The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Rafael Sabatini [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

a blow she shattered the fond hopes he had been cherishing

ever since the night of gems - of gems, forsooth! - in the Grove of

Venus; thus she laid his ambition in ruins about him, and left the

man himself half stunned.

 

Observing his disorder, the ponderous but kindly monarch rose.

 

“Come, my cousin,” he said more gently, “collect yourself. Sit

down here and write what you may have to say in answer.”

 

And with that he passed into the library beyond, accompanied by the

Queen and the two Ministers.

 

Alone, Rohan staggered forward and sank nervelessly into the chair.

He took up a pen, pondered a moment, and began to write. But he

did not yet see clear. He could not yet grasp the extent to which

he had been deceived, could not yet believe that those treasured

notes from Marie Antoinette were forgeries, that it was not the

Queen who had met him in the Grove of Venus and given him the rose

whose faded petals kept those letters company in a portfolio of red

morocco. But at least it was clear to him that, for the sake of

honour - the Queen’s honour - he must assume it so; and in that

assumption he now penned his statement.

 

When it was completed, himself he bore it to the King in the

library.

 

Louis read it with frowning brows; then passed it to the Queen.

 

“Have you the necklace now?” he asked Rohan.

 

“Sir, I left it in the hands of this woman Valois.”

 

“Where is this woman?”

 

“I do not know, Sire.”

 

“And the letter of authority bearing the Queen’s signature, which

the jewellers say you presented to them - where is that?”

 

“I have it, Sire. I will place it before you. It is only now that

I realize that it is a forgery.”

 

“Only now!” exclaimed the Queen in scorn.

 

“Her Majesty’s name has been compromised,” said the King sternly.

“It must be cleared. As King and as husband my duty is clear.

Your Eminence must submit to arrest.”

 

Rohan fell back a step in stupefaction. For disgrace and dismissal

he was prepared, but not for this.

 

“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

furlined 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