“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice, bear, for
your consolation, its memory to the scaffold.”
With a stiff smile on his lips, and those words of the President of
the reconstituted Court in his ears, Antoine Quentin Fouquier de
Tinville, late Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal, turned
to follow his guard.
This was at seven o’clock of a May evening, and twelve or fourteen
hours remained to him in which to collect his thoughts and settle his
affairs. At ten on the following morning the tumbrils would arrive at
the archway to the Cour du Mai, and he and his fifteen condemned
jurymen would start on their long road of agony to the Place de la
Révolution, whither, or elsewhere, on a like errand, he himself had
already despatched so many thousands.
Those words of the President somehow haunted him.
So many thousands--dismissed to their deaths, without remorse or pity,
from that same _salle de la liberté_ in which he had just stood his
own trial! How familiar it had all seemed, how matter-of-course, how
inevitable!--the relentless hands of the clock, creeping on to the
premeditated doom-stroke; the hungry, bestial faces lolling at the
barriers; the voices of the street entering by the open windows, and
seeming to comment derisively on the drawling evidence, selected to
convict. He had known the procedure so well, had been so instrumental
in creating it, that any defence had well seemed a mockery of the
methods of the Palais de Justice.
“I have been a busy man,” he had said. “I forget things. Are we to be
held accountable for every parasite we destroy in crushing out the
life of a monster?”
That had appeared a reasonable plea. What did not seem reasonable was
the base sums he had personally amassed out of the destruction of the
parasites, the bribes he had accepted, his subornation of witnesses,
his deafness to the just pleas of unprofitable virtue, his neglect of
the principles of brotherhood. He had held one of the first offices of
the fraternal State, and had made of it a wholly self-seeking vehicle.
He had seen his _chance_ in the mad battle of a people for liberty,
and had used it to rob the dead. There was, in truth, no more
despicable joint in that “tail of Robespierre” which Sanson was busily
engaged just now in docking than this same Antoine Quentin. And yet he
believed himself aggrieved.
That night he wrote to his second wife, from his cell in the
Conciergerie, to which he had been returned, the following words:
“I shall die, heart and hands pure, for having served my country with
too much zeal and activity, and for having conformed to the wishes of
the Government.”
It bettered Wolsey’s cry in the singleness of its reproach.
The problem of all villainy is that it regards itself with an
obliquity of vision for which it seems hard to hold it accountable.
Given a lack of the moral sense, and how is a man to make an honest
living? Tinville--or de Tinville, mark you--became an attorney because
he was poor, and then a rascal because he was an attorney. There are
always many thousands living in an odour of respectability whom
fortune alone saves from a like revelation of themselves. But that is
not to say that, in the general purification of society, the lethal
chamber is not the best answer to the problem.
This man was by nature a callous, coarse-grained ruffian,
constitutionally insensible to the pleas of humanity, and with the
self-protective instinct prominently developed in him as in brutes.
You could not regard his sallow, grim-jawed face-structure, his
staring, over-bushed black eyes, his thin-lipped mouth, perpetually
mobile in sneers and spitting scorns and cynicisms, and affect to read
in them any under-suggestion of charity or benevolence. Numbers, poor
obsequious wretches, had essayed the monstrous pretence, and had
pitiably retracted their heresy under the axe. He was forty-seven
years of age; he had lived every day of his later manhood in secret
scorn and abuse of the principles he had hired himself to advocate;
and only where his personal interests were not affected had it ever
been possible to credit him with a deed of grace, or, at the best, of
passive indifference.
“_If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice!_”
He had done kind things in his time, two or three; but had they ever
included “one act of self-sacrifice”? Had he not conceded them,
rather, for the very contrary reason? He tried to think it out. The
question worried him oddly and persistently; it seemed to have
absorbed every other; he groped perpetually for an answer to it
through the whirling chaos of his mind. There had been the wife and
daughters of the Marquis de Miranion, whom he had shielded in their
peril because once, when he had been a young man contemplating Orders,
they had shown him kindness. He suddenly remembered the case, and
remembered too that his condescension had occurred at a time when the
despotic nature of his office had held him virtually immune from
criticism or misrepresentation. Again, there had been the young
virgins of Verdun, condemned and executed for offering sweetmeats to
the King of Prussia. He had pitied them; but pity was inexpensive,
and, at the moment, not unpopular. There had been--what else had there
been? He flogged his brains for a third instance, and, not being
successful, had to fall back upon the minor amenities. Little
convivial generosities (for he had been a _camarade_, a
_joyeux-vivant_, in his rough way), little family indulgences, and
sensual concessions--he had these to set against the habitual inhuman
greed which had made him the most squalid, soulless Harpagon of his
tribe. Insolent to weakness, truckling to power, his interest in the
awful part he had played had never risen above self-interest. The very
list of the great names he had extinguished represented nothing to his
ignoble mind but so many opportunities seized by him to acquire
personal gain or personal safety. Vergniaud the ineffable, Corday the
magnificent, Lavoisier the gentle, Hébert the dastard, Danton the
tremendous--these, to take but a handful, he had despatched to their
graves with a like indifference to the principles which had brought
them subject to his chastisement. There were no principles in his
creed but self-gain and self-preservation. From the poor Austrian
“plucked hen” at one limit of the tale to Robespierre at the other, he
had been always as ready to cut short a saint as a rogue in the
vindication of that creed. He simply could not understand any other;
and yet the words of the President were worrying him horribly.
He had answered them, at the time, after his nature--that is to say,
with servility while a thread of hope remained, and afterwards with
loud scorn and venomous defiance. Brazen by constitution, he was not
to reveal himself soft metal at the last. Trapped and at bay, he
snarled like a tiger, confessing his yellow fangs at their longest.
Hope might exist for other men; but he knew too well it was ended. He
himself had stabbed it to death with a thousand wounds.
And yet he was racked with a sense of grievance.
And yet those words of the President tormented him.
He spoke, and wrote, and raged--throughout the brief interval of life
which remained to him he was seldom still. But always the one sentence
floated in letters of dim fire in the background of his mind. He had a
mad feeling that if only once he could recall the necessary instance,
he would be equipped with the means to defy his enemies--to defy
heaven and hell and earth. That was a strange obsession for a sceptic
and atheist, but it clung to him. The words, and the rebuke that they
implied, were for ever in his brain, crossing its dark wastes like a
shaft of light peopled with tiny travelling motes, which bore some
relation, only in an insignificant form, to the tremendous business of
the day, and yet seemed to have survived that business as its only
realities. Thus through the texture of the ray came and went little
absurd memories of a cut that juryman Vilate, a fellow-prisoner, had
made upon his chin in shaving, of an early queen-wasp that had come
and droned about the presidential desk during the droning indictment,
of the face of an old shrewd, wintry hag which had peered out, white
and momentary, from among the crowd of spectators, and had been as
swiftly absorbed back into it.
The face! His wandering mind brought up on the recollection of it with
an instant shock. The hate, the tumult, all other foam-white faces of
the court, seemed in one moment to drop and seethe away from it like a
spent wave, and to leave it flung up alone, stark, motionless,
astounding.
* * * * *
At ten came the tumbrils, together with the prescriptive guard of
sixty gendarmes to escort them to the scaffold. The ex-Public
Prosecutor mounted to his place, dogged, baleful, heroic, according to
his lights. He could not help bullying even his fellow-sufferers; but
from the outset there was a strange, searching gleam in his eyes,
which never left them until they were closed for ever.
From the Quai de l’Horloge came the first roar of the mob, as rabid to
flesh its teeth in the accuser as it had ever been in the accused.
Already, as the Pont Neuf was reached, a running, howling _valetaille_
of blackguards and prostitutes was travelling with the procession.
Lumbering onwards, between ranks of many-windowed houses alive with
screaming faces and waving hands, the carts traversed the rues la
Monoie and du Roule, and turned into the long stretch of the rue St.
Honoré, which ended only at the bend into the great square of the
guillotine.
They cursed him all the way; he cursed them back. The habit of his
lips spat venom, while his brain ignored and his vision overlooked
them.
“Where are thy batches now, Antoine?” they screamed.
“Ravening curs!” he thundered; “is thy bread cheaper lacking them?”
All the time his eyes were going with the running crowd, searching it,
beating it like covert, hunting for something on which they hungered
to fasten. And suddenly they found it--_the figure of a little
withered old woman, bearing a gross green umbrella in her hand_.
She was there in a moment, moving in pace with the carts, a dead twig
borne on the living stream, now afloat, now under, but always
reappearing--bobbing out grotesque and vital, and dancing on her way.
She was of the poorest class, bent, lean, tattered, and her face was
quite hidden behind the wings of a frowsy cap. No one seemed to
observe her; only the eyes of the condemned gloated on her movements,
followed them, watched her every step with an intense greed that never
wavered. For she it was who stood to him, at last, for that single act
of self-sacrifice with the instance of which he was to refute his
slanderers and defy the grave.
It had come upon him, all at once, with the memory of that face,
projected, livid and instant, from the mist of faces that had walled
him in. He had recalled how, on a certain wet and dismal evening
months ago, he had been crossing the Pont St. Michel on his way home
after an exhausting day, when the gleam of a gold coin lying in the
kennel had arrested his attention. Avaricious in the most peddling
sense, he had been stooping eagerly to grasp his find, when the
interposition of a second body had halted him unexpectedly on his way.
“Bon Dieu, little citizen, let the old rag-sorter be happy for once!”
He had heard the febrile plea; had checked himself and had looked. It
was an old, old woman, grotesque, battered, drenched with rain. In her
trembling claw, nevertheless, she had borne a shapeless green
umbrella, an article sufficiently preposterous in that context of
poverty and sans-culottism. No doubt the dislocation of the times
accounted for her possession of it. It had burst open as she grabbed
at the coin, and out had rolled a sodden red cabbage, fished from some
mixen. It had borne an uncanny resemblance to a severed head, and had
made him start for the moment.
“Let the old rag-sorter be happy for once.”
And, with a laugh, he had let her clutch the gold, restore the cabbage
to its receptacle, and hobble off breathing benedictions on his head.
God knew why he had let her--God would know. And yet God was a cipher
in the scheme of things. Only, from the moment when the President had
uttered those words, he had been looking--he knew it now--for the old
rag-sorter to refute them. She could testify, if she would, that his
life had not been entirely devoid of disinterested self-sacrifice. He
had once, for another’s sake, refused a ten-franc piece.
How had she risen, and whence followed? There had been something
unearthly in the apparition; there was something unearthly in his
present possession by it. Yet, from the moment of his mental
identification of the face, he had expected to renew the vision of it,
to take it up somewhere between the prison and the scaffold, and he
would have been perplexed only to find his expectation at fault. His
witnesses were not wont to fail him, and this, the most personal of
any, he could not afford to spare. He dwelt upon the flitting figure
with a passion of interest which blinded him to the crowd, deafened
him to its maledictions. Automatically he roared back blasphemy for
hate; subliminally he was alone in Paris with his old rag-sorter.
He could never see her face; yet he knew it was she as surely as he
knew himself. She went on and on, keeping pace with the cart,
threading the throng, and always, it seemed, unobserved by it.
And then, all in a moment, the guillotine--and he was going up the
steps to it!
He turned as he reached the platform. For an instant, tumult and a
sense of mad disaster hemmed him in. There was a foam of upturned
faces, vaster than anything he had yet realised; there was the tall,
lean yoke, with its wedge of dripping steel swung up between; there
was the lunette, the little window, and the corners, just visible, of
the deep basket beyond into which he was to vomit his life. They were
hauling away the trunk of the last victim, a ludicrous, flabby welter,
into the red cart adjacent. What a way to treat a man--soulless,
obscene! For one instant a deadly sickness overpowered him; he turned
his head away--and saw her panting up the steps, confessed, but yet
unnoticed, a jocund leer on her withered old face.
Then suddenly something happened. The thundering voice of the crowd
rose to an exultant pitch; there was a crash, a numbing jerk--and he
was erect again, amazed and flung at liberty.
But even in that supreme moment his vision sought out his old
rag-sorter, and was for her alone. She was down on her knees, eager
and mumbling, stuffing something into her green umbrella. What was
it--a red cabbage--a head? He caught a glimpse of it as it went
in--and it was his own head--the head of Antoine Quentin Fouquier de
Tinville, ex-Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal.