PARIS: SEPTEMBER, 1792
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in
name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures,
animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The
hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West
Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant
raised an undying monument to the nation’s glory and his own vanity.
During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at
its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries,
of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for
liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late
hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for
the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the
barricades for the night.
And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Grève and made for
the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing
sight.
It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They
were traitors to the people of course, all of them, men, women, and
children, who happened to be descendants of the great men who since the
Crusades had made the glory of France: her old noblesse. Their
ancestors had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet
heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the
rulers of France and crushed their former masters—not beneath their
heel, for they went shoeless mostly in these days—but beneath a more
effectual weight, the knife of the guillotine.
And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many
victims—old men, young women, tiny children, even until the day when it
would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen.
But this was as it should be: were not the people now the rulers of
France? Every aristocrat was a traitor, as his ancestors had been
before him: for two hundred years now the people had sweated, and
toiled, and starved, to keep a lustful court in lavish extravagance;
now the descendants of those who had helped to make those courts
brilliant had to hide for their lives—to fly, if they wished to avoid
the tardy vengeance of the people.
And they did try to hide, and tried to fly: that was just the fun of
the whole thing. Every afternoon before the gates closed and the market
carts went out in procession by the various barricades, some fool of an
aristo endeavoured to evade the clutches of the Committee of Public
Safety. In various disguises, under various pretexts, they tried to
slip through the barriers which were so well guarded by citizen
soldiers of the Republic. Men in women’s clothes, women in male attire,
children disguised in beggars’ rags: there were some of all sorts:
ci-devant counts, marquises, even dukes, who wanted to fly from
France, reach England or some other equally accursed country, and there
try to rouse foreign feeling against the glorious Revolution, or to
raise an army in order to liberate the wretched prisoners in the
Temple, who had once called themselves sovereigns of France.
But they were nearly always caught at the barricades. Sergeant Bibot
especially at the West Gate had a wonderful nose for scenting an aristo
in the most perfect disguise. Then, of course, the fun began. Bibot
would look at his prey as a cat looks upon the mouse, play with him,
sometimes for quite a quarter of an hour, pretend to be hoodwinked by
the disguise, by the wigs and other bits of theatrical make-up which
hid the identity of a ci-devant noble marquise or count.
Oh! Bibot had a keen sense of humour, and it was well worth hanging
round that West Barricade, in order to see him catch an aristo in the
very act of trying to flee from the vengeance of the people.
Sometimes Bibot would let his prey actually out by the gates, allowing
him to think for the space of two minutes at least that he really had
escaped out of Paris, and might even manage to reach the coast of
England in safety, but Bibot would let the unfortunate wretch walk
about ten mètres towards the open country, then he would send two men
after him and bring him back, stripped of his disguise.
Oh! that was extremely funny, for as often as not the fugitive would
prove to be a woman, some proud marchioness, who looked terribly
comical when she found herself in Bibot’s clutches after all, and knew
that a summary trial would await her the next day and after that, the
fond embrace of Madame la Guillotine.
No wonder that on this fine afternoon in September the crowd round
Bibot’s gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows with its
satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a hundred noble
heads fall beneath the guillotine to-day, it wanted to make sure that
it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.
Bibot was sitting on an overturned and empty cask close by the gate of
the barricade; a small detachment of citoyen soldiers was under his
command. The work had been very hot lately. Those cursed aristos were
becoming terrified and tried their hardest to slip out of Paris: men,
women and children, whose ancestors, even in remote ages, had served
those traitorous Bourbons, were all traitors themselves and right food
for the guillotine. Every day Bibot had had the satisfaction of
unmasking some fugitive royalists and sending them back to be tried by
the Committee of Public Safety, presided over by that good patriot,
Citoyen Foucquier-Tinville.
Robespierre and Danton both had commended Bibot for his zeal, and Bibot
was proud of the fact that he on his own initiative had sent at least
fifty aristos to the guillotine.
But to-day all the sergeants in command at the various barricades had
had special orders. Recently a very great number of aristos had
succeeded in escaping out of France and in reaching England safely.
There were curious rumours about these escapes; they had become very
frequent and singularly daring; the people’s minds were becoming
strangely excited about it all. Sergeant Grospierre had been sent to
the guillotine for allowing a whole family of aristos to slip out of
the North Gate under his very nose.
It was asserted that these escapes were organised by a band of
Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled, and who, from sheer
desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare time
in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la Guillotine.
These rumours soon grew in extravagance; there was no doubt that this
band of meddlesome Englishmen did exist; moreover, they seemed to be
under the leadership of a man whose pluck and audacity were almost
fabulous. Strange stories were afloat of how he and those aristos whom
he rescued became suddenly invisible as they reached the barricades and
escaped out of the gates by sheer supernatural agency.
No one had seen these mysterious Englishmen; as for their leader, he
was never spoken of, save with a superstitious shudder. Citoyen
Foucquier-Tinville would in the course of the day receive a scrap of
paper from some mysterious source; sometimes he would find it in the
pocket of his coat, at others it would be handed to him by someone in
the crowd, whilst he was on his way to the sitting of the Committee of
Public Safety. The paper always contained a brief notice that the band
of meddlesome Englishmen were at work, and it was always signed with a
device drawn in red—a little star-shaped flower, which we in England
call the Scarlet Pimpernel. Within a few hours of the receipt of this
impudent notice, the citoyens of the Committee of Public Safety would
hear that so many royalists and aristocrats had succeeded in reaching
the coast, and were on their way to England and safety.
The guards at the gates had been doubled, the sergeants in command had
been threatened with death, whilst liberal rewards were offered for the
capture of these daring and impudent Englishmen. There was a sum of
five t