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Updated: June 29, 2025
The citoyenne Élodie had climbed the four storeys to embrace the widow Gamelin, whom she called her good mother. She was in white from head to foot, and smelt of lavender. An old two-horsed travelling berline stood waiting in the Place, with the hood down. Rose Thévenin occupied the back seat with Julienne Hasard.
But Gamelin, as he descended the steps among the press of jurors and spectators, saw nothing, heard nothing but his own act of justice and humanity and the self-congratulation he felt at having recognized innocence. In the courtyard stood Élodie, all in white, smiling through her tears; she threw herself into his arms and lay there half fainting.
Their attitude made a strong impression on Gamelin who felt he was of the same kidney himself. "This Guillergues," he thought to himself, "is a cunning scamp, a villain who has speculated in the forage supplied to our cavalry. To acquit him is to let a traitor escape, to be false to the fatherland, to devote the army to defeat."
But it was not a genre that suited his temperament. His cold treatment of such like scenes proved the painter's incurable purity of heart. Amateurs were right: Gamelin had no gifts as an erotic artist. Nowadays, though he was still short of thirty, these subjects struck him as dating from an immemorial antiquity.
At last, in answer to the citoyenne Gamelin's look of amazement: "Don't you know your daughter?" The old dame clasped her hands: "Julie!... It is you.... Good God! is it possible?..." "Why, yes, it is I. Kiss me, mother." The citoyenne Gamelin pressed her daughter to her bosom, and dropped a tear on the collar of the box-coat. Then she began again in an anxious voice: "You, in Paris!..."
When the judge asked him an embarrassing question, his face remained unmoved and his voice confident, but his two hands, folded on his breast, kept twitching in an agony. Gamelin was struck by this and whispered to the colleague sitting next him, a painter like himself: "Watch his thumbs!" The first witness to depose alleged a number of most damaging facts. He was the mainstay of the prosecution.
Évariste Gamelin seized Élodie's hand, but dropped it again swiftly next moment: "Farewell! I have involved you in my hideous fortunes, I have blasted your life for ever. Farewell! I pray you may forget me!" "Whatever you do," she warned him, "do not go back home to-night. Come to the Amour peintre. Do not ring; throw a pebble at my shutters.
The Incorruptible is in the neighbouring Hall, in deliberation with the Commune and the proscribed representatives. Gamelin casts a despairing look over the dark Square below. By the light of the lanterns he can see the wooden candles above the grocer's shop knocking together like ninepins; the street lamps shiver and swing; a high wind has sprung up.
At that moment Combalot the cobbler showed his red nose at the half-open door. He had brought, along with some pairs of shoes he had re-heeled, the bill for the repairs. For fear of being taken for a bad citizen, he made a point of using the new calendar. The citoyenne Gamelin, who liked to see clearly what was what in her accounts, was all astray among the Fructidors and Vendémiaires.
"Citoyen Blaise, I have still two or three drawings of Gamelin's by me, which you gave me to engrave. Is it urgent?" "Not a bit." "By-the-bye, about Gamelin; yesterday, strolling in the Boulevard du Temple, I saw at a dealer's, who keeps a second-hand stall opposite the House of Beaumarchais, all that poor devil's canvases, amongst the rest his Orestes and Electra.
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