“On the contrary; I have seen and spoken with him.”
“Par exemple!The man was a charlatan. He could foretell everything but his own guillotining last year. And yet thou art ignorant—well, well!”
He threw up his hands in deprecation; then came and sat down on the grass beside me.
“Cela m’est égal, M. Quatremains-Quatrepattes,” said I.
“Ah!” he said; “but I will convince thee at once. Describe to me thy dream.”
“I dreamt I wrestled with an angel and was overthrown.”
“Thy mistress has quarrelled with and rejected thee.”
“An obvious deduction. Yet I will assure you she is no angel.”
“Canst thou say so? But we are all of the seed of Lucifer. Proceed.”
“I dreamt how a great march grew out of a single accident of sound.”
Here I was watchful of him, and I saw some relish twitch his lips. He assumed an air of tense introspection, groping with his soul, like a fakir, amongst the reflex images thrown upon the backs of his eyeballs.
“I hear a note,” he said presently, as if speaking to himself—“one vibrant accent like the clipt song of a bullet. Is it struck from an instrument or from any resounding vessel? It comes down the wind—it clangs—it passes. Nay—it signifies only that some winged insect has fled by the ear of a solitary traveller resting on an ancient bridge; yet from that little bugle-sound shall the traveller learn to date the processes of a long and fruitless journey.”
I broke into a great laugh.
“Most excellent!” I cried. “Thou hast an ingenuity of adaptation that should make thy fortune—even at the very low rate of fifty centimes the job.”
His eyebrows lifted at me.
“Why, M. Quatremains-Quatrepattes—M. Jacquemart,” said I,—“I knew thee listening to me just now; and I heard thee steal away and come again. It is easy to construe with the key in one’s hand.”
He was no whit abashed.
“Cela m’est égal,” he said serenely, echoing my words. “But I can foretell one’s future, nevertheless, very exactly.”
“Why, so can I, if I am not to be called upon to verify my statements.”
He looked suddenly in my face.
“Thou art a disguised aristocrat.”
“Better and better. But are we not all such to ourselves? The soul is excessively exclusive.”
“You will not consider I have earned my fee?” said he.
“Fifty times over, my friend. Will you take it in a promissory note?”
“Ah!” he cried pleasantly. “I perceive I have sown in barren soil.”
“Again you justify yourself. Yet should I be a very thicket were all the berries I have swallowed of late to germinate in me.”
“Is that so?” said he. “But I have been a scapegoat myself——” and thereat this extraordinary person pressed upon me some food he had with him with an ample and courtly grace.
“This shall yield a better crop than my prophesying,” he said, watching me as I munched.
“Of a surety,” I answered; “the full harvest of my gratitude.”
He pondered at me.
“I wish I could convince thee,” he said.
“Wherefore? Is not the evil sufficient for the day in this distracted land? Why should one want to probe the future?”
“Because forewarned is forearmed.”
“Oh, little Quatremains-Quatrepattes! Dost thou not perceive the paradox? How can destiny be altered by foreknowledge? If you interpret that I am to be guillotined, and I profit by the statement to evade such a catastrophe, how is not your prophecy stultified?”
“Why, I have no creed of predestination. The lords of life and death are not inexorable. Sometimes, like M. St Meard, one may buy his reprieve of them with a jest. Above all, they hate the sour fatalist whose subscription to his own faith is a gloomy affectation.”
“Well; I think I love thee a little.”
He looked at me with a smile.
“Come with me, then. I long to give thee proof. Dost thou need a safeguard? Thou shalt run under my wing—ça et là—to Paris if thou wilt. I am popular with all. If necessity drives, thou shalt figure as my Jack-pudding. What! thou mayst even play up to the part. Thou hast slept in the mire; but ‘many a ragged colt makes a good horse.’”
I laughed.
“Why not?” I said. “For I have played the tragic to empty houses till I am tired.”
* * * * * * *
Quatremains-Quatrepattes and his merry-andrew gambolled through a score of villages on their road to Paris. I found the rascal hugely popular, as he had boasted he was, and a most excellent convoy to my humble craft, so perilously sailing under false colours. He was subtle, shrewd, seasonable,—of the species whose opportunity is accident; and perhaps no greater tribute could be paid to his deftness than this—that he never once exposed himself to detection by me in a question of moral fraud. “Ton génie a la main crochue,” I would say to him, chuckling; but he would only respond with a rebuking silence.
Early he handed over the bag of broadsides—the revolutionary songs and ballads (some, it must be confessed, abominably coarse)—to my care, that so he himself might assume a lofty indifference to the meaner processes of his business. This delighted me. It was like a new rattling game to me to hawk my commodities amongst the crowd; to jest and laugh with my fellows once more under cover of the droll I represented. Shortly, I think, I became as popular as Quatremains himself; and over this, though he loved me as a valuable auxiliary, he began to look a little sober by-and-by, as if he dreaded I should joke the weightier part of his commerce out of all respect.
Hispopularity was chiefly with the village wenches. They would gather about him at the fountains, and pay their sous open-eyed to be expounded; or singly they would withdraw him into nooks or private places if the case was serious.
“Citizen seër,” says Margot, “I dreamed I fell and was wounded.”
“That is good, little minette. Thou wilt pay me five sous for a fond lover.”
“Citizen seër, I dreamed I was eating of a great egg.”
“And thou shalt shortly beget a male child that shall bring thee honour.”
“How now, old Jackalent!”
There rises a shrill cackle of laughter.
“Fi donc, Margot!On te le rendra de bonne heure!”
To submit the commerce of love to the test of a little dream-manual he carried about with him, that was Quatremains’ system. This key (it was in manuscript) interpreted on a couple of hundred, or more, words, fromAbeltoWounds; but affairs of the heart predominated through the whole alphabet of nonsense. He would coach himself continually from it in secret; but indeed a small wit and a trifle of invention were all that was needed. Now and again I would rally him on this petty taxing of credulity.
“How now!” he would answer. “Art thou not yet convinced?”
“By what, thou most surprising Quatremains-Quatrepattes?”
“For example, did I not foretell that Mère Grignon, whose husband was guillotined, would be brought to bed of a child with the mark of thelunetteon its throat; and were not my words verified the same night?”
“But who knows that some one may not have bribed the nurse to score the neck of the new-born with whipcord?”
“Tête-bleu!Should I hold good my reputation and pay this nurse, think’st thou, out of five sous?”
But the rascal had other strings to his bow, all twanging to the same tunede folles amours—charms, fortune-telling, palmistry: so many lines under the thumb, so many children; a shorter first joint to the little than to its neighbour finger, the wife to rule the roast; a mole on the nose, success in intrigues; a mole on the breast, sincerity of affection. Then, too, he would tell nativities, cast horoscopes, quarter the planets for you like an orange or like the fruit of his imagination. There is a late picture of him often before me as he sat in the market-place of Essonnes, a little village that lies almost within view of the towers of Paris. A half-dozen blooming daughters of the Revolution stood about him, their hands under their aprons for warmth,—for it was pretty late in November, and in fact the eve of St Catherine’s feast.
“Now,” said Quatremains, “there are seven of ye, and that is the sure number,—for there must not be more than seven nor fewer than three; and be certain ye are quick to my directions.” (He jingled softly in his fists the copper harvest of his gathering.) “Are all of ye virgins?” he cried. “If the charm fails, she who is not will be accountable to the others.” (He scanned their hot faces like a very Torquemada of the true faith.) “To-morrow, then,” he said, “let each wear inside her bosom all day a sprig of myrtle. At night, assemble together privately in a room, and, as the clock strikes eleven, take ye each your twig and fold it in tissue-paper, having first kindled charcoal in a chafing-dish. Thereonto throw nine hairs from the head, and a little moon-paring of every toe- and finger-nail, as also some frankincense, with the fragrant vapour arising from which ye shall fumigate each her packet. Now, go to your beds, and with the stroke of midnight compose yourselves to slumber, the envelope under the head, and, so ye have not failed to keep silence from first to last, each shall assuredly be made conversant in dream with her future husband.”
Oh, wonderful nature of woman, thus, in a starving France, to throw sous into a pool for the sport of vanity!
* * * * * * *
Quatremains smuggled me into Paris, and there, for we had no further use of one another, our connection ceased. Thenceforwards I must live on my wits—other than those he had taxed—and on the little pieces of money that remained to me for feast-days. The struggle was a short one. I had not been a fortnight in the city when the blow that I had so long foreseen fell upon me. One day I was arrested and carried to La Force. That, perhaps, was as well; for my personal estate was dwindled to a few livres, and I knew no rag-picker that would be likely to extend to me his patronage and protection.
Yet before this came about, I had one other strange little experience that shall be related.
Itwas on a night of middle Vendémiaire in the year two (to affect the whimsical jargon of thesans-culottes) that I issued from my burrow with an intrepidity that was nothing more nor less than a congestion of the sensibilities. Fear at that time having fed upon itself till all was devoured, was converted in very many to a humorous stoicism that only lacked to be great because it could not boast a splendid isolation. “Suspect of being suspect”—Citizen Chaumette’s last slash at the hamstrings of hope—had converted all men of humane character to that religion of self-containment that can alone spiritually exalt above the caprices of the emotions. Thousands, in a moment, through extreme of fear became fearless; hence no man of them could claim a signal inspiration of courage, but only that subscription to the terms of it which unnatural conditions had rendered necessary to all believers in the ultimate ethical triumph of the human race.
I do not mean to say that I was tired of life, but simply that it came to me at once that I must not hold that test of moral independence at the mercy of any temporal tyranny whatsoever. Indeed I was still so far in love with existence physically, as to neglect no precaution that was calculated to contribute to the present prolonging of it. I wore my frieze night-cap, carmagnole, sabots, and black shag spencer with all the assumption I could muster of being to the shoddy born. I had long learned the art of slurring a sigh into a cough or expectoration. I could curse the stolid spectres of the tumbrils so as to deceive all but the recording angel, and, possibly, Citizen Robespierre.
Nevertheless, with me, as with others, precaution seemed but a condition of the recklessness whose calculations never extended beyond the immediate day or hour. We lived posthumous lives, so to speak, and would hardly have resented it, should an arbitrary period have been put to our revisiting of the “glimpses of the moon.”
On this night, then, of early September (as I will prefer calling it) I issued from my burrow, calm under the intolerable tyranny of circumstance. Desiring to reconstruct myself on the principle of an older independence, I was mentally discussing the illogic of a system of purgation that was seeking to solve the problem of existence by emptying the world, when I became aware that my preoccupied ramblings had brought me into the very presence of that sombre engine that was the concrete expression of so much and such detestable false reasoning. In effect, and to speak without circumbendibus, I found myself to have wandered into the Faubourg St Antoine—into the place of execution, and to have checked my steps only at the very foot of the guillotine.
It was close upon midnight, and, overhead, very wild and broken weather. But the deeps of atmosphere, with the city for their ocean bed, as it were, lay profoundly undisturbed by the surface turmoil above; and in the tranquilPlace, for all the upper flurry, one could hear oneself breathe and think.
I could have done this with the more composure, had not another sound, the import of which I was a little late in recognising, crept into my hearing with a full accompaniment of dismay. This sound was like licking or lapping, very bestial and unclean, and when I came to interpret it, it woke in me a horrible nausea. For all at once I knew that, hidden in that dreadful conduit that strong citizens of late had dug from the Place St Antoine to the river, to carry away the ponded blood of the executed, the wild dogs of Paris were slaking their wolfish thirst. I could hear their filthy gutturising and the scrape of their lazy tongues on the soil, and my heart went cold, for latterly, and since they had taken to hunting in packs, these ravenous brutes had assailed and devoured more than one belated citizen whom they had scented traversing the Champs Elysées, or other lonely space; and I was aware a plan for their extermination was even now under discussion by the Committee of Public Safety.
Now, to fling scorn to the axe in that city of terror was to boast only that one had adjusted oneself to a necessity that did not imply an affectation of indifference to the fangs of wild beasts—for such, indeed, they were. So, a suicide, who goes to cast himself headlong into the river, may run in a panic from a falling beam, and be consistent, too; for his compact is with death—not mutilation.
Be that as it may, I know that for the moment terror so snapped at my heel that, under the very teeth of it, I leaped up the scaffold steps—with the wild idea of swarming to the beam above the knife and thence defying my pursuers, should they nose and bay me seated there at refuge—and stood with a white desperate face, scarcely daring to pant out the constriction of my lungs.
There followed no sound of concentrated movement; but only that stealthy licking went on, with the occasional plash of brute feet in a bloody mire; and gradually my turbulent pulses slowed, and I thought myself a fool for my pains in advertising my presence on a platform of such deadly prominence.
Still, not a soul seemed to be abroad. As I trod the fateful quarter ten minutes earlier, the last squalid roysterers had staggered from the wine-shops—the last gleams of light been shut upon the emptied streets. I was alone with the dogs and the guillotine.
Tiptoeing very gently, very softly, I was preparing to descend the steps once more, when I drew back with a muttered exclamation, and stood staring down upon an apparition that, speeding at that moment into thePlace, paused within ten paces of the scaffold on which I stood.
Above the scudding clouds was a moon that pulsed a weak intermittent radiance through the worn places of the drift. Its light was always more suggested than revealed; but it was sufficient to denote that the apparition was that of a very pale young woman—a simple child she looked, whose eyes, nevertheless, wore that common expression of the dramatic intensity of her times.
She stood an instant, tense as Corday, her fingers bent to her lips; her background a frouzy wall with the legendPropriété Nationalescrawled on it in white chalk. Significant to the inference, the cap of scarlet wool was drawn down upon her youngblondescurls—the gold of the coveted perukes.
Suddenly she made a little movement, and in the same instant gave out a whistle clear and soft.
Yes, it was she from whom it proceeded; and I shuddered. There below me in the ditch were the dogs; here before me was this fearless child.
For myself, even in the presence of this angel, I dared scarcely stir. It was unnatural; it was preposterous—came a scramble and a rush; and there, issued from the filthy sewer, was a huge boar-hound, that fawned on the little citoyenne, and yelped (under her breath) like a thing of human understanding.
She cried softly, “Down, Radegonde!” and patted the monster’s head with a pretty manner of endearment.
“Ah!” she murmured, “hast thou broken thy faith with thy hunger? Traitor!—but I will ask no questions. Here are thy comfits. My sweet, remember thy pedigree and thy mistress.”
She thrust a handful of sugar-plums into the great jaws. I could hear the hound crunching them in her teeth.
What was I to do?—what warning to give? This child—this frail wind-flower of the night—the guillotine would have devoured her at a snap, and laughed over the tit-bit! But I, and the nameless gluttons of the ditch!
They were there—part at least of one of those packs (recruited by gradual degrees from the desolated homes of the proscribed—ofémigrés) that now were swollen to such formidable proportions as to have become a menace and a nightly terror. The dogs were there, and should they scent this tender quarry, what power was in a single faithful hound to defend her against a half hundred, perhaps, of her fellows.
Sweating with apprehension, I stole down the steps. She was even then preparing to retreat hurriedly as she had come. Her lips were pressed to the beast’s wrinkled head. The sound of her footstep might have precipitated the catastrophe I dreaded.
“Citoyenne! citoyenne!” I whispered in an anguished voice.
She looked up, scared and white in a moment. The dog gave a rolling growl.
“Radegonde!” she murmured, in a faint warning tone.
The brute stood alert, her hair bristling.
“Bid her away!” I entreated. “You are in danger.”
She neither answered nor moved.
“See, I am in earnest!” I cried, loud as I durst. “The wild dogs are below there.”
“Radegonde!” she murmured again.
“Ah, mademoiselle! What are two rows of teeth against a hundred. Send her away, I implore you, and accept my escort out of this danger.”
“My faith!” she said at last, in a queer little moving voice, “it may be as the citizen says; but I think dogs are safer than men.”
I urged my prayer. The beauty and courage of the child filled my heart with a sort of rapturous despair.
“God witness I am speaking for your safety alone! Will this prevail with you? I am the Comte de la Muette. I exchange you that confidence for a little that you may place in me. I lay my life in your hands, and I beg the charge of yours in return.”
I could hear her breathing deep where she stood. Suddenly she bent and spoke to her companion.
“To the secret place, Radegonde—and to-morrow again for thyconfiture, thou bad glutton. Kiss thy Nanette, my baby; and, oh, Radegonde! not what falls from the table of Sainte Guillotine!”
She stood erect, and held up a solemn finger. The hound slunk away, like a human thing ashamed; showed her teeth at me as she passed, and disappeared in the shadows of the scaffold.
I took a hurried step forward. Near at hand the pure loveliness of this citoyenne was, against its surroundings, like a flower floating on blood.
She smiled, and looked me earnestly in the face. We were but phantoms to one another in that moony twilight; but in those fearful times men had learned to adapt their eyesight to the second plague of darkness.
“Is it true?” she said, softly. “Monsieur le Comte, it must be long since you have received a curtsey.”
She dropped me one there, bending to her own prettiness like a rose; and then she gave a little low laugh. Truly that city of Paris saw some strange meetings in the year of terror.
“I, too,” she said, “was born of thenoblesse. That is a secret, monsieur, to set against yours.”
I could but answer, with some concern—
“Mademoiselle, these confessions, if meet for the holy saint yonder, are little for the ears of the devil’s advocates. I entreat let us be walking, or those in the ditch may anticipate upon us his benediction.”
“Ma foi!” she said, “it is true. Come, then!”
We went off together, stealing from the square like thieves. Presently, when I could breathe with a half relief, “You will not go to-morrow?” I said.
“To feed Radegonde! Ah, monsieur! I would not for the whole world lose the little sweet-tooth her goodies. Each of us has only the other to love in all this cruel city.”
“So, my child! And they have taken the rest?”
“Monsieur, my father was the rest. He went on the seventeenth Fructidor; and since, my veins do not run blood, I think, but only ice-water, that melts from my heart and returns to freeze again.”
I sighed.
“Nay,” she said, “for I can laugh, as you see.”
“And the dog, my poor child?”
“She ran under the tumbril, and bit at the heels of the horses. She would not leave him, monsieur; and still—and still she haunts the place. I go to her,—when all the city is silent I go to her, if I can escape, and take her the sweetmeats that she loves. What of that? It is only a little while and my turn must come, and then Radegonde will be alone. My hair, monsieur will observe, is the right colour for the perukes.”
She stayed me with a touch.
“I am arrived. A thousand thanks for your escort, Monsieur le Comte.”
We were by a low casement with a ledge before it—an easy climb from the street. She pushed the lattice open, showing me it was unbolted from within.
“She thinks me fast and asleep,” she said. “Some day soon, perhaps, but not yet.”
I did not ask her whoshewas. I seemed all mazed in a silent dream of pity.
“It is quite simple,” she said, “when no cavalier is by to look. Will the citizen turn his head?”
She was up in an instant, and stepping softly into the room beyond, leaned out towards me. On the moment an evil thing grew out of the shadow of a buttress close by, and a wicked insolent face looked into mine with a grin.
“A sweet good-night to Monsieur le Comte,” it said, and vanished.
Shocked and astounded, I stood rooted to the spot. But there came a sudden low voice in my ear:
“Quick, quick! have you no knife? You must follow!”
I had taken but a single uncertain step, when, from a little way down the street we had traversed, there cut into the night a sharp attenuated howl; and, in a moment, on the passing of it, a chorus of hideous notes swept upon me standing there in indecision.
“My God!” I cried—“the dogs!”
She made a sound like a plover. I scrambled to the ledge and dropped into the room beyond. There in the dark she clutched and clung to me. For though the cry had been bestial, there had seemed to answer to it something mortal—an echo—a human scream of very dreadful fear,—there came a rush of feet like a wind, and, with ashy faces, we looked forth.
They had him—that evil thing. An instant we saw his sick white face thrown up like a stone in the midst of a writhing sea; and the jangle was hellish. Then I closed the lattice, and pressed her face to my breast.
He had run from us to his doom, which meeting, he had fled back in his terror to make us the ghastly sport he had designed should be his.
How long we stood thus I know not. The noise outside was unnameable, and I closed her ears with her hair, with my hands—nay, I say it with a passionate shame, with my lips. She sobbed a little and moaned; but she clung to me, and I could feel the beating of her heart. We had heard windows thrown open down the street—one or two on the floors above us. I had no heed or care for any danger. I was wrapt in a fearful ecstasy.
By-and-by she lifted her face. Then the noise had ceased for some time, and a profound silence reigned about us.
“Ah!” she said, in a faint reeling voice. “Radegonde was there; I saw her!”
“Mademoiselle—the noble creature—she hath won us a respite.”
Her breath caught in the darkness.
“Yes,” she said. “There is a peruke that must wait.”
Suddenly she backed from me, and put the hair from her eyes.
“If you dare, monsieur, it necessitates that we make our adieux.”
“Au revoir, citoyenne. It must be that, indeed.”
She held out her hand, that was like a rose petal. I put my lips to it and lingered.
“Monsieur, monsieur!” she entreated.
The next moment I was in the street.
* * * * * * *
Who was my little citoyenne? Ah! I shall never know. The terror gripped us, and these things passed. Incidents that would make the passion of sober times, the spirit of revolution dismisses with a shrug. To die in those days was such a vulgar complaint.
But I saw her once more, and then when my heart nestled to her image and my veins throbbed to her remembered touch.
I was strolling, on the morning following my strange experience, in the neighbourhood of the Champs Elysées, when I was aware of a great press of people all making in the direction of that open ground.
“What arrives, then, citizen?” I cried to one who paused for breath near me.
He gasped, the little morose. To ask any question that showed one ignorant of the latest caprice of the Executive was almost to be “suspect.”
“Has not the citizen heard? The Committee of Safety has decreed the destruction of the dogs.”
“The dogs?”
“Sacred Blood!” he cried. “Is it not time, when they take, as it is said they did last night, a good friend of the Republic to supper?”
He ran on, and I followed. All about the Champs Elysées was a tumultuous crowd, and posted within were two battalions of the National Guard, their blue uniforms resplendent, their flint-locks shining in their hands. They, the soldiers, surrounded the area, save towards the Rue Royale, where a gap occurred; and on this gap all eyes were fixed.
Scarcely was I come on the scene when on every side a laughing hubbub arose. The dogs were being driven in, at first by twos and threes, but presently in great numbers at a time. For hours, I was told, had half thegaminsof Paris been beating the coverts and hallooing their quarry to the toils.
At length, when many hundreds were accumulated in the free space, the soldiers closed in and drove the skulking brutes through the gap towards the Place Royale. And there they made a battue of it, shooting them down by the score.
With difficulty I made my way round to thePlace, the better to view the sport. The poor trappedfriponsran hither and thither, crying, yelping—some fawning on their executioners, some begging to the bullets, as if these were crusts thrown to them. And my heart woke to pity; for was I not witnessing the destruction of my good friends?
The noise—the volleying, the howling, the shrieking of thecanaille—was indescribable.
Suddenly my pulses gave a leap. I knew her—Radegonde. She was driven into the fire and stood at bay, bristling.
“Nanette!” cried a quick acid voice; “Nanette—imbecile—my God!”
It all passed in an instant. There, starting from the crowd, was the figure of a tall sour-featured woman, the tiny tricolour bow in her scarlet cap; there was the thin excited musketeer, his piece to his shoulder; there was my citoyenne flung upon the ground, her arms about the neck of the hound.
* * * * * * *
Whether his aim was true or false, who can tell? He shot her through her dog, and his sergeant brained him. And in due course his sergeant was invited for his reward to look through the little window.
These were a straw or two in the torrent of the revolution.
* * * * * * *
It was Citizen Gaspardin who accepted the contract to remove the carcasses (some three thousand of them) that encumbered the Place Royale as a result of this drastic measure. However, his eye being bigger than his stomach, as the saying is, he found himself short of means adequate to his task and so applied for the royal equipages to help him out of his difficulty. And these the Assembly, entering into the joke, was moved to lend him; and the dead dogs, hearsed in gilt and gingerbread as full as they could pack, made a rare procession of it through Paris, thereby pointing half-a-dozen morals that it is not worth while at this date to insist on.
I saw the show pass amidst laughter and clapping of hands; and I saw Radegonde, as I thought, her head lolling from the roof of the stateliest coach of all. But her place should have been on the seat of honour.
And the citoyenne, the dark window, the ripping sound in the street, and that bosom bursting to mine in agony? Episodes, my friend—mere travelling sparks in dead ashes, that glowed an instant and vanished. The times bristled with such. Love and hate, and all the kaleidoscope of passion—pouf! a sigh shook the tube, and form and colour were changed.
But—but—but—ah! I was glad thenceforth not to shudder for my heart when ablonde perruquewent by me.
Gardel—one of the most eminent and amusing rascals of my experience—is inextricably associated with my memories of the prison of the Little Force. He had been runner to the Marquis de Kercy; and that his vanity would by no means deny, though it should procure his conviction ten times over. He was vivacious, and at all expedients as ingenious as he was practical; and, while he was with us, the common-room of La Force was a theatre of varieties.
By a curious irony of circumstance, it fell to Madame, his former châtelaine, to second his extravagances. For he was her fellow-prisoner; and, out of all that motley, kaleidoscopic assemblage, an only representative of the traditions of her past. She indulged him, indeed, as if she would say, “In him,mes amis, you see exemplified the gaieties that I was born to patronise and applaud.”
She was a small, faded woman, of thirty-five or so—one of those colourless aristocrats who, lying under no particular ban, were reserved to complete the tale of anyfournéethat lacked the necessary number of loaves. It is humiliating to be guillotined because fifty-nine are not sixty. But that, in the end, was her fate.
I recall her the first evening of my incarceration, when I was permitted to descend, rather late, to thesalle de récréationof the proscribed. She was seated, with other ladies, at the long table. The music of their voices rippled under the vaulted ceiling. They worked, these dear creatures—the decree depriving prisoners of all implements and equipments not yet being formulated. Madame la Marquise stitched proverbs into a sampler in red silk. She looked, perhaps, a morsel slatternly for agrande dame, and her fine lace was torn. But the sampler must not be neglected, for all that. Since the days she had played at “Proverbs” (how often?) in the old paternal château, her little philosophy of life had been all maxims misapplied. Her sampler was as eloquent to her as was their knitting to the ladies in thePlace du Trône. Endowed with so noble a fund of sentiments, how could they accuse her of inhumanity? I think she had a design to plead “sampler” before Fouquier Tinville by-and-by.
I had an opportunity presently to examine her work. “A laver la tête d’un Maure on perd sa lessive.” She had just finished it—in Roman characters, too, as a concession to the Directory. It was a problem-axiom the Executive had resolved unanswerably—as I was bound to tell her.
“Comment?” she asked, with a little sideling perk of her head, like a robin.
“Can madame doubt? It requests the black thing to sneeze once into the basket; and, behold! the difficulty is surmounted.”
“Fi donc!” she cried, and stole me a curious glance. Was I delirious with the Revolution fever?
“Of what do they accuse you, my friend?” she said kindly, by-and-by.
“A grave offence, surely. There is little hope for me. I gave a citizen ‘you’ instead of ‘thou.’”
“So? But how men are thoughtless! Alas!” (She treated me to a little proverb again.) “‘The sleeping cat needs not to be aroused.’”
This was late in the evening, a little before the “lock up” hour was arrived.
Earlier, as I had entered, she lifted her eyebrows to Gardel, who stood, herchevalier d’honneur, behind her chair. The man advanced at once, with infinite courtesy, and bade me welcome, entirely in the grand manner, to the society of La Force.
“I have the honour to represent madame. This kiss I impress upon monsieur’s hand is to be returned.”
The ladies laughed. I advanced gravely and saluted the Marquise.
“I restore it, like a medal blessed of the holy father, sanctified a hundredfold,” I said.
There was a mignonne seated near who was critical of my gallantry.
“But monsieur is enamoured of his own lips,” she said in a little voice.
“Cruel!” I cried. “What should I mean but that I breathed into it all that I have of reverence for beauty? If the citoyenne——”
There was a general cry—“A fine! a fine!”
The hateful word was interdicted under a penalty.
“I pay it!” I said, and stooped and kissed the fair cheek.
Its owner flushed and looked a little vexed, for all the general merriment.
“Monsieur cheapens his own commodities,” she said.
“Ah, mademoiselle! I know the best investments for my heart. I am a very merchant of love. If you keep my embrace, I am well advertised. If you return it, I am well enriched.”
The idea was enough. Gardel invented a new game from it on the spot. In a moment half the company was rustling and chattering and romping about the room.
M. Damézague’s “Que ferons-nous demain matin?”—that should have been this vivacious Gardel’s epitaph. He could not be monotonous; he could not be unoriginal; he could not rest anywhere—not even in his grave. It was curious to see how he deluded la Marquise into the belief that she was his superior.
Indeed, these prisons afforded strange illustration of what I may call the process of natural adjustments. Accidents of origin deprived of all significance, one could select without any difficulty the souls to whom a free Constitution would have ensured intellectual prominence. I take Gardel as an instance. Confined within arbitrary limits under the oldrégime, his personality here discovered itself masterful. His resourcefulness, his intelligence, overcrowed us all, irresistibly leaping to their right sphere of action. He had a little learning even; but that was no condition of his emancipation. Also, he was not wanting in that sort of courage with which one had not condescended hitherto to accredit lackeys. No doubt in those days one was rebuked by many discoveries.
Yet another possession of his endeared him to allmisérablesin this casual ward of the guillotine. He had a mellow baritone voice, and arépertoireof playful and tender little folk-songs. Clélie (it was she I had kissed; I never knew her by any other name) would accompany him on the harp, till her head drooped and thepoudre maréchalefrom her hair would glitter red on the strings—not to speak of other gentle dew that was less artificial.
Then she would look up, with a pitiful mouth of deprecation. “La paix, pour Dieu, la paix!” she would murmur. “My very harp weeps to hear thee.”
The pathos of his songs was not in their application. Perhaps he was quit of worse grievances than those the Revolution presented to him. Perhaps he was happier proscribed than enslaved. At any rate, he never fitted music to modern circumstance. His subjects were sweet, archaic—the mythology of the woods and pastures. It was in their allusions to a withered spring-time that the sadness lay. For, believe me, we were all Punchinellos, grimacing lest the terror of tears should overwhelm us.
There was achansonnetteof his, the opening words of which ran somewhat as follows:—
“Oh, beautiful apple-tree!Heavy with flowersAs my heart with love!As a little wind servethTo scatter thy blossom,So a young lover onlyIs needed to ravishThe heart from my bosom.”
“Oh, beautiful apple-tree!Heavy with flowersAs my heart with love!As a little wind servethTo scatter thy blossom,So a young lover onlyIs needed to ravishThe heart from my bosom.”
“Oh, beautiful apple-tree!
Heavy with flowers
As my heart with love!
As a little wind serveth
To scatter thy blossom,
So a young lover only
Is needed to ravish
The heart from my bosom.”
This might be typical of all. We convinced ourselves that we caught in them echoes of a once familiar innocence, and we wept over our lost Eden. Truly the indulging of introspection is the opportunity of the imagination.
To many brave souls Gardel’s peasant ballads were the requiem—
“Passez, la Dormette,Passez par chez nous!”—
“Passez, la Dormette,Passez par chez nous!”—
“Passez, la Dormette,
Passez par chez nous!”—
and so comes the rascal Cabochon, our jailer, with his loweringhuissiers, and the ‘Evening Gazette’ in his hand.
“So-and-so, and So-and-so, and So-and-so, to the Conciergerie.”
Then, if the runner had been singing, would succeed some little emotions of parting—moist wistful eyes, and the echo of sobs going down the corridor.
Yet, more often, Cabochon would interrupt a romp, to which the condemned would supplement a jocund exit.
“Adieu, messieurs! adieu! adieu!We cannot keep our countenances longer. We kneel to Sanson, who shall shrive us—Sanson, the Abbé, the exquisite, in whose presence we all lose our heads!”
And so the wild hair and feverish eyes vanish.
But it is of Gardel and the Marquise I speak. While many went and many took their places, these two survived for a time. To the new, as to the old, the rogue was unflagging in his attentions. His every respite inspired him with fresh audacity; from each condemned he seemed to take a certain toll of animation.
Presently Madame and her emancipated servant, with Clélie and I, would make a nightly habit of it to join forces in a bout of “Quadrille.” We appropriated an upper corner of the long table, and (for the oil lamps on the walls were dismally inadequate) we had our four wax candles all regular—but in burgundy bottles for sconces. A fifth bottle, with no candle, but charged with the ruddier light that illuminates the heart, was a usual accompaniment.
We chattered famously, and on many subjects. Hope a little rallied, maybe, as each night brought Cabochon with a list innocent of our names.
Also we had our eccentricities, that grew dignified by custom. If, in the game, “Roi rendu” was called, we paid, not with a fish, but with a hair plucked from the head. It made Clélie cry; but not all from loyalty. So, if the King of Hearts triumphed, its owner drank “rubis sur l’ongle,” emptying his glass and tapping the edge of it three times on his left thumb-nail.
Now, I am to tell you of the black evening that at the last broke up our coterie—of the franticabandonof the scene, and the tragedy of farce with which it closed.
On that afternoon Gardel sparkled beyond his wont. He made the air electric with animation. The company was vociferous for a romp, but at present we four sat idly talkative over the disused cards.
“M. Gardel, you remind me of a gnat-maggot.”
“How, sir?” says Gardel.
“It is without offence. Once, as a boy, I kept a tub of gold-fish. In this the eggs of the little insect would be found to germinate. I used to watch the tiny water-dragons come to the surface to take the air through their tails—my faith! but that was comically like the France of to-day. Now touch the water with a finger, andpouf!there they were all scurried to the bottom in a panic, not to rise again till assured of safety.”
“That is not my way,” says Gardel.
“Wait, my friend. By-and-by, nearing their transformation, these mites plump out and lose their gravity. Then, if one frights them, they try to wriggle down; their buoyancy resists. They may sink five—six inches. It is no good. Up they come again, like bubbles in champagne, to burst on the surface presently and fly away.”
“And shall I fly, monsieur?”
“To the stars, my brave Gardel. But is it not so? One cannot drive you down for long.”
“To-night, M. Thibaut” (such was my name in the prison register)—“to-night, I confess, I am like a ‘Montgolfier.’ I rise, I expand. I am full of thoughts too great for utterance. My transformation must be near.”
The Marquise gave a little cry—
“Je ne puis pas me passer de vous, François!”
The servant—the master—looked kindlily into the faded eyes.
“I will come back and be with you in spirit,” he said.
“No, no!” she cried, volubly. “It is old-wives’ tales—the vapourings of poets and mystics. Of all these murdered thousands, which haunts the murderers?”
I gazed in astonishment. This passivedouillette, with the torn lace! I had never known her assert herself yet but through the mouth of her henchman.
“Oh yes!” she went on shrilly, nodding her head. “Death, death, death! But, if the dead return, this Paris should be a city of ghosts.”
“Perhaps it is,” said Gardel.
“Fie, then!” she cried. “You forget your place; you presume upon my condescension. It is insolent so to put me to school. ‘Ma demeure sera bientôt le néant.’ It was Danton—yes, Danton—who said that. He was a devil, but he could speak truth.”
Suddenly she checked herself and gave a little artificial titter. She was not transfigured, but debased. A jealous scepticism was revealed in every line of her features.
“And what is death to M. Gardel?” she said ironically.
“It is an interruption, madame.”
She burst forth again excitedly—
“But Danton saw further than thee, thou fool, who, like a crab, lookest not whither thou art going, and wilt run upon a blind wall while thine eyes devour the landscape sidelong. I will not have it. I do not desire any continuance. My faith is the faith of eyes and ears and lips. Man’s necessities die with him; and, living, mine are for thy strong arm, François, and for thy fruitful service. My God! what we pass through! And then for a hereafter of horrible retrospection! No, no. It is infamous to suggest, foolish to insist on it.”
“But, for all that, I do,” said Gardel, steadily.
He took her outburst quite coolly—answered her with gaiety even.
I cried “Malepeste!” under my breath. And, indeed, my amazement was justified. For who would have dreamed that this little colourless draggle-tail had one sentiment in her that amounted to a conviction? Madame Placide an atheist! And what was there of dark and secret in her past history that drove her to this desire of extinction?
At Gardel’s answer she fell back in her chair with defiant eyes and again that little artificial laugh. In the noisy talk of the room we four sat and spoke apart.
“Malappris!” she said. “You shall justify yourself of that boldness. Come back to me, if you go first, and I will believe.”
“Agreed!” he cried. “And for the sign, madame?”
She thought; and answered, with the grateful womanliness that redeemed her,—
“Do me a little service—something, anything—and I shall know it is you.”
The candles were burned half-way down in their bottles. He rose and one by one blew them out.
“Voilà!” he cried gaily. “To save your pocket!”
So the little scene ended.
“M. Gardel,” I said to him presently, “you come (you will pardon me) of the makers of the Revolution. I am curious to learn your experience of the premonitory symptoms of that disease to which at last you have fallen a victim.”
“Monsieur! ‘A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.’ It is an early remembrance with me how my father cursed me that I passed my eighth year, and so was liable to the salt-tax. My faith! I do not blame him. Things were hard enough. But it was unreasonable to beat me because I could not stop the march of Time. Yet we had not then learned to worship Reason.”
“The Moloch that devours her children!”
“So it appears. But there were signs and omens for long years before. I am of the territory of Berri, monsieur; and there all we learned to read was between the lines. I will tell you that I heard—for I was in service at the time” (he bowed with infinite complaisance to his Marquise)—“how, all during the chill, dark spring that preceded the September Massacres,Les laveuses de la nuitwere busy at their washing.”
“And who are they, my friend?”
“Strange, inhuman women, monsieur, who wash in the moonlight by lonely tarns. And while they wash they wail.”
“Wash? But what?”
“Some say the winding-sheets of those who are to die during the year.”
La Marquise broke into shrill laughter.
“Poor, poor imbecile!” she cried. “Thy credulity would make but one gulp of a gravestone. You must know these things are not, my friend. I tell thee so—I, thy mistress. Miserable! have you nothing in your life that not mountains of eternity could crush out the memory of?”
Again she checked herself.
“It is the one virtue of the Revolution to have decreed annihilation.”
A deputation approached us. She jumped to her feet, her pale eyes flickering.
“But, yes!” she cried, “a game, a game! I acquit myself of these follies. It is present life I desire. Messieurs, what is it to be? To the front, François!”
The man responded at a leap. The veins of all received the infection of his wild humour. In a moment, chattering and pushing and giggling, we were to take our places for “Shadow Buff.”
We had no sheet. The dirty drab of the wall must suffice. A stool was placed for the guesser—not yet appointed; and la Marquise’s four candles, relighted, were placed on the table over against it, in a receding row like a procession of acolytes. Between the candles and the back of the guesser the company were to pass one by one, for identification by means of the shadows cast on the wall.
“Who shall take the stool?”
The clamour echoed up to the vaulted stonework of the roof—and died. Cabochon’s evil face was visible at the grille.
He saw what we were at; the dull brute was sopped with drink and bestially amiable. His key grated in the door and he stood before us, his bodyguard supporting him, the fatal list in his hand.
“Ah!” he said, “but ‘Shadow Buff’ again? It is well timed. Yet I could name some citizen shadows without sitting on the stool.”
His voice guttered like a candle. It seemed to run into greasy drops.
A wild inspiration seized me.
“Voilà, citoyen!” I cried. “You shall join us. You shall take your victims from the wall!”
In a moment I had snatched the dirty rag of paper out of his hand, and had retreated with it a few paces. I had an instant to glance down the list before he slouched at me in sodden anger. My heart gave a queer little somersault and came upright again.
“Sang Dieu!” he growled, thickly. “You do well to jest. Give me the paper, or I’ll brain you with my keys!”
I dropped laughing upon the stool, and held the list between and under my knees. With an oath he fell upon me. The company applauded it all with a frenzy of mad mirth and frolic.
The struggle was brief. He rose directly, puffing and cursing, the paper in his hand.
I affected a crestfallen good-humour.
“You might have let us have our game out,” I protested.
With his recovered authority in his hand, the rascal condescended to some facetious tolerance.
“So!” he said; “you play a good part. They should have you for King George in ‘Le Dernier Jugement des Rois.’ But rest content. You shall appear on a notable stage yet, and before an audience more appreciative than that of the Théâtre de la République.”
“And I shall know how to bow my thanks, citizen.”
“Ah!” he crowed. “I love thee! Thou shalt have thy game and sit here; and I will pick from the flock as thou numberest its tale.”
It fell in with the reckless, dreadful humour of the times. I would have withdrawn from the cruel jest, but it was the company ofles misérablesthat prevented me.
Who should go first? There was a little hesitation and reluctance.
“Come, hurry!” cried Cabochon, “or I must do my own guessing!”
Suddenly a shadow glided past upon the wall.
“No, no!” I muttered.
“Name it, name it!” chuckled the jailer. The grinningsans-culottesat the door echoed his demand vociferously.
“Gardel!” I murmured faintly. The leading spirit had, characteristically, been the first to enter the breach.
“Good,” croaked Cabochon, referring to his list. “Citizen shadow, you are marked for judgment.”
I rose hurriedly from the stool.
“I will no more of it!” I cried.
“What!—already? My faith! a nerveless judge.”
Instantly a figure pressed forward and took my place.
“Pass, pass, good people!” it cried, “andIwill call the tale!”
She sat there—the Marquise—her lips set in an acrid smile. Neither look nor word did she address to her forfeited servant.
Another shadow passed.
“Darviane!” she cried shrilly.
“Encore bien,” roared Cabochon amidst shrieks of laughter. My God, what laughter!
Milet, De Mérode, Fontenay—she named them all. They took their places by the door, skipping—half-hysterical.
D’Aubiers, Monville—I cannot recall a moiety of them. It was a destructive list. Clélie also was in it—poor Clélie, the frail, I fear, but with the big heart. I fancied I noticed a harder ring in Madame’s voice as she identified her.
I stood stupidly in the background. Presently I heard Cabochon—
“Enough! enough! The virtuous citizens would forestall the Executive.”
He numbered up his list rapidly, counted his prisoners. They tallied.
“To be repeated to-morrow,” he said. “It is good sport. But the guessers, it seems, remain.”
He treated us to a grin and a clumsy bow, gave the order to form, and carried off his new batch to the baking.
As the door clanged upon them I gave a deep gasp. I could not believe in the reality of my respite.
For the thinned company the reaction had set in immediately: women were flung prostrate, on the table, over the benches, wailing out their desperate loss and misery.
Madame made her way to me. The strange smile had not left her mouth.
“You were on the list. I saw it in your face.”
“I was at the bottom—the very last.”
“But how——?”
“As Cabochon struggled with me, I turned my name down and tore it off.”
“But the number?”
“It tallied. It was enough for him.”
“They must find it out—to-morrow, when the prisoners are arraigned.”
“Probably. And in the meantime we will drink to our poor Gardel’s acquittal.”
“No,” she said, shrinking back, with an extraordinary look. “If I wish him well, I wish him eternal forgetfulness.”
It was the evening of the day succeeding. Shorn of our partners in “Quadrille,” Madame and I had been playing “Piquet.”
We were only two, but the four lights flickered in their bottles.
La Marquise de Kercy had been musing. Suddenly she looked up. Her eyes were full of an inhuman mockery.
“The candles!” she said, with a little laugh. “We are no longer using them. To save my pocket, François!”
Pouf!a candle went out—another, another, another; between each the fraction of time occupied by something unseen moving round systematically.
I started to my feet with a suppressed cry.
One or two sitting near us complained of this churlish economy of wax. They imagined I was the culprit.
“Madame!” I muttered. “Look! she is indisposed!”
Her face was white and dreadful, like a skull. Hearing my voice she sat up.
“So! He has been guillotined!” she said.
She articulated with difficulty, swallowing and panting without stop.
“M. Thibaut, it is true, then, they say! But it was he made me kill the child. He has more need to forget than I. Is it not appalling? If I tell them now how I have learnt to fear, they will surely spare me. I cannot subscribe to their doctrines—that Club of the Cordeliers. If I tell them so—Danton being gone——”
Her voice tailed off into a hurry of pitiful sobs and cries. I welcomed the entrance of Cabochon with his list.
Her name was first on it.
As we stood arisen, dreading some hideous scene, she fell silent quite suddenly, got to her feet, and walked to the door with a face of stone.
“Death is an interruption.”
“Ma demeure sera bientôt le néant.”
Which could one hope for her, pondering only that delirious outcry from her lips?
Possibly, indeed, she had been mad from first to last.
I had time to collect my thoughts, for—from whatever cause—Citizen Tinville had, it appeared, overlooked me.
I wastaking exercise one forenoon in the yard of the prison. It was the last black “Prairial” of the “Terror”—the month, like the girl La Lune, once dedicate to Mary—and its blue eyes curiously scrutinised, as Cleopatra’s of old, the processes amongst us slaves of that poison that is called despair.
As for myself, I yet a little consorted with Hope—the fond clinging mistress I had dreaded to find banished with the rest of the dear creatures whose company had long now been denied us;—for five months had passed since my incarceration, and I was still, it seemed, forgotten.
I trod the flags—fifty paces hither and thither. Going one way, I had always before my eyes the frowzy stone rampart and barred windows of the prison. Going the other, an execrable statue of M. Rousseau—surmounting an altar to Liberty, the very cement of which was marbled with the blood of the massacres—closed my perspective. To my either hand was a lofty wall—the first giving upon the jailers’ quarters; the second dividing the men’s yard from that in which the women were permitted to walk; and a foul open sewer, tunnelled through the latter about its middle, traversed the entire area, and offered the only means by which the sexes could now communicate with each other.
“M. Thibaut,” said a voice at my ear; and a gentleman, detaching himself from the aimless and loitering crowd of prisoners, adapted his pace to mine and went with me to and fro.
I knew this oddity—M. the Admiral de St Prest—though he had no recognition of me. That, however, was small wonder. By this time I was worse than asans-culotte, by so much as that my bareness was suggested rather than revealed. My face was sunk away from my eyes, like soft limestone from a couple of ammonites; my ribs were loose hoops on a decayed cask; laughter rattled in my stomach like a pea in a whistle. Besides, I had come, I think, to be a little jealous of my title to neglect, for I had made that my grievance against Fate.
Nevertheless, M. de St Prest and I had been slightly acquainted once upon a time, and it had grieved me to see this red month marked by the advent in La Force of the dubious old fop.
He had been a macaroni of Louis XV.’s Court, and the ancientrôlehe had never learnt to forego. The poor puppies of circumstance—the fops of a more recent date, to whom the particular cut of a lapel would figure as the standard of reason—bayed him in the prison as they would have bayed him in the streets. To them, with their high top-bootsà l’Anglaise, poor St Prest’s spotted breeches and knee-ribbons were a source of profound amusement. To them, affecting the huskiness of speech of certain rude islanders (my very good friends), his mincing falsetto was a perpetual incitement to laughter. Swaggering with their cudgels that they called “constitutions,” they would strike from under him the elaborate tasselled staff on which he leaned; tossing their matted manes, they would profess to find something exquisitely exhilarating in the complicatedtoupetthat embraced and belittled his lean physiognomy. I held them all poor apes; yet, I confess, it was a ridiculous and pathetic sight, this posturing of an old wrecked man in the tatters of a bygone generation; and it gave me shame to see him lift his plate of a hat to me with a little stick, as the fashion was in his younger days.
“M. Thibaut,” he said, falling into step with me, “these young bloods” (he signified with his cane a group that had been baiting him)—“they worry me, monsieur.Mort de ma vie!what manners! what a presence! It shall need a butcher’s steel to bring their wits to an edge.”
“Oh, monsieur,” said I—“have you not the self-confidence to despise personalities? The fool hath but a narrow world of conventions, and everything outside it is to him abnormal. His head is a drumstick to produce hollow sounds within a blank little area. For my part, I never hear one holding the great up to ridicule without thinking, There is wasted a good stone-cutter of epitaphs.”
“Eh bien, monsieur! but I have been accustomed to leave the study of philosophy to my lackeys.”
He spoke in a lofty manner, waving his hand at me; and he took snuff from a battered wooden box, and flipped his fingers to his thumb afterwards as if he were scattering largesse of fragrance.
“So, you have a royal contempt of personalities?” he said, with a little amused tolerance.
“Why,” said I—“I am not to be put out of conceit with myself because an ass brays at me.”
“Or out of countenance, monsieur?”
“Oh, M. de St Prest! That would be to lose my head on small provocation. Besides, one must admit the point of view. M. Malseigne there surveys the world over the edge of a great stock; you, monsieur, regard it with your chin propped upon a fine fichu. No doubt Sanson thinks a wooden cravatcomme il faut; and I—fichtre!I cry in my character of patriot, ‘There is nothing like the collar of a carmagnole to keep one’s neck in place!’ Truly, M. l’Amiral, I for one am not touchy about my appearance.”
His old eyes blinked out a diluted irony.
“And that is very natural,” he said; “but then,mort de ma vie!you are a philosopher—like him there.”
He pointed to the statue of Rousseau. The libellous block wrought in him, it seemed, a mood of piping retrospection.
“I saw the rascal once,” he said—“a mean, common little man, in a round wig. He was without air or presence. It was at the theatre. The piece was one of M. de Sauvigny’s, and he sat in the author’s box, aloge grillée. That was a concession to his diffidence; but his diffidence had been too much consulted, it seemed. He would have the grate opened, and then the house recognised and applauded him, and finally forgot him for thePersiffleur. He was very angry at that, I believe. We heard it lost the author his friendship. He accused him of having made a show of him, and—Mort de ma vie!that is to be a philosopher.”
He ogled and bowed to a stout kindly-looking woman who, coming from the jailers’ quarters, passed us at the moment. It was Madame Beau, the keeper of La Force—the only one there in authority whose sense of humanity had not gone by the board. A ruffianly warder, leading a great wolf-hound, preceded her. She nodded to us brightly and stopped—
“Ah, M. Thibaut! but soon we shall call you the father of La Force.”
“As you are its mother, madame.”
“Poor children. But, after all, if one considers it as a club——”
“True; where one may feast like Belshazzar. Yet, I find, one may have a surfeit of putrid herrings, even though one is to die on the morrow.”
Madame shrugged her shoulders.
“Ah, bah! the stuff is supplied by contract. I am not to blame, my little fellows. Yet some of you manage better.” (She pointed to the retreating hound.) “Voilà le délinquent!He was caught red-handed—discussing the bribe of a sheep’s trotter; and his sentence is five hours in a cell.”
She nodded again and jingled her keys.
“But, yes,” she said, “consider it as a club——” and off she went across the yard.
“A club? Oh,mon Dieu!” murmured St Prest.
“Well,” said I, “I am inclined to fall in with the idea. What livelier places of sojourn are there, in these days of gravity and decorum, than the prisons?”
He pursed his lips and wagged his old head like a mandarin.
“At least,” he said, leeringly, “she is a fine figure of a woman. She dates, like myself, from the era of theBien-aimé, when women knew how to walk and to hold themselves; and to reveal themselves, too.Oh, je m’entends bien!I have been entertained in theParc aux cerfs, M. Thibaut.”
I could certainly believe it. This effete old carpet-admiral? Had he ever smelt salt water? I could understand, perhaps, that he had crossed in the packet to the land of fogs. But now he was to exhibit himself to me in a more honourable aspect—to confess the man under the powder and the rubbish.
We stood close by where the wall was pierced by the running sewer. The whole yard was alive with laughter and babble; and now and again one would leave a friend or party of triflers and, kneeling down over the infected sink, would call some name through the opening. Then, summoned to the other side, Lucille, poorange déchu, would exchange a few earnest pitiful words with husband or brother or lover, and her tears, perhaps, would fall into the gushing drain and sanctify its abomination to him. Was not that for love to justify itself in the eyes of the most unnatural misogynist?
Now there came up to the trap a pale little fellow—the merest child. It was little Foucaud, the son of Madame Kolly. This poor lad must be held a man (God save him!) when misfortune overtook his family; but the scoundrels had the grace to consign his younger brother to the company of his mother on the woman’s side. And here, through this sink opening, the two babes would converse in their sad little trebles two or three times a-day.
“How now, my man?” said St Prest; for the boy stood wistfully watching us, his hands picking together and his throat swelling. Then all at once he was weeping.
The old fop gently patted the heaving shoulders.
“Oh, monsieur,” said the youngster, in a hoarse little voice, “the cold of the stones is in my throat and on my chest.”
“What then, child! That is not to be guillotined.”
“But I cannot cry out so that he shall hear me; and if we do not talk I know nothing.”
In a paroxysm of agitation he threw himself down by the sewer.
“Lolo, Lolo!” he tried to call; but his voice would not obey his will.