The Elusive Pimpernel | Page 5

means--Henriot
conceded that the idea was a good one--but the goddess merely as a
figure-head: around her a procession of unfrocked and apostate priests,
typifying the destruction of ancient hierarchy, mules carrying loads of
sacred vessels, the spoils of ten thousand churches of France, and ballet
girls in bacchanalian robes, dancing the Carmagnole around the new
deity.
Public Prosecutor Foucquier Tinville thought all these schemes very
tame. Why should the People of France be led to think that the era of a
new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and of
fireworks? Let every man, woman, and child know that this was an era
of blood and again of blood.
"Oh!" he exclaimed in passionate accents, "would that all the traitors in
France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow of the
guillotine!"
He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of the
guillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded on
one grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place de la
Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after the
guillotine had accomplished this record work.
But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say. Collot lately hailed from
the South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled throughout the
whole of this horrible decade. He would not be outdone by Tinville's
bloodthirsty schemes.
He was the inventor of the "Noyades," which had been so successful at
Lyons and Marseilles. "Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one of
these exhilarating spectacles?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.
Then he explained his invention, of which he was inordinately proud.
Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tied
securely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown upon
a barge in the middle of the river: the barge with a hole in her bottom!
not too large! only sufficient to cause her to sink slowly, very slowly,

in sight of the crowd of delighted spectators.
The cries of the women and children, and even of the men, as they felt
the waters rising and gradually enveloping them, as they felt
themselves powerless even for a fruitless struggle, had proved most
exhilarating, so Citizen Collot declared, to the hearts of the true patriots
of Lyons.
Thus the discussion continued.
This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoing
others in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving his own
head by threatening that of his neighbour.
The great duel between the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties,
the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-
blooded Robespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-
devouring monsters had dug their claws into one another, but the issue
of the combat was still at stake.
Neither of these two giants had taken part in these deliberations anent
the new religion and the new goddess. Danton gave signs now and then
of the greatest impatience, and muttered something about a new form
of tyranny, a new kind of oppression.
On the left, Robespierre in immaculate sea-green coat and carefully
gauffered linen was quietly polishing the nails of his right hand against
the palm of his left.
But nothing escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious egoism,
his unbounded ambition was even now calculating what advantages to
himself might accrue from this idea of the new religion and of the
National fete, what personal aggrandisement he could derive therefrom.
The matter outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen and
calculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to place
him--Robespierre--on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle.

Surrounded by those who hated him, those who envied and those who
feared him, he ruled over them all by the strength of his own
cold-blooded savagery, by the resistless power of his merciless cruelty.
He cared about nobody but himself, about nothing but his own
exaltation: every action of his career, since he gave up his small
practice in a quiet provincial town in order to throw himself into the
wild vortex of revolutionary politics, every word he ever uttered had
but one aim--Himself.
He saw his colleagues and comrades of the old Jacobin Clubs ruthlessly
destroyed around him: friends he had none, and all left him indifferent;
and now he had hundreds of enemies in every assembly and club in
Paris, and these too one by one were being swept up in that wild
whirlpool which they themselves had created.
Impassive, serene, always ready with a calm answer, when passion
raged most hotly around him, Robespierre, the most ambitious, most
self-seeking demagogue of his time, had acquired the reputation of
being incorruptible and self-less, an enthusiastic