The Historical Nights' Entertainment by Rafael Sabatini (most important books to read .txt) 📖

have you, and, by — , you shall not escape me, you — !”

 

Marc Antoine looked into the Representative’s face, and saw there

the wickedness of his intent. He stiffened. Nature had endowed

him with wits, and he used them now.

 

“Citizen Carrier,” he said, “I understand. I am to be murdered

tonight in the gloom and the silence. But you shall perish after

me in daylight, and amid the execrations of the people. You may

have intercepted my letters to my father and to Robespierre. But

if I do not leave Nantes, my father will come to ask an account of

you, and you will end your life on the scaffold like the miserable

assassin that you are.”

 

Of all that tirade, but one sentence had remained as if corroded

into the mind of Carrier. “My letters to my father and to

Robespierre,” the astute Marc Antoine had said. And Marc Antoine

saw the Representative’s mouth loosen, saw a glint of fear replace

the ferocity in his dark eyes.

 

What Marc Antoine intended to suggest had instantly leapt to

Carrier’s mind - that there had been a second letter which his

agents had missed. They should pay for that. But, meanwhile, if

it were true, he dare not for his neck’s sake go further in this

matter. He may have suspected that it was not true. But he had

no means of testing that suspicion. Marc Antoine, you see, was

subtle.

 

“Your father?“growled the Representative. “Who is your father?”

 

“The Deputy Jullien.”

 

“What?” Carrier straightened himself, affecting an immense

astonishment. “You are the son of the Deputy Julien?” He burst

into a laugh. He came forward, holding out both his hands. He

could be subtle, too, you see. “My friend, why did you not say

so sooner? See in what a ghastly mistake you have let me flounder.

I imagined you - of course, it was foolish of me - to be a

proscribed rascal from Angers, of the same name.”

 

He had fallen upon Marc Antoine’s neck, and was embracing him.

 

“Forgive me, my friend!” he besought him. “Come and dine with me

to-morrow, and we will laugh over it together.”

 

But Marc Antoine had no mind to dine with Carrier, although he

promised to do so readily enough. Back at his inn, scarce

believing that he had got away alive, still sweating with terror

at the very thought of his near escape, he packed his valise,

and, by virtue of his commission, obtained post-horses at once.

 

On the morrow from Angers, safe beyond the reach of Carrier, he

wrote again to Robespierre, and this time also to his father.

 

“In Nantes,” he wrote, “I found the old regime in its worst form.”

He knew the jargon of Liberty, the tune that set the patriots

a-dancing. “Carrier’s insolent secretaries emulate the intolerable

haughtiness of a ci-devant minister’s lackeys. Carrier himself

lives surrounded by luxury, pampered by women ‘and parasites,

keeping a harem and a court. He tramples justice in the mud. He

has had all those who filled the prisons flung untried into the

Loire. The city of Nantes,” he concluded, “needs saving. The

Vendean revolt must be suppressed, and Carrier the slayer of Liberty

recalled.”

 

The letter had its effect, and Carrier was recalled to Paris, but

not in disgrace. Failing health was urged as the solicitous reason

for his retirement from the arduous duties of governing Nantes.

 

In the Convention his return made little stir, and even when early

in the following July he learnt that Bourbotte, his successor at

Nantes, had ordered the arrest of Goullin, Bachelier, Grandmaison,

and his other friends of the committee, on the score of the

drownings and the appropriation of national property confiscated

from emigres, he remained calm, satisfied that his own position was

unassailable.

 

But the members of the Committee of Nantes were sent to Paris for

trial, and their arrival there took place on that most memorable

date in the annals of the Revolution, the 10th Thermidor (July 29,

1794, O.S.), the day on which Robespierre fell and the floodgates

of vengeance upon the terrorists were flung open.

 

You have seen in the case of Marc Antoine Jullien how quick Carrier

could be to take a cue. In a coach he followed the tumbril that

bore Robespierre to execution, radiant of countenance and shouting

with the loudest, “Death to the traitor!” On the morrow from the

rostrum of the Convention, he passionately represented himself as

a victim of the fallen tyrant, cleverly turning to his own credit

the Marc Antoine affair, reminding the Convention how he had

himself been denounced to Robespierre. He was greeted with applause

in that atmosphere of Thermidorean reaction.

 

But Nemesis was stalking him relentlessly if silently.

 

Among a batch of prisoners whom a chain of curious chances had

brought from Nantes to Paris was our old friend Leroy the cocassier,

required now as a witness against the members of the committee.

 

Having acquainted the court with the grounds of his arrest, and the

fact that for three years he had lain forgotten and without trial

in the pestilential prison of Le Bouffay, Leroy passed on to a

recital of his sufferings on that night of terror when he had gone

down the Loire in the doomed lighter. He told his tale with an

artlessness that rendered it the more moving and convincing. The

audience crowding the chamber of justice shuddered with horror,

and sobbed over the details of his torments, wept for joy over his

miraculous preservation. At the close he was applauded on all

sides, which bewildered him a little, for he had never known

anything but abuse in all his chequered life.

 

And then, at the promptings of that spirit of reaction that was

abroad in those days when France was awakening from the nightmare

of terror, some one made there and then a collection on his behalf,

and came to thrust into his hands a great bundle of assignats and

bank bills, which to the humble cocassier represented almost a

fortune. It was his turn to weep.

 

Then the crowd in the court which had heard his story shouted for

the head of Carrier. The demand was taken up by the whole of Paris,

and finally his associates of the Convention handed him over to the

Revolutionary Tribunal.

 

He came before it on November 25th, and he could not find counsel

to defend him. Six advocates named in succession by the President

refused to plead the cause of so inhuman a monster. In a rage, at

last Carrier announced that he would defend himself. He did.

 

He took the line that his business in Nantes had been chiefly

concerned with provisioning the Army of the West; that he had had

little to do with the policing of Nantes, which he left entirely to

the Revolutionary Committee; and that he had no knowledge of the

things said to have taken place. But Goullin, Bachelier, and the

others were there to fling back the accusation in their endeavours

to save their own necks at the expense of his.

 

He was sentenced on the very anniversary of that terrible night on

which the men of the Marat Company broke into the prison of Le

Bouffay, and he was accompanied in the tumbril by Grandmaison the

pitiless, who was now filled with self-pity to such an extent that

he wept bitterly.

 

The crowd, which had hooted and insulted him from the Conciergerie

to the Place de Greve, fell suddenly silent as he mounted the

scaffold, his step firm, but his shoulders bowed, and his eyes upon

the ground.

 

Suddenly upon the silence, grotesquely, horribly merry, broke the

sound of a clarinet playing the “Ca ira!”

 

Jerking himself erect, Carrier turned and flung the last of his

terrible glances at the musician.

 

A moment later the knife fell with a thud, and a bleeding head

rolled into the basket, the eyes still staring, but powerless now

to inspire terror.

 

Upon the general silence broke an echo of the stroke.

 

“Vlan!” cried a voice. “And there’s a fine end to a great drowner!”

 

It was Leroy the cocassier. The crowd took up the cry.

 

IX. THE NIGHT OF NUPTIALS

 

CHARLES THE BOLD AND SAPPHIRA DANVELT

 

When Philip the Good succumbed at Bruges of an apoplexy in the early

part of the year 1467, the occasion was represented to the stout

folk of Flanders as a favourable one to break the Burgundian yoke

under which they laboured. It was so represented by the agents of

that astute king, Louis XI, who ever preferred guile to the direct

and costly exertion of force.

 

Charles, surnamed the Bold (le Temeraire), the new Duke of Burgundy,

was of all the French King’s enemies by far the most formidable and

menacing just then; and the wily King, who knew better than to

measure himself with a foe that was formidable, conceived a way to

embarrass the Duke and cripple his resources at the very outset of

his reign. To this end did he send his agents into the Duke’s Flemish

dominions, there to intrigue with the powerful and to stir up the

spirit of sedition that never did more than slumber in the hearts of

those turbulent burghers.

 

It was from the Belfry Tower of the populous, wealthy city of Ghent

- then one of the most populous and wealthy cities of Europe - that

the call to arms first rang out, summoning the city’s forty thousand

weavers to quit their looms and take up weapons - the sword, the

pike, and that arm so peculiarly Flemish, known as the goedendag.

>From Ghent the fierce flame of revolt spread rapidly to the valley

of the Meuse, and the scarcely less important city of Liege, where

the powerful guilds of armourers and leather workers proved as ready

for battle as the weavers of Ghent.

 

They made a brave enough show until Charles the Bold came face to

face with them at Saint-Trond, and smashed the mutinous burgher army

into shards, leaving them in their slaughtered thousands upon the

stricken field.

 

The Duke was very angry. He felt that the Flemings had sought to

take a base advantage of him at a moment when it was supposed he

would not be equal to protecting his interests, and he intended to

brand it for all time upon their minds that it was not safe to take

such liberties with their liege lord. Thus, when a dozen of the

most important burghers of Liege came out to him very humbly in

their shirts, with halters round their necks, to kneel in the dust

at his feet and offer him the keys of the city, he spurned the

offer with angry disdain.

 

“You shall be taught,” he told them, “how little I require your

keys, and I hope that you will remember the lesson for your own

good.”

 

On the morrow his pioneers began to smash a breach, twenty fathoms

wide, in one of the walls of the city, rolling the rubble into the

ditch to fill it up at the spot. When the operation was complete,

Charles rode through the gap, as a conqueror, with vizor lowered

and lance on thigh at the head of his Burgundians, into his city

of Liege, whose fortifications he commanded should be permanently

demolished.

 

That was the end of the Flemish rising of 1467 against Duke Charles

the Bold of Burgundy. The weavers returned to their looms, the

armourers to their forges, and the glove-makers and leather workers

to their shears. Peace was restored; and to see that it was kept,

Charles appointed military governors of his confidence where he

deemed them necessary.

 

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