The Man who Killed the King

by Dennis Wheatley

  The Girondins had with their usual cowardice, although still numerically the strongest party in the Convention, allowed a new form of legalised massacre to begin. The inmates of the prisons who had shown any prominence as reactionaries were now being hauled from their cells and, on quite minor political charges, sent to the guillotine. In the new emergency, the extremists had their chance to accelerate the movement. A special Revolutionary Tribunal was set up for the swifter liquidation of the “enemies of the Republic”; and on the 6th of April Danton succeeded in establishing the first “Committee of Public Safety” with powers to deliberate in secret, to override Ministers, and with 100,000 livres to pay its agents. The word “suspect” began to take on a terrible significance.

  Throughout February and March Roger had overtly continued to rule with a rod of iron in the des Granvilliers Section, whilst secretly using Dan as his liaison with the Rescue League to get many people whose lives were in jeopardy smuggled out of Paris. On the 25th of March the Comité de Défense Générale had decreed the levy of a further 300,000 men for the army, and had despatched representatives to every Department of France to speed up their raising. Roger had not been chosen for this work, but in April he was sent for by the Committee of Public Safety and charged with a far more dangerous and disagreeable task. It had been decided that the Royalist risings in the Vendée must be suppressed at all costs, and he had been selected as one of the small band of Commissioners which was to be despatched with absolute powers to crush the rebels.

  On the 10th of April he again left Paris as Représentant en mission, but this time he was escorted by a troop of cavalry, while in his wake lumbered a heavy wagon containing a portable guillotine and a squad of executioners.

  The heart of the Royalist rebellion lay to the south of the river Loire, in territory where the towns were few and small. This had enabled the fanatical peasants under their audacious leaders—Cathelineau, a poor hawker of woollen goods, and Gaston, a barber—swiftly to overcome the local Municipals and seize control of a large area. Regular troops were now being sent against them, but Roger’s instructions showed that he was not one of the Commissioners detailed to operate with the army. He and several others had been given areas outside that in which the actual fighting was taking place, with orders to liquidate all reactionary elements in them, and thus prevent the revolt spreading.

  He had been allotted three out of the five new Departments that made up the old Duchy of Brittany—Ille et Vilaine, Le Morbihan and Côte du Nord. That of Finistère, in the extreme west, was already being purged by the Jacobins of Brest, while the fifth, Basse Loire, to the south, with Nantes in its centre, was the Department in which civil war had flared up. Rennes was the largest town in Roger’s area, and he had been told to leave a visit to it as the last on his circuit, as it was the smaller places that called more urgently for “cleansing”.

  On being charged with this mission, he had had to face the awful choice of either accepting it or abandoning the position which enabled him to supply Mr. Pitt with invaluable first-hand information. Had it entailed the slaughter of hundreds of loyalist peasants as they were captured by the Reds, he would have felt it too terrible a price for any man to pay in serving his country; but he determined to carry on as long as his conscience would allow, and left Paris hoping that in the still peaceful parts of Brittany to which he was sent he would find this new ordeal no worse than that which he had gone through whilst with the Army of Dumouriez. In that hope, however, he proved mistaken.

  During the latter part of April, and in May and early June, he was called on to face more shattering experiences than any he had previously encountered in his whole life. Week after week he moved through the villages and townships of the west, bringing death in his train. In all those he came to that were of any size he stopped for several days. His first duty was to purge the local Municipality. Almost invariably, this meant listening to a series of the foullest accusations and meanest betrayals, as the local “patriots” strove to save their own necks at the expense of those of colleagues whom they hated or envied. As there were comparatively few of them who were not guilty to some degree of crimes committed in the name of the Revolution, Roger did not find it too repugnant a task to send one or two of them to his guillotine at every place at which it was set up. It was after this preliminary that the real horror of his task began. The list of the prisoners in the local jail was brought to him, with the charges on which they had been imprisoned; then, supported by the Municipals whom he had spared, he had to try all those accused of crimes against the new Order, while a crowd of local sans-culottes looked on and broke into angry murmurs whenever they considered that he was being too merciful.

  Day after day, and often far into the night by the light of smoky lanterns, he had to sit stern-faced and impassive while terrified men and women were dragged before him. Very few among them were aristocrats or people who in the past had enjoyed wealth. Some were of the professional classes, and there were quite a number of priests; but the majority were tradespeople, small farmers, teachers, servants who had been loyal to their employers, and ex-N.C.O’s of the old army. As a temporary relief to his feelings he could acquit some of them and so secure their release from prison; but in every place where his guillotine was set up he had to send four or five to the scaffold.

  There were times when he thought he would go mad; and the strain might well have proved too much for him had he not had the rugged, faithful Dan to whom he could pour out his over wrought mind when they were alone. Only one thing enabled him to keep going with this ghastly routine instead of throwing his hand in and returning to England—the knowledge that he was saving life as well as taking it. He could save only a small proportion of those proved to be counter-Revolutionaries; but every one of them would have been sent to the guillotine had he abandoned his mission, with the inevitable result that some genuinely blood-lusting Jacobin fanatic would have been despatched to replace him.

  Dan was once more acting as his secretary; so, wherever they halted, exercised an authority second only to his own; and before leaving Paris Dan had secured full particulars of the Rescue League’s network in Brittany. After a preliminary investigation at each place, Roger went through the lists of accused and suspects with him; and they held a secret court of their own, which was almost as great a strain as sitting on the Revolutionary tribunal, for they had to decide there and then who could be saved and who must be left to die.

  Roger could have had no better man than Dan for such a job. His old trade of smuggler had taught him cunning and resource. As an ex-galley slave he could talk the filthy argot of Marseilles, Toulon and Finistère as well as could any cut-throat who hailed from those ports. Even his presence as Roger’s alter ego appeared to the sans-culottes a guarantee that Roger’s own patriotism was irreproachable, despite his cleanliness and well-cut clothes. Dan’s memory, too, was marvellous; he needed to write nothing down; his great physical strength enabled him to work day and night with little sleep; and he was as brave as a lion.

  So, week in, week out, the awful work went on, and the knife of Roger’s guillotine clanked and crashed, severing heads from bodies. But night after night brave Englishmen in strange disguises haunted the streets of the towns in which the guillotine was set up. By some mysterious means they knew the weak spots of the jails, sometimes possessed the keys to them, and knew the hours at which the guards were changed. Again and again, in pitch darkness or under a fitful moon, the people whose names Roger had given to Dan disappeared from their homes a few hours before the Municipals arrived to arrest them, or were spirited away from the prisons to lightless luggers that lay concealed in unfrequented coves along the coast.

  Roger had entered Brittany from the north, his first stay of more than twenty-four hours being at St. Malo; from there he zigzagged about the country, staying for several days at Dinan, St. Brieux, Lorient and Vannes in turn. Most of the larger places were well under the thumb of their Red Municipalities, but in the countr
y districts the peasants were sullen and sometimes openly hostile. On three occasions he was shot at and twice members of his escort were wounded; but Citizen Captain Labord, their commander, was a tough, capable ex-N.C.O., and whenever they moved from village to village he had vedettes out on either flank, which prevented snipers getting near enough to aim with any accuracy.

  During most of this time Roger learned only belatedly what was going on in the rest of France; but towards the end of May it became clear to him that the Revolution was moving swiftly towards a new crisis. Austrian, Prussian, British and Dutch armies were now taking the offensive in the north, from the coast right down to Alsace; Piedmontese and Sardinians were again attacking in the east and south; the Spaniards had opened a new front in the south-west from across the Pyrenees, and the Royalists of La Vendée were rapidly gaining ground in the west. But foreign enemies and the Royalists were no longer the only threats to the extremists in Paris; their control of the country was now menaced by the possibility of a second civil war tearing it apart.

  The more ground the Girondins and their associates lost in the Convention, the more strongly the provincial cities that had sent them there resented the tyranny of Paris and clamoured for a new Constitution under which France should be federalised on the model of the United States, thus enabling them to administer the Departments adjacent to them under laws made by themselves. They had no desire whatever to restore the Monarchy, but they were set on preventing further inroads on property and on the rights of the individual, and aimed to destroy the communist minority which was seeking to crush all opposition by instituting a reign of terror. The three great cities of Bordeaux, Lyons and Marseilles all declared against the Jacobins; Toulouse, Rouen, Nîmes, Grenoble and Caen were reported ripe for insurrection, and revolts had already broken out in the mountainous districts of eastern France.

  In Paris, from mid-May onward, the Girondins had made a belated attempt to suppress the forces of disorder. As a precaution against a successful repetition of the 9th of March, in which they might all be killed, they proposed the creation of a Reserve Convention at Bourges which was automatically to assume power in the event of their arbitrary arrest. But the treacherous Barère persuaded them to abandon the measure in favour of the appointment of a Committee of Twelve to investigate subversive activities.

  The new Committee made numerous recommendations for curbing the power of the Commune, the Sections and various unorthodox bodies, all intent on stirring up insurrection; but the only active steps it took were the arrest of Hébert for publishing an incendiary article in Le Père Duchesne, and of Dobson, the Commissar-President of the Cité Section, for refusing to disclose the minutes of his Sectional Committee.

  These arrests on the 24th led to the final clash, as the Commune, backed by the sans-culottes, made violent demands for the release of its two members. On the 25th the Girondin Isnard attempted to quell the mob by a speech in which he threatened that the Provinces would annihilate Paris unless order was restored, but, like Brunwick’s manifesto, this only added fuel to the fire. The Committee of Insurrection now collected 500 extremists from the Sections at the Archbishop’s Palace and these, on the lines of the 10th of August, declared themselves the true representatives of the People; but instead of turning out the old Commune they merged themselves with it, thereby enormously strengthening the communist element in the already radical Municipality.

  Hébert and Dobson were released. Hanriot, a bloodthirsty drunkard, was appointed Commandant of the National Guard, and on the 31st of May a mob of 30,000 people surrounded the Convention. The Girondins, now in terror of their lives, were forced to give way and dissolve the Committee of Twelve. Madame Roland was arrested that night, and by morning the Insurrectionaries were well on the way to winning their battle.

  June the 1st passed comparatively quietly, but on the morning of Sunday the 2nd great crowds began to collect again outside the Tuileries, to which the Convention had recently moved from its old quarters in the riding-school. Hanriot, reeling drunk and egged on by his friends, brought up several batteries of guns and threatened to bombard the Palace unless the leading Girondins were arrested.

  A number of deputies came out and argued with him in vain; so Barère as usual stepped into the breach and proposed that since the Convention was powerless to resist force the threatened Girondins should save their colleagues’ faces by proscribing themselves. This absurd and cowardly expedient was adopted by the majority and at 2 p.m. the session broke up, the twenty-two leading Girondins having been suspended from further participation in the government of the country by the orders of the Commune backed by the mob.

  It now became clear that the very principle of government by democracy, which the Revolution had been launched to secure, was being challenged by the Commune of Paris and the little group of extremists led by Danton and Robespierre, and that France was about to fall under a new type of tyranny far worse than the old—unless Paris could be subdued by the Federalists. Some seventy of the most moderate deputies left Paris in secret to raise the provinces, and their arrival at the cities they represented proved the signal for war to be declared on the Convention.

  Between the 8th and the 12th of June rumours reached Roger that armies were being raised in Lyons and Bordeaux to march upon the capital; that in Marseilles the Municipality had been overthrown and a Tribunal set up to try “patriots” accused of revolutionary excesses, and that an insurrection had broken out in Normandy; while the Bretons, as he could see for himself, were ready to rise at any moment. So he began to contemplate seizing on this new situation as an excuse to abandon his grim task.

  He hesitated from doing so at once only because his information was so scanty, and his men were all full-blooded revolutionaries. If he took them back to Paris prematurely, and the Dantonists came out on top, it would be the end of his hard-won credit with the Committee of Public Safety. After some thought he decided that, as he had been definitely ordered to “cleanse” Rennes, he had better take it next on his itinerary. He would learn there whether the Federal movement looked like dominating the province and, if so, would be able to justify a retirement from it by reporting that disaffection had increased to such a degree that it was no longer possible for him to overawe the reactionaries with the limited number of troops at his disposal. In consequence, on the 13th of June, with some hope that the sinister wood and steel “Madame” who trundled behind him might remain packed in her wagon, he led his cavalcade of death into the Breton capital.

  The sight of the narrow streets of the old town filled him with nostalgia, as it was here that, after running away from home, he had spent nearly two years of his boyhood working in Maître Léger’s office; and although he had at first been made miserable by the bullying of the eldest apprentice, he had received much kindness from the lawyer and his family, and had known times of ecstatic happiness while living with them. Those joyous hours, which now recurred to him so vividly, had been occasioned by his love affair with the beautiful Athénaïs de Rochambeau. She had been scarcely more than a child when he had first met her, but to him, with her lovely blue eyes, delicate aquiline profile, milk and roses complexion and halo of golden hair, she had seemed like a fairy princess become mortal. She had been his first and, therefore, most desperate passion. From the beginning he had known that nothing could ever come of their romance, for, although well born, he was only a penniless youth who had cut himself adrift from his family, and had then but the poorest prospects of making his fortune; whereas she was the only daughter of a rich and powerful noble. But, in spite of that, in the end she had confessed her love for him, and married another only for reasons that were beyond the control of either of them.

  To his disappointment, Roger found Rennes still firmly in the grip of the Jacobins, and of the gangs of sans-culottes from the river wharfs who acted as their bullies. There were plenty of rumours that smaller towns in the province had declared against the Convention, but the Red Municipality was confident that troo
ps sent from Paris would soon suppress the deviationists; so Roger had no option but to order his guillotine to be set up in the Champs de Mars, and the usual arrangements were made for him to hold his Special Tribunal.

  When the lists of prisoners were submitted to him he went through them with particular care, in case any of his old friends happened to be on them. A third of the way down one list he came on the names of Maître and Madame Léger, the very couple in whose house he had lived and who had been so kind to him. On others appeared the names of a girl with whom he had once had a passing affair, of her brother, of his old fencing master, and of a dear old gentleman who had been a neighbour of the Légers.

  At the first opportunity he consulted with Dan, and put in hand the preliminary measures for saving them, which included ensuring that they were not brought before him for the next few days, in order to give time to make arrangements for their rescue. As they discussed the matter he wondered a shade uneasily if other citizens of Rennes, who had known him in his boyhood, might not recognise him during his stay there and involve him in an undesirable tissue of lies and possibly dangerous explanations; but he decided that it was unlikely.

  It was eight years since he had left Rennes, and in the meantime he had not only grown up, but altered greatly, particularly during the past two months. His ghastly work had played havoc with both his appetite and his sleep; his height was now accentuated by his thinness, his face was pale, lean and bony, his mouth a hard grim line, and his eyes bright but with heavy shadows beneath them. How could anyone associate the jolly boy of sixteen with the tall, sinister figure of the dreaded Citizen Representative in the new plumage which had recently been designed to distinguish that rank—a blue tail coat, red waistcoat, white breeches, broad tricolore sash of silk worn as a cummerbund round the waist, with gold fringe dangling on the hip, and a tricorne hat with three great ostrich feathers of red, white and blue rising above its crown?