Jean-Georges Schneider, who had either given himself or had been endowed with the name of Euloge, was a man of thirty-seven or eight years of age, ugly, fat, short, common, with round limbs, round shoulders, and a round head. The most striking thing about his strange appearance was that he had his hair cut short, while he let his enormous eyebrows grow as long and as thick as they pleased. These eyebrows, bushy, black and tufted, shadowed yellow eyes, bordered with red rims.
He had begun by being a monk, hence his surname of the Monk of Cologne, which his name of Euloge had not been able to efface. Born in Franconia, of poor laboring parents, he had by his talents won the patronage of the village priest in his childhood, and the latter had taught him the elements of Latin. His rapid progress enabled him to go to the Jesuit college at Wurzburg. He was expelled from the illustrious society on account of misconduct, sank to the depths of misery, and finally entered a convent of Franciscans at Bamberg.
His studies finished, he was thought competent to become professor of Hebrew, and was sent to Augsburg. Called, in 1786, to the court of Duke Charles of Wurtemburg as chaplain, he preached there with success, and devoted three-fourths of the revenues which accrued to him to the support of his family. It is said that it was here that he joined the sect of the Illuminated, organized by the famous Weishaupt, which explains the ardor with which he adopted the principles of the French Revolution. At that time, full of ambition, impatient under restraint, and devoured by ardent passions, he published a catechism which was so liberal that he was obliged to cross the Rhine and establish himself at Strasbourg, where, on the 27th of June, 1791, he was appointed episcopal vicar and dean of the theological faculty; then, far from refusing the civic oath, he not only took it, but preached in the cathedral, mingling together comments on political incidents and religious teachings with singular zeal.
Before the 10th of August, he demanded the abdication of Louis XVI., the while protesting against being styled a Republican. From that moment he fought with desperate courage against the royalist party, which had in Strasbourg, as well as in the neighboring provinces, many powerful adherents. This struggle earned him, toward the end of 1792, the post of mayor of Haguenau.
Finally he was appointed to the post of public accuser of the Lower Rhine on the 19th of February, and was invested on the 5th of the following May with the title of Commissioner of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Strasbourg. Then it was that the terrible thirst for blood, to which his natural violence drove him, burst forth. Urged on by feverish excitement, when he was not needed at Strasbourg, he went about the neighborhood with his terrible escort, followed by the executioner and the guillotine.
Then, upon the slightest pretext, he stopped at towns which had hoped never to see his fatal instrument, set up the guillotine, established a tribunal, tried, judged, and executed. In the midst of this bloody orgy he brought the paper money up to par, money that had hitherto been worth only eighty-five per cent. He also, by his own unaided efforts, procured more grain for the army, which was in need of almost everything, than all the other commissioners in the district put together. And finally, from the 5th of November to the 11th of December, he had sent at least thirty-one persons to their death in Strasbourg, Mutzig, Barr, Obernai, Epfig, and Schlestadt.
Although our young friend was ignorant of most of these things, and especially of the latter, it was not without a feeling of genuine terror that he found himself in the presence of the formidable pro-consul. But, reflecting that he, unlike the others, had a protector in the man by whom so many were menaced, he soon regained his composure, and after seeking how best to open the conversation, he thought he had found a way in the oysters that Schneider was eating.
"Rara concha in terra," he said, in his clear, flute-like voice, smiling as he spoke.
Euloge turned his head. "Do you mean to insinuate that I am an aristocrat, baby?" he asked.