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

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 Convention, 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.

 

Leroy was awakened about ten o’clock that night by sounds that were

very unusual in that sombre, sepulchral prison. They were sounds

of unbridled revelry - snatches of ribald song, bursts of coarse,

reverberating laughter and they proceeded, as it seemed to him,

from the courtyard and the porter’s lodge.

 

He crawled from the dank straw which served him for a bed, and

approached the door to listen. Clearly the porter Laqueze was

entertaining friends and making unusually merry. It was also to be

gathered that Laqueze’s friends were getting very drunk. What the

devil did it mean?

 

His curiosity was soon to be very fully gratified. Came heavy steps

up the stone staircase, the clatter of sabots, the clank of weapons,

and through the grille of his door an increasing light began to beat.

 

Some one was singing the “Carmagnole” in drunken, discordant tones.

Keys rattled, bolts were drawn; doors were being flung open. The

noise increased. Above the general din he heard the detestable

voice of the turnkey.

 

“Come and see my birds in their cages. Come and see my pretty birds.”

 

Leroy began to have an uneasy premonition that the merrymaking

portended sinister things.

 

“Get up, all of you!” bawled the turnkey. “Up and pack your traps.

You’re to go on a voyage. No laggards, now. Up with you!”

 

The door of Leroy’s cell was thrown open in its turn, and he found

himself confronting a group of drunken ruffians. One of these - a

red-capped giant with long, black mustaches and a bundle of ropes

over one arm suddenly pounced upon him. The cocassier was an active,

vigorous young