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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




Then Marat spoke. "So you are from Caen, child?" he said. "And
what is doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?"

She approached him.

"Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat."

"Rebellion, ha!" It was a sound between a laugh and a croak.
"Tell me what deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their
names." He took up and dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of
paper towards him.

She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him,
erect and calm. She recited the names of her friends, the
Girondins, whilst hunched there in his bath his pen scratched
briskly.

"So many for the guillotine," he snarled, when it was done.

But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her
fichu, and as he uttered those words of doom to others his own
doom descended upon him in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by
that strong young arm, the long, stout blade was buried to its
black hilt in his breast.

He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as
he sank back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.

"Help, chére amie! Help!" he cried, and was for ever silent.

The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the
bath at the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank
sideways in the same direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon
his right shoulder, whilst from the great rent in his breast the
blood gushed forth, embruing the water of his bath, trickling to
the brick-paved floor, bespattering--symbolically almost--a copy
of L'Ami du Peuple, the journal to which he had devoted so much
of his uneasy life.

In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance
sufficed to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a
tigress, she sprang upon the unresisting slayer, seizing her by
the head, and calling loudly the while for assistance. Came
instantly from the anteroom Jeanne, the old cook, the Fortress of
the house, and Laurent Basse, a folder of Marat's paper; and now
Charlotte found herself confronted by four maddened, vociferous
beings, at whose hands she may well have expected to receive the
death for which she was prepared.

Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of
it across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his
fury to have battered her to death, but for the arrival of gens
d'armes and the police commissioner of the district, who took her
in their protecting charge.

The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became
known. All night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the
revolutionary rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch
upon the house wherein the People's Friend lay dead.

That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte
Corday lay in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude
the indignities that for a woman were almost inseparable from
revolutionary incarceration. She preserved throughout her
imperturbable calm, based now upon a state of mind content in the
contemplation of accomplished purpose, duty done. She had saved
France, she believed; saved Liberty, by slaying the man who would
have strangled it. In that illusion she was content. Her own life
was a small price to pay for the splendid achievement.

Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her
friends, in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she
had done, expounding fully the motives that had impelled her,
dwelling upon the details of the execution, and of all that had
followed. Among the letters written by her during those "days of
the preparation of peace "--as she calls that period, dating in
such terms a long epistle to Barbaroux--was one to the Committee
of Public Safety, in which she begs that a miniature-painter may
be sent to her to paint her portrait, so that she may leave this
token of remembrance to her friends. It is only in this, as the
end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought for her
own self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a
instrument in the hands of Fate.

On the 15th, at eight o'clock in the morning, her trial began
before the Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall
as she appeared in her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and
calm--always calm.

The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of
the cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.

"These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat."

The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to
examine her.

"What was the object of your visit to Paris?" he asks.

"To kill Marat."

"What motives induced you to this horrible deed?"

"His many crimes."

"Of what crimes do you accuse him?"

"That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive
the fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator;
that he sought to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by
causing the arrest and imprisonment of the deputies to the
Convention on May 31st."

"What proof have you of this?"

"The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a
mask of patriotism."

Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.

"Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?"

"I have none."

Montane shook his head. "You cannot convince anyone that a person
of your age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless
instigated by some person or persons whom you are unwilling to
name."

Charlotte almost smiled. "That shows but a poor knowledge of the
human heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the
strength of one's own hatred than upon that of others." And then,
raising her voice, she proclaimed: "I killed one man to save a
hundred thousand; I killed a villain to save innocents; I killed
a savage Wild-beast to give repose to France. I was a Republican
before the Revolution. I never lacked for energy."

What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established.
Her fearless self-ossession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-
Tinville, the dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her
so virginal and fair and brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal
had not had the best of it, he sought with a handful of
revolutionary filth to restore the balance. He rose slowly, his
ferrety eyes upon her.

"How many children have you had?" he rasped, sardonic, his tone a
slur, an insult.

Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed,
disdainful, as she answered coldly:

"Have I not stated that I am not married?"

A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the
impression he sought to convey, and he sat down again.

It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed
to defend her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had
been intimidated. He had received a note from the jury ordering
him to remain silent, another from the President bidding him
declare her mad.

Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable;
it satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his
client. It uttered the whole truth.

"The prisoner," he said, "confesses with calm the horrible crime
she has committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she
confesses its most dreadful details; in short, she confesses
everything, and does riot seek to justify herself. That, citizens
of the jury, is her whole defence. This imperturbable calm, this
utter abnegation of self, which displays no remorse even in the
very presence of death, are contrary to nature. They can only be
explained by the excitement of political fanaticism which armed
her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury, to judge what
weight that moral consideration should have in the scales of
justice."

The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full
sentence of the law.

It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the
antechamber of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent
to her, but she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his
ministrations. She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received
the Revolutionary Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in
accordance with her request. And during the sitting, which lasted
half an hour, she conversed with him quietly on ordinary topics,
the tranquillity of her spirit unruffled by any fear of the death
that was so swiftly approaching.

The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He
carried the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination.
She showed no dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that
the time spent with Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged
for a few moments in which to write a note, and, the request
being granted, acquitted herself briskly of that task, then
announcing herself ready, she removed her cap that Sanson might
cut her luxuriant hair. Yet first, taking his scissors, she
herself cut off a lock and gave it to Hauer for remembrance. When
Sanson would have bound her hands, she begged that she might be
allowed to wear gloves, as her wrists were bruised and cut by the
cord with which she had been pinioned in Marat's house. He
answered that she might do so if she wished, but that it was
unnecessary, as he could bind her without causing pain.

"To be sure," she said, "those others had not your experience,"
and she proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further
demur. "If this toilet of death is performed by rude hands," she
commented, "at least it leads to immortality."

She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and,
disdaining the chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to
show herself dauntless to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce
was that rage, indeed. So densely thronged were the streets that
the tumbril proceeded at a crawl, and the people surging about
the cart screamed death and insult at the doomed woman. It took
two hours to reach the Place de la Révolution, and meanwhile a
terrific summer thunderstorm had broken over Paris, and a
torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed streets.
Charlotte's garments were soaked through and through, so that her
red smock, becoming glued now to her body and fitting her like a
skin, threw into relief its sculptural beauty, whilst a
reflection of the vivid crimson of the garment faintly tinged her
cheeks, and thus heightened her appearance of complete composure.

And it is now in the Rue St. Honoré that at long last we reach
the opening of our tragic love-story.

A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux--sent to Paris by the
city of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention--
was standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an
accomplished, learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy
and of medicine, although in the latter capacity he had never
practiced owing to an extreme sensibility of nature, which rendered
anatomical work repugnant to him. He was a man of a rather exalted
imagination, unhappily married--the not uncommon fate of such
delicate temperaments--and now living apart from his wife. He had
heard, as all Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of
the trial, and he waited there, curious to see this woman, with
whose deed he was secretly in sympathy.

The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled
up around him, and at last he beheld her--beautiful, serene, full
of life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed
upon her, standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of
those about him, he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and
paid homage to her. She did not see him. He had not thought that
she would. He saluted her as the devout salute the unresponsive
image of a saint. The tumbril crawled on. He turned his head, and
followed her with his eyes for awhile; then, driving his elbows
into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a passage
through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
gaze, a man entranced.

He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the
last he had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable
calm, and in the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the
great knife his voice suddenly rang out.

"She is greater than Brutus!" was his cry; and he added,
addressing those who stared at him in stupefaction: "It were
beautiful to have died with her!"

He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at
that moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's
attendant, who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped
the cheek with his hand. The story runs that the dead face
reddened under the blow. Scientists of the day disputed over this,
some arguing from it a proof that consciousness does not at once
depart the brain upon decapitation.

That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded
with copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of
Republicanism, the deliverer of France, in which occurs the
comparison with Joan of Arc, that other great heroine of France.
This was the work of Adam Lux. He made no secret of it. The
vision of her had so wrought upon the imagination of this
susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such enthusiasm,
that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in
expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last
moments of life she had inspired him.

Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he
urged the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her
act, placed her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately
demanded for her the honour and veneration of posterity. It is in
this manifesto that he applies euphemistically to her deed the term
"tyrannicide." That document he boldly signed with his own name,
realizing that he would pay for that temerity with his life.

He was arrested on the 24th of July--exactly a week from the day
on which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they
exerted themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and
release if he would publicly retract what he had written. But he
laughed the proposal to scorn, ardently resolved to follow into
death the woman who had aroused the hopeless, immaterial love
that made his present torment.

Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor
named Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that
the sight of Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a
paper on this plea, recommending that clemency be shown to the
young doctor on the score of his affliction, and that he should
be sent to a hospital or to America. Adam Lux was angry when he
heard of this, and protested indignantly against the allegations
of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la Montagne, which
published his declaration on the 26th of September, to the effect
that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his
anxiety to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his
sanity.

He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of
October, when at last he was brought to trial. He stood it
joyously, in a mood of exultation at his approaching deliverance.
He assured the court that he did not fear the guillotine, and
that all ignominy had been removed from such a death by the pure
blood of Charlotte.

They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.

"Forgive me, sublime Charlotte," he exclaimed, "if I should find
it impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness
that were yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right
that the adored should be above the adorer."

Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers
had been a mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic
exaltation. At five o'clock that same afternoon he stepped from
the tumbril under the gaunt shadow of the guillotine. He turned
to the people, his eyes bright, a flush on his cheeks.

"At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte," he
told them, and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the
bridegroom on his way to the nuptial altar.

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