The Gods Will Have Blood (the Gods Are Athirst)
Language: English
Pages: 124
ISBN: 1420947761
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Anatole France's work "Les dieux ont soif" translates to "The Gods Will Have Blood" or "The Gods are Athirst." Both translations of the title accurately depict the nature of this novel set during the French Revolution. Young artist Évariste Gamelin is the right-hand man of Jacobin, Marat, and Robespierre and eventually becomes appointed as a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal during the heinous Reign of Terror. Though Gamelin fully believes in the ideas of revolution and liberty, he uses his position of power to terrorize his friends and family who do not agree with his zealous ideals. Yet his bloodthirsty nature is put to an end when he, along with his mentor Robespierre, is beheaded during the aftermath of the Thermidorian Reaction. "The Gods Will Have Blood" was published in 1912, and author Anatole France received the Nobel Prize for Literature in honor of his literary achievements. The text shows the dangers a fervently angry country and the terror that can arise when the public is allowed to dole out its own version of justice with random death sentences. It shows the consequences when humanity is consumed by an idea, even a good idea, that is allowed to become more important than the people who hold it.
Dike, the city of brass, out of the burning debris of worlds past and gone. Without possessing a scrap of bread for his mother or himself, he walked in a dream of being seated at a table, laden with food, which would be endless since it would encompass the whole world and at which there would be room for all regenerated mankind. In the meantime, he persuaded himself, his country like a good mother would feed her faithful child. Forcing the gibes of the print-dealer from his mind, he convinced
aristocrat, always the lover of antiquity, made the young spartan a present of the true recipe for the famous old black broth. After dinner, Jean Blaise, who never forgot business, set his group of artists making studies and sketches of the inn, whose dilapidated condition appeared to him quite romantic. Whilst Desmahis and Dubois were sketching the cowsheds, the girl Tronche came out to feed the pigs. At that moment, the doctor, the Citizen Pelleport, who had been giving his professional
bottom of the staircase, Brotteaux found himself facing a young peasant girl who was about to go up. She carried a basket full of eggs on her arm and in her hand a flat cake wrapped in a napkin. It was Athénaïs, who had come from Palaiseau to give a token of gratitude to her saviour. When she saw the delegates, the four grenadiers and ‘Monsieur Maurice’ being taken away a prisoner, she stopped, stupefied, asked if it were true, went up to the commissary and said gently to him: ‘You’re not taking
waiting. The condemned were piled into them, with their hands tied. The woman Rochemaure, whose pregnancy had not been confirmed by the surgeon, was hoisted into one of the tumbrils. She recovered sufficiently to watch the crowd of onlookers, hoping against hope to find someone to save her. The crowd was less dense than formerly, and the excitement less extreme. Only a few women screamed: ‘Death! Death!’ or mocked those about to die. The men mostly shrugged their shoulders, looked away and kept
and the voice of a citizen in a round hat in the pit replied with the Hymne des Marseillais: ‘Allons, enfants de la patrie!…’ His voice was drowned with howls; voices shouted: ‘Down with the Terrorists! Death to the Jacobins!’ And Lays was recalled to sing for a second time the hymn of the Thermidorians, who had brought Robespierre to the scaffold: ‘Peuple français, peuple de frères!…’ In every theatre the bust of Marat was to be seen, on a column or a pedestal. At the Théâtre Feydeau his
