'Abbeville,' Ramage said quietly, 'has some unpleasant associations for you.'
Louis looked down and was silent for a full minute, seeming almost to shrink, leaving his body behind while he went to some private place full of dreadful memories. Embarrassed at this unexpected reaction to his curiosity and regretting the question, Ramage was trying to think of a way of changing the subject when the Frenchman looked up.
'I will tell you about it - no, don't worry,' he said as Ramage went to speak, ‘I want to tell you so you can understand better why I help you. At the moment I must seem to be a smuggler with no allegiances; a man whose loyalty can be bought - no, do not bother to protest, M. Ramage, you have all the doubts about me that I would expect in an honest man. In a minute or two you will understand and we shall be better friends.
'The name Joseph Le Bon means nothing to you. To me he is a former priest from Arras who almost made me believe in God. "Ah" you might say, "a saintly man, and wise, as befits someone who once taught rhetoric at the College of Beaune, in Burgundy, and a man of great ability if he nearly succeeded in making an atheist like Louis believe in God and an after-life."
'You would be partly right: Le Bon made me hope there is an after-life because I want the comfort of knowing there is a Hell in whose flames Joseph Le Bon burns in agony for all eternity, for he is now dead. My only regret is that the Committee of Public Safety finally ordered his execution and cheated me of my revenge. But those who watched him on the scaffold - they saw him screaming with fear, groaning, wailing and begging for mercy before the blade dropped. I had planned that he would be begging me for mercy, but -' he shrugged his shoulders '- the Committee that set him on a path of mass murder eventually executed its own servant.
'I can see you are wondering why this man Louis should be hunting another man, a former priest and teacher of rhetoric, with a knife, with the intention of murdering him. Don't protest, m'sieur' Louis said grimly, 'it is a reasonable question for a man whose country is not torn by revolution, who has never seen pork butchers set down their knives and become ministers of state overnight and use the guillotine to butcher their fellow men, and bakers and grocers made judges who listen only to the charges against the man, never the evidence for his defence, before sending him to death.
'You will leam what happens when I tell you of Le Bon. After the Revolution this man left the Church and entered politics, becoming the Mayor of Arras. He showed judgment; he was even moderate. Then, since he had also been given responsibility for the whole Department of the Pas de Calais, he was told to destroy any anti-revolutionary movement in Calais and the neighbouring towns.
'Again, he was moderate, even indulgent - so much so that one of his enemies denounced him to the Committee of Public Safety as a protector of aristocrats and a persecutor of patriots. He was recalled to Paris, escaped being put on trial for his life only because Citizen Robespierre liked him and accepted his promise to redeem himself.
'Redeem himself! He was sent back to Calais - a badly frightened man, with unlimited powers to crush the anti-revolutionaries. The problem was that Le Bon could not find any, so in fear of his own life he simply accused scores and scores of innocent people and sent them to the guillotine. Within weeks hundreds met their death in Calais alone. He then went to other towns - Abbeville, Amiens, Arras, Boulogne ...
'Two young ladies in Abbeville who taught the pianoforte, for example, were playing Ça Ira on the day a defeat by the Austrians was announced. Le Bon heard them and accused them of having an evil disposition towards the Revolution. They said quite truthfully they had heard nothing of defeat, and in any case Ça Ira was a patriotic tune. Le Bon disagreed - playing Ça Ira in those circumstances, he said meant that they wished the Austrians to advance and capture other French fortresses. If they were true patriots, he told them at the tribunal, they should have played Le Rével du Peuple...
'So he condemned them to death, and at the scaffold next morning, while the young ladies were in the tumbril at the scaffold, he delayed the public execution for a quarter of an hour, until some women of the town, in all their finery, had arranged themselves comfortably on a balcony overlooking the guillotine. You find the story hard to believe, I see ...’
Ramage nodded and was about to add that that did not mean he thought it was untrue when Louis turned to look him straight in the eye, the strained look back on his face. ‘Those two young ladies were sisters, m'sieur. The elder was my wife who was staying in her mother's house while I was away at sea. Some might say it was punishment on me for being a smuggler,' he said bitterly. 'Anyway, when you get to Abbeville, ask about Joseph Le Bon, and they will tell you that story.'
'But you said he was executed -'
'I came back a few days after Le Bon had finished his bloody business and gone on to Paris. I followed him - was arrested almost immediately, because my passport was for travelling only from Boulogne to Abbeville and back. They knew who I was but the gendarmes at Breteuil, where I was imprisoned, were sympathetic because of my loss. They never guessed I was following Le Bon; they assumed I was going to Paris to protest to the authorities. So they kept me in prison for a year, and during that time the mayors of several towns had protested to the Ministry of Police at Le Bon’s wholesale murders. He was accused of public assassination and oppressing citizens of the Republic, found guilty of "an unlimited abuse of the guillotine" and sentenced to death. Yet he was a craven man; I think he was always frightened for his life, and when they sent him back to Calais the second time he became so obsessed that he saw enemies of the Republic all round him. People told me that when the time came to dress him in the red garment which is reserved for murderers as they make their last journey in the tumbril to the scaffold, Le Bon said, "It is not I who should wear this garment, but those whose orders I obeyed." Ironic,' he added, 'that Fouché, the present Minister of Police, is also a former priest: a sea captain's son who was an abbé and a professor at Nantes university ...
'I had a long time to think about the past while I was in prison. I despaired and grew fat - can you imagine that? I, who did not want to live, became ugly and gross; my teeth fell out, I began to grow bald . . . But in that time I came to understand what Le Bon meant. I would agree with him if he had said, "It is not I alone...'"'
Louis stood up and walked over to the window, glanced out into the darkness, and then sat down beside Ramage, who knew the movement was not curiosity about what was outside but rather closing a door on his past which he rarely dared to open.
'I have been thinking about your journey to Amiens. It will be dangerous. In Boulogne people accept you as foreign carpenters because there are many of them working in the shipyards. The road to Amiens from Boulogne is different. Four Frenchmen might be suspected of being deserters. Four foreigners - well, I can only guess at what protection the possession of passports and travel documents would give you against suspicion.'
'Is the danger because there are four of us, or the fact we are young and not in the Army?' Ramage asked.