Part 16

Alone of the central bishoprics of these hills they are united by a road, and have so been united for two thousand years. Characteristically, in the true spirit of the Pyrenees, there is but that one great road between them. It takes men, and has taken them since the legions made it, up by Huesca and Jaca and so over the Summus Pyrenæus, the "Somsport," then down by the deep valley of Bearn to Oloron, to Pau, to Tarbes, and down the river bank to Toulouse. All the armies have taken it. Through this paved gap went the first Frankish kings, still wild, wandering South for spoil, and through it in a tide poured the Mohammedan host that so nearly seized upon Europe. All such marchings brought up under the walls of one or other of the cities: Saragossa for ever besieged from the North, Toulouse beating off the raids from the South, fight similar wars. Each has its river, and the river of each is the life of the two provinces on either slope of the mountains; the Ebro of Aragon, the Garonne of Aquitaine. Each has its port: the one Barcelona, the other Bordeaux; and in each valley there is separation of thought and custom--something like hostility--between the inland city and the commerce of the sea. Each was for long the centre of a nation, each afforded the title of a great house. Aragon was built up under its princes, from that remote age when the chieftain of a few mountain clans began to fight his way South against the infidels till the light grew strong upon the Twelfth Century and Alphonso fixed himself and the Faith upon the Ebro. Toulouse grew under its counts to be almost a nation, ruling everything from the Cevennes to the Pyrenees, and making a rallying place, schools, law courts, and an imperial middle for all the fields of the Garonne.

So far the parallel between these twin cities holds; but the test of any appreciation of them is contrast.

The landscape of Saragossa is a baked plain, ill-watered and reflecting up to heaven the fierce sun of Spain like a plate of bronze. The landscape of Toulouse is of fields and meadows with many trees. The Ebro trickles under the great bridge of Saragossa for weeks together; then perhaps dies altogether, becoming rather a stagnant pool or two than a river; then, in spate, rises high and threatens the piles, roaring against them, and suddenly sinks again. The Garonne runs in a broad, even stream, shallow, but full and never lacking water; it is already placid as it sweeps under the great bridge of Toulouse. Saragossa became the capital of a true kingdom whose language, traditions, and above all whose chivalrous aristocracy were its own. Toulouse went under in the false adventure of the Albigensian schism. Saragossa was Mohammedan, a sort of northern bastion of Islam, till far into the development of the Middle Ages: it did not re-enter Christendom till 1118. The First Crusade was long past, England was all Norman, while yet this city was governed by Asiatic ideas in contempt of Europe. Toulouse, always Christian, rose against the unity of Christendom. Saragossa in those struggles got a great hero and his legend, a man who fighting now for Islam and now for us built up an epic, the Cid Campeador, the "Challenger." Toulouse has no heroes. Saragossa became a pivot of steadfast faith, round which turned and on which reposed the reconquest of Spain by men of our race. Toulouse was--and to-day still is--perpetually seeking new things and divergence in Europe: a sort of smouldering fire. To-day full of denials of things sacred yesterday, dogma, the family, property, all the foundations. Saragossa lies indifferent, ready to become (as it is becoming) more wealthy and careless of these philosophical quarrels.

The great churches of the two towns are in violent contrast too. At Toulouse these are all of one pattern and old. The place where St. Saturninus, the evangelist of the city, died--the church of the "Toro," the Bull (for a bull dragged him to death through the streets of the city)--is of small Roman brick, plain, steadfast. The vast cathedral to which his body was translated is of that same brick, and all the arches are Roman, round and small. The Dominican Church is the same; a stranger sometimes takes one for the other. In Saragossa the cathedral is stamped with the fervour of the reconquest. It is crammed with detail and with infinite carving. It is very dark, high and silent, and at the same time, with its wealth of creation and of figures, magical. Toulouse has no monument of faith other than those similar early simple and huge temples. Saragossa has the colour, the tinsel, and the gorgeousness of the late Renaissance in the gilded Basilica of the Pilar.

Religion, which is at once the maker and the expression of States, differs utterly in mood between one city and the other. In Toulouse there is war. The men who deny and the men who affirm are at it with all the weapons of our time, as six hundred years ago they were at it with swords. You buy a newspaper, and ten to one the leading article will be an affirmation or a denial of the creed--signed by some famous name. In Saragossa you may buy newspapers for a month and get nothing but the common news, two days old. Mass is crammed at Toulouse, empty in Saragossa. There are enemies of the Mass in power at Toulouse, numerous, vigilant, convinced. In Saragossa a few eccentrics or none. Toulouse would persecute one way or the other had it a power separate from the State. Saragossa was always tolerant; of its few murders one was the popular murder of an Inquisitor. There is something that sleeps in Saragossa for all its liveliness and wealth and air. There is something that wakes and prowls in Toulouse for all its ancient walls and green things growing upon ruins as they grew in Rome.

These are the two cities as I know them. Often upon a height upon the Pyrenees I have thought how one lay beneath me to the left, the other to the right, the end of a chance journey. All human tracks from the mountains seem to lead down like water-courses to one or the other place, and travel flows of its own weight to the sunlit market-place of Saragossa or to the Capitol of Toulouse from every saddle in the hills. You may be in the Cerdagne (which is Catalan) or in Roncesvalles (which is Basque), but if you are on foot and wish to go far the roads will bring you insensibly to the great town on the Ebro; you may be as far west as St. Jean-Pied-de-Port or as far east as Ax, but on the northern slope insensibly you will be driven to Toulouse. The two cities are the reservoirs of life on either slope of the hills, and each holds, as it were, a number of threads, which are paths and roads radiating out to the high crossings of the chain.

And, as I consider the two towns, whether near them as I lately was or here at home, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining their future as in remembering their long past and the sharp picture of their present time. The Provinces of Europe develop, but they do not change their identity. If it be paradoxical to suggest a wealthy Saragossa and a fanatical Toulouse, yet it is not out of keeping with the revolutions of Europe. Saragossa is on the road to wealth in a country which is rapidly accumulating; Toulouse is well on the road to fanaticism and religious war. One can see Toulouse with great artists and fierce rhetoric standing out against some reaction of thought in the Republic or captured by the flame that has set fire to Lourdes; one can see Saragossa dragged into the orbit of Barcelona, drifting with the rising wealth of Mediterranean commerce, forgetting altars, and sharing the mere opulence of the Catalans. Such thought leads one to fantastic guesses; it is provoked by the modern character of these two great, unwritten, ill-known Pyrenean towns in one of which the chief quarrel of our time is so actively pursued, in the other of which lies all the new promise of Spain. And that reminds me. Saragossa has no song of its own; Toulouse has one called "If the Garonne had only wished, she might."

So much for Saragossa and Toulouse.

THE JUDGMENT OF ROBESPIERRE

"It is of little profit," said Robespierre severely, "that we should debate what may or may not come to pass in that time. You speak of more than a hundred years, and of a season when the youngest child before us shall have long been dead, and his child, too, perhaps be dead after him; and for that matter, even if it profited us, it would not be to the service of God, for we must say what is true and defend it. As for the rest, no man is master of destiny."

He was about to make an allusion to the people of Epirus and to a discovery of theirs which he had read in the classics upon this subject, when St. Just interrupted, as was his way, with burning eyes and a sort of high, rhetorical facility which gave all his young words such amazing power. He was sitting in an attitude one might have thought listless, so lightly did his delicate hand lean upon his knee, save that all thought of carelessness left one when one watched the intensity of his face. And he repeated a phrase which its rhythm has made famous, "The things we have said will never be lost on earth."

It was in the weeks after Fleurus. Charlotte Robespierre, ill-tempered and silent, sat like a sort of guardian of the room upon the little sofa by the western wall of it, the darkest side. Couthon was there, the cripple, his face permanently stretched by pain, and there also, almost foreign--English or Italian one might have said from their length--shone the delicate features of Fouché, his thin lips firm and inevitably ironical.

Paris was glorious. There was a festivity in the sky of that July, a cool air in the sunlit streets, and that sort of clear sound which comes up from the gulfs of the narrow ways when Paris in summer is at the full of its life. The sunlight upon the courtyard shone reflected from the white walls of it into the darkness of the little room where the friends sat talking together before they should go down to the Parliament. In the shed outside was the noise of their host, the carpenter, sawing. A very quiet and respectful young man, the son of the house and secretary to Robespierre, ventured an opinion. He had a wooden leg and his expression was not intelligent. When these two generations of men had passed, he said, the Goddess Liberty would be firm upon her throne. It would be the chief advantage of the passage of time that men would forget all the old days of slavery, and that the evil thing which the Revolution was occupied in destroying would be remembered only as a sort of nightmare of humanity. The insolent palaces which might remind men of their tyrants will have been pulled down long ago, and their gew-gaws of pictures have been left to moulder. He foresaw and was about to describe at some length the reign of Virtue and Equality among men, when Robespierre interrupted him severely in his high voice and bade him not to pirouette upon the stump of his wooden leg, which wore the carpet of the Citizen his father, and was, moreover, an ungainly gesture. He further told him with increased severity that the arts in a State of free men would always be decently cherished, for but a few weeks before he had been delighted to sit for his portrait to M. Greuze.

There was a little silence following this reprimand.

"If it be of any moment to you," he continued, "I can, I think, tell you some things certainly that society will hold. For they have invariably accompanied liberty in her majestic march. Men will respect the labour and the property of others, and the power of peace and war will reside with the people. It is to this," he added earnestly, "that I have given my chief efforts, and I believe I have placed it upon a secure foundation. What I am most afraid of," he mused, "is the power that may be put into the hands of representatives. But that again will be tamed by long usage. I shall soon see to it that the places of meeting are made largely public, and I have drafted a design whereby it shall be death, or at least exile, to plan so much as a municipal building for the meetings of municipal bodies unless the galleries permit a full view of the debate, and accommodate a number of citizens not less than five times the total number of the elected. It would be better," he sighed in conclusion, "that a law should compel at intervals great meetings in the open, and should punish by the loss of civic power all those who did not attend, unless, indeed, they had been given leave of absence by some magistrate."

St. Just was weary of the war, and asked him how long it would continue.

"It will continue," said Robespierre firmly, and in the tone of a man who can speak more definitely of near things than of distant, "it will continue until the winter at least, upon which occasion I design...."

At this point Charlotte, whose temper was not improved by such discourses, abruptly left them. They heard the sharp hurrying of her footsteps cross the flags of the courtyard; she was going up to her own room overlooking the street. Fouché smiled.

"You smile, Fouché," said Robespierre, displaying very obvious irritation, "because you think, as politicians do, that war is an unaccountable thing. Let me tell you that reason here is much stronger than chance, and that the forces opposed to us are already convinced of liberty. I have before me" (he pulled out his little brown book from his pocket) "a list of pamphlets recently distributed beyond the frontiers, and a very good estimate of the numbers of their readers."

Fouché restrained his smile; he was a man capable of self-control to any limit. He leant his long, delicate, refined head upon the tapering fingers of his left hand, and listened with great apparent interest to what the Master was saying. The sawing in the courtyard without ceased, and his host, the carpenter, entered in that reverential way which marks the sentiment of religion, and very silently took a distant chair to listen to the Master's discourse. Couthon shifted himself in his place to relieve his crippled members, and Robespierre continued--

"Nothing endures unless it be based upon Virtue, but though Virtue tends to corrupt with time, and though Liberty is rather for what the fanatics have called 'angels' than for men, yet if men's chains are broken it has great chance of permanence and of effect upon the public. I have upon this matter," he continued, pulling out of a pocket a shagreen case and from that case a pair of spectacles, "certain notes that will not be without interest for you."

Fouché sighed while Robespierre was seeking among a group of neatly-folded papers for what he had to read. His host, the carpenter, bent forward to hear as a man might bend forward to hear the reading of the Gospel. He even had an odd instinct to stand up and listen with bowed head. St. Just was thinking of other things. And certainly any modern man looking on would have been compelled to watch St. Just's deep and luminous eyes. He had already forgotten the future, and once again he was thinking of the wars. He had begun to take pleasure in the charges. A moment might have made him, from the poet that he was, a soldier; and while the high thin voice of the little man Robespierre went on with appropriate gestures, describing the permanence of Virtue in a free State, he clearly saw what he had seen but a few days before from the lines: the houses of the beleaguered city against the June dawn, and he heard the bugles.

Robespierre had begun: "The sentiment of property which is native in man proceeds from what he gives to Nature by his toil, and this is respected by all, yet even property itself cannot be thought secure until Virtue be there to guarantee it, no laws can make up for its absence. It is Virtue, therefore, upon which even this essential, without which society cannot be, reposes. And Virtue which will cause a poor man to be equal with the rich, while the one regards the other without envy upon the one side, without contempt upon the other."

For a full quarter of an hour Robespierre went on, and Couthon, as a matter of ritual, and the master of the house as a matter of religion, listened: the one as a matter of course, the other ardently. And when he had finished his little peroration, when he had taken off those spectacles and wiped them, when he had turned upon them his pale, small, watchful, grey-green eyes, he noted that Fouché alone had been inconstant. Fouché had his back turned and was looking out of a window. A boy who passed through the courtyard whistling, carrying a short ladder, looked at the window for a moment and saw the aquiline, refined face covered with laughter. The boy thought that laughter merely friendly. He waved his hand and smiled an answer, and Fouché saw in that boy the generation that should arise. He composed his features and turned them once more towards the room. Before Robespierre could speak sharply, as he meant to speak, and complain of such inattention, he said in a clear, well-modulated voice, that he had never heard those sentences before. Was Robespierre to pronounce them that day in Parliament?

"I shall do so," said Robespierre, "if I am permitted by the President to speak. If not, I will reserve my remarks for another occasion." He pulled out a fat little round watch prettily enamelled, touched the lace at his wrists, settled the order of his stock, and said as a schoolmaster might say it to young St. Just: "Are you not coming with me?"

St. Just, startled suddenly like a man awakened, thought of the hour, remembered the Parliament, and went out with his friend.

Fouché with his hand to his chin crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs to that part of the house which overlooked the Rue St. Honoré. He had something to say to Charlotte. Couthon, who was hungry, remained to lunch, but he found his hosts dull and a little ill-tempered. He could not fill the void that had been left by Robespierre.

_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._

+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+