More great lines from The Gods Will Have Blood

Brotteaux again on religion:

He had noticed that religions are fiercest and most cruel in the vigour of their youth and that they grow milder as they grow older. He was anxious, therefore, to see Catholicism preserved, since though it had devoured many victims in its youth, it was now, burdened by the weight of years and an enfeebled appetite, content with roasting four or five heretics every hundred years. 

Gamelin's poor sister Julie returns to France with her husband and he gets arrested. She goes to her mother and asks if Gamelin will help and in the process makes this observation about why Gamelin is an unsuccessful artist:

"To be a good artist, a man must know how to feel tenderness. And he's incapable of that....There's his soul. You can see it in his paintings, cold and empty. Look at his Orestes there with those dull eyes and cruel mouth. That's Evariste to the life."


This being the Orestes painting, most specifically the head, that Gamelin is so proud of. 


Brotteaux is of course arrested along with Father Longuemare and Athenais the prostitute who yells "Vive le roi" at the guards when they are taking the men away rather than escaping, thus insuring she will be arrested with them. This while Brotteaux's neighbors do nothing and turn away. Here is Brotteaux's final exchange with Longuemare on the way to the guillotine which is the powerful and wrenching moment of the book:

"Father, I have let you see my weakness. I love life and I cannot leave it without regret."

"Monsieur," replied the monk very gently, "be mindful, then, of the fact that you who are a braver man than I, are more troubled by death than I. What does that mean, if not that I see the light which you do not yet see?"

"It could also mean," said Brotteaux, "that I regret leaving it because I have enjoyed it more than you, who have made it resemble death."

.........

"Monsieur," Father Longuemare said to the philosophical epicurean, "I ask you for one favour: this God in whom you do not yet believe, pray to Him for me.  It is possible that you may be nearer to him than I am myself: a moment and we shall know. Only one second, and you may have become one of the Lord's most dearly beloved children. Monsieur, pray for me."

.....

Beside him [Brotteaux], Athenais, proud to die thus like the Queen of France, gazed haughtily at the crowd, and the old aristocrat, contemplating with a connoisseur's eyes the young woman's white breasts, was filled with regret for the light of day.

Old Brotteaux, a gentleman and philosopher to the last, goes to the guillotine with his beloved copy of Lucretius in his pocket. Damn, this book was good.