第69章

One of the great benefits of an organised society is that it does restrain these dangerous characters, whom nothing but social restraints can hold.

Fouquier-Tinville died without understanding why he was condemned, and from the revolutionary point of view his condemnation was not justifiable.Had he not merely zealously executed the orders of his superiors? It is impossible to class him with the representatives who were sent into the provinces, who could not be supervised.The delegates of the Convention examined all his sentences and approved of them up to the last.

If his cruelty and his summary fashion of trying the prisoners before him had not been encouraged by his chiefs, he could not have remained in power.In condemning Fouquier-Tinville, the Convention condemned its own frightful system of government.It understood this fact, and sent to the scaffold a number of Terrorists whom Fouquier-Tinville had merely served as a faithful agent.

Beside Fouquier-Tinville we may set Dumas, who presided over the Revolutionary Tribunal, and who also displayed an excessive cruelty, which was whetted by an intense fear.He never went out without two loaded pistols, barricaded himself in his house, and only spoke to visitors through a wicket.His distrust of everybody, including his own wife, was absolute.He even imprisoned the latter, and was about to have her executed when Thermidor arrived.

Among the men whom the Convention brought to light, Billaud-Varenne was one of the wildest and, most brutal.He may be regarded as a perfect type of bestial ferocity.

``In these hours of fruitful anger and heroic anguish he remained calm, acquitting himself methodically of his task--and it was a frightful task: he appeared officially at the massacres of the Abbaye, congratulated the assassins, and promised them money; upon which he went home as if he had merely been taking a walk.We see him as president of the Jacobin Club, president of the Convention, and member of the Committee of Public Safety; he drags the Girondists to the scaffold: he drags the queen thither, and his former patron, Danton, said of him, `Billaud has a dagger under his tongue.' He approves of the cannonades at Lyons, the drownings at Nantes, the massacres at Arras; he organises the pitiless commission of Orange; he is concerned in the laws of Prairial; he eggs on Fouquier-Tinville; on all decrees of death is his name, often the first; he signs before his colleagues; he is without pity, without emotion, without enthusiasm; when others are frightened, hesitate, and draw back, he goes his way, speaking in turgid sentences, `shaking his lion's mane'--for to make his cold and impassive face more in harmony with the exuberance that surrounds him he now decks himself in a yellow wig which would make one laugh were it on any but the sinister head of Billaud-Varenne.When Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon are threatened in turn, he deserts them and goes over to the enemy, and pushes them under the knife....Why? What is his aim? No one knows; he is not in any way ambitious; he desires neither power nor money.''

I do not think it would be difficult to answer why.The thirst for blood, of which we have already spoken, and which is very common among certain criminals, perfectly explains the conduct of Billaud-Varennes.Bandits of this type kill for the sake of killing, as sportsmen shoot game--for the very pleasure of exercising their taste for destruction.In ordinary times men endowed with these homicidal tendencies refrain, generally from fear of the policeman and the scaffold.When they are able to give them free vent nothing can stop them.Such was the case with Billaud-Varenne and many others.