all that you may in future wish, so that you will but go away. I will be your abject slave; you shall spurn me, trample on me, crush me, if you choose; only leave the house.’
‘I am waiting for an interview with M. Theria,’ Sainte-Croix replied coldly.
‘You will not depart!’ exclaimed the Marchioness, suddenly altering her tone, and springing up from her position of supplication. ‘Then but one resource is left.’
‘Where are you about to go?’ asked Sainte-Croix, as she advanced towards the top of the flight of stairs.
‘Hinder me not,’ returned Marie. ‘To the river!’
The Seine flowed but a few steps from the corner of the Place Maubert, and Sainte-Croix doubted not but that, in her desperation of fear and excitement, she would not hesitate to precipitate herself into it from the quay—at that time unguarded by wall or barrier of any kind. He seized her wrist as she was about to descend, and exclaimed hurriedly—
‘Wherever you go, Marie, I go too; even to perdition!’
They flew down the winding stairs, scarcely knowing how they progressed, Sainte-Croix still keeping hold of his companion. In an instant they were at the bottom of the flight, and Gaudin’s hand was glowing like a live coal from the rapid friction of the balusters as they descended; but, frenzied and insensible to the pain, he saw or thought of nothing except the pale and terrified creature in his grasp. As they reached the end of their headlong and impetuous course, Marie could no longer bear up against the whirl of tumultuous passions that agitated her. The struggle had been too intense; her nerves gave way, and she sank, apparently lifeless, on the ground.
The interview between Sainte-Croix and Madame de Brinvilliers, hurried as it had been, was too violent for the sound of their altercation not to reach Theria’s chambers, and the frenzied pair had scarcely reached the bottom of the stairs, when the student was following them, accompanied by the terrified grisette, who was bearing a light. He found Gaudin endeavouring to raise the fainting Marchioness. She had struck her face, in falling, against a projecting portion of the staircase, and was bleeding therefrom; a circumstance which, in the hurry of the instant, Theria attributed to Sainte-Croix. A few hot and hurried words passed on either side, and the next instant their swords were drawn and crossed.
Sainte-Croix, it need scarcely be observed, was a practised swordsman. But he nearly found his match in Camille Theria. The students were at that time most expert in fencing; and Gaudin was somewhat hardly driven by the assaults of his antagonist, who, with more enthusiasm than science, pressed on him, following thrust after thrust so rapidly, that Sainte-Croix was compelled to act on the defensive alone for some seconds. At length the cool calculation of the soldier, unnerved though he had been by the events of the last few minutes, prevailed over the impetuous assaults of his adversary. He allowed Theria to spend his energy in a series of heated attacks, which he put aside with practised skill; until, watching his moment, he made a lunge and thrust his rapier completely through the fleshy part of the sword-arm of the student, whose weapon fell to the ground.
‘I have it!’ cried Camille, as he reeled back against the pillar of the staircase; and stretching out his left hand he caught hold of the hilt of Gaudin’s sword, preventing him from drawing it back again, until, with singular nerve, he allowed the bright blade to be retracted through his quivering muscle.
‘A peace, monsieur; I have it!’ he continued, smiling as he watched the trickling dark stream that followed its withdrawal. ‘But you have not crippled me beyond to-night. Glazer will tell you that the veins will soon close. Had it been a leaping artery, the case would have been different. Clemence, tie my arm round with your handkerchief.’
The grisette, who had been frightened to death during the contest, was now supporting the still senseless Marchioness. Gaudin knelt down and relieved her of her charge, and she immediately bound up Theria’s wound as he had requested, and then, at his command, went back to the chambers upstairs; she evidently lived in complete submission to what he chose to order.
‘So!’ said Camille, ‘that is past. We have met again in an odd fashion, Captain de Sainte-Croix.’
As he was speaking, Marie opened her eyes and looked around. But, the instant she saw the two rivals she shuddered convulsively, and again relapsed into insensibility.
‘She is a clever actress,’ continued Camille, smiling; ‘they will tell you so at Versailles.’
‘We have each been duped,’ answered Gaudin, somewhat struck at the cool manner in which Theria appeared to take everything; ‘she has been playing a deep, double game with us.’
‘She will play one no longer as far as I am concerned. You are welcome to all her affections, and I shall rank you as one of my best friends for your visit this evening.’
‘Let me ask one thing,’ said Gaudin. ‘For her sake this rencontre must be kept between ourselves.’
‘You have my honour that it shall,’ answered Theria, ‘if you think such an article good security.’
But, whatever might have been their intentions, they were not permitted to preserve the secrecy. For Glazer’s man, Panurge, hearing the struggle in the court, had thought it by far the best plan to call in the guard instead of going himself to see what it was; and opening the window of the shop, looking on to the street, had bawled so lustily that a detachment of the Guet Royal was soon summoned, and by his directions now entered the court-yard, upon the assurance that a woman was being murdered.
They advanced at once to the foot of the staircase, where Theria, Gaudin, and Marie were stationed; their bright cressets shedding a vivid light over every part of the interior. Some young men, who had come up with the guard, as they were returning from their orgies, pressed forward with curiosity to ascertain the cause of the tumult.
But from one of them a fearful cry of surprise was heard as he recognised the persons before him. Sainte-Croix raised his eyes, and found that he was standing face to face with Antoine, Marquis of Brinvilliers!
Whilst the good gossipers of Paris, on the morning after the arrest of Exili at the Pont Notre Dame, were everywhere discussing the events of the preceding evening, the principal actors in the scene were quiet enough. On board the boat-mill everything was tranquil. The morning sun was high up, sparkling upon the river, and glistening in the lofty casements, indenting the tall, sloping roofs of the houses adjoining the Seine. The quays were again filled with busy crowds; the buzz and bustle of the foot passengers and the rumbling of ignoble morning vehicles—for the aristocratic quarters still slumbered—once more fell on the ear; and the mountebanks and charlatans of the Pont Neuf and Carrefour du Châtelet were arriving with their stalls and apparatus to prepare for another day’s speculation upon the credulity of their customers.
Benoit Mousel was the first of the three inmates of the mill that was stirring, and he blessed himself as the clock of the Tour d’Horloge read him a lesson upon his sluggishness. But he had been late in bed. The Garde Bourgeois had remained some little time after the prisoner had been taken; and even when they went, taking their dead comrades with them, the excitement and alarm of the Languedocian and his wife were too great to allow them to think of retiring to rest. Nor could Benoit persuade himself, in spite of some comforting assurances from the guard, that he was altogether exculpated from the suspicion of being an accomplice of Exili. In the stormy night that followed, even until morning, there was not a tile or fragment blown down from the tottering houses on the Pont Notre Dame, upon the roof of the mill, which did not cause him to start and tremble, with the belief that a fresh party of the watch were coming to arrest him. Even his usual narcotic, the clicking of the water-wheel, failed to lull him, although aided by the gentle sway of the boat as it rocked in the current, and his couch of empty sacks never before appeared so uncomfortable.
His wife had shared her bed with her young guest, and was scarcely less watchful and terrified than her husband; for Bathilde had not been very long in Paris, and never cared to leave their little floating tenement but to go to the market, or on Sunday when she donned her best costume of Languedoc, and accompanied Benoit to some of the resorts of the holiday-keepers beyond the walls; so that the wild manners of the time and city were comparatively little known to her. Louise was the only one of the party who slept throughout the night. Worn, broken down, crushed in heart and spirits, she had almost mechanically allowed Bathilde to officiate as her serving-woman; and a faint smile which passed occasionally over her sad features was the only token by which the good-tempered paysanne knew that her assistance was appreciated.
‘Pardieu!’ said Benoit, as they assembled to their morning repast; ‘I like the sun a little better than the night; how the clouds growled at the angry wind! And how the wind chafed the lighters against the piles of the bridge! Did you ever hear such a devil’s squeaking as they made? Ugh!’
Benoit shuddered at the mere recollection of the sounds that had rendered the night so fearful, and then directly afterwards attacked the large log of bread, and one of a store of small cheeses, in a manner that showed his mental disquietude had not in any way affected his appetite.
‘Did you hear the rain, Benoit?’ asked Bathilde.
‘One must have had sorry ears not to have done so,’ he replied. ‘I only dozed once; and then I dreamt I was tied to a stake in the Place de Grêve, with a painted paper cap on my head, and the executioner was lighting the faggots, when down came the rain and washed us all away. Just then the storm awoke me.’
And he drowned the recalled terror in a horn of wine, poured out from the rude earthen jug on the table.
‘You have eaten nothing, petite,’ said Bathilde, as she took the hand of Louise in her own and pressed it kindly. ‘I am afraid you do not like our city food.’
‘Indeed you are mistaken,’ returned Louise: ‘it is most excellent. But I cannot eat. And yet,’ she added sadly, ‘I have tasted nothing for two days.’
‘It’s a bad thing, sweetheart, not to eat,’ said Benoit, by way of commentary on his own proceedings. ‘When I was courting Bathilde, if I had not eaten and drank a great deal I should have died. Love is a terrible thing for the appetite.’
‘We have no honey here, nor oil, like we have at Béziers,’ said Bathilde.
‘Ay! Béziers!’ continued Benoit, with a fond reminiscence. ‘How I used to eat the mulberries there! You know the mulberries at Béziers, Ma’amselle Louise? And the old image of Pierre Pepesuc, that we used to dress up once a year.’
‘And I made ribbons for his hat,’ said Bathilde; ‘because he kept the town by himself, against the English, in the Rue Françoise.’
‘And the orchards on the bank of the Orb, and the vineyards, and the farms all along the river,’ continued Benoit, warming up as he called to mind the principal features of his beautiful Languedoc.
But it produced no corresponding animation in the pale face of Louise. On the contrary, she bent down her head; and they saw the tears falling, although she was evidently endeavouring to conceal her anguish from her hospitable entertainers.
‘I shall never see Languedoc again,’ she said sorrowfully, at length.
‘Oh yes you will, ma belle!’ said Benoit cheeringly; ‘and so we shall all. When autumn arrives, and Jacques Mito will come and mind the mill, we will all start together. I can get a mule who will go the whole way, with easy stages.’
‘And we have been promised a patache,’ observed Bathilde.
‘Ay—a patache. Mass! did you ever travel by a patache? They send you up to the sky every round the wheels make. ’Tis a fine method of seeing the country.’
Bathilde laughed at her husband’s explanation of the uncomfortable conveyance. But it was evident that the mention of Languedoc only brought back tearful recollections to Louise Gauthier. She shuddered, as the image of some bitter scene was called up by the allusion, and remained silent.
The day wore on. Several persons—neighbours from the bridge, and street acquaintances of Benoit—came in the course of the morning to gossip about the events of which the boat-mill had been the principal scene of action. Bathilde went to market on the quays, and while she was gone Louise busied herself in setting to rights the humble appointments of their ark. The good-hearted Languedocian himself appeared very little at ease with himself respecting the disposal of his time, and he was constantly speculating upon the chance of ever recovering a small sum of money due to him from Exili for lodging and services. He had discarded his motley habit, which hung in a woe-begone and half-ludicrous fashion against the wall; and was now attired in the simple costume of a banlieue peasant.
Twilight was again coming, and the little party were once more reassembled, whilst Bathilde was telling all sorts of wonderful stories of the marvels she had seen on the quays and carrefours, when a fresh visitor arrived at the boat-mill. He came alone in a small boat, similar to the one Sainte-Croix had used the preceding evening, and without announcing himself, entered the apartment with an easy, half-impudent air, which proved that he was on excellent terms with himself. Benoit and his wife received him with great respect, being somewhat overcome by his appearance; for he was gaily dressed, and assumed the air of a grand seigneur. Their visitor was in the little room lately occupied by Exili, which the kind-hearted couple had begged she would call her own so long as she chose to remain with them.
‘Salut! good people,’ said the stranger on entering. ‘Do not let me incommode you. Is this the mill in which the poisoner Exili was captured last evening?’
‘Y-e-s, monsieur,’ gasped Benoit, in very frightened accents, whilst he added inwardly, ‘It is all up with me! I shall be broken or burnt on the Grêve after all!’
There could be no doubt about it in his mind. The visitor was evidently charged with a commission to arrest him as one of the Italian’s accomplices. Even Bathilde’s fresh, rosy cheeks paled; chiefly, however, from beholding her husband’s terror.
‘My husband had nothing in the world to do with him, beyond watching his fires and selling his love spells,’ said Bathilde eagerly. ‘He had not, indeed, monsieur. Maître Picard, the chapelier of the Rue St. Jacques, will give him his good word.’
‘He is one of the Garde Bourgeois of St. Marcel,’ said Benoit.
‘And kept the keys of the Port Bordelle before King Louis knocked it down,’ added his wife rapidly.
‘And his wife owns half the mulberries at Béziers,’ ejaculated Benoit. ‘I worked for her father, monsieur: he would come up to speak for me; but he has been dead ten years.’
‘My honest couple,’ said the visitor; ‘you appear to be giving yourselves a great deal of unnecessary discomfort. I have very little business with either of you.’
Benoit drew a good long breath of relief, and now for the first time hastened to get a seat for the stranger.
‘Have you any one staying in the mill with you,’ inquired the new-comer.
‘M. Exili was our only lodger,’ said Benoit, not choosing to speak of the girl.
‘But there is a young woman here, I think,’ continued the other. ‘The same that was present at the capture last evening.’
‘Merciful Virgin! she is not a poisoner!’ exclaimed Benoit, who began to misgive everything and everybody.
‘Reassure yourself,’ replied the other; ‘she certainly is not, if the person be the same. Her name is——’
‘Louise Gauthier?’ replied Benoit, as the stranger hesitated.
‘That is right. Will you tell her some one wishes to see her upon business of importance.’
Bathilde ran towards the chamber to summon the young girl. She appeared immediately; but as soon as she saw who it was required her attendance, she shrank back, with an expression of alarm and dislike, as she exclaimed—
‘M. Lachaussée here!’
‘Yes, Ma’amselle Louise,’ returned Sainte-Croix’s confidant, as he rose from his seat. ‘You do not give me a very hearty welcome. Come here.’
He advanced towards her; but Louise uttered a slight cry, and retired in the direction of her chamber, appealing to Benoit for protection. The miller immediately seized a partisan, which had been left behind in the tumult of the preceding night, and put himself before the door.
‘Look you, monsieur,’ he said; ‘I heard your name from her lips last night, under no very pleasant circumstances. I think you hold some situation at the Gobelins.’
‘Well?’ returned Lachaussée coolly. ‘Well, my good fellow?’
‘Well!’ continued Benoit; ‘it is not well, and I am not a good fellow,—at least, I would rather not be, according to your opinion of one. Now take this hint, and don’t be too pressing in your attentions.’
‘Pshaw! you are a fool!’
‘Without doubt,’ said Benoit; ‘or rather I was. Yesterday it was part of my profession; to-day I am a bourgeois, if I please to call myself so. But fool or not, you shall not annoy that poor girl.’
‘When you have come to the end of your heroics, perhaps you will let me speak,’ said Lachaussée. ‘Mademoiselle Gauthier,’ he continued, addressing himself to Louise, ‘you had a hurried interview here last evening with M. de Sainte-Croix. I am the bearer of a message from him.’
‘An apology, I hope, for his brutality,’ again interrupted Benoit, gaining fresh courage every minute. And he was going on with an invective, when an appealing look from Louise restrained him, and he contented himself by performing feats of revenge in imagination, flourishing his halbert about to the great terror of Bathilde, who had never seen her husband so furious.
‘I know nothing of that to which this person alludes,’ continued Lachaussée to Louise. ‘M. de Sainte-Croix desires to see you, mademoiselle.’
‘To see me!’ exclaimed Louise in a tremor of excitement, not unmixed with joy. ‘Oh, M. Lachaussée! you are not trifling with me? Is this really true?’
‘You may convince yourself within a quarter of an hour,’ replied the other. ‘I have a carriage waiting at the foot of the bridge. Possibly you may conceive the reason of my mission; of that I know nothing.’
‘Do you think that I ought to go?’ asked Louise timidly of her honest host. ‘And you will not say it is unkind, leaving you at this short notice? Oh! if you knew how I have prayed to see him but once more—to speak to him again, if it were but to exchange a single word, and then bid him farewell for ever.’
‘Unkind, sweetheart?’ said Benoit, laying his rough hand upon her shoulder. ‘It would be greater unkindness in us to keep you here. Go, by all means; and recollect this is still your home if you have need of one. I will not even say good-bye. Shall I go with you?’
‘There is no occasion for that,’ said Lachaussée. ‘There are two valets with the coach, who will see mademoiselle safely back again, should she return. And here is something M. de Sainte-Croix desired me to offer to you for your care of her.’
He placed a purse in Benoit’s hand as he spoke. The Languedocian looked at it for a few seconds, peeping into its contents like a bird; and then he shook his head saying—
‘A fiftieth part of this sum would more than repay us for what we have done. No, no—I would rather you had given me a few sous—though I did not want anything. Keep it for us, Mademoiselle Louise, until you come back.’
This was Benoit’s rough method of making over the money to his late guest. Louise took it, for she did not wish to annoy him by returning it.
And then—hoping, doubting, trembling—she embraced Bathilde, and accompanied Lachaussée to the water platform of the mill. Benoit lighted her into the boat, and then remained waving his torch in adieu, until they touched the landing-place of the Quai du Châtelet. And then, with a hasty adieu to his wife, he jumped into his own light craft, and followed the direction the others had taken.
There was much depravity and reckless disregard of every moral and social ordinance to be found moving upon the surface of the city of Paris at this epoch; but there was still more beneath it. The vast carrières that have undermined the city in so many directions, the chief of which are now known by the general name of ‘the catacombs,’ still existed; but they were not then, as now, appropriated to the storing of remnants of mortality collected from the over-charged cemetery of the Innocents and other places of interment. They had, however, living occupants—many, perchance, whose bones exhumed and transported in future times from these burial-grounds now assist in forming the ghastly decorations of these subterranean charnel-houses.
As early as the commencement of the fourteenth century it was the custom to dig the white freestone, of which the greater part of the edifices of ancient Paris were built, from carrières on either side of the Bièvre, and beneath the Faubourg St. Marcel, in which neighbourhood much of our scene has passed. These undertakings were continued for two or three centuries, without method or direction, unrestrained by any authority, and entirely according to the will of the excavators, until they had not only hollowed out the ground for an incredible distance under the faubourgs, but had even undermined the southern parts of the city, placing in great jeopardy the streets and buildings over them, as indeed they are said to be at present. The empty caverns, most of which opened to the air and light by unguarded pits and archways, at which accidents were constantly occurring, soon found inhabitants; and whenever the working of one of these carrières ceased, either from the fear of proceeding further or the stoppage of the outlet by a tumbling in of the freestone, it was immediately taken possession of by the graceless wanderers and outcasts who formed the refuse of every grade and circle of society in the dissolute city.
A carriage was waiting, as Lachaussée had stated, at the side of the Seine; and when he had entered with his unsuspecting companion it moved on towards the southern extremity of the city, in the direction Sainte-Croix had taken the preceding evening. Scarcely a word was spoken by either party, until the vehicle stopped beneath the sign of the ‘Lanterne,’ the low tavern in the Rue Mouffetard. The light revealed its blackened beams, and the rough, crumbling pillars that supported the upper floor.
‘This is the end of our journey, mademoiselle,’ said Lachaussée; ‘we must descend now.’
‘But this is not the residence of M. de Sainte-Croix,’ observed Louise, as she cast a misgiving glance at the worn and ancient tenement.
‘We shall meet him by appointment,’ replied the other, as he got down; ‘and he is certain not to be much after his time. If he has not arrived, do not be alarmed; I have received his orders to take the greatest care of you.’
The manner of Lachaussée towards Louise was so completely changed since they last met, his usual insolence had turned to so respectful a bearing, that her suspicions were for a time lulled. ‘He is evidently trying,’ she thought, ‘to efface my recollection of his importunities.’
They were admitted by the host, and Lachaussée inquired if Gaudin had arrived. The man answered in the affirmative, and moreover stated that he had gone to his laboratory, leaving word that, if any one inquired for him, especially two who answered to the description of the present visitors, they were to be admitted to him.
He threw back a heavy door in the corner of the room as he spoke, and placed himself at the entrance with a light. It opened apparently on the brink of a dark well; at all events there was no passage leading from it. In her anxiety to meet Sainte-Croix once more, Louise had stepped forward before her conductor; but as she saw the deep abyss that yawned immediately at her feet, she started with a cry of affright.
‘Do not alarm yourself, mademoiselle,’ said Lachaussée; ‘Monsieur is a subtle chemist, and pursues his studies below. Let me go first.’
Lachaussée took the light from the host, and grasping the hand of Louise, almost dragged her towards the door-way, for she hung back from terror. The light revealed a few rude wooden steps, down which they passed; and then she found herself, with her guide, in a narrow excavation, scarcely large enough to contain them both, and hewn in the solid limestone.
A straightened passage led from this hollow upon a rapid descent. The walls were roughly fashioned, as well as the roof, from which large blocks depended, which threatened every instant to tumble down and crush those below. At the sides the stone was dirty and smoothed, as if from the frequent contact of passers by; but above it was white, and scintillated in places from the reflection of the light which Lachaussée carried. They went rapidly on, still going down, down, until the arched-way became damp, and in some places small streams of water trickled through the walls, or mixed with the lime and depended in stalactites from the projecting pieces. Then other caverns branched out from the track they were following, and were soon lost in the obscurity. Shells and marine fossils, so bright that they almost appeared metallic, were everywhere visible, and occasionally the petrified traces of monsters of a former world started out from the rude boundaries of the passage. The air became chill and damp; the breath of the intruders steamed in the flaring light of the torch; and their footsteps fell without an echo, clogged by the deadened and imprisoned atmosphere. Louise spoke not a word; but even clung to Lachaussée in the fright of their dreary journey.
Before long the way became more lofty and spacious. Other tracks evidently branched into it from various points; and the paths were more beaten, but still always descending. Louise fancied she heard sounds too; now and then the echo of a laugh, as at a distance, or the roar of hasty altercation. She addressed several questions to Lachaussée, as to how much further they had to travel, but received no reply beyond a commonplace evasion. Then the sounds were louder and nearer; and at last the superintendent of the Gobelins pushed aside a curtain of coarse sackcloth that hung before a doorway, as if to deaden the noise within, and led Louise into an apartment about thirty feet square, roughly cut in the same manner as the archway, but in a soft, chalky stone—that kind which, burnt and pulverised, is known so well in the arts.
There were many people of both sexes in this vault, and a glance sufficed to show that they were collected from the lowest dregs of those who lived from day to day they cared not how—in Paris. When any one of their usual haunts—such as the Cours des Miracles, before alluded to—became too prominent in its iniquities for the police to suffer it to remain unvisited, they sought a refuge in the carrières at the southern part of the city, beyond the barriers, out of the jurisdiction of the Guet Royal. The Garde Bourgeois they set entirely at defiance. Having once taken possession of their subterranean domain, approach was at all times dangerous, except to the initiated. The fruits of all the robberies committed in the faubourgs were stored in the gypsum vaults of St. Marcel; and these caverns also served to secrete those hapless people who had been carried off by force, and were either sent from there to America—to be sold, as they affirmed, having been kept en charte privée—or else they were disposed of to the officers who were on the look-out for recruits. Lachaussée’s employments, whilst in the service of Sainte-Croix, were of this nature, and will in some measure account for his intimacy with the inhabitants of the carrières.
There was a rough table in this room, formed by planks laid upon blocks of gypsum. Seats of the same fashion were placed about, and settles were in some places cut from the limestone itself. Lamps were hung from the roof, burning dimly in the imprisoned air, and smoking the blackened pointed incrustation that depended around them in fanciful variety.
We have said that several persons, both male and female, were grouped about the room. Some were drinking; others quarrelling over and dividing their spoils; and many were sleeping off the fumes of intoxication. But there was one man striding about the room, to whom they all appeared to pay some deference—such respect, at least, as could be exacted from the party. He was of enormous stature, and clad in the rudest manner, in garments apparently chosen from half a dozen different wardrobes. His hair hung matted and dishevelled about his head, and his arms were bare, of immense power, and scarred in all directions. One eye was perfectly closed, the result of some violent attack, and the other glared unnaturally, from the absence of a portion of the upper eyelid. As Lachaussée lifted up the curtain he turned sharply round, but, recognising him, dropped immediately into his usual lounging position. This man was Bras d’Acier, the most celebrated brigand of the city.
‘M. Lachaussée,’ he said, ‘enter. I thought Colbert had dared some of his bloodhounds to follow us. Whom have you there?’
‘A friend of M. de Sainte-Croix,’ replied the intendant, with much significance. ‘He wishes her taken the greatest care of.’
‘She is welcome,’ replied Bras d’Acier. ‘His wishes shall be obeyed.’
Louise uttered a scream as Bras d’Acier advanced towards her, and would have fled; but Lachaussée held her by the hand, and he pulled her into the vault. The women at the same time rose from their seats and collected around, and in an instant had dispossessed her of a few ornaments of humble jewellery which she carried in her hair.
‘M. Lachaussée,’ cried the terrified girl, ‘you have cruelly deceived me! Where is M. de Sainte-Croix?’
A loud laugh broke from those about her, as Bras d’Acier took her from the intendant and pulled her under the lamp.
‘M. de Sainte-Croix will be here directly; especially if he knows such a pretty face expects him. In the meantime you can bestow your favours as you please. Give me a kiss.’
He attempted to draw her still closer towards him; but Louise, shuddering from his advances, freed herself from his hold and crouched down at his feet.
‘Is there no one to protect me?’ she cried. ‘M. Lachaussée, you shall pay dearly for this treachery. Help! help! Gaudin! are you near me, or have I been so cruelly deceived?’
‘Pshaw!’ returned the ruffian, at whose feet she was crouching, as he liberated her wrists. ‘I never give myself much trouble in these matters; too many women are too eager to court me. There—get up; you will know better after you have lived with us a little time.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the terrified girl. ‘You do not intend to keep me here?’
‘I am sorry, if it displeases you, to say we cannot let you go,’ answered Lachaussée, entirely altering his tone.
‘What is the meaning of all this? For the love of heaven, tell me for what you have brought me hither?’
‘To take care of you—that is all,’ said Lachaussée. ‘Paris is a dangerous place for youth and beauty like yours; besides, you will find companions to cheer your solitude.’
Louise looked round, and shuddered at the unpromising countenances about her. Some were laughing, others gazing in stupid curiosity; but none seemed to sympathise with her. She covered her face with her hands to shut them from her sight. One of the women, an Amazonian creature, who was near her, pulled them away, as she said—
‘We have an altar, if you wish to pray; you will find nothing omitted in our cour souterrain. Only do not hide your face, for you will be married to-morrow; and it is right your future husband should see something of you.’
Louise was too frightened to reply. She looked wildly about her, and drew back trembling to Lachaussée; loathing him, yet he appeared the most human of this fearful company. The woman who had addressed her pointed to the altar she had spoken of. It was indeed there, at the end of the room, cut out from the gypsum, and surrounded by a few rough ornaments of the same material.
‘Why not marry her at once,’ continued the woman; ‘Jerôme Barbier has no wife. A la noce! à la noce!’
‘A la noce!’ chorussed all the others.
‘Look here, ma’amselle,’ cried the Amazon, leading a man forward. ‘Is he not a proper bridegroom? Will you have him? We have the cruche ready to be broken.’
The man advanced, and was about to offer some rude salutation, when Louise darted from the side of Lachaussée, and hurrying along the vault threw herself upon the highest step of the altar, clasping the crucifix that surmounted it with her hands. No one had time to arrest her progress; the movement had been too sudden.
‘Asile!’ she cried. ‘A sanctuary! If you have any respect for this holy sign, and it is not set up here in mockery, I claim it. I throw myself on the protection of the cross!’
Superstition, rather than religion, had a powerful hold upon these lawless people. Even Bras d’Acier was silent, and the remainder appeared undecided how to act.
But the duration of this silence soon came to an end. Whilst the ruffians and their associates were yet doubting what course they should pursue, they were startled by a dull, heavy knocking, repeated at slow intervals, and sounding in the immediate vicinity of the cross, to which Louise was clinging. It was first observed by Bras d’Acier, and he called the attention of Lachaussée to it, as a small piece of limestone, unsettled by the concussion, fell upon the rough floor of the vault. Louise, too, heard the noise; and, seeing that it appeared to alarm her persecutors, redoubled her cries.
‘Silence, woman!’ cried Bras d’Acier, although in a subdued voice, as the deadened blows still kept on. ‘Silence, I tell you; if you think your life worth keeping.’
‘Knock her on the head,’ said one of the ruffians.
‘Drag her from the cross,’ exclaimed the woman who had before spoken. ‘I will do it myself, if you are all so terror-stricken.’
‘Hold!’ shouted a third, as he raised his hand in an attitude of denunciation. It was the broken-down abbe whom Lachaussée
had before met with the students. ‘Such violation must not be. The crumbling walls would fall and crush you all beneath their ruins did you invade the sanctity of that altar. Back—and respect this holy emblem!’
Degraded as Camus was, there was something in his manner and attitude that awed the group about him. They had advanced at the instigation of the woman, but now once more fell back.
The noise still continued, but it came nearer and nearer; and now the sound of a voice could be heard shouting, but in the distance.
‘It is a fresh scheme of Colbert’s hounds,’ said Bras d’Acier. ‘They know every vault and underground alley in Paris as well as the rats. To the Carrière Montrouge with ye all! I will dispose of this squeaking girl myself, though heaven and hell forbid it.’
His companions immediately took the hint. They hastily collected their things together, hiding some of them in niches and corners of the quarry, and then fled through the different archways in the direction indicated by Bras d’Acier; whilst the robber himself remained in the carrière, together with Lachaussée.
We left the Marchioness of Brinvilliers at the moment when her husband, in company with the Guet Royal, entered the court-yard, where she was lying in real or well-feigned insensibility, Sainte-Croix by her side, his drawn sword in his hand, and Camille Theria, a silent observer of the group, leaning with folded arms against one of the pillars of the doorway.
At the sudden exclamation of the Marquis, Sainte-Croix had started from his stooping position, and for a moment all was silence and expectation. Gaudin was a bold and ready-witted man; but the rage, jealousy, and hate that worked within him almost over-mastered even his well-practised invention. For an instant he thought of declaring his guilty passion for Marie, although at the risk of involving himself in her ruin; for he knew the hasty and vindictive temper of Brinvilliers. But this passed away, and with one great effort he turned calmly to Theria.
‘Now, sir,’ said he; ‘you will believe the assurance of this lady’s husband, that she is not what you took her for.’
The quick glance of intelligence that passed between them showed how well Theria understood the game Sainte-Croix was playing. Advancing to the Marquis, with a respectful bow, he tendered, in set phrase, his humble apology for having, in mistake, insulted ‘Madame la Marquise.’ He had an appointment on the spot, he declared; and the cloak which the Marchioness wore, together with the darkness of the night, had prevented his discovering that she was not the person he had expected, until her cries had brought in Sainte-Croix, who was passing, as he said himself, to his lodgings in the Rue des Bernardines, hard by the Place Maubert.
Whether fully satisfied with this explanation or not, the Marquis of Brinvilliers was too much a coureur des rues himself to scan too closely the equivocal position in which he had found his wife. She accounted very naturally for her presence by her connection with Glazer, the apothecary, who furnished the medicines for her patients in the Hôtel Dieu. The guard retired on finding that no more disturbance was to be apprehended; and Panurge having summoned a voiture de place, Antoine took a friendly leave of Sainte-Croix, thanking him for his interposition, handed in the Marchioness, and they drove rapidly off in the direction of the Pont Notre Dame.
‘Adieu, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix, or au revoir, if you will,’ said Theria, when they were left once more alone together. ‘The poor Marquis wears his horns with a grace that belongs exclusively to the court of our Grand Monarque. It would be a pity to rob him of so becoming an ornament.’
Gaudin scarcely knew what answer to make. Nor indeed did Theria permit any, as he continued—
‘For myself I renounce all pretensions, and leave the field to you. The poor student is no rival for the gallant captain of the Regiment de Tracy.’
And with a smile that had in it more of mockery than mirth, he rapidly remounted the stairs, without waiting for a reply.
Sainte-Croix offered none. It was only by his clenched teeth and the quivering of his brow that his thoughts could have been read, as he strode with a hasty step along the Rue St. Victor to his own lodgings. His was one of those natures that take their tone from the accidental circumstances around them. He might have been a military hero, an enthusiastic priest, a successful politician. The illegitimacy of his birth, and the colour of the times, had made him an adventurer, a gambler, a criminal. His love for Marie de Brinvilliers had been passionate and intense; as it can be only in natures like his own. Now that its current had been forced back upon his heart, it seemed changed to a deep, deadly, withering hate.
‘I will be her bane—her curse!’ he exclaimed, as he paced up and down the apartment, after flinging his hat and cloak aside. ‘I will be her bad angel. She shall be mine—yes, body and soul—in life and after it! And I will triumph over that besotted fool, her husband. Come, my power—my talisman!’
With a short dry laugh, he stopped before a massive bureau which stood, surmounted by a narrow mirror, between the windows of the room; and taking up a small iron-clamped box, he opened it, and brought from it a small packet carefully sealed, and a phial of clear, colourless fluid.
‘Come,’ he continued, ‘the fools who envy me—the bastard-captain—my fortune, have said I had discovered the philosopher’s stone. I have it—it is here; the source, not of life, but death!’
He held the packet in his hand a moment; and then returning it to its place in the casket, resumed his hasty walk and broken exclamations of passion, strangely mixed with triumph.
An hour had passed away when La Prairie, one of his servants, entering the room, announced Françoise Rousset, femme de chambre to the Marchioness of Brinvilliers. The girl entered with a look of terror that contrasted strangely with her lively and good-humoured face, and handing a note to Sainte-Croix with much the same air which a child would put on in presenting a cake to an elephant, timidly waited his answer.
‘Tell Madame la Marquise that I will attend to her,’ said Sainte-Croix, as he hastily ran over the contents of the note.
The girl curtsied, and left the room with more precipitation than grace. For Sainte-Croix was said to deal in strange and forbidden arts; and the same tastes which among the rich had won for him the reputation of a successful alchemist, had established for him also, amongst the vulgar, a character for intimacy with Satan and his imps, which his dark and lowering manner, at the moment Françoise entered, was well calculated to sustain.
‘So,’ he exclaimed, slowly rereading the letter, and dwelling on parts of it with a bitter emphasis, ‘you are determined not to outlive the night, and would have some of the subtle poison of which you have heard me speak. No, fair lady; we must not part so soon. Now begins my triumph!’
And with these words he resumed his hat and mantle; and leaving orders that Lachaussée, should he return, was to await him in the house, he entered a fiacre, and drove to the Hôtel d’Aubray, the residence of the Marchioness, in the Rue Neuve St. Paul, not far from the Bastille.
His road lay across the Pont de la Tournelle, which connected the Ile St. Louis with the Quartier des Bernardins. The fiacre was lumbering along this route when Gaudin was startled from his moody reflections by its sudden stoppage. Looking out to ascertain its cause, he saw that they were in the Rue des Deux Ponts, and his horses entangled with those belonging to another carriage, escorted by two armed lackeys, whose altercation with the driver of the fiacre was not so loud but that, from the interior of the vehicle which they guarded, Sainte-Croix could hear a mingled sound of oaths, shrieks, and remonstrances, in a woman’s voice. Gaudin would have heeded this little, had it not been for the stoppage, which, excited as he was, chafed him beyond his usual coolness. Springing out of the fiacre, he found himself, almost before he knew it, crossing swords with the two lackeys, one of whom he slightly wounded; the other, hotly pressed, sheltered himself by running behind the carriage, calling loudly for help.
One of the carriage windows was now suddenly broken from within, and he could see that its occupants were struggling; the one for escape, the other to prevent it; whilst the shouts of au secours! grew louder and louder. Sainte-Croix abandoned his pursuit of the servant, and was proceeding to open the door of the carriage, when it was suddenly forced from within, and a woman, young, beautiful, and richly dressed, half-fell, half-sprang into his arms.
‘Marotte Dupré!’
‘Gaudin de Sainte-Croix!’
The exclamations were uttered at the same instant.
‘Save me, as you are a gentleman!’ cried the girl; at the moment she was seized by a person masked, who leapt after her into the street.
‘A moi! monsieur,’ cried Sainte-Croix, still holding the girl, and presenting his drawn sword to her companion.
The male occupant of the carriage burst into a loud laugh, and pulling off his mask, discovered the features of the Marquis of Brinvilliers!
‘Ventre St. Bleu, my friend! we are fated to odd rencontres,’ cried Brinvilliers. ‘You have begun the night by protecting my wife; you finish it by robbing me of a mistress.’
‘No, no!’ cried the girl, an actress at the theatre in the Rue du Temple. ‘I am no mistress of his: it is against my will that I am here: he carried me off from my mother’s. Save me, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix!’
‘Pardon, mademoiselle,’ returned Gaudin, sheathing his sword. ‘I cannot interfere in an affair of gallantry. Au revoir, Marquis, and success attend your wooing.’
So saying he resigned the poor girl, who continued to shriek and implore his aid in heart-rending entreaties, to the Marquis. Kissing his hand, he remounted the fiacre, which was by this time disengaged. And each proceeded on his way; the husband to his amour, the gallant to his wife!
The Hôtel d’Aubray, in which the Marchioness of Brinvilliers resided with her father, Monsieur Dreux d’Aubray, Lieutenant-civil of the city of Paris, was a massive building, as we have stated, in the Rue Neuve St. Paul, lately erected by Lemercier. The fiacre rolled under its arched gateway, encrusted with the cupids and wreaths which characterised the ornamental architecture of the period, and stopped in the court-yard. Except on the entresol, where a light shone from the window of the Marchioness’s boudoir, the heavy square was dark and silent. Françoise was on the watch, and admitting Sainte-Croix by an escalier dérobé led him, with a light step, to a door concealed by tapestry, where, knocking with three low raps, she left him. The door opened, and Sainte-Croix, for the second time that night, stood face to face with the Marchioness of Brinvilliers.
It was a low but spacious room. Heavy curtains of rich, dark damask almost hid the two windows. The floor was covered with a soft Persian carpet—a luxury then unusual in Paris—and the air was heavy with the perfume that wreathed in thin, blue smoke from a silver cassolette on the carved marble mantelshelf, over which hung a full-length portrait of the Marchioness, painted with all the elaborate finish of Mignard’s pencil, but scarcely so lovely as the original, on whom Sainte-Croix was gazing with a passion quite unaffected by the contempt he felt for her. On a table near the fire were piled rare fruits, and the reflection of the ruddy flame leapt and sparkled in the silver wine-flagons and tall-stemmed Venetian glasses.
On a settee beside the table sat Marie, in studied disarray. She might have been made up after one of Guido’s Magdalens, so beautiful were her rounded shoulders—so dishevelled her light hair—so little of real grief in her swimming eye, and so much of voluptuous abandonment in the attitude of resignation she wore when Sainte-Croix entered the room.
He comprehended all the artifice in a moment; but there are states of feeling in which trickery, so far from inspiring disgust, is most acceptable. All truth and sincerity was at an end between them; and the only tie that yet held them together—that of passion—has a craving for such dexterity as the Marchioness had exhibited in the mise en scène of herself and her boudoir. Without an effort to resist its influence, and with a voluntary yielding up, for the moment, of his scorn and bitterness, Sainte-Croix passed on to the couch, and sinking at his mistress’s feet, felt her hands entwine his neck, and her long hair mingling with his own, as her rosy mouth, pressed to his forehead, half-sighed, half-whispered, ‘Forgive!’
Not a word was spoken. A more perfect adept in all the arts of gallantry than Sainte-Croix never encountered a more passionate and more calculating woman than Marie de Brinvilliers.
‘Gaudin!’ said the Marchioness, in a low, sweet voice, ‘you love me—still?’
‘Ever—ever!’ murmured Sainte-Croix. And so far as passion is love, he spoke truly at that moment.
‘I cannot live without thee, Gaudin,’ continued Marie. ‘Antoine knows of our love. I saw it in his face to-night as we returned from the Place Maubert. He will kill thee, Gaudin; and, my father—’ Marie shuddered with well-feigned terror.
‘Has your husband seen M. d’Aubray to-night?’ inquired Sainte-Croix.
‘They were closeted together after our return,’ replied the Marchioness.
Quick as thought Sainte-Croix raised his head to the face of the Marchioness, and, half-muttering to himself, said—
‘You have not played me false again?’ A shower of kisses was the only answer. Another pause ensued, broken by Sainte-Croix.
‘Marie!’ he said, ‘they must die, or our happiness is impossible.’
‘Who?’ asked the Marchioness eagerly.
‘Your husband and your father.’
With a hasty shriek Marie flung her lover from her, and retreated as far as the couch would allow her, repeating, as if in a dream, ‘Die! my husband and my father!’
‘Ay,’ said Gaudin, uttering each word slowly and calmly, as if he would have had it sink into the heart and memory of her he was addressing. ‘Ay—die! if we are to give the rein to our attachment. I cannot brook the slow and secret arts of an intrigue with thee, Marie; my love must have full scope and open daylight. I repeat, your husband and father must be removed. Do you understand me?’
The Marchioness returned no answer. Her hands were clasped over her eyes, and the hot tears trickled through her fingers, strained convulsively as if to shut out sight—sound—all sense whatever.
‘I have the means,’ continued Gaudin; ‘safe, secure means, that defy detection. You know the medicines that I have given you from time to time for your patients at the Hôtel Dieu. How did they work?’
‘Alas! alas!’ screamed the Marchioness, ‘I see it all; they were poisons! Oh, Gaudin!—lost—lost!’ And she buried her face in the cushions, writhing like a serpent.
Not an emotion was traceable in the face of Sainte-Croix, as, with a steady hand, he took a small packet from his cloak, and slowly breaking the seals, shook a portion of its contents into one of the glasses near him—a tall goblet with a piece of antique money blown in its hollow stem—which he filled with wine. He then raised the Marchioness from her crouching position, and, lifting the glass to his lips, said to her—
‘Marie; in your letter to me this night, you asked for means of death. You are not of that clay from which a self-murderess is made. Let our love end. I will set you an example.’
He made a motion as if to drink, but deliberately enough for the Marchioness to seize his hand and arrest the progress of the goblet to his mouth.
‘No! no!’ she ejaculated, ‘I will be your tool, your slave, even until death!’ Sainte-Croix placed the goblet on the table and clasped Marie in his arms, when suddenly a different door from that by which he had entered opened, and a tall, stately old man stood looking on the scene before him. Absorbed in each other they had not heard the door open, and it was not until his deep voice uttered the name of Marie that the Marchioness and Sainte-Croix perceived the intruder. It was Monsieur d’Aubray.
‘My father!’ shrieked the agonised woman, her eyes staring and her lips apart. Sainte-Croix spoke not a word, but rose and bowed.
The old man returned the salutation as ceremoniously as if the scene were passing at the king’s levée at Versailles.
‘To your chamber,’ he said at length, addressing himself to Marie. Then, turning to Gaudin, he continued, ‘Monsieur de Sainte-Croix, I will provide you with a lodging where you will run no risk of compromising the honour of a noble family.’
He drew from the pocket of his coat a folded paper. Sainte-Croix recognised the regal seal, and bowing, exclaimed—
‘A lettre de cachet, I presume. For Vincennes?’
‘Better, Monsieur le Capitaine,’ replied D’Aubray; ‘for the Bastille.’
‘I am too good a soldier to demur to any order of his Majesty, however disagreeable,’ said Sainte-Croix. ‘As for my appearance here, I will not attempt to justify it.’
‘Palsambleu! you do well, sir,’ said the old man, his voice quivering with anger, ‘and I would recommend your example to Madame la Marquise, there, my daughter, and—your paramour.’
‘Monsieur, de grace!’ returned Gaudin deprecatingly. ‘Your son-in-law will find me ready on my return from confinement to make him every amende he can ask as a gentleman. But be not unkind to your daughter; it is I alone who am to blame in this matter.’
A grateful look from Marie rewarded Sainte-Croix for his apparent magnanimity, and even D’Aubray, much as he was moved, seemed struck with it; for, in a tone of less bitterness than before, he requested Sainte-Croix to attend him into the court-yard, where the archers were in waiting.
‘Willingly,’ answered Gaudin. ‘But, monsieur, before I go, let me exchange a pledge with you; do not refuse me this one favour:’ and filling another glass, he offered to D’Aubray the one he had before poured out.
‘To my speedy reformation,’ said he, as he raised his glass.
D’Aubray was on the point of drinking when, with a shriek, the Marchioness dashed the goblet from his hand, and it fell shivered on the floor.
‘What means this?’ said her father passionately. ‘Are you mad, madame?’
‘Nay,’ interrupted Sainte-Croix. ‘Apparently, Madame la Marquise has no desire to see me a better or a wiser man. Ah these women!’ he added, in a half-aside tone to D’Aubray, and shrugging his shoulders. ‘Allons, monsieur!’ then, as if suddenly recollecting something, he continued, ‘The staircase is guarded, I presume. You are too experienced a magistrate to neglect every precaution.’
Monsieur d’Aubray bowed.
‘Then, will you give me a moment alone with your daughter?’ asked Sainte-Croix. ‘On my honour, I will not abuse it.’
D’Aubray paused; but after a minute’s thought, replied—
‘You have behaved better than I expected, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix. I grant your request.’ And so saying he quitted the apartment.
As he left the boudoir the Marchioness gazed wildly and inquiringly at Gaudin, who, only whispering in her ear—‘Fool! you have thrown away a chance to-night that may never occur again’—threw open the window of the entresol, and, after a careful look, continued, in a low tone—‘As I expected, the court is empty.’
Then with a sign that checked the Marchioness, who was apparently on the point of flinging her arms about his neck, he quickly stepped from the window, and, aided by the trellis-work and ornaments of the intercolumnar architecture of the hôtel, descended easily and safely to the ground. A glance at the porte-cochère, which was open, showed him a fiacre in waiting, with two exempts, who guarded the porch with their halberts. Wrapping his cloak round his left arm, and drawing his sword, with a spring he was under the shade of the archway almost before the sentinel’s attention was awakened. Then, receiving on his cloaked arm the ill-directed blow of the one, he ran the other through the body, and springing over him was in the street before the alarm was given.
He sped along, and was turning the corner of the Rue Neuve St. Paul, when someone suddenly sprang from a doorway upon him, and then, being borne down by his impetuous rush, still clung round his body and effectually hampered his progress. With curses he strove to free his sword-arm, and would soon have rid himself of his assailant had not the archers, who were in chase, at that moment arrived to take their prisoner from the clutches of his captor, who was neither more nor less than Benoit, our friend the mountebank of the Carrefour du Châtelet, who, at the termination of an adventure to be hereafter explained, had tracked Sainte-Croix to the Hôtel d’Aubray, and remained crouched in a doorway of the Rue St. Paul until the arrival of the archers.
Sullenly Sainte-Croix resigned his sword to the officer in command, who attended him to the fiacre; and then, mounting beside him, they set off at a foot pace to the Bastille. During the short journey Sainte-Croix was silent; and as the fiacre rolled over the drawbridge of the frowning fortress, which he had traversed under such different circumstances but the evening before, and along its barbican lined with low cabarets, wherein soldiers were gaming and drinking, to the inner gate, it would have been difficult to say which was the official and which the prisoner. On their arrival at the lodge of the Under-Governor a parley was held, which ended in that functionary expressing his regret to Monsieur de Sainte-Croix that he could not accommodate him with a separate apartment.
‘Do not trouble yourself, monsieur,’ replied Sainte-Croix, with a forced laugh. ‘Provided my fellow-lodger is silent and cleanly, I had rather have his company than that of my own thoughts. I have no doubt we shall be long enough together to become excellent friends.’
‘If you do not object, then,’ answered the courtly deputy, ‘to another inmate, I have a chamber that will suit you exactly. Galouchet, conduct Monsieur de Sainte-Croix to Number Eleven in the Tour du Nord. I wish you a good night, sir.’
With mutual inclinations they separated, and Sainte-Croix followed the gaoler along the gloomy passages. His guide at length paused at a door numbered eleven, and, unlocking it, threw it open with a polite ‘Par ici, monsieur.’
Gaudin entered. The room was not a cachot. It had a boarded floor and a tolerably large window, though heavily barred. There was nothing in its appearance of those terrible underground dungeons, which, in the notions of the vulgar, formed the only places of confinement in the Bastille. It contained some rude furniture and two truckle beds, one of which was occupied.
The gaoler set the light on the table, and, as he turned to depart, the unwonted glare roused the original tenant of the room. Starting up on his pallet he disclosed to Sainte-Croix the livid face of the prisoner of the preceding evening—the physician of the Carrefour du Châtelet.
It was Exili!
As the last of the lawless band departed from the carrière Lachaussée advanced towards the altar, at the foot of which Louise Gauthier had claimed a sanctuary. In spite of Bras d’Acier’s last threat, the denunciation of the Abbe Camus had somewhat awed him. But Lachaussée was less scrupulous. He was as dead to all religious feeling as the others, and besides this, superstition had no power over him. Advancing to the cross, he seized the arm of Louise, and tore her from the altar into the middle of the apartment.
The knocking which had struck such terror into the hearts of the subterraneous gang still continued, and again Louise raised her voice for assistance.
‘They will murder me!’ she cried. ‘Help! this instant, or it will be too late. There are but two, and——’
Lachaussée placed his hand over her mouth and stopped her cries. And then, assisted by Bras d’Acier, he hurried her into a smaller carrière leading from the great one by a rude archway, which could be closed after a manner, like the door, by a large curtain of rude sackcloth. It was a vault hewn out similarly to the other, with a rough attempt to form a gothic roof and buttresses from the limestone. But there were horrid features in the apartment which made Louise shudder as she looked timidly round. A dull and smoking lamp was here also suspended from the ceiling, and by its light could be seen coffins in every direction round the walls; some with their feet projecting some inches beyond them; others lying sideways, such as we see bounding the grave of a crowded burying-ground. In many instances they were open, but no remains were visible. Their cases appeared to have been appropriated to use as cupboards, in which articles of various kinds were stored. In one corner were a few skulls and bones thrown carelessly together; the number was insignificant, and they were not ranged in the order of the existing catacombs. As we have stated, the carrières were at that time the mere result of excavations for building stone; it was not until more than a century after the date of our story that the health of the city demanded the removal of the foul and reeking burial-ground attached to the Église des Innocens, at the corner of the Rue St. Denis and the Rue aux Fers, near the present market, with whose beautiful fountain every visitor to Paris is familiar.3
In one corner of this ghastly chamber was a large font filled with water, which distilled drop by drop from the stalactites that overhung it, and the reflection of the lamp quivered on its dark surface. It ran over at one corner, and small channels hewn in the floor conveyed it away to carrières still deeper.
‘Another word,’ said Lachaussée, ‘and we leave you to your own company in this dreary place.’
‘I ask no more,’ replied Louise, recoiling from him as he relaxed his hold. ‘Let me be anywhere, so long as I am alone, and away from those fearful people.’
‘I am sorry you do not like them,’ said Bras d’Acier; ‘the more so as you will perhaps have to pass a little time amongst us. Only it would not have answered to have taken you from the sanctuary before them. They are particular in matters of religion.’
And he accompanied these last words with a horrid laugh.
‘Do not take me among them again, M. Lachaussée,’ said Louise, ‘I implore you. Let me remain here rather, even in this dismal vault.’
‘Pshaw!’ cried Lachaussée; ‘you know not where you are. Look at those coffins—they have long since been despoiled of their festering contents to hold Bras d’Acier’s riches. You are below the cemetery of St. Medard, hemmed in on all sides by corpses, the accumulation of centuries. Would you like this for a companion?’
He stooped to pick up a skull, and held it in mockery over the flame of the lamp, which hideously illuminated it. Then, tossing it back to the corner of the chamber, he went on—
‘The very air is redolent of mortality. The decay of ages, in some of the coffins, leaves but the food for that lamp which is now burning above us. Bras d’Acier is an economist; and many of the quiet inhabitants of the cemetery become more useful to mankind in death than they ever were in lifetime. They form his flambeaux.’4
‘Is there no one to aid me,’ cried Louise in agony, and shrinking from the accumulated horrors of Lachaussée’s description.
The dull knocking sound was again audible, but louder. It appeared to be close at hand, and the girl redoubled her outcry.
‘Be still, I tell you,’ said Bras d’Acier, ‘and come instantly with us.’
‘With you!’ exclaimed Louise; ‘never; you shall kill me first. Mother of Mercy! pity me; for to you alone can I now look for assistance.’
She fell on her knees and grasped a small crucifix that was suspended from her neck. Lachaussée snatched it from her, and threw it amidst the bones and rubbish in the corner.
‘One moment’s delay,’ he added, ‘and you are lost. Do you see that wall where the water is trickling and oozing into the font? It is not thicker than the length of your hand, and that is the only boundary between us and a branch of the cold Bièvre, which flows over our heads. We have but to confine you in this room, and let in the river; the carrière will be filled, and every record of the deed hidden. Come.’
‘Leave me here—drown me—if you know what mercy means,’ returned Louise, as she struggled with her persecutor. ‘How have I ever injured you, that you should persecute me thus terribly?’
‘Your own sense might have warned you not to annoy M. de Sainte-Croix as you have done. But we have no time for words; you will have plenty of leisure in the Carrière Montrouge to learn everything. Bras d’Acier, you have broader shoulders than my own to carry a burden. Take up the squalling minx, and follow me. I will precede you with the light.’
The huge ruffian advanced towards Louise Gauthier, who, despite their threats, shrieked with terror as he approached. He lifted her as he would have done an infant, whilst Lachaussée took down the lamp from where it hung and prepared to go before him. But as they were leaving the vault the noise sounded close at their side; the very walls appeared to quiver from some unseen blows; a few of the stalactites fell down with the vibration at their feet, and lastly the gypsum that formed the doorway was shivered into the chamber in large blocks, and a bar of iron, sharpened at one end, protruded, as though it came from the very bowels of the quarry. The concussion and the fall of the blocks brought down others with them, and one large mass falling from the top of the archway completely closed the passage.
Bras d’Acier recoiled at the unexpected obstruction, and, throwing Louise off, raised a long heavy pistol fitted with a snaphaunce—a cheap modification of the wheel-lock, much used by the marauders of the period—and discharged it at the aperture whence the blocks had tumbled. The report caused a few more lumps to fall from the ceiling, and when the smoke cleared off, the upper part of a man’s body appeared at the opening.
‘If that is one of Colbert’s blood-scenters, I have winged him,’ said Bras d’Acier.
‘Not yet,’ said the stranger, smashing the wall on either side and scrambling into the vault; ‘not yet, mes braves. Pheugh! I was obliged to knock a long time before you let me in!’
‘Benoit!’ cried Louise, as she recognised our friend of the boat-mill, and flew towards him. ‘What good angel brought you here?’
‘No better one than yourself, ma belle,’ replied the Languedocian. ‘So,’ he continued, looking around him, and perfectly undismayed by the threatening looks of Bras d’Acier; ‘this is an odd place for gallant officers, like M. Gaudin, to give appointments at or receive visitors!’
‘Where are your fellows?’ asked Lachaussée.
‘Oh, I’m alone,’ replied Benoit. ‘What should I want with fellows?’
‘To bury you if we blow your brains out,’ returned Bras d’Acier.
‘Do it,’ said Benoit, drawing Louise towards him with one arm, whilst with the other he carelessly dug a bit of gypsum from the wall with his iron spike, and kicked it towards them. ‘Do it; and to-morrow my little wife, Bathilde, will go to the Préfet with a note from me, ordering a search for Louise and M. Lachaussée there, and telling him where there will be a chance of finding me.’
‘How came you here?’ asked Lachaussée fiercely.
‘Not by your route,’ said Benoit. ‘I know every turn of the quarries better than yourselves; I ought to do, for I worked in them when the stone was hewn for the new works at the Gobelins. Do me the pleasure, ma’amselle, to scramble through this opening.’
The last words were addressed to Louise, who remained close to her new protector during the hurried parley, but at his bidding prepared to climb over the debris of the gypsum into a passage beyond. Bras d’Acier made a movement to intercept her, but was restrained by Lachaussée.
‘Your turn is yet to come,’ said the robber, grinding his teeth at Benoit.
‘As you please, mon maître; only think twice about it first,’ answered the Languedocian, as he assisted Louise through the archway.
‘You have checked us to-night,’ said Lachaussée; ‘it is the first time, but it is the last; and when we meet above ground we will let you know it.’
‘Sacré bleu!’ roared Bras d’Acier, rushing forward with a sudden impulse. ‘I can’t lose our promised wages thus, come what may. Give up the girl.’