I believe that at that I burst into tears not altogether unmanly; for they were tears of thankfulness and gratitude. I had gone through very much, and, though the wound in my arm was a trifle, I had lost some blood; and the tears may be forgiven me. Nor indeed was I alone in weeping that day. I learned afterwards that one of the very murderers, a man who had been foremost in the work, cried bitterly when he came to himself and saw what he had done.
They killed in Nîmes on that day and the two next, about three hundred men, principally in the Capuchin convent--which Froment had used as a printing-office, and made the headquarters of his propaganda--in the Cabaret Rouge, and in Froment's own house, which held out until they brought cannon to bear on it. Not more than one-half of these fell in actual conflict or hot blood; the remainder were hunted down in lanes and houses and hiding-places, and killed where they were found, or, surrendering at discretion, were led to the nearest wall, and there shot.
Later, both in Paris and the provinces, this severity was commended, and held up to admiration as the truest mercy; on the ground that it stamped out the fire of revolt which was on the point of blazing up and prevented it spreading to the rest of France. But, looking back, I find in it another thing; I find in it not mercy, but the first, or nearly the first, instance of that strange contempt of human life which marked the Revolution in its later stages; of that extravagance of cruelty which three years afterwards paralysed society and astounded the world, and, by the horrible excesses into which it occasionally led men, proved to the philosophers of the Human Race that France in the last days of the eighteenth century could do in the daylight, at Arras and Nantes and Paris, deeds which the tyrants of old confined to the dark recesses of their torture-chambers: deeds--I blush to say it--that no other polite country has matched in this age.
But with these crimes--and be it understood I do not refer here to the work of the guillotine--I thank God that I have at this time nothing to do. They left their traces on later pages of my life--as on the life of what Frenchman have they not?--and some day I may revert to them. But my task here barely touches them. It is enough for me to say that of eighteen men who shared with me the horrors of the alley by the Capuchins, four only lived to tell the tale, and look back on the walls of Nîmes; they and I owing our lives in part to the timely arrival of Buton and some foreign representatives, who did not share the Cevennols' fanaticism, and partly to the late relenting of the murderers themselves.
Of the four, Father Benôit and Louis St. Alais were two, and strange was the meeting, when we three, so wonderfully preserved, with clothes still torn and disordered, and faces splashed with blood, came together in the upstairs salon at Madame Catinot's. The shutters of the room, with the exception of one high corner shutter, were still closed; dead ashes lay white and cold in the empty fire-place, that had blazed so cheerfully in my honour the night I supped with Madame Catinot. The whole room was gloomy and chill, the furniture cast long shadows, and up the stairs came the clamour of the mob, that having seen us into the house eddied curiously round the scene of the murder, and could not have enough of it.
A strange meeting, for we three had all loved one another, and by stress of the times had been separated. Now we met as from the grave, ghostly figures, livid, trembling, with shaking hands and eyes burning with the light of fever; but with all differences purged away. "My Brother!" "Your Brother!" and Louis' hands met mine, as if the dead man who had died with the courage of his race joined them; while Father Benôit wrung his hands in uncontrollable grief or walked the room, crying: "My poor children! Oh, my poor children! God have mercy on this land!"
A low sound of women's voices, and weeping, with the hurrying of feet going softly to and fro, came from the next room: and that it was, I think, that presently calmed us, so that except for an occasional burst of grief on Louis' part we could talk quietly. I learned that Madame St. Alais lay there, sadly injured in the mêlée, either by her fall or a blow from a foot; and that Denise and Madame Catinot and a surgeon were with her. The very room in its gloom was funereal, and we talked in whispers--and then sank into silence; or again one or other would rise with a shudder of remembrance, and walk the room with heaving breast. Presently, the sound of guns coming to our ears, we forgot ourselves for a while and talked of Froment, and what chance of escape he had, and listened and heard the mob raving and howling as it surged by; and then talked again. But always as men who were no longer concerned; as men whom death had released from the common obligations.
Presently they came and called Louis, who went to his mother; and then after another interval Father Benôit was summoned, and I walked the room alone. Silence after so great commotion, solitude, when an hour before I had dealt death and faced it in that inferno, safety after danger so imminent, all stirred the depths of my heart. When, in addition, I thought of St. Alais' death, and recalled the brilliant promise, the daring, the brightness of that haughty spirit now for ever quenched, I felt the tears rise again. I paced the room in uncontrollable emotion, and was thankful for the gloom that allowed me to give it vent. Old times, old scenes, old affections rose up, and my boyhood; I remembered that we had played together, I forgot that we had gone different ways.
After a long time, a long, long time, when evening had nearly come, Louis came in to me. "Will you come?" he said abruptly.
"To Madame St. Alais?"