The Man who Killed the King

by Dennis Wheatley

  Without dignity or courage, each Girondin endeavoured to prove that he had been in the front rank of those who had destroyed the Old Order, inspired and encouraged every excess of which the sans-culottes had been guilty, approved the execution of the King, and supported the policies of the Mountain.

  In their fight for life they had lost none of their powers of oratory. After three days the Committee of Public Safety, wearied of their now pointless declamations, issued a new decree that no trial should last longer than forty-eight hours. On the evening of the 29th their defence was summarily terminated and all twenty-one were condemned to death.

  On the 31st, the citizens of Paris turned out in force to be present at this new spectacle—the guillotining of a score of Revolutionaries. Once the condemned men realised there was no escape they regained their courage. Valazé committed suicide by stabbing himself in Court, and it was ordered that his dead body should be taken to be beheaded with the rest; but the others were permitted to hold a last supper in the Conciergerie. At it they joked, laughed, and discussed philosophy until dawn, then when the tumbrels came they went bravely to execution.

  That same day Roger launched a project that he had long cherished in secret. Under the influence of Hébert, now the most powerful man in Paris with the one exception of Robespierre, the Commune had become ever more terrorist in character. Roger rarely spoke there, and knew that in recent months he had begun to be regarded as lukewarm. That was dangerous, and the time was already overdue for him to make some gesture which would reassure the extremists about the “purity of his patriotism”. Having caught the President’s eye at an afternoon session of the Commune, he denounced Citizen Égalité, formerly Philippe Due d’Orléans, in a forceful, scathing speech.

  Orléans had been arrested in Marseilles on the 7th of April and recently transferred to Paris. Above and beyond all men he was the creator of the Revolution. He had used the basest and most unscrupulous methods in an endeavour to have his cousin Louis XVI dethroned and himself made Regent. His vast fortune had enabled him to provoke famine riots by cornering grain; to defame Marie Antoinette by printing hundreds of thousands of obscene pamphlets describing her invented immoralities; to keep, finance and organise a private army of agitators and agents provocateur who had incited the people to rebellion; to import into Paris a legion of bandits, cut-throats and assassins from the Mediterranean ports whom he had plied with liquor and had sent out to pillage and murder. But now his bolt was shot; he had raised the whirl wind, but had failed to ride it. Robespierre, Hébert and their friends had never favoured the idea of a Constitutional Monarchy, however mild in form; but the Girondins had toyed with it, and Orléans was known by all to have been hand in glove with them.

  After twenty minutes spent in recalling “His Royal Highness’s” manipulation of the markets, boundless extravagance, and political treachery, Roger cried, “Those enemies of the People, the Girondin deputies, are this day meeting their just deserts. But why should they die while this scheming Prince—this tyrant’s spawn in whose veins runs the vile Bourbon blood—this multimillionaire who all his life has lived on the sweat of the workers—this arch-conspirator who inspired all their treacheries—be allowed to live? I demand the head of this traitor, who has brought indelible shame upon the glorious word ‘Égalité’.”

  His denunciation could not have been better timed, and it met with a great ovation. The Chamber rose to a man, cheering, stamping and shouting, “We want his head! We want Égalité’s head!” A deputation was at once formed to go to the Convention, and at its bar Roger had to make his speech all over again. There, he received another ovation, and was decreed the honours of the sitting. Orléans’s trial was ordered and the news ran round Paris. For a few days Roger was in the limelight, for his skilful move had served him well; not only had he regained the complete confidence of the Comité and the Hébertists, but also the adulation of the ordinary people of Paris who cheered him wherever he went, as they had gradually learned the truth about Orléans, and were delighted that he was to die.

  On the 6th of November, the ci-devant Duke was sent to the guillotine. As the tumbrel in which he stood was drawn slowly through the streets by a heavy cart-horse, the mob howled its execrations. The people had not forgotten the part that he had played at the trial of his cousin, Louis XVI, the previous January; all along the mile-long route they mocked and derided him with his own words, “I vote for death! I vote for death!” So, one of the basest men in all history went to his doom.

  Roger’s triumph gave him little satisfaction. He was still too miserable about his own affairs. A fortnight had elapsed since his interview with Athénaïs, and it had shaken him badly. He had to admit to himself that, cruel as her conduct had at first appeared, it had from her point of view been fully justified; and the more he thought of the matter the more he came round to the view that Amanda was largely responsible for bringing her present unhappy situation on herself. Had she remained to challenge him, as Athénaïs maintained she should have done, she would have emerged the victor. She was his wife, and, however great his passion for another, he knew that honour and decency would have compelled him to stand by her at that moment, whatever might have happened afterwards. She should, he felt, have had sufficient trust in him for that; but she had not. Without giving him the chance to say that he loved her best, which for all she knew might have been the case, or even to save her dignity and humbly beg her pardon, she had run away.

  Yet he could not leave matters as they were; and, having failed to find her, his next thought had been to write to her and reassure her about the legal status of their marriage. That he had not done so yet was because he was in no position to have letters smuggled to England whenever he liked. He was dependent on the brave men of the League for that, and often a month or more elapsed between the occasions when one of them came into Paris. He had by these means sent off a long despatch to Mr. Pitt shortly before the Queen’s execution, informing him about many political matters and predicting the early elimination of the Girondins. He was shortly due to compose another, but as yet there was nobody in Paris by whom he could send it; so he decided that, rather than keep Amanda in suspense any longer, he would use Dan as his messenger. Since his return to Paris in July, his share of the Commune plunder had amounted to over £4,000, most of which he had converted into bills of exchange on cities outside France; Dan could take the despatch, the letter for Amanda, and this handsome nest-egg safely out of the country at the same time.

  When, early in the month, he had been checking up his plunder, he had decided to put his name down again for duty at the Temple. The poor Queen was now beyond rescue, but the boy remained. Since he had become King he was, potentially, a more valuable pawn than ever in the game of European politics; so still worth a hundred thousand pounds. During all the months Roger had been in France he had never lost sight of that, and although his three attempts to snatch him from his captors had, by force of circumstances, been made at long intervals and had all failed, he was very far from having given up the game.

  He was listed to report at the Temple on the night of the 10th; and that morning saw another outstanding execution. For once, when the knife of the guillotine descended, a shorn neck spouted bile instead of blood. Only twenty-five days after Marie Antoinette, her inveterate enemy, Manon Roland, who had planned to have her murdered in the Tuileries, followed her to the scaffold.

  The other Girondins were now being hunted through the length and breadth of France. News was coming in that one by one they had been caught and executed or, lacking the courage to defy their enemies at the end, had taken their own lives. Roland and Clavière stabbed themselves, Condorcet took poison, Rebecqui drowned himself, and Buzot put a bullet through his brain. The vile and treacherous Pétion had not even the courage to commit suicide, and tried to hide in a forest; but he met a fitting end—his body was discovered half devoured by wolves.

  Madame Roland’s execution early on the 10th served only as a hors-d
’œuvre to the feast of base emotions provided for the canaille that day. Hébert, Chaumette, Rosnin and many other of the most violent members of the Commune were not content with having revolutionised the Catholic Church in France; they wished to abolish it altogether, and their endeavours were on the point of bearing fruit. Three days earlier Gobel—a priest who, on abjuring the Pope, had been made Archbishop of Paris—and a number of his fellow renegades had appeared at the bar of the Convention with red caps of Liberty on their heads, thrown down their mitres, crosses and rings, and formally abjured Christianity. Now Notre Dame was to be converted into a Temple of Reason.

  No sooner had one of Citizen Executioner Sanson’s assistants thrown Manon’s body into a cart and pushed her head between her legs than the crowd turned its back upon the guillotine and streamed towards the great cathedral. In the square before it, to the raucous laughter of the mob, sans-culottes dressed in surplices and copes parodied the Mass, then sang the ça ira and danced the carmagnole.

  In due course a solemn procession appeared: all the Sections of Paris were represented and Roger had no option but to attend with his fellow Commissioners. Borne aloft among them in an armchair placed on a litter was a beautiful young actress, who had been the mistress of several of the Commissars and was now the terrorist Momoro’s wife. Robed in white, with a blue mantle and red Phrygian cap, she represented the Goddess of Reason; accompanying her as her handmaidens were a score of the prettiest prostitutes in Paris. With absurd parodies of religion, Chaumette, Anacharis Clootz and other leading atheists installed her upon the altar; then they carried her to the Convention and back again, followed by all the deputies, who gave up further business for the day to participate in these profane rites.

  Towards evening it became clear to Roger that the general junketing was about to degenerate into an orgy; so he was glad that his having to go on duty at the Temple provided him with an excuse to get away. He found that no material change had occurred there. The quiet routine of the saintly Princess Elizabeth and the young Madame Royale continued on the same lines as before the Queen had been taken from them. The Simons still had charge of the little King, and the only change in the boy was that signs of their “education” were beginning to appear in his face; for, instead of its former engaging beauty, it was acquiring a mean, sly look.

  Now that sufficient time had elapsed since the scare caused by Michonis’s arrest for things to settle down again, Roger hoped that he might win over Goret, or some other Commissar, to assist him in a revival of the plan to smuggle the little King out in the big birdcage; but in this he was disappointed. The birdcage was no longer there, and a casual enquiry about it to Simon produced the information that the musical box in its base had been broken, so it had been sent to be repaired. While up in the apartment, Roger scrutinised every other piece of furniture for a possible alternative, but could see nothing at all suitable; and, as he could think of no better plan, he decided that he would do well to wait until the birdcage was returned.

  Among the Commissars on duty was one whose son had, the previous day, returned from Lyons; and he gave his colleagues an account of the latest developments in that unfortunate city. Apparently Couthon, although Robespierre’s oldest collaborator and, like him, completely ruthless of human life, had thought it a senseless proceeding to destroy many hundred million francs’ worth of property; so on the 29th of October he had been replaced by two other Representatives, Collot d’Herbois and Joseph Fouché. The first had been chosen by the Hébertists and, having as a small-part actor been hissed off the stage at Lyons, was peculiarly suited to exact vengeance on the city. The second, Roger’s old enemy, was a Robespierrist, and had presumably been selected on account of the notoriety he had won by smashing up statues of saints, stained-glass windows and other Church ornaments wherever he went. Apparently these two beauties were having a high old time, killing and destroying to their hearts’ content.

  Roger took mental note of the latter appointment with satisfaction, as it meant that Fouché would be well out of the way for two or three months. After challenging recognition by him when he had first arrived in Paris as a deputy to the Convention, Roger had been fairly easy in his mind that the ex-oratorian teacher of mathematics was unlikely to remember him, provided they were not called on to work together; but any business that necessitated a renewal of their acquaintance might prove highly dangerous. That possibility, together with the fact that Michonis might give him away if brought to trial, was an ever-present menace to Roger’s security, of which he never entirely lost sight; but it looked as if Michonis, having been imprisoned, had been forgotten, and it was comforting to learn that he had nothing to fear from Fouché for some time to come.

  As he had little to occupy him while on duty in the Temple, he spent his second morning there composing a letter to Amanda. He found it by no means easy to write, as he did not wish to evade the blame for the distressing situation to which he had exposed her; but he did want to impress upon her that, had she had sufficient faith in him to wait at Passy until he arrived, she could have spared herself the far greater distress of returning to England in doubt as to the validity of their marriage. At length he succeeded in getting down a fair draft of what he wished to say, which, in essence, was: a frank admission that he had first loved Athénaïs when he was sixteen and that she still meant a great deal in his life; an apology that through his mismanagement they should have met; and an assurance that Amanda was both his legal wife and that she still held a special place in his heart which no one but herself could ever destroy.

  Before going off duty on the night of the 12th he learned that another celebrated figure of the Revolution had been executed that day, in peculiarly revolting circumstances. Bailly—the renowned astronomer and great humanitarian, who understood what liberty and freedom meant in their best sense and had endeavoured to bring them to his countrymen; the first President of the National Assembly, and the first to take the famous oath of the Tennis Court, by which the deputies of the Third Estate had pledged themselves not to separate until France had a Constitution; the elected Mayor of Paris who had laboured night and day for months on end to feed the capital when its poor were starving—had been victimised, at Hébert’s instigation, in order to appease an old score that the sans-culottes had against him.

  After the abortive flight of the Royal Family to Varennes in the summer of ’91, the Club of the Cordeliers had at Danton’s suggestion laid for signature on the Altar of the Nation in the Champs de Mars a petition calling for the King’s deposition. This had led to a riot. The National Assembly, fearing to be attacked, had ordered Lafayette to call out the National Guard and disperse the people. Bailly, as Mayor, had accompanied Lafeyette and read the Riot Act. The mob had both stoned and shot at the troops. Without orders some of the troops had retaliated by firing on the mob. It was the sole instance throughout the whole Revolution of the forces of law and order using their arms against a riotous assembly. Only a handful of people were killed or wounded, but the mob dissolved as if by magic; which just went to show how easily Louis XVI could have restored order in his capital on a score of occasions had he only had the courage to do so instead of simply looking on while his loyal defenders were butchered. However, the Jacobins had seized upon the episode and made great capital out of it as an example of the way in which “the armed lackeys of the Tyrant” were used to enforce slavery upon the “People”. Owing to their fulminations this affair of the 17th of July, ’91 became known as “the massacre of the Champs de Mars”.

  Now, two and a half years later, as a result of the aged and honest Bailly’s courageous refusal to testify against the Queen at her trial, it had been resurrected as an excuse to condemn him to death. In order that the sans-culottes might enjoy their vengeance to the utmost it had been decreed that for this day the guillotine should be removed to the Champs de Mars, where the “massacre” had occurred, and that instead of going in a tumbrel, Bailly should be made to walk there.

  It
was a cold, rainy day. Soaked through, chilled to the marrow, and with his arms tied behind his back, the poor old man had bravely walked two miles through a lane of jeering, hostile onlookers; yet that was not enough. When he reached the scaffold some depraved ape in human form raised the cry that the Field of the Nation was a place of honour; so it should not be polluted by the blood of such a “criminal”. With acclamation, the assembled canaille agreed that the guillotine should be removed to a dungheap on the banks of the Seine, then proceeded to dismantle and remove it. Three hours elapsed before it was re-erected, and during that time Bailly was made to run the gauntlet round and round the Champs de Mars while the “sacred People” pelted him with mud, beat him with sticks and kicked him. When finally executed, he was already half-dead.

  When Roger heard of the episode he felt that there was some reason to doubt the justice of God; for why had He allowed Louis XVI to go comfortably in his own carriage to the scaffold with a Confessor, while He had let Marie Antoinette be reduced to a skeleton in a dungeon before she was taken in a cart to die, and had allowed a great soul like Bailly to be slowly beaten to death?

  Two days later another perished for having refused to bear witness against the Queen: that strangest enigma of the whole Revolution—Manuel, the man who had known the inside of the Bastille as a prisoner—was condemned as a reactionary and executed.

  Roger, meanwhile, had had a long talk with Dan. That born adventurer had been loath to give up his rescue work even for a fortnight, but at his master’s wish he agreed to go to England. He was to take a despatch for Mr. Pitt, the letter to Amanda, and the £4,000 worth of securities, which he was to deliver to Droopy Ned for conversion into British Government funds. He asked a few days to arrange for the continuity of his work during his absence; then, on the 14th of November, he quietly disappeared from Paris.