When his gaze was idle, it did not wander in vacancy but retired into his meditations and became the gloomier and deeper.
His nose was straight, coming down from the brow in a direct line: it surmounted a disdainful lip, showing the dazzling enamel of his teeth.
Commonly he was clad with Quaker-like simplicity; but it approached elegance from its extreme primness. His stature, above the middle height, was well formed; and we have seen how strong he could be when he roused all his nervous force.
Although a week in jail, he had taken the usual care of himself. Though his beard had grown long, it was combed out and set off his clear skin, indicating by its length, not his neglect but the refusal of a razor or a shave.
After thanking Billet and Pitou, he turned to the crowd in the cell. As if he recovered all his command in a twinkling, he said:
"Then the long looked-for day has come! I thank you, all my friends, and I thank the Eternal Spirit which watches over the liberty of peoples."
He held out his hands, but they shrank from touching them, so lofty was his glance, and his voice so dignified as of a superior man.
Leaving the dungeon, he walked out before them all, leaning on the farmer and the country boy.
After Gilbert's first impulse of gratitude and friendship, a second had established the first distance between him and the subordinates.
At the door, Gilbert stopped, dazzled by the sunshine.
He stopped, folded his arms, and said as he gazed upwards:
"Hail, beautiful Liberty! I saw you spring into life in the New World, and we are old friends and battlefield comrades. Hail!"
The smile he wore showed that the cheers of a free people were not a novelty to him.
"Billet," he said, after collecting his thoughts, "Have the people overcome despotism?"
"They have."
"And you came to liberate me? how did you know of my arrest?"
"Your son told me this morning."
"Poor Emile-Sebastian! have you seen him? is he at peace in the school?"
"I left him being carried to the sick ward as he had a fit. He was wild because we would not let him have a share in the fighting to get you out."
The physician smiled, for the boy was his hope, and had borne himself as he hoped.
"I said that as you were in the Bastile we would have to take the Bastile," went on the farmer, "and now we have taken it. But that is not all: the casket is stolen which you entrusted to me."
"Stolen by whom?"
"By men wearing black, who broke into the house under guise of seizing the pamphlet which you sent me; locking me up in a room, they searched the whole house and found the casket."
"Yesterday? then there is a coincidence between my arrest and this purloining. The same person caused this arrest and abstraction. I must know whom. Where are the books of the jail?" demanded the doctor, turning round to the jailer who kept close.
"In Government yard," replied he. "Oh, master, let me go with you or say a good word to these gentlemen who will otherwise knock me about."
"Just so," replied Gilbert; "Friends, I want you not to do any harm to this poor fellow who only did his duty in opening doors and locking them; he was always gentle with the prisoners."
"Good," cried the voices all round, as they surrounded him in respect mingled with curiosity; "he need not be scared, but can come along."
"Thank you, sir," said the jailer; "but we had better make haste, for they are burning the papers."
"Then there is not an instant to be lost," cried the physician. "To the Archives."
He darted off towards the office, drawing the mob with him, at the head of which still marched Billet and Pitou.
THE TRIANGLE OF LIBERTY.
At the door of the Register Hall they had made a bonfire of the documents.
One of the first feelings of the masses after a victory is for destruction, unfortunately. The memorials of the prison were turned out of the large room, where the records of all the prisoners since a hundred years back were kept higgledy piggledy. The mob shut up the papers with anger, seeming to think that they gave the prisoners freedom by annulling the warrants.
Gilbert, assisted by Pitou, looked at the registers, but the present year's was missing. Though a calm and cool man, the doctor stamped his foot with impatience while he turned blanched.
At this Pitou spied a boy, such a little hero as always pops up in the reign of King Mob, who was carrying on his head the volume to throw it into the fire. With his long legs he soon overtook him. It was the register for 1789. The deal did not take long, for Ange announced himself as one who had captured the place and explained that a prisoner wanted the book. The boy gave it up with the comforting remark that there were lots more where it came from.
Pitou opened the book and on the last page he saw the entry:
"This day, ninth of July, 1789, enters Dr. Gilbert, a most dangerous writer of public matters and philosophy: keep in solitary confinement."
He carried the register to the physician. It was of course what he sought. Looking whence the order emanated, he exclaimed:
"The warrant to arrest me signed by my friend Necker? then there must be some trick played on him."
"Necker your friend?" ejaculated the crowd, for the name had great influence over them.
"Yes, my friend, and I upheld him. I am convinced that he is ignorant of my being in prison. But I will go and find him, and——"
"He is not at Versailles," said Billet, "but at Brussels; he is exiled."
"His daughter lives in the country out by St. Ouen," suggested one of the throng, whom Gilbert thanked without seeing who it was.
"Friends," he said, "in the name of history, who will find the condemnation of tyranny in these papers, cease such devastation, I entreat you. Demolish the Bastile, stone by stone, till not a trace remains, but respect documents and books, for the light of the future is in them."
The multitude had scarce heard the rebuke than its high intelligence gauged he was correct.
"The doctor is right," cried a hundred voices; "no more spoiling. Let us take these papers to the City Hall."
A fireman who had brought a small hand-engine into the fort, with half a dozen comrades, directed the horse-butt at the fire which was about to repeat a conflagration of books like that of Alexandria, and they put it out.
"At whose request were you arrested?" inquired the farmer.
"Just what I was looking for but the name is blank. I shall learn," he added after brief meditation.
Tearing out the leaf concerning himself, he folded it up and pocketed it.
"Let us be off, friends," said he, "we have no farther business here."
"It is easier to say, let us go, than manage it," remarked the countryman.
Indeed, the concourse, entering the Castle by all openings, choked up the doorways. They had liberated eight prisoners, including Gilbert. Four excited no interest; they had been locked up on a charge of forging a bank draft, without anyevidence, which leads to the premise that it was a false charge; they had been in jail only two years. The next was Count Solange, a man of thirty, who was in rapture: he hugged his liberators, exalted their victory and related his captivity.
Arrested in 1782, and shut up in Vincennes Castle on a blank warrant obtained by his father, he had been transferred to the Bastile, where he remained five years without having seen a magistrate or being examined once: his father had died two years back, and nobody asked after him. Had not the Bastile been captured, he would probably have died there unasked for.
White was another wretch; he was sixty years old and jabbered incoherent words with a foreign accent. To the many questions he replied that he was ignorant how long he had been detained and for what cause. He remembered he was a kinsman of Chief of Police Sartines. A turnkey recalled having seen Lord Sartines enter White's cell and force him to sign a power of attorney. But the prisoner had utterly forgotten the incident.
Tavernier was the oldest of all. He had been ten years imprisoned in another states prison before coming to the Bastile for thirty years; he was in his ninetieth year, white in beard and hair; his eyes were so used to the gloom that he could not bear the light. When they broke open his dungeon, he did not understand what they wanted to do. When they spoke of liberty, he shook his head. When finally they said the Bastile was taken by the people, he cried:
"What will Louis XV. say?"
White was crazed, but Tavernier was an idiot.
The delight of the rest was terrible to view, so close was it to alarm; it called for vengeance.
Two or three were almost ready to expire, amid the hubbub of thousands of voices, having never heard two speaking at the same time while in the prison. They had become accustomed to the slow and odd sounds of wood cracking with dampness, or the death-watch cricket, or the spider weaving its web, or the frightened rat gnawing his Majesty's prisonwalls.
As Gilbert appeared, the resolution was unanimously adopted that the rescued ones should be carried in triumph through the town.
Gilbert wished to elude this ovation but he could not do so, as he was recognized as well as Billet and his comrade.
"To the City Hall!" shouted everybody, and Gilbert was taken up on the shoulders of twenty fellows. In vain did Gilbert resist, and Billet and Pitou shower punches and cuffs on their brothers-in-arms; joy and enthusiasm had made the people's hide tough. Fisticuffs, digs with the elbow or thrusts with musket butts, all seemed soft as strokings and only enhanced their glee.
A spear was stuck in a table and Gilbert placed on it to be carried. Thus he was above the level of the sea of heads, undulating from the Bastile to St. John's Arcade, a stormy sea which transported the delivered captives amid billows crested with bloody swords, bayonets and pikes.
At the same time another sea roiled terribly and irresistibly, a group closely serried around the prisoner Launay.
Around him the shouts were as loud and hearty as for the liberated prisoners, but they were of death not of triumph.
Gilbert, from his elevated stand, did not lose an incident of the horrible occurrence. Alone, among all his fellow captives, he enjoyed the fulness of his faculties, because five days' imprisonment was but a black speck in his career. His eye had not had time to be dimmed by the Bastile's darkness.
Usually fighting makes men hardhearted only during the action. Men coming out of the fire with their own lives intact, feel kindly towards their foes.
But in great popular uprisings, such as France had seen many from the Jacquerie or Peasants' Outbreak in 1358, those whom fear kept in the rear during the conflict, but were irritated by the turbulence, are ferocious cowards who seek after the victory to redden their hands in the blood of those they dared not face in the combat. They take their share in the reprisal.
Since he was dragged out of his castle the march of the governor was a dolorous one.
Elie, protected by his uniform and the part he had taken in the assault, marched at the head, having taken Launay's lifeunder his special care: he was admired for the manner in which he had borne himself. On his swordpoint he carried the letter which Launay had passed out of the prison loophole to be taken by Maillard. After him came the Tax-Commissioners Guards, carrying the keys of the royal fortress; then, Maillard, bearing the Bastile flag; then, a young man who bore on a pike the Bastile's rules and regulations, an odious rescript by virtue of which many a tear had been made to flow.
Lastly came the governor, protected by Hullin and three or four others, but almost covered in with shaking fists, flourished blades and brandished pikeheads.
Beside this column, almost parallel, rolling up St. Antoine Street, leading from the main avenue to the River Seine, was to be distinguished another, no less awful and menacing, dragging Major Losme, whom we saw struggle against his superior for a space but succumb under the determination to resist to the last.
He was a kind, good and brave man who had alleviated many miseries within the jail, but the general public did not know this. On account of his showy uniform many took him to be the governor. The latter, clothed in grey, having torn off the embroidery and the St. Louis scarf, was shielded by some doubt from those who did not recognize him.
This was the spectacle which Gilbert beheld with his gloomy, profound and observant glance, amid the dangers foreseen by his powerful organization.
On leaving the Bastile, Hullin had rallied his own friends the surest and most devoted, the most valiant soldiers of the day; these four or five tried to second his generous design of shielding the governor. Impartial history had preserved the names of three: Arne, Chollat and Lepine.
These four, with Hullin and Maillard in advance, attempted to defend the life for which a hundred thousand were clamoring.
A few French Grenadiers, whose uniform had become popular within three days, clustered round them. They were venerated by the mob.
As long as his generous defenders could do it they beat off the blows aimed at Count Launay; but he could not evade the hooting, the insults and the curses.
At Jouy Street corner, all the grenadiers had been brushed aside. Not the crowd's excitement, but the calculation of murderers may have had something to do with this; Gilbert had seen them plucked away as beads are flipped off a string.
He foresaw by this that the victory would be tarnished by bloodshed; he tried to get off the table but iron hands held him to it. In his impotence he sent Billet and Pitou to the defense of the governor, and obeying his voice they made efforts to reach the threatened one. His protectors stood in strong need of reinforcement. Chollat, who had eaten nothing since the evening before, fell with exhaustion, though he tried to struggle on: had he not been assisted, he would have been trodden under foot. His falling out of line made a breach in the living wall.
A man darted in by this crevasse in the dyke and clubbing his musket, delivered a crushing blow at the governor's bared head.
Lepine saw the mace descending and had time to throw his arms around Launay and receive the blow on his own forehead. Stunned by the shock and blinded by the blood, he staggered back and when he recovered, he was twenty paces apart from the prisoner.
This was the moment when Billet fought his way up, towing Pitou after him, like a steamship-of-war bringing up a sailing man-of-war into action.
He noticed that what marked Launay out was his being without a hat: he snatched off his own and put it on the count's head.
The latter turned and recognized him.
"I thank you," he said, "but whatever you do you cannot save me."
"If I can get you inside the City Hall, I will answer for all," said Hullin.
"Yes, but can you do it?" said the victim.
"God helping us, we'll try it."
They might hope this as they reached the City Hall Square, It was packed with men with their arms bared to the pit, wavingswords and spears. The rumor had run along that they were bringing the Bastile Governor and his major, and they were waiting for them like a pack of wolfhounds held back from breaking up the quarry.
As soon as they saw the party they rushed at it. Hullin saw that this was going to be the supreme peril and final struggle. If he could only get the governor up the steps and inside the building, he would save him.
"Help, Elie, and Millard, all men who hold our honor dear!" he shouted.
Elie and Maillard forged onward but the mob closed in behind them and they were isolated. The crowd saw the advantage it had won, and made a furious effort. Like a gigantic boa, it wound its coils round the knot: Billet was taken off his feet and swept away with Pitou, who stuck to him. The same whirlwind made Hullin reel on the steps where he fell. He rose but was forced down anew, and Launay fell with him this time.
He stayed down; up to the last he did not murmur or beg for mercy, but he cried in a hoarse voice:
"Do not at least keep me lingering, tigers that you are. Slay me outright."
Never had he issued an order executed more promptly than this prayer: in one instant, armed hands flourished round his stooped head. Fists and plunging blades were seen: and then a head severed from the trunk rose disgustingly on the tip of a pike; it had preserved its cold and scornful smile.
This was the first head lopped off by the Revolution.
Gilbert had foreseen the atrocity: he had tried again to dart to the rescue but a hundred hands held him down. He turned his head and sighed.
This head was lifted with its eyes glaring, up to the window where Flesselles stood, surrounded and supported by the electors—as if to bid him a last farewell. It would be hard to say which was the paler, his face or the corpses.
All at once a deafening uproar burst from where the headless body lay. In searching it, in the vest pocket, was found the note addressed to him by the Provost of the Traders, theone he had shown to Losme. It will be remembered as in these terms:
"Hold out firmly; I will amuse the Parisians with cockades and promises. Before day is done, Bezenval will send you reinforcements.
"Hold out firmly; I will amuse the Parisians with cockades and promises. Before day is done, Bezenval will send you reinforcements.
Flesselles."
A horrible yell of blasphemy rose from the pavement to the window where the writer stood. Without divining the cause, he understood the threat and threw himself back. But he had been seen and was known to be within; the rush for him was so universal that even the bearers of Dr. Gilbert left him to join the hunters.
Gilbert sought to enter with them to protect Flesselles. He had not run up three steps before he felt himself pulled back by the coatskirts. He turned to shake off the hand but saw they were of Billet and Pitou.
From the higher standpoint he overlooked the square.
"What is going on over there?" he inquired, pointing towards a spot of commotion.
"Come, doctor, come," said the two countrymen together.
"The butchers," said the doctor.
At that instant Major Losme fell, struck down by a hatchet; in their hatred the people confounded the persecutor of the prisoners with the merciful warden.
"Let us begone," said the physician, "for I begin to be ashamed that such murderers let me out."
"Do not say that, doctor," reproved Billet, "those who stormed the Bastile are not the cutthroats yonder."
As they descended the steps which he had mounted to try to help Flesselles, the throng which had flowed through the doorway, was hurled forth. In the midst of the battling gathering one man was struggling.
"Take him to the Palais Royal," vociferated the thousands.
"Yes, my friends, yes, my good friends, to the Palais Royal," gasped this wretch.
But the human inundation rolled towards the river as though it intended to drown him.
"Another they mean to murder," shouted Gilbert; "let us try to save him at any rate."
But he had hardly got the words out of his mouth before a pistol-shot resounded; Flesselles disappeared in the smoke.
Gilbert covered his eyes, cursing the multitude, great but unable to remain pure, and sullying the victory by a triple murder.
When he took his hands from his eyes, he beheld three heads on pike points: Flesselles', Launay's and Losme's. One rose on the City Hall steps, another in the mouth of Tixeranderie Street and the last in Pelletier Street, so that the trio formed a triangle. He remembered the sign in the Order of the Invisibles.
"Oh, Balsamo," he muttered, "is this the emblem of Liberty?"
And sighing, he fled up Vannerie Street, dragging Billet and Pitou with him.
THE YOUNG VISIONARY.
Meeting with a public conveyance, the doctor got into it with Billet and Pitou, and they went to Louis-the-Great College, where Sebastian was still in the sick ward.
The principal received the doctor with deep regard as he knew him to be the foremost pupil of the physicians and chemists, Cabanis and Condorcet.
He imparted his fears, as well to the doctor as to the parent of his pupil, that the boy was too much given to moody fits.
"You are right," said Gilbert, "gravity in a boy is a token of lunacy or weakness."
While Pitou was being refreshed in the principal's residence and Billet shared a bottle with the gentleman himself, the physician conferred with his son.
"I ask you about your health," said the father to the pallid, nervous youth, "and you answer that you are well. Now I ask you if your reserve towards your schoolfellows arises from pride and I hope you will answer, no."
"Be encouraged, father," said Sebastian, "It is neither pride nor ill health, but sorrow. I have a dream which frightens me and yet it is not a terror. When a little boy, I had such visions."
"Ah?"
"Two or three times I was lost in the woods, following this phantom."
Gilbert looked at the speaker in alarm.
"It was thus, father dear: I would be playing with the other children of the village when I saw nothing; but when I left them, I heard the rustle of a silk dress as if some one wearing it were going away from me; I would thrust out my hands to seize it but grasp nothing but air. But as the sound diminished, the vision appeared, more and more distinct. This cloudy vapor would gradually assume a human shape. It was a woman's, who glided rather than walked, and grew the more clear as it was buried in the woody depths.
"A strange, weird, irresistible spell drew me on in the woman's steps. I pursued her with extended arms, mute like she was. Often I tried to call her but my lips would not emit a sound; I pursued without ever overtaking, until the prodigy announcing her coming was reproduced for her departure. She became misty and faded away. Spent with weariness, I would drop on the sward, where she had disappeared. Pitou would find me there, sometimes not till the following day."
Gilbert looked at the youth with increasing disquiet. His fingers were fixed on his pulse. Sebastian seemed to understand his father's feelings.
"Do not be uneasy about it," said he; "I know that it is a phantasm."
"What did this woman look like?"
"Majestic as a queen."
"Have you seen her lately?"
"I have seen her here—that is, in the garden reserved for the teachers. I saw her glide from our grounds into that garden. And one day when Master Berardier, pleased with mycomposition, asked me to state a favor, I got leave to stroll in this garden. She appeared to me."
"Strange hallucination," thought Gilbert; "yet not so remarkable in the child of a mesmeric medium. Who do you think this woman is?"
"My mother."
Gilbert turned pale and clasped his hand to his heart as though to staunch a re-opening wound. "But this is all a dream and I am almost as crazed as you."
"It may be all a dream," said the youth with pensive eye, "but the reality of the dream exists. I have seen the lady alive, in a magnificent equipage drawn by four horses, in Satory Woods near Versailles, on the last holiday when we were taken out there. I nearly swooned on seeing her, I do not know why. For she could not be my mother, who is dead, and she is the same as the vision."
He remarked the giddiness of his father who ran his hand over his brow, and he was frightened by his white face.
"I see I am wrong to tell you such nonsense," he said.
"Oh, no, speak all you can on the subject and we shall try to cure you," responded the doctor.
"Why? I am born to musing: it takes up half my time. I love this ghost though it avoids me and seems sometimes to repulse me. Do not expel it: I should else be all alone when you are on your travels or return to America."
"I hope we shall not part," he said to his boy whom he embraced: "for I want to take you on my journeys."
"Was my mother fair?" inquired the youth.
"Very," was answered in the doctor's stifled voice.
"And did she love you as much as I do?" continued the child.
"Sebastian, never speak her name to me!" cried the physician, kissing him a last time and bounding out of the garden.
Instead of following him, the boy dropped on a bench, disconsolate.
In the yard Gilbert found Billet and Pitou, refreshed by the feast of the principal, to whom the doctor recommended special care of his son, and the three men got into the hack again.
THE PHYSICIAN FOR THE STATE.
On the way back to Paris, Gilbert stopped at St. Ouen to see Necker's daughter. He had a suspicion that the financier had not gone to Brussels as everybody was led to think. Indeed, it was at Madam de Stael's country house that he was concealed, awaiting events. He made no difficulty in supplying his friend with a letter of introduction to the King.
Armed with this, the doctor, leaving Billet and Pitou in a pretty hotel of Paris where the farmer usually stayed, hurried to Versailles.
It was half past ten but Versailles could not sleep now. It was agitated about how the King would take the insult of the Bastile being captured. It was not a slap in the face like Mirabeau's refusal to obey the order of the King to vacate the Assembly-rooms, but a death-blow.
The palace and surrounding sites were packed with troops, but Gilbert managed to reach the Bulls-eye Chamber where Necker's letter passed him into the royal presence.
The doctor examined in silence the pilot given to France in stormy weather, whom he had not seen for many long years.
For the physiognomist who had studied under Lavater, the magnetiser who had read the future with Balsamo, the philosopher who had meditated with Rousseau, the traveler who had reviewed many peoples, all in this short, stout man signified degeneracy, impotence and ruin.
When Louis had read the introduction he dismissed all attendants with a wave of the hand not devoid of majesty.
"Is it true," said he, "that you are the author of the Memoirs on Administration and Politics, which much struck me? you are young for such a work?"
"I am thirty-two, but study and misfortune age a man; treat me as an old one."
"Why are you so slow to present yourself to me?"
"Because I had no need to speak to your Majesty what I could freely and easily write."
"But you ought to have been informed that I was kindly towards you," observed the monarch, suspiciously.
"Your Majesty alludes to my audacity in requesting him, in token of having read my work with gratification, to show a light in his own study window? I saw that, and was gladdened, but your Majesty offered a reward, and I want none."
"Any way you come like a true soldier when the action is on. But I am not used to meet those who do not haste when recompense is offered."
"I deserve none. Born a Frenchman, loving my land, jealous of its prosperity, confounding my individuality with that of its thirty millions of men, I work for them in toiling for myself. A selfish man deserves no recompense."
"Excuse me, you had another reason. You thought the state of events serious and held back——"
"For a more serious one? Your Majesty guesses correctly."
"I like frankness," said the King, reddening, for he was nervous. "So, you predicted ruin for the sovereign and you wanted to be out of the reach of the flying splinters."
"No, Sire, since I hasten towards the danger."
"You come fresh from Necker and you naturally speak like him. Where is he?"
"Ready at hand to obey your orders."
"All for the best, for I shall require him," returned Louis with a sigh. "In politics, nobody should sulk. A plan may be good and fail from accidents."
"Sire, your Majesty reasons admirably," said Gilbert, coming to his aid; "but the main thing now is to see into the future clearly; as a physician, I speak bluntly at crises."
"Do you attach much importance to the riot of yesterday?"
"It is not riot, but revolution."
"And would you have me treat with rebels and murderers? Their taking the Bastile by force was an act of rebellion; their slaying of Launay, Losme and Flesselles, murder."
"They should be held apart; those who stormed the Bastile were heroes; those who murdered those gentlemen, butchers."
"You are right, sir," said the King, his lips blanching after a transient blush and perspiration appearing on his brow. "You are indeed a physician, or rather a surgeon for you cut into the tender flesh. But let us return to the subject. You are Dr. Gilbert, who wrote those articles?"
"Sire, I consider it is a great happiness that my name is retained in your memory. It must not have sounded new when spoken a week ago in your hearing. I mean that when I was arrested and put in the Bastile. I always understood that no arrest is made of any importance without the King being advised."
"You in the Bastile?" cried the astonished King.
"Here is the order to lock me up. Put in prison six days ago by the royal order, I was released by the grace of the people at three o'clock this day. Did not your Majesty hear the cannon? they broke the doors down to let me out."
"Ah, I should be glad if I might say the cannon was not fired on royalty at the same time as the Bastile." Thus the King muttered.
"Oh, Sire, do not take a prison as the emblem of the monarchy. Say on the contrary that you are glad the Bastile is taken; for, I trust, no such injustice as I was the victim of will be henceforth committed in the name of the ruler who is kept ignorant of it."
"But there must be some cause for your arrest."
"None that I am aware of, Sire; I was arrested as soon as I landed and imprisoned—that is all there is in it."
"Really, sir," said the monarch mildly, "is there not selfishness in your dilating on your troubles when I want my own dealt with?"
"I only need a word: did your Majesty have anything to do with my arrest?"
"I was unaware of your return to this kingdom."
"I am happy for this reply. I may loudly say that your Majesty is defamed when evil is attributed to you, and cite myself as example."
"You put balm on the wound, Doctor," said the other, smiling.
"Oh, Sire, I will liberally anoint it; and I will cure it, I promise. But you must strongly wish the healing done. But, before pledging yourself too deeply, I should like you to notice the note on the prison record."
The King frowned to read: "At the Queen's request."
"Have you incurred the Queen's disfavor?" he inquired.
"Sire, I am sure that her Majesty knows me less than yourself."
"But you must have committed some misdeed, for people are not put in the Bastile for nothing."
"Humph, several in this situation, have come out."
"If you run over your life——"
"I will do so, out aloud: but do not be uneasy, it will not take long. Since sixteen I have toiled without repose. The pupil of Rousseau, the companion of Joseph Balsamo, the friend of Lafayette and Washington, since I quitted France, I have not a fault to reproach myself with, not a wrongful deed. Since heaven gave me the charge of bodies, I have shed my blood for mankind and staunched its flow in others. Thousands live to bless my labors."
"In America you worked with the innovators and propagate their principles by your writings."
"Yes, Sire, I forgot this claim on the gratitude of monarchs and peoples."
This silenced the King.
"Sire, you know my life now; I have offended and injured nobody, queen or beggar; and I humbly ask your Majesty why I was imprisoned."
"I will speak to the Queen about it. Do you believe that the warrant to arrest and imprison came directly from her Majesty?"
"I do not believe this; I rather presume that her Majesty countersigned it. But when a queen approves, she commands."
"Countess of Charny," read the King on the record sheet; "is it she who wanted you imprisoned? why, what have you done to poor Charny?"
"Before this morning I never heard of any lady of that title."
"Charny," muttered the King, musing, "virtue, goodness, chastity in person!"
"You see, they have put me in prison in the name of the Christian Graces," remarked Gilbert, laughing.
"Oh, I will have this cleared up," said the King, and ringing the bell he bade the servant bring the Countess of Charny into his presence.
THE COUNTESS OF CHARNY.
Gilbert had retired into a window recess, while the King paced the Bulls-eye Hall, called on account of a round window in the wall, thinking now of public matters, then of his visitor's persistence though nothing but news from Paris ought to have enchained him.
Suddenly the door opened and the lady entered, dressed in the extreme of the showy and fantastic fashion of Marie Antoinette and her court.
She was lovely, this Countess Charny, with a peerless figure and her hand was aristocratic to the utmost with which she played with a small cane.
"She, Andrea Taverney!" muttered Gilbert, involuntarily shrinking behind the curtains.
"My lady, I ask your presence for a little information," began the monarch, seeing nothing of Gilbert's emotion.
"I am ready to satisfy your Majesty." The voice attracted the doctor who came a little forward.
"A week ago, or so, a blank letter under the royal seal was delivered to Minister Necker," went on the King, "for the arrest——"
Gilbert had his eye on the lady, who was pale, feverish and fretful as if bent under the weight of a secret.
"This warrant was applied for by your ladyship and countersigned by the Queen. I say this to refresh your memory. Why do you not say something, countess?"
"It is true, your Majesty," she faltered, in a feverish abstraction, "I wrote for the letter, filled up the blanks, and the Queen backed it."
"Will you please tell me what crime the person committed for whom the measure was taken?" demanded Louis.
"Sire, I may not do that, but I shall say the crime was great."
"Then you should do so to the object," continued the King; "what you refuse the King Louis XVI., you cannot Doctor Gilbert."
He stepped aside to discover the doctor, who opened the curtains and appeared as pale as the staggering lady. She tossed her head backwards as if going to swoon, and only kept her footing by aid of a table. She leaned on it in dull despair, like one whom a snake bite was filling with poison.
"My lady, let me put the question to you which the King addressed," said Gilbert.
Andrea's lips moved but no sound struggled forth.
"What did I do to you, lady, that your order threw me into a hideous dungeon?"
The voice made her leap as if it tore the very soul in her.
Suddenly lowering her cold gaze on him, she replied:
"Sir, I do not know you."
But while she was speaking the mesmerist stared at her with so much fixedness and his glance was so charged with invincible boldness that her own lost lustre under his.
"Countess, you see what this abuse of the royal signature leads to," gently reproved the monarch; "you confess you do not know this gentleman, who is a renowned physician, a learned man, whom you can blame in no way,——"
Andrea darted a withering glance at Gilbert, who bore it calmly and proudly.
"I am saying that it is wicked to visit on the innocent the faults of another. I know you have not a bad heart," he hastened to add, for he was trembling lest he offended his wife's favorite, "and that you would not pursue anybody in your hatred unless he merited it: but you will understand that such mistakes must not be made in the future. Doctor," he went on, turning to the other hearer, "these things are the fault of our period rather than of persons. We are born in corruption and we shall die in it. But we are going to try to make matters better, in which work I expect you to join us, dear doctor."
He stopped, thinking he had said enough to please both parties. If he had spoken thus at a Parliamentary session, he would have been applauded; but his audience of two personal enemies little heeded his conciliatory philosophy.
"But," recommenced Gilbert, "while not knowing me, you knew another Gilbert, whose crime weighs upon his Namesake. It is not my place to question the lady; will your Majesty deign to inquire of her ladyship what this infamous man did?"
"Countess, you cannot refuse so just a request."
"The Queen must know, since she authorized the arrest," said Andrea evasively.
"But it is not enough that the Queen should be convinced," said the sovereign, "it is necessary that the King also should know. The Queen is what she is, but I am the King."
"Sire, the Gilbert for whom the warrant was intended committed a horrible crime sixteen years ago."
"Will your Majesty please inquire what age this Gilbert is to-day?"
"He may be thirty-two," replied Andrea.
"Sire, then the crime was done by a boy, not a man, and does he not deserve some indulgence who has for sixteen years deplored his boyish crime?"
"You seem to know him? has he committed no other crime than this sin of youth?" demanded the King.
"I am less indulgent to him than others, but I can say that he reproaches himself with none other."
"Only with having dipped his pen in poison and written odious libels!"
"Sire, please ask my lady if the real cause of the arrest and committal of this Gilbert was not to enable his enemies—particularly one enemy—to get possession of a certain casket containing papers possibly compromising a great lady of the court?"
Andrea shuddered from head to foot.
"Countess, what casket is this?" inquired the King, who noticed the plain pallor and agitation of the lady.
"No more shifting and subterfuges," cried Gilbert, feeling that he was master of the situation. "Enough falsehoods on both sides. I am Gilbert of the crime, the libels, the casket, and you the real great lady of the court. I take the King as the judge. Accept him and we will tell our judge, under heaven and the King will decide."
"Tell his Majesty what you please, but I shall say nothing more—for I do not know you," responded the haughty lady.
"And the casket? you do not know about that?"
"No more than of you."
But she shook with the effort to make this denial, like a statue rocking at the base.
"Beware," said the doctor, "you cannot have forgotten that I am the pupil of Balsamo-Cagliostro the Magician, who has transmitted to me the power he had over you. Once only, will you answer the question? My casket?" then, lifting his hand, full of threatening, he thundered: "Nature of steel, heart of adamant, bend, melt, shatter under the irresistible pressure of my will! You shall speak, Andrea, and none, King or any powers less than heaven's, shall subtract you from my sway. You shall unfold your mind to the august witness and he shall read what you hid in the black recesses of your soul. Sire, you shall know all through her who refuses to speak. Sleep, Andrea Taverney, Countess of Charny, sleep and speak, for I will it."
Hardly were the words uttered before the woman, stopped short in beginning a scream, held out her arms for support as if struck by blindness. Finding none, she fell into the King's arms and he placed her in a chair.
"Ha!" exclaimed he, trembling like herself, "I have heard about hypnotism but never saw an exhibition. Is not this magnetic sleep to which you oblige her to succumb, doctor?"
"Yes, my lord. Take her hand, and ask her why she had me arrested."
Astounded by the scene, Louis receded but, interested, he did as directed. As Andrea resisted, the magnetizer touched the crown of her head with his palm, saying;
"Speak, I will it."
She sighed and her arms fell; her head sank back and she wept.
"Ugh, I hate you," she hissed.
"Hate away, but speak."
"So, countess," said the King, "you wanted to arrest and imprison the doctor?"
"Yes."
"And the casket?"
"How could I leave that in his hands?" muttered the lady, in a hollow voice.
"Tell me about that," said the King forgetting etiquette and kneeling beside the countess.
"I learnt that Gilbert, who had in sixteen years been twice back in France, purposed another voyage, to settle here. Chief of Police Crosne informed me that he had on a previous return bought an estate at Villers Cotterets: that his farmer enjoyed his trust, and I suspected that the casket with his papers was at his house."
"How could you suspect that?"
"I—I went to Mesmer's and had myself put into a trance, when, my own medium, I wrote down the revelations I wanted."
"Wonderful," exclaimed the Sovereign.
"I went to Chief Crosne and he lent me his best man, one Wolfstep, who brought me the casket."
"Where is it?" cried Gilbert. "No lying—where is my casket?"
"In my rooms at Versailles," said Andrea, trembling nervously and bursting into tears. "Wolfstep is waiting for me here by appointment since eleven."
Twelve was striking.
"Where is he?"
"Standing in the waiting room, leaning on the mantleshelf. The casket is on the table before him. Oh, haste! Count Charny, who was not to return before to-morrow, will be back to-night on account of the events. He is at Sevres now. Get Wolfstep away for fear my lord will see him."
"Your Majesty hears? This casket belongs to me. Will the King please order it to be returned to me?"
"Instantly."
Placing a screen before the countess, Louis called the officer on duty and gave him orders what to do.
This curiosity of a monarch whose throne was being undermined to a purely physical problem, would make those smile who expected him to be engrossed with politics.
But he concentrated himself on this private speculation and returned to see the mesmerizer and the medium.
In the mesmeric slumber Andrea's wondrous beauty was displayed in its entire splendor. She who had in her youth enthralled Louis XV. now enchanted his successor.
Gilbert turned his head away, sighing: he could not resist the prompting to give his adored this degree of supernal beauty; and now more unhappy than Pygmalion, for he knew how insensible was the lovely statue, he was frightened by his own work.
Gilbert knew how to own his ignorance, like all superior men. He knew what he could do, but not the wherefore.
"Where did you study the art? under Mesmer?" asked the King.
"I saw the most astonishing phenomena ten years before that German came into France. My master was a more amazing man, superior to any you can name, for I have seen him execute surgical operations of incredible daring. No science was unknown to him. But I ought not to utter his name before your Majesty."
"I should like to hear it, though it was Satan's itself."
"My lord, you honor me almost with a friend's confidence in speaking thus. My master was Baron Balsamo, afterwards Count Cagliostro."
"That charlatan!" exclaimed Louis, blushing, for he could not help remembering the plot of the Diamond's Necklace, in which Cagliostro had figured as friend of Cardinal Rohan and consequently enemy of Marie Antoinette. The King believed his wife but the world thought that she had participated in the fraud on the court jewelers. We have related the story according to our lights in the volume of this series entitled "The Queen's Necklace."
"Charlatan?" repeated Gilbert warmly. "You are right. The name comes from the Italian word meaning to patter, totalk freely—and no one was more ready than Cagliostro to talk instructively where the seed would fall on fruitful ground."
"This Cagliostro whom you praise was a great enemy of kings," observed Louis.
"Rather say of queen's," retorted Gilbert.
"In the trial of Prince Rohan, his conduct was equivocal."
"Sire, then as ever he fulfilled his mission to mankind. He may have acted mistakenly then. But I studied under the physician and philosopher, not under the politician."
"Well, well," said the King, suffering under the wound to his person and his pride; "we are forgetting the countess who is in pain."
"I will awaken her presently, for here is the casket coming."
In fact the messenger was arriving with the small box which he handed to the King. He nodded his satisfaction and the officer went out.
"Sire, it is my casket: but I would remark that it contains papers damning to the countess and——"
"Carry it away unopened, sir," said the monarch coldly. "Do not awaken the lady here, I detest shrieks, groans, noise."
"She will awaken wherever you suggest her removal."
"In the Queen's apartments will be best."
"How long will it take?"
"Ten minutes."
"Awaken in fifteen minutes," ordered the mesmerizer to the lady.
Two guardsmen entered and carried out the countess, seated on the chair.
"My lady fainted here," said the King to the officer, "bear her to the Queen."
"What can I do for you, Dr. Gilbert?" he asked when they were alone.
"I wish to be honorary house physician to your Majesty. It is a position which will do nobody umbrage and is more of trust than emolument and lustre."
"Granted! Good-by, Dr. Gilbert. Remind me affectionately to Necker. Bring me supper," he added, for nothing could make the King forget a meal.
THE QUEEN AT BAY.
While the King was learning to fight Revolution like a philosopher, and recreate himself with a spiritualistic seance, the Queen was rallying the combative around her in her rooms.
She sat at a table, with priests, courtiers, generals and her ladies surrounding her. At the doorways young officers, full of ardor and courage, rejoiced in the riots which gave them a chance to show their military gifts as at a tourney under view of their queens of beauty.
The Queen was no longer the sweet girl whom we saw in our work entitled "Balsamo the Magician," or the fair princess who went to Mesmer's Baths, with Princess Lamballe: but the haughty and imperious Queen who was neither Marie Antoinette, nor Queen of France, but the Austrian Eagless.
She looked up as Prince Lambesq arrived, dusty, splashed, his boots torn and his sabre bent so as not to be sheathed properly.
"Well, my lord," she said, "You come from Paris. What are the people doing?"
"Killing and burning."
"From madness or malice?"
"From ferocity."
"Nay, prince," she replied, after meditating: "the people are not ferocious. Hide nothing from me. Is it delirium or hate?"
"I believe it is hate at the point of delirium."
"Against me?"
"What does it matter?" said Dreux Breze, stepping forward. "The people may hate any one, saving your Majesty."
The Queen did not notice the flattery.
"The people," replied Lambesq, "are acting in hatred of—all above them."
"Good, that is the truth at last?" exclaimed the royal lady resolutely; "I feel that is so."
"I am speaking as a soldier," continued the cavalrist.
"Speak so. What is to be done?"
"Nothing."
"What?" cried she, emboldened by the protest from among the gold-laced coat and gold-hilted sword wearers, "nothing? do you, a Lorraine prince, tell this to the Queen of France when the people are killing and burning?"
A fresh murmur, this time approbative, hailed her speech. She turned, embraced all the gathering with flaring eyes, and tried to distinguish whose flamed the most brightly, thinking they would be the most loyal.
"Do nothing," repeated the prince, "for the Parisians will cool down if not irritated—they are warlike only when teased. Why give them the honors of a war and the risks of a battle? Keep tranquil, and in three days Paris will not talk about the matter."
"But the Bastile?"
"Shut the doors and trap all those who are inside."
Some laughs sounded among the groups.
"Take care, prince," said the lady; "now you are going to the other extreme, and too much encouraging me."
With a thoughtful mien, she went over to where her favorite, the Countess of Polignac, was in a brown study on a lounge. The news had frightened the lady; she smiled only when the Queen stood before her and that was a faint and sickly smile like a wilted lily.
"What do you say to this, countess?"
"Nothing," and she shook her head with unspeakable discouragement.
"Heaven help us, our dashing Diana is afraid," said the Queen, bending over her, "we want our intrepid Countess Charny here. It seems to me that we need her to cheer us up."
"The countess was going out when the King sent for her," explained an attendant.
Then only did Marie Antoinette perceive the isolation and stillness around her. The recent strange and unheard-ofevents had hit Versailles hard, making the hardest hearts tender, more by astonishment than fear. The sovereign understood that she must lift up these disheartened spirits.
"As nobody suggests any advice, I shall act on my own impulse," she said: "The people are not wicked but led astray." Everybody drew nearer. "They hate us because they do not know us; let us go up to them."
"To punish," interposed a voice, "for they know we are their masters, and to doubt us is a crime."
"Oh, baron," she said, recognizing Bezenval; "do you come to give us good advice?"
"I have given it."
"The King will punish, but as a kind father does."
"He loveth well who chasteneth soundly," replied the noble.
"Are you of this thinking, prince?" she asked of Lambesq. "The populace have committed assassinations——"
"Which they call retaliation," observed a sweet, fresh voice which made the Queen turn.
"Yes, but that is where their error lies, my dear Lamballe, so we shall be indulgent."
"But," resumed the princess with her bland voice, "before one talks of punishment one ought to be sure of winning the victory, methinks."
A general outcry rose against this piece of good sense from the noble lips.
"Not vanquish—with the Swiss troops—and the Germans—and the Lifeguards?"
"Do you doubt the army and the nobility?" exclaimed a young man in Bercheny Hussian uniform, "have we deserved such a slur? Bear in mind, royal lady, that the King can put in battle array forty thousand men, throw them into Paris by the four sides and destroy the town. Forty thousand proven soldiers are worth half a million of Parisian rioters."
The young lieutenant, emboldened to be the mouthpiece of his brother officers, stopped short on seeing how far his enthusiasm had carried him. But the Queen had caught enough to feel the scope of his outburst.
"Do you know the state of affairs, sir?" she inquired.
"I was in the riots yesterday," was his confused reply.
"Then, do not fear to speak. Let us have details."
The lieutenant stepped out, though he colored up.
"My Lords of Bezenval and Lambesq know them better than I," he said.
"Continue, young sir; it pleases me to hear them from you. Under whose orders are these forty thousand men?"
"The superiors are the two gentlemen I named; under whom rule Prince Conde, Narbonne-Fritzlar and Salkenaym. The park of artillery on Montmartre could lay that district in ashes in six hours. At its signal to fire, Vincennes would answer. From four quarters as many corps of ten thousand troops could march in, and Paris would not hold out twenty-four hours."
"This is plain speaking at least, and a clear plan. What do you say to this, Prince Lambesq?"
"That the young gentleman is a perfect general!"
"At least, he is a soldier who does not despair," said the Queen, seeing the lieutenant turn pale with anger.
"Thank your Majesty," replied the latter. "I do not know what your Majesty will decide, but I beg her to count me with the other forty thousand men, including the captains, as ready to die for her."
With these words he courteously saluted the general, who had almost insulted him. This courtesy struck the Queen more than the pledge of devotedness.
"Your name, sir?" said she.
"Viscount Charny," he responded.
"Charny," repeated Marie Antoinette, blushing in spite of herself; "any relation to Count Charny?"
"I am his brother, lady," bowing more lowly than before.
"I might have known that you were one of my most faithful servitors," said she, recovering from her tremor and looking round with confidence, "by the first words you spoke. I thank you, viscount; how comes this to be the first time I have the pleasure of seeing you at court?"
"My eldest brother, head of the family, ordered me to stay with the army, and I have only been in Versailles twice during seven years on the regimental roll-call."
She let a long look dwell on his face.
"You resemble your brother," she remarked. "I shall scold him for having waited for you to present yourself at court."
Electrified by this greeting to their young spokesman, the officers exaggerated their devotion to the royal cause and from each knot burst expressions of heroism able to conquer the whole of France.
These cries flattered Marie Antoinette's secret aspirations, and she meant to profit by them. She saw herself, in perspective, the leader of an immense army, and rejoiced over the victory against the civilians who dared to rebel. Around her, ladies and gentlemen, wild with youth, love and confidence, cheered their brilliant hussars, heavy dragoons, terrible Switzers, and thunderous cannoniers, and laughed at the home-made spikes fastened on clothes-poles, without dreaming that on these coarse spears were to be carried the noblest heads of the realm.
"I am more afraid of a pike than a musket," murmured Princess Lamballe.
"Because it is uglier, my dear Therese," said the Queen. "But you need not be alarmed. Our Parisian pikemen are not worth the famous spearmen of Moat, and the good Swiss of this day carry guns much superior to the spears of their forefathers. Thank God, they can fire true with them!"
"I answer for that," said Bezenval.
Lady Polignac's disheartenment had no effect beyond saddening her royal mistress. The enthusiasm increased among the rest of the gathering, but was damped when the King, coming in abruptly, called for his supper!
The simple word chilled the assemblage. She hoped that he did it to show how cool he was; but in fact, the son of Saint Louis was hungry. That was all.
The King was served on a small table in the Queen's sitting-room. While she was trying to revive the fire, he devoured. The officers did not think this gastronomical exercise worthy of a hero, and looked on as little respectful as they dared to be. The Queen blushed, and her fretfulness was displayed in all her movements. Her fine, nervy, and aristocratic nature could not understand the rule of matter over mind. She went up to him, asking what orders he had to give.
"Oh, orders," he said, with his mouth full: "Will you not be our Egeria in the pinch?"
"My lord, Numa was a peaceful King. But at present we think a belligerent one is wanted, and if your Majesty wants to model himself on an antique pattern, be Romulus if not Tarquin."
"Are these gentlemen all bellicose, too?" he asked with a tranquillity almost beatific.
But his eyes were bloodshot with the animation of the meal and they thought it was courage.
"Yes, Sire, war?" they chorussed.