The soldiers—there were a score of them—occupied the best place in the room, as was only fitting; they sat squeezed tightly against one another like dried figs in a box, on the two benches on either side of the centre trestle table. Old Baptiste Portal sat with them, beside the officer. Some kind of lieutenant this man appeared to be, or other subaltern; but oh dear me! these days one could hardly tell an officer from the ragtag and bobtail of the army, save for the fact that he wore epaulettes. Now this man—but there! what was the use of comparing these ruffians with the splendid officers of the King’s armies in the past?
This one certainly was not proud. He sat with his men, joked, drank with them, and presently he convened friend Portal to a glass of wine: “A la santé,” he added, “de la République, and of Citizen Robespierre, the great and incorruptible master of France!”
Baptiste, wagging his old head, had not liked to refuse, because soldiers were soldiers and these had been at great pains to explain to him that the reason why the guillotine was kept so busy was because Frenchmen had not yet learned to be good Republicans.
“We’ve cut off the head of Louis Capet and of the widow Capet too,” the officer had added with grim significance, “but there are still Frenchmen who are bad patriots and hanker after the return of the tyrants.”
Now Baptiste, like all his like in the Dauphiné, had learned in childhood to worship God and honour the King. The crime of regicide appeared to him unforgivable, like that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost, which M. le Curé used vaguely to hint at, and which no one understood. In addition to that, Baptiste greatly resented His late Majesty King Louis XVI and his august Queen being irreverently referred to as Louis Capet and the widow Capet. But he kept his own counsel and silently drank his wine. What his thoughts were at the moment was nobody’s business.
After that, talk drifted to the neighbourhood: the aristos who still clung to the land which by right belonged to the people. Neither Baptiste nor his customers—old peasants from the district—were a match for the lieutenant and his corporals in such discussions. They did not dare argue, only shook their heads and sighed at the coarse jests which the soldiers uttered against people and families whom everyone in the Dauphiné knew and esteemed.
The Frontenacs for instance.
The talk and the jests had turned on the Frontenacs: people who had owned the land for as long as the oldest inhabitant could remember and God only knows how long before that. Well! it appeared that in the eyes of these soldiers of the Republic the Frontenacs were bad patriots, tyrants and traitors. Didn’t Citizen Portal know that?
No! Portal did not—he had never been called “citizen” before, and didn’t like it: he was just Baptiste to those who knew him, quoi?—Nor would he admit that the Frontenacs were traitors. There was Monsieur, who knew more about cattle and almonds than any man for leagues around. How could he be a bad patriot? And Madame, who was very good and pious, and Mademoiselle who was so ill and delicate. But on this there followed an altercation—stern rebuke of Baptiste from the officer for talking of “Monsieur,” of “Madame” and “Mademoiselle.” Bah! there were no aristos left these days. “Aren’t we all citizens of France?” the lieutenant concluded grandiloquently.
Silence and submission on the part of all the groundlings which followed on the lieutenant’s rebuke, somewhat mollified the latter’s aggressive patriotism. He condescended to relate how he had been deputed to make a perquisition in the house of the Frontenacs, and if anything was found the least compromising, then the devil help the whole brood: their lives would not be worth an hour’s purchase. In fact, in the lieutenant’s opinion—and who better qualified to hold one?—the Frontenacs were already judged, condemned, and as good as guillotined. He held with the “law of the suspect,” lately enacted by the National Assembly, did Lieutenant Godet.
Again much wagging of heads! “The Committees in all Sections,” Godet now goes on airily, and proceeds to pick his teeth after that excellently stewed scrag-end of mutton, “the Committees in all Sections are ordered in future to arrest all persons who are suspect.”
No one knows what is a Committee, nor yet a Section: but they are evidently fearsome things. But no matter about them: the thing is who are the “suspect” who are thus arrestable?
“The Frontenacs are suspect,” the lieutenant explains whilst sucking his toothpick, “and so are all persons who by their actions—or—their writings have become—er—suspect.”
Not very illuminating perhaps, but distinctly productive of awe. The worthies of Sisteron, those who are privileged to sit close to the centre table and actually to put in a word with the soldiers, sip their wine in silence. Just below the tiny window at the end of the room two charcoal-burners, or woodcutters—I know not what they are—are lending an attentive ear. They dare not join in the conversation because they are comparative strangers, vagabonds really, come to pick up a few sous by doing menial work too lowering for a local peasant to do. One of them is small and slender, but looks vigorous; the other, much older, with stooping shoulders, and grey, lank hair that falls over a wrinkled forehead. He is harassed by a constant, tearing cough which he strives in vain to suppress out of respect for the company.
“But,” the worthy Portal puts in tentatively, “how does one know Monsieur le—I mean citizen officer, that a person is in verity suspect?”
The lieutenant explains with a sweeping gesture of the toothpick: “If you are a good patriot, Citizen Portal, you are able to recognize a Suspect in the street, you can seize him by the collar then and there, and you may drag him
