Beyond Revanche, page 35
He looked downcast, so I took him into my confidence. “You see, Carbolic…”
“Monsieur Villain, you do know that my name is Marti, or even Moutie, as my friends call me…this Carbolic has become monotonous. Boring, even.”
“Oh, but I like it. I mean no harm. It’s a compliment.”
“Would the same remarks apply if I called you villain or assassin or murderer, Monsieur?” He was being rude. Offensive.
“No, it would not.”
The cheek of the man. But I wanted to talk, share my good news with someone, so I swallowed my anger and began again.
“Marti,” I said. It sounded wrong. “Wait till you read those newspapers. They are going to start an anti-Jaures campaign. He’s to be revealed as a traitor to France. Isn’t that clever?”
“Certainly would be, Monsieur. I’ll tell my friends to watch out for it.” He turned and left me to my thoughts. Now I had a future. My goodness. Where will I go when I get out of here? I need to see my father. I have to go back to Reims and show myself to those who made my life miserable. Oh yes, I would rub their noses in the merde.
33
March 1919 – The Ravaging Virus
Mathieu’s world spun into an orbit of confusion. He needed to focus. An attempt on the prime minister’s life, Emile Cottin, news of Villain’s impending trial, a city full of political targets, newspapers spreading disinformation, journalists from every corner of the earth, anarchists, Bolsheviks, and now, Agnès. As he rushed towards the Saint-Antoine hospital on Rue Faubourg he revised the list. Agnès. Agnès of the blessed wonderful smile was his real concern. He was tempted to prayer, but resisted. How? Agnès had warned him repeatedly that this Spanish flu was lethal and everyone had to take precautions to avoid contact with a victim. One sneeze released half a million germs, she said. One cough could be equally as dangerous. She always wore her gauze mask in the hospital. She was protected, surely? Could it have happened the night before last? He had taken Agnès to the theatre to see Sarah Bernhardt, still a magnificent actress even if she only had one leg. That was the problem with this killer disease; it struck indiscriminately. Legs or no legs.
Matron Veronique Lore caught him at the main entrance of the Hotel-Dieu with its grand facade and famed central passage. Her stern face betrayed deep concern. Though barely forty years of age, her hair had turned prematurely grey and her lined face and sunken eyes reflected the agonies she had witnessed over the last four years. “You have to understand, captain, that Agnès is seriously unwell. Her temperature this morning was almost forty and she has trouble breathing. If pneumonia grips her…”
“Veronique.” Mathieu had met the Matron several times when Agnès was in Paris. He took both of her weathered hands in his own and pleaded, “How? Yesterday morning she was perfectly normal. She is the strongest woman I know. She was in Etaples last weekend working in the military hospital…”
“And that is probably where she caught the virus. It’s been around for months, and the government won’t allow the newspapers to broadcast the extent of this epidemic. Professor Tuffier has been extensively studying victims brought to this hospital. They’ve called it Spanish flu, but it’s not from Spain.”
“No? But…”
“We’re not certain but it appears to be rife in those overcrowded transit camps for American soldiers. And it’s young adults who are most at risk. Agnès is strong, but la grippe has no respect for strength. When you see her, do not distress her by crying or overreacting. Put on this mask.”
She handed him a simple, white gauze covering which he bound around his nose. Were it not so serious, he might have passed comment about looking like a horse with its snout in a bag, but levity had no place in his world. They passed through heavy swing-doors with rubber seals to retain any circulating spores and entered a universe of prim cleanliness. Rows of individual beds with cloth-tented coverings separating one from the other were draped in white sheets. Underneath lay sick and dying patients. Some lay prone, unmoving, while others coughed and squirmed in pain. Agnès was sleeping fitfully in the fifth cloth bay. She looked like the painting of ashen-faced Saint Odile which had graced the wall of his infant school in Marseilles. Translucent and vulnerable.
“Don’t touch her or disturb her or I’ll throw you out myself.” Matron’s warning was absolute.
“Thanks, Veronique. I’ll be very quiet,” he whispered. Mathieu Bertrand sat by his lover’s side and dared himself to breathe. Agnès had been washed in cooling water and was visibly struggling in her fight against the inner enemy. He wanted to say, “I love you, Agnès,” a hundred times over, but dared not. He wanted to kiss her pale rose lips, but dared not. Seeing her like this was agony. But he sat in the agony of hope for an hour.
Waiting, watching, seething at the fates who mocked this good woman who had dedicated her life to saving others and now sought to repay her with untimely death. He bowed his sorry head, exhausted, and fell asleep.
A nurse touched his elbow. Agnès was still…and was she more restful? “She’s in a deeper sleep. That’s usually good,” she assured him. “By the way, there’s an odd fellow at the door asking to speak with you. Smells of soap.”
Moutie was agitated. The last time Mathieu had seen him pacing so uncomfortably back and forth was outside the police court before the onset of war. The man had certainly changed since his conversion, or was it conversation, in the Saint Gervais confessional. Moutie’s clothes were fresh, perhaps not fully ironed, but clean. His addiction to carbolic soap, though welcome, was thought by his friends to have been caused by falling masonry in the shelled church. The word miracle had been used on occasion, but that was certainly stretching credibility. They moved swiftly to the nearby Auberge Saint Antoine though Moutie could not contain his excitement.
“They’ve opened discussions on Villain’s trial.”
“I thought they might.”
“His lawyers, Giraud and Bourson, have concocted a plan to start abusing Jaurès’ name in Le Parisien, and Villain is absolutely certain that he will be found not guilty. Could that be used as evidence that he has indeed lost his mind?” Moutie was as excited as a small boy with a new bicycle.
“What do you think of him, Moutie? How will he perform in court, do you think?”
“Arrogant. Truly believes that he murdered Jaurès on behalf of the nation. Not popular with other prisoners. Seems to call the tune with his lawyers…as if he is paying for their services himself. And stupid, too. Been too long on his own, probably.”
“Does he appear rational or is he obviously feeble-minded?”
“As rational as me…” No sooner had the words slipped from Moutie’s mouth than he realized what he had said… “And you,” he added for effect.
“They certainly plan to do something. They’ve not kept him alive for the duration of the war simply to have him imprisoned for the rest of his life. He never mentions names?”
“Now, here’s a thing.” Moutie extracted a small bag from his pocket and handed it to Mathieu.
“What’s inside?” His suspicion was understandable.
“Open it…and smell.”
That was an invitation that would have previously been rejected out of hand. Moutie held the bag between his thumb and forefinger and offered it again. Mathieu took it from him without moving his eyes, opened it, and let the aroma from the luxury coffee beans take flight. “My oh my, that smells good. Do you know what this is?”
“Blue Mountain beans. From Jamaica. Costs a fortune.”
“Perhaps. I couldn’t have told you that, my friend. I was speaking metaphorically.”
“Oh?”
“This is the smell of ultimate corruption. A reminder to Villain that he has very rich friends. Imprisoned and isolated, removed from reality and hemmed in by stone walls, they can provide him with the most exclusive of coffee beans. Everyone else has to put up with chicory, and this is what Villain has every day.”
“Yessir, this is what our man in La Santé had with his breakfast this morning.”
“Who brought him these?”
“He wouldn’t say, but I tricked him by claiming that only two men in Paris could afford them. He still said nothing, so I offered him two initials… R and Z. When I said Z, his face lit up like Zaharoff’s chandelier.”
“Basil Zaharoff? Are you sure?”
“He didn’t actually say so, but his reaction was electric. Do you know anyone else with a surname beginning with Z?”
“And the R?”
“Rothschild. He could afford it, but he didn’t react to the R.”
If Zaharoff was involved in any way, then financing Villain’s trial was simplicity itself. Zaharoff? He mused to himself. That raised deeper concerns. Zaharoff and the president? Possibly. Zaharoff and Action française? Probably. Zaharoff and the Comité des Forges at Briey? Certainly.
Moutie’s agitation interrupted his thought pattern.
“Are these coffee beans for me, or do you want them back?” Mathieu smiled innocently as his informer’s face crumpled
“Well…” Moutie clearly did not want to part with them. “They were a gift, you know.”
“I take it that Villain knows he gave you a gift?” Silence.
Mathieu’s look was one of reproof; Moutie’s, one of guilt. “You keep them, Moutie. You are doing well. Now, back to work.”
Louis Emile Cottin, known to his friends as Milou, did not have to wait five and a half years before his trial. Indeed he did not have to linger five and a half weeks in jail. In comparison to Raoul Villain, Cottin was subjected to instant retribution. Bernard Roux first heard of the proposal to bring forward his trial at a joint service meeting on the first day of March. Not only had the judicial responsibility been passed to the military courts, but factions inside the Deuxième Bureau were actively involved in manufacturing the case against the anarchist, as the right-wing press would have it. A date was set. March 14th 1919.
The implications were transparent. While Raoul Villain was kept safely incarcerated until he could be tried for assassination by a civil court, Cottin was to be given a court-martial, though he was, of course, a civilian. The first would most likely impose a jail sentence; the second would order the death sentence. Mindful of the daily civilian disruption during Henriette Caillaux’s appearance at the Palais de Justice in 1914, Roux despaired of common sense in French politics. “You have to ask who pulls the strings in this country? The president, the Assembly, the prime minister and his cabinet…or others?”
“Don’t forget the Comité des Forges, Chief. They call the shots.” Mathieu’s sarcasm was evident.
“We’d better get the Paris gendarmerie and national police force to cancel all leave from mid-March onwards.”
Jacques, who only knew parts of the conspiracy theory, couldn’t understand. “If they can hold back on Raoul Villain, why not wait until the peace conference has finished and all these foreigners have gone home before dealing with Cottin? At all levels, this is crazy.”
Crazy it was.
“But there will be a reason. Believe me, there is always a reason.”
As predicted, Cottin became the victim of a St Valentine’s day print massacre. The right-wing press splattered his defenseless reputation across their front pages and vied with each other to find the most villainous stories they could concoct to strip decency from him. At 1:00 P.M. the court-martial was convened in the Palais de Justice under the presidency of Colonel Hivert, with a Captain Mornet as government prosecutor and Maitre Oscar Bloch as defense counsel. Bernard Roux was thoroughly embarrassed that foreign journalists were allowed to witness the proceedings.
Though Jacques-Francois had not been present, he had to sit through the angry debrief led by Bernard Roux, discomfited by rising his blood pressure.
“I know he intended to kill the Tiger, but honestly, the trial was a travesty, even by military standards.” He flicked his shaking right hand at Mathieu inviting him to continue.
“You are going to have to cut back on these cigarettes, Chief.”
“I didn’t ask for the obvious. Tell the Lieutenant what happened at the court-martial.”
Roux’s wheeze darkened the atmosphere further. Phlegm soiled the handkerchief he had drawn from his pocket. His lungs ached in protest and his faced turned purple.
Mathieu spelled it out. “They made a big fuss of his being an anarchist, and to prove it, cited the books he kept on the shelf in his boarding room. The works of Homer and Marcus Aurelius.”
“Since when did either of those pen an anarchist tome?” Roux’s ragged cough continued to strain his anger. “Followed by a book by Auguste Comte, father of French scientific philosophy? Incredible. How could any man call himself educated and claim that these world famous texts were the foodstuff of anarchists?”
They were genuinely affronted. Indeed, Roux was personally insulted. How they would laugh at the stupidity of the French court. But he was far from finished. “Then,” he spat, almost swallowing his Gauloises in apoplexy, “they pulled out Flammarion’s Astronomy, one of the most beautifully designed and important works of the last century, and concluded that all of these literary treasures added up to anarchism, Bolshevism, and rebellion. If Flammarion is an anarchist, I’m the King of Indo-China.” His spluttering choked him to silence.
Mathieu intervened. “It was, as the Chief says, embarrassing. The prosecutor, Mornet, sporting his war medals to underline his importance, made a spurious comment about Cottin’s intention to kill Clemenceau when the Germans were seventy kilometers from the gates of Paris. We couldn’t understand what he was talking about. Germans at the gates of Paris? One of the court officials spoke to him and he corrected himself, claiming that Cottin had declared his intention to kill Clemenceau as far back as May of last year. Not last month. It became more and more absurd.”
On a second telling it sounded so ridiculous that any fair person would have stopped the trial. But this was Paris. Bitter Paris. A Paris that had been terrorized. Paris that was determined to believe that it had won the war. And Emile Cottin was, in the eyes of even-minded citizens, a terrorist. Furthermore, the military court had to find a victory where it could. Stories had begun to circulate of courts-martial on the front line in 1917 where shell-shocked youths and men had been executed for refusing to fight as an example to others. Confused, shaken, ill, and enfeebled by months at the front, it made no difference to the comfortably uniformed upholders of military justice. The poor victims of harsh front line verdicts would have no place in the glory of France’s victory. They were sentenced to be airbrushed from history.
“Cottin was the only one with a sense of dignity.” Mathieu parted company with any pretense of impartiality. “His lawyers told the truth. Yes, he had tried to shoot the prime minister and failed. Yes, it was politically motivated, but given his youth and lack of guidance, the court should have consider a measure of clemency.”
His coughing fit concluded, Bernard Roux finished the story. “It took ten minutes for the military court-martial to deliver its predicted judgment. Guilty. Unanimous decision. Death sentence passed. Long Live France.” He threw up his arms in despair. Contempt rattled the room till the echo died in a silence of embarrassment.
Raoul’s Story
Threats
I fell to my knees and lifted my eyes to the high heavens. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. That was God’s promise. And that was me. I thirsted for righteousness and slew the evil Jaurès. My grandmother was a mystic, you know. She claimed to have had a visitation from the Blessed Virgin Mary. It caused considerable interest and some annoyance. Had she not gathered a reputation for dabbling in astral nonsense, the Abbe might well have taken forward her claim, but they said there was no guarantee that she would behave appropriately. I always behaved appropriately. But you know that, my friend. Everything that Charles promised was falling into place. Everything in my life had meaning again. I was determined that when they announced that they wanted to build statues in my honor, I would say, no. At least, I would at the start. I knew that I would probably have to give way to such demands, eventually.
A court-martial condemned Emile Cottin to death. Quite so. You couldn’t permit anarchists to take pot-shots at a prime minister. Seven shots. They say, he fired seven shots and failed to kill Clemenceau. Huh. Two shots and I blew off Jaurès’ head.
Maîtres Giraud and Bourson came in person to give me the good news that my trial date had been set, but I already knew. Carbolic had alerted me. Must have read it on the governor’s desk as he claimed. I was beginning to think that the governor left things on his desk so that Carbolic, I could not remember the name he preferred to be called, could let me know in advance. So it was to be March 24th. Splendid. But their attitude suddenly changed. I began to feel that this court case had more to do with them than me. Fifty-five months I’d been there. Fifty-five months of continuous instruction on what I must and must not say and then they began to treat me like a child.
“You will have your hair cut.” Giraud’s voice was harsh. Dogmatic. Unyielding, the bully
“You must grow a moustache, it will make you look softer,” Bourson added as if I was to be a model for one of the fashion houses. The soft touch.
“You will be given a clean suit. Don’t make a fuss, do you hear? It will be an ordinary suit. You will dress down for the court appearance. Do not ask answer questions about the clothes you were wearing when you killed Jaures.”
What? My beautiful Hermes outfit? Surely I should look my best in court? A proud Frenchman of some means who would not tolerate the socialists and anarchists.
“Keep your eyes lowered until you are asked a question and then look directly at the judge or lawyer who is speaking to you.” Did Giraud think I was a child-actor to be directed at every turn?
