Scaramouche (24 page)

Such was his tone that at last the Regent lowered his hands, and looked at him. The round face was startled, almost scared.

"Delivered?" he asked hoarsely. "But what else, d'Entragues? What else?"

D'Entragues drew a long breath audibly, like a sigh. "I have been thinking, monseigneur."

"You have been thinking? And then?"

The letter was in d'Entragues' hands, poised by its edges between his forefingers. He rotated it slowly as he spoke. "It seems almost a refinement of cruelty." He paused there, and then, in answer to the question in Monsieur's stare, he went on: "This rash young man and that fanfarron de Bata continue in reactionary activities, likely to result in nothing but the fall of their own heads under the guillotine."

"What then? What is in your mind?"

D'Entragues raised his brows as if deprecating the sluggishness of his master's wits. "This gentle young lady has already suffered her bereavement. She has endured her agony. She has recovered from it. Time has begun to heal the wound. Is her anguish to be suffered all over again at some time in the near future, when that which in this case was a misapprehension of that idiot Langéac shall come to be the actual fact?"

Monsieur considered. His breathing was slightly laboured. "I see," he said. "Yes. But if, after all, Moreau should survive all these perils he is facing?"

"That is so improbable as not to be worth taking into account. He has escaped this time by a miracle. Such miracles do not happen twice in a man's life. And even if it did..." He broke off, ruminating.

"Yes, yes," the Regent rapped at him. "What then? What then? That is what I want to know. What then?"

"Even then no harm would have been done, and perhaps some good. It is clear to all that this is a mésalliance for Mademoiselle de Kercadiou. She is deserving of something far better than this nameless fellow, this bastard of God knows whom. If in the persuasion that he is dead she puts him from her mind, as she is doing already, and if before he comes to life again—if he ever should, which is so very unlikely—her affections, liberated from his thrall, shall have fixed themselves elsewhere, upon someone worthier, would not that be something to the good?"

The Regent was continuing to stare at him. "That letter?" he said at last.

D'Entragues shrugged. "Need any know that it ever arrived? It is a miracle that it did, The fellow who brought it suffered a concussion that delayed him three weeks upon the road. He might easily have suffered death."

"But, my God! I know of its existence."

"Could your highness blame yourself for silence where it may do so much good, and when speech might be the cause of such ultimate suffering to a lady who deserves well?"

The tortured prince took his head in his hands again. At long last he spoke without looking up.

"I give you no orders, d'Entragues. I desire to know nothing more of this. You will act entirely upon your own discretion."

The smile which hitherto had been a ghost took definite shape upon the lips of Monsieur d'Entragues. He bowed to the averted huddled figure of his prince.

"Perfectly, monseigneur," he said.

CHAPTER XXV

THE INTERDICT

Life in Paris was becoming uncomfortable. The results of government by Utopian ideals began to make themselves felt. In the words of Saint-Just, "misery had given birth to the Revolution, and misery might destroy it". The immediate cause lay in the fact that, again to quote the fidus Achates of Robespierre, "the multitude which had recently been living upon the superfluities of luxury and by the vices of another class", found itself without means of subsistence.

In less revolutionary language this means that the vast mass of the people which found employment so long as there was a wealthy nobility to employ it, was now, under the beneficent rule of equality, unemployed and faced with destitution. Not only were these unfortunates without the means to purchase food, but food itself was becoming difficult to purchase. The farmers were becoming increasingly reluctant to market their produce, in exchange for paper money which was daily depreciating in value.

For this depreciation, partly resulting from the flood of assignats in which the country was submerged, the Convention denounced the forgers who were at work. The Convention beheld in them the agents of the foreign despots who sought by these means to push the Nation into bankruptcy. This was, of course, a gross exaggeration; it possessed nevertheless some slight basis of truth. We do know of the activities of that printing-press at Charonne, and of the reckless prodigality with which de Batz was putting in circulation the beautiful paper money manufactured there by the extraordinarily skilful Balthazar Roussel. De Batz served two purposes at once: directly, he corrupted by means of this inexhaustible wealth those members of the government whom he found corruptible: indirectly, he increased the flood of forgeries that was so seriously embarrassing the Convention and diluting the shrunken resources of the Nation.

Saint-Just had a crack-brained notion of relieving matters by using grain as currency. Thus he felt that the agriculturists might be induced to part with it in exchange for other substances. But agriculturists, being by the very nature of their activities self-supporting, the scheme, otherwise impracticable, held little promise of success and was never put into execution. Industry and manufacture languished. Conscription was absorbing some seven hundred and fifty thousand men into its fourteen armies. But apart from this there was little employment to be found. The tanneries were idle, iron and wool were almost as scarce as bread. What little was produced barely sufficed for home consumption, so that nothing was left for export, and consequently the foreign exchanges rose steadily against France.

To the physical depression arising out of this came in the early days of that July of 1793, style esclave, Messidor of the Year 2 by the calendar of Liberty One and Indivisible, a moral depression resulting from the disasters to French arms, despite the unparalleled masses which conscription had enrolled.

And when on the anniversary that year of the fall of the Bastille came the assassination of the popular idol Marat by a young woman concerned to avenge the unfortunate Girondins, Paris went mad with rage.

Charlotte Corday was guillotined in a red shirt—the Convention decreed Pantheon honours to the murdered patriot, and never was there such a funeral as the torchlight procession in which his remains were borne to their tomb.

François Chabot, discerning parallels between Marat's position and his own, thundered in the Convention denunciations which reflected his own fear of assassination.

But the Convention had other distractions. At the moment Condée was occupied by the Austrians, and then in Thermidor Valenciennes suffered the same fate and Kléber capitulated at Mainz. The Vendee was in flagrant insurrection, and in the south there were mutterings of a royalist storm.

A cause for all these disasters, and for the menace of worse that seemed to overhang the land, had to be discovered by the Utopians who had endowed France and who hoped to endow the world with the glorious rule of Universal Brotherhood. It was discovered in the machinations of aristocrats at home and of Pitt and. Coburg abroad. Against Pitt and Coburg the Convention could only inveigh. But against her home conspirators she could take action. And to this end was passed the Law of Suspects which was to overwhelm the new Revolutionary Tribunal with work and bring the guillotine into daily function.

Thus the Reign of Terror was established. Danton, newly-married, having been active in establishing it, went off to his lands at Arcis-sur-Aube, there to devote himself to agriculture and uxoriousness. Robespierre became more than ever the focus of popular hope and popular idolatry, with Saint-Just at his side to inspire him, and his little group of supporters to ensure that his will should be paramount. Already there were rumours that he aimed at a dictatorship. Saint-Just had boldly declared that a dictator was a necessity to a country in the circumstances in which France found herself, without however explaining how this could be reconciled with the purity of views which beheld tyranny in all individual authority.

For François Chabot, that other stout henchman of the Incorruptible Maxmilien, these continued to be busy days. The Law of Suspects gave a free rein to his passion for denunciation, and almost daily now his capucinades were to be heard from the tribune of the Convention.

He would, wade, he announced, through mud and blood in the service of the people. He would tear out his heart and give it to be eaten by the irresolute in republicanism, that thus they might assimilate the pure patriotism by which it was inspired.

Daily now the bread queues increased at the bakers; daily the populace, its passions whetted by famine, grew more bloodthirsty; daily the tumbrils, with their escorts of National Guards and rolling drums, rumbled down the Rue Saint Honoré to the Place de la Revolution. Nevertheless the curtain still rose punctually every evening at the Opera, there was an undiminished attendance at the Fifty and other gaming-houses in the Palais Egalité—heretofore Palais Royal—and elsewhere, and life in the main pursued a normal course on this swiftly thinning crust of a volcano.

De Batz watched, organized and waited. His work lay in Paris, and in Paris he would remain whatever might be happening elsewhere. The Marquis de la Guiche, that most enterprising and daring of his associates, who went by the name of Sevignon, would have lured him away to join the insurrectionaries in the South. The Marquis, himself a soldier, reminded de Batz that he was a soldier, too, and pointed out that in the South a soldier's work awaited him. But de Bata would not move, such was his faith in the schemes of André-Louis, and in the end La Guiche departed alone to carry his sword where there was employment for it. The Baron did not oppose his departure But he regretted it deeply, for there was no man more whole-heartedly devoted to the restoration of the monarchy than this utterly fearless, downright Marquis de la Guiche, who had been the only one to stand by him in that attempt to rescue the King.

He overcame, however, his regrets and remained at the post he had allotted himself. Here all was going as it should. At the present pace the revolution could not last much longer. Soon now this unfortunate populace must be brought to realize that its sufferings were the result of the incompetence of its rulers and of the chaos which had been born of their idealism. If, without awaiting this, it could be made to discover that the elected were corrupt and dishonest, and it could assign to their corruption, and not merely to incompetence, the hunger which it was made to endure, then a storm should arise that must sweep away for ever those windy rhetoricians. This had been the thought of André-Louis. The soundness of its foundation was being confirmed by the march of events observed at close quarters. Meanwhile the captivity of the Queen and her family continued. A month and more had passed since the attempt to rescue her, and nothing further had been heard of the negotiations with Vienna for the exchange of prisoners. De Batz began to be uneasy. Reasonably he suspected that the negotiations had aborted. The Queen's salvation must depend now upon the speedy exploding of the revolution. Therefore he spurred on André-Louis in the delicate task to which his confederate had set his hand.

André-Louis required no spurring. The task itself absorbed him. He approached it like a chess-player carefully studying the sequence of moves by which the end was to be reached.

François Chabot was his immediate object, to be gained by the brothers Frey, mere pawns to be taken or not in passing as the developments should indicate. And the Freys were making things easy for him. His skilfully masked approach of defences, which the brothers knew in their consciences to be extremely vulnerable, had not failed of its intimidation. Junius, having considered, had discovered that their security lay in welcoming an association which they dared not take the risk of refusing. He had been helped to his decision by a hint from Proly that de Bata was in alliance with Moreau, and that de Bata wielded a wide and mysterious influence, a power which it was not prudent to provoke.

So the Freys opened their doors to the Baron and his friend, and had no immediate cause to regret it. On the contrary, the Baron, disposing of very considerable sums, showed himself from the outset able and willing to co-operate with the Freys in any of the financial ventures which engaged them and for which funds were necessary. Soon, indeed, the brothers came to congratulate themselves upon an association which at first had been forced upon them against their inclinations. The Baron displayed a shrewdness in finance which commended him increasingly to the respect and even friendship of the Freys, and which resulted in some transaction of considerable profit to them both.

André-Louis, too, being associated with the Baron, was by now on intimate terms with these Jewish bankers, a constant visitor at their substantial house in the Rue d'Anjou, and at their well-furnished table, which had first rendered apparent to the starveling Chabot the advantages of accepting the friendship of these very zealous apostles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The quiet, comely little Léopoldine never failed to make him welcome to dinner at her brothers' house, and made no secret of the fact that she found a pleasure in his company. Her gentle brown eyes would soften as they watched him; her ears were attentive to all that he said, and her lips ready to smile at any sally of his. Thus very soon he was entirely at home with the Freys. They made him feel—as they had made Chabot feel—almost one of the family.

One evening after he and de Bata had dined at the Rue d'Anjou, and whilst they were still at table, Chabot being of the party, Junius expounded to them a scheme in which he believed that millions could be made.

He and his brother were fitting out at Marseilles a corsair fleet to operate in the Mediterranean, raiding not only the ships of enemy powers but also those ports on the Spanish and Italian coast which could easily be surprised.

Junius coloured the undertaking so speciously as to make it appear of outstanding national importance, a patriotic enterprise of advantage to the Republic since it harrassed her enemies. André-Louis appeared to be profoundly impressed. He praised the project in high terms for both its financial and patriotic soundness, that de Bate at once offered a contribution of a hundred thousand livres.

Junius smiled approval upon him. "You are quick to judge opportunity, my friend."

Chabot was looking at him with round eyes. "You have the advantage of being wealthy," he said with a sigh of envy.

"If you would enjoy the same advantage, this is your opportunity, Citizen-Representative."

"I?" Chabot smiled sourly. "I have not the necessary means to acquire a share. My labours have all been in the service of humanity. They bring no pecuniary reward."

"Think of the treasure you might have amassed in Heaven if the Republic had not abolished it," said André-Louis.

"My friend, you are flippant," the representative reproved him. "You gibe upon sacred subjects. It is not worthy."

"Do you still regard Heaven as a sacred subject?"

"I so regard the Republic," Chabot thundered. "You permit yourself to jest about it. A sacrilege."

De Batz intervened to place his purse at the disposal of the representative, so that he might acquire a share in this venture. Chabot, however, would not be tempted. If the business went awry, as well it might, for the risks connected with it were not to be denied, he would be without means to repay. He would be left in debt, and that was a dangerous situation for a Representative of the People. The Baron did not pursue the matter. He returned instead to the subject of his own investment, settling the details.

On their way home, through deserted streets at a late hour of that summer night, André-Louis approved him.

"You were quick to take the hint, Jean."

"Even although I did not perceive your aim. My trust in you becomes almost child-like, André."

"My aim is twofold. To seduce Chabot by showing hint how easily and safely he may grow rich by trusting us, and so to display our powers to the Freys that they will not venture to oppose us, whatever we demand. You shall see some pretty happenings shortly."

But the month was out before André-Louis made any further move. He concerned himself, meanwhile, jointly with de Batz, in some transactions in émigré property by which Delaunay and Julien were allowed to profit modestly, so as to encourage them.