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.
The crippled man hauled himself up with the clumsiness of pain and began hobbling towards the main door, but seeing Ramage and Stafford he waved his stick as if in greeting. He was tall, though his shoulders were now hunched; his hair was grey and his face lined, but Ramage guessed that pain and worry - or was it sadness? - had aged him more than the passing years.
'Good morning, Citizen,' he said carefully, as though wanting to pass the time of day but wary and unsure, like a man half afraid he was about to be accused of trespassing. Ramage thought of the two gendarmes near the main door. Perhaps they were more interested in visitors to the Cathedral than they seemed: a man attending church, albeit without there being a priest present, could be a man against the Revolution ...
Ramage shook hands and, guessing that the man could satisfy his curiosity about the Cathedral's fate during the Revolution, waved towards the altar: 'Things have changed since I was last here.'
'You are not French. Italian, perhaps?'
Ramage nodded. 'From Genoa. I've been to Boulogne; now I go to Paris and then back home.'
'Italy ... at the pass of Mont Cenis -' the man tapped his wooden leg with his stick ' - that's where I left this leg.'
Was there fighting up among the Alps? Who would be crazy enough to have a battle among the mountains? The man saw his puzzled look and said: 'The snow - my regiment was part of the Army of Italy. We marched over the mountains in thick snow. Some of us were too weak to get over the pass . . .' He glanced at Stafford, uncertain whether to go on.
'And the weak ones were left behind?' Ramage asked quietly.
The man nodded. 'If an arm or a leg freezes it dies, and if it isn't amputated quickly gangrene sets in. It can set in even if it is amputated. I was lucky.'
'They carried you in a wagon?' Ramage asked innocently, hoping to draw the man out.
‘They left me in the snow, just where I collapsed. There was a monastery nearby,' he added, almost absently. 'After the Army had gone the monks came along the pass to see what had been left behind. Not looking for loot, you understand; they were interested only in saving lives. They found me - and seventeen more like me. They carried us back to the monastery. They couldn't save my leg, but they saved my life. They had very little food, but they shared it with us - with eighteen atheists who up to a few hours earlier had belonged to the 24th Infanterie de Ligne. They nursed us and fed us and sheltered us. For the five of us that needed them, they made legs of wood, specially carved and fitted. It was five months before I was well again - and by then spring had come and the snow had melted and I could leave ..."
'So you returned to your regiment?'
'With one leg?' He knew Ramage was encouraging him to talk and he smiled. 'There was war in Italy and war in Austria — there was war almost everywhere; but there was peace in the monastery near the top of Mont Cenis, so I stayed and tried to pay my debt. I helped hoe and sow and reap the year's harvest - it's a very brief season - and I left the following spring, when the snow had once again cleared, just a year and a half after I first arrived. I got back to my home here in Amiens as winter began; it was a long walk for a one-legged man.'
'But your family was glad to see you.'
'I found that my family was dead.' Again that flat, expressionless tone of voice. 'My brother and my wife had been denounced as anti-Revolutionaries and guillotined, and the shock had killed my old father..,'
'Who denounced them?'
'The man who wanted our grocery shop,' he said simply. 'He is now the prefect of Amiens and the most powerful man in the city.'
'And you?' Ramage asked quietly. 'What do you do?'
The man glanced at the statue of the weeping child for a few moments, and then at the old women who were still kneeling. 'I come each morning and pray; I pray as I did before the Revolution and I pray as I learned to at the monastery. I pray for the souls of those I loved, and I have one other prayer which I can reveal to no man.' No flourish, no drama; just a plain statement by a man no longer afraid.
Louis had become an atheist at the Revolution; but now he prayed, too; he prayed that there was an after-life, so that Joseph Le Bon would be eternally punished. Had Le Bon worked here in Amiens?
'I have met men who have prayed for Citizen Le Bon,' Ramage said in a voice barely above a whisper.