When Carrier, commissioned by Heraut Seychelles, acting on behalf of
the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, to _purge_ Nantes, arrived in
that town, he found all ready to his hand a Revolutionary Committee
such as his heart, or whatever deformity represented that organ, could
most desire. There were Goullin, Grandmaison, Chaux, Jolly,
Perrochaux, and a score others, all “intrepid” Mountain men, and all
scoundrels of the most atrocious antecedents. His task was
consequently a simple one. He had merely to produce his credentials
and authorise his instruments, and the depopulating process started,
as it were, automatically. One need not recapitulate, for the
thousandth time, a selection from the infernal wickednesses
perpetrated by these fiends. Such were being enacted, in more or less
degree, in a hundred other districts of the tortured land, and these
were noteworthy in nothing but their multitude. What _was_ noteworthy,
however, was the fact that Nantes produced the solitary instance--so
far as one may gather throughout the entire Revolution--of a
butchering devil succumbing to a sense of his own enormities. But,
even so, there was to be observed a particular judgment in the case.
Carrier’s theories of political economy were simplicity itself. The
population of France, he declared, was out of all proportion with the
amount of food the land could produce; wherefore he proposed, for his
individual part, to pare down the population until it corresponded
with the yield. But this decimating process was fatiguing, and called
for some compensation. It was only decent that the killers should be
allowed to extract what profit and enjoyment they could from their
task. And, in fact, they enjoyed a glut, which was the reason why a
good many personable women, not of the first order of attractiveness,
were allowed to escape--to the scaffold, or to the drownings.
Amongst these came one day to the Place du Buffay, where the
guillotine was erected, a mother and her five daughters and their
little maid, all, according to a chronicler, _jeunes et belles,
condamnées sans jugement_. There was a good batch that noon, and the
seven were kept waiting for a long half-hour at the foot of the
scaffold before their turn came. The populace was not yet so hardened
but that it could witness this tragedy with emotion. “Ah, the poor
infants! But what is their crime?” “Hush! they were taken with arms in
their hands!” “My God! but it is outrageous! Are knitting-needles
arms?” “I know not, I. It is Carrier who decides.”
The six encouraged one another amidst tears and embraces. Most of all
they sought to fortify the little _bonne_, who, a mere large-eyed
child, stood quite stunned with the turn affairs had taken. When at
length the period came to their agony, they mounted the steps in
succession, faltering to one another sweet hymns of consolation, their
voices fading away one by one like the lights in Tenebrae. The
spectators were dissolved in tears; in the midst of a weeping silence
the rush and thud of the axe was the only sound audible. Stolidly,
monotonously, Jules Garreau, the executioner, a powerful,
black-bearded man, sliced off the heads as they came through the
“little window.” He might have been cutting chaff for any concern he
showed.
The little maid came last. She understood things least of all at that
moment, and only cried like a child when the assistants jerked her
roughly down on the board and slid her under the yoke. And then, in
the very instant that Garreau mechanically touched off the knife, the
man was seen to stagger and fall back, his hands flung to his face.
He died the next day in a raving delirium. “It is no wonder,”
whispered the less inhumane of those who had witnessed the execution.
“The pity of it would have killed a wolf’s heart.”
That was the truth, but not the whole of the truth. The full
explanation was not given until years afterwards, when the story was
communicated to a priest to whom one of Garreau’s assistants came to
unburden himself. He knew all about the man and the reason for his
death. It had been actually due, he declared, to an instantaneous
realisation of the terrific part he was playing, and of the mortal
hazards he had invited in lending himself to it. In that moment he had
known his soul as surely lost as if he had heard God’s voice in his
ear, and the shock had killed him. But it will be well to give the
story in the narrator’s own words:
“I had known this Garreau since we were young men together. We were in
the same office, a wine merchant’s, in the Isle Feydeau. Garreau was a
very handsome fellow, but as headstrong as the devil. He had a great
tenacity of purpose, and when once he had set his heart on a thing, he
would pursue it, as a weasel follows a rabbit, until he could set his
teeth in its neck. We had no quarrel with the existing order, and our
lives were, for our position, prosperous and content. For my part, I
was always a slave to the stronger will of my comrade.
“We were at that time good children of the Church, which was indeed
our misfortune, for the change in us dated from the moment of
Garreau’s return from a week’s retreat in the monastery of St. Pierre
de la Roche. He had acquired therein something other than the
religious serenity he had gone to seek, had meditated a passion remote
from that of the Testament. It happened in this way.
“Attached to the monastery was the Convent of the Bon Secours, whose
sisters washed the linen of the ghostly fathers. To one of these
sisters, a beautiful neophyte, Jules found himself instantly
attracted. His interest ripened into desire, and his desire into a
devouring passion. From that moment all was decided. He never rested
until he had secured its object to himself.
“He would have married the lovely apostate, but the Church refused to
sanction their union. It was that refusal which first inspired his
recusancy, and in consequence mine. I admired and looked up to him in
all things. A child, a girl, was born to the thus ostracised pair, and
it was remarked that a little torn heart, emblematic of her birthright
of sin, was printed on the innocent’s neck under her hair. It was the
rending of the Sacred Heart which she was thus made to symbolise in
her birth.
“But Garreau loved her, and far more than her mother did. If he had
been great, aristocratic, he would have experienced no difficulty in
sheltering his mistress from slander and persecution; but he was
neither, and he could give her little of the protection that she
craved. So in the end she sought and found it in the arms of the Comte
de Chasles, son of a marquis, who carried her off to Paris. It was
then that Jules and I attached ourselves to the party of the advanced
thinkers.
“He followed the seducer, and for years I lost sight of him. In the
meanwhile all that I knew of his affairs was that the infant had been
claimed as their perquisite by the sisters of the Bon Secours, and
that they were training her, ignorant of her parentage, to service.
Then, in a clap, came the Revolution.
“All society was disintegrated in that shock. Institutions ceased to
exist and order resolved itself into chaos. The religious houses were
the first to suffer. The hour of the great retribution had struck, and
I sided with the extremists. And presently arrived Carrier.
“I was out of employment, as who was not? The beneficent Republic
provided idleness for us all; but, alas! idleness begot no bread. At
this juncture the Revolutionary Tribunal called for candidates for the
post of executioner. It was their purpose to strip the office of
prejudice, and exalt it to a State dignity. This headsman was to be
entitled for the future the People’s Avenger.
“There were many applicants, and among them came one whom I had
difficulty in recognising at first for my old friend and leader Jules
Garreau. It was thirteen years since we had met. Most of that time he
had spent in the prison of la Force in Paris, whither he had been
conveyed on a process for debt ingeniously devised against him by the
Comte de Chasles. When released at length by the Revolution, he went,
like that weasel before-mentioned, straight for the neck of his enemy.
It was at the Abbaye that he found him, and he took what revenge he
could for that long term of suffering out of the September massacres.
Afterwards he drank blood awhile in Paris, and then came on to his
native town to surfeit his hatred on the social order which had been
responsible for his ruin. He was by then rabid among the rabid. His
deadly sense of wrong had killed whatever spirit of humanity had once
existed within him. His only desire was to kill, and kill, and yet
kill. This post offered him such an opportunity for the satisfaction
of his lust as could be found nowhere else, and he applied for it. He
was elected unanimously and with enthusiasm by the National
Representatives. All lesser candidates, among whom I figured, waived
their claims in view of his, which were irresistible. But he made me
his assistant, and I resumed my natural position of subordinate to
him.
“Jules lacked from that moment no food to satiate his vengeance; and
yet it hungered perpetually. He was a dark, powerful man, wholly
inexorable, yet in seeming more stern than wrathful. He appeared the
Avatar of sans-culottism, a soulless, sightless idol, to whom human
flesh had to be sacrificed. Of his child, the pledge of that lost
passion, he never seemed to think. Indeed, in the utter annihilation
of the religious houses which had occurred it would have been
impossible to discover whether she lived or were dead. And perhaps
even, one might assume, he did not care. His soul was by now delivered
completely over to the one lust of destruction.
“On the day of the execution of the Marcé family we wrought
consciously in an unsympathetic atmosphere. It is so sometimes on that
platform of the guillotine, as on the stage, when the actor is aware,
he does not know why, of an antagonistic presence in the house. One
plays then with caution and deprecation, fearing to give offence. I
was very sensitive to a throbbing in the popular pulse; but, as for
Jules, he showed no more sign of feeling than was his wont. Indeed, I
observed even an increased callousness in the way in which, noting
that the heads were seven, he ticked off each one as it fell with a
day from the little nursery proverb uttered _sub voce_, as thus:
“‘Monday, fair of face; Tuesday, full of grace; Wednesday, full of
woe; Thursday, far to go; Friday, loving and giving; Saturday, work
for a living; Sunday----’
“With the word on his lips, and his hand in the very act of touching
off the bolt, he suddenly paled and staggered. I ran to catch him,
_and looked straight into the face of one that was damned_.
“It was the last head, and we conveyed Garreau to his lodging. He was
by then in a raving fever, from which he never recovered. But in one
of the few lucid intervals that came to him he recognised me, and,
catching at my hand, whispered in a voice, whose exquisite horror I
shall never forget, the secret of his awakening.
“In the very moment that his fingers released the knife, he had caught
sight of a little torn heart printed on the neck beneath him.”