Charles Lever - Maurice Tiernay, Soldier of Fortune

‘That is, I know,’ said I, ‘a thriving business; but mine is even better; and, not to mystify you longer, I ‘ll just tell you what I am; which is, simply, a friend of the Citizen Robespierre.’

The blow told with full force; and I saw, in the terrified looks that were interchanged around the table, that my sojourn amongst them, whether destined to be of short or long duration, would not be disturbed by further liberties. It was truly a reign of terror that same period! The great agent of everything was the vague and shadowy dread of some terrible vengeance, against which precautions were all in vain. Men met each other with secret misgivings, and parted with the same dreadful distrust. The ties of kindred were all broken; brotherly affection died out. Existence was become like the struggle for life upon some shipwrecked raft, where each sought safety by his neighbour’s doom! At such a time – with such terrible teachings – children became men in all the sterner features of character; cruelty is a lesson so easily learned.

As for myself, energetic and ambitious by nature, the ascendency my first assumption of power suggested was too grateful a passion to be relinquished. The name – whose spell was like a talisman, because now the secret engine by which I determined to work out my fortune – Robespierre had become to my imagination like the slave of Aladdin’s lamp; and to conjure him up was to be all-powerful Even to Boivin himself this influence extended; and it was easy to perceive that he regarded the whole narrative of the pocket-book as a mere fable, invented to obtain a position as a spy over his household.

I was not unwilling to encourage the belief – it added to my importance, by increasing the fear I inspired; and thus I walked indolently about, giving myself those airs of mouchard that I deemed most fitting, and taking a mischievous delight in the terror I was inspiring.

The indolence of my life, however, soon wearied me, and I began to long for some occupation, or some pursuit. Teeming with excitement as the world was – every day, every hour, brimful of events – it was impossible to sit calmly on the shore, and watch the great, foaming current of human passions, without longing to be in the stream. Had I been a man at that time, I should have become a furious orator of the Mountain – an impassioned leader of the people. The impulse to stand foremost – to take a bold and prominent position – would have carried me to any lengths. I had caught up enough of the horrid fanaticism of the time to think that there was something grand and heroic in contempt for human suffering; that a man rose proudly above all the weakness of his nature, when, in the pursuit of some great object, he stifled within his breast every throb of affection – every sentiment of kindness and mercy. Such were the teachings rife at the time – such the first lessons that boyhood learned; and oh! what a terrible hour had that been for humanity if the generation then born had grown up to manhood unchastened and unconverted!

But to return to my daily life. As I perceived that a week had now elapsed, and the Citizen Robespierre had not revisited the ‘restaurant,’ nor taken any interest in my fate or fortunes, I began to fear lest Boivin should master his terror regarding me, and take heart to put me out of doors – an event which, in my present incertitude, would have been sorely inconvenient. I resolved, therefore, to practise a petty deception on my host, to sustain the influence of terror over him. This was, to absent myself every day at a certain hour, under the pretence of visiting my patron; letting fall, from time to time, certain indications to show in what part of the city I had been, and occasionally, as if in an unguarded moment, condescending to relate some piece of popular gossip. None ventured to inquire the source of my information – not one dared to impugn its veracity. Whatever their misgivings in secret, to myself they displayed the most credulous faith. Nor was their trust so much misplaced, for I had, in reality, become a perfect chronicle of all that went forward in Paris – never missing a debate in the Convention, where my retentive memory could carry away almost verbally all that I heard – ever present at every public fête or procession, whether the occasions were some insulting desecration of their former faith, or some tasteless mockery of heathen ceremonial.

My powers of mimicry, too, enabled me to imitate all the famous characters of the period; and in my assumed inviolability, I used to exhibit the uncouth gestures and spluttering utterance of Marat – the wild and terrible ravings of Danton – and even the reedy treble of my own patron Robespierre, as he screamed denunciations against the enemies of the people. It is true these exhibitions of mine were only given in secret to certain parties, who, by a kind of instinct, I felt could be trusted.

Such was my life, as one day, returning from the Convention, I beheld a man affixing to a wall a great placard, to which the passing crowd seemed to pay deep attention. It was a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, containing the names of above seven hundred Royalists, who were condemned to death, and who were to be executed in three tournées , on three successive days.

For sometime back the mob had not been gratified with a spectacle of this nature. In the ribald language of the day, the ‘holy guillotine had grown thirsty from long drought’; and they read the announcement with greedy eyes, commenting as they went upon those whose names were familiar to them. There were many of noble birth among the proscribed, but by far the greater number were priests, the whole sum of whose offending seemed written in the simple and touching words, ancien curé , of such a parish! It was strange to mark the bitterness of invective with which the people loaded these poor and innocent men, as though they were the source of all their misfortunes. The lazy indolence with which they reproached them seemed ten times more offensive in their eyes than the lives of ease and affluence led by the nobility. The fact was, they could not forgive men of their own rank and condition what they pardoned in the well born and the noble! an inconsistency that has characterised democracy in other situations beside this.

As I ran my eyes down the list of those confined in the Temple, I came to a name which smote my heart with a pang of ingratitude as well as sorrow – the ‘Père Michel Delannois, soi disant curé de St. Blois’ – my poor friend and protector was there among the doomed! If, up to that moment, I had made no effort to see him, I must own the reason lay in my own selfish feeling of shame – the dread that he should mark the change that had taken place in me, a change that I felt extended to all about me, and showed itself in my manner as it influenced my every action. It was not alone that I lost the obedient air and quiet submissiveness of the child, but I had assumed the very extravagance of that democratic insolence which was the mode among the leading characters of the time.

How should I present myself before him, the very impersonation of all the vices against which he used to warn me – how exhibit the utter failure of all his teachings and his hopes? What would this be but to embitter his reflections needlessly. Such were the specious reasons with which I fed my self-love, and satisfied my conscience; but now, as I read his name in that terrible catalogue, their plausibility served me no longer, and at last I forgot myself to remember only him.

‘I will see him at once,’ thought I, ‘whatever it may cost me – I will stay beside him for his last few hours of life; and when he carries with him from this world many an evil memory of shame and treachery, ingratitude from me shall not increase the burthen.’ And with this resolve I turned my steps homeward.