From the book
The Gods Are Athirst
Anatole France · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordCouteau is the general noun knife and also names the guillotine’s blade in these scenes.
- In the novelIn chapter VI Gamelin divides his scarce bread and leaves half with a hungry mother.
- In this editionThe edition retains eustache at the first specific naming, uses knife for the portable object and blade for the guillotine.
- A place to readun eustache à manche de corne: a horn-handled folding knife.
Meaning
Related words and phrases.
Couteau is the general noun knife and also names the guillotine’s blade in these scenes. Lame identifies a blade as a component; an eustache is the simple folding pocketknife Gamelin carries, here with a horn handle. The same word family links different uses without making the portable object and the execution apparatus physically identical.
Use in the book
In chapter VI Gamelin divides his scarce bread and leaves half with a hungry mother. The knife makes generosity concrete and measurable before it becomes an image of anything else. Back home he claims to have eaten the missing bread, hiding rather than advertising the gift. At the inn it becomes a forfeit in a drawing-room game and is reclaimed from Élodie’s lap; the narrator explicitly recalls the earlier charity. His good-humoured recital of Voltaire also qualifies any portrait of uninterrupted severity.
Chapter XXVII recalls bread-sharing and the game as Gamelin tries to kill himself with this same knife. Its blade strikes a rib, the collar gives way and his fingers are cut. The intended heroic self-ending fails bodily and technically; the object does not mechanically pronounce a moral verdict. Its remembered uses nevertheless enlarge what is lost in the political catastrophe.
Other couteaux belong to the execution machinery. Gamelin imagines the Republic’s last enemy beneath the blade; Élodie feels its imagined pressure on her neck; the bloodstained guillotine blade rises at his execution. The small knife that divided bread is not that apparatus, yet the recurrent French noun brings capacities to sustain and destroy life into disturbing proximity.
Places to read
- Chapter VI, paragraph 61Frenchun eustache à manche de corne: a horn-handled folding knife. Gamelin uses it to share bread with a hungry mother.
- Chapter X, paragraph 61Frenchle petit couteau acheté six sous: the little knife bought for six sous. The object becomes a forfeit in a shared game.
- Chapter X, paragraph 63Frenchson couteau de six liards: His six-liard knife. The later price differs in the French source itself.
- Chapter XXV, paragraph 41Frenchdu couteau sur sa nuque: of the blade on her neck. Élodie imagines execution in a scene combining horror and desire.
- Chapter XXVII, paragraph 44Frenchla virole qui a cédé: the metal collar that has given way. The instrument fails materially and cuts his fingers.
- Chapter XXVII, paragraph 44Frenchle couteau de six sous: the six-sou knife. The narrative explicitly recalls bread-sharing and the game before the attempted suicide.
- Chapter XXVIII, paragraph 16Frenchle couteau ensanglanté: the bloodstained blade. Here the referent is the guillotine, not the pocketknife.
Translation in this edition
The edition retains eustache at the first specific naming, uses knife for the portable object and blade for the guillotine. It also preserves a price discrepancy: Chapter X, paragraph 61 gives six sous, Chapter X, paragraph 63 six liards, and Chapter XXVII, paragraph 44 returns to six sous. The narrative explicitly establishes the object’s continuity; do not invent a second knife, silently convert the denominations or standardise the reading. Virole is the metal collar that fails, not the blade itself.