Thrusting her off, he dashed into the next room, but he had now lost his bearings. At every turn he took he came upon some fresh scene of horror. The mob had become human tigers, intent upon butchering every inmate of the Palace—Swiss, nobles, officials, servants; none was spared. Their weapons dripping with blood, the fédérés and the sans-culottes hauled their victims from cupboards and from under beds, chased them up to the attics and down to the cellars. When Roger at length succeeded in finding another stairway and reached the ground floor, he could hear the shrieks coming up from the basement. There, these fiends, whose immunity from harm the imbecile King had placed above all other interests, were breaking his scullions’ heads in with their dishes and roasting his cooks in their own ovens.
At last Roger stumbled out through a small door that gave on to the terrace. Sick, faint, bewildered, he crossed it in a daze, staggered down into the garden and collapsed upon a bench. He had been up all night and had eaten nothing since the previous evening. Physically and mentally he was exhausted.
Gradually, he began to take in the scene in front of him—it was almost as horrifying as those from which he had just escaped. During the night Santerre and his friends had found great difficulty in rousing the Faubourgs, but as the morning advanced their efforts were no longer needed. The sound of the firing, together with the news of the King’s surrender and of the Tuileries being sacked, had emptied every den and kennel in the slums of Paris. By their thousands, the criminals, the harlots, the destitute, the hungry, the diseased in mind, and the crippled in body, had swarmed from east, south and north to participate in the overthrow of the Monarchy.
In the half-mile-long garden there were now twenty Parisiens for every fédéré, and they had become infected with the furious lust of the assassins from the ports. A great part of the contents of the Palace cellars had now found its way out into the gardens; everywhere men and women were drinking from the necks of bottles, and the empties littered the ground in all directions. It was afterwards assessed that over 10,000 bottles were consumed in the course of the morning, and that at least 200 people died from the effects of the quantity of neat spirits they had drunk.
A saturnalia of the most ghastly description was taking place, as drunkenness and lechery were combined with the defiling of the bodies of the dead Swiss. Their corpses had been stripped and hung from the branches of trees, or arranged in revolting postures; while with raucous laughter and indecent jests rings of intoxicated furies of both sexes bellowed the ça ira and danced the carmagnole round them.
For a time Roger watched the hellish orgy with lacklustre eyes, scarcely taking in its horrifying details any more. Never in his life before had he felt so utterly helpless. There was nothing whatever he could do, and he was tired—most terribly tired. The exertion of getting himself elected as a Commissioner the previous night had been considerable, the long, anxious hours of waiting at the Hôtel de Ville had been an appalling strain, and the soul-shattering sights he had seen in the Palace had burned up all that had remained of his nervous energy. Matter triumphed over mind; his head nodded once or twice, then fell forward on his chest, and he slept.
CHAPTER XI
IN THE NAME OF THE LAW
When Roger awoke it was late afternoon. There were still hundreds of people in the gardens, but in the majority of them the frenzy had burnt itself out. Those who were on their feet were mainly newcomers who had arrived belatedly from the more distant suburbs; most of the others were either sitting, maudlin drunk, singing unmelodiously, or sprawled out, full length, asleep. Almost at Roger’s feet lay one of the scores of tightly embraced couples who were to be seen under almost every tree. The pair were dead drunk and snoring; a half-empty bottle was still clutched in the woman’s outstretched hand.
Reaching down, Roger took the bottle from her, wiped its neck, and drank. It contained noyeau, a sweet liqueur made from almonds. He threw it away, got up, and hunted round until he found a nearly-full bottle of white wine. The noyeau had done nothing to make his mouth feel less gummy and parched; he rinsed it out several times and gargled with the white wine, then drained the bottle. After that he felt slightly better. Adjusting his sash and the big cockade in his hat, he set off towards the Assembly.
The doorkeepers greeted him with respect and one of them led him to a low box in the body of the hall reserved for members of the Municipality. Looking up, he saw that the public galleries were packed to suffocation, but the Chamber itself was half empty. Since his arrival in Paris, errands for Santerre had taken him to the Assembly on several occasions, and he knew that the attendance of deputies at important sittings was usually over six hundred. Now, less than half that number were present; evidently a very high proportion of the more respectable had remained at home for fear of their lives.
The Royal Party had been put in the Press box. Half a dozen nobles, who had risked their lives to join them, stood near it. They had dressed themselves up as National Guards, but among them Roger recognised the Ducs de Choiseul and de Brézé, the Comte François de la Rochefoucauld, and Talleyrand’s friend, Comte Louis de Narbonne. The fleshy face of the King, with its big hook nose, was quite impassive; the Dauphin, lying across the laps of the Queen and his governess, Madame de Tourzel, was asleep; little Madame Royale was quietly crying; Madame Elizabeth and the Princesse de Lamballe looked utterly worn out. Only the Queen showed any animation; she was following the debate with keen interest, but turned every now and then to comfort her daughter, or to smile and say a cheerful word to one of her companions. Roger’s heart bled for her.
For eight hours the Assembly had been debating what was to be done next. Various proposals had been put forward—that the King should be deposed, temporarily suspended from his functions, held as a hostage, or reinstated with new Ministers selected for him by the Assembly. But among the deputies there was not a single man of real vigour; they seemed bewildered, uncertain of themselves and quite incapable of handling the crisis; so nothing had yet been decided. After an hour listening to their windy vapourings Roger felt that he was wasting his time, and that he would do better to go and take his own seat in the new Commune.
When he reached the Hôtel de Ville he found a very different state of affairs. All the enragés—as the dyed-in-the-wool revolutionaries of the old National Assembly were termed—had been debarred from election to the Legislative Assembly, but most of them had seized on this opportunity to emerge into public life again as “the People’s Commissars”. To them had been added half a hundred of the most violent Jacobins and Cordeliers, the whole body being controlled by the Committee of Insurrection; so the Commune had now become the weapon of the most forceful, cunning and ruthless men in Paris. It did not take Roger long to realise that here lay the real power that would soon dominate the situation.
Although the meeting had been in session since dawn, no one appeared to think of leaving it. Some of the members had fallen asleep on the benches, but most of them were on their feet a good part of the time, either declaiming, interrupting or cheering; and to prevent hunger interfering with their long and violent debate a buffet had been set up at one end of the chamber.
Going over to it, Roger helped himself to a meal and, while he was still eating, Santerre joined him. When they had last met the big bully had been in a dither from fear of everything going wrong, and that even if he were not called to account by the authorities for his part in the insurrection, he might lose his status as a leader through Westermann reporting his cowardice to the Committee. But now he was boisterous and boastful again; the coup had succeeded after all, and he had forestalled the Alsatian. Immediately on hearing that the King had surrendered, he had returned to the Hôtel de Ville and got himself appointed Commandant Général of the National Guard, in Mandat’s place. The post made him practically unassailable, and he had promptly made use of it to remain well out of danger all day, at the Hôtel de Ville, on the pretext that a Commander’s place was at his headquarters.
He greeted Rog
er effusively, and heaped congratulations on him for his work of the previous night. Apart from the wealthiest Sections of the city, that of des Granvilliers had been regarded as one of the most difficult to handle. Oysé had given a glowing report of Roger’s skilful and resolute tactics, and there had been so many delays or complete failures in the other doubtful Sections that his swift coup was regarded as an outstanding success. During the course of the day, after seeing how things were going, nearly all the other Sections had elected Commissioners to the new Commune, but Roger, with his colleagues, had been among the few to arrive when this momentous day was barely an hour old, so he now found himself acclaimed as one of the heroes of the hour by Santerre and the group of men at the buffet.
When asked why, having taken his seat, he had absented himself for the rest of the day, he stated unblushingly that on hearing the shooting he had felt that matters still hung in the balance, so had gone out to use his new authority in encouraging the insurgents. He described his entry into the Palace among the first of the Marseillais, then added that he had later gone to the Assembly to see how matters were progressing there, and had only just left it.
This provoked fresh applause and great interest, as everyone wanted to hear the latest report of the way in which the deputies were reacting to the situation. Santerre jumped upon a chair, cut in on the harangue of the man who was speaking, and bellowed in his stentorian voice:
“Silence! Silence for Citizen Commissioner Breuc, the patriot who led the Marseillais in their attack on the Tuileries! He comes from the Assembly and can tell us what those useless windbags are up to there.”
Roger had already realised that his new rôle would entail public speaking, and that he would defeat his own ends if the sentiments he expressed were the least half-hearted. On the other hand, the very last thing he wished to do was to use his talents to forward the aims of the Revolution; so he had decided that when he had to speak he would express the sentiments that were expected of him boldly, but very briefly, and speak as seldom as possible, relying rather upon his private contacts than upon oratory to maintain his reputation as a full-blooded patriot.
Therefore, when he had been pushed up by eager hands on to the tribune, he shouted: “Today is a great day! The People have conquered the Tyrant! To defeat his foreign slaves in uniform they gave freely of their blood. I was there! I saw them! They fought like heroes. And why did they shed their sacred blood upon those marble floors polluted by vice and idleness? It was to achieve Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!”
That was the sort of meaningless claptrap they liked, and it brought him a great ovation. Then, as it would have been both pointless and dangerous to deceive them, he gave a short but truthful account of the proceedings in the Assembly. He ended by quoting one of the well-worn tags from Rousseau’s Contrat Social—the Bible of the Revolution, without some reference to which no such speech was complete—cried, “Vive la Commune!” and jumped down.
He had scarcely got the last word out before a dozen members began to speak at once, each trying to shout down his competitors. For a few minutes the chamber was a babel, but at length the speakers were reduced to two, both saying much the same thing: “Now is the moment to dethrone the King. If it is lost all may have to be done again.”
Other speakers followed in rapid succession. Ignoring the fact that their election had been shamelessly framed, and that even if it had been legal they represented only Paris, whereas all but 24 out of the 700-odd deputies who made up the Assembly represented other parts of France, they declared that the Assembly no longer spoke for the nation. They alone, they now told one another, were true patriots, capable of giving expression to the wishes of the tillers of the soil and the workers in the towns, who formed the vast bulk of the population. The Assembly was a nest of reactionaries and bourgeois, who would betray the People unless they, the Commune, acted to protect the People’s rights. At length a motion was put and passed with acclamation that a deputation be sent to the Assembly to inform it that the “Will of the People” was that the King should be deposed.
Twelve members, Roger among them, were chosen to form the deputation, and a little before ten o’clock they set off, packed into two hackney coaches. At the Assembly a body of obviously frightened deputies received with nervous flattery this embassy from the new and terrible Power that had come into being overnight. Roger’s only contribution to the proceedings was a stern face and unbending air; several of his companions were eager enough to do the talking, and he was glad enough to be able to leave it to them.
The scene had not altered since his last visit, except that the Royal Party looked still more woebegone and weary; but they roused themselves a little at personal insults with which the Commissioners interlarded their speeches. When three of the deputation had delivered themselves of their personal remarks, and had conveyed the message from the Commune in much the same terms, Vergniaud, who had been whispering with Brissot in a corner, mounted the tribune and proposed the following plan:
That the King should be, not deposed, but suspended, while a Convention was summoned to replace the present Assembly and produce a new Constitution. In the meantime the King was to be lodged in the Palace of the Luxembourg and the government of the country carried on by a Provisional Executive Council.
This did not fit in at all with the deputation’s ideas, or with those of their friends among the deputies, so the latter took up the cudgels on the Commune’s behalf and an acrimonious debate ensued that went on until nearly three o’clock in the morning. By that time the unfortunate Sovereigns, with their family and friends, had been sitting in the Press box for close on seventeen hours. No decision as to their final fate having yet been arrived at, it was then agreed to accommodate them for the rest of the night in some of the cells at the ex-convent of the Feuillants; and, this much having been settled, the deputation returned to the Commune.
The negative result of their mission was far outweighed by two facts of immense significance. By admitting the right of the new Commune to have a say in matters at all, the Assembly had tacitly acknowledged it a legally constituted body, and had not yet dared to take a decision in defiance of its wishes.
Members who had been active all day were now falling asleep where they sat, but others who had been sleeping woke up again and took part in the new arguments—as was the custom during a crisis at these en permanence sessions. However, Roger, now feeling his position to be assured, and like the sensible fellow he was, saw no reason why he should sleep on a bench when he could do so in a bed; so at a quarter past four he went back to the Cushion and Keys.
It was past midday when he awoke, but he lay in bed for some time thinking over the situation. Vergniaud’s proposals clearly indicated that the Girondins did not want a Republic, but were probably aiming at a change of King. Whom they had in mind had not yet emerged and the odds were that upon that point they were still divided. Nearly all of them had originally been Orléanists; later the Duke of Brunswick had been named, but now the Duke had put himself out of the running by his manifesto there were rumours that they favoured King George’s second son, the Duke of York.
Contemptuously as Roger regarded King Louis, he knew that he was at least honest, which was much more than could be said for the boorish, dissipated Duke, and as the Duke had always been one of Mr. Pitt’s most inveterate enemies, it seemed unlikely that the Prime Minister would be at all pleased to see him on the throne of France. However that might be, Mr. Pitt’s instructions to Roger had been to contribute in any way he could to keeping King Louis on his own throne.
That he was two-thirds off it already was fully apparent, and only one way presented itself of putting him back again—to kidnap him and carry him off to one of his still loyal Provinces. After the fiasco of his last attempt Roger had been left no illusions that he might yet persuade the King and Queen to entrust themselves to him, but there remained the possibility that he might rescue them against their will.
From the moment the
idea first occurred to him he had realised that the chances of pulling off such a coup would be far greater if he could gain for himself a position of authority which would give him ready access to the Sovereigns, and it was largely the determination to do so that had enabled him to stick out the hideous six weeks he had spent at the Axe and Facies. Now, that horribly unpleasant experience had paid an extraordinarily handsome dividend. He was a recognised revolutionary leader and a powerful official of the Municipality; he could demand admission to the King at any time he liked, and he did not believe that anyone would dare to refuse it to him. But it was one thing merely to go and speak to the King, and quite another to spirit him away with his wife and children without anyone attempting to prevent it. He could but keep his wits about him and hope that the uncertainties of the crisis might suggest to him a more detailed plan and provide him with an opportunity to execute it.
Having dressed, he ate a hearty meal and immediately afterwards went straight to the Hôtel de Ville. Quite a number of his colleagues had, like himself, gone home for a few hours’ sleep, but the Conseil Général de la Commune, as it styled itself, was now setting about its business in earnest. The cautious Robespierre had taken his seat that morning, and a Comité de Surveillance—which replaced the old Committee of Insurrection—was formed to guide the Commune in its struggle with the Assembly. Robespierre now came to the fore as its directing brain and, mainly at his instance, a number of decrees to strengthen the Commune’s powers were rapidly being put through.
The 20,000 signatories of the petition to the King, asking him to oppose the establishment of a great tamp for the fédérés outside Paris, were prohibited from holding any public office as “enemies of the People”. By a new measure, the policing of Paris was secured to the Commune, while all active citizens were empowered to drag anybody suspected of a crime against the State in front of the Sectional Tribunals, and unlimited powers of imprisonment were accorded to the Communal Commissars.
The Man who Killed the King Page 20