So many thousands—dismissed to their deaths, without remorse or pity, from that same salle de la liberté in which he had just stood his own trial! How familiar it had all seemed, how matter-of-course, how inevitable!—the relentless hands of the clock, creeping on to the premeditated doom-stroke; the hungry, bestial faces lolling at the barriers; the voices of the street entering by the open windows, and seeming to comment derisively on the drawling evidence, selected to convict. He had known the procedure so well, had been so instrumental in creating it, that any defence had well seemed a mockery of the methods of the Palais de Justice.
“I have been a busy man,” he had said. “I forget things. Are we to be held accountable for every parasite we destroy in crushing out the life of a monster?”
That had appeared a reasonable plea. What did not seem reasonable was the base sums he had personally amassed out of the destruction of the parasites, the bribes he had accepted, his subornation of witnesses, his deafness to the just pleas of unprofitable virtue, his neglect of the principles of brotherhood. He had held one of the first offices of the fraternal State, and had made of it a wholly self-seeking vehicle. He had seen his chance in the mad battle of a people for liberty, and had used it to rob the dead. There was, in truth, no more despicable joint in that “tail of Robespierre” which Sanson was busily engaged just now in docking than this same Antoine Quentin. And yet he believed himself aggrieved.
That night he wrote to his second wife, from his cell in the Conciergerie, to which he had been returned, the following words:
“I shall die, heart and hands pure, for having served my country with too much zeal and activity, and for having conformed to the wishes of the Government.”
It bettered Wolsey’s cry in the singleness of its reproach.
The problem of all villainy is that it regards itself with an obliquity of vision for which it seems hard to hold it accountable. Given a lack of the moral sense, and how is a man to make an honest living? Tinville—or de Tinville, mark you—became an attorney because he was poor, and then a rascal because he was an attorney. There are always many thousands living in an odour of respectability whom fortune alone saves from a like revelation of themselves. But that is not to say that, in the general purification of society, the lethal chamber is not the best answer to the problem.
This man was by nature a callous, coarse-grained ruffian, constitutionally insensible to the pleas of humanity, and with the self-protective instinct prominently developed in him as in brutes. You could not regard his sallow, grim-jawed face-structure, his staring, over-bushed black eyes, his thin-lipped mouth, perpetually mobile in sneers and spitting scorns and cynicisms, and affect to read in them any under-suggestion of charity or benevolence. Numbers, poor obsequious wretches, had essayed the monstrous pretence, and had pitiably retracted their heresy under the axe. He was forty-seven years of age; he had lived every day of his later manhood in secret scorn and abuse of the principles he had hired himself to advocate; and only where his personal interests were not affected had it ever been possible to credit him with a deed of grace, or, at the best, of passive indifference.
“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice!”
He had done kind things in his time, two or three; but had they ever included “one act of self-sacrifice”? Had he not conceded them, rather, for the very contrary reason? He tried to think it out. The question worried him oddly and persistently; it seemed to have absorbed every other; he groped perpetually for an answer to it through the whirling chaos of his mind. There had been the wife and daughters of the Marquis de Miranion, whom he had shielded in their peril because once, when he had been a young man contemplating Orders, they had shown him kindness. He suddenly remembered the case, and remembered too that his condescension had occurred at a time when the despotic nature of his office had held him virtually immune from criticism or misrepresentation. Again, there had been the young virgins of Verdun, condemned and executed for offering sweetmeats to the King of Prussia. He had pitied them; but pity was inexpensive, and, at the moment, not unpopular. There had been—what else had there been? He flogged his brains for a third instance, and, not being successful, had to fall back upon the minor amenities. Little convivial generosities (for he had been a camarade, a joyeux-vivant, in his rough way), little family indulgences, and sensual concessions—he had these to set against the habitual inhuman greed which had made him the most squalid, soulless Harpagon of his tribe. Insolent to weakness, truckling to power, his interest in the awful part he had played had never risen above self-interest. The very list of the great names he had extinguished represented nothing to his ignoble mind but so many opportunities seized by him to acquire personal gain or personal safety. Vergniaud the ineffable, Corday the magnificent, Lavoisier the gentle, Hébert the dastard, Danton the tremendous—these, to take but a handful, he had despatched to their graves with a like indifference to the principles which had brought them subject to his chastisement. There were no principles in his creed but self-gain and self-preservation. From the poor Austrian “plucked hen” at one limit of the tale to Robespierre at the other, he had been always as ready to cut short a saint as a rogue in the vindication of that creed. He simply could not understand any other; and yet the words of the President were worrying him horribly.