The time chosen by me was that of the Terror in France,
1793-94, during which the noble fruits of the French
Revolution came near to annihilation, thanks to the supremacy,
for a time, of a small band of anarchical men who, in the name
of liberty, invoked the tyranny of terror.
The hero of my play, _Paul Kauvar_, has for his prototype
Camille Desmoulins, one of the most conspicuous and sincere
sons of liberty of his day, who--in spite of his magnificent
devotion to freedom--when he dared oppose the Jacobins, was
beheaded at the guillotine--a martyr to national, as distinct
from personal, liberty.
The typical anarchist in my play is portrayed in _Carrac_,
whose prototype was Thomas Carier, sent into La Vendee as a
representative of the Jacobin convention. It was this man who,
without process of law, guillotined or destroyed most
horribly over one hundred thousand innocent men, women, and
children--in the name of liberty. He it was who invented
the "republican marriage"--the drowned bodies of whose
naked victims dammed the river Loire, and rendered its water
pestilential.
The _Duc de Beaumont_ portrays a type of the true noblesse of
France--proud, fearless, often unjust, never ignoble.
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