Le 14 Juillet, action populaire, trois actes
ELEVENTH CAHIER OF THE THIRD SERIES
THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY
A POPULAR ACTION THREE ACTS
by
Romain Rolland
EDITIONS OF THE CAHIERS PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor
We are placing this cahier in commerce; we sell it for three francs fifty.
For performances we sell five copies for fourteen francs eight copies for twenty-one francs ten copies for twenty-four francs.
By the same author, available at the cahiers bookshop: Saint Louis, dramatic poem in five acts, Revue de Paris, 1897. Aert, drama in three acts, performed at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, May 3, 1898, editions of the Revue d’Art dramatique, 3 francs. Les Loups — Morituri, drama in three acts, performed at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, May 18, 1898, editions of Georges Bellais, 3 francs. Le Triomphe de la Raison, drama in three acts, performed at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, June 21, 1899, editions of the Revue d’Art dramatique, 3 francs. Danton, drama in three acts, sold out in the editions of the Revue d’Art dramatique, performed at the Nouveau Théâtre, December 29, 1900, by the Cercle des Escholiers, and December 30, 1900, by the Théâtre Civique, sixth cahier of the second series, editions of the cahiers, 3 francs.
The author has here sought moral truth more than anecdotal truth. He believed it necessary, in this action enveloped by legendary poetry, to take more liberties with history than he had permitted himself in writing Danton. In that earlier work, he had constrained himself to follow as closely as possible the psychology of a few characters: for the entire drama was concentrated in the souls of three or four great men. Here, nothing of the sort: individuals disappear in the popular ocean. To represent a tempest, one need not paint each wave; one must paint the sea in upheaval. The minute accuracy of details matters less than the passionate truth of the whole. There is something false and offensive to the intelligence in the disproportionate place that anecdote, miscellaneous news, and the petty dust of history have taken today, at the expense of the living soul. To resurrect the forces of the past, to rekindle its powers of action — and not to offer to the curiosity of a few amateurs a cold miniature, more concerned with fashion and costume than with the being of heroes; to relight the heroism and faith of the nation at the flames of the republican epic, so that the work interrupted in 1794 may be taken up again and completed by a more mature people, more conscious of its destinies: such is our ideal. If we are not strong enough to realize it, we are always strong enough to work at it as best we can. The end of art is not the dream, but life. Action must spring from the spectacle of action.
This play was first performed at the Théâtre de la Renaissance-Gémier, March 21, 1902, with the following cast:
LA CONTAT — Mme Andrée Mégard LUCILE DUPLESSIS — Jane Heller MAMAN BOUJU — Renée Bussy FIRST WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE — Marcelle Jullien SECOND WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE — Jeanne Lion FIRST GIRL — Dinard SECOND GIRL — Hélène Milton THIRD GIRL — Delage A YOUNG GIRL — Renée Leduc LITTLE JULIE — la petite Marcelle HOCHE — MM. Gémier HULIN — Arvel MARAT — Beaulieu CAMILLE DESMOULINS — Capellani VINTIMILLE — Lenormant DE LAUNEY — Frédal THE MAN ON GUARD — Maxence GONCHON — Baudoin DE FLUE — Mosnier BÉQUART — Berthier ROBESPIERRE — Godeau A MANIAC — Jehan Adès A PORTER — Jarrier A NOTARY — Courcelles A FRENCH GUARD — Cailloux A STUDENT — Laforêt A BEGGAR — Edmond Bauer A MERCHANT — Gorieux FIRST NEWSPAPER CRIER — Bertin SECOND NEWSPAPER CRIER — Mallet AN ABBÉ — Keller FIRST BOURGEOIS — Thoulouze SECOND BOURGEOIS — Ludwig THIRD BOURGEOIS — Schells FOURTH BOURGEOIS — Regnier Incidental music by M. Julien Tiersot
The Fourteenth of July
For a nation to be free, it suffices that it wills it. — La Fayette
CHARACTERS
LAZARE HOCHE, corporal of the French Guards, 21 years old. PIERRE-AUGUSTIN HULIN, huntsman of the Marquis de Vintimille, 31 years old. JEAN-PAUL MARAT, physician and journalist, 46 years old. CAMILLE DESMOULINS, advocate before the Parlement, 29 years old. MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE, deputy to the Assembly, 31 years old. JEAN-BAPTISTE DE CLOOTS, German baron, (1) 34 years old. CLAUDE FAUCHET, priest, 45 years old. GONCHON THE PATRIOT, keeper of gambling dens, 40 years old. FÉLIX-HUBERT DE VINTIMILLE, commandant of the Invalides, 60 years old. BERNARD-RENÉ JOURDAN, Marquis DE LAUNEY, governor of the Bastille, 49 years old. DE FLUE, Commander of the Swiss, 50 years old. BÉQUART, invalid, 50 years old. LOUISE-FRANÇOISE CONTAT, of the Théâtre Français, 29 years old. LUCILE DUPLESSIS (LUCILE DESMOULINS), 18 years old. MARIE-LOUISE BOUJU, vegetable seller, 65 years old.
(1) The roles of Cloots and Fauchet are cut in performance.
A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE, Julie’s mother; A LITTLE BOY OF SEVEN; A PORTER; A MANIAC; A STUDENT; A NOTARY; NEWSPAPER SELLERS; MERCHANTS OF THE PALAIS-ROYAL; GIRLS OF THE PALAIS-ROYAL; FRENCH GUARDS; INVALIDES; SWISS; Idlers, strollers, dandies; Workers, beggars, women of the people, children: all classes; all ages.
The scene is in Paris, from July 12 to 14, 1789.
The first act. — At the Palais-Royal, Sunday morning, July 12. The second act. — In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, night of Monday, July 13. The third act. — At the Bastille, and the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, Tuesday, July 14, from four o’clock to seven o’clock in the evening.
CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS
LAZARE HOCHE, 21 years old. — Tall (“five feet seven inches,” says Rousselin), thin; hair, eyebrows, and eyes black; a slight scar from the middle of the nose to the top of the forehead, on the right; the mouth not large, and fine teeth. Somewhat the type, already, of the neo-Greek ephebes of the painting of the Consulate and the Empire. The desire to be lovable and loved; but gravity is the foundation of his thoughtful, kind, slightly melancholy physiognomy, which bears, like his whole being, the mark of willpower. A hidden, distant sadness. (The man who will die young, worn out by fatigue, sorrows, failures, suspicions, the illness that silently undermines his athletic chest.) But a heroic joviality takes the upper hand, and, in moments of crisis, laughs with a youthful laugh that astonishes.
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN HULIN, 31 years old. Swiss, from Geneva. — Very tall, very broad, blond, phlegmatic, speaking little, without violence, laughing silently, indifferent to arguments and mockery, quietly obstinate, with sudden fits of fury that shatter everything. A hero who would not act, without the example of his friend Hoche, without his instinct as a decent man, and without the need to expend a herculean strength. (The man who, without personal initiative, shrinks from nothing, dares everything, and, risen from nothing, will rise to everything without surprise — later Count of the Empire, general of division, commander of the Legion of Honor, governor of Milan, of Vienna, of conquered Berlin, commandant of Paris, president of the military commission that will have the Duke of Enghien shot.)
JEAN-PAUL MARAT, 46 years old. Of Spanish origin, born in Switzerland. — Very short (under five feet). Robust, not corpulent. — Fabre d’Églantine drew an admirable portrait of him: “The neck strong, the face broad and bony, the nose aquiline, flat and even crushed, with the underside protruding and thrust forward; the mouth average, often twisted at one corner by a frequent contraction; the lips thin; the forehead large, the eyes grey-yellow, bright, piercing, naturally gentle, and with a steady gaze; the eyebrows sparse; the complexion leaden and withered; the hair on his body black, the hair on his head brown and unkempt. He walked with his head held high, straight and back, with a cadenced rapidity, that swayed with a rolling of the hips. His most habitual bearing was to cross his two arms tightly over his chest. He agitated himself vehemently while speaking, and nearly always finished his expression with a movement of his foot which he turned forward, and with which he struck the ground, suddenly rising on tiptoe, as if to raise his short stature to the height of his opinion. The sound of his voice was manly, sonorous, a little thick, and of a ringing timbre; a speech defect made it difficult for him to pronounce clearly the c and the s, whose pronunciation he blended with the consonance of the g, without any disagreeable effect other than making his delivery somewhat heavy, a maxillary heaviness, which was effaced by the energy of his conviction. Dressed in a negligent fashion, completely ignorant of the conventions of fashion and taste, and even with an air of uncleanliness.” — Morally, beneath the exaltation of a quivering and irritable sensibility, which sometimes throws him into convulsive fits, a great common sense, a good nature that will not admit itself, and above all a profound moral sense, an ardent love of truth and purity — which makes him acknowledge with candor his own errors, when reason has demonstrated them to him.
CAMILLE DESMOULINS, 29 years old. Advocate before the Parlement. — See his portrait in Danton. Though younger than in Danton, less young in appearance: happiness has not yet passed over him. A thin greyhound. A Paris street urchin, bold and impudent; the face bilious, hollow, withered by poverty, late nights, the dissipated life; laughing despite everything, but the mouth a little grimacing, and the features irregular.
MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE, 31 years old. Deputy to the Constituent Assembly. — See his portrait in Danton. But his face is fuller, softer; it has not yet been kneaded by a bitter thought — hollowed by fatigue and responsibility. A white flame that lights in silence. The soul has not fully taken consciousness of its inner strength; but that strength is there, mute, immobile, manifesting itself only by the absolute renunciation one feels he has already made of his life, without believing in success, by a haughty, pessimistic, and icy stoicism.
JEAN-BAPTISTE DE CLOOTS, BARON DE GNADENTHAL, 34 years old. German from Cleves, of Dutch origin. — Tall: everything is large in him: the eye, the nose, the mouth, the speech, the boasting, and the good heart. A Gascon from the banks of the Rhine. The voice clear, the gestures exuberant and somewhat eccentric; an overflowing joy, a communicative good humor; the need for movement and eloquence.
CLAUDE FAUCHET, 45 years old. — “Tall, emaciated, of a sickly pallor, a furtive look, a strange character, listening without appearing to, with a vague smile on his lips, seeming to slumber, arms crossed, head bent on his chest.” (Reichardt) A Nivernais mystic (somewhat like Adam Lux in Le Triomphe de la Raison) who, after having been preacher to the king, and abbé of a Breton parish, will become a member of the Legislative Assembly, and constitutional bishop of Calvados, will take part in the most energetic measures of public safety, then undergo a new crisis, be implicated in the attack of Charlotte Corday, and condemned. His portrait, in the Musée Carnavalet, shows a face still of the ancien régime, fine, aristocratic, “the Fénelon of the Revolution.”
GONCHON THE PATRIOT, 40 years old. Keeper of gambling dens at the Palais-Royal. Short, enormous of face and stature, bloated, pockmarked. A vain ham actor, a braggart and liar, who wants to be terrible, and plays a grotesque Mirabeau.
FÉLIX-HUBERT DE VINTIMILLE, MARQUIS DE CASTELNAU, 60 years old.
BERNARD-RENÉ JOURDAN, MARQUIS DE LAUNEY, governor of the Bastille, 49 years old.
DE FLUE, commander of the Swiss, 50 years old.
BÉQUART, invalid, 70 years old.
LOUISE-FRANÇOISE CONTAT, of the Théâtre Français, 29 years old. The type of Boucher’s paintings. Blonde, plump, laughing, the mouth mocking, the eye somewhat large, the forehead and chin receding, the manner bold and sensual. “An eye that speaks, a look that bites” (Goncourt). Elmire of Tartuffe, and above all Suzanne of Figaro. “The Thalia of the Théâtre Français.” (N.B. — Should the portrait not seem rigorously exact to the erudition of the gentlemen of the house of Molière, one need only substitute for Louise-Françoise her sister Marie-Émilie, the soubrette, eight years her junior.)
ANNE-LUCILE-PHILIPPE LARIDON DUPLESSIS (LUCILE DESMOULINS), 18 years old. — See her portrait in Danton — and above all in the Musée Carnavalet, the charming portrait by Boilly. Tender, sensual, childlike, romantic, and mocking.
LITTLE JULIE, 9 to 10 years old. A little girl of the people, thin, slight, pale, with blue eyes.
MARIE-LOUISE BOUJU, vegetable seller. Past sixty.
ACT ONE
Sunday, July 12, 1789, toward ten o’clock in the morning. The garden of the Palais-Royal, seen from the Café de Foy. At the back, the “Circus.” (1) To the right, a basin with fountains. Between the Circus and the galleries of the Palais, an avenue of trees. The merchants are posted at the doors of their shops, decorated with patriotic signs: “Au Grand Necker”; “A l’Assemblée Nationale.” Girls, breasts bare, shoulders bare, arms bare, plumed with enormous bouquets of flowers, stroll through the crowd with a provocative air. Hawkers cry out newspapers. Keepers of gambling dens (among them, Gonchon) circulate in dressing gowns, escorted by men armed with cudgels. Open-air “bankers” slip among the groups with folding stools under their arms, settle for a moment, unfold a game that folds like a map, produce sacks of money, slip away abruptly, and move on. A restless and anxious crowd, uncertain of its movements, which sits down before the cafés, rises, runs at the slightest noise, climbs on chairs and tables, goes, turns back on its steps, increases little by little until the end of the act, when the galleries and the garden are so overflowing that many climb the trees, hanging from the branches.
All classes mingled: starving and ragged beggars, workers, bourgeois, aristocrats, soldiers, priests, women, children, some of whom continue their games between the legs of the strollers.
(1) It was an enclosure topped by a terrace, covered with trellises, which rose like a flowering bower in the middle of the garden.
NEWSPAPER SELLERS. Great conspiracy discovered! Famine! Here’s the famine! The arrival of the cutthroats!
THE CROWD (calling them). Psst! Over here!
A MAN OF THE PEOPLE (anxiously, to a bourgeois who is reading). Well?
THE BOURGEOIS. Ah! my friend! They’re coming! The Germans, the Swiss. Paris is surrounded! In a moment, they’ll be here!
THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE. The King won’t allow it.
A BEGGAR. The King? He’s with them in the camp at Sablons, in the midst of the Germans.
THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE. The King is a Frenchman.
THE BOURGEOIS. The King, yes. The Queen, no. The Austrian woman hates us. Her marshal of brigands, old de Broglie, has sworn to crush Paris. Between the cannons of the Bastille and the troops of the Champ de Mars, we are caught in a vise.
A STUDENT. They won’t move. Monsieur Necker is at Versailles, and he’s watching over us.
THE BOURGEOIS. Yes, as long as Monsieur Necker remains minister, we must not despair entirely.
THE BEGGAR. Who says he still is? They’ve gotten rid of him.
ALL (protesting). No, no, he’s still there! The paper says he’s still there. He must stay! If Monsieur Necker were no longer there, all would be lost.
THE GIRLS (strolling). There’s nothing to be done with them today. They’re mad. They think of nothing but Versailles.
— I had, just now, a young fellow who talked to me of nothing but Necker.
— Is it really true that that bitch of an Austrian has thrown our deputies in prison?
THE BANKERS (mysteriously jingling their sacks of money under people’s noses). Craps; pass ten, thirty-one, biribi. Fortune, gentlemen, let us court fortune!
THE MERCHANTS. Fine Sunday morning. Ten o’clock. And the garden is full! What will it be later?
— Fine show, and little profit. They only come to look for news.
— Bah! when you know how to handle them!
GONCHON (to the merchants). Come, my children, let’s bestir ourselves, bestir ourselves! It’s not enough to do good business. One must do it, that goes without saying. But one must also be good patriots. Eyes open, by God! I warn you, something is brewing.
A MERCHANT. Do you know something, Monsieur Gonchon?
GONCHON. Attention! The storm is approaching. Everyone to his post! And when the moment comes, warm up these idiots for me, and bellow in unison.
A MERCHANT. Long live the Nation!
GONCHON (giving him a shove). Shut up, you fool! Long live the Duke of Orléans! — After that, you can shout both. One will cover the other.
CAMILLE DESMOULINS (coming out of a gambling den, excited, laughing and stammering). Plucked! They took everything I had! — I told you so, Camille, you’re going to get robbed. There you are, happy? It’s done. — Well then, it no longer needs doing. — I always foresee the foolish things I’m going to do. But, thank God, I never miss one. — I’ve at least killed two hours. Has the Versailles courier finally arrived? The scoundrel! They’re all in league together. You die of impatience waiting for him. The gambling dens beckon: you go in to pass the time. One must keep one’s hands and the rest occupied. Cards and girls were made for that. They know how to relieve you of useless money. My pockets are hardly heavy now. Who wants to see a brand new purse? Look! Not a single coin!
THE GIRLS (mocking him). “They’ll fleece you, fleece you, they’ll fleece you good!”
CAMILLE DESMOULINS. Bats of Venus, you’re quite proud of having gobbled up a poor little devil’s money! By God! He doesn’t hold it against you. “I’d lose it again if I had it left to lose.”
AN OLD BOURGEOIS. A gambler’s purse has no lock.
GONCHON. Young man, I see you’re in difficulties. To oblige you, I’ll lend you against that chain three — nine.
DESMOULINS. Generous Gonchon, you want to strip me naked as Saint John? Leave that to these young ladies. They manage quite well without you.
GONCHON. You worthless little beggar, do you know who you’re talking to?
DESMOULINS. You’re Gonchon: that says it all. You’re a jeweler, usurer, watchmaker, banker, lemonade seller, brothel keeper. You are everything, you are Gonchon, king of the gambling dens.
GONCHON. What’s this talk of gambling dens? I have founded a few clubs, where under the pretext of honest and natural amusements, people gather to study means of reforming the State; assemblies of free citizens, of patriots…
DESMOULINS. Where does patriotism hide itself!
GONCHON. …The Society of Men of Nature.
DESMOULINS. Women of Nature.
GONCHON. Bad joker! If you haven’t enough decency to respect a respectable man, at least respect the sign under whose protection my establishment is placed.
DESMOULINS (without looking). What sign? The Forty Thieves?
GONCHON (furious). The Grand Necker!
DESMOULINS. You’re hard on him, Gonchon. (He looks.) And what’s on the other side?
GONCHON. It’s nothing.
DESMOULINS. I see another portrait.
GONCHON. It’s the Duke of Orléans. Two faces of the same coin.
DESMOULINS. The front and the back! (Those listening laugh. Gonchon advances, threatening, with his merchants.) All right, all right, don’t have me beaten up by your praetorian guard. You want a certificate of civic virtue? O Janus Gonchon, I grant it to you. You give bread to every scoundrel in Paris, and you take it from honest people, so that they have nothing left but a desire: to go fight. Audax et edax. Long live the Revolution!
GONCHON. I forgive you, because one doesn’t fight in the presence of the enemy… and because you’re a customer. But I’ll see you again shortly before the Versaillais.
DESMOULINS. Are they really coming?
GONCHON. You’re already turning pale? — The battle is being prepared. The mercenaries of Lorraine and Flanders are on the plain of Grenelle; the artillery at Saint-Denis; the German cavalry at the Military School. At Versailles, the marshal, surrounded by aides-de-camp, issues war orders. They will attack tonight.
A WOMAN. Mercy! What will become of us?
A BOURGEOIS. The brigands! They treat us as if we were the enemy.
A WORKER (to Gonchon). How do you know this? The road to Versailles is cut. They’ve put cannons at the Pont de Sèvres. They won’t let anyone pass.
GONCHON. Suspicions? I’ll put my fist in the face of the first person who doubts my patriotism. Don’t they know Gonchon here?
THE WORKER. No one suspects you. Calm down. We have too much to do to quarrel among ourselves. We’re asking where you got this information.
GONCHON. I will not be questioned. I know what I know. I have my sources.
ANOTHER WORKER (to the first). Leave him, he’s a good one, a deep drinker.
A BOURGEOIS. What shall we do, my God?
A STUDENT. To the gates! Everyone to the gates! Let’s keep them from entering!
A BOURGEOIS. As if we could keep out — poor folks like us, without arms, without experience of war — the finest troops of the kingdom!
ANOTHER. But they’ve already entered! We have that Bastille right here, that canker installed in our body, gnawing at us quietly, impossible to cut out.
A WORKER. The vile thing! Who will deliver us from it?
A STUDENT. They’ve just brought in another company of Swiss today.
ANOTHER. Its cannons are trained on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
A WORKER. Nothing, nothing can be done as long as we have this bit in our teeth. We’d have to start by tearing it out.
A BOURGEOIS. And how?
A WORKER. How, I don’t know. We’d have to take it.
ALL (with a dark and incredulous air). Take the Bastille!
They turn away from each other.
Here’s something new! — Fight to the death!
A MAN (gaunt and threadbare, with a maniacal air). It’s not the soldiers you should fear. They won’t attack.
ALL. What?
THE MANIAC. They won’t attack. Their plan is much simpler: they’re blockading us. They’re waiting for us to starve to death.
A WORKER. Well, if they keep at it, we’re heading that way. We lose a whole day’s work waiting for bread at the bakeries.
A WOMAN. Flour is becoming scarce.
THE MANIAC. It won’t arrive at all tomorrow.
A BOURGEOIS. But what are they doing with the wheat?
THE MANIAC. I know. They’ve buried it in the quarries of Senlis and Chantilly, so it rots, and we can’t eat it.
THE BOURGEOIS (incredulous). Come now!
THE MANIAC. It is so.
A WOMAN. It’s true. In Champagne, the cavalry destroyed the wheat in the blade to starve us.
THE MANIAC. Better than that. They’re poisoning the bread they give us. It burns the throat and the bowels. Twenty people have died from it in my neighborhood. It’s the order from Versailles. They want to make us die like rats.
DESMOULINS. That’s mad. No king can want to murder his people. One would have to be Nero. We’re not there yet.
THE MANIAC (mysteriously). I know the key to the matter. The nation is too numerous. There are orders to depopulate France.
DESMOULINS. You’re ill, my friend, you need medical attention.
A WORKER. There’s some truth in all that. The Queen would like us all dead.
DESMOULINS. What interest has she in that?
THE WORKER. She’s Austrian, of course. Austria has always been the enemy of France. If that one consented to marry our king, it was to do us harm. We won’t be at peace as long as she’s in our midst.
THE OTHERS. He’s right. Out of France with the Austrian!
LA CONTAT (in the middle of the crowd). Why, then?
THE CROWD. What? Why?
LA CONTAT (showing herself). Well, yes, why? Are you mad, attacking the most charming, the best of women?
THE CROWD. Who dares speak well of the Austrian here?
— Good God! This is too much! We’re being insulted to our face!
DESMOULINS (to la Contat). Be quiet, leave without answering them.
LA CONTAT. Why?
DESMOULINS. They’re crowding around. They’re coming from all sides.
LA CONTAT. So much the better.
A BEGGAR. What did you say, you aristocrat? What did you say?
LA CONTAT. Don’t blow in my face. I said: Long live the Queen!
THE CROWD (exasperated). Good God!
A CLERK. There’s a pretty girl who needs a spanking.
LA CONTAT. There’s a silly face who won’t wait long for his own. (She slaps him.)
THE CLERK. Help!
Some laugh, others shout.
THE CROWD (rushing in). Ho there! — Come see! — What is it? — It’s an aristocrat woman beating up a patriot! — Into the water!
DESMOULINS. Citizens, it’s a joke.
THE CROWD (furious). Into the water!
HULIN (cleaving through the crowd, which he towers over with his herculean height). Ho there! — (He places himself before la Contat.) You know me well, comrades. I am Hulin. You saw me at work the other day. I broke down the door of the Abbaye to free our friends, the imprisoned French Guards. I’ll break the head of the first one who steps forward in the same way. Respect for women, by God! If you want to fight, the enemy is not lacking. Go find him!
THE CROWD. He’s right. — Bravo! — Not at all! She insulted us! She must beg pardon! — On your knees, aristocrat! — Let her cry: Down with the Queen!
LA CONTAT. I’ll cry nothing at all. (To Desmoulins.) Help me up. (She climbs on a table.) If you annoy me, I’ll cry: Down with Necker! (Howls.) You don’t intimidate me. Do you think you can frighten me, because you’re a crowd, and you have a hundred mouths that howl? I have only one; but it knows how to make itself heard. I’m used to speaking to the people. I see you all every evening face to face. I am Mademoiselle Contat.
THE CROWD. Contat of the Théâtre Français! — Of the Théâtre Français! — Ah! Let’s see! — Silence!
LA CONTAT. You don’t love the Queen? You give her notice? Are you going to chase all the pretty women out of France now? You have only to say so: we’ll pack our bags. We’ll see what happens without us. — You amuse me by calling me an aristocrat. I’m the daughter of a herring fryer who had her stall under the Châtelet. I work like you. I love Necker as much as you do. I’m for the Assembly. But I cannot stand being ordered about; and I believe, by heaven, that if you took it into your heads to make me cry “Long live the Comedy!” I’d cry “Down with Molière!” Think what you like. There are no laws against foolishness. But there are no laws either to force those who keep their good sense into it. I love the Queen, and I say so.
A STUDENT. I should think so: they’re in it together. They both have the Count of Artois for a lover.
TWO WORKERS. What a tongue! It runs all by itself!
— She has a mouth like nobody’s business.
DESMOULINS. Citizens, one cannot ask a queen to speak against royalty. The true queen, here she is: the others are queens of rubbish, idle monarchs. Their only use is to produce a dauphin. Once the little one is hatched, there’s nothing more to be done with them. They live at our expense and cost us dearly. The wisest course would be to send that Austrian poultry back to its henhouse, whence it was fetched at great expense, as if there were not girls enough in France to make children. — Give me the queens of the theatre. Those are made for the people’s happiness. Not one hour of their life is not at our service. Not one inch of their person is not for our pleasure. It is our thing, our property, our national possession. By Venus of the fair cheeks, let us defend her, and let us cry all together: Long live the Queen, the real one, long live la Contat!
Applause and laughter.
THE CROWD. Long live Queen Contat!
LA CONTAT. Thank you. — (To Desmoulins.) Give me your arm, you; you’re nicer than the others. — Have you looked at me enough? Good. Let me pass. If you want to see me again, you know the way to the theatre. — What is your name?
DESMOULINS. Camille Desmoulins. — Reckless woman! I told you so. Weren’t you afraid?
DESMOULINS. They nearly killed you.
LA CONTAT. Nonsense! They always shout, they never do any harm.
DESMOULINS. O blind one! It is well said that contempt of danger is merely ignorance of danger.
THE CROWD. A little woman who hasn’t cold feet.
— No, by God, nor elsewhere.
A WORKER. All the same, mademoiselle, it’s not right for you to take the side of the exploiters against poor folk like us.
THE MANIAC. Of course! A hoarder!
LA CONTAT. What! A hoarder!
THE MANIAC. Look at that wig!
LA CONTAT. Well?
THE MANIAC. That amount of powder! With the flour that passes over the nape of these idle women, there would be enough to feed all the poor of Paris.
LA CONTAT. If I were He who drew from seven small dried fish a meal for four thousand men, I would take pleasure in feeding the people with the dust of my hair. Lacking that power, I try to deceive their hunger by delighting their eyes.
SECOND WORKER. Leave that maniac alone. But if you have a good heart, mademoiselle — and one can see it in your eyes — how can you defend the brigands who want us dead?
LA CONTAT. Your death, my poor friend! Who’s talking about that?
A STUDENT. You don’t know anything, then? Look, here’s another letter from the Austrian’s man, the marshal of the Jesuits, the old assassin, the donkey loaded with amulets, relics, and medals — de Broglie! Do you know what he writes?
THE CROWD. Read! Read!
THE STUDENT. They’ve hatched a conspiracy. They want to break our Estates General, seize our deputies, throw them in prison, expel our Necker, sell Lorraine to the Emperor to get money and pay their troops, bombard Paris, crush the people. The plot is for tonight.
GONCHON. Have you heard? Have you had enough, or do you need still more to shake you? By my life! Are we going to let ourselves be slaughtered like pigs? Ah! In the name of God! — To arms! — Fortunately we have a protector ready, and he watches over us. Long live Orléans!
GONCHON’S MEN. Long live Orléans!
THE CROWD. To arms! Let us march against them!
MARAT (springing onto a chair; small, nervous, agitated, rising on tiptoe when he raises his voice). Stop! — Wretches, where are you running? Don’t you see that the cutthroats are only waiting for an uprising of Paris to unleash their rage upon it? Don’t listen to these treacherous counsels. They are wicked tricks to consummate your ruin. — Yes, you, who incite this people, who call yourself a patriot — who tells me you are not an agent of despotism, charged with provoking good citizens and delivering them to the hordes of Versailles? Who are you? Where do you come from? Who answers for you? I don’t know you.
GONCHON. I don’t know you either.
MARAT. If you don’t know me, it’s because you’re a scoundrel. I am known wherever there is misery and virtue. I spend my nights caring for the sick, my days watching over the people. My name is Marat.
GONCHON. I don’t know you.
MARAT. If you don’t know me, you will know me soon, traitor! — O credulous people, absurd people, open your eyes! Do you even know where you are? What! This is where you meet to dream and accomplish your liberty? But look, look! This is the lair of all the exploiters, all the idlers, swindling bankers, thieves, prostitutes, disguised informers, agents of the aristocracy!
Protests and howls from a part of the crowd, which cries: “Down with him!” shaking their fists.
DESMOULINS. Bravo, Marat! Well struck!
LA CONTAT. Who is this dirty little man with such beautiful eyes?
DESMOULINS. A journalist-physician. Continue! (She applauds.)
MARAT. What do I care for the clamor of these traitors, these accomplices of famine and servitude? They rob you of your remaining money with gambling, of your vigor with girls, of your good sense with brandy. — Fools! And you come put yourselves in their hands, bring them your secrets, deliver yourselves entirely! But behind every pillar, at every café corner, at your side, at your table, a spy listens to you, watches you, notes what you say, prepares your ruin. Flee this cesspool, you who wish to be free! Before engaging in the supreme combat, begin by taking stock of your forces. Where are your weapons? You have none. Forge pikes, manufacture muskets. — Where are your friends? You have none. Your neighbor deceives you. The one who shakes your hand may be betraying you. Yourselves — are you even sure of yourselves? You are at war with corruption, and you are corrupt. (Jeers from the people.) You protest? If the aristocracy offered you gold and feasting, dare you swear to me you would not all become aristocrats! You will not silence me. You will hear the truth. You are too accustomed to flatterers who court and betray you. You are vain, conceited, frivolous; you have neither strength, nor character, nor virtue. All your vigor is spent in speeches. You are soft, uncertain, without will; you tremble before the tip of a musket…
THE CROWD. Enough! Enough!
MARAT. You cry “Enough!” And I cry it with you, I cry it louder than you. Enough of vices, enough of follies, enough of cowardice! Collect yourselves, watch yourselves, purify yourselves, re-temper your souls, gird your loins! — O my fellow citizens, I tell you your truths a bit harshly; but it is because I love you!
LA CONTAT. Look! He’s crying now.
MARAT. You are given opium. I pour acid into your wounds, and I shall pour it until you are fully restored to your rights and your duties, until you are free, until you are happy. Yes, in spite of your fickleness, you will be happy, you will be happy, or I shall be no more!
He finishes, his cheeks covered with tears, his voice broken by sobs.
LA CONTAT. His cheeks are streaming with tears. Oh, how droll he is!
THE PEOPLE (half laughing, half cheering). There’s a friend of the people! Long live Marat!
They surround him, lift him up despite himself, place him on their shoulders, though he struggles, shaken with convulsive tremors, great tears running down his cheeks.
HULIN (noticing a little girl watching Marat with eyes full of tears). Hey, little one, what’s the matter? You’re crying too?
The little girl pulls away abruptly without answering, and does not take her eyes from Marat, whom his carriers set down on the ground. She runs to him.
LITTLE JULIE (to Marat, clasping her hands). Don’t cry, don’t cry!
MARAT (looking at the little girl). What’s the matter, little girl?
JULIE. Don’t be unhappy, I beg you, I beg you! We’ll be better, yes, I promise you, we won’t be cowards anymore, we won’t lie anymore, we’ll be virtuous, I swear!
The crowd laughs and watches. Hulin signals his neighbors to be silent, so as not to disturb the little one. Marat, who has sat down, abruptly changes expression as he listens. His face lights up. He looks at the child with great gentleness, takes her hands.
MARAT. Why are you crying?
JULIE. Because you are crying.
MARAT. Do you know me?
JULIE. When I was ill, you took care of me.
MARAT (gently draws her toward him, looks her in the eyes, pushes back her hair). Your name is Julie. Your mother is a laundress. You had the measles this winter. You were afraid. You cried in your bed that you didn’t want to die. (She turns her head away; he presses her to his chest, smiling.) Don’t be ashamed. — You understand me then? You’re with me? Do you even know what I want?
JULIE. Yes, I want it too…
The rest of her sentence is lost in a murmur.
MARAT. What do you want?
JULIE (raising her head and speaking with a conviction that brings smiles). Liberty.
MARAT. What for?
JULIE. To give it away.
MARAT. To whom?
JULIE. To the unhappy ones who are locked up.
MARAT. Where?
JULIE. Over there, in the great prison. The ones who are alone all their lives, who see no one anymore, whom everyone forgets.
The crowd has changed attitude. It listens, suddenly grown serious; some frown; they do not look at each other; their eyes are fixed on the ground, and they seem to talk to themselves.
MARAT (surprised). How do you know that, little one?
JULIE. I know. I was told… I think about it often, at night.
MARAT (gently, stroking her head). You should sleep at night.
JULIE (after a silence of a few moments, seizing Marat’s hand with vivacity). We will free them, won’t we?
MARAT. How?
JULIE. We just all have to go together.
THE CROWD (laughing). There you are! It’s no more difficult than that!
The little girl raises her eyes, suddenly sees the circle of curious faces surrounding and watching her. She is intimidated, and hides her face in one arm, leaning on Hulin’s table.
LA CONTAT. Isn’t she sweet!
MARAT (looking at her). O holy virtue of childhood, pure spark of goodness, how your light soothes, how one’s gaze relaxes in your innocent eyes! Ah! how dark the world would be without the eyes of children!
He goes solemnly to the child, takes the hand that hangs at her side, and kisses it.
A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE (arriving). Julie! — What! You’re here? What is she doing in the middle of all these people?
DESMOULINS. She was haranguing the crowd. (Laughter.)
THE MOTHER. My God! She, so timid! What came over her?
She goes toward Julie; but as soon as she tries to touch the little girl, the child runs away without speaking, with a childlike wildness.
THE CROWD (laughing and clapping). Run, little worm!
Great cries are heard from the back of the garden.
THE CROWD. Come! Come!
— What do you see?
— They’re bathing a countess!
LA CONTAT. They’re bathing a countess?
THE CROWD. She insulted the people; they’re dipping her in the basin.
LA CONTAT (on Desmoulins’s arm, laughing). Let’s run and see! God! How amusing!
DESMOULINS. The finest show in Europe!
LA CONTAT. Impudent! — And the Comédie!
They go out laughing. The people run outside, shouting and laughing. Marat and Hulin remain alone in the foreground, one standing, the other seated at a café table. A dense crowd fills the entire back of the stage, some standing on chairs, all watching what is happening in the garden. Strollers continue to circulate beneath the galleries, at the second level.
MARAT (shaking his fist at the crowd). Actors! It’s not liberty they’re after, it’s comedy! On a day when all their lives are at stake, they think only of making a spectacle of one another. I’ve had enough of these people. Their uprisings are nothing but a tissue of buffooneries. I don’t want to see them anymore. Ah! to live locked in a cellar, walled off from the noises outside, so that the baseness of the world no longer reaches me!
He sits down, his head in his hands.
HULIN (quietly seated, smoking, looking at Marat with a somewhat ironic composure). Come now, Monsieur Marat, don’t be discouraged. Is it worth the trouble? They’re big children playing. You know them as well as I. There’s nothing serious in all this. Why take it so tragically?
MARAT (raising his head and fixing him with a hard look). Who are you?
HULIN. I’m from your country, from Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Don’t you remember me? I know you well. I saw you as a child, in Boudry.
MARAT. You’re Hulin, Augustin Hulin?
HULIN. That’s right.
MARAT. What are you doing here? You were a watchmaker in Geneva.
HULIN. I was living quietly there. But I hadn’t reckoned with my brother, a fellow who got mixed up in speculations, shady enterprises, where he pledged his name. Naturally, he saw fit to die afterward, leaving his wife and a three-year-old child without resources. I sold my shop to get them out of trouble; and I came to Paris, where I entered the service of the Marquis de Vintimille.
MARAT. I’m no longer surprised at your cowardly words. You’re a servant.
HULIN. And what harm is there in that?
MARAT. Aren’t you ashamed to serve a man like yourself?
HULIN. There’s no shame in that. We all serve, each in our own way. Are you not a physician, Monsieur Marat? You spend your days examining wounds, dressing them as best you can. You go to bed very late, you get up in the night at your patients’ call. Is that not serving?
MARAT. I don’t serve a master; I serve humanity. But you, you’ve made yourself the valet of a corrupt man, a wretched aristocrat.
HULIN. It’s not because he’s corrupt that he doesn’t need service. You don’t ask those you treat whether they’re good or bad. They’re men, that is to say poor devils like us. When they need a hand, you must give it to them without haggling. My master, like so many others, is atrophied by wealth. He can’t manage for himself; he needs fifty arms to serve him. I have three times more strength than I need for myself; I don’t know what to do with it. From time to time, I feel like smashing something to relieve myself. Since this fool needs my strength, I sell it to him. We’re even. I do him good, and myself too.
MARAT. You also sell your free soul, your conscience.
HULIN. Who’s talking about that? I defy anyone whatsoever to take it from me.
MARAT. Yet you submit. You don’t speak your mind.
HULIN. What need have I to speak it? I know it. It’s only for those who aren’t sure of it that they need to shout it to the winds. I don’t think for others; I think for myself.
MARAT. Nothing in you is yours alone. You don’t belong to yourself. You are bound to the world. You owe it your strength, your will, your intelligence — such as it is.
HULIN. Will and intelligence are not a currency one gives. Work done for others is work badly done. I have made myself free. Let them do the same.
MARAT. I recognize my odious compatriots. Because Nature gave them a six-foot frame and the muscles of a brute, they think they have the right to despise those who are weak and sick. And when, after working their fields and bringing in their harvests, they sit at their door, sucking for hours at a pipe whose disgusting smoke finishes lulling their dull conscience, they think their duty done, and say to the wretches who hold out their hand: “You have only to do as I do.”
HULIN (calmly). You know me perfectly. That is how I am. (He laughs under his breath.)
HOCHE (arriving. He is in the uniform of a corporal of the French Guards. He carries clothing on his arm. To Marat). Don’t believe him, citizen. He slanders himself. He never sees a misfortune without lending a hand. Last week, he put himself at our head to free my comrades, the French Guards imprisoned at the Abbaye by the aristocrats.
HULIN (without turning around, extends his hand over his shoulder). Is that you, Hoche? Who asked your opinion? That’s rubbish. I was saying just now: my strength bothers me sometimes; so I break down a door, or demolish a wall. Of course! When I see a man drowning, I lend him my hand too: that’s nothing one reasons about. But I don’t go hunting for people who are drowning; nor especially do I throw them into the water first, like these revolutionaries, in order to save them afterward.
MARAT. You’re ashamed of the good you do. I hate braggarts of vice. (He turns his back on him. To Hoche.) And you, what are you carrying there, on your arm?
HOCHE. Waistcoats I’ve embroidered, that I’m trying to sell.
MARAT. Fine task for a soldier! You sew clothes?
HOCHE. That’s always worth as much as ripping them apart.
MARAT. You’re not ashamed of stealing women’s trade? — And that’s what you busy yourself with! You think about your business, you count your profits, you pile up coins, when Paris is about to collapse in blood!
HOCHE (calm and slightly disdainful). All right, we have time. Everything in its place.
MARAT. Your heart is cold. Your pulse beats slowly. You’re not a patriot. (To Hulin.) As for you, you’re more guilty than a bad man. Your nature was sound, your instinct led you toward good, and it is willfully that you pervert them. — O Liberty! Here are your defenders. Indifferent to your dangers, they will do nothing to combat them. — Well, I, even if I stood alone, I will not abandon you. I will watch over this people. I will save it despite itself. (He goes out.)
HULIN (without leaving his seat or his pipe, watches him go, laughing under his breath). A jolly fellow! He sees the world through rose-colored glasses. He’s a doctor from my country. You can tell he’s used to finishing people off. His trade wasn’t enough for him anymore. To speed things up, he’s taken it into his head to treat all of humanity.
HOCHE (watching Marat go, with a mixture of pity and interest). An honest man. The sufferings of the world resound too loudly in him; they disturb his judgment. He is sick with virtue.
HULIN. How do you know him?
HOCHE. I’ve read his books.
HULIN. You have time to waste. Where did you find them?
HOCHE. I bought them with the proceeds from these waistcoats, which he reproached me for so bitterly.
HULIN (looking at him). Let me see. What have you got there? You’ve been in a fight again?
HOCHE. Well, yes.
HULIN. Savage! Where did you get that?
HOCHE. Place Louis XV. I was passing through. The arrogance of those Germans, camped in my Paris, got on my nerves. I couldn’t help going to laugh in their faces. They fell on me, a whole gang. The people rescued me. But I always managed to rough up one or two, for my part.
HULIN. That’s a fine escapade! It’ll cost you dear.
HOCHE. Bah! — Do me a favor, Hulin. Read me this letter.
HULIN. A letter to whom?
HOCHE. To the King.
HULIN. To the King? You’re writing to the King?
HOCHE. Why shouldn’t I write to the King? He has eyes to read, I imagine, and a reason to understand. If I have good advice, why should I be forbidden from giving it, and he from following it?
HULIN (mocking). And what are you telling the King?
HOCHE. Here it is: I’m telling him to send away his troops, to come to Paris alone, and to make the Revolution himself.
Hulin laughs loudly.
HOCHE (smiling). I thank you for your opinion; your reasons are excellent, even contagious; but it isn’t your opinion I’m asking for.
HULIN. What do you want, then?
HOCHE (embarrassed). It’s the style, you see. The spelling… I’m not very sure of it. So…
HULIN. If you think he’s going to read it!
HOCHE. No matter.
HULIN. All right, I’ll fix it up for you.
HOCHE. Ah, Hulin, how lucky you are to have had an education! As for me, no matter how hard I work now, I’ll never make up the lost years.
HULIN. Naive! — And you’re counting on this letter?
HOCHE (good-humoredly). To tell the truth, I’m not counting on it much. — And yet, it would be so easy for all these animals who govern Europe to be great cheaply, simply by applying to their government ordinary reason, common sense, and morality! Too bad for them! If they don’t do it, it will be done without them.
HULIN. Instead of dreaming about reforming the world, you’d do better to find a way to get yourself out of trouble. You’re going to be reported; you doubtless already have been. Do you know what awaits you, when you return to barracks?
HOCHE. Yes; but do you know what awaits the barracks when I return?
HULIN. What?
HOCHE. You’ll see.
HULIN. What are you planning now? Keep still for a bit. Don’t you think there’s enough disorder already?
HOCHE. When order is injustice, disorder is already the beginning of justice.
HULIN. Justice! Justice is not asking things for what they cannot give. You can’t remake the world, so you can only accept it. Why seek the impossible?
HOCHE. My poor Hulin, do you even know all that is possible?
HULIN. What do you mean?
HOCHE. Let this people merely do what it can do, and you’ll see whether one can’t remake the world.
HULIN. If you enjoy deluding yourself, I’ve nothing to say; keep your illusions.
HOCHE. Tear them away without fear; don’t try to spare me. I detest self-deception, the cowardly idealism that puts a blindfold over its eyes so as not to see evil. I look at it, and it doesn’t trouble me. I know as well as you this poor uncertain crowd that believes what it’s told, that is the prey of its passions, that takes fright at a shadow, that forgets its own cause, and betrays its friends.
HULIN. Well?
HOCHE. The flame too is capricious and trembles; a breath twists it, smoke envelops it. Yet it burns, and rises toward the sky.
HULIN. Comparison is not proof. Look at this rabble of idlers, of chatterers, this meddlesome little lawyer, this big girl who loves nothing but to shout, these old boastful and timid children! Believe in the people — what a fine delusion! — Don’t count on others: that is my rule in life. Do them service whenever you can, but expect nothing from them. — I have a good head and good fists. That is what I believe in: myself.
HOCHE. You’re a solid companion: but there is more strength, more good sense, even more moral sense in that obscure mass than in any one of us. We are nothing without the people. Haven’t you ever felt its ferment in you? Where does this need for justice come from, these aspirations to the world’s happiness, this emotion that gripped me as a child, that I didn’t understand, when the news reached us of America rising against English barbarism, the intoxication that went to my head, a fortnight ago, when our deputies took the heroic oath never to part until they had made the world free?
HULIN. From you, of course.
HOCHE. You don’t understand. It was a force a thousand times greater than mine, which burst my chest. It didn’t come from me. It blew through me. And I’ve felt it too in other humble people, workers, soldiers like me. You’re not of this people; you can’t read in it. It doesn’t know itself well. Poverty, ignorance, hunger, the worries it struggles against, leave it neither the time nor the strength to know itself. It sees; but it thinks it’s dreaming, and its weary eyes cannot fix what it sees. It feels its strength rumbling; but it doubts it, the strength frightens it. What could it not do, if it knew? What will it not do, when it knows?
HULIN. And what common thought can drive this chaos?
HOCHE. Necessity. A moment comes when all the taut forces converge on action. A single gesture suffices then to set worlds in motion.
HULIN (clapping him on the shoulder). You’re an ambitious man. You dream of ruling the people.
HOCHE. Stupid colossus! That’s a fine ambition! You think I have the soul of a corporal? (He looks at his uniform.)
HULIN. You turn up your nose? What’s got into you? You look quite joyful today. Have you been promoted to sergeant?
HOCHE (shrugs his shoulders). There’s joy in the air.
HULIN. You’re not hard to please. Famine. Imminent massacre. Your people on the point of being crushed by brute force… You yourself, what will you do? You’re the slave of your officers. You’ll have to march against what you love, or be killed with it.
HOCHE (smiles). Good.
HULIN. You find that good? Thunder hanging ready to crash down?
HOCHE (laughs, then). Yes.
HULIN (looks at him). You believe in your star?
HOCHE (shakes his head, laughing). My star? No, Hulin, I don’t believe in it. Stars are made for the idle, for aristocrats. (1) Poor lads like me don’t have one. — Don’t you know how I’ve lived till now? I had suffering for my godmother. An orphan at birth, I never saw my mother. Without my old aunt, the vegetable seller, I’d have been raised in some hypocritical almshouse, or abandoned to my worst instincts. Thanks to her, I knew laborious poverty that tempers the soul. Thanks to her, I knew the steely energies and the silent virtues of this people you despise from a café table. Brave old woman, crushed with fatigue, not having, after a whole life of work, her bread assured for more than half a week, condemned until the last day to push her little cart, through wind or snow, with her gouty fingers, and the wheezing of her asthmatic chest, which forced her to stop constantly to catch her breath — and her good red laughing face — for with all that she was cheerful, Hulin. You can imagine how eager I was to find employment that would relieve her of me! I began my career as a stable boy. Were I to become a general, I would not have as much joy as the day I first earned my bread. Bah! It wasn’t the worst time of my life. Even today, I don’t think of my old stable without gratitude. I lived there some famous hours. It was there I read Rousseau. I had picked up in the gutter a stray volume, torn pages pulled from a book, dirty and ripped (I’ll never part with them). One Sunday — my comrades had gone out — alone, lying on the straw, at the horses’ feet, I read — no, it wasn’t reading — I heard the voice of a demigod. Everything vanished. Over Versailles, the breath of Nature struck my face. Beyond those masters, Man appeared to me. And within myself, in my poverty and solitude, I saw my divine conscience, my eternal grandeur. I stopped, I could no longer read; I heard the pounding of my blood, rushing from my whole being and storming my heart at the call of that heroic music. A river flowed through my body. I rose, laughing and weeping at once. I cried out, I clasped the air with my arms, I embraced my horses; I would have embraced the world. — When I think, Hulin, that this man who brought us so much joy lived unhappy, poor, wandering, persecuted, betrayed by his friends, mocked by foolish irony, embittered by grief, and believing himself hated and rejected by all men… I feel almost ashamed, as if I were responsible for that shame… Ah! had I been there, to defend him against that rabble! — You see, it’s in memory of him that I feel sympathy for poor Marat, despite his violence and aberrations. He suffers as Rousseau did, as all those suffer who love the ungrateful human race too much. — I myself am not always as calm as I appear; and when I laugh, it’s sometimes at the moment I’m strangling the anger and doubts that growl within me. Locked for five years in the dreary trade into which I was thrown by the infamous trickery of recruiting sergeants, I make the best of it, because wherever one is, there is good to be done, and the means to make oneself great. But you can believe that it is not with an impassive heart that I endure the shame of this life, and the odious arbitrariness to which I am subject. — What can you do? After all I’ve seen, one ends by armoring oneself against evil. Just now, I’ve barely left the dungeon where a slanderer had me thrown. I stayed there three months, forgotten in the most horrible misery, rotting in filth. I would have died there, if I were capable of dying; for provident Nature has cemented my body so as to resist the cannonballs of Destiny. — It’s been five years that I toil; I’m still a corporal, and I have no hope of escaping this dead end; for we’re forbidden even the thought of rising one day. — There is my star, Hulin. No, life is hard on me; and it always will be, I feel it well. I am not one of those born with luck. No matter. I don’t place my confidence in shooting stars. All my recourse is in myself. That suffices. Evil may rage upon me and around me; the victories of injustice, the crimes of force and wealth, the follies with which superstition stupefies the human mind, will not trouble me, for the light is here — (he touches his chest) — and in the hearts of my brothers, unhappy like me. Nothing will extinguish it; it ferments through formless matter, it organizes chaos. It conquers the world, and does not hurry, having eternity. I am not impatient. Victory is coming. — Look at the clouds. You’re afraid of the storm? It is in the midst of tempests that heaven’s fire bursts forth. Then thunder, roar! Burn the night, Truth!
(1) The narrative that follows is almost entirely cut in performance.
HULIN. I don’t fear the storm. Everything I’ve told you, comrade, doesn’t make me more timid. I don’t care about success, and I’m not afraid for my skin. But I can’t see a thing. If you have better eyes, show me the way. Wherever there are punches to be given, you can be sure I’ll give them fairly and well. Lead me. What must we do?
HOCHE. No plan in advance. Watch the event; and when it comes, seize its mane, and mount its back. — In the meantime, do what we’re doing. Let’s sell our waistcoats.
The crowd floods back onto the stage, announcing itself with laughter and cries. A boy of five or six is carried on the shoulders of a tall devil of a porter. La Contat, Desmoulins, and the crowd follow them, laughing.
THE CHILD (crying out in a shrill voice). Down with the aristos, aristocrocs, aristocranks, aristojugs, the aristocrossed!
HULIN. What are they playing at now? — Ah! it’s their great pastime. They’re trying the aristocrats.
THE PORTER. Attention, the voice of the People! To what do we condemn — hey there! monsieur! don’t you hear me, Leonidas? — To what do we condemn d’Artois?
THE CHILD (in his piping voice). To the pillory!
THE PORTER. And the Polignac?
THE CHILD. To a spanking!
THE PORTER. And Condé?
THE CHILD. To the gallows!
THE PORTER. And the Queen?
THE CHILD. To the brothel!
The crowd bursts out laughing and cheers the child, who repeats louder still, in his piercing voice — quite puffed up with his success. The porter continues on his way with him.
LA CONTAT. Oh, the darling! He’s good enough to eat!
DESMOULINS. Let’s nibble the brat! Bravo, terror of the aristos! — Gentlemen, young Leonidas has forgotten one of our friends, M. de Vintimille, Marquis de Castelnau.
HULIN (to Hoche). Listen, that’s my employer they’re talking about.
DESMOULINS. We owe him something. The marshal has just named him to the guard of the Bastille, with M. de Launey; and he’s pledged that within two days, we’ll come begging for mercy, barefoot and with ropes around our necks. I propose that one of us make a gift of his rope to this friend of the people.
THE CROWD. Burn him! — He lives near here. — Burn his house, his furniture, his wife, his children!
VINTIMILLE (appearing in the middle of the crowd, cold and ironic). Gentlemen.
LA CONTAT. Oh my God!
HULIN. Hoche! — (He seizes Hoche by the arm.)
HOCHE. What’s the matter?
HULIN. It’s him.
HOCHE. Who?
HULIN. Vintimille.
HOCHE. Vintimille?
Hulin nods yes.
VINTIMILLE. Gentlemen, M. de Vintimille’s upholsterer requests the floor.
THE CROWD. The floor to the upholsterer!
VINTIMILLE. Gentlemen, you are quite right to want to burn this wicked aristocrat, who laughs at you, who despises the people, and who goes about saying that dogs must be whipped when they show their teeth. Burn, gentlemen, burn, spare him nothing. But, if you please, may the outbursts of so just a fury not turn against yourselves, and take care not to confound in one destruction your property and his. And first of all, gentlemen, is it just to ruin at once M. de Vintimille and those who ruin him — I mean his creditors? Allow me to beg mercy, at least for the furniture that belongs to me, and for which this miser has never paid me a thing.
THE CROWD. Yes, yes, take back your furniture!
VINTIMILLE. The success of my petition emboldens me, gentlemen, to present a second one for the architect of the mansion. No more than I has he managed to see the color of M. de Vintimille’s money; and he begs you to consider that you would do him a very serious injury by burning a building that is the guarantee of his debt.
THE CROWD. All right then, pass on the mansion.
VINTIMILLE. As for his wife, gentlemen — why burn what belongs to you? His wife is public property. The king, the court, the city, the clergy, the commoners, have often appreciated her great qualities. A liberal and truly philosophical spirit, she recognizes no privileges; the three orders are equal before her; she realizes in herself the union of the nation. Let us honor so rare a virtue. Gentlemen, mercy for Madame.
DESMOULINS. Mercy for Our Lady!
THE CROWD (laughing). Yes, yes, mercy for the wife!
VINTIMILLE. Lastly, gentlemen. I abuse your patience.
THE CROWD. No! No!
VINTIMILLE. Lastly, would you not shudder, gentlemen, in consigning M. de Vintimille’s children to the pyre, to compete with our ordinary tragedians, and to be infanticides without knowing it?
THE CROWD (convulsed with laughter). Ha! Ha! Long live the bastards!
VINTIMILLE (changing tone at the end of his speech). As for him, gentlemen, hang him, carve him, burn him; and I even encourage you to do so; for if you don’t burn him, it is he who will burn you.
He steps down from his chair and disappears into the crowd, which laughs, shouts, and cheers him.
LA CONTAT (goes quickly to Vintimille). Leave at once! They might recognize you.
VINTIMILLE. Contat, you were there? What are you doing in such company?
LA CONTAT. One should not mock the dogs until one is out of the village.
VINTIMILLE. Pah! Every dog that barks doesn’t bite… Come.
LA CONTAT. Not now, later.
VINTIMILLE. Rendezvous at the Bastille.
LA CONTAT. At the Bastille, agreed.
He goes out.
HOCHE. And that was really him? You’re sure?
HULIN. Of course!
HOCHE. The scoundrel! What effrontery!
HULIN. A mixture of courage and ignominy.
HOCHE. That’s often seen among our leaders.
HULIN. That one made his fortune by marrying one of the old king’s mistresses; and the same man did wonders at Krefeld and Rossbach.
HOCHE. We’ll meet him again soon.
AN OLD MARKET WOMAN. My children, why do you always talk of burning and hanging and sacking everything? What good will that do you? I know perfectly well you won’t do any of it. But then, why say it? Do you think your soup will be any better for cooking a few aristocrats in it? They’ll go away with their money, and we’ll be still more wretched than before. — You see, you have to accept things as they are, and not believe the liars who claim you can change them with shouts. Shall I tell you? We’re wasting our time here. Nothing will happen. Nothing can happen. They threaten you with famine, with war, with the whole Apocalypse. All that is newspaper inventions, provocateurs’ tricks. There’s a misunderstanding with the King. But it will be straightened out, if we each go quietly about our business. We have a good King; he has promised to keep our good Monsieur Necker for us, who will give us a good Constitution. Why not believe it? Isn’t that just plain good sense? Why do you want good sense not to be right? I believe in it; I was as much a gawker as you; I’ve wasted four hours here; I’m off to sell my turnips.
THE CROWD (murmur of approval). She’s right. — You’re right, mother. Let’s go home.
HULIN. What do you say to that?
HOCHE (smiling). She reminds me of my old aunt. She always talked of patience, just when she was about to box my ears.
HULIN. What she says seems very reasonable to me.
HOCHE. I’d like nothing better than to believe it; I find it so natural that reason should prevail that, if I listened to myself, I’d leave it to my enemies themselves to make it triumph. But I’ve been disillusioned too often by experience; I open my eyes, and I see Gonchon and his agents, hurrying to close their shops. They do nothing without a motive. I greatly fear that this sudden calm is only the lull before the storm, and the crisis of the ill. No one really believes it. They’ve all stayed, even the old woman. They try to delude themselves; but they can’t. They have the fever. Listen to the noise of the crowd. It’s no longer shouting; it’s whispering. A tree’s shiver. The little wind before the rain… (He seizes Hulin’s hand.) And listen!… Attention! Hulin… Here it is! Here it is!…
A great confused clamor rises from the back of the garden, and approaches with the speed and brilliance of thunder. All rise and look.
A MAN (out of breath, hatless, his clothes in disorder, rushes onto the stage, crying out in a terrified voice). Necker is exiled!
THE CROWD (seizing him, rushing at the man). What? What? Necker! It can’t be true!
THE MAN (crying out). Necker is banished! — He’s gone, gone!
THE CROWD (howling). Kill him! — He’s an agent of Versailles!
THE MAN (terrified, struggling). What are you doing? — But you haven’t understood! — I’m telling you that Necker—
THE CROWD. Into the basin with the spy! Drown him!
THE MAN (screaming). Help!
HOCHE. Let’s save him, Hulin!
HULIN. You’d have to knock out twenty to save one.
They try in vain to force a passage through the crowd, which shouts and carries the wretch away. Robespierre appears on a table and signals that he wishes to speak. Hoche, Hulin, Desmoulins, and a few others notice him.
HOCHE. That small, thin man trying to speak.
DESMOULINS. It’s Robespierre, the deputy from Arras.
HOCHE. Shout, Hulin! Make them be quiet!
HULIN. Listen! Listen to citizen Robespierre!
Robespierre trembles at first; he cannot be heard amid the noise; people cry: “Louder!”
DESMOULINS. Speak, Robespierre.
HULIN. Don’t be afraid.
Robespierre looks at him with a timid and contemptuous smile.
DESMOULINS. He’s not used to speaking.
HOCHE. Silence, comrades!
ROBESPIERRE (constraining himself to calm). Citizens, I am a deputy of the Third Estate. I come from Versailles. This man speaks true. Necker is dismissed. Power is in the hands of the nation’s enemies. De Broglie, Breteuil, Foulon: Carnage, Theft, and Famine are ministers today. It is war. I have come to shut myself in with you, to share your fate.
THE PEOPLE (terrified). We are lost!
DESMOULINS. What must we do?
ROBESPIERRE. Let us know how to die.
HOCHE (shrugging his shoulders). Lawyer!
HULIN. Speak to them, citizen deputy.
ROBESPIERRE. What use are speeches? Let each one question his conscience.
HOCHE. They’re panicking. If we don’t make them act on the spot, they’re lost.
Robespierre takes from his pocket handwritten sheets and printer’s proofs.
HULIN. What’s he going to read? — Leave your papers alone! — As if the least generous word didn’t have a thousand times more power than all your paperwork!
ROBESPIERRE (indifferent to what Hulin says, unfolds the papers and reads in his cold, weak, incisive voice). “Declaration of Rights.”
HOCHE. Listen!
ROBESPIERRE. “Declaration of Rights, proposed in yesterday’s session, Saturday, July eleventh, to the National Assembly.
“The National Assembly proclaims in the face of the Universe, and under the eyes of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
“Nature has made men free and equal…”
A thunder of applause covers the end of the sentence.
“Every man is born with inalienable and imprescriptible rights: the liberty of his thoughts, the care of his honor and his life, the entire ownership of his person, the pursuit of happiness, and resistance to oppression.”
The cheers redouble.
HOCHE (drawing his saber). Resistance to oppression!
He is imitated; in an instant, the crowd bristles with weapons.
ROBESPIERRE. “There is oppression against the social body when a single one of its members is oppressed. There is oppression against each member when the social body is oppressed.”
GONCHON (to his men). Are they going to go on like this much longer? We have to get these people away from here. If the army comes, let them go get themselves killed elsewhere. (He speaks in a low voice to his men.)
ROBESPIERRE. “The nation is sovereign.”
A voice is heard crying. The crowd trembles and listens distractedly.
HOCHE. The stroke of the helm, Hulin! Here is the tempest!
A VOICE (terrified, crying). They’re coming! They’re coming! The cavalry!
ONE OF GONCHON’S MEN (in a shrill voice). Every man for himself!
A moment of jostling and cries.
HULIN (leaping on the man who is shouting, and dealing him a blow to the head that silences him, suffocated). A thousand Gods! — Continue!
Robespierre tries to continue; but his voice chokes and is lost amid the tumult of the crowd. Hoche leaps onto the table next to Robespierre, whom he towers over with his great height, snatches the paper from him, and reads in an ardent and triumphant voice whose accents immediately stir the crowd.
HOCHE. “The nation is sovereign; the government is its work.
“When the government violates the rights of the nation, the insurrection of the nation is the most sacred of duties.
“Those who make war upon a people to halt the progress of liberty must be pursued by all, not as ordinary enemies, but as slaves in revolt against the Sovereign of the earth, which is the Human Race.”
Amid the cheers, Desmoulins, his hair in the wind, his eyes exalted, mounts the table from which Hoche descends.
DESMOULINS. Liberty! Liberty! She soars above our heads. She bears me away in her sacred tempest. To victory! Let us march in the wind of her wings! The time of servitude passes — it has passed. On your feet! Let us turn the thunderbolt against the wretches who armed it! — To the King! (The crowd cries: “To the King!”) — Look at me, spies hiding here! It is I, Camille Desmoulins, who calls Paris to revolt! I fear nothing: come what may, they shall not take me alive. (He shows a pistol he has drawn from his breast.) The only misfortune would be to see France become enslaved again. We shall not see it. She will be free with us, or die with us. Yes, like Virginius, we will stab her with our own hands rather than let her be violated by tyrants. — Brothers, we shall be free! We are already free! Against Bastilles of stone let us oppose the rampart of our breasts, impregnable fortress of Liberty! — Look! The sky opens, the gods are with us. The sun tears the clouds. A shiver of joy stirs the leaves of the chestnut trees. O leaves, that tremble with the fever of a people awakening to life, be our colors, our rallying sign, our promise of victory — leaves the color of hope, color of the sea, color of Nature: young and free! — (He tears off a small branch.) In hoc signo vinces! Liberty! Liberty!
THE PEOPLE. Liberty!
They press around Desmoulins, clasp and embrace him.
LA CONTAT (adorning her hair with the tree leaves). O young Liberty! Flourish in my hair and blossom in my heart! (She throws handfuls of leaves around her.) Friends, deck yourselves with the cockade of summer!
The people tear the leaves and branches and strip the trees.
THE OLD MARKET WOMAN. To the King! He said it well! We must go to the King! — To Versailles, my children!
HULIN (pointing to the old woman and la Contat). There they are, more furious than the rest!
HOCHE. We’ll have trouble stopping them now.
THE PEOPLE. To the Champ de Mars! — Let’s face the Versaillais! We’ll show them what stuff we’re made of!
— The wretches! They thought to stifle the people of Paris in silence!
THE OLD WOMAN. I’ll have their hide. I’ll trim their whiskers, those brigand Germans!
DESMOULINS. They’ve banished our Necker. — And we banish them! We want Necker to stay. And we are going to show the world our will.
THE PEOPLE. A procession in honor of Necker! — His portrait is here, at Curtius’s, in the wax figure cabinet. — Let’s carry it in triumph! — The shop is closed! — Break down the door!
GONCHON (to his men). Attention! Let’s take advantage of the opportunity!
A MERCHANT. Gonchon! They’re ransacking everything!
GONCHON. Let them, do as they do.
THE MERCHANT. But they’ll come into our shops!
GONCHON. Don’t fart against the thunder!
He enters the shop following the people, and shouts like the others. The rest of the crowd runs in all directions; and in a few moments, sticks, swords, pistols, and axes appear everywhere.
THE PEOPLE. Solemnity, comrades! No disorder!
— Hey, boy! Off to school! We’re not here to laugh!
— It must be solemn, mournful! We must teach the tyrants the sacred terror of the nation.
The bust of Necker emerges from the shop, carried triumphantly by the athletic porter, who clasps it with both arms against his chest. The crowd presses around him.
THE PEOPLE. Hats off! Here is our defender, our father!
— Cover him with crape! The Fatherland is in mourning!
Gonchon and his men emerge from the shop, carrying behind the others the bust of the Duke of Orléans, and hypocritically affecting the solemn and exalted attitudes of the others. The people take no notice.
HULIN. What’s that?
HOCHE. It’s the patron of our friend Gonchon, citizen Orléans.
HULIN. I’ll smash his head, and those who carry him.
HOCHE (smiling). No, no, leave it. One must always let people compromise themselves.
HULIN. Don’t you know who he is?
HOCHE. An Orléans? If you know one, you know them all. A vicious brat who clings to Liberty’s skirts and tries to slip his hand underneath. He wants to get slapped. He will be. Let him be.
HULIN. But what if he wants to steal Liberty?
HOCHE. That runt? Let him just be careful she doesn’t steal his head!
Gonchon and his men cover the bust of d’Orléans with crape, imitating the bearers of Necker. A procession forms with a strange and solemn order. Imposing silence. Suddenly, the old market woman arrives, beating a drum. A tremendous clamor rises.
THE PEOPLE. Forward!
The procession moves. First, the old woman at the drum. Then the bust of Necker, which the porter has placed on his head. He is surrounded by men of the people with sticks and axes — by young dandies dressed in striped silk, with watches and jewelry, armed with cudgels or swords — by French Guards, saber drawn — by women, in the front rank of whom comes la Contat, on Desmoulins’s arm. Then Gonchon, solemnly carrying the bust of the Duke of Orléans, surrounded by the merchants of the Palais-Royal. Then the crowd. Grand buzzing and solemn silence, from which rise, at intervals, cheers that travel the entire length of the procession like shivers, and fall silent at the same time.
HOCHE (showing the people to Hulin). Well, Hulin, are you convinced now?
HULIN. It’s absurd… This disorderly crowd, going to attack an army… They’ll get themselves massacred. It makes no sense. (He follows the crowd.)
HOCHE. Where are you going?
HULIN. With them, naturally.
HOCHE. Old comrade, your instinct is better than your head.
HULIN. You understand this, do you? You know where this blind people is going?
HOCHE. Don’t worry about understanding. It knows; it sees for you.
HULIN. I, the blind one?
HOCHE. The blind one, yes.
ACT TWO
The night of Monday the 13th to Tuesday the 14th of July. Two to three o’clock in the morning.
A street in Paris, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. In the background rises, above the houses, the enormous black mass of the Bastille, whose towers, wrapped in night, emerge gradually against the sky as dawn approaches. To the left, in the foreground, one sees the interior of a low-ceilinged, dimly lit room, a sort of poor café where the patriots gather. (1) At the back, and at a turning of the street, Lucile’s house. A morning glory twines around the balcony rail and climbs the wall. No streetlamps. The street is lit by candles placed at the edge of the windows. In the distance one hears the ring of anvils in the forges and hammers, sometimes the tocsin of church bells, or very distant gunshots. People of the common sort and bourgeois work at a barricade of barrels, wood, and stones, at the bend in the street, below Lucile’s window.
(1) This arrangement is eliminated in performance, where the scene of the deputies and bourgeois (Robespierre, Desmoulins, Cloots, Fauchet, Hulin) is replaced by the scene of the man of the people on guard. — See the Variants at the end of the play.
A MASON. A few more stones.
A WORKER (loaded with his bed). Here, put this in. It’s my bed.
THE MASON. You’re going to sleep here?
THE WORKER. In a little while, with a bullet in my body.
THE MASON. You’re cheerful.
THE WORKER. If the brigands get through, we won’t need anything anymore. Our beds are made elsewhere.
A CARPENTER. Help me stretch this rope.
AN APPRENTICE. What for?
THE CARPENTER. To trip the horses.
A TYPOGRAPHER. Camuset, hey!
ANOTHER. What?
THE TYPOGRAPHER. Listen.
THE OTHER. What?
THE TYPOGRAPHER. Don’t you hear?
THE OTHER. I hear the anvils ringing. In all the forges, they’re making pikes.
THE TYPOGRAPHER. No, that’s not it. — Over there… (He points to the ground.)
THE OTHER. Down there?
THE TYPOGRAPHER. Yes. Underground. (He lies down, his ear against the ground.)
THE OTHER. You’re dreaming.
THE WORKER (lying on the ground). It sounds like mining.
THE OTHER. Good God! They’re going to blow us up!
THE CARPENTER (incredulous). Come now!
THE WORKER (lying down). They’ve hidden thousands of barrels of powder down there.
THE OTHER WORKER. That’s why none can be found anywhere.
THE CARPENTER. Do you think an army walks underground as easily as a band of rats?
THE WORKER (lying down). Come on! They have tunnels running from the Bastille to Vincennes.
THE CARPENTER. All that is fairy tales.
THE OTHER WORKER (who has also gotten on all fours to listen). The noise is moving away.
THE FIRST WORKER (getting up). I’ll go have a look in the cellar all the same. Are you coming, Camuset?
They both enter a house.
THE CARPENTER (laughing). In the cellar? Well, well! They’re looking for an excuse to oil their throats. Let us finish our work.
THE MASON (casting a glance behind him as he works). Dear God!
THE CARPENTER. What’s the matter?
THE MASON (pointing to the Bastille). That, that, weighing on my back. Every time I turn around and see that Bastille, it grips my throat.
THE CARPENTER. Right. One looks underground, another looks up. Don’t turn around, and work.
THE MASON. No use. I can feel it there. It’s as if someone were standing behind me with fist raised over my head, ready to strike me down. — Dear God!
AN OLD BOURGEOIS. He’s right: we’re being watched by its cannons. What use is what we’re doing? With a flick of the wrist, it could knock all this down like a house of cards.
THE CARPENTER. No, no, come now.
THE MASON (shaking his fist at the Bastille). Villain! When will we be rid of you!
THE CARPENTER. Soon.
SEVERAL. You think? — How?
THE CARPENTER. I don’t know. But it will be. Courage! Come! There is no night so long that it doesn’t end in day. (They work.)
THE APPRENTICE. In the meantime, we can barely see.
THE CARPENTER (calling up to the windows). Hey! Up there! Hey! Women! Tend your lights! We need to see tonight.
A WOMAN (at a window, relighting candles). Well, is it coming along?
THE CARPENTER. More than one will leave his carcass here, before they get through.
THE WOMAN. Are they coming soon?
THE CARPENTER. They say Grenelle is in blood. You can hear firing from Vaugirard.
THE OLD BOURGEOIS. They’re waiting for daylight to enter.
THE MASON. What time is it?
THE WOMAN. Three o’clock. Listen: the cock is crowing.
THE MASON (wiping himself with his sleeve). Let’s hurry, let’s hurry! Good God, it’s hot!
THE CARPENTER. So much the better! Summer plowing is worth manure.
THE OLD BOURGEOIS. I can’t go on.
THE CARPENTER. Rest a bit, Monsieur Notary. No one is bound to do more than he can.
THE OLD BOURGEOIS (bringing a paving stone). I want to put this one more.
THE CARPENTER. Go more slowly. He who can’t gallop, let him trot.
THE WOMAN. Have we finally got muskets?
THE CARPENTER. Bah! At the Hôtel de Ville, they keep putting us off with promises. There are a few hundred bourgeois who hoard everything.
THE MASON. No matter! We have knives, sticks, stones. Everything is good for killing.
THE WOMAN. I’ve carried up to my room tiles, crockery, bottle ends; I’ve brought everything near the window — everything, the dishes, the furniture, the books. If they pass, I’ll smash their faces.
ANOTHER WOMAN (at her window). My kettle has been on the fire and boiling since dinner. I’m cooking paving stones in it. Let them come; I’ll grill them.
A BEGGAR (with a musket, addressing a bourgeois). Give me money.
THE BOURGEOIS. We don’t beg here.
THE BEGGAR. I’m not asking you for bread, though my guts are empty. But I’ve got a musket, and nothing to buy powder with. Give me money.
ANOTHER BEGGAR (a bit tipsy). Money, I’ve got, as much as you want. (He pulls out a handful of money.)
FIRST BEGGAR. Where did you get that?
SECOND BEGGAR. I took it from the Lazarists today, when the convent was looted.
FIRST BEGGAR (grabbing him by the throat). So you want to dishonor the people, you swine?
SECOND BEGGAR (trying to break free). Well, what? Are you mad?
FIRST BEGGAR (shaking him). Empty your pockets!
SECOND BEGGAR. But—
FIRST BEGGAR (emptying the other’s pockets himself). Empty your pockets, thief!
SECOND BEGGAR. Are we no longer allowed to rob aristos?
THE CROWD. Hang him! — String him up on the sign! — No, a beating will do. Beg the people’s pardon. — Good. — Now clear out!
The man runs away at top speed.
FIRST BEGGAR (going back to work). We should have hanged him, as an example. More will come. We’re liable to get dirty in the company of these thieves. It’s disagreeable.
CAMILLE DESMOULINS (entering as usual, nose in the air, idling and distracted). You’ll get off with a brushing.
They laugh and go back to work.
THE PEOPLE. Come, let’s finish this.
DESMOULINS (looking at the house and the workers). My Lucile is here. I’ve just come from her house. The house was empty. They told me the whole family had gone to dinner with relatives in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. They couldn’t get back, no doubt. They’ve been blocked. — Well, of course! I should think so! What a fortification! Scarp and counterscarp, lunette and half-moon, nothing is missing. They’re laying siege to the house. — But my friends, the point is to demolish the Bastille; the point is not to build another one. — I don’t know what your enemies will think. In any case, it’s exceedingly dangerous for your friends. I’ve just caught my legs in your strings; a bit more and I’d have stayed there. — This barrel doesn’t hold. It needs more paving stones.
THE CARPENTER. Do you work as well as you talk?
DESMOULINS (gaily, taking a pickaxe). I can work too.
From the top of the barricade, where he climbs, he can touch the window of the house. Inside the room, one sees a light pass. Desmoulins looks.
She’s there.
THE OLD BOURGEOIS. The provost Flesselles is betraying us. He pretends to be with us. He’s in correspondence with Versailles.
THE MASON. He’s the one who invented this bourgeois militia, which, under the pretext of defending us, seeks only to prevent us from acting. They’re all Judases in there, sold, and ready to sell us.
THE CARPENTER. All this teaches us, my friends, that we must count only on ourselves. I’ve known that for a long time.
Meanwhile, Camille softly taps the windowpane, murmuring: “Lucile.” The light goes out. The window opens. Lucile’s little face appears, with her smiling teeth. They both put a finger on their lips, to warn each other to be silent and take care. They speak through amorous and amused signs. Each time the barricade workers raise their heads in their direction, Lucile quickly closes the half-open window. Two workers notice her nevertheless.
A WORKER (pointing to Desmoulins). Well, what’s he doing?
SECOND WORKER. The lad’s in love. Well, let’s not disturb them!
FIRST WORKER. He’ll only fight the better for it. The rooster defends his hen.
They continue working, while casting from time to time a curious and good-natured glance at the young couple’s little game; but with touching precautions, so as not to disturb them.
LUCILE (in a low voice). What are you doing there?
DESMOULINS. A fort to defend you.
LUCILE. I can’t stay. My parents are next door.
DESMOULINS. A little longer.
LUCILE. Later. When everyone is in bed and they’ve gone. (Same game.)
LUCILE (listening to noises in the house). They’re calling me. Wait for me.
She blows him a kiss and disappears. In this little dialogue, the words matter only for the value given them by the lovers’ looks and smiles.
THE MASON (looking at the barricade). There! That’s done — and well done, I dare say. All that’s missing is a bouquet on top.
THE CARPENTER (clapping Desmoulins on the shoulder). Don’t work too hard; you’ll catch pleurisy.
DESMOULINS. Each to his own work, comrade. After all, if this barricade is standing, it was my voice that raised it.
THE MASON. What’s that you’re singing?
THE CARPENTER. You do your work with your voice?
DESMOULINS. Were none of you at the Palais-Royal yesterday?
THE CROWD. The Palais-Royal? — Wait a moment! — Are you the lad who called us to arms, who gave us the cockade? You’re Monsieur Desmoulins? — Good God! How fine it was! How well you spoke! I wept like a calf. — The brave little man! — Monsieur Desmoulins, Monsieur Desmoulins, will you permit me! I must shake your hand! — Long live Monsieur Desmoulins! Long live our little Camille!
GONCHON (captain of the bourgeois militia, entering, followed by a patrol of his company). What the devil are you doing here? What are you bellowing about? You’re disturbing the peace, you’re waking the neighborhood. Clear off! Go home!
THE PEOPLE. It’s that damned bourgeois guard again! Fiddlesticks for the watch! To hell with the sergeants! — Disturbing the peace? That’s too much! We’re defending Paris.
GONCHON. That’s not your concern.
THE PEOPLE (stunned and indignant). That’s not our concern?
GONCHON (louder). That’s not your concern! It only concerns us. We’re the ones the Standing Committee has charged with defense. Clear off!
DESMOULINS (looking more closely). But it’s Gonchon!
GONCHON (stopping short before the barricade). In the name of all that’s unholy! Who are the sons of bitches who took it upon themselves to raise this contraption, to tear up the street, to block traffic? Knock it down!
THE PEOPLE (beside themselves). Tear down our barricade! Let them try!
THE CARPENTER. Listen, captain, listen well, and weigh what’s about to be said. We agree to leave, and not to dispute the Committee’s orders, though they’re idiotic. There must be discipline in war; and one submits. But if anyone touches a single stone of our fortification, we’ll smash your face, yours and your monkeys’.
THE PEOPLE. Tear down our barricade!
GONCHON. Who’s talking about tearing it down? Are we masons? We have other things to do. Clear off!
THE MASON (threatening). We’re going, but you heard?
GONCHON (boldly). I said it won’t be touched; and no one will touch it. No back talk!
The barricade workers disperse. Desmoulins lingers.
GONCHON. Didn’t you hear, you?
DESMOULINS. Are there no privileges for friends, Gonchon?
GONCHON. Is that you, you damned chatterbox? — Arrest this fellow!
ROBESPIERRE (entering). Sacrilege, who dares lay a hand on a founder of Liberty!
DESMOULINS. Ah! Robespierre! — Thank you.
GONCHON (releasing Desmoulins. Aside). A deputy! The devil! (Aloud.) All right. I’m charged with maintaining order. I will maintain order in spite of everything. — Clear off!
ROBESPIERRE. Come with me, Camille. Our friends are meeting tonight, in this house.
He points to the house on the left, in the foreground.
DESMOULINS (aside). From here, I’ll see Lucile’s window.
GONCHON (to his men). And we, let’s continue our rounds. — Ah! the wretches! There’s no end to them! No matter how wide you keep your eyes open: the barricades spring out of the ground like mushrooms; and all the streets are full of these good-for-nothings who think only of fighting. If we let them, by God, there’d be no king left tomorrow! — Come on! (To one of the bourgeois guards.) Hey! Blast it! Watch out, you! What are you doing with that pistol? Regulations prohibit firearms. It’s exceedingly dangerous. Put that away, you animal! (He goes out with his men.)
Robespierre and Desmoulins approach the house on the left, at whose door, in a dark recess, a man in his shirt, bare-legged, a musket on his shoulder, smoking his pipe, stands guard.
THE MAN ON GUARD. Who are you?
ROBESPIERRE. Robespierre.
THE MAN. Don’t know you.
ROBESPIERRE. Deputy from Arras.
THE MAN. Show your papers.
DESMOULINS. Desmoulins.
THE MAN. The little one with the cockade? Pass, comrade.
DESMOULINS (pointing to Robespierre). He’s with me.
THE MAN. All right, pass too, citizen Robert Pierre.
DESMOULINS (smugly). Admire, my friend, the power of eloquence.
Robespierre looks at him, smiles bitterly, sighs, and follows without speaking.
They enter the house. (1) One sees Hulin, the Abbé Fauchet, Cloots, and a few others, bourgeois and petty bourgeois, seated around a table or standing, drinking, smoking, and arguing.
(1) Through a system of decoration, used at the People’s Theatre of Bussang, the interior of the house should only be visible during the following scene, until the arrival of Hoche. The rest of the time, it is hidden, either by a moving set representing the house’s street façade, or by a metal curtain, which lights up to reveal the café interior.
THE ABBÉ FAUCHET (going to meet Robespierre). Well?
ROBESPIERRE. Well, the battle is engaged now. There is nothing to do but wait.
FAUCHET. Wait, wait… If only it were over!
ROBESPIERRE. Let us not wish it too much. We are still free tonight; we can dream of liberty together.
FAUCHET. No, I’d rather anything, even the worst, than this uncertainty!
HULIN (looking out the window). What trouble they go to! And for what? A few volleys of cannon will soon clear all that away.
THE BOURGEOIS. We don’t even have weapons.
— And that Bastille, getting ready to crush us!
HULIN (looking). They’re not sleeping up there any more than we are. Look. Lights are moving on the left tower.
— They’ve groomed their cannons. They’ve trained them on the faubourg.
HULIN. We’re like an anthill that lumberjacks are smoking out, and that agitates itself in vain.
FAUCHET. And the Assembly?
ROBESPIERRE. No news. It’s still blockaded. Perhaps it’s already over on that side.
FAUCHET. No, no, God cannot permit that!
CLOOTS (cheerful face, open, clear voice, somewhat eccentric manners). Let’s hear about your God! He’s a fine fellow. I wonder how anyone can be naive enough to expect anything from an individual who has more crimes on his conscience than Cartouche, or the King of Prussia, since he’s the father of them all.
FAUCHET. He made evil so that we might combat it.
CLOOTS. Yes, yes, I know the refrain: “This God who kills God to appease God.” “God the Father deems men worthy of His vengeance; God the Son deems them worthy of His mercy; and God the Holy Spirit remains neutral.” Let all three be silent, instead of quarreling. They have nothing better to do than not exist. — And they don’t deprive themselves of it.
DESMOULINS (laughing). Is that you, Monsieur de Cloots! Since when have you been back?
CLOOTS. I was traveling in Spain, wandering from town to town, following my habit, hunted by every police force, enemy of every State. The news of events in France reached me in Madrid. I foresaw what would follow, and I came at full gallop to take part in the fight for our dear Paris.
DESMOULINS. It’s very good of you — rich, independent, and a foreigner — to come of your own free will to share our dangers.
CLOOTS. I’m not the only one. I passed on the road English and Americans. It was a race to see who would be the first to come to Paris’s rescue. We owe it to Paris: it is for us that it fights. Don’t call me a foreigner. My fatherland is yours — that of Humanity!
DESMOULINS (laughing). But that isn’t God’s fatherland, from what I hear?
CLOOTS. Excuse me, I can’t stand that rogue; and that is what I was saying, perhaps a bit too vehemently, to the Abbé, who is an honest man, and whom I respect. It outrages me that there are still people — and there are some in your Assembly — who think of prefacing your Constitution with this gothic absurdity: “In the presence of the Supreme Being,” or “Having invoked the assistance of the Supreme Legislator of the Universe.” A fine exordium to the emancipation of man! Then call your declaration of liberty a declaration of slavery straightaway!
DESMOULINS (slyly, pointing Robespierre out to Cloots). Address yourself to him.
CLOOTS (accosting Robespierre). You believe in that? You swallow such nonsense?
Robespierre turns his back on him.
CLOOTS (to Fauchet). Who is he?
FAUCHET (in a low voice). A provincial deputy, who gives somewhat ridiculous speeches to the Assembly, but well-intentioned.
CLOOTS. He’s quite eloquent when he keeps quiet. — I’ll convert him.
DESMOULINS. Leave God alone. It’s a word like any other.
CLOOTS. Words are more murderous than men. It’s on that one, for centuries, that tyrants and their armies have leaned.
DESMOULINS. All the more reason to put God in our Constitution. We seduce Him secretly; we make Him cross over to the camp of Liberty. Hush! Don’t tell! Isn’t that right, Monsieur Abbé?
FAUCHET. My poor friends, do believe that the good Lord is no more foolish than anyone, and there’s no reason He shouldn’t prefer justice and liberty to their enemies.
CLOOTS. If He existed, He would be a sovereign, therefore unjust and despotic. No sovereign of the world, but the Lord Human Race!
HULIN. Ah! the blessed chatterboxes! They make war on God as if He were the point. Gentlemen, if you please, let us come back to the matter at hand. The king attacks us any moment now. Let us deal with the king. As for God, we have time to manage.
THE BOURGEOIS (shaking their heads). Ah, as to that, what can be done? The revolution was started too early. Why was the people aroused? We weren’t ready.
DESMOULINS (stung). It wasn’t we who started it. The declaration of war came from Versailles. And besides, even if one had wished it, one couldn’t have waited. We had to speak, we had to act.
THE BOURGEOIS. True. Fate willed it.
HULIN. But in the end, is there no hope?
THE BOURGEOIS. — Perhaps, if the provinces imitated Paris.
— Alone, it won’t dare anything.
— Besides, it knows nothing.
HULIN. But what should we do?
THE BOURGEOIS. — Negotiate with the court?
— It won’t even agree to discuss with us.
— Its first condition would be the surrender of the movement’s leaders.
FAUCHET. If it sufficed for a few men to surrender themselves to buy the freedom of the rest!
CLOOTS. There’s my priest again, with his old ideas of sacrifice!
DESMOULINS. To surrender the people’s leaders would be to surrender the people!
CLOOTS. Why are you throwing in the towel? Patience! If it’s tomorrow, in ten years, in a century, we are sure of victory.
HULIN. If it’s not tomorrow, it’s a bit late for us.
CLOOTS. It will be tomorrow. The hour has struck. Man has come of age; he takes possession of the earth. The harvest of revolt rises on the fields. Leave it to us: we shall appeal to all the free men of the universe.
HULIN. A thin army. We haven’t time to wait.
DESMOULINS. Robespierre, you’re silent. Do you doubt our cause?
ROBESPIERRE. I do not doubt justice: it is with us. But I know that the justice of a cause is, in this world, a reason for it to be crushed. No matter. It is our inflexible duty to defend it to the end. Woe to whoever quibbles with his duty and tries to evade it. Our goal is not victory, but virtue.
DESMOULINS. I recognize my Roman, with his eternal maxim: the worst is always certain. Your encouragements have an infallible effect on me: they strip me of all courage. Your stoicism is a sheet of ice. Your words are a perpetual knell.
HULIN. Well, I see that in the way of advice, you have no other than to do as one does in Paris when it rains: let it rain. Yet we must decide! I ask only to march; but tell me where to go! If only Hoche were here! — Well, let us do our best. I hope no more than you; but at least we can hold out long enough to make it cost those who try to flush us from our den. Let each arm himself for the fight. There is no other alternative.
ROBESPIERRE. If Paris cannot be defended, let Paris be burned, let Paris be wiped from the earth rather than be returned to slavery. One day, Liberty will rise from our ashes.
DESMOULINS (looking out the window). Who wanders haggard and staggering, with furious gestures, bumping into walls?
HULIN (looking). It’s that madman Marat.
Marat, hatless, clothing open and disheveled, eyes starting from his head, hair in the wind, walks with great strides in the street, staggering at times as if drunk, shaking his fist at the sky and striking the walls of the houses.
MARAT (in the street). O night! What crushing mass you weigh upon this city! — Inert and empty nothingness, death is in you. The death of this people, the death of my thoughts, the death of my Liberty! O God! And they sleep! Are they already dead? They always have been. — I wander through the streets, like a dog howling at death, in this funeral vigil, beneath these lights that illuminate Liberty’s funeral. — Supreme Being, were we not worthy of this Good, whose presentiment you had placed in the hearts of a few chosen ones? — Then burn these men, scourge them — so that from the excess of suffering, their souls may rise more quickly to the truth! Strike! Hasten by your blows the advent of justice! — O God! To be vanquished, vanquished again, all one’s life vanquished! To feel within oneself this force, these tempests, all the powers of the Revolution, ready to overturn the idols of the past — and to be vanquished! Liberty! Liberty! Shall I not tear you from the prison of this breast, of this sky, of this world, where you hide, like the spark in the stone! — Rise from the earth! Rise from this city! I want you! I want you, Liberty!
He bloodies his fists, striking the walls.
ROBESPIERRE (inside the house. He has risen and joined his hands with emotion. The others have risen instinctively around him, watching him, and listen reverently. The two voices of Robespierre and Marat answer each other like a prayer). O Liberty! So many centuries you have struggled against a hostile universe! After so many sufferings, you had broken through the chaos. The light of your eyes appeared to us at last. So near to us, so patiently, so dearly awaited, will you forsake us? Will your gaze be extinguished — for how many centuries more? The globe lies buried in darkness. Light, will you not rise at last?
Outside, the joyful and clear voice of Hoche is heard, amid the cheers and laughter of the crowd. The windows of the houses open. People appear and lean out to see.
HULIN (at the window). It’s Hoche! I hear his laugh! — Ah! That does one good!
Hoche enters, amid a troop of French Guards armed like him, and a crowd that laughs and shouts. La Contat stands out above all by her high spirits. Marat, slumped on the steps of a house, straightens up, suspicious and uneasy.
HOCHE (laughing, showing his comrades the popular fortifications). Look at this work. Who is the Vauban who built this? Ah, the brave people! I could kiss you all. — What trouble they’ve taken! And for what, good God? — Friends, against whom is all this? Against your friends? The enemy won’t come, trust me!
THE PEOPLE (joined by Hulin, Desmoulins, and some from the windows). Long live the French Guards!
Marat springs before Hoche and bars his way, arms outstretched.
MARAT. Halt, soldier! Not one step farther!
The astonished crowd speaks confusedly and presses forward to see.
CLOOTS. What’s wrong with him? Has he lost his mind?
HULIN. That happened long ago.
MARAT. Surrender your saber! Surrender your weapons, all of you!
DESMOULINS. He’s going to get himself hacked to pieces.
THE FRENCH GUARDS. What, you rogue! — Surrender my saber? — I’ll return it in your belly!
THE PEOPLE. Beat him up!
HOCHE. Peace. Let me explain myself with him. I know him. — Let go, friend!
MARAT (rising on tiptoe to take Hoche by the collar). Surrender your saber!
HOCHE (calmly freeing himself and, with his hand placed on Marat, holding him still despite his contortions). And what will you do with it, my boy?
MARAT. I’ll prevent you from stabbing liberty.
HOCHE. You suspect those who come to give their blood to the people?
MARAT. Who proves your loyalty? Why should I trust unknown soldiers?
THE FRENCH GUARDS. Smash his head, Hoche!
Hoche calms them with a gesture, looks at Marat with a smile, and lets him go.
HOCHE. He’s right. Why should he trust us? He hasn’t seen us at work.
Marat, taken aback, suddenly becomes silent and motionless, staring at Hoche, listening to his words.
THE FRENCH GUARDS. Blast! It’s a bit much to let ourselves be accused, when we’re risking death for these birds!
HOCHE. Bah! He doesn’t know us; it doesn’t matter. (Kindly.) You’re wrong, Marat; but you do well to watch over the people. (To the people.) We understand each other in half a word, comrades; it took us only a moment to feel that we were decent men, and to have faith in one another. Yet he’s not wrong to give you a lesson in prudence; we are in wartime, and you have the right to demand an account from everyone; no one can escape it.
THE PEOPLE. We know you, Hoche, you’re a friend.
HOCHE. Be wary of your friends. (Smiling.) I don’t say that for myself. Besides, you’re still in too poor a position to have many friends; they’re not very dangerous. But you’ll see them come when you are powerful, and that’s when you must keep your eyes open.
THE FRENCH GUARDS. He’s good with his advice. He wants us to be prudent, and he doesn’t distrust anyone.
HOCHE (laughing). Oh! As for me, when two eyes please me, I always let myself be taken in. But if I’m a fool, that’s only my affair. You have the world to save. Don’t imitate me. We are a few hundred French Guards. Our officers, who knew our sympathies for the people, tried to send us to Saint-Denis to keep us away from you. We left the barracks, and we offer you our sabers. To reassure Marat, divide us into groups of ten or twenty, and let each group be embedded in a popular battalion. Thus you will be masters of us, and we can guide you and give you training. As for me, Marat, will you come with me? There will be profit for both of us. You’ll see that there are still decent men, and perhaps you’ll teach me to beware of traitors, though I fear you’ll waste your effort.
Marat, who has not ceased devouring Hoche with his eyes and following his words with violent attention, steps forward.
MARAT. I was wrong.
HOCHE (extending his hand with a smile). How tiring it must be to always suspect! I’d rather die.
MARAT (sighing). So would I. — But as you said just now: it’s not about us; it’s about the Nation.
HOCHE. Then continue to be the vigilant eye of the people. But I don’t envy you; my task is easier.
MARAT (looking at Hoche). O Nature, if the eyes and voice of this man are false, there is no more honesty. Soldier, I offended you before all. Before all, I ask your pardon.
HOCHE. You haven’t offended me. No one knows better than I what a military chief is, and the dangers he poses to Liberty. “Military government is that of slaves; it cannot suit men. We abhor it” as you do. (1) We come of our own will to break the blind force we hold in our hands. We bow the army at the feet of reason. Open your arms to us, make room for us at the family table, give us back our lost liberty, our chained conscience, our right to be men like you, your equals and your brothers. Soldiers, let us become People again. And you, People, all of you, become the Army! Defend yourself, defend us, defend our threatened soul! Let us join hands, embrace, be but one single heart! — Friends! Each for all! All for all!
(1) Words of Hoche.
THE PEOPLE AND THE SOLDIERS (in the grip of a transport of love and fraternal enthusiasm, weeping, embracing, and laughing, crying). Yes! For you! For you! For our brothers of the people! For our brothers the soldiers! For all who suffer! For all the oppressed! For all men!
These exclamations cross in disorder, from all sides at once, from the people, the soldiers, the street, the windows, the balconies laden with women and children, from the house on the left, at whose window press Desmoulins, Hulin, Fauchet, Cloots, Robespierre.
HULIN (at the window). Hurrah! Hoche! — At last! There’s the one who dispels the sadness!
HOCHE (warmly). Is that you, Hulin? What are you doing in there? What are you all doing there in the night? You’re brooding, naturally. What folly to shut yourselves in like this on this fine July night! A man is sad when he isolates himself from others. It’s this cellar air that breeds suspicion and doubt. Get out of your houses! Long enough we’ve been forced to stay walled up at home. Now it’s in the street, in the open air that we must live! Come feel the morning rising! The captive City breathes deeply; the breath of the meadows comes over our walls, and the armies that blockade them, to bring us the greeting of the fraternal countryside. The wheat is ripe: we shall reap it.
LA CONTAT. What a handsome lad! He spreads joy all around him. (She goes toward Hoche.)
HOCHE. Here you are, bouquet-seller of Liberty, Madame the Royalist, who ravaged the trees of the Palais-Royal with your lovely hands, to throw the people the cockades of liberation! I knew you’d come too. So you’ve come to believe in our cause?
LA CONTAT. I’ll believe in anything you like. With a face like that — (she points to him) — I’ll always be converted. (The people laugh.)
HOCHE (laughing). That doesn’t surprise me: I have the temperament of an apostle. — Well, come along; we don’t refuse anyone. And take a pike: a girl like you ought to know how to defend herself.
LA CONTAT. Not so fast! Don’t enlist me so quickly! I’m watching, I’m applauding, I find the show amusing; but I’m not playing tonight.
HOCHE. You find this amusing? You find this a game? — Look at this poor wretch, whose bones stick out beneath his blouse, this woman holding out her milkless breast to this glassy-eyed child — does that amuse you, these creatures dying of hunger? And you call this a good comedy, this people which, having neither bread nor life assured for tomorrow, thinks only of the Constitution the Assembly is elaborating, of the rights of humanity, of eternal justice? — Don’t you see that this is something as serious as a tragedy by Corneille?
LA CONTAT. Why, that’s a game too.
HOCHE. Nothing is a game. Everything is serious. Cinna and Nicomède exist as I do.
LA CONTAT. Strange fellow. The authors and actors do these things in pretense, and you take them for real: isn’t that curious?
HOCHE. You’re wrong; you don’t know yourself. I know you better than you know yourself.
LA CONTAT. You amuse me. And how do you know me?
HOCHE. I’ve heard you at the theatre; I’ve seen your passion in your roles.
LA CONTAT. If you think I feel them!
HOCHE. You may deny it all you like; your instinct feels them for you. A force is never an illusion. You are perhaps only the instrument of that force within you. No matter; it drives you. I know better than you what destiny will make of you.
LA CONTAT. What, then?
HOCHE. What is strong must go with what is strong. You will be on our side.
LA CONTAT. But if I don’t believe in it!
HOCHE. Pah! What does that matter? Everything is a matter of temperament. There are only two parties in the world: the healthy and the sick. What is healthy goes toward life. Life is with us. Come.
LA CONTAT. With you, gladly.
HOCHE. Decidedly, you don’t mince words! — Well! We’ll see about that later, if we have time to think about it.
LA CONTAT. There’s always time for love.
HOCHE. You’ve been told that too often. You imagine our Revolution is going to dissolve into a love affair? Little females! For fifty years you’ve been accustomed to governing everything in France, to having everything brought back to you, to your whims, to your affectations — it doesn’t enter your heads that anything else might take precedence over you? The games are over, Madame. This is a serious match, and the stake is the world. Make way for men! — And if you dare, follow us into battle, support us, share our faith; but by God, don’t go troubling it! You don’t weigh much beside it. — No hard feelings, Contat! A fling, I haven’t the time. A love, my heart is taken.
LA CONTAT. By whom?
HOCHE. By Liberty.
LA CONTAT. I’d like to know what this girl looks like.
HOCHE. A bit like you, I imagine. Good and healthy, well built, blonde, ardent, bold, but scrubbed of your paint, your beauty patches, your affectations, your ironies, acting instead of mocking those who act, breathing into men — instead of your provocative sweetness and equivocal innuendos — words of action, devotion, and fraternity. I am the lover of that woman. When you are she, you’ll have me. There’s my declaration!
LA CONTAT. I like it. I’ll have you. — Let’s go fight!
She snatches a musket from her neighbor, and declaims to the people, with joyful enthusiasm, a few lines from Cinna.
Fear not success that stains thy memory! The good and ill alike augment thy glory; And in such a design, failure’s mere cost Risks but thy life, and not thine honor lost. Look on the fate of Brutus and of Cassius: Is the splendor of their name thereby obscured? Did they die wholly with their great designs? Are they not counted still among the last of Romans? Go march in their steps where honor calls thee!
She throws herself into the ranks of the people, who burst into applause.
HOCHE. That’s the spirit! Let Corneille guide us! Shake before us the torch of heroism!
HULIN (at the window). Where are you going?
HOCHE. Where are we going? (He raises his eyes and sees, at the house across the way, little Julie, half undressed, leaning out the window, animated and joyful.) — Ask this little one, whose eyes are as bright as a nest of mice! I want her to speak the answer that is in all our hearts. Be our voice, innocent one! Where are we going? Where must we go?
JULIE (leaning her whole body out the window — held back by her mother — stretching out her arms and crying with all her might). To the Bastille!
Explosion of cries from the people.
THE PEOPLE. To the Bastille!
A furious outcry from which burst forth clashing and frenzied apostrophes that erupt from every quarter, at once or in succession, shared among groups or isolated individuals — workers, bourgeois, students, and women.
THE PEOPLE (in the grip of a wild exaltation). The Bastille! The Bastille! — At last! — Smash this yoke! — Tear off this collar! — Overthrow this crushing, stupid mass! — This eternal monument of our defeat and degradation! — The tomb of those who dared speak the truth! — Those wretches, walled up alive by the execrable despotism! — Voltaire’s dungeon! — Mirabeau’s dungeon! — Liberty’s dungeon! — To breathe! To breathe! — We want the Bastille! — Monster, you shall fall! — We’ll raze you from summit to base, devourer of men, assassin, coward, coward, bandit!
They shake their fists at it, urge each other on, their faces congested, hoarse from shouting. Desmoulins and Cloots have been caught by the contagion. Cloots has come out of the house through the door; Desmoulins has jumped through the window. Hulin, Robespierre, and Marat wave their arms, trying to make themselves heard; one understands they disapprove of the people, but their voices are lost in the tumult.
HULIN (when he can finally make himself heard, shouting). You’re mad, mad! We’ll smash our faces against that mountain!
MARAT (crossing his arms). I admire how much trouble you take to free a few aristocrats. Don’t you know there are only rich people in there? It’s a luxury prison, made only for them. Let them settle their affairs among themselves: it’s none of your business.
HOCHE. Every injustice is our business. Our Revolution is not a family affair. If we’re not rich enough to have relatives in the Bastille, we’re rich enough to adopt the rich, unhappy like us. Every man who suffers unjustly is our brother.
MARAT. You’re right.
THE PEOPLE. We want the Bastille!
HULIN. But in the end, you madmen, with what will you take it? We have no weapons, and they do!
HOCHE. Precisely. Let’s go take them.
CLOOTS (rolling up his sleeves). Gaudeamus! I’ve been acting by syllogism long enough. I’m going to limber up my fists.
FAUCHET. You are my parishioners, you promised to follow me; I will show you the way.
CLOOTS. The parish of the Bastille! That one, I’m in! Abbé, for once, I’ll serve you the mass.
A murmur rises from the back.
A WORKER (running in). I’ve come from the Left Bank. They’re all on their feet — the Place Maubert, the Basoche, the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève; they’re marching on the Invalides to take the weapons stored there, thousands of muskets. There are French Guards, monks, women, students, a whole army. The king’s attorney and the curate of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont march at their head.
HOCHE. You asked for weapons, Hulin. Here they are.
HULIN. It’s not with a few hundred old arquebuses, rusted helmets, or even a few good cannons found at the Invalides, that one can take the Bastille. You might as well open a rock with a knife.
HOCHE. It’s not with cannons indeed that the Bastille will be taken. But it will be taken.
HULIN. How?
HOCHE. The Bastille must fall. It will fall. The gods are with us.
HULIN (shrugging). Which gods?
HOCHE. Justice, reason. You shall fall, Bastille!
THE PEOPLE. You shall fall!
HULIN. I’d prefer more tangible allies. I don’t believe much in any of this. No matter; it shall not be said that I let myself be outdone. I even intend to march first. You perhaps know better than I what must be done. But I will do it. — You want to go to the Bastille, you fools? Let’s go.
HOCHE. Of course! You’ll do everything, while always repeating that nothing can be done.
Gonchon returns with his patrol.
GONCHON. Here they are again! — Blast! — The vermin! Chase them from one side, they come out the other. — Is this how you obey me? Didn’t I order you home? — (Grabbing a man by the collar.) You heard me, you; I recognize you, you were here before. Damn it! I’ve had enough! I’m going to have you arrested. I’m going to have you all arrested. We’re charged with maintaining order. Any citizen who moves about the streets at night without a pass is suspect.
HOCHE (laughing). The animal would like to make the people disappear!
MARAT. Who is this traitor who has decreed that he is the People? By what right does this odious voice give orders to the Nation? I know this big man, this Silenus face, bloated with vice, sweating debauchery and shamelessness. Does this monopolist claim to have the monopoly on the Revolution, as he had that of the orgies of his Palais-Royal? — Out of here! Or I’ll have you arrested yourself by the sovereign People!
GONCHON (stammering). I am the representative of power, the elect of the central Committee.
THE PEOPLE. The power is us! — The central Committee is our creature. You have only to obey.
MARAT (with a fierce air that is at bottom only a sinister piece of clowning to amuse himself with Gonchon’s terrors). We must beware of these traitors who rally to the people in order to destroy it. Hoche said it well: if we’re not careful, we’ll soon be overrun. I’m of the opinion that, to distinguish all those who have made themselves lackeys of the aristocrats, we should cut off their ears, or better yet the thumbs of their hands: it’s an indispensable measure of prudence. (The people laugh.)
GONCHON (frightened, to Hoche). Soldier, you’re here to lend force to the law.
HOCHE. Get in line: no one will harm you. — And now, go ahead; we follow you.
GONCHON. You follow me? Where?
THE PEOPLE. To the Bastille!
GONCHON. What?
HOCHE. Naturally. To take the Bastille. You defend the people, gentlemen of the bourgeois militia? Then the front rank is yours. Lead the way, and no fuss. — You don’t look pleased? — (Leaning close to Gonchon’s ear.) I know your tricks, my good man; you’re in correspondence with the Duke of Orléans. Come, peace, and walk straight: I’ve my eye on you, and I have only a word to say to Marat. It’s not yet daylight; you could light our way, hung from one of these lanterns.
GONCHON. Let me go home.
HOCHE. No other alternative: be hanged, or take the Bastille.
GONCHON (eagerly). Take the Bastille!
The people laugh.
HOCHE. You’re a brave one! — And we, people of the faubourg, let’s not be outdone by the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Let Saint-Antoine not play the idler while Saint-Jacques battles with fists and sticks! Ring the bells, beat the drum, call the citizens to the districts! — (To the electors and deputies.) You, citizens, watch over the Hôtel de Ville; make sure no treachery is prepared behind our backs; take charge of the bourgeois! We’re going to muzzle the beast. (He points to the Bastille.)
Little Julie has come down with her mother, to the doorstep of her house; she has climbed on a post to see better, and watches Hoche with a mute and passionate insistence. Hoche looks at her and smiles.
Hey, little one! You want to come too? You’re dying to? (She holds out her trembling hands, nodding yes, without speaking.) Well, come! (He lifts her and puts her on his shoulder.)
THE MOTHER. You’re mad! Leave her! Taking her where people are fighting!
HOCHE. Isn’t she the one who sends us there? Here is our standard-bearer!
THE MOTHER. Don’t take her from me!
HOCHE. Come too, mother! No one should stay indoors today. Let the snail leave its shell. The whole city is leaving its prison. Let’s leave nothing behind. This is not an army at war; it’s an invasion.
THE MOTHER. Well, yes. If we must die, better to be all together.
HOCHE. Die? Come now! You only die when you want to die.
The sky brightens behind the houses and the dark mass of the Bastille.
Hurrah! See the day, the new day, the dawn of Liberty!
JULIE (who has held herself on Hoche’s shoulder till now, quite smiling, excited, and mute, a finger in her mouth, begins to sing in a thin voice a national round of the time). Liberty, on this fine day / Come fill our souls.
HOCHE (laughing). Do you hear this little sparrow?
The people laugh.
Come, cheerfully! Forward, toward the sun!
He takes up little Julie’s tune as he sets off marching, and the entire mass of the people moves, joining their voices to the song of Hoche and the little girl. Immediately a small flute is heard accompanying the popular round in a brisk and piping way. To the music are mingled great enthusiastic clamors, the bells awakening from near and far, and confused noises that persist during the following scene. Gonchon and the trembling militiamen are pushed by a mocking and laughing crowd, among them la Contat and Hulin. Men and women come out of the houses, join the people, run after them. — A joyful tempest.
While the people noisily flow out of the theatre, Desmoulins, who accompanies them to the edge of the stage, retraces his steps, climbs hastily onto the barricade, goes to Lucile’s window, and presses his face against the glass. During the end of the act, the noise of the people, the bells, the drums, continues to buzz outside; and a few stragglers still come out of the houses, but pay no attention to the lovers.
CAMILLE (in a low voice). Lucile.
The window opens softly. Lucile slips her arms around his neck.
LUCILE. Camille.
They kiss.
CAMILLE. You were there?
LUCILE. Hush! They’re asleep next door. I was there, hidden. I stayed the whole time. I listened and I saw everything.
CAMILLE. You didn’t go to bed?
LUCILE. How could one sleep with all that racket? — Oh! Camille, how they cheered you!
CAMILLE (pleased). You heard how they shouted?
LUCILE. The windowpanes shook. I was laughing in my corner. I wanted to shout too. Since I couldn’t, I did crazy things, I climbed on a chair, I… guess what I did…
CAMILLE. How can I guess?
LUCILE. Guess, if you love me. If you felt nothing, then you don’t love me. What did I send you?
CAMILLE. Kisses.
LUCILE. You love me. That’s it. Basketfuls of kisses. A few strayed onto those who were applauding you. — Oh, the darlings, how they shouted! How glorious you’ve become, my Camille, in one day, a single day! — Last week, only your Lucile knew you, knew what you were worth. Today, a whole people.
CAMILLE. Listen.
Joyful and tumultuous noise of Paris.
LUCILE. All that. You made all that… that beautiful uproar!
CAMILLE. I can’t believe it myself!
LUCILE. And all that with a speech! How did you do it? They told me everyone was beside themselves listening to you. How I wished I’d been there!
CAMILLE. I don’t know what I said. I felt myself lifted from the ground. I heard my voice and saw my gestures as if it were someone else speaking. Everyone was weeping, and I wept like the rest. At the end, they carried me on their shoulders. Nothing like it has ever been seen.
LUCILE. My great man, my Patru, my Demosthenes! — And you were able to speak before a whole crowd watching you? And you didn’t get flustered? You didn’t lose your memory? You didn’t do as you sometimes do?
CAMILLE. What?
LUCILE. You know… like a bottle too full, from which the water can’t flow out… (She laughs.)
CAMILLE. Wicked girl! There you are, pleased with your mischief! You’re showing your little teeth, like a cat.
LUCILE (laughing). No, I tell you, I love you; I love you as you are. I look for your faults, I find them, and I love them. Don’t be angry. There, I love your stammer, I assure you; I’m practicing talking that way now.
They both laugh.
CAMILLE. Listen to what one day has made of this people. What shall we not see! — O Lucile, what fine things we shall do together! The thunderbolt is launched. What superb claps of thunder! What joy to strike on all sides, into the heap, to destroy these tyrants, these injustices, these prejudices, these laws! At last! — We’re going to break the noses of those ridiculous and odious idols whose grotesque smile stood in the way of everything, forbade everything, prevented thinking, breathing, living! We’ll clean house, burn the old rags! No more masters. No more fetters. What fun!
LUCILE. Who will run Paris now?
CAMILLE. We will, of course. Reason.
LUCILE. They’re shouting very loud. It frightens me.
CAMILLE. That’s the effect of some of my words.
LUCILE. Do you think they’ll always listen to you?
CAMILLE. They listened to me when I was unknown. What shall I not be able to do, now that they adore me! — Good people! When they’re delivered from the miseries that crush them, everything will become easy, pleasant, cheerful. — Ah, Lucile, it’s too much happiness, all at once! No. Not too much! Never too much! But it makes me a little giddy, after so much misery!
LUCILE. Poor Camille! Were you so unhappy?
CAMILLE. Yes, it was very hard, and very long! Six years! No money, no friends, no hope. Abandoned by my own. Reduced to humiliating trades. Running after a few sous, and not finding them, often. There’s more than one day I went to bed without supper. — I don’t want to tell you about it. — Later, later I’ll tell you… It was wrong of me.
LUCILE. Is it possible? Oh! My God! Why didn’t you come?
CAMILLE. You would have shared your little roll with me? That wasn’t the hardest, Lucile. One can do without supper. But to doubt oneself, to see the future closed before one; and then, that little girl, that dear little girl, whose blond curls and brown eyes smiled at the window across from my window — whose steps I followed, from afar, in the paths of the Luxembourg, savoring the artless grace of her movements, and the fine thinness of her childlike body… Ah, little Lucile, if you sometimes made me forget my misery, how much heavier you often made it too! You were so far from me! How could I have believed that one day…! And that day, I hold it, oh! I hold it tight! It will not escape me. I have you! I kiss your hands with their little dimples. All the happiness in the world, they have brought me. The world freed by me! Ah! How happy I am!
They embrace and remain a moment without speaking.
CAMILLE (looking at Lucile). You’re crying?
LUCILE (smiling). You too.
The candles in the neighboring windows go out.
LUCILE. The lights are going out. Dawn is coming.
Noise of the crowd outside.
CAMILLE (after a moment). Do you remember that old English story we read together: those two children of Verona who loved each other in the midst of a city in upheaval?
LUCILE (nods yes). Why do you ask me that?
CAMILLE. I don’t know. — Who knows what the future holds for us?
LUCILE (covering his mouth). Camille!
CAMILLE. Poor Lucile, would you have the strength, if misfortune were to…
LUCILE. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll find it then. But you, I’m afraid, will suffer cruelly.
CAMILLE (displeased and worried). But you say that as if you really believed it would happen!
LUCILE (smiling). You’re weaker than I am, my hero.
CAMILLE. Perhaps. I need to be loved. I don’t know how to be alone.
LUCILE. I will never leave you.
CAMILLE. Never. Whatever happens, may everything be shared between us, may nothing separate us, may nothing loosen the clasp of our arms…
A moment of silence. Lucile remains motionless, her head resting on Camille’s shoulder.
CAMILLE (looking at her). Are you sleeping?
LUCILE (raising her head). No. (Sighing.) God spare us those trials!
CAMILLE (skeptical). God?
LUCILE (rests her cheek on the windowsill and remains still, one arm around Camille’s neck). Don’t you believe He exists?
CAMILLE. Not yet.
LUCILE. What do you mean?
CAMILLE. We are creating Him at this moment. Tomorrow, if I trust this heart, tomorrow there will be a God: Man.
Lucile closes her eyes and falls asleep.
CAMILLE (softly). Lucile. She’s fallen asleep.
ROBESPIERRE (crossing the street, sees Camille). You’re still here, Camille?
CAMILLE. Hush!
ROBESPIERRE. You’re forgetting your duty.
Camille points to Lucile.
ROBESPIERRE (lowering his voice and looking at Lucile). Poor child.
He stands a moment motionless, gazing at them both. A sound of nearer drums wakes Lucile.
LUCILE (sees Robespierre and starts with fright).
CAMILLE. What is it, what is it, Lucile? It’s our friend; it’s Maximilien.
ROBESPIERRE (bows to her, smiling). Don’t you recognize me?
LUCILE (still trembling). Oh! You frightened me!
ROBESPIERRE. Forgive me.
CAMILLE. How you’re trembling!
LUCILE. I’m cold. Farewell, Camille. I’m going to sleep. I can’t go on.
Camille smiles at her and blows her a kiss. Robespierre bows. But she withdraws, not yet recovered from her emotion, saluting them only with a nod, mute and troubled.
Dawn has come; the sky has colored behind the houses and the Bastille. Amid the distant cries, the crackle of the first fusillades rises.
ROBESPIERRE (turning toward the sound). Come! There is no question of love today.
He goes out.
CAMILLE (descending from the barricade). No question of love? And of what is there a question? Is it not love that ferments in this city, that swells these breasts, that offers these great human harvests to sacrifice?… O my love, you are not selfish and narrow; you bind me to these men with bonds stronger yet; you see all, you can do all, you are all. You embrace the world. It is not only my Lucile I love. It is the universe. Through her dear eyes, I love all who love, who suffer, who are happy, all that lives and dies. I love. I feel that the flame within me makes this people seethe, reddens this eastern sky behind that Bastille. All shadows are fading. That one will fall too, that shadow of nightmare!
The Bastille, monstrous and black, rises against the bright red sky. The voice of the cannon suddenly bursts out amid the musket fire, the cries, the bells, and the drums.
CAMILLE (laughs and thumbs his nose at the Bastille). The wolf howls. Growl, bare your teeth! The pack has you cornered! Since the King loves hunting, we’ll go hunting for the King!
ACT THREE
Tuesday, July 14, the afternoon.
The inner courtyard of the Bastille. (1) To the left, the base of two enormous towers, whose summits are invisible, connected by thick massive walls that rise like a mountain of stone. Facing, the gate and drawbridge giving access to the Governor’s courtyard. To the right, a one-story building backed against the walls of the other towers.
At the rise of the curtain, the invalid Béquart and his comrades stand in the courtyard, with three cannons. Vintimille, commandant of the Invalides, is seated, looking indifferent and bored. At every moment, Swiss soldiers come and go across the drawbridge, bringing news of the fighting that is taking place at the other gate of the Governor’s courtyard. Outside, musket fire, drums, and cries of the crowd. Smoke rises from time to time above the walls.
(1) The Bastille had two principal courts: the Governor’s court, outside the great moat, separated from the city by a drawbridge and two guard houses; and the inner court, at the foot of the walls, between the towers; a moat, a second drawbridge, and a third guard house separated it from the Governor’s court.
DE LAUNEY (governor of the Bastille, arriving from the other courtyard, agitated, nervous). Well, Monsieur de Vintimille, you see, they’re attacking, they’re attacking!
VINTIMILLE (seated, in a weary and somewhat ironic tone). Well, Monsieur de Launey, let them attack. What does it matter to us? Unless they have wings, like Messieurs Montgolfier, I defy them to get in.
THE INVALIDES (among themselves). Indeed!
BÉQUART. Poor devils! They’re going to be crushed. They’ll all die. Those damned Swiss are shooting at them as hard as they can. Fine thing, shooting defenseless people when you’re safe behind good walls!
AN INVALID. Well, what idea do they have, coming to attack us?
BÉQUART. Nobody knows what’s going on in any of their heads anymore. They’ve all gone daft, especially this last month. — All the same, it’s a shame to mistreat them: they’re not bad folk. And they’re our own.
AN INVALID. Well, orders are orders. Tough luck. They shouldn’t have come.
BÉQUART. Obviously. — And besides, it’s quite pleasant to hear that music. I didn’t think I’d see another battle.
DE FLUE (commander of the Swiss, arriving from the other courtyard). Governor, if you please, have the neighboring houses burned. From the rooftops, their fire can reach down into the castle courtyard.
DE LAUNEY. No, no, I can’t burn private property; I haven’t the right.
DE FLUE. War without fire, sausage without mustard. You’re very good to have such scruples. When one wages war, one must stop at nothing, or meddle in nothing.
DE LAUNEY. What is your opinion, Monsieur de Vintimille?
VINTIMILLE (shrugging). Oh, it doesn’t matter. Do as you please. No fear they’ll get in. But if you feel like taking the opportunity to clear the quarter that hems in the Bastille, and to sweep away the brawlers who’ve gathered round it, don’t restrain yourself. Of that sort, the seed is not rare. Act as you will: it is of no importance.
DE LAUNEY. Let’s wait then, since nothing presses. We are in force. We have abundant munitions. We don’t need to resort to those desperate measures, do we, Father Béquart?
BÉQUART. We could hold out here until the Last Judgment, Governor. I was under M. de Chevert, at Prague, forty-seven years ago. The Marshal de Belle-Isle had left us stranded. We were a handful in the heart of enemy country. We lacked everything. Even the city was against us. They never managed to dislodge us, except by our own consent. Here, we’re dealing only with rabble, women and shopkeepers; we’re sheltered by solid walls, a stone’s throw from the troops of the Champ de Mars and Sèvres. All we have to do is smoke our pipes and cross our arms.
DE FLUE. The moment you sit still, those Parisian frogs jump on your knees. Just toss them a few stones; you’ll see them dive back into their pond.
DE LAUNEY. Let us not exasperate them.
DE FLUE. Grease the villain, he’ll prick you. Spare the rogue, he’ll hang you.
BÉQUART. They’re poor wretches, Monsieur de Flue. One mustn’t be too hard. They don’t really know what they’re doing.
DE FLUE. By thunder! If they don’t know, I do. That’s enough.
DE LAUNEY. You think only of winning the battle, Monsieur de Flue. But for me, it’s another matter. I must think of the consequences. All the responsibility rests on me. Do I know what pleases or displeases the Court, what they want me to do?
DE FLUE. What! You don’t know where the King’s enemies are? If we’re here, isn’t it by order of His Majesty, and if we’re attacked, isn’t it He who is being attacked?
DE LAUNEY. No one is ever sure, with the indecision of His Majesty. His enemies of yesterday are His friends of tomorrow. I have no orders, or they contradict each other. Some command: “Resist to the end.” Others: “Don’t fire.” The provost Flesselles sends me word in secret that he’s on my side, and that he’s keeping the people busy. To the people he says he’s keeping me busy, and that he’s on their side. Whom is he betraying? How can one be sure one isn’t displeasing the Court by believing one is serving it, and that it won’t disavow one? If it wanted to act, doesn’t it have a thousand means? Why doesn’t M. de Breteuil, with the troops of the Champ de Mars, come take these rebels from behind?
DE FLUE. Oh, that would be truly admirable! What a stew!
VINTIMILLE (to de Launey). My dear fellow, be the victor, and you’ll always be right.
He goes to sit in a corner of the courtyard in the shade.
BÉQUART (who has brought him his armchair). My lord, you don’t have your usual spirit on battle days.
VINTIMILLE. They bore me with their discussions. (Pointing to de Launey.) He never knows what he wants; he has to consult everyone; he makes a fuss about everything. What am I doing between this ditherer and that sausage-stuffer? Stupid task they’ve given me. There’s neither pleasure nor honor in such combats. Disciplining the people! — that’s a police matter.
BÉQUART. It’s no fun being forced to fire on these poor devils.
VINTIMILLE. Getting sentimental? It’s the fashion of the day. — That’s not the point. I care little for that rabble. — Listen to them howl. It’s repulsive. — What do they want?
BÉQUART. Bread.
VINTIMILLE. Do they think the Bastille is a bakery? — Again! How persistent they are! Do they cling so hard to life? I wonder what interest they can find in their wretched existence, with for all pleasure their sour wine and their unwashed women.
BÉQUART. You know, my lord, however little one has, one always clings to what one’s got.
VINTIMILLE. Really? Speak for yourself.
BÉQUART. Oh, you’ve had everything one could desire.
VINTIMILLE. You envy me? There’s nothing to envy, my boy.
BÉQUART. Nothing to envy!
VINTIMILLE. You’re surprised? — Bah! You can’t understand. It’s nothing. It’s this July sun that makes me hypochondriac.
A SWISS (coming from the other courtyard, to de Launey). My lord, they’re firing from the neighboring houses. A few have climbed up on the rooftops.
DE FLUE. Well, pick them off! It’s child’s play for marksmen like you.
Outside, the voice of Hoche sings the refrain of the second act’s round: “Liberty, on this fine day.”
SWISS (outside). Come on, forward! Before the Governor!
DE FLUE. What is it?
SWISS (coming from the outer courtyard and pushing Hoche before them; Hoche carries Julie on his back). Commander, we caught this one as he was jumping over the outer wall.
HOCHE (setting Julie down). Houp-la! Here we are! I told you you’d get in first!
JULIE (in ecstasy, clasping her hands). The Bastille!
VINTIMILLE. What is this joke?
A circle has formed around Hoche and the child, watching them curiously.
HOCHE (calmly). Commander, we are emissaries.
The soldiers laugh.
DE LAUNEY. Strange emissaries!
HOCHE. We didn’t have a choice. We signal to you; you refuse to see. We jumped the wall, since it was the only way to reach you.
JULIE (going toward the Swiss). Oh! It’s them!
SWISS. What do you want, brat?
JULIE. Are you the prisoners?
SWISS (laughing). The prisoners? No! We’re the ones who guard them.
HOCHE. Go on, you’re not far wrong. They too are prisoners, and the most to be pitied of all; for they have been robbed even of the desire for freedom.
DE LAUNEY. Who is this little girl?
HOCHE. Our good angel. She begged me to bring her. I carried her on my back.
VINTIMILLE. Have you lost your wits, exposing this child to death?
HOCHE. Why shouldn’t she share our risks? She’ll certainly die if we die. — Don’t play at pity. Your cannons aren’t so scrupulous.
VINTIMILLE (with his hard and mocking coldness). A soldier, a deserting non-commissioned officer! That’s the emissary this rabble sends us! Very well. Shoot him: that will complete his mission.
DE LAUNEY. One moment. It would be useful to know what they want.
VINTIMILLE. They have nothing to want.
DE FLUE. One doesn’t parley with rebels.
DE LAUNEY. Let’s hear them out all the same; it costs nothing.
VINTIMILLE. It’s indecent: by tolerating a discussion with these rebels, we seem to treat them as equals.
DE LAUNEY. What lack of modesty, or what aberration, drove you to accept this mission?
HOCHE. The thought of serving both my friends and you.
VINTIMILLE. Are you unaware of your acts? Don’t you know what a traitor is?
HOCHE. Yes, my lord. It’s one who bears arms against his own people.
VINTIMILLE (shrugs and turns his back). Imbecile!
HOCHE. I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to insult you. I came as a friend, on the contrary. I’ve been told I’ll be shot. It’s possible. To tell the truth, I’d be surprised; I’ve come to try to help you and settle things. But if it must be, well, you know the proverb: A fine death graces a whole life.
DE LAUNEY. Your message!
HOCHE (presenting a letter). From the Standing Committee of the Hôtel de Ville.
De Launey takes the letter and reads it apart, with the two other commanders. The Invalides have taken Julie on their knees.
BÉQUART. Why did you want to come, little one? Do you know someone here?
JULIE. Several.
BÉQUART. Where?
JULIE. In the prison.
BÉQUART. You have fine acquaintances. Who are they? Relatives?
JULIE. No.
BÉQUART. What are their names?
JULIE. I don’t know.
BÉQUART. What! You don’t know? — What are they like, then?
JULIE. I couldn’t say exactly.
BÉQUART. Well now! You’re making fun of us, you rascal?
JULIE. No, no, I know them well, I’ve seen them. Only, it’s hard to put into words.
BÉQUART. Tell us.
JULIE. Mama lives on the rue Saint-Antoine, near here. The carriages going to the prison pass at night in front of our house. I often get up to watch. Oh, I see almost all of them. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t, because I was asleep, and when I woke up, the carriage had passed.
BÉQUART. What can that have that’s interesting for you?
JULIE. They’re in pain.
BÉQUART. A sad sight, a wretch’s misfortune. Why do you want to see them?
JULIE (very naturally). Because it pains me.
AN INVALID (laughing). Ha! Ha! There’s a reason!
BÉQUART. Shut up, you fool!
THE INVALID (at first annoyed). Fool? — (After reflecting, scratching his head.) That’s true.
JULIE (who has sat down, playing, on a cannon). You won’t fire on us, will you? (They don’t answer.) Say you won’t fire. I beg you. I’m very fond of you. Be fond of me too.
BÉQUART (kissing her). Little ragamuffin!
DE LAUNEY (who has read the letter delivered by Hoche, shrugs his shoulders). This is beyond everything! — Gentlemen, the strange message delivered to me from I don’t know what bourgeois calling themselves the Standing Committee, makes the preposterous demand that we share the guard of the Bastille between our troops and the popular bands.
The soldiers guffaw; the officers are indignant.
VINTIMILLE. A fine proposition!
HOCHE (to de Launey). Hear me, my lord. Prevent the carnage. It is not you we’re against; it’s this heap of stones, this malicious force that has weighed upon Paris for centuries. Blind force is no less shameful for those who impose it than for those who endure it. It revolts reason. You who are more intelligent than we are must feel this and suffer from it more than we do. Help us instead of fighting us! The reason for which we struggle is your good as well as ours. — Surrender the place of your own accord; don’t wait until it is taken from you.
VINTIMILLE. Reason, conscience — his mouth is full of it. These apes of Rousseau! — (To de Flue.) My compliments, you’ve given us a fine gift.
DE FLUE. What gift?
VINTIMILLE. Your Jean-Jacques. You could have kept him in Switzerland.
DE FLUE. We’d gladly have done without him ourselves.
DE LAUNEY (to Hoche). You’re mad. When have the strongest ever willingly surrendered their weapons to the weakest?
HOCHE. You are not the strongest.
DE LAUNEY. You count for nothing these brave men, twenty cannons, twenty chests of cannonballs, thousands of cartridges?
HOCHE. You may kill a few hundred men. What good will it do? Thousands more will come.
DE LAUNEY. We’ll be relieved.
HOCHE. You won’t be relieved. — You could have been. You haven’t been. A king does not slaughter his people. That would not merely be murder, but suicide. You will be vanquished, I assure you. You parade your artillery. You’re accustomed to the old wars; you don’t understand this one. You don’t know what a liberated people is. War is a game for you; you don’t believe in it. Since Malplaquet, no one takes an interest in the fatherland anymore. You were the friends of the enemies you fought. You rejoiced in the King of Prussia’s successes. Victory is not a necessity for you. For us, we have no choice. We must win. — (To the Invalides.) My comrades, I know you well; I respect you; you’re fine old lads. But when you fought, it was to obey orders; you don’t know what it means to fight for yourself. (To Béquart.) You yourself, Father Béquart — we all love you, we honor your valor — but when you were at Prague, besieged by the enemy, you were defending only your skin. We are defending our soul, the soul of our children, of all who will come from us. You hear this people at the foot of these walls. It is but a part of our forces. Millions of beings, all the peoples to come, fight in our ranks — that formidable invisible, which wins battles.
DE FLUE. You bore us. We’ll sweep away in a few volleys of cannon these invisible forces.
HOCHE. Don’t fire! If you fire, you’re lost. A people is not a regular army. You don’t unleash it with impunity.
VINTIMILLE (to himself, considering Hoche). What a strange sort of men! How did that come out of us, out of our France? They’re Germans. — Germans? No. I’ve known Prussians more French than this one. Who changed all this for us?
HOCHE. Consider that you can still come to terms, that soon you’ll no longer be able to. Once you’ve shed blood, nothing will stop it.
DE FLUE. Save your advice for your friends.
HOCHE (shrugging. To Julie). Come, pigeon of the ark; they refuse your olive branch. (He puts Julie back on his shoulder.)
DE LAUNEY (to Hoche). Nothing can take the Bastille. It can be surrendered, not taken.
HOCHE. It will be surrendered.
VINTIMILLE. And who will surrender it?
HOCHE. Your bad conscience.
Hoche goes out with Julie, in the general silence, without anyone thinking to stop him.
VINTIMILLE (reflecting). Our bad conscience.
DE LAUNEY (abruptly). Well! Why has he been allowed to leave?
DE FLUE. He’s still in the courtyard.
DE LAUNEY. Run after him, catch him.
BÉQUART. My lord, that’s impossible.
THE INVALIDES (grunting their assent). He’s an emissary.
DE LAUNEY. Impossible, you rogue? An emissary from whom? From what recognized authority?
BÉQUART (solemnly). From the people.
DE FLUE (to the Swiss). Arrest him.
BÉQUART AND THE INVALIDES (to the Swiss). No, comrades, not that! You will not arrest him.
A SWISS (trying to pass). Those are the orders.
BÉQUART AND THE INVALIDES. You will not pass, or you’ll have us to deal with.
VINTIMILLE (watching them. Aside). Ah, well. (Aloud.) Very well. (To de Launey.) Let’s not insist.
[The battle continues. A truce is attempted; the Swiss fire during the truce, enraging the people. La Contat, captured, confronts Vintimille. When she sees the people fired upon, she tries to kill Vintimille with his own sword, is restrained, and falls into a convulsive seizure. The Invalides refuse to fire on the French people. De Launey tries to blow up the powder magazine but is restrained. Vintimille takes command and writes a capitulation. Béquart carries it to the people and is shot dead. The capitulation is accepted.]
VINTIMILLE (looking at Béquart dead, with a mixture of irony and sympathy). The savoir-vivre remains? — The savoir-ne-plus-vivre.
THE INVALIDES (listening). Listen!
One hears crying from outside, and the Invalides repeat: The capitulation is accepted!
VINTIMILLE (indifferent). Inform the Governor.
INVALIDES. My lord, he’s lost his mind; he’s smashing everything in his room; he’s crying and screaming like a child.
VINTIMILLE (shrugging). Well. I will take his place to the end. (To himself, ironic, slightly bitter.) I didn’t suspect I would one day have the honor of bringing down, along with the four centuries of these walls, the royalty of France into the hands of lawyers. What a fine task. Scoundrel of a fate! Pah! Nothing is anything, all is indifferent, all passes, all ends. One need only not be duped, and despise things and oneself. Death settles all. So be it! — We’ll give them a little comedy, a grand aria for the finale. (Aloud.) Fall in! Form up!
The garrison lines up in the courtyard, the Invalides on the right, the Swiss on the left. Perfect order. De Flue, standing. Vintimille rises, leaning on his cane.
Butts in the air! — Gentlemen, I must warn you that, despite my precautions, there may be surprises when the enemy enters. You know this is not a disciplined army. But if they fail in propriety, that is only one more reason for us to remain faithful to it. — Gentlemen of the Swiss, in the King’s name, I thank you for your obedience. You have more merit in it than the others. (Turning his head toward the Invalides, with a slight smile.) As for you, we understand each other.
Murmur of approval from the Invalides.
DE FLUE (phlegmatic). Bah! That’s war.
An Invalid whistles: “Where can one be better than in the bosom of one’s family?”
VINTIMILLE (turning toward him, with a somewhat disdainful gesture). Hush! Show less your joy. It’s indecent, my friend.
THE INVALID. My lord, I can’t help it.
VINTIMILLE (with a contemptuous smile). You’re quite proud of being beaten!
THE INVALID (with warmth). We’re not beaten! They would never have taken the Bastille if we hadn’t wanted them to take it.
His companions approve.
VINTIMILLE (same manner). You’re going to say it’s we who took the Bastille?
THE INVALID. There’s some truth in that.
VINTIMILLE. Indeed. — To your post. (After a silence, aloud.) Open the gate. — Lower the drawbridge.
Some men open the gate and slowly lower the drawbridge, before the growing vociferations of the crowd.
VINTIMILLE (contemptuous). Here then is the new King!
The drawbridge is lowered. A tremendous clamor bursts forth. A human tide rushes through the gate opening, swarming and howling heads, men and women with muskets, pikes, and axes. In the front rank, Gonchon, pushed, waves a saber and shouts. Hoche and Hulin struggle in vain to calm them. Cries of death and victory.
VINTIMILLE (baring his head). Gentlemen — the Rabble.
SOME INVALIDES (waving their hats, seized by a sudden transport). Long live Liberty!
VINTIMILLE. Gentlemen, for shame!
THE INVALIDES (louder, with overflowing enthusiasm). Long live Liberty! (They throw down their muskets and hurl themselves into the arms of the people.)
VINTIMILLE (ironic and disdainful, shrugging). Poor human reason, how unsteady you are! — Farewell, Monsieur de Vintimille. (He breaks his sword.)
Gonchon, beside himself, pushed by the people — the old market woman — and a mob of furious ones throw themselves upon Vintimille, de Flue, and their soldiers, envelop them, drag them, push them off the stage, with savage cries.
GONCHON. Cut them open!
THE OLD WOMAN. You aristocrat dogs!
THE PEOPLE. Those damned Swiss! — And these, I recognize them! The cripple regiment! — The enemy! Kill them! — They fired on us!
Hoche and Hulin, who try to stop the crowd, are swept away and violently thrown against a wall.
HOCHE. Stop! Stop!
HULIN. Impossible! You might as well stop the Seine in flood.
HOCHE. You’re wounded?
HULIN (with a laugh). Know by whom? By Gonchon!
HOCHE. The coward!
HULIN. He’s fierce now. The most cowardly dog bites when you try to snatch the bone he’s eating. Look at him over there.
HOCHE. The monster!
HULIN. And la Contat, thrusting with her pike, and the old woman slitting Vintimille’s throat where he’s fallen!
HOCHE (beside himself, striking right and left to get through). I’ll kill them!
HULIN. You won’t get through, I tell you!
HOCHE (pushed back by the crowd). The wretches!
HULIN. Didn’t you know this? — Bah! It’s not we who made men.
THE CROWD. The Invalid running away! Beat him!
DESMOULINS. The old legless monster! Away with the scarecrow! Into the water with the Court of Miracles!
HOCHE (seizing Desmoulins by the throat). Shut up!
DESMOULINS (stupefied). What?
HOCHE. You’re drunk!
DESMOULINS (not understanding). Drunk?… But I… I—
HOCHE. You’re drunk with blood. Shut up!
DESMOULINS (passing his hand over his forehead). Yes… yes… you’re right. (He sits on a stone post.)
HULIN. Help us!
THE PEOPLE (making way for Marat). Long live Marat!
MARAT. Well, children, what are you doing?
THE WOMEN. Kill! Kill!
MARAT. Kill them! What do you want with them? Do you want to eat them? (Part of the people laugh.)
HULIN. He knows the way. You have to amuse them.
HOCHE. Where’s the little one?
HULIN. The little one? (Hoche runs to find Julie.)
DESMOULINS (springing forward). Stop, comrades, you’re killing the prisoners!
THE PEOPLE (taken aback). The prisoners?
DESMOULINS. The prisoners of the Bastille. Look at their grey smocks! They’re the ones we’ve come to free.
THE PEOPLE (uncertain). But no, they’re the enemy.
HULIN. There are no more enemies.
JULIE (appearing, standing on the great gate of the Bastille, held on the shoulders of men of the people, stretching out her arms, a green branch in her hand, crying). Mercy for our friends, our friends the enemies!
THE PEOPLE (laughing). Do you hear that little one?
DESMOULINS. The little maiden treading with her bare feet the gate of the Bastille — vanquished despotism!
HOCHE. Cry, little one: All brothers, all friends!
JULIE. Brothers! Brothers!
THE PEOPLE. All brothers, she’s right!
THE INVALIDES. Long live the people!
THE PEOPLE. Long live the old glory!
THE INVALIDES (to Julie). Little one, you saved us!
THE PEOPLE. But she is also the one who conquered you, comrades. It’s this little atom that took the Bastille!
MARAT. You are our good conscience!
THE PEOPLE. You are our little Liberty!
They stretch out their arms toward her. The women blow her kisses. She closes her eyes, smiles, and trembles.
HOCHE (clapping Hulin on the shoulder; Hulin shares the crowd’s emotion). Well, Hulin? Eternal doubter, are you at last convinced?
HULIN (wipes his eyes. Stubbornly). Yes — although…
The laughter of Hoche and the people cuts off his sentence. He stops and laughs louder than the rest. He looks around, sees in a niche at the entrance to the courtyard, in the wall of the Bastille, the statue of the King. He goes briskly to it and seizes it.
By God! Down with you! Make way for Liberty!
He hurls it to the ground, takes little Julie in his arms, and sets her in the niche in place of the statue.
My strength awakens and becomes conscious of itself. The Bastille overthrown! I did that! We did that! — We’ll do much more yet! We’ll clean the Augean stables, purge the earth of monsters, smother in our arms the lion of royalty. Our fist shall beat despotism, as the hammer beats the anvil. Come, companions, let us forge the Republic! — Force too long compressed, that cracks my breast, burst forth, overflow! Roll on, torrent of Revolution!
THE OLD MARKET WOMAN (astride a cannon, a red scarf around her head). To the King! Here’s my horse! I’ve taken it. I’m going to hitch the beast to my little cart, and we’ll go to Versailles to pay a call on fat Louis. I’ve plenty to say to him. Good Lord! For centuries I’ve been storing up in here misery upon misery, and patience on top of it all — I’m choking: I’ve got to let it out. Good beast that I was, resigning myself, thinking it was necessary to suffer, for the pleasure of the rich! Now I understand! I want to live, I want to live! Too bad I’m so old! By my blood! I want to make up for lost time! — Giddyup, my beauty, to the Court!
She passes, pushed on her cannon by men of the people, bare-legged, in helmets and armor.
THE PEOPLE. To the Court! To Versailles! — Yes, we have suffered too much! We want happiness! We shall take happiness!
DESMOULINS (a green branch in his hand). The forest of Liberty has sprung from the paving stones. The green branches wave in the wind. The old heart of Paris blooms again. Here is the spring!
THE PEOPLE (bursting with joy and pride, waving green branches, decked with green cockades, green ribbons, green leaves). Free! The sky is free!
The setting sun enters through the opening of the drawbridge and bathes in its purple rays the courtyard of the Bastille, the crowd with the green branches, and little Liberty.
HOCHE. Sun, you may sleep; we have not wasted our day.
LA CONTAT. Its dying fires redden the castle windows, the swaying branches, the swell of heads, and little Liberty.
HULIN. The sky sounds the call to war.
MARAT. Like Him who entered, seventeen hundred years ago, amid the branches, this little girl has not come among us to bring peace.
DESMOULINS. There is blood upon us.
ROBESPIERRE (with a concentrated and burning fanaticism). It is our own.
THE PEOPLE (in a frenzy). It is mine! It is mine!… We offer it to you, Liberty!
DESMOULINS. To the devil with our lives! Great joys must be paid for.
HOCHE. We are ready to pay.
ROBESPIERRE (concentrated). We shall pay.
THE PEOPLE (with enthusiasm). We shall pay!
Rounds form around Liberty. Music.
LA CONTAT (to the audience). Laughter, laughter, love! Joy is with us. Joy of being one with all, joy of loving with all, joy of suffering with all! Let us join hands! Let us form fraternal dances! Sing! For this is your festival, O people of Paris!
MARAT. Dear people, for so long you have toiled, struggled in silence! So many centuries of suffering to arrive at last at this hour of joy! Liberty is yours. Guard well your conquest!
DESMOULINS (to the audience). And now, to you! Complete our work! The Bastille is down: other Bastilles remain. To the assault! To the assault of lies! To the assault of the Night! The Spirit shall conquer Force. The past is broken. Death is dead!
HULIN (to Julie). O our Liberty, our light, our love! How small you still are, delicate and fragile! Will you withstand the coming storms? Grow, grow, dear little plant, rise straight and vigorous, and gladden the world with your breath of the meadow!
HOCHE (saber in hand, mounts a step, at the foot of the niche where little Liberty stands). Be at peace, Liberty, safe in the shelter of our arms! We hold you. Woe to whoever touches you! You are ours; we are yours. All that is ours is yours. Yours, these spoils, these trophies!
The women throw flowers to Liberty. The men bow before her their pikes, their banners, their green branches, the trophies of the Bastille.
But this is not enough: we shall make for you an immortal triumph. Daughter of the people of Paris, your clear eyes shall shine for the enslaved peoples. We shall carry through the universe the dread level of Equality. We shall drive your chariot, amid battles, by saber, by cannon, toward Love, toward the Fraternity of the human race. — Brothers! All brothers! All free! — Let us go deliver the world!
Swords, lances, tree branches, handkerchiefs, hats, and arms wave amid cheers and trumpet calls. The people form rounds around Liberty.
VARIANTS
FOR PERFORMANCE AT THE THÉÂTRE GÉMIER
ACT ONE
(See page 83)
A procession forms with a strange and solemn order.
HOCHE (showing the people to Hulin). Well, Hulin, are you convinced now?
HULIN. It’s absurd… This disorderly crowd, going to attack an army… They’ll get themselves massacred. It makes no sense. (He follows the crowd.)
HOCHE. Where are you going?
HULIN. With them, naturally.
They laugh and go to take the lead. Suddenly the old market woman arrives beating a drum.
THE PEOPLE. Forward!
A tremendous clamor rises.
THE PEOPLE (in a low voice). Solemnity, comrades! No disorder!
Yes. Solemnity! Silence!
Hats off!
He bares his head. All imitate him. The crowd whispers — and falls silent.
THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE (in a low voice). Forward.
Funeral roll of the drum. The people march. Silence.
ACT TWO
(See page 101)
[The variant replaces the scene with Fauchet, Cloots, and others with an extended scene featuring the Man on Guard — a homeless, bare-footed man who philosophizes about liberty, dreams of carrying the revolution across Europe, and encounters Vintimille passing through the streets. Vintimille tries to buy the man’s complicity with money; the man is outraged, but ultimately takes the money to drink and forget that he is not free. Hulin watches the exchange, protecting Vintimille’s identity from the man but refusing to take sides. This variant then rejoins the main text at Hoche’s arrival.]
POPULAR FESTIVAL VARIANT
(Scene for a performance as a popular festival, with music and choruses)
(See page 191)
The drawbridge of the Bastille is lowered. A tremendous clamor bursts forth. [The scene reprises the storming, ending with Vintimille — in a sudden burst of delirium amid the crowd’s frenzy — crying “Long live Liberty!” before catching himself and breaking his sword.]
FINAL SCENE
Festival of the People — Triumph of Liberty
Tuesday July 14, 7 o’clock in the evening. Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. People crying, laughing, rushing in all directions, decked with green cockades, green ribbons, green leaves, waving green branches, delirious with joy, strength, and pride. Above this human ocean emerge, like the foam of waves crashing against rocks, men, women, children, mounted on stopped wagons and carts, on ladders, on stools, on lampposts, on each other’s shoulders, all carrying and shaking green branches. A forest undulating in the rays of the setting sun.
At the rise of the curtain, triumphal music, which ends amid the tumult of joy, the unceasing enthusiastic cries of the crowd.
THE PEOPLE (bursting with happiness and pride, running about the stage, waving tree branches, crying all together). Free! We are free!
DESMOULINS (a green branch in his hand). The forest of Liberty has sprung from the paving stones. The green branches wave in the wind. The old heart of Paris blooms again. Here is the spring!
THE PEOPLE (all together). Free! The sky is free!
The voices divide and clash like lightning.
— Shattered, the fist raised above our heads!
— Under our heel, the beast!
— She’s taken! She’s taken!
(All together.) We have vanquished them!
DESMOULINS. The scarecrow of that Bastille, that lion skin with which they hid their ferocious cowardice — torn from their shoulders! And here appears, quite naked, shivering and ridiculous, the King, the enemy King!
THE PEOPLE. Check to the King! The King is vanquished!
— Paris no longer belongs to the King. Paris belongs to Paris!
THE OLD MARKET WOMAN (astride a cannon, a red scarf around her head). To the King! To the King! Here’s my horse! I’ve taken it. I’m going to hitch the beast to my little cart, and we’ll go to Versailles to pay a call on fat Louis, M. Capet the Elder. I’ve plenty to say to him. Good Lord! For centuries I’ve been storing up in here misery upon misery, and patience on top of it all — I’m choking: I’ve got to let it out. Good beast that I was, resigning myself, thinking it was necessary to suffer, for the pleasure of the rich! Now I understand! I want to live, I want to live! Too bad I’m so old! By my blood! I want to make up for lost time! — Giddyup, my beauty, to the Court!
She passes, pushed on her cannon, escorted and followed by men of the people, bourgeois, women, with helmets, shields, muskets, lances, armor — four drummers at the head: a beggar in rags, bare-legged; a woman; a child; and an old bourgeois, the type of a prim and proper process server.
THE PEOPLE. To the Court! To Versailles! To the King! — Yes, we have suffered too much! We want happiness! We have a right to happiness! We shall take happiness!
LA CONTAT (her blonde hair undone, arms bare, her tunic open, throat and breasts bare, holding a tree branch and garlanded with foliage, surrounded by women, young men, and children carrying long branches like her — drunk with joy and victory). Victory! We have conquered you! My heart leaps with joy in my breast. I have grazed like a goat on the vine of liberty, and its intoxication bathes my senses and carries me away. What have I done? I don’t know. But I know that I am victorious, that I have crushed them. I feel myself drowned in this blessed flood of strength that flows brimming through the city. Joy of letting go, of disappearing entirely in this human ocean, only to find oneself tumultuous and all-powerful like it, to feel thundering in its flanks these thunderous energies! — O people who breathe in me, I love you, I am your voice, your instrument, the trumpet that sounds your victory and your joy of being free!
DESMOULINS. Bacchante of the Revolution, intoxicated by Liberty — is it love or hate that radiates from the joy of your body? A haze of voluptuousness and murder envelops your eyes and wet lips. Are your fingers reddened by wine or blood? No matter! I love you, Victory! — Evoé! Let us sing Liberty!
Music.
CLOOTS. O Paris, holy city! Rome of free souls! New Jerusalem! Cradle of the future! You have just sounded the hour of the world’s coming of age! The world is yours. But nothing belongs to you more than my heart, dear city, my heart that adores you and gives itself wholly to you!
THE PEOPLE. Bravo, Prussian!
CLOOTS. Don’t call me that! I’m no longer Prussian! There are no more nations! There is no more Prussia! I give it to you. Make it free!
FAUCHET. Source of Liberty, we have fought for you! Complete our work! We pray to you for our brothers, for all the men of the universe who cannot reach happiness, as we can, by their own strength. Come to their aid! Deliver the world!
MONKS AND PRIESTS (Mathurins, Capuchins, armed curates, with muskets, crosses, and banners, singing). Domine, salvam fac gentem, et exaudi nos in die quâ invocaverimus te!
THE PEOPLE. Long live the tonsured ones! Long live Sainte-Geneviève!
DESMOULINS. Long live the papegaux, cardingaux, bishopaux, priestaux, monkaux! Long live the archinitwits!
CLOOTS. By God! Long live citizen God! Once won’t hurt!
STUDENTS (arm in arm with girls, singing a song by Vadé). The supreme good, / The one I love, / Is Liberty, / My heart is enchanted by it.
THE PEOPLE. Vivat, Basoche!
DESMOULINS. Hats off to the pen! That is what killed the Bastille!
A STUDENT (pushing a wheelbarrow). Ten sous, ten sous for the stones of the Bastille!
THE PEOPLE (laughing). The joker! The bear isn’t dead, and he’s already selling the skin.
THE STUDENT. Cobblestones!
ANOTHER STUDENT (carrying a large placard inscribed “BASTILLE”). Charity, citizens! Where will honest folk sleep tonight? There’s no more Bastille.
The crowd laughs.
Gonchon is carried on students’ shoulders; they laugh and shout. He has a saber in his hand and a laurel wreath on his head.
THE STUDENTS. The heroic Gonchon! — The reluctant hero! — Gonchon Poliorcetes!
THE PEOPLE. Gonchon, enemy of kings! Terror of the aristos!
THE STUDENTS. He was so frightened that he charged in first. He fled through the enemy, putting them all to flight, terrible in his terror.
DESMOULINS. Scoundrel! Who gave you permission to take the Bastille? You ought to be whipped for usurping an honor of which you are unworthy.
THE PEOPLE. Your masters will take care of that for us. You’ll be hanged by them.
THE STUDENTS. You’ll be hanged, Gonchon! You took the Bastille!
Gonchon’s bearers bounce him on their shoulders. Gonchon, trembling, excited, and bewildered, clumsily waves his saber and salutes with his wreath. The crowd dances around him.
DESMOULINS. The rogue takes himself seriously. Give him a drubbing!
MARAT (calmed, smiling at the crowd’s joy). Let them laugh. One hates no more when one is victorious. The spectacle of vice is nothing now but ridiculous! Let this grotesque monster dilate their spleens!
Behind Gonchon and the group of Students come men of the people and soldiers, muskets, sickles, green banners, red and blue banners. The combatants of the Bastille, covered with dust and blood, carry wounded. Then, preceded and enveloped by an immense cheer, little Julie, standing straight and still, a branch in her hand, on the great gate of the Bastille, held on the shoulders of a dozen defenders of the Bastille: Swiss and Invalides. Iron chains lie at her feet. Before her march Hulin and Hoche — Hulin, bareheaded, bare-necked, in his shirtsleeves, an axe on his shoulder — Hoche, carrying on the point of his saber the act of capitulation of the Bastille.
DESMOULINS (amid the people’s cheers). The Dioscuri! Hoche and Hulin! — And the little maiden treading with her bare feet vanquished despotism, the gate of the Bastille!
THE PEOPLE. The capitulation! — The key! — The chains!
MARAT. The act of deposition of Kings!
CLOOTS. The fetters of Man, broken!
DESMOULINS. The cage is open. Fly, Liberty-bird!
[The scene continues with the people recognizing the Swiss and Invalides, Julie crying mercy, the reconciliation, Hulin placing Julie in the niche, and the final hymns — as in the main text.]
NOTE
This is, as the title indicates, a festival of the people — the festival of the People of yesterday and today, of the eternal People. For it to take its full meaning, the audience itself should participate, giving itself the spectacle of its own triumph, joining in the songs and dances at the end.
The object of this tableau is precisely to realize the union of the audience and the work, to throw a bridge between the auditorium and the stage, to make of a dramatic action truly an action. The drama addresses itself suddenly and directly to the people. Desmoulins, la Contat, Marat, Hoche call to them. But that is not enough, and words no longer suffice. To give the work its logical crowning, and to the historical fact its universal significance, a new power must enter the scene: Music, the tyrannical force of sound, which stirs the heavy passive crowds; that magical illusion which abolishes Time and gives to what it touches an absolute character.
The music must be here the background of the fresco, the warp of the words. Not a moment should it fall silent — now loud and distinct, now soft and veiled. Its office is to define the heroic meaning of the festival, and to fill the silences that a theatre crowd can never completely fill, which open despite everything amid their cries, and which destroy the illusion of continuous life. It is not necessary that the audience grasp every word of the crowd, any more than every note of the orchestra and the choruses; it need only have the impression of an exuberant and triumphant kermesse.
I would also want the imperious obsession of a theme — a theme of joy and action — the theme of Liberty conquering the world — which germinates from the beginning, grows little by little, imposes itself with the tenacity of a fixed idea, and finishes, at the denouement, by embracing and seizing everything: all the other themes and all the popular masses.
For one must arrive at this — perhaps impossible to achieve today, but which must one day be realized, and which is the principle of a new popular art: the audience compelled to join not only its thought but its voice to the action; the People becoming itself an actor in the festival of the People.
Finished writing in Paris, June 1901
Romain Rolland
Finished printing three thousand copies for the first edition on Thursday, March 20, 1902.
At the Suresnes Printing Works (C. Payen, administrator) 9, rue du Pont