Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (best color ebook reader txt) 📕

he was⁠—quite exaggeratedly⁠—deemed to wield in his native province, it was natural that the Commission of Twelve should propose to him in the early days of the Girondin ministry, and on the suggestion of Roland, that he should go down to Brittany to combat, by peaceful means, if possible, the evil influences at work.

It was a matter in which the municipalities had clear and well-timed powers. But many of the municipalities were themselves growing suspect for their singular inertia before the steadily spreading reactionary sentiments. Hence the need to send down an elected representative with fullest powers to arouse the municipalities to a sense of their danger. He was desired to proceed peacefully; but that he was empowered to have recourse to other measures is clear from the nature of the orders he carried⁠—orders enjoining upon all Frenchmen, in the name of the nation, to render him all possible assistance, and warning those who hindered him that they would do so at their peril.

He accepted the task, and so he was one of five similar plenipotentiaries dispatched on the same errand in that Spring of 1792⁠—which saw for the first time the philanthropic Dr. Guillotin’s engine of painful death erected in the Carrousel⁠—into the provincial departments, forerunners in a sense of the representatives en mission so common later on under the National Convention.

Considering what afterwards happened in Brittany, it cannot be pretended that his mission achieved the success that was expected. That, however, is no pan of our present concern. It kept him absent from Paris for some four months, and might have engaged him longer, and perhaps to better purpose, but that at the beginning of August he was recalled. More imminent than any trouble in Brittany was the trouble brewing at home in Paris itself, where the political sky was blacker than it had been since ’89.

Of this trouble André-Louis saw signs and heard rumours ever increasing as his berline bore him eastwards towards the capital. Into that powder magazine that Paris was become, the torch had been recklessly cast by the manifesto of their Majesties of Prussia and Austria, a manifesto declaring responsible for all events and to be dealt with in summary military fashion all members of the Assembly, of departments, of districts, of municipalities, the very justices of the peace, and the soldiers of the National Guard.

It was a declaration of war of an unprecedented kind⁠—a declaration of war, not against France, but against one section of France. And the amazing thing is that this manifesto, published in Coblentz on the 26th of July, was known already in Paris on the 28th, justifying those who denounced its real source as being not Coblentz at all, but the Tuileries. Madame de Campan’s memoirs also afford this a certain measure of confirmation when they betray the fact that the Queen, her mistress, was in possession of the itinerary prepared by the Prussians who stood in arms at the gates of France. Even in those days the methodical Prussians planned, it would appear, by the calendar. Her Majesty was able to give Madame de Campan full details of that itinerary. On such a day the Prussians would be at Verdun; on such a day at Chalons; and on such a day before the walls of Paris, of which Bouillé had sworn that not one stone should remain upon another.

And Paris, receiving this manifesto, receiving the news of it prematurely, understood that it was the gage of battle flung down not by Prussia, but by the old detested and detestable regime which the Constitution was believed to have swept away forever. France saw⁠—or justifiably thought she saw⁠—revealed in full at last the bad faith in which that Constitution had been accepted. She perceived that her last resource lay in insurrection, so that she might anticipate as far as possible her coercion by foreign armies. In Paris itself there were still at the time all the provincial federates who had come up for the national festival of the fourteenth of July, including the bands of the Marseillais who had marched from the South to the rhythm of that new hymn of theirs that was presently to resound so terribly. It was Danton who had detained them in the capital, forewarned of what was brewing.

And now, in full view of each other, each side proceeded to arm. The Swiss were fetched up from Courbevoie to the Tuileries, the Chevaliers du Poignard⁠—a band of gentlemen numbering some hundreds sworn to the defence of the Throne, and including in its ranks M. de La Tour d’Azyr, lately returned from the camp of the émigrés beyond the frontier⁠—assembled in the royal palace when their place as Frenchmen was with the Army of the North. In the sections the forging of pikes was renewed, muskets were unearthed, cartridges procured and distributed, and hostilities were declared in petitions to the Assembly itself. Paris realised that the hour was rapidly approaching which would see the climax of this long struggle between Equality and Privilege. And it was towards a city so disposed that André-Louis came speeding from the West to find there also the climax of his own disturbed career.

XIV The Overwhelming Reason

Mlle. de Kercadiou was in Paris in those days of early August, on a visit to her uncle’s cousin and dearest friend, Mme. de Plougastel. And although nothing could now be plainer than the seething unrest that heralded the explosion to come, yet the air of gaiety, indeed of jocularity, prevailing at Court⁠—whither madame and mademoiselle went almost daily⁠—reassured them. M. de Plougastel had come and gone again, back to Koblenz on that secret business that kept him now almost constantly absent from his wife. But whilst with her he had positively assured her that all measures were taken, and that an insurrection was a thing to be welcomed, because it could have one only conclusion, the final crushing of the Revolution in the courtyard of the Tuileries. That, he added, was