BOOK VII.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
Orrida maesta nei fero aspetto
Terrore accresce, e piu superbo il rende;
Rosseggian gli occhi, e di veneno infetto
Come infausta cometa, il guardo splende,
Gil involve il mento, e sull 'irsuto petto
Ispida efoita la gran barbe scende;
E IN GUISA DE VORAGINE PROFONDA
SAPRE LA BOCCA A'ATRO SANGUE IMMONDA.
(Ger. Lib., Cant. iv. 7.)
A horrible majesty in the fierce aspect increases it terror, and
renders it more superb. Red glow the eyes, and the aspect
infected, like a baleful comet, with envenomed influences,
glares around. A vast beard covers the chin--and, rough and
thick, descends over the shaggy breast.--And like a profound gulf
expand the jaws, foul with black gore.
CHAPTER 7.I.
Qui suis-je, moi qu'on accuse? Un esclave de la Liberte, un
martyr vivant de la Republique.
"Discours de Robespierre, 8 Thermidor."
(Who am I,--_I_ whom they accuse? A slave of Liberty,--a living
martyr for the Republic.)
It roars,--The River of Hell, whose first outbreak was chanted as
the gush of a channel to Elysium. How burst into blossoming
hopes fair hearts that had nourished themselves on the diamond
dews of the rosy dawn, when Liberty came from the dark ocean, and
the arms of decrepit Thraldom--Aurora from the bed of Tithon!
Hopes! ye have ripened into fruit, and the fruit is gore and
ashes! Beautiful Roland, eloquent Vergniaud, visionary
Condorcet, high-hearted Malesherbes!--wits, philosophers,
statesmen, patriots, dreamers! behold the millennium for which ye
dared and laboured!
I invoke the ghosts! Saturn hath devoured his children ("La
Revolution est comme Saturne, elle devorera tous ses enfans."--
Vergniaud.), and lives alone,--I his true name of Moloch!
It is the Reign of Terror, with Robespierre the king. The
struggles between the boa and the lion are past: the boa has
consumed the lion, and is heavy with the gorge,--Danton has
fallen, and Camille Desmoulins. Danton had said before his
death, "The poltroon Robespierre,--I alone could have saved him."
From that hour, indeed, the blood of the dead giant clouded the
craft of "Maximilien the Incorruptible," as at last, amidst the
din of the roused Convention, it choked his voice. (Le sang de
Danton t'etouffe!" (the blood of Danton chokes thee!) said
Garnier de l'Aube, when on the fatal 9th of Thermidor,
Robespierre gasped feebly forth, "Pour la derniere fois,
President des Assassins, je te demande la parole." (For the last
time, President of Assassins, I demand to speak.)) If, after
that last sacrifice, essential, perhaps, to his safety,
Robespierre had proclaimed the close of the Reign of Terror, and
acted upon the mercy which Danton had begun to preach, he might
have lived and died a monarch. But the prisons continued to
reek,--the glaive to fall; and Robespierre perceived not that his
mobs were glutted to satiety with death, and the strongest
excitement a chief could give would be a return from devils into
men.
We are transported to a room in the house of Citizen Dupleix, the
menuisier, in the month of July, 1794; or, in the calendar of the
Revolutionists, it was the Thermidor of the Second Year of the
Republic, One and Indivisible! Though the room was small, it was
furnished and decorated with a minute and careful effort at
elegance and refinement. It seemed, indeed, the desire of the
owner to avoid at once what was mean and rude, and what was
luxurious and voluptuous. It was a trim, orderly, precise grace
that shaped the classic chairs, arranged the ample draperies,
sank the frameless mirrors into the wall, placed bust and bronze
on their pedestals, and filled up the niches here and there with
well-bound books, filed regularly in their appointed ranks. An
observer would have said, "This man wishes to imply to you,--I am
not rich; I am not ostentatious; I am not luxurious; I am no
indolent Sybarite, with couches of down, and pictures that
provoke the sense; I am no haughty noble, with spacious halls,
and galleries that awe the echo. But so much the greater is my
merit if I disdain these excesses of the ease or the pride, since
I love the elegant, and have a taste! Others may be simple and
honest, from the very coarseness of their habits; if I, with so
much refinement and delicacy, am simple and honest,--reflect, and
admire me!"
On the walls of this chamber hung many portraits, most of them
represented but one face; on the formal pedestals were grouped
many busts, most of them sculptured but one head. In that small
chamber Egotism sat supreme, and made the Arts its looking-
glasses. Erect in a chair, before a large table spread with
letters, sat the original of bust and canvas, the owner of the
apartment. He was alone, yet he sat erect, formal, stiff,
precise, as if in his very home he was not at ease. His dress
was in harmony with his posture and his chamber; it affected a
neatness of its own,--foreign both to the sumptuous fashions of
the deposed nobles, and the filthy ruggedness of the sans-
culottes. Frizzled and coiffe, not a hair was out of order, not
a speck lodged on the sleek surface of the blue coat, not a
wrinkle crumpled the snowy vest, with its under-relief of
delicate pink. At the first glance, you might have seen in that
face nothing but the ill-favoured features of a sickly
countenance; at a second glance, you would have perceived that it
had a power, a character of its own. The forehead, though low
and compressed, was not without that appearance of thought and
intelligence which, it may be observed, that breadth between the
eyebrows almost invariably gives; the lips were firm and tightly
drawn together, yet ever and anon they trembled, and writhed
restlessly. The eyes, sullen and gloomy, were yet piercing, and
full of a concentrated vigour that did not seem supported by the
thin, feeble frame, or the green lividness of the hues, which
told of anxiety and disease.
Such was Maximilien Robespierre; such the chamber over the
menuisier's shop, whence issued the edicts that launched armies
on their career of glory, and ordained an artificial conduit to
carry off the blood that deluged the metropolis of the most
martial people in the globe! Such was the man who had resigned a
judicial appointment (the early object of his ambition) rather
than violate his philanthropical principles by subscribing to the
death of a single fellow-creature; such was the virgin enemy to
capital punishments; and such, Butcher-Dictator now, was the man
whose pure and rigid manners, whose incorruptible honesty, whose
hatred of the excesses that tempt to love and wine, would, had he
died five years earlier, have left him the model for prudent
fathers and careful citizens to place before their sons. Such
was the man who seemed to have no vice, till circumstance, that
hotbed, brought forth the two which, in ordinary times, lie ever
the deepest and most latent in a man's heart,--Cowardice and
Envy. To one of these sources is to be traced every murder that
master-fiend committed. His cowardice was of a peculiar and
strange sort; for it was accompanied with the most unscrupulous
and determined WILL,--a will that Napoleon reverenced; a will of
iron, and yet nerves of aspen. Mentally, he was a hero,--
physically, a dastard. When the veriest shadow of danger
threatened his person, the frame cowered, but the will swept the
danger to the slaughter-house. So there he sat, bolt upright,--
his small, lean fingers clenched convulsively; his sullen eyes
straining into space, their whites yellowed with streaks of
corrupt blood; his ears literally moving to and fro, like the
ignobler animals', to catch every sound,--a Dionysius in his
cave; but his posture decorous and collected, and every formal
hair in its frizzled place.
"Yes, yes," he said in a muttered tone, "I hear them; my good
Jacobins are at their post on the stairs. Pity they swear so! I
have a law against oaths,--the manners of the poor and virtuous
people must be reformed. When all is safe, an example or two
amongst those good Jacobins would make effect. Faithful fellows,
how they love me! Hum!--what an oath was that!--they need not
swear so loud,--upon the very staircase, too! It detracts from
my reputation. Ha! steps!"
The soliloquist glanced at the opposite mirror, and took up a
volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a
bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his
waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was
a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far
more decided and resolute expression of countenance. He entered
first, and, looking over the volume in Robespierre's hand, for
the latter seemed still intent on his lecture, exclaimed,--
"What! Rousseau's Heloise? A love-tale!"
"Dear Payan, it is not the love,--it is the philosophy that
charms me. What noble sentiments!--what ardour of virtue! If
Jean Jacques had but lived to see this day!"
While the Dictator thus commented on his favourite author, whom
in his orations he laboured hard to imitate, the second visitor
was wheeled into the room in a chair. This man was also in what,
to most, is the prime of life,--namely, about thirty-eight; but
he was literally dead in the lower limbs: crippled, paralytic,
distorted, he was yet, as the time soon came to tell him,--a
Hercules in Crime! But the sweetest of human smiles dwelt upon
his lips; a beauty almost angelic characterised his features
("Figure d'ange," says one of his contemporaries, in describing
Couthon. The address, drawn up most probably by Payan (Thermidor
9), after the arrest of Robespierre, thus mentions his crippled
colleague: "Couthon, ce citoyen vertueux, QUI N'A QUE LE COEUR
ET LA TETE DE VIVANS, mais qui les a brulants de patriotisme"
(Couthon, that virtuous citizen, who has but the head and the
heart of the living, yet possesses these all on flame with
patriotism.)); an inexpressible aspect of kindness, and the
resignation of suffering but cheerful benignity, stole into the
hearts of those who for the first time beheld him. With the most
caressing, silver, flute-like voice, Citizen Couthon saluted the
admirer of Jean Jacques.
"Nay,--do not say that it is not the LOVE that attracts thee; it
IS the love! but not the gross, sensual attachment of man for
woman. No! the sublime affection for the whole human race, and
indeed, for all that lives!"
And Citizen Couthon, bending down, fondled the little spaniel
that he invariably carried in his bosom, even to the Convention,
as a vent for the exuberant sensibilities which overflowed his
affectionate heart. (This tenderness for some pet animal was by
no means peculiar to Couthon; it seems rather a common fashion
with the gentle butchers of the Revolution. M. George Duval
informs us ("Souvenirs de la Terreur," volume iii page 183) that
Chaumette had an aviary, to which he devoted his harmless
leisure; the murderous Fournier carried on his shoulders a pretty
little squirrel, attached by a silver chain; Panis bestowed the
superfluity of his affections upon two gold pheasants; and Marat,
who would not abate one of the three hundred thousand heads he
demanded, REARED DOVES! Apropos of the spaniel of Couthon, Duval
gives us an amusing anecdote of Sergent, not one of the least
relentless agents of the massacre of September. A lady came to
implore his protection for one of her relations confined in the
Abbaye. He scarcely deigned to speak to her. As she retired in
despair, she trod by accident on the paw of his favourite
spaniel. Sergent, turning round, enraged and furious, exclaimed,
"MADAM, HAVE YOU NO HUMANITY?")
"Yes, for all that lives," repeated Robespierre, tenderly. "Good
Couthon,--poor Couthon! Ah, the malice of men!--how we are
misrepresented! To be calumniated as the executioners of our
colleagues! Ah, it is THAT which pierces the heart! To be an
object of terror to the enemies of our country,--THAT is noble;
but to be an object of terror to the good, the patriotic, to
those one loves and reveres,--THAT is the most terrible of human
tortures at least, to a susceptible and honest heart!" (Not to
fatigue the reader with annotations, I may here observe that
nearly every sentiment ascribed in the text to Robespierre is to
be found expressed in his various discourses.)
"How I love to hear him!" ejaculated Couthon.
"Hem!" said Payan, with some impatience. "But now to business!"
"Ah, to business!" said Robespierre, with a sinister glance from
his bloodshot eyes.
"The time has come," said Payan, "when the safety of the Republic
demands a complete concentration of its power. These brawlers of
the Comite du Salut Public can only destroy; they cannot
construct. They hated you, Maximilien, from the moment you
attempted to replace anarcy by institutions. How they mock at
the festival which proclaimed the acknowledgment of a Supreme
Being: they would have no ruler, even in heaven! Your clear and
vigorous intellect saw that, having wrecked an old world, it
became necessary to shape a new one. The first step towards
construction must be to destroy the destroyers. While we
deliberate, your enemies act. Better this very night to attack
the handful of gensdarmes that guard them, than to confront the
battalions they may raise to-morrow."
"No," said Robespierre, who recoiled before the determined spirit
of Payan; "I have a better and safer plan. This is the 6th of
Thermidor; on the 10th--on the 10th, the Convention go in a body
to the Fete Decadaire. A mob shall form; the canonniers, the
troops of Henriot, the young pupils de l'Ecole de Mars, shall mix
in the crowd. Easy, then, to strike the conspirators whom we
shall designate to our agents. On the same day, too, Fouquier
and Dumas shall not rest; and a sufficient number of 'the
suspect' to maintain salutary awe, and keep up the revolutionary
excitement, shall perish by the glaive of the law. The 10th
shall be the great day of action. Payan, of these last culprits,
have you prepared a list?"
"It is here," returned Payan, laconically, presenting a paper.
Robespierre glanced over it rapidly. "Collot d'Herbois!--good!
Barrere!--ay, it was Barrere who said, 'Let us strike: the dead
alone never return.' ("Frappons! il n'y a que les morts qui ne
revient pas."--Barrere.) Vadier, the savage jester!--good--good!
Vadier of the Mountain. He has called me 'Mahomet!' Scelerat!
blasphemer!"
"Mahomet is coming to the Mountain," said Couthon, with his
silvery accent, as he caressed his spaniel.
"But how is this? I do not see the name of Tallien? Tallien,--I
hate that man; that is," said Robespierre, correcting himself
with the hypocrisy or self-deceit which those who formed the
council of this phrase-monger exhibited habitually, even among
themselves,--"that is, Virtue and our Country hate him! There is
no man in the whole Convention who inspires me with the same
horror as Tallien. Couthon, I see a thousand Dantons where
Tallien sits!"
"Tallien has the only head that belongs to this deformed body,"
said Payan, whose ferocity and crime, like those of St. Just,
were not unaccompanied by talents of no common order. "Were it
not better to draw away the head, to win, to buy him, for the
time, and dispose of him better when left alone? He may hate
YOU, but he loves MONEY!"
"No," said Robespierre, writing down the name of Jean Lambert
Tallien, with a slow hand that shaped each letter with stern
distinctness; "that one head IS MY NECESSITY!"
"I have a SMALL list here," said Couthon, sweetly,--"a VERY small
list. You are dealing with the Mountain; it is necessary to make
a few examples in the Plain. These moderates are as straws which
follow the wind. They turned against us yesterday in the
Convention. A little terror will correct the weathercocks. Poor
creatures! I owe them no ill-will; I could weep for them. But
before all, la chere patrie!"
The terrible glance of Robespierre devoured the list which the
man of sensibility submitted to him. "Ah, these are well chosen;
men not of mark enough to be regretted, which is the best policy
with the relics of that party; some foreigners too,--yes, THEY
have no parents in Paris. These wives and parents are beginning
to plead against us. Their complaints demoralise the
guillotine!"
"Couthon is right," said Payan; "MY list contains those whom it
will be safer to despatch en masse in the crowd assembled at the
Fete. HIS list selects those whom we may prudently consign to
the law. Shall it not be signed at once?"
"It IS signed," said Robespierre, formally replacing his pen upon
the inkstand. "Now to more important matters. These deaths will
create no excitement; but Collot d'Herbois, Bourdon De l'Oise,
Tallien," the last name Robespierre gasped as he pronounced,
"THEY are the heads of parties. This is life or death to us as
well as them."
"Their heads are the footstools to your curule chair," said
Payan, in a half whisper. "There is no danger if we are bold.
Judges, juries, all have been your selection. You seize with one
hand the army, with the other, the law. Your voice yet commands
the people--"
"The poor and virtuous people," murmured Robespierre.
"And even," continued Payan, "if our design at the Fete fail us,
we must not shrink from the resources still at our command.
Reflect! Henriot, the general of the Parisian army, furnishes
you with troops to arrest; the Jacobin Club with a public to
approve; inexorable Dumas with judges who never acquit. We must
be bold!"
"And we ARE bold," exclaimed Robespierre, with sudden passion,
and striking his hand on the table as he rose, with his crest
erect, as a serpent in the act to strike. "In seeing the
multitude of vices that the revolutionary torrent mingles with
civic virtues, I tremble to be sullied in the eyes of posterity
by the impure neighbourhood of these perverse men who thrust
themselves among the sincere defenders of humanity. What!--they
think to divide the country like a booty! I thank them for their
hatred to all that is virtuous and worthy! These men,"--and he
grasped the list of Payan in his hand,--"these!--not WE--have
drawn the line of demarcation between themselves and the lovers
of France!"
"True, we must reign alone!" muttered Payan; "in other words, the
state needs unity of will;" working, with his strong practical
mind, the corollary from the logic of his word-compelling
colleague.
"I will go to the Convention," continued Robespierre. "I have
absented myself too long,--lest I might seem to overawe the
Republic that I have created. Away with such scruples! I will
prepare the people! I will blast the traitors with a look!"
He spoke with the terrible firmness of the orator that had never
failed,--of the moral will that marched like a warrior on the
cannon. At that instant he was interrupted; a letter was brought
to him: he opened it,--his face fell, he shook from limb to
limb; it was one of the anonymous warnings by which the hate and
revenge of those yet left alive to threaten tortured the death-
giver.
"Thou art smeared," ran the lines, "with the best blood of
France. Read thy sentence! I await the hour when the people
shall knell thee to the doomsman. If my hope deceive me, if
deferred too long,--hearken, read! This hand, which thine eyes
shall search in vain to discover, shall pierce thy heart. I see
thee every day,--I am with thee every day. At each hour my arm
rises against thy breast. Wretch! live yet awhile, though but
for few and miserable days--live to think of me; sleep to dream
of me! Thy terror and thy thought of me are the heralds of thy
doom. Adieu! this day itself I go forth to riot on thy fears!"
(See "Papiers inedits trouves chez Robespierre," etc., volume ii.
page 155. (No. lx.))
"Your lists are not full enough!" said the tyrant, with a hollow
voice, as the paper dropped from his trembling hand. "Give them
to me!--give them to me! Think again, think again! Barrere is
right--right! 'Frappons! il n'y a que les morts qui ne revient
pas!'"
