The Greatest Historical Novels. Rafael Sabatini
down limply into his seat. His colleagues surveyed him between censure and compassion.
Thuillier was brought in between guards. He walked firmly, his head high, his glance arrogant, his jaw more prominent than ever.
He broke into menaces, uttered with a deal of foulness, as to what would happen to them all when his friends in Paris came to know of this. André-Louis let him run on. Then with a crooked smile he turned to the Committee.
'You hear his assurances, his confidence in his friends in Paris—by which he means his friend in Paris. This unhappy Thuillier is under the delusion that the rule of tyranny still prevails in France; that there has merely been a change of tyrants. He and his friend in Paris are likely very soon to discover their error.' To the prisoner he added: 'My secretary, there, is setting down every word you utter. So you had better weigh your words carefully, because the Committee of Public Safety will certainly weigh them. In fact, if you will accept a piece of friendly advice, you will be silent. You have been brought here not to speak, but to listen.'
Thuillier glowered at him, but prudently accepted his advice.
André-Louis was brief. 'There is no need to question you. The case is complete. It is established—very fully established—by the documents found in your possession, which I have here, and by the evidence of a member of this Committee, that you arrested Thorin and sent him to Paris upon orders from the Citizen Saint-Just. That the charge of conspiracy upon which he was arrested was entirely false is also established by the utter lack of evidence of any conspiracy at all, and by the fact that no other arrest has been made on this ground. As I pointed out to you before, a man cannot conspire alone. Seeking further, we find in these sworn statements of Thorin's sister and Thorin's cousin that the Representative Saint-Just carried off the wife of this Thorin and has kept her under his protection in Paris. All the village can testify that Thorin was raging and complaining in a manner likely to bring the Representative Saint-Just into deserved disrepute. The Citizen Saint-Just's despotic act in having this man thrown into prison is at once explained.
'The Representative Saint-Just will have to answer for himself when I lay my report before the Committee of Public Safety. You will have to answer for having been his accomplice in this abhorrent act of tyranny, in this loathsome abuse of trust. If you have anything to say that will mitigate your part, this is your opportunity.'
'I have nothing to say.' Thuillier grimaced in his rage. 'These are all rash assumptions, for which your head may have to pay. You are meddling in dangerous matters, citizen, as you will discover. So are you all, you imbeciles! Do this man's bidding like a pack of silly sheep, and like a pack of silly sheep you'll come to the shambles for it.'
'Take him out,' André-Louis commanded. 'Take him back to gaol, and let him lie there until orders concerning him come from Paris.'
Thuillier, swearing and threatening to the end, was dragged out by his guards.
Next Bontemps was introduced. André-Louis made even shorter work of him. It was established that in the course of the last year he had acquired lands in La Beauce to the value of close upon a half-million francs. It was also established by documents found in his possession that in this he had merely acted as the agent for the Citizen-Representative Saint-Just, who had supplied him the money for these enormous purchases. The lands in question had thus become the property of Saint-Just. They were registered in the name of Bontemps merely so that Saint-Just's dishonest acquisitions should not be disclosed.
Bontemps admitted it.
Summaries of his case and of that of Thuillier having been drawn up by Boissancourt, André-Louis required the signatures to them of every member of the present committee.
That completed the formidable dossier, with which at last André-Louis departed from Blérancourt, leaving behind him a little township shaken to its foundations by his passage. Armed with this dossier he counted upon shaking Paris as effectively.
CHAPTER XLI
THE THUNDERBOLT
It was in mid-Nivôse—which is to say, in the early days of the new year—when André-Louis reappeared in Paris.
His return was opportune, and the hour fully ripe for that which he came back to do.
The contest between the parties of anarchy and moderation, the bitter struggle between the foul Hébert and the Titanic Danton, touched its end. Feeling himself crushed under the weight of Danton's oratory, which held him up to derision, as an imbecile who succeeded only in making the revolution an object of hatred and ridicule, Hébert in his madness attempted to head an insurrection.
That was the end of him.
Beholding him stagger and desiring to speed his end, Robespierre roused himself from the inert vigilance in which hitherto he had observed the combat of his two rivals. Foreseeing his own trial of strength with the survivor, which must follow, he loosed now his valiant henchman Saint-Just against Hébert. This terrible young man, with the golden head and the liquid eyes through which his sadic soul looked out compassionately upon the world, delivered the death-blow in a speech of burning, impassioned eloquence in which purity and virtue were flaunted like banners in the wind.
Hébert and those associated with him were arrested for conspiracy to the State. Their doom was sealed.
And so, at last, the lists were cleared for the final struggle for supremacy. Already Dantonists and Robespierrists were buckling their harness. If Danton prevailed, it was, as we know, the view of de Batz that he might be won to play in France the part that Monk had played in England, and lend his influence to the restoration of the throne. But if the fall of Robespierre could be brought about in such a way as to cover his party with infamy, in such a way as to make clear to the famished people that they had been deluded by a gang of corrupt, self-seeking scoundrels, whose doctrines of equality and fraternity had been so much hypocrisy employed to magnify themselves, then the hopes of de Batz would be changed to certainty. The end of the revolution and the revolutionaries would be assured.
You conceive, therefore, how breathless was his greeting of André-Louis on his return from Blérancourt, how eagerly his demands for news of how the adventure there had sped, what fruits it had borne.
There exists among the papers of André-Louis Moreau the draft of an article which he had prepared for the Vieux Cordelier. This draft he now laid before de Batz. Here are the terms of it:
Citizens: If chaos is upon the face of the land and starvation in your midst, it is because the despotism from which you hoped to deliver France when you gave her a constitution, has had no other result than to substitute one set of tyrants for another. The fault does not lie in the constitution. Properly administered it would have borne all the rich fruits expected of it. But the constitution has not been properly administered. The government has been in the hands of self-seeking scoundrels, corrupt and hypocritical, whose only object has been to serve their own interests, abuse their sacred trust, and enrich themselves at the price of your own starvation.
When it became necessary for the party of the Mountain to which François Chabot belonged, for the Robespierrists amongst whom he was regarded as a leader, to exculpate themselves from the stain which his villainy had cast upon them all, there was none more eloquent in expressing abhorrence of that man's misdeeds than the Representative Florelle de Saint-Just. It was Saint-Just more than any other who, by his denunciations of Chabot and his fellow conspirators against the public welfare, calmed your just wrath and restored your shaken faith in the National Convention. Saint-Just convinced you that with the removal of those scoundrels the work of purification was complete; and he promised you under a purer government a speedy end to the misery which he cajoled you into continuing out of patriotism to endure. You listened to him where you might not have listened to another because he had known how to persuade you that he was the soul of truth and the mirror of purity in his private and in his public life. In your eyes Saint-Just affected the austerity of Scipio. In the Convention, when questions of public morals are to