Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the last he had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable calm, and in the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the great knife his voice suddenly rang out.

  “She is greater than Brutus!” was his cry; and he added, addressing those who stared at him in stupefaction: “It were beautiful to have died with her!”

  He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at that moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner’s attendant, who, in holding up Charlotte’s truncated head, slapped the cheek with his hand. The story runs that the dead face reddened under the blow. Scientists of the day disputed over this, some arguing from it a proof that consciousness does not at once depart the brain upon decapitation.

  That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded with copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of Republicanism, the deliverer of France, in which occurs the comparison with Joan of Arc, that other great heroine of France. This was the work of Adam Lux. He made no secret of it. The vision of her had so wrought upon the imagination of this susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such enthusiasm, that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last moments of life she had inspired him.

  Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he urged the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her act, placed her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately demanded for her the honour and veneration of posterity. It is in this manifesto that he applies euphemistically to her deed the term “tyrannicide.” That document he boldly signed with his own name, realizing that he would pay for that temerity with his life.

  He was arrested on the 24th of July — exactly a week from the day on which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they exerted themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and release if he would publicly retract what he had written. But he laughed the proposal to scorn, ardently resolved to follow into death the woman who had aroused the hopeless, immaterial love that made his present torment.

  Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor named Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that the sight of Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a paper on this plea, recommending that clemency be shown to the young doctor on the score of his affliction, and that he should be sent to a hospital or to America. Adam Lux was angry when he heard of this, and protested indignantly against the allegations of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la Montagne, which published his declaration on the 26th of September, to the effect that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his anxiety to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his sanity.

  He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of October, when at last he was brought to trial. He stood it joyously, in a mood of exultation at his approaching deliverance. He assured the court that he did not fear the guillotine, and that all ignominy had been removed from such a death by the pure blood of Charlotte.

  They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.

  “Forgive me, sublime Charlotte,” he exclaimed, “if I should find it impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness that were yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right that the adored should be above the adorer.”

  Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers had been a mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic exaltation. At five o’clock that same afternoon he stepped from the tumbril under the gaunt shadow of the guillotine. He turned to the people, his eyes bright, a flush on his cheeks.

  “At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte,” he told them, and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the bridegroom on his way to the nuptial altar.

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

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  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

  Charles Dickens

  D.H. Lawrence

  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  George Eliot

  H. G. Wells

  Henry James

  Ivan Turgenev

  Jack London

  James Joyce

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  Mark Twain

  Oscar Wilde

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sir Walter Scott

  The Brontës

  Thomas Hardy

  Virginia Woolf

  Wilkie Collins

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

  Gustave Flaubert (English)

  H. Rider Haggard

  Herman Melville

  Honoré de Balzac (English)

  J. W. von Goethe (English)

  Jules Verne

  L. Frank Baum

  Lewis Carroll

  Marcel Proust (English)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nikolai Gogol

  O. Henry

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  Tobias Smollett

  Victor Hugo

  William Shakespeare

  Series Three

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ann Radcliffe

  Ben Jonson

  Charles Lever

  Émile Zola

  Ford Madox Ford

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  George Gissing

  George Orwell

  Guy de Maupassant

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Henrik Ibsen

  Henry David Thoreau

  Henry Fielding

  J. M. Barrie

  James Fenimore Cooper

  John Buchan

  John Galsworthy

  Jonathan Swift

  Kate Chopin

  Katherine Mansfield

  L. M. Montgomery

  Laurence Sterne

  Mary Shelley

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  Washington Irving

  Series Four

  Arnold Bennett

  Arthur Machen

  Beatrix Potter

  Bret Harte

  Captain Frederick Marryat

  Charles Kingsley

  Charles Reade

  G. A. Henty

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Edgar Wallace

  E. M. Forster

  E. Nesbit

  George Meredith

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jerome K. Jerome

  John Ruskin

  Maria Edgeworth

  M. E. Braddon

  Miguel de Cervantes

  M. R. James

  R. M. Ballantyne

  Robert E. Howard

  Samuel Johnson

  Stendhal

  Stephen Crane

  Zane Grey

 
Series Five

  Algernon Blackwood

  Anatole France

  Beaumont and Fletcher

  Charles Darwin

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  Edward Gibbon

  E. F. Benson

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  George Bernard Shaw

  George MacDonald

  Hilaire Belloc

  John Bunyan

  John Webster

  Margaret Oliphant

  Maxim Gorky

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Radclyffe Hall

  Robert W. Chambers

  Samuel Butler

  Samuel Richardson

  Sir Thomas Malory

  Thomas Carlyle

  William Harrison Ainsworth

  William Dean Howells

  William Morris

  Series Six

  Anthony Hope

  Aphra Behn

  Arthur Morrison

  Baroness Emma Orczy

  Captain Mayne Reid

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  E. W. Hornung

  Ellen Wood

  Frances Burney

  Frank Norris

  Frank R. Stockton

  Hall Caine

  Horace Walpole

  One Thousand and One Nights

  R. Austin Freeman

  Rafael Sabatini

  Saki

  Samuel Pepys

  Sir Issac Newton

  Stanley J. Weyman

  Thomas De Quincey

  Thomas Middleton

  Voltaire

  William Hazlitt

  William Hope Hodgson

  Ancient Classics

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  Aristophanes

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  Herodotus

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  Plotinus

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  Sallust

  Sappho

  Seneca the Younger

  Sophocles

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  Delphi Poets Series

  A. E. Housman

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  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Andrew Marvell

  Beowulf

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  Christina Rossetti

  D. H Lawrence (poetry)

  Dante Alighieri (English)

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Delphi Poetry Anthology

  Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)

  Edmund Spenser

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  Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Emily Dickinson

  Ezra Pound

  Friedrich Schiller (English)

  George Herbert

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

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  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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  John Dryden

  John Keats

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  Ludovico Ariosto

  Luís de Camões

  Matthew Arnold

  Michael Drayton

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Robert Browning

  Robert Burns

  Robert Frost

  Robert Southey

  Rumi

  Rupert Brooke

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Sir Philip Sidney

  Sir Thomas Wyatt

  Sir Walter Raleigh

  Thomas Chatterton

  Thomas Gray

  Thomas Hardy (poetry)

  Thomas Hood

  Torquato Tasso

  T. S. Eliot

  W. B. Yeats

  Walt Whitman

  Wilfred Owen

  William Blake

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  Masters of Art

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  Sandro Botticelli

  Raphael

  Rembrandt van Rijn

  Titian

  Vincent van Gogh

  Wassily Kandinsky

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  Sabatini died during his final visit to Adelboden, Switzerland, in 1950; he was buried in Adelboden Cemetery; the epitaph on his headstone was the first sentence of his novel Scaramouche: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”