The committee, however, were not satisfied with these assurances and insisted on ransacking the house, in quest of compromising correspondence and so forth. Presently they came across a bust of Gluck and paused before it.
“It is Marat,” said Sophie, in a tone of the deepest veneration.
The worthy sans-culottes uncovered, and convinced that they had just been contemplating the august features of the father of the people, whose sanguinary career the knife of Charlotte Corday had recently brought to an abrupt termination, retired, with many apologies for having doubted the patriotism of the Citoyenne Arnould.[64]
Sophie remained at Luzarches for seven years, “tout à fait en paysanne.” She wore sabots, she planted cabbages, she gathered peas and apples, and she reared, or tried to rear, poultry. Her daughter Alexandrine lived with her for a couple of years, and then took advantage of the new law of divorce to get rid of the estimable Murville and replace him by the son of the local postmaster, “a stout boy, who was quite unsuitable for her.” Sophie, though, as we have seen, by no means strait-laced herself, strongly disapproved of her daughter’s conduct, and made it the occasion of one of her most celebrated bons mots. “Divorce,” she gravely observed, “is the sacrament of adultery.”
All this time the unfortunate woman was gradually becoming poorer and poorer. Her pension had been discontinued; the greater part of what money she had possessed apart from that seems to have been swallowed up, with so many other fortunes, in the financial chaos which accompanied the political one; while to apply to her friends for help was no longer of any avail. Not a few of them, among whom was the Prince d’Hénin, had departed to another world, by way of the Place de la Révolution; others, like Lauraguais, were in exile; those who were still within reach of her appeals were ruined. Of all her old friends and admirers the only one to whom she could turn was Belanger, and it was but little that he could do to assist his once-adored Sophie. He himself had been imprisoned and had narrowly escaped the guillotine, and when he was released, to find that everything portable belonging to him had been carried off by a faithless servant, he was thrust, bon gré mal gré, into a miserably-paid municipal office, which kept him hard at work from seven o’clock in the morning until nearly midnight, and left him no time for practising his profession. Moreover, he was now married, having, while in prison, espoused a companion in misfortune, Mlle. Dervieux, of the Opera, who had been a notorious courtesan, and, consequently, had no money to spare for old friends in distress.
Nevertheless, the kind-hearted architect did all that was in his power. He wrote to Sophie; he went to visit her; he entertained her at his house, and acted as her intermediary with the Minister of the Interior, in order to secure the restitution of the pension to which she was entitled. And Sophie, on her side, makes him the confidant of all her hopes and disappointments, and writes him long, affectionate letters, beginning: “Mon bel ange,” and one of them superscribed, “À mon meilleur ami.”
Once, learning that she was in sore distress, Belanger sent her a double louis—probably all that the poor man could afford—which the grateful Sophie acknowledges in the following letter:
“8 Nivôse, Year viii. (January 29, 1800).
“Ah, mon bel ange, my friend, you are always the same for goodness and generosity. What a good heart is yours! I would thank you sincerely, my poor friend, but what expressions can I employ?... They would always fall short of my gratitude, not for the money, but for the action. Ah! what good you have done my heart! Here are a hundred years of happiness for me, if I had them to live. Console yourself, my friend; I have still a few sous, and have no need of the two louis that you sent me, and of which you have deprived yourself for me; for I also know what your position is. But I will keep this piece to wear upon my heart, and it shall not leave me until my death. I know the motto I shall put there; it shall be my relic. Good-bye, mon bel ange, my good angel, my true friend. Believe me there does not exist on earth a being who is more tenderly attached to you, and more inviolably attached to you, than your
“Sophie Arnould.