FIC: Remember the Brightness of this Summer Day - Rated PG
Title: Remember the Brightness of this Summer Day
Author: Maelicia
First Posted: July 22, 2008.
Characters: Saint-Just; his mother; one of his sisters.
Rated: PG - features the slightly creepy and graphic vision of a nightmare in the end.
Era: Blérancourt, 10 thermidor, year II.
Word Count: 3105
Summary: As she watches the sun setting, Madame de Saint-Just recalls the events of the day and memories on her son.
Author’s Notes: The title is, obviously, irony. It’s enigmatic enough for you to read into it anything you want. It can be thought as a metaphor for Heaven, where Madame de Saint-Just hopes her son will go, after all, even though she seems to deny most of all of his principles, his fight and the Revolution who has taken her only son. Thus, don’t be too surprised if you feel uncomfortable with Madame de Saint-Just’s thoughts. In the patrie vs. family neoclassical dilemma, the two usually oppose each other, as in David’s paintings. I tried to illustrate this.
Also, I don’t think I need to remind you it’s depressing: it’s a Thermidor fic.
Beta'ed by estellacat.
Remember the Brightness of this Summer Day
~ By Maelicia.
Madame de Saint-Just looked out at the fields surrounding the small village of Blérancourt. They were shining with gold as the sun slowly set. From the window, she could see the peasants preparing for the harvest, a few kids running through the hay, too innocent and carefree to realise they were children living during the Terror. Children who would survive the Terror. Yet, she couldn’t help but think that they might have some feeling about the nature of the unique moment they were living, the nature of this new era arriving, the future being born in front of their eyes. They spoke of it already. They would fight for it soon. Though… for what would they fight now? For whom? What would happen, what would change, now that her son was-
Louis-Antoine used to walk through these fields too, Madame de Saint-Just remembered. During the summer vacations, when he could leave the College of the Oratorians, he would run and play there every year. Except he didn’t really run and play. The more he aged, the more he merely hid there, lying down against the dark earth and looking at the sky and clouds above him. That was what her daughters - his younger sisters - told her when she sent them to bring their brother back home, for he never responded to the calls and demands of his mother.
What was he thinking about? Death or life? The past or the future? Himself or the others?
She grasped the heavy wooden frame of the window which she was standing next to, a painful sigh - not a sob yet - wracking her body.
Today had been a busy day.
She had expected none of it.
Though she had always known this day would come soon enough.
She remembered the screams that shook her out of her everyday habits on this morning. They were the screams of her elder daughter, Louise, married to the notary Decaisne and still living in the commune; Louise who was knocking desperately on the door so that her mother would open it as fast as she could. Madame de Saint-Just remembered how Louise had fallen into her arms, crying and panicking.
“François told me… Antoine, Maman, he’s… he’s going to be… Robespierre and Couthon and… oh, God!”
It was all she had been able to mutter before her cries become impossible to control. Madame de Saint-Just knew. She understood what Louise had tried to explain. “Don’t speak,” she calmly replied, patting the back of her daughter. “I know.” A long moment had passed during which they embraced closely, comforting each other as much as they could. As she shut her eyes, Madame de Saint-Just could still feel the body of her daughter in her small arms, the grip on her dress, the tears on her shoulder.
Madame de Saint-Just had tried not to cry. She succeeded in this by reminding herself to be strong for her daughter. However, her calm had abandoned her when a troubling thought suddenly overcame her.
“What time?” She remembered frantically having started to ask her daughter. “What time will it happen?” Madame de Saint-Just had repeated her question many times, she didn’t remember how many.
“François said late this afternoon,” Louise had finally muttered. “Around five or six, but I don’t remember for sure, Maman.”
Louis-Antoine would probably laugh if he had known why his mother needed to know the exact time.
She needed to know so that she could pray.
To pray.
To pray for her only son’s soul.
He despised her fanaticism.
Except that now he would never despise, nor sneer, nor laugh at anything again.
Madame de Saint-Just remembered another banging on the door, when Louise was still with her, tears not having had the time to dry yet on her shoulder. This time, it was no one of the family.
***
“Citoyenne Saint-Just!”
This was what she was called in the world of her son.
“Open this door!”
Silently, she walked to the door and opened it to the yelling men. There were two of them. They entered the house.
“We have a mandate from the Convention to requisition any paper of interest belonging to one of the tyrants.”
She felt her heart wringing inside her chest. She blinked, repressing all visible emotions in a manner her son had - as she heard them saying - also perfected quite well. She may have been the only one to know he had learned it from herself.
“What do you expect to find here, pray tell?” She calmly asked.
“Anything to prove his conspiring.”
Madame de Saint-Just sneered. “He hasn’t stepped into this house for more than one hour ever since he was elected to the Convention in ’92 - your ‘Year One’.”
“Isn’t this quite enough time for a conspirator to leave evidence?” One of the agents added, disdainfully.
“Where’s his room?” The other agent asked, irritated and impatient.
Madame de Saint-Just understood there was nothing she could say that could stop them in their task. Lowering her stare slightly - a gesture not to be mistaken with submission but meant to hide from them the tears welling in her eyes - she complied. “First door on the left to the stairs,” she muttered.
Not thanking her for the information, they started loudly for the stairs. She held them back with a last call, showing and proving a mental strength she had been unaware she could still possess in such moment. “I demand that you not break anything!”
They turned. One of the two stepped back towards her, looking slightly intimidating. “You demand? With what authority, Citoyenne?”
Louise tried to stop her mother from continuing, but Madame de Saint-Just was suddenly quite determined.
“On my own. This is my house.”
“According to our laws, it should be his.” She was about to reply when he continued. “Even if it weren’t, we could still seize this house and arrest you.”
She raised her voice. “On what grounds?!”
“For spawning a tyrant!” He snapped back.
She said nothing more, as the other turned a last time to give to her his final warning, “Be wary, Citoyenne.” She couldn’t help but think that many men like these two may have said these same words and used this same sort of intimidation many times since the beginning of the Revolution her son had awaited so eagerly and had taken such an important part in. Despite the slightest, deepest, shameful and criminal thought she may have hidden within herself all these years to blame her son for this; this one scene which had occurred in her house confirmed to her that even her son’s sacrifice - for she knew this was his sacrifice - would never be enough to change human nature.
She watched the two men leaving to her son’s room, hearing the noise of furniture and objects being violently moved and thrown down. She slowly walked towards the door that had been left open. As she shut it, she noticed the old notary Antoine Gellé - the old enemy of her son’s political (and sentimental) life - on the other side of the street. He was smiling, watching, satisfied by his victory: he would live.
***
Upstairs, the room was still in the mess the two men had left it when they had left the house. They had taken with them a few papers - various notes from Louis-Antoine’s youth, nothing very important, but which she knew she would never see again. She didn’t have the courage to clean the room, mattress turned upside down and papers everywhere on the floor. Rejected notes, drafts for letters and, especially, printed copies of old speeches dating from the Constituante and the Législative.
Those old speeches her son had cherished so much, she remembered.
She bent down to take a look at some of them. There were many speeches by Maximilien de Robespierre - as his name was written back then. The famous and notorious Robespierre. The hero of her son. The tyrant of his (their) enemies. Only once had Louis-Antoine spoken of him to her. He didn’t generally speak of his political thoughts or expectations. He spoke of his frustrations more than his joys - except once.
“Robespierre read my letter, Maman! He has supported my appeal to the Assembly!”
Words coming back from the past.
The proposal hadn’t been favoured, but Madame de Saint-Just remembered how blissful her son had been. Very odd, she had noted, because Louis-Antoine should have considered it a failure, as he repeated on so many occasions. Yet, he hadn’t said it this time. He had merely repeated that Robespierre had read his letter. As if his request had been less important than the one whose attention he was requesting.
At that moment though, Madame de Saint-Just thought she finally understood.
One of the papers she was holding dated January 1790. It was titled Sur le marc d’argent. There were annotations in the margins in her son’s handwriting, as well as words and sentences underlined in the text. One of the annotations caught her attention, for it was a complete phrase rather than few summarising words. It was written next to a sentence in which the word DESPOTISME was underlined. It said:
“Deputy of Humanity and of the Republic, you sustain the patrie against this torrent of despotism and I want to follow you and I will follow you.”
Madame de Saint-Just didn’t know entirely what it meant, but she knew what it implied.
***
She had learned from Thuillier that her son had returned to the North for a third mission. Learning of the victories for France, she had sent him a message asking him to visit her on his way back to Paris. He could have politely declined - it would not have been the first time - giving as pretext his busy schedule and that the fate of the patrie came before family. However, this time, he accepted. She supposed he was, perhaps, in a happy mood, rejoicing at the positive outcome of the Battle of Fleurus. Thus, one evening, very late, Saint-Just came to see his mother. She was hardly expecting it anymore and, therefore, nobody else was home, apart from the maid, Marguerite, the old companion and helper of the ageing woman.
“I am glad to see you, my son,” she said as she welcomed him inside. She looked at his features under the candlelight. He seemed older than last time she had seen him. He seemed quite fatigued too. She didn’t know everything he was doing in Paris or elsewhere in France. She didn’t know how much he was working, but she knew he was very likely doing too much.
“Good evening, Maman,” he replied formally. He stood in the entrance. “I warn you that I cannot stay very long. I have just received a letter from Robespierre this morning, asking me to return to Paris as soon as possible.”
“It is already quite late,” she said with concern, smiling encouragingly, trying to keep her son with her as long as she could. “Surely you can stay here for the night.”
“I don’t know, Maman. I am not tired. I am both eager and anxious to return to Paris.”
“Do you want to eat something, at least? You must be hungry-”
“I am not hungry,” he snapped back, interrupting.
She frowned. “Antoine.”
“Maman,” he appeared impatient. “Did you have any reason to require my presence? Do you need help? Do you have problems?”
“No, Antoine, no… I wanted to see you.”
Saint-Just seemed shocked for an instant, incredulous and not understanding that this odd statement was coming out of his own mother’s mouth.
“That’s all?”
He looked at his mother as she slowly nodded. Then, he started walking towards the door again.
“Very well. I’ll catch a coach now.”
“Louis-Antoine!” He had always hated the way she said his two names together. “Marguerite is heating up some soup.”
There was no appeal to this. Yet, Saint-Just could simply have walked out to the municipal council where his coach was waiting for him. He did not. He sighed, and followed his mother to the dinning room.
His side of the conversation had been particularly silent. Madame de Saint-Just told him news of his two sisters, which pleased him, because he liked to know about Louise and Victoire, if their husbands were being nice to them, how their children were behaving and how they were growing up; but he was greatly annoyed at being kept here this way by his mother. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel like starting any disagreement and quietly ate his soup.
Until his mother brought up a greatly displeasing subject.
“I have heard many things recently, my son.”
She watched his mood change in his eyes, now glaring at her. He understood what she was referring to - the only thing she could possibly be referring to. He brought his hands together and adopted a different pose.
“Don’t listen to Rumour, Maman,” he indifferently replied. He was using the voice of the orator, of the revolutionary; not that of a son. “It emerges from Propaganda as from Calumny. It serves us as it serves the enemy. We must never trust tools so little clear-cut.”
“Unlike the guillotine?”
Saint-Just moved back in the chair, giving his back a stiff and straight shape. He stared sharply at his mother.
“Maman, don’t you ever talk this way again!” He raised his voice. “Never. This is the language of the Counter-Revolution.” He paused and pushed back his soup, feeling even less hungry now. Then, he added, his voice suddenly softer, “Who speaks with you in such a way in Blérancourt?”
She didn’t seem moved by his political demonstration.
“I will not tell you.”
He sneered. “You don’t need to. I know who. The clan Gellé-Thorin. As always.”
“We belong with their world, Antoine.”
“I don’t belong with them! I never did! They live in the Past, while my world is the Revolution.”
“Yes, your Revolution,” she repeated, apathetically, thinking about the younger years of her son. She was unable to grasp what all he was trying to build ex nihilo could possibly mean for him.
“It is not my Revolution,” he rectified.
“That is what people say here,” she added. Madame de Saint-Just knew she should have ended the conversation right there. However, there was a reason she had wanted him to come that evening. She wanted to speak with him. She wanted to see him. She feared for him as she had never feared before. Yet, what she was doing was dangerous: she knew what she was about to say would push him away from her, convincing him to leave and to never return. “They also say it’s your Terror,” she finally said. Saint-Just, who was keeping silent, suddenly looked at her. He knew she wasn’t over and therefore waited before replying. “And that your dearest friend is a tyrant.”
The features of his face didn’t move as he swiftly pushed the bowl of soup with his elbow from the table to the floor, where the bowl broke, spilling the soup. Saint-Just advanced towards his mother slowly, glaring, resting his hands further onto the table. He looked very calm on the outside.
“Stop listening to those people or it will be I who stops listening to you.”
Taking his frock coat from the back of the chair and his hat from the hat-stand, he walked towards the door of the dining room. There, Marguerite appeared, alarmed by the noise. Saint-Just apologised to her before leaving. His mother, however, quietly told her to leave her alone with her son.
“Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just!”
Saint-Just turned back to her. This time, he lost his self-taught stoical composure, angry at the way she had called him. “Without the particle, Maman!”
She stood, walking towards him.
“With or without, what does it change? Call yourself Brutus if that pleases you, but you remain my son. Doesn’t your Republic extol filial love and respect?”
Saint-Just calmed down and, quietly, he agreed. “Yes.”
“Then come, and embrace your mother.”
It took several minutes for him to comply. Long minutes during which they exchanged a cold stare, a stare filled with betrayal and fear.
Neither could yet know what this single embrace would mean to them - especially to her - one month later.
***
Madame de Saint-Just was a strong woman, a trait she had given to her strong son. Yet on her familiar impassive and severe features, there were tears shining. Tears for a son who had always known he was never to come back home.
She looked down at herself, at the black gown she had worn ever since the death of her husband, his father, Louis-Jean.
Now, she would wear black for Louis-Antoine.
The sun was setting on France.
The sun had already set a few hours before on the life of her son. Louis-Antoine would never see the end of this day, but, she thought, the memory of the brightness of this clear and beautiful summer day would stay with him in the grave.
What would they do with his body? She didn’t know. Consciously, she didn’t want to think of it.
Tonight, Madame de Saint-Just would dream of being in Paris, that city she had always known would eat the soul of her son, her first born.
Tonight, she would dream of digging the hole in which they have put her unruly, only son, digging in spite of her age and fragile health, digging even with her nails. She would fall into that hole, filled with so many bodies showing various degrees of decay. Bodies with no heads. Perhaps she would find the head of her son. Her beautiful son who never listened. Who had always dreamt of exactly this. This was the life he had chosen. To become a martyr with men that she only knew from their reputations. To become a monster, a tyrant and she the one who has spawned him.
Madame de Saint-Just didn’t know yet what she would dream of. She didn’t know that she would wake up knowing she would never stroke his hair again, regretting she hadn’t embraced him more, but she would be thankful, grateful to God for the last time they had parted, when she had held him close to her and bid him farewell the way he had always wanted her to see him.
In her mind, she could still hear their last words to each other.
“Adieu, Maman.”
“Salut et fraternité, Citoyen… Mon fils.”
When Madame de Saint-Just finished wiping the tears sliding down her cheeks, she noted that the sun had completely set on France.
The End.
Author’s Notes: Some biographical information.
Antoine Gellé - notary, father of Thérèse (Saint-Just’s teenage crush). Thérèse married the son of Gellé’s associate, François-Emmanuel Thorin. At the start of the Revolution, Gellé was siding with the traditional powers of Blérancourt, opposing Saint-Just already in his early political career: hence, the clan Gellé-Thorin.
Louise Saint-Just (1768-1857) - the older sister, born one year after Louis-Antoine. She married in 1786 Francois Decaisne, notary, born in Saint-Quentin, but moving his study in Blérancourt.
Victoire Saint-Just (1769-1832) - the younger sister. She married in 1790 Adrien Bayard, also a notary, but they moved in the département of Somme.
However, Marguerite the old maid is invented: I’m guessing Madame de Saint-Just at the age she would be at the time, with her two daughters being married, and from the social class she’s from, would naturally need a maid to help her. Genetic helping, I’m guessing she may consider an old maid as a friend more than a mere domestique - as many did anyway. It grounds the whole thing a bit more into raw reality.
Author: Maelicia
First Posted: July 22, 2008.
Characters: Saint-Just; his mother; one of his sisters.
Rated: PG - features the slightly creepy and graphic vision of a nightmare in the end.
Era: Blérancourt, 10 thermidor, year II.
Word Count: 3105
Summary: As she watches the sun setting, Madame de Saint-Just recalls the events of the day and memories on her son.
Author’s Notes: The title is, obviously, irony. It’s enigmatic enough for you to read into it anything you want. It can be thought as a metaphor for Heaven, where Madame de Saint-Just hopes her son will go, after all, even though she seems to deny most of all of his principles, his fight and the Revolution who has taken her only son. Thus, don’t be too surprised if you feel uncomfortable with Madame de Saint-Just’s thoughts. In the patrie vs. family neoclassical dilemma, the two usually oppose each other, as in David’s paintings. I tried to illustrate this.
Also, I don’t think I need to remind you it’s depressing: it’s a Thermidor fic.
Beta'ed by estellacat.
Remember the Brightness of this Summer Day
~ By Maelicia.
Madame de Saint-Just looked out at the fields surrounding the small village of Blérancourt. They were shining with gold as the sun slowly set. From the window, she could see the peasants preparing for the harvest, a few kids running through the hay, too innocent and carefree to realise they were children living during the Terror. Children who would survive the Terror. Yet, she couldn’t help but think that they might have some feeling about the nature of the unique moment they were living, the nature of this new era arriving, the future being born in front of their eyes. They spoke of it already. They would fight for it soon. Though… for what would they fight now? For whom? What would happen, what would change, now that her son was-
Louis-Antoine used to walk through these fields too, Madame de Saint-Just remembered. During the summer vacations, when he could leave the College of the Oratorians, he would run and play there every year. Except he didn’t really run and play. The more he aged, the more he merely hid there, lying down against the dark earth and looking at the sky and clouds above him. That was what her daughters - his younger sisters - told her when she sent them to bring their brother back home, for he never responded to the calls and demands of his mother.
What was he thinking about? Death or life? The past or the future? Himself or the others?
She grasped the heavy wooden frame of the window which she was standing next to, a painful sigh - not a sob yet - wracking her body.
Today had been a busy day.
She had expected none of it.
Though she had always known this day would come soon enough.
She remembered the screams that shook her out of her everyday habits on this morning. They were the screams of her elder daughter, Louise, married to the notary Decaisne and still living in the commune; Louise who was knocking desperately on the door so that her mother would open it as fast as she could. Madame de Saint-Just remembered how Louise had fallen into her arms, crying and panicking.
“François told me… Antoine, Maman, he’s… he’s going to be… Robespierre and Couthon and… oh, God!”
It was all she had been able to mutter before her cries become impossible to control. Madame de Saint-Just knew. She understood what Louise had tried to explain. “Don’t speak,” she calmly replied, patting the back of her daughter. “I know.” A long moment had passed during which they embraced closely, comforting each other as much as they could. As she shut her eyes, Madame de Saint-Just could still feel the body of her daughter in her small arms, the grip on her dress, the tears on her shoulder.
Madame de Saint-Just had tried not to cry. She succeeded in this by reminding herself to be strong for her daughter. However, her calm had abandoned her when a troubling thought suddenly overcame her.
“What time?” She remembered frantically having started to ask her daughter. “What time will it happen?” Madame de Saint-Just had repeated her question many times, she didn’t remember how many.
“François said late this afternoon,” Louise had finally muttered. “Around five or six, but I don’t remember for sure, Maman.”
Louis-Antoine would probably laugh if he had known why his mother needed to know the exact time.
She needed to know so that she could pray.
To pray.
To pray for her only son’s soul.
He despised her fanaticism.
Except that now he would never despise, nor sneer, nor laugh at anything again.
Madame de Saint-Just remembered another banging on the door, when Louise was still with her, tears not having had the time to dry yet on her shoulder. This time, it was no one of the family.
***
“Citoyenne Saint-Just!”
This was what she was called in the world of her son.
“Open this door!”
Silently, she walked to the door and opened it to the yelling men. There were two of them. They entered the house.
“We have a mandate from the Convention to requisition any paper of interest belonging to one of the tyrants.”
She felt her heart wringing inside her chest. She blinked, repressing all visible emotions in a manner her son had - as she heard them saying - also perfected quite well. She may have been the only one to know he had learned it from herself.
“What do you expect to find here, pray tell?” She calmly asked.
“Anything to prove his conspiring.”
Madame de Saint-Just sneered. “He hasn’t stepped into this house for more than one hour ever since he was elected to the Convention in ’92 - your ‘Year One’.”
“Isn’t this quite enough time for a conspirator to leave evidence?” One of the agents added, disdainfully.
“Where’s his room?” The other agent asked, irritated and impatient.
Madame de Saint-Just understood there was nothing she could say that could stop them in their task. Lowering her stare slightly - a gesture not to be mistaken with submission but meant to hide from them the tears welling in her eyes - she complied. “First door on the left to the stairs,” she muttered.
Not thanking her for the information, they started loudly for the stairs. She held them back with a last call, showing and proving a mental strength she had been unaware she could still possess in such moment. “I demand that you not break anything!”
They turned. One of the two stepped back towards her, looking slightly intimidating. “You demand? With what authority, Citoyenne?”
Louise tried to stop her mother from continuing, but Madame de Saint-Just was suddenly quite determined.
“On my own. This is my house.”
“According to our laws, it should be his.” She was about to reply when he continued. “Even if it weren’t, we could still seize this house and arrest you.”
She raised her voice. “On what grounds?!”
“For spawning a tyrant!” He snapped back.
She said nothing more, as the other turned a last time to give to her his final warning, “Be wary, Citoyenne.” She couldn’t help but think that many men like these two may have said these same words and used this same sort of intimidation many times since the beginning of the Revolution her son had awaited so eagerly and had taken such an important part in. Despite the slightest, deepest, shameful and criminal thought she may have hidden within herself all these years to blame her son for this; this one scene which had occurred in her house confirmed to her that even her son’s sacrifice - for she knew this was his sacrifice - would never be enough to change human nature.
She watched the two men leaving to her son’s room, hearing the noise of furniture and objects being violently moved and thrown down. She slowly walked towards the door that had been left open. As she shut it, she noticed the old notary Antoine Gellé - the old enemy of her son’s political (and sentimental) life - on the other side of the street. He was smiling, watching, satisfied by his victory: he would live.
***
Upstairs, the room was still in the mess the two men had left it when they had left the house. They had taken with them a few papers - various notes from Louis-Antoine’s youth, nothing very important, but which she knew she would never see again. She didn’t have the courage to clean the room, mattress turned upside down and papers everywhere on the floor. Rejected notes, drafts for letters and, especially, printed copies of old speeches dating from the Constituante and the Législative.
Those old speeches her son had cherished so much, she remembered.
She bent down to take a look at some of them. There were many speeches by Maximilien de Robespierre - as his name was written back then. The famous and notorious Robespierre. The hero of her son. The tyrant of his (their) enemies. Only once had Louis-Antoine spoken of him to her. He didn’t generally speak of his political thoughts or expectations. He spoke of his frustrations more than his joys - except once.
“Robespierre read my letter, Maman! He has supported my appeal to the Assembly!”
Words coming back from the past.
The proposal hadn’t been favoured, but Madame de Saint-Just remembered how blissful her son had been. Very odd, she had noted, because Louis-Antoine should have considered it a failure, as he repeated on so many occasions. Yet, he hadn’t said it this time. He had merely repeated that Robespierre had read his letter. As if his request had been less important than the one whose attention he was requesting.
At that moment though, Madame de Saint-Just thought she finally understood.
One of the papers she was holding dated January 1790. It was titled Sur le marc d’argent. There were annotations in the margins in her son’s handwriting, as well as words and sentences underlined in the text. One of the annotations caught her attention, for it was a complete phrase rather than few summarising words. It was written next to a sentence in which the word DESPOTISME was underlined. It said:
“Deputy of Humanity and of the Republic, you sustain the patrie against this torrent of despotism and I want to follow you and I will follow you.”
Madame de Saint-Just didn’t know entirely what it meant, but she knew what it implied.
***
She had learned from Thuillier that her son had returned to the North for a third mission. Learning of the victories for France, she had sent him a message asking him to visit her on his way back to Paris. He could have politely declined - it would not have been the first time - giving as pretext his busy schedule and that the fate of the patrie came before family. However, this time, he accepted. She supposed he was, perhaps, in a happy mood, rejoicing at the positive outcome of the Battle of Fleurus. Thus, one evening, very late, Saint-Just came to see his mother. She was hardly expecting it anymore and, therefore, nobody else was home, apart from the maid, Marguerite, the old companion and helper of the ageing woman.
“I am glad to see you, my son,” she said as she welcomed him inside. She looked at his features under the candlelight. He seemed older than last time she had seen him. He seemed quite fatigued too. She didn’t know everything he was doing in Paris or elsewhere in France. She didn’t know how much he was working, but she knew he was very likely doing too much.
“Good evening, Maman,” he replied formally. He stood in the entrance. “I warn you that I cannot stay very long. I have just received a letter from Robespierre this morning, asking me to return to Paris as soon as possible.”
“It is already quite late,” she said with concern, smiling encouragingly, trying to keep her son with her as long as she could. “Surely you can stay here for the night.”
“I don’t know, Maman. I am not tired. I am both eager and anxious to return to Paris.”
“Do you want to eat something, at least? You must be hungry-”
“I am not hungry,” he snapped back, interrupting.
She frowned. “Antoine.”
“Maman,” he appeared impatient. “Did you have any reason to require my presence? Do you need help? Do you have problems?”
“No, Antoine, no… I wanted to see you.”
Saint-Just seemed shocked for an instant, incredulous and not understanding that this odd statement was coming out of his own mother’s mouth.
“That’s all?”
He looked at his mother as she slowly nodded. Then, he started walking towards the door again.
“Very well. I’ll catch a coach now.”
“Louis-Antoine!” He had always hated the way she said his two names together. “Marguerite is heating up some soup.”
There was no appeal to this. Yet, Saint-Just could simply have walked out to the municipal council where his coach was waiting for him. He did not. He sighed, and followed his mother to the dinning room.
His side of the conversation had been particularly silent. Madame de Saint-Just told him news of his two sisters, which pleased him, because he liked to know about Louise and Victoire, if their husbands were being nice to them, how their children were behaving and how they were growing up; but he was greatly annoyed at being kept here this way by his mother. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel like starting any disagreement and quietly ate his soup.
Until his mother brought up a greatly displeasing subject.
“I have heard many things recently, my son.”
She watched his mood change in his eyes, now glaring at her. He understood what she was referring to - the only thing she could possibly be referring to. He brought his hands together and adopted a different pose.
“Don’t listen to Rumour, Maman,” he indifferently replied. He was using the voice of the orator, of the revolutionary; not that of a son. “It emerges from Propaganda as from Calumny. It serves us as it serves the enemy. We must never trust tools so little clear-cut.”
“Unlike the guillotine?”
Saint-Just moved back in the chair, giving his back a stiff and straight shape. He stared sharply at his mother.
“Maman, don’t you ever talk this way again!” He raised his voice. “Never. This is the language of the Counter-Revolution.” He paused and pushed back his soup, feeling even less hungry now. Then, he added, his voice suddenly softer, “Who speaks with you in such a way in Blérancourt?”
She didn’t seem moved by his political demonstration.
“I will not tell you.”
He sneered. “You don’t need to. I know who. The clan Gellé-Thorin. As always.”
“We belong with their world, Antoine.”
“I don’t belong with them! I never did! They live in the Past, while my world is the Revolution.”
“Yes, your Revolution,” she repeated, apathetically, thinking about the younger years of her son. She was unable to grasp what all he was trying to build ex nihilo could possibly mean for him.
“It is not my Revolution,” he rectified.
“That is what people say here,” she added. Madame de Saint-Just knew she should have ended the conversation right there. However, there was a reason she had wanted him to come that evening. She wanted to speak with him. She wanted to see him. She feared for him as she had never feared before. Yet, what she was doing was dangerous: she knew what she was about to say would push him away from her, convincing him to leave and to never return. “They also say it’s your Terror,” she finally said. Saint-Just, who was keeping silent, suddenly looked at her. He knew she wasn’t over and therefore waited before replying. “And that your dearest friend is a tyrant.”
The features of his face didn’t move as he swiftly pushed the bowl of soup with his elbow from the table to the floor, where the bowl broke, spilling the soup. Saint-Just advanced towards his mother slowly, glaring, resting his hands further onto the table. He looked very calm on the outside.
“Stop listening to those people or it will be I who stops listening to you.”
Taking his frock coat from the back of the chair and his hat from the hat-stand, he walked towards the door of the dining room. There, Marguerite appeared, alarmed by the noise. Saint-Just apologised to her before leaving. His mother, however, quietly told her to leave her alone with her son.
“Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just!”
Saint-Just turned back to her. This time, he lost his self-taught stoical composure, angry at the way she had called him. “Without the particle, Maman!”
She stood, walking towards him.
“With or without, what does it change? Call yourself Brutus if that pleases you, but you remain my son. Doesn’t your Republic extol filial love and respect?”
Saint-Just calmed down and, quietly, he agreed. “Yes.”
“Then come, and embrace your mother.”
It took several minutes for him to comply. Long minutes during which they exchanged a cold stare, a stare filled with betrayal and fear.
Neither could yet know what this single embrace would mean to them - especially to her - one month later.
***
Madame de Saint-Just was a strong woman, a trait she had given to her strong son. Yet on her familiar impassive and severe features, there were tears shining. Tears for a son who had always known he was never to come back home.
She looked down at herself, at the black gown she had worn ever since the death of her husband, his father, Louis-Jean.
Now, she would wear black for Louis-Antoine.
The sun was setting on France.
The sun had already set a few hours before on the life of her son. Louis-Antoine would never see the end of this day, but, she thought, the memory of the brightness of this clear and beautiful summer day would stay with him in the grave.
What would they do with his body? She didn’t know. Consciously, she didn’t want to think of it.
Tonight, Madame de Saint-Just would dream of being in Paris, that city she had always known would eat the soul of her son, her first born.
Tonight, she would dream of digging the hole in which they have put her unruly, only son, digging in spite of her age and fragile health, digging even with her nails. She would fall into that hole, filled with so many bodies showing various degrees of decay. Bodies with no heads. Perhaps she would find the head of her son. Her beautiful son who never listened. Who had always dreamt of exactly this. This was the life he had chosen. To become a martyr with men that she only knew from their reputations. To become a monster, a tyrant and she the one who has spawned him.
Madame de Saint-Just didn’t know yet what she would dream of. She didn’t know that she would wake up knowing she would never stroke his hair again, regretting she hadn’t embraced him more, but she would be thankful, grateful to God for the last time they had parted, when she had held him close to her and bid him farewell the way he had always wanted her to see him.
In her mind, she could still hear their last words to each other.
“Adieu, Maman.”
“Salut et fraternité, Citoyen… Mon fils.”
When Madame de Saint-Just finished wiping the tears sliding down her cheeks, she noted that the sun had completely set on France.
The End.
Author’s Notes: Some biographical information.
Antoine Gellé - notary, father of Thérèse (Saint-Just’s teenage crush). Thérèse married the son of Gellé’s associate, François-Emmanuel Thorin. At the start of the Revolution, Gellé was siding with the traditional powers of Blérancourt, opposing Saint-Just already in his early political career: hence, the clan Gellé-Thorin.
Louise Saint-Just (1768-1857) - the older sister, born one year after Louis-Antoine. She married in 1786 Francois Decaisne, notary, born in Saint-Quentin, but moving his study in Blérancourt.
Victoire Saint-Just (1769-1832) - the younger sister. She married in 1790 Adrien Bayard, also a notary, but they moved in the département of Somme.
However, Marguerite the old maid is invented: I’m guessing Madame de Saint-Just at the age she would be at the time, with her two daughters being married, and from the social class she’s from, would naturally need a maid to help her. Genetic helping, I’m guessing she may consider an old maid as a friend more than a mere domestique - as many did anyway. It grounds the whole thing a bit more into raw reality.