... and her distance and her sea.Here is wealth that has no measure,All wide England is my treasure,Park and Close and private pleasure:All her hills were made for me.
... and her distance and her sea.Here is wealth that has no measure,All wide England is my treasure,Park and Close and private pleasure:All her hills were made for me.
... and her distance and her sea.Here is wealth that has no measure,All wide England is my treasure,Park and Close and private pleasure:All her hills were made for me.
... and her distance and her sea.
Here is wealth that has no measure,
All wide England is my treasure,
Park and Close and private pleasure:
All her hills were made for me.
Then he can poke about the cities, and any one of them might occupy him almost for a lifetime. Hereford, for instance. I know of nothing in Europe like the Norman work of Hereford or Ludlow, where you will perpetually find new things, or Leominster just below, or Ledbury just below that again; and the inn at each of these three places is called The Feathers.
Then a man may be pleased to consider the recorded history of this country, and to inform the fields he knows with the past and with the actions ofmen long dead. In this way he can use a battlefield with no danger of any detestable insolence or vulgar civilian ways, for the interest in a battlefield, if it is closely studied, becomes so keen and hot that it burns away all foolish violence, and you will soon find if you study this sort of terrain closely that you forget on which side your sympathies fail or succeed: an excellent corrective if, as it should be with healthy men, your sympathies too often warp evidence and blind you. On this account also one should always suspect the accuracy of military history when it betrays sneering or crowing, because, in the first place, that is a very unmilitary way of looking at battles, and, in the second place, it argues that the historian has not properly gone into all his details. If he had he would have been much too interested in such questions as the measurement of ranges, or, latterly, the presence and nature of cover to bother about crowing or sneering.
When a man tires of these there is left to him the music of his country, by which I mean the tunes. These he can sing to himself as he goes along, and if ever he tires of that there is the victuals and the drink, which, if he has travelled, he may compare to their advantage over those of any other land. But they must be national. Let him take no pleasure in things cooked in a foreign way. There was a man some time ago, in attempting to discover whose name I have spent too much energy, who wrote a most admirable essay upon cold beef and pickles, remarking that these two elements of English lifeare retreating as it were into the strongholds where England is still holding out against the dirty cosmopolitan mud which threatens every country to-day. He traced the retreat of cold beef and pickles eastward towards the City from the West End all along Piccadilly and the Strand right into Fleet-street, where, he said, they were keeping their positions manfully. They stand also isolated and besieged in one hundred happy English country towns....
The trouble about writing an article like this is that one wanders about: it is also the pleasure of it. The limits or trammels to an article like this are that, by a recent and very dangerous superstition, the printed truth is punishable at law, and all one's memories of a thousand places upon the Icknield Way, the Stane Street, the Pilgrim's Way, the Rivers Ouse (all three of them), the Cornish Road, the Black Mountain, Ferry Side, the Three Rivers, all the Pennines, all the Cheviots, all the Cotswolds, all the Mendips, all the Chilterns, all the Malvern Hills, and all the Downs—to speak of but a few—must be memories of praise—by order of the Court. One may not blame: therefore I say nothing of Northwich.
* * * * * * *
Some men say that whereas wealth can be accumulated and left to others when we die, this sort of inheritance can not, and that the great pleasure a man took in his own land and the very many ways in which he found that pleasure and his increase in that pleasure as his life proceeded, all die with him.This you will very often hear deplored. As noble a woman as ever lived in London used to say, speaking of her father (and she also is dead), that all she valued in him died with him, although he had left her a considerable fortune. By which she meant that not only in losing him she had lost a rooted human affection and had suffered what all must suffer, because there is a doom upon us, but that those particular things in which he was particularly favoured had gone away for ever. His power over other languages and over his own language, his vast knowledge of his own county, his acquired courtesy and humour, all mellowed by the world and time, these, she said, were altogether gone. And to us of a younger generation it was her work to lament that we should never know what had once been in England. Among others she vastly admired the first Duke of Wellington, and said that he was tall—which was absurd. Now this noble woman, it seems to me, was in error, for all of us who have loved and enjoyed know not only that we carry something with us elsewhere (as we are bound to believe), but leave also in some manner which I do not clearly perceive a legacy to our own people. We take with us that of which Peter Wanderwide spoke when he said or rather sang these lines—
If all that I have loved and seenBe with me on the Judgment Day,I shall be saved the crowd betweenFrom Satan and his foul array.
If all that I have loved and seenBe with me on the Judgment Day,I shall be saved the crowd betweenFrom Satan and his foul array.
If all that I have loved and seenBe with me on the Judgment Day,I shall be saved the crowd betweenFrom Satan and his foul array.
If all that I have loved and seen
Be with me on the Judgment Day,
I shall be saved the crowd between
From Satan and his foul array.
We carry it with us. And though it is not a virtue it is half a virtue, and when we go down in the grave like the character inEveryman, there will go down with us, I think, not only Good Deeds, a severe female, but also a merry little hobbling comrade who winks and grins and keeps just behind her so that he shall not be noticed and driven away. This little fellow will also speak for us, I think, and he is the Pleasure we took in this jolly world.
But I say that not only do we carry something with us, but that we leave something also; and this has been best put, I think, by the poet Ronsard when he was dying, who said, if I have rightly translated him, this—
"Of all those vanities" (he is speaking of the things of this world), "the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory—fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I; I have lived in it and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So do I go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as I am hungry and all longing for that of God."
That is very good. It would be very difficult to put it better, and if you complain that here Ronsard was only talking of fame or glory, why, I can tell you that the pleasure one takes in one's country is of the same stuff as fame. So true is this that the two commonly go together, and that those become most glorious who have most enjoyed their own land.
It is at once the most amusing and the most dramatic feature of our time that we can foresee—for some few years ahead—material things. Things moral escape us altogether. Never was there a generation of Europeans who could less determine what the near future held for the fate of national characters, of religions, or of styles in art; the more foolish attempt to escape this ignorance by pretending that things moral depend upon things material. They observe the cutting of a canal and prophesy the decline of one nation upon its completion, the growth of another—as though the power of nations armed resided in something lower than the Mind, and as though the success of armies (upon which all at last depends) were determined by the exchange of metals or by new routes of trade. Meanwhile, though the future, even the immediate future, of nations and of faiths is more closely hidden from us than ever, yet it is entertaining, and, as I have said, it is even dramatic, to watch our power of prophecy over material things.
We undertake works of such magnitude and spreadover so long a span of years, they are accomplished under such conditions of international comprehension and security, that we can stand (sometimes) in a desert place and say, "Here, in five years, will be a town," or on a barren coast and say, "Here, in five years, will be a harbour." We can distract ourselves by imagining the contrast beforehand and by returning, when the work is done, to see how nearly one has imagined the truth. Bizerta once afforded such an opportunity, Rosyth now affords one, and so does that sight which set me writing this, and which I have just witnessed in a remote and hitherto quite silent valley. There, with little advertisement of public interest, one of the immemorial high-roads of Europe is under restoration and is about to return to life: the old High Road into Spain.
It is often remarked that the lines of European travel can hardly be permanently altered, that Nature has designed them. Generations do sometimes pass in which some profound change in man rather than in Nature affects a few of the great roads. The Roman line from the south northward, the highway from the Saone to the Straits of Dover, passing by Laon and Amiens, was deflected as the Dark Ages closed round the mind of Gaul. Water carriage succeeded the degraded high-roads. The convergence of water-ways in the basin of Paris made that basin the centre of travel, and the old way by Laon was forgotten. Yet modern conditions restored it. The railway has done again what the Romanengineers accomplished, and Laon is once again a halt upon the great road southwards, and once again the most direct avenue from the Channel to the Mediterranean follows the plain to the east of Paris. So it has come to be with a road equally famous, equally forgotten, the High Road from the North into Spain.
The Pyrenees lie, as every one knows, like an artificial wall between the valley of the Ebro and Gaul. How great the division is only those can believe who have seen with their own eyes the meadows and the deep orchards of Bearn, and then, after a painful crossing of the hills, have come upon the burnt deserts of Aragon. The road from the one to the other, the administrative road which bound Spain to Gaul, which connected Cæsaraugusta with Tolosa, that is, Saragossa with Toulouse, was a Roman Highway, called "the High Pyrenean," the highest and most central of the two main passes. It had, as I have said, Toulouse for its northern terminus, Saragossa for its southern. It had for two mountain towns, or depots, at the foot of either climb, Oloron, the town of the Ilurones, on the north; on the south the Bishop's town of Jaca. It had for its last outpost just before the last steep Urdos, the Forum Ligneum, to the north; to the south a cluster of huts and a station, whose Roman name has not come down to us, but which since the barbarian invasions has been called "Canfranc." This great road, like so many throughout the Empire, fell. You may yet trace itsstructure in those places where it is not identical with the modern way, but with the close of the Empire, and on nearly to our own time its surface was left unrepaired. Armies used it, as they used all the great Roman roads of the north and west, till the Twelfth Century. The Merovingians crossed it in their raids to the Ebro; Charlemagne sent men down it in the advance upon (and failure before) Saragossa—the expedition whose retreat was clinched by the destruction of his rearguard and the death of Roland in Roncesvalles. It was still a gate for armies when the reconquest of Spain from the Mohammedan began. Jaca was free before any other town of the Central North, Huesca fell before the first Crusade was fought, Saragossa before the second. Bearn, and indeed all Christendom, still used that high notch until the new civilisation of the Middle Ages had set in with the Twelfth Century, but from that beginning till our own time it was more and more forgotten. Spain, reconquered, corresponded with Europe by the sea. The two land roads that bound the Peninsula to Christendom ran round either end of the Pyrenean Chain. The central pass was abandoned when the great development of French roads, which was the work of Louis XIV, was imitated—most imperfectly—by his grandson in Madrid, it was the road by Burgos, Vittoria, and Bayonne that was renewed; the commercial energy of the Catalans in the same generation opened the Perthuis, broke into the Roussillon, and connectedBarcelona with Perpignan and with Narbonne. But Aragon, the pivot and centre of the old Reconquest, Saragossa, the main town of the Roman communication with the north, lay off the two tracks of travel, half forgot Europe and by Europe were ill-remembered. It was Napoleon, or, to be more accurate, the Revolutionary Crusade, which reopened the central pass, and here, as in so many other places, began the return to Roman things. While the armies of the Empire, with their train and their artillery, were still tied to the sea road from the Roussillon, a small force without guns passed up the old Roman road (now come to be called the "Somport"), marched over its silent grasses, wading the Arroyos, the bridges over which had long since fallen in, appeared suddenly before Jaca, occupied that citadel, and pursued the way to Saragossa, there to join the main army and to lay a siege memorable beyond all modern sieges for an heroic defence. Buonaparte seized the advantage of that passage. He desired a road over which artillery could go. It was one of twenty which he so desired over the mountain ranges of Europe, and which a full century has barely seen completed; for within four years of his resolution his supremacy was broken at Leipsic and destroyed at Waterloo. The Third Empire continued the tradition; the road was carried up on the French side of the pass, but the universal power of 1808 was gone and the Spanish approach was neglected. It was not till the otherday, till our own generation, that the full work was done, and that the great street from Toulouse to Saragossa right over the hills was once more open to the full power of travel. Yet travel failed it. In the meanwhile the railways had come; they had followed the coast roads, and the main line from Madrid to Paris ran tortuously through the mountains of Castile and turned twenty times in the labyrinth of Basque Valleys, between Vittoria and Irun. Saragossa was still upon one side; Aragon still remained remote; the new road was empty beneath the cliffs of its great hills.
To all this exception in Europe I had grown so used that I took pleasure, during each of my yearly passages over this road, in noting its loneliness, and in considering how the noise of this chief way between the south and the north had been silenced for so many centuries. The absence of men and of public knowledge was a perpetual, a renewed, and a permanent curiosity. There are many sites in Europe once peopled now lonely, once famous and now ignored, but this place seemed to be especially eccentric, and to have passed from something which had long been like the Æmilian Way or the stages of the Rhone Valley to something as untouched as the uplands of Cheviot or the moors of the West Riding over Ribble and above Airedale—very lonely places.
This year I found that the last change had come. Far down the Gave d'Aspe, in the gorge whereAbdurrahman led the Mohammedan invasion into Gaul, there came loud thunders, for all the world as though it were really thundering on the gloomy shoulders of Anie, so many thousand feet beyond the clouds. Then, as I neared the head of the vale I saw Man at it. He was at it in swarms. He had dammed the torrent; he had fixed great turbine tubes, and he had begun the Hole in the Hill. For just the few miles of the ridge itself there was still silence—as there is still silence above the Gothard on the high road—but up from the Spanish valley, rolling up from it as it had rolled down the Val d'Aspe, came again the human thunder, and when the road had fallen its two thousand feet and touched the water of the River Aragon, there again was Man in great numbers working like an ant, burrowing under the terrible Garganta and determined upon his Hole in the Hill. The two tunnels will meet when each has accomplished three or four miles, and the work will be done. There will be a straight way from Paris to Madrid; the Pyrenees will have lost their unbroken line; the Roman scheme will have re-arisen; Saragossa will come forward again into the list of great European cities, and people will hear of Aragon. I do not know whether to be glad—seeing such proof that Europe always returns to itself—or sorry.
The wide countrysides of Europe sum themselves up in central cities: municipalities inheriting from Rome. The lesser towns group round the larger; the bishops of the lesser suffragan to metropolitan of the greater cities, as it was fixed in the Roman order which Constantine inherited from Diocletian and which everywhere stamps the West with the framework of the Fourth Century. These great cities are not only the heads and inspirers of their provinces, they are also the gathering places of armies; the contrast and the fellowship between them is especially seen when either is the capital of a wide plain below a mountain range. Then each becomes the depot and the goal in turn of invading forces, each stands for the national fortunes upon either side of the passes. So, for the great Alps, you have Augsburg and Milan; so for the Vosges, Strasburg and Nancy; so for the Pyrenees, Saragossa and Toulouse.
No two cities in Europe are more representative of their provinces or stand better for symbolising the nature of their land. From the towers of each thelong line of the Pyrenees may be traced, especially in early autumn mornings when the sky is clear with the approaching cold and when the first snow has fallen upon the summits. From Toulouse the dark Northern escarpment runs along the southern horizon in a wall, surprisingly level and seeming tiny in its long stretch or belt of grey; from Saragossa, much further off and more rarely the white strips and patches can be caught behind the nearer foothills, the whole in a glare of sunlight full upon it, like a desert tilted up; you just see them over dry, treeless plains, and immediately the sun rises they are lost in the hot haze. The Pyrenees thus stand between the two cities and belong to each, and the legends of the mountain regard now one, now the other, or, as in the Song of Roland, both combined (for the Horn of Roland as he died was heard southward in Saragossa, northward in Toulouse), and the smoke of each may just be seen or guessed from certain heights, from passes that look southward into Aragon or northward into Aquitaine.
Alone of the central bishoprics of these hills they are united by a road, and have so been united for two thousand years. Characteristically, in the true spirit of the Pyrenees, there is but that one great road between them. It takes men, and has taken them since the legions made it, up by Huesca and Jaca and so over the Summus Pyrenæus, the "Somsport," then down by the deep valley of Bearn to Oloron, to Pau, to Tarbes, and down the river bank to Toulouse.All the armies have taken it. Through this paved gap went the first Frankish kings, still wild, wandering South for spoil, and through it in a tide poured the Mohammedan host that so nearly seized upon Europe. All such marchings brought up under the walls of one or other of the cities: Saragossa for ever besieged from the North, Toulouse beating off the raids from the South, fight similar wars. Each has its river, and the river of each is the life of the two provinces on either slope of the mountains; the Ebro of Aragon, the Garonne of Aquitaine. Each has its port: the one Barcelona, the other Bordeaux; and in each valley there is separation of thought and custom—something like hostility—between the inland city and the commerce of the sea. Each was for long the centre of a nation, each afforded the title of a great house. Aragon was built up under its princes, from that remote age when the chieftain of a few mountain clans began to fight his way South against the infidels till the light grew strong upon the Twelfth Century and Alphonso fixed himself and the Faith upon the Ebro. Toulouse grew under its counts to be almost a nation, ruling everything from the Cevennes to the Pyrenees, and making a rallying place, schools, law courts, and an imperial middle for all the fields of the Garonne.
So far the parallel between these twin cities holds; but the test of any appreciation of them is contrast.
The landscape of Saragossa is a baked plain, ill-watered and reflecting up to heaven the fierce sun ofSpain like a plate of bronze. The landscape of Toulouse is of fields and meadows with many trees. The Ebro trickles under the great bridge of Saragossa for weeks together; then perhaps dies altogether, becoming rather a stagnant pool or two than a river; then, in spate, rises high and threatens the piles, roaring against them, and suddenly sinks again. The Garonne runs in a broad, even stream, shallow, but full and never lacking water; it is already placid as it sweeps under the great bridge of Toulouse. Saragossa became the capital of a true kingdom whose language, traditions, and above all whose chivalrous aristocracy were its own. Toulouse went under in the false adventure of the Albigensian schism. Saragossa was Mohammedan, a sort of northern bastion of Islam, till far into the development of the Middle Ages: it did not re-enter Christendom till 1118. The First Crusade was long past, England was all Norman, while yet this city was governed by Asiatic ideas in contempt of Europe. Toulouse, always Christian, rose against the unity of Christendom. Saragossa in those struggles got a great hero and his legend, a man who fighting now for Islam and now for us built up an epic, the Cid Campeador, the "Challenger." Toulouse has no heroes. Saragossa became a pivot of steadfast faith, round which turned and on which reposed the reconquest of Spain by men of our race. Toulouse was—and to-day still is—perpetually seeking new things and divergence in Europe: a sort of smoulderingfire. To-day full of denials of things sacred yesterday, dogma, the family, property, all the foundations. Saragossa lies indifferent, ready to become (as it is becoming) more wealthy and careless of these philosophical quarrels.
The great churches of the two towns are in violent contrast too. At Toulouse these are all of one pattern and old. The place where St. Saturninus, the evangelist of the city, died—the church of the "Toro," the Bull (for a bull dragged him to death through the streets of the city)—is of small Roman brick, plain, steadfast. The vast cathedral to which his body was translated is of that same brick, and all the arches are Roman, round and small. The Dominican Church is the same; a stranger sometimes takes one for the other. In Saragossa the cathedral is stamped with the fervour of the reconquest. It is crammed with detail and with infinite carving. It is very dark, high and silent, and at the same time, with its wealth of creation and of figures, magical. Toulouse has no monument of faith other than those similar early simple and huge temples. Saragossa has the colour, the tinsel, and the gorgeousness of the late Renaissance in the gilded Basilica of the Pilar.
Religion, which is at once the maker and the expression of States, differs utterly in mood between one city and the other. In Toulouse there is war. The men who deny and the men who affirm are at it with all the weapons of our time, as six hundredyears ago they were at it with swords. You buy a newspaper, and ten to one the leading article will be an affirmation or a denial of the creed—signed by some famous name. In Saragossa you may buy newspapers for a month and get nothing but the common news, two days old. Mass is crammed at Toulouse, empty in Saragossa. There are enemies of the Mass in power at Toulouse, numerous, vigilant, convinced. In Saragossa a few eccentrics or none. Toulouse would persecute one way or the other had it a power separate from the State. Saragossa was always tolerant; of its few murders one was the popular murder of an Inquisitor. There is something that sleeps in Saragossa for all its liveliness and wealth and air. There is something that wakes and prowls in Toulouse for all its ancient walls and green things growing upon ruins as they grew in Rome.
These are the two cities as I know them. Often upon a height upon the Pyrenees I have thought how one lay beneath me to the left, the other to the right, the end of a chance journey. All human tracks from the mountains seem to lead down like water-courses to one or the other place, and travel flows of its own weight to the sunlit market-place of Saragossa or to the Capitol of Toulouse from every saddle in the hills. You may be in the Cerdagne (which is Catalan) or in Roncesvalles (which is Basque), but if you are on foot and wish to go far the roads will bring you insensibly to the greattown on the Ebro; you may be as far west as St. Jean-Pied-de-Port or as far east as Ax, but on the northern slope insensibly you will be driven to Toulouse. The two cities are the reservoirs of life on either slope of the hills, and each holds, as it were, a number of threads, which are paths and roads radiating out to the high crossings of the chain.
And, as I consider the two towns, whether near them as I lately was or here at home, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining their future as in remembering their long past and the sharp picture of their present time. The Provinces of Europe develop, but they do not change their identity. If it be paradoxical to suggest a wealthy Saragossa and a fanatical Toulouse, yet it is not out of keeping with the revolutions of Europe. Saragossa is on the road to wealth in a country which is rapidly accumulating; Toulouse is well on the road to fanaticism and religious war. One can see Toulouse with great artists and fierce rhetoric standing out against some reaction of thought in the Republic or captured by the flame that has set fire to Lourdes; one can see Saragossa dragged into the orbit of Barcelona, drifting with the rising wealth of Mediterranean commerce, forgetting altars, and sharing the mere opulence of the Catalans. Such thought leads one to fantastic guesses; it is provoked by the modern character of these two great, unwritten, ill-known Pyrenean towns in one of which the chief quarrel ofour time is so actively pursued, in the other of which lies all the new promise of Spain. And that reminds me. Saragossa has no song of its own; Toulouse has one called "If the Garonne had only wished, she might."
So much for Saragossa and Toulouse.
"It is of little profit," said Robespierre severely, "that we should debate what may or may not come to pass in that time. You speak of more than a hundred years, and of a season when the youngest child before us shall have long been dead, and his child, too, perhaps be dead after him; and for that matter, even if it profited us, it would not be to the service of God, for we must say what is true and defend it. As for the rest, no man is master of destiny."
He was about to make an allusion to the people of Epirus and to a discovery of theirs which he had read in the classics upon this subject, when St. Just interrupted, as was his way, with burning eyes and a sort of high, rhetorical facility which gave all his young words such amazing power. He was sitting in an attitude one might have thought listless, so lightly did his delicate hand lean upon his knee, save that all thought of carelessness left one when one watched the intensity of his face. And he repeated a phrase which its rhythm has made famous,"The things we have said will never be lost on earth."
It was in the weeks after Fleurus. Charlotte Robespierre, ill-tempered and silent, sat like a sort of guardian of the room upon the little sofa by the western wall of it, the darkest side. Couthon was there, the cripple, his face permanently stretched by pain, and there also, almost foreign—English or Italian one might have said from their length—shone the delicate features of Fouché, his thin lips firm and inevitably ironical.
Paris was glorious. There was a festivity in the sky of that July, a cool air in the sunlit streets, and that sort of clear sound which comes up from the gulfs of the narrow ways when Paris in summer is at the full of its life. The sunlight upon the courtyard shone reflected from the white walls of it into the darkness of the little room where the friends sat talking together before they should go down to the Parliament. In the shed outside was the noise of their host, the carpenter, sawing. A very quiet and respectful young man, the son of the house and secretary to Robespierre, ventured an opinion. He had a wooden leg and his expression was not intelligent. When these two generations of men had passed, he said, the Goddess Liberty would be firm upon her throne. It would be the chief advantage of the passage of time that men would forget all the old days of slavery, and that the evil thing which the Revolution was occupied in destroying would beremembered only as a sort of nightmare of humanity. The insolent palaces which might remind men of their tyrants will have been pulled down long ago, and their gew-gaws of pictures have been left to moulder. He foresaw and was about to describe at some length the reign of Virtue and Equality among men, when Robespierre interrupted him severely in his high voice and bade him not to pirouette upon the stump of his wooden leg, which wore the carpet of the Citizen his father, and was, moreover, an ungainly gesture. He further told him with increased severity that the arts in a State of free men would always be decently cherished, for but a few weeks before he had been delighted to sit for his portrait to M. Greuze.
There was a little silence following this reprimand.
"If it be of any moment to you," he continued, "I can, I think, tell you some things certainly that society will hold. For they have invariably accompanied liberty in her majestic march. Men will respect the labour and the property of others, and the power of peace and war will reside with the people. It is to this," he added earnestly, "that I have given my chief efforts, and I believe I have placed it upon a secure foundation. What I am most afraid of," he mused, "is the power that may be put into the hands of representatives. But that again will be tamed by long usage. I shall soon see to it that the places of meeting are made largely public, and I have drafted a design whereby it shallbe death, or at least exile, to plan so much as a municipal building for the meetings of municipal bodies unless the galleries permit a full view of the debate, and accommodate a number of citizens not less than five times the total number of the elected. It would be better," he sighed in conclusion, "that a law should compel at intervals great meetings in the open, and should punish by the loss of civic power all those who did not attend, unless, indeed, they had been given leave of absence by some magistrate."
St. Just was weary of the war, and asked him how long it would continue.
"It will continue," said Robespierre firmly, and in the tone of a man who can speak more definitely of near things than of distant, "it will continue until the winter at least, upon which occasion I design...."
At this point Charlotte, whose temper was not improved by such discourses, abruptly left them. They heard the sharp hurrying of her footsteps cross the flags of the courtyard; she was going up to her own room overlooking the street. Fouché smiled.
"You smile, Fouché," said Robespierre, displaying very obvious irritation, "because you think, as politicians do, that war is an unaccountable thing. Let me tell you that reason here is much stronger than chance, and that the forces opposed to us are already convinced of liberty. I have before me" (he pulled out his little brown book from his pocket) "a list of pamphlets recently distributed beyond the frontiers,and a very good estimate of the numbers of their readers."
Fouché restrained his smile; he was a man capable of self-control to any limit. He leant his long, delicate, refined head upon the tapering fingers of his left hand, and listened with great apparent interest to what the Master was saying. The sawing in the courtyard without ceased, and his host, the carpenter, entered in that reverential way which marks the sentiment of religion, and very silently took a distant chair to listen to the Master's discourse. Couthon shifted himself in his place to relieve his crippled members, and Robespierre continued—
"Nothing endures unless it be based upon Virtue, but though Virtue tends to corrupt with time, and though Liberty is rather for what the fanatics have called 'angels' than for men, yet if men's chains are broken it has great chance of permanence and of effect upon the public. I have upon this matter," he continued, pulling out of a pocket a shagreen case and from that case a pair of spectacles, "certain notes that will not be without interest for you."
Fouché sighed while Robespierre was seeking among a group of neatly-folded papers for what he had to read. His host, the carpenter, bent forward to hear as a man might bend forward to hear the reading of the Gospel. He even had an odd instinct to stand up and listen with bowed head. St. Justwas thinking of other things. And certainly any modern man looking on would have been compelled to watch St. Just's deep and luminous eyes. He had already forgotten the future, and once again he was thinking of the wars. He had begun to take pleasure in the charges. A moment might have made him, from the poet that he was, a soldier; and while the high thin voice of the little man Robespierre went on with appropriate gestures, describing the permanence of Virtue in a free State, he clearly saw what he had seen but a few days before from the lines: the houses of the beleaguered city against the June dawn, and he heard the bugles.
Robespierre had begun: "The sentiment of property which is native in man proceeds from what he gives to Nature by his toil, and this is respected by all, yet even property itself cannot be thought secure until Virtue be there to guarantee it, no laws can make up for its absence. It is Virtue, therefore, upon which even this essential, without which society cannot be, reposes. And Virtue which will cause a poor man to be equal with the rich, while the one regards the other without envy upon the one side, without contempt upon the other."
For a full quarter of an hour Robespierre went on, and Couthon, as a matter of ritual, and the master of the house as a matter of religion, listened: the one as a matter of course, the other ardently. And when he had finished his little peroration, when he had taken off those spectacles and wiped them, when hehad turned upon them his pale, small, watchful, grey-green eyes, he noted that Fouché alone had been inconstant. Fouché had his back turned and was looking out of a window. A boy who passed through the courtyard whistling, carrying a short ladder, looked at the window for a moment and saw the aquiline, refined face covered with laughter. The boy thought that laughter merely friendly. He waved his hand and smiled an answer, and Fouché saw in that boy the generation that should arise. He composed his features and turned them once more towards the room. Before Robespierre could speak sharply, as he meant to speak, and complain of such inattention, he said in a clear, well-modulated voice, that he had never heard those sentences before. Was Robespierre to pronounce them that day in Parliament?
"I shall do so," said Robespierre, "if I am permitted by the President to speak. If not, I will reserve my remarks for another occasion." He pulled out a fat little round watch prettily enamelled, touched the lace at his wrists, settled the order of his stock, and said as a schoolmaster might say it to young St. Just: "Are you not coming with me?"
St. Just, startled suddenly like a man awakened, thought of the hour, remembered the Parliament, and went out with his friend.
Fouché with his hand to his chin crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs to that part of thehouse which overlooked the Rue St. Honoré. He had something to say to Charlotte. Couthon, who was hungry, remained to lunch, but he found his hosts dull and a little ill-tempered. He could not fill the void that had been left by Robespierre.
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay.
Transcriber's Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
Transcriber's Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.