Chapter 30 Scaramouche The Kingmaker by Rafael Sabatini
THE INDIA COMPANY
Informed of the successful association with the scheme not only of Chabot but also of Bazire, that other prominent deputy and pillar of the dominant party of the Mountain, André-Louis repaired on the morrow to the Convention, to hear Julien make his preliminary denunciation.
De Batz accompanied him, and together they found seats in the gallery, among the idle riff-raff which daily crowded it, and so often interrupted the proceedings of the legislators below in order to make clear to them how they should interpret the will of the sovereign people. For we are now in Fructidor of the Year 2 of the French Republic One and Indivisible, by the Calendar of Freedom. The Reign of Terror is sweeping to its climax. The dreadful Law of Suspects is being widely enforced. The law of the maximum has been enacted in an endeavour to restrain the constant rise in the price of the necessaries of life which keeps pace with the constant depreciation of the paper money of the Republic. The lately-established Revolutionary Tribunal is submerged in business. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, most zealous and industrious of public servants, can barely find time to eat or sleep. Executions are multiplying. The great daily spectacle is the passing of the tumbril to the Place de la Revolution where the axe of the guillotine clanks busily at the hands of Charles Sanson, the public executioner, fondly and familiarly known to the rabble as Charlot. The bread and meat queues grow longer and sadder; hunger becomes more general among the poor, the bread more and more foul. But the people suffer it out of faith in the integrity of the legislators, counting upon their assurances that this Lenten time is but the prelude to a season of plenty. Meanwhile, to delude and pacify them, doles are distributed to the indigent, largely as a result of the activities of the astute Saint-Just.
Nevertheless, the curtain continues to rise punctually at the opera, the cafés and eating-houses continue to be crowded at the usual hours by those who can afford to pay. Fevrier's in the Palais Royal does a brisk trade; at Venua's banquets are nightly spread for the prosperous and well-nourished representatives of a starving people. Life pursues its course, and such men as de Batz, if of sufficient circumspection and assurance, may move freely.
And freely de Batz moved, his clothes scrupulously elegant, his hair dressed with the same care as of old, his manner as assured and haughty as in the days before the fall of the Bastille. His confidence was based upon that great army of agents and associates, gradually recruited, which by now was permeating every stratum of Parisian life. André-Louis, moving as freely, relied in any emergency that might arise upon the protection of his civic card, which announced him for an agent of that dread body the Committee of Public Safety.
Thus these two came openly and without diffidence to mingle with the crowd in the gallery of the Convention.
There was little to interest them until the sturdy figure of Chabot was seen mounting the tribune to address the assembly, and they rubbed their eyes to behold a transmogrified Chabot. No longer was he the unkempt, unclean, red-bonneted sansculotte. He came spruce as a dandy in a tight-fitting brown frock and snowy cravat, his hair combed and tied. The assembly stared, assuming that at last he followed the fashion set by his illustrious leader the great Robespierre. This until the declaration he came to make suggested another explanation. He was there to proclaim himself a lover; and it was supposed that, like a bird at mating time, he had assumed this gay plumage suitably to fill the part.
"Before I pass to the questions of public interest upon which it is my duty to address you, I desire to touch upon a matter entirely personal to myself."
Thus he opened, pausing there to resume a moment later. "I take this opportunity of announcing to you that I am about to marry. It is known that I have been a priest, a capuchin. I should therefore lay before you the motives that have urged me to this resolve. As a legislator I have thought that it was my duty to set an example in all the virtues. It has been made a reproach against me that the love of women has played too large a part in my life, and I have come to perceive that I can best silence that calumny by taking the wife that the law accords to me. The woman I am to marry is of recent acquaintance. Brought up like the women of her country in the greatest reserve, she has been screened from the eyes of strangers. I do not pretend where she is concerned to be in love with anything beyond her virtue, her talents and her patriotism. And it is the reputation of these gifts in myself which have discovered for me the road to her affections."
He proceeded to add that no priest should soil his nuptials, or any superstitious ceremonies defile them, and thereby showed how well he knew his audience. For if the declaration brought no more than a murmur of applause from his fellow-legislators it produced a thunder of acclamation from the rabble in the galleries.
Thereafter he passed to matters of business so slender that they revealed themselves for the pretext and not the reason of his presence in the tribune.
André-Louis had listened to him in anger and contempt. Filled with pitying concern for Léopoldine, he was at this moment more intent that his India-Company scheme should result in her deliverance than in the restoration of the Bourbons.
Chabot's place in the tribune was taken by Julien, that other scoundrelly apostate, and André-Louis leaned forward eagerly to hear the attack he was to deliver against the India Company, the burning phrases with which André-Louis himself had supplied this puppet. Julien, however, in concert with Delaunay, had improved upon the original plan. His present address resolved itself into one of those flamboyant exhibitions of logorrhea on the subject of virtue and purity in private and in public life, to which members of the Convention were in these days becoming more and more addicted. It was in the course of this, and no more than in passing, that he alluded to the India Company, as one of those organizations abusing the shelter of the State in which it flourished and turning that shelter to purposes not always beneficial to the State itself.
The allusion brought a sudden attentive stillness to an assembly which hitherto had been a little restless. Somewhere a voice challenged him to be more precise, declared that if he had charges to bring he should bring them specifically, and not by innuendo.
"The reproof is just," said Julien with perfect composure. "When I began to speak I had no intention of touching upon this, or else I should have armed myself with the details necessary for a full exposure of an abuse that must be within the knowledge of many of you. For it can be no secret to those of you who are zealous and watchful that the India Company advanced considerable sums of money to the heretofore King, whereby the deliverance of France from the odious rule of despotism was materially retarded."
His allusion to their watchfulness and zeal was a cunning gag in their mouths. Which of these deputies, by contradicting him or by demanding instantly the evidential details, would betray himself as without zeal and vigilance? Not one, as he well knew. And he left the matter there.
When later Bazire, who had also been taken by surprise, asked him if, indeed, he were in a position to prove what he had said, Julien smiled his sour, cynical smile and shrugged.
"What do proofs matter? The price of the stock will show to-morrow whether my shaft has gone home."
That his shaft had indeed gone home there could be no doubt two days later, by when the stock of the India Company had fallen from 1,500 to 600 francs. Already there was panic among the stockholders.
The next move was made a week later, and it came from Delaunay.
He pretended in the speech with which he electrified the Convention, that as a result of the allegations against the Compagnie des Indes which his confrere Julien of Toulouse had let fall in that place, he had been looking into the affairs of the Company, and what he discovered in them had appalled him. From this he passed to a fulminating denunciation of the fraud which the Company had practised in evading a tax justly imposed by the Nation. To defraud the Republic of moneys due to her, was to deprive her of her life's blood. Delaunay did not hesitate to describe as a sacrilege the defalcations of which the India Company was guilty.
The term was received with applause. On Robespierre's atrabilious countenance the tiger-cat grin was observed to spread as if in commendation.
Then, even as he had wrought up their passions, Delaunay now chilled them again by the motion he put forward. He proposed to dissolve the India Company, placing her directors under the obligation of proceeding to the liquidation of her affairs.
So inadequate to the crime was the proposed punishment that the Convention, after a gasp of surprise that was almost of anger, broke into a babble of discussion. The president rang his bell for silence, and Fabre d'Englantine was seen to be ascending the tribune to voice the general feeling.
He moved deliberately, a man slightly above middle height, of graceful build and careful attire. He had been many things in turn: actor, author, poetaster, painter, composer, thief, murderer, blackguard, and gaolbird. In every part assumed, however, the historian had predominated, and still unmistakably histrionic were his movements, speech and gestures now, that by histrionic arts he had won to a position of eminence in this grotesque parliament. Those very arts served to make him popular with the masses whose sympathies are so easily captured by externals.
The man, however, was not without ability, and in his sonorous, slightly affected voice he displayed now the prompt grasp of affairs of which his mind was capable.
He began by complimenting Delaunay upon his diligence in unveiling the turpitude of the India Company; but deplored the inadequacy of the motion with which Delaunay proposed to deal with it.
"If the Company's administrators are to be left in charge of the Company's liquidation, they are supplied with the means of indefinitely perpetuating it."
Delaunay, like André-Louis who had dictated those very terms, was well aware of this, and awaiting precisely such an objection. Had no one else voiced it, the task would have fallen to Bazire, that other member of this conspiracy. It was a little disconcerting that one who was not in the plot should intervene at this point. But it could not, after all, be serious in its consequences; because they could never have hoped to pack the commission entirely.
Meanwhile Fabre, warming to his subject, was becoming more and more inexorable. He professed astonishment that Delaunay should have demanded anything less than the total and immediate extinction of the Company. No measures could be too strong against such a pack of scoundrels. He demanded that the property of these delinquents should immediately be impounded.
This was pushing matters a little further than the conspirators had reckoned. But opinions in the assembly were soon shown to be divided; the Representative Cambon expressed the view that Fabre's demands were too intransigent; that they would be productive of a disorganization in the world of commerce, such as could not ultimately be to the advantage of the Nation. Others followed him, each anxious to parade the purity of his patriotism and earning the applause of the gallery, and the debate might have gone on for ever had not at last Robespierre risen in his place to set a term to it.
Long since departed were the days when men sighed and yawned to behold the mincing Representative from Arras preparing to address the assembly in his dull, monotonous voice. The power that he had become, and for which so much was due to his young ally Saint-Just, was apparent in the almost awed silence that fell upon the assembly immediately upon his rising. Even the ribalds in the gallery who had emancipated themselves from all respect of persons seemed now to hold their breath before that slight, frail figure. He was dressed with a care that was almost effeminate, in a close sky-blue frock over a striped satin waistcoat. Below this he wore black satin smalls, silk stockings, and buckled shoes whose heels were built up so as to increase his stature. His head emerged from a snowy, elaborately-tied cravat, the hair carefully dressed and powdered.
He stood a moment in silence, his horn-rimmed spectacles pushed up on to his forehead, his myopic eyes peering forth from that lean, pallid countenance with its curiously tip-tilted nose and wide, almost lipless mouth that was ever set in a tiger-cat grin.
Then the dull, unimpressive voice droned forth. He desired that the counsel of Fabre should be given weight. But this only after due investigation should have confirmed the charges made. For the rest, the matter was not one for the great body of the Convention but for a commission which he desired should be formed at once, not only to investigate but to decree the measures to be taken.
With that, cold and impassive as he had risen, he resumed his seat. His fiat had gone forth. These were not days in which any man in France would dare to call it in question, unless it were that fearless cyclops Danton, who was still absent, honeymooning at Arcis-sur-Aube. Robespierre had demanded that a commission be formed.
This was Chabot's clue. It had been concerted that the demand should come from Delaunay. That it came from a higher authority was all the better. Chabot rose from his seat on Robespierre's immediate left to support the wish expressed by his august leader, and to propose that Delaunay himself should be included in the commission. His real object was thus to connect himself with the business so that he too might be named. This followed easily and naturally. Beyond that, however, things did not quite run the prescribed course. It had been arranged that Julien and Bazire should name each other for service on that commission, and as five members would compose it, thus there would have been an overwhelming preponderance of these in the financial conspiracy.
Fabre's intervention, however, had brought him into prominence, and his nomination was inevitable. So, too, was Cambon's, who had spoken to mitigate the harshness of Fabre. To these was added Ramel, who had also intervened in the debate, and upon that, at last, the matter was closed.
That evening the conspirators, a little dismayed by the turn of events, a little dubious now of the result, foregathered in the Rue de Ménars to take counsel with André-Louis.
He was out of temper and caustic, and he lashed Bazire and Julien for having neglected to make an opportunity for themselves in the course of the debate. It would have been especially easy for Julien to have got himself appointed to the commission, considering that he was already associated in the mind of the assembly with the affairs of the India Company.
"It was Fabre who sent things awry," Julien excused himself.
De Batz interposed. "Why recriminate? What does it matter? Does any man believe in the incorruptibility of that mummer? Do you know his history? Bah! You can have his soul for a hundred thousand francs." He pulled a bundle of assignats from a drawer of the secretaire. "Here, Chabot! Buy him with that. Thus, whatever Cambon and Ramel may wish, you will be sure of a majority on your commission."
He had acted upon a sudden inspiration. And when those four traffickers in their mandate had taken their departure, he laughed deep in his throat as he looked at André-Louis.
"Thus things fall out even better than you designed. To entangle Fabre d'Englantine in the business as well as the others was more than I had hoped just yet! He's worth as much as Julien, Delaunay and Bazire all added together. The gods fight on our side, André-Louis, as we might have known they would; for the gods are all aristocrats."
Rumours that the Compagnie des Indes was about to be extinguished by order of the Convention spread immediate panic among the stockholders. Within twenty-four hours the shares had fallen even below the level last prognosticated by Delaunay. The miracle was that there should be buyers for them at any price. And yet buyers there were. At one twentieth of their real value, the shares, so fearfully cast upon the market, were instantly absorbed.
Benoit, the Angevin banker, was known to be the buyer. He was derided by his financial colleagues for his pains. He was denounced to his face as mad to pay even the vilest price for paper whose only purpose hereafter could be to wrap up bread. But Benoit remained unperturbed.
"What would you? I am a gambler. I take my chances. The commission has yet to decide the fate of the Company. If the decision is utterly ruinous to it, my loss will be none so heavy. If it is otherwise I shall have made a fortune."
He bought of course for Delaunay, Julien and Bazire. Chabot at the last moment lacked the necessary courage. Delaunay urged him to invest the half of the hundred thousand francs he had received for supporting the scheme. But Chabot was fearful of losing it. In the end, he might not prevail with Fabre; and if Fabre remained uncorrupted all would be lost. Already Fabre's intervention had made it impossible to lay alternative decrees before the directors of the India Company and blackmail them into buying the decree that would save them from destruction.
Delaunay reported the matter to André-Louis. André-Louis dealt with it summarily. Chabot must be implicated neck-deep, inextricably, and for this some speculation on his part was of the first importance. But this was not what André-Louis said.
What he said was: "Chabot must stand to profit by the preservation of the Company or else he will not work for it. His cowardice will make him take the easier road, and rest content with his hundred thousand francs. If he will not buy shares, himself, we must buy them for him." He thrust upon Delaunay a wad of assignats. "Let Benoit buy him twenty-thousand francs' worth, and take them to him. Point out to him that on the day when the India Company's credit is clear of this cloud, those shares will be worth half a million. To resist that it would be necessary that Chabot should not be human. And God knows he's so human as to be almost bestial." Chabot's resistance did not prove insuperable. The prospect of the half-million was a persuasion not only to accept but also to set about the seduction of Fabre d'Englantine.
Ten days passed, and still the commission had not sat. It was time to get to work. Chabot sought Fabre, to learn when it would please him to attend to the matter. Fabre displayed indifference. "I will suit my convenience to your own as far as I am able."
"I will consult the others, and send you word," Chabot replied.
The others whom he consulted were Delaunay, Julien and Bazire, of whom only the first had any official concern in the matter. Unofficially, however, their concern was a common one.
"You may act when you please," Julien informed him. "And the sooner the better. We have bought to the limit of our resources."
So they had, and another who had bought heavily, informed by his friend Delaunay of the inner movement in this business, was Benoit, himself, for his own account. The extent of his purchases gave him a more than ordinarily keen interest in the manipulation, and out of this it presently followed that he began to seek for a reason why de Batz and Moreau, whom he knew for the moving spirits in the scheme, should themselves have abstained from purchasing, neglecting so rare an opportunity of easy fortune. Benoit made exhaustive inquiries. Positively neither de Batz nor Moreau had bought a single share. What the devil was the meaning of it?
He tackled de Batz with some such question at the very first opportunity. De Batz was off his guard, and did not sufficiently weigh his reply.
"It's a speculation. I do not speculate. I trade along lines that are secure."
"But then, why the devil did you trouble to work out this scheme?"
And de Batz still more incautiously replied: "I did not. It is Moreau's scheme."
"Ah! Then why has Moreau not bought?"
De Batz affected innocence. "Has he not? Ha! Curious!" And he changed the subject.
Benoit agreed with him in his heart that it was curious. Infernally curious. So curious that he must find the explanation of it. Since he could seek it nowhere else, he sought it of André-Louis himself upon the morrow. Fear of heavy pecuniary loss can spur some men as strongly as the fear of loss of life itself, and Benoit, whose whole existence had been dedicated to the service of Mammon, was of these. So it was a truculent, combative, dangerous Benoit who descended next morning upon André-Louis. He found the young man alone in the Rue de Ménars.
Benoit came straight to the point. André-Louis, standing before him in the Baron's gay salon, heard him with an astonishment of which he betrayed no faintest sign. His lean, keen countenance remained rigid as a mask. If before he answered in words he uttered a short laugh, yet it was a laugh that told Benoit nothing.
"I do not know that I owe you any explanation. But I'll gratify your curiosity. I do not like the commission that has been appointed. If Fabre d'Englantine keeps of the same mind as that in which he addressed the Convention on this subject, the India Company will be extinguished."
"Then why," demanded the portly banker, his countenance more florid than usual this morning, his little eyes narrowed to observe the other's unrevealing countenance, "why did you send Fabre a hundred thousand francs to change his mind? Why do you spend such a sum if you have no interest to speculate on the result?"
"Since when, Benoit, have I been accountable to you for what I choose to do? What is your right to question me?"
"My right? God of God! I have embarked two hundred and fifty thousand francs upon this scheme of yours..."
"Of mine?"
"Ay, of yours. Don't waste time in denying it. I know what I know."
"You know too much, Benoit."
"For your safety, you mean?"
"No, Benoit. For your own." And smoothly though the words were spoken, there was a cold, steely edge to them that made the banker suddenly apprehensive.
André-Louis was watching him with glittering eyes. Slowly, incisively, letting his words fall like drops of icy water, André-Louis asked a question that voiced the very threat already trembling on the banker's lips. "Will you tell the Revolutionary Tribunal that this piece of chicanery concerned with the India Company is a thing of my invention, done at my instigation? Will you?"
"And if I did?"
The glittering eyes never left his own. They held his glance in a singular magnetic fascination.
"What is your evidence? Who are your witnesses? A group of venal rascals who traffic in their mandate, who abuse their position in the State, to grow rich by blackmail and by fraudulent speculation. Yes, fraudulent, Benoit, and fraudulent in the grossest manner. Will the word of these rogues, these thieves—for it is upon their word that you have it that this scheme is mine—destroy a man whose hands are clean, who cannot be shown to have purchased a single share in the India Company? Or will it destroy a man like you, who, taking advantage of the fraud, has invested a quarter of a million in the Company's stock? Which do you think, Benoit?" Again came that short, toneless laugh. "And there you have the answer that you sought. Now you know precisely why I have neglected, as you say, this opportunity to make a fortune."
Benoit, his face the colour of clay, his jaw fallen, his breathing shortened, stood there and trembled. He had his answer indeed.
"My God!" he groaned. "What game do you play here?" André-Louis advanced upon him. He set a hand upon the banker's fleshly shoulder in its gay green coat.
"Benoit," he said quietly, "you have the reputation—it is whispered of you, no more—of being a safe man. But not all those whom you have served, not if each were as influential as Robespierre himself, could keep you safe if this were known. Remember that, Benoit. I, too, am a safe man. Take comfort in the thought. Keep faith with me, and I'll keep faith with you. Keep faith with me, and you may yet keep your head whatever heads may fall. Break it, mention this matter to a single soul and be sure that Charlot will make your toilet for you within forty-eight hours. And now that we understand each other suppose that we talk of other things."
Benoit departed, enlightened and yet in darkness. Something was moving here, something deep, dangerous and portentous of which even knowledge might be perilous. Yet that knowledge he would seek, but not until he had made himself safe by ridding himself of the evidences of his participation in the India Company business. He would sell his stock at once, content at need to suffer a loss where by waiting he might clear a colossal profit. Then, being rid of that dangerous burden with nothing on his hands to betray him, he could laugh at the threat which imposed silence. But the stock was impossible to sell at any price by now, since all those who were in the secret had already purchased to the limit of their available resources.