Historical vignettes, 1st series

by Bernard Capes

“I had known this Garreau since we were young men together. We were in the same office, a wine merchant’s, in the Isle Feydeau. Garreau was a very handsome fellow, but as headstrong as the devil. He had a great tenacity of purpose, and when once he had set his heart on a thing, he would pursue it, as a weasel follows a rabbit, until he could set his teeth in its neck. We had no quarrel with the existing order, and our lives were, for our position, prosperous and content. For my part, I was always a slave to the stronger will of my comrade.

“We were at that time good children of the Church, which was indeed our misfortune, for the change in us dated from the moment of Garreau’s return from a week’s retreat in the monastery of St. Pierre de la Roche. He had acquired therein something other than the religious serenity he had gone to seek, had meditated a passion remote from that of the Testament. It happened in this way.

“Attached to the monastery was the Convent of the Bon Secours, whose sisters washed the linen of the ghostly fathers. To one of these sisters, a beautiful neophyte, Jules found himself instantly attracted. His interest ripened into desire, and his desire into a devouring passion. From that moment all was decided. He never rested until he had secured its object to himself.

“He would have married the lovely apostate, but the Church refused to sanction their union. It was that refusal which first inspired his recusancy, and in consequence mine. I admired and looked up to him in all things. A child, a girl, was born to the thus ostracised pair, and it was remarked that a little torn heart, emblematic of her birthright of sin, was printed on the innocent’s neck under her hair. It was the rending of the Sacred Heart which she was thus made to symbolise in her birth.

“But Garreau loved her, and far more than her mother did. If he had been great, aristocratic, he would have experienced no difficulty in sheltering his mistress from slander and persecution; but he was neither, and he could give her little of the protection that she craved. So in the end she sought and found it in the arms of the Comte de Chasles, son of a marquis, who carried her off to Paris. It was then that Jules and I attached ourselves to the party of the advanced thinkers.

“He followed the seducer, and for years I lost sight of him. In the meanwhile all that I knew of his affairs was that the infant had been claimed as their perquisite by the sisters of the Bon Secours, and that they were training her, ignorant of her parentage, to service. Then, in a clap, came the Revolution.

“All society was disintegrated in that shock. Institutions ceased to exist and order resolved itself into chaos. The religious houses were the first to suffer. The hour of the great retribution had struck, and I sided with the extremists. And presently arrived Carrier.

“I was out of employment, as who was not? The beneficent Republic provided idleness for us all; but, alas! idleness begot no bread. At this juncture the Revolutionary Tribunal called for candidates for the post of executioner. It was their purpose to strip the office of prejudice, and exalt it to a State dignity. This headsman was to be entitled for the future the People’s Avenger.

“There were many applicants, and among them came one whom I had difficulty in recognising at first for my old friend and leader Jules Garreau. It was thirteen years since we had met. Most of that time he had spent in the prison of la Force in Paris, whither he had been conveyed on a process for debt ingeniously devised against him by the Comte de Chasles. When released at length by the Revolution, he went, like that weasel before-mentioned, straight for the neck of his enemy. It was at the Abbaye that he found him, and he took what revenge he could for that long term of suffering out of the September massacres. Afterwards he drank blood awhile in Paris, and then came on to his native town to surfeit his hatred on the social order which had been responsible for his ruin. He was by then rabid among the rabid. His deadly sense of wrong had killed whatever spirit of humanity had once existed within him. His only desire was to kill, and kill, and yet kill. This post offered him such an opportunity for the satisfaction of his lust as could be found nowhere else, and he applied for it. He was elected unanimously and with enthusiasm by the National Representatives. All lesser candidates, among whom I figured, waived their claims in view of his, which were irresistible. But he made me his assistant, and I resumed my natural position of subordinate to him.

“Jules lacked from that moment no food to satiate his vengeance; and yet it hungered perpetually. He was a dark, powerful man, wholly inexorable, yet in seeming more stern than wrathful. He appeared the Avatar of sans-culottism, a soulless, sightless idol, to whom human flesh had to be sacrificed. Of his child, the pledge of that lost passion, he never seemed to think. Indeed, in the utter annihilation of the religious houses which had occurred it would have been impossible to discover whether she lived or were dead. And perhaps even, one might assume, he did not care. His soul was by now delivered completely over to the one lust of destruction.