The Eleven by Pierre Michon

Author:Pierre Michon [Michon, Pierre;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

II

I

The painting was commissioned in Nivôse – and not in Ventôse, as was said, as continues to be said, because History arranges dates in its own way; because the afterwards is a great lord and has all the rights, His Lordship the Afterwards; because Ventôse was the darkest month in that winter of year II when the factions fell, when the barren Decrees of Ventôse were drawn up and proclaimed, terrible to the suspects, full of compassionate zeal for the unfortunate, making the first despair, giving the second the phantom hope of food and shelter, setting the tone for the Great Terror; because it was also the coldest month, because lurking in the great cold and feeling it at heart Robespierre brought out the knife to shear off right and left, the moderates and the extremists, the beautiful knife named Saint-Just; because the wind in Ventôse resounds more theatrically than the snow lying softly in Nivôse; because there is no snow in the painting, but something like the effect of great wind, although there is no wind either; above all because, as you know, since the Empire, in a bold, romantic confusion, this definitive painting has sometimes been called Le Décret de Ventôse. No, it was earlier. It was commissioned two months before Ventôse, in Nivôse in year II, on the fifteenth or sixteenth of Nivôse, which is about January 5, 1794, erstwhile the Epiphany, Three Kings Day.

It was the night of the fifteenth. It may have been eleven o’clock. Corentin was sleeping. Someone knocked loudly on the door, on Rue des Haudriettes – he was still living in that small mansion, the main building of which opened to the street and which he had bought with the large commission from the Marquis de Marigny for the Louveciennes château, twenty-five thousand pounds from the king, almost twenty years earlier. The little girl (he no longer had servants living in), the little girl heard them before he did and ran frightened to his bedside. He went over to the window alone, opened it, and saw the three Sans Culottes below, peaceable, respectful in so far as was possible for Sans Culottes, who told him that he was wanted à la section at that very moment. From his extended arm, one of them raised a large square guardroom lantern. Their voices and the raised faces aglow in its full light were familiar to him. He signaled for the little girl to climb very quietly to the safety of the garret. He got dressed and went down.

There was a biting frost, the bright stars glistened in the dark night. Surely it was not the great off-white cloak that he wore, but the one that appears in legend, the greatcoat the color of the smoke of hell, impossible to tell if it is black, red, charcoal gray, or chocolate brown, and which is repeatedly mentioned in memoirs of those times. The Sans Culottes, who were shivering in their rags – they were already walking

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