VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I. — ROBESPIERRE’S CHARACTER.
We will now jump over a space of nearly three months, and leaving the châteaux of royalist La Vendée, plunge for a short while into the heart of republican Paris. In the Rue St. Honoré lived a cabinet-maker, named Duplay, and in his house lodged Maximilian Robespierre, the leading spirit in the latter and more terrible days of the Revolution. The time now spoken of was the beginning of October, 1793; and at no period did the popularity and power of that remarkable man stand higher.
The whole government was then vested in the Committee of Public Safety—a committee consisting of twelve persons, members of the Convention, all of course ultra-democrats, over the majority of whom Robespierre exercised a direct control. No despot ever endured ruled with so absolute and stringent a dominion as that under which this body of men held the French nation. The revolutionary tribunal was now established in all its horror and all its force. A law was passed by the Convention, in September, which decreed that all suspected people should be arrested and brought before this tribunal; that nobles, lawyers, bankers, priests, men of property, and strangers in the land, should be suspected unless known to be acting friends and adherents of the ultra-revolutionary party; that the punishment of such persons should be death; and that the members of any revolutionary tribunal which had omitted to condemn any suspected person, should themselves be tried, and punished by death. Such was the law by which the Reign of Terror was organized and rendered possible.
At this time the Girondists were lying in prison, awaiting their trial and their certain doom. Marie Antoinette had been removed from the Temple to the Conciergerie, and her trial was in a day or two about to commence. Her fate was already fixed, and had only to be pronounced. Danton had retired from Paris to his own province, sick with the shedding of so much blood, jealous of the pre-eminence which Robespierre had assumed; watching his opportunity to return, that he might sell the republic to the royalists; equally eager, let us believe, to save his country as to make his fortune, but destined to return, only that he also might bend his neck beneath the monster guillotine. Marat, the foulest birth of the revolution, whose licentious heat generated venom and rascality, as a dunghill out of its own filth produces adders’ eggs—Marat was no more. Carnot, whose genius for war enabled the French nation, amidst all its poverty and intestine contests, even in the pangs and throes of that labour in which it strove to bring forth a constitution, to repulse the forces of the allied nations, and prepare the way for future conquests, was a member of the all-powerful Committee, and we cannot suppose that he acted under the dictation of Robespierre; but if he did not do so, at any rate he did not interfere with him. The operations of a campaign, in which the untaught and ill-fed army of republican France had to meet the troops of England, Flanders, Prussia, Austria, Sardinia, and Spain, besides those of royalist France, were sufficient to occupy even the energies of Carnot.
Robespierre, in the Convention and in the Committee, was omnipotent; but he also had his master, and he knew it. He knew that he could only act, command, and be obeyed, in union with, and dependence on, the will of the populace of Paris; and the higher he rose in that path of life which he marked out for himself with so much precision, and followed with so much constancy, the more bitterly his spirit chafed at the dependence. He knew it was of no avail to complain of the people to the people, and he seldom ventured to risk his position by opposing the wishes of the fearful masters whom he served, but at length he was driven to do so, and at length he fell.
Half a century has passed since Robespierre died, and history has become peculiarly conversant with his name. Is there any one whose character suffers under a more wide-spread infamy? The abomination of whose deeds has become more notorious? The tale of whose death has been oftener told; whose end, horrid, fearful, agonized, as was that of this man, has met with less sympathy? For fifty years the world has talked of, condemned, and executed Robespierre. Men and women, who have barely heard the names of Pitt and Fox, who know not whether Metternich is a man or a river, or one of the United States, speak of Robespierre as of a thing accursed. They know, at any rate, what he was—the demon of the revolution; the source of the fountain of blood with which Paris was deluged; the murderer of the thousands whose bodies choked the course of the Loire and the Rhone. Who knows not enough of Robespierre to condemn him? Who abstains from adding another malediction to those which already load the name of the King of the Reign of Terror.
Yet it is not impossible that some apologist may be found for the blood which this man shed; that some quaint historian, delighting to show the world how wrong has been its most assured opinions, may attempt to vindicate the fame of Robespierre, and strive to wash the blackamoor white. Are not our old historical assurances everywhere asserted? Has it not been proved to us that crooked-backed Richard was a good and politic King; and that the iniquities of Henry VIII are fabulous? whereas the agreeable predilections of our early youth are disturbed by our hearing that glorious Queen Bess, and learned King James, were mean, bloodthirsty, and selfish.
I am not the bold man who will dare to face the opinion of the world, and attempt to prove that Robespierre has become infamous through prejudice. He must be held responsible for the effects of the words which he spoke, and the things which he did, as other men are. He made himself a scourge and a pestilence to his country; therefore, beyond all other men, he has become odious, and therefore, historian after historian, as they mention his name, hardly dare, in the service of truth, to say one word to lessen his infamy.
Yet Robespierre began his public life with aspirations of humanity, which never deserted him; and resolutions as to conduct, to which he adhered with a constancy never surpassed. What shall we say are the qualifications for a great and good man?—Honesty. In spite of his infamy, Robespierre’s honesty has become proverbial. Moral conduct—the life he led even during the zenith of his power, and at a time when licentiousness was general, and morality ridiculous, was characterized by the simplicity of the early Quakers. Industry—without payment from the State, beyond that which he received as a member of the Convention, and which was hardly sufficient for the wants of his simple existence, he worked nearly night and day in the service of the State. Constancy of purpose—from the commencement of his career, in opposition at first to ridicule and obscurity, then to public opinion, and lastly to the combined efforts of the greatest of his countrymen, he pursued one only idea; convinced of its truth, sure of its progress, and longing for its success. Temperance in power—though in reality governing all France, Robespierre assumed to himself none of the attributes or privileges of political power. He took to himself no high place, no public situation of profit or grandeur. He was neither haughty in his language, nor imperious in his demeanour. Love of country—who ever showed a more devoted love? For his country he laboured, and suffered a life which surely in itself could have had nothing attractive; the hope of the future felicity of France alone fed his energies, and sustained his courage. His only selfish ambition was to be able to retire into private life and contemplate from thence the general happiness which he had given to his country. Courage—those who have carefully studied his private life, and have learnt what he endured, and dared to do in overcoming the enemies Of his system, can hardly doubt his courage. Calumny or error has thrown an unmerited disgrace over his last wretched days. He has been supposed to have wounded himself in an impotent attempt to put an end to his life. It has been ascertained that such was not the fact, the pistol by which he was wounded having been fired by one of the soldiers by whom he was arrested. He is stated also to have wanted that firmness in death which so many of his victims displayed. They triumphed even in their death. Louis and Vergniaud, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Roland, felt that they were stepping from life into glory, and their step was light and elastic. Robespierre was sinking from existence into infamy. During those fearful hours, in which nothing in life was left him but to suffer, how wretched must have been the reminiscences of his career! He, who had so constantly pursued one idea, must then have felt that that idea had been an error; that he had all in all been wrong; that he had waded through the blood of his countrymen to reach a goal, which, bright and luminous as it had appeared, he now found to be an ignis fatuus. Nothing was then left to him. His life had been a failure, and for the future he had no hope. His body was wounded and in tortures; his spirit was dismayed by the insults of those around him, and his soul had owned no haven to which death would give it an escape. Could his eye have been lit with animation as he ascended the scaffold! Could his foot have then stepped with confidence! Could he have gloried in his death! Poor mutilated worm, agonised in body and in soul. Can it be ascribed to want of courage in him, that his last moments were passed in silent agony and despair?
Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country: these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; history confesses it, and to what favoured hero does history assign a fairer catalogue? Whose name does a brighter galaxy adorn? With such qualities, such attributes, why was he not the Washington of France? Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a bye-word, a reproach, and an enormity? Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed. He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed. He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness. He was gifted with a power over common temptation, which belongs to but few. His blood was cool and temperate, and yet his heart was open to all the softer emotions. He had no appetite for luxury; no desire for pomp; no craving for wealth. Among thousands who were revelling in sensuality, he kept himself pure and immaculate. If any man could have said, I will be virtuous; I, of myself, unaided, trusting to my own power, guarding myself by the light of my own reason; I will walk uprightly through the world, and will shed light from my path upon my brethren, he might have said so. He attempted it, and history shows us the result. He attempted, unassisted, to be perfect among men, and his memory is regarded as that of a loathsome plague, defiling even the unclean age in which he lived.
At about five o’clock in the afternoon on an October day, in 1793, Robespierre was sitting alone in a small room in the house of his friend, Simon Duplay, the cabinet-maker. This room, which was the bed-chamber, reception-room, and study of the arbitrary Dictator, was a garret in the roof of Duplay’s humble dwelling. One small window, opening upon the tiles, looked into the court-yard in which were stored the planks or blocks necessary to the cabinet-maker’s trade. A small wooden bedstead, a long deal table, and four or five rush-bottomed chairs, constituted the whole furniture of the apartment.
A deal shelf ran along the wail beneath the slanting roof, and held his small treasure of books; and more than half of this humble row were manuscripts of his own, which he had numbered, arranged, and bound with that methodical exactness, which was a part of his strange character. He was sitting at a table covered with papers, on which he had now been laboriously preparing instructions for those who, under him, carried on the rule of terror; and arranging the measured words with which, at the Jacobins, he was to encourage his allies to uphold him in the bloody despotism which he had seized.
The weight upon his mind must have been immense, for Robespierre was not a thoughtless, wild fanatic, carried by the multitude whether they pleased: he led the people of Paris, and led them with a fixed object. He was progressing by one measure deeply calculated to the age of reason, which he was assured was coming; and that one measure was the extermination of all who would be likely to oppose him. The extent of his power, the multiplicity of his cares, the importance of his every word and act, and the personal danger in which he lived, might have ruffled the equanimity of a higher-spirited man than he is supposed to have been; but yet, to judge from his countenance, his mind was calm; the traces of thought were plain on his brow, but there was none of the impatience of a tyrant about his mouth, nor of the cruelty of an habitual blood-shedder in his eyes. His forehead showed symptoms of deep thought, and partially redeemed the somewhat mean effect of his other features. The sharp nose, the thin lips, the cold grey eyes, the sallow sunken cheeks, were those of a precise, passionless, self-confident man, little likely to be led into any excess of love or hatred, but little likely also to be shaken in his resolve either for good or evil. His face probably was a true index to his character. Robespierre was not a cruel man; but he had none of that humanity, which makes the shedding of blood abominable to mankind, and which, had he possessed it, would have made his career impossible.
His hair was close curled in rolls upon his temples, and elaborately powdered. The front and cuffs of his shirt were not only scrupulously clean, but starched and ironed with the most exact care. He wore a blue coat, a white waistcoat, and knee-breeches. His stockings, like his shirt, were snow-white, and the silver buckles shone brightly in his shoes. No one could have looked less like a French republican of 1793 than did Robespierre.
He had just completed a letter addressed jointly to Thurreau and Lechelle, the commissioners whom he had newly appointed to the horrid task of exterminating the royalists of La Vendée. Santerre had undertaken this work, and had failed in it, and it was now said that he was a friend and creature of Danton’s; that he was not to be trusted as a republican; that he had a royalist bias; that it would be a good thing that his head should roll, as the heads of so many false men had rolled, under the avenging guillotine. Poor Santerre, who, in the service of the Republic, had not shunned the infamy of presiding at the death of Louis. He, however, contrived to keep his burly head on his strong shoulders, and to brew beer for the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire.
Thurreau and Lechelle, it was correctly thought, would be surer hands at performing the work to be done. They had accepted the commission with alacrity, and were now on the road to commence their duties. That duty was to leave neither life nor property in the proscribed district. “Let La Vendée become a wilderness, and we will re-populate it with patriots, to whom the fertility of fields, rich with the blood of traitors, shall be a deserved reward.” Thus had Robespierre now written; and as he calmly read over, and slowly copied, his own despatch, he saw nothing in it of which he could disapprove, as a reasoning being animated with a true love of his country. “Experience has too clearly proved to us that the offspring of slaves, who willingly kiss the rod of tyrants, will have no higher aspiration than their parents. In allowing them to escape, we should only create difficulties for our own patriot children. Hitherto the servants of the Convention have scotched the snake, but have not killed it; and the wounded viper has thus become more furiously venomous than before. It is for you, citizens, to strike a death-blow to the infamy of La Vendée. It will be your glory to assure the Convention that no royalist remains in the western provinces to disturb the equanimity of the Republic.” Such were the sentiments he had just expressed, such the instructions he had given, calmly meditating on his duty as a ruler of his country; and when he had finished his task, and seen that no expression had escaped him of which reason or patriotism could disapprove, he again placed the paper before him, to write words of affection to the brother of his heart.
Robespierre’s brother was much younger than himself; but there was no one whom he more thoroughly trusted with State secrets, and State services of importance; and no one who regarded him with so entire a devotion. Robespierre the elder believed only in himself; Robespierre the younger believed in his brother, and his belief was fervid and assured, as is always that of an enthusiast. To him, Maximilian appeared to be the personification of every virtue necessary to mankind. Could he have been made to understand the opinion which the world would form of his brother’s character, he would have thought that it was about to be smitten with a curse of general insanity. Robespierre’s vanity was flattered by the adoration of his brother, and he loved his worshipper sincerely. The young man was now at Lyons, propagating the doctrines of his party; and in his letters to him, Robespierre mingled the confidential greetings of an affectionate brother with those furious demands for republican energy, which flooded the streets of the towns of France with blood, and choked the rivers of France with the bodies of the French.
“I still hope,” he wrote, slowly considering the words as they fell from his pen, “for the day when this work will have been done—for the happy day when we shall feel that we have prevailed not only against our enemies, but over our own vices; but my heart nearly fails me, when I think how little we have yet effected. I feel that among the friends whom we most trust, those who are actuated by patriotism alone are lukewarm. Lust, avarice, plunder, and personal revenge, are the motives of those who are really energetic . . . It is very difficult for me to know my friends; this also preys heavily on my spirits. The gold of the royalists is as plentiful as when the wretched woman, who is now about to die, was revelling in her voluptuous pride at Versailles. I know that the hands of many, who call themselves patriots, are even now grasping at the wages for which they are to betray the people. A day of reckoning shall come for all of them, though the list of their names is a long one. Were I to write the names of those whom I know to be true, I should be unable to insert in it above five or six. . . . I look for your return to Paris with more than my usual impatience. Eleanor’s quiet zeal, and propriety of demeanour, is a great comfort to me; but even with her, I feel that I have some reserve. I blame myself that it is so, for she is most trustworthy; but, as yet, I cannot throw it off. With you alone I have none. Do not, however, leave the work undone; remember that those who will not toil for us, will assuredly toil against us. There can be none neutral in the battle we are now waging. A man can have committed no greater crime against the Republic than having done nothing to add to its strength. I know your tender heart grieves at the death of every traitor, though your patriotism owns the necessity of his fall. Remember that the prosperity of every aristocrat has been purchased by the infamy of above a hundred slaves! How much better is it that one man should die, than that a hundred men should suffer worse than death!”
When he had finished his letter, he read it accurately over, and then having carefully wiped his pen, and laid it near his inkstand, he leant back in his chair, and with his hand resting on the table, turned over in his mind the names and deeds of those who were accounted as his friends, but whom he suspected to be his enemies. He had close to his hand slips of paper, on which were written notes of the most trivial doings of those by whom he was generally surrounded; and the very spies who gave him the information were themselves the unfortunate subjects of similar notices from others. The wretched man was tortured by distrust; as he had told his brother, there were not among the whole body of those associates, by whose aid he had made himself the ruling power in France, half-a-dozen whom he did not believe to be eager for his downfall and his death. Thrice, whilst thus meditating, he stopped, and with his pencil put a dot against the name of a republican. Unfortunate men! their patriotism did not avail them; within a few weeks, the three had been added to the list of victims who perished under the judicial proceedings of Fouquier Tinville.
It had now become nearly dark, and Robespierre was unable longer to read the unfriendly notices which lay beneath his hand, and he therefore gave himself up entirely to reflection. He began to dream of nobler subjects—to look forward to happier days, when torrents of blood would be no longer necessary, when traitors should no longer find a market for their treason, when the age of reason should have prevailed, and France, happy, free, illustrious, and intellectual, should universally own how much she owed to her one incorruptible patriot. He thought to himself of living on his small paternal domain in Artois, receiving nothing from the country he had blessed but adoration; triumphant in the success of his theory; honoured as more than mortal; evincing the grandeur of his soul by rejecting those worldly rewards, which to his disposition offered no temptation. But before he had long indulged in this happy train of thought, he was called back to the realities of his troubled life by a low knock at his door, and on his answering it, a young woman, decently, but very plainly dressed, entered the garret with a candle in her hand; this was Eleanor Duplay; and when Robespierre allowed himself to dream of a future home, she was the wife of his bosom, and the mother of his children.
CHAPTER II. — ROBESPIERRE’S LOVE.
Eleanor Duplay was not a beautiful young woman, nor was there anything about her which marked her as being superior to those of her own station of life; but her countenance was modest and intelligent, and her heart was sincere; such as she was she had won the affection of him, who was, certainly, at this time the most powerful man in France. She was about five-and-twenty years of age; was the eldest of four sisters, and had passed her quiet existence in assisting her mother in her household, and in doing for her father so much of his work as was fitting for a woman’s hand. Till Robespierre had become an inmate of her father’s house, she had not paid more than ordinary attention to the politics of the troubled days in which she lived; but she had caught the infection from him, as the whole family had done. She had listened to his words as though they fell from inspired lips: the pseudo-philosophical dogmas, which are to us both repulsive and ridiculous, were to her invaluable truths, begotten by reason, and capable of regenerating her fellow-creatures. Robespierre was to her, what her Saviour should have been; and he rewarded her devotion, by choosing her as the partner of his greatness.
Robespierre’s affection was not that of an impassioned lover; he did not show it by warm caresses or fervid vows; but yet he made her, whom he had chosen, understand that she was to him dearer than any other woman; and Eleanor was prouder of her affianced husband, than though the handsomest youth of Paris was at her feet.
As she entered his chamber, he was thinking partly of her, and he was not sorry to be thus interrupted. She carried a candle in one hand, and in the other a bouquet of fresh flowers, which she quietly laid among his papers. Robespierre either had, or affected a taste for flowers, and, as long as they were to be gotten, he was seldom seen without them, either in his hand or on his coat.
“I thought you would want a light, M. Robespierre,” said she, for though she hoped to be closely connected with him, she seldom ventured on the familiarity of calling him by his Christian name. Had she been a man, her democratic principle would have taught her to discontinue the aristocratic Monsieur; but, even in 1793, the accustomed courtesy of that obnoxious word was allowed to woman’s lips. “I thought you would want a light, or I would not have interrupted you at your work.”
“Thanks, Eleanor: I was not at work, though; my brain, my eyes, and hands were all tired. I have been sitting idle for, I believe, this half hour.”
“Your eyes and hands may have been at rest,” said she, sitting down at the end of the table, “but it is seldom that your thoughts are not at work.”
“It is one of the high privileges of man, that though his body needs repose, the faculties of his mind need never be entirely dormant. I know that I have reasoned in my sleep as lucidly as I have ever done awake; and though, when awake, I have forgotten what has passed through my mind, the work of my brain has not been lost: the same ideas have recurred to me again, and though in the recurrence, I cannot remember when I have before employed myself with arranging them, still they come to me as old friends, with whom I am well acquainted. The mind will seldom complain of too much labour, if the body be not injured by indulgence or disease.”
“But too much labour will bring on disease,” said Eleanor, in a tone which plainly showed the sincerity of the anxiety which she expressed. “We never get a walk with you now; do you know that it is months since we were in the Champs Elysées together; it was in May, and this is October now.”
“Affairs must be greatly altered, Eleanor; many things which are now undone must be completed, before we walk again for our pleasure: a true patriot can no longer walk the streets of Paris in safety, while traitors can come and go in security, with their treason blazoned on their foreheads.”
“And yet do not many traitors expiate their crimes daily?”
“Many are condemned and die; but I fear not always those who have most deserved death. Much blood has been shed, and it has partly been in compliance with my counsel. I would that the vengeance of the Republic might now stay its hand, if it could be so, with safety to the people. I am sick of the unchanging sentences of the judges, and the verdicts of juries who are determined to convict. I doubt not that those who are brought before them are traitors or aristocrats—at any rate, they are not at heart republicans, and if so, they have deserved death; but I should be better pleased, if now and then a victim was spared.” He paused for a while, and then added, “The blood of traitors is very sickening; but there are those Eleanor, in whose nostrils it has a sweet savour: there are butchers of the human kind, who revel in the horrid shambles, in which they are of necessity employed. Such men are to me accursed—their breath reeks of human blood.”
Eleanor shuddered as she listened to him: but it was not the thought of all the blood, which he whom she loved had shed, which made her shudder: she had no idea that Robespierre was a sanguinary man: she sympathized with the weakness of humanity which he confessed, and loved him for the kindness of his heart—and he was not a hypocrite in his protestation; he believed that there was nothing in common between himself and the wretches who crowded round the last sufferings of the victims whom he had caused to ascend the scaffold. He little thought that, in a few years, he would be looked upon as the sole author of the barbarities of which he now complained.
It was seldom that Robespierre had spoken so openly to Eleanor Duplay of his inmost thoughts. She was flattered and gratified to think he had thought her worthy of his confidence, that he had chosen her to listen to the secrets of his heart, and she felt that, if she had influence with him, it would become her as a woman to use it on behalf of those whom it might be in his power to save from a fearful death.
“And are there many more who must die?” said she. “When I hear the wheels of that horrid cart, as it carries the poor creatures who have been condemned, on their last journey, my heart, too, sickens within me. Will these horrid executions go on much longer?”
“There are still thousands upon thousands of men in France, who would sooner be the slaves of a King, than draw the breath of liberty,” answered he.
“But they can be taught the duties and feelings of men, cannot they? They think, and feel now only as they have been brought up to think and feel.”
“Had they not been too stubborn to learn, they have had a lesson written in letters of blood, which would have long since convinced them—if it be necessary, it must be repeated I for one will not shrink from my duty. No though I should sink beneath the horrid task which it imposes on me.”
They both then sat silent for a while; though Robespierre had ventured to express to the girl, whom he knew to be so entirely devoted to him, a feeling somewhat akin to that of pity for his victims, he could not bear that even she should appear to throw a shadow of an imputation on the propriety and justness of his measures, although she only did so by repeating and appealing to the kindly expressions which had fallen from himself. He had become so used to the unmeasured praise of those among whom he lived, so painfully suspicious of those who, in the remotest degree, disapproved of any of his words or deeds, so confident of himself, so distrustful of all others, that even what she had said was painful to him, and though he himself hardly knew why, yet he felt that he was displeased with her. Eleanor, however, was altogether unconscious of having irritated his sore feelings; and relying on the kind tone of what he had said, and the confident manner in which he had spoken to her, she determined to obey the dictates of her heart, and intercede for mercy for her fellow-creatures. Poor girl! she did not know the danger of coming near the lion’s prey.
She had heard much of the Vendeans, and though those who had spoken in her hearing of the doings of the royalist rebels were not likely to say much to excite sympathy on their behalf still she had learnt that they were true to each other, faithful to their leaders, generous to their enemies, and brave in battle. The awful punishment to be inflicted on the doomed district had also been partially discussed in her hearing; and though the Republic had no more enthusiastic daughter than herself, her woman’s heart could not endure the idea that even the innocent children of a large province should be condemned to slaughter for their fathers’ want of patriotism. What work so fitting for the woman whom a ruler of the people had chosen for a wife, as to implore the stern magistrate to temper justice with mercy? In what way could she use her influence so sweetly as to ask for the lives of women and children?
And yet she felt afraid to make her innocent request. Robespierre had never yet been offended with her. Though he had given her counsel on almost every subject, he had never yet spoken to her one word of disapprobation still she knew that he had inspired her with fear. She made some attempts to begin the subject, which he did not notice, for he was still brooding over the unpleasant sensation which her words had occasioned; but at last she gathered courage, and said:
“The soldiers of the Republic have at last overcome the rebels of La Vendée—have they not, M. Robespierre?”
“It is not enough to conquer traitors,” answered he, “they must be crushed, before the country can be safe from their treachery.”
“Their treason must be crushed, I know.”
“Crimes between man and man can be atoned for by minor punishments: crimes between citizens and their country can only be properly avenged by death. You may teach the murderer or the thief the iniquity of his fault; and when he has learnt to hate the deed he has committed, he may be pardoned. It is not so with traitors. Though the truest child of France should spend his life in the attempt, he would not be able to inspire one aristocrat with a spark of patriotism.”
“Must every royalist in La Vendée perish then?” said Eleanor.
Robespierre did not answer her immediately, but leaning his elbow on the table, he rested his forehead on his hand, so as nearly to conceal his face. Eleanor thought that he was meditating on her question; and remembering that he had declared that he should be pleased if now and then a victim might be spared, again commenced her difficult task of urging him to mercy.
“They talk of shedding the blood of innocent children—of destroying peasant women, who can only think and feel as their husbands bid them. You will not allow that this should be done, will you?”
“Is the life of a woman more precious to her than that of a man? It is a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the iniquities of women because of their sex. Their weakness entitles them to our protection, their beauty begets our love; but neither their weakness or their beauty should be accepted as an excuse for their crimes.”
“But poor innocent babes—it is not possible that they should have committed crimes.”
“In the religion of Christ it is declared, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children, to the third and fourth generation. The priests who made these laws, and handed them down to their flocks, as the very words of their God, had closely studied human nature. I do not believe that an Almighty Creator condescended to engrave on stone, with his own finger, these words, as they would feign that he did do; but the law is not the less true; the children must expatiate, to the third and fourth generation, the sins of their fathers. Nature, which is all benignant, wills that it should be so.”
“If this be so, will not nature work out her own law. Will it not be punishment enough that so many women should lose their husbands; so many children their fathers? You, I know, are averse to shedding blood; you would spare life whenever your sense of duty would allow you to do so. Try what clemency will do in La Vendée. Try whether kindness will not put a stop to the bitterness of their enmity. Do, dearest, for my sake.”
It is possible that Eleanor had never before spoken to her lover in language so tender; it is also probable that she had never before asked of him any request, in which ought of a political nature was concerned. Be that as it may, as soon as she had finished speaking, her face became suffused with scarlet, as though she had said something of which she was ashamed. One would think that there was nothing in the term of endearment which she had used which could have displeased a betrothed husband; nothing in the petition she, had made which could have angered a political friend. Robespierre, however, soon showed that he was displeased and angered; nay, worse still, that his black, unmanly suspicion was aroused. To his disordered brain it seemed that Eleanor was practising on him her woman’s wiles for some unworthy purpose, and that treason lurked in her show of humanity and affection. He believed that she, who had always believed in him, loved him, almost worshipped him, had become in an instant false and designing.
He looked her steadily in the face a moment or two before he answered, and she did not bear calmly the fierce glance of his eye; she saw at once that she had angered him, and, in spite of her love, she could not but know how dark and terrible was his anger.
“Who has set you on to talk to me of this?” he said slowly, still keeping his eyes fixed on hers.
“Set me on, M. Robespierre! what do you mean? Who should have set me on?”
“There are hundreds, I grieve to say, ready to do so. Some of them are daily near you. I should have thought, though, that with you I might have been safe.”
“Safe with me! And do you doubt it now—do you doubt that you are safe with me?” and as she spoke, she laid her hand upon his arm, and attempted to appeal to his affection. He gently withdrew his arm from her grasp, and again concealed his face with his hand. “As I stand here alive before you,” continued she, speaking with a more assured voice than she had hitherto used, “I have not whispered a word to man or woman upon this subject, but yourself.”
Eleanor had risen from her chair when her companion first expressed his suspicion, and she was now standing; but Robespierre remained seated, still shading his eyes with his hand, as though he had nothing further to say to her, and would wish to be alone. She, however, felt that she could not leave him without some further explanation on her part, some retraction on his; but she knew not how to set about it. The most eloquent men in France had found it difficult to explain anything to Robespierre’s satisfaction. No one had yet been able to make him retract the word which he had spoken.
“Say that you believe me, M. Robespierre,” said she; “for mercy’s sake, say that you do not doubt me! Do you not know that I would always obey you, that your words are always to me the words of truth? I have done wrong, I doubt not, in speaking to you of public matters. I beg your pardon, and promise that I will not so transgress again; but before I leave you, tell me that you do not distrust my fidelity.”
“I would still wish to hope, Eleanor, that you are truly anxious for the welfare of your country, and the safety of your friend,” said he, still, however, without looking up.
“Indeed I am, most anxious; anxious above all things for your welfare and safety. I should think little of my life, could I give it to promote the one, or secure the other.”
“Tell me then, I conjure you, who are they who have desired you to beg for the lives of these Vendean rebels,” and as he spoke, he leapt from his chair, and putting his hand upon her shoulder, looked sternly into her face.
“As God is my judge—”
“Bah! if neither love of your country or of me, nor yet fear of the punishment due to traitors, will keep you true,” (and he slightly shook her with his hand, as he slowly uttered the last fearful words), “the judgment of God will not have much effect upon you.”
“True!” said the poor girl, almost confounded with her horror at the charge against her, amid the violence of the man. “True! Oh! Sir, for mercy’s sake, tell me what it is of which you accuse me—tell me what it is that I have done. No man has spoken of you behind your back words which you might not yourself have heard. No man has desired me to ask you to spare the rebels. No man has even dared to hint to me, that I should do or say ought in opposition to you.”
“Some woman has done it then,” said he.
“My God! that you should think so foully of me! No, Sir, neither man, nor woman, nor child. You said that, were it possible, you would wish that the hand of the executioner might be stayed. It was your own words that set me on to say what I did. I did not dream that I should displease you. Tell me, M. Robespierre, tell me that you are not angry with me, and I will forget it all.”
“Forget it all. Yes, things trivial and of no concern are long remembered, but matters on which depend the life and death of those we ought to love, are soon forgotten if they are unpleasant. No, Eleanor, do not forget it all. Do not forget this—remember that I never have, and never will, allow my feelings as a private man to influence my conduct as a public functionary. I have many duties to perform; duties which are arduous, disagreeable, and dangerous, but difficult as they are, I believe that I am able to perform them. I do not wish for advice, and I will not permit interference. Now go down, Eleanor; our friends are below, I heard their steps a while since, as they came in. I have but a few words to write, and I will join you.”
“But you will tell me before I go that we are friends again,” said the poor girl, now weeping. “You will say that you do not distrust me.”
“I do not believe that you meant evil to me, but you were indiscreet. Let that be sufficient now, and bear this in mind, Eleanor—you know the place you hold in my affections, but were you still nearer to me than you are; were you already my wife, and the mother of my children, I would not stand between you and the punishment you would deserve, if you were untrue to your country.”
After hearing this energetic warning, Eleanor Duplay left her lover’s room, firmly believing that she had greatly sinned in speaking as she had done, but conscious, at any rate, of having intended no evil, either to him or to the unfortunate country respecting which he expressed so constant a solicitude.
As soon as she was gone, he again took up the papers which he had written, and re-read them with great care. In the letter to the two Commissioners he underscored the passages which most forcibly urged them to energy in their work of destruction, and added a word here and there which showed more clearly his intention that mercy should be shown to none. He then turned to his letter to his brother. In that he said that Eleanor’s conduct had been a source of great comfort to him, and that he blamed himself for still feeling any reserve with her. He now erased the passage, and wrote in its stead, “even with Eleanor Duplay I have some reserve, and I feel that I cannot throw it off with safety!” and having done this, he, laboriously copied, for the second time, the long letter which he had written.
When he had finished his task, he left his own chamber, and went down into a room below, in which the family were in the habit of assembling in the evening, and meeting such of Robespierre’s friends as he wished to have admitted. The cabinet-maker, and his wife and daughters, together with his son and nephew, who assisted him in his workshop, were always there; and few evenings passed without the attendance of some of his more intimate friends. They were, at first, merely in the habit of returning with him from the Jacobins’ club, but after a while their private meetings became so necessary to them, that they assembled at Duplay’s on those nights also on which the Jacobins did not meet.
When Robespierre entered the humble salon, Lebas, St. Just, and Couthon were there; three men who were constant to him to the last, and died with him when he died. As far as we can judge of their characters, they were none of them naturally bad men. They were not men prone to lust or plunder; they betrayed no friends; they sought in their political views no private ends; they even frequently used the power with which they were invested to save the lives of multitudes for whose blood the infuriate mob were eager. Lebas and St. Just were constant to the girls they loved, and Couthon, who was an object of pity as a cripple, was happy in the affection of a young wife whom he adored; and yet these were the men who assisted Robespierre in organizing the Reign of Terror, and with him share the infamy of the deeds which were then committed. They were all of them young when they died. They were men of education, and a certain elevation, of spirit. Men who were able to sacrifice the pleasures of youth to the hard work of high political duties. Blood could not have been, was not, acceptable to them; yet under how great a load of infamy do their names now lie buried!
“We thought you were going to seclude yourself tonight,” said Lebas, “and we were regretting it.”
“What have you done with Eleanor,” said Madame Duplay, “that she does not come down to us?”
“I thought to have found her here,” answered he; “she left me some minutes since. She was not in good spirits, and has probably retired for the night. Tell me, St. Just, do they talk much of tomorrow’s trial?”
Robespierre alluded to the trial of Marie Antoinette, as the cruel farce, which was so called, was then to commence. The people were now thirsty after her blood, and thought themselves wronged in that she had been so long held back from their wrath.
“They speak of her execution as of a thing of course,” said St. Just; “and they are right; her sand has well nigh run itself out. I wish she were now at her nephew’s court.”
“Wish rather that she had never come from thence,” said Couthon. “She has brought great misfortunes on France. Could she die a thousand deaths, she could not atone for what she has done. Not that I would have her die, if it were possible that she could be allowed to live.”
“It is not possible,” said Robespierre. “To have been Queen of France, is in itself a crime which it would have been necessary that she should expiate, even had she shown herself mistress of all the virtues which could adorn a woman.”
“And she is not possessed of one,” said Lebas. “She was beautiful, but her beauty was a stain upon her, for she was voluptuous. She was talented, but her talents were all turned to evil, for they only enabled her to intrigue against her adopted country. She had the disposal of wealth, with which she might have commanded the blessings of the poor, and she wasted it in vain frivolities. She was gracious in demeanour, but she kept her smiles for those only who deserved her frowns. She had unbounded influence over her husband, and she persuaded him to falsehood, dishonesty, and treachery.”
“Do not deny that she has courage,” said St. Just. “She has borne her adversity well, though she could not bear her prosperity.”
“She has courage,” said Lebas, “and how has she used it? in fighting an ineffectual battle against the country who had received her with open arms. We must all be judged by posterity, but no historian will dare to say that Marie Antoinette did not deserve the doom which now awaits her.”
How little are men able to conceive what award posterity will make in judging of their actions, even when they act with pure motives, and on what they consider to be high principles; and posterity is often as much in error in its indiscriminate condemnation of actions, as are the actors in presuming themselves entitled to its praise.
When years have rolled by, and passions have cooled, the different motives and feelings of the persons concerned become known to all, and mankind is enabled to look upon public acts from every side. Not so the actors; they are not only in ignorance of facts, the knowledge of which is necessary to their judging rightly, but falsehoods dressed in the garb of facts are studiously brought forward to deceive them, and men thus groping in darkness are forced to form opinions, and to act upon them.
Public men are like soldiers fighting in a narrow valley: they see nothing but what is close around them, and that imperfectly, as everything is in motion. The historian is as the general, who stands elevated on the high ground, and, with telescope in hand, sees plainly all the different movements of the troops. He would be an inconsiderate general, who would expect that his officers in action should have had as clear an idea of what was going on, as he himself had been able to obtain.
There was no murder perpetrated during the French Revolution, under the pretext of a judicial sentence, which has created more general disgust than has that of Marie Antoinette. She came as a stranger to the country, which on that account owed to her its special protection. She had been called to France to be a Queen, and her greatest crime was that she would not give up the high station she had been invited to fill. She had been a faithful wife to a husband who did not love her till he knew her well, and who was slow in learning anything. She had been a good mother to the children, who were born, as she believed, to rule the destinies of France.
She had clung to a falling cause, with a sense of duty which was as admirable as her courage, and at last she died with the devoted heroism which so well became her mother’s daughter. But what we now look on as virtues, were vices in the eyes of the republicans, who were her judges. Her constancy was stubbornness, and her courage was insolence. Her innocent mirth was called licentiousness, and the royal splendour which she had been taught to maintain, was looked upon as iniquitous extravagance. Nor was this, even in those bloody days, enough to condemn her. Lies of the basest kind were, with care and difficulty, contrived to debase her character—lies which have now been proved to be so, but which were then not only credible, but sure to receive credit from those who already believed that all royal blood was, from its nature, capable of every abomination.
When Lebas so confidently predicated the sentence which posterity would pass on the fall of Marie Antoinette, none of his auditors doubted the correctness of his prophecy. Posterity, however, more partial to the frivolities of courts than to the fury of revolutions, has acquitted the Queen, and passed, perhaps, too heavy a sentence on the judges who condemned her. Till the power of Satan over the world has been destroyed, and man is able to walk uprightly before his Maker, the virtues of one generation will be the vices of another.