Edgar started, and his hand went to his dagger. Elfrida stumbled forward.
“No,” she said, in a weak voice, “it is my dog, lord King. I will not have him killed because he barks.”
THE EXECUTIONER OF NANTES
When Carrier, commissioned by Heraut Seychelles, acting on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, to purge Nantes, arrived in that town, he found all ready to his hand a Revolutionary Committee such as his heart, or whatever deformity represented that organ, could most desire. There were Goullin, Grandmaison, Chaux, Jolly, Perrochaux, and a score others, all “intrepid” Mountain men, and all scoundrels of the most atrocious antecedents. His task was consequently a simple one. He had merely to produce his credentials and authorise his instruments, and the depopulating process started, as it were, automatically. One need not recapitulate, for the thousandth time, a selection from the infernal wickednesses perpetrated by these fiends. Such were being enacted, in more or less degree, in a hundred other districts of the tortured land, and these were noteworthy in nothing but their multitude. What was noteworthy, however, was the fact that Nantes produced the solitary instance—so far as one may gather throughout the entire Revolution—of a butchering devil succumbing to a sense of his own enormities. But, even so, there was to be observed a particular judgment in the case.
Carrier’s theories of political economy were simplicity itself. The population of France, he declared, was out of all proportion with the amount of food the land could produce; wherefore he proposed, for his individual part, to pare down the population until it corresponded with the yield. But this decimating process was fatiguing, and called for some compensation. It was only decent that the killers should be allowed to extract what profit and enjoyment they could from their task. And, in fact, they enjoyed a glut, which was the reason why a good many personable women, not of the first order of attractiveness, were allowed to escape—to the scaffold, or to the drownings.
Amongst these came one day to the Place du Buffay, where the guillotine was erected, a mother and her five daughters and their little maid, all, according to a chronicler, jeunes et belles, condamnées sans jugement. There was a good batch that noon, and the seven were kept waiting for a long half-hour at the foot of the scaffold before their turn came. The populace was not yet so hardened but that it could witness this tragedy with emotion. “Ah, the poor infants! But what is their crime?” “Hush! they were taken with arms in their hands!” “My God! but it is outrageous! Are knitting-needles arms?” “I know not, I. It is Carrier who decides.”
The six encouraged one another amidst tears and embraces. Most of all they sought to fortify the little bonne, who, a mere large-eyed child, stood quite stunned with the turn affairs had taken. When at length the period came to their agony, they mounted the steps in succession, faltering to one another sweet hymns of consolation, their voices fading away one by one like the lights in Tenebrae. The spectators were dissolved in tears; in the midst of a weeping silence the rush and thud of the axe was the only sound audible. Stolidly, monotonously, Jules Garreau, the executioner, a powerful, black-bearded man, sliced off the heads as they came through the “little window.” He might have been cutting chaff for any concern he showed.
The little maid came last. She understood things least of all at that moment, and only cried like a child when the assistants jerked her roughly down on the board and slid her under the yoke. And then, in the very instant that Garreau mechanically touched off the knife, the man was seen to stagger and fall back, his hands flung to his face.
He died the next day in a raving delirium. “It is no wonder,” whispered the less inhumane of those who had witnessed the execution. “The pity of it would have killed a wolf’s heart.”
That was the truth, but not the whole of the truth. The full explanation was not given until years afterwards, when the story was communicated to a priest to whom one of Garreau’s assistants came to unburden himself. He knew all about the man and the reason for his death. It had been actually due, he declared, to an instantaneous realisation of the terrific part he was playing, and of the mortal hazards he had invited in lending himself to it. In that moment he had known his soul as surely lost as if he had heard God’s voice in his ear, and the shock had killed him. But it will be well to give the story in the narrator’s own words: