CHAPTER IX.
THE WILD DOGS.
It was on a night of middle Vendémiaire in the year two (to affect the whimsical jargon of the sans-culottes) that I issued from my burrow with an intrepidity that was nothing more nor less than a congestion of the sensibilities. Fear at that time having fed upon itself till all was devoured, was converted in very many to a humorous stoicism that only lacked to be great because it could not boast a splendid isolation. “Suspect of being suspect”—Citizen Chaumette’s last slash at the hamstrings of hope—had converted all men of humane character to that religion of self-containment that can alone spiritually exalt above the caprices of the emotions. Thousands, in a moment, through extreme of fear became fearless; hence no man of them could claim a signal inspiration of courage, but only that subscription to the terms of it which unnatural conditions had rendered necessary to all believers in the ultimate ethical triumph of the human race.
I do not mean to say that I was tired of life, but simply that it came to me at once that I must not hold that test of moral independence at the mercy of any temporal tyranny whatsoever. Indeed I was still so far in love with existence physically, as to neglect no precaution that was calculated to contribute to the present prolonging of it. I wore my frieze night-cap, carmagnole, sabots, and black shag spencer with all the assumption I could muster of being to the shoddy born. I had long learned the art of slurring a sigh into a cough or expectoration. I could curse the stolid spectres of the tumbrils so as to deceive all but the recording angel, and, possibly, Citizen Robespierre.
Nevertheless, with me, as with others, precaution seemed but a condition of the recklessness whose calculations never extended beyond the immediate day or hour. We lived posthumous lives, so to speak, and would hardly have resented it, should an arbitrary period have been put to our revisiting of the “glimpses of the moon.”
On this night, then, of early September (as I will prefer calling it) I issued from my burrow, calm under the intolerable tyranny of circumstance. Desiring to reconstruct myself on the principle of an older independence, I was mentally discussing the illogic of a system of purgation that was seeking to solve the problem of existence by emptying the world, when I became aware that my preoccupied ramblings had brought me into the very presence of that sombre engine that was the concrete expression of so much and such detestable false reasoning. In effect, and to speak without circumbendibus, I found myself to have wandered into the Faubourg St Antoine—into the place of execution, and to have checked my steps only at the very foot of the guillotine.
It was close upon midnight, and, overhead, very wild and broken weather. But the deeps of atmosphere, with the city for their ocean bed, as it were, lay profoundly undisturbed by the surface turmoil above; and in the tranquil Place, for all the upper flurry, one could hear oneself breathe and think.
I could have done this with the more composure, had not another sound, the import of which I was a little late in recognising, crept into my hearing with a full accompaniment of dismay. This sound was like licking or lapping, very bestial and unclean, and when I came to interpret it, it woke in me a horrible nausea. For all at once I knew that, hidden in that dreadful conduit that strong citizens of late had dug from the Place St Antoine to the river, to carry away the ponded blood of the executed, the wild dogs of Paris were slaking their wolfish thirst. I could hear their filthy gutturising and the scrape of their lazy tongues on the soil, and my heart went cold, for latterly, and since they had taken to hunting in packs, these ravenous brutes had assailed and devoured more than one belated citizen whom they had scented traversing the Champs Elysées, or other lonely space; and I was aware a plan for their extermination was even now under discussion by the Committee of Public Safety.
Now, to fling scorn to the axe in that city of terror was to boast only that one had adjusted oneself to a necessity that did not imply an affectation of indifference to the fangs of wild beasts—for such, indeed, they were. So, a suicide, who goes to cast himself headlong into the river, may run in a panic from a falling beam, and be consistent, too; for his compact is with death—not mutilation.
Be that as it may, I know that for the moment terror so snapped at my heel that, under the very teeth of it, I leaped up the scaffold steps—with the wild idea of swarming to the beam above the knife and thence defying my pursuers, should they nose and bay me seated there at refuge—and stood with a white desperate face, scarcely daring to pant out the constriction of my lungs.
There followed no sound of concentrated movement; but only that stealthy licking went on, with the occasional plash of brute feet in a bloody mire; and gradually my turbulent pulses slowed, and I thought myself a fool for my pains in advertising my presence on a platform of such deadly prominence.