PANTHER OF THE TERROR

Evening Star, Issue 19615, 22 July 1927, Page 11

PANTHER OF THE TERROR

COUTHON, THE BLOODTHIRSTY CRIPPLE

In tho Carnavalet Museum in Paris stands a curious relic. It is the chair of Couthon, the man who, with his colI leagues Robespierre and St. Just, really ran the Reign of Terror. Of tho three dictators his figure is by far the least I fhmiliar. Yet this chair of his has played a part in some of the most thrill- , ing scenes in history. Couthon, the crippled monster, who was called the Panther of the Terror, well deserves a study. Let us try te make, a lightning sketch of him (writes H. G. Smith, in ‘John o’ London’s’). _ In spirit, Couthon was a kind of goblin : but tfyere was nothing of the goblin n his aspect. Indeed, Pope’s lines on Sporus well describe him “A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest.” It was only when he was aroused to anger that the I field within him bolted out into the j light. One vivid scene has been recorded that will set the man before us. Tho judges of a certain town had been reported as too slack in sending victims to tho scaffold. Their own heads being threatened, they sent a deputy to Paris to plead their cause with the dictators. A lady friend of Couthon’s wife agreed to introduce him to the man of terror. A DOMESTIC IDYLL. When, with his guide, Jio entered Couthon’s chamber, his blood was running chill within his veins. What was his surprise to see before him a domestic j idyll! Couthon, whose legs were j withered, was sitting, wrapped in a : white dressing gown, with a glass of milk beside him, feeding a rabbit on his lap with parsley, while his little boy of five was standing at his knee. But when the envoy ventured to explain his visit, the idyll vanished like a dream Child and rabbit were sent flying, ns the Panther, with a face of fury, stretched his arm to sound the bell. Another moment, and his guards would have come rushing in to hale the victim to his doom. His companion, wild with terror, held the lifted arm W'th all her strength, while the envoy i hito the street. The horror or that nightmare vision never left ; him. And no wonder—he had looked upon the demon face to face. “ THE SERVICE OP THE PEOPLE.” Georges Couthon was not born a cripple. In the Senate he was fond of boasting that he owed his palsied limbs to his intense exertions in the cause of 1 , tre , ~r n, ' “ I bavo given half my body, he declared, in accents of selfjiity, in the service of the people.” This account was not in strict accordance with the truth. The fact was that, in his youth, having an assignation with a. married lady, lie had been caught and chased by the indignant husband, and had been forced to spend the nightJn hiding, sunk to his middle m a frozen bog. When at length he ventured iortlx he had escaped the husband, but his legs were paralysed for life.

Mud baths and a milk diet did no- | thing to relieve him. At first he dragged himsolf on crutches, or was carried in a chair Then somebody remembered. in the palace of Versailles, this little carriage on three wheels, ; which had belonged to the exiled Countess of Artois, whose spouse was to become the King of France. This carriage the convention placed at the disposal of their crippled colleague. Strange that its yellow cushion, now so faded, that once had borne the Royal lady, should have come to carry Conthon, the assassin of her kin. Henceforth he drove his carriage daily from his lodging to the Hotel do A Hie. Beside him walked two soldiers, one of them carrying a lapdog, which ho always held upon his knees, even when speaking from his seat in Assembly. Me are able, from descriptions, to form a picture of his progress through the streets—this shattered relic of ainan, whirling the handles of his chair like coflee-mills, his body, leaning forward, racked by a continual hiccup, sweating, panting,, glaring, while tho gazers, parting as before an ogre, muttered, trembling, “ It is Conthon ! It is tho Panther of the Terror passing by!” MORE BLOOD. The nickname is not hard to understand. We have only, for example, to conceive the scene in the Assembly on the morning when ho moved the everiiomlying Act of Prairial. Ail the nightmares of the Terror—the sight of old men, little children, women with their babies at their breasts, sunk in barges or shot down in files, their skins tanned for breeches, their hair cut off for periwigs, the death carts bearing bevies of young girls “looking like white lilies”—all these things were not enough for Coutlion. The knife was only topping forty heads or so a week. (Joutlion’s remedy was ready. His Act decreed, in brief, that victims

should bo sent to death without a trial. When tho speaker, ending, called for : water, a voice among tho Moderates ; cried out, “ Bring him a glass of ■ blood!” There must have boon about • tho scene a strange grotesquerie of horror, as the palsied reptile with the i cherub's face, with the lapdog on his i ( knees, set forth a masterpiece of . wickedness that would have sickened ! Nero. ESCAPE FROM PRISON. , The Act was passed—and the weekly ! toll of heads was raised to upwards of . two hundred. But the evil carried with , f it its own euro. Couthon’s Act it was that, in reality, brought down himself, his colleagues, and the Reign of Terror. No man’s head was safe upon his shouli dors. On tho ninth of Thermidor the ! throe dictators were impeached, ar- ■ rested, and dispatched to prison. In 1 the middle of the night their friends I released them from the frightened I gaolers, and they returned in triumph ;to the Council Chamber. Couthou was 1 tho last to join them. At 1 o’clock in 1 tho morning his two guards aroused him, and set him in his carriage. A thunderstorm was raging, and it was through a sheet of blinding rain that he drove himself to the Assembly. He was driving, also, though he little dreamt it, to the scaffold of the guillotine. Leaving his carriage standing in the ■ Jisill, ho was carried up the stairway to his seat. His colleagues, eager to restart tho work of murder, received him with a cheer of welcome. But the joy in every face was soon to vanish. Above the sound of thunder there came another sound, of deeper omen—the thunder of the army of their enemies beating at the chamber doors. In a moment all was panic. St. Just besought his friend Lebas to shoot him with a pistol; but Lebas preferred to turn tho weapon on himself, and blew his out. Robespierre the Younger climbed a lofty window, balanced for a moment on the sill, and then fell crashing to ther stones.

SHAM DEATH. As the soldiers and the crowd came bursting in, a boy of seventeen, whose name was Merda. fired a pistol shot at Couthou, and then, the bullet missing, fired at Robespierre, who was sitting at a table, arid shattered his left jaw. Beneath, this table Couthon dragged himself, but he was quickly routed out and kicked, like a bale of goods, across tho floor to the head of the great staircase, down the whole fiigh# of-which he _ toppled headlong to the hall, in which his chair was standing. Then, with his head broken, he writhed himself into a corner, where he pretended to be dead. When he was lifted, ho was holding in his hand an open penknife, which ho tried to drive into his heart. He was laid upon a stretcher. It was his last conveyance, except one—the death cart. A special touch of horror marker] his end. When he was lifted from . the

tumbril to tho scaffold and his crooked body laid upon tho plank, it was found impossible.to lash him in the usual way, face downward. Maimed and shattered though he was, he fought and bellowed like a wild beast driven mad with rage and terror. At last- the guards were forced to fasten him faco upwards—the only case on record of tho kind. Then, with the knife above his eyes, tho plank was shot into its place, the axe fell crashing, and the head of the Panther of tho Terror rolled into the sack.