CHAPTER IV
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
ONCE there was a man in the world who was soured on discovering that his disposition was cowardly and vicious, and he visited his consequent disgust on society at large. He was an ill-starred lover of Nature, and Nature in her wrath armed him with eloquence as with a scourge. He dared to plead the cause of ignorance in the face of science, of savagery in the face of civilisation, of all low-life deeps in the face of all social heights. Instinctively the populace pelted this maniac, yet he was welcomed by the great and lionised by women. His success was so signal that, by revulsion, his hatred of humanity increased, and he ended in suicide as the final issue of his rage and disgust. After his death the world was shaken in its attempts to realise the dreams of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and that silent conspiracy which ever since the murder of Jacques de Molay had sworn destruction to the social edifice, inaugurated in Rue Platrière, and in the very house where Rousseau had once lived, a Masonic Lodge, with the fanatic of Geneva as its patron saint. This Lodge became the centre of the revolutionary propaganda, and thither came a prince of the blood royal, vowing destruction to the successors of Philip the Fair over the tomb of the Templar.
It was the nobility of the eighteenth century which corrupted the people; the aristocracy of that period were seized with a mania for equality, which took its rise in the orgies of the Regency; low company was kept for the pleasure of it and the court obtained diversion in talking the language of the slums. The archives of the Order of the Temple1 testify that the Regent was its Grand Master, that he had as his successors the Duc de Maine, the princes of Bourbon-Condé and Bourbon-Conti, and the Duc de Cossé-Brissac. Cagliostro drew auxiliaries from the middle class to swell the membership of his Egyptian Rite; everyone was eager to obey the secret and irresistible impulse which drove decadent civilisation to its destruction. Events did not tarry, but as if impelled by hands unseen, they were heaped one upon another, after the manner foreseen by Cazotte. The unfortunate Louis XVI was led by his worst enemies, who at once prearranged and stultified the paltry project of evasion which brought about the catastrophe of Varennes, just as they had done with the orgy at Versailles and the massacre of August 10. On every side they compromised the king; at every turn they saved him from the fury of the people, to foment that fury and ensure the dire event which had been in preparation for centuries. A scaffold was essential to complete the revenge of the Templars.
Amidst the pressure of civil war, the National Assembly suspended the powers of the king and assigned him the Luxembourg as his residence; but another and more secret assembly had ruled otherwise. A prison was to be the residence of the fallen monarch, and that prison was none other than the old palace of the Templars, which had survived, with keep and turrets, to await the royal victim doomed by inexorable memories. There he was duly interned, while the flower of French ecclesiasticism was either in exile or at the Abbey. Artillery thundered on the Pont Neuf, menacing posters proclaimed that the country was in danger, unknown personages organised successive slaughters, while a hideous and gigantic being, covered with a long beard, was to be seen wheresoever there were priests to murder. “Behold,” he cried with a savage sneer, “this is for the Albigenses and the Vaudois; this is for the Templars, this for St. Bartholomew and this for the exiles of the Cevennes.” As one who was beside himself, he smote unceasingly, now with the sabre and now with axe or club. Arms broke and were replaced in his hands; from head to foot he was clothed in blood, swearing with frightful blasphemies that in blood only would he wash. It was this man who proposed the toast of the nation to the angelical Mlle de Sombreuil. Meanwhile another angel prayed and wept in the tower of the Temple, offering to God her own sufferings and those of two children to obtain pardon for the royalty of France. All the agonies and all the tears of that virgin martyr, the saintly Mme Elizabeth, were necessary for the expiation of the imbecile joys which characterised courtesans like Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry.
Jacobinism had received its distinctive name before the old Church of the Jacobins was chosen as the headquarters of conspiracy; it was derived from the name Jacques—an ominous symbol and one which spelt revolution. French iconoclasts have always been called Jacques; that philosopher whose fatal celebrity prepared new Jacqueries and was a peg on which to hang the sanguinary projects of Johannite schemers bore the name of Jean Jacques, while those who were prime movers in the French Revolution had sworn in secret the destruction of throne and altar over the tomb of Jacques de Molay. At the very moment when Lcuis XVI suffered under the axe of revolution, the man with a long beard—that wandering Jew, significant of vengeance and murder—ascended the scaffold and, confronting the appalled spectators, took the royal blood in both hands, casting it over the heads of the people, and crying with his terrible voice: “People of France, I baptise you in the name of Jacques and of liberty.”1 So ended half of the work, and it was henceforth against the Pope that the army of the Temple directed all its efforts. Spoliation of churches, profanation of sacred things, mock processions, inauguration of the cultus of reason in the metropolis of Paris—these were the signals in chief of the war in its new phase. The Pope was burnt in effigy at the Palais Royal, and presently the armies of the Republic prepared to march on Rome. Jacques de Molay and his companions were martyrs possibly, but their avengers dishonoured their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the scaffold of Louis XVI; the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius VI, when he was taken a prisoner to Valence, perishing of fatigue and suffering. But the unworthy sucessors of that old chivalry of the Temple perished in their turn, overwhelmed by disastrous victory.
Signal abuses had characterised the ecclesiastical state and grave scandals were entailed by the misfortune of great riches; but when the riches melted away, the pre-eminent virtues returned. Such transitory disasters and such a spiritual triumph were predicted in the Apocalypse of St. Methodius, to which reference has been made already. We have a black letter copy of the work mentioned, printed in 1527 and embellished with amazing designs. Unworthy priests are shewn in the act of casting the sacred elements to swine; the populace in a state of rebellion are seen assassinating the priests and breaking their sacramental vessels on their heads; the Pope appears as a prisoner in the hands of soldiers; a crowned knight raises with one hand the standard of France, and with the other draws his sword against Italy. Finally, two eagles are depicted on either side of a cock, bearing a crown on his head and a double fleur de lys on his breast. One of the eagles combines with griffins and unicorns to drive the vulture from his eyrie; and there is a host of other marvels. This singular book may be compared with an illustrated edition of the prophecies attributed to Abbé Joachim, the Calabrian, wherein are exhibited portraits of all the popes to come, with the allegorical signs of their respective pontificates, down to the coming of Anti-Christ. These are strange chronicles of futurity, pictured as things of the past; they seem to intimate a succession of worlds wherein events are repeated, so that the prevision of things to come is the evocation of shadows already lost in the past.
1 The reference is here to the latest development of Templary under the ægis 
Fabré-Palaprat. It came into public knowledge about 1805, and its invention is not much earlier. Its documents were fictitious, like its claims
1 Éliphas Lévi mentions in a note that he quotes these words as they were given to him by an old man who heard them. They are cited differently in the Journal of Prudhomme.