“Arrest?” he whispered. “Ah, wait, Sire. The publicity! The scandal! Think of that! As for the necklace, I will pay for it myself, and so pay for my credulous folly. I beseech you, Sire, to let the matter end here. I implore it for my own sake, for the sake of the Prince de Soubise and the name of Rohan, which would be smirched unjustly and to no good purpose.”
He spoke with warmth and force; and, without adding more, yet conveyed an impression that much more could be said for the course he urged.
The King hesitated, considering. Noting this, the prudent, far-seeing Miromesnil ventured to develop the arguments at which Rohan had hinted, laying stress upon the desirability of avoiding scandal.
Louis was nodding, convinced, when Marie Antoinette, unable longer to contain her rancour, broke into opposition of those prudent measures.
“This hideous affair must be disclosed,” she insisted. “It is due to me that it should publicly be set right. The Cardinal shall tell the world how he came to suppose that, not having spoken to him for eight years, I could have wished to make use of his services in the purchase of this necklace.”
She was in tears, and her weak, easily swayed husband accounted her justified in her demand. And so, to the great consternation of all the world, Prince Louis de Rohan was arrested like a common thief.
A foolish, indiscreet, short-sighted woman had allowed her rancour to override all other considerations — careless of consequences, careless of injustice so that her resentment, glutted by her hatred of the Cardinal, should be gratified. The ungenerous act was terribly to recoil upon her. In tears and blood was she to expiate her lack of charity; very soon she was to reap its bitter fruits.
Saint-Just, a very prominent counsellor of the Parliament, one of the most advanced apostles of the new ideas that were to find full fruition in the Revolution, expressed the popular feeling in the matter.
“Great and joyful affair! A cardinal and a queen implicated in a forgery and a swindle! Filth on the crosier and the sceptre! What a triumph for the ideas of liberty!”
At the trial that followed before Parliament, Madame de la Motte, a man named Reteaux de Villette — who had forged the Queen’s hand and impersonated Desclaux and a Mademoiselle d’Oliva — who had used her striking resemblance to Marie Antoinette to impersonate the Queen in the Grove of Venus were found guilty and sentenced. But the necklace was not recovered. It had been broken up, and some of the diamonds were already sold; others were being sold in London by Captain de la Motte, who had gone thither for the purpose, and who prudently remained there.
The Cardinal was acquitted, amid intense public joy and acclamation, which must have been gall and wormwood to the Queen. His powerful family, the clergy of France, and the very people, with whom he had ever been popular, had all laboured strenuously to vindicate him. And thus it befell that the one man the Queen had aimed at crushing was the only person connected with the affair who came out of it unhurt. The Queen’s animus against the Cardinal aroused against her the animus of his friends of all classes. Appalling libels of her were circulated throughout Europe. It was thought and argued that she was more deeply implicated in the swindle than had transpired, that Madame de la Motte was a scapegoat, that the Queen should have stood her trial with the others, and that she was saved only by the royalty that hedged her.
Conceive what a weapon this placed in the hands of the men of the new ideas of liberty — men who were bent on proving the corruption of a system they sought to destroy!
Marie Antoinette should have foreseen something of this. She might have done so had not her hatred blinded her, had she been less intent upon seizing the opportunity at all costs to make Rohan pay for his barbed witticism upon her mother. She might have been spared much had she but spared Rohan when the chance was hers. As it was, the malevolent echoes of the affair and of Saint-Just’s exultation were never out of her ears. They followed her to her trial eight years later before the revolutionary tribunal. They followed her to the very scaffold, of which they had undoubtedly supplied a plank.
VIII, THE NIGHT OF TERROR — The Drownings At Nantes Under Carrier
The Revolutionary Committee of the city of Nantes, reinforced by some of the administrators of the district and a few members of the People’s Society, sat in the noble hall of the Cour des Comptes, which still retained much of its pre-republican sumptuousness. They sat expectantly — Goullin, the attorney, president of the committee, a frail, elegant valetudinarian, fierily eloquent; Grandmaison, the fencing-master, who once had been a gentleman, fierce of eye and inflamed of countenance; Minee, the sometime bishop, now departmental president; Pierre Chaux, the bankrupt merchant; the sans-culotte Forget, of the People’s Society, an unclean, ill-kempt ruffian; and some thirty others called like these from every walk of life.
Lamps were lighted, and under their yellow glare the huddled company — for the month was December, and the air of the vast room was chill and dank — looked anxious and ill at ease.
Suddenly the doors were thrown open by an usher; and his voice rang loud in announcement —
“The Citizen Representative Carrier.”
The great man came in, stepping quickly. Of middle height, very frail and delicate, his clay-colored face was long and thin, with arched eyebrows, a high nose, and a loose, coarse mouth. His deeply sunken dark eyes glared fiercely, and wisps of dead-black hair, which had escaped the confining ribbon of his queue, hung about his livid brow. He was wrapped in a riding-coat of bottle-green, heavily lined with fur, the skirts reaching down to the tops of his Hessian boots, and the enormous turned-up collar almost touching the brim of his round hat. Under the coat his waist was girt with the tricolour of office, and there were gold rings in his ears.
Such at the age of five-and-thirty was Jean Baptiste Carrier, Representative of the Convention with the Army of the West, the attorney who once had been intended by devout parents for the priesthood. He had been a month in Nantes, sent thither to purge the body politic.
He reached a chair placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back, he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so terrible and brutal of aspect despite his frailness that more than one of those stout fellows quailed now before him.
Suddenly he broke into torrential speech, his voice shrill and harsh:
“I do not know by what fatality it happens, but happen it does, that during the month that I have been in Nantes you have never ceased to give me reason to complain of you. I have summoned you to meet me here that you may justify yourselves, if you can, for your ineptitude!” And he flung himself into the chair, drawing his fur-lined coat about him. “Let me hear from you!” he snapped.
Minee, the unfrocked bishop, preserving still a certain episcopal portliness of figure, a certain episcopal oiliness of speech, respectfully implored the representative to be more precise.
The invitation flung him into a passion. His irascibility, indeed, deserved to become a byword.
“Name of a name!” he shrilled, his sunken eyes ablaze, his face convulsed. “Is there a thing I can mention in this filthy city of yours that is not wrong? Everything is wrong! You have failed in your duty to provide adequately for the army of Vendee. Angers has fallen, and now the brigands are threatening Nantes itself. There is abject want in the city, disease is rampant; people are dying of hunger in the streets and of typhus in the prisons. And sacre nom! — you ask me to be precise! I’ll be precise in telling you where lies the fault. It lies in your lousy administration. Do you call yourselves administrators? You—” He became unprintable. “I have come here to shake you out of your torpor, and by — I’ll shake you out of it or I’ll have the blasted heads off the lot of you.”
They shivered with chill fear under the wild glare of his sunken eyes.
“Well?” he barked after a long pause. “Are you all dumb as well as idiots?”
It was the ruffian Forget who had the courage
to answer him:
“I have told the People’s Society that if the machine works badly it is because the Citizen Carrier refuses to consult with the administration.”
“You told them that, did you, you — liar?” screeched Carrier. “Am I not here now to consult with you? And should I not have come before had you suggested it? Instead, you have waited until, of my own accord, I should come to tell you that your administration is ruining Nantes.”
Goullin, the eloquent and elegant Goullin, rose to soothe him:
“Citizen Representative, we admit the truth of all that you have said. There has been a misunderstanding. We could not take it upon ourselves to summon the august representative of the Sacred People. I We have awaited your own good pleasure, and now that you have made this manifest, there is no reason why the machine should not work effectively. The evils of which you speak exist, alas! But they are not so deeply rooted that, working under your guidance and advice, we cannot uproot them, rendering the soil fertile once more of good under the beneficent fertilizing showers of liberty.”
Mollified, Carrier grunted approval.
“That is well said, Citizen Goullin. The fertilizer needed by the soil is blood — the bad blood of aristocrats and federalists, and I can promise you, in the name of the august people, that it shall be abundantly provided.”
The assembly broke into applause, and his vanity melted to it. He stood up, expressed his gratification at being so completely understood, opened his arms, and invited the departmental president, Minee, to come down and receive the kiss of brotherhood.
Thereafter they passed to the consideration of measures of improvement, of measures to combat famine and disease. In Carrier’s view there was only one way of accomplishing this — the number of mouths to be fed must be reduced, the diseased must be eliminated. It was the direct, the radical, the heroic method.
That very day six prisoners in Le Bouffay had been sentenced to death for attempting to escape.
“How do we know,” he asked, “that those six include all the guilty? How do we know that all in Le Bouffay do not share the guilt? The prisoners are riddled with disease, which spreads to the good patriots of Nantes; they eat bread, which is scarce, whilst good patriots starve. We must have the heads off all those blasted swine!” He took fire at his own suggestion. “Aye, that would be a useful measure. We’ll deal with it at once. Let some one fetch the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal.”
He was fetched — a man of good family and a lawyer, named Francois Phelippes.
“Citizen President,” Carrier greeted him, “the administration of Nantes has been considering an important measure. To-day you sentenced to death six prisoners in Le Bouffay for attempting to escape. You are to postpone execution so as to include all the Bouffay prisoners in the sentence.”
Although an ardent revolutionary, Phelippes was a logically minded man with a lawyer’s reverence for the sacredness of legal form. This command, issued with such cynical coldness, and repudiated by none of those present, seemed to him as grotesque and ridiculous as it was horrible.
“But that is impossible, Citizen Representative,” said he.
“Impossible!” snarled Carrier. “A fool’s word. The administration desires you to understand that it is not impossible. The sacred will of the august people—”
Phelippes interrupted him without ceremony.
“There is no power in France that can countermand the execution of a sentence of the law.”
“No — no power!”
Carrier’s loose mouth fell open. He was too amazed to be angry.
“Moreover,” Phelippes pursued calmly, “there is the fact that all the other prisoners in Le Bouffay are innocent of the offence for which the six are to die.”
“What has that to do with it?” roared Carrier. “Last year I rode a she-ass that could argue better than you! In the name of — , what has that to do with it?”
But there were members of the assembly who thought with Phelippes, and who, whilst lacking the courage to express themselves, yet found courage to support another who so boldly expressed them.
Carrier sprang up quivering with rage before that opposition. “It seems to me,” he snarled, “that there are more than the scoundrels in Le Bouffay who need to be shortened by a head for the good of the nation. I tell you that you are slaying the commonweal by your slowness and circumspection. Let all the scoundrels perish!”
A handsome, vicious youngster named Robin made chorus.
“Patriots are without bread! It is fitting that the scoundrels should die, and not eat the bread of starving patriots.”
Carrier shook his fist at the assembly.
“You hear, you — ! I cannot pardon whom the law condemns.”
It was an unfortunate word, and Phelippes fastened on it.
“That is the truth, Citizen Representative,” said Phelippes. “And as for the prisoners in Le Bouffay, you will wait until the law condemns them.”
And without staying to hear more, he departed as firmly as he had come, indifferent to the sudden uproar.
When he had gone, the Representative flung himself into his chair again, biting his lip.
“There goes a fellow who will find his way to the guillotine in time,” he growled.
But he was glad to be rid of him, and would not have him brought back. He saw how the opposition of Phelippes had stiffened the weaker opposition of some of those in the assembly. If he was to have his way he would contrive better without the legal-minded President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. And his way he had in the end, though not until he had stormed and cursed and reviled the few who dared to offer remonstrances to his plan of wholesale slaughter.
When at last he took his departure, it was agreed that the assembly should proceed to elect a jury which was to undertake the duty of drawing up immediately a list of those confined in the prisons of Nantes. This list they were to deliver when ready to the committee, which would know how to proceed, for Carrier had made his meaning perfectly clear. The first salutary measure necessary to combat the evils besetting the city was to wipe out at once the inmates of all the prisons in Nantes.
In the chill December dawn of the next day the committee — which had sat all night under the presidency of Goullin forwarded a list of some five hundred prisoners to General Boivin, the commandant of the city of Nantes, together with an order to collect them without a moment’s delay, take them to L’Eperonniere, and there have them shot.
But Boivin was a soldier, and a soldier is not a sans-culotte. He took the order to Phelippes, with the announcement that he had no intention of obeying it. Phelippes, to Boivin’s amazement, agreed with him. He sent the order back to the committee, denouncing it as flagrantly illegal, and reminding them that it was illegal to remove any prisoner, no matter by whose order, without such an order as might follow upon a decision of the Tribunal.
The committee, intimidated by this firmness on the part of the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, dared not insist, and there the matter remained.
When Carrier learnt of it the things he said were less than ever fit for publication. He raved like a madman at the very thought that a quibbling lawyer should stand in the very path of him, the august representative of the Sacred People.
It had happened that fifty-three priests, who had been brought to Nantes a few days before, were waiting in the sheds of the entrepot for prison accommodation, so that their names did not yet appear upon any of the prison registers. As a solatium to his wounded feelings, he ordered his friends of the Marat Company to get rid of them.
Lamberty, the leader of the Marats, asked him how it should be done.
“How?” he croaked. “Not so much mystery, my friend. Fling the swine into the water, and so let’s be rid of them. There will be plenty of their kind left in France.”
But he seems to have explained himself further, and what precisely were his orders, and how they were obeyed, transpires from a letter which he wrote to the Conven
tion, stating that those fifty-three wretched priests, “being confined in a boat on the Loire, were last night swallowed up by the river.” And he added the apostrophe, “What a revolutionary torrent is the Loire!”
The Convention had no illusions as to his real meaning; and when Carrier heard that his letter had been applauded by the National Assembly, he felt himself encouraged to break down all barriers of mere legality that might obstruct his path. And, after all, what the Revolutionary Committee as a body — intimidated by Phelippes — dared not do could be done by his faithful and less punctilious friends of the Marat Company.
This Marat Company, the police of the Revolutionary Committee, enrolled from the scourings of Nantes’ sans-culottism, and captained by a ruffian named Fleury, had been called into being by Carrier himself with the assistance of Goullin.
On the night of the 24th Frimaire of the year III (December 14, 1793, old style), which was a Saturday, Fleury mustered some thirty of his men, and took them to the Cour des Comptes, where they were awaited by Goullin, Bachelier, Grandmaison, and some other members of the committee entirely devoted to Carrier. From these the Marats received their formal instructions.
“Plague,” Goullin informed them, “is raging in the gaols, and its ravages must be arrested. You will therefore proceed this evening to the prison of Le Bouffay in order to take over the prisoners whom you will march up to the Quay La Fosse, whence they will be shipped to Belle Isle.”
In a cell of that sordid old building known as Le Bouffay lay a cocassier, an egg and poultry dealer, arrested some three years before upon a charge of having stolen a horse, and since forgotten. His own version was that a person of whom he knew very little had entrusted him with the sale of the stolen animal in possession of which he was discovered.
The story sounds familiar; it is the sort of story that must have done duty many times; and it is probable that the cocassier was no better than he should have been. Nevertheless Fate selected him to be one of her unconscious instruments. His name was Leroy, and we have his own word for it that he was a staunch patriot. The horse business was certainly in the best vein of sans-culottism.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 677
