Collected Works of Eugène Sue

by Eugène Sue

  “At nine o’clock in the morning Couthon, and Gombeau, a conspirator of the Commune, were brought in on stretchers as far as the big staircase of the Committee, where they were deposited. The citizens detailed to watch them stood about, while a commissioner and an officer of the National Guard went to report to Billaud-Varenne, Barrere and Collot D’Herbois, then sitting in committee. They took an order to these three calling for Robespierre, Couthon and Gombeau to be removed at once to the Conciergerie Prison, a decree which was immediately carried out by the good citizens to whom had been confided the guard over the three prisoners.

  “St. Just and Dumas were taken before the Committee in the audience hall, and at once taken on to the Conciergerie by those who had brought them in. St. Just gazed at the large engrossing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and said, as he pointed towards it, ‘Yet it was I who got that passed!’

  “Such was the downfall of Robespierre. His agony was more cruel than his death. His erstwhile colleagues on the committees insulted him, struck at him, spat in his face; the clerks of the bureau pricked him with their penknives.”

  So died Robespierre by the guillotine. Let us glorify, sons of Joel, the memory of this great citizen, the Incorruptible revolutionist. And as sacred for us let the memory be of the other illustrious martyr-victims of Thermidor, like St. Just, Lebas, Couthon, Robespierre the younger; or martyrs obscure, like that throng of patriots whose blood flowed from the scaffold in torrents during the Four Days. The reaction of Thermidor smote with the guillotine without judgment; it assassinated the greater part of the last defenders of the Republic.

  PART III. NAPOLEON

  CHAPTER I.

  THE WHITE TERROR.

  TO-DAY, THE 22ND of September, 1830, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the foundation of the French Republic in 1792, I, John Lebrenn, arrived at the sixtieth year of my life, add these pages to the legend of the Sword of Honor.

  I have been for long back in Paris, established with my family in St. Denis Street. During my stay in Brittany, beginning after the days of Thermidor, 1794, I kept track of the more important historical events by means of the journals of the period. Later, on my return to Paris, I re-entered political life and took part in the events of the Eighteenth Brumaire, the Hundred Days, and the Revolution of 1830. In the following pages I shall endeavor to reproduce briefly the principal deeds of these three epochs — 1800, 1815, and 1830.

  Should I depart this life before the completion of my task, my son Marik Lebrenn, now arrived in his thirty-seventh year, will supply my place in the work, aided thereto by the material and notes left by me, and by his own memories. I have postponed from year to year this continuation to our family legends, awaiting the accomplishment of the two prophecies which hover ever above these accounts. One has been realized, in the period from 1800 to 1814; the other has had but one approach toward success — in July of this present year 1830.

  Alas, we have already seen the sinister fulfilment of the prophecy of Robespierre the Incorruptible, the martyr of Thermidor— ‘The brigands have triumphed, the Revolution is lost.’ The reins of the Revolution fell into hands that were corrupt, perfidious, criminal. The national representation was debauched, annihilated in the month of Brumaire by Bonaparte; military despotism seized the power, and civil war desolated the country.

  The second prophecy of our family records — that there should be no more Kings — had already begun to move towards fulfilment. Since 1793 the tradition of republicanism had struck in the people’s minds roots that were live, deep, and indestructible. The people protested against the Consulate of Bonaparte by the conspiracy of Topino Lebrun and Arena; it protested against the Empire by forming the secret society of the Philadelphians and by the conspiracy of General Mallet; it protested against the Restoration by several conspiracies, among them that of the four sergeants of La Rochelle.

  Let us rest firm in the assurance that, despite these eclipses, the star of the Republic will yet rise over France, over the world, and our children will yet greet the appearance of the United States of Europe, the Universal Republic.

  Meanwhile the disinherited shuddered and trembled before the fury of the counter-revolution. At Avignon, at Lyons, at Marseilles, prisoner patriots were massacred without even the excuse the latter had when in September they put the traitors to death in the name of public safety and of the fatherland, menaced from without and within. The victims of the royalist reaction were ten times as numerous as those of the Terror. The murders of Lyons pass all belief, and that in time of peace, without provocation or cause. In one single day and in one single prison one hundred and ninety-seven prisoners, among whom were three women, were assassinated by the royalist dandies known as the Jeunesse Dorée, or “Gilded Youth.” At Marseilles, at the St. John Fortress, two hundred and ten patriots were slashed to pieces or burned in the same day.

  But let us draw the veil over these saturnalia of blood, these orgies of the White Terror, and compose our minds in thoughts of the republican armies. Our armies learned with grief of the fall of Robespierre; but then, submissive to the civil and military powers, and respecting the decrees of the Convention, they accepted the Thermidor government; and under the command of Hoche, Marceau, Jourdan, Moreau, Augereau, and Joubert, they continued to battle against the coalized Kings. Holland, freed by our arms, set itself up anew as a Republic; Prussia and Spain sued for peace and obtained it; the royalists, encouraged by the reaction, attempted again to arouse the Vendee, with the support of the English, who made a descent upon Quiberon; but Hoche snuffed out that civil war in its first flickers. The Convention modified on the 15th Thermidor, year III (August 2, 1795), the Constitution of 1793. The mass of the proletariat was stripped of its political rights. According to the Constitution of 1793, all citizens twenty-one years old, born and living in France, were electors, and members of the sovereign people; according to the Constitution of 1795, on the contrary, it was necessary to pay a direct tax in order to be eligible to the electoral right. The Constitution of the year III, further, divided the legislative power into two bodies, the Council of Five Hundred, and the Council of Ancients; to be a member of the latter, one must have attained the age of forty. The executive power, or Directorate, was to be composed of five members, chosen by the Councils, which were themselves elected by a taxpayers’ and indirect vote, in two degrees. Primary assemblies nominated electors, and these latter chose the deputies to the Councils. The imposition of a tax qualification excluded the proletariat from the count, and delivered it up to the will of a reactionary bourgeoisie; hence the royalist party had not the slightest doubt of the success of its candidates. The majority of the old Convention, composed in part of lukewarm oligarchic republicans, but in the main of corrupted legislators who were opposed to a restoration of the monarchy (whose vengeance they feared, most of them having been regicides), attempted to obviate the certain success of the royalists by decreeing that two-thirds of the old members must be re-elected. This restraint imposed upon the freedom of the ballot was at once iniquitous and absurd, and paved the way for a new civil war. The Constitution of the year III and the clause relative to the re-election of two-thirds of the members of the Convention was submitted to the sanction of the primary assemblies, composed of taxpayers. Among these, thanks to the exclusion of the proletariat, the reaction was on top. Certain of a majority in the approaching elections, and expecting consequently to control both the Councils and Directorate, the reaction had anticipated dealing the last blows to the expiring Republic, and re-establishing the monarchy. But defeated in their hope by the decree rendering obligatory the re-election of two-thirds of the Conventionals, the royalists incited the primary assemblies against this decree. On the 11th Vendemiaire, year IV (October 3, 1795) the bourgeois and aristocratic Sections of the center of Paris — Daughters of St. Thomas and Hill of the Mills among others — came to the front of the movement, and a horde of Emigrants and ex-suspects raised an insurrection. The rebels declared the decree com
pelling the re-election of two-thirds of the old Conventionals an assault upon the rights of the ‘sovereign people’; they took up arms and organized a council of resistance under the presidency of the Duke of Nivernais. The Convention named a committee of defense and called to its assistance the patriots of the suburbs. Twelve or fifteen hundred patriots responded to the appeal. The royalists, to the number of forty thousand men, or thereabouts, under the command of Generals Danican, Duhoux, and the ex-bodyguard Lafond, marched against the troops of the Convention, and won at first some advantage over them. Barras, commander-in-chief of the forces at the disposal of the Assembly, called to his staff a young artillery officer named Bonaparte, whose military renown dated from the siege of Toulon. The latter hastily brought up the cannon from the camp of Sablons, made an able strategic disposition of his forces, and, with the aid of the patriots of ‘93, wiped out the royalist insurrection before the Church of St. Roche, on the 13th Vendemiaire, year IV. The Convention employed its last session in organizing the Councils; that of the Ancients was composed of two hundred and fifty members; the remaining elected deputies formed the Council of the Five Hundred.

  The members of the Directorate elected by these Councils were Carnot, Rewbell, Lareveillere-Lepaux, Letourneur, and Barras — all of them, except Barras, men of honesty, only moderate republicans, but sincere.

  The 4th Brumaire, year IV (October 26, 1795), the Convention pronounced its own dissolution. It had been in session since the proclamation of the Republic, September 21, 1792.

  CHAPTER II.

  COLONEL OLIVER.

  THE STUDIO OF Citizen Martin, painter, member of the Council of Five Hundred, and former captain and then battalion commander of the Paris Volunteers who fought at Weissenburg, was decorated in martial fashion with pictures and sketches depicting episodes in the republican wars, placed here and there on easels; models of antique statuary and studies of nature graced the walls. On one side was a gay display composed of the epaulets of Commander Martin, his arms of war, and his military hat, whose two bullet holes bore witness to its wearer’s intrepidity. One morning early in November, 1799, the painter himself was gladsomely embracing John Lebrenn, who had just deposited on a stool the traveling bag he carried.

  “Well, but I’m glad to see you, my friend,” said John warmly, “after so many chances and such a long separation!”

  “It was made less grievous for me,” rejoined Martin, “by our correspondence. What is the news of your worthy wife, your little Marik, and Madam Desmarais?”

  “They were all well when I left them.”

  “And your cloth business — does it prosper as you would wish?”

  “Our labor furnishes us the means to supply our modest wants; we desire nothing more. Our life is rolling on peacefully at Vannes, that old town of Armorica, the cradle of our family.”

  “I know how greatly the country should please you.”

  “And nevertheless, we must soon leave our nest, for it is impossible there to give my son a suitable education. In a year or two, or perhaps even sooner, we shall return to Paris, where we shall continue our Breton cloth commerce. Such, at least, is my intention and that of my dear wife and her mother.”

  “Hurrah! May your plan be realized, the sooner the better, my dear friend. Then we shall no longer be reduced to a correspondence for consolation.”

  “Your last letters,” replied John, “decided me to come to Paris, seeing the Republic was in danger of perishing. I think I could be useful to you in such a case, and also perhaps to the Republic, by still pulling a trigger against her enemies.”

  “The political situation is indeed grave. Nevertheless, there is no ground for fearing a catastrophe very soon. In the Council of Five Hundred there is an imposing republican majority; we are decided to preserve liberty, and to fight the clericals, Jesuits and monarchists to the finish.”

  “I doubt not your energy nor that of your friends; but the Republic has now been for some time deprived of the popular element, its life, its spirit, its strength.”

  “True; since Thermidor a great gap has been made in the republican ranks. You may be sure that General Bonaparte, for all his military renown, would never have dared affront Vergniaud, Danton, or Robespierre, had they been in the Council of Five Hundred. At their voice the people would rise in arms, and the ambitious dictator would be sent before the revolutionary tribunal.”

  “Belated regrets, my friend. But explain to me how it is that the Directorate, knowing full well the intrigues organized in Napoleon’s favor by his brothers, by Fouché, and by that former Bishop Talleyrand, than whom no meaner rascal ever lived — how the Directorate was so weak as not to send this General Bonaparte before a court-martial, guilty as he was of deserting the army in Egypt, more than six hundred leagues from France? In the height of the Convention such an act would not have passed unpunished.”

  “For this weakness of the Directorate, and our own indecision in the Council of Five Hundred, there are many causes. Sieyès is the soul of the conspiracy against the Constitution of the year III, which he himself framed, while we republicans rather defend that Constitution, defective as it is, in order not to throw the Republic open to new dangers. Sieyès, a member of the Directorate, and Roger Ducos, his colleague and accomplice, are at the head of the sworn enemies of the present Constitution. Among these oppositionists are the majority of the Council of Ancients and some members of the Council of Five Hundred; then come a crowd of intriguers of all sorts, stock brokers, men with frayed reputations, get-rich-quick contractors, bourgeois weather-vanes, corruptionists, harpies, repentant Terrorists, like Fouché and your brother-in-law Desmarais, who is now a member of the Council of Ancients. Sieyès’s object is to overthrow the Constitution of the year III by a coup d’etat and replace it by a bourgeois oligarchy; on top of which would come a constitutional monarchy similar to that of ‘92, and then it would be done for the Republic. That is the plan of the opposition. Now here is the situation of us republicans, who constitute the majority of the Council of Five Hundred. We count on the support of two members of the Directorate, Moulins and Gohier, devoted to the Republic. Then in case of a conflict, we have cause to hope that General Bernadotte, whose influence may serve to blanket Bonaparte’s, will march on our side. The Council of Five Hundred has, moreover, for braces, the remains of the several republican parties — Girondins, Mountainists, Jacobins, Terrorists — as well as a large number of former members of the Commune who escaped the scaffold after Thermidor, and belong to the bourgeoisie — men of progress and free thought.”

  “And the people,” inquired John again, “the workingmen of the suburbs, are they also sunk in inertia? They should form a strong element for you.”

  “Alas, they live indifferent to public affairs, except some workingmen in Santerre’s brewery and some old sans-culottes, such as your old foreman Castillon — whom you will no doubt see this morning, as I notified him of your arrival.”

  “Thank you, friend, for having arranged this pleasure for me. I shall be happy to see our brave Castillon.”

  “He is still the industrious and honest artisan of yore; only, credulous and naïve as a veritable child of the people, he is like so many other sincere republicans, a great partisan of Bonaparte’s.”

  “Castillon, once so devoted to the Republic!”

  “Exactly, since there is not a better republican — God save the mark! — than this very General Bonaparte, according to Castillon and his friends.”

  Just then Martin’s servant entered to hand him a letter, saying: “An ordnance dragoon has just brought this epistle, citizen, and awaits your answer.”

  Martin tore open the envelope and read aloud:

  “Perhaps you recall, sir, an under-officer in the Third Hussars, who in the days of terrorism when the nation’s honor sought refuge in the armies, fought with you in the defense of a battery at the battle of Weissenburg. This under-officer has made his way. He has had the happy fortune of serving under the orders
of the greatest captain of ancient and modern times, on whom to-day hangs the safety of France.

  “Knowing, sir, your renown as a painter of battles, I desire to engage you on a picture. I beg you to let me know at what hour to-day you can grant me an interview on the subject of this work, on which you may set your own price.

  “Accept, sir, my best sentiments,

  “OLIVER,

  “Colonel of the Seventh Dragoons,

  aide-de-camp to General Bonaparte.

  “Tell the soldier I await his colonel this morning,” added Martin to the domestic, after a moment’s thought.

  The servant left the studio, and Lebrenn, to whom Martin had passed the letter, began:

  “My sister’s forecast, I see, was not wide of the mark. ‘Oliver,’ she said to me, ‘loves battles. He sees in war only a trade, a means to carve out a fortune — pride and ambition.’ And Oliver has become a colonel and one of the staff officers of Bonaparte.”