Chapter 16

And this, no doubt, is what would have happened but for that hasty visit of Bohmer's to Versailles. It ruined everything. As a result of it, Bohmer was summoned to wait instantly upon the Queen in the mater of some paste buckles.

The Queen received the jeweller in private, and her greeting proved that the paste buckles were a mere pretext. She demanded to know the meaning of his words to Madame de Campan.

Bohmer could not rid himself of the notion that he was being trifled with. Had he not written and himself delivered to the Queen a letter in which he thanked her for purchasing the necklace, and had not that letter remained unanswered--a silent admission that the necklace was in her hands? In his exasperation he became insolent.

“The meaning, madame? The meaning is that I require payment for my necklace, that the patience of my creditors is exhausted, and that unless you order the money to be paid, I am a ruined man!”

Marie Antoinette considered him in cold, imperious anger.

“Are you daring to suggest that your necklace is in my possession?”

Bohmer was white to the lips, his hands worked nervously.

“Does Your Majesty deny it?”

“You are insolent!” she exclaimed. “You will be good enough to answer questions, not to ask them. Answer me, then. Do you suggest that I have your necklace?”

But a desperate man is not easily intimidated.

“No, madame; I affirm it! It was the Countess of Valois who--”

“Who is the Countess of Valois?”

That sudden question, sharply uttered, was a sword of doubt through the heart of Bohmer's confidence. He stared wide-eyed a moment at the indignant lady before him, then collected himself, and made as plain a tale as he could of the circumstances under which he had parted with the necklace Madame de la Motte's intervention, the mediation of the Cardinal de Rohan with Her Majesty's signed approval of the terms, and the delivery of the necklace to His Eminence for transmission to the Queen.

Marie Antoinette listened in increasing horror and anger. A flush crept into her pale cheeks.

“You will prepare and send me a written statement of what you have just told me,” she said. “You have leave to go.”

That interview took place on August 9th. The 15th was the Feast of the Assumption, and also the name-day of the Queen, therefore a gala day at Court, bringing a concourse of nobility to Versailles. Mass was to be celebrated in the royal chapel at ten o'clock, and the celebrant, as by custom established for the occasion, was the Grand Almoner of France, the Cardinal de Rohan.

But at ten o'clock a meeting was being held in the King's cabinet, composed of the King and Queen, the Baron de Breteuil, and the Keeper of the Seals, Miromesnil. They were met, as they believed, to decide upon a course of action in the matter of a diamond necklace. In reality, these puppets in the hands of destiny were helping to decide the fate of the French monarchy.

The King, fat, heavy, and phlegmatic, sat in a gilded chair by an ormolu-encrusted writing-table. His bovine eyes were troubled. Two wrinkles of vexation puckered the flesh above his great nose. Beside, and slightly behind him, stood the Queen, white and imperious, whilst facing them stood Monsieur de Breteuil, reading aloud the statement which Bohmer had drawn up.

When he had done, there was a moment's utter silence. Then the King spoke, his voice almost plaintive.

“What is to be done, then? But what is to be done?”

It was the Queen who answered him, harshly and angrily.

“When the Roman purple and a princely title are but masks to cover a swindler, there is only one thing to be done. This swindler must be exposed and punished.”

“But,” the King faltered, “we have not heard the Cardinal.”

“Can you think that Bohmer, that any man, would dare to lie upon such a matter?”

“But consider, madame, the Cardinal's rank and family,” calmly interposed the prudent Miromesnil; “consider the stir, the scandal that must ensue if this matter is made public.”

But the obedient daughter of Marie Therese, hating Rohan at her mother's bidding and for her mother's sake, was impatient of any such wise considerations.

“What shall the scandal signify to us?” she demanded. The King looked at Breteuil.

“And you, Baron? What is your view?”

Breteuil, Rohan's mortal enemy, raised his shoulders and flipped the document.

“In the face of this, Sire, it seems to me that the only course is to arrest the Cardinal.”

“You believe, then--” began the King, and checked, leaving the sentence unfinished.

But Breteuil had understood.

“I know that the Cardinal must be pressed for money,” he said. “Ever prodigal in his expenditure, he is further saddled with the debts of the Prince de Guimenee.”

“And you can believe,” the King cried, “that a Prince of the House of Rohan, however pressed for money, could--Oh, it is unimaginable!”

“Yet has he not stolen my name?” the Queen cut in. “Is he not proven a common, stupid forger?”

“We have not heard him,” the King reminded her gently.

“And His Eminence might be able to explain,” ventured Miromesnil. “It were certainly prudent to give him the opportunity.”

Slowly the King nodded his great, powdered head. “Go and find him. Bring him at once!” he bade Breteuil; and Breteuil bowed and departed.

Very soon he returned, and he held the door whilst the handsome Cardinal, little dreaming what lay before him, serene and calm, a commanding figure in his cassock of scarlet watered silk, rustled forward into the royal presence, and so came face to face with the Queen for the first time since that romantic night a year ago in the Grove of Venus.

Abruptly the King launched his thunderbolt.

“Cousin,” he asked, “what purchase is this of a diamond necklace that you are said to have made in the Queen's name?”

King and Cardinal looked into each other's eyes, the King's narrowing, the Cardinal's dilating, the King leaning forward in his chair, elbows on the table, the Cardinal standing tense and suddenly rigid.

Slowly the colour ebbed from Rohan's face, leaving it deathly pale. His eyes sought the Queen, and found her contemptuous glance, her curling lip. Then at last his handsome head sank a little forward.

“Sire,” he said unsteadily, “I see that I have been duped. But I have duped nobody.”

“You have no reason to be troubled, then. You need but to explain.”

Explain! That was precisely what he could not do. Besides, what was the nature of the explanation demanded of him? Whilst he stood stricken there, it was the Queen who solved this question.

“If, indeed, you have been duped,” she said scornfully, her colour high, her eyes like points of steel, “you have been self-duped. But even then it is beyond belief that self-deception could have urged you to the lengths of passing yourself off as my intermediary--you, who should know yourself to be the last man in France I should employ, you to whom I have not spoken once in eight years.” Tears of anger glistened in her eyes; her voice shrilled up. “And yet, since you have not denied it, since you put forward this pitiful plea that you have been duped, we must believe the unbelievable.”

Thus at a blow she shattered the fond hopes he had been cherishing ever since the night of gems--of gems, forsooth!--in the Grove of Venus; thus she laid his ambition in ruins about him, and left the man himself half stunned.

Observing his disorder, the ponderous but kindly monarch rose.

“Come, my cousin,” he said more gently, “collect yourself. Sit down here and write what you may have to say in answer.”

And with that he passed into the library beyond, accompanied by the Queen and the two Ministers.

Alone, Rohan staggered forward and sank nervelessly into the chair. He took up a pen, pondered a moment, and began to write. But he did not yet see clear. He could not yet grasp the extent to which he had been deceived, could not yet believe that those treasured notes from Marie Antoinette were forgeries, that it was not the Queen who had met him in the Grove of Venus and given him the rose whose faded petals kept those letters company in a portfolio of red morocco. But at least it was clear to him that, for the sake of honour--the Queen's honour--he must assume it so; and in that assumption he now penned his statement.

When it was completed, himself he bore it to the King in the library.

Louis read it with frowning brows; then passed it to the Queen.

“Have you the necklace now?” he asked Rohan.

“Sir, I left it in the hands of this woman Valois.”

“Where is this woman?”

“I do not know, Sire.”

“And the letter of authority bearing the Queen's signature, which the jewellers say you presented to them--where is that?”

“I have it, Sire. I will place it before you. It is only now that I realize that it is a forgery.”

“Only now!” exclaimed the Queen in scorn.

“Her Majesty's name has been compromised,” said the King sternly. “It must be cleared. As King and as husband my duty is clear. Your Eminence must submit to arrest.”

Rohan fell back a step in stupefaction. For disgrace and dismissal he was prepared, but not for this.

“Arrest?” he whispered. “Ah, wait, Sire. The publicity! The scandal! Think of that! As for the necklace, I will pay for it myself, and so pay for my credulous folly. I beseech you, Sire, to let the matter end here. I implore it for my own sake, for the sake of the Prince de Soubise and the name of Rohan, which would be smirched unjustly and to no good purpose.”

He spoke with warmth and force; and, without adding more, yet conveyed an impression that much more could be said for the course he urged.

The King hesitated, considering. Noting this, the prudent, far-seeing Miromesnil ventured to develop the arguments at which Rohan had hinted, laying stress upon the desirability of avoiding scandal.

Louis was nodding, convinced, when Marie Antoinette, unable longer to contain her rancour, broke into opposition of those prudent measures.

“This hideous affair must be disclosed,” she insisted. “It is due to me that it should publicly be set right. The Cardinal shall tell the world how he came to suppose that, not having spoken to him for eight years, I could have wished to make use of his services in the purchase of this necklace.”

She was in tears, and her weak, easily swayed husband accounted her justified in her demand. And so, to the great consternation of all the world, Prince Louis de Rohan was arrested like a common thief.

A foolish, indiscreet, short-sighted woman had allowed her rancour to override all other considerations--careless of consequences, careless of injustice so that her resentment, glutted by her hatred of the Cardinal, should be gratified. The ungenerous act was terribly to recoil upon her. In tears and blood was she to expiate her lack of charity; very soon she was to reap its bitter fruits.

Saint-Just, a very prominent counsellor of the Parliament, one of the most advanced apostles of the new ideas that were to find full fruition in the Revolution, expressed the popular feeling in the matter.

“Great and joyful affair! A cardinal and a queen implicated in a forgery and a swindle! Filth on the crosier and the sceptre! What a triumph for the ideas of liberty!”

At the trial that followed before Parliament, Madame de la Motte, a man named Reteaux de Villette--who had forged the Queen's hand and impersonated Desclaux and a Mademoiselle d'Oliva--who had used her striking resemblance to Marie Antoinette to impersonate the Queen in the Grove of Venus were found guilty and sentenced. But the necklace was not recovered. It had been broken up, and some of the diamonds were already sold; others were being sold in London by Captain de la Motte, who had gone thither for the purpose, and who prudently remained there.

The Cardinal was acquitted, amid intense public joy and acclamation, which must have been gall and wormwood to the Queen. His powerful family, the clergy of France, and the very people, with whom he had ever been popular, had all laboured strenuously to vindicate him. And thus it befell that the one man the Queen had aimed at crushing was the only person connected with the affair who came out of it unhurt. The Queen's animus against the Cardinal aroused against her the animus of his friends of all classes. Appalling libels of her were circulated throughout Europe. It was thought and argued that she was more deeply implicated in the swindle than had transpired, that Madame de la Motte was a scapegoat, that the Queen should have stood her trial with the others, and that she was saved only by the royalty that hedged her.

Conceive what a weapon this placed in the hands of the men of the new ideas of liberty--men who were bent on proving the corruption of a system they sought to destroy!

Marie Antoinette should have foreseen something of this. She might have done so had not her hatred blinded her, had she been less intent upon seizing the opportunity at all costs to make Rohan pay for his barbed witticism upon her mother. She might have been spared much had she but spared Rohan when the chance was hers. As it was, the malevolent echoes of the affair and of Saint-Just's exultation were never out of her ears. They followed her to her trial eight years later before the revolutionary tribunal. They followed her to the very scaffold, of which they had undoubtedly supplied a plank.

VIII, THE NIGHT OF TERROR--The Drownings At Nantes Under Carrier

The Revolutionary Committee of the city of Nantes, reinforced by some of the administrators of the district and a few members of the People's Society, sat in the noble hall of the Cour des Comptes, which still retained much of its pre-republican sumptuousness. They sat expectantly--Goullin, the attorney, president of the committee, a frail, elegant valetudinarian, fierily eloquent; Grandmaison, the fencing-master, who once had been a gentleman, fierce of eye and inflamed of countenance; Minee, the sometime bishop, now departmental president; Pierre Chaux, the bankrupt merchant; the sans-culotte Forget, of the People's Society, an unclean, ill-kempt ruffian; and some thirty others called like these from every walk of life.

Lamps were lighted, and under their yellow glare the huddled company--for the month was December, and the air of the vast room was chill and dank--looked anxious and ill at ease.

Suddenly the doors were thrown open by an usher; and his voice rang loud in announcement--

“The Citizen Representative Carrier.”

The great man came in, stepping quickly. Of middle height, very frail and delicate, his clay-colored face was long and thin, with arched eyebrows, a high nose, and a loose, coarse mouth. His deeply sunken dark eyes glared fiercely, and wisps of dead-black hair, which had escaped the confining ribbon of his queue, hung about his livid brow. He was wrapped in a riding-coat of bottle-green, heavily lined with fur, the skirts reaching down to the tops of his Hessian boots, and the enormous turned-up collar almost touching the brim of his round hat. Under the coat his waist was girt with the tricolour of office, and there were gold rings in his ears.

Such at the age of five-and-thirty was Jean Baptiste Carrier, Representative of the Convention with the Army of the West, the attorney who once had been intended by devout parents for the priesthood. He had been a month in Nantes, sent thither to purge the body politic.

He reached a chair placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back, he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so terrible and brutal of aspect despite his frailness that more than one of those stout fellows quailed now before him.

Suddenly he broke into torrential speech, his voice shrill and harsh:

“I do not know by what fatality it happens, but happen it does, that during the month that I have been in Nantes you have never ceased to give me reason to complain of you. I have summoned you to meet me here that you may justify yourselves, if you can, for your ineptitude!” And he flung himself into the chair, drawing his fur-lined coat about him. “Let me hear from you!” he snapped.

Minee, the unfrocked bishop, preserving still a certain episcopal portliness of figure, a certain episcopal oiliness of speech, respectfully implored the representative to be more precise.

The invitation flung him into a passion. His irascibility, indeed, deserved to become a byword.

“Name of a name!” he shrilled, his sunken eyes ablaze, his face convulsed. “Is there a thing I can mention in this filthy city of yours that is not wrong? Everything is wrong! You have failed in your duty to provide adequately for the army of Vendee. Angers has fallen, and now the brigands are threatening Nantes itself. There is abject want in the city, disease is rampant; people are dying of hunger in the streets and of typhus in the prisons. And sacre nom!--you ask me to be precise! I'll be precise in telling you where lies the fault. It lies in your lousy administration. Do you call yourselves administrators? You--” He became unprintable. “I have come here to shake you out of your torpor, and by--I'll shake you out of it or I'll have the blasted heads off the lot of you.”

They shivered with chill fear under the wild glare of his sunken eyes.

“Well?” he barked after a long pause. “Are you all dumb as well as idiots?”

It was the ruffian Forget who had the courage to answer him:

“I have told the People's Society that if the machine works badly it is because the Citizen Carrier refuses to consult with the administration.”

“You told them that, did you, you--liar?” screeched Carrier. “Am I not here now to consult with you? And should I not have come before had you suggested it? Instead, you have waited until, of my own accord, I should come to tell you that your administration is ruining Nantes.”

Goullin, the eloquent and elegant Goullin, rose to soothe him:

“Citizen Representative, we admit the truth of all that you have said. There has been a misunderstanding. We could not take it upon ourselves to summon the august representative of the Sacred People. I We have awaited your own good pleasure, and now that you have made this manifest, there is no reason why the machine should not work effectively. The evils of which you speak exist, alas! But they are not so deeply rooted that, working under your guidance and advice, we cannot uproot them, rendering the soil fertile once more of good under the beneficent fertilizing showers of liberty.”

Mollified, Carrier grunted approval.

“That is well said, Citizen Goullin. The fertilizer needed by the soil is blood--the bad blood of aristocrats and federalists, and I can promise you, in the name of the august people, that it shall be abundantly provided.”

The assembly broke into applause, and his vanity melted to it. He stood up, expressed his gratification at being so completely understood, opened his arms, and invited the departmental president, Minee, to come down and receive the kiss of brotherhood.

Thereafter they passed to the consideration of measures of improvement, of measures to combat famine and disease. In Carrier's view there was only one way of accomplishing this--the number of mouths to be fed must be reduced, the diseased must be eliminated. It was the direct, the radical, the heroic method.

That very day six prisoners in Le Bouffay had been sentenced to death for attempting to escape.

“How do we know,” he asked, “that those six include all the guilty? How do we know that all in Le Bouffay do not share the guilt? The prisoners are riddled with disease, which spreads to the good patriots of Nantes; they eat bread, which is scarce, whilst good patriots starve. We must have the heads off all those blasted swine!” He took fire at his own suggestion. “Aye, that would be a useful measure. We'll deal with it at once. Let some one fetch the President of the Revolutionary Tribunal.”

He was fetched--a man of good family and a lawyer, named Francois Phelippes.

“Citizen President,” Carrier greeted him, “the administration of Nantes has been considering an important measure. To-day you sentenced to death six prisoners in Le Bouffay for attempting to escape. You are to postpone execution so as to include all the Bouffay prisoners in the sentence.”

Although an ardent revolutionary, Phelippes was a logically minded man with a lawyer's reverence for the sacredness of legal form. This command, issued with such cynical coldness, and repudiated by none of those present, seemed to him as grotesque and ridiculous as it was horrible.

“But that is impossible, Citizen Representative,” said he.

“Impossible!” snarled Carrier. “A fool's word. The administration desires you to understand that it is not impossible. The sacred will of the august people--”

Phelippes interrupted him without ceremony.

“There is no power in France that can countermand the execution of a sentence of the law.”

“No--no power!”

Carrier's loose mouth fell open. He was too amazed to be angry.

“Moreover,” Phelippes pursued calmly, “there is the fact that all the other prisoners in Le Bouffay are innocent of the offence for which the six are to die.”

“What has that to do with it?” roared Carrier. “Last year I rode a she-ass that could argue better than you! In the name of--, what has that to do with it?”

But there were members of the assembly who thought with Phelippes, and who, whilst lacking the courage to express themselves, yet found courage to support another who so boldly expressed them.

Carrier sprang up quivering with rage before that opposition. “It seems to me,” he snarled, “that there are more than the scoundrels in Le Bouffay who need to be shortened by a head for the good of the nation. I tell you that you are slaying the commonweal by your slowness and circumspection. Let all the scoundrels perish!”

A handsome, vicious youngster named Robin made chorus.

“Patriots are without bread! It is fitting that the scoundrels should die, and not eat the bread of starving patriots.”

Carrier shook his fist at the assembly.

“You hear, you--! I cannot pardon whom the law condemns.”

It was an unfortunate word, and Phelippes fastened on it.

“That is the truth, Citizen Representative,” said Phelippes. “And as for the prisoners in Le Bouffay, you will wait until the law condemns them.”

And without staying to hear more, he departed as firmly as he had come, indifferent to the sudden uproar.

When he had gone, the Representative flung himself into his chair again, biting his lip.

“There goes a fellow who will find his way to the guillotine in time,” he growled.

But he was glad to be rid of him, and would not have him brought back. He saw how the opposition of Phelippes had stiffened the weaker opposition of some of those in the assembly. If he was to have his way he would contrive better without the legal-minded President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. And his way he had in the end, though not until he had stormed and cursed and reviled the few who dared to offer remonstrances to his plan of wholesale slaughter.

When at last he took his departure, it was agreed that the assembly should proceed to elect a jury which was to undertake the duty of drawing up immediately a list of those confined in the prisons of Nantes. This list they were to deliver when ready to the committee, which would know how to proceed, for Carrier had made his meaning perfectly clear. The first salutary measure necessary to combat the evils besetting the city was to wipe out at once the inmates of all the prisons in Nantes.

In the chill December dawn of the next day the committee--which had sat all night under the presidency of Goullin forwarded a list of some five hundred prisoners to General Boivin, the commandant of the city of Nantes, together with an order to collect them without a moment's delay, take them to L'Eperonniere, and there have them shot.