Reign of Terror

“ France was rapidly sinking into that state of silent apathy which foreboded the Reign of Terror: discouraged by their experience of the past, men lost their faith in humanity, and selfishly despaired of the future. A maiden’s heroic spirit alone conceived the daring project of saving those who had so long and so nobly striven for freedom; or, if this might not be, of avenging their fall, and striking terror into the hearts of their foes, by a deed of solemn immolation, worthy of the stern sacrifices of paganism, offered of yore on the blood-stained shrines of the goddess Nemesis. ”

“ Who would not have been carried away—especially a Frenchman and a student of the history of civilisation—by descriptions of the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women, the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die with a light heart, and preserved their quick wit and refinement of life until the fatal summons? ”

“ Then came martial law, militia campaigns, loyal leagues, murders, arsons, burglaries, rapes, and a reign of terror and intimidation to make the way for the easy perpetration of the most monstrous and unparallelled wrongs, frauds and outrages that ever cursed the earth. ”

“ It is, therefore, to their mutual disadvantage that anything but sympathy and good will should prevail. A reign of terror means a stagnation of all the energies of the people and a corruption of the fountains of law and justice. ”

“ I had heard something of the terribly-brutalising effects of the Reign of Terror, but the conversation of these wretches gave me such a vivid insight of the incredible depths of depravity of which the human mind is sometimes capable as I could certainly not otherwise have gained, unless indeed by associating with the ruffians who gathered daily round the guillotine to insult and exult over the death-agonies of their victims. ”

“ The atrocities of the Reign of Terror brought fully home to the American public, to the conservative-minded particularly, the conviction that the Revolution had become diverted from its original principles and aims, and had descended to the plane of brutal despotism, reprehensible both in principle and practice above anything the eyes of men had ever beheld. ”

“ Living things!—Grand Dieu! the bats of the living Terror. They peered from holes and alcoves; they mowed and chattered; they shook their sooty locks at us and hailed Gusman in the jargon of the underworld. Thieves and rogues and cowards—here they swarmed in the warrens of despair, the very sacristans of devil-worship, the unclean acolytes of the desecrated rock-chapels, whose books of the Gospel were long since torn for fuel. ”

“ By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democratic prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, the Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most important part of the revolutionary epic. ”

“ Already the civilized world was shaken to its depths by the events in France where the original respectable movement to suppress tyranny and substitute for it democratic institutions had degenerated into a reign of terror, culminating in the execution of the king and queen. ”

“ So men entitle them. No doubt it is human to think to put terror out of countenance by miscalling it.”
“How, then?”
He beckoned us to follow; plunged into the very funnel mouth that had vomited the eerie babble; led us swiftly by a winding passage, and stopped.
“Behold!” said he, flashing his torch to and fro over the surface of a roughly piled and cemented wall that seemed to close the entrance to a vast recess.
“Behold!” said he, sweeping the flame to the ground at the wall-foot.
We saw a skull or two; a few scattered bones. An indescribable brassy odour assailed our nostrils. ”

“ It is these enlightened infidels that arrest the progress of true civilization and prepare those terrible catastrophes which deluge a country with blood. Who were the leaders in the work of destruction and wholesale butchery in the Reign of Terror? ”

“ One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification.
All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquillity. ”

“ When a revolution has sufficiently destroyed this common symbolism leading to common actions for usual purposes, society can only save itself from dissolution by means of a reign of terror. Those revolutions which escape a reign of terror have left intact the fundamental efficient symbolism of society. For example, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century and the American revolution of the eighteenth century left the ordinary life of their respective communities nearly unchanged. ”

“ Involuntarily we shrunk against the wall, as if to allow space to the impetuous rush we foresaw. Mon Dieu, the strange illusion! Only the swarming imps of echoes, summoned to the Master call, came hurrying forth, leaping and falling over one another, fighting and struggling, clanging with reverberant laughter, distributing themselves, disappearing down this or that corridor, shouting over their shoulders as they fled—faint, fainter—till silence settled down once more like water in the wake of a vessel. ”

“ But also I knew that to me, moving no longer under the ægis of authority, the towns and the resorts of men were become quagmires for my uncertain feet. I was three hundred miles from Paris; all my neighbourhood was dominated by Revolutionary Committees; my chance of escape, did once that black cuttle-fish of the “Terror” touch me with a tentacle, a finger-snap would express. My hitherto immunity was due, indeed, to the offices of certain friends, and a little, perhaps, to my constitutional tendency to allow circumstances to shape my personality as they listed. ”

“ A fine self-sacrificial rapture illumined his wild face.
“Let me be hurled into the bottomless pit,” he cried, “that so the Millennium may rise in the east like an August sun!”
“Now,” said I, “I will commune with my soul during the night, that perchance it may be revealed to me how the guillotine may guillotine itself.”
To my surprise the ridiculous bait took, and the poor wretch sunk down upon his straw and uttered no further word. Crossing the cell to come to my own heap, my foot struck against an iron ring that projected from a flag. ”

“ The resurrection of France shall be in discretion. That is the real courage to those whose overbearing impulse is to strike. We are discreet, and we watch, and we evolve by degrees the whole alphabet of espionage. ”

“ They will last our time. The ills in the constitution of France are many. For the resurrection—sang Dieu!” he cried, with a wry face, “but that is no part of our programme!”
Indeed, it was not of his. He was actuated by no passion but the blood-sucker’s. One day he showed me a clumsy model guillotine, a foot high, of his own contriving. The axe was a fragment of table-knife sunk in a finger of lead, and with it he would operate upon a gruesome little doll he had with an adjustable neck. Snip! the blade fell and the head, and a spout of crimson gushed forth and stained the floor. ”

“ Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market.”
A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a queer constriction seized my heart. ”

“ Now it seems a matter for marvel how a great many thousands of capable men, having nothing to hope from the intolerable tyranny that was massing them in a number of professed slaughter-houses, should not only have attempted no organised retaliation, but should, by unstiffening their necks (in a very heroic fashion, be it said) to be the footstools to a few monstrous bullies, have tacitly allowed the righteousness of a system that was destroying them to go by implication. ”

“ Even during the Terror, when death seemed for so many a thing to face smiling, the man who daily sent to the guillotine in Paris or the provinces uncounted thousands, walked the streets unguarded, and no one, vengeful, struck. In fact, the Terror seemed to paralyze even the will of the most reckless. Not so felt the young noble. ”

“ But the decree was gone forth from a mightier throne. During the latter days of the siege, a hostility to which that of man was as the grain of sand to the tempest that drives it on, overpowered our strength and senses.
Fearful shapes and voices in the air; visions startling us from our short and troubled sleep; lunacy in its most hideous forms; sudden death in the midst of vigor; the fury of the elements let loose upon our unsheltered heads; we had every terror and evil that could beset human nature, but pestilence ”

“ And one of these kept barking at my heel: “Carinne, that you were impotent to defend! What has become of the child?”
CHAPTER II.
CITOYENNE CARINNE. It was my unhappiness in the black spring-time of the “Terror” to see my old light acquaintance, the Abbé Michau, jogging on his way to the Place de la Bastille. I pitied him greatly. He had pursued Pleasure so fruitlessly all his days; and into this fatal quagmire had the elusive flame at length conducted him. He sat on the rail of the tumbril—a depressed, puzzled look on his face—between innocence and depravity. ”

“ We still remember the men who rejoiced in every death, and Americans in uniform rising to duty. And we remember the calling that came to us on that day, and continues to this hour: We will confront this mortal danger to all humanity. We will not tire, or rest, until the war on terror is won. ”

“ Where his glowing eye-balls turn, Thousand banners round him burn. Where he points his purple spear, Hasty, hasty Rout is there, Marking with indignant eye Fear to stop and shame to fly. There Confusion, Terror's child, Conflict fierce and Ruin wild, Agony that pants for breath, Despair and honourable Death. ”

“ In every sunny vale of France death is the countersign.
The purest blood in Britain's veins is being poured like wine.
Far, far across the crimsoned map the impassioned armies sweep,
Destruction flashes down the sky and penetrates the deep.
The Dreadnought knows the silent dread, and seas incarnadine
Attest the carnival of strife, the madman's battle scene.
Relentless, savage, hot, and grim the infuriate columns press
Where terror simulates disdain and danger is largess,
Where greedy youth claims death for bride and agony seems bliss. ”

“ In terror the inhabitants fled through their gates, but the soldiers of the bloodthirsty queen awaited them outside, sword in hand, with orders to cut them down without mercy as they appeared. The prince and all the leading men of the state perished, and only the lowest of the populace were left alive, while the whole land thereafter was laid under a load of tribute so heavy that it devastated the country like an invading army and caused the people to groan bitterly beneath the burden. ”

“ As one who feels the breathless nightmare grip His heart-strings, and through visioned horrors fares, Now on a thin-ledged chasm's rock-crumbling lip, Now on a tottering pinnacle that dare The front of heaven, while always unawares Weird monsters start above, around, beneath, Each glaring from some uglier mask of death, So the White Czar imperial progress made Through terror-haunted days. ”

“ The groans and cries of the legionaries, the screams of the mangled horses, and the roars and howlings of the lions, bleeding with sword and spear, tearing the dead, darting up the sides of the hills in terror, and rushing down again with the fresh thirst of gore, baffled all conception of fury and horror. But man was the conqueror at last; the savages, scared by the spear, and thinned in their numbers, made a rush in one body toward the ravine, overthrew everything in their way, and burst from the valley, awaking the desert for many a league with their roar. ”

“ If, as is assumed, he was fain to kill the Terror by the Terror, to fill up the abyss by dead bodies, and so cross over this bridge of corpses into the promised land of a reorganized society, his plan was the most horrible failure. ”

“ The State resembles an army; punishments must inspire terror; the idea of war is ever present. Such instincts, such a history, raises before them with tragic severity the idea of life; death is at hand, wounds, blood, tortures. The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. ”

“ The tiny savage groups, stranded in alien lands, far from the homes and families that they knew to be destroyed, carried on a mockery of war, lived off the land, fought their own countrymen if the occasion suited, and revived the ancient terror of hand-wielded, personal, one-head-at-a-time killing. ”

“ As to the Kings, they massacre, they threaten, they foam at the mouth with rage—and, above all, with terror! Already they see myriads of avengers arise out of the blood of the martyrs whom they assassinated. These crown-carriers have the vertigo. And there is good reason therefor. If a European war breaks out, immediately the Revolution will raise its head in their own camp and devour them; if peace prevails, the pacific tide of civilization will rise higher and higher, and engulf their thrones. Proceed, children."
"But at home!" cried George. "At home!" ”

“ Nor doubt it when in mad, disjointed times It shakes the torch of terror, and its cry Shrills o'er the quaking earth, and in the flame Of riot and war we see its awful form Rise by the scaffold, where the crimson axe Rings down its grooves the knell of shuddering kings. For ever in thine eyes, O Liberty, Shines that high light whereby the world is saved, And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee! ”