Produced by J.C. Byers and L.M. Shaf
THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL
By Baroness Orczy
Contents
I. Paris: 1793
II. A Retrospect
III. Ex-Ambassador Chauvelin
IV. The Richmond Gala
V. Sir Percy and His Lady
VI. For the Poor of Paris
VII. Premonition
VIII. The Invitation
IX. Demoiselle Candeille
X. Lady Blakeney's Rout
XI. The Challenge
XII. Time -- Place -- Conditions
XIII. Reflections
XIV. The Ruling Passion
XV. Farewell
XVI. The Passport
XVII. Boulogne
XVIII. No. 6
XIX. The Strength of the Weak
XX. Triumph
XXI. Suspense
XXII. Not Death
XXIII. The Hostage
XXIV. Colleagues
XXV. The Unexpected
XXVI. The Terms of the Bargain
XXVII. The Decision
XXVIII. The Midnight Watch
XXIX. The National Fete
XXX. The Procession
XXXI. Final Dispositions
XXXII. The Letter
XXXIII. The English Spy
XXXIV. The Angelus
XXXV. Marguerite
Chapter I: Paris: 1793
There was not even a reaction.
On! ever on! in that wild, surging torrent; sowing the wind of anarchy,
of terrorism, of lust of blood and hate, and reaping a hurricane of
destruction and of horror.
On! ever on! France, with Paris and all her children still rushes
blindly, madly on; defies the powerful coalition,--Austria, England,
Spain, Prussia, all joined together to stem the flow of carnage,--defies
the Universe and defies God!
Paris this September 1793!--or shall we call it Vendemiaire, Year I.
of the Republic?--call it what we will! Paris! a city of bloodshed, of
humanity in its lowest, most degraded aspect. France herself a gigantic
self-devouring monster, her fairest cities destroyed, Lyons razed to the
ground, Toulon, Marseilles, masses of blackened ruins, her bravest sons
turned to lustful brutes or to abject cowards seeking safety at the cost
of any humiliation.
That is thy reward, oh mighty, holy Revolution! apotheosis of equality
and fraternity! grand rival of decadent Christianity.
Five weeks now since Marat, the bloodthirsty Friend of the People,
succumbed beneath the sheath-knife of a virgin patriot, a month since
his murderess walked proudly, even enthusiastically, to the guillotine!
There has been no reaction--only a great sigh!... Not of content or
satisfied lust, but a sigh such as the man-eating tiger might heave
after his first taste of long-coveted blood.
A sigh for more!
A king on the scaffold; a queen degraded and abased, awaiting death,
which lingers on the threshold of her infamous prison; eight hundred
scions of ancient houses that have made the history of France; brave
generals, Custine, Blanchelande, Houchard, Beauharnais; worthy patriots,
noble-hearted women, misguided enthusiasts, all by the score and by the
hundred, up the few wooden steps which lead to the guillotine.
An achievement of truth!
And still that sigh for more!
But for the moment,--a few seconds only,--Paris looked round her mighty
self, and thought things over!
The man-eating tiger for the space of a sigh licked his powerful jaws
and pondered!
Something new!--something wonderful!
We have had a new Constitution, a new Justice, new Laws, a new Almanack!
What next?
Why, obviously!--How comes it that great, intellectual, aesthetic Paris
never thought of such a wonderful thing before?
A new religion!
Christianity is old and obsolete, priests are aristocrats, wealthy
oppressors of the People, the Church but another form of wanton tyranny.
Let us by all means have a new religion.
Already something has been done to destroy the old! To destroy! always
to destroy! Churches have been ransacked, altars spoliated, tombs
desecrated, priests and curates murdered; but that is not enough.
There must be a new religion; and to attain that there must be a new
God.
“Man is a born idol-worshipper.”
Very well then! let the People have a new religion and a new God.
Stay!--Not a God this time!--for God means Majesty, Power, Kingship!
everything in fact which the mighty hand of the people of France has
struggled and fought to destroy.
Not a God, but a goddess.
A goddess! an idol! a toy! since even the man-eating tiger must play
sometimes.
Paris wanted a new religion, and a new toy, and grave men, ardent
patriots, mad enthusiasts, sat in the Assembly of the Convention and
seriously discussed the means of providing her with both these things
which she asked for.
Chaumette, I think it was, who first solved the difficulty:--Procureur
Chaumette, head of the Paris Municipality, he who had ordered that
the cart which bore the dethroned queen to the squalid prison of the
Conciergerie should be led slowly past her own late palace of the
Tuileries, and should be stopped there just long enough for her to see
and to feel in one grand mental vision all that she had been when she
dwelt there, and all that she now was by the will of the People.
Chaumette, as you see, was refined, artistic;--the torture of the fallen
Queen's heart meant more to him than a blow of the guillotine on her
neck.
No wonder, therefore, that it was Procureur Chaumette who first
discovered exactly what type of new religion Paris wanted just now.
“Let us have a Goddess of Reason,” he said, “typified if you will by
the most beautiful woman in Paris. Let us have a feast of the Goddess of
Reason, let there be a pyre of all the gew-gaws which for centuries
have been flaunted by overbearing priests before the eyes of starving
multitudes, let the People rejoice and dance around that funeral pile,
and above it all let the new Goddess tower smiling and triumphant. The
Goddess of Reason! the only deity our new and regenerate France shall
acknowledge throughout the centuries which are to come!”
Loud applause greeted the impassioned speech.
“A new goddess, by all means!” shouted the grave gentlemen of the
National Assembly, “the Goddess of Reason!”
They were all eager that the People should have this toy; something to
play with and to tease, round which to dance the mad Carmagnole and sing
the ever-recurring “Ca ira.”
Something to distract the minds of the populace from the consequences of
its own deeds, and the helplessness of its legislators.
Procureur Chaumette enlarged upon his original idea; like a true artist
who sees the broad effect of a picture at a glance and then fills in the
minute details, he was already busy elaborating his scheme.
“The goddess must be beautiful... not too young... Reason can only go
hand in hand with the riper age of second youth... she must be decked
out in classical draperies, severe yet suggestive... she must be rouged
and painted... for she is a mere idol... easily to be appeased with
incense, music and laughter.”
He was getting deeply interested in his subject, seeking minutiae of
detail, with which to render his theme more and more attractive.
But patience was never the characteristic of the Revolutionary
Government of France. The National Assembly soon tired of Chaumette's
dithyrambic utterances. Up aloft on the Mountain, Danton was yawning
like a gigantic leopard.
Soon Henriot was on his feet. He had a far finer scheme than that of
the Procureur to place before his colleagues. A grand National fete,
semi-religious in character, but of the new religion which destroyed and
desecrated and never knelt in worship.
Citizen Chaumette's Goddess of Reason by all means--Henriot conceded
that the idea was a good one--but the goddess merely as a figure-head:
around her a procession of unfrocked and apostate priests, typifying
the destruction of ancient hierarchy, mules carrying loads of sacred
vessels, the spoils of ten thousand churches of France, and ballet girls
in bacchanalian robes, dancing the Carmagnole around the new deity.
Public Prosecutor Foucquier Tinville thought all these schemes very
tame. Why should the People of France be led to think that the era of
a new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and of
fireworks? Let every man, woman, and child know that this was an era of
blood and again of blood.
“Oh!” he exclaimed in passionate accents, “would that all the traitors
in France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow of
the guillotine!”
He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of the
guillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded on
one grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place de
la Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after the
guillotine had accomplished this record work.
But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say. Collot lately hailed from
the South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled throughout the
whole of this horrible decade. He would not be outdone by Tinville's
bloodthirsty schemes.
He was the inventor of the “Noyades,” which had been so successful at
Lyons and Marseilles. “Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one of
these exhilarating spectacles?” he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.
Then he explained his invention, of which he was inordinately proud.
Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tied
securely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown upon a
barge in the middle of the river: the barge with a hole in her bottom!
not too large! only sufficient to cause her to sink slowly, very slowly,
in sight of the crowd of delighted spectators.
The cries of the women and children, and even of the men, as they felt
the waters rising and gradually enveloping them, as they felt themselves
powerless even for a fruitless struggle, had proved most exhilarating,
so Citizen Collot declared, to the hearts of the true patriots of Lyons.
Thus the discussion continued.
This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoing
others in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving his
own head by threatening that of his neighbour.
The great duel between the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties,
the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-blooded
Robespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-devouring
monsters had dug their claws into one another, but the issue of the
combat was still at stake.
Neither of these two giants had taken part in these deliberations anent
the new religion and the new goddess. Danton gave signs now and then
of the greatest impatience, and muttered something about a new form of
tyranny, a new kind of oppression.
On the left, Robespierre in immaculate sea-green coat and carefully
gauffered linen was quietly polishing the nails of his right hand
against the palm of his left.
But nothing escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious egoism, his
unbounded ambition was even now calculating what advantages to himself
might accrue from this idea of the new religion and of the National
fete, what personal aggrandisement he could derive therefrom.
The matter outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and
calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to place
him--Robespierre--on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle.
Surrounded by those who hated him, those who envied and those who feared
him, he ruled over them all by the strength of his own cold-blooded
savagery, by the resistless power of his merciless cruelty.
He cared about nobody but himself, about nothing but his own exaltation:
every action of his career, since he gave up his small practice in a
quiet provincial town in order to throw himself into the wild vortex
of revolutionary politics, every word he ever uttered had but one
aim--Himself.
He saw his colleagues and comrades of the old Jacobin Clubs ruthlessly
destroyed around him: friends he had none, and all left him indifferent;
and now he had hundreds of enemies in every assembly and club in Paris,
and these too one by one were being swept up in that wild whirlpool
which they themselves had created.
Impassive, serene, always ready with a calm answer, when passion
raged most hotly around him, Robespierre, the most ambitious, most
self-seeking demagogue of his time, had acquired the reputation of being
incorruptible and selfless, an enthusiastic servant of the Republic.
The sea-green Incorruptible!
And thus whilst others talked and argued, waxed hot over schemes for
processions and pageantry, or loudly denounced the whole matter as the
work of a traitor, he, of the sea-green coat, sat quietly polishing his
nails.
But he had already weighed all these discussions in the balance of his
mind, placed them in the crucible of his ambition, and turned them into
something that would benefit him and strengthen his position.
Aye! the feast should be brilliant enough! gay or horrible, mad or
fearful, but through it all the people of France must be made to feel
that there was a guiding hand which ruled the destinies of all, a head
which framed the new laws, which consolidated the new religion and
established its new goddess: the Goddess of Reason.
Robespierre, her prophet!