RETRIBUTION ACCOMPLISHED
When Cyrène was pushed out of the outer portal of the prison she was met
by her good friend the patriot Hugues la Tour.
"Do not despair," said he. "My influence is great; he shall yet be
saved."
"Oh, for the love of God, try, citizen," she sobbed. Supporting her he
signed for a _fiacre_ and drove her to his room not far away, where he
left her with the housekeeper, and bidding her trust in him, flew back
and obtained an interview with Lecour in his cell. He explained the
object of his visit and the history of his connection with Cyrène.
"And now I am come to return her life for life," he ended.
"But mine is not worth it," Germain answered soberly. "Save hers. How
can you risk yourself for me? I was once the cause of your
condemnation."
"What matters that. It was but what was believed right at the time. In
our glorious Revolution we do not think of revenge; we only seek to
strike at the enemies of human rights. You are not really an aristocrat.
Plead that before the judges: your liberty will not be hard for me to
obtain."
"Noble-hearted man----"
"Take care--the word 'noble' is forbidden."
"You are generous, citizen. My conscience tells me it would be base to
do as you urge. After plucking life's blossoms as an aristocrat I must
grasp the thorns."
Nothing could save him from his determination. He had lived as an
aristocrat--it was incumbent on him, he said, not to shirk death as one.
At last la Tour left him and sought for the Admiral. He could not find
the latter until about two o'clock, and then at the prison. The
concierge said he was in the courtyard and la Tour found him engaged in
a singular business.
The women's courtyard was separated by an iron railing some fifteen feet
long from the men's. Here the imprisoned ladies communicated with their
male friends as gaily as if each were not foredoomed. The Faubourg St.
Germain was transferred to the Conciergerie. The toilets were the
freshest and the manners most well-bred in Paris. The guillotine was the
subject of facetious remarks up to the very hour of parting for the
mockery of the trial below, and at evening vows of love were breathed
between the bars. La Tour found a crowd on both sides enjoying the
cramped promenade. Amid this crowd was a "sheep"--one of those vile
spies who acted the part of pretending to be a fellow-prisoner of the
rest in order that he might entrap them into unguarded expressions and
denounce them.
The _Sans-culottes_ commissioners were selecting their daily list of
victims at random. In doing so they seized the "sheep." The Admiral was
present and the "sheep" appealed to him, protesting his occupation. The
Admiral only laughed at him.
"Correct," said he to the guard, chuckling, and the guard needed no
more. They began to drag the "sheep" away.
The "sheep" was Jude.
"I am yours--you promised me my life," he desperately screamed back. The
Admiral smiled contemptuously; his eyes were very bright and hard.
"I promised that Répentigny should die first; you afterwards; I grant
you the privilege of going second." The _Sans-culottes_, their noisy
laughs resounding through the corridor and echoed by the baying of the
mastiffs, dragged the spy away.
La Tour could not move the Admiral to any leniency for Germain. The
bandit followed each of his prayers by a sinister silence. At length la
Tour was compelled by lack of time to give him up and speed to the
revolutionary tribunal itself, in session underneath. He was just in
time to make his appeal, for Lecour was already brought before the jury
and the five judges.
The strenuous efforts of Hugues were nullified by the persistent refusal
of the Canadian to take advantage of the device proposed to him, by his
would-be preserver--of declaring himself a non-aristocrat. La Tour
vehemently urged him at least to cry--"_Vive la Republique!_" At that
Lecour seemed to conceive an idea, and stepping forward cried instead in
a voice of decision--
"Long live the King!"
His sentence was signed immediately.
Sanson's death-carts rolled into the courtyard. The hour for the daily
public show had arrived. The rest of the prisoners on trial were
peremptorily shoved through the mill of condemnation and all were
hustled up to the toilette of the executioner. Hands tied, hair cut,
feet bared, half a dozen were pushed up into each cart, seated three on
a side, and the carts set out. Seven in the line, the roughest, rudest
vehicles in the town, they jerked over the uneven cobbles, rumbled
across the Pont-Neuf, and crept along the Rue de la Monnaie and then
along the Rue Honoré, regardless, both they, their carters, their
executioner's men, and their Dragoon escorts, of the agony they
freighted. The streets themselves wore unfeeling faces. The merchants
had closed their shutters and across the façades of many houses were
large inscriptions such as, "THE REPUBLIC ONE AND INDIVISIBLE,"
"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, _or Death_." And the sun poured down its
untempered rays on the condemned. But more pitiless than carts or
streets or sun were the coarse Jacobins who ran alongside.
With what fine wit they shouted--
"Long live the razor of the Republic!"
A newsvendor began to sing, and was joined in chorus--
"Doctor Guillotin,
That great _médécin_
Love of human kind
Preoccupies his mind."
As to the company of the lost in the carts, they consisted of a strange
variety. In the first, the principal persons were a majestic woman and
her two daughters, sitting erect, with hands tied, costumed freshly and
invested still with the old carefulness of manner; but the eyes of the
youngest were staring with horror. There was a large dog in the same
cart, condemned for carrying despatches. In the next a National
Assembly-man, betrayed by Robespierre, tore his hair and raved on his
fate. Opposite him two poor sewing-women, falsely accused by a
neighbour, sat helplessly, their eyes shut, their lips incessantly
repeating prayers; by their side, a boy of eight, with bright, fair
features, sobbing, his little hands tied, as the executioner's man
showed the crowd with a laugh. His crime was that his father had been a
Count. Third came the cart containing Germain, to whom all eyes were
directed. On the seat opposite him was Jude, frantically entreating the
saints, the driver, the guards, and the crowd to take pity on his soul.
"Buy the bulletin of the revolutionary tribunal; judgements of to-day!
The horrible aristocrat Répentigny brought to justice! Here he is! here
is the one who defied the jury!"
"Bodyguard of Capet!"
"Here is the one who killed Bec and Caron!" shrilled Wife Gougeon.
"Long live the Galley-on-Land!"
These cries gradually roused Lecour, and for the first time, putting it
all together and recognising faces, he realised the truth of the
Admiral's boast that he had been pursued all these years by the crew
about him--the organisation of the cave of Fontainebleau. The long-lit
hatred of so many eyes stabbed his heart to the quick. Yet of the inward
Passion of his journey there was no outward appearance. He sat quiet of
visage, clinging to the one underlying thought that he had been able to
free Cyrène. Alas! how long even yet could it be before she would be
riding the same ride?
Suddenly Abbé Jude in front of him lost his frantic gestures and sobbed
violently. Germain put aside his own concerns, and bending over
whispered gently, "Courage, my brother, for a little."
"Admit even now that you are not an aristocrat," cried Hughes from
beside the cart, "and I will move heaven and earth to reprieve you."
But Germain went steadily forward.
The Place de la Révolution, now completely transformed into the Place de
la Concorde, that ornament of Paris, was then unpaved and unfinished. In
the middle stood a plaster statue of Liberty and near it the gaunt
machine of fear--a plank platform reached by a narrow stair having a
single handrail, and, pointing out of it towards the sky a pair of tall
beams between which, on touching a spring, the knife fell on the neck of
the condemned.
From early morning Cyrène had been waiting, racked with fear, at the
house of la Tour on one of the small streets not far from the Place. At
the sound of the shouts which showed that an execution had begun, she
flew there and by despairing force crushed her way through thousands of
spectators, towards the guillotine, on whose platform figures could
already be seen appearing and falling one by one. She moaned and gasped
at each fresh obstacle to her frantic efforts. Her lips were white, her
eyes staring.
The patriotesses, who sat knitting on the stand erected near the machine
for their daily delectation, agreed that she was an excellent diversion.
All at once her difficulty in pushing forward ceased and the brutes
around her made way.
"Give her a good place," she heard one cry, and many hands impelled her
to the foot of the guillotine. Bloated faces, wicked jests, fists
grasping pipes and bottles, a tumult of the coarse and passionate,
swayed, about her, organised under one being, the Admiral, jeering in
his low power. Never had his head, his face, shown more completely their
resemblance to a skull.
As he stretched up his arm with a gesture of ferocious, gleeful malice,
the wretches around the scaffold, as one man, broke into intoxicated
laughter, joined hands and swayed in and out in the popular dance--
"Hurrah for the sound
Of the cannon."
Meanwhile two of his henchmen held Cyrène before him.
"Look!" he cried to her. "See!" and pointed up to the guillotine. Her
eyes involuntarily followed.
She saw the flash of the descending blade. Wild and speechless, she hung
petrified on the arms of the two men holding her. But now she was
oblivious of everything except that another head, another form, far
above all else to her, was on the platform. His face was pallid, his
bearing sweet, solemn, and brave.
"Death to the aristocrat!" shouted the excited mob. His lips moved with
a brief appearance of words. Had she been closer she would have beard
him say quietly: "It is just."
The executioner Sanson turned from the last victim and seized him. At
the very instant he felt the grasp he caught sight of the face of his
beloved, held there in the grasp of the two Jacobins. This was the
crowning agony. The immensity of his retribution swept over him in an
overwhelming flood.
"Oh God, does Justice require this too?" he cried.
Sanson's sinewy assistants thrust him against an upright plank. In the
last remnants of her congested, distorted vision, Cyrène saw the bright
knife fall like a lightning vengeance.
At night in the Cemetery of the Madeleine near by la Tour, searching
anxiously with a lantern, found her lying across the common trench into
which the bodies and heads of the executed were indiscriminately thrown
and hastily covered. There, her arms stretched across as if to embrace
as much of it as she could, her wonderful golden majesty of hair strewn
upon them, her white complexion still dazzling in its purity, her blue
eyes half closed, lay the _fiancée_ of the false Répentigny. Her soul
had flown to be blent with that of him who had suffered his punishment,
in the bosom of God, the place of social justice, where all ambition
and all forgiveness melt satisfied and surpassed in Love Divine.
* * * * *
A wave of the Revolution swept out to India. In Mahé, under the eyes of
the new Golden Dog, Philibert killed the Marquis de Répentigny.
THE END.
UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
End of Project Gutenberg's The False Chevalier, by William Douw Lighthall