The Man Who Was Born Again

by Paul Busson

  And still I felt compassion for the two gentlemen going to their death.

  I was awakened from my thoughts by the pressure of people who wanted to move with the procession. I shrank back and let the mob push past me. We had arrived in a small square, surrounded on all sides by old gabled houses with blackened walls. I felt my feet sink into a dark sticky slime, and I was obliged to find some higher ground to escape the disgusting mire; its nauseously-sweet smell explained its origin. There was a wild roaring and murmuring of voices round me. All the windows of the surrounding houses were full of people, and handkerchiefs were being waved by them to draw the attention of friends down below.

  Straight before me in the middle of the square, dominating all heads, hats and bonnets, there stood a narrow two-legged gallows. It was painted brown; the oblique sliding blade hung from the crossbeam glistening in the sun. The posts between which it slid loomed dark and greasy in the broad daylight: the timber was all soaked with human blood and grease.

  The little group of the condemned rose stiffly and with difficulty from the cart’s planks. A horse neighed, scenting the blood. The unhappy people who had now arrived at their last destination helped each other out of the cart amiably and politely. The old priest took pains with the crippled Dr. Postremo, who was making frightful grimaces, his teeth madly chattering. I saw the powdered heads of the others and the hunchback’s dishevelled hair as they went up the narrow corridor of soldiers. Calmly and slowly, the victims went up the short ladder towards the engine of death.

  Taunts flew at them, fists were shaken in their direction, and hideous fat market-women who formed the front row, some of them even sitting on stools knitting, made coarse jests. I saw every doomed face quite distinctly. Except Postremo they all went towards their fate with stony composure in face and manner.

  The excited crowd that surrounded Guillotin’s machine was in constant movement, and I found myself gradually pushed quite near to it, face to face with the victims.

  I wished myself away, for the sight of the tragic preliminaries caused a dreadful pressure on my heart. But I was unable to move, I was held as fast as a wedge; I could not even turn away my face from the dishevelled hair of a dirty woman who stood in front of me and smelt of garlic; I could not help being bespattered by the man behind me when he was seized by a fit of sneezing. But these little nastinesses soon disappeared before one nameless horror.

  A giant sprang on the scaffold. His appearance was disgusting and coarse beyond anything I had ever seen in my varied life. He had broad shoulders, a bare chest covered with red hair, and sinewy arms; and, planted on a short neck, the face of a diabolical ape with gnashing teeth, evil eyes, and a brash of flaming red bristles. It was not Samson, whose picture I had seen in the shop windows. I learned that he was unwell to-day and was replaced by his first assistant. I was struck with terror by the mere sight of the fellow.

  This human beast, who was followed by two raw-looking youths, grinned and licked his blue lips and then pointed at Postremo. The two assistants behind him instantly laid hands on the hunchback. Postremo kicked and struggled, cried out words in an unknown language, and drew his deformed head still farther back into his shoulders; but vainly, for they bound him in a twinkling to the perpendicular plank and upset it, so that he lay helplessly on his face on a trough-like board with its fore-part pushed in between the posts. A shudder went through me when the executioner pressed his hairy blood-smirched hand on the button in one of the posts. The blade came down with a rush and a wheeze. Something leapt into a basket, the deformed body kicked, as poor Haymon had done under the murderous stone; and out of the gigantic, dark red gash belched a stream of blood that ran down the boards with a gurgling sound.

  The executioner’s hand dived into the basket and lifted the head high into the air. The axe had not been able to reach the hunchback’s neck and the lower jaw was consequently severed from the head and hung from the neck, displaying its crescent of teeth. The mutilated grimace stared me straight in the face. And the dreadful head slowly drew an eyelid over a protruding eyeball, as if it wanted to blink at me.

  “It does not look pretty, citizen,” said a workman at my side. “But what other way was there of beheading the hunchback angel-maker?” He drew out a bottle from under his apron that smelt of liquor.

  “There, have a drink - it keeps the food down when it wants to rise from your stomach.”

  I took a gulp of the strong, burning brandy and its warmth restored me. Once more I looked round to see whether I could escape the next scene to come; but there was no way of getting through this wall of human bodies.

  Thus I was forced to stay and witness the execution of all the six condemned people: each time I heard the crack of the falling blade a shudder went through the whole of my body. I was covered with cold perspiration and my legs trembled violently.

  After the old lady had died calmly came the last of the cartful, the officer of the Flanders regiment, which had been the last of the army to remain loyal to the King. While the executioner’s assistants were busy fastening him down with blood-soaked straps he turned to the man of blood, his eyes alight with anger, and in a loud and distinct voice he shouted: “Don’t you dare to hold my head up to the crowd with your dirty paws, you red-bristled hog!”

  The executioner only curled his thick lips and waited indifferently for the board to be tilted and the neck fitted into the hole; when all was ready he let the axe fall, so that two streams of blood sprang from the neck stump. He put his hand into the basket.

  But he hastily pulled it back again with a loud grunt of pain and wrung his index finger in the air, as if it had touched red-hot iron. In a mad rage he kicked the basket, so that the severed head was nearly thrown out. Then he clasped his right forefinger in his left hand and uttered a savage oath.

  “The aristocrat has bitten his finger!” exclaimed the man with the apron. “They are not so easy to subdue, those haughty creatures.”

  Like a ray of light there came to me the recollection of Iza Bekchi and his parable of the beheaded criminal who had concentrated all his last force of will on a similar wretched act of vengeance and had thus squandered it...

  Meanwhile one of the assistants, a bold-looking dark man, sprang to the basket and looked in with such caution as to arouse the laughter of the onlookers; he pulled out the head, holding it with two fingers by the hair. The dead man’s eyes were half closed and stared at the crowd with an expression of scorn, a narrow stream of blood running down the chin.

  The red-haired executioner climbed down from the scaffold, cursing and swearing.

  In my heart I understood then the care that a priest takes (although the reason for his doing so may be unknown to him, despite that he lays such stress on it) to persuade the dying to concentrate all their thoughts on eternal bliss, on repentance, and on immortality in God, and to get rid of all ideas of vengeance, all earthly desires. What infinite wisdom was contained in this custom, what hope and solace!

  I was thrilled with an indescribably joyous feeling of knowledge, I was almost sorry that my own life had not ended to-day in this square.

  There was nothing more to be seen, and the crowd gradually dispersed. The windows of the surrounding houses were shut, and down in the square the two assistants appeared with buckets of water and a cart on which they placed the remains of the dead with scant ceremony.

  I had not moved from the scene of the guillotine. I stood there meditating on the words I had heard from Iza Bekchi as I lay ill in the haunted room at Krottenriede; and of a sudden I felt someone looking at me.

  Chapter Fourty Two

  I turned, and found myself face to face with a young man whose swarthy, regular features and dark eyes were full of extraordinary power of will. There was great strength behind his eyes, and it harmonised with the rare and severe beauty of his face and of his hard mouth. In spite of his short stature there was something in his bearing that commanded respect, and was difficult to withstand. The sight of him
attracted my attention in the highest degree. He wore a very simple uniform of a kind I had never seen before; and his arms were crossed on his breast.

  “You are a foreigner?” He addressed me with a smile, just perceptible.

  “I am a German,” I answered.

  “Oh, a German.” He nodded shortly. “Fine nation, clever, warlike and at the same time obedient. First-rate soldiers. You have been watching the execution, sir?”

  In spite of the risk that I knew attended any outspokenness, I did not hide my disgust.

  “Ay, ay,” he smiled sadly. “The sight of these brutes must give you a splendid opinion of the French nation. But it does not signify. Our nation is good. It is just having a fever. It will be cured, after a little blood-letting..."

  I hesitated before replying, though there was none to overhear us; for I knew very well that the so-called Committee of Public Safety kept numerous agents whose duty it was to discover what the people thought and felt, and to encourage malcontents to say things that might be a pretext for arresting them. And yet the next moment I felt ashamed of my suspicion. Spying was surely not the function of this new companion of mine. As far as my knowledge of men guided me I read in this heroic face only rashness, unbending force of will and the strength to remove obstacles from his way with violence. The little man with the hard mouth might be capable perhaps of some tremendous infamy, if his plans, which doubtless were uncommon, demanded it, but he was hardly capable of dealing meanly or treacherously with a man who was not in his way. I read all this in the dark abyss of his eyes, which sparkled with the fire of superhuman genius.

  “What I deplore,” I said to him, “is that blood-thirstiness and vengeance have soiled the raiment of the goddess of Freedom, and that the ugliest instincts become most apparent when an old-established order of things falls to pieces. From a distance the Revolution seemed to me grand and noble, but now that I see it at close quarters it turns out to be horrible, and devoid of all grandeur. The freedom of a nation - ”

  He interrupted me.

  “Freedom, indeed! This is only a silly catchword. What the people need is not freedom, but the strong hand of a leader. Centuries will pass before the people will be ripe for the ideals which undisciplined dreamers think fit for our time. But the harm is not really very great. The heads that are falling now, with the exception of a few that will be badly missed, are not worth much. The rabble may amuse itself once in a while after its own style. And still I tell you, Mr. German, that the world may be conquered by the means of this very valuable, inflammable and pliable material, if only it gets into the right hands. These lousy, bawling, ragged lads would make an army of heroes, the like of which never trod the earth. The tremendous body is unconscious of its strength, it lacks a head to make it invincible!”

  “That head sits on mortal shoulders,” I replied. “And as you know the present is a hard time for heads.”

  The man’s lips again formed themselves into a scarcely perceptible smile. “I have good ground to hope that the head I refer to will not fall into Samson’s basket,” he said.

  We walked slowly in the direction of a side street leading out of the square. I noticed the wild, continuous cries and moans of a female voice that came from an old house. As we drew nearer we saw a young woman lying in childbirth on the pavement in a dark passage. Amid her pangs a new life was coming into existence. Neighbours were busy around her, and an old woman told us to move on.

  “Fat Margot again!” cried an urchin. “She brings a sucking-pig into the world every year!” And he hopped about on one leg, delighted to be present at such a spectacle.

  The officer caught hold of the boy’s arm, turned him round and looked at him with terrible eyes, saying:

  “What are you rejoicing about, idiot? Is it that the man to replace you is being born? He’ll take your place in the ranks when you are buried in the mud after the battle!”

  I saw the lad turn pale under the icy look of my companion, as if he had seen Medusa’s head. He ran away squealing and flinging his arms about.

  I followed him with my eyes.

  When I turned again the officer had disappeared.

  Chapter Fourty Three

  After that day I hardly ever left my lodging. At night I would hear the ominous noise of musket butts knocking at doors, and the cries of terrified women and frightened objections of suddenly arrested men dragged without warning from their beds.

  Soon it became plain to me that my solitary mode of life was arousing the suspicions of my fellow-lodgers and neighbours. But only by the greatest effort could I persuade myself to go out in the streets, where the only people I was likely to meet were drunken men and importunate women. Anyone who showed himself at that period was sure to be accosted by beggars, molested in every way, suspected, abused without provocation.

  But there came an early autumn day when the air was so oppressively sultry that it was quite intolerable to stay indoors. I put on the oldest of my suits, my brown very worn travelling-coat, and an ordinary rain-spattered hat; and carried a plain stick. I desired to make myself as little conspicuous as possible among those who had the run of the streets. My hair was no longer powdered and dressed, but fell on the shoulders after the new fashion.

  I found the streets again swarming with a noisy, partly-armed mob. Recruits were passing in great numbers, decorated with scarves and ribbons, on their way to the threatened frontier. The excitement of the first days of September was at its height.

  All the scum of the Faubourg St. Antoine seemed to have concentrated in the neighbourhood of the prison of La Force. The nearer I approached the prison-entrance, the wilder sounded the noise of moving throngs, the singing and the cries.

  Ragged sansculottes armed with pikes and rusty swords had flocked there in dense multitudes, evidently hoping for something out of the ordinary. A deformed cripple, revolting to see, for he had a purple tumour like a cock’s comb hanging over his left eye, passed from one group to another, saying a few words; and always his message was received with deafening cries. I approached one of the groups, in the midst of which a dishevelled fury was brandishing a slaughterer’s axe, and strained my ears to hear what it was that so greatly excited them. No sooner had I come nearer than the lopsided monster came up to us and began whispering.

  “Citizens! An aristocrat is shortly to come out of the prison door. If you allow her to escape to England, she will contrive to kidnap fat Capet and the Austrian from under your very noses. So down with the Mistress of the Household of the Austrian whore! Down with the Lamballe!”

  Cries of approval showed that everybody held the same opinion on the matter and were unwilling to let the Princesse de Lamballe make her escape.

  “Enough of that talking, you there with the violet on the eye!” shouted a lean wretch. “We will twist her bowels into cockades for us if we get our hands on her.”

  “Let me do it!” cried a wolf-like fellow with immense jaws and a low forehead. “You’ll be no use, none of you - you will all take compassion on her if she wrinkles her pretty mug.”

  “What about you, Matt from the Galleys,” laughed a sluttish female, giving him a playful push in the side. “You’ve a heart of stone and iron veins, haven’t you!”

  “Do you want to see a keepsake of Louis Capet’s, you streetwalker?” retorted the fellow she addressed as Matt. He stretched out a wrist with a purple circular scar. “I have worn his bracelets for six years, here and on my hind legs. Do you think that makes me a sugar candy?”

  A peal of coarse laughter greeted him. I felt the smell of liquor, the stench of old clothes, and the smoke of bad tobacco.

  “A femicide,” whispered somebody. “Escaped death by the King’s mercy. Just look at the brute, his forehead, the thick eyebrows, the jaw...”

  “What are you muttering there, you old fish’s head?” The convict shook his fist at my neighbour, a small, bent man, who thereupon dived rapidly into the crowd.

  “Out with the Lamballe!” went forth
the chorused demand. “Give us the Mistress of the Household! Open the doors! We want to see her front and back, just as her lover would.”

  “The judges inside are asleep,” croaked the man with the tumour on lis face. “Let’s wake them up!”

  “Out with her. Snap to it, you jackasses in there. Give her to us!”

  I stood bewildered in the midst of the seething and storming crowd, surrounded on all sides by brandished swords, knives and pikes. I stared at at the prison doorway, unable to move a limb. I was paralysed by fear. To my horror I realised that I had divined what was to follow, as surely as if I had lived through it before. I struggled against is feeling, and again and again succeeded in suppressing the dreadful knowledge within me; but I could not escape from the certainty of being able to tell beforehand, moment for moment, everything that is to come. It was like a dream in a dream, and yet terribly real.

  The prison authorities must have heard the cries of the savage crowd, for anxious and inquisitive faces appeared at the windows. But soon the threats of the crowd gave place to action. Axes began thundering at the small heavy door; stones flew, and a dusty pane was shattered to pieces. Then one of the windows opened, and a sleepy face h half-closed eyes and baggy cheeks appeared in it, smiling and iding to the crowd. The noise became terrific. The scene was approaching a climax.

  For a moment my eyes hung on an old grey relief on the wall. Then hurricane howl of thousands of voices went past me. The windows trembled. The postern-door of the prison swung inward. On the stone framework a young woman was staring, pale as death, upright, with a convulsive smile of mortal fear on her handsome face. Her small hands were raised as if to implore mercy.