To Maître Blanchard it had long been obvious that Roger would not have continued to pay for the best suite in the house simply as a lodging for his servant, and he was shrewd enough to guess the real reason. Moreover, as he knew Roger to be an Englishman, and one who, in the past, had been on intimate terms with many of the nobility, he also guessed that more than met the eye lay behind all he had heard of his activities as a Commissar. He therefore greeted him with some surprise, but with no less friendliness than of old.
Dan, Roger learnt to his relief, had arrived back four days before, but was out at present; so he asked Blanchard to provide him with a cold meal and a bottle of wine in his private parlour. As he sat down to it, he asked his old friend what he thought of the present situation, adding with a grin that he could speak his mind without fear of being denounced as an aristo.
The landlord replied that it was pleasant for once to be able to say freely what one thought, as in these days all honest folk had to be extremely careful; he then launched out on a bitter tirade against the Revolution. Business had never been so bad; supplies could now be got only by lavish bribery; the city swarmed with petty officials who made life intolerable; these little masters of the new régime were stupid, arrogant, dishonest and would have been incapable of earning a living in the old days; in order to buy, sell, take on a new hand, or leave the city, even for a walk in the country on a Sunday, permits now had to be obtained; endless I time was wasted filling up forms and answering stupid questions; still more time was wasted standing in queues to buy food, clothes and every other necessity; gold and silver had almost disappeared, so one was forced to accept payment in assignats, which everyone knew had no permanent value and of which from day to day more and more were required to purchase anything of solid worth; the genuine poor could not possibly earn enough of them to feed and clothe themselves; thousands were starving and being forced willy-nilly into the ranks of the sans-culottes, who were now being paid forty sous a day by the Convention to idle in the streets until! required to demonstrate against anyone opposing the measures of the Mountain. In the previous week Danton, as the head of a Committee seeking ways to establish a more equal distribution of goods, had put through a new law termed the “Maximum”; it placed a price control on all commodities, making it a prison offence for any trader to ask a price for his wares higher than that fixed by the Government, and compelled traders to unload their stocks whether they wished to or not, with the result that everything was being bought up for a few almost worthless bits of paper. This new law of the Maximum meant inevitable bankruptcy for thousands of shopkeepers, and when their stocks were exhausted what then? The only ray of daylight that the honest Norman could see was the rising in his own and other Provinces; so he was praying fervently that the Federalists would soon arrive in Paris, to execute the maniacs in the Convention and save the capital from complete anarchy and starvation.
Soon after eleven a potman looked in to say that Dan was back; so Roger excused himself from listening further to Maître Blanchard’s tale of woe, and went upstairs to join his henchman.
Dan reported that his party had had an uneventful journey and that he did not think Roger need fear finding himself in hot water on account of the delay in his own arrival. As he had taken considerable pains to see that his escort and execution squad were well cared for, Citizen Captain Labord and the rest had all spoken well of him on their return. Nothing had come out before they left Rennes of his having taken Athénaïs from Hutot, and Dan was of the opinion that the Committee of Public Safety must be far too occupied with the crisis to worry themselves over the temporary disappearance of one of their Citizen Representatives.
When Roger told Dan about Amanda he was absolutely dumbfounded at the idea of his vague and impractical mistress attempting to rescue the Queen; but he promptly swore with many violent seafaring oaths that he would “get she out o’ the clutches o’ they Devil’s pimps”, even if he died doing it. Nevertheless, when they got down to brass tacks, the only help he could offer lay in his own courage, brute strength and ability to make any Frenchman believe that he was a dyed-in-the-wool sans-culotte. As Roger had feared, the League could smuggle suspects out of Paris, but had no means of penetrating the prisons, and had only on a few rare occasions succeeded in snatching captives from their guards when they were being taken for trial or were being transferred from one prison to another.
As there was nothing they could do until the following morning, they went to bed; but Roger woke early and went over in his mind the plans he had made on his journey, on the assumption that he would have to get Amanda out of prison himself. In doing so he knew that he would have to risk both the status he had acquired through many months of hard, repugnant work, and his head; and he was determined to protect both to the utmost of his ability. If he were to retain his reputation as an irreproachable “patriot”, it was important that he should not appear to have any personal interest in Amanda, so that he should not later be suspected of having had a hand in her escape—except, as seemed unavoidable, by one key-man to whom the affair could be put as a matter of business.
Therefore it must be for Dan to make all the necessary enquiries and, when Amanda had been located, get messages smuggled in to her if necessary. People were constantly enquiring at the prisons for lost relatives, and for a small bribe any of the jailers was willing to take food or clothing in to the prisoners from their friends outside; so no danger normally attached to such activities. In this case there was just a chance that some official might get the idea that anyone asking about Amanda was possibly implicated in her plot; but if Dan were held for questioning he could say that he had chanced to learn of her arrest from one of the guards at the Temple, and was solicitous about her because it was she who had induced the Queen to have him reprieved from the galleys four years ago. No one could prove that he had seen her since, whereas it could be proved that he had only just returned from three months in Brittany on the Revolution’s business; and the latter fact would clear him entirely.
When Dan woke, Roger asked him to make a round of the prisons until he found out in which Amanda was confined, then visit the office of the Public Prosecutor and bribe one of the clerks to find out for him if her name had yet been put down for trial. They agreed to meet at the Cushion and Keys as soon after midday as possible. Roger then decked himself out in his feathers and sash, ate a good breakfast at a café, and spent the next two hours writing a report of his mission to Brittany. When it was finished he took it along to the office of the Committee of Public Safety and boldly demanded an immediate interview with Citizen Danton.
A secretary informed him that, owing to the crisis, the Committee had recently been “strengthened”—which meant that it had become a still deeper shade of red—and that Danton was no longer on it. Danton was still represented by two of his friends, but all the moderate men had been pushed out and replaced by Couthon, Saint-Just, Prieur de la Marne, and other Robespierrists. The little lawyer from Arras was not on it himself, but now controlled the votes of seven out of its nine members, and came every day to its office to consult with his nominees.
Roger decided that it would be more proper to hand his report personally to one of the members of the Committee than to leave it with a clerk; so he sat down to wait. Presently Saint-Just came in, and on being informed of his business invited him into a small committee room. As it was the first time that Roger had met this new power in the land he was glad of the opportunity to form an opinion of him. He was twenty-five—the same age as Roger—dark, and good-looking except for an enormously over-developed jaw which he did his best to hide by wearing a high, stiffly-goffered cravat of muslin. Reports had it that he was a visionary who dreamed of turning France into a Utopian State where all men should be really equal, and that he was a fanatic who would stick at nothing to achieve his ends. His large, dark, burning eyes gave colour to the latter belief; but Roger found him practical, quick-minded and decisive in his views.
They had
not been talking long when Robespierre joined them. Roger had known him since ’89, although he had talked with him on only a few occasions. He was now thirty-four, a very little man of no more than five feet three inches in height, but eaten up with a consuming vanity. This morning he was in a particularly good humour because he had found in a smuggled English paper a passage which, instead of referring to the enemy as the armies of France, or of the Republic, spoke of them as “the armies of Robespierre”.
He was quick in all his movements, but suffered from a convulsive twitching of the neck and shoulders. The same twitch caused him constantly to blink his eyelids and, like Roger’s old enemy Fouché, he never looked anyone straight in the face. His eyes were dull and sunken, his complexion bilious; and although his nose was sharply-pointed there was something curiously catlike about his features. Having heard him speak in public scores of times, Roger was convinced that he was in no way a great man, but that he had had power thrust upon him, and was frightened by it. The fact that he never initiated a new move himself, but always set the ball rolling through some committee or one of his nominees, bore that out. He had never given a lead in any single crisis, but always lurked in the background waiting for a chance to spring out upon people he thought might prove a menace to himself, when he had them at a disadvantage. In his speeches he was a past-master at the art of converting errors into crimes and crimes into errors; and by sudden vindictive attack, or skilful palliation, he had succeeded on innumerable occasions in striking down his enemies, or protecting colleagues whom he thought might still prove useful to him.
Now, as usual, instead of listening to what Roger had to say, he did nine-tenths of the talking himself, making constant references to his struggle, the great burden he bore almost alone, his acceptance of responsibility only at the desire of the French people, and the irreproachable purity of his intentions. As Roger had put in his report that the reason for his delay in returning to Paris was that he had been held for nearly three weeks as a hostage by Breton Federalists, from whom he had succeeded in escaping only with great difficulty, he was naturally much averse to being closely questioned on that invention. He therefore blessed the loquacity of this small, vain, evil creature, with the nervous twitch and dandified manner of taking snuff; as it enabled him to plant his story and, by making the appropriate grimaces and adulatory remarks, take his leave in as good favour as anyone might hope to stand with “the Incorruptible”.
Repairing at once to the Cushion and Keys, Roger spent an hour with Citizen Oysé, gave him a suitably expurgated account of his tour of Brittany, and learned what had been going on in the Granvilliers Section. Soon after midday Dan joined him there with the news that Amanda was in La Force, and the most welcome tidings that her case had not been set down for trial. He had, on his own initiative, given one of the warders money to buy comforts for her, and made the man a handsome present, so that he would be well disposed to perform further mildly illegal, but generally winked-at, services.
As soon as Roger had eaten he went in search of Manuel, the one-time Procurator of the Commune. This notable Revolutionary was one of the few living people who had seen the inside of the Bastille as a captive. He had been imprisoned there in ’83 for publishing an anti-monarchical historical essay, and it was largely this that had made him such a fervid apostle of Republicanism when, six years later, the Revolution had broken out. In its early years he had been regarded as one of the most dangerous of the extremists; but his sense of justice had by no means deserted him, and after being elected a deputy to the Convention he had taken the quite extraordinary step of resigning from it in protest at the King’s condemnation. As against that, in the preceding November he had, by a brilliant speech at the Jacobins, virtually saved Robespierre from ostracism; so nobody knew quite what to make of him. Had he ever expressed the least sympathy for the Girondins he would have been proscribed with them; but, as it was, he had been left in a sort of political limbo. It was not until late in the afternoon, after considerable difficulty, that Roger succeeded in running him to earth at a comfortable apartment on the south side of the river.
Feigning a detached cynicism, Roger put his case quite frankly. He said that he had been offered 50,000 francs to procure the release of an Englishwoman named Madame Brook, who, he gathered, had been involved in an attempt to rescue the Queen; and he asked Manuel how he should set about earning the reward.
Manuel’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he said, “Why should you imagine that I can help you in such a matter?”
“Because,” replied Roger, “it was you who arranged the escape of Madame de Tourzel, la Princesse de Tarente and others, at the time of the September massacres.”
“You are quite wrong!” exclaimed the other hastily. “I deny it!”
Roger saw that he had Manuel rattled, but he had no intention of disclosing the fact that it was he who had suggested him to Gouverneur Morris for that undertaking. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and said with a smile:
“Why should we waste time going into the past, Citizen? All I desire is to make some quick money, and I am prepared to give you half the reward if you can pull this chestnut out of the fire for me.”
“How am I to know that this is not a trap? I have many enemies these days.”
“Did I wish to make trouble for you I should have no need to embroil you in a fresh affair: I have only to tell the Comité what I know of your activities last September.”
For a moment Manuel stroked his brown cheek thoughtfully, then he said, “Michonis, the Inspector of Prisons, is still a good friend of mine; I spent an evening with him a few nights ago, and he told me of this plot to rescue the Widow Capet. The Convention are anxious that it should not get out, but he seemed to think the whole thing a mare’s nest. Nevertheless, it is a grave charge, and it would create a fine rumpus if a prisoner involved in such an affair was allowed to escape.”
“What reason has Michonis for thinking it a mare’s nest?” Roger asked.
“The letter that this Madame Brook was caught passing to the Queen was written in her own hand; it mentioned the Baron de Batz and a Lady Atkyns, but the one is known to have been in Brussels at the time, and the other in England. No date was suggested for the attempt and the letter was mainly a questionnaire—saying if this, if that, if the other thing, could be arranged, would the Queen agree to place herself in these people’s hands. One of the ifs was ‘if de Batz could get into the Temple with a company of National Guards all loyal to him’. That alone makes the whole thing sound preposterous.”
With a flash of inspiration Roger said, “Since this Madame Brook is English, perhaps she is mad.”
“Perhaps; anyway, it looks as if she is no genuine conspirator, but a woman whose head has been turned by romantic ideas of becoming the Queen’s rescuer.”
“Then could we not do the trick by getting her certified as a harmless lunatic?”
“Ah!” exclaimed Manuel, “there you have certainly hit upon something. If we made it worth Michonis’s while, a message could be passed to her telling her to show signs of madness, and later he could get the prison doctor to order her transfer to the Hôtel Dieu. Once she is in the madhouse there her name will be struck off the Public Prosecutor’s books. There would then be nothing to prevent our getting her moved to a private asylum, and after that…” He ended by snapping his fingers.
They discussed the project in detail, and it was agreed that for a payment of 30,000 francs, half of which was to go to Micnonis, Manuel would arrange matters; then Roger departed with a very much lighter heart.
On thinking matters over, he felt that, although the plan had a good prospect of success, it could be marred by Amanda ignoring a tip from some prison official to feign madness, as she might get the idea that they were trying to lead her into some kind of trap. So, as soon as he got back to the Cushion and Keys, he began to draft a note to be sent in to her, letting her know that her friends outside wished her to play a madwoman’s part, and cheering h
er with the knowledge that those friends were Dan and himself.
The message had to be thought out with some care, as to smuggle it in would be to risk her not receiving it; it had therefore to be an apparently harmless missive which could be shown to a jailer and passed on by him without his appreciating its hidden significance. After some cogitating, Roger drafted a short letter which might have come from a grateful servant to a lady who had once befriended him, and he included the following sentence:
. . . and having seen the inside of French prisons myself, I know, kind Madame, what you must be suffering. I was once locked up for a while in Bedlam, and found it better by far to be there, as I am sure you would. . .
Roger felt confident that no ordinary French jailer would ever have heard of Bedlam, and if Dan were questioned he could simply say it was an English prison which he had found much less unpleasant than French ones; whereas Amanda would know that Bedlam was the London madhouse and would, he hoped, react accordingly. That evening he told Dan to rewrite the note in his laborious scrawl and put his own signature to it; but they decided that it would be better not to send it in for forty-eight hours, in order to give Michonis, or one of his trusted agents, a chance to first put the idea of feigning madness into Amanda’s mind.
That day, Charlotte Corday had been tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. In all history there was no precedent for a case like hers. She was twenty-four years of age, in good health, unmarried and agreed by all to be a girl of unusual beauty. She was well-educated, intelligent and quite normal, as she had had a love affair with an officer and been prevented from marrying him only by his premature death. She came from a good, upper-middle-class family—being a descendant of the gifted playwright Pierre Corneille—had a comfortable home, many friends of both sexes, and every reasonable prospect of a happy life before her. Yet she had deliberately sacrificed all this in order to make the maximum contribution of which she was capable to the destruction of evil.
The Man who Killed the King Page 39