Plenty of men in France these days called themselves "Jacques" and rose up against the gentry, seizing their lands and sometimes their throats, while the national barber did its clean work in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and blood ran like wash. But this boy was really named after Saint James. And now he sat in a barge with a hundred other men and boys, as the craft floated down the sluggish Loire, westward toward the sea and the dying day.
The sun glowered through the smoke like the eye of a beast. There was smoke all round, and the glare of fires far off. It was cold and bitter. Pere François the curé paused in his prayer to look over his shoulder. Then he turned to pray again.
This was the work of Robespierre and his men of light. They profaned the Cathedral of Our Lady in Paris, parading a whore in place of the Mother of God and calling her the goddess Reason. They seized Church lands "for the republic' and put them up for sale. They made the clergy swear to be state puppets, their electors to include any drunken ruffians or atheists who lived in the parish. If the priests did not swear, there was the barber. They suppressed the monastic life, the birthplace of so many holy works and prayers. They dared to alter the time of God, depriving men of their Sabbath rest, replacing it with the rationalist's decadi, every tenth day, for the exhibition of patriotic sentiment, or else. They stripped religion bare, inventing for social utility the worship of L'Etre Suprême, who was neither Father nor Son nor Holy Spirit.
They sent nuns to the scaffold, their only offense that they would not offend. They laid hands on the kindly King Louis himself and his innocent wife and children. Their enlightened hatred knew no bounds.
"I see what Parisians mean by fraternité," said Jacques. The soldiers from Mainz who stormed his village were not bellowing in French. Assassins for pay: only from the throats of assassins could come sounds so ugly. They and the republican army put the Vendée to the torch, slaughtering every man they could reach, not sparing women and children. The marshes of the lower Loire, rich in pitch-pines, thick with the peaty soil where you could just toss a seed and it would grow — the plains that Jacques and his family had drained and plowed for three hundred years, were laid waste, with a stench of burnt swamp grass and turpentine and bitumen and death. It was Frenchmen murdering their brothers in the name of the brotherhood of man. It looked like the end of the world.
"Why has this happened, Monsieur le Curé?" said Jacques.
"For the same reason it always happens," said the curé. "Men have forgotten God." And the Loire seeped through the cracks of the barge and rose up over their shoes.
