Then as Nicole, shaking her head, turned wearily and went down the street, rubbing from time to time against the wall, la Mère Corniche said to herself, "Ah, it is Javogues!"
She sought the eye of Cramoisin. He was still on the vat, struck dumb in the midst of a furious harangue, following the girl as she disappeared from sight.
The concierge, in her fear, had guessed rightly: Nicole sought the Marseillais. Her doubts of Barabant, dispelled on the instant of his arrest, had given place to bitter reproaches, to self-accusation, and to an immense, confused hatred of the man who had betrayed him. The separation was irrevocable; she could see nothing ahead. In the desolation of her hopes her anger turned against the Revolution. Barabant guilty! Barabant, the generous, impulsive advocate of great ideas, a traitor! At such a thought her whole being rose in revolt against the Revolution that would destroy him. Without distinguishing its abuses from its truths, reasoning from men to ideas, revolting at the doctrine of the community of women that menaced her pure ambitions, she saw the Revolution only in the furious figure of Javogues, brutal, despotic, and mad. Shrinking from her comrades, without faith, without hope, adrift, with the figure of Charlotte Corday ever before her, tormented with the thought of martyrdom, she followed Javogues, restlessly keeping him under her eye, seeking him with an instinctive impulse that gradually and fearfully shaped itself in her resolution.
The streets where she wandered were filled with barbaric processions from the sack of the churches. Unshaven heads crowned with gorgeous miters, ragged bodies clothed in purple robes, smudgy arms brandishing golden chalices, crucifixes, and relics swept by with exultant, mocking chorus. In the churchyards troops of beggars demolished monuments and leveled the tombs, while still others beheaded the stone images in the niches of the doors.
Toward night the lowest elements of the social order were unchained. The drunkards, the thieves, the idiots, the pariahs, the beggars, the destitute, the morbidly curious, the shrews, the hags, the harlots; all who hated the good and many who had been taught to regard religion as the shackles that fastened them to servitude, erupted into the night, to mock the Church and dishonor it.
Listless, troubled, and uneasy, through the demented city Nicole continued her search, stopping neither for lunch nor for supper, sorting, without success, each successive throng, while every scene of license and sacrilege that inflamed her anger steadied her resolve.
In the church of St. Gervais she stopped, appalled at the riot. Within, shrieks of laughter mingled with hoarse shouts of men and the surging rhythm of music. Horror and rage possessed her, and she plunged in, seeking Javogues, while her hand went nervously to her breast.
The church was dim with the smoky glimmer of lamps, which veiled the interior in a mantle of fog. The fishwives from the Marché St. Jean offered salted herrings to all comers, poisoning the air and disgusting the nostrils, while on their track followed limonadiers with overtopping tanks, rattling their cups and hawking their beverage.
In the Chapel of the Virgin a hundred couples were dancing, bumping into one another, hilarious with wine and hoarse with shouting; while above the carnival, enthroned on the altar, a blue and white Goddess of Reason, a girl of fifteen, watched the rout, arranging her scarlet liberty-cap or extending her hand with conscious smiles to those who acclaimed her.