XLIX
The egg of thecoup d’Étatwas hatched as the train that carried Monseigneur’s secret messenger rushed over the iron rails that sped it to the sea.
We know his programme, masterly in detail, devilish in its crushing, paralyzing, merciless completeness. The posting of notices at every street corner, in every public square,on every tree of the boulevards, proclaiming that crowds would thenceforth be dispersed by military force,Without Warning; the distribution of troops; the disposition of batteries; the arrests of the Representatives, the publication of the Decree dissolving the Assembly; the seizure of the Ministry of the Interior; the closure of the High Courts of Justice—a symbolical gagging and blinding of the Law. And Paris, rising early on that red December morning, turned out under the chilly skies to read her death-sentence, ignorant of its true nature; and to wonder at the military spectacle provided for her eyes.
For the five brigades of Carrelet’s Division, cavalry and infantry, extended inéchelonfrom the Rue de la Paix to the Faubourg Poissonière. Each brigade with its artillery, numbering seventeen thousand Pretorians, give additional regiments, with a reserve of sixty thousand men, being held in readiness to use cannon, saber, pistol, and bayonet upon the bodies of their fellow-countrymen and women, that France might be saved, according to Monseigneur.
The First Regiment of Lancers, to their eternal dishonor, opened the ball. Amidst cries of “Long live the Republic!” “Down with Louis Bonaparte, traitor to the people!” they charged the crowd. Men, women, and children were ruthlessly cut down: and then, from the Gymnase Theater to the Bains Chinois, took place the Great Battue.
Killing is thirsty work. Wine flowed down the soldiers’ throats in rivers, as the blood of their victims rolled down the Paris gutters. And as the slayers flagged they were stimulated to fresh exertions. Food, drink, and cigars were lavished upon them. Rolls of gold were broken and shared among them like sticks of chocolate. Women were promised them by-and-by. Long after the soldiers were too drunk to stand upright they went on killing—an instance of devotion which brought tears of sensibility to the eyes of Monseigneur.
It was late, and raining heavily, when the Folkestone train clanked into Waterloo Station. The yellow gaslights were reflected in the numerous puddles on the slippery wooden platform; in the shiny peaks of porters’ caps, and in the dripping oilskins of cabmen. A red-nosed Jehu,suffering from almost total extinction of the voice, undertook to convey Dunoisse to Belgrave Square, the haggard beast attached to the leaky vehicle accomplishing the journey in a series of stumbles, slides, and collapses.
“Vy does the ’orse fall down?” indignantly repeated the husky driver, to whom Dunoisse, on alighting for the second time to assist the prostrate steed to rise, had addressed this question. “Vy, becos’ he can’t stand hup, nor no more could you, my topping codger, after twenty hours on the job.”
He drove his fare to the address given without further casualty, pocketed Dunoisse’s liberal fare without any perceptible emotion, and, warning an advancing hall-porter to be careful, for he had brought him “something wallyble,” jerked and prodded his drooping beast into some faint show of vitality, and rattled and jingled away.
The windows of the Embassy blazed with lights, music thrilled and throbbed upon the ear, a double line of waiting carriages extended along the railings of the Square garden,—late arrivals were even now being set down in the shelter of the awning that protected the crimson-carpeted doorsteps from the sooty downpour; police were on duty in unusual force, and the six tall cuirassiers of the Embassy were dwarfed into insignificance by a British guard of honor, betokening the presence of Royalty; stately, splendid Household Cavalrymen, whose gold-laced scarlet blue velvet facings, gleaming steel cuirasses, and silver, white-plumed helmets lined the flower-decked vestibule, and struck savage splendid chords of color amidst the decorations of the marble staircase, where Gloire de Dijon roses and yellow chrysanthemums were massed and mingled with the trailing foliage of smilax, and the tall green plumes of ferns.
The Tricolor was barely in evidence. The Imperial colors of green and gold, displayed in the floral decorations, predominated in the draperies that hung below the carved and gilded cornices, and beneath the pillared archways that led to the dining and reception rooms. The full-length portrait of the Prince-President that hung over the sculptured marble fireplace had a canopy of emerald velvet spangled with fleurons, and upheld by eagles perched on laurel-wreathed spears. And above the head of the portrait, slender gilded tubes formed the letter N, and abovethe initial, concealed by a garland of trailing rose-boughs, lurked another more significant device....
Thus much evidence of preparation at the Embassy for some event of profound importance was evident to the bearer of the letter from the Élysée, before the steward of the chambers, a stately gold-chained personage in discreet black, accosted the stranger, and at the sight of a signet bearing a familiar coat-of-arms, conducted him in haste to an apartment on the rear of the ground-floor, reserved for similar arrivals; set sandwiches, cold game, and champagne-cup before him; indicated a dressing-room adjoining where the stains of travel might be removed; and disappeared, to return before the rage of hunger had been half-appeased, ushering in a handsome personage in a brilliant Hussar uniform, who greeted Dunoisse as an acquaintance, and shook him warmly by the hand.
“There has been a great dinner this evening,” explained this personage, who held the post of First Military Attaché to France’s Embassy. “The entireCorps Diplomatiqueaccredited to the Court ofSt.James’s, to meet the Duke of Bambridge and Lord Walmerston. His Royal Highness will be leaving directly; those Life Guards in the square and in the vestibule are his escort of honor. Magnificent men, are they not? But less active dismounted than our own Heavy Cavalry. Are you sufficiently refreshed? You will take nothing more? You are positive? Then be good enough to come with me.”
And they returned to the hall, to commence the ascent of the great staircase, as a steady, continuous stream of well-bred, well-dressed people began to flow downwards in the direction of the refreshment-buffets. The slender, supple figure of the stranger, attired in plain, close-fitting mufti black, relieved only by the red rosette at the left lapel, closely following its brilliant guide, attracted many curious glances as it passed.
“The women wear magnificent jewels, and are handsome, are they not?” commented the Hussar. “These English skins of cream and roses, these thick, straight profiles, these rounded contours, these fine eyes, lacking expression and fire, but still magnificent, these superbchevelureswould atone to most men for their lack of grace andverve. But to me, my dear fellow—word of honor! the little finger of achicParisienne is worth the whole ofBelgravia. Pray, how is Madame de Roux? Heavens! how her presence would eclipse a roomful of British beauties! They tell me”—possibly the speaker was not guileless of a dash of malice—“de Roux is exerting himself to get transferred to a Home command. For me, I find that natural. Don’t you?”
And the attaché, whose loquacious vivacity could not hide the excitement and suspense under which he was laboring, and which were palpably shared by every official encountered on the way upstairs, paused at a curtained archway at the end of a short corridor on the second floor, and said, lifting the velvet drapery that Dunoisse might pass within:
“This is His Excellency’s library. Wait a moment, and I am instructed to say that he will join you here. Excuse me that I am compelled to leave you now!”
The curtain fell heavily, blotting out the handsome martial figure. Dunoisse moved forwards, and found himself in the middle of an octagonally-shaped library, furnished in the somber, sumptuous style of the Empire. Bronze bookcases, surmounted by crowned eagles holding wreaths of bay and laurel in their beaks, lined the walls, bronze-colored velvet curtains draped the windows, the walnut furniture was upholstered in bronze leather; the needed note of color being supplied by the superb Persian rugs that covered the polished walnut parquet, the single gorgeous amaryllis that bloomed in a tub of Nankin ware upon an inlaid ivory stool, and the brilliant trophies of Eastern arms that gleamed from the upper walls and covered the ceiling. A glowing fire of billets burned on the bronze dogs of the fireplace. Above the carved walnut mantelshelf, where groups of wax tapers burned in silver candelabra, hung a fine replica from the brush of David, of the painter’s imposing, heroic, impossible portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps. And Dunoisse, sinking down with a sigh of relief amongst the cushions of a capacious armchair and stretching his chilled feet towards the cheerful hearth-glow, remembered with a faint amusement how violent an outburst of indignation this picture invariably provoked from the Marshal; who with many oaths would denounce the long dead-and-buried painter as an ass and a jackanapes, incapable of imagining the conqueror of the Simplon as anything but a barley-sugar soldier, or ofrepresenting upon canvas the true spirit of War.
“He rode a mule, did my General, and left his charger to his bâtmen. The flaps of his cocked hat were turned to keep the snow out of his neck and ears; he tied them down with a peasant-wench’s red woolen shawl, and wrapped himself in an old gray cloak lined with skins of lambs. Death of my life! the road to glory is not paved with sugar-plums and rose-leaves.... A fellow who looked one way and spurred his beast another as the fool is doing in that accursed picture would have found himself at the bottom of an ice-gulf before he could say ‘Crac!’”
There was something in the Marshal’s roughly blocked-out word-sketch that warmed the heart and stirred the blood as the classical equestrian figure of the David portrait failed to do. Dunoisse, even in his childish days, had recognized this. He was looking at the picture between half-closed eyelids; and the spirited charger had begun to shrink into a mule, and the red woolen shawl of homely truth had covered up the laced cocked hat of ornamental fiction, when the imperative summons of a door-bell pealed through the house, and was succeeded by a sudden lull in the Babel of general conversation.