One begins to be sick of “death vomited in great floods.” Nevertheless hearest thou not, O reader (for the sound reaches through centuries), in the dead December and January nights, over Nantes Town,—confused noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of rage and lamentation; mingling with the everlasting moan of the Loire waters there? Nantes Town is sunk in sleep; but Représentant Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped Company of Marat is not sleeping. Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft, that gabarre; about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under hatches? They are going to Belle Isle? In the middle of the Loire stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with all her cargo. “Sentence of Deportation,” writes Carrier, “was executed vertically.” The Ninety Priests, with their gabarre-coffin, lie deep! It is the first of the Noyades, what we may call Drownages, of Carrier; which have become famous forever.
Guillotining there was at Nantes, till the Headsman sank worn out: then fusillading “in the Plain of Saint-Mauve;” little children fusilladed, and women with children at the breast; children and women, by the hundred and twenty; and by the five hundred, so hot is La Vendée: till the very Jacobins grew sick, and all but the Company of Marat cried, Hold! Wherefore now we have got Noyading; and on the 24th night of Frostarious year 2, which is 14th of December 1793, we have a second Noyade: consisting of “a Hundred and Thirty-eight persons.”[708]
Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them? Fling them out; fling them out, with their hands tied: pour a continual hail of lead over all the space, till the last struggler of them be sunk! Unsound sleepers of Nantes, and the Sea-Villages thereabouts, hear the musketry amid the night-winds; wonder what the meaning of it is. And women were in that gabarre; whom the Red Nightcaps were stripping naked; who begged, in their agony, that their smocks might not be stript from them. And young children were thrown in, their mothers vainly pleading: ‘Wolflings,’ answered the Company of Marat, ‘who would grow to be wolves.’
By degrees, daylight itself witnesses Noyades: women and men are tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands: and flung in: this they call Mariage Républicain, Republican Marriage. Cruel is the panther of the woods, the she-bear bereaved of her whelps: but there is in man a hatred crueller than that. Dumb, out of suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims tumble confusedly seaward along the Loire stream; the tide rolling them back: clouds of ravens darken the River; wolves prowl on the shoal-places: Carrier writes, “Quel torrent révolutionnaire, What a torrent of Revolution!” For the man is rabid; and the Time is rabid. These are the Noyades of Carrier; twenty-five by the tale, for what is done in darkness comes to be investigated in sunlight:[709] not to be forgotten for centuries,—We will turn to another aspect of the Consummation of Sansculottism; leaving this as the blackest.
But indeed men are all rabid; as the Time is. Representative Lebon, at Arras, dashes his sword into the blood flowing from the Guillotine; exclaims, ‘How I like it!’ Mothers, they say, by his order, have to stand by while the Guillotine devours their children: a band of music is stationed near; and, at the fall of every head, strikes up its ça-ira.[710] In the Burgh of Bedouin, in the Orange region, the Liberty-tree has been cut down over night. Representative Maignet, at Orange, hears of it; burns Bedouin Burgh to the last dog-hutch; guillotines the inhabitants, or drives them into the caves and hills.[711] Republic One and Indivisible! She is the newest Birth of Nature’s waste inorganic Deep, which men name Orcus, Chaos, primeval Night; and knows one law, that of self-preservation. Tigresse Nationale: meddle not with a whisker of her! Swift-crushing is her stroke; look what a paw she spreads;—pity has not entered her heart.
Prudhomme, the dull-blustering Printer and Able Editor, as yet a Jacobin Editor, will become a renegade one, and publish large volumes on these matters, Crimes of the Revolution; adding innumerable lies withal, as if the truth were not sufficient. We, for our part, find it more edifying to know, one good time, that this Republic and National Tigress is a New Birth; a Fact of Nature among Formulas, in an Age of Formulas; and to look, oftenest in silence, how the so genuine Nature-Fact will demean itself among these. For the Formulas are partly genuine, partly delusive, supposititious: we call them, in the language of metaphor, regulated modelled shapes; some of which have bodies and life still in them; most of which, according to a German Writer, have only emptiness, “glass-eyes glaring on you with a ghastly affectation of life, and in their interior unclean accumulation of beetles and spiders!” But the Fact, let all men observe, is a genuine and sincere one; the sincerest of Facts: terrible in its sincerity, as very Death. Whatsoever is equally sincere may front it, and beard it; but whatsoever is not?—
Chapter 3.5.IV.
Carmagnole complete.
Simultaneously with this Tophet-black aspect, there unfolds itself another aspect, which one may call a Tophet-red aspect: the Destruction of the Catholic Religion; and indeed, for the time being of Religion itself. We saw Romme’s New Calendar establish its Tenth Day of Rest; and asked, what would become of the Christian Sabbath? The Calendar is hardly a month old, till all this is set at rest. Very singular, as Mercier observes: last Corpus-Christi Day 1792, the whole world, and Sovereign Authority itself, walked in religious gala, with a quite devout air;—Butcher Legendre, supposed to be irreverent, was like to be massacred in his Gig, as the thing went by. A Gallican Hierarchy, and Church, and Church Formulas seemed to flourish, a little brown-leaved or so, but not browner than of late years or decades; to flourish, far and wide, in the sympathies of an unsophisticated People; defying Philosophism, Legislature and the Encyclopédie. Far and wide, alas, like a brown-leaved Vallombrosa; which waits but one whirlblast of the November wind, and in an hour stands bare! Since that Corpus-Christi Day, Brunswick has come, and the Emigrants, and La Vendée, and eighteen months of Time: to all flourishing, especially to brown-leaved flourishing, there comes, were it never so slowly, an end.
On the 7th of November, a certain Citoyen Parens, Curate of Boissise-le-Bertrand, writes to the Convention that he has all his life been preaching a lie, and is grown weary of doing it; wherefore he will now lay down his Curacy and stipend, and begs that an august Convention would give him something else to live upon. “Mention honorable,” shall we give him? Or “reference to Committee of Finances?” Hardly is this got decided, when goose Gobel, Constitutional Bishop of Paris, with his Chapter, with Municipal and Departmental escort in red nightcaps, makes his appearance, to do as Parens has done. Goose Gobel will now acknowledge “no Religion but Liberty;” therefore he doffs his Priest-gear, and receives the Fraternal embrace. To the joy of Departmental Momoro, of Municipal Chaumettes and Héberts, of Vincent and the Revolutionary Army! Chaumette asks, Ought there not, in these circumstances, to be among our intercalary Days Sans-breeches, a Feast of Reason?[712] Proper surely! Let Atheist Maréchal, Lalande, and little Atheist Naigeon rejoice; let Clootz, Speaker of Mankind, present to the Convention his Evidences of the Mahometan Religion, “a work evincing the nullity of all Religions,”—with thanks. There shall be Universal Republic now, thinks Clootz; and “one God only, Le Peuple.”
The French Nation is of gregarious imitative nature; it needed but a fugle-motion in this matter; and goose Gobel, driven by Municipality and force of circumstances, has given one. What Curé will be behind him of Boissise; what Bishop behind him of Paris? Bishop Grégoire, indeed, courageously declines; to the sound of ‘We force no one; let Grégoire consult his conscience;’ but Protestant and Romish by the hundred volunteer and assent. From far and near, all through November into December, till the work is accomplished, come Letters of renegation, come Curates who are “learning to be Carpenters,” Curates with their new-wedded Nuns: has not the Day of Reason dawned, very swiftly, and become noon? From sequestered Townships comes Addresses, stating plainly, though in Patois dialect, That “they will have no more to do with the black animal called Curay, animal noir, appellé Curay.”[713]