Miserably, Roger went on to another passage, evidently written later:
Roger, my heart, I have lain awake all night and I see but one way out of the snare into which we are fallen. Since that wonderful night in the ruins of Bécherel I have kept my vows to you. Even when you deserted me, even when you were abroad and I believed you dead, I remained faithful to you, although I was desperately lonely and much pressed by more than one gallant gentleman of the League. Yet could I save you I would give myself to a sans-culotte; but in this, for me to submit to Candalous’s embraces is no solution—or only a temporary one at best. He is of a mean, vindictive personality, and will never forgive you for the humiliation you put upon him when you forced him to vacate his lodging here. I have seen enough of these swinish revolutionaries to know how their minds work. Having made all the decencies of life illegal, they are determined to drag everyone down to their own level of the gutter, and delight in any excuse to destroy those who resist. They have no sense of honour, no chivalry, no mercy, and no constancy to the women whom they force to gratify their lusts. Did I give way to him, therefore, as soon as he had tired of me he would throw us both to the executioner.
There is only one way by which I can save you and spare myself from degradation, and I am resolved upon it. I shall go to him tonight and take with me my poignard. You have seen me use a dagger so you may be certain that I shall not fail in my purpose. I shall lead this lecherous rat to expect the utmost, then watch the triumph in his eyes turn to agony and despair as I seal his lips for ever.
When the deed is accomplished I shall give myself up to the police at once, in my own name. I shall say that Candalous was one of the men responsible for the death of my poor children, and that on meeting him again I resolved to be revenged upon him. Your only danger will then lie in Baudin, the Rennes apothecary; but trials are now reduced to such a farce that they occupy only a few moments, and the odds are that even if he volunteers to give evidence they will not trouble themselves to hear him. Why should they, if I confess my deed? As I recall him, he was a quiet, elderly man of good disposition. My death should prove sufficient satisfaction to him for the killing of his friend, and as you will not be in Paris at the time he cannot suppose that you had any hand in it; so I count it most unlikely that he will go out of his way to denounce you.
Yet should he do so, I have also thought of a way to protect you from that. Regarding yourself, my story will be that I escaped from Nantes and met you again in Paris last October, and that I lied to you about my past. When you remarked on my great likeness to the Vicomtesse de la Tour d’Auvergne, whom you had handed over to the Revolutionary authorities in Nantes early in July, I accounted for that by telling you that I was an illegitimate daughter of M. de Rochambeau by a merchant’s wife, and so the Vicomtesse’s halfsister. You believed me, took me as your mistress and allowed me to use your name only as a convenience. If you are questioned and confirm what I shall say, how can anyone prove that it was otherwise? But I have little fear that you will be called on to use this story, except to satisfy such acquaintances of yours in Paris who may suspect you of having known me to be an aristocrat—and they can know nothing of your having first condemned, then saved me, in Rennes.
Oh, Roger, how I thank you for all the love that you have given me both in the distant past and in these recent nightmare months. Do you remember, dear Miller’s youngest son, how I saved you from your pursuers by taking you into my coach that night long ago in Rennes? I was but a child then and carried an ugly doll that I called “my Englishman”. Do you remember our first kiss?—how in a passion I had struck you across the face with my whip, and as a punishment you kissed me? I thought I had been raped and threatened to have you branded; then in revenge I made you kiss me again when my face was all blotched with smallpox. Dear God, how vile a creature I must have been! What you can have seen to love in me then defeats my imagination. The thought that I have been able to repay your great love for me a little in this past year brings me some consolation, yet even now I know myself to be base and unworthy of it. Out of my selfish passion for you I treated your poor wife abominably. For that I humbly crave both your pardon and hers, and beg you to ask it of her when you return to England. If she too has erred I beg you to forgive her for my sake. Such is my wicked nature still that I cannot bring myself to hope that you will ever love her more than you have myself; yet it would ease my conscience could I have your promise before I go that you will do your utmost to become reconciled to her.
Think of me sometimes, Roger, my heart, but only to recall our happy hours together. Do not brood upon my death, for I am not afraid to die; and at the end I shall raise my voice to cry “Vive le Roi!” May the Good God show mercy to our poor France, and have you always in His holy keeping.
Athénaïs Hermonaie de Breuc.
Roger let the last sheet fall from his fingers and buried his face in his hands. She wrote of his love for her, but what of hers for him? There had been nothing to stop her leaving Paris; instead, she had remained and gone to the guillotine rather than allow him to be denounced.
Again he remained for a long time half stunned by grief; then there came a gentle knock on the door. Although he did not reply, it was opened and Maître Blanchard came in carrying a tray. As he set it down, he said:
“I ask pardon, Monsieur le Chevalier, for disregarding your wish not to be disturbed; but you must endeavour to eat something to keep up your strength. Look now, my wife has cooked this young pullet for you in your favourite cream sauce, and here is a bottle of Clos Vougeot from my own special reserve.”
Roger shook his head. “It is most kind of you. A glass of wine perhaps, but more than that I could not swallow.”
“Ah, come, Monsieur; Madame la Vicomtesse would be much annoyed if she thought you were starving yourself.”
“You . . . you knew her real name, then?” stammered Roger, in surprise.
The landlord shrugged his broad shoulders. “Why, yes, Monsieur. Did she not live when a young demoiselle in her father’s great mansion just round the corner, and was it not then that you first became one of my patrons? The famous duel that you fought on her behalf was the talk of all Paris, and despite her dyed hair I would have known her again anywhere. But there are many things known to my wife and myself of which we do not talk. It is sufficient for us that instead of living comfortably in England, you risk your life here month after month secretly fighting the great evil. There is, alas, so little that poor folk like us can do, and we count it a privilege to serve you in small matters while keeping still tongues in our heads.”
Tears again sprang to Roger’s eyes as he took the stalwart Norman by the hand, and murmured, “How blessed I am to have such loyal friends as you and your wife; it makes it all the harder for me to forgo your kindly care of me, as I must for a while. The whole house will remind me too poignantly of her until I am a little accustomed to her loss. But keep my room, for I shall return as soon as I feel I can bear to do so.”
“I understand, Monsieur; and now please to attempt to eat a little supper before you go. I will have a coach waiting for you in twenty minutes.”
Obediently, Roger sat down, ate some of the chicken and drank two-thirds of the wine, then drove in the coach to the Cushion and Keys. It was now past eleven o’clock, but Citizen Oysé was still up, and welcomed him in a subdued manner which showed that he knew about Madame Breuc’s execution, but did not like to make any mention of it. Roger went straight to bed, and, after tossing miserably for a while, woke to find to his surprise that it was morning.
By the time he was dressed his grief had crystallised into a cold, hard rage against the state of things which had led to Athénaïs’s death. The sights he had been compelled to witness during the past two years had given him cause enough to hate everything connected with the monstrous upheaval which had for so long crucified France, but his personal loss was like the turning of a knife in a wound, making him mad with the urge to strike out blindly at the sys
tem which had inflicted it. Had Candalous not already been dead he would have sought him out to exact a bloody vengeance, regardless of the consequences, but as it was he could only grope in his mind for some other means of slaking his agonised distress.
Fortunately, his long training in caution once again got the better of his impulse to take immediate action; yet all the same, as he was going to report to Carnot at the offices of the Comité, he decided that it would be wisest to leave his pocket pistol behind in case he ran into Robespierre there and could not overcome the temptation to shoot him.
When he had made his report, Carnot gravely commiserated with him on the loss he had sustained during his absence, and he had the sense to realise that this was the perfect opportunity for conveying to the Comité his ignorance of the fact that the woman with whom he had been living was an aristocrat. As he lied glibly about Athénaïs having told him that she was an illegitimate child, he felt like St. Peter when the cock crowed twice; but to have done otherwise was to risk her self-sacrifice having been made in vain, and Carnot shrugged the matter off by saying that in times such as the present a man could count himself lucky if he even knew the private political convictions of his own mother, let alone his wife.
That afternoon Roger went for a long walk in the Bois. A single morning in Paris had been enough to bring home to him with renewed force the now desperate condition of its inhabitants. Four out of every five shops were closed; lined up before every baker’s, butcher’s and grocer’s were long queues of lean, grimly silent people. The streets were almost empty of traffic. Even the uniforms of the National Guards were now in rags. Every passer-by had a furtive, hunted look. A prolonged glance was enough to send any of them scuttling round the nearest corner. Their eyes were ringed with black circles of sleeplessness and hunger, their faces were grey with fear. The squads of soldiers no longer sang the ça ira or the Marseillaise as they marched. The shouting mobs bent on demonstrating, so long a feature of the city, had disappeared. Even the sans-culottes were cowed.
Roger wondered if it would be possible for him to organise an insurrection, and decided that the chances of stirring up one of sufficient magnitude to overthrow the Comité were very slender. He was convinced that ninety-nine out of every hundred people would be overjoyed to see an end put to the Revolution, but the spirit had gone out of them. In the past month attempts had been made on the lives of both Collot and Robespierre, yet those exceptions only proved the rule. The people were desperate, but too terrified of betrayal to combine openly against their oppressors. If the thing were to be done at all it must be done from outside. There was plenty of secret opposition to Robespierre in high places; his antics as High Priest to the Supreme Being had done him great damage with nearly all his most powerful associates. The problem was which of them had sufficient resolution to gamble their lives in an attempt to bring about his downfall; how could their divergent aims temporarily be reconciled and their jealousies lulled long enough to prevent them betraying one another before the deed was done?
After a two-hour walk Roger returned to the city; his mind was made up. How could he better avenge Athénaïs than by organising a coup d’état to end the Terror? How could he serve his own country, the wretched people of France, the whole of humanity, better than by bringing down in ruins the whole awful structure of the Revolution? The odds were that the attempt would fail and cost him his life, but he now felt that he had little left to live for. Even so, to get himself sent to the guillotine would be synonymous with failure; so he meant to go to work with the utmost caution and devote several days to an intensive study of the men best suited to his purpose before taking the first of several steps, any one of which might land him on the scaffold.
Collot, Billaud and Barère were the obvious choice for a combination against Robespierre, but Roger rejected them at once because they were all dyed-in-the-wool terrorists, and to exchange the present régime for one dominated by them would be to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire. Carnot was waging the war which kept France’s many enemies at bay and Roger felt certain that he would not be willing to jeopardise the safety of the country by risking his own neck in a political conspiracy.
Outside the great Comité a score of possible names offered themselves. The men on the lesser Comité de Sûreté Générale, which controlled the police, were, unfortunately, mostly Robespierrists, and all the judges on the Revolutionary Tribunal had been appointed by him; there remained the men who had made great names for themselves as Représentants en mission.
During the next two days Roger sought out and, apparently by chance, ran into a number of the most prominent of these, to whom he talked for a while, cautiously sounding their opinions. The question of the worship of the Supreme Being served admirably as a hare to bring the conversation round to the Incorruptible. Almost without exception they expressed the view that Robespierre’s vanity had affected his brain. He was not even bothering now to consult his colleagues on the Comité, but was issuing new measures simply signed “By the order of Robespierre”. All agreed that it would not be long before he openly declared himself Dictator, and several hinted darkly that if France were to remain a Republic it was high time that the nation produced a Brutus; but none of them was bold enough to hint that he would be willing to play the part.
By the 16th of July Roger had chosen his men. As the risk of immediate denunciation would be doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and so on by each person to whom he put his proposals openly, he dare risk approaching only a very limited number; but he meant to approach those chosen few together, thereby taking the one big gamble that they would either unite in denouncing him or would all commit themselves in the presence of each other. His choice was governed not so much by apparent animosity to Robespierre as by an endeavour to secure a balanced group in which each member would contribute some source of power that the others lacked.
He selected Barras as a good leader, because the ci-devant noble was bold, unscrupulous, an able military commander, and a man whose scandalous debaucheries must soon bring him under the axe of the Incorruptible, unless he struck first. But Barras was a poor speaker and of only mediocre intelligence; so Roger’s second choice was Dubois-Crancé, a deputy who had great influence in the Convention, possessed a first-class brain, and bore a deadly hatred for Robespierre’s alter ego, Couthon, who had recently threatened to impeach him for having allowed a Royalist force to escape from Lyons. His third choice was Tallien, because he knew that unless he had one of the old school terrorists in the party its basis would not be broad enough to keep the sans-culottes from rising, should an outcry occur that the People’s liberties were being threatened by a counter-Revolution; yet Tallien, although it was not known to the Paris mob, had fallen under the influence of his beautiful wife, who could be counted on to moderate his terrorist leanings should he become one of the new masters; while the fact that she had recently been arrested and imprisoned as a suspect should make him eager to join any movement for the overthrow of the Comité, as offering the best means of saving her.
Having decided with whom he would risk his neck, Roger invited the three of them to dine with him on the 17th at La Belle Étoile, although he had no intention of entertaining them there. When he woke on that day he was much relieved to see that it promised to be fine, apart from the possibility of July thunderstorms. Going straight to La Belle Étoile, he asked Maître Blanchard to prepare the finest picnic lunch for four persons that he could provide, and enquired whether he would then be willing to drive one of his hire coaches himself to take the party to the Bois.
The good Norman, realising that secrecy was the object of his being asked to act as coachman, at once agreed, and when Roger returned at three o’clock in the afternoon he found all in readiness. As each of his guests arrived he popped them swiftly into the waiting coach, and immediately they were all assembled it set off.
The moment it got under way, Dubois-Crancé said to him, “I had no idea this was to be a party, and thought myse
lf bidden to dine with you at your inn. Where are you taking us?”
“To enjoy a little air and sunshine,” Roger replied lightly. “Paris stinks too much of blood for my liking these days, and I thought it would be a pleasant change for us all to eat a meal in God’s country, sitting on the grass.”
Barras gave a great guffaw of laughter. “God’s country, say you? Have a care! ’Tis your blood that will be stinking soon, unless you refer to it as the Supreme Being’s country—or Citizen Robespierre’s.”
Roger’s reference to “God” had been deliberate, and he was much encouraged that his first shaft had found so ready a mark; but Dubois-Crancé’s serious reply, a second later, was even more to his liking.
The Man who Killed the King Page 62