THE EXECUTIONER OF NANTES
When Carrier, commissioned by Heraut Seychelles, acting on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, to purge Nantes, arrived in that town, he found all ready to his hand a Revolutionary Committee such as his heart, or whatever deformity represented that organ, could most desire. There were Goullin, Grandmaison, Chaux, Jolly, Perrochaux, and a score others, all “intrepid” Mountain men, and all scoundrels of the most atrocious antecedents. His task was consequently a simple one. He had merely to produce his credentials and authorise his instruments, and the depopulating process started, as it were, automatically. One need not recapitulate, for the thousandth time, a selection from the infernal wickednesses perpetrated by these fiends. Such were being enacted, in more or less degree, in a hundred other districts of the tortured land, and these were noteworthy in nothing but their multitude. What was noteworthy, however, was the fact that Nantes produced the solitary instance—so far as one may gather throughout the entire Revolution—of a butchering devil succumbing to a sense of his own enormities. But, even so, there was to be observed a particular judgment in the case.
Carrier’s theories of political economy were simplicity itself. The population of France, he declared, was out of all proportion with the amount of food the land could produce; wherefore he proposed, for his individual part, to pare down the population until it corresponded with the yield. But this decimating process was fatiguing, and called for some compensation. It was only decent that the killers should be allowed to extract what profit and enjoyment they could from their task. And, in fact, they enjoyed a glut, which was the reason why a good many personable women, not of the first order of attractiveness, were allowed to escape—to the scaffold, or to the drownings.
Amongst these came one day to the Place du Buffay, where the guillotine was erected, a mother and her five daughters and their little maid, all, according to a chronicler, jeunes et belles, condamnées sans jugement. There was a good batch that noon, and the seven were kept waiting for a long half-hour at the foot of the scaffold before their turn came. The populace was not yet so hardened but that it could witness this tragedy with emotion. “Ah, the poor infants! But what is their crime?” “Hush! they were taken with arms in their hands!” “My God! but it is outrageous! Are knitting-needles arms?” “I know not, I. It is Carrier who decides.”
The six encouraged one another amidst tears and embraces. Most of all they sought to fortify the little bonne, who, a mere large-eyed child, stood quite stunned with the turn affairs had taken. When at length the period came to their agony, they mounted the steps in succession, faltering to one another sweet hymns of consolation, their voices fading away one by one like the lights in Tenebrae. The spectators were dissolved in tears; in the midst of a weeping silence the rush and thud of the axe was the only sound audible. Stolidly, monotonously, Jules Garreau, the executioner, a powerful, black-bearded man, sliced off the heads as they came through the “little window.” He might have been cutting chaff for any concern he showed.
The little maid came last. She understood things least of all at that moment, and only cried like a child when the assistants jerked her roughly down on the board and slid her under the yoke. And then, in the very instant that Garreau mechanically touched off the knife, the man was seen to stagger and fall back, his hands flung to his face.
He died the next day in a raving delirium. “It is no wonder,” whispered the less inhumane of those who had witnessed the execution. “The pity of it would have killed a wolf’s heart.”
That was the truth, but not the whole of the truth. The full explanation was not given until years afterwards, when the story was communicated to a priest to whom one of Garreau’s assistants came to unburden himself. He knew all about the man and the reason for his death. It had been actually due, he declared, to an instantaneous realisation of the terrific part he was playing, and of the mortal hazards he had invited in lending himself to it. In that moment he had known his soul as surely lost as if he had heard God’s voice in his ear, and the shock had killed him. But it will be well to give the story in the narrator’s own words:
“I had known this Garreau since we were young men together. We were in the same office, a wine merchant’s, in the Isle Feydeau. Garreau was a very handsome fellow, but as headstrong as the devil. He had a great tenacity of purpose, and when once he had set his heart on a thing, he would pursue it, as a weasel follows a rabbit, until he could set his teeth in its neck. We had no quarrel with the existing order, and our lives were, for our position, prosperous and content. For my part, I was always a slave to the stronger will of my comrade.
“We were at that time good children of the Church, which was indeed our misfortune, for the change in us dated from the moment of Garreau’s return from a week’s retreat in the monastery of St. Pierre de la Roche. He had acquired therein something other than the religious serenity he had gone to seek, had meditated a passion remote from that of the Testament. It happened in this way.
“Attached to the monastery was the Convent of the Bon Secours, whose sisters washed the linen of the ghostly fathers. To one of these sisters, a beautiful neophyte, Jules found himself instantly attracted. His interest ripened into desire, and his desire into a devouring passion. From that moment all was decided. He never rested until he had secured its object to himself.
“He would have married the lovely apostate, but the Church refused to sanction their union. It was that refusal which first inspired his recusancy, and in consequence mine. I admired and looked up to him in all things. A child, a girl, was born to the thus ostracised pair, and it was remarked that a little torn heart, emblematic of her birthright of sin, was printed on the innocent’s neck under her hair. It was the rending of the Sacred Heart which she was thus made to symbolise in her birth.
“But Garreau loved her, and far more than her mother did. If he had been great, aristocratic, he would have experienced no difficulty in sheltering his mistress from slander and persecution; but he was neither, and he could give her little of the protection that she craved. So in the end she sought and found it in the arms of the Comte de Chasles, son of a marquis, who carried her off to Paris. It was then that Jules and I attached ourselves to the party of the advanced thinkers.
“He followed the seducer, and for years I lost sight of him. In the meanwhile all that I knew of his affairs was that the infant had been claimed as their perquisite by the sisters of the Bon Secours, and that they were training her, ignorant of her parentage, to service. Then, in a clap, came the Revolution.
“All society was disintegrated in that shock. Institutions ceased to exist and order resolved itself into chaos. The religious houses were the first to suffer. The hour of the great retribution had struck, and I sided with the extremists. And presently arrived Carrier.
“I was out of employment, as who was not? The beneficent Republic provided idleness for us all; but, alas! idleness begot no bread. At this juncture the Revolutionary Tribunal called for candidates for the post of executioner. It was their purpose to strip the office of prejudice, and exalt it to a State dignity. This headsman was to be entitled for the future the People’s Avenger.
“There were many applicants, and among them came one whom I had difficulty in recognising at first for my old friend and leader Jules Garreau. It was thirteen years since we had met. Most of that time he had spent in the prison of la Force in Paris, whither he had been conveyed on a process for debt ingeniously devised against him by the Comte de Chasles. When released at length by the Revolution, he went, like that weasel before-mentioned, straight for the neck of his enemy. It was at the Abbaye that he found him, and he took what revenge he could for that long term of suffering out of the September massacres. Afterwards he drank blood awhile in Paris, and then came on to his native town to surfeit his hatred on the social order which had been responsible for his ruin. He was by then rabid among the rabid. His deadly sense of wrong had killed whatever spirit of humanity had once existed within him. His only desire was to kill, and kill, and yet kill. This post offered him such an opportunity for the satisfaction of his lust as could be found nowhere else, and he applied for it. He was elected unanimously and with enthusiasm by the National Representatives. All lesser candidates, among whom I figured, waived their claims in view of his, which were irresistible. But he made me his assistant, and I resumed my natural position of subordinate to him.
“Jules lacked from that moment no food to satiate his vengeance; and yet it hungered perpetually. He was a dark, powerful man, wholly inexorable, yet in seeming more stern than wrathful. He appeared the Avatar of sans-culottism, a soulless, sightless idol, to whom human flesh had to be sacrificed. Of his child, the pledge of that lost passion, he never seemed to think. Indeed, in the utter annihilation of the religious houses which had occurred it would have been impossible to discover whether she lived or were dead. And perhaps even, one might assume, he did not care. His soul was by now delivered completely over to the one lust of destruction.
“On the day of the execution of the Marcé family we wrought consciously in an unsympathetic atmosphere. It is so sometimes on that platform of the guillotine, as on the stage, when the actor is aware, he does not know why, of an antagonistic presence in the house. One plays then with caution and deprecation, fearing to give offence. I was very sensitive to a throbbing in the popular pulse; but, as for Jules, he showed no more sign of feeling than was his wont. Indeed, I observed even an increased callousness in the way in which, noting that the heads were seven, he ticked off each one as it fell with a day from the little nursery proverb uttered sub voce, as thus:
“‘Monday, fair of face; Tuesday, full of grace; Wednesday, full of woe; Thursday, far to go; Friday, loving and giving; Saturday, work for a living; Sunday——’
“With the word on his lips, and his hand in the very act of touching off the bolt, he suddenly paled and staggered. I ran to catch him, and looked straight into the face of one that was damned.
“It was the last head, and we conveyed Garreau to his lodging. He was by then in a raving fever, from which he never recovered. But in one of the few lucid intervals that came to him he recognised me, and, catching at my hand, whispered in a voice, whose exquisite horror I shall never forget, the secret of his awakening.
“In the very moment that his fingers released the knife, he had caught sight of a little torn heart printed on the neck beneath him.”