I would not
have you take satisfaction in the thought that I regret your escape.
I do not. I rejoice in it. To deal justice by death has this
disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has
overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that
night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and
untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind
should the guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter
is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in
this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you
may taste something of its bitterness.
"You murdered Philippe de Vilmorin because you feared what you
described as his very dangerous gift of eloquence, I took an oath
that day that your evil deed should be fruitless; that I would
render it so; that the voice you had done murder to stifle should
in spite of that ring like a trumpet through the land. That was
my conception of revenge. Do you realize how I have been fulfilling
it, how I shall continue to fulfil it as occasion offers? In the
speech with which I fired the people of Rennes on the very morrow
of that deed, did you not hear the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin
uttering the ideas that were his with a fire and a passion greater
than he could have commanded because Nemesis lent me her inflaming
aid? In the voice of Omnes Omnibus at Nantes my voice again -
demanding the petition that sounded the knell of your hopes of
coercing the Third Estate, did you not hear again the voice of
Philippe de Vilmorin? Did you not reflect that it was the mind of
the man you had murdered, resurrected in me his surviving friend,
which made necessary your futile attempt under arms last January,
wherein your order, finally beaten, was driven to seek sanctuary
in the Cordelier Convent? And that night when from the stage of
the Feydau you were denounced to the people, did you not hear yet
again, in the voice of Scaramouche, the voice of Philippe de
Vilmorin, using that dangerous gift of eloquence which you so
foolishly imagined you could silence with a sword-thrust? It is
becoming a persecution - is it not? - this voice from the grave
that insists upon making itself heard, that will not rest until
you have been cast into the pit.
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