At sight of him Jolly's eyes bulged in his head.
“Where the devil have you come from?” he greeted him thunderously.
Leroy quailed. Jolly's associates stared. But Jolly explained to them:
“He was of last night's bathing party. And he has the impudence to come before us like this. Take him away and shove him back into the water.”
But Bachelier, a man who, next to the President Goullin, exerted the greatest influence in the committee, was gifted with a sense of humour worthy of the Revolution. He went off into peals of laughter as he surveyed the crestfallen cocassier, and, perhaps because Leroy's situation amused him, he was disposed to be humane.
“No, no!” he said. “Take him back to Le Bouffay for the present. Let the Tribunal deal with him.”
So back to Le Bouffay went Leroy, back to his dungeon, his fetid straw and his bread and water, there to be forgotten again, as he had been forgotten before, until Fate should need him.
It is to him that we owe most of the materials from which we are able to reconstruct in detail that first of Carrier's drownings on a grand scale, conceived as an expeditious means of ridding the city of useless mouths, of easing the straitened circumstances resulting from misgovernment.
Very soon it was followed by others, and, custom increasing Carrier's audacity, these drownings—there were in all some twenty-three noyades—ceased to be conducted in the secrecy of the night, or to be confined to men. They were made presently to include women—of whom at one drowning alone, in Novose, three hundred perished under the most revolting circumstances—and even little children. Carrier himself admitted that during the three months of his rule some three thousand victims visited the national bathing-place, whilst other, and no doubt more veracious, accounts treble that number of those who received the National Baptism.
Soon these wholesale drownings had become an institution, a sort of national spectacle that Carrier and his committee felt themselves in duty bound to provide.