As if startled at the length of his speech he hurriedly gulped his wine, followed by Louis, and put his glass down nervously.
Ramage held out his own empty glass, and Louis poured some wine.
'Here's to you and the lads,' Ramage said soberly, not trusting himself to say more.
Louis finished his glass and said: 'Before we sleep, we should think of our plan for tomorrow.'
Ramage nodded. 'Since it's a Saturday, the patron won't expect us to try to do any business at the factories, so we'll establish ourselves as visitors. We can have a look at the Cathedral - after all, it's the biggest in France, and even though the Church is not popular here, we Italians are Godfearing people! After that we'll make sure we know all the roads leading away from this hotel, and you must find out where we can hire horses in an emergency - steal them, if necessary.'
He paused for a minute or two, deep in thought. 'Stafford has his picklocks; we have wax in case we have to break and repair a seal, candles, and the little lantern. You have that thin-bladed knife and each of us has a heavier one. Pen, paper and ink to copy any documents. Plaster and some boxwood in case we have to carve a copy of a seal, and the chisels and gouges. You have the sheets of notepaper with the Ministry of Marine heading . . . Can you think of anything else?'
When Louis shook his head, Ramage asked Stafford: 'You have everything you might want?'
'Me picklocks, some thin wire, a spatula an' me fingers; that's all I need, sir.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Next morning Louis left them after explaining that he was going to make the necessary arrangements while Ramage and Stafford wandered through the city, establishing themselves as innocent visitors. The short walk to the great Cathedral was almost frightening. The whole city seemed to be silent and foreboding; silent although horses' hooves clattered over thecobbles and cartwheels rumbled; although people walked the streets talking to each other and shopkeepers stood at their doorways, calling out greetings and trying to beguile prospective customers.
There were a few of the noises one would expect in a city; but in an almost deserted city. These were not the noises of a normal city going about its daily business, and he and Stafford had almost reached the Cathedral before Ramage realized exactly what was missing: no one was laughing and no one was bustling: it was as though everyone had a secret guilt and feared that the pairs of gendarmes who seemed to stand at every corner were watching and waiting to make an arrest; that they knew only too well there was among the quiet streets of Amiens a building with barred windows where a man who laughed loudly or joked or behaved in a carefree manner might be dragged before a tribunal and accused of being an enemy of the Revolution.
But surely these,people in the streets were the Revolution: surely it was for them, the sans-culottes, that the Revolution had been staged? With the aristocrats dead or exiled and their estates sold off to the people, with every man proclaimed as free and equal as his neighbour, and the armies of France standing astride Europe from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, surely now was the time for the people to be happy? Yet Ramage sensed that these people in Amiens were far from carefree; they were nervous and suspicious of each other, and looked at those gendarmes not as protectors against burglars, cutpurses and pickpockets but as honest men might be wary of large and unknown dogs.
Louis had told him all this; indeed, he had explained it with great care. Ramage admitted to himself that it had been easy enough to listen but too hard to visualize; one had to see it to believe it.
The majority of the French people had supported the idea of the Revolution: for generations under the monarchy taxation had been harsh and arbitrary, with the poorest always paying the most. But there had been such a struggle for power after the Revolution: such almost unbelievable cruelties and injustices committed with chilhng cynicism in the name of the Revolution by those very leaders, as each struggled for personal power, that the people were bewildered and disillusioned. Debtors denouncing their creditors to avoid paying their bills, vicious men settling old scores by the same means - the people had seen too much of it. Louis must be right - the majority of them were sick of the metallic hiss and thud of the guillotine, sick of passing a tumbril laden with white-faced men and weeping women. This was an aspect of the Revolution they had never visualized and never wanted — seeing former neighbours (and often former friends and sometimes relatives) dragged off to the Widow . . . This bore no relation to getting rid of the tyrannical landowners and the iniquitous tax collectors of the ancien régime; it had nothing to do with driving out the grasping priests and seizing the vast lands owned by the Church.
But in several cases the grasping priests had cast off the soutane, snatched up the Red Cap of Liberty and returned - in the role of rabid Revolutionaries. Joseph Le Bon, the former curé, had probably killed more innocent Frenchmen in the time of the Revolution than Bonaparte's Army of Italy lost in the march to Rome; and Joseph Fouché, former abbé of Nantes and professor at its university, was now the Minister of Police and the most feared man in France. It was, Ramage reflected, as though the old fierceness of the Inquisition readily converted into Revolutionary zeal; merely a question of changing the Church's rack for the State's guillotine in the determination either to command men's souls or kill their bodies. As with the Inquisition so with the Revolution: mere acceptance was not enough; one had to be a zealot,
As he and Stafford side-stepped to avoid three pimply boys who were begging, watched without interest by the gendarmes, he realized that although no one seemed to be starving, few were wearing clothes which had not been carefully darned.
A cool and supercilious look at the outside of the Cathedral. Two more gendarmes standing fifteen yards from the main door watching lethargically, although a strange face was a reason for them slowly swivelling their heads to relieve the boredom. One removed his tricorn and inspected the inside before replacing it on his head.
The outside of the Cathedral had suffered the sort of damage you would expect from excited schoolboys drunk for the first time on Calvados: the heads of all the saints had been smashed off and sculptured groups had been crudely mutilated in an attempt to make them look ridiculous. Yet it was an attempt that was itself ridiculous, since the Cathedral had stood for nearly six hundred years, massive and graceful. Disfiguring the small, sculptured groups had as much effect on its majesty as a man relieving himself against a buttress.
Ramage walked through the main door, and despite the gloom saw at once that the great altarpiece spreading the whole breadth of the Cathedral was untouched. As he noted that the beautiful chapels on either side of the choir also appeared to be undamaged he saw five people kneeling. Four seemed to be old women, the fifth a crippled man, one of his legs stuck out sideways. A wooden leg. Their presence emphasized the vastness and the emptiness and the silence: there was none of the distant chanting or murmuring that you usually heard the moment you entered the main door of a great cathedraclass="underline" simply the chilling silence of an abandoned building ... As he walked towards the altar he saw that the famous marble statue of the weeping child had been damaged. The altar was bare - not surprisingly the Revolutionaries had taken the gold and silver candlesticks, and the rich red and purple hangings had vanished. Yet the stained-glass windows were mostly intact - a gap here and there in the delicate lacework of coloured glass showed where an eager fellow with a strong arm had lobbed a brick or fired a fowling-piece.