CHAPTER XII

Cordelier-Delanoue--A sitting of the Athénée--M. Villenave--His family--The one hundred and thirty-two Nantais--Cathelineau--The hunt _aux bleus_--Forest--A chapter of history--Sauveur--The Royalist Committee--Souchu--The miraculous tomb--Carrier

During the period of the first representations of the English actors (which coincided with my evening attendance at the offices of the Secretariat) I made the acquaintance of a young fellow named Cordelier-Delanoue. It came about very naturally. We were publishing _Psyché_ at that time and Delanoue had sent us a poem which he called _Hamlet_; this we inserted in our journal, he came to thank us and Adolphe and I became friendly with him, I especially. Delanoue was the son of one of the generals of the Revolution, who had formerly known my father; this circumstance had drawn us together and our dramatic and political sympathies did the rest. One night Delanoue came to see me at the office and suggested taking me to the Athénée while the courier from the Palais-Royal went to Neuilly and back. I was ignorant about many things, so it will not be any cause for astonishment, I hope, if I admit that I had never heard of the Athénée. M. Villenave was giving a literary soirée there that evening. I did not know who M. Villenave was; and my ignorance in this respect was a little more excusable than my not knowing what the Athénée was. However, I accepted. At that time, I had not the horror of making fresh acquaintances which beset me later. I was promised something connected with literature and literary people, and a promise such as this would have urged me on to cross the razor edge which serves as a bridge between the Mohammadan Paradise and this earth. I could cross such an edge now, prone though I am to giddiness, but it would be in order to fly from the very thing I then went to seek. So far as I can recollect, the meetings of the Athénée were held in a lower hall of the Palais-Royal, which had its entrance from the rue de Valois. They discussed all sorts of topics that would have been insufferable in drawing-rooms, but which at the Athénée were simply tedious. The people who discussed these tedious subjects had the right to a certain number of tickets to distribute among the members of their families, their friends and their acquaintances. They could have discussed these subjects quite well alone, but, for some inexplicable reason, they preferred to have an audience. On this particular evening the hall was full. M. Villenave was very popular in society, and, besides, these meetings had a certain celebrity. If I were condemned to be hung, I could not to save my life say what they talked of that night. It was probably some treatise on a second-rate deceased author, who served as an excuse to the writer to deliver a few raps to the living. M. Villenave conducted the meeting: he addressed it standing, by the aid of a couple of candelabras and a glass of _eau sucrée_ near him. He was a fine-looking old man of, perhaps, at that time, some sixty-six or sixty-eight years of age. He had splendid white hair, daintily curled about his temples; black eyes that flashed with quite Southern fire; he was very tall but stooped a little from much bending over a desk; there was something distinguished-looking and graceful in his movements and manners. I had stopped modestly by the door for two reasons: first, because I was yet too unknown to imagine I had the right to put the speaker himself or anybody else out for my sake; secondly, as I had to return to my office by half-past nine, it was more convenient to be near the door than elsewhere, in order to escape incognito, as I had entered. Delanoue, who was more familiar with the company than I, left me to go and joke with them, during the short intervals when the sitting broke up to give M. Villenave time to take breath.

The usual hour for the courier having come, I was quietly escaping to return and receive him at my office, when Delanoue ran after me and caught me up under the peristyle. He had been deputed by the Villenave family to invite me to go and take tea with them at their house, after the meeting. I owed this favour to the kind things my friend Delanoue had said about me. I then had to inquire where the Villenaves lived. No. 82 rue de Vaugirard. Oh! but 53 faubourg Saint-Denis was a fair distance from my home. Fortunately, during my five years' residence in Paris, I had learnt to know its streets pretty thoroughly, so I did not feel obliged, as on my first visit, to hire a conveyance to take me from the place du Palais-Royal to the rue des Vieux-Augustins. The invitation conveyed by Delanoue had been so courteously and warmly pressed that the least I could do was to accept it. I ran off to the office, attended to the courier and returned. During the half-hour of my absence the sitting had been concluded, and I returned to find M. Villenave in a small drawing-room that opened out of the large hall, receiving the congratulations of his friends. Delanoue introduced me to M. Villenave and to his family. The Villenave family consisted first of Madame Villenave, a very gracious little old lady, very intellectual and an experienced society entertainer, but very fond of grumbling in her home-life, for she suffered, like Anne of Austria, from a cancer which ultimately killed her; Théodore Villenave, a tall, energetic young fellow, an author, at that time, of various fugitive poems, and translator of _Wallenstein_, which was destined to make a great commotion behind the scenes of the Odéon for three or four years before it was put on the stage, where it had a fairly successful reception; Madame Mélanie Waldor, the wife of a captain in the infantry on service and in garrison, who only put in short and rare appearances at Paris, where those who knew him spoke of him as a brave and loyal soldier. Madame Waldor composed fugitive verses, like her brother, which she published in the daily paper; like her brother, too, she afterwards wrote a play which had a successful run under the title of the _École des Jeunes Filles._ Last came Élisa Waldor, who at that period was only a charming little child with the head of a chérubin surrounded by lovely golden curly hair; she afterwards grew into a tall, beautiful woman, and was twice married--and happily each time, I trust.[1]

The family returned home on foot, in patriarchal fashion, accompanied by five or six friends, who, like myself, were on their way to the rue de Vaugirard, to take tea and nibble cake together there. As I was the stranger, I was allotted the position of honour--namely, to give my arm to Madame Waldor. As the distance was very long, it was a good opportunity of becoming acquainted. But, as we had never seen each other or spoken together before, the long walk would have been embarrassing to us both, had not Delanoue joined us and made a third in the conversation between the place du Palais-Royal and the rue de Vaugirard. He thereby rendered us both a great service, for which both of us were profoundly grateful to him.

What a strange thing these chance meetings are! How astonished I should have been had anyone told me that this family, whose very existence I had not known a couple of hours before, and who were complete strangers to me, would become for the next two or three years almost as close to me as my own, and that I should traverse the road that then seemed to me so long between the rue du faubourg-Saint-Denis and the rue de Vaugirard twice every day in future!

But I was in haste to reach our destination, to have a talk with M. Villenave. I do not remember how it was, or on what occasion, but a pamphlet he had written fell into my hands--a little work he had published in 1794, entitled _Relation des noyades de cent trente-deux Nantais_ (Story of the drowning of a hundred and thirty-two people of Nantes). Directly I saw M. Villenave I remembered this pamphlet, and as soon as I thought of the pamphlet I resolved to lead the conversation to Carrier, and Nantes and the hundred and thirty-two Nantais. It was not a difficult matter to set M. Villenave talking; only, his conversation was very much like a sermon. When he talked, one had to let him go on, not interrupt him, and listen to him with reverent attention. He had, indeed, happened to be at Nantes in 1793, at the same time as Jean-Baptiste Carrier, of bloody memory. God forbid we should make the faintest excuses for that terrible proconsul and the horrors he perpetrated! But it must be admitted that the Vendeans had themselves set him an abominable example. Wars conducted by priests are apt to be barbarous wars, and it is known--or rather, it is not known, that at the beginning the insurrection was entirely in the hands of priests; the nobles did not involve themselves in it until later, and, when they did take part in it, the method of butchery became rather more humane: it changed to shooting. The first person to play a part in that bloody squabble was a sacristan named Cathelineau. Machiavelli says that, "When it was decided to. assassinate Julian de Medicis in the church of Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs, they chose ecclesiastics to do the work of assassination, because they were less likely to be impressed by the sanctity of the place."

It is a strange but indisputable fact that when men of peace and love and charity turn into executioners, they become the most refined in cruelty of all; witness the _in-pace_ (dungeons) of convents, witness the cells of the Inquisition, witness the massacres of Alby, witness the auto-da-fés of Madrid, witness Joan of Arc, witness Urbain Grandier.

This Cathelineau was what the country people between Angers and Saint-Laurent would term a sturdy lad (_gars_). Only three months elapsed between the day of his first shot and the day when he was killed, but these three months sufficed to make his name renowned in history. He was neither tall, nor had he refined manners; he was but five feet four inches high; but he had well-set shoulders and the hips were splendidly poised, and he possessed the fine cool prudent courage of the men of the West. We have mentioned that he was a sacristan, but he was many other things beside; he was mason, carrier, linen-merchant, a married man and the father of twelve or fourteen children. He had hardly gained a hearing before he set up a superior council comprised chiefly of priests: they troubled themselves but little over the nobles. The head of this council was the famous Bernier, curé d'Angers. Cathelineau was the man for him; the simple peasant discovered a quicker method of starting an insurrection than the pope with his bulls or the priests with their sermons. He advised the curés to shroud the crucifixes in black crèpe and to carry them thus in their processions. At the sight of their Christ in mourning, the peasants could no longer contain themselves; women tore their hair, men beat their breasts and all swore to kill the Republicans, root and branch, since they had grieved the Saviour. It should be added that nothing could be less knightly and less patriotic than the proclamations of these brave folk:--

"Down with conscription! Down with the militia! Let us dwell in our own countryside. People tell us the enemy may descend on us and threaten our homes. Well and good, let them first trespass on our soil, we shall be ready to meet them there!"

And those who talked thus were well aware that the enemy would have devastated, pillaged and burned all France and demolished Paris before it ventured between their hedges and among their furze bushes and in their sunken pathways.

It was equivalent to saying, "What does it matter to us what may happen to Alsace and Lorraine, Champagne and Burgundy, the Dauphiné and Provence?... What does it matter to us if they extinguish Paris, the light of the world?... Time enough to seize our guns when we see the Cossack leap his horse over our hedges!"

Now the most picturesque of writers would find great difficulty in giving a patriotic turn to such assertions as these. Personally, I much prefer the volunteers who ran in front of the Prussians as far as Valmy, to these peasants who waited quietly behind their hedgerows; and all the more so since I am not at all convinced that they were not really waiting for them on purpose to ally themselves to them. Why should they not compound with the Prussians? they entered into plenty of negotiations with the English! The war, then, began between patriots and royalists, between citizens and peasants. There were constitutional towns, manufacturing ones,--as, for example, Chollet, where very beautiful handkerchiefs are made,--which contained numbers of workpeople who did not wish for Prussians in France or for friends of the Prussians. One day they heard that the people of Bressuire had risen in revolt; they armed themselves with pikes and rushed off to attack them. So the town of Chollet was especially marked out for hatred by the peasants.

On 4 March, they attacked it in their turn. A commanding officer belonging to the National Guard trusted himself among a group of royalists; he went among them to endeavour to reconcile the two parties; soon, cries of pain issued from this group, the members of which had closed round him and were slashing at his legs with his own sword.

On the 10th, came the turn of Machecoul; here, there was less to do than at Chollet. Machecoul was a small town, exposed on every side and easy to capture. They first learnt the danger they were in on a Sunday; the tocsin was rung and all the peasantry of the surrounding country made for the town. Two hundred patriots rallied and bravely advanced against the assailants--two hundred against two thousand!--the mass opened, surrounded the little band and made but one mouthful of it. Machecoul had a constitutional curé, and the priests who had not taken the oath to the constitution bore a grudge against those who had: they protested that the latter "spoilt the profession"; they seized the poor man as he came to say mass, and they killed him; but there was a preconcerted plan among them to kill him by inches by blows on the face. The torture lasted a long time: life is sometimes very tenacious, especially in the hands of skilful executioners, who do not incline to chase it too quickly out of the body. But everything has an end: the curé died a martyr, and, when he was dead, they consulted an old huntsman, a clever bugle blower, and organised a hunt, searching from house to house to track down their quarry. When they unearthed a patriot they blew the _vue_, at the sound of which every man, woman and child ran out (in this kind of warfare, women and children are even worse than men). When the patriot was beaten down, the _hallali_ was bugled, then came the _curée_, which lasted a long time: it was carried out, usually, by women, with the help of scissors and nails, and by children, with the aid of stones. Machecoul lies on an eminence between two departments; it was judged to be a good place for establishing a court of justice; and they massacred there for forty-two days, from 10 March to 22 April.

The reader knows how the insurrection spread from the Lower Vendée to the Higher. It was brought about by an affair at Saint-Florent: an émigré had sent his servant, a Vendean named Forest into Vendée to preach resistance, and opposition to the military system. They tried to stop him, but he would not be denied a hearing; he openly preached revolt in the streets. A gendarme came to him; he drew a pistol from his pocket, fired at the gendarme and killed him. That pistol-shot woke those who were yet slumbering, And, mark well, when this unlucky shot was fired, the tocsin was already ringing in six hundred parishes; then it was carried by the wind in all directions; nothing could be heard but the ringing of bells, as though flocks of invisible birds were flying over their brazen tongues. The vibration of those deadly knells, which were answering one another from village to village, grew in volume, clashing in the air, charging the atmosphere like a thunderstorm, with electric currents of hatred and of revenge.

Meantime, what was Cathelineau, the prime mover of all this, busy about? We will hear Michelet's version:--

"He had heard of the fight at Saint-Florent and the firing of guns clearly enough; nor could he be unaware by the 12th of the frightful massacre of the 10th, which had compromised the Vendean coast in the revolt past all drawing back. Even if he had not heard anything, the tocsin would have roused him hard enough: the whole country seemed in an uproar, the very earth trembled. He began to think things were growing serious, and whether from the foresight of the father of a family which he was shortly to leave, or whether from military prudence, in the matter of laying in stores of food, he began to heat his ovens and to make bread. First came his nephew, with the story of the affray at Saint-Florent. Cathelineau continued to knead his dough. Then the neighbours began dropping in--a tailor, a weaver, a shoemaker, a hatter.

"'Well, neighbour, what shall we do?'

"Quite twenty-seven of them had assembled there, bent on following his counsel implicitly. He pointed out first that a crisis had come: the leaven had done its work, the fermentation was sufficiently advanced; it was time to stop kneading, wipe his hands and shoulder his gun. Twenty-seven went forth; at the end of the village they numbered five hundred. It was the whole of the population, all worthy men, sturdy, strong, steadfastly brave and honest, the very pick of the Vendean armies, intrepid leaders almost always to be found in the front ranks, facing the Republican cannon."

By the time they reached Chollet, they were fifteen thousand. They had seized a piece of cannon at Jallais, which they christened the _Missionnaire_; and a second, at some other place, which was dubbed _Marie-Jeanne_. All along the route priests joined their ranks, exhorting, preaching, singing mass to them. They started on the 12th, as we have seen; after the 14th, a large band joined forces with them, headed by a man who was to share the command with Cathelineau, and, later, to succeed him. This was Stofflet, another rough but brave peasant, a gamekeeper on M. Maulevrier's estate, whose grandson, poor lad, the last descendant of the race, was killed out hunting, at the age of sixteen. When the Vendean army reached Chollet it sent in a flag of truce--a strange envoy he was, too, and he gives us a good idea of the times, the place and the circumstances: his head and his feet were bare; he carried in his hand a crucifix crowned with thorns, bound round with a huge rosary; his eyes were lifted to heaven, as those of a mystic or martyr, and he cried out between his sobs--

"Surrender, my dear friends, or you will all be put to fire and sword!"

This summons was made in the name of _commanding officer_ Stofflet and _almoner_ Barbotin.

The whole of the garrison of Chollet comprised three hundred patriots armed with muskets, and five hundred armed with pikes; they attempted to offer resistance to fifteen thousand men; but, of course, resistance was utterly impossible; M. de Beauveau, the head of the Republicans, fell in the first attack. The patriots retired into a part of the castle which commanded the square, and from whence they could fire upon the Vendeans as they entered the square; this was all the easier as there was a Calvary in the square before which every peasant knelt and prayed, heedless of the firing, not returning to the fight until his prayers were finished and the sign of the cross made. These good folk--let us lay stress on the word and call them brave folk--for they did not understand the enormity of the crimes they were committing, since their priests had ordered them!--did not plunder, but they killed not merely during battle, which was a necessity, but even afterwards, and they killed cruelly, as we shall see.

We will again refer to Michelet for an account of how they killed; if I related it to you in my own words you would say I was romancing. He, it is known, did not lie; he was, indeed, driven from his chair because he told the truth not only about the past but also about the future. Michelet says:--

"Directly a prisoner was confessed, the peasants no longer hesitated to kill him, as his spiritual salvation was made secure; several escaped death by refusing confession, and by saying that they were not yet in a state of grace; one of them was spared because he was a Protestant and could not confess. They were afraid to send him into damnation. History has dealt very severely with the unfortunate patriots who slaughtered the Vendeans; many of them displayed heroic courage and died like martyrs. Those who were cut into pieces could be counted by hundreds. I will give one instance, among many, of a boy of sixteen who, over the dead body of his father, shouted '_Vive la nation!_' until he was pierced through by a score of bayonettes. The most celebrated of these martyrs was Sauveur, a municipal officer of Roche-Bernard, rather let us say of Roche-Sauveur, for it should preserve his name. This town, which is a thoroughfare between Nantes and Vannes, was attacked on the 16th by an immense gathering of nearly six thousand peasants; there were hardly any armed men in the town and it was compelled to surrender. The maddened crowd began at once by butchering twenty-two persons on the square, on the pretext of a gun going off suddenly in the air; they rushed upon the town hall and discovered the _procureur syndic_, Sauveur, a fearless magistrate who had stuck to his post. He was seized and dragged off; they put him into a dungeon whence, next day, he was taken out to be barbarously massacred. They sampled all kinds of weapons on him, principally pistols: they fired at him with small shot, trying to make him cry, '_Vive le roi!_' but he would only shout, '_Vive la république!_' Infuriated, they fired at his mouth with gunpowder and dragged him before the Calvary to beg for mercy; he lifted his eyes to heaven in adoration, but still he cried, '_Vive la nation!_' Next they shot his left eye out and kicked him on a few paces; mangled and bleeding, he stood with hands clasped looking upward.

"'Commend thy spirit to God!' yelled his assassins.

"They shot him down; he fell, but rose again, clasping tightly his magisterial medal and still kissing it. Again he was fired upon; he fell on one knee, dragged himself to the edge of a trench with stoical calmness, without a single groan or cry of anger or of despair! His fortitude drove the frenzied mob to madness, for his only words were--

"'Finish me off, my friends,' and '_Vive la République!_ Do not keep me lingering on, friends; '_Vive la nation!_'

"He made his confession of faith to the end, and they silenced him with blows from the butt ends of their rifles!"

What do you think of that, you Royalist gentlemen? Surely the 2nd and 3rd of September could not show you anything better than that? Wait a bit, this is not all; and what we are about to tell, be it clearly understood, is not written for the purpose of reviving hatred, but to make people detest civil warfare. If I once again borrow Michelet's words, it is not only because they are more eloquent than mine, but so that there may be two of us to cry "Shame!" Listen, and you will see how true are his words:--

"One essential difference that we have noticed between the violence of the revolutionist and that of the fanatic, urged on by the fury of priests is, that the former, in killing, desire nothing but to be rid of their enemy; the latter, inspired with the feelings of ferocity of the times of the Inquisition, have less desire to kill than to cause suffering, to make the poor finite victim expiate in infinite misery, in protracted agony, by way of avenging God! To read the gentle idyllic accounts of Royalist writers, one might think that these insurgents were saints; that, in the main, they only exacted vengeance and entered upon reprisals when forced thereto by the cruelties of the Republicans. Let them tell us what were the reprisals which caused the people of Pontivy, on the 12th or 13th of March, led by a refractory curé, to murder seventeen of the National Guard in the public square! Were they reprisals which were exercised at Machecoul, for six weeks, under the organised authority of the Royalist Committee? One Souchu, a tax-gatherer, who presided, filled and emptied the town prisons four times. The mob had, as we have seen, at first killed from sheer sport out of brutal delight. Souchu put a stop to that, and took care that the executions should be long drawn-out and painful. As executioners, he specially preferred children, because their clumsy hands caused more protracted suffering. Seasoned men such as sailors and soldiers could not witness these deeds without indignation, and wanted to prevent them, so the Royalist Committee did its murders by night: they did not shoot any longer, but slaughtered their victims and then hastily covered up the dying with earth. According to authentic reports made at the Convention, 542 persons perished in one month and by what ghastly deaths! When they could find practically no more men to slay they proceeded to women. Many were Republicans and not sufficiently complaisant to the priests who had a spite against them. A frightful miracle took place: in one of the churches there was a tomb of some noted saint or other; they consulted it; a priest said mass over the tomb and laid hands on it. Behold, the stone moved.

"'I can feel it rising up!' exclaimed the priest.

"And why did it rise up? To demand a sacrifice pleasing to God, namely, that women should no longer be spared but slaughtered! Happily, indeed, the Republicans, the National Guard from Nantes, arrived.

"'Alas!' the townspeople said to them, coming to them weeping and wringing their hands, 'you come too late! You can but save the walls, the town itself is exterminated!...'

"And they pointed to the place where men had been buried alive. Horrified, they beheld a shrivelled hand which in the fearful anguish of suffocation had seized hold of and twisted the withered grasses...."

Is it any good to speak about Carrier after all this? What would it serve to tell of his _bateaux à Soupapes_;[2] of his _bagnades républicaines_; of his _mariages révolutionnaires_ [men and women bound hands and feet together and thrown into the Loire]; of his _déportations verticales._[3] It would only be to set crime against crime, which would prove nothing beyond the wickedness of man. Besides, Carrier has atoned for his crimes. I am well aware that though this may have been enough to satisfy the requirements of justice as far as the man himself was concerned, it has not been sufficient to satisfy history. It was in vain for Carrier to struggle with all his might and main against the accusation, which came upon him like a shock; in vain for him to exclaim, with sombre eyes, outstretched arms and strident voice, to his old colleagues, now become his judges--

"I do not understand you! You must be mad! Why blame me to-day for doing what you gave me orders to do yesterday? In accusing me, the Convention accuses itself.... My condemnation, look to it, is your condemnation also; you will find yourselves caught in the same proscription with me: if I am guilty, so is every man here ... every one, every one, every one! down to the very bell on the president's table!"

But all his cries were useless. And herein lies the horror of revolutions; they reach a pitch at which the same terror that drove them into action drives them into reaction, and in which the guillotine, sated with drinking the blood of the accused, is callously and indifferently willing to drink the blood of judges and executioners! This reaction, which set in two days later, saved the lives of André Chénier and M. Villenave, together with a hundred and thirty-one of the Nantais, his companions.

[Footnote 1: Alas! since these lines were penned death has intervened in the life and happiness of this poor lady, for I read in the papers one day at Brussels, in words as cold as the steel of the Middle Ages which used to be placed in the hands of a skeleton:--

"Madame Bataillard, daughter of Madame Mélanie Waldor, has just died after a long and painful illness. The funeral will take place to-morrow. Any friends who may not have received an invitation to be present are invited to attend at the cemetery at eleven o'clock."

Unhappily, the notice came too late for me. Amongst all her many friends I certainly held her in the most affectionate remembrance, and I was denied the consolation either of seeing her before she died or of following her to her grave. The merry child, the beautiful young girl, the serious and intelligent wife, who should have died long after us, since we saw her grow up, has gone before us, and we still wait here!]

[Footnote 2: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.--Carrier compelled his victims to embark on boats, which were then scuttled.]

[Footnote 3: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.--See note 2.]