Lord Tony’s Wife Baroness Orczy (story read aloud .TXT) 📖

So la Compagnie Marat is formed⁠—they wear red bonnets on their heads⁠—no stockings on their feet⁠—short breeches to display their bare shins: their captain, Fleury, has access at all times to the person of the proconsul, to make report on the raids which his company effect at all hours of the day or night. Their powers are supreme too. In and out of houses⁠—however private⁠—up and down the streets⁠—through shops, taverns and warehouses, along the quays and the yards⁠—everywhere they go. Everywhere they have the right to go! to ferret and to spy, to listen, to search, to interrogate⁠—the red-capped Company is paid for what it can find. Piecework, what? Work for the guillotine!

And they it is who keep the guillotine busy. Too busy in fact. And the court of justice sitting in the Hôtel du Département is overworked too. Carrier gets impatient. Why waste the time of patriots by so much paraphernalia of justice? Wolves and wolflings can be exterminated so much more quickly, more easily than that. It only needs a stroke of genius, one stroke, and Carrier has it.

He invents the Noyades!

The Drownages we may call them!

They are so simple! An old flat-bottomed barge. The work of two or three ship’s carpenters! Portholes below the waterline and made to open at a given moment. All so very, very simple. Then a journey downstream as far as Belle Isle or la Maréchale, and “sentence of deportation” executed without any trouble on a whole crowd of traitors⁠—“vertical deportation” Carrier calls it facetiously and is mightily proud of his invention and of his witticism too.

The first attempt was highly successful. Ninety priests, and not one escaped. Think of the work it would have entailed on the guillotine⁠—and on the friends of Carrier who sit in justice in the Hôtel du Département! Ninety heads! Bah! That old flat-bottomed barge is the most wonderful laboursaving machine.

After that the “Drownages” become the order of the day. The red-capped Company recruits victims for the hecatomb, and over Nantes Town there hangs a pall of unspeakable horror. The prisons are not vast enough to hold all the victims, so the huge entrepôt, the bonded warehouse on the quay, is converted: instead of chests of coffee it is now encumbered with human freight: into it pell-mell are thrown all those who are destined to assuage Carrier’s passion for killing: ten thousand of them: men, women, and young children, counterrevolutionists, innocent tradesmen, thieves, aristocrats, criminals and women of evil fame⁠—they are herded together like cattle, without straw whereon to lie, without water, without fire, with barely food enough to keep up the last attenuated thread of a miserable existence.

And when the warehouse gets over full, to the Loire with them!⁠—a hundred or two at a time! Pestilence, dysentery decimates their numbers. Under pretence of hygienic requirements two hundred are flung into the river on the 14th day of December. Two hundred⁠—many of them women⁠—crowds of children and a batch of parish priests.

Some there are among Carrier’s colleagues⁠—those up in Paris⁠—who protest! Such wholesale butchery will not redound to the credit of any revolutionary government⁠—it even savours of treachery⁠—it is unpatriotic! There are the emissaries of the National Convention, deputed from Paris to supervise and control⁠—they protest as much as they dare⁠—but such men are swept off their feet by the torrent of Carrier’s gluttony for blood. Carrier’s mission is to “purge the political body of every evil that infests it.” Vague and yet precise! He reckons that he has full powers and thinks he can flaunt those powers in the face of those sent to control him. He does it too for three whole months ere he in his turn meets his doom. But for the moment he is omnipotent. He has to make report every week to the Committee of Public Safety, and he sends brief, garbled versions of his doings. “He is pacifying La Vendée! he is stamping out the remnants of the rebellion! he is purging the political body of every evil that infests it.” Anon he succeeds in getting the emissaries of the National Convention recalled. He is impatient of control. “They are weak, pusillanimous, unpatriotic! He must have freedom to act for the best.”

After that he remains virtual dictator, with none but obsequious, terrified myrmidons around him: these are too weak to oppose him in any way. And the municipality dare not protest either⁠—nor the district council⁠—nor the departmental. They are merely sheep who watch others of their flock being sent to the slaughter.

After that from within his lair the man tiger decides that it is a pity to waste good barges on the cattle: “Fling them out!” he cries. “Fling them out! Tie two and two together. Man and woman! criminal and aristo! the thief with the ci-devant duke’s daughter! the ci-devant marquis with the slut from the streets! Fling them all out together into the Loire and pour a hail of grape shot above them until the last struggler has disappeared!” “Equality!” he cries, “Equality for all! Fraternity! Unity in death!”

His friends call this new invention of his: “Marriage Républicain!” and he is pleased with the mot.

And Republican marriages become the order of the day.

Nantes itself now is akin to a desert⁠—a desert wherein the air is filled with weird sounds of cries and of moans, of furtive footsteps scurrying away into dark and secluded byways, of musketry and confused noises, of sorrow and of lamentations.

Nantes is a city of the dead⁠—a city of sleepers. Only Carrier is awake⁠—thinking and devising and planning shorter ways and swifter, for the extermination of traitors.

In the Hôtel de la Villestreux the tiger has built his lair: at the apex of the island of Feydeau, with the windows of the hotel facing straight down the Loire. From here there is a magnificent view downstream upon the quays which are now deserted and upon the once prosperous port of Nantes.

The staircase of the hotel which leads up to the