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Updated: May 15, 2025
Gamelin pushed this door open and found the Secretary of the Committee within; he was writing at a large table loaded with books, papers, steel ingots, cartridges and samples of saltpetre-bearing soils. "Greeting, citoyen Trubert. How are you?" "I?... I am perfectly well."
Gamelin, where he sat on the jury bench, was handed a letter from Trubert, Secretary of the Committee of Defence; it was to notify his appointment as Commissioner of Supplies of Powder and Saltpetre: "You will excavate all the cellars in the Section in order to extract the substances necessary for the manufacture of powder.
The Secretary of the Military Committee, Fortuné Trubert, invariably made this same reply to all who troubled about his health, less by way of informing them of his welfare than to cut short any discussion on the subject. At twenty-eight, he had a parched skin, thin hair, hectic cheeks and bent shoulders.
Fortuné Trubert laid down his pen: "Citoyen Évariste," he said, "I beg you to go to the Convention and ask them to send us orders to dig up the floor of cellars, to wash the soil and flag-stones and collect the saltpetre. It is not everything to have guns, we must have gunpowder too." A little hunchback, a pen behind his ear and a bundle of papers in his hand, entered the erstwhile sacristy.
Is it not averred that more than one juror of this tribunal has let himself be corrupted by the gold of the accused, and that the President Montané falsified the procedure to save the head of the woman Corday?" At the words the hall resounded with vehement applause. The vaults were still reverberating with the uproar when Fortuné Trubert mounted the tribune.
It was the citoyen Beauvisage, of the Committee of Surveillance. "Citoyens," he announced, "we have bad news: Custine has evacuated Landau." "Custine is a traitor!" cried Gamelin. "He shall be guillotined," said Beauvisage. Trubert, in his rather breathless voice, expressed himself with his habitual calmness: "The Convention has not instituted a Committee of Public Safety for fun.
It was little Joséphine; her mother was whipping her for playing in the Place with good-for-nothing boys and dirtying the fine white frock she had worn for the obsequies of the citoyen Trubert.
Left alone in the nave with Trubert, Gamelin pressed the latter's hand. "Thank you. How are you?" "I? Oh! Very well, very well!" replied Trubert, coughing and spitting blood into his handkerchief. "The Republic has many enemies without and within, and our own Section counts a not inconsiderable number of them.
Three days after the execution of Marie Antoinette Gamelin was called to the bedside of the citoyen Fortuné Trubert, who lay dying, within thirty paces of the Military Bureau where he had worn out his life, on a pallet of sacking, in the cell of some expelled Barnabite father. His livid face was sunk in the pillow.
Fortuné Trubert wrote on calmly. The Sections being instructed by resolution of the Commune to carry out the levy of twelve thousand men for La Vendée, he was drawing up directions relating to the enrolment and arming of the contingent which the "Pont-Neuf," erstwhile "Henri IV," was to supply.
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