Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 77

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The ci-devant Chevalier de Saint-Just, that flaming torch of patriotism and republican integrity, was about to depart on a mission of importance to Strasbourg, where a strong hand was just then required. No stronger hand could the party of the Mountain supply than that of this elegant, fiercely eloquent, ardently zealous young idealist. Such was the reputation into which he had come. Engrossed in national work, he was accounted of an asceticism unusual in his age, of a purity of life that was a model to mankind, and of an incorruptibility that rendered him a fit lieutenant to Robespierre, that Great Incorruptible. His youth—he was scarcely more than a boy—his well-knit, graceful figure, his handsome face with the golden curls clustering thickly about his smooth white brow, and his indubitable talents had raised him by the autumn of '93 to the position of a popular idol. If he had contrived to place Robespierre supreme, as the first man in France, he had at the same time not been neglectful of himself. With his talents, remorselessness, and ambition, it is possible that he was content to play the acolyte; it is probable that he dreamed of ultimately wresting to himself the office of high-priest in the republican temple.

His last act in the Convention before departing on that Strasbourg mission had served to increase his popularity. He had moved that decree for the confiscation of all foreign property, the foreshadowing of which had led to the tightening of the relations between Chabot and the Freys. And he had moved it in an address which was a challenge of France to the world in arms against her. Her frontiers were being violated by the mercenaries of the despots; her blood was being shed in the sacred cause of Freedom; whilst the vile agents of Pitt and Coburg were sapping her strength by tapping the veins of her commercial and social life. They must strike the enemy wherever he was to be met. They must strike him here in their midst no less than on the frontiers. Let all foreign property in France be placed under seal.

That motion was carried. The ardent terms in which it had been advocated were reported, circulated, and extolled by every true son of France.

Fortunately for the Freys, Chabot was already married to their sister. Some days before, poor little Léopoldine had submitted to the horrible ordeal, had been immolated by her brothers on the foul altar of Mammon. The worthless assignment they had made rendered their property immune from the decreed confiscation. Chabot, the unclean, licentious ex-Capuchin, turned fop, was installed in the handsome apartments on the first floor of the Freys' house, and thus to be regarded as its inquiline.

The delectable Poldine, as he now called her, the little partridge whose maiden plumpness had so whetted his lascivious appetite, was now his own possession; and her dowry was on a scale that in itself should make him rich, had made him rich already. And even this dowry had ceased to signify. Soon now he would count his wealth from other sources in hundreds of thousands, for with reëstablished confidence the stock of the India Company must soar rapidly back towards the high figure from which it had so precipitately tumbled. Wealth, greatness, and honours awaited François Chabot. Very clearly his eyes perceived the golden glow on his horizon. Robespierre had been a fool to be afraid of money, to neglect opportunities to enrich himself which his position gave him. For money, as Chabot had so lately discovered, was the stoutest staff upon which a man could lean. With it, before all was done, he would try a fall with Robespierre himself; and Robespierre, caught without any golden panoply about him, should go down to make way for François Chabot.

Meanwhile, he would neglect no opportunity of focussing the popular attention. He would keep all eyes upon himself, so that his republican ardour might dazzle the beholders. With this in view he was of those who in an impassioned speech demanded the trial too long delayed of the infamous Austrian woman, that wicked Messalina, the Widow Capet.

The Convention yielded promptly. It dared do no other even if it had wished. Already popular feeling against this woman had made it prudent to abandon the secret negotiations with Austria for the exchange of prisoners by which she would have been delivered. The execution of the King had been in the nature of a dangerous experiment. In decreeing it the Convention had staked its existence. It would stake that existence now, and undoubtedly lose it, if it hesitated in dealing mercilessly with this woman to whom so many national calamities were attributed.

And so at three o'clock in the morning on the 2d of October, the unfortunate widow of Louis XVI was conveyed in a closed carriage, faced by two municipals to guard her, from the prison of the Temple to the guillotine's antechamber, the Conciergerie.

When it was known on the morrow, André-Louis was oddly bitter. He smiled sourly upon de Batz, who sat crushed with horror.

'And so,' he said slowly, 'the sacrifice of poor little Léopoldine has been in vain. It has not sufficed, after all, to propitiate your dreadful gods. They must have a queen in holocaust.'

The Baron leapt up with flaming eyes. 'Do you mock?'

André-Louis shook his head. 'I do not mock. I view the ruin, the futile ruin of a sweet young life. It was to save a queen, you said. I told you that no good would come of it.'

Livid, de Batz swung away from him. 'I spoke of more than the Queen. But why argue? You have moved too slowly with your infernal caution.'

'That is unjust. I was spurred to swiftest movement in the hope of precipitating the avalanche in time to save Léopoldine.'

'Léopoldine! Léopoldine! Can you think of nothing else? Not even the fate of the Queen of France can eclipse her from your thoughts. What do I care for all the Léopoldines in the world, when that anointed head may fall unless I can work a miracle! And that fat fool at Hamm will mock again; will call me a Gascon and a boaster.'

'Does that matter? Is your vanity to be concerned?'

'It is a question of my honour,' de Batz fiercely retorted.

Thereafter for a week he scarcely ate or slept, and was seldom at his lodging in the Rue de Ménars. He scoured the city. He hunted out his army of loyal associates. He held conferences, propounded plans, each more reckless than the other for the deliverance of the unhappy Queen. Rougeville, one of his associates, even claimed thereafter to have penetrated the Conciergerie and to have spoken with her Majesty in an attempt to prepare the ground for an evasion. But all was vain. There was not even the forlorn hope of delivering her by some such desperate attempt on the road to the Place de la Révolution as that by which nine months ago he had proposed to save the King. Those were early days, and after all the King had still some friends even among the Republicans, whereas the Queen, thanks to the infamous propaganda that had been steadily at work, was universally execrated.

That propaganda was to continue industrious to the end. There are no limits to the invention by which men seek to justify the wrong they do. Hitherto they had been content to brand this poor tarnished queen as a Messalina. But not even this was enough for the foul mind of Hébert.

Her trial, lasting two days, closed with the death sentence at four o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, the 16th of October. Some hours later she set out in the tumbril, dressed all in white, her hands pinioned behind her. From the mob-cap with which she was coiffed escaped the ragged ends of the grey hair rudely cropped by the executioner's valet in the course of the last toilet. But she sat erect, disdainful, her heavy Austrian lip protruding, in scorn of the loathly rabble that booed her as she passed to her death.

It was an imposing last procession. All Paris was under arms. The drums rolled. Thirty thousand troops of foot and horse had turned out, and lined the route. Cannon was mounted at every commanding point. Did she contrast it with that other procession, twenty-three years ago, in which, as the lovely young Archduchess of fifteen, she had first come among these people, who then, as now, and yet in what different sentiment, had yelled themselves hoarse at sight of her?

De Batz, a man anguished and almost demented, was in the crowd to hear the shouts of 'Death to tyrants! Live the Republic!' which greeted the fall of that royal head.

Disordered in mind as in appearance he came back to the Rue de Ménars and to André-Louis, who had abstained from going forth that day. But not on that account had he remained either ignorant of or indifferent to what was taking place. He rose as de Batz entered.

'So. It is finished,' he said quietly.

Out of the Baron's livid face a pair of flaming, blood-injected eyes regarded him in fury.

'Finished? No. It is about to begin. What you have heard from here was but the overture. It is time to ring up the curtain. Time to make an end.'

His self-control had completely left him. He had the air of a drunkard or a madman, and he raved like one. He reviled all things, beginning with himself and ending with the people. It shamed him, he declared, that the same blood should run in his veins as in the veins of these tigers. They were vile as no people in the world ever had been or ever could be vile. They were inhuman, bestial imbeciles. But they should soon be brought to their senses. Even to such sub-human wits as theirs the corruption of their masters in the Convention should be made apparent. Their passions, so easily inflamed, should be inflamed, indeed, so as to consume the evil satyrs who were responsible for this horror. All these, he swore, should go the way the Queen had gone that morning.

If André-Louis did not share his stormy emotions, he certainly shared his resolve. Because he remained cold and self-contained, he was in fact, as he had always been, as he would be to the end, the deadlier of the two.

There followed days of watchful waiting for the moment to ring up the curtain on the drama of which he had so craftily prepared the scenario.

First came, less than a fortnight later, the mockery of a trial of the twenty-two Girondins, who had languished in prison since last June. Robespierre judged that the hour for this had struck. It would drive home the assertion that the party of the Mountain, of which he was the undisputed head, was now the paramount party in the State. Their execution followed: a wholesale butchery this, providing in the Place de la Révolution a spectacle of blood on a scale not yet witnessed there.

Yet it was a spectacle which restored to de Batz something of his old remorseless spirit. Almost he smiled even as, with a sigh, he said: 'Poor devils! All young, all able! But even as for their own advancement they did not hesitate to murder the King, so must their own murder be approved by all monarchists, since it must advance the cause of the monarchy. Saturn-like the Convention begins to devour its own children. It is upon this that we have depended. Let the work thus begun be pushed forward ruthlessly, until, when it is seen in the departments that the representatives themselves are being guillotined, none will be found to brave the danger of replacing them, and the Convention will be reduced to a handful of contemptible fellows to be used or to be brushed aside.' In a breath he added: 'Is the business of the India Company ripe yet?'

'It is ripening fast,' André-Louis informed him. Already some days previously the commission had pronounced, upon the vote of the majority, that the extinction of the Company could not be countenanced, since it would be against the national interest. That finding, published unostentatiously, was already abroad, and confidence was being restored. 'The stock is rising again daily. Whether our friends have taken their profits or not scarcely matters. They have certainly made them. I am preparing now a memorial for some representative or other ambitious enough to bell the cat.'

'Whom have you in mind?'

'Philippeaux. There's a crude honesty about him. Also he is a moderate, and therefore a natural enemy of the extremist Chabot. I have sounded him in a casual way. I pointed out to him how odd a thing it is that so many members of the Convention have latterly become men of property. I asked him innocently what possible explanation there could be for this. He became angry. Used the word "calumny"; voiced a suspicion that rumours indicated the existence of a plot to bring the Convention into discredit.'

'That was shrewd enough,' said de Batz.

'I promised him particulars. I am preparing them.'

He prepared them so well that the Representative Philippeaux, convinced, mounted the tribune of the Convention to cast a bombshell into the Assembly. This happened on a November morning a week later, and for the moment put an end to the discussion of abstract questions which had been occupying so much time since Danton's return from his uxorious retirement. The murder of the Girondins had been the immediate cause of his reappearance. That and the summons from his friend Desmoulins, who began to dread the daily increasing ascendancy of Robespierre. Danton, the man chiefly responsible for the butchery of the 10th of August, when the gutters had run with blood, was there now to preach in his powerful voice a gospel of moderation.

It startled de Batz, who accounted the movement premature. At the same time, he perceived in it the beginnings of a counter-revolutionary tendency, and it confirmed the opinion he had long held that, when the time to use him came, he would find in Danton the man to play in France the part that Monk had played in England.

And then, even whilst these things were engaging the Baron's attention, this was suddenly diverted to more immediate matters by the speech of Philippeaux. The curtain was raised, indeed; the drama for which there had been such long and laborious preparation was at last about to commence.