She was a very old lady of extreme elegance, tall and slight, dressed in the antique fashion. She made pretty curtsies, and raised her gown with her two hands very gracefully when she walked in the garden, and, as my father said, seemed always about to dance the minuet.
In her large drawing-room, furnished with Louis XV. and Louis XVI. furniture, which my grandmother had taught me to discern and to admire, and which my father thought old-fashioned and horrible, as he cared only for modern furniture—the furniture of “progress” made of mahogany and ebony—Madame Decaisne seemed to me like an apparition.
There lived with her in her house (although her son did not like it, my father told me before we went in) an old friend, the Chevalier de Saint-Louis, dressed also in old-time fashion, who was called simply “Monsieur le Chevalier.”
Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier had both remained thorough Royalists and Legitimists, detesting the “Egalité branch,” but faithful to the memory of Saint-Just, of whom the Chevalier had been the friend. “In spite of the crimes they had made him commit,” said Madame Decaisne, “she and the Chevalier had not ceased to love him.”
The Chevalier amused me very much because he glided and skipped over the waxed floors, and kissed Madame Decaisne’s hand when he left her only for an instant. He spoke of Saint-Just with affection.
“Monsieur le Chevalier,” my father said, “is it not true that Saint-Just still strikes you as having been, above all, a humanitarian and a poet?”
“Yes,” he replied, and added: “Besides, he, who was so intelligent, so superior, so full of hope for the great future, expiated his errors by his death. One should have seen him in the political storm to be able to understand how so good and so noble, but too fanatical, a man could at certain moments have thought that ‘blood was necessary.’”
The “necessary blood” remained in my mind after I heard the Chevalier use the phrase.
I spoke to grandmother about it on my return to Chauny, and she was not as indignant as I supposed she would be.
“When the kings protected the people from the nobles, they caused necessary blood to be shed,” she said to me, “and the kings grew greater in spite of their crimes. If the men of the Revolution had shed only the enemy’s blood at the frontiers, and that of traitors—of which there were a few like the Messieurs de Sainte-Aldegonde, who during the invasion called the invaders of France, ‘Our friends, the enemies’—if, I say, the men of the Revolution had not killed for the desire of so doing, they would have been absolved, but they sacrificed innocent persons to their ferocity, and they will never be forgiven. Your father is one of those who, like Saint-Just, wishes to purify society more and more, after having shed ‘necessary blood.’ He is one of those humanitarian Jacobins, people more cruel than the wickedest, who think they have the right to be implacable under the pretext that they have been tender-hearted in their youth.”