Scaramouche (29 page)

"Simpleton!" said Delaunay contemptuously. "Do you suppose that any of us will do that? We shall appoint Benoit or another to buy and sell for us. Our hands will not be seen at all."

Peremptorily he added: "It is you or another, Chabot. I give you the first chance because we are old friends. But resolve yourself. Will you take the money and join us or must I offer it elsewhere?"

Before that immediate and terrible risk, Chabot capitulated. He stuffed the bundle into the breast of his shabby coat. Then he made a little oration.

"If I consent, it is only because I perceive that no harm can result to the Republic, or to any sound patriot. These rascally directors of the India Company, who have been defrauding the national treasury, will be the only sufferers; and it is proper that they should be punished for their dishonesty. Yes, my friends. Before the tribunal of my conscience I stand dear. If it were otherwise let me assure you that no prospect of gain, however considerable, would move me to take part in this."

Julien looked at him with wonder in his deep-set eyes. "Nobly spoken, Chabot. How worthy you ever prove yourself of the great trust the people repose in you. A man of your purity of republican principles is destined for the highest honours his country can bestow upon him."

And the unfrocked priest, suspecting no irony in the speech of that rascally unfrocked parson, bowed his head. "I covet no honours. I desire but to perform the duty which my country has imposed upon me. The burden was not of my seeking. But I will carry it while my legs will bear me up, and while breath does not fail me."

They left him, to go and seek Bazire. As they went, "Do you know, Julien," said Delaunay in his gentle, sluggish voice "that the little rascal believes himself?"

CHAPTER XXX

THE INDIA COMPANY

Informed of the successful association with the scheme not only of Chabot but also of Bazire, that other prominent deputy and pillar of the dominant party of the Mountain, André-Louis repaired on the morrow to the Convention, to hear Julien make his preliminary denunciation.

De Batz accompanied him, and together they found seats in the gallery, among the idle riff-raff which daily crowded it, and so often interrupted the proceedings of the legislators below in order to make clear to them how they should interpret the will of the sovereign people. For we are now in Fructidor of the Year 2 of the French Republic One and Indivisible, by the Calendar of Freedom. The Reign of Terror is sweeping to its climax. The dreadful Law of Suspects is being widely enforced. The law of the maximum has been enacted in an endeavour to restrain the constant rise in the price of the necessaries of life which keeps pace with the constant depreciation of the paper money of the Republic. The lately-established Revolutionary Tribunal is submerged in business. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, most zealous and industrious of public servants, can barely find time to eat or sleep. Executions are multiplying. The great daily spectacle is the passing of the tumbril to the Place de la Revolution where the axe of the guillotine clanks busily at the hands of Charles Sanson, the public executioner, fondly and familiarly known to the rabble as Charlot. The bread and meat queues grow longer and sadder; hunger becomes more general among the poor, the bread more and more foul. But the people suffer it out of faith in the integrity of the legislators, counting upon their assurances that this Lenten time is but the prelude to a season of plenty. Meanwhile, to delude and pacify them, doles are distributed to the indigent, largely as a result of the activities of the astute Saint-Just.

Nevertheless, the curtain continues to rise punctually at the opera, the cafés and eating-houses continue to be crowded at the usual hours by those who can afford to pay. Fevrier's in the Palais Royal does a brisk trade; at Venua's banquets are nightly spread for the prosperous and well-nourished representatives of a starving people. Life pursues its course, and such men as de Batz, if of sufficient circumspection and assurance, may move freely.

And freely de Batz moved, his clothes scrupulously elegant, his hair dressed with the same care as of old, his manner as assured and haughty as in the days before the fall of the Bastille. His confidence was based upon that great army of agents and associates, gradually recruited, which by now was permeating every stratum of Parisian life. André-Louis, moving as freely, relied in any emergency that might arise upon the protection of his civic card, which announced him for an agent of that dread body the Committee of Public Safety.

Thus these two came openly and without diffidence to mingle with the crowd in the gallery of the Convention.

There was little to interest them until the sturdy figure of Chabot was seen mounting the tribune to address the assembly, and they rubbed their eyes to behold a transmogrified Chabot. No longer was he the unkempt, unclean, red-bonneted sansculotte. He came spruce as a dandy in a tight-fitting brown frock and snowy cravat, his hair combed and tied. The assembly stared, assuming that at last he followed the fashion set by his illustrious leader the great Robespierre. This until the declaration he came to make suggested another explanation. He was there to proclaim himself a lover; and it was supposed that, like a bird at mating time, he had assumed this gay plumage suitably to fill the part.

"Before I pass to the questions of public interest upon which it is my duty to address you, I desire to touch upon a matter entirely personal to myself."

Thus he opened, pausing there to resume a moment later. "I take this opportunity of announcing to you that I am about to marry. It is known that I have been a priest, a capuchin. I should therefore lay before you the motives that have urged me to this resolve. As a legislator I have thought that it was my duty to set an example in all the virtues. It has been made a reproach against me 'that the love of women has played too large a part in my life, and I have come to perceive that I can best silence that calumny by taking the wife that the law accords to me. The woman I am to marry is of recent acquaintance. Brought up like the women of her country in the greatest reserve, she has been screened from the eyes of strangers. I do not pretend where she is concerned to be in love with anything beyond her virtue, her talents and her patriotism. And it is the reputation of these gifts in myself which have discovered for me the road to her affections."

He proceeded to add that no priest should soil his nuptials, or any superstitious ceremonies defile them, and thereby showed how well he knew his audience. For if the declaration brought no more than a murmur of applause from his fellow-legislators it produced a thunder of acclamation from the rabble in the galleries.

Thereafter he passed to matters of business so slender that they revealed themselves for the pretext and not the reason of his presence in the tribune.

André-Louis had listened to him in anger and contempt. Filled with pitying concern for Léopoldine, he was at this moment more intent that his India-Company scheme should result in her deliverance than in the restoration of the Bourbons.

Chabot's place in the tribune was taken by Julien, that other scoundrelly apostate, and André-Louis leaned forward eagerly to hear the attack he was to deliver against the India Company, the burning phrases with which André-Louis himself had supplied this puppet. Julien, however, in concert with Delaunay, had improved upon the original plan. His present address resolved itself into one of those flamboyant exhibitions of logorrhea on the subject of virtue and purity in private and in public life, to which members of the Convention were in these days becoming more and more addicted. It was in the course of this, and no more than in passing, that he alluded to the India Company, as one of those organizations abusing the shelter of the State in which it flourished and turning that shelter to purposes not always beneficial to the State itself.

The allusion brought a sudden attentive stillness to an assembly which hitherto had been a little restless. Somewhere a voice challenged him to be more precise, declared that if he had charges to bring he should bring them specifically, and not by innuendo.

"The reproof is just," said Julien with perfect composure. "When I began to speak I had no intention of touching upon this, or else I should have armed myself with the details necessary for a full exposure of an abuse that must be within the knowledge of many of you. For it can be no secret to those of you who are zealous and watchful that the India Company advanced considerable sums of money to the heretofore King, whereby the deliverance of France from the odious rule of despotism was materially retarded."

His allusion to their watchfulness and zeal was a cunning gag in their mouths. Which of these deputies, by contradicting him or by demanding instantly the evidential details, would betray himself as without zeal and vigilance? Not one, as he well knew. And he left the matter there.

When later Bazire, who had also been taken by surprise, asked him if, indeed, he were in a position to prove what he had said, Julien smiled his sour, cynical smile and shrugged.

"What do proofs matter? The price of the stock will show to-morrow whether my shaft has gone home."

That his shaft had indeed gone home there could be no doubt two days later, by when the stock of the India Company had fallen from 1,500 to 600 francs. Already there was panic among the stockholders.

The next move was made a week later, and it came from Delaunay.

He pretended in the speech with which he electrified the Convention, that as a result of the allegations against the Compagnie des Indes which his confrere Julien of Toulouse had let fall in that place, he had been looking into the affairs of the Company, and what he discovered in them had appalled him. From this he passed to a fulminating denunciation of the fraud which the Company had practised in evading a tax justly imposed by the Nation. To defraud the Republic of moneys due to her, was to deprive her of her life's blood. Delaunay did not hesitate to describe as a sacrilege the defalcations of which the India Company was guilty.

The term was received with applause. On Robespierre's atrabilious countenance the tiger-cat grin was observed to spread as if in commendation.

Then, even as he had wrought up their passions, Delaunay now chilled them again by the motion he put forward. He proposed to dissolve the India Company, placing her directors under the obligation of proceeding to the liquidation of her affairs.

So inadequate to the crime was the proposed punishment that the Convention, after a gasp of surprise that was almost of anger, broke into a babble of discussion. The president rang his bell for silence, and Fabre d'Englantine was seen to be ascending the tribune to voice the general feeling.

He moved deliberately, a man slightly above middle height, of graceful build and careful attire. He had been many things in turn: actor, author, poetaster, painter, composer, thief, murderer, blackguard, and gaolbird. In every part assumed, however, the historian had predominated, and still unmistakably histrionic were his movements, speech and gestures now, that by histrionic arts he had won to a position of eminence in this grotesque parliament. Those very arts served to make him popular with the masses whose sympathies are so easily captured by externals.

The man, however, was not without ability, and in his sonorous, slightly affected voice he displayed now the prompt grasp of affairs of which his mind was capable.

He began by complimenting Delaunay upon his diligence in unveiling the turpitude of the India Company; but deplored the inadequacy of the motion with which Delaunay proposed to deal with it.

"If the Company's administrators are to be left in charge of the Company's liquidation, they are supplied with the means of indefinitely perpetuating it."

Delaunay, like André-Louis who had dictated those very terms, was well aware of this, and awaiting precisely such an objection. Had no one else voiced it, the task would have fallen to Bazire, that other member of this conspiracy. It was a little disconcerting that one who was not in the plot should intervene at this point. But it could not, after all, be serious in its consequences; because they could never have hoped to pack the commission entirely.

Meanwhile Fabre, warming to his subject was becoming more and more inexorable. He professed astonishment that Delaunay should have demanded anything less than the total and immediate extinction of the Company. No measures could be too strong against such a pack of scoundrels. He demanded that the property of these delinquents should immediately be impounded.

This was pushing matters a little further than the conspirators had reckoned. But opinions in the assembly were soon shown to be divided; the Representative Cambon expressed the view that Fabre's demands were too intransigent; that they would be productive of a disorganization in the world of commerce, such as could not ultimately be to the advantage of the Nation. Others followed him, each anxious to parade the purity of his patriotism and earning the applause of the gallery, and the debate might have gone on for ever had not at last Robespierre risen in his place to set a term to it.

Long since departed were the days when men sighed and yawned to behold the mincing Representative from Arras preparing to address the assembly in his dull, monotonous voice. The power that he had become, and for which so much was due to his young ally Saint-Just, was apparent in the almost awed silence that fell upon the assembly immediately upon his rising. Even the ribalds in the gallery who had emancipated themselves from all respect of persons seemed now to hold their breath before that slight, frail, figure. He was dressed with a care that was almost effeminate, in a close sky-blue frock over a striped satin waistcoat. Below this he wore black satin smalls, silk stockings, and buckled shoes whose heels were built up so as to increase his stature. His head emerged from a snowy, elaborately-tied cravat, the hair carefully dressed and powdered.

He stood a moment in silence, his horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up on to his forehead, his myopic eyes peering forth from that lean, pallid countenance with its curiously tip-tilted nose and Wide, almost lipless mouth that was ever set in a tiger-cat grin.

Then the dull, unimpressive voice droned forth. He desired that the counsel of Fabre should be given weight. But this only after due investigation should have confirmed the charges made. For the rest, the matter was not one for the great body of the Convention but for a commission which he desired should be formed at once, not only to investigate but to decree the measures to be taken.

With that, cold and impassive as he had risen, he resumed his seat. His fiat had gone forth. These were not days in which any man in France would dare to call it in question, unless it were that fearless cyclops Danton, who was still absent, honeymooning at Arcis-sur-Aube. Robespierre had demanded that a commission be formed.

This was Chabot's clue. It had been concerted that the demand should come from Delaunay. That it came from a higher authority was all the better. Chabot rose from his seat on Robespierre's immediate left to support the wish expressed by his august leader, and to propose that Delaunay himself should be included in the commission. His real object was thus to connect himself with the business so that he too might be named. This followed easily and naturally. Beyond that, however, things did not quite run the prescribed course. It had been arranged that Julien and Bazire should name each other for service on that commission, and as five members would compose it, thus there would have been an overwhelming preponderance of these in the financial conspiracy.