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

apartments of the proconsul is crowded every day and all day with suppliants and with petitioners, with the citizens of the household and the members of the Compagnie Marat.

But no one has access to the person of the dictator. He stands aloof, apart, hidden from the eyes of the world, a mysterious personality whose word sends hundreds to their death, whose arbitrary will has reduced a once flourishing city to abject poverty and squalor. No tyrant has ever surrounded himself with a greater paraphernalia of pomp and circumstance⁠—no aristo has ever dwelt in greater luxury: the spoils of churches and châteaux fill the Hôtel de la Villestreux from attic to cellar, gold and silver plate adorn his table, priceless works of art hang upon his walls, he lolls on couches and chairs which have been the resting-place of kings. The wholesale spoliation of the entire countryside has filled the demagogue’s abode with all that is most sumptuous in the land.

And he himself is far more inaccessible than was le Roi Soleil in the days of his most towering arrogance, than were the Popes in the glorious days of medieval Rome. Jean Baptiste Carrier, the son of a small farmer, the obscure deputy for Cantal in the National Convention, dwells in the Hôtel de la Villestreux as in a stronghold. No one is allowed near him save a few⁠—a very few⁠—intimates: his valet, two or three women, Fleury the commander of the Marats, and that strange and abominable youngster, Jacques Lalouët, about whom the chroniclers of that tragic epoch can tell us so little⁠—a cynical young braggart, said to be a cousin of Robespierre and the son of a midwife of Nantes, beardless, handsome and vicious: the only human being⁠—so we are told⁠—who had any influence over the sinister proconsul: mere hanger-on of Carrier or spy of the National Convention, no one can say⁠—a malignant personality which has remained an enigma and a mystery to this hour.

None but these few are ever allowed now inside the inner sanctuary wherein dwells and schemes the dictator. Even Lamberty, Fouquet and the others of the staff are kept at arm’s length. Martin-Roget, Chauvelin and other strangers are only allowed as far as the anteroom. The door of the inner chamber is left open and they hear the proconsul’s voice and see his silhouette pass and repass in front of them, but that is all.

Fear of assassination⁠—the inevitable destiny of the tyrant⁠—haunts the man-tiger even within the fastnesses of his lair. Day and night a carriage with four horses stands in readiness on La Petite Hollande, the great, open, tree-bordered Place at the extreme end of the Isle Feydeau and on which give the windows of the Hôtel de la Villestreux. Day and night the carriage is ready⁠—with coachman on the box and postillion in the saddle, who are relieved every two hours lest they get sleepy or slack⁠—with luggage in the boot and provisions always kept fresh inside the coach; everything always ready lest something⁠—a warning from a friend or a threat from an enemy, or merely a sudden access of unreasoning terror, the haunting memory of a bloody act⁠—should decide the tyrant at a moment’s notice to fly from the scenes of his brutalities.

III

Carrier in the small room which he has fitted up for himself as a sumptuous boudoir, paces up and down just like a wild beast in its cage: and he rubs his large bony hands together with the excitement engendered by his own cruelties, by the success of this wholesale butchery which he has invented and carried through.

There never was an uglier man than Carrier, with that long hatchet-face of his, those abnormally high cheekbones, that stiff, lanky hair, that drooping, flaccid mouth and protruding underlip. Nature seemed to have set herself the task of making the face a true mirror of the soul⁠—the dark and hideous soul on which of a surety Satan had already set his stamp. But he is dressed with scrupulous care⁠—not to say elegance⁠—and with a display of jewelry the provenance of which is as unjustifiable as that of the works of art which fill his private sanctum in every nook and cranny.

In front of the tall window, heavy curtains of crimson damask are drawn closely together, in order to shut out the light of day: the room is in all but total darkness: for that is the proconsul’s latest caprice: that no one shall see him save in semi-obscurity.

Captain Fleury has stumbled into the room, swearing lustily as he barks his shins against the angle of a priceless Louis XV bureau. He has to make report on the work done by the Compagnie Marat. Fifty-three priests from the department of Anjou who have refused to take the new oath of obedience to the government of the Republic. The red-capped Company who tracked them down and arrested them, vow that all these calotins have precious objects⁠—money, jewelry, gold plate⁠—concealed about their persons. What is to be done about these things? Are the calotins to be allowed to keep them or to dispose of them for their own profit?

Carrier is highly delighted. What a haul!

“Confiscate everything,” he cries, “then ship the whole crowd of that pestilential rabble, and don’t let me hear another word about them.”

Fleury goes. And that same night fifty-three priests are “shipped” in accordance with the orders of the proconsul, and Carrier, still rubbing his large bony hands contentedly together, exclaims with glee:

“What a torrent, eh! What a torrent! What a revolution!”

And he sends a letter to Robespierre. And to the Committee of Public Safety he makes report:

“Public spirit in Nantes,” he writes, “is magnificent: it has risen to the most sublime heights of revolutionary ideals.”

IV

After the departure of Fleury, Carrier suddenly turned to a slender youth, who was standing close by the window, gazing out through the folds of the curtain on the fine vista