THOMAS PAINE
“Ah, monsieur!” said the tall, nervous prisoner with the ravaged face, “the rights of one man are very well the wrongs of another—that is a new discovery; but you did not make it. Even God—who, nevertheless, does not exist just at present—could not invent a gale that would favour all ships; and yet you have thought yourself cleverer than God.”
“I do not know you,” interrupted his hearer and fellow-captive peevishly. “Why do you presume to address yourself to me?”
“Why?” The other lifted a little broken plaque or medallion which hung by a spoiled tricolour ribbon from his neck. “Do you observe this, M. Paine? I am one Garat, ex-President of the Sectional Committee of the Bonnet-Rouge, and this is my badge of office—or what remains of it. It represented the table of the law, en précis, as revealed to Mr. Paine on Sinai. Wearing it, I symbolised the Rights of Man. Well, what I say is, ‘Damn the Rights of Man!’”
“O! certainly, if you wish,” responded Mr. Paine coolly.
“They are fragile, are they not?” said the ex-President, with feverish derision; “they are apt to be broken in any scuffle. And where is there not a scuffle where opinions differ—which they always do? The Rights of Man have not, I perceive, altered the nature of man, which is to have his way wherever he can get it. Observe: I desired to do justice according to this tablet, but the mob would not permit me. Instead they haled away their suspect, unheard; and I, because I would not commit him unheard, was pronounced a traitor to the principles I represented and was despatched to this Luxembourg, where, to my profound amazement, I find incarcerated before me the lawgiver himself! Now I think I begin to understand everything. Your Rights of Man could not even save yourself. What the devil did you want redeeming others with them? For me, I would welcome all my ancient wrongs to find myself once more a prosperous barber in the Marche Neuf.”
* * * * *
In Paris on the 28th July, 1794, at six o’clock in the evening, ended at a stroke the Terror, lopped off by the head. It had been virile and active up to that last moment, prepared with its daily fournée, all chosen and set out for the baking; only in the result the order had been somewhat changed. Messieurs the Triumvirs and their following had been called upon to take the place of their destined victims—that was the difference.
But the evening before the death-carts had jolted as usual on their monotonous way to the Place du Trône; and therein surely the insensate tragedy of the guillotine had found its crowning expression. For at that time the dissolution of the Terror had actually begun, and the smallest gift of fortune or of foresight might have saved the lives of a half-hundred innocents. There is no sorrier fate than to perish in the lash of a just expiring monster’s tail.
There was one man appointed to figure in those tragic last tumbrils who had the best reason in the world for considering himself a spoilt child of Fortune. This was Mr. Deputy Thomas Paine, some time fallen from his popular estate, and since January imprisoned in the Luxembourg. We see him, as he stands in the courtyard of the old palace nominally taking exercise, an aloof, self-complacent little man of fifty-seven, dressed in plain brown, and wearing his own brown hair, which nature has curled. His eyes are large, dreamy, and bagged underneath; his drooping nose has a suggestion of red in its fall; he has a moist, temulent mouth, rather weighed down at the corners by pursey cheeks.
It is evening of the 26th July, and the prisoners, their brief liberty ended, are filing back to their cells. There is an unwonted excitement abroad. Some rumour of it has penetrated the walls, and fluttered the breasts of the poor caged birds within. A change is imminent; they know not what; but scarce any could be for the worse. Meanwhile, nevertheless, Fouquier’s emissary is up above, condemned list in hand, waiting to prick off the names for the morrow’s batch. The procedure is quite simple; it consists in a chalk-mark made on the door of each victim’s cell, whence on the following morning its inmate will pass to the Conciergerie, to the Revolutionary Tribunal, back to the Conciergerie, and thence the same evening to the scaffold. That is a predestined course, which much treading has made monotonous and much philosophy smoothed. It is possible even to walk it with a gay fatalism—under prescriptive circumstances. Supposing, however, that there be truth in the reports; that the Triumvirs are threatened and the Terror itself doomed? What tragedy on tragedy, then, to drown in the turn of the tide! The prisoners, yesterday resigned, to-day are pacing their cells like wild beasts. Yet nothing will avail them. The last tumbrils must have their load.
Paine was sensible of their misery; he believed in the imminence of a political volte-face, and he pitied them. For himself he had not, nor ever had had, the least apprehension. As he lingered in abstraction, the last to withdraw, his own security, his own importance, were the first of convictions in his mind. As a moderate, he was unacceptable to the extremists—it amounted to no more than that. He had been put out of the way because he was in the way. But they would never dare more than to coerce into silence so notable an apostle of liberty. He reviewed, with some smug satisfaction, the processes of his own career. By origin a Norfolk staymaker, by chance an exciseman, by nature a demagogue, his inherent force of character had lifted him to a position which suffered at the moment only a temporary eclipse. Was it to be believed that he who had forcibly contributed to the Declaration of American Independence, who had been honoured and rewarded by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, who had earned Franklin’s friendship and Burke’s hostility, who had been elected by the Department of Calais to sit in the French Convention, and whose bold assertion of the Rights of Man had been accepted for the very ritual of the Revolution, would be let to be snuffed out by the dirty fingers of a murdering attorney? Fouquier dare not do it; Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, the all-powerful Triumvirate, were not assured enough for such a venture. Besides, they represented, in an age of reason, the crowning expression of reason—that government by minority which had always been a pet theory of his.
He frowned, then lifted his eyebrows with a smile. Something in the connection, a memory of his own once discomfiture on a certain occasion, had recurred to him. It had happened in London, in a Fleet Street tavern, two or three years before. How remote it all seemed! Dr. Wolcot—he who called himself Peter Pindar—had been there—a huge, overbearing old voluptuary, with flashing eyes, and a flashing wit, and a scurrilous tongue. Paine had been discoursing to an admiring audience on the reasonableness of deciding questions in Parliament by minorities instead of majorities, “since,” said he, “the proportion of men of sense to ignoramuses is but as one to ten. Wherefore the wisest portion of mankind are always in the minority in debate”—a statement which the Doctor disputed. “Still,” said the latter, “I will assert nothing for myself, but leave the question to the company.”
Now, at that, Paine, confident of his surroundings, had risen, and put the question to the vote, those who agreed with him to hold up their hands. Whereupon every hand had gone up, and the Doctor had arisen, with a bow. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I thank you for this decision in my favour. The wise minority, as represented in my person, carries the vote. I pronounce Mr. Paine wrong.” And he had swallowed his glassful and lumbered out.
Somehow the prisoner remembered that occasion with pleasure. It suggested a form of liberty much more in accord with his real nature than a world of abstract utilitarianisms. The wine in the Luxembourg was thin; indulgences were few; they often dined off stale sprats. The end of his own nose, touched by a ray of the slanting sun, caught his eye as with the glint of a ruby. He pished under his breath.
“Bah!” he muttered. “He was a domineering beast; but I wish I were with him now at Dick’s in Fleet Street.”
He sighed and stirred; and it was at that moment that the stranger of the broken plaque had approached and accosted him. He was a newcomer, and unknown to the ex-Deputy.
“To the devil with your Rights of Man!” ended the tall prisoner. He caught at Paine, who had turned an angry shoulder to him and was going. “Is it not so?” he demanded. “They are just one’s right, it appears, to run with the crowd the crowd’s way. If one takes the Liberty to pause a moment for reflection, one is trampled underfoot by Fraternity and packed off to discuss Equality with the other heads in the basket.”
“I would have you observe,” said Paine frigidly, “that the turnkey is summoning us to return to our cells.”
He moved away, but the other followed close beside him, agitated and voluble.
“Cells!” he cried—“cells! But is not that a fine comment on your propaganda? I interpret your Rights according to the tables, and you send me to the guillotine for it.”
“I?” said Paine. He stopped in desperation.
“Is not your emissary up there now,” cried Garat, “marking off the doomed?”
“My emissary?” said Paine.
“You are as responsible as any for him,” said the ex-President, kneading his damp palms together. “If you would try to blow east and west at once, meddling with unknown forces. You should have remembered, monsieur, that the first right of man is to existence. There would have been a fine air of originality about that precept. It has always been the easiest thing in the world to solve human problems by killing.”
The demagogue took refuge behind derision.
“I perceive you are simply a coward,” he said.
“Yes,” cried Garat, his lips trembling. “I am simply that. What can you expect, who have decreed us annihilation for our despair? Our ancient wrongs conceded us a heaven after all; your modern rights have taken it away. It is all very well for you, safeguarded by your position, to pretend to despise death; it would be another matter, I expect, if you feared, like me, to find the chalk-mark on your door.”
“Rest assured,” said Paine contemptuously. “If you have sought to serve Justice, Justice will not destroy her own.”
“But there are accidents.”
“I answer for her, I say,” insisted the demagogue, with an air of pompous finality. “You may, trust to my own share, citizen—grossly as you libel it—in her modern scheme, which provides against such possibilities. No trick of Fortune is permitted nowadays to spare the guilty or condemn the innocent.”
“But are you sure, monsieur? Monsieur, in God’s name!”
Paine waved the creature aside with a peremptory gesture, and continued his way across the yard. They were the last to enter the prison, and they mounted the naked stairs almost together. In the same corridor above were their cells situated, and Torné, the surly gaoler, was already holding half-closed the door of Garat’s, which came first. It was bare of the fatal sign, and Garat ran into his fold with a bleat like a comforted sheep.
Mr. Thomas Paine, with a shrug and sneer, tripped on his way to his own cell. Reaching it, he raised his eyes, staggered slightly, and gave a single gasp. Its door was flung back against the outer wall, and the mark was on it.
Inside! He had but to close it upon himself, and the mark would vanish. Fouquier’s hurrying emissary, not being of the wise minority, had overlooked that contingency.
Torné, having locked in Garat, was coming down the corridor. Screening the sign with his arm, the ex-Deputy swung round the door and shut himself in.
He died a dozen deaths before he heard the key turn in the lock outside—a hundred before the news of next day’s coup d’état came to restore life to ten thousand withering hopes.
But the tumbrils went on the morrow, and for the last time, all the same—only he was not a passenger by them. It was just his luck that Fortune was offered such a characteristic way of retaliating upon him for his boasted command of her.