The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [56]
Danton bravely accepted the term. Like Clovis, he had for a moment dunked his head in this baptism of blood, only to raise it higher and more menacingly than before. A further occasion to resort to past terror presented itself with the trial of the King. Violence and moderation entered not yet into a battle of persons, but into a battle of principles. Relative strengths were tested on the royal prisoner. Moderation was vanquished and the head of Louis XVI fell on the scaffold.
As the tenth of August had done, the twenty-first of January gave the coalition back all its energy. The same man was still set up to oppose them, but the outcome was not the same. Dumouriez, halted in his military progress by the reigning chaos within the government, which ensured that the needed manpower and money never reached him, declared himself against the Jacobins, whom he blamed for all the chaos, adopted the party of the Girondins, and then promptly sank them by declaring himself their friend—the kiss of death.
The Vendée then rose up and the departments9 threatened to follow suit; reversals led to betrayals and betrayals to reversals. The Jacobins accused the moderates of trying to polish them off on the tenth of March—that is, on the night on which our story opened. But too much haste on the part of their adversaries saved them, along with, perhaps, the rain that had caused Pétion, that profound anatomist of the esprit de Paris, to say: “It’s raining, nothing will happen tonight.”
But since the tenth of March everything had gone against the Girondins, spelling ruin: Marat10 was accused and acquitted; Robespierre and Danton were now freshly reconciled, at least as far as a tiger and a lion can be reconciled for the purpose of bringing down a bull they’re both keen to devour; Hanriot,11 the Septembasher, was appointed commander-in-chief of the National Guard. Everything presaged the terrible day when the last dike that the Revolution had flung up to stem the stormy tide of the Terror would be smashed and swept away.
Those were the momentous events in which, in any other circumstances, Maurice would have taken an active part—which his powerful nature and his passionate patriotism naturally inclined him toward. But, happily or unhappily for Maurice, neither Lorin’s exhortations nor the terrible preoccupations of the street had been able to chase from his mind the single idea that obsessed him. When the thirty-first of May arrived, the fearsome assailant of the Bastille and the Tuileries was lying flat on his back in bed, racked by the fever that kills the strongest, and yet which a mere glance can dispel, a mere word heal.
13
THE THIRTY-FIRST OF MAY
On the infamous thirty-first of May, when the tocsins sounded the call to arms from the break of day on, the battalion of the faubourg Saint-Victor entered the Temple. When all the customary formalities had been completed and the posts distributed, the municipal officers on duty were seen to arrive and four units of cannoneer reinforcements joined those already in place in the artillery at the entrance to the Temple.
At the same time as the cannon, Santerre arrived with his yellow woolen epaulets and his usual getup, in which his patriotism could be read in great fat stains. He reviewed the battalion, which he found to be in a fit state, and counted the municipal officers, who numbered only three.
“Why only three municipals?” he asked. “Who’s the bad citizen who’s missing?”
“The one missing, citizen general, is nevertheless no wimp,” answered our former acquaintance Agricola, “for it is the secretary of the Lepelletier section, the leader of the brave Thermopylae, citizen Maurice Lindey.”
“Good, good,” said Santerre. “Like you, I acknowledge the patriotism of citizen Maurice Lindey, but that won’t stop him