Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/16

4 engine that goes on or stops short in spite of ourselves, because it is God's hand winds it up, a clock that strikes, at its own sweet will and pleasure, the hours of the past and sometimes those of the future.

Now what did my thoughts attach themselves to when I looked at Monsieur de Villenave? Was it to an angle of his speech, as I put it just now? No, this time it was to an angle, a salient incident, of his life.

I had read somewhere, I have no notion where, a pamphlet by Monsieur de Villenave, published in 1794 entitled, Relation de Voyage de 132 Nantais (Account of the Journey of 132 Men of Nantes). Well, it was upon this episode in Monsieur de Villenave's life that my mind fastened when I set eyes for the first time on that gentleman.

Monsieur de Villenave was actually living at Nantes, it seems, in 1793, that is at the very time when Jean-Baptiste Carrier, of bloody memory, was there. He had seen with his own eyes the terrible Proconsul, who, finding the courts too dilatory and the guillotine too slow, had abolished legal trial altogether (quite superfluous indeed, as the accused were never acquitted), and replaced the guillotine by those barges of his invention with sliding valves. He may have stood on the Nantes quays when, November 15, 1793, Carrier, by way of first trial of his Republican bathing-boais and his expatriations vertically (these were the facetious names he gave this new method of capital punishment which he had devised), embarked ninety four priests, under the pretence of deporting them to Belle-Isle; he may have been walking on the Loire banks when the horror-stricken river cast up on its shores the ninety four corpses of the men of God; he may have shuddered at the sight which, repeated night after night, had ended by corrupting the water to such a degree that the citizens were forbidden to drink it; he may, more rashly still, have helped to bury one of these first victims, soon to be followed by so many others. Be this as it may, it fell out one morning that Monsieur de Villenave was arrested, cast into prison, and condemned like his fellows to add his quota to the corruption of the stream. But by this time Carrier had changed his mind. He chose out a hundred and thirty two prisoners, all under penalty of death, and despatched them to Paris,—an offering of beings from the scaffolds of La Vendée to the guillotine of Paris. Then, once they had started. Carrier changed his mind afresh. Apparently the offering struck him as too insignificant, and he sent orders to Captain Boussard, in command of the escort, to shoot his hundred and thirty two prisoners on reaching Ancenis.

But Boussard was a gallant soldier; he ignored the savage order and simply went on his way towards Paris.

On learning this, Carrier sent despatches to Hentz, Commissioner of Convention at Angers, bidding him arrest Boussard as he passed through that town and throw the hundred and thirty two Nantese into the river.

Hentz duly arrested Boussard; but when it came to drowning the hundred and thirty two prisoners, the bronze of his Republican heart melted—it was not triple it would appear,—and he directed his victims to continue their march on Paris. It made Carrier shake his head in pained surprise and ejaculate contemptuously: "Poor drowner this Hentz, a very poor drowner."

The prisoners accordingly continued their route. Out of the hundred and thirty two thirty six died before reaching the capital; but the ninety six who did arrive there, did so, fortunately for themselves, just in the nick of time to give evidence as witnesses at Carrier's trial instead of appearing before the judges on their own account.

The ninth Thermider had come, the day of vengeance had dawned, the turn of the judges had arrived to be judged; after a month of debate and hesitation, the Convention had just put the grand drowner on his trial.

The recollection of this pamphlet, which M. de Villenave published thirtyfour years ago when in prison, had thus carried me back into the past, and what I saw and heard was no longer a lecture on a literary subject delivered by a professor of the " Athénée," but an act of accusation, an appeal formidable, strenuous, a matter of life and death, of the weak against the strong, the prisoner against the judge, the victim against the executioner.

Such is the power of imagination that lecture-hall, lecturer and listeners, speakers, all underwent a metamorphosis,