Zanoni Part 42

CHAPTER 6.IX.

Zukunft hast du mir gegeben, Doch du nehmst den Augenblick.

"Ka.s.sandra."

(Futurity hast thou given to me,--yet takest from me the Moment.)

"Mejnour, behold thy work! Out, out upon our little vanities of wisdom!--out upon our ages of lore and life! To save her from Peril I left her presence, and the Peril has seized her in its grasp!"

"Chide not thy wisdom but thy pa.s.sions! Abandon thine idle hope of the love of woman. See, for those who would unite the lofty with the lowly, the inevitable curse; thy very nature uncomprehended,--thy sacrifices unguessed. The lowly one views but in the lofty a necromancer or a fiend. t.i.tan, canst thou weep?"

"I know it now, I see it all! It WAS her spirit that stood beside our own, and escaped my airy clasp! O strong desire of motherhood and nature! unveiling all our secrets, piercing s.p.a.ce and traversing worlds!--Mejnour, what awful learning lies hid in the ignorance of the heart that loves!"

"The heart," answered the mystic, coldly; "ay, for five thousand years I have ransacked the mysteries of creation, but I have not yet discovered all the wonders in the heart of the simplest boor!"

"Yet our solemn rites deceived us not; the prophet-shadows, dark with terror and red with blood, still foretold that, even in the dungeon, and before the deathsman, I,--I had the power to save them both!"

"But at some unconjectured and most fatal sacrifice to thyself."

"To myself! Icy sage, there is no self in love! I go. Nay, alone: I want thee not. I want now no other guide but the human instincts of affection. No cave so dark, no solitude so vast, as to conceal her.

Though mine art fail me; though the stars heed me not; though s.p.a.ce, with its shining myriads, is again to me but the azure void,--I return but to love and youth and hope! When have they ever failed to triumph and to save!"

BOOK VII. -- THE REIGN OF TERROR.

Orrida maesta nei fero aspetto Terrore accresce, e piu superbo il rende; Rosseggian gli occhi, e di veneno infetto Come infausta cometa, il guardo splende, Gil involve il mento, e sull 'irsuto petto Ispida efoita la gran barbe scende; E IN GUISA DE VORAGINE PROFONDA SAPRE LA BOCCA A'ATRO SANGUE IMMONDA.

(Ger. Lib., Cant. iv. 7.)

A horrible majesty in the fierce aspect increases it terror, and renders it more superb. Red glow the eyes, and the aspect infected, like a baleful comet, with envenomed influences, glares around. A vast beard covers the chin--and, rough and thick, descends over the s.h.a.ggy breast.--And like a profound gulf expand the jaws, foul with black gore.

CHAPTER 7.I.

Qui suis-je, moi qu'on accuse? Un esclave de la Liberte, un martyr vivant de la Republique.

--"Discours de Robespierre, 8 Thermidor."

(Who am I,--_I_ whom they accuse? A slave of Liberty,--a living martyr for the Republic.)

It roars,--The River of h.e.l.l, whose first outbreak was chanted as the gush of a channel to Elysium. How burst into blossoming hopes fair hearts that had nourished themselves on the diamond dews of the rosy dawn, when Liberty came from the dark ocean, and the arms of decrepit Thraldom--Aurora from the bed of t.i.thon! Hopes! ye have ripened into fruit, and the fruit is gore and ashes! Beautiful Roland, eloquent Vergniaud, visionary Condorcet, high-hearted Malesherbes!--wits, philosophers, statesmen, patriots, dreamers! behold the millennium for which ye dared and laboured!

I invoke the ghosts! Saturn hath devoured his children ("La Revolution est comme Saturne, elle devorera tous ses enfans."--Vergniaud.), and lives alone,--I his true name of Moloch!

It is the Reign of Terror, with Robespierre the king. The struggles between the boa and the lion are past: the boa has consumed the lion, and is heavy with the gorge,--Danton has fallen, and Camille Desmoulins.

Danton had said before his death, "The poltroon Robespierre,--I alone could have saved him." From that hour, indeed, the blood of the dead giant clouded the craft of "Maximilien the Incorruptible," as at last, amidst the din of the roused Convention, it choked his voice. ("Le sang de Danton t'etouffe!" (the blood of Danton chokes thee!) said Garnier de l'Aube, when on the fatal 9th of Thermidor, Robespierre gasped feebly forth, "Pour la derniere fois, President des a.s.sa.s.sins, je te demande la parole." (For the last time, President of a.s.sa.s.sins, I demand to speak.)) If, after that last sacrifice, essential, perhaps, to his safety, Robespierre had proclaimed the close of the Reign of Terror, and acted upon the mercy which Danton had begun to preach, he might have lived and died a monarch. But the prisons continued to reek,--the glaive to fall; and Robespierre perceived not that his mobs were glutted to satiety with death, and the strongest excitement a chief could give would be a return from devils into men.

We are transported to a room in the house of Citizen Dupleix, the menuisier, in the month of July, 1794; or, in the calendar of the Revolutionists, it was the Thermidor of the Second Year of the Republic, One and Indivisible! Though the room was small, it was furnished and decorated with a minute and careful effort at elegance and refinement.

It seemed, indeed, the desire of the owner to avoid at once what was mean and rude, and what was luxurious and voluptuous. It was a trim, orderly, precise grace that shaped the cla.s.sic chairs, arranged the ample draperies, sank the frameless mirrors into the wall, placed bust and bronze on their pedestals, and filled up the niches here and there with well-bound books, filed regularly in their appointed ranks. An observer would have said, "This man wishes to imply to you,--I am not rich; I am not ostentatious; I am not luxurious; I am no indolent Sybarite, with couches of down, and pictures that provoke the sense; I am no haughty n.o.ble, with s.p.a.cious halls, and galleries that awe the echo. But so much the greater is my merit if I disdain these excesses of the ease or the pride, since I love the elegant, and have a taste!

Others may be simple and honest, from the very coa.r.s.eness of their habits; if I, with so much refinement and delicacy, am simple and honest,--reflect, and admire me!"

On the walls of this chamber hung many portraits, most of them represented but one face; on the formal pedestals were grouped many busts, most of them sculptured but one head. In that small chamber Egotism sat supreme, and made the Arts its looking-gla.s.ses. Erect in a chair, before a large table spread with letters, sat the original of bust and canvas, the owner of the apartment. He was alone, yet he sat erect, formal, stiff, precise, as if in his very home he was not at ease. His dress was in harmony with his posture and his chamber; it affected a neatness of its own,--foreign both to the sumptuous fashions of the deposed n.o.bles, and the filthy ruggedness of the sans-culottes.

Frizzled and coiffe, not a hair was out of order, not a speck lodged on the sleek surface of the blue coat, not a wrinkle crumpled the snowy vest, with its under-relief of delicate pink. At the first glance, you might have seen in that face nothing but the ill-favoured features of a sickly countenance; at a second glance, you would have perceived that it had a power, a character of its own. The forehead, though low and compressed, was not without that appearance of thought and intelligence which, it may be observed, that breadth between the eyebrows almost invariably gives; the lips were firm and tightly drawn together, yet ever and anon they trembled, and writhed restlessly. The eyes, sullen and gloomy, were yet piercing, and full of a concentrated vigour that did not seem supported by the thin, feeble frame, or the green lividness of the hues, which told of anxiety and disease.

Such was Maximilien Robespierre; such the chamber over the menuisier's shop, whence issued the edicts that launched armies on their career of glory, and ordained an artificial conduit to carry off the blood that deluged the metropolis of the most martial people in the globe! Such was the man who had resigned a judicial appointment (the early object of his ambition) rather than violate his philanthropical principles by subscribing to the death of a single fellow-creature; such was the virgin enemy to capital punishments; and such, Butcher-Dictator now, was the man whose pure and rigid manners, whose incorruptible honesty, whose hatred of the excesses that tempt to love and wine, would, had he died five years earlier, have left him the model for prudent fathers and careful citizens to place before their sons. Such was the man who seemed to have no vice, till circ.u.mstance, that hotbed, brought forth the two which, in ordinary times, lie ever the deepest and most latent in a man's heart,--Cowardice and Envy. To one of these sources is to be traced every murder that master-fiend committed. His cowardice was of a peculiar and strange sort; for it was accompanied with the most unscrupulous and determined WILL,--a will that Napoleon reverenced; a will of iron, and yet nerves of aspen. Mentally, he was a hero,--physically, a dastard. When the veriest shadow of danger threatened his person, the frame cowered, but the will swept the danger to the slaughter-house. So there he sat, bolt upright,--his small, lean fingers clenched convulsively; his sullen eyes straining into s.p.a.ce, their whites yellowed with streaks of corrupt blood; his ears literally moving to and fro, like the ign.o.bler animals', to catch every sound,--a Dionysius in his cave; but his posture decorous and collected, and every formal hair in its frizzled place.

"Yes, yes," he said in a muttered tone, "I hear them; my good Jacobins are at their post on the stairs. Pity they swear so! I have a law against oaths,--the manners of the poor and virtuous people must be reformed. When all is safe, an example or two amongst those good Jacobins would make effect. Faithful fellows, how they love me!

Hum!--what an oath was that!--they need not swear so loud,--upon the very staircase, too! It detracts from my reputation. Ha! steps!"

The soliloquist glanced at the opposite mirror, and took up a volume; he seemed absorbed in its contents, as a tall fellow, a bludgeon in his hand, a girdle adorned with pistols round his waist, opened the door, and announced two visitors. The one was a young man, said to resemble Robespierre in person, but of a far more decided and resolute expression of countenance. He entered first, and, looking over the volume in Robespierre's hand, for the latter seemed still intent on his lecture, exclaimed,--

"What! Rousseau's Heloise? A love-tale!"

"Dear Payan, it is not the love,--it is the philosophy that charms me.

What n.o.ble sentiments!--what ardour of virtue! If Jean Jacques had but lived to see this day!"

While the Dictator thus commented on his favourite author, whom in his orations he laboured hard to imitate, the second visitor was wheeled into the room in a chair. This man was also in what, to most, is the prime of life,--namely, about thirty-eight; but he was literally dead in the lower limbs: crippled, paralytic, distorted, he was yet, as the time soon came to tell him,--a Hercules in Crime! But the sweetest of human smiles dwelt upon his lips; a beauty almost angelic characterised his features ("Figure d'ange," says one of his contemporaries, in describing Couthon. The address, drawn up most probably by Payan (Thermidor 9), after the arrest of Robespierre, thus mentions his crippled colleague: "Couthon, ce citoyen vertueux, QUI N'A QUE LE COEUR ET LA TETE DE VIVANS, mais qui les a brulants de patriotisme" (Couthon, that virtuous citizen, who has but the head and the heart of the living, yet possesses these all on flame with patriotism.)); an inexpressible aspect of kindness, and the resignation of suffering but cheerful benignity, stole into the hearts of those who for the first time beheld him. With the most caressing, silver, flute-like voice, Citizen Couthon saluted the admirer of Jean Jacques.

"Nay,--do not say that it is not the LOVE that attracts thee; it IS the love! but not the gross, sensual attachment of man for woman. No! the sublime affection for the whole human race, and indeed, for all that lives!"

And Citizen Couthon, bending down, fondled the little spaniel that he invariably carried in his bosom, even to the Convention, as a vent for the exuberant sensibilities which overflowed his affectionate heart.

(This tenderness for some pet animal was by no means peculiar to Couthon; it seems rather a common fashion with the gentle butchers of the Revolution. M. George Duval informs us ("Souvenirs de la Terreur,"

volume iii page 183) that Chaumette had an aviary, to which he devoted his harmless leisure; the murderous Fournier carried on his shoulders a pretty little squirrel, attached by a silver chain; Panis bestowed the superfluity of his affections upon two gold pheasants; and Marat, who would not abate one of the three hundred thousand heads he demanded, REARED DOVES! Apropos of the spaniel of Couthon, Duval gives us an amusing anecdote of Sergent, not one of the least relentless agents of the ma.s.sacre of September. A lady came to implore his protection for one of her relations confined in the Abbaye. He scarcely deigned to speak to her. As she retired in despair, she trod by accident on the paw of his favourite spaniel. Sergent, turning round, enraged and furious, exclaimed, "MADAM, HAVE YOU NO HUMANITY?")

"Yes, for all that lives," repeated Robespierre, tenderly.

"Good Couthon,--poor Couthon! Ah, the malice of men!--how we are misrepresented! To be calumniated as the executioners of our colleagues!

Ah, it is THAT which pierces the heart! To be an object of terror to the enemies of our country,--THAT is n.o.ble; but to be an object of terror to the good, the patriotic, to those one loves and reveres,--THAT is the most terrible of human tortures at least, to a susceptible and honest heart!" (Not to fatigue the reader with annotations, I may here observe that nearly every sentiment ascribed in the text to Robespierre is to be found expressed in his various discourses.)

"How I love to hear him!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Couthon.

"Hem!" said Payan, with some impatience. "But now to business!"

"Ah, to business!" said Robespierre, with a sinister glance from his bloodshot eyes.

"The time has come," said Payan, "when the safety of the Republic demands a complete concentration of its power. These brawlers of the Comite du Salut Public can only destroy; they cannot construct. They hated you, Maximilien, from the moment you attempted to replace anarcy by inst.i.tutions. How they mock at the festival which proclaimed the acknowledgment of a Supreme Being: they would have no ruler, even in heaven! Your clear and vigorous intellect saw that, having wrecked an old world, it became necessary to shape a new one. The first step towards construction must be to destroy the destroyers. While we deliberate, your enemies act. Better this very night to attack the handful of gensdarmes that guard them, than to confront the battalions they may raise to-morrow."

"No," said Robespierre, who recoiled before the determined spirit of Payan; "I have a better and safer plan. This is the 6th of Thermidor; on the 10th--on the 10th, the Convention go in a body to the Fete Decadaire. A mob shall form; the canonniers, the troops of Henriot, the young pupils de l'Ecole de Mars, shall mix in the crowd. Easy, then, to strike the conspirators whom we shall designate to our agents. On the same day, too, Fouquier and Dumas shall not rest; and a sufficient number of 'the suspect' to maintain salutary awe, and keep up the revolutionary excitement, shall perish by the glaive of the law. The 10th shall be the great day of action. Payan, of these last culprits, have you prepared a list?"

"It is here," returned Payan, laconically, presenting a paper.

Robespierre glanced over it rapidly. "Collot d'Herbois!--good!

Barrere!--ay, it was Barrere who said, 'Let us strike: the dead alone never return.' ('Frappons! il n'y a que les morts qui ne revient pas.'--Barrere.) Vadier, the savage jester!--good--good! Vadier of the Mountain. He has called me 'Mahomet!' Scelerat! blasphemer!"

"Mahomet is coming to the Mountain," said Couthon, with his silvery accent, as he caressed his spaniel.

"But how is this? I do not see the name of Tallien? Tallien,--I hate that man; that is," said Robespierre, correcting himself with the hypocrisy or self-deceit which those who formed the council of this phrase-monger exhibited habitually, even among themselves,--"that is, Virtue and our Country hate him! There is no man in the whole Convention who inspires me with the same horror as Tallien. Couthon, I see a thousand Dantons where Tallien sits!"