On the moorland above the old gray village of Carbaix, in
Finistere--Finistere, the most westerly province of Brittany--stands a
cottage, built, as all the cottages in that country are, of rough-hewn
stones. It is a poor, rude place to-day, but it wore an aspect far
more rude and primitive a hundred years ago--say on an August day in
the year 1793, when a man issued from the doorway, and, shading his
eyes from the noonday sun, gazed long and fixedly in the direction of
a narrow rift which a few score paces away breaks the monotony of the
upland level. This man was tall and thin and unkempt, his features
expressing a mixture of cunning and simplicity. He gazed a while in
silence, but at length uttered a grunt of satisfaction as the figure
of a woman rose gradually into sight. She came on slowly, in a
stooping posture, dragging behind her a great load of straw, which
completely hid the little sledge on which it rested, and which was
attached to her waist by a rope of twisted hay.
The figure of a woman--rather of a girl. As she drew nearer it could
be seen that her cheeks, though brown and sunburned, were as smooth as
a child's. She looked scarcely eighteen. Her head was bare, and her
short petticoats, of some coarse stuff, left visible bare feet thrust
into wooden shoes. She advanced with her head bent and her shoulders
strained forward, her face dull and patient. Once, and once only, when
the man's eyes left her for a moment, she shot at him a look of scared
apprehension; and later, when she came abreast of him, her breath
coming and going with her exertions, he might have seen, had he looked
closely, that her strong brown limbs were trembling under her.
But the man noticed nothing in his impatience, and only chid her for
her slowness. "Where have you been dawdling, lazy-bones?" he cried.
She murmured, without halting, that the sun was hot.
"Sun hot!" he retorted. "Jeanne is lazy, I think! _Mon Dieu_, that I
should have married a wife who is tired by noon! I had better have
left you to that never-do-well Pierre Bounat. But I have news for you,
my girl."
He lounged after her as he spoke, his low, cunning face--the face of
the worst kind of French peasant--flickering with cruel pleasure, as
he saw how she started at his words. She made no answer, however.
Instead, she drew her load with increased vehemence towards one of the
two doors which led into the building. "Well, well, I will tell you
presently," he called after her. "Be quick and come to dinner."
He entered himself by the other door. The house was divided into two
chambers by a breast-high partition of wood. The one room served for
kitchen; the other, now half full of straw, was barn and granary,
fowl-house and dove-cote, in one. "Be quick!" he called to her.
Standing in the house-room, he could see her head as she stooped to
unload the straw.
In a moment she came in, her shoes clattering on the floor. The
perspiration stood in great beads on her forehead, and showed how
little she had deserved his reproach. She sat down silently, avoiding
his eyes; but he thought nothing of this. It was no new thing. It
pleased him, if anything.
"Well, my Jeanne," he said, in his gibing tone, "are you longing for
my news?"
The hand she stretched out towards the pitcher of cider, which, with
black bread and onions, formed their meal, shook, but she answered
simply: "If you please, Michel."
"Well, the Girondins have been beaten, my girl, and are flying all
over the country. That is the news. Master Pierre is among them, I do
not doubt, if he has not been killed already. I wish he would come
this way."
"Why?" she asked, suddenly looking up at last, a flash of light in her
gray eyes.
"Why?" he repeated, grinning across the table at her, "because he
would be worth five crowns to me. There is five crowns, I am told, on
the head of every Girondin who has been in arms, my girl."
The French Revolution, it will be understood, was at its height. The
more moderate and constitutional Republicans--the Girondins, as they
were called--worsted in Paris by the Jacobins and the mob, had lately
tried to raise the provinces against the capital, and to this end had
drawn together at Caen, near the border of Brittany. They had been
defeated, however, and the Jacobins, in this month of August, were
preparing to take a fearful vengeance at once on them and the
Royalists. The Reign of Terror had begun. Even to such a boor as this,
sitting over his black bread, the Revolution had come home, and, in
common with many a thousand others, he wondered what he could make of
it.
The girl did not answer, even by the look of contempt to which he had
become accustomed, and for which he hated her; and he repeated, "Five
crowns! Ah, it is money, that is! _Mon Dieu!_" Then, with a sudden
exclamation, he sprang up. "What is that?" he cried.
He had been sitting with his back to the barn, but he turned now so as
to face it. Something had startled him--a rustling in the straw behind
him. "What is that?" he said again, his hand on the table, his face
lowering and watchful.
The girl had risen also; and, as the last word passed his lips, sprang
by him with a low cry, and aimed a frantic blow with her stool at
something he could not see.
"What is it?" he asked, recoiling.
"A rat!" she answered, breathless. And she aimed another blow at it.
"Where?" he asked, fretfully. "Where is it?" He snatched his stool,
too, and at that moment a rat darted out of the straw, ran nimbly
between his legs, and plunged into a hole by the door. He flung the
wooden stool after it; but, of course, in vain. "It was a rat!" he
said, as if before he had doubted it.
"Thank God!" she muttered. She was shaking all over.
He stared at her in stupid wonder. What did she mean? What had come to
her? "Have you had a sunstroke, my girl?" he said, suspiciously.
Her nut-brown face was a shade less brown than usual, but she met his
eyes boldly, and said: "No," adding an explanation which for the
moment satisfied him. But he did not sit down again. When she went out
he went out also. And though, as she retired slowly to the rye fields
and work, she repeatedly looked back at him, it was always to find his
eyes upon her. When this had happened half a dozen times, a thought
struck him. "How now?" he muttered. "The rat ran out of the straw!"
Nevertheless he still stood gazing after her, with a cunning look upon
his features, until she disappeared over the edge of the rift, and
then he crept back to the door of the barn, and stole in out of the
sunlight into the cool darkness of the raftered building, across which
a dozen rays of light were shooting, laden with dancing motes. Inside
he stood stock still until he had regained the use of his eyes, and
then he began to peer round him. In a moment he found what he sought.
Half upon, and half hidden by, the straw, lay a young man, in the deep
sleep of utter exhaustion. His face, which bore traces of more than
common beauty, was now white and pinched; his hair hung dank about his
forehead. His clothes were in rags; and his feet, bound up in pieces
torn at random from his blouse, were raw and bleeding. For a short
while Michel Tellier bent over him, remarking these things with
glistening eyes. Then the peasant stole out again. "It is five
crowns!" he muttered, blinking in the sunlight. "Ha, ha! Five
crowns!"
He looked round cautiously, but could see no sign of his wife; and
after hesitating and pondering a minute or two, he took the path
for Carbaix, his native astuteness leading him to saunter slowly
along in his ordinary fashion. After that the moorland about the
cottage lay seemingly deserted. Thrice, at intervals, the girl
dragged home her load of straw, but each time she seemed to linger
in the barn no longer than was necessary. Michel's absence, though
it was unlooked-for, raised no suspicion in her breast, for he would
frequently go down to the village to spend the afternoon. The sun
sank lower, and the shadow of the great monolith, which, standing
on the highest point of the moor, about a mile away, rose gaunt and
black against a roseate sky, grew longer and longer; and then, as
twilight fell, the two coming home met a few paces from the cottage.
He asked some questions about the work she had been doing, and she
answered briefly. Then, silent and uncommunicative, they went in
together. The girl set the bread and cider on the table, and going to
the great black pot which had been simmering all day upon the fire,
poured some broth into two pitchers. It did not escape Michel's
frugal eye that there was still a little broth left in the bottom
of the pot, and this induced a new feeling in him--anger. When his
wife hailed him by a sign to the meal, he went instead to the door,
and fastened it. Thence he went to the corner and picked up the
wood-chopper, and armed with this came back to his seat.
The girl watched his movements first with surprise, and then with
secret terror. The twilight was come, and the cottage was almost dark,
and she was alone with him; or, if not alone, yet with no one near who
could help her. Yet she met his grin of triumph bravely. "What is
this?" she said. "Why do you want that?"
"For the rat," he answered grimly, his eyes on hers.
"Why not use your stool?" she strove to murmur, her heart sinking.
"Not for this rat," he answered. "It might not do, my girl. Oh, I know
all about it," he continued. "I have been down to the village, and
seen the mayor, and he is coming up to fetch him." He nodded towards
the partition, and she knew that her secret was known.
"It is Pierre," she said, trembling violently, and turning first
crimson and then white.
"I know it, Jeanne. It was excellent of you! Excellent! It is long
since you have done such a day's work."
"You will not give him up?"
"My faith, I shall!" he answered, affecting, and perhaps really
feeling, wonder at her simplicity. "He is five crowns, girl! You do
not understand. He is worth five crowns, and the risk nothing at
all."
If he had been angry, or shown anything of the fury of the suspicious
husband; if he had been about to do this out of jealousy or revenge,
she would have quailed before him, though she had done him no wrong,
save the wrong of mercy and pity. But his spirit was too mean for the
great passions; he felt only the sordid ones, which to a woman are the
most hateful. And instead of quailing, she looked at him with flashing
eyes. "I shall warn him," she said.
"It will not help him," he answered, sitting still, and feeling the
edge of the hatchet with his fingers.
"It will help him," she retorted. "He shall go. He shall escape before
they come."
"I have locked the doors!"
"Give me the key!" she panted. "Give me the key, I say!" She had risen
and was standing before him, her figure drawn to its full height. He
rose hastily and retreated behind the table, still retaining the
hatchet in his grasp.
"Stand back!" he said, sullenly. "You may awaken him, if you please,
my girl. It will not avail him. Do you not understand, fool, that he
is worth five crowns? And listen! It is too late now. They are here!"
A blow fell on the door as he spoke, and he stepped towards it. But at
that despair moved her, and she threw herself upon him, and for a
moment wrestled with him. At last, with an effort he flung her off,
and, brandishing his weapon in her face, kept her at bay. "You vixen!"
he cried, savagely, retreating to the door, with a pale cheek and his
eyes still on her, for he was an arrant coward. "You deserve to go to
prison with him, you jade! I will have you in the stocks for this!"
She leaned against the wall where she had fallen, her white,
despairing face seeming almost to shine in the darkness of the
wretched room. Meanwhile the continuous murmur of men's voices outside
could now be heard, mingled with the ring of weapons; and the summons
for admission was again and again repeated, as if those without had no
mind to be kept waiting.
"Patience! patience! I am opening!" he cried. Still keeping his face
to her, he unlocked the door and called on the men to enter. "He is in
the straw, M. le Mayor!" he cried in a tone of triumph, his eyes still
on his wife. "He will give you no trouble, I will answer for it! But
first give me my five crowns, mayor. My five crowns!"
He still felt so much fear of his wife that he did not turn to see the
men enter, and was taken by surprise when a voice at his elbow--a
strange voice--said, "Five crowns, my friend? For what, may I ask?"
In his eagerness and excitement he suspected nothing, but thought only
that the mayor had sent a deputy. "For what? For the Girondin!" he
answered, rapidly. Then at last he turned and found that half-a-dozen
men had entered, and that more were entering. To his astonishment,
they were all strangers to him--men with stern, gloomy faces, and
armed to the teeth. There was something so formidable in their
appearance that his voice faltered as he added: "But where is the
mayor, gentlemen? I do not see him."
No one answered, but in silence the last of the men--there were eleven
in all--entered and bolted the door behind him. Michel Tellier peered
at them in the gloom with growing alarm. In return the tallest of the
strangers, who had entered first and seemed to be in command, looked
round keenly. At length this man spoke. "So you have a Girondin here,
have you?" he said, his voice curiously sweet and sonorous.
"I was to have five crowns for him," Michel muttered dubiously.
"Oh! Petion," continued the spokesman to one of his companions, "can
you kindle a light? It strikes me that we have hit upon a dark
place."
The man addressed took something from his pouch. For a moment there
was silence, broken only by the sharp sound of the flint striking the
steel. Then a sudden glare lit up the dark interior, and disclosed the
group of cloaked strangers standing about the door, the light gleaming
back from their muskets and cutlasses. Michel trembled. He had never
seen such men as these before. True, they were wet and travel-stained,
and had the air of those who spend their nights in ditches and under
haystacks. But their pale, stern faces were set in indomitable
resolve. Their eyes glowed with a steady fire, and they trod as kings
tread. Their leader was a man of majestic height and beauty, and in
his eyes alone there seemed to lurk a spark of some lighter fire, as
if his spirit still rose above the task which had sobered his
companions. Michel noted all this in fear and bewilderment; noted the
white head and yet vigorous bearing of the man who had struck the
light; noted even the manner in which the light died away in the dim
recesses of the barn.
"And this Girondin--is he in hiding here?" said the tall man.
"That is so," Michel answered. "But I had nothing to do with hiding
him, citizen. It was my wife hid him in the straw there."
"And you gave notice of his presence to the authorities?" continued
the stranger, raising his hand to repress some movement among his
followers.
"Certainly, or you would not have been here," replied Michel, better
satisfied with himself.
The answer struck him down with an awful terror. "That does not
follow," said the tall man, coolly, "for we are Girondins!"
"You are?"
"Without doubt," the other answered, with majestic simplicity; "or
there are no such persons. This is Petion, and this Citizen Buzot.
Have you heard of Louvet? There he stands. For me, I am Barbaroux."
Michel's tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. He could not
utter a word. But another could. On the far side of the barrier a
sudden rustling was heard, and while all turned to look--but with
what different feelings--the pale face of the youth over whom
Michel had bent in the afternoon appeared above the partition. A
smile of joyful recognition effaced for the time the lines of
exhaustion. The young man, clinging for support to the planks,
uttered a cry of thankfulness. "It is you! It is really you! You are
safe!" he exclaimed.
"We are safe, all of us, Pierre," Barbaroux answered. "And now"--and
he turned to Michel Tellier with sudden thunder in his voice--"this
man whom you would have betrayed is our guide, let me tell you, whom
we lost last night. Speak, man, in your defence, if you can. Say what
you have to say why justice shall not be done upon you, miserable
caitiff, who would have sold a man's life for a few pieces of
silver!"
The wretched peasant's knees trembled, and the perspiration stood upon
his brow. He heard the voice as the voice of a judge. He looked in the
stern eyes of the Girondins, and read only anger and vengeance. Then
he caught in the silence the sound of his wife weeping, for at
Pierre's appearance she had broken into wild sobbing, and he spoke out
of the base instincts of his heart.
"He was her lover," he muttered. "I swear it, citizens."
"He lies!" cried the man at the barrier, his face transfigured with
rage. "I loved her, it is true, but it was before her old father sold
her to this Judas. For what he would have you believe now, my friends,
it is false. I, too, swear it."
A murmur of execration broke from the group of Girondins. Barbaroux
repressed it by a gesture. "What do you say of this man?" he asked,
turning to them, his voice deep and solemn.
"He is not fit to live!" they answered in chorus.
The poor coward screamed as he heard the words, and, flinging himself
on the ground, he embraced Barbaroux's knees in a paroxysm of terror.
But the judge did not look at him. Barbaroux turned, instead, to
Pierre Bounat. "What do you say of him?" he asked.
"He is not fit to live," said the young man solemnly, his breath
coming quick and fast.
"And you?" Barbaroux continued, turning and looking with his eyes of
fire at the wife, his voice gentle, and yet more solemn.
A moment before she had ceased to weep, and had stood up listening and
gazing, awe and wonder in her face. Barbaroux had to repeat his
question before she answered. Then she said, "He is not fit to die."
There was silence for a moment, broken only by the entreaties of the
wretch on the floor. At last Barbaroux spoke. "She has said rightly,"
he pronounced. "He shall live. They have put us out of the law and set
a price on our heads; but we will keep the law. He shall live. But,
hark you," the great orator continued, in tones which Michel never
forgot, "if a whisper escape you as to our presence here, or our
names, or if you wrong your wife by word or deed, the life she has
saved shall pay for it.
"Remember!" he added, shaking Michel to and fro with a finger, "the
arm of Barbaroux is long, and though I be a hundred leagues away, I
shall know and I shall punish. So, beware! Now rise, and live!"
The miserable man cowered back to the wall, frightened to the core of
his heart. The Girondins conferred a while in whispers, two of their
number assisting Pierre to cross the barrier. Suddenly there came--and
Michel trembled anew as he heard it--a loud knocking at the door. All
started and stood listening and waiting. A voice outside cried: "Open!
open! in the name of the law!"
"We have lingered too long," Barbaroux muttered. "I should have
thought of this. It is the Mayor of Carbaix come to apprehend our
friend."
Again the Girondins conferred together. At last, seeming to arrive at
a conclusion, they ranged themselves on either side of the door, and
one of their number opened it. A short, stout man, girt with a
tricolor sash, and wearing a huge sword, entered with an air of
authority--being blinded by the light he saw nothing out of the
common--and was followed by four men armed with muskets.
Their appearance produced an extraordinary effect on Michel Tellier.
As they one by one crossed the threshold, the peasant leaned forward,
his face flushed, his eyes gleaming, and counted them. They were only
five. And the others were twelve. He fell back, and from that moment
his belief in the Girondins' power was clinched.
"In the name of the law!" panted the mayor. "Why did you not--" Then
he stopped abruptly, his mouth remaining open. He found himself
surrounded by a group of grim, silent mutes, with arms in their hands,
and in a twinkling it flashed into his mind that these were the eleven
chiefs of the Girondins, whom he had been warned to keep watch for. He
had come to catch a pigeon and had caught a crow. He turned pale and
his eyes dropped. "Who are--who are these gentlemen?" he stammered, in
a ludicrously altered tone.
"Some volunteers of Quumpen, returning home," replied Barbaroux, with
ironical smoothness.
"You have your papers, citizens?" the mayor asked, mechanically; and
he took a step back towards the door, and looked over his shoulder.
"Here they are!" said Petion rudely, thrusting a packet into his
hands. "They are in order."
The mayor took them, and longing only to see the outside of the
door, pretended to look through them, his little heart going
pit-a-pat within him. "They seem to be in order," he assented,
feebly. "I need not trouble you further, citizens. I came here under
a misapprehension, I find, and I wish you a good journey."
He knew, as he backed out, that he was cutting a poor figure. He would
fain have made a more dignified retreat. But before these men,
fugitives and outlaws as they were, he felt, though he was Mayor of
Carbaix, almost as small a man as did Michel Tellier. These were the
men of the Revolution. They had bearded nobles and pulled down kings.
There was Barbaroux, who had grappled with Marat; and Petion, the
Mayor of the Bastille. The little Mayor of Carbaix knew greatness when
he saw it. He turned tail, and hurried back to his fireside, his
body-guard not a whit behind him.
Five minutes later the men he feared and envied came out also, and
went their way, passing in single file into the darkness which brooded
over the great monolith; beginning, brave hearts, another of the few
stages which still lay between them and the guillotine. Then in the
cottage there remained only Michel and Jeanne. She sat by the dying
embers, silent, and lost in thought. He leaned against the wall, his
eyes roving ceaselessly, but always when his gaze met hers it fell.
Barbaroux had conquered him. It was not until Jeanne had risen to
close the door, and he was alone, that he wrung his hands, and
muttered: "Five crowns! Five crowns gone and wasted!"
"HUMAN DOCUMENTS."
Facing this pastel, in an opposite corner of the room, another
little thing full of sadness catches my eye, despite the deepening
twilight. It is a yellow-stained photograph hung on the wall in a
simple, wooden frame. It is the young Prince Imperial, who was
killed in Africa a dozen years ago, but is shown here as a mere
child in knee breeches. An odd, but touching, fancy it was of the
Empress Eugenie to place this souvenir of her son, the last of the
Napoleons, in the very room where that other one was born, the
giant who shook the earth....
How strange and startling it will be a century or two hence
for our descendants to turn over the photographs of their
ancestors!... The portraits left by our forefathers, expressive
though they may be, whether painted or engraved, can never
produce in us an impression equally vivid; but photographs are
the very reflections of living beings, fixing their precise
attitudes, their gestures, their most fleeting expressions.
What a curious thing it will be, what an awe-inspiring thing for
future generations to study our faces when we shall have fallen
into the dead past!...--A fragment from Loti's "Book of Pity
and of Death."