“Among all the noble and ignoble sufferers by the guillotine there is no record of cowardice on the part of any–save only in the case of Madame du Barry, a woman of the people who had been mistress of France during the most extravagant years of the reign of Louis XV.”–History of France.
“Among all the noble and ignoble sufferers by the guillotine there is no record of cowardice on the part of any–save only in the case of Madame du Barry, a woman of the people who had been mistress of France during the most extravagant years of the reign of Louis XV.”–History of France.
On the third day of November, 1793, Madame la Comtesse du Barry, arrested for “supplying the Emigrants with money,” and for this offence sentenced to death, was brought to the prison of the Concièrgerie.
There were many prisoners that day, among them Philippe, one time Duc d’Orleans, recently Philippe Égalité, the man who had voted for the death of his cousin, the King, and was now to die the same way himself.
Madame du Barry and her companions were conducted through a large Gothic hall, dark and low, down a long stone corridor, also dark and low, and half open one side to grim vaults, through two squat doors and across a courtyard narrowed and cobbled, into another building, up gloomy straight stairs and into a narrow corridor. While the jailer was unlocking doors Madame du Barry looked round her; she perceived that only one of her companions remained–a woman as young and beautiful as herself, with black hair and dusky eyes and a face twisted with terror.
“What is your name?” whispered Madamedu Barry.
“Josephine Beauharnais,” answered the dark beauty in a feeble voice. “And for God’s sake tell me–are we to die–to die?”
“No–no,” whispered the fair woman eagerly.
Madame Beauharnais smiled foolishly.
“A wise woman once said that I should be a queen and more,” she replied brokenly, “therefore I cannot be going to die—”
“No, no,” repeated the Countess, shaking her blonde head.
The jailer came and roughly separated them. Madame du Barry saw the pallid, dazed face of her companion and heard her shriek as she was thrust into a room and the key turned; then she herself was pushed through an open door and locked in.
She stumbled across the threshold and nearly fell, recovered herself and went straight to the window and looked out.
The window was heavily and closely barred from top to bottom, and faced the other portion of the prison through which she had just come, which was only a few yards distant. A small portion of sky was visible and a small strip of cobbled courtyard; nothing else.
The sky was grey with the sullen snows of November, and the cobbles and the walls were splashed and stained with dark patches; Madame du Barry knew what they were: a few days before the Girondists had been gathered in the chapel of the Concièrgerie and then driven out into the courtyard to be massacred.
She had heard a man say that the blood had been ankle-deep.
A peculiar, terrible and sickening smell filled the prison; she had noticed it as soon as she had stepped down into the dark entrance hall. It was very strong in this room where they had put her. She tried to forget what it was.
“I must think,” she said to herself; “I must think.”
She had been saying that all day. Holding on to her senses and saying to herself that as soon as this horrible and bewildering tumult was over, as soon as she was alone and quiet, away from the abuse, the staring, the rough handling, she would think–straighten things out in her mind, decide what must be done.
And now she was alone she found she could not think; she had acted on impulse, not reflection, all her life; besides, she was rather stupid.
Her mind wandered off to trivial things: the details that had made her life still chiefly interested her; she noticed the dull small room, the wooden bed with a rough coverlet, the broken chair. She pulled out the bed pillow and shuddered to see that it was soiled. Then she began to consider her own dress.
She wore the gown she had been arrested in, a plain yellow taffeta with muslin ruffles at the throat and elbows and a dark green pelerine with a cape.
Her hat had gone; on putting her hands up to her fair curls she found that her hair ribbonhad gone too. Her dress was torn and muddy round the hem, and one of her light boots was broken.
She put her hand to her bosom and drew out a string of pearls that she had, the moment before her arrest at her country château, snatched up mechanically and concealed in her dress. The soft lustre and colour of them gave her pleasure and comfort; she handled them lovingly and laid them next her cheek.
She remembered that she had worn them on the occasion when King Louis, at the review, had stood bare-headed at the door of her sedan, her lacquey before the eyes of France.
And she was still as beautiful as she had been then–perhaps more beautiful; therefore it could not be that they were going to murder her. Beauty like hers was a power. The men who had put her here could not have noticed her.
She looked round, hoping for a mirror, but there was none.
She put her hand to her face, felt her smooth skin, her glossy hair, her delicate neck, the curve of her lips.…
“If I were a plain woman I might be afraid,” she murmured; “but they will not touchme.”
Rising impatiently, she moved about the room; she began to be indignant that they had put her in such a place. She knocked on the door and called out, demanding a better apartment–food–clean sheets.
It was absurd that she should be treated thus; they had forgotten who she was, she told herself.
There was no answer to her cries. She began to tremble, and presently returned to the window.
She must think.
She was condemned to death; she had heard the man wearing the tricolor sash and cocked hat say so; but at the time the words had meant little or nothing: they had only been one detail more in the tumult of horror and terror by which she had been surrounded since her arrest. She knew that people were sentenced and left months in prison or set free the next morning; besides, she was not an aristocrat, but a woman of the people. Despite her rapid rise and the brilliance of her shining, she was by birth no better than the draggled women who had shouted at her as she was dragged before the tribunal.
Yes, she was one with these people; the great aristocrats had always scorned her. M. de Choiseul had lost his place for a disdainful word of her; they had all recognised that she was, however gilded by the homage of Louis, only a common creature.
She tried to recall the years of her glory when she had ruled France, and to search in her mind for any cause of offence given to the People who were now the masters. She thought that her conscience was clear: she had never meddled with politics; she had been kind to those dependent on her; she had done her best to amuse a King who was “unamusable.” True, she had used the public treasury as her own, but she had robbed no one, for the money would only have gone to some other woman. No, she could not see that she had done more than fill her part. Certainly, when she had ruled France it had not floated in blood as it was floating now; she had not pulled down God and profaned His Churches; she had not imprisoned the innocent and massacred the helpless.
With the thought that the People had no crime to charge her with she consoled herself, and she was not afraid of the actual charge on which she was condemned, for it was vague and feeble.
The truth they did not know. Having fled to London on the first outbreak of the revolution, she had returned to France–not, as her accusers believed, to fetch her jewels with which to succour the emigrants in England, but to put her wealth and her services at the disposal of those who were engaged in a plot to rescue the Queen.
Marie Antoinette had always looked over the head of Madame du Barry; while the old King lived she had afforded her, under compulsion, a frozen tolerance; when she became Queen the favourite had been banished to a convent, utterly ignored and forgotten.
Yet on an impulse of loyalty Madame du Barry had come impetuously from London to endeavour to rescue the Queen whom she had always admired, whom she admired rather more perhaps for her constant lofty attitude of contempt towards herself; her placid, rather foolish mind had never resented the disdain of an Emperor’s daughter. She was very sorry that her attempt to serve theQueen had been frustrated; she resolved, when she was free, to make another endeavour, though she had already given nearly all the spoils of her years of plunder to help the refugees in England.…
The dusk began to fall; the room was shiveringly cold. No one came to her. She paced up and down the room to keep herself warm and beat her hands on her breast.
Suppose that, after all, they did mean to drag her out to the guillotine?
Many, many had gone already; many, many were yet to go–women as beautiful as herself, as innocent of offence towards the People.
At this thought her spirit shrieked aloud; she fell across the chair by the window and gazed frantically at the strip of darkening sky.
The smell of blood rose intolerably and clung to her nostrils; it reminded her that all her poor reasonings were of no avail, that this was an age of anarchy when none of the old arguments held good.
And she was in the power of creatures without pity, without justice, who stopped for nothing in their swift slaying.
But she would not accept this view; her mind rejected it. She could not and would not believe that she was meant for death.
Suddenly the jailer entered; she had meant to assail him with questions, arguments, reproaches, but when she saw him, though he had no particular appearance of brutality, shecould not summon the courage to say one word.
He put a plate of bread and meat and a glass of water on the table. He did not even look at her; his air was one of absolute indifference.
She noticed his black and broken nails, his dirty neck and greasy clothes; she felt sick, and closed her eyes.
The sound of the closing door penetrated her nausea. She tried to ask for a light, but he had gone and the key was turned in the lock; she rose then and pushed away the fat, almost raw meat, the sight of which made her quiver with disgust. She tried to eat a little of the bread, but it was coarse and dry and stuck in her throat.
Some of the water she drank and the rest she used to bathe her hands and brow, drying them afterwards on her petticoat.
The light faded quickly in this confined chamber, built in as it was; and though the chimes of the Concièrgerie clock told her that it was no more than four, it was soon completely dark.
She faced the fact that they meant to leave her without a light; this did not much trouble her. She felt a dullness creeping over her spirits; she was more conscious of the cold than anything else. Chilled in every limb, she lay down on the distasteful bed and dragged the thin blankets over her. All her terrified and bewildered thoughts were soothed by the exquisite sense of physical relief that ran through her fatigued body. She sighed and dismissed everything till to-morrow; the tension of nerves and brain relaxed. She spread her thick hair between her face and the pillow and slept.
She dreamt of a little episode that had taken place many years ago at Versailles. Marie Antoinette, the childish young Dauphine, had, in her tremendous pride of royal birth and purity, refused to speak to the Comtesse du Barry, who was then the most powerful person in France.
The Austrian Ambassador had besought this concession of her in vain; but at last, on the commands of her mother, the Empress Marie Therèse, she had given way, and had reluctantly promised to speak to the favourite in full court.
It was this scene that Madame du Barry saw now in her sleep.
She thought that she was standing again in the gorgeous gallery at Versailles that looked out on to the terrace; she thought that she was again powdered, perfumed, and clad in rose-coloured velvet and wearing on her breast diamonds that would have bought bread for all the starving people in France.
And across the shining floor came the young Austrian, her immature figure glittering in jewelled brocade and tense with the effort she was making.
“Madame,” she said in a stifled voice, “there are a number of people at Versailles to-day—”
Then her voice broke, her breast heaved, she flushed crimson and hurried away, bursting into tears.
Madame du Barry thought that she was following her, saying–
“Do not be distressed, Madame. I am sorry they have made you speak to me. I shall not do you any harm.”
But the Princess would not turn, but hastened along the gleaming floor.
She woke with a start and a horrid leap of her heart; the room was quite dark but cut by the yellow light coming through the open door; she could see the shape of a man looking in.
“Six o’clock to-morrow, citizeness,” he said in a tired voice, and closed the door.
She tried to concentrate her mind on what he had said. What was it that was to happen at six o’clock to-morrow?
She was quite ignorant of the rules and customs of the prison. Perhaps it meant that she was to be set free in the morning, or taken to a better apartment, or put on her trial–or perhaps it was merely the hour at which he would rouse her and bring her food.
Fatigue overwhelmed her again; she fell into a heavy sleep, this time dreamless.
When she woke the darkness was faintly filled with the glimmer of dawn; she rose, stiff and giddy, and put up her hair with such pins as she could find scattered on the bed.
Mechanically she pulled her coat and gown, her fichu and ruffles into place. The exquisite habits of years of luxurious living asserted themselves without any prompting of the brain, as her beauty, that neither dissipation nor indolence could mar, asserted itself even now, when she was for perhaps the first time in her life unconscious of it.
She felt very feeble, and her head was aching slightly with a dull pain in the temples. She would not go to the window because of the remembrance of the stained courtyard.
The room was very cold, yet close and foul; she wondered who had been confined here before, and whether they had been released or—
She heard doors opening and shutting down the corridor, footsteps and the jangle of keys.
Her own door opened and the jailer appeared, holding a lantern.
He made a gesture for her to pass out; she rose stiffly.
“What is this? Where am I to go? Am I to have no food? I could not eat what you brought last night.”
The man seized her arm and pushed her out into the corridor, then went on to the next door.
Madame du Barry found several people waiting who had evidently been roused as she had been; they all glanced at her curiously, and some recognised her and all noticed her beauty.
On her part she looked for the gipsy-like lady whom she had spoken with last night, but she was not there. From the others Madame du Barry shrank; she thought that their eyes were cold and disdainful.
When some seven were gathered and the last door had been relocked, the jailer conducted them downstairs and across the courtyard, the way Madame du Barry had been brought last night.
She made a resolve, and kept it, of not looking down when she crossed those foul cobbles, but forced herself to look up at the strip of sky sadly coloured with the winter dawn, that–melancholy and remote as it was–yet seemed kinder and more human than either buildings or people. Then the sombre walls closed round them again. A couple of Republican Guards took charge of the prisoners and conducted them to the large, dark Gothic entrance hall–“la salle des pas perdu.”
This was lit by two lanterns and already contained several people besides the soldiers on duty.
There was a great silence. Madame du Barry wished to speak, to ask what was going to happen, but could not; she leant against one of the pillars and looked round with frightened eyes.
Every one was very quiet; a few whispered together, but in the most hushed of tones. The soldiers paced about heavily; one was eating nuts.
Most of the people were poorly dressed and white-faced, as if they had been long in prison, but some were fashionable and neat, and must have been just arrested.
One of these, a young man wearing a handsome travelling dress and his hair elaborately curled, approached Madame du Barry.
His face was vaguely familiar to her; she thought that she must have seen him at Versailles.
“Why did you return to France, Madame?” he asked.
The sound of a refined man’s voice was beyond words grateful to her ears; the numb sensation left her brain. She raised her blue eyes and gave him (unconsciously) the sideway glance she had used with such effect at the court of France.
“They think it was for my jewels,” she whispered; “but I was in a plot to save the Queen.”
He looked at her very kindly, and she was pleased and flattered to a great degree, for she had believed that the aristocracy still despised her, and this man was obviously an aristocrat.
“What are they keeping us here for?” she asked. “What is going to happen?”
He made no immediate answer, and, looking intently at him, she perceived that his face was slightly distorted–or was it that her vision was distracted and gave this abnormal appearance to others?
A soldier passed them, insolently near; when he had gone the young man answered–
“They must have told you? You were tried yesterday?”
She faintly shook her fair head.
“Oh no, you could not call it a trial; they dragged me before some tribunal. A servant denounced me, Monsieur.”
“Do you not know, Madame, what this means?”
A spasm of agony contracted her heart.
“No–no—” she stammered.
He very gently laid his hand on her wrist. “We are all condemned to the guillotine,” he said. “We are waiting for that now–the guillotine.”
Incomprehension and confusion showed in the blue eyes of Madame du Barry; her mouth fell open.
“They are going to kill–me?” she asked.
His fingers tightened on her wrist; he answered, and his voice was so low and hoarse that it seemed a whistle in his throat.
“They are watching us. Do not let them see that you care.”
“Oh, I shall be very quiet,” she answered.
He let go of her hand, and it fell like a dead thing to her side.
She was, as she had promised, very quiet, but it was only because she did not, could not, realise what this man had said. Yesterday she had clung to the idea that once she was alone in prison she would think clearly, but she had not, and now the nightmare was closing round her again.
Her weight slipped against the pillar; she felt both sick and giddy. Some one moved a chair towards her and gently pushed her into it; she looked up to see a woman holding some knitting in her left hand.
“The bad air makes you faint,” said this lady kindly and serenely.
“Was I faint?” asked Madame du Barry.
The lady and the young man exchanged glances over her bent blonde head.
“You must not be afraid,” he said. “It is only death.”
“And it is very quickly over,” added the lady.
“Who are you?” asked Madame du Barry stupidly.
The lady mentioned a great name, the name of a friend of the Queen, the name of a woman who had quietly ignored the favourite at Versailles.
“Yes, I remember you,” muttered the Countess and shrank away.
The other woman touched her shoulder. “Madame has behaved like a person of quality,” she said gently. “Madame will die as such—”
At this a little blood crept into the poor prisoner’s face; she caught at the kind hand on her shoulder.
“Yes, yes,” she answered pitifully, “I will try to behave well.”
“Are you afraid?” asked the young man.
She looked up at him and thought that his face was beyond doubt horribly distorted now, like a wet clay mask pulled awry by clumsy fingers.
“I am very much afraid–I can’t believe it—” Her voice trailed off; she turned her eyes to the woman the other side of her. In that white, calm face was that same dragged look of distortion. Madame du Barry did not know that her own features were now almost unrecognisable through the contraction of terror and anticipation ofdeath.
“Why do you not do something?” she glanced round the assembled prisoners. “All these people cannot be going to–die?”
The lady put her knitting in the pocket of her black silk apron; she had seen the guards unbarring the doors.
“Whatever we are or have been,” she answered, “none of us, so far, have failed in this moment.”
Madame du Barry sprang up.
“But I cannot–do–it—” she stammered. “I–cannot–I am not an aristocrat–I–I–have nothing to die for–I am only a woman of the people—”
There was no response in the faces of her two companions; they were watching the opening of the doors at the top of the few shallow steps. Madame du Barry watched too; her senses seemed suspended or dulled; her mouth hung open in a childish circle and her eyes showed the white round the pupils.
The doors were flung wide and fastened back; four soldiers entered and took up their places inside the entrance. A shaft of chill white light fell across the lantern-lit gloom, and a rush of bitter air dispersed the close odours of the hall.
Madame du Barry found the name–“salle des pas perdu” running in her head; for the first time in her life she noticed the meaning.… Of course, “The hall of lost footsteps.” Of course that was why it was given to entrance places: people came and went, but no one stayed–lost footsteps … lost footsteps.…
She could see a cart outside, a humble, dirty cart with straw in the bottom. A jailer began to call out numbers; the prisoners moved towards the door. She found herself being drawn along by the young man who had spoken to her, found herself mounting the few steps and outside in the raw, cold morning.
She had an appalling sensation of being hurried along too fast for comprehension. If they would only give her time to think! She could not realise anything.
There were very few people before the prison; the one or two there took no notice. A man delivering bread looked over his shoulder, then away again, indifferently.
Some passers-by on the quay stopped to watch.… Madame du Barry wondered what was the matter with these people, with the river, with the houses beyond, with the sky–all seemed unreal, distorted. This was not the world that she knew … she was among grotesque strangers. Following the others meekly, she ascended the cart; there were about twelve people in it, and they had to stand. When the horse started the jerk almost threw her on her knees; the man next her helped her up.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “Where are we going?”
“To Heaven, I hope,” was the flippant answer.
A man the other side of her spoke. “One cannot be sure of one’s company even in the tumbrils,” he remarked, glancing at her. “But poor Duquesne had to go with Philippe Égalité, which was worse,” he added.
Madame du Barry looked wildly round for the young aristocrat who had befriended her; he was standing towards the front of the cart, looking with a melancholy air at the river. She could not attract his attention. The lady with the knitting had not come.
They soon left the quay for the more crowded thoroughfares. People began to line the roads, to fill the windows. There was an unusual crowd to-day to watch the passing of the King’s favourite.
The wretched object of this attention began to be aware of it, began to understand that the abuse and execrations that were flung after them were chiefly directed against her, began to grasp the meaning of the finger-pointing, the shouting.
Shewasgoing to her death, and these people were hounding her to it with delight and ferocity.
A convulsion shook her and a light foam frothed on her lips while her eyes turned in her head; she gave a shriek so sharp and ghastly that the men beside her covered their ears; she would have fallen had not the wooden rails of the cart held her up.
This new spectacle of abandoned terror brought the mob rushing after the cart with fresh imprecations of hate and contempt towards the woman who had spent the revenues of France in wanton luxury while such as themselves sweated and starved.
But she was ignorant of her offence towards them; and now the conviction of the truth was borne blazingly into her brain, filled only with one desire–to save her life.
She stretched her hands out over the back of the cart.
“I am no aristocrat!” she cried. “I am a woman of the people! Save me; do not let them take me! I do not want to die!”
Such taunts of vile and horrible abuse answered her that she drew back with her fingers to her lips.
“No, no!” she shrieked. “I never wronged any one of you!”
The surging crowd now almost blocked the progress of the cart; the soldiers who were conducting it had to make a way with their bayonets.
Stones and garbage were hurled at her; dirt splashed on her dress; the jerking of the cart shook her hair down; she continually lost her balance and fell against the wooden side.
“Madame, for God’s sake—” said the man next her. “You demean us all.”
She put her hands over her face; these others might well be brave, she thought; they were dying for all they believed in, for the sake of what they were, but she had nothing to die for. All she had, all she had ever had, was her beauty, and death would take that from her–and what was left?
Death presented itself to her as an intolerable blackness; she could not, she would not face it. She would resist. They could not be such fiends as todragher to her death.
She clenched her hands. She heard the words they were throwing at her; a sense of rage nerved her against them. She hated them, especially the women. She lifted her head, and her blue eyes had a hot brilliance like madness.
“I am not a wicked woman!” she cried out fiercely, looking over the sea of haggard, angry faces. “What I did any of you women here would have done had it been offered to you as it was offered to me!”
Such of the women who could hear these words replied by a rush of fury that nearly upset the cart, and tried to pull the speaker down among them; the soldiers drove them back, and one man struck Madame du Barry with the flat of his sword and violently bade her be silent.
She crouched down, hiding her eyes and her ears. A little cold rain began to fall; she felt it on her head and shivered.
The cart stopped. She dropped her stiff fingers and looked up; she was face to face with the final horror.
A platform surrounded with soldiers in the midst of an open place crowded with people; at one side a palace and trees–the great square once named after her lover, Louis XV.
From the centre of the platform rose the hideous machine itself, the guillotine, with two tall upright posts dyed red, the plank, the basket, the cloth, a man in a dark coat holding a cord, all outlined against a grey tumultuous sky and the leafless, dry trees of November.
The prisoners began to descend from the cart, began to ascend the steps to the guillotine amid the murmurs and yells of the haggard feverish crowd.
Madame du Barry stood at the foot of the scaffold. One by one her companions passed her. The young man in the handsome great coat murmured “courage” as he stepped up and looked at her with pitying eyes.
Her heart was beating very fast; she did not know what she was thinking or doing, only that all her worst anticipations had not equalled this horror—
There were only three left besides herself. The man in charge of the cart seized hold of her long locks and quickly and roughly cut them off.
“Your turn, my little piece of royalty,” he said.
She looked at him blankly; he snatched her small, feeble hands and tied them behind her before she had guessed his intention.
“Oh!” she cried. “Oh!”
She was quite bewildered. The world seemed to have stopped. She saw her blonde curls lying at her feet and moved her head stiffly to and fro to see if the ringlets were not still there.
They pushed her forward and told her to mount.
“Up there?” she asked vacantly, and stared at the scaffold.
“Yes, up there,” was the answer. She hesitated, looked about her as if she did not understand. The man, becoming impatient, pushed her again, roughly, and she, impeded by her bound arms, could not save herself, but fell in the slime and mud at the foot of the steps.
They dragged her to her feet and up the steps, one either side of her, hurting her arms.
The roar of the crowd that greeted her was prolonged and horrible; she looked round at them; no one who had seen her, even yesterday, would have recognised her then.
Samson approached and caught hold of her fichu.
“May I not keep that?” she asked. He did not even trouble to refuse, but snatched away the muslin, leaving her throat and bosom bare. She struggled to release her arms, turned and saw the plank, the posts, the basket full of heads. Shriek after shriek left her lips. Such desperate strength possessed her that she almost broke from the two men holding her.
“Have mercy on me–I never hurt anything–I was not properly tried–I am not an aristocrat! Why did he denounce me? I was always good to him! Oh, myGod, myGod, save me from this!”
For an awful moment the two men and the woman struggled together, she being drawn nearer, nearer the plank. The pearls, last remnant of her guilty greatness, fell from her poor torn bodice on to the dirty boards. Samson stooped to pick them up, and the other man, using brutal force, hurled Madame du Barry to her knees.
“Do not hurt me!” she screamed. They seized her again and pitched her forward on to the plank. She strove unavailingly.
Samson pulled the cord. She saw and smelt blood and slime; she felt herself being swung forward. She shrieked once–twice–and the knife descended, sending her common blood gushing over the other noble blood that stained the oak and iron.
“Oh, it would be better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men.”–Danton in Prison.
“Oh, it would be better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men.”–Danton in Prison.
On a morning in May, 1794, misty bright with the pure soft glow of a spring sun, a man sat under a hedge on the high-road to Paris, near Clamars, a village close to Bourg-la-Reine.
He was in ragged clothes, unshaven, gaunt and pallid; his hair hung damp and dusty round his forehead and neck; his face, which was of aquiline type, had a closed look of physical suffering silently endured; his feet were blistered and bleeding, his dirty stockings had fallen down to his ankles though he had endeavoured to fasten them with wisps of grass; he had neither shoes nor waistcoat; he was thin with the dry horrible thinness of starvation. His eyes, large and deep-set, were flecked with red, and his cracked lips stiffly parted over the white glisten of his teeth.
This man was Marie Jean Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, peer of France, famous mathematician, philosopher, man of letters, politician and Girondist, the friend of Liberty, the dreamer of the dream of a respectable Republic and the People ruling gloriously over France, the denouncer of Robespierre and all the excesses of the Revolution, a man famous for his learned book “Esquise sur l’Esprit Humaine” and suchlike, and for the Roman-like tend of his speeches inthe Senate.
Neither birth nor learning nor high-minded endeavour, nor patriotism, nor flinging aside ancient prejudices of birth and joining hands with the people in what he had hoped was an enlightened age, had saved him from this: the ignominy of flight, of hiding, the ignominy of sheer starvation. On the fall of his party and the arrest of his colleagues he had fled, and for two months had been sheltered by friends; but he was too great a man to be forgotten; as the principles he had advocated fell most hopelessly to ruin, as the section he had been associated with became more and more an object of public contempt and hatred, as the bloody tyranny of the Robespierre tribunals grew fiercer and more unrestrained, so did the net begin to close more tightly round the Marquis de Condorcet.
His presence in his friend’s house began to endanger that friend; he was entreated to stay, at whatever cost, but nevertheless rose early one morning and left the house and left Paris; he had come to the humiliation of flight and concealment, not yet to the humiliation of dragging others with him in his piteous downfall.
For two weeks he had lurked round Paris, hiding in thickets and quarries, living on the food he had with him in his pocket and a few crusts begged from a farmhouse and a few scraps purchased by a day’s labour in turning the ground.
These two weeks had served to bring him to the last stage of extremity; the aristocrat, the philosopher, had only two desires–a little food and a little sleep.
Goaded by this intolerable need of food he had left the disused quarry where he had lain hidden for the last two days and stumbled on to the high-road where he sat now, blinking at the sun.
Yesterday he had found an unsuspected treasure, in the shape of two silver pieces, in the inner pocket of his coat, and he resolved to reach the nearest inn and lay this out in food.
What he should do afterwards he was too sick to think; everything had narrowed to that desire for food and rest–the rest that could only come of hunger satisfied; for at present the pangs of starvation would not let him sleep or, for one instant, forget his outraged body.
Yet prudence still whispered in his ear that he meditated a foolish thing; they were looking for him–even the half-witted peasants on the farm where he had worked had suspected him–and at an inn where some one of better intelligence might any moment enter, surely he was not safe.
Then he considered his appearance; certainly the Marquis de Condorcet was well disguised now; his clothes had been at best poor, for he had passed as a servant in his friend’s house, and now there was not one sign or mark of anything save the most abject poverty and want about his person; he thought he could defy recognition.
He watched the sun mounting above the hawthorn trees that were clouded with white blossoms,and there seemed to be two orbs of gold fire changing and mingling and slipping giddily about the heavens.
He staggered to his feet and walked stiffly and slowly down the long dusty road, each step an agony, for his feet were chafed raw in his rough hard boots.
He passed a poor cottage standing in an untidy garden; it was the beginning of the village of Clamars.
The winding street led to the inn; though it was still so early the place was open; a boy was whistling while he rubbed down a horse, his plump aspect had something grotesque in it to the famished man.
A woman came out of the inn and threw a pail of dirty water across the street; the Marquis stupidly noticed the long dark trails of wet across the dust that were trickling slowly to his feet. The boy looked up and saw him as he stood hesitating.
“Good morning, citizen.”
“Good morning, citizen,” answered the Marquis in a voice feeble from weakness and long silence. “Can I get some food here?”
“If you can pay for it, citizen.”
“Yes, I can pay.”
The boy straightened himself and looked at the wild and miserable figure advancing towards him.
“Who are you, citizen?” he asked, and the Marquis saw suspicion creep into his common dull face.
“I am a servant looking for a place; my last was in Paris–I have walked a long way–I mean to get to Bourg-la-Reine to-night.”
“Well, it is not far,” answered the peasant with an instant insolence of the poor towards the ragged.
“I must have breakfast first,” said the Marquis, putting a great restraint on himself to speak gently and humbly; it was natural to him to be brief and cold with his inferiors.
The youth jerked his head towards the open door.
The Marquis entered the low dark passage and stepped into the common parlour in the front, which was roughly furnished but filled with beauty by the chestnut tree that pressed its load of young clear green leaves against the panes of the small low window.
The Marquis sank on to a chair by this window, with his back to the light and rested his elbows on the stained table in front of him.
The woman whom he had seen with the pail entered, wiping her hands on her rough blue apron; she did not appear to notice his desperate appearance; the light was not good and probably she was used enough to wild and haggard figures stopping here for a moment’s respite on some bitter journey.
He asked her briefly for food; she nodded and looked at him, not unkindly. Few indeed could have looked at him unmoved, so obviously had everything lefthim save mere fainting humanity that cried for succour.
“You are hungry?” she said.
He answered her with an effort; repeated his story of a servant out of place.
“What became of your master?” she asked.
“Dead,” he replied, hardly knowing what he said. “The guillotine—”
“Ah, the guillotine–he was, then, an aristocrat?” She put bread, cheese and a bottle of wine on the table, having taken them from a cupboard in the wall.
“Do aristocrats only go to the guillotine?” he replied, while his hand went out to the bread. “No, there are no longer any aristocrats, and now we execute the good republicans, citizeness.”
“Yes,” she answered; “but you spoke as if you had lived with aristocrats, citizen.”
The Marquis shuddered: so she had noticed it, this stupid woman; his speech stamped him, he could not disguise that.
“I was in a good place,” he said.
She left him, and he began eating and drinking, not thinking for the moment of anything but that, the gratification of his necessity.
He ate all the bread and cheese she had brought him before he dare touch the wine; when he did drink it, poor and thin as it was, it restored his blood to nearer its normal beat and heat; his brain began to work more clearly and sanely, his strong intelligence reasserted its sway; he began to form plans, to make resolves.
The woman came in and brought him meatand more bread; he asked her if he could rest there till noon, and she answered that he could stay in the room till then, he would not trouble her, and she was not likely to have more customers before the evening.
Again he was alone; the peace of the dark parlour, the delicious green of the softly-waving leaves outside, the silence and a certain homely perfume from the herbs hanging in bunches from the dark raftered ceiling affected him like a spell.
It was probably foolish to remain here; it would probably be wise to take advantage of his luck and slip away while the inn was quiet, but he could not. The pain of hunger ceased, his great fatigue asserted itself; if they had been galloping red-hot from Paris after him with certain news that he was at this very spot, he must still have done as he did; drop on to the worn chintz settle and sleep.
The gratification of his utter bodily weariness was more exquisite than the gratification of his hunger had been; the humble couch was like down pillows after stones and hedges, and the pursued and hunted man abandoned himself without resistance to the helplessness of sleep.
When he awoke it was about three hours later; he was racked with pain and still exhausted, but he made a violent effort to rouse himself; his mind was quite clear; he knew what he was risking and he would risk it no longer; he forced back the desire to again fall into a stupor of sleep and sat up on the couch.
There was a great noise outside; some one was arriving with loud and angry commands, jingle of harness, clatter of horses’ hoofs.
The Marquis guessed that this noise was what had roused him; he rose softly, went to the window and peeped through the screen of leaves.
A well-dressed man was dismounting and another was ordering about the stable-boy with an air of great importance.
The Marquis dropped into his former seat with his back to the light–had he stayed too long?–was there some possible way of immediate escape?
Only by the common passage through which he had come; and it was too late for that, for he could hear the two men already there calling for wine.
Who were they? Was he caught? Could he play his part through and cheat the accursed of their prey?
He asked himself these questions in swift succession, and every nerve in his being braced itself to avoid the final misery of facing the humiliation of falling into his enemies’ hands after undergoing every other humiliation of flight, concealment and degradation. He could not have put into words the hatred he felt towards the tyrants with whom for a while he had in his blindness joined, forsaking his own order, believing in his folly that he was leaguing with the right, that he was to be one of the prophets of a new era of liberty and light and hope.
Believing, too, that he and they could forget his gentle blood, that they could forgive it and he ignore it; but it had been the strongest of all strong things; now, when everything else was stripped away it remained: his birth, his blood, his traditions, and the great hate between him and the plebeian that had been for a while cloaked and disguised, now sprang actively to life.
He could not repent too bitterly of his mistaken ideals of patriotism and the general good, his unfortunate ambitions of governing his country, of doing some service to his kind that had led him to this pass of despair, that had made him another figure of tragedy to blend in the bloody carnival being daily enacted; and in this moment of anguish he would rather have died as others of his class had died–at once hating the people and by them hated, tyrants perhaps and men who had done nothing with their lives, but to be envied by men like Marie Jean Caritat who had forsaken his order only to come to this.
The two new-comers entered the room; which was now so light by reason of the level rays of the sun piercing the chestnut leaves that but little part of it was in shadow, and the Marquis, even with his back to the light was clear enough in every detail, as he well felt.
He sat upright, with nothing of the pose of the character he was assuming in his bearing, and looked at the new-comers.
He could see at once that they were of a type particularly hateful to him: the small officialof no birth or culture whom chance had thrown to the surface in the turmoil of the revolution, and whom chance might, and probably would, throw to-morrow to the guillotine; but while their power lasted they used it brutally, these men, and enjoyed to deal fiercely with those of the oldrégime.
One wore the tricolour sash round his rusty black cloth coat, and the tricolour in his cockade; he was perhaps president of the Committee of Public Safety in Bourg-la-Reine, or perhaps the Public Prosecutor; it was obvious that he considered himself a great man; in his native town he was probably bowed down to, being no doubt for the moment a potent instrument for death and terror. His companion seemed a kind of secretary or attendant, subservient and truckling to the more important man; both of them had the loose ungraceful air of low breed in a position of authority.
On their entry both glanced instantly at the Marquis; it was no more than a glance from either of them; he drew a broken breath of relief to think that they passed his appearance.
The woman came hurrying in to wait on them; they ordered wine lavishly and began talking noisily together about local politics.
The Marquis foresaw no difficulty in making an easy escape, but he waited, considering what to do.
He dare not go back to Paris, he dare not go on to Bourg-la-Reine; there was nothing butto creep back to the disused quarries and hide there till perhaps the Robespierre tyranny fell; he had hoped at first to find means to fly to England, but without money that had proved impossible.
Still, the idea returned to him now; it would be better to risk all on that than to return to the quarries; he resolved to push on to the coast; there were several people on the way who would help him could he but reach them; the food and rest had put new daring into him; under the very eyes of two of the men who would deliver him to instant and horrible death if they knew him did he plan calmly his future means of escape.
It occurred to him that this might be the last chance of food for some while and he was again hungry.
When the woman re-entered, attending to the wants of the citizens of Bourg-la-Reine, he beckoned to her and asked her in a low tone to prepare him an omelette before he set out on his journey.
Then, fearful that she might deny him, under the impression that he could not pay, he took one of his silver pieces out of his pocket and laid it on the table.
The woman looked at the money and at him.
“You can stay the night, if you wish, for that,” she said.
“No, citizeness,” he answered. “I must get on.”
“Lodging is dearer in Bourg-la-Reine,” she said. “And what is your need to hasten?”
“I was told of a possible place,” he said.
“Likely they will take you!” she glanced at him pityingly.
Looking beyond her he saw that the two men had stopped their conversation and were watching him. The woman moved away and one of the men (he of the tricolour) stopped her.
“The citizen over there is not very prosperous looking,” he remarked. “Who is he?”
“A servant looking for a place, citizen.”
“He speaks,” was the answer, “like an aristocrat.”
“He has lived with them, I believe, citizen.”
“Has he?” The important man glanced at his companion, who struck his knee softly and cried–
“‘Suspect!’–on the face of it! What did he order–an omelette?”
The other stroked his rough chin and spoke to the woman.
“Ask the citizen-servant how many eggs go to his omelette!”
She stared. “Iknow, citizen.”
“Certainly, citizeness, but does he? Ask him.”
Condorcet had not heard this conversation which was spoken very low and in the patois of the neighbourhood; he feared, however, that it might be about him, and was therefore relieved to hear the simple question the woman put to him when she returned to his little table by the window.
“How many eggs will you have to your omelette, citizen?”
“A dozen,” answered the Marquis.
He saw instantly by the expression of the woman’s face that he had said the wrong thing.
“A dozen eggs!” she echoed.
“Is not that the right number, citizeness?”
She retreated from him and went to the other two men with amazement and suspicion in her face.
“He said–a dozen eggs,” she repeated.
The official smiled.
“He is clearly of the people, this citizen, since he has been able to be so lavish with his omelettes!”
He rose and crossed over to where the Marquis sat.
“So you want a dozen eggs for your breakfast, eh?” he said.
Condorcet looked at him and hated him; he was furious with himself for the slip that had brought this attention on himself, but he answered calmly.
“I have seen omelettes made with as many, I thought, citizen.”
The other eyed him closely.
“You are a servant looking for a place?”
“Yes, citizen.”
His questioner stood over him in the attitude, of a judge and thrust his thumbs into his tricolour sash; he was noticing the make and look of this haggard, ragged figure, the shape of his hands, the pose of the head, the steady gaze of the eyes unknown in one born in servitude.
“Where have you come from?”
“Paris.”
“You are very tattered, citizen, to have come such a short way.”
Condorcet moved his arms on the table, and put up the right hand to rest his chin in; this attitude, so unconscious, so easy, so coolly reflective and authoritative betrayed him utterly; the fact that he had not risen when spoken to had in itself been almost sufficient to confirm the official’s suspicion.
“I have been out of a place,” said the Marquis, “some time. I have hopes of another at Bourg-la-Reine.”
The other laughed.
“You are a ‘suspect,’” he said. “And you lie very badly.”
Condorcet’s eyes flashed hell-fire for an instant: thereby he further betrayed himself. “Who do you think I am?” he asked.
“An aristocrat.”
“You flatter me, citizen.” Condorcet’s face was dark and violent; he could not keep his tone humble; he could not forget that this man might have been his servant a few years ago–a creature who would never have presumed to address him; all the lessons of the Revolution had not killed his heritage of aristocratic pride.
“Stand up,” said the man from Bourg-la-Reine.
The Marquis kept his seat.
“I stand up when I rise to leave the inn, citizen,” he answered.
The other man was standing watchfully by the door; the woman had summoned others; they might be seen in the passage, a rough hovering group.
Condorcet knew that he was trapped; his nostrils dilated and his thin lips compressed; he eyed his enemy steadily.
“Now I will go on my way,” he said, and rose–a gaunt, ragged figure against the background of sunny chestnut leaves tapping at the thick glass window-panes. He came round the table and he walked easily despite his bleeding feet and the rough boots that galled them. The heavy person of the official barred his way.
“Will you not wait for your dozen eggs?” he sneered and put out a thick hand to seize the Marquis’ shoulder, but Condorcet moved swiftly aside.
“Your insolence—” he breathed. “You have no right to detain me.”
The people round the door began laughing; Condorcet gave them a bitter look, and in that instant when his eyes were directed his opponent seized him and thrust him backwards against the wall, while he plunged a hand into his torn pocket.
Condorcet shuddered and the blood surged up into his hollow face while the official pulled out a small old book with a discoloured calf cover.
“A foreign language!” he cried, fluttering over the leaves. “I smell treason!”
“Is it treason to read Horace?” asked the Marquis fiercely.
“Do you–a servant–readthis?” was the triumphant counter question. “Eh, do youreadthis, then?”
The people at the door began to crowd into the room; the Marquis took a step forward; therewas no possible supposing that he would escape the malice and fury fronting him; he did not for an instant hope it; instinctively, his right hand went round to his left hip where his sword should have been.
The unmistakable gesture was instantly noticed and excited murmurs went up from the gathered peasants.
“By God, you are an aristocrat!” cried the man from Bourg-la-Reine, seizing him roughly.
“By God I am!” answered Condorcet, and struck him across the face.…
They fell on him with quick and hideous noises; he felt himself seized, struck, shaken, pushed, dragged, insulted; he kept his head high and was silent.
They found a rope and tied his arms behind him, and with the ends of this rope struck him across the shoulders. The important official, nursing a smarting face, was incoherent in the coarse violence of his abuse.
The woman trembled at the edge of the group, stupidly afraid.
“Who is he?” she asked again and again.
They took the question up.
“Who are you?Scélérat!”
“One who has served the Republic,” he replied, white with the pain of his close-bound arms.
They pushed him into the centre of the room while they paused to consider what they should do with their prize, and as he stood there, swaying a little, but upright, the light was full onhis face, which had once been so famous in Paris.
The stern outlines, the dark colouring, the fiery expression were the same; unwashed, unshaven, starved as he was, the little timid man, who had lived in Paris, recognised him.
“Deauville! Deauville!” he shrieked to his master, dancing in his excitement, “it is Condorcet! Condorcet!”
The Marquis made no denial; his silence was confirmation and he meant it to be; he knew that he was face to face with the end and he was for no further subterfuge; he had tasted already of the depths of humiliation, he was enduring the extreme of bitterness; there was nothing further to lose or gain in this world for Marie Jean Nicolas de Caritat.
Presently, while some were arguing about his identity, he said in his rough broken voice, with the clear accent that they hated–
“I am Condorcet. Make an end of it.”
They had no more doubts; his face and his voice had betrayed him more completely even than his twelve eggs and his Latin Horace; they were elated at the capture of a man so long unsuccessfully searched for; they drank together, congratulating each other.
Only the woman serving them noticed the prisoner–noticed the cords cutting his wrists, the drop of pain on his brow, the effort he was making to keep upright on his feet.
In a dim, vague way she was aware of the mental torture he was enduring, compared to which thetorture of cord and bleeding feet was slight; she felt that this was a proud man enduring the extremity of humiliation and that no more awful bitterness could be imagined in this world.
“He suffers,” she said under her breath, “he suffers.”
Presently they started; four men and the two from Bourg-la-Reine, towards which town’s prison they turned.
Condorcet was in the middle; the four with the prisoner went on foot, the others on horseback.
Strange thoughts came to the Marquis de Condorcet as he walked bound between his four rude guards, as he walked painfully, dragging his fatigued body on bleeding feet along the hot dusty high-road that led to his prison.
Thoughts strange because they were so incongruous to his present situation, and because it was curious that in his misery he should be filled with all the old burning pangs of ambition and desire for power and glory.
And yet he could not even die gloriously; no man could have a more ignominious end than he would have, he knew that. He cursed the body that had failed him, that had broken like any peasant’s body, that was dragging him down–demeaning him, bringing all his philosophy to mockery. His mind flew back over the salient points of his life; yet there was no need for him to consider his past years: one word covered them all–that word was failure.
Failure–had any failure ever been more bitter, more complete?
For he had conceived loftily and dared greatly, and his fall was terrible and his end abject.
Intolerable became the heat of the sun, intolerable the dust on his dry lips, on his hot lids; intolerable the chafing of his feet, caked with blood and dirt; intolerable the deep pain of his elbows and the cutting of the rope round his wrists; intolerable the agony of fatigue in his weak body, already worn to the last endurance.…
He concentrated all his mental powers on self-control; the man whose mind had flown out into the widest realms of thought now brought that same mind to bear on the terrible effort of holding himself upright, so that he might not, before those whom he despised, fall face downwards in the dust.
He dare not think how far it was to Bourg-la-Reine; he looked ahead of him and could see nothing–no house, no sign of a town; only the dusty hedges, the dusty road.…
“Let me keep upright,” he muttered to himself, “let me keep upright—”
The sky seemed to be burning–blue it was, but not gentle–he had never understood before that the sky can be both blue and flaming, as bitter and fierce as scarlet.
The grass, too, and the trees, they were not soothing nor peaceful but harsh and glaring.
“How long can I keep upright? How long can I walk?”
He tried to snatch at old mathematical problems, to soothe and calm and distract himself with that; he saw the figures range themselves before him–but they were of fire, gigantic and flaming.
He thought that the trees had caught fire from the unsupportable sky, that the hedgerows were singeing and smoking, that the road was rising up before him in a column of white fire; that all this fiery world was advancing on him; everything was scarlet, and there was a sound in his ears like the beating of many drums.
“He will fall,” said the official on horseback, fanning himself with his hat.
Condorcet heard the words, he saw them written before him in the same acrid scarlet that was colouring the world. He tried to protest, to draw himself erect, for he had heard them laughing; but he felt his strength breaking like brittle dry straws; he fell head first as they had meant him to fall, as he had dreaded to fall, and his mouth filled with dust.
When they saw that he was indeed unconscious and that no blows nor kicks could induce him to rise, they lifted him up and dragged him between them to Bourg-la-Reine. As they entered the town he recovered consciousness enough to know that his martyrdom was complete and that he was the object of all the town idlers’ ridicule as he was drawn along, ragged, bloody, with a distorted face, between two of his peasant guards.
They brought him to the prison, an old building in bad repair; his head hung down on his breast, shaking from side to side. The soldiers and jailers greeted him and his escort with amusement.
“What have we here?”
“A philosopher citizen–an aristocrat citizen. In here, citizen, and consider this same philosophy of yours!”
They thrust him into a cell several feet below the ground; the foul damp of it hung close round walls and roof.
“The citizen is a little weak in the legs–he will have a little business to transact in Paris; supper and a bed for the citizen.”
“Who is he?”
“Condorcet, citizen.”
“Ah, at last–manifestly for the guillotine–without a trial.”
“Without a trial, surely, citizen.”
The heavy door closed on him; the key turned; they went away and drank, and in their drink forgot him.
For a while he lay face downwards on the cold mud floor; the rope had been loosened from his hands; presently he shook them free and sat up.
The cell was half underground and almost entirely dark; the high-placed window was heavily barred across and evidently looked out on some close courtyard, for the light that came from it was pale and uncertain.
Condorcet rose, shuddering strongly; the damp of the place was bitter and insistent, after the heat without the chill was horrible.
He staggered against the door and flung his weight against it.
“You! You!” he whispered. “You think you have me?–No, for I have one friend left.”
He slipped down by the door and lay there, thinking.
Often had he wondered quite how the end might come, and speculated how he would meet it; in these days a man would naturally consider a violent death as possible, especially if he meddled with affairs of government; but he had never considered that he would first be so cruelly broken and humbled.
He regretted that he had fled when Robespierre proscribed him; far better to have died then than like this.… But he closed his mind to the past, over which he wrote that one word–failure.
The hard bright philosophy of Voltaire, scorning mystery, cynical of any future state, was of little comfort now; his own book on the human spirit seemed very shallow in the recollection; these things were for life, not for death. Nothing helped now but courage. Just that one quality that would bring him safely into the unknown, the harbour to which he was now so swiftly bound.
He felt very weak and ill; he shivered continually, yet his blood was burning with fever; he dragged himself into a sitting posture, put his hand inside his miserable shirt and took from a cord round his heart–his one friend. A little package containing a phial–poison, bought in a cold dawn at a little druggist’s in Paris on that day when he had left the city for ever.