Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Very soon it was followed by others, and, custom increasing Carrier’s audacity, these drownings — there were in all some twenty-three noyades — ceased to be conducted in the secrecy of the night, or to be confined to men. They were made presently to include women — of whom at one drowning alone, in Novose, three hundred perished under the most revolting circumstances — and even little children. Carrier himself admitted that during the three months of his rule some three thousand victims visited the national bathing-place, whilst other, and no doubt more veracious, accounts treble that number of those who received the National Baptism.

  Soon these wholesale drownings had become an institution, a sort of national spectacle that Carrier and his committee felt themselves in duty bound to provide.

  But at length a point was reached beyond which it seemed difficult to continue them. So expeditious was the measure, that soon the obvious material was exhausted. The prisons were empty. Yet habits, once contracted, are not easily relinquished. Carrier would be looking elsewhere for material, and there was no saying where he might look, or who would be safe. Soon the committee heard a rumour that the Representative intended to depose it and to appoint a new one, whereupon many of its members, who were conscious of lukewarmness, began to grow uneasy.

  Uneasy, too, became the members of the People’s Society. They had sent a deputation to Carrier with suggestions for the better conduct of the protracted campaign of La Vendee. This was a sore point with the Representative. He received the patriots with the foulest abuse, and had them flung downstairs by his secretaries.

  Into this atmosphere of general mistrust and apprehension came the most ridiculous Deus ex machina that ever was in the person of the very young and very rash Marc Antoine Jullien. His father, the Deputy Jullien, was an intimate of Robespierre’s, by whose influence Marc Antoine was appointed to the office of Agent of the Committee of Public Safety, and sent on a tour of inspection to report upon public feeling and the conduct of the Convention’s Representatives.

  Arriving in Nantes at the end of January of ‘94, one of Marc Antoine’s first visits happened to be to the People’s Society, which was still quivering with rage at the indignities offered by Carrier to its deputation.

  Marc Antoine was shocked by what he heard, so shocked that instead of going to visit the Representative on the morrow, he spent the morning inditing a letter to Robespierre, in which he set forth in detail the abuses of which Carrier was guilty, and the deplorable state of misery in which he found the city of Nantes.

  That night, as Marc Antoine was sinking into the peaceful slumber of the man with duty done, he was rudely aroused by an officer and a couple of men of the National Guard, who announced to him that he was under arrest, and bade him rise and dress.

  Marc Antoine flounced out of bed in a temper, and flaunted his credentials. The officer remained unmoved. He was acting upon orders from the Citizen Representative.

  Still in a temper, Marc Antoine hurriedly dressed himself. He would soon show this Representative that it is not safe to trifle with Agents of the Public Safety. The Citizen Representative should hear from him. The officer, still unimpressed, bundled him into a waiting carriage, and bore him away to the Maison Villetreux, on the island where Carrier had his residence.

  Carrier had gone to bed. But he was awake, and he sat up promptly when the young muscadin from Paris was roughly thrust into his room by the soldiers. The mere sight of the Representative sufficed to evaporate Marc Antoine’s anger, and with it his courage.

  Carrier’s pallor was of a grey-green from the rage that possessed him. His black eyes smouldered like those of an animal seen in the gloom, and his tumbled black hair, fluttering about his moist brow, increased the terrific aspect of his countenance. Marc Antoine shrank and was dumb.

  “So,” said Carrier, regarding him steadily, terribly, “you are the thing that dares to denounce me to the Safety, that ventures to find fault with my work!” From under his pillow he drew Marc Antoine’s letter to Robespierre. “Is this yours?”

  At the sight of this violation of his correspondence with the Incorruptible, Marc Antoine’s indignation awoke, and revived his courage.

  “It is mine,” he answered. “By what right have you intercepted it?”

  “By what right?” Carrier put a leg out of bed. “So you question my right, do you? You have so imposed yourself upon folk that you are given powers, and you come here to air them, by—”

  “You shall answer to the Citizen Robespierre for your conduct,” Marc Antoine threatened him.

  “Aha!” Carrier revealed his teeth in a smile of ineffable wickedness. He slipped from the bed, and crouching slightly as if about to spring, he pointed a lean finger at his captive.

  “You are of those with whom it is dangerous to deal publicly, and you presume upon that. But you can be dealt with privily, and you shall. I have you, and, by — , you shall not escape me, you — !”

  Marc Antoine looked into the Representative’s face, and saw there the wickedness of his intent. He stiffened. Nature had endowed him with wits, and he used them now.

  “Citizen Carrier,” he said, “I understand. I am to be murdered to-night in the gloom and the silence. But you shall perish after me in daylight, and amid the execrations of the people. You may have intercepted my letters to my father and to Robespierre. But if I do not leave Nantes, my father will come to ask an account of you, and you will end your life on the scaffold like the miserable assassin that you are.”

  Of all that tirade, but one sentence had remained as if corroded into the mind of Carrier. “My letters to my father and to Robespierre,” the astute Marc Antoine had said. And Marc Antoine saw the Representative’s mouth loosen, saw a glint of fear replace the ferocity in his dark eyes.

  What Marc Antoine intended to suggest had instantly leapt to Carrier’s mind — that there had been a second letter which his agents had missed. They should pay for that. But, meanwhile, if it were true, he dare not for his neck’s sake go further in this matter. He may have suspected that it was not true. But he had no means of testing that suspicion. Marc Antoine, you see, was subtle.

  “Your father?” growled the Representative. “Who is your father?”

  “The Deputy Jullien.”

  “What?” Carrier straightened himself, affecting an immense astonishment. “You are the son of the Deputy Julien?” He burst into a laugh. He came forward, holding out both his hands. He could be subtle, too, you see. “My friend, why did you not say so sooner? See in what a ghastly mistake you have let me flounder. I imagined you — of course, it was foolish of me — to be a proscribed rascal from Angers, of the same name.”

  He had fallen upon Marc Antoine’s neck, and was embracing him.

  “Forgive me, my friend!” he besought him. “Come and dine with me to-morrow, and we will laugh over it together.”

  But Marc Antoine had no mind to dine with Carrier, although he promised to do so readily enough. Back at his inn, scarce believing that he had got away alive, still sweating with terror at the very thought of his near escape, he packed his valise, and, by virtue of his commission, obtained post-horses at once.

  On the morrow from Angers, safe beyond the reach of Carrier, he wrote again to Robespierre, and this time also to his father.

  “In Nantes,” he wrote, “I found the old regime in its worst form.” He knew the jargon of Liberty, the tune that set the patriots a-dancing. “Carrier’s insolent secretaries emulate the intolerable haughtiness of a ci-devant minister’s lackeys. Carrier himself lives surrounded by luxury, pampered by women and parasites, keeping a harem and a court. He tramples justice in the mud. He has had all those who filled the prisons flung untried into the Loire. The city of Nantes,” he concluded, “needs saving. The Vendean revolt must be suppressed, and Carrier the slayer of Liberty recalled.”

  The letter had its effect, and Carrier was recalled to Paris, but not in disgrace. Failing health was urged as the solicitous reason for his retirement fro
m the arduous duties of governing Nantes.

  In the Convention his return made little stir, and even when early in the following July he learnt that Bourbotte, his successor at Nantes, had ordered the arrest of Goullin, Bachelier, Grandmaison, and his other friends of the committee, on the score of the drownings and the appropriation of national property confiscated from emigres, he remained calm, satisfied that his own position was unassailable.

  But the members of the Committee of Nantes were sent to Paris for trial, and their arrival there took place on that most memorable date in the annals of the Revolution, the 10th Thermidor (July 29, 1794, O.S.), the day on which Robespierre fell and the floodgates of vengeance upon the terrorists were flung open.

  You have seen in the case of Marc Antoine Jullien how quick Carrier could be to take a cue. In a coach he followed the tumbril that bore Robespierre to execution, radiant of countenance and shouting with the loudest, “Death to the traitor!” On the morrow from the rostrum of the Convention, he passionately represented himself as a victim of the fallen tyrant, cleverly turning to his own credit the Marc Antoine affair, reminding the Convention how he had himself been denounced to Robespierre. He was greeted with applause in that atmosphere of Thermidorean reaction.

  But Nemesis was stalking him relentlessly if silently.

  Among a batch of prisoners whom a chain of curious chances had brought from Nantes to Paris was our old friend Leroy the cocassier, required now as a witness against the members of the committee.

  Having acquainted the court with the grounds of his arrest, and the fact that for three years he had lain forgotten and without trial in the pestilential prison of Le Bouffay, Leroy passed on to a recital of his sufferings on that night of terror when he had gone down the Loire in the doomed lighter. He told his tale with an artlessness that rendered it the more moving and convincing. The audience crowding the chamber of justice shuddered with horror, and sobbed over the details of his torments, wept for joy over his miraculous preservation. At the close he was applauded on all sides, which bewildered him a little, for he had never known anything but abuse in all his chequered life.

  And then, at the promptings of that spirit of reaction that was abroad in those days when France was awakening from the nightmare of terror, some one made there and then a collection on his behalf, and came to thrust into his hands a great bundle of assignats and bank bills, which to the humble cocassier represented almost a fortune. It was his turn to weep.

  Then the crowd in the court which had heard his story shouted for the head of Carrier. The demand was taken up by the whole of Paris, and finally his associates of the Convention handed him over to the Revolutionary Tribunal.

  He came before it on November 25th, and he could not find counsel to defend him. Six advocates named in succession by the President refused to plead the cause of so inhuman a monster. In a rage, at last Carrier announced that he would defend himself. He did.

  He took the line that his business in Nantes had been chiefly concerned with provisioning the Army of the West; that he had had little to do with the policing of Nantes, which he left entirely to the Revolutionary Committee; and that he had no knowledge of the things said to have taken place. But Goullin, Bachelier, and the others were there to fling back the accusation in their endeavours to save their own necks at the expense of his.

  He was sentenced on the very anniversary of that terrible night on which the men of the Marat Company broke into the prison of Le Bouffay, and he was accompanied in the tumbril by Grandmaison the pitiless, who was now filled with self-pity to such an extent that he wept bitterly.

  The crowd, which had hooted and insulted him from the Conciergerie to the Place de Greve, fell suddenly silent as he mounted the scaffold, his step firm, but his shoulders bowed, and his eyes upon the ground.

  Suddenly upon the silence, grotesquely, horribly merry, broke the sound of a clarinet playing the “Ca ira!”

  Jerking himself erect, Carrier turned and flung the last of his terrible glances at the musician.

  A moment later the knife fell with a thud, and a bleeding head rolled into the basket, the eyes still staring, but powerless now to inspire terror.

  Upon the general silence broke an echo of the stroke.

  “Vlan!” cried a voice. “And there’s a fine end to a great drowner!”

  It was Leroy the cocassier. The crowd took up the cry.

  IX. THE NIGHT OF NUPTIALS — Charles The Bold And Sapphira Danvelt

  When Philip the Good succumbed at Bruges of an apoplexy in the early part of the year 1467, the occasion was represented to the stout folk of Flanders as a favourable one to break the Burgundian yoke under which they laboured. It was so represented by the agents of that astute king, Louis XI, who ever preferred guile to the direct and costly exertion of force.

  Charles, surnamed the Bold (le Temeraire), the new Duke of Burgundy, was of all the French King’s enemies by far the most formidable and menacing just then; and the wily King, who knew better than to measure himself with a foe that was formidable, conceived a way to embarrass the Duke and cripple his resources at the very outset of his reign. To this end did he send his agents into the Duke’s Flemish dominions, there to intrigue with the powerful and to stir up the spirit of sedition that never did more than slumber in the hearts of those turbulent burghers.

  It was from the Belfry Tower of the populous, wealthy city of Ghent — then one of the most populous and wealthy cities of Europe — that the call to arms first rang out, summoning the city’s forty thousand weavers to quit their looms and take up weapons — the sword, the pike, and that arm so peculiarly Flemish, known as the goedendag. From Ghent the fierce flame of revolt spread rapidly to the valley of the Meuse, and the scarcely less important city of Liege, where the powerful guilds of armourers and leather workers proved as ready for battle as the weavers of Ghent.

  They made a brave enough show until Charles the Bold came face to face with them at Saint-Trond, and smashed the mutinous burgher army into shards, leaving them in their slaughtered thousands upon the stricken field.

  The Duke was very angry. He felt that the Flemings had sought to take a base advantage of him at a moment when it was supposed he would not be equal to protecting his interests, and he intended to brand it for all time upon their minds that it was not safe to take such liberties with their liege lord. Thus, when a dozen of the most important burghers of Liege came out to him very humbly in their shirts, with halters round their necks, to kneel in the dust at his feet and offer him the keys of the city, he spurned the offer with angry disdain.

  “You shall be taught,” he told them, “how little I require your keys, and I hope that you will remember the lesson for your own good.”

  On the morrow his pioneers began to smash a breach, twenty fathoms wide, in one of the walls of the city, rolling the rubble into the ditch to fill it up at the spot. When the operation was complete, Charles rode through the gap, as a conqueror, with vizor lowered and lance on thigh at the head of his Burgundians, into his city of Liege, whose fortifications he commanded should be permanently demolished.

  That was the end of the Flemish rising of 1467 against Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. The weavers returned to their looms, the armourers to their forges, and the glove-makers and leather workers to their shears. Peace was restored; and to see that it was kept, Charles appointed military governors of his confidence where he deemed them necessary.

  One of these was Claudius von Rhynsault, who had followed the Duke’s fortunes for some years now, a born leader of men, a fellow of infinite address at arms and resource in battle, and of a bold, reckless courage that nothing could ever daunt. It was perhaps this last quality that rendered him so esteemed of Charles, himself named the Bold, whose view of courage was that it was a virtue so lofty that in the nature of its possessor there could, perforce, be nothing mean.

  So now, to mark his esteem of this stalwart German, the Duke made him Governor of the province of Zeeland, and dispatche
d him thither to stamp out there any lingering sparks of revolt, and to rule it in his name as ducal lieutenant.

  Thus, upon a fair May morning, came Claud of Ryhnsault and his hardy riders to the town of Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, to take up his residence at the Gravenhof in the main square, and thence to dispense justice throughout that land of dykes in his master’s princely name. This justice the German captain dispensed with merciless rigour, conceiving that to be the proper way to uproot rebellious tendencies. It was inevitable that he should follow such a course, impelled to it by a remorseless cruelty in his nature, of which the Duke his master had seen no hint, else he might have thought twice before making him Governor of Zeeland, for Charles — despite his rigour when treachery was to be punished — was a just and humane prince.

  Now, amongst those arrested and flung into Middelburg gaol as a result of Rhynsault’s ruthless perquisitions and inquisitions was a wealthy young burgher named Philip Danvelt. His arrest was occasioned by a letter signed “Philip Danvelt” found in the house of a marked rebel who had been first tortured and then hanged. The letter, of a date immediately preceding the late rising, promised assistance in the shape of arms and money.

  Brought before Rhynsault for examination, in a cheerless hall of the Gravenhof, Danvelt’s defence was a denial upon oath that he had ever taken or offered to take any part in the rebellion. Told of the letter found, and of the date it bore, he laughed. That letter made everything very simple and clear. At the date it bore he had been away at Flushing marrying a wife, whom he had since brought thence to Middelburg. It was ludicrous, he urged, to suppose that in such a season — of all seasons in a man’s life — he should have been concerned with rebellion or correspondence with rebels, and, urging this, he laughed again.