THE TROUILLASSE TOWER  
Now Lescuyer, the man of the ropes, the patriot who had torn down the decrees of the Holy Father, the quondam Picard notary, was secretary to the municipality. His name was thrown to the crowds as not only having participated in the crimes already mentioned, but as having signed the order to the keeper at the Mont-de-Piété to allow the property to be taken away.
Four men were sent out to seize Lescuyer and to bring him to the church. They found him in the street on his way to the municipality. The four men threw themselves upon him, and amid ferocious cries they dragged him to the church.
In the church, Lescuyer realized from the flaming eyes fixed upon him, the outstretched hands which menaced him, and the cries demanding his death, that he was in one of those circles of hell forgotten by Dante. His only idea was that this hatred was inspired because of the ropes which had been taken forcibly from his shop, and the destruction of the pontifical decrees.
He ascended the pulpit, thinking to convert it into a tribunal of justice, and in the voice of a man who is not only not ashamed of what he has done, but who would repeat it, he began: "Citizens, I believed the Revolution necessary, and I have acted accordingly."
[Pg 427]
The Whites knew that if Lescuyer, whose death they desired, should explain, Lescuyer was saved. That was not what they wanted. Obeying a sign from the Comte de Fargas, they threw themselves upon him, tore him from the pulpit, and thrust him into the midst of the howling mob, which dragged him toward the altar, uttering that terrible cry, which combines the hiss of the serpent and the roar of the tiger—that murderous "Zou! zou! zou!" peculiar to the populace of Avignon.
Lescuyer knew that sinister cry. He tried to take refuge at the foot of the altar. He fell there. A laborer, armed with a club, dealt him such a blow on the head that the weapon was broken in two.
Then they flung themselves upon the poor body, and with that awful mixture of ferocity and gayety peculiar to Southern people, the men sang as they danced upon his body, while the women, that he might the more fitly atone for the blasphemies which he had uttered against the pope, cut off his lips, or rather scalloped them with their scissors. Then from the midst of that terrible group came a cry, or rather a death-rattle. It said: "In the name of Heaven, in the name of the Virgin, in the name of humanity, kill me at once!"
This groan was heard and understood. With one accord the crowd drew back. They left the wretched, mangled, bleeding man to taste his death-agony. It lasted five hours, during which, amid bursts of laughter, jeers, insults and mockeries, the poor body lay quivering on the steps of the altar. That is how they kill at Avignon.
Stay, and you will see that there is still another way.
While Lescuyer was undergoing his mortal agony, it occurred to one of the French party to go to the Mont-de-Piété (a thing they might well have done at first), to see if the story of the theft were true. He found everything in order there; not the smallest article had been removed.
It was therefore not as an accomplice of theft, but as a patriot, that Lescuyer had been murdered.
[Pg 428]
There was at that time a man in Avignon who ruled the destinies of that party which in times of revolution is neither white nor blue, but blood-hued. All these terrible leaders of the South have acquired such fatal celebrity that it suffices to name them for every one, even the least educated, to recognize them. This was the famous Jourdan. Braggart and liar, he had made the common people believe that it was he who had cut off the head of the governor of the Bastille; and so they called him "Jourdan Coupe-Tête." This was not his real name; it was Mathieu Jouve. He was not a Proven?al; he came from Puy-en-Velay. He had once been a muleteer on the steep heights which surrounded his native town; afterward he became a soldier, without seeing war (war might have perhaps humanized him), then an innkeeper at Paris. At Avignon he dealt in madder.
He assembled three hundred men, took possession of the gates of the city, left half his troops there, and with the rest marched upon the church of the Cordeliers, preceded by two pieces of artillery. He set the battery up in front of the church and fired at random. The assassins dispersed like a flock of frightened birds, some escaping through the windows, others by way of the sacristy, leaving several dead upon the church steps. Jourdan and his men stepped over these corpses and entered the sacred precincts.
There was nothing there save the statue of the Virgin and the unfortunate Lescuyer. He was still breathing, and when they asked him who had assassinated him, he gave the name, not of those who had dealt the blows, but of the man who had given the order to strike.
It was the Comte de Fargas.
Jourdan and his men were careful not to despatch the dying man, for his agony was a most potent means of exciting the people. They took this remnant of pulsating life, which was three-fourths dead, and carried it along, bleeding, panting, with the death-rattle in its th............