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 the Queen 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, she could 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 of death.
“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.
She _was_ going 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 to _drag_ her 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, my _God_, my _God_, 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.
THE ARISTOCRAT
“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 in _the 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.