Part 13

She could see a cart outside, a humble, dirty cart with straw in the bottom. A jailer began to call out numbers; the prisoners moved towards the door. She found herself being drawn along by the young man who had spoken to her, found herself mounting the few steps and outside in the raw, cold morning.

She had an appalling sensation of being hurried along too fast for comprehension. If they would only give her time to think! She could not realise anything.

There were very few people before the prison; the one or two there took no notice. A man delivering bread looked over his shoulder, then away again, indifferently.

Some passers-by on the quay stopped to watch.… Madame du Barry wondered what was the matter with these people, with the river, with the houses beyond, with the sky–all seemed unreal, distorted. This was not the world that she knew … she was among grotesque strangers. Following the others meekly, she ascended the cart; there were about twelve people in it, and they had to stand. When the horse started the jerk almost threw her on her knees; the man next her helped her up.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “Where are we going?”

“To Heaven, I hope,” was the flippant answer.

A man the other side of her spoke. “One cannot be sure of one’s company even in the tumbrils,” he remarked, glancing at her. “But poor Duquesne had to go with Philippe Égalité, which was worse,” he added.

Madame du Barry looked wildly round for the young aristocrat who had befriended her; he was standing towards the front of the cart, looking with a melancholy air at the river. She could not attract his attention. The lady with the knitting had not come.

They soon left the quay for the more crowded thoroughfares. People began to line the roads, to fill the windows. There was an unusual crowd to-day to watch the passing of the King’s favourite.

The wretched object of this attention began to be aware of it, began to understand that the abuse and execrations that were flung after them were chiefly directed against her, began to grasp the meaning of the finger-pointing, the shouting.

She _was_ going to her death, and these people were hounding her to it with delight and ferocity.

A convulsion shook her and a light foam frothed on her lips while her eyes turned in her head; she gave a shriek so sharp and ghastly that the men beside her covered their ears; she would have fallen had not the wooden rails of the cart held her up.

This new spectacle of abandoned terror brought the mob rushing after the cart with fresh imprecations of hate and contempt towards the woman who had spent the revenues of France in wanton luxury while such as themselves sweated and starved.

But she was ignorant of her offence towards them; and now the conviction of the truth was borne blazingly into her brain, filled only with one desire–to save her life.

She stretched her hands out over the back of the cart.

“I am no aristocrat!” she cried. “I am a woman of the people! Save me; do not let them take me! I do not want to die!”

Such taunts of vile and horrible abuse answered her that she drew back with her fingers to her lips.

“No, no!” she shrieked. “I never wronged any one of you!”

The surging crowd now almost blocked the progress of the cart; the soldiers who were conducting it had to make a way with their bayonets.

Stones and garbage were hurled at her; dirt splashed on her dress; the jerking of the cart shook her hair down; she continually lost her balance and fell against the wooden side.

“Madame, for God’s sake—” said the man next her. “You demean us all.”

She put her hands over her face; these others might well be brave, she thought; they were dying for all they believed in, for the sake of what they were, but she had nothing to die for. All she had, all she had ever had, was her beauty, and death would take that from her–and what was left?

Death presented itself to her as an intolerable blackness; she could not, she would not face it. She would resist. They could not be such fiends as to _drag_ her to her death.

She clenched her hands. She heard the words they were throwing at her; a sense of rage nerved her against them. She hated them, especially the women. She lifted her head, and her blue eyes had a hot brilliance like madness.

“I am not a wicked woman!” she cried out fiercely, looking over the sea of haggard, angry faces. “What I did any of you women here would have done had it been offered to you as it was offered to me!”

Such of the women who could hear these words replied by a rush of fury that nearly upset the cart, and tried to pull the speaker down among them; the soldiers drove them back, and one man struck Madame du Barry with the flat of his sword and violently bade her be silent.

She crouched down, hiding her eyes and her ears. A little cold rain began to fall; she felt it on her head and shivered.

The cart stopped. She dropped her stiff fingers and looked up; she was face to face with the final horror.

A platform surrounded with soldiers in the midst of an open place crowded with people; at one side a palace and trees–the great square once named after her lover, Louis XV.

From the centre of the platform rose the hideous machine itself, the guillotine, with two tall upright posts dyed red, the plank, the basket, the cloth, a man in a dark coat holding a cord, all outlined against a grey tumultuous sky and the leafless, dry trees of November.

The prisoners began to descend from the cart, began to ascend the steps to the guillotine amid the murmurs and yells of the haggard feverish crowd.

Madame du Barry stood at the foot of the scaffold. One by one her companions passed her. The young man in the handsome great coat murmured “courage” as he stepped up and looked at her with pitying eyes.

Her heart was beating very fast; she did not know what she was thinking or doing, only that all her worst anticipations had not equalled this horror—

There were only three left besides herself. The man in charge of the cart seized hold of her long locks and quickly and roughly cut them off.

“Your turn, my little piece of royalty,” he said.

She looked at him blankly; he snatched her small, feeble hands and tied them behind her before she had guessed his intention.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh!”

She was quite bewildered. The world seemed to have stopped. She saw her blonde curls lying at her feet and moved her head stiffly to and fro to see if the ringlets were not still there.

They pushed her forward and told her to mount.

“Up there?” she asked vacantly, and stared at the scaffold.

“Yes, up there,” was the answer. She hesitated, looked about her as if she did not understand. The man, becoming impatient, pushed her again, roughly, and she, impeded by her bound arms, could not save herself, but fell in the slime and mud at the foot of the steps.

They dragged her to her feet and up the steps, one either side of her, hurting her arms.

The roar of the crowd that greeted her was prolonged and horrible; she looked round at them; no one who had seen her, even yesterday, would have recognised her then.

Samson approached and caught hold of her fichu.

“May I not keep that?” she asked. He did not even trouble to refuse, but snatched away the muslin, leaving her throat and bosom bare. She struggled to release her arms, turned and saw the plank, the posts, the basket full of heads. Shriek after shriek left her lips. Such desperate strength possessed her that she almost broke from the two men holding her.

“Have mercy on me–I never hurt anything–I was not properly tried–I am not an aristocrat! Why did he denounce me? I was always good to him! Oh, my _God_, my _God_, save me from this!”

For an awful moment the two men and the woman struggled together, she being drawn nearer, nearer the plank. The pearls, last remnant of her guilty greatness, fell from her poor torn bodice on to the dirty boards. Samson stooped to pick them up, and the other man, using brutal force, hurled Madame du Barry to her knees.

“Do not hurt me!” she screamed. They seized her again and pitched her forward on to the plank. She strove unavailingly.

Samson pulled the cord. She saw and smelt blood and slime; she felt herself being swung forward. She shrieked once–twice–and the knife descended, sending her common blood gushing over the other noble blood that stained the oak and iron.

THE ARISTOCRAT

“Oh, it would be better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men.”–_Danton in Prison._

On a morning in May, 1794, misty bright with the pure soft glow of a spring sun, a man sat under a hedge on the high-road to Paris, near Clamars, a village close to Bourg-la-Reine.

He was in ragged clothes, unshaven, gaunt and pallid; his hair hung damp and dusty round his forehead and neck; his face, which was of aquiline type, had a closed look of physical suffering silently endured; his feet were blistered and bleeding, his dirty stockings had fallen down to his ankles though he had endeavoured to fasten them with wisps of grass; he had neither shoes nor waistcoat; he was thin with the dry horrible thinness of starvation. His eyes, large and deep-set, were flecked with red, and his cracked lips stiffly parted over the white glisten of his teeth.

This man was Marie Jean Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, peer of France, famous mathematician, philosopher, man of letters, politician and Girondist, the friend of Liberty, the dreamer of the dream of a respectable Republic and the People ruling gloriously over France, the denouncer of Robespierre and all the excesses of the Revolution, a man famous for his learned book “Esquise sur l’Esprit Humaine” and suchlike, and for the Roman-like tend of his speeches in _the Senate_.

Neither birth nor learning nor high-minded endeavour, nor patriotism, nor flinging aside ancient prejudices of birth and joining hands with the people in what he had hoped was an enlightened age, had saved him from this: the ignominy of flight, of hiding, the ignominy of sheer starvation. On the fall of his party and the arrest of his colleagues he had fled, and for two months had been sheltered by friends; but he was too great a man to be forgotten; as the principles he had advocated fell most hopelessly to ruin, as the section he had been associated with became more and more an object of public contempt and hatred, as the bloody tyranny of the Robespierre tribunals grew fiercer and more unrestrained, so did the net begin to close more tightly round the Marquis de Condorcet.

His presence in his friend’s house began to endanger that friend; he was entreated to stay, at whatever cost, but nevertheless rose early one morning and left the house and left Paris; he had come to the humiliation of flight and concealment, not yet to the humiliation of dragging others with him in his piteous downfall.

For two weeks he had lurked round Paris, hiding in thickets and quarries, living on the food he had with him in his pocket and a few crusts begged from a farmhouse and a few scraps purchased by a day’s labour in turning the ground.

These two weeks had served to bring him to the last stage of extremity; the aristocrat, the philosopher, had only two desires–a little food and a little sleep.

Goaded by this intolerable need of food he had left the disused quarry where he had lain hidden for the last two days and stumbled on to the high-road where he sat now, blinking at the sun.

Yesterday he had found an unsuspected treasure, in the shape of two silver pieces, in the inner pocket of his coat, and he resolved to reach the nearest inn and lay this out in food.

What he should do afterwards he was too sick to think; everything had narrowed to that desire for food and rest–the rest that could only come of hunger satisfied; for at present the pangs of starvation would not let him sleep or, for one instant, forget his outraged body.

Yet prudence still whispered in his ear that he meditated a foolish thing; they were looking for him–even the half-witted peasants on the farm where he had worked had suspected him–and at an inn where some one of better intelligence might any moment enter, surely he was not safe.

Then he considered his appearance; certainly the Marquis de Condorcet was well disguised now; his clothes had been at best poor, for he had passed as a servant in his friend’s house, and now there was not one sign or mark of anything save the most abject poverty and want about his person; he thought he could defy recognition.

He watched the sun mounting above the hawthorn trees that were clouded with white blossoms, and there seemed to be two orbs of gold fire changing and mingling and slipping giddily about the heavens.

He staggered to his feet and walked stiffly and slowly down the long dusty road, each step an agony, for his feet were chafed raw in his rough hard boots.

He passed a poor cottage standing in an untidy garden; it was the beginning of the village of Clamars.

The winding street led to the inn; though it was still so early the place was open; a boy was whistling while he rubbed down a horse, his plump aspect had something grotesque in it to the famished man.

A woman came out of the inn and threw a pail of dirty water across the street; the Marquis stupidly noticed the long dark trails of wet across the dust that were trickling slowly to his feet. The boy looked up and saw him as he stood hesitating.

“Good morning, citizen.”

“Good morning, citizen,” answered the Marquis in a voice feeble from weakness and long silence. “Can I get some food here?”

“If you can pay for it, citizen.”

“Yes, I can pay.”

The boy straightened himself and looked at the wild and miserable figure advancing towards him.

“Who are you, citizen?” he asked, and the Marquis saw suspicion creep into his common dull face.

“I am a servant looking for a place; my last was in Paris–I have walked a long way–I mean to get to Bourg-la-Reine to-night.”

“Well, it is not far,” answered the peasant with an instant insolence of the poor towards the ragged.

“I must have breakfast first,” said the Marquis, putting a great restraint on himself to speak gently and humbly; it was natural to him to be brief and cold with his inferiors.

The youth jerked his head towards the open door.

The Marquis entered the low dark passage and stepped into the common parlour in the front, which was roughly furnished but filled with beauty by the chestnut tree that pressed its load of young clear green leaves against the panes of the small low window.

The Marquis sank on to a chair by this window, with his back to the light and rested his elbows on the stained table in front of him.

The woman whom he had seen with the pail entered, wiping her hands on her rough blue apron; she did not appear to notice his desperate appearance; the light was not good and probably she was used enough to wild and haggard figures stopping here for a moment’s respite on some bitter journey.

He asked her briefly for food; she nodded and looked at him, not unkindly. Few indeed could have looked at him unmoved, so obviously had everything left him save mere fainting humanity that cried for succour.

“You are hungry?” she said.

He answered her with an effort; repeated his story of a servant out of place.

“What became of your master?” she asked.

“Dead,” he replied, hardly knowing what he said. “The guillotine—”

“Ah, the guillotine–he was, then, an aristocrat?” She put bread, cheese and a bottle of wine on the table, having taken them from a cupboard in the wall.

“Do aristocrats only go to the guillotine?” he replied, while his hand went out to the bread. “No, there are no longer any aristocrats, and now we execute the good republicans, citizeness.”

“Yes,” she answered; “but you spoke as if you had lived with aristocrats, citizen.”

The Marquis shuddered: so she had noticed it, this stupid woman; his speech stamped him, he could not disguise that.

“I was in a good place,” he said.

She left him, and he began eating and drinking, not thinking for the moment of anything but that, the gratification of his necessity.

He ate all the bread and cheese she had brought him before he dare touch the wine; when he did drink it, poor and thin as it was, it restored his blood to nearer its normal beat and heat; his brain began to work more clearly and sanely, his strong intelligence reasserted its sway; he began to form plans, to make resolves.

The woman came in and brought him meat and more bread; he asked her if he could rest there till noon, and she answered that he could stay in the room till then, he would not trouble her, and she was not likely to have more customers before the evening.

Again he was alone; the peace of the dark parlour, the delicious green of the softly-waving leaves outside, the silence and a certain homely perfume from the herbs hanging in bunches from the dark raftered ceiling affected him like a spell.

It was probably foolish to remain here; it would probably be wise to take advantage of his luck and slip away while the inn was quiet, but he could not. The pain of hunger ceased, his great fatigue asserted itself; if they had been galloping red-hot from Paris after him with certain news that he was at this very spot, he must still have done as he did; drop on to the worn chintz settle and sleep.

The gratification of his utter bodily weariness was more exquisite than the gratification of his hunger had been; the humble couch was like down pillows after stones and hedges, and the pursued and hunted man abandoned himself without resistance to the helplessness of sleep.

When he awoke it was about three hours later; he was racked with pain and still exhausted, but he made a violent effort to rouse himself; his mind was quite clear; he knew what he was risking and he would risk it no longer; he forced back the desire to again fall into a stupor of sleep and sat up on the couch.

There was a great noise outside; some one was arriving with loud and angry commands, jingle of harness, clatter of horses’ hoofs.

The Marquis guessed that this noise was what had roused him; he rose softly, went to the window and peeped through the screen of leaves.

A well-dressed man was dismounting and another was ordering about the stable-boy with an air of great importance.

The Marquis dropped into his former seat with his back to the light–had he stayed too long?–was there some possible way of immediate escape?

Only by the common passage through which he had come; and it was too late for that, for he could hear the two men already there calling for wine.

Who were they? Was he caught? Could he play his part through and cheat the accursed of their prey?

He asked himself these questions in swift succession, and every nerve in his being braced itself to avoid the final misery of facing the humiliation of falling into his enemies’ hands after undergoing every other humiliation of flight, concealment and degradation. He could not have put into words the hatred he felt towards the tyrants with whom for a while he had in his blindness joined, forsaking his own order, believing in his folly that he was leaguing with the right, that he was to be one of the prophets of a new era of liberty and light and hope.

Believing, too, that he and they could forget his gentle blood, that they could forgive it and he ignore it; but it had been the strongest of all strong things; now, when everything else was stripped away it remained: his birth, his blood, his traditions, and the great hate between him and the plebeian that had been for a while cloaked and disguised, now sprang actively to life.

He could not repent too bitterly of his mistaken ideals of patriotism and the general good, his unfortunate ambitions of governing his country, of doing some service to his kind that had led him to this pass of despair, that had made him another figure of tragedy to blend in the bloody carnival being daily enacted; and in this moment of anguish he would rather have died as others of his class had died–at once hating the people and by them hated, tyrants perhaps and men who had done nothing with their lives, but to be envied by men like Marie Jean Caritat who had forsaken his order only to come to this.

The two new-comers entered the room; which was now so light by reason of the level rays of the sun piercing the chestnut leaves that but little part of it was in shadow, and the Marquis, even with his back to the light was clear enough in every detail, as he well felt.

He sat upright, with nothing of the pose of the character he was assuming in his bearing, and looked at the new-comers.

He could see at once that they were of a type particularly hateful to him: the small official of no birth or culture whom chance had thrown to the surface in the turmoil of the revolution, and whom chance might, and probably would, throw to-morrow to the guillotine; but while their power lasted they used it brutally, these men, and enjoyed to deal fiercely with those of the old _régime_.

One wore the tricolour sash round his rusty black cloth coat, and the tricolour in his cockade; he was perhaps president of the Committee of Public Safety in Bourg-la-Reine, or perhaps the Public Prosecutor; it was obvious that he considered himself a great man; in his native town he was probably bowed down to, being no doubt for the moment a potent instrument for death and terror. His companion seemed a kind of secretary or attendant, subservient and truckling to the more important man; both of them had the loose ungraceful air of low breed in a position of authority.

On their entry both glanced instantly at the Marquis; it was no more than a glance from either of them; he drew a broken breath of relief to think that they passed his appearance.

The woman came hurrying in to wait on them; they ordered wine lavishly and began talking noisily together about local politics.

The Marquis foresaw no difficulty in making an easy escape, but he waited, considering what to do.

He dare not go back to Paris, he dare not go on to Bourg-la-Reine; there was nothing but to creep back to the disused quarries and hide there till perhaps the Robespierre tyranny fell; he had hoped at first to find means to fly to England, but without money that had proved impossible.

Still, the idea returned to him now; it would be better to risk all on that than to return to the quarries; he resolved to push on to the coast; there were several people on the way who would help him could he but reach them; the food and rest had put new daring into him; under the very eyes of two of the men who would deliver him to instant and horrible death if they knew him did he plan calmly his future means of escape.

It occurred to him that this might be the last chance of food for some while and he was again hungry.

When the woman re-entered, attending to the wants of the citizens of Bourg-la-Reine, he beckoned to her and asked her in a low tone to prepare him an omelette before he set out on his journey.

Then, fearful that she might deny him, under the impression that he could not pay, he took one of his silver pieces out of his pocket and laid it on the table.

The woman looked at the money and at him.

“You can stay the night, if you wish, for that,” she said.

“No, citizeness,” he answered. “I must get on.”

“Lodging is dearer in Bourg-la-Reine,” she said. “And what is your need to hasten?”

“I was told of a possible place,” he said.

“Likely they will take you!” she glanced at him pityingly.

Looking beyond her he saw that the two men had stopped their conversation and were watching him. The woman moved away and one of the men (he of the tricolour) stopped her.

“The citizen over there is not very prosperous looking,” he remarked. “Who is he?”

“A servant looking for a place, citizen.”

“He speaks,” was the answer, “like an aristocrat.”

“He has lived with them, I believe, citizen.”