THE DROWNINGS AT NANTES UNDER CARRIER
The Revolutionary Committee of the city of Nantes, reinforced by some of the administrators of the district and a few members of the People's Society, sat in the noble hall of the Cour des Comptes, which still retained much of its pre-republican sumptuousness. They sat expectantly - Goullin, the attorney, president of the committee, a frail, elegant valetudinarian, fierily eloquent; Grandmaison, the fencing-master, who once had been a gentleman, fierce of eye and inflamed of countenance; Minee, the sometime bishop, now departmental president; Pierre Chaux, the bankrupt merchant; the sans-culotte Forget, of the People's Society, an unclean, ill-kempt ruffian; and some thirty others called like these from every walk of life.
Lamps were lighted, and under their yellow glare the huddled company - for the month was December, and the air of the vast room was chill and dank - looked anxious and ill at ease.
Suddenly the doors were thrown open by an usher; and his voice rang loud in announcement -"The Citizen Representative Carrier."
The great man came in, stepping quickly. Of middle height, very frail and delicate, his clay-colored face was long and thin, with arched eyebrows, a high nose, and a loose, coarse mouth. His deeply sunken dark eyes glared fiercely, and wisps of dead-black hair, which had escaped the confining ribbon of his queue, hung about his livid brow. He was wrapped in a riding-coat of bottle-green, heavily lined with fur, the skirts reaching down to the tops of his Hessian boots, and the enormous turned-up collar almost touching the brim of his round hat. Under the coat his waist was girt with the tricolour of office, and there were gold rings in his ears.
Such at the age of five-and-thirty was Jean Baptiste Carrier, Representative of the Convention with the Army of the West, the attorney who once had been intended by devout parents for the priesthood. He had been a month in Nantes, sent thither to purge the body politic.
He reached a chair placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back, he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so terrible and brutal of aspect despite his frailness that more than one of those stout fellows quailed now before him.
Suddenly he broke into torrential speech, his voice shrill and harsh:
"I do not know by what fatality it happens, but happen it does, that during the month that I have been in Nantes you have never ceased to give me reason to complain of you. I have summoned you to meet me here that you may justify yourselves, if you can, for your ineptitude!" And he flung himself into the chair, drawing his fur-lined coat about him. "Let me hear from you!" he snapped.
Minee, the unfrocked bishop, preserving still a certain episcopal portliness of figure, a certain episcopal oiliness of speech, respectfully implored the representative to be more precise.
The invitation flung him into a passion. His irascibility, indeed, deserved to become a byword.
"Name of a name!" he shrilled, his sunken eyes ablaze, his face convulsed. "Is there a thing I can mention in this filthy city of yours that is not wrong? Everything is wrong! You have failed in your duty to provide adequately for the army of Vendee. Angers has fallen, and now the brigands are threatening Nantes itself.
There is abject want in the city, disease is rampant; people are dying of hunger in the streets and of typhus in the prisons. And sacre nom! - you ask me to be precise! I'll be precise in telling you where lies the fault. It lies in your lousy administration.
Do you call yourselves administrators? You - " He became unprintable. "I have come here to shake you out of your torpor, and by -- I'll shake you out of it or I'll have the blasted heads off the lot of you."They shivered with chill fear under the wild glare of his sunken eyes.
"Well?" he barked after a long pause. "Are you all dumb as well as idiots?"It was the ruffian Forget who had the courage to answer him:
"I have told the People's Society that if the machine works badly it is because the Citizen Carrier refuses to consult with the administration.""You told them that, did you, you -- liar?" screeched Carrier.
"Am I not here now to consult with you? And should I not have come before had you suggested it? Instead, you have waited until, of my own accord, I should come to tell you that your administration is ruining Nantes."Goullin, the eloquent and elegant Goullin, rose to soothe him:
"Citizen Representative, we admit the truth of all that you have said. There has been a misunderstanding. We could not take it upon ourselves to summon the august representative of the Sacred People. I We have awaited your own good pleasure, and now that you have made this manifest, there is no reason why the machine should not work effectively. The evils of which you speak exist, alas! But they are not so deeply rooted that, working under your guidance and advice, we cannot uproot them, rendering the soil fertile once more of good under the beneficent fertilizing showers of liberty."Mollified, Carrier grunted approval.
"That is well said, Citizen Goullin. The fertilizer needed by the soil is blood - the bad blood of aristocrats and federalists, and I can promise you, in the name of the august people, that it shall be abundantly provided."The assembly broke into applause, and his vanity melted to it. He stood up, expressed his gratification at being so completely understood, opened his arms, and invited the departmental president, Minee, to come down and receive the kiss of brotherhood.
Thereafter they passed to the consideration of measures of improvement, of measures to combat famine and disease. In Carrier's view there was only one way of accomplishing this - the number of mouths to be fed must be reduced, the diseased must be eliminated.
It was the direct, the radical, the heroic method.
