The Elusive Pimpernel Read online

  Produced by J.C. Byers and L.M. Shaf

  THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL

  By Baroness Orczy

  Contents

  I. Paris: 1793 II. A Retrospect III. Ex-Ambassador Chauvelin IV. The Richmond Gala V. Sir Percy and His Lady VI. For the Poor of Paris VII. Premonition VIII. The Invitation IX. Demoiselle Candeille X. Lady Blakeney's Rout XI. The Challenge XII. Time -- Place -- Conditions XIII. Reflections XIV. The Ruling Passion XV. Farewell XVI. The Passport XVII. Boulogne XVIII. No. 6 XIX. The Strength of the Weak XX. Triumph XXI. Suspense XXII. Not Death XXIII. The Hostage XXIV. Colleagues XXV. The Unexpected XXVI. The Terms of the Bargain XXVII. The Decision XXVIII. The Midnight Watch XXIX. The National Fete XXX. The Procession XXXI. Final Dispositions XXXII. The Letter XXXIII. The English Spy XXXIV. The Angelus XXXV. Marguerite

  Chapter I: Paris: 1793

  There was not even a reaction.

  On! ever on! in that wild, surging torrent; sowing the wind of anarchy,of terrorism, of lust of blood and hate, and reaping a hurricane ofdestruction and of horror.

  On! ever on! France, with Paris and all her children still rushesblindly, madly on; defies the powerful coalition,--Austria, England,Spain, Prussia, all joined together to stem the flow of carnage,--defiesthe Universe and defies God!

  Paris this September 1793!--or shall we call it Vendemiaire, Year I.of the Republic?--call it what we will! Paris! a city of bloodshed, ofhumanity in its lowest, most degraded aspect. France herself a giganticself-devouring monster, her fairest cities destroyed, Lyons razed to theground, Toulon, Marseilles, masses of blackened ruins, her bravest sonsturned to lustful brutes or to abject cowards seeking safety at the costof any humiliation.

  That is thy reward, oh mighty, holy Revolution! apotheosis of equalityand fraternity! grand rival of decadent Christianity.

  Five weeks now since Marat, the bloodthirsty Friend of the People,succumbed beneath the sheath-knife of a virgin patriot, a month sincehis murderess walked proudly, even enthusiastically, to the guillotine!There has been no reaction--only a great sigh!... Not of content orsatisfied lust, but a sigh such as the man-eating tiger might heaveafter his first taste of long-coveted blood.

  A sigh for more!

  A king on the scaffold; a queen degraded and abased, awaiting death,which lingers on the threshold of her infamous prison; eight hundredscions of ancient houses that have made the history of France; bravegenerals, Custine, Blanchelande, Houchard, Beauharnais; worthy patriots,noble-hearted women, misguided enthusiasts, all by the score and by thehundred, up the few wooden steps which lead to the guillotine.

  An achievement of truth!

  And still that sigh for more!

  But for the moment,--a few seconds only,--Paris looked round her mightyself, and thought things over!

  The man-eating tiger for the space of a sigh licked his powerful jawsand pondered!

  Something new!--something wonderful!

  We have had a new Constitution, a new Justice, new Laws, a new Almanack!

  What next?

  Why, obviously!--How comes it that great, intellectual, aesthetic Parisnever thought of such a wonderful thing before?

  A new religion!

  Christianity is old and obsolete, priests are aristocrats, wealthyoppressors of the People, the Church but another form of wanton tyranny.

  Let us by all means have a new religion.

  Already something has been done to destroy the old! To destroy! alwaysto destroy! Churches have been ransacked, altars spoliated, tombsdesecrated, priests and curates murdered; but that is not enough.

  There must be a new religion; and to attain that there must be a newGod.

  "Man is a born idol-worshipper."

  Very well then! let the People have a new religion and a new God.

  Stay!--Not a God this time!--for God means Majesty, Power, Kingship!everything in fact which the mighty hand of the people of France hasstruggled and fought to destroy.

  Not a God, but a goddess.

  A goddess! an idol! a toy! since even the man-eating tiger must playsometimes.

  Paris wanted a new religion, and a new toy, and grave men, ardentpatriots, mad enthusiasts, sat in the Assembly of the Convention andseriously discussed the means of providing her with both these thingswhich she asked for.

  Chaumette, I think it was, who first solved the difficulty:--ProcureurChaumette, head of the Paris Municipality, he who had ordered thatthe cart which bore the dethroned queen to the squalid prison of theConciergerie should be led slowly past her own late palace of theTuileries, and should be stopped there just long enough for her to seeand to feel in one grand mental vision all that she had been when shedwelt there, and all that she now was by the will of the People.

  Chaumette, as you see, was refined, artistic;--the torture of the fallenQueen's heart meant more to him than a blow of the guillotine on herneck.

  No wonder, therefore, that it was Procureur Chaumette who firstdiscovered exactly what type of new religion Paris wanted just now.

  "Let us have a Goddess of Reason," he said, "typified if you will bythe most beautiful woman in Paris. Let us have a feast of the Goddess ofReason, let there be a pyre of all the gew-gaws which for centurieshave been flaunted by overbearing priests before the eyes of starvingmultitudes, let the People rejoice and dance around that funeral pile,and above it all let the new Goddess tower smiling and triumphant. TheGoddess of Reason! the only deity our new and regenerate France shallacknowledge throughout the centuries which are to come!"

  Loud applause greeted the impassioned speech.

  "A new goddess, by all means!" shouted the grave gentlemen of theNational Assembly, "the Goddess of Reason!"

  They were all eager that the People should have this toy; something toplay with and to tease, round which to dance the mad Carmagnole and singthe ever-recurring "Ca ira."

  Something to distract the minds of the populace from the consequences ofits own deeds, and the helplessness of its legislators.

  Procureur Chaumette enlarged upon his original idea; like a true artistwho sees the broad effect of a picture at a glance and then fills in theminute details, he was already busy elaborating his scheme.

  "The goddess must be beautiful... not too young... Reason can only gohand in hand with the riper age of second youth... she must be deckedout in classical draperies, severe yet suggestive... she must be rougedand painted... for she is a mere idol... easily to be appeased withincense, music and laughter."

  He was getting deeply interested in his subject, seeking minutiae ofdetail, with which to render his theme more and more attractive.

  But patience was never the characteristic of the RevolutionaryGovernment of France. The National Assembly soon tired of Chaumette'sdithyrambic utterances. Up aloft on the Mountain, Danton was yawninglike a gigantic leopard.

  Soon Henriot was on his feet. He had a far finer scheme than that ofthe Procureur to place before his colleagues. A grand National fete,semi-religious in character, but of the new religion which destroyed anddesecrated and never knelt in worship.

  Citizen Chaumette's Goddess of Reason by all means--Henriot concededthat the idea was a good one--but the goddess merely as a figure-head:around her a procession of unfrocked and apostate priests, typifyingthe destruction of ancient hierarchy, mules carrying loads of sacredvessels, the spoils of ten thousand churches of France, and ballet girlsin bacchanalian robes, dancing the Carmagnole around the new deity.

  Public Prosecutor Foucquier Tinville thought all these schemes veryta
me. Why should the People of France be led to think that the era ofa new religion would mean an era of milk and water, of pageants and offireworks? Let every man, woman, and child know that this was an era ofblood and again of blood.

  "Oh!" he exclaimed in passionate accents, "would that all the traitorsin France had but one head, that it might be cut off with one blow ofthe guillotine!"

  He approved of the National fete, but he desired an apotheosis of theguillotine; he undertook to find ten thousand traitors to be beheaded onone grand and glorious day: ten thousand heads to adorn the Place dela Revolution on a great, never-to-be-forgotten evening, after theguillotine had accomplished this record work.

  But Collot d'Herbois would also have his say. Collot lately hailed fromthe South, with a reputation for ferocity unparalleled throughout thewhole of this horrible decade. He would not be outdone by Tinville'sbloodthirsty schemes.

  He was the inventor of the "Noyades," which had been so successful atLyons and Marseilles. "Why not give the inhabitants of Paris one ofthese exhilarating spectacles?" he asked with a coarse, brutal laugh.

  Then he explained his invention, of which he was inordinately proud.Some two or three hundred traitors, men, women, and children, tiedsecurely together with ropes in great, human bundles and thrown upon abarge in the middle of the river: the barge with a hole in her bottom!not too large! only sufficient to cause her to sink slowly, very slowly,in sight of the crowd of delighted spectators.

  The cries of the women and children, and even of the men, as they feltthe waters rising and gradually enveloping them, as they felt themselvespowerless even for a fruitless struggle, had proved most exhilarating,so Citizen Collot declared, to the hearts of the true patriots of Lyons.

  Thus the discussion continued.

  This was the era when every man had but one desire, that of outdoingothers in ferocity and brutality, and but one care, that of saving hisown head by threatening that of his neighbour.

  The great duel between the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties,the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-bloodedRobespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-devouringmonsters had dug their claws into one another, but the issue of thecombat was still at stake.

  Neither of these two giants had taken part in these deliberations anentthe new religion and the new goddess. Danton gave signs now and thenof the greatest impatience, and muttered something about a new form oftyranny, a new kind of oppression.

  On the left, Robespierre in immaculate sea-green coat and carefullygauffered linen was quietly polishing the nails of his right handagainst the palm of his left.

  But nothing escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious egoism, hisunbounded ambition was even now calculating what advantages to himselfmight accrue from this idea of the new religion and of the Nationalfete, what personal aggrandisement he could derive therefrom.

  The matter outwardly seemed trivial enough, but already his keen andcalculating mind had seen various side issues which might tend to placehim--Robespierre--on a yet higher and more unassailable pinnacle.

  Surrounded by those who hated him, those who envied and those who fearedhim, he ruled over them all by the strength of his own cold-bloodedsavagery, by the resistless power of his merciless cruelty.

  He cared about nobody but himself, about nothing but his own exaltation:every action of his career, since he gave up his small practice in aquiet provincial town in order to throw himself into the wild vortexof revolutionary politics, every word he ever uttered had but oneaim--Himself.

  He saw his colleagues and comrades of the old Jacobin Clubs ruthlesslydestroyed around him: friends he had none, and all left him indifferent;and now he had hundreds of enemies in every assembly and club in Paris,and these too one by one were being swept up in that wild whirlpoolwhich they themselves had created.

  Impassive, serene, always ready with a calm answer, when passionraged most hotly around him, Robespierre, the most ambitious, mostself-seeking demagogue of his time, had acquired the reputation of beingincorruptible and selfless, an enthusiastic servant of the Republic.

  The sea-green Incorruptible!

  And thus whilst others talked and argued, waxed hot over schemes forprocessions and pageantry, or loudly denounced the whole matter as thework of a traitor, he, of the sea-green coat, sat quietly polishing hisnails.

  But he had already weighed all these discussions in the balance of hismind, placed them in the crucible of his ambition, and turned them intosomething that would benefit him and strengthen his position.

  Aye! the feast should be brilliant enough! gay or horrible, mad orfearful, but through it all the people of France must be made to feelthat there was a guiding hand which ruled the destinies of all, a headwhich framed the new laws, which consolidated the new religion andestablished its new goddess: the Goddess of Reason.

  Robespierre, her prophet!

  Chapter II: A Retrospect