as one laughs when shivering with cold. They can both see that crucial hand — for they really cannot believe, Sir, neither Corentin nor Collot, in their possible innocence, in a good future earned by their good innocence, in their good Right, in men free and equal by right, frolicking happily in the great fraternal garden. They were awaiting the hand. They believed more in luck and, yes, you could say, in Salvation, Sir. In the bells.
Corentin does not laugh. Perhaps he is not listening to Collot, but he is looking at him. With a kind of joy he thinks that the compassionate zeal for the unfortunate and the Brotteaux plain, the welcoming table and the Macbeth moor, the helping hand and the murder, Nivôse and April, is all in the same man. It is in Collot, one of those eleven men whom he will paint. That he is destined to paint. He is also thinking that every man is capable of anything. That eleven men are capable of eleven times anything. That that can be painted. No, he is certainly not listening to Collot. His joy is growing. His joy rings out. He is listening to the memory of the bells. He hears them as they begin, as they grow louder, as they ring out fully, as they subside. As they cease. In the dark Collot does not see his tears of joy, or he attributes them to the cold. It is three o’clock in the night. Come, it is time to part, Collot has already gone to saddle the other horse. He leads it under the porch, holding the bridle: the horse, the two men, among the stilled bells. They have extinguished the lantern. They embrace. They will not see each other again.
IV
All that you have read as well, Sir, in the framed notes in the antechamber. You have even paused before the reproduction of the oil sketch by Géricault, which is not here at the Louvre, which is sleeping among the Girodets in the Montargis museum: Corentin in Ventôse receives the order to paint the Eleven. The title assigned after the fact is approximate, the painting is hardly roughed out, there are large areas of white, because Géricault painted it with death looking over his shoulder. But it conforms exactly to what I have said.
It could not be otherwise.
Because, Sir, Géricault’s sketch is only valuable for having inspired Lord After-the-Fact himself, Michelet, Jules Michelet was his complete official name, to write the definitive twelve pages that discuss The Eleven, that assign The Eleven a place and set them before the historiographic tradition for centuries to come.
What really happened on that night when luck loosened its generous purse from its belt and produced the possibility of The Eleven, we do not know, Sir. Are we even sure it was night? All we know, knowledge or legend, are the theatrical effects, the coat the color of the smoke of hell rushing past, the self-assurance of four men in two-cornered hats, the empty nave and the horses in the nave, the lowered bells, the pile of gold and glowing bones of saints; three characters who are types, Collot in the role of Macbeth, Bourdon as Iago, Proli as Shylock; and before these stereotypes Corentin, struck dumb between the spilled gold and the phantom sound of bells, plays the role of Saint Matthew, who is not in Shakespeare. That is how we see it.