书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
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第851章

They, too, maintain themselves by Terror; only, like so many Tartuffes, they are not disposed to act openly as executioners. The Directory, heir to the Convention, affects to repudiate its inheritance: "Woe," says Boulay de la Meurthe, "to whoever would re-establish scaffolds." There is to be no guillotine; its purveyors have been too strongly denounced; they stand too near the red stream and view with too great nervous horror those who fed it. It is better to employ death at a distance, lingering and spontaneous, with no effusion of human blood, "dry," less repulsive than the other sort, but more painful and not less certain; this shall be imprisonment on the marshes of Rochefort, and, better still, transportation to the feverish coasts of Guyanna: there is no distinction between the mode used by the Convention and that of the Directory, except the distinction between to kill and to cause death.[84] Moreover, every brutality that can be employed to repress the indignation of the proscribed by fear is exhausted on the way. - The first convoy which bears away, with thirteen others, Barthélémy, who negotiated the treaty of Basle, Pichegru, the conqueror of Holland, Lafond-Ladébat, president of the council of the Five Hundred, Barbé-Marbois, president of the council of the Ancients, was at first provided with carriages.[85] An order of the Directory substitutes for these the prison van, an iron car with one door bolted and padlocked, and, overhead, openings through which the rain poured in streams, and with common boards for seats. This lumbering machine without springs rolls along at a fast trot along the ruts in the road, each jolt sending the condemned inmates against the hard oak sides and roof; one of these, on reaching Blois, "shows his black-and-blue elbows." The man selected to command this escort is the vilest and most brutal reprobate in the army, Dutertre, a coppersmith foreman before the Revolution, next an officer and sentenced to be put in irons for stealing in the La Vendée war, and such a natural robber that he again robs his men of their pay on the road; he is evidently qualified for his work. On stopping at Blois, "he passes the night in an orgy with his brothers and friends,"fellow-thieves and murderers as above described. He curses Madame Barbé-Marbois who comes to take leave of her husband, dismissing on the spot the commandant of the gendarmerie who supports her in a swoon, and, noticing the respect and attentions which all the inhabitants, even the functionaries, show to the prisoners, he cries out, "Well, what airs and graces for people that will perhaps be dead in three or four days!" On the vessel which transports them, and still in sight of Rochelle, a boat is observed rowing vigorously to overtake them and they hear a shout of "I am Lafond-Ladébat's son! Allow me to embrace my father!" A speaking-trumpet from the vessel replies: "Keep away or you'll be fired on!" - Their cabins, on the voyage, are noxious; they are not allowed to be on deck more than four at a time, one hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. The sailors and soldiers are forbidden to speak to them; their food consists of a sailor's ration, and this is spoilt; toward the end of the voyage they are starved. In Guyanna they are allowed one candle to a mess, and no table-linen; they lack water, or it is not drinkable; out of sixteen taken to Sinnamary only two survive.

Those who are deported the following year, priests, monks, deputies, journalists and artisans accused of emigration, fare worse. On all the roads leading to Rochefort, sorrowful crowds are seen on carts or tramping along in files, on foot, the same as former chains of convicts. "An old man of eighty-two, Monsieur Dulaurent of Quimper, thus traverses four departments," in irons which strangle him.

Following upon this, the poor creatures, between the decks of the "Décade" and the "Bayonnaise," crammed in, suffocated through lack of air and by the torrid heat, badly treated and robbed, die of hunger or asphyxia, while Guyanna completes the work of the voyage: out of 193conveyed on board the 'Décade," only 39 remain at the end of twenty-two months, and of the 120 brought by the 'Bayonnaise," only one is left. - Meanwhile, in France, in the casemates of the islands of Rhéand Oléron, over twelve hundred priests become stifled or rot away, while, on all sides, the military commissioners in the departments shoot down vigorously. At Paris, and in its environs, at Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, Rennes, and in most of the large towns, sudden arrests and clandestine abductions go on multiplying.[86] "Nobody, on retiring to rest, is sure of awaking in freedom the next morning. .

. . From Bayonne to Brussels, there is but one sentiment, that of unbounded consternation. No one dares either to speak to, encounter, look at or help one another. Everybody keeps aloof, trembles and hides away." - So that through this third offensive reaction, the Jacobin Conquest is completed, and the conquering band, the new feudalism, becomes a fixed installation. "All who pass here," writes a Tours habitant, "state that there is no difference in the country between these times and Robespierre's[87].. . . . It is certain that the soil is not tenable, and that the people are continually threatened with exactions as in a conquered country. . . .