Chapter X:


But the time soon came, even in these remote villages, when agitator and demagogues would rub their hands with glee. They would stretch out their legs in front of their own hearths and declare complacently that the revolution which they had foretold had not only come but come to stay. Distress had become general; with it stalked resentment and a fury of reprisals.


In the provincial towns bread riots were of constant occurrence; the starving people had taken to looting granaries and stores; in several cases shops, house, châteaux had been fired. Tub thumpers were shouting daily to willing ears the deadly slogan: "Liberty and Equality."


Paris was full of men and women who had wandered to the capital from the neighbouring towns and villages, armed with scythes and other agricultural implements which had become useless, since there were no crops to harvest; starving, wrathful, and determined, they paraded the streets shouting for redress. At street corners, in the clubs, in public bars, malcontents waved their arms and spouted magnificent phrases about Liberty and the sovereignty of the people. Danton thundered forth his call to arms, to bloodshed and revenge.


Misery had sown discontent and reaped revolution. Less than a year later butchery had begun.


In September, '92, a brutish crowd, armed with pikes, scythes, old blunderbusses, and rifles, rushed through the streets of Paris, stormed the houses of detention that were overcrowded with unfortunate prisoners, and in cold blood massacred hundreds of men, women, and children, while Danton, the darling of the crowd, the all-powerful party leader, did not raise a hand to stop the carnage.


André Vallon, long before then, had given up his profession in order to join the army. France was besieged on every side: the whole of Europe had taken up arms against her, outraged at the excesses of this revolution which aimed at regicide and achieved wholesale butchery. The onus of carrying on a world war now rested upon the shoulders of men with no experience of organization or government. The responsibilities which hitherto had devolved solely upon the King and his ministers were theirs now; and they were already finding out that to depose the King, to wrest from him the control of civil and military administration, was quite one thing, but to defend the country against the foreign invader, with troops whom they themselves had taught to mutiny, was quite another. To rouse the people to insurrection had not been difficult, famine and misery had helped in the task; but to feed a whole nation and, at the same time, to raise an army strong enough to fight both Austria and Prussia, was not quite so easy.


Already these new masters of France hated and despised one another. Five out of the six ministers who formed the Executive were timid and vacillating. Danton alone dominated them. He, too, was ignorant of the essentials that make up a stable government, but at any rate was a man - a lion amid a flock of sheep.


His impassioned oratory, his powerful voice, his immense patriotism, helped to raise an army of recruits, to send them to the frontiers, insufficiently armed, insufficiently clothed, empty bellied and undisciplined, but full of enthusiasm for la patrie in danger. There is nothing in the world that quite comes up to the love of a Frenchman for his country. France is a beautiful country; every corner of it is beautiful, and its sons love it with a love that in a way transcends the patriotism of every other nation. La patrie is a word that cannot be rendered in any other language - it is not a question of home, of family, of race! it is just France! And there are few pages in the world's history so pathetic and yet so magnificent as this epic of raw, untrained, famished recruits, dragging their shoeless feet along the muddy woods of Champagne, on whose sacred soil the King of Prussia was advancing with his well trained, highly equipped army, and, with the sheer enthusiasm of love for their country and determination to defend her against foreign invasion, keeping the whole of Europe at bay.


At home now there remained, in addition to the women and children, only the halt and the maimed, a few youngsters too débile to bear arms, the only sons of widowed mothers, who were exempt from military service, and the fathers of growing families. Quite a crowd, nevertheless, and one that, in the opinion of the Executive up in Paris, must be made to bear its part in furthering the glorious Revolution.


Inflammatory placards were posted up at every street corner and every crossroad, proclaiming the sovereignty of the people and headed by Danton's declaration: "We must govern by fear."


Terror had become the order of the day. Men and women - peaceable and respectable citizens - went in fear of their lives. Every crime had become permissible; every act of violence was considered patriotic; every outrage was not only condoned but commended; so long as they were directed against those who, through their selfish enjoyment of life, their riches, their contentment and luxury, had proved themselves traitors to their country and enemies of the people.


And men in three-cornered hats and cloth coast ornamented with brass buttons, pot bellied and bleary eyed, were sent round the provincial towns on a tour of active propaganda. Hoisted on tables outside the taverns they harangue the famished crowds, denouncing the traitors that caused all the sufferings of the people, and foretelling an era of plenty, which certainly would soon come if only France were swept clean of King and aristocrats


At first the crowds listened in sullen silence, and in some places it took the rogues some time to work the people up to a state of effervescence. They were all so poor and so hungry that in most cases all they wanted to do was to sit still and brood over their wrongs. But the demagogues were no fools; they knew their business. It was not inertia they wanted, or acceptance of penury. They were out to make trouble and to stir up strife. Within half an hour they had hurled sufficient invectives against the owner of the nearest château - his hoard of wheat and fuel, his cellar full of good wines - to work up the lethargic blood of these ignorant folk into a state of frenzy. The poisonous suggestion of reprisals began to filter down into receptive brains, and men who saw their wives and children dying for want of food began lending a more attentive ear to these prophecies of a panacea for all their ills.
"Liberty!" and "The sovereign will of the people!" The great slogans,

thundered at them day after day, began to make an appeal to their empty stomachs and frozen limbs. If liberty meant taking what you want, eating your fill, and drinking good wine; if it meant covering your wife's emaciated shoulders with a warm shawl and putting shoes on your children's feet, then liberty by all means!


In the villages the tavern orators were for the most part local malcontents or ambitious rascals who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by a complete upheaval of the social system. Subsides for carrying on the propaganda came from the clubs in Paris. It was a paying game, carried on in one village by a defaulting clerk, in another by a dishonest servant or perhaps it would be an absconding lawyer, or even an unfrocked priest.


At Val-le-Roi it was Hector Talon.


Talon was still nominally steward to Monseigneur le Duc de Marigny, but the place had become a sinecure. The estates had become so impoverished that they were no longer worth administering. Talon knew well enough that the days of Marigny in its present condition were numbered. Either the owner would emigrate - as so many of his kind had done, in which case the whole of the property would be confiscated - or he would be arrested on some pretext or other and sent to the guillotine. And it was quite a usual thing for faithful servants to share the fate of their masters.


Now, Talon was quite determined not to share any untoward fate with his employer or with anyone else. He wanted to be on the right side. Not only now, but in the future.


Indeed, Hector Talon was no fool. He knew as well as anybody that the present state of affairs could not possibly last; that presently - in three, four, or even ten years, perhaps - tempers would quieten down, and when all these assassins who were now in power had butchered one another, an era of moderation would then assert itself. And - who knows? - it was just possible that the reaction would be so great that the political pendulum would swing right over to the old regime.


Fortunately for him, Talon was an adept as dual rôles. Monseigneur - or ci-devant Marigny, as he was contemptuously designated by his former sycophants - lived a solitary life up at the château, like an eagle in its eerie, with only his daughter for company and a couple of his old servants to wait on him. Talon was, as it were, the only link between him and the seething world down below. It was easy enough to throw dust in his eyes and to persuade him that the interests of respectable citizens, be they bailiffs or ex-dukes were identical. There certainly was the Curé of Val-le-Roi, the Abbé de Rosemonde, who had kept up friendship with De Marigny and who might have enlightened him as to the real worth of Hector Talon; but the old priest was one of those entirely childlike natures which never see anything that is not thrust under their very noses, who never seem to know anything of what goes on around them, and whom it is the easiest thing in the world to hoodwink.


Talon, therefore, had a clear field up at the château for his rôle of faithful administrator entirely devoted to his employer's interests. But in the village taverns, surrounded by all the malcontents of the countryside, adulated and puffed up with his own importance, he gave lip service to Danton and Marat, spouted insults at every man or women who had ever owned a hectare of land, and spat out the venom of malice and envy which was the accumulation of years.


Of a truth, he was on the safe side. During the past lean years his corpulence had melted away; he was thin now and more bandy-legged than ever, with wide, bony shoulders and hollow belly. His head rolled about on his long, lean neck, crowned with a stubble of short, tawny, ill brushed hair; his lips were thin and his mouth awry; his chin was pointed, and his hollow cheeks were darkened with the bristles of an unshaven beard. And under overhanging brows his eyes, which had a yellow tinge in them, were always veiled by heavy, blue-veined lids. Unlike the regular army of tub thumpers, he affected the meanest and dirtiest of clothes, a ragged shirt which had not seen the washtub for months, breeches that hardly covered his lean thighs; his shanks were bare, and his feet were thrust in sabots stuffed with straw.


But he had a powerful voice and a good delivery and an easy choice of words. For the most part he drew his inspiration for his most inflammatory speeches from articles which he picked out of various Paris journals.


"Liberty! The time has come, citizens, not only to talk of liberty, but to fight in her sacred cause!" his was one of his favourite tirades. And then he would go on: "Let us take up arms like our brave soldiers on the frontier and engage in a hand-to-hand struggle against tryanny, against all those vampires who suck our blood and strive to break our will. France needs you, citizens, every one of you; she needs your help to gain that freedom for which she pines; she needs all your strength, all your courage. She needs the patriotism of self-sacrifice. To arms, citizens, to arms! Think no longer of yourselves or of your wives or children! Think only of liberty. And if in your heart you should reckon the cost of your lives, then remember that there are forty-thousand palaces, châteaux, and abodes of the rich, half the wealth of France, that will become yours in payment for your valour and for your loyalty."


And after he had delivered himself of this oratory he would go home, put on a cloth coat and breeches, woollen stockings and buckled shoes, and make his way up to the château, and fill Monseigneur's ears with protestations of his loyalty.
His wife sometimes gave him a word of warning.


"If the old crow should hear of your oratory..." she would say.


"He wouldn't believe anything against me," Talon retorted with a complacent snigger.


"Rumours do travel," Lucile insisted. "I heard in the village, for instances, that it was you who egged that crowd on last night to set fire to the mill and the granaries."


Talon nodded. "Quite true," he said drily. "I did."


"What was the good? The granaries were empty, and they'll want to burn the château down next."


"I hope they do."


"What? Set fire to the château?"


"No. Only threaten to."


Lucile Talon was silent for a moment or two. By the feeble light of a flickering tallow candle she could only partly see the expression on her husband's face. It was not pretty at this moment, and Lucile gave a slight shudder as she turned away and busied herself for a time with her household affairs. But presanlty she came back into the parlour and sat down at the table opposite her husband.


"You have a plan in your head, Hector," she said decisively. "What is it?"


Then, as he made no reply, only stared and stared into the flickering flame, she added: "You won't tell me?"


"It is too vague at present," he replied at last, "for you to understand."


And Lucile saw the yellow gleam in his eyes, shining like the light in the eyes of a cat.

 

©Blakeney Manor, 2002