Read The Conspiracy for Free Online Page B

days, they would have had to be blind . . .
    A normalien of Rosenthal’s acquaintance procured them invitations on 24 November to the lying in state. It was to take place at the Palais-Bourbon, in the Salle Mirabeau, which had that very morning ceased to be called the Salle Casimir-Périer : at the last moment people had judged the latter to be impossible, because of the memories that hyphenated name evoked. Echoes of the Lyon risings crushed in eighteen hundred and thirty-one by the Interior Minister grandfather would, after all, have jarred; nor could any great connection be discerned between Jaurès and the President of the Republic grandson. Mirabeau could be accommodated, by stressing his speeches and his historic sallies in the Summoned-here-by-the-will-of-bayonets style, while casting a veil over his intrigues with the Court. Since there was in any case no question of Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Babeuf . . .
    Violet gauze hangings draped the stone walls, which recalled the Expiatory Chapel in Boulevard Haussmann and also, already, the cellars and subterranean glory of the Panthéon; they shrouded the chandeliers and diffused a gloomy mauve light, just right for half-mourning, over a fragile scaffolding that awaited the coffin and a black cloth with silver stars that had done sterling duty. The women seated at the foot of the walls were saying to themselves that this mauve lighting must give them an odd complexion, but that they would not solve the problem by putting on more powder. The guests all consisted of figures from a house of bereavement: little groups of individuals were chatting quietly in corners; deputies were shaking hands, with a mien and bowed shoulders imbued with grief-stricken familiarity; every now and then, the husky tones would be heard of someone who could not manage to keep his voice down. The ushers, who carried their little cocked hats with the tricolour cockades under one arm, marched in double slow time like Swiss Guards, in well-broken shoes that did not squeak; they kept a passage open between the catafalque and the door, through the crowd that had grown denser as though Jaurès had really had quantities of brothers, relatives and inconsolable friends. Everyone kept glancing towards the door. People were thinking about that great man, dead ten years and five months, who was still not arriving. They were vaguely uneasy: the news spread that the Albi train had had an accident at Les Aubrais. Someone said in the vicinity of Laforgue and Rosenthal:
    â€” It’s really rotten luck.
    Bernard sniggered.
    Then they recognized Lucien Herr , who was chatting to Lévy-Bruhl and whom they respected, since being told that Herr still talked to young men about the will not to succeed. Lucien Herr, who already bore – along with the invisible weight of the great books he had not written – the burden of his imminent death, came up to them. They greeted him. Herr said to their companion from Rue d’Ulm:
    â€” Don’t go too far away now. I want to introduce you to Blum.
    Herr moved off and returned with Léon Blum, who proffered them a long hand, which they found soft and burning, and said nothing to them. He did not seem to take much interest in these young men; after turning his head this way and that, like a large bird on the lookout, he moved away with a strange stiff, jerky gait.
    At a quarter to eleven, the two leaves of the door at last slowly opened as if upon a scene at the Opera; everyone thronged forward, the crowd made the same noise as a theatre audience does when the curtain goes up. Outside there was a milky darkness astonishingly luminous for the end of November, as though somewhere behind the sky there had been a moon of frost or spring; those sparkling mists on the black courtyard of the Palais-Bourbon caused the insipid violet twilight of the Salle Mirabeau to grow pale; people felt cold and anxious to leave that long cavern to walk beneath the