On her part, Andrea would have given ten years, sooner than only one, to have him in that place, but, unfortunately, each was ignorant of the other’s mood, and they stood still, in almost painful expectation.
“You were saying that you had to endure a great deal at court. Was not the Queen pleasant towards you?”
“I have nothing to blame her Majesty for,” replied the ex-lady of honor, “and I should be unjust if I did not acknowledge her Majesty’s kind treatment.”
“I hinted at this, because I have lately noticed that the friendship seemed to show a falling off,” continued the count.
“That is possible, and that is why I am leaving the court.”
“But you will live so lonely?”
“Have I not always lived so, my lord?” sighed Andrea, “as maid—wife—“ she stopped, seeing that she was going too far.
“Do you make me a reproach?”
“What right have I in heaven’s name to make reproaches to your lordship?” retorted the countess: “do you believe I have forgot the circumstances under which we were plighted? Just the opposite of those who vow before the altar reciprocal love and mutual protection, we swore eternal indifference and complete separation. The blame would be to the one who forgot that oath.”
Charny caught the sigh which these words had not entirely suppressed, from the speaker’s heart.
“But this is such a small dwelling,” he said: “a countess in one sitting room with only another to eat in, and this for repose——“
She sprang in between him and the bedroom, seeing Sebastian behind the door, in her mind’s eye.
“Oh, my lord, do not go that way, I entreat you,” she exclaimed, barring the passage with her extended arms.
“Oh, my lady,” said he, looking at her so pale and trembling, with fright never more plain on a human face, “I knew that you did not like me: but I had no idea you hated me to this degree.”
Incapable of remaining any longer beside his wife without an outburst, he reeled for a space like an intoxicated man; recovering himself, he rushed out of the room with an exclamation of pain which echoed in the depths of the hearer’s heart.
She watched him till he was out of sight; she listened till she could no longer hear his departing carriage, and then with a breaking heart, dreading that she had not enough motherly love to combat with this other passion, she darted into the bedroom, calling out:
“Sebastian,” but no voice replied.
By the trembling of the night-lamp in a draft she perceived that the window was open. It was the same by which the child was kidnapped fifteen years before.
“This is justice,” she muttered; “did he not say that I was no more his mother?”
Comprehending that she had lost both husband and child at the period when she had recovered them, Andrea threw herself on the couch, at the end of her resignation and her prayers exhausted.
Suddenly it seemed to her that something more dreadful than her sorrowful plight glided in between grief and her tears.
She looked up and beheld a man, after climbing in at the open window, standing on the floor.
She wished to shriek and ring for help; but he bent on her the fascinating gaze which caused her the invincible lethargy she remembered Cagliostro could impose upon her: but in this mesmerist and his spell-binding look and bearing, she recognized Gilbert.
How was it the execrated father stood in the stead of his beloved son?
IT was Dr. Gilbert who was closeted with the King when the usher inquired after him on the order of Isidore and the entreaty of Sebastian.
The upright heart of Louis XVI. had appreciated the loyalty in the doctor’s. After half an hour, the latter came forth and went into the Queen’s ante-chamber, where he saw Isidore.
“I asked for you, doctor, but I have another with me who wants still more to see you. It will be cruel to detain you from him: so let us hasten to the Green Saloon.”
But the room was empty and such was the confusion in the palace that no servant was at hand to inform them what had become of the young man.
“It was a person I met on the road, eager to get to Paris and coming here on foot only for my giving him a ride.”
“Are you speaking of the peasant Pitou?”
“No, doctor—of your son, Sebastian.”
At this, the usher who had taken Isidore away returned.
He was ignorant of what had happened but, luckily, a second footman had seen the singular disappearance of the boy in the carriage of a court lady.
They hastened to the gates where the janitor well recalled that the direction to the coachman was “No. 9 Coq-Heron Street, first carriage entrance from Plastriere Street.”
“My sister-in-law’s,” exclaimed Isidore, “the countess of Charny!”
“Fatality,” muttered Gilbert. “He must have recognized her,” he said in a lower tone.
“Let us go there,” suggested the young noble.
Gilbert saw all the dangers of Andrea’s son being discovered by her husband.
“My lord,” he said, “my son is in safety in the hands of the Countess of Charny, and as I have the honor to know her, I think I can call by myself. Besides it is more proper that you should be on your road; for I presume you are going to Turin, from what I heard in the King’s presence.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Receive my thanks for your kindness to Sebastian, and be off! When a father says he is not uneasy, you need feel no anxiety.”
Isidore held out his hand which the revolutionist shook with more heartiness than he had for most of his class; while the nobleman returned within the palace, he went along to the junction of the streets Coq-Heron and Plastriere.
Both were painful memories.
In the latter he had lived, a poor boy, earning his bread by copying music, by receiving instruction from the author Rousseau. From his window he had contemplated Andrea at her own casement, under the hands of her maid, Nicole, his first sweetheart, and to that window he had made his way by a rope and by scaling the wall, to view more closely and satisfy his passion for the high-born lady who had bewitched him.
Rousseau was dead, but Andrea was rich and nobler still; he had also attained wealth and consideration.
But was he any happier than when he walked out of doors to dip his crust in the waters of this public fountain?
He could not help walking up to the door where Rousseau had lived. It was open on the alley which ran under the building to the yard at the back as well as up to the attic where he was lodged.
He went up to the first floor back, where the window on the landing gave a view of the rear house where Baron Taverney had dwelt.
No one disturbed him in his contemplation; the house had come down in the world; no janitor; the inhabitants were poor folk who did not fear thieves.
The garden at Taverney’s house was the same as a dozen years before. The vine still hung on the trellis which had served him as ladder in his night clamberings within the enclosure.
He was unaware whether Count Charny was with his wife, but he was so bent on learning about Sebastian that he meant to risk all.
He climbed the wall and descended on the other side. In the garden nothing obstructed him, and thus he reached the window of Andrea’s Bedroom.
In another instant, as related, the two enemies stood face to face.
The lady’s first feeling was invincible repugnance rather than profound terror.
For her the Americanized Gilbert, the friend of Washington and Lafayette, aristocratic through study, science and genius, was still the hangdog Gilbert of her father’s manor house, and the gardener’s boy of Trianon Palace.
Gilbert no longer bore her the ardent love which had driven him to crime in his youth, but the deep and tender affection, spite of her insults and persecutions, of a man ready to do a service at risk of his life.
With the insight nature had given him and the justice education implanted, Gilbert had weighed himself: he understood that Andrea’s misfortunes arose from him, and he would never be quits with her until he had made her as happy as he had the reverse.
But how could he blissfully affect her future.
It was impossible for him yet to comprehend.
On seeing this but to so much despair, again the prey to woe, all his fibres of mercy were moved for so much misery.
Instead of using his hypnotic power to subdue her, he spoke softly to her, ready to master her if she became rebellious.
The result was that the medium felt the ethereal fluid fade away like a dissolving fog, by Gilbert’s permission, and she was able to speak of her own free will.
“What do you want, sir? how came you here?”
“By the way I used before,” replied the doctor. “Hence you can be easy—no one will know of it. Why? because I come to claim a treasure, of no consequence to you, but precious to me, my son. I want you to tell what has become of my son, taken away in your carriage and brought here.”
“How do I know? taught by you to hate his mother, he has fled.”
“His mother? are you really a mother to him?”
“Oh, you see my grief, you have heard my cries, and looking on my despair, you ask me if I am his mother?”
“How then are you ignorant what has become of him?”
“But I tell you he has fled; that I came into this room for him and found the window open and the room vacant.”
“Where could he have gone—good God!” exclaimed Gilbert. “It is past midnight and he does not know the town.”
“Do you believe anything evil has befallen him?” asked she, approaching.
“We shall hear, for it is you who shall tell me.”
And with a wave of the hand he began anew to plunge her into the mesmeric sleep.
She uttered a sigh and fell off into repose.
“Am I to put forth all my will power or will you answer voluntarily?” asked Gilbert when she was under control.
“Will you tell the boy again that I am not his mother?”
“That depends. Do you love him?”
“Then you are his mother as I am his father, for it is thus I love him. Loving him, you shall see him again. When did you part from the boy?”
“About half an hour ago, when Count Charny called. I had pushed him into this room.”
“What were his last words?”
“That I was no more his mother: because I had told him that you were a villain.”
“Look into the poor boy’s heart and see what harm you wrought.”
“Oh, God forgive me,” said Andrea: “forgive me, my son.”
“Did Count Charny suspect the boy was here?”
“No, I am sure.”
“Why did he not stay?”
“Because he never stays long with me. Oh, wretch that I am,” she interrupted herself, “he was returning to me after refusing that mission—because he loves me—he loves me!”
Gilbert began to see more clearly into this drama which his eye was first to penetrate.
“But do you love him?” he demanded.
“I see your intention is good: you wish to make up to me for the grief you have caused: but I refuse the boon coming from you. I hate you and wish to continue in my hatred.”
“Poor mortality,” muttered the philosopher, “have you had so much happiness that you can dally with a certain amount offered you? so you love him?”
“Yes. Since first I saw him, as the Queen and I sat with him in a hackney-carriage in which we returned from Paris to Versailles one night.”
“You know what love is, Andrea,” queried Gilbert, mournfully.
“I know that love has been given as a standard by which we can measure how much sadness we can endure,” replied she.
“It is well: you are a true woman and a true mother: a rough diamond, you were shaped by the stern lapidary known as Grief. Return to Sebastian.”
“Yes, I see him leaving the house with clenched hands and knit brow. He wanders up the street—he goes up to a woman and asks her for St. Honore Street—--“
“My street: he was seeking for my house. Poor child! he will be there awaiting me.”
“Hold! he has gone astray—he is in New St. Roch Street. Oh, he does not see that vehicle coming down Sourdiere Street, but I see the horses—Ah!”
She drew herself up with an awful scream, maternal anguish depicted on her visage, down which rolled tears and perspiration.
“Oh, if harm befalls him, remember that it will recoil on your head,” hissed Gilbert.
“Ah,” sighed Andrea in relief, without hearing or heeding him, “God in heaven be praised! it is the horse’s breast which struck him, and he is thrown out of the rut of the wheel. There he lies, stunned, but he is not killed. Only swooned. Hasten to help him. It is my son! They form a crowd round him: is there not a doctor or surgeon among them all?”
“Oh, I shall run,” said Gilbert.
“Wait,” said Andrea, stopping him by the arm, “they are dividing to let help come. It is the doct—oh, do not let that man approach him—I loathe him—he is a vampire, he is hideous!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, do not lose sight of Sebastian,” said Gilbert, shuddering.
“This ghoul carries him away—up the street—into the blind alley, called St. Hyacinthe: where he goes down some steps. He places him on a table where books and printed papers are heaped. He takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeve. He ties the arm with bandages from a woman as dirty and hideous as himself. He finds a lance in a case—he is going to bleed him. Oh, I cannot bear to see my son’s blood flow. Run, run, and you will find him as I say.”
“Shall I awaken you at once with recollection: or would you sleep till the morning and know nothing of what has happened?”
“Awaken me at once with full memory.”
Gilbert described a double curve with his hands so that his thumbs came upon the medium’s eyelids; he breathed on her forehead and said merely:
Instantly her eyes became animated; her limbs were supple; she looked at Gilbert almost without terror, and continuing, though aroused, the impulse in her vision, she cried:
“Oh, run, run, and snatch the boy from the hands of that man who causes me so much fright!”
WITH no need to be spurred in his quest, Gilbert darted through the rooms and as it would have taken too long to climb the walls, he made for the front door, which he opened himself and bounded out on the street.
Knowing Paris intimately, he reached the spot indicated by Andrea in her vision without delay and his first question to a storekeeper, who had witnessed the accident to the boy, confirmed the statement.
He proceeded straightway to the door in the alley, and knocked.
“Who knocks?” challenged a woman’s voice.
“I, the father of the wounded child whom you succored,” replied the knocker.
“Open, Albertine,” said a man’s voice: “it is Dr. Gilbert.”
He was let into a cellar, or rather cavern, down some moldering steps, lighted by a lamp set on the table cumbered with printed papers, books and manuscripts as Andrea had described.
In the shadow, and on a mattress, young Gilbert lay, but held out his arms to his father, calling him. However powerful the philosophical command in Gilbert, paternal love overruled decorum, and he sprang to the boy whom he pressed to his breast, with care not to hurt his bruised chest or his cut arm. After a long, fond kiss, he turned to thank the good Samaritan. He was standing with his feet far apart, one hand on the table, the other on his hip, lit by the lamp of which he had removed the shade the better to illumine the scene.
“Look, Albertine,” said he, “and with me thank the chance enabling me to do a good turn for one of my brothers.”
The speaker was a green and sallow man, like one of those country clowns whom Latona’s wrath pursued and who was turning to a frog. Gilbert shuddered, thinking that he had seen this abortion before as through a sheet of blood.
He drew nearer to Sebastian and hugged him once more. But triumphing over his first impulse, he went back to the strange man who had so appalled Andrea in the second-sight vision, and said:
“Receive all the thanks of a father, sir, for having preserved his son: they are sincere and come right from his heart.”
“I have merely done my duty as prescribed by nature and recommended by science,” replied the other. “I am a man, and as Terence says, nothing human is foreign to me; besides, I have a tender heart, and cannot see even an insect suffer; consequently still less my fellow man.”
“May I learn to what fervent philanthropist I have the honor to speak?”
“Do you not know your brother-physician?” said the surgeon, laughing in what he wanted to seem benevolence though it was ghastly. “I know you, Dr. Gilbert, the friend of the American patriots, and of Lafayette!” He laid peculiar stress on this name. “The republican of America and France, the honorable Utopist who has written magnificent articles on constitutional government, which you sent to Louis XVI. from the States, and for which he lodged you in the Bastile, the moment you touched French soil. You wanted to save him by clearing the road to the future, and he opened that into jail—regular royal gratitude!”
He laughed again, this time terribly and threateningly.
“If you know me it is a farther reason for me to insist on learning to whom I am indebted.”
“Oh, it is a long while since we made acquaintance,” said the surgeon. “Twenty years, sir, on the dreadful night of the thirtieth of May, 1770; the night when the fireworks exploded by accident among the people in the Paris square, and injured and killed many who came to rejoice over the wedding of the Archduchess and our Prince Royal, but who had to curse their names. You were but a boy whom Rousseau brought to me, wounded and crushed almost to death, and I bled you on a board amid the dead and the cut-off limbs. Yet that awful night is a pleasant memory to me for I was able to save many existences by my steel knowing where to dissever to preserve life and where to cut to spare pain.”
“You are Jean Paul Marat, then,” cried Gilbert, falling back a step despite himself.
“Mark, Albertine, that my name makes some effect,” said Marat with a sinister laugh.
“But I thought you were physician to Count Artois; why are you in this cave, why lighted by this smoky lamp?”
“I was the Prince’s veterinary surgeon, you mean. But he emigrated? no prince, no stables; no stables, no vet. Besides, I gave in my resignation, for I would no longer serve the tyrants.”
The dwarf drew himself up to the full extent of his form.
“But, in short, why are you in this hole?”
“Because, Master Philosopher, I am a sound patriot writing to decry the ambitious; Bailly fears me, Necker detests me, and Lafayette sets the National Guard on to hunt me down and has put a price on my head—the aspiring dictator! but I brave him! out of my hole, I pursue him, and denounce the Caesar. Do you know what he has done? He has had fifteen thousand snuffboxes made with his portrait on them, which hides some trick. So I entreat all good citizens to smash them when found. It is the rallying sign for the great Royalist Plot, for you cannot be ignorant that Lafayette is conspiring with the Queen while poor Louis is blubbering scalding tears over the blunders the Austrian is leading him into.
“The Queen,” said Gilbert pensively.
“Yes; don’t tell me that she is not plotting: lately she gave away so many white cockades that white ribbon went away up in the market. It is a fact, for I had it from one of the workgirls of Bertin the dressmaker, her Prime Minister in Fashions, who used to say: ‘I have been discussing matters this morning with her Majesty.'”
“And how do you denounce such things?” inquired the doctor.
“In my newspaper, the one I have just started, twenty numbers having appeared. It is ‘The Friend of the people or the Parisian Publicist,’ an impartial political organ. To pay for the paper and the printing—look behind you—I have sold the sheets and blankets off my bed.”
Turning, Gilbert indeed saw that Sebastian lay on the mattress absolutely bare, but he had fallen asleep, overcome with pain and fatigue. He went up to him to see that it was not a swoon, but reassured by the regular breathing he, returned to this journalist, who irresistibly inspired him with the interest we feel for a hyena, tiger or other wild beast.
“Who help you in this gigantic work?” he inquired.
“My staff?” sneered Marat. “Ha, ha, ha! the geese fly in files: the eagle soars alone. My helpers are these,” and he showed his head and hands. “I write the whole paper single handed—I can show you the copy, though it runs into sixteen pages octavo sometimes, and often I use small type though I commenced with large. So, it is not merely a newspaper—but a personality—it is Marat!”
“Enormous labor—how do you manage it?” asked the other doctor.
“It is the secret of nature—a compact I have made with death. I have given ten years of my life, so that I need no rest by day and no sleep by night. My existence is summed up in writing: I do it day and night. Lafayette’s police coop me up in this cell, where they chain me body and soul to my work: they have doubled my activity. It was heavy on me at first but I am inured to it. It delights me now to see poor humanity through this airhole, by the narrow and slanting beam. From my gloomy den I judge mankind living, and science and politics without appeal. With one hand I demolish the savants, with the other the politicians. I shall upset the whole state of things, like Samson destroying the Temple, and under the ruins perhaps crushing me, I shall bury the throne!”
In spite of himself the hearer shuddered: in his rags and the poverty-stricken vault this man repeated very nearly what Cagliostro had said in his palace under his embroidered clothes.
“But when you are so popular, why do you not try for a nomination in the National Assembly?” he asked.
“Because the day has not come for that,” replied the demagogue; expressing his regret, he continued, “Oh, were I a tribune of the masses, sustained by only a few thousand of determined men, I answer for the Constitution being perfectly safe in six weeks: the political machine should move better: no villain would dare play ticks with it: the Nation should be free and happy: in less than a year, it should be flourishing and redoubtable: and thus would it remain while I was erect.”
The vain creature was transformed under Gilbert’s eyes: his eyes became bloodshot; his yellow skin shone with sweat; the monster became great in his hideousness as another is grand in his beauty.
“Yes, but I am not a representative,” he proceeded, resuming his train of ideas from where he had interrupted himself: “I have not the thousands of followers. No, but I am a journalist, and have my weapons and ammunition, my subscribers and readers, for whom I am an oracle, a prophet and a diviner. I have my following for whom I am a friend, and I lead them on, trembling, from treachery to treachery, discovery to discovery, from one dreadful thing to another. In the first number of The Friend of the People, I denounced the upper classes saying that there were six hundred guilty wretches in France and that number of ropes-ends would do the job: but I made a mistake, ha, ha! The deeds of the fifth and sixth of October opened my eyes and I see that we must hang twenty thousand of the patricians.”
Gilbert smiled, for fury elevated to this point, seemed madness to him.
“Why, there is not enough hemp in France to do this work, and rope would go up in price,” he said.
“That is why I am looking round for some other means,” returned Marat, “more expeditious and novel. Do you know whom I expect this evening? one of our brother medicos, a member of the National Assembly whom you must know by name, Dr. Guillotin——“
“The one who moved that the Assembly, expelled from the Session Hall at Versailles, should meet in the Tennis Court a learned man?”
“Do you know what this able citizen has discovered? a marvellous machine which kills without pain, for death must be punishment not torture; he has invented it and we shall try it one of these mornings.”
Gilbert started: this was the second time that this brother Invisible reminded him of the Chief, Cagliostro; no doubt this death-machine was the same he had spoken of.
“But you are lucky—a knock! it is he. Run and open the door, Albertine.”
The hag, who was the wife—rather the female mate of Marat—rose from the stool on which she was squatting, and staggered half asleep towards the door.
Giddy with terror, Gilbert went instinctively towards Sebastian, ready to take him in his arms and flee.
“Just think of an automatic executioner,” said Marat, enthusiastically, “with no need of a man to set it going; which can, if the knife is changed a couple of times, cut off three hundred heads a-day!”
“And add,” said a bland, melodious voice, behind Marat, “which can cut off these heads without other sensation than a slight coolness around the neck.”
“Oh, is this you, doctor?” exclaimed Marat, turning towards a dapper little man of forty or so, whose gentle demeanor and spruce dress made a marked contrast with his host: in his hand he carried a small box such as children’s toys are kept in. “What are you bringing us?”
“A model of my machine, my dear Marat. But I see Dr. Gilbert here, unless I mistake,” said the little dandy, trying to pierce the obscurity.
“The same, sir,” said the other visitor bowing.
“Enchanted to meet you, sir; you are only too welcome, and I shall be happy to have the opinion of so distinguished a man on my invention. I must tell you, my dear Marat, that I have found a skillful carpenter, named Guidon, to make my machine on the working scale. He is dear, though, wanting five thousand five hundred francs; but no sacrifice is too great for me to make for humanity. In two months it will be built, and we can try it: I shall propose it to the Assembly. I hope you will approve of it in your excellent new paper, though, in sober earnest, the machine recommends itself, as you will see with your own eyes, Dr. Gilbert. But a few lines in the People’s Friend will do no harm.”
“Be easy on that score; it is not a few lines but a whole number that I shall dedicate to it.”
“You are too good, Marat; but I am not going to let you puff a pig in a poke.”
He took out of his pocket a much smaller box, in which a sound indicated that some little live thing or several such were fidgeting in their prison. This noise did not escape Marat’s subtle hearing.
“What have you got there?” he asked, putting out his hand towards the box.
“Mind,” said the doctor, drawing it back, “do not let them escape as we could not catch them again; they are mice whose heads we are going to nick off with the machine. What, are you going to leave us, Dr. Gilbert?”
“Alas, yes, sir, to my great regret; but my son, wounded by being run over by a horse just now, has been relieved by Friend Marat, to whom I also owe my own life in an almost similar affair. I have to thank him again. The boy needs a fresh bed, cares and repose: so that I cannot witness your interesting experiment.”
“But you will come and see the one with the real machine, in two months, you promise, doctor?”
“I pledge my word.”
“Doctor,” said Marat, “I need not say, keep my abode secret. If your friend Lafayette were to discover it he would have me shot like a dog, or hung like a thief.”
“Shooting, hanging,” exclaimed Guillotin. “But we shall put an end to these cannibal deaths. We shall have a death, soft, easy, instantaneous, such as old people, disgusted with their life and wishful to pass away like sages and philosophers, will prefer to a natural one. Come and see how it works, Marat!”
And without troubling any farther about Dr. Gilbert, the enthusiast opened his larger box and began to set up on the table a model apparatus which the surgeon regarded with curiosity equal to his enthusiasm.
Gilbert profited by their being so engaged, to carry away Sebastian, guided by Albertine who fastened up the outer door after him.
Once in the street, he felt the night wind chill the perspiration gathered on his brow.
“Heavens,” he muttered, “what will happen to a city where the cellars perhaps hide five hundred lovers of mankind who are occupied with such work as we have a sample of there? one day they will perform in broad daylight before the crowd.”
It was little distance to his house in St. Honore Street.
The cold revived Sebastian but his father would not let him walk. When he knocked at his door, a heavy step was heard approaching.
“Is that you, Dr. Gilbert?” challenged one within.
“That is Pitou’s voice,” said the boy.
“Praise heaven, Sebastian is found,” shouted Pitou on opening the door. “Master Billet,” he shouted still more loudly, “Sebastian is found, and all right, I hope, doctor?”
“Without any serious hurt, anyway,” replied the other, “Come, Sebastian.”
He carried his son up to his bed.
Pitou followed with the light; by his mud-bespattered shoes and stockings it was plain that he had come a long journey.
Indeed, after taking the broken-hearted Catherine home and learning from her lips that her deep sorrow came from Isidore Charny being called away to Paris, he took leave of her and Mother Billet, weeping by her bedside, and went home to Haramont. He walked so slowly that he did not get there until daybreak.
He fell off to sleep so that it was not till he awoke, that he found the youth’s letter. Immediately he started to overtake him.
He girded up with a leather strap, took some bread and with a walking stick in his fist, proceeded to town, where he arrived at eight that night.
He found neither the doctor nor his son at home—only Farmer Billet.
This hearty, robust man, unnerved by the bloody scenes witnessed since the Taking of the Bastile, of which enterprise he was the leader, had no news for Pitou.
Their sad waiting was rewarded by the double arrival.
Though tranquil about Sebastian, Pitou, when sent to bed had his budget to unfold to the farmer. Let no reader think that he revealed Catherine’s secrets and spoke of her amour with the young noble. The honest soul of the Commander of the Haramont National Guard would not stoop to that story. But he told Billet that the harvest was bad, the barley a failure, part of the wheat wind-laid, and the barns but a third full—and that he had found Catherine on the road.
Billet was little vexed about the grain, but the illness of his daughter distressed him.
He ran to Dr. Gilbert with a sad face as the latter was finishing this note to Andrea: “Be of good heart; the child is found, with no one hurt.”
“Dr. Gilbert, you were right to retain me in town where I might be useful; but everything has been going wrong in the country while the good man is away.”
Gilbert agreed with his friend that a hearty buxom girl like Catherine should not faint on the public road. Feeling with a parent, he responded:
“Go home, my dear Billet, since land and family call you. But do not forget that I shall claim you in the name of the country.”
Thus Billet returned home after an absence of three months, although he had intended to be away only a week.
Pitou followed him, bearing twenty-five louis destined from Gilbert for the equipment and maintenance of the Haramont National Guard.
Sebastian stayed with his father.
A WEEK has passed since the events related. Everybody was saying: The Revolution is finished; the King is delivered from Versailles, and his courtiers and evil counsellors. The King is placed in life and actuality. He had heretofore the license to work wrong; now he has full liberty to do good.
The dread from the riots had brought the conservatives over to the royalty. The Assembly had been frightened, too, and saw that it depended on the King. A hundred and fifty of its members took to flight.
The two most popular men, Lafayette and Mirabeau, became royalists. The latter wanted the other to unite with him to save the crown, but while honorable Lafayette had a limited brain, he did not see the orator’s genius.
Mirabeau was all for the Duke of Orleans, whom Lafayette advised, nay, ordered to quit the kingdom.
“But suppose I come back without your permission?” said the prince.
“Then, I hope you will do me the honor to cross swords with me at the first battle,” replied the marquis.
He was the veritable ruler and the duke had to depart; he did not return until called to be King of the French.
Lafayette had saved the Queen and protected the King; he was perfectly a royalist.
But still, like Gilbert, he was not so much the friend of the King as of the crown.
The monarch had too just a mind not to see this clearly.
Although he had not seen the doctor lately he remembered that this was his day of duty and he called him.
The King was pacing the bedroom, but stopping now and then to look at the Vandyke picture of Charles First, now in the Louvre.
The sovereign of England is painted as a Cavalier, with his horse, as ready for flight as for battle.
This picture seemed fatally the goal of the King’s wanderings.
At the step, Louis turned round.
“Oh, is it you, doctor?” he said. “Come in, I am glad to see you.” Leading him up to the painting he said: “Do you know this? where did you see it?”
“In Lady Dubarry’s house, when I was a boy, but it deeply struck me.”
“Yes, she pretended to be descended from the page who holds the horse. Jeanne Dubarry was the woman chosen by Marshal Richelieu to be the sole feminine ruler over the worn-out monarch Louis XV. and to induce him to shut up the infamous Deerpark, which was the harem ruining the old man. She was an adroit actress and played her part marvellously. She entertained while making sport of him, and he became manly because she persuaded him he was so.”
He stopped as if blaming himself for his imprudence in speaking of his grandfather thus openly before a stranger; but one glance at Gilbert’s frank face encouraged him, for he saw that he could speak all to a man who understood every thing.
“This melancholy, lofty face,” went on the King, referring to the portrait, “was placed in the strange Egeria’s boudoir, where it heard her impudent laughs and saw her lascivious gambols. Merrily she would take Louis by the arm and show him Charles, saying: ‘Old gossip, this King had his neck cut through because he was too weak towards his Parliament. Take warning about your own!’ Hence Louis broke up his Parliament and died peacefully on his throne. Thereupon we exiled the poor woman, for whom we ought to have been most indulgent. The picture was packed away in the lumber room of Versailles and I never thought about it. Now, how comes it here, in my bedroom? why does it haunt me?” He shook his head. “There is some fate in this.”
“Fatality, if the portrait reads no lesson, Sire; Providence if it does. What does it say to your Majesty?”
“That Charles lost his throne from having made war on his subjects, and James the Second for having tired his own.”
“Like me, then, it speaks the truth.”
“Well?” inquired the sovereign, questioning the doctor with his glance.
“Well, I beg to ask for your answer to the portrait.”
“Friend Gilbert, I have resolved on nothing: I will take the cue from circumstances.”
“The people fear that your Majesty purposes war upon them.”
“No, sir,” he rejoined, “I cannot make war on them without foreign support and I know the state of Europe too well to rely on that. The King of Prussia offers to enter France at the head of a hundred thousand men; but I too well know his ambitious and intriguing spirit—a petty monarchy which wishes to become a great one, thriving on turmoil and hoping to catch some fish like another Silesia. On her part, Austria places a hundred thousand men at my call; but I do not like my brother-in-law Leopold, a two-faced Janus, whose mother, Marie Theresa, had my father poisoned.
“My brother Artois proposes the support of Sardinia and Spain, but I do not trust those powers, led by Artois. Beside him is Calonne, in other words, the Queen’s worst enemy, the one who annotated with his own hand the pamphlet of the Countess Lamotte Valois anent the conspiracy of the Queen’s Necklace, for which she was branded. I know all that is going on yonder. In their last council a debate ensued about deposing me and appointing a regent who would be probably my dear, very dear brother Count Provence. Prince Conde suggested marching with an enemy upon Lyons, ‘whatever happened me at Paris!’
“It is another thing with the Great Empress Catherine; she confines herself to advice, bless her! you can understand that when you reflect that she is at table digesting Poland and cannot rise until she has finished her feast. She gives me advice which aims to be sublime but is only ridiculous, considering what has lately occurred. She says: ‘Monarchs ought to proceed on their course like the moon in her orbit, without being disturbed by the baying of curs!’—that is, the protests of the common people. It appears that the Russian curs merely bark; ours do some biting, as you may learn of my poor Lifeguardsmen, torn to pieces by them.”
“The people thought that your Majesty was going to quit the country.”
“Doctor,” said the King after hesitating, and he laid his hand on the other’s shoulder, “I have promised you the truth and you shall have it thoroughly. Such a matter has been broached; it is the opinion of many faithful servitors surrounding me that I ought to flee. But on the sixth of October night, when weeping in my arms, the Queen besought me never to flee without her, and that we should all depart together, to be saved or die in company. I shall keep my word; and as I do not think that we could flee in such a number without being stopped, a dozen times before we got to the frontier, I conclude that we shall never get away.”
“Well, Sire, there is indeed no need of the foreigners. What would be the use until you shall exhaust your own resources? My advice is that we are only beginning the fight and that the Taking of the Bastile and the attack on the Palace at Versailles are only the two first acts in the tragedy to be played by France under the eyes of Europe.”
“I hope you are mistaken, sir,” replied Louis, slightly turning pale: “My police tell me nothing like this.”
“I have no police or information to check them; but in my position I am the natural conductor between the heavens and what is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. Sire, what we have experienced is merely the rumble that runs before the earthquake; we have yet to meet the lava, the fire and the smoke. I fear that the Revolutionary torrent will run ahead of us. There are only two methods to save yourself. One is to place yourself on the foremost breaker and be carried on with it.”
“I do not wish to go where it would carry me.”
“The second is to place a barrier across the tide. It is Genius and Popularity in one dam: and it is named Mirabeau.”
“The King looked Gilbert in the face as though he had misunderstood him; then turning to the portrait, he said:
“What would you have replied, Charles Stuart, if when you felt the ground quake beneath your feet, some one had suggested your leaning on Cromwell?”
“He would have refused, and rightly; for there is no likeness between Cromwell and Mirabeau.” Such was Gilbert’s answer.
“They were both traitors.”
“Sire,” replied the other with profound respect but invincible firmness; “neither were traitors: Cromwell was a rebellious subject, and Mirabeau is a discontented nobleman.”
“What is he discontented with?”
“With his father, who locked him up in prison; the courts which condemned him to death; with the King who miscomprehended and still miscomprehends his genius.”
“The spirit of a public man is honesty,” said the King quickly.
“The reply is fine, worthy of Titus, Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, unluckily many examples arise to the contrary.”
“How can you ask me to confide in a man who has a price?”
“Because he is a man of his price. If he will sell himself for a million, it is a bargain. Do you think he is worth twice a Polignac?”
“You are pleading for a friend.”
“I have not that honor: but he has a friend who is of the Queen’s party, too.”
“Count Lamarck? We cast it up to him every day.”
“On the contrary, your Majesty ought to dissuade him breaking the friendship with him, under pain of death. Mirabeau is a noble, an aristocrat, a King’s-man above all. He was elected by the people because the nobles scorned him and he had sublime disdain of the means to attain an end which genius thirsted for. You may say that he will never quit the party of his constituents to join the court party? Why is there not union of the court and plebeians? Mirabeau could make them one. Take him, my lord! To-morrow, rebuffed by your despisal, he may turn against you, and then you will say, as the portrait of your Martyr King will say: All is lost!”
“I will talk this over with the Queen, sir,” said the monarch, having turned pale and hesitatingly glanced at the royal portrait. “She may decide on speaking with Mirabeau: but I will not. I like to be able to shake hands with those I confer with, and I could never take the hand of a Mirabeau, though my life, my liberty, and my throne were at stake—After she shall have seen him, we will see——“
“I pray God that it will not be too late.”
“Do you believe the peril so imminent?”
“Sire, do not let the portrait of Charles First be removed from your room,” said Gilbert; “it is a good adviser.”
Bowing, he went forth as another visitor appeared on the sill. He could not restrain from a cry of surprise. This gentleman was Marquis Favras, whom he had met at Cagliostro’s a week or so before and to whom the magician had predicted a near and shameful death.
LOUIS the King displayed the usual irresolution in dealing with Favras’ proposition, approved by the Queen, to make a rush out of the kingdom. He reflected all the night and at breakfast called for Count Charny.
He was still at table when the officer walked in.
“Won’t you take breakfast with me, count?”
Charny was obliged to excuse himself from the honor as he had broken his fast.
“I must ask you to wait a while as I never care to speak of important matters while at meals and I have something to talk over with your lordship. Let us speak of other matters for the moment. Of yourself, for instance. I hear that you are badly lodged here; somewhere in the garret, my lord, while the countess is lodging in Paris.”
“Sire, I am in a room of my own choice: the countess is dwelling in her own house in Coq-Heron Street.”
“I must confess my ignorance; is it near the palace?”
“What does this mean that after only three years of married life, you have separate establishments?”
“Sire, I have no answer to make than that my lady wishes to live alone. I have not had the pleasure of seeing her since your Majesty sent me for news. That is, better than a week ago.”
The King understood grief more readily than melancholy and noticed the difference in the tone.
“Count, there is some of your fault in this estrangement,” said the monarch, with the familiarity of the family man, as he called himself.
“The man must be to blame when so charming a woman keeps aloof from him. Do not tell me that this is none of my business: for a king can do a great deal by speaking a word. You must treat the lady ungratefully, for she loves you dearly—or did when Lady Taverney.”
“Sire, you know that one must not dispute with a king.”
“I do not know that the signs were visible to me alone; but this I know very well that on that dreadful October night, when she came to join us, she did not lose sight of you throughout, and her eyes expressed all her soul’s anguish, so much so that I saw her make a movement to fling herself between you and danger when the Bullseye Saloon door was beaten down.”
Count Charny was not softened; he believed he had seen something of this sort: but the details of his recent interview with his wife were too distinct for him to have his opinion shaken.
“I was paying all the more attention to her,” went on Louis, “from the Queen having said when you were sent to the City Hall while I was on my journey to Paris, that she almost died of distress in your absence and of joy at your return.”
“Sire,” replied Charny with a sad smile, “God had allowed those who are born above us to receive in birth as a privilege of their rank, the gift of seeing deeper into one’s heart than oneself can do; the King and the Queen have perceived secrets unrevealed to me: but my limited vision prevents me seeing the same. Therefore I beg to be employed on any dangerous errand or one that would take me to a distance without considering the great love of the Countess of Charny. Absence or danger will be equally welcome, coming at least for my part.”
“Nevertheless, a week ago, you appeared wishful to stay in town when the Queen desired to despatch you to Italy.”
“I deemed my brother adequate for the position and reserved myself for a mission more difficult or dangerous.”
“Then count, this is the very time when I have a difficult task to entrust to you, that with danger to you in the future, that I spoke of the countess’s isolation and wished her to have a lady friend’s company while I took away her husband.”
“I will write to the countess, yes, write: for from the way she last received me, I ought in that manner acquaint her with my movements.”
“Say no more on this head; I will talk it over with the Queen during your absence,” said Louis, rising. “Faith, the medical lights are right to say that things look differently as you handle them before or after a hearty meal. Come into my study, count; I feel in a mood to talk straight out to you.”
Charny followed, thinking how much Majesty lost by this material side, for which the proud Marie Antoinette was always carping at him.
THOUGH the King had been only a fortnight in the Tuileries he had two places fitted out completely for him. The forge was one, the study the other.
Charny walked up to the desk at which his royal master seated himself without looking round at the papers with which he was familiar.
“Count Charny,” began the King at last, yet seeming to halt, “I noticed one thing, on the night of the attack by the rioters, you stood by me while you set your brother on guard over the Queen.”
“Sire, it was my right as head of my family, as you are chief of the realm, to die for you.”
“That made me think, that if ever I had a secret errand, difficult and dangerous, I could rely on your loyalty as a Frenchman, and on your heart as a friend’s.”
“Oh, Sire, however the King may raise me, I have no pretension to believe that I shall be more than a faithful and thankful subject.”
“My lord, you are a grave man though but thirty-six; you have not passed through recent events without drawing some conclusion from them. What do you think of the situation and what would be your means to relieve me, if you were my Premier?”
“Sire, I am a soldier and a seaman,” returned Charny, with more hesitation than embarrassment, “these high social questions fly over my head.”
“Nay, you are a man,” said the sovereign with a dignity in holding out his hand which sprang from the quandary; “another man, who believes you to be his friend, asks you, purely and simply, what you, with your upright heart and healthy mind, would do in his place.”
“Sire, in a no less serious position, the Queen asked my opinion: the day after the Taking of the Bastile, when she wanted to fling the foreign legions upon the mobs. My reply would have embroiled me with her Majesty had I been less known to her and my respect and devotion less plain. I said that your Majesty must not enter these walls as a conqueror if he could not as a father of his people.”
“Well, my lord, is not that the counsel I followed? The question is was I right? am I here as a King or a captive?”
“Speaking in full frankness, I disapproved of the banquet at Versailles, supplicating the Queen not to go there; I was in despair when she threw down the tricolor and set up the black cockade of Austria.”
“Do you believe that led really to the attack on the palace?”
“No, Sire; but it was the cover for it. You are not unjust for the lower orders; they are kindly and love you—they are royalist. But they are in pain from cold and hunger; beneath and around them are evil advisers, who urge them on, and they know not their own strength. Once started they become flood or fire, for they overwhelm or they consume.”
“Well, what am I to do? supposing, as is natural enough, I do not want to be drowned or burned.”
“We must not open the sluices to the flood or windows to the flame. But pardon me forgetting that I should not speak thus, even on a royal order——“
“But you will on a royal entreaty. Count Charny, the King entreats you—to continue.”
“Well, Sire, there are two strata of the lower orders, the soil and the mud; the one which may be reposed upon and the other which will yield and smother one. Distrust one and rest on the other.”
“Count, you are repeating at two hours’ interval, what Dr. Gilbert told me.”
“Sire, how is it that after taking the advice of a learned man, you ask that of a poor naval officer like me?”
“Because there is a wide difference between you, I believe. Dr. Gilbert is devoted to royalty and you to the King. If the principle remains safe, he would let the King go.”
“Then there is a difference between us, for the King and the principle are inseparable for me,” responded the nobleman; “under this head it is that I beg your Majesty to deal with me.”
“First, I should like to hear to whom you would apply in this space of calm between two storms perhaps, to efface the wreck made by one and soothe the coming tempest.”
“If I had the honor and the misfortune to be the wearer of the crown, I should remember the cheers I heard round my carriage, and I should hold out my hands to General Lafayette and Member Mirabeau.”
“Can you advise this when you detest one and scorn the other?”
“My sympathies are of no moment, the whole question is the safety of the crown and the salvation of the monarchy.”
“Just what Dr. Gilbert says,” muttered the hearer as though speaking to himself.
“Sire, I am happy to be in tune with such an eminent man.”
“But if I were to agree to such a union and there should be failure, what think you I ought to do?”
“Think of your safety and your family’s.”
“Then you suggest that I should flee?”
“I should propose that your Majesty should retire with such regiments as are reliable and the true nobles to some fortified place.”
“Ah,” said the King with a radiant face: “but among the commanders who have given proof of devotion, you knowing them all, to which would you confide this dangerous mission, of guarding and removing the King?”
“Sire,” replied Charny, after hesitation, “it is not because ties of friendship—almost of family—attach me to a certain nobleman that I name him, but because he is known for his steadfast devotion; as Governor of the Leeward Islands, he not only protected our possessions in the Antilles, but captured some islands from the British: he had been charged with various commands, and at present he is General Governor, I believe, at Metz—this is the Marquis of Bouille. Were I a father, I should trust my son to him; a subject, I would confide the King!”
At the name the hearer could not repress an outcry of joy. He held out a letter, saying:
“Read this address, my lord, and see if Providence itself did not inspire me to apply to you.”
The address ran: “To Lord François Claude Amour, Marquis of Bouille, General Commander at Metz.”
“After what has happened, I do not feel that I ought to keep anything back from you. I have thought of this flight before, but in all the propositions was the hand of Austria beckoning me into a trap, and I have recoiled. I do not love Austria more than you do yourself.”
“Sire, you forget that I am the faithful subject of the King and the Queen of France.” He emphasized the second title.
“I have already told you, count,” went on the King, “that you are a friend, and I can speak the more frankly as the prejudice I cherished against the Queen is completely effaced from my mind. But it was against my will that I received into my house the double enemy of my line, as an Austrian and a Lorrainer. After ten years’ struggle it was despite my will that I had to charge Lord Breteuil with the management of my household and the government of Paris; make the Premier of the Archbishop of Toulouse, an atheist; lastly, pay to Austria the millions she extorted from the Low Countries. At present speaking, who succeeds the dead Maria Theresa, to counsel and direct the Queen? Her brother Joseph II., who is luckily dying. He is advised by old women of councillors who sway the Queen of France through her hairdresser Leonard and her dressmaker Bertin.
“They are pensioned by us while they are leading her to alliance with Austria. Austria has always been fatal to France, either as foe or friend, as when she put the dagger in Jacques Clement’s or Ravaillac’s or Damien’s to slay our kings. Formerly it was Catholic and devout Austria, but she is abjuring now and is partly philosophical under Joseph; rashly, she runs against her own sword, Hungary: without foresight, she lets the Belgian priesthood rob her of the finest jewels in her crown, the Low Countries; become the vassal of Russia, she wears out her troops in fighting for it against the Turks, our allies. No, my lord, I hate Austria and I will not trust to her. But I was saying that her overtures of flight were not the only ones. I have had one proposed by Marquis Favras. Do you know him?”
“He was the captain in the Belgunze Regiment, and lieutenant in the Count of Provence’s own Guards.”
“You have hit it with the latter shot. What think you of him?”
“He is a brave soldier and a loyal gentleman. Unfortunately he has no means and this makes him restless and fit for mad projects and hazardous attempts. But he is a man of honor who will die without retreating a step, or uttering a complaint in order to keep his word. He may be trusted to make a dash but not to manage an enterprise.”
“He is not the leader,” said the King, with marked bitterness; “that is Provence, who finds the means and manages all; devoted to the end, he will remain while Favras bears me hence. This is not the plot of Austria but of the fugitive princes and peers.”
“But why should not your Majesty’s brother go with you? why would he remain?”
“Through devotion, and also to be at hand in case the people should be tired of revolution and seek a regent. I tell you what all know, my dear count, and what your brother wrote me yesterday from Turin. They debate about deposing me and ruling by a regent. You see that unless in an extremity I can no sooner accept the Favras plan than the Austrian. This is what I have said to nobody, my dear count, but yourself, and I do it in order that nobody, not even the Queen,” he laid stress on the last three words, “can make you more devoted to them than to me, since they cannot show more confidence.”
“Sire, am I to keep the journey a secret from everybody?” inquired Charny, bowing.
“It little matters, count, that it should be known whither you go, as long as the design is unknown. You know the situation, my fears and hopes, better than my Minister Necker and my adviser Gilbert. Act accordingly; I put the scissors and the thread in your hands—disentangle or cut, as you see fit.”
He held the letter open for him to read: