With the republicans too were to be found men equally capable or courageous, if less personally attractive. In the French romance that followed the Irish novels Trollope made no pretence of making his imagination the handmaid of history. Bulwer-Lytton, in The Last of the Barons, circumstantially constructed a bold and picturesque hypothesis as a plausibly conjectural explanation of the quarrel between Edward IV and Warwick. That was not at all in Trollope’s way. Equally little is his inclination, after the fashion of Sir Walter Scott, to play fast and loose with recorded facts, and to represent authenticated events in the light, and from the point of view, which happened to suit him. For the most part Trollope follows through every detail the accurate chronicle of the time. In one case, however, that he may account for the disappearance from his narrative of the character he calls Adolphe Denot, he departs from the historic record. According to Trollope, the Chouans, or Bretons who continued the Vendean War, followed a mysterious, if not an actually insane leader. The alleged mystery is mere invention. No personage of the period is more historical than Jean Cottereau, who from the first led the Bretons, and whose signal, the cry of the screech-owl (chat-huant), gave their name to the little Breton band. Nor can it be said that the historian’s version of events is, even for artistic purposes, improved on by the novelist’s discovery, in the Vendean leader, of Adolphe Denot, who, in an hour of what his friends charitably called mental aberration, had left the good cause of Church and King, had thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries. Since then he had remained out of sight.
At the point now under consideration, the novelist might indeed have done better, for himself as well as for his readers, had he exercised his fancy at least on the lines marked out by the historian. At the same time he deserves the praise of having caught the spirit of his period, as well as of having imbued his pages with a fair amount of genuine local colour. One word may be said about the pen-and-ink artist’s methods and the effect of his picture as a whole. The pervading tone, subdued if not, as in his first story, The Macdermots, sombre, at well-chosen points is relieved by the introduction of those lighter tints that Trollope’s quick eye for the humorous never failed in the right place to bring out. In the loyalist households, of the Vendean squires, the servants are treated less as inferiors than equals. Seeing in their employers their friends, and during war-time their comrades, they vie with each other in proving their devotion to the good cause. There thus sets in among them a generous rivalry as to who shall be nearest their lords in the hour of peril. Such a competition provides many happy openings for sketches of votaries of the sceptre and the crozier outdoing each other in the still-room and the servants’ hall.
There still remain Trollope’s estimates of the republican managers who, differing about much, agreed in calling the Vendeans mean curs, fit only for utter extermination. Six years earlier than the writing of La Vendée, Macaulay’s article on Barère had appeared in the spring number of The Edinburgh Review. The estimates of that particular revolutionary leader given by the historian and by the novelist generally agree with each other, but in every detail show the mutual independence of their writers. Macaulay’s account is an oratorical indictment, delivered in a more than usually impressive manner, and declaring that an amalgam of sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, and barbarity, such as in a novel would be condemned for caricature, was realised in Barère. Beside the essayist’s portrait of Bertrand Barère, place that in the novel which is our immediate concern, the one man, in a little party armed to the teeth, without sword, constantly playing with a little double-barrelled pistol, which he continually cocked and uncocked, and of which the fellow lay on the table before him. A tall, well-built, handsome man about thirty years of age, with straight black hair brushed upright from his forehead, his countenance gave the idea of eagerness and impetuosity rather than of cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially egotistical and insincere. A republican not from conviction but from prudential motives, he only deserted the throne when he saw that it was tottering.
For a time Barère supported the moderate party in the republic, and voted with the Girondists. He gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw they were triumphing over their rivals. He was afterwards one of those who handed over the leaders of the Reign of Terror to the guillotine, and assisted in denouncing Robespierre and St. Just. He was one of the very few who managed to outlive the Revolution, and did so for nearly half a century. Nature had not formed him to be a monster gloating in blood. The republic had altered his disposition, and taught him, among those with whom he associated, to delight in the work which they required at his hands. Thus he became one of those who loudly called for more blood, while blood on every side was running in torrents. He too it was who demanded the murder of the queen, when Robespierre would have saved her. Before the Revolution he had been a wealthy aristocrat; he still wears the costume of his earlier period in the blue dress-coat, buttoned closely, notwithstanding the heat of the weather, round his body; the carefully tied cravat, disfigured by no wrinkle; the tightly fitting breeches that show the well-shaped leg. As a contrast to this sometime nobleman gibbeted by Macaulay, Trollope presents one to another notoriety of the period, known as the “King of the Faubourgs.” This was a large, rough, burly man, about forty years of age, of Flemish descent, by trade a brewer, by name Santerre, without fine feelings to be distressed at the horrid work set him to do, but filled with a coarse ambition, which made him a ready tool for the schemers who used his physical powers, courage, and wealth to their own ends.
The gallery given us by Trollope contains one more portrait, of fresher interest in itself, and not less life-like in its swift, sure strokes. Westerman in Carlyle’s description appears as an Alsatian. With Trollope he is a pure Prussian, a mercenary soldier who, banished from his native land, took service as a private in the army of the French republic, was soon promoted to be an officer, and after this promotion, foreseeing the future triumph of the extreme republicans, declared himself their adherent, and, joining Dumourier’s army, became that general’s aide-de-camp at the time of his attempt to sell the French legions to their Prussian and Austrian adversaries. Then Westerman left his master, and had since been the most prompt and ruthless military executioner of the Convention’s sternest behests. Westerman, as drawn by Trollope, is both soldier and politician. Two other military personages directing the campaign against the Vendeans, Bourbotte and Chouardin, take no interest in the affairs of State, and are merely rough, bold, brave fighters. Conspicuous among the Vendean leaders was Cathelineau. His spirited and fearless life’s work, crowned by a soldier’s brave death, excited the sympathetic admiration of the republic’s two military servants. That tribute to an enemy’s great qualities was enough to draw down upon them the anger of their superiors, especially of Barère. It was not, however, a time to visit such offences with a severe penalty. Both Bourbotte and Chouardin escaped without any formal reprimand.
To the sketch of Robespierre and the analysis of his character, Trollope, as might be expected, gives particular care. Here he supplements rather than follows those who before him had made this subject their own. “Seagreen incorruptible” was, says Carlyle, physically a coward, kept from flinching or turning tail only by his moral strength of purpose. Not so, is Trollope’s verdict. Courage indeed went conspicuously in hand with constancy of resolution, temperance in power, and love of country. If at the last he gave way, it was from the inward torment caused him too late by the discovery that his whole career had been a blunder, and that none of the objects which he had first set before himself were fulfilled. Poor mutilated worm, exclaims the novelist of La Vendée, what was there of pusillanimity in the remorse of conscience prostrating his whole physical frame, when he compared the aims which animated him at his beginnings with the results he saw all about him at his close? From Carlyle, Trollope knew of Mirabeau’s prophecy on hearing Robespierre’s maiden speech: “This man will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.” So staunch and sympathetic a Tory as Alison echoes as well as amplifies that view. And with him Trollope, who like many other writers about this period had learnt the usefulness of Alison, agrees.
To the English novelist, not less than to the English historian, Robespierre’s career stands out not as the offspring of any individual character, but as representing the delusions of the age. Chief among those errors ranked a belief in the natural innocence of man. With this fallacy had united itself another—the lawfulness of doing evil that good might come. Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who embodied the debasing influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses would rise to the full height of their native greatness. Thus a triumphant democracy, enthroned upon mountains of patrician corpses, would wield its beneficent sceptre over a purified and reanimated society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps indebted to, Alison, Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in Convention and in the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of the populace of Paris. In union with and in dependence on that, he could alone act, command, and be obeyed. Alison puts the same idea rather differently when he says: “Equally with Napoleon during his career of foreign conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five millions of men.”
Apart from the failure of moral fortitude and nerve which weakened and clouded his end, what particular feature in Robespierre’s temperament and life gave colour to the charge of cowardice that Carlyle at least considers so irrefutable? The answer is suggested by Trollope in what forms the most original passage in this portion of his story. One fond and tender dream Robespierre could never banish. Once let France, happy, free, illustrious, and intellectual, own how much she owed to the most disinterested patriot among her sons, Robespierre would retire to his small paternal estate in Artois; evincing the grandeur of his soul by the rejection of all worldly rewards, receiving nothing from his country but adoration. While in Trollope’s pages he is represented as preoccupied with visions like these, his garret is entered by a young woman, decently but very plainly dressed. This was Eleanor Duplay, who, when Robespierre allowed himself to dream of a future home, was destined to be the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children. Eleanor Duplay possessed no mark of superiority to others of her age (about five-and-twenty) and station. The eldest of four sisters, she specially helped her mother in caring for the house, of which Robespierre had become an inmate. With no political aptitude or taste of her own, she had caught, as she believed, political inspiration from his words, finding in his pseudo-philosophical dogmas, at once repulsive and ridiculous to modern ears, great truths begotten of reason and capable of regenerating her fellow-creatures.
Eleanor Duplay has a special object in approaching Robespierre at this moment, which brings her into the central current of the story. She had, in fact, undertaken to plead with her father’s lodger the Vendean cause. Both the girl herself, and the public opinion whose echoes she caught, were shocked by the wholesale massacre of women and children now going on in the doomed district after which Trollope called his story. What work, she had asked herself, when rallying her courage to the task, so fitting for the wife-elect of a ruler of the people as to implore the stern magistrate to temper justice with mercy? Her lover’s reception of the first hint at her prayer is not promising. The Vendeans, he says, must be not only conquered but crushed. The religion of Christ, he goes on, declares that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. Hence the babes must share the fate of their parents. As for the mothers, it is, says Robespierre, a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the iniquities of women because of their sex. This interview leads up to one of the most dramatic situations of the novel, and is so managed as during its progress to bring out in effective relief the feature of Robespierre’s character, which other expositors of it have noticed, but which none illustrated so fully as Trollope. Eleanor Duplay’s petition had not been completed when her lover’s suspicion—his predominating trait—expresses itself in an outburst of dark and terrible anger. In vain she assures him that no one has set her on to talk to him of this. In ordinary men suspicion sometimes clouds love; in Robespierre, as he is here described, it strangled the possibility of love at its birth.