Justice.
The day had been an unusually busy one.
Five and thirty prisoners, arraigned before the bar of the Committee of
Public Safety, had been tried in the last eight hours--an average of
rather more than four to the hour; twelve minutes and a half in which to
send a human creature, full of life and health, to solve the great
enigma which lies hidden beyond the waters of the Styx.
And Citizen-Deputy Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, had
surpassed himself. He seemed indefatigable.
Each of these five and thirty prisoners had been arraigned for treason
against the Republic, for conspiracy with her enemies, and all had to
have irrefutable proofs of their guilt brought before the Committee of
Public Safety. Sometimes a few letters, written to friends abroad, and
seized at the frontier; a word of condemnation of the measures of the
extremists; and expression of horror at the massacres on the Place de la
Révolution, where the guillotine creaked incessantly--these were
irrefutable proofs; or else perhaps a couple of pistols, or an old
family sword seized in the house of a peaceful citizen, would be brought
against a prisoner, as an irrefutable proof of his warlike dispositions
against the Republic.
Oh! it was not difficult!
Out of five and thirty indictments, Foucquier-Tinville had obtained
thirty convictions.
No wonder his friends declared that he had surpassed himself. It had
indeed been a glorious day, and the glow of satisfaction as much as the
heat, caused the Public Prosecutors to mop his high, bony cranium before
he had adjourned for the much-needed respite for refreshment.
The day's work was not yet done.
The "politicals" had been disposed of, and there had been such an
accumulation of them recently that it was difficult to keep pace with
the arrests.
And in the meanwhile the criminal record of the great city had not
diminished. Because men butchered one another in the name of Equality,
there were none the fewer among the Fraternity of thieves and petty
pilferers, of ordinary cut-throats and public wantons.
And these too had to be dealt with by law. The guillotine was impartial,
and fell with equal velocity on the neck of the proud duke and the
gutter-born _fille de joie,_ on a descendant of the Bourbons and the
wastrel born in a brothel.
The ministerial decrees favoured the proletariat. A crime against the
Republic was indefensible, but one against the individual was dealt
with, with all the paraphernalia of an elaborate administration of
justice. There were citizen judges and citizen advocates, and the
rabble, who crowded in to listen to the trials, acted as honorary jury.
It was all thoroughly well done. The citizen criminals were given every
chance.
The afternoon of this hot August day, one of the last of glorious
Fructidor, had begun to wane, and the shades of evening to slowly creep
into the long, bare room where this travesty of justice was being
administered.
The Citizen-President sat at the extreme end of the room, on a rough
wooden bench, with a desk in front of him littered with papers.
Just above him, on the bare, whitewashed wall, the words: "_La
République: une et indivisible,_" and below them the device: "_Liberté,
Egalité, Fraternité!_"
To the right and left of the Citizen-President, four clerks were busy
making entries in that ponderous ledger, that amazing record of the
foulest crimes the world has ever known, the "_Bulletin du Tribunal
Révolutionnaire._"
At present no one is speaking, and the grating of the clerks' quill pens
against the paper is the only sound which disturbs the silence of the
hall.
In front of the President, on a bench lower than his, sits Citizen
Foucquier-Tinville, rested and refreshed, ready to take up his
occupation, for as many hours as his country demands it of him.
On every desk a tallow candle, smoking and spluttering, throws a weird
light, and more weird shadows, on the faces of clerks and President, on
blank walls and ominous devices.
In the centre of the room a platform surrounded by an iron railing is
ready for the accused. Just in front of it, from the tall, raftered
ceiling above, there hangs a small brass lamp, with a green _abat-jour._
Each side of the long, whitewashed walls there are three rows of
benches, beautiful old carved oak pews, snatched from Notre Dame and
from the Churches of St Eustache and St Germain l'Auxerrois. Instead of
the pious worshippers of mediaeval times, they now accommodate the
lookers-on of the grim spectacle of unfortunates, in their brief halt
before the scaffold.
The front row of these benches is reserved for those citizen-deputies
who desire to be present at the debates of the Tribunal Révolutionnaire.
It is their privilege, almost their duty, as representatives of the
people, to see that the sittings are properly conducted.
These benches are already well filled. At one end, on the left, Citizen
Merlin, Minister of Justice, sits; next to him Citizen-Minister Lebrun;
also Citizen Robespierre, still in the height of his ascendancy, and
watching the proceedings with those pale, watery eyes of his and that
curious, disdainful smile, which have earned for him the nickname of
"the sea-green incorruptible."
Other well-known faces are there also, dimly outlined in the
fast-gathering gloom. But everyone notes Citizen-Deputy Déroulède, the
idol of the people, as he sits on the extreme end of a bench on the
right, with arms tightly folded across his chest, the light from the
hanging lamp falling straight on his dark head and proud, straight
brows, with the large, restless, eager eyes.
Anon the Citizen-President rings a hand-bell, and there is a discordant
noise of hoarse laughter and loud curses, some pushing, jolting, and
swearing, as the general public is admitted into the hall.
Heaven save us! What a rabble! Has humanity really such a scum?
Women with a single ragged kirtle and shift, through the interstices of
which the naked, grime-covered flesh shows shamelessly: with bare legs,
and feet thrust into heavy sabots, hair dishevelled, and evil,
spirit-sodden faces: women without a semblance of womanhood, with
shrivelled, barren breasts, and dry, parched lips, that have never known
how to kiss. Women without emotion save that of hate, without desire,
save for the satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and lust for revenge
against their sisters less wretched, less unsexed than themselves. They
crowd in, jostling one another, swarming into the front rows of the
benches, where they can get a better view of the miserable victims about
to be pilloried before them.
And the men without a semblance of manhood. Bent under the heavy care of
their own degradation, dead to pity, to love, to chivalry; dead to all
save an inordinate longing for the sight of blood.
And God help them all! for there were the children too. Children--save
the mark!--with pallid, precocious little faces, pinched with the
ravages of starvation, gazing with dim, filmy eyes on this world of
rapacity and hideousness. Children who have seen death!
Oh, the horror of it! Not beautiful, peaceful death, a slumber or a
dream, a loved parent or fond sister or brother lying all in white
amidst a wealth of flowers, but death in its most awesome aspect,
violent, lurid, horrible.
And now they stare around them with eager, greedy eyes, awaiting the
amusement of the spectacle; gazing at the President, with his tall
Phrygian cap; at the clerks wielding their indefatigable quill pens,
writing, writing, writing; at the flickering lights, throwing clouds of
sooty smoke, up to the dark ceiling above.
Then suddenly the eyes of one little mite--a poor, tiny midget not yet
in her teens--alight on Paul Déroulède's face, on the opposite side of
the rooms.
"_Tiens!_ Papa Déroulède!" she says, pointing an attenuated little
finger across at him, and turning eagerly to those around her, her eyes
dilating in wishful recollection of a happy afternoon spent in Papa
Déroulède's house, with fine white bread to eat in plenty, and great
jars of foaming milk.
He rouses himself from his apathy, and his great earnest eyes lose their
look of agonised misery, as he responds to the greeting of the little
one.
For one moment--oh! a mere fraction of a second--the squalid faces, the
miserable, starved expressions of the crowd, soften at sight of him.
There is a faint murmur among the women, which perhaps God's recording
angel registered as a blessing. Who knows?
Foucquier-Tinville suppresses a sneer, and the Citizen-President
impatiently rings his hand-bell again.
"Bring forth the accused!" he commands in stentorian tones.
There is a movement of satisfaction among the crowd, and the angel of
God is forced to hide his face again.