Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 60

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Moloch stood before the Palace of the Tuileries in the brilliant sunshine of a June morning, and raised his hideous voice in a cry for blood. The sprawling incarnation of him that filled to overflowing the Place du Carrousel was made up of some eighty thousand men under arms: sectionary National Guards, battalions of the new army about to set out for the Vendée, and ragged patriots brandishing musket, pike, or sabre, the bloodthirsty scourings of the streets. It was just such a mob as André-Louis had seen in this very place on the memorable and terrible 10th of August of the previous year.

On that occasion they had come to storm a palace housing a king, so that they might impose upon him their mutinous will, shaped and directed by the incendiaries who employed them as a weapon. Today, once more in an insurrection that had been craftily engineered, they came in their thousands to storm this same palace which now housed the National Convention elected by the people themselves to replace the departed monarch.

Then it had been Danton, the great tribune, massive and overwhelming in body, brain, and voice, the cyclops of Madame Roland's detestation, who had inspired and led the populace. Today its leader was a poor creature of weakly frame, shabbily dressed, his head swathed like a buccaneer's in a red kerchief, from which black, greasy rags of hair hung about a livid, Semitic countenance. He laboured in his walk, setting his feet wide. He was the Citizen Jean-Paul Marat, President of the powerful Jacobin Club, surgeon, philanthropist, and reformer, commonly styled the People's Friend, from the title of the scurrilous journal with which he poisoned the popular mind. And Danton was amongst those against whom today he led this mob, which ten months ago Danton had led in this same place.

The situation was not without a terrible humour; and Monsieur de Batz, standing prominently on a horse-block by the courtyard wall with André-Louis beside him, smiled grimly as he looked on, well pleased with the climax for which these two had striven and intrigued.

This is not to say that the ruin of the Girondin party, which was now as good as encompassed—the only alternative being the ruin of the entire Convention—was the work of de Batz and André-Louis. But it is beyond doubt that their part in it had been important. Without the grains of sand which they had flung at moments into the scales when these were too nicely balanced between victory and defeat, it is not impossible that the Girondins, who combined intelligence with courage, would have overthrown their opponents and established, by the rule of moderation for which they stood, the law and order necessary to save the State. But from the moment when they first rendered themselves vulnerable by procuring the arrest of the rabble's idol Marat, de Batz with the assistance of André-Louis had worked diligently through his agents to fan the resentment into a fury in the face of which no jury dared to convict the offending journalist.

Marat's acquittal had been a triumph. Laurel-crowned the mob had borne him to the Convention so that there he might vent his spite against the men who, inspired by decency, had sought his ruin.

After this had come the laudable attempt of the Girondins to curb the insolence of the Commune of Paris, which, by imposing its will upon the elected representatives of the people of France, made a mock of government. They compelled the setting-up of the Commission of Twelve, to examine the conduct of the municipality and control it.

The situation became strained. The party of the Mountain, with Robespierre at its head, feared lest the Girondins should recapture in the Convention the domination which they had held in the Legislative Assembly. Certainly the available talent lay with this band of lawyers and intellectuals, led by the formidable, eloquent Vergniaud, that shining light of the Bordeaux bar, whom someone has called the Cicero from Aquitaine. In debate Robespierre could produce on his side no champions to hold the lists against these. In a man of Robespierre's temperament this was cause enough for rancour, without the additional rancour he bore the Girondins for having excluded him from office when theirs was the power. But for outside influence these men of the Gironde must have prevailed. Outside influence, however, was at work, and none more active in it than de Batz at once directed and seconded by André-Louis. It was André-Louis who, employing his gifts of authorship, composed those pamphlets printed in the presses of the Ami du Peuple and widely circulated, in which the Girondins were charged with counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Their moderation was represented as a betrayal of their trust; the Commission of Twelve set up by their influence was shown to be an attempt to hobble the Commune, whose sole aim was to destroy despotism. Subtly was it suggested that the royalist victories in the Vendée, the reactionary insurrections at Marseilles and Bordeaux, and the defeat of the Republican Army in Belgium, ending in General Dumouriez's defection and flight, were the results of Girondist moderation and weakness at a time when National necessity called for the strongest, sternest measures.

Such had been the poison sedulously pumped into Parisian veins, and here at last was the result in this rising of the inflamed Parisian body: eighty thousand men and sixty guns, commanded by the ridiculous General Henriot, who sat his horse with obvious discomfort, to back Marat's demand that the traitors—and he was prepared to name twenty-two of them—should be given up.

There was a sudden movement in the crowd, and cries of 'They come!'

A group of men had made its appearance at the door of the Palace. It advanced, others crowding after it, to the number of perhaps two hundred, a considerable proportion of the whole body of representatives. At the head of these men walked that tall graceful libertine, Hérault de Séchelles, President of the Convention at this time. He wore his plumed hat, as was usual in the chamber when proceedings were out of order.

Henriot thrust his horse forward a few paces. Séchelles halted, and held up his hand for silence. He carried a paper, and he raised his resonant voice to read it. It was a decree just passed by the staggered body of legislators, commanding the instant withdrawal of this armed insurrectionary force. But as Robespierre had said (or was it Chabot?), 'There is no virtue where there is no fear.' And the Government was without the means to arouse the fear that inculcates virtue.

'I charge you to obey!' cried Séchelles, lowering his paper and delivering himself resolutely.

'You have my orders, Hérault,' he was truculently answered by the mounted General.

'Your orders!' Séchelles paused. There was a murmur of indignation behind him in the ranks of the representatives. 'What does the people want? The Convention has no thought or concern save for the public welfare.'

'What it wants, Hérault? You well know what it wants.' The General's tone was conciliatory. 'We know that you are a good patriot, Hérault, that you belong to the Mountain. Will you answer for it upon your head that the twenty-two traitors in the Convention will be delivered up within twenty-four hours?'

The President stood firm. 'It is not,' he began, 'for the people to dictate thus to the august body of ...'

His voice was drowned in a roar, sudden as a thunder-clap, and then, like thunder, protracted in a long roll of furious sound that waxed and waned. Above the sea of heads arms were thrust up brandishing weapons.

Hérault de Séchelles stood firm. Behind him his agitated fellow representatives looked on, conceiving that they were to fare even as in this very place those had fared against whom ten months ago they had loosed the fury of this same populace.

But Henriot, more uncomfortable than ever on a charger made restive by the din, yet contrived to pacify and silence Moloch.

'The sovereign people,' he said, 'is not here to listen to phrases, but to issue its sovereign commands.'

Séchelles played his last card. He advanced a step, drawing himself up, and flinging out an arm in a superb gesture of authority. His voice rang like a trumpet-call.

'Soldiers! In the name of the Nation and the law, I order you to arrest this rebel.'

Moloch curbed his derision and held his breath to hear the answer.

Henriot drew his sabre.

'We take no orders from you. Return to your place, and deliver up the deputies demanded by the people.' In the bright sunshine the flourish of his blade made a lightning-flash above his head. 'Cannoneers, to your posts!'

There was an obeying movement about the guns trained on the Palace. Matches smouldered. Hérault de Séchelles and his crowd of deputies hastily, confusedly retreated and vanished into the building.

De Batz burst into laughter, which found an echo among those about him. Grinning ragamuffins looked round and up at him approvingly. Obscenely decked jests were tossed to and fro.

The Baron waited to see the tragi-comedy played out. Nor was his patience tried. Marat, supported by some scoundrels, had followed the deputies into the hall of the Convention, there to name the twenty-two whose exclusion was demanded. Resistance to such force was idle. Robespierre and a small group of the party of the Mountain passed the decree for the arrest of the Girondins. The main body of the Assembly sat awed, humiliated, appalled by this dictation to which they were compelled to submit.

Thereupon Moloch raised the siege, and the members of the Convention, virtually prisoners until that moment, were allowed to depart. They filed out to the accompaniment of the ironical cheers of the multitude.

The Baron de Batz descended from his horse-block, and took André-Louis by the arm. 'That rings down the curtain on the first act. Come. There is no more to be done here.'

They entered the human stream of the departing mob and were borne by it into the cool shade of the gardens, where at last they won release. Thence by the Terrace of the Feuillants and the Rue Saint Thomas du Louvre, they made their way towards the Rue de Ménars.

Here in the heart of the Section Lepelletier of the Commune of Paris, the Baron rented in the name of his servant, Biret-Tissot, the first floor of No. 7. The locality was well chosen for a man in his precarious position. Of all the Paris sections, the Section Lepelletier was the least revolutionary. Consequently its members would have few revolutionary scruples against selling themselves. Of how widely they were in the pay of de Batz—from Pottier de Lille, the secretary of the Revolutionary Committee of the section, down to Captain Cortey, who commanded its National Guard—André-Louis had already come to realize.

As they went, the two fell naturally into talk of what was done. André-Louis had been rather gloomily silent.

'You have no scruples?' he asked at last. 'Your conscience makes you no reproaches?'

'Reproaches!'

'These men, after all, are the cleanest, the best, the most upright and honest in that galley.'

'They're in the galley no longer. They are overboard, and the craft will go the more surely on to the rocks without them. Wasn't this your aim?'

'True. And yet ruthlessly to sacrifice men of such worth ...'

'Were they less ruthless in sacrificing the King?'

'They did not mean to send him to the guillotine. They did not desire his death. They would have saved him by suspending sentence.'

'The more ruthless were they in voting for his death. A cowardly act to save their waning popularity. Bah! If you have pity, save it for worthier objects than this crew of windy ideologues, who are ridden by Madame Roland, from Buzot her lover (in the spirit, so she pretends) to that pedant, her spiritual cuckold of a husband. To this in the end, by one road or another, must they have come. We have but shortened the journey for them.'

'What will be the end of them?'

'You have seen it. The rest is not important. It is odd to reflect that there is not a man amongst them who was not one of the architects of this Republic upon whose altar they are now sacrificed. Lanjuinais, the founder of the Jacobin Club; Barbaroux, who brought the Marseillais to the work of revolution; Saint-Étienne, responsible for the shaping of the civil constitution; Brissot, who intoxicated men with his revolutionary writings; Fauchet, the apostle of the Revolutionary Church; and the others who encompassed the overthrow of the throne. Are these men for a royalist's compassion? They're gone, and with them departs all chance of law and order in the State. The very manner of their going is the ruin of the Convention. Henceforth the august law-givers are the slaves of the sovereign rabble, which today has discovered its sovereignty. In the exercise of this sovereignty it must of necessity perish, for anarchy is of necessity self-destructive.' After a pause he added on a note of elation, gripping his companion's arm. 'This is monarchy's greatest hour since the Bastille was taken four years ago. Those who remain are easily swept away by the same forces that have removed the Girondins.'

He clapped the gloomy André-Louis on the shoulder. 'Rejoice, then, in Heaven's name, at this vindication of the theories with which you startled me at Hamm.'