The Influencing Machine: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom by Mike Jay

Author:Mike Jay [Jay, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ebookoidz
ISBN: 9781907222139
Google: 1ES0tgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1907222138
Publisher: Strange Attractor
Published: 2012-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

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But we hear nothing of this from Matthews yet: instead, he returns energetically to his campaign to get himself released. The response to his cabbage plan has reawoken his hopes, and he decides to strike hard while the authorities are paying attention to him. In November 1795 he sends two letters, one to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and another to the newly created executive, the Directory. His tone has altered dramatically: the pleading and the wistful chatter are replaced by a brusque attention to business. He has been the victim of an ‘infamous calumny’, and it is high time it was redressed. He is sure that the Committee ‘must be well acquainted with my affair’ and ‘will not permit to languish long unheard a man so devoted to the nation as I am’. He addresses himself personally to their civic responsibilies: ‘I demand justice’, he insists, and ‘I deny any charge which can be laid against me’.

Again, he hits the target: this letter is translated the same day. But silence descends once more. We next hear from him three months later, in February, by which point briskness has shaded into righteous anger. Once again, he goes straight to the top: Charles Lacroix, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Matthews has told him everything he needs to know — ‘you are in possession of all the pieces which shew the infamy of those who thus keep me here’ — and he is losing patience. Now he speaks the unspeakable. ‘I am sorry’, he continues, ‘after all my efforts to be obliged to think that to have a right to justice in France, I ought to have assisted in its destruction instead of having endeavoured its preservation’. Matthews the republican is, at this moment, dead. He is through with protesting his loyalty to the cause, offering justifications for his actions or evidence that he is on their side. The faith that has bound him through the entire story is consigned to the past. He no longer cares what they think: for the first time since the early days of his arrest, he is threatening to make trouble. ‘I demand of you personally’ he concludes, ‘in your official capacity, that you lay before the Directory all my papers’.

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