A rogue's tragedy

by Bernard Capes

In Cartouche’s time, the Prefect of Faissigny, it was to be observed, did not grow rich. He expended his shameful gains in riotous living, said scandal. Such gangs of chained convicts, again it remarked, had never yet been encountered on the public roads, wending their way to Chambéry and the state prisons. Such a healthy moral condition, it might have added, had never yet obtained in the Province. The majority nevertheless thought him a strong Prefect, if privately a bad man. The evidences for the former were unquestionable, and rather admirable; for the latter, not even circumstantial—but they were admitted. It is the human way to require convincing proof of a man’s virtues; but to accept his wickedness on hearsay. There was a vile story—of the Colonel Kirke order—which related of a father’s life sold to a child at the price of her honour, and the contract repudiated after receipt. The facts lay in the unconditional offer of herself to the young autocrat by a bold-eyed jade, who had been smitten in Court by the beaux yeux of her parent’s judge, and of his answering by impounding her for a time, while he despatched the old miscreant to his deserved ending on the gallows.

The truth is that this fable, with others as odious, was no more than a political expedient for procuring the Prefect’s downfall and removal. Mr Trix had proved himself an annoyingly sharp thorn in the side of Illuminatism, and that body was for ever wriggling and twisting to get rid of him. It was, as a matter of fact, in a particularly sensitive state during the first years of the young man’s ascendency, owing to an unhappy determination on the part of the Elector of Bavaria to put his heel on its head, which lay in his dominions; the result being that that same head—Weishaupt, by name, general and brain of the Society—had flicked itself away, none exactly knew whither; leaving to the corporate rest of it the solution of the problem as to how a body was to continue to answer, as a compact international entity, to an unlocalisable brain.

That bitter stroke was, indeed, the beginning of the finish with Illuminatism. The Society survived for some years longer; but more as a local than a universal power. It retained for a time a certain mystic influence on events, until in the end that influence, with many another as inherently socialistic, was absorbed into the elemental energy of the revolution.

A significant revelation, on the seizure of its papers in 1786, was its rôle of names. They included “princes, nobles, magistrates, bishops, priests and professors”—men of a condition weighty enough to carry them and their occult propaganda into the very heart of society; to bring their suggestions to bear, even, upon some heads that wore crowns.

There was one of those, pretty vain and silly, which did not fail, you may be sure, to make itself a subject for their practices. It had looked out of the windows of Piedmont on the tide rising down there in Savoy, and, with all the first tentative assurance, and none of the after humility of Canute, had commanded the waters peevishly to retire. They had not: on the contrary they had come determinedly on, until they threatened to find a way through the passes into Piedmont. The King was disgustedly amazed. He heard of peasants refusing to pay their lawful taxes; he heard of bread riots; he heard of a dissemination of pernicious doctrines, such as those which spoke of commonwealths, and the right of the many to exist other than by sufferance of the few. Was this the way to realise his ideal of a piping Arcadia? What were his provincial viceroys doing, so to let corruption over-run his duchy?

Innuendo whispered to him of one of them, at least. His Prefect of Faissigny, it murmured into his ear, was as responsible as any for the subversive creed that justice, to be effective, must be impartial. That gave him thought. He had made rather a pet of this man; although, it was true, his plans for his aggrandisement had fallen something short of their intention. Was he, this Cartouche, making his disappointment the text for a popular dissertation on the fallibility of Kings? He began to wonder if he had misplaced his confidence.

And the gay Prefect himself—the bright siderite of all this conspiracy? Something conscious of the forces at work against him, indifferent to results and for himself, he continued to administer his office in the way most characteristic of him. He had no ideals nor delusions. Equality to him, in a world nine-tenths asses, was a vicious chimera. He was a magistrate of the crown, and he simply sought to make that respectable in the popular view. The rights of man, in his, were solely to be governed justly. Roguery, in whatever form, must be suppressed. No man should be privileged to tyrannise. He gave practical effect to the loose tenets of reformers, who, obsessed with a personal vanity, could see nothing in them thus presented but a hide-bound reactionism. Many people, it is certain, think less of their own ideals than of the credit they may gain in pursuing them. They are quite blind to them when achieved by others.

Mr Trix’s Prefecture in Le Prieuré was a very Court of Barataria. It was flanked by a lofty stone tower, known as the Belfry, which had once formed part of a long-vanished monastery of Benedictines, and was now used as a lock-up, for those condemned to walk the long road to Chambéry. The committed to it seldom had reason to question the justice of their convictions, or to complain of consideration of extenuating circumstances having been withheld. Cartouche, proclaimed a libertine and martinet, had nevertheless a happy wit for justice. He could tell a rascal under a silk frock.

So much for his public life. What surcease of private pain he sought in its incessant action, in that airy yet vigorous administration of his office, might not appear. He was always reckless for himself, for his reputation. He walked like one gaily damned, conscious of his own bond to the devil. What did it matter what she thought of him now? What did anything matter in a world where man was held responsible for the resolving of irresolvable ethical problems. He supposed, and rightly, that she felt his mere presence in her neighbourhood to be an insult to herself. What if she were to be told the truth? It could never cleanse her of an indelible stain: it could never restore her to him for what she had been. Sometimes he told himself now that he hated her—that the proof of it was in his indifference to such reports of himself as might reach her ears. Was that a proof? He took pleasure, on her behoof, in refraining from forcing his slanderers to disgorge their lies. Did not she want him wicked? Every nail knocked into his character was a fresh vindication to her of her self-sacrificial love for another.

And there was a worse true story of him, after all, than any his enemies could invent. It was part of the irresolvable problem; but he believed she would answer it, if she knew, with a more utter condemnation of him than any he had yet suffered at her hands. That he had cast the girl away, because her disobedience to him had wrought an irremediable wrong to another, herself—would that appeal to her, even if in the hot blaze of the truth, for righteousness? She would answer, he knew, that he himself was the one solely responsible for the situation which his double-dealing with the woman most entitled to his candour had created. What justification had she herself ever given him for submitting her to the chance assaults of jealousy? If he had been honest with the wretched child, this climax had never reached its period. And, instead, he had made her the scapegoat of his own deceit.