In the Name of Liberty: A Story of the Terror
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Title: In the Name of Liberty: A Story of the Terror
Author: Owen Johnson
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IN THE NAME OF LIBERTY
[Illustration: BARABANT SURPRISES NICOLE]
IN THE NAME OF LIBERTY
A Story of the Terror
by
OWEN JOHNSON
Author of "Arrows of the Almighty"
O Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are committed
in thy name! _Madame Roland_
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1905
Copyright, 1905, by
The Century Co.
Published January, 1905
The Devinne Press
TO
MY FATHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I IN SEARCH OF THE REVOLUTION 3
II A RESCUE FROM ARISTOCRATS 14
III CITOYENNE NICOLE 30
IV BREWINGS OF THE STORM 54
V THE TAKING OF THE TUILERIES 74
VI THE HEART OF A WOMAN 92
VII THE FEAR OF HAPPINESS 104
VIII THE MOTHER OF LOUISON 116
IX THE TURN OF JAVOGUES 127
X A TRIUMPH OF INSTINCT 140
XI THE MAN WITH THE LANTERN 155
XII THE MASSACRE OF THE PRISONS 165
XIII DOSSONVILLE IN PERIL 176
XIV GOURSAC AS ACCUSER 188
XV LOVE, LIFE, AND DEATH 200
PART II
(One Year Later)
I FAMINE 211
II DOSSONVILLE EARNS A KISS 224
III WAITING FOR BREAD 235
IV SIMON LAJOIE 250
V CRAMOISIN PLOTS AGAINST NICOLE 266
VI BARABANT HESITATES 277
VII THE MADNESS OF JEALOUSY 290
VIII LA FÊTE DE LA RAISON 301
IX AS DID CHARLOTTE CORDAY 314
X UNRELENTING IN DEATH 323
XI NICOLE FORGOES THE SACRIFICE 332
XII THE FATHER OF LOUISON 346
XIII DAUGHTER OF THE GUILLOTINE 357
XIV THE LAST ON THE LIST 369
XV THE FALL OF THE TERROR 386
EPILOGUE 402
IN THE NAME OF LIBERTY
I
IN SEARCH OF THE REVOLUTION
In the month of August of the year 1792 the Rue Maugout was a distorted
cleft in the gray mass of the Faubourg St. Antoine, apart from the
ceaseless cry of life of the thoroughfare, but animated by a sprinkling
of shops and taverns. No. 38, like its neighbors, was a twisted,
settled mass of stone and timber that had somehow held together from
the time of Henry II. The entrance was low, pinched, and dank. On one
side a twisted staircase zig-zagged into the gloom. On the other a
squat door with a grating in the center, like a blind eye, led into
the cellar which la Mère Corniche, the concierge, let out at two sous
a night to travelers in search of an economical resting-place. Beyond
this rat-hole a murky glass served as a peep-hole, whence her flattened
nose and little eyes could dimly be distinguished at all hours of the
day. This tenebrous entrance, after plunging onward some forty feet,
fell against a wall of gray light, where the visitor, making an abrupt
angle, passed into the purer air of a narrow court. Opposite, the
passage took up its interrupted way to a farther court, more spacious,
where a dirt-colored maple offered a ragged shelter and a few parched
vines gripped the yellow walls. The tiled roofs were shrunk, the ridges
warped, the walls cracking and bulging about the distorted windows.
Along the roofs the dust and dirt had gradually accumulated and given
birth to a few blades of gray-green plants. Nature had slipped in
and assimilated the work of man, until the building, yielding to the
weight of time and the elements, appeared as a hollow sunk in fantastic
cliffs, where, from narrow, misshapen slits, the dwellers peered forth.
About the maple swarmed a troop of children, grimy, bare, and voluble.
In the branches and in the ivy a horde of sparrows shrilled and fought,
keeping warily out of reach of the lank cats that slunk in ambush.
In front of No. 38, each morning, prompt as the sun, which she often
anticipated, la Mère Corniche appeared with her broom. She was one of
those strange old women in whom the appearances of youth and age are
incongruously blended. Seen from behind, her short, erect stature (she
was an equal four feet), her skirt stopping half-way below the knees
to reveal a pair of man's boots, gave the effect of a child of twelve.
When she turned, the shock of the empty gums, the skin hanging in
pockets on the cheeks, the eyes showing from their pouches like cold
lanterns, caused her to seem like a being who had never known youth.
She had thrown open the doors on this August morning and was conducting
a resolute campaign with her broom when she perceived a young man, who
even at that early hour, from the evidence of dust, had just completed
an arduous journey. A bulging handkerchief swinging from a staff across
his shoulder evidently contained all his baggage, and proclaimed the
definite purpose of the immigrant. The concierge regarded him with
some curiosity. He was too old to be a truant scholar, and too much at
ease to be of the far provinces. Besides, his dress showed familiarity
with the city modes. He seemed rather the young adventurer running to
Paris in the first flush of that enthusiasm and attraction which the
Revolution in its influx had awakened.
The dress itself proclaimed, not without a touch of humor, the
preparation of the zealous devotee approaching the Mecca of his
ambitions. His cocked hat, of a largeness which suggested another
owner, was new and worn jauntily, with the gay assurance of youth in
its destiny. A brilliant red neck-cloth was arranged with the abandon
of pardonable vanity. A clear blue redingote, a cloth-of-gold vest,
and a pair of drab knickerbockers completed a costume that had drawn
many a smile. For while the coat was so long that the sleeves hid the
wrist, the vest was bursting its buttons, and though the knickerbockers
pinched, the hat continued to wobble in dumb accusation; so that two
generations at least must have contributed to the wardrobe of the young
buccaneer.
At the moment the concierge discovered the youthful adventurer, he was
engrossed in the task of slapping the dust from his garments, while his
eyes, wandering along the streets, were searching to some purpose.
Curiosity being stronger than need, it was la Mère Corniche who put the
first question.
"Well, citoyen, you seek some one in this street?"
"The answer should be apparent," the young fellow answered frankly. "I
seek a lodging. Have you a room to let?"
"H'm!" La Mère Corniche eyed him unfavorably. "Maybe I have, and maybe
I haven't; I take no aristocrats."
The young man, seeing that his clothes were in disfavor, began to laugh.
"In as far, citoyenne," he said, with a sweep of his hand, "as it
concerns these, I plead guilty: my clothes are aristocrats. But hear
me," as his listener began to scowl. "They were; but aristocrats being
traitors, I confiscated them; and," he added slyly, "I come to deliver
them to the State."
"And to denounce the traitors, citoyen," the concierge exclaimed
fiercely, "even were they your father and mother."
"Even that--if I had a family," he added cautiously. "And now,
citoyenne, what can you do for me?"
With this direct question, the fanatic light in her face died away.
The little woman withdrew a step and ran her eyes over the prospective
tenant. She made him repeat the question, and finally said, with a
sigh, as though regretting the price she had fixed in her mind, "How
long?"
"A year--two years--indefinitely."
"There are two rooms and a parlor on the second," she began tentatively.
"That suits me."
"The price will be for you--" la Mère Corniche hastened to increase the
sum, "thirty francs a month."
"Good."
"Payable in advance."
The young fellow shrugged his shoulders, and with a comical grin turned
his pockets inside out.
"What!" la Mère Corniche shrieked in her astonishment. "You swindler!
You have taken an apartment at thirty francs a month without a sou in
your pocket."
"At present."
"Get off, you, who'd rob a poor old woman."
"We'll renounce the apartment, then," he cried, with a laugh. "One
room, citoyenne; give me one room if you are a patriot."
"Patriot--robber! Be off or I'll denounce you!"
The young fellow, seeing his case hopeless, prepared to depart.
"Good-by, then, mother," he said. "And thanks for your patriotic
reception. Only direct me to the house of Marat and I'm done with you."
"What have you to do with the Citoyen Marat?" cried the old woman,
startled into speech at that name.
"That is my affair."
"You know him?"
"I have a letter to him."
La Mère Corniche looked at him in indecision. An emissary to Marat was
a very different matter. She struggled silently between her avarice
and the one adoration of her life, until her listener, mistaking her
silence, turned impatiently on his heel.
"Here, come back," the concierge cried, thus brought to decision. "Let
me see your letter."
The young fellow shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly and produced a
large envelope, on which the curious eye of his listener beheld the
magic words, "To Jean Paul Marat." But if she had hoped to find on it
some clue to its sender, she was disappointed. She turned the letter
over and handed it reluctantly back.
"Private business, hey?"
"Particularly private," he said. Then, seeing his advantage and
following up his good fortune, he added: "Now, citoyenne, don't you
think you could tuck me away somewhere until I make a fortune?"
The old woman hesitated a moment longer, whereupon he fell to scanning
pensively the address, and mumbling over "Jean Paul Marat, a great man
that."
"Damn, I'll do it!" la Mère Corniche suddenly cried, and with a crook
of her thumb she bade him follow her. But immediately she halted and
asked:
"Citoyen--?"
"Citoyen Barabant--Eugène Armand Barabant."
"Of--?"
"Of 38 Rue Maugout," he said laconically, then, with a smile, modified
his step to follow the painful progress of his guide.
At the dark entrance a raven came hopping to meet them, filling the
gloom with his raucous cry. Barabant halted.
"It's only Jean Paul," explained the old woman. "He brings good luck."
She placed him, flapping his wings, on her shoulder and continued. At
the first court, by the stairs that led to the vacant apartment on
the second floor, she hesitated, but the indecision was momentary.
Into the second court Barabant followed with an air of interest that
showed that, though perhaps familiar with the streets of Paris, he
had never delved into its secret places. Twice more la Mère Corniche
halted before possible lodgings, until at last, having vanquished each
temptation, she began to clamber up the shaky flights that led to the
attic.
Barabant had perceived each mental struggle with great enjoyment. He
was young, adventurous, entering life through strange gates. So when at
length they reached the end of their climb, and his guide, after much
tugging, accompanied by occasional kicks, had forced open the reluctant
door, the dingy attic appeared to him a haven of splendor.
La Mère Corniche watched him curiously from the doorway, rubbing her
chin. "Eh, Citoyen Barabant? Well, does it suit you?"
"Perfect."
He cast a careless glance at the impoverished room and craned out of
the window. In his survey of the court, his eye rested a moment on the
window below, where, through the careless folds of a half-curtain, he
had caught the gleam of a white arm.
"And what is the price of this?" he asked; but his thoughts were
elsewhere.
"Nothing."
La Mère Corniche sighed heroically, and hastened on as though
distrusting her generosity. "Only, when you see Citoyen Marat, tell him
that I, Citoyenne Corniche, have done this to one who is his friend."
Barabant remained one moment motionless, as though confounded at this
remnant of human feeling in the sibyl. But the door had hardly closed
when, without a glance at his new quarters, he was again at the window.
The truth was that, without hesitating to reflect on the insufficiency
of the evidence, he had already built a romance on the sight of a white
arm seen two stories below through the folds of a curtain. So when
he returned eagerly to his scrutiny, what was his disenchantment to
perceive below a very buxom matron, who was regarding him with equal
attentiveness.
Barabant, with a laugh at his own discomfiture, began to search more
cautiously. And as one deception in youth is sufficient to make a
skeptic for an hour, when in turn he began to explore the window
opposite he received, with indifference, the view of another arm,
though it was equally white and well modeled.
But this time, as though Fate were determined to rebuke him for
scorning her gifts, there appeared at the window the figure of a
young girl, whose early toilet allowed to be seen a throat and arm of
sufficient whiteness to dazzle the young romanticist.
Youth and natural coquetry fortunately are stronger than the
indifference of poverty. Had Barabant been fifty the girl would have
continued her inspection undisturbed; but perceiving him to be in the
twenties, and with a certain air of distinction, she hastily withdrew,
covering her throat with an instinctive motion of her hand, and leaving
Barabant, forgetful of his first disenchantment, to gallop through the
delightful fields of a new romance.
II
A RESCUE FROM ARISTOCRATS
After a moment of vain expectation, Barabant withdrew to the inspection
of his new possessions. In one corner stood a bed that bore the marks
of many restorations. Each leg was of a different shape, rudely
fastened to the main body, which, despite threatening fissures, had
still survived by the aid of several hitches of stout rope that
encouraged the joints. One pillow and two coverings, one chair and
a chest of drawers, that answered to much tugging, completed the
installation. The floor was of tiles; the ceiling, responding to the
sagging of the roof, bulged and cracked, while in one spot it had even
receded so far that a ray of the sun squeezed through and fell in a
dusty flight to the floor.
Barabant's survey was completed in an instant. Returning to the bed, he
paused doubtfully and cautiously tried its strength with a shake. Then
he seated himself and slowly drew up both legs. The bed still remaining
intact, he turned over, threw the covers over him, and, worn out with
the journey, fell asleep.
It was almost ten when he stirred, and the August sun was pouring
through the gabled window. A mouse scampered hurriedly home as he
started up; a couple of sparrows, hovering undecidedly on the sill,
fluttered off. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the confusion of one
who awakens at an unaccustomed hour, and then sprang to the floor so
impetuously that the bed protested with a warning creak. His first
movement was to the window, where an eager glance showed the opposite
room vacant. More leisurely he turned to a survey of his horizon, where
in the distance the roofs, of an equal height, rolled away in high,
sloping billows of brown tile dotted with flashes of green or the white
fleck of linen. The air was warm, but still alive with the freshness
of the morning, inviting him to be out and seeing. He left his bundle
carelessly on the chair, brushed his clothes, arranged his neck-cloth
by means of a pocket-mirror, preparing himself with solicitude for his
appearance in the streets.
He descended the stairs alertly, listening for any sound of his
neighbors; but the stairways, as well as the courts, were silent and
empty, for at that period all Paris hastened daily to the streets,
expectant of great events.
Through the ugly, tortuous streets of the Faubourg St. Antoine Barabant
plunged eagerly to the boulevard, where the crowd, circulating slowly,
lingered from corner to corner, drifting to every knot of discussion,
avaricious for every crumb of rumor. Hawkers of ballads and pamphlets
sought to slip their wares into the young fellow's hand with a show of
mystery and fear of detection. One whispered his "Midnight Diversions
of the Austrian Veto"; another showed him furtively the title, "Capet
Exposed by his Valet."
Refusing all these, Barabant halted at every shop-window, before
numberless engravings representing the Fall of the Bastille, the Oath
in the Tennis-court, and the Section-halls.
The gloomy, disheveled figures of the Marseillais were abroad, stalking
melodramatically through the crowds or filling the cafés to thunder
out their denunciations of tyrants and aristocrats. Fishwives and
washerwomen retailed to all comers the latest alarms.
"The aristocrats are burning the grain-fields!"
"A plot has been unearthed to exterminate the patriots by grinding
glass in their flour."
"The Faubourg St. Antoine is to be destroyed by fire."
Venders of relics offered the manacles of the Bastille and the
rope-ladder of Latude; fortune-tellers prophesied, for a consideration,
the fall of Capet and the advent of the Republic; an exhibitor of
trick-dogs advertised a burlesque on the return of the royal family
from Versailles. At a marionette theater the dolls represented public
personages, and the king and the queen (Veto and the Austrian) were
battered and humiliated to the applause of the crowds.
At points on Barabant's progress he listened to young fellows from
tables or chairs reading to the illiterate from the newspapers,
quoting from witty Camille Desmoulins or sullen, headlong Marat.
Barabant was amazed at the response from the audience, at their sudden
movements to laughter or anger. Swayed by the infection, his lips moved
involuntarily with a hundred impetuous thoughts. In this era that
promised so much to youth, which demanded its ardor, its enthusiasm,
and its faith, he longed to emerge from obscurity. For youth is the
period of large resolutions, ardent convictions, and the championship
of desperate causes. In that season, when the world is new, the mind,
fascinated by its unfolding strength, leaps over decisions, doubts
nothing, nor hesitates. In revolutions it is the generation that dares
that leads.
From the young and daring Faubourg St. Antoine Barabant emerged,
inspired, elated, and meditative. Barabant, disciple of the Revolution
of Ideas, was bewildered by the might of this torrent. It excited
his vision, but it terrified him. It was immense, but it might erupt
through a dozen forced openings.
In the Rue St. Honoré, where the discussions grew more abstract, he was
startled at the contrast. Great events were struggling to the surface,
yet here in the cafés men discussed charmingly on theory and principle;
nor could he fancy, fresh from the vigor of the people, the sacred
Revolution among these gay colors, immaculate wigs, and well-fed and
thirsty orators.
But this first impression, acute with the shock of contrast, was soon
succeeded by a feeling of stimulation. Attracted, as is natural in
youth, by the beautiful and the luxurious, and led by his imagination
and his ambition, he forgot his emotions. Whereas in the mob he had
felt himself equal to the martyr, he now breathed an air that aroused
his powers. They discussed the freedom of the individual, the liberty
of the press, and the abolishment of the penalty of death, with grace
and with unfailing, agile wit, and debated the Republic with the airs
of the court.
Barabant, who wished to see everything at once, made a rapid excursion
to the Tuileries, to the Place de la Grève, the Place de la
Revolution, the Markets, and the famous Hall of the Jacobins.
Toward evening, as the dusk invaded the streets, and the lanterns, from
their brackets on the walls, set up their empire over the fleeting
day, an indefinable melancholy descended over him: the melancholy of
the city that affects the young and the stranger. Barabant's spirits,
quick to soar, momentarily succumbed to that feeling of loneliness and
aloofness that attacks the individual in the solitudes of nature and in
that wilderness of men, the city.
He was leaning against a pillar in the Rue St. Honoré, in this
ruminative mood watching the unfamiliar crowd, when his glance was
stopped by the figure of a flower-girl. She was tall, dark, and lithe,
and, though without any particular charm of form, she had such an
unusual grace in her movements that he fell curiously to speculating on
her face. But the turning proving a disappointment, he laughed at his
haste, and his glance wandered elsewhere.
"Citoyen, buy my cockade?"
Barabant turned quickly; the flower-girl was at his side, smiling
mischievously up at him. He was conscious of a sudden embarrassment--a
solicitude for his bearing before the frank amusement of the girl.
This time he did not turn away so carelessly. The face was attractive
despite its irregularity, full of force in the free span of the
forehead and of sudden passions in the high, starting eyebrows. The
eyes alone seemed cold and sardonic, without emotion or change.
"Come, citoyen, a cockade."
Barabant shrugged his shoulders, and diving into his purse, at length
produced a few coppers.
"A patriot's dinner is more my need, citoyenne, than a cockade."
The girl, who had been watching with amusement this search after the
elusive coins, ignoring his answer, asked curiously:
"From the provinces?"
Barabant, resenting the patronizing tone, said stiffly:
"No."
"But not quite Parisian," the flower-girl returned, with a smile, and
her glance traveled inquiringly over the incongruous make-up.
Barabant laughed. "Parisian by a day only."
The girl smiled again, and, suddenly fastening a cockade on his lapel,
said: "You are a good-looking chap; keep your sous; when your purse is
fuller, remember me." And thrusting back his proffered money, she took
up her basket and nodded gaily to him. "Good luck to you, citoyen. Vive
la jeunesse!"
The accidental meeting quite restored him to his eager zest again. The
one greeting converted the wilderness into a familiar land. He started
on his walk, seeking a humble bill of fare within the range of his
modest resources. He chose one where the dinner consisted of a thick
soup the filling qualities of which he knew--a purée of beans and a
piece of cheese. It was still somewhat earlier than the dinner-hour,
and he finished his meal silently watched by the waiter with suspicious
eyes. Thence he wandered through brighter streets, pausing at times on
the skirts of the crowd that invaded the cafés, which now began to grow
noisy with impromptu oratory.
The Palais Royal with its flaring halls drew him to its tumultuous
life. He wandered through the gambling-rooms, through fakers'
exhibitions, heedless of siren voices, watching the play of pickpockets
and dupes, until suddenly in the crowd a figure of unusual oddity
caught his attention: a tall, military man with a cocked hat, shifted
very much over one ear, and a nose thrown back so far that it seemed
to be scouting in the air, fearful lest its owner should miss a single
rumor.
Without purpose in his wanderings, Barabant unconsciously fell to
following this new character. The body was lank, the legs long,--out
of all proportion, and so thin that they seemed rather a pair of
pliable stilts,--while the arms hung or moved in loose jerks as though
dependent from the joints of a manikin.
Oblivious to the banter and the scrutiny of the throng, the wanderer
pursued his inquisitive way. From time to time he stopped, craning his
neck and remaining absorbed in the contemplation of a chance display of
tricolor or a group of shrill orators sounding their eloquence to the
eager mass. The inspection ended, a guttural exclamation or a whistle
escaping the lips showed that the impression had been registered behind
the keen, laughing countenance. Gradually the crowd, inclined at first
to jeer, perceiving him utterly unconscious of their interest, turned
to banter; but there too they were met with the utmost complacency.
"Hey, Daddy Long-legs!"
"Beware you keep out of their reach, my friend."
"Citizen Scissors!"
"Citizen Stilts!"
"Citizen Pique la bise!"
At this last allusion to the manner in which his nose might be said to
cut the breeze, he opened wide a gaping mouth and roared "Touché!" so
heartily that the crowd, who never laugh long at those who laugh with
them, returned to their occupation with grunts of approval. Still there
remained to be revealed the complexion of his political belief: whether
it was a patriot that thus paraded the steadfast Palais Royal, or a
hireling of a tyrant aristocracy.
Here again the visitor puzzled all conjectures. Arrived opposite the
café, "To the Fall of the Bastille," his glance no sooner seized the
inscription than he snatched off his hat with so hearty a "Bravo!"
that his neighbors echoed the infectious acclamation; but at the very
next turn, perceiving a mountebank's counter presided over by a pretty
citizeness, he paused and repeated the salute with equal vigor. Now,
though the tribute to a pretty face could not justly distinguish
the parties, yet the inspiration and the manner had the taint of
aristocracy. So that those who had listened looked dubious, then
scratched their heads, and finally retired, laughing over their own
mystification.
With a gluttonous chuckle the stranger turned suddenly into a
neighboring passage. Barabant followed, in time to see the lean figure
mount a chance staircase, ascending which on the humor of the moment,
he emerged in turn into a café of unusual magnificence.
Having no money with which to pay a _consommation_ at the tables,
Barabant remained among the spectators. The tall stranger had joined a
group in the middle of the room, whence a florid Chevalier de St. Louis
cried bombastically:
"Citizen Bottle-opener, send me the Citizen Table-wiper!"
"And bring the Citizen Broom," took up another, "to expel this Citizen
Dog!"
"Let the Citizen Crier," added another, with careless scorn, "call the
Citizen My Carriage!"
Amid this persiflage Barabant remained, chafing and angry, realizing
that he had stumbled into that abomination of patriots, a den of
aristocrats.
The purport of all table-to-table addresses was the incompetency of the
National Assembly and the state of anarchy existing since the royal
power had been defied. Although the café was not accessible to the mob,
and was evidently of a certain clientèle, there was a smattering of
unaccustomed guests, who manifested their disapproval of these remarks
by grumbling and even threats.
Barabant at length, losing control of his temper, sprang upon a chair.
"A government," he cried--"yes, a government is what we need. Let us
be frank: the present condition of affairs is an anomaly. It cannot
exist. The Revolution is to-day a farce."
"Anarchy!" "Chaos!" "Bravo!" "Continue!"
"And why?" he went on. "Because it has not gone far enough. Either king
or revolution: the two cannot exist. What we need is the Republic, the
Republic, the Republic!"
The words fell on the room like offal thrown in the midst of ravenous
wolves. A hideous upheaval, a hoarse shout, a multitude of scrambling
forms, and the listeners who had mistaken the drift of his first words
rose in fury. Some one pulled the table from under him. There were
shouts and blows, a confusion of bodies before his eyes, and babel let
loose. In the midst of it he felt himself suddenly enveloped in a pair
of wiry arms and dragged through the mêlée. He struggled, but the grip
that held him was not to be shaken. Leaving behind the shouting, they
passed out into the turning of a corridor, then through another into
quiet and a garden. There his captor, setting him on his feet, drew
back with a smile. Barabant, glancing up, beheld the lank military
figure of an hour before, with his nose tipped in the air in impudent
enjoyment.
"Well, my knight-errant," he said quizzically, "the next time you
preach the Republic, select a Sans-Culotte audience and not a Royalist
café, or there may not be a Dossonville to rescue you."
Barabant smoothed out his clothes, crestfallen, but resumed his dignity.
"From the country!" his rescuer continued, and the amusement gave
place to one of reflectiveness. "Dame! are they already crying for the
Republic outside of Paris?"
"They are. That is," Barabant added, "the masses are done with the
king. The Girondins are not so radical."
"H'm!" Dossonville said for all answer. He stood silent a moment,
wrapped in his own thoughts, before he again questioned him: "And the
Revolution: do you hear such opinions as you heard to-night in the
provinces? Is there no sign of a reaction?"
"No; everything is for more radical measures."
With this answer, Dossonville seemed to dismiss the matter from his
mind. He looked him over again, and a twinkle showing in his eyes, he
asked:
"More enthusiasm than friends, hey?"
Barabant laughed. "True."
"And what are you counting upon doing?"
Barabant remained silent.
"Good--discretion!"
Barabant, determined to shift the inquiry, demanded point-blank:
"What were you doing in a café of aristocrats?"
"What were you?" Dossonville retorted. "There are many ways to serve
the Revolution besides proclaiming it from the tops of tables. Leave me
my ways. Do you think if I were an aristocrat I'd have taken the pains
to save you? Come, young man, don't turn your back on opportunities.
Swallow your pride and confess that there are not many more meals in
sight."
"I am but a day in Paris," Barabant answered; and then, lest he should
seem to have relented: "there are a hundred ways to find a living."
"Can you write? Have you written pamphlets?" Dossonville persisted.
"What would you say to a chance to see that fine eloquence caught in
black and white and circulating in the streets?"
Barabant's face flushed with such a sudden delight that the other
laughingly drew his arm into his and exclaimed:
"Come, I see how it is. Camille Desmoulins is only twenty-nine. It is
the age for the youngsters. Only--" He stopped suddenly. "There are
many degrees of Republicans nowadays. Does your eloquence run in the
line of our valiant radical Marat, or Danton and Desmoulins, or are we
of the school of Condorcet and Roland?"
"I am Girondin," Barabant answered.
"Good." He reflected a moment. "Just the place!"
He started on, and then suddenly stopped, as by habit of caution. "No,
not to-night. Where do you live?"
"Eugène Barabant, Rue Maugout, No. 38." He drew out two letters. "I
have a word of introduction to Roland."
"And the other?"
"To Marat."
"Ah, Marat," Dossonville said, with a sudden cooling. "A strong man
that, and very patriotic."
"I do not intend to present it," Barabant said, seeing the change. He
hesitated a moment, as though to reveal a confidence, while a smile
struggled to his lips. But in the end, resisting the desire, he said
evasively, "It is a measure of protection, in case of danger."
Dossonville scrutinized him sharply, and then, as though reassured by
the frank visage, he said: "Very well; I'll be around to-morrow night.
Try your hand at a polemic or two. Have you a knack of poetry? Satires
are more powerful than arguments. A laugh can trip up a colossus."
"I have done a little verse."
"Who hasn't?" He paused. "You will be discreet? Au revoir!"
He turned on his heel, but immediately returned.
"I forgot. One word of advice."
"Well?"
"Revolutions strike only among the steeples. Take my advice: renounce
publicity and remain obscure."
"But I had rather die in this age than live through another."
"Well, my duty's done," Dossonville answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Then repeating to himself Barabant's last response, he added, "That
sounds well; food for the mob; put it down."
And without more ado, he left him as delighted as though he had just
been elected to the National Convention.
III
CITOYENNE NICOLE
Toward six o'clock the next morning, when la Mère Corniche and her
broom alone were stirring, there appeared at a gabled window that broke
through the crust of the roofs, the figure of a young girl, who, after
a glance down at the quiet courtyard and the windows void of life,
remained to give the final touches to a scattering of golden hair.
The air was still young, and in the skies the multifarious tints of the
dawn had not quite faded as the burly sun bobbed up among the distant
chimney-tops. She ensconced herself in the window, running her hands
with indolent movements through the meshes as though reluctant to leave
the flash and play of the sun amid its lusters. She was young and
pretty, and she knew it, and, with a frank enjoyment, she let the long
locks slip through her fingers or brought them caressingly against her
cheek.
Though from her figure she could not have been more than eighteen, yet
in the poise of her head and in the subtile smile, full of grace and
piquancy, there showed the coquetry of the woman who plans to please
the masculine eye.
Suddenly she sprang back, leaving the window vacant. A moment later
there emerged opposite the thoughtful face of Barabant. Unaware of her
proximity, he swept the courtyard with an indifferent look, and drawing
from his pocket the three sous that alone remained to him, he fell into
a deep meditation.
Presently the sprightly eyes and mischievous profile of the girl
returned, cautiously, as though awaiting a challenge. Then, as in the
abstraction of his mood he continued to be oblivious to her presence,
she advanced to fuller view.
Gradually her curiosity became excited by an evident conflict in his
moods. At one moment he pulled a long, somber face, and at the next
he lapsed into laughter. As human nature cannot endure in silence the
spectacle of someone laughing to himself, the girl, unable longer to
restrain her interest, called to him with that melody which is natural
to the voice of a maiden:
"Well, citoyen, are you going to laugh or cry?"
At her banter, Barabant started up so suddenly that one of the sous
which he had been regarding meditatively slipped from his fingers,
bounded on the roof, rolled along the gutter, and disappeared in the
water-hole.
"Diable! there goes my dinner!"
"How so?" the girl said, repressing her laugh at his long face.
"I had three; one for lunch, one for dinner, and one for some purchases
I intend to make."
"Dame! citoyen, three are not many sous."
Barabant drew himself up proudly. "Plenty, after to-night."
"When your banker returns?"
"Exactly."
"And I have made you lose your dinner: a bad beginning for neighbors,
Citoyen--?"
"Citoyen Eugène Barabant. Citoyenne--?"
"Nicole."
"Nicole--?"
"Heavens, isn't Nicole enough? One name is all we need; besides, it
would take me too long to find out the other."
As she said this, she smiled so unaffectedly that Barabant, forgetting
the pangs of hunger, looked on admiringly.
"You are a philosopher, Nicole. And what do you do--if it is not
indiscreet to ask?"
She understood perfectly the hesitancy, but laughed without a trace of
disconcertion.
"Oh, I work hard; I am a bouquetière. Which reminds me, I must be off
to the flower-market."
However, she lingered a moment. "And you, citoyen?"
"Traveler," Barabant said, with a superb wave of his hand, and then
exploded in laughter at the thought. "Citoyenne, tell me something."
"Speak."
"Have you ever fasted a day?"
"Hundreds of times."
"If you have but one meal in sight, when is the best time to take it?"
"In the middle of the day; something may happen before dinner."
Barabant made a wry face.
"Seriously, how much have you?"
He held up the two sous.
"Two sous, and you speak of buying a meal,--a crumb of bread!"
"Perhaps," Barabant admitted, "meal is an exaggeration."
"Come, you are a good fellow," Nicole said, nodding approvingly. "You
have the right spirit. I have made you lose one dinner; it is only
right that I should make reparation. Will you lunch with me?"
To her amusement, he drew up proudly at the thought of accepting a
favor from her. She smiled at this show of pride, liking it, but
trusting in the bloom and charm of her youth to defeat it. She did not
trust in vain. After a brief conflict which showed clearly the weak
surrender, he ended by smiling in turn.
"Only," he cried, "I accept it as a loan."
"Heavens! but I didn't intend to pay, myself," she protested, well
pleased with her victory. "If you think dinners are to be had only for
pay you are not a Parisian yet."
"In that case, I accept."
"Meet me, then, at eleven o'clock, Place de la République, Citoyen
Barabant."
"I shall be there an hour ahead!"
At the door of the next room she called, "Louison!" drumming quietly
with her fingers. Receiving no answer, she entered. The bed was vacant,
undisturbed. Without surprise, and with even a certain satisfaction at
being freed from the company of her friend, she passed down and out
into the streets on her way to the Marché des Fleurs.
As she went, with many an energetic toss of her head interspersed
with pensive smiles, she turned over in her mind the impressions of
her first encounter, with the confidence of the woman who at the
first exchange of glances feels her power. He had shown his admiration
without timidity, which would have been vexatious, or forwardness,
which would have been unendurable. She liked his show of pride, and
more that he had yielded before the temptation of her eyes. That
tribute sent her straying into the thousand and one pleasurable paths
with which her ardent imagination filled the future.
At the flower-markets her preoccupation was so evident that she
was compelled to run the fire of banter. She bore the ordeal with
equanimity, hurrying away with buoyant step and eyes alert, impatient
for the morning to pass.
She passed along the boulevards, disposing of her cockades among
regular customers, until at length she arrived at her destination, the
Café Procopé. There, mounted on a chair, a short, roly-poly ragamuffin,
with bloated, pouter cheeks and squinting, almond eyes, was reading the
morning bulletins in such thunderous tones that one readily divined
the crier of carriages, whose voice had been trained in the battle of
street sounds.
Among those assembled at the tables, she directed her way to where a
gruff, gaunt man, sunk in a capacious redingote, was heralding her
approach with a look of welcome.
"Good morning, Papa Goursac," she said, slipping into a waiting seat.
"Here's your cockade,--the best, as usual!"
"There, take your drink," he answered, showing her the glass. He roused
himself from his attitude of whimsical inspection, turning to her a
look that belied the stern voice. "Well, and what luck to-day?"
"The best," she said, showing him her lightly laden basket.
"Of course you did not notice the new lodger," said Goursac,
scornfully. His bushy eyebrows and looming beak seemed so grim that
Nicole with difficulty suppressed a laugh.
"Indeed," she said, pretending ignorance to plague him, "is there a new
lodger?"
"Yes, but he's a doctor, old as I am, so he'll not interest you."
"What a bad humor you are in," she said, enjoying his wrath. "As though
you did not interest me!"
"You know what I mean."
Aware of his suspicious scrutiny, she continued. "What a pity! Why
couldn't he have been a young fellow? Ah, mon Dieu, what time is it?"
"Why do you want to know?" growled Goursac. "Whom are you going to
meet?"
"The old doctor, of course," she answered, laughing as she escaped.
As she passed in front, the ragamuffin was still roaring the news.
"Heavens, Jambony," she cried, "there is no need to let the foreigners
know what is taking place!"
"Citoyenne, you exaggerate," the carriage-crier answered; "I am only
whispering."
"Then, my dear Jambony, just think your thoughts. I am sure they will
be loud enough!"
In great good humor, she began to work her way in the direction of the
wrecked Bastille, and perhaps from the very elevation of her spirits,
good luck quickly emptied her basket. Thus freed, she lapsed into the
spectator, flattening her nose against the shop-windows or drifting
lazily from knot to knot of discussion.
All at once, when she was wandering from the thoroughfares among a
tangle of silent, murky alleys, a child's scream brought her to an
attentive halt. The cries redoubled. Without a thought of personal
danger, she plunged recklessly down the alley in the direction of the
appeals. Under the bulging shadow of a balcony a girl was struggling in
the clutches of a mountebank, while, from a box on the ground, a monkey
was adding its shrill chatter to the broil.
At Nicole's charge the man released the girl with an oath and sprang
back against the wall. At the sight of the shriveled-parchment face and
the familiar leer Nicole burst out, in astonishment:
"Ah, Cramoisin, I might have known it was you!" She replaced in her
belt the knife she had drawn, facing him with the whips of her scorn.
"Women are too strong for you, then! You must match your strength with
children. Bravo! my brave fellow, you are the victor at last. Wait
until I sing your praises. You shall become famous, tamer of children!"
"Vixen!" shrieked the mountebank, stung to words by her gadding. He
shook a lean fist at her, crying, "Thy turn'll come!"
"And I who thought you were pining away for love of me!" she continued
mercilessly. "Fickle Cramoisin! There, be off, be off, do you hear, or
I shall be tempted to chastise you!"
Cramoisin, not disdaining the offer of retreat, slung his mountebank's
box on his back and scurried off, the ape on his shoulder chattering
back at them with communicated fear.
Nicole turned. A slip of a girl, half child, half savage, was regarding
her from round, wolfish eyes, shrinking against the wall. "There,
there, ma petite," she said, "there is nothing to cry about. That
Cramoisin is as weak as a leaf; you could have pushed him over with a
finger. And your knife?"
The girl, still sobbing, shook her head.
"Heavens! child, you are not fit to be abroad. There, stop crying, I
tell you. I do not like to hear it." But perceiving that the girl was
thoroughly unnerved, she abandoned her note of command, and, enveloping
her with her arm, said gently: "Come, mon enfant, I promise you there
is nothing more to fear. Cramoisin is as much afraid of me as the fat
Louis of the Citoyen Marat. I'll take you under my protection. You are
nothing but a child; no wonder the brute has frightened you. Come,
what's your name?"
"Geneviève."
"How old?"
"Fifteen."
"But that is almost a woman! Why, I am but eighteen. One must be gay,
that is all, and have a bit of a temper."
Seeing that the girl was recovering, she continued for a while her
light tone. "And where do you live?"
"38 Rue Maugout."
"Impossible! Since when?"
"Two months."
"How curious! And I have never noticed you."
"I am not very big."
"Bah, you are big enough and old enough, only you need some hints.
See there!" With a deft hand she drew in the dress over the hips and
loosened it at the throat. "You have really a good figure, but you
don't know it. You must be coquette before you can be a woman. In
future I'll keep an eye on you. Where do you sleep?"
"In the cellar."
"I thought so. Sleep with me to-night, then; there's room enough. All
right now? I must be going."
Geneviève caught her hand and covered it with kisses.
"There, kiss my cheek," Nicole said, affected by her display of
gratitude. "What a baby! You shall stay with me. Until to-night, then."
All at once she remembered her engagement, and on the moment,
forgetting the new partnership so lightly contracted, she hurried away,
with such good will that she arrived exactly on time. As this was not
to her liking, she screened herself in the crowd, seeking Barabant. She
found him soon, approaching, still immersed in his projected article
and betraying his preoccupation by such scowls and sudden gestures that
the passers-by would have taken him for demented had not the spectacle
been one familiar to their eyes.
"Ah, mon Dieu!" Nicole said to herself, "I thought I'd found a man, and
he turns out a philosopher. Also, he does not seem very much occupied
in looking for me!"
She stepped forward to meet him, saying mischievously: "Well, have you
settled the affairs of the nation? What furor on an empty stomach,
Citoyen Eugène!"
Barabant returned to earth quickly, not a little ashamed at the flights
of his imagination, and his laugh betrayed his discomfiture as he said:
"It helps one to forget the vacancy."
Nicole leading the way, they hurried through the thronged streets,
scenting at every step the inviting odor of soups and stews, until they
arrived at a large tavern, or brasserie, around which was a thick crowd
struggling for admission.
"Have you heard of Santerre?" Nicole said. "A very wise man who has
discovered that the seat of popularity lies in the stomach."
"The Romans placed all the affections there."
"Ah, you've had an education," Nicole said, with a new respect.
"There's Santerre."
Before the entrance a huge mass of a man, boisterous in his hospitality
and his laughter, was distributing enormous hand-shakes.
Nicole saluted him with evident familiarity.
"I have brought you a patriot to dinner, citoyen!"
Santerre winced a bit and grumbled:
"Eh, Nicole, and you have brought yourself along."
"Vive Santerre!" the girl cried, with a laugh. "Citoyen Barabant has
just arrived, and the first thing he asked was to see the famous leader
of the Faubourg St. Antoine."
"At lunch-time, of course," said Santerre, with a shrug. "Pass in and
eat."
Nicole seized Barabant by the hand and entered the restaurant, already
crowded with the self-invited guests of the leader's ready hospitality.
They found a corner table and settled down to a quiet inspection of the
noisy room.
Masons, carters, and laborers preponderated, while a smattering of
young lawyers and journalists circulated from table to table, with
ready hand-shakes, to take up the conversation or clink a glass in
toasts to the dozen subjects most in favor. Above the din of plates and
cutlery, cutting the hum of voices, the toasts emerged sharply.
"To the Bonnets Rouges!"
"To the good Sans-Culottes!"
"À bas les Tyrans!"
"Vive la Constitution!"
"Vive Santerre!"
"Long life to our host!"
At times the Carmagnole, at times some popular ballad of the day, would
start from a corner, and gathering headway, would gradually run through
the noise of the room until, absorbing all other sounds, it ended in a
gale. Whereupon there would be a clatter of knives and glass, shouts of
"Bravo!" laughter, and more drinking.
Barabant was too susceptible a nature not to respond to the magnetism
of such surroundings. His look regained all its ardor of the morning,
until Nicole regarded him with a new interest. He had the long, narrow
forehead of the period, marked with thoughtfulness and curiosity. The
nose was high-bridged, the nostrils were sensitive and dilating with
emotion. The gray eyes were shrewd, kind, gay, and noting, with the
mobility and charm of the enthusiast, but, in their repose, without
that impress of authority and earnestness of purpose which give to the
man of imagination the genius of leadership.
"Come, citoyen," Nicole said, at the end of her inspection, "tell me
something about yourself. I am filled with curiosity."
"Ma foi, Nicole," Barabant answered, "it's not much. I was at
Fontainebleau; I'm now in Paris. I had an uncle who disapproved of my
ideas; he showed me the door, I declared his goods confiscate, and
here I am, not a bit depressed,--with but one debt," he added as an
afterthought.
"Debts are aristocratic; renounce them."
"The trouble is, I can't rid myself of the creditor, though I pay him
over and over."
Nicole raised her glance in surprise, but Barabant added, smiling, "It
is my stomach, and a persistent creditor he is."
Nicole laughed gaily. "There, touch hands," she cried. "You are the
philosopher." Persisting in her inquiry, she continued encouragingly:
"You have a father?"
Barabant smiled. "And a mother, too. And now no more questions, Nicole,
for I shall refuse them."
She drew back with a little movement of pique, but yielding to her
natural moods, she lifted her eyebrows and, with her charming smile,
said with frankness:
"Ah, you are legitimate, then. I have only a mother; that is to say, I
had. She is dead now. I don't remember her. God rest her soul."
A little movement of superstition passed over her face and she crossed
herself. "My father was a sergeant of the line, so they tell me." She
threw out the palms of her hands. "Who knows? It might as well be a
rag-picker, or a prince, for all the good it does me."
"Diable!" Barabant exclaimed, regarding her more closely. "You don't
seem to be cast down."
"Oh, no; it's only this year I've been by myself. I was brought up by
my aunt--Aunt Berthe. What a woman!" She shook her head grimly. "When I
came in late she beat me,--oh, but solidly, firmly." She grimaced and,
with the instinct of acting that is of the people, drew her hand across
her shoulder, as though still smarting under the sting. "And do you
know how it ended?"
"Well, how?"
"It ended by my taking the cane from her one night and laying it over
her. Oh, such a beating! I was striking for old scores. Aïe! aïe! After
that, you understand, I couldn't return."
"I understand."
"So I took a room next to Louison."
Barabant raised his eyebrows in question.
"Louison? She's a comrade. You will see her." She stopped. "We are
good friends, only I--well--I don't know." Nicole, who conversed
abundantly with her shoulders, raised them again. "When you're rich you
can choose; but with us, we take what's nearest. We must have some one
to gossip with, to weep with, to laugh with, to confide a little in,
and so we take what we can get. That's how it is." Suddenly she halted
suspiciously. "Are you a patriot?" she asked point-blank.
"You'd have thought so last night." Barabant, remembering the drubbing
he had escaped the night before, grinned and nodded. At his description
of the café Nicole showed great interest.
"You said that, and escaped with your life from that den of
aristocrats!" she exclaimed, in horror, for she had the popular idea
that aristocrats were ogres and inhuman monsters. At the first words
descriptive of his rescue she cried:
"Dossonville; beyond a doubt, Dossonville!"
"What, do you know him?" said Barabant. "Who and what is he?"
"Now you have asked me a question. What is Dossonville?" Suddenly she
became serious. "He is a mystery to me and to more than me. Frankly, I
do not know his party, and don't believe any one else does. He is here
and there, with the patriots one moment and the court the next; but
whether he is acting for one side or for neither, no one knows. And he
rescued you!" She meditated a moment. "That sounds like a patriot; but
then, what was he doing in such a place?"
The crowd became more boisterous as the wine-jugs grew lighter; seeing
which, Nicole rose and made a sign to him to follow. In the front room
she stopped before a vat on which, his huge body astride, Santerre was
bandying jests with the crowd. Nicole, approaching, whispered:
"Is it for to-night?"
The brewer affected not to understand her.
"Look here, my big fellow," she said, with the familiarity of the day,
"do you want me to cry it from the housetops? Will you understand me
now?"
"I don't know when it is to be, or if it will ever be." He sank his
voice. "The leaders are wavering; only the tocsin can tell."
"We assemble by sections?"
Santerre nodded.
Nicole, only half satisfied, turned away.
Barabant, who had overheard enough to form a conjecture, kept his
counsel; but Nicole, approving his discretion, imparted the information.
"They say we are to storm the Tuileries. But every one hangs back. They
are in a panic at the last moment."
"Why, it is folly; think of the National Guard!" Barabant exclaimed.
"I see well you have just arrived. The National Guard, indeed! We are
the National Guard. It is only the Swiss we have to fear."
They had gained the right bank of the Seine, and paused from time to
time to watch the water-carriers filling their casks in the river, and
the loiterers angling sleepily in the shadow of the boats.
Barabant, despite the fires of patriotic fervor, had for some time
forgotten his mission in the contemplation of the fresh cheeks and the
free carriage of his companion, more and more beguiled from his task
of righting the wrongs of the nation by this gipsy of the streets who
traversed the rough paths of fortune with such perfect bonhomie.
Nicole, happening to look up, met an unmistakable fixture of gaze,
and divined the workings of his mind. She withdrew slightly and said
reprovingly: "Not too fast, Citoyen Barabant; we are not in the
provinces."
Barabant defended himself.
"My dear Nicole, I have committed no offense. I have done nothing but
wish. Judge my acts; my thoughts are not offenses."
"You are not slow at an answer, citoyen," said Nicole, amused. "There,
take my hand if you wish. Only, not too fast."
He took her hand, and together they went joyfully through Paris,
laughing like two children of the people.
"Barabant, I like you," she said from time to time. "You are a good
fellow." Once she added naïvely, "You know, all the same, it is lonely
at times." Then, with a laugh, "Allons, comrade!"
She led him through the boulevards, pointing out celebrities at
every step, showing him the cafés, Feuillantes or Jacobin. They were
constantly halted by the sudden assembly of a crowd to listen to some
singer perched on a chair above their shoulders, intoning his ballads.
Presently Nicole said: "Barabant, do you not feel something in the
atmosphere--something extraordinary?"
He sharpened his wits and gradually began to distinguish currents
in the crowd, and it seemed to him that there was some subtle
communication by furtive glances of inquiry and nods of intelligence.
"I believe it will be for to-night," she whispered.
He felt in her hand something nervous and exalted.
"Were you at the taking of the Bastille?" he asked.
"Yes. Wait till you see the women of Paris!" Her eyes grew large as
they lost themselves in recollection. Then suddenly she added: "But you
haven't seen the gardens of the Palais Royal, and the tree of the green
cockades from which Desmoulins called us to arms!"
Leading him into the historic garden, she showed him the chestnut-tree
surrounded by a crowd of curious seekers, many of whom snatched up the
leaves for mementos.
Everywhere were swarms of children, shrieking high, shrill notes,
running and leaping, dodging in and out of the most sedate groups, and
stopping occasionally to mimic the swollen front and bombastic arm
of the hundred and one orators about whom swirled a hundred and one
eddies. Newsboys, racing ahead of their competitors, cried hoarsely
the latest bulletins; while in their wake improvised orators mounted
on tables and announced the news amid a gale of comments. Through
the throng a score of flower-girls twisted their way, calling their
patriotic cockades, nodding familiarly to Nicole, who from all sides
received salutations of deputies and orators.
"You are well known," said Barabant, surprised at the range of her
acquaintance.
"Pardi, I should hope so," she answered, with a proud toss of her
head. "Bouquetières are useful. We go everywhere, see everything. We
are the scouts of the Republic. I have influence, Barabant; I'll push
you ahead," she added, with a determined nod. "Can you speak from the
tribune?"
"I have done so."
"Good. You must go to the club. Speak out. Do not be afraid. I adore
fire and spirit!" She looked at him critically. "You have the eyes and
the lips of the orator. Yes, I'm sure you can speak."
Barabant thrilled at the inspiration in her eyes, and some of the
fierce, exulting spirit, the unconquerable gaiety and daring of this
gamine, passed swiftly into his soul. Filled with the bombastic daring
and sublime confidence of the patriot, he cried: "Give me the chance;
give but the chance! They shall hear me--and listen!"
Nicole had a wild impulse to embrace him, but, restraining her
enthusiasm, she contented herself with passing from his hand to his arm.
"How old are you?" she asked all at once.
"I am twenty-four," Barabant said, with importance.
"Why, you are a child."
"Camille Desmoulins is not thirty."
"True."
"And what is six years?"
"I hadn't thought of it," admitted Nicole. "I am eighteen; but in Paris
at eighteen there is not much unlearned. Allons, les enfants." She drew
up to his side, hanging a little on his arm. "Barabant, you are a lucky
fellow," she said mischievously.
Barabant, who perfectly understood her allusion to mean lucky in
meeting her, drew her closer as they elbowed their way out of the
throng. He bent his head to scrutinize her, while Nicole not too
consciously accepted the gaze, confident in herself: she was young and
she was a Parisian. Her features were rather saucy than regular; her
figure, though full and graceful, was perhaps too perfect for eighteen,
when a certain slenderness is a future guaranty. But the eyes of the
young man do not look into the future. Barabant saw only--giving color
to her cheeks, a glow to the eye, and a spring to the foot--that bloom
which is of youth and which speaks of eagerness and impatience to
embrace life.
Suddenly Nicole, seeking an interruption to this scrutiny, which,
though delightful, had become embarrassing, exclaimed, "There's Louison
now." She made a movement as though to free her arm, immediately
checking it.
Barabant, looking up, beheld the high eyebrows, the starting eyes, and
the curious, thin smile of the flower-girl who had spoken to him the
night before.
She sent Nicole a greeting from her fingertips, and then perceiving
Barabant, she accosted him with a smile of tolerant amusement.
"Why, it's my little man from the country!" Nodding, she passed, with
the exclamation, "Bien vrai, you don't lose any time!"
"What, you have already met her?" Nicole exclaimed, disengaging her
arm, suddenly quieted and sobered.
"In the Rue St. Honoré, last night."
A frown, swift as a thunderbolt, passed over Nicole's forehead. She
stopped, extended her hand, and said curtly, "I must go; good day."
Barabant looked at her in dismay.
"What has happened? What have I done?"
She shook her head, and without further explanation disappeared.
IV
BREWINGS OF THE STORM
When Barabant had groped his way up the tortuous ascent, he was
surprised to find his door open, sending a feeble glow over the
remainder of his journey. He crossed the threshold on tiptoe, and, to
his amazement, beheld a man, in the uniform of the National Guard,
stretched out upon his bed, and two lank legs that, over-lapping, were
perched on the footboards. He came forward, advanced another step, and
recognized Dossonville.
Barabant, believing him to be shamming, went softly to the farther
corner and installed himself to wait. But the steady, tranquil
breathing of the sleeper soon convinced him. With a sudden inspiration,
he stole to the threshold, grasping the handle of the door. The next
moment there thundered upon the slumberer the cry:
"Arrest him! The aristocrat!"
As though propelled from a catapult, the lank form in one bound shot
over the end of the bed, threw two chairs in front of him as a
rampart, snatched out his sword, and beheld, in this bellicose posture,
no horrid band of Jacobins, but the lithe figure of Barabant, laughing
silently, with folded arms.
"Tonnerre de Dieu! Why did you do that?"
Dossonville returned the sword to the scabbard, pushed aside the
rampart, and extended his hand, saying, "I was asleep; serves me right;
but you have a rude manner of jesting."
"I did not suspect your conscience was so uneasy," Barabant said,
retaining the quizzical smile.
"Oho!"
With his lips in this startled oval, Dossonville halted. His eyes
contracted into slits as he said dryly, "So that was a ruse."
"If you like."
"Hello! it was well conceived. Tiens, tiens, tiens!" His eyes continued
their scrutiny. "I have, perhaps, not done justice to your acumen. My
compliments and my excuses."
He swung his bonnet in a long, awkward, trailing swoop across his feet.
Barabant executed a bow of equal assurance.
Dossonville returned to uprightness with a snap of his heels, and a
certain asperity rang in the next question.
"And why did you deem the experiment necessary?"
"Before intrusting my safety I prefer to reassure myself."
"You saw that at the cry of 'aristocrats' I sprang to my guard."
"I said 'the aristocrat.'"
"I understood, 'Arrest him, aristocrats!'"
The two men, Dossonville cool, Barabant amused, measured looks, until,
dismissing the subject with a motion of his arm, Dossonville seated
himself.
"Well, what do they say of me?"
Barabant, who did not intend to surrender his vantage, straddled his
chair, rested his arms on the back, and, looking him magisterially in
countenance, answered:
"Citoyen Dossonville, you seem to be a mystery. No one knows where to
place you. You consort with patriots and traitors alike."
Dossonville, facing this accusation, appeared to reflect a moment.
"That's true. I do not hide it--from patriots." His voice gave a
meaning inflection to the ending; then he added, irritably: "There are
more ways than one of serving the nation. I repeat, leave me mine." He
broke off. "Have you written anything? Give it to me."
Barabant extended the precious manuscript. He took it, but before
spreading it upon his knee, he said: "After all, you are right. I have
a way to convince you. You shall see. But first for this."
He began to read, with approval. "Good--good"; "very good"; "excellent."
At the end he brought his hand down upon his knee with a slap.
"Tonnerre de Dieu, that is well put!"
Barabant, who was soaring in the seventh heaven, made a superhuman
effort and forced back a smile. Dossonville, much amused, tapped him on
the shoulder.
"Come, it is not a crime to be pleased with one's self."
"You think it will do?" Barabant stammered.
"Splendid! And now to convince this suspicious republican." He eyed him
a moment, enjoying the surprise his next words would cause. "Suppose
you return with me to Santerre."
Barabant, astounded at this acquaintance with his doings, dropped his
jaw.
"So, do you think I would employ you without some knowledge of your
actions?" He enjoyed for a moment Barabant's embarrassment. "Come,
and Santerre shall reassure you." At the door he paused, cast a
rapid glance at the impoverished fittings, and drew out his purse.
"Republican or not, the essential thing is to dine." Then evading the
young fellow's thanks, he led the way into the city.
It was now toward twilight. The streets were choked with laborers
returning home. In the air was an unwonted stir, a muttering, defiant
and eager, as the crowd discussed openly, with impassioned questions,
the prospective attack on the Tuileries.
"It is for to-night, sure?"
"For to-night, yes, at the tocsin."
"It's true, is it, the National Guards are coming over?"
"They've armed the Marseillais."
"Who?"
"Pétion."
"Vive Pétion!"
Hundreds of National Guards fraternized with the crowd, reassuring
them. Occasionally was to be seen the glimmer of a weapon, a scythe, a
cutlass, or a half-concealed dagger. Questioners stopped them from time
to time.
"Is it true, we are to attack to-night?"
Dossonville shrugged his shoulders.
"If the tocsin sounds you are. That is all I know."
From time to time there were new accessions in the streets; until, as
the two approached the Rue St. Antoine, they were forced to beg their
way at every step.
Dossonville, his head flung back, reviewed the throng from his great
height.
"What a people! Is there anything they will not dare?" he exclaimed.
"Brave people! Sublime people!"
They passed through a side street, deserted except for some straggler
hastening toward the human torrent. Dossonville, in a burst of
confidence, laid his hand on his companion's shoulder.
"That was good to see. I, Citoyen Barabant--I take nothing seriously.
Men, individuals, are but blind little animals wriggling for a day or
so. I have seen too much of selfishness, of wickedness, of deceits
and hypocrisy, to be moved by human motives. Nothing really matters,
nothing is serious. But when I see such a sight as that, a whole people
rising with one accord, ah, then that thrills me; yes, I am moved!"
Barabant was silent, more perplexed concerning his companion than
ever, and in this reflective mood he persevered, resolving to be on
his watch for artifices and tricks. About the brasserie of the famous
brewer the throng was massed so tightly that the two companions would
have stuck thirty feet away, unable to turn, had not Santerre, from an
upper window, perceived the lanky form of Dossonville. The moment his
eye fell upon that appealing figure, he started up, as though awaiting
him, and hurrying down-stairs, appeared at the entrance, where, by dint
of command and abuse, he managed to open a passage, through which the
crowd disgorged them.
Barabant, at a nod from Dossonville, remained in an anteroom listening
to the compressed rumble of the crowd, that reached him through the
open window on the warm, suffocating air. He did not have long to wait.
Santerre soon reappeared, excited and red with the emotion communicated
to his fleshy head. Dossonville, more tranquil, called him to them.
"I must take a message to the Bonnet Rouge," he said. "It is urgent.
So I must leave you--only, I do not forget." He glanced at him, adding
slyly: "Is there anything you care to ask of the Citoyen Santerre?"
Barabant, gulping down his confusion, cried: "Nothing."
"Good. Then you are no longer afraid you are dealing with an agent of
the perfidious Pitt?"
Barabant seized the occasion to vanish through the side exit, carrying
with him the memory of a chuckle.
* * * * *
Nicole no sooner had dismissed Barabant than she regretted the act.
Her intuition had warned her that caprice was necessary to counteract
her bonhomie, which might have produced in the young man an assurance
of facile conquest. But, left to her own devices, to her astonishment
she found the solitude oppressive. She made an effort to dispel the
ennui by seeking Goursac; but no sooner had she perceived him than,
apprehending the banter in which he was privileged to indulge, she
halted and then turned away.
Toward evening, according to her custom, she joined Louison in search
of supper.
"What have you done with your companion?" the girl asked at once.
"I dismissed him long ago," Nicole answered carelessly: from that
quarter she welcomed attack. "A man interferes with the business."
"How did you meet him?"
"Why, I thought you knew! He has taken the room across from us!"
"Ah, indeed. He seems interesting." She took her companion's arm and
said abruptly, "I have taken a fancy to him, so garde à toi!"
Nicole, not certain whether she spoke in jest or in earnest, abandoned
uneasily the conversation, saying, "Where do we dine to-night?"
"At the Bonnet Rouge."
"Why there?"
"It is the rendezvous for the Marseillais. If there is to be an attack,
we'll have the news."
"Do you think it will be for to-night?"
"Yes; there is something in the air that makes me think so."
Their way soon involved them in a network of dusky, gaping streets. On
each side somber walls, peopled with dim, curious flecks of headgear,
strained upward and back in a bulging effort to draw down a little more
of the allotted strip of sky. The windows of taverns, on the ground
floor, were beginning to redden and to cast faint streaks across the
black, oozing streets; but the frugal inhabitants of upper stories, in
deference to the price of candles, still hung on the sills, causing
the evening to resound with the nervous chatter of window-to-window
speculation.
At times the tension of conjecture and discussion would be broken by
the bass voice of a passing laborer thundering forth,
"Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira!"
Above the soprano of women's voices and the thin piping of children
responded feverishly:
"La liberté s'établira:
Malgré les tyrans tout réussira!"
They found the cabaret beginning to fill up by twos and
threes--workingmen for the most part: water-carriers divesting
themselves of their barrels at the door with a sigh of contentment;
wood-carriers, with relaxed limbs, slipping gratefully into the hard
wooden benches; women of the markets, corpulent, quick-tongued,
smelling of onion and garlic; erstwhile actors still with the strut of
the stage; an occasional bourgeois in misfortune; a handful of gamins,
impudent and witty--all discussing feverishly the projected attack.
The two girls, perceiving the congestion in the outer room, elbowed
their way to where, by an inner door, a waiter of exceptional but
broken height was scanning the crowd with an eye to orders.
"Well, Citoyen Boudgoust, what news?"
At Louison's question, he showed the palms of his hands, finally
volunteering:
"Santerre is to send us word."
"There's room beyond?"
"You are going to eat?"
"Of course," Louison said impatiently, as he barred the way. "Besides,
mon ami, don't you think we know what's going on?"
He allowed them to pass, grumbling, "Every one comes to talk; no one to
eat."
In the farther hall the crowd was thinner and composed mostly of
Marseillais and the National Guard, who looked up furtively, until half
a dozen greetings removed their suspicions.
"Good evening, Citoyenne Nicole."
In her astonishment, she turned to find Geneviève.
"What are you doing here, child?" she cried.
"I am listening."
"You are no longer afraid?"
"We are to attack," the girl said proudly, and her eyes snapped with
defiant ardor.
"Bravo, little one!" laughed Nicole. "Sit with us, then."
She turned to Louison in explanation.
"She is my protégée who is coming to me for lessons."
Louison nodded without surprise and turned her slow, restrained gaze
on the room, while the eyes of Nicole, full of enthusiasm, leaped from
group to group in rapid, eager scrutiny, resting finally on a knot of
Marseillais near by. One man dominated these uncouth, bristling, living
arsenals--a squat figure, sprawling under the grotesque shadows of
the lamp, which further distorted his huge bulk and bullet head. One
ungainly, crooked hand leaned in ponderous support upon the table; the
other was flourished above him in frantic gestures, magnetic, absurd,
comic, and terrible, as he harangued his comrades, who acclaimed his
exhortations with shouts that burst above the ceaseless roar of the
room.
"They are not very coquette," Nicole said critically, "and not very
clean."
"Ah, but think how they have marched, all the way from Marseilles!"
Geneviève cried, in protest.
"You know them, then?" Nicole asked, astonished at this side of the
girl.
"Yes."
"And that bear of a man in the center, do you know his name?"
"Yes," she answered, with a slight disconcertion. "He is the Citoyen
Javogues."
"He looks like an ogre."
"Wait till you hear him."
"Really!" answered Nicole, with a smile which threw the girl into
confusion.
At this moment a rumble reached them from the outer room. Boudgoust,
profoundly dejected, appeared, followed by the insouciant figure of
Dossonville. Instantly the room was filled with cries.
"What news?"
"What news from Santerre?"
"We attack?"
"For to-night?"
Dossonville, facing the eager, breathless gallery, shrugged his
shoulders, uttering but one word:
"Postponed."
A roar of rage and disappointment drowned his voice.
"Citoyens!" he cried, "I am but announcing the decision; I did not
make it. The tyrants are intrenched. Mandat is in ambush at the Pont
Neuf and the Arcade St. Jean. The leaders have decided the moment is
unfavorable."
The storm of protests increased.
"More delay! Enough of waiting!"
"Mon Dieu, we are not cowards!"
"And the Prussians?"
"Hé, yes, are we to wait for the foreign bandits?"
"Javogues! Javogues!"
"Javogues, lead us!"
"Lead us, Javogues!"
Nicole felt through the child at her side a sudden trembling and
drawing of breath. Then into the center of the suddenly quiet room
lurched the squat figure, bareheaded, bare-armed, bare-chested but
for a tattered shirt. He seemed rooted to the floor, like a mound
transformed to human shape, quivering in the primeval mold and passions.
"Well, yes, I'll lead you!" The huge fist, describing a circle, crashed
upon a table. "We're here to fight. We'll wait no longer. Hesitate and
bandy words and deliberate whoever wants--we are not such! We have
suffered and ached. We have been crushed to the ground, saddled to the
earth,--we, human beings, like cattle, and we remember our wrongs.
Fear? Neither God nor men do we fear. We came here, we, marching from
Marseilles,--all the way from Marseilles,--to wipe out the accursed
tyrants, to make things go faster, and, by God, they shall go!"
Nicole saw the hideous face transformed, lighted up with the glow of
martyrdom. From lungs of leather there burst a welcoming response.
Dossonville, facing the fanatic without a change of position, waited
imperturbably the lull. Geneviève was breathing hard, in her excitement
seizing the hand of her protectress.
"Bravo, patriot, you are eloquent!" came at last the calm answer of
Dossonville. "But what can you do? March and be made into beefsteaks?
The people, it is true, are hungry, but not a step will the sections
move without Santerre. Will you march alone? What say you?"
"I say they are traitors who would halt us!" burst forth Javogues,
glancing at the man who dared to jest with him.
"Meaning Santerre?"
"Meaning those who bear false messages. I don't like these manners. Who
are you?"
"My friend," Dossonville said, with cool scorn of the threatening
throng, "you are curious."
"Aristocrat!"
"Am I?"
"I say you are!"
"Indeed!"
"You will not answer?"
"Certainly! Citoyen Dossonville, at present lieutenant of the Section
des Bonnes Nouvelles, in the past soldier, sailor, actor, innkeeper, a
bit of everything except the law and the church. Citoyen Boudgoust,"
he continued, shifting his head just enough to bring into range the
apathetic waiter, "before this fire-eater is at my throat, come, vouch
for me!"
The hang-down head wabbled a moment on the bent shoulders.
"Yes, yes, a good patriot, Citoyen Javogues, and an eater of little
aristocrats."
"As all good patriots should be!" retorted Dossonville, gravely.
"There, citoyen, good patriots should not quarrel when there are so
many tyrants to be digested. There is my hand--touch!"
Javogues stared at the proffered hand a moment stolidly, drunkenly,
then deliberately folded his arms. A murmur of dissent gathered volume.
"Comrade, you are wrong!"
"Give him your hand!"
"Aye, touch together!"
Above the outburst the voice of Dossonville rose acridly.
"Dame! mon ami, you bring strange manners from Marseilles."
"I bring something else."
"And that is--"
"The way to tell a traitor."
"And that is--"
"By the look in his eyes!" Raising his fist, the Marseillais lurched
forward with the angry shout of "Spy!"
A dozen men rushed to separate them, while the Marseillais, echoing
the accusation of their leader, surged furiously forward. Louison
and Nicole, with a common impulse, seized Dossonville, and in the
confusion drew him into the hall and out by a rear entrance into the
cool of the night.
"Thanks, my dears!" he cried, once free of the turmoil, nonchalant and
flippant as ever. "It is always difficult to find the right word on
which to retreat with dignity. You saved me the trouble. What! it is
you, Louison and Nicole? Diable! if it were only one I could offer my
eternal devotion--for a week."
"Citoyen," cried Nicole, reprovingly, "you were wrong to bait him. You
have gained an enemy."
"On the contrary," Louison interposed, and strangely on her cold
face there was a flash of admiration. "Citoyen Dossonville, you were
splendid!"
"No, I was a fool," he said. "It is very stupid that some men must be
at each other's throats from the first glance. Diable! I have a feeling
this fellow will bother me some day. However, it will add a little
interest to these quiet times. Au revoir--I must be off. If I stay I
shall be falling in love with both of you. What good would that do?
Thanks, and good night!"
In the distance his footsteps grew faint, while for a time the gay
chorus of the Carmagnole told of his passage.
Nicole, leaving Louison, sought Geneviève, and, with a desire to
reconnoiter, struck out through the now quiet Faubourg toward the Hôtel
de Ville. There, all was animation with the arrival of the delegates
from the forty-eight sections, assembling to deliberate upon a plan of
action, while from time to time messengers passed like streaks down the
steps and across the crowd, leaving the disturbance of their trail on
the surface.
They passed along the Seine, where the river, as though, too, at the
end of the day it sought its rest, lay still and black, shot across
with faint reflections. They arrived at the Tuileries only to be barred
passage by a patrol. Everywhere as they made the rounds they found
the palace guarded and prepared; while a hundred other scouts passed
ceaselessly to and fro, examining the frowning walls, grim in the
shadow of night.
A dozen rumors were current: the palace was filled with Swiss and
Chevaliers du Poignard; there were cannons masked at every point; the
windows were protected with screens of oak; the court were dancing
inside, drinking to the white cockades, as they had done at Versailles.
Others affirmed that the city was to be set on fire from the four
quarters; that the king had fled; that the National Assembly was to
be arrested. Nicole, her curiosity satisfied and wearying of these
wild rumors, returned home. At the Faubourg St. Antoine they found
everything tranquil, and retired for the night. It was then half-past
ten.
In their room Geneviève hazarded the question for which Nicole had
waited with amused patience.
"Tell me, Nicole, what did you think of him?"
"Of whom?"
"Of the Citoyen Javogues. Was I not right?"
"He frightens me," Nicole said frankly. "He had the air of a butcher--a
madman. Well, how shall I express it? He made me tremble, almost with a
premonition of danger."
"Ah, you cannot understand him," Geneviève protested. "To me he is
heroic!"
"What a little Jacobin!" Nicole said, with a smile. Without attaching
further importance to what she considered the whim of a child, she
added: "Well, mon enfant, here is your room. The half of it is yours
for as long as you want it."
She passed to the window, casting a longing glance at the dark window
opposite. Surprised at Geneviève's silence, she turned, a little
provoked. The child was crying.
"Dear Geneviève!" she cried, springing to her side and taking her in
her arms. "Don't try to thank me; I understand."
But the girl, through her sobs, murmured again and again, "Thank you,
ah, thank you!"
"But it is I who am thankful," Nicole protested. "You bring me
something to love and to care for. I was getting used to solitude,
which is dangerous."
Checking her thanks, she snuffed the candle, stretching out upon the
bed beside the girl.
"Yes, it is bad for one to be always alone," she said.
Geneviève timidly covered her hands with kisses.
"No, no, kiss me on the cheek," Nicole said. "And now, if you are going
to obey, go right to sleep."
The child nestled closer, drawing Nicole's arm about her. The embrace
seemed strange to Nicole, and, without quite understanding why, she
sought to draw her arm away.
V
THE TAKING OF THE TUILERIES
Boom! Boom!
All at once Nicole and Geneviève found themselves on their feet in the
middle of the dark room. Through the open window there fell upon their
ears a wild metal shriek, hoarse, furious, angry, that spoke of fire
and of the dungeon--the boom of the tocsin.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Nicole bounded to the window. Below she beheld startled heads in white
night-caps scattered down the length of the walls. As one dog wakes the
pack, another and another bell took up the call, till from every point
of the horizon broke forth the jangle and clang of the iron throats of
Paris.
Below, a few tiny cries rose through the murmur. Across the roofs came
the thin shrieks of a woman. Lights began to appear, forms clad in
night-dress. Suddenly across the court tore into the night Barabant's
frenzied voice.
"To arms! to arms!"
As though awaiting the signal, there burst upon the ear the rumbling
of drums, the scattered popping of firearms, calls and answering calls
flung from roof to roof.
"To arms, citoyens, to arms!"
A frenzy passed over Nicole. She leaned far out, and gathering her
voice, echoed:
"To arms!"
She bounded back into the room, knocking over the chair, snatched up
her cloak, bounded to the window to cry "To arms!" crashed down the
stairs, dragging Geneviève, flung out of the blind passage, bumping and
bruising her shoulders, down and out into the streets.
From every doorway figures shot forth and passed, running toward the
north. The two girls, at top speed, joined the crowd. They passed a
woman with a torch, whose hair stood out in long streams against the
racing; la Mère Corniche hobbling along as fast as her old legs would
take her; families of five and six running in packs, panting and
silent, while beneath, above, about, from disgorging cellars, from
loud-flung open windows, from every bell the city writhed in nightmare.
Distancing their companions, they arrived among the first before the
brasserie of Santerre, where the Quinze-Vingts were assembling,
forming quickly into ranks. From one window Jambony, the crier, in
an enormous red cap, was feeding pikes to a hundred outstretched
hands. The arrival of fresh torches caused the walls to loom up like
lurid cliffs, sparkling in spots where a window-pane blazed back the
reflection. From the windows flattened faces with black-encircled eyes
looked down,--children too young, men and women too old, to survive in
the press below: unhuman faces of unhuman beings, like a multitude of
rats driven to shelter by the influx of a torrent.
Below, the black mass surged in, spattered, under the glow of the
torches, with the red of the liberty-caps, while two banners hung like
huge blurs above the tossing surface of pikes and weapons. The noise
was deafening, the confusion beyond control. Men rushed in and out,
their arms flung wide and high, bellowing:
"Death to the tyrants!"
"Death to the fat Louis!"
A slip of a girl, clinging on a window-sill, harangued the mob; a
fishwife, astride her husband, comic and furious, beat the air and
screamed to the crowd to dye the Seine red. Hags with threatening fists
shrieked themselves into a frenzy:
"To the Tuileries! To the Tuileries!"
Some, foaming, overcome with their passions, collapsed on the ground.
The anger of the mob against the queen gathered at times in bursts and
shouts:
"Death to Mme. Veto!"
"Death to the Austrian!"
Unthinkable obscenities were coupled with her name and tossed from eddy
to eddy. The Marseillais, gathering in a body, dominated the tumult
with the swelling chords of their battle hymn that on their voices
became a chant of carnage and a thing of terror.
It was more than a mob: it was the populace in eruption. All the
human passions and emotions were there, the basest and the noblest.
There were the scum--the lepers, the beggars, and the criminals
diffused among the zealots, the fanatics, and the idealists. There
were the frankly curious and the adventurous, and those with hatred
and vengeance in their hearts. There was youth, warm-blooded and
chivalrous, stirred by visions, and old age impatient to see the
dawn--all hoarse and all clamorous to march.
The order did not come. For an hour they waited, trembling for the
word. The uproar subsided a little. The torches began to drop out:
there were moments of darkness when one could hardly distinguish the
faces about. The cries to advance changed to inquiries. Boudgoust
brought back the report that Pétion, the mayor, was a captive, held as
a hostage in the Tuileries.
Santerre, the Goliath, passed among them, distributing hand-shakes,
reassuring them, counseling patience. The Assembly would meet and
summon Pétion to its bar and the court would not dare detain him. Some
listened, half satisfied; others, the Marseillais specially, cried
out for action. They waited still another hour and a half. The first
outburst had seemingly exhausted the populace: they remained quietly,
awed at the immensity of their daring. Many, tiring of the long vigil
on foot, imitated Nicole and Geneviève and stretched out upon the
pavements, forming little shallows throughout the length of the street.
A few melted away to seek sleep or food. No more torches were lighted.
The few that spluttered on became pale and effaced before the drab of
the morning. An ashen glow stole over the street. Then the army that
had huddled through the night roused itself, shook itself, gathered
spirit and anger and again clamored to advance.
Santerre, besieged by the eager, hesitated. He sent off a band of
pikemen and then the Marseillais, but the rest he held irresolutely.
Suddenly a cry started up from the outskirts of the crowd. A tall man
was seen running toward them with outstretched hands, trying to pierce
the crowd that closed around him. A great shout went up:
"The news! The news!"
On the outskirts a hundred hands were flung up, then a thousand. The
sound of a mighty cry could be heard indistinguishable, rumbling,
gathering volume, sweeping over the crowd.
"Pétion is free!"
"Pétion is at the Hôtel de Ville!"
Santerre hesitated no longer. He descended from his brasserie and gave
the signal. The enormous mass started, moving swiftly, consuming its
way like a glacier. A scullion, with the sudden converging impulse
toward comradeship that now permeated the throng, sought anxiously for
a familiar face.
A pikeman from a group, seeing his trouble, called out:
"Hé, comrade, you seek friends. We are your brothers. March with us."
In measure, as they swarmed toward the Tuileries, fresh reports came
back. Mandat had been summoned. The artillery at the Pont Neuf had been
withdrawn. Mandat was at the Hôtel de Ville. Mandat had fallen before
the vengeance of the crowd.
They hastened forward and rolled into the Place de la Grève. It was
then seven o'clock in the morning. There, where they expected the order
to attack, they were compelled again to wait. When they clamored they
were told that they were delaying for the Faubourg St. Marceau, which
was to join them at the Pont Neuf. Then these hordes, who had passed
the night in suspense, in the midst of rumors and counterrumors, sent
up a great shout of anger:
"Treachery!"
The populace that could dare anything could not stand suspense. A panic
was imminent; but firmer spirits began to exhort them. On all sides
knots of men flung one of their number into the air, where, from the
shoulders of a comrade, witty, brilliant, and magnetic, he calmed the
crowd with laughter.
Nicole and Geneviève, circulating from group to group, were halted by a
familiar voice, and beheld, aloft the giant shoulders of Javogues, the
ardent figure of Barabant addressing the throng.
"Peace, good, kind, gentle, loyal citizens," he was saying mockingly,
"you will disturb the royal slumbers. Why such impatience? The Austrian
cannot see you at such an hour. You are forgetting etiquette!" A roar
of laughter showed him his ground. "I assure you, aristocrats will
not fight before breakfast, before they are shaved and powdered and
dressed. Patience, my Sans-Culottes; we do not want to stab them in
their beds; give them time to sleep and breakfast, that we may show
them how Sans-Culottes can fight. They are not Sans-Culottes; only
Sans-Culottes can fight with empty stomachs!
"For shame, citizens; one does not grumble in the face of danger. Look
about you. The moment is sublime. You who have felled the Bastille, you
who brought Capet back from Versailles--you are now to strike the great
blow for freedom, and you grumble. What matters it if we have waited
twenty hours or twenty days, if we may see such an event? Who would not
rather die at such a moment than live in any age or in any condition
the world has ever known? Citizens, the moment is sublime; be ye also
sublime!"
He slid to the ground, amid uproarious approval, satisfied and elate.
Javogues, the Atlas, bellowed out, "That's the way to talk; he is
right! Vive la Nation!"
"Vive le Citoyen Barabant!"
Barabant, recognizing the voice of Nicole, turned, while the crowd,
eagerly catching up his name, saluted it with cheers.
"Bravo the Parisian!"
The second voice was Louison's. The two girls, each armed with a
cutlass, sent him their applause over the crowd. But, while the frank
enthusiasm of Nicole inspired him, there was something in the tolerant
smile of Louison that seemed to mock his elation. Before he could reach
them, the crowd, abandoning the cries of treachery, exploded in anger
at the Faubourg St. Marceau.
"Fine patriots!"
"What the devil are they doing?"
"We do not need them; to the Tuileries without them!"
"Give us news of them!"
"Citoyens, I'll bring you news," Barabant retorted. "A little patience
and you shall know of the Faubourg St. Marceau."
He returned through the chafing multitude, and departed down the
Rue St. Honoré as fast as his legs could carry him. At the Place
du Carrousel the mob was besieging the entrance to the Tuileries,
clamoring for admittance. As he hesitated, the gate was flung open and
the mass, with the quickness of gunpowder seeking an outlet, crashed
in. Barabant, all else forgotten, hurled himself forward in a blind
endeavor to reach the court. He tripped and fell, and before he could
gain his feet the mob had passed him.
There had been not a moment of hesitation. They rushed into the trap,
heeding neither the windows, bristling with muskets, that confronted
them nor the walls that hemmed them in. Leaping and shouting, they ran
to the vestibule at the end. There they saw a mass of red that colored
it from top to bottom--a mass perfectly ordered. It was the Swiss,
drawn up line by line on every step, their muskets at aim, awaiting the
word.
The first assailants stopped irresolutely, but the impetus of those
behind swept them on, until the vestibule was consumed and the first
ranks looked into the threatening barrels. Still no sound. The two
forces, the machine and the monster, looked into each other's eyes,
noting little details. The populace, gaining confidence, began to jest,
saluting the soldiers with friendly greetings, inviting them to join
them.
Some one in the mob, extending a long crook, hooked a Swiss and drew
him into the vortex, amid shouts of laughter. They clapped their hands,
laughing like children, and set to work at this new game. A second, a
third, five Swiss, were thus fished out of the ranks without resisting.
All at once, from the balcony above, a voice cried:
"Fire!"
As the sea with an immense impulse recoils from an earthquake, there
was a vast recoil in the mob, an exact explosion from the machine. The
smoke, rushing down the vestibule, swirled into the air and lifted.
The officer leaned curiously over the balcony and gave the order to
advance. The red ranks moved down and over the inanimate mound; of all
those who a moment before had laughed incredulously not one survived.
Outside, the mob broke and fled up the Place du Carrousel, recoiling
from the horrid vestibule, where suddenly there formed a bubble of red,
that grew larger and trickled over the garden, widening and assuming
mass and shape. At times across the red, like a diamond meeting the
sun, there ran a brilliant flash. At every flash men stumbled in their
flight and pitched forward. Pell-mell into the Rue St. Honoré they ran,
routed, but full of anger and enthusiasm.
At this moment the sections of the Marais swept in, gathered them up,
and, burning with vengeance at the sight of their wounds, rushed on to
the attack. Barabant, who had received a flesh-wound in the hand, had
barely time to bind it up before he was swept again into the Carrousel.
Then a vast hurrah burst from them, a shout of relief and of battle.
From the quais the guerrilla band of the Marseillais were rolling
forward, formidable, grim, and unleashed. Suddenly their ranks parted
and two tongues of fire lashed out; in the solid bank of the Swiss two
gaps appeared. A frenzy possessed the assaulting mass. It flung itself
forward, without method, attacking only with its anger. The Swiss
reëntered the vestibule, issuing forth from time to time to deliver a
volley.
Barabant, in the midst of the swirl, lost consciousness of his acts,
swayed by sudden, unreasoning passion. He fired fast and faster, caught
by the infection of his comrades, cursing, exhorting wildly, laughing;
but his bullets, without objective, flattened themselves against the
death-dealing walls. At times he saw, through the thick smoke, Javogues
and his comrades dragging a cannon forward toward the barracks. At
another moment there suddenly emerged out of the mêlée the figure of
the two bouquetières.
Amid the swirl of smoke, Nicole appeared to Barabant's excited senses
as a goddess exhorting them to battle. Her hair had tumbled, rioting,
her dress was torn open at the throat, her bare arms were stained with
powder and red with the contact of the wounded; and yet, as she loaded
a musket, or presented it to a volunteer, or showed him the flashing
walls, she laughed one of those laughs sublime with the indifference to
danger and the joy of heroism that inflame the souls of those who hear
it, and transform the wavering with the frenzy of sacrifice.
On the contrary, Louison, among all the confusion and the tumult, moved
quietly, gathering the bullets from the fallen and returning them to
her friend. Her face was calm, cold; her eyes sought everything and
showed nothing; and though she moved incessantly on her quests, she was
apart from all--a spectator.
Barabant, unable to join them, was carried step by step toward the
barracks. Once he slipped in a pool of blood and went down, his
companion falling across him. He called to him to rise, but the man was
dead. A woman of the halles freed him.
A series of explosions almost hurled him back; the next moment
the barracks, rent in gaps, were swept with a sheet of flame. The
assailants, with a cry of triumph, hurled themselves into the palace,
while the Swiss, forced up the staircase, broke and fled, pursued and
shot down by the victors.
Through the apartments, shattering doors, overturning furniture,
howling along the empty corridors, the mob crashed in, as the first
victorious blast of a tempest, shrieking:
"À la mort! À la mort!"
One by one the flying Swiss were overtaken. Packs of the invaders
leaped upon them, burying them from view, until, stabbed with a dozen
useless thrusts, their bodies were flung with exulting cries from the
windows; while as the foremost stopped to enjoy their prey, the herd
swept to the front with hungry arms and the ever-rising shout:
"Death to all! Death to all!"
Barabant, racing ahead to save the women, soon found himself in front,
running beside a Marseillais, who cried to him with the voice of
Javogues:
"Keep with me, citoyen, keep with me! Leave the curs to the others!"
A Swiss, hearing them at his back, fell on his knees, shrieking for
mercy.
"Leave him. Don't stop!" Javogues panted. Seizing Barabant's arm, he
bore him down a side gallery, shouting:
"There he is! There he is!"
At the end of the corridor Barabant beheld a tall form disappearing at
the head of a narrow stairway.
Up this they rushed, into the single outlet, a guard-room, only to
find it empty. Javogues threw himself furiously against the walls.
"I saw him, I saw him; he is here somewhere!"
"Who?"
"Dossonville! He was among the Swiss. I saw him." He ran around the
room, assailing it with his huge fists. All at once he gave a cry, and
lifting the hatchet he bore, he sent a secret door crashing in.
"He is here!"
He hacked his way through and disappeared, thundering down the passage.
Barabant, only half comprehending what had happened, remained a moment
in perplexity. But the sound of women's cries startled him again to
activity. He darted back into the current of the mob and gained the
women's apartments. At the foot of the staircase an officer of the
National Guard was crying:
"We don't kill women!"
"Spare the women!" Barabant echoed.
A dozen others took up the cry.
"The Republic does not make war on women!"
The mob, balked of half its vengeance by the firmness of a dozen
officers, turned to desecration and pillage. Troops of women, like
furies, swarmed through the royal apartments, tearing the beds to
pieces, exulting, foul and crazed.
Barabant, sickening at the sight of unnamable excesses, retraced his
way down the strewn galleries, heaped with overturned furniture,
and tapestries pulled from the wall, spattered with blood and dirt.
Heedless of the shouts above him, he passed down the vestibule and
over the mountain of slain, suffocated by the stench and the horror of
wide-mouthed corpses. Now that the crisis was over, his inflammable
nature recoiled before the ugliness of the triumph.
* * * * *
While Louison and Geneviève had been drawn into the frantic mob which
swept the palace, Nicole had remained outside, joining the hundreds of
women who visited the wounded or sought, in agony, among the dead. She
also, with a new anxiety, sped among the slain with a sinking dread
before each upturned face.
All at once a familiar voice cried at her side:
"Help! help!"
The cry came from beneath the body of a Marseillais. With the aid of a
fishwife she pulled away the corpse, discovering the shaken, limp form
of the mountebank Cramoisin.
"Ah, mon Dieu," she cried, forgetting the rancor of the woman in the
patriot, "are you wounded?"
"I--I think so."
"Where?"
"I don't know," he stammered, rising weakly to his feet. "Is it ended?"
"In thy stomach, I guess, my brave fellow!" the fishwife cried with
rough scorn. "It seems to have failed thee!"
"You do not know him: he is a hero!" Nicole cried, ironically. "Wait a
moment; we'll find the wound!"
With a laugh, the two sought to seize him; but Cramoisin, having
recovered the use of his legs, escaped in a ludicrous, snarling flight.
Suddenly Nicole beheld Barabant stumbling forth from the vestibule. All
coquetry forgot, she sprang to him with the cry:
"Barabant, you are wounded!"
He looked at his arm and saw it was covered with blood. He passed
his hand over his face; a scalp-wound trickled a red stream down
his forehead. He sat down while she hurriedly washed the wounds and
bandaged them. When he essayed to rise, a dizziness made his step so
unsteady that Nicole drew his arm over her shoulder, laughing at his
feeble resistance.
"Allons, this is the hour of the women. I'll bring you back. Don't be
afraid to lean on me!"
She put her arm about his waist and impelled him gently. He resisted
no longer, and together slowly they moved homeward over the stricken
field, amid the groaning and the silent.
He had a misty recollection of a phantasmagoric passage, of rapidly
moving figures hideous with blood, of heads dancing on pikes above him,
of stretchers bearing inanimate things, of rushing, floating women,
of the sudden rumbling of drums, of companies swinging past him, of
interminable streets, and of cliffs, mountains high, that gave forth
shrieks of triumph. Then in the city, delirious with joy and sorrow,
delirium, too, rushed through his brain, his head fell heavily upon
Nicole's bare shoulder, and the will deserting his limbs, he slipped
from her arms heavily to the ground.
VI
THE HEART OF A WOMAN
When at last Nicole had brought Barabant to his room, she was very
tired. Goursac, whom she had summoned to help her, knelt by the bed
to examine the unconscious form. Every now and then he turned a
questioning look upon the girl, as though to penetrate the indifferent
attitude she maintained.
"Why don't you say something?" Nicole cried at last, her anxiety
mastering her prudence. "Is it so serious?"
"A mere scratch," he grumbled; "nothing to make such a fuss over. If he
hadn't been as weak as a woman--"
Nicole, reassured, smiled at his ill-humor, knowing the mood of old.
Goursac, furious at such a reception of his sarcasm, turned on her
angrily.
"You are like all the rest--just as stupid. Because a young fellow gets
a scratch and you pilot him home, you call that a romance. You know
well enough what that leads to!"
"That may be true; why shouldn't I have my romance as well as another?"
"You say that to plague me. You know that is not so!" he said
impatiently. "Now give me a bandage."
Stooping, Nicole seized her petticoat; but finding it stained with
traces of the combat, she dropped it, and calling to him to wait,
passed through the window and across the gutter, swaying lithely
against the roof. In a moment she returned with half of a sheet, which
they quickly tore into bandages.
"There; with a little rest--a chance to recover some blood--the fever
will abate!" Preparing a sling, Goursac jerked his head toward the bed
and demanded: "You are not going to watch?"
"Certainly I am!"
"Then say at once," he cried point-blank, "that you imagine you are in
love!"
"Goursac, my friend, you are ridiculous with your ideas," Nicole
answered impatiently. "You know that the Citoyen Barabant arrived only
yesterday. We are good comrades. That's all!"
"Yes, yes, yes!"
He wrinkled his lips in scornful unbelief, raised his shoulders to his
ears, and disappeared, heavily, down the stairs, grumbling ironically,
"A man lies to deceive others; a woman lies to deceive herself!"
A moment later he called back:
"Hé, above there!"
Nicole went to the landing.
"Is that you, the comrade?"
"Yes, old cynic."
"If you need me, stamp twice on the floor."
"Agreed."
"Return now to your--acquaintance."
Nicole, laughing, returned to the bedside. She placed her hand on
the heated forehead, frowned, smoothed down the covers, arranged the
discarded clothes, and, after a moment's reflection, departed over the
roof to her room.
When she again appeared, she had removed all traces of the battle. She
pulled a chair near the bed, loosened her hair, scattering it over her
shoulders, and began to comb it out, unraveling the tangle with many
grimaces and an oft-wrung "Aïe! aïe!"
Occasionally she consulted a pocket-mirror, then resumed the combing,
humming to herself. Barabant, his forehead enveloped in white, his arm
in a sling, lay with his head turned toward her, one arm escaping bare
above the covers. She regarded approvingly the lithe muscles suggested
under the soft skin, and, ceasing her humming, pronounced:
"He is well made!"
She leaned over the bed and opened the collar of his shirt, revealing
the full throat.
"Tiens, he's as white as a woman."
She withdrew, and resumed her humming.
"But, Dieu merci, it's not a woman." She was taking up another strand
when the stairs cried out and Louison entered. Nicole frowned and said
curtly:
"Ah, it's you, is it? Who told you?"
"La Mère Corniche. How goes it?" she asked, indicating Barabant.
"Well."
"Are you coming to eat something?"
"No, I'm staying here."
"Is it so serious?"
"I don't know," she said, continuing her combing. "He pleases me."
Louison stood at the bed, looking down. "Not bad; he's interesting. I
noticed he had good eyes."
Nicole stopped her combing, and a frown gathered above the childish
cheeks, as she cried impetuously:
"Louison, no interference, do you hear? Or--"
"Or what?" The dark eyebrows arched slightly, but the deep eyes
remained cold. Nicole did not answer. Louison returned to the
contemplation of the young man a moment longer, then reluctantly
rousing herself from her reverie, turned on her heel. Her eye, falling
on Nicole, regarded her with a trace of amusement.
"Child!" she said, standing in the doorway, her face relaxing into a
smile. "You have chosen the best moment, my dear: you are adorable!"
Nicole listened, immovable, until the last footstep had grown silent.
Then drawing her lips together, she seized her knees with her hands,
and thus curbed, her eyes fixed themselves in intense contemplation,
while several times a sudden anger knit her features before she shook
off the disagreeable emotions and sought the cool of the window.
At a rustling from the bed she returned quickly. Barabant had stirred
slightly, but so as to throw his weight upon the wounded arm. She
slipped her arm under him and moved him to a more comfortable position.
This maternal solicitude, slight as it was, awakened a new emotion
in her. She arranged his hair, and seeking hungrily for any further
service, began to bathe the hot eyelids.
Barabant, under the gentle stroking, opened his eyes. The confines
appeared to him vast and silent, the window far removed and small. The
long August twilight invaded the room with the delicious promise of
a quieter night, while from without the distant, scattered sounds of
rejoicing reached his ears, through the corridors of insensibility,
like the tinkle of soft music. He sighed contentedly and closed his
eyes again.
Presently he said, turning his head a trifle, but without opening his
eyes:
"Thou art really there, Nicole?"
The accent and the caress pierced to the depths the heart of the young
girl, already stirred by the maternal impulse of the woman.
"Really here, yes."
But almost immediately, as though regretting the softness of the
response, she added, in remonstrance:
"I have not given you permission to call me thou!"
"It is my gratitude that--that permits me."
"Ah, that is nice." She smiled with pleasure. "That was very prettily
said."
"Nicole?"
"Yes."
"Place your ear to my lips; I cannot talk so far."
The girl, with a smile, divining the ruse, leaned over him. But
Barabant making no sound, she withdrew, scrutinizing anxiously the hot
face.
"Nicole."
"I am here."
Again she stooped, and this time so close that her hair swept his
forehead.
"You are there?"
"Yes."
"I love you," he said drowsily.
"Oh, oh!" Nicole started back, blushing and amused; but looking down,
she saw he had dropped again into the wanderings of delirium.
"He does not know what he says," she said, shaking her head. "Poor
fellow!"
She watched him in his helplessness, and all at once she sighed; but it
was a sigh that rose from the soul, and while it filled her heart, it
passed on and awakened in her a famine of tenderness, leaving a longing
for tears.
* * * * *
Motionless and perplexed, she stood staring down at the dim bed, her
lips parted, her breast filling with deep breaths, until at last
she turned reluctantly and sought the window, still uncertain, nor
comprehending what was germinating within her.
The night was beginning; in the clear heavens the high moon was
strengthening in luster at every moment. Across the stretch of window
lights the sounds of revelry and rejoicing persisted faintly to her
ears. The courtyard, deserted by the men, was hushed with the silence
of fatigue. The laugh of a girl mounted at times, clear and playful,
mingling with the deeper, good-humored protests of her companion. From
a window a hag, chin in hand, followed the lovers with due interest.
In another room a weary mother had fallen asleep with her baby still
feeding at her breast. At other windows the women waited patiently
the return of the men, bending mechanically over their knitting or
crooning to the sleepy children. There, under the enduring, tedious
night, Nicole stayed from minute to minute, pressing her clenched hand
tensely against her lips; while within her breast beat tumult and a
revolt against the slavery of women. She returned to the bedside,
rebelling against this helpless man who drew her irresistibly from her
independence.
"Nicole--"
It was Goursac calling, and she sprang furiously to the landing,
rebuking him with a low: "Silence! he is asleep. What do you want?"
"If you are tired, I'll watch."
"No, no!" she answered angrily. The cry seemed to burst from her heart,
threatened by the very thought of such exile.
She knelt at the bed hungrily, waiting jealously for an opportunity
to ease the restless body, her revolt forgotten in the defense of her
right to soothe and minister. She slipped her arm under his body, and
drew his head upon her shoulder. A sigh of contentment rewarded her.
He grew more quiet, breathing gentle breaths that disturbed her hair
and fanned her throat. In the half-darkness she remained, with aching
shoulder, holding him in her arms as though to defend him from all
who would separate them. Several times, in an access of tenderness,
she approached her lips to the unconscious forehead, but each time
instinctively drew back from the surrender. She had a desire for tears,
for laughter, for swift anger, that he should wake at last. She would
have kept him there forever, weak and helpless, turning to her in trust
and necessity. At times, with a sudden alarm, she asked herself what
had happened, what could be these new emotions, until at last, in the
disturbance and bewilderment of her soul, she saw the utter loneliness
of her life, and the cry went up from her:
"Ah, mon Dieu, how unhappy I am!"
The full sun was beating into the room when Barabant awoke. His
forehead was cold, his senses were sharp; but his memory struggled
in vain to reconstruct the events of the afternoon. His arm confined
in a sling brought back his wound, and Nicole, and the beginning of
the tedious journey; beyond that a black wall rose up and shut out
all vision. He turned over, calculating his strength, when, his eye
traveling over the bedside, what was his stupefaction to behold Nicole
stretched upon the floor. Her hands were pillowed under her cheek,
where the long eyelashes showed sharply against the heightened color.
She slept easily, the lips slightly parted as though smiling under
happy dreams. Barabant watched her breathlessly, jealously putting off
the awakening. But at this moment, as though aware of the intensity
of his gaze, the girl opened her eyes, met the enraptured glance of
Barabant a moment only, then sprang to her feet with a confusion which
she sought to cover with a laughing "Good morning!"
"You have been here all night?" Barabant said, in astonishment.
"Why not?" Nicole noticed that he did not address her as "thou." She
rearranged her dress and said with forced naturalness, "Do you think
that is much to do for a patriot who is wounded?"
Barabant, displeased with the answer, made no reply.
"So you have decided to return to this world, citoyen?"
"Have I been delirious?"
"Do you remember nothing?"
"Nothing since--since the Place de la Grève." As this answer seemed to
plunge Nicole into silence, he asked, "How did you get me here?"
"It wasn't difficult," she began more gaily. "I begged your way from
block to block. Let me see; two water-carriers brought you half-way,
then a coachman a block on his route, then another block on a litter,
and finally a fishwife helped me to the end."
"You carried me?"
"Indeed, I am not a weakling; look at that." She extended her arms,
laughing. "They are solid."
"And this?" Barabant touched the sling.
"Oh, that was the Citoyen Goursac."
"Who?"
"Your neighbor below, a brown man who buries his chin like this, and
scowls. That reminds me, it is time he should see you."
"Nicole!"
"Well, what?"
"Not now; not just yet."
"Why not?"
"I wish to talk with you."
"The idea, as though I had nothing to do!" She raised her foot and
stamped twice. "I have a desire to dine to-night, thank you."
"Where are you going?"
"I'm going to work." She picked up her possessions and made for the
window, while Barabant cried excitedly:
"Nicole, I have not thanked you. Wait, let me thank you."
"Why?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I'd do that for any one."
Barabant raised himself on his elbow and threatened, half angrily:
"Nicole, if you go, I'll follow you. I swear I'll follow you. I will.
Look at me. I swear I will!"
"What good will it do you? I'll be gone."
She shook her head, and, deaf to his entreaties, disappeared; while
Barabant, furious, fell back, baffled and perplexed, little suspecting
the awakening that was taking place in Nicole.
VII
THE FEAR OF HAPPINESS
When Nicole reached her room, she found Geneviève up and waiting.
"What are you doing, child?" she cried sharply, to cover her confusion.
"Why are you here?"
"I--I am waiting," Geneviève stammered, "to see if I could do anything
for you."
"There is nothing. I am going out now myself."
"What!" cried the child, opening her eyes wide. "You are not going to
stay with the poor fellow?"
"There is no need. He is well."
"But I thought--" She stopped, in confusion, and then clumsily beat a
retreat to the door. "I'll go now. I--I only _wanted_ to be of service."
Nicole waited only long enough to be sure of Geneviève's departure
before descending in turn. Her little room was too narrow; it choked
her. She had need of the open span of the sky to think over the new
emotions.
After an hour of unprofitable solitude, feeling the need of a
confidence which would lessen the tension of her thoughts, she sought
Goursac, beginning timidly with the question:
"And the Citoyen Barabant, how is he?"
"Why, he is still alive, clamoring for you like a lost child for his
mother."
"Goursac, my old friend," she said, taking his arm, "be serious and
gentle for once. I am unhappy, and I want to talk with you."
"Ah, you love him," he said bitterly.
"Yes," she said slowly, as though the revelation had just come, "I love
him."
"Then why do you avoid him?"
"I am afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of loving him too much."
"I don't understand."
She tried to tell him a little of her emotions at the bedside--the
wonder and the swift, acute joy of ministering, the longing to tend and
own. Goursac, with a few questions, led her on. They were now in the
Tuileries, a little apart from the quick throng, the swish of skirts,
the laughter and the hum. At last he said:
"My little Nicole, listen. Love is not something that comes to us from
the outside: it is a need within ourselves. We each have our functions
in this world and our needs. At the bottom, what is strongest and best
in woman is the maternal instinct. Listen to me! You fall in love when
the need within you becomes too insistent. Any one of a hundred men can
appeal to you. It is the moment and not the man. You knew the maternal
instinct for the first time when you had in your keeping the Citoyen
Barabant. You think that it is he that has awakened you. Not at all;
all these emotions have been in you, dormant; it is they, not he, which
enchant you. Voyons--you do not listen--Nicole!"
"That's true," she said, rousing herself from her reverie. Her eyes
had been deep in the bright to and fro of the promenaders, but she saw
only the room under the attic, and felt only the hot head on her aching
shoulder.
"After all, you are thinking only of him, and I am a fool," he said.
"Nothing that I can say will make any difference. You will learn, as
others have learned, on the steps of experience. Out of some curious
twist within you, in some strange way of reasoning you will decide for
yourself."
"I suppose so," she said drearily. "But I wanted to talk it out; you
are kind to me."
"I," he said calmly--"I adore you."
"Be serious."
"That is serious."
"Truly?"
"You know it."
"Why?" she said meditatively, but half believing him.
"You are young," he answered, looking steadfastly at the charming
profile. "And to see you is good for the eyes. You are youth, and I
have not been old long enough to be reconciled to age. But you don't
believe me."
"Yes."
"No; at least, you do not understand."
* * * * *
She did not return home until nightfall, and then did not cross
Barabant's window-sill, but contented herself with an inquiry as to his
condition; nor could artifice and entreaty retain her longer. The next
day she did not appear at all.
Barabant, who saw in her absence nothing but coquetry, was furious
with her, with himself, with all that kept him to his bed. The
lagging, still hours seemed doubly lagging and still with the memory
of the charm which the presence of the girl had brought to the bare
walls. Time and time his eyes sought the empty floor where he had
surprised her asleep; and, conjuring up that delightful picture, he
accused himself in his unreasoning irritation for not having simulated
insensibility throughout the day.
Why did she thus avoid him? He remembered their first encounter with
Louison. Was she jealous of her comrade, or was it simply calculation?
That Nicole should think of playing the coquette annoyed him
exceedingly. He had yielded to the fascination of this gipsy from the
moment she had taken his arm in the gardens of the Palais Royal with
the mischievous "Barabant, you are a lucky fellow," with which she had
opened their comradeship. But this easy, pleasurable interest had been
fanned into a passionate flame at the storming of the Tuileries, where,
by her fire, her tempestuous beauty, and her careless laughter, she
had impressed herself imperishably on his imagination; and later the
thought of her bearing him home, of her nursing, and of her tenderness
had invaded his heart.
With the rapture of the first unfolding romance he abandoned himself
utterly to the thought of her, while retaining in his deeper
consciousness, as undebatable, that limit of common sense which must
separate the man of education and promise from a daughter of the people.
The thought was a part of his intuitions rather than his
consciousness; for in his simplicity he believed himself utterly
unselfish in seeking her, and was at a loss to understand why she
should have changed.
Neither the afternoon nor the evening brought any sign of Nicole, nor
during the next day could he obtain more than one glimpse of her, as
she departed toward the flower-market. Recovered from his exhaustion,
he set forth on the following morning, piqued and angry, resolved to
find her and force an explanation.
He searched the Palais Royal and the Tuileries without success, and it
was only after luncheon that, passing down the left bank of the Seine,
he found her near the Conciergerie.
She was a little apart from the throng, strolling meditatively by the
river, into whose swift flood her look was plunged. The half-depleted
basket, overrun with flowers, dangled from her arm, while in her
fingers she was turning a cockade without purpose. Against the hot
August foliage and the buildings weltering under the sun there was
something about her inexpressibly cool and refreshing to the eye.
The meditative abandon of her pose suggested all at once to Barabant
a reason for her absence, and with this pleasing thought his anger
yielded to the zest of the eager and confident lover.
So serious was her reverie that she was unaware of his approach until
his greeting startled her.
"Am I so terrible, Nicole," Barabant asked, smiling at her confusion,
"that you find it necessary to avoid me?"
She rallied quickly, and simulating indecision, exclaimed:
"Why, it is the Citoyen Barabant!"
Barabant brought his brows together and said, with a return of his
exasperation: "Nicole, why do you avoid me?"
She shook her head.
"I don't avoid you; I do not seek you out."
"Nicole, you are playing with me."
She again shook her head.
Barabant, taking her wrist, repeated the assertion.
"Barabant, I do not play with you," Nicole answered earnestly.
"Then why have you avoided me?"
He waited for her answer, but she said firmly: "I cannot tell you."
"Assuredly she is beginning to love me," thought Barabant, and, well
content, did not press the question. They strayed a little from the
Conciergerie, and leaning over the bank, contemplated the river scenes
below, following the fortunes of the languid fishermen, the antics
of a kitten that romped over the flat decks herded together, and the
glistening backs of boys splashing near the shore.
"Of whom were you thinking so seriously before I came?" Barabant asked,
secure in his new confidence. He sought her face, hoping to surprise
some trace of confusion.
"I was wondering how it would seem to have a mother," Nicole answered.
She crumbled a flower and scattered the petals on the wafting stir of
the air before she turned. "But then we might not agree. Perhaps I am
lucky. What do you think?"
"Such reverie for a mother?"
"Oh, there are moments when one has such moods."
"I had hoped you were thinking of me."
"Really?" She lifted her eyebrows slightly. "And why?"
Her composure routed his agreeable theories and plunged him into
perplexities. So, abandoning his confident attitude, he exclaimed
vehemently:
"Nicole, what has happened? What is there--a misunderstanding, or what?
Surely you will not tell me that it is natural for you to shun me so
persistently. I will be answered!"
"I don't; I don't. I will not have you saying that!" She seized the
opportunity of a passing party of muscadins--the dandies of the day--to
offer her cockades. On her return, Barabant said more quietly:
"Listen to me, Nicole. You misunderstand me; I do not upbraid you. I
want to thank you. I owe you much, and you give me no opportunity to
tell you of my gratitude. That is what vexes me. Voyons, Nicole, we had
begun so well!" He leaned closer and said mischievously: "Oh, if I had
known you would leave, I would have remained unconscious all the day.
I've cursed myself ever since."
He laughed, and growing bolder as he perceived she listened without
displeasure, he poured into her ear, in one breath daring, in another
shy, a thousand and one of those vague, delightful half-confidences
which in the imagination of the lover awaken as naturally as the
flowers open to the sun.
Nicole could not but listen. She assembled a bouquet and pressed her
face against it to screen her pleasure from his avid scrutiny. From
time to time she turned, and looking him full in the face, sought to
read there the true value of his words. But almost immediately she
would turn with a wistful smile of unbelief. At length she checked him,
saying, with reluctant gentleness:
"Enough, Barabant. Your imagination runs away with you. You do not know
your own feelings."
Barabant, borne on by the ardor of his emotions, retorted point-blank:
"And you, do you know yours?"
At this sudden challenge, Nicole had a moment of confusion, during
which she answered at random:
"I?" But immediately regaining her composure, she added, "Perfectly."
"You evade my question."
"If you begin like that, I warn you I will not listen. Besides, I am
neglecting my cockades."
She unslung her basket and again accosted the crowd. Barabant, after
the first outburst of expostulation, waited moodily, leaning against
a tree, his gaze lost in the current. The moment Nicole was assured
of his abstraction, she hesitated no longer, but slipping through the
throng, quickly gained her liberty among distant streets.
* * * * *
She knew that the evasion was unwise, exposing her to his
judgment either as a coquette or as fearing to betray her true
feelings--opinions which she did not wish him to entertain. She had
fled, but not by calculation. She had again avoided him, and yet she
scarcely understood why. New emotions had awakened in her a commotion
that disturbed her whole theory of life.
Before, with happy tolerance, she had passed along the weary road of
poverty, shrugging her shoulders at hunger, meeting adversity with a
smile, expecting two or three attachments, not deep; delightful while
lasting, sharp and saddening when broken; but, sad or sweet, not to be
regarded too seriously,--the lot of life.
She had, therefore, welcomed the coming of Barabant with the
pleasurable anticipation of a delightful comradeship. That she could
retain him, or, in all probability, would care to retain him, beyond a
certain term never occurred to her. As to the question of marriage, it
did not for a moment enter her head. For her it did not exist.
A sigh drawn from her soul as she stood by his bed had dissipated
all that, and discovered to her immense longings, womanly, motherly
necessities which she had never realized before and which she
imperfectly comprehended now. She perceived him no longer as a comrade,
but as the new need of her awakened nature.
She had imagined love as impassioned, headlong, and impetuous, and,
in the place of this ideal, she felt only the confident, weak appeal
of Barabant to her ministering tenderness. The sensation was acute,
poignant, disturbing; the happiness that had possessed her then was too
big, too strange; it frightened her. She feared such a transforming,
all-consuming love. To give herself utterly thus she felt, in her
intuitions, would mean only disaster. So she fled from herself, trying
to stifle that immense emotion to which she had no right,--so fraught
with peril. So when, through all the rumble of sound and the ceaseless
rabble of the boulevards, there returned the silent room under the
eaves, and the feverish smile that answered to her soothing touch, she
incessantly cried to herself:
"No, no. I would love him too much. The end would crush me."
Little vagrant of the people, she knew well what that end inevitably
must be.
VIII
THE MOTHER OF LOUISON
Barabant, baffled and incensed at Nicole's desertion, vowed that he
would be through with such a coquette. Where pride begins there is a
limit to gratitude, and that limit she had overstepped. He washed his
hands of her. So, having decided--irrevocably decided--that Nicole had
removed herself from any interest of his, and that it was a matter of
indifference to him whether or not he saw her again, he determined to
bring her to reason by paying attention to Louison.
Accordingly he contrived to meet her in the passageway the morning
after his unceremonious desertion by Nicole.
"Salutations, Citoyen Barabant," Louison cried. "No luck this morning.
Nicole has already left."
"Nicole is out of the question," he retorted.
"What!" Louison opened her eyes in astonishment.
"I say, we have nothing to do with Nicole," he replied coolly. "Where
are you bound?"
"To the flower-market."
"I understand the route is dangerous at this time of day."
"Exceedingly dangerous."
"Then I had better accompany you."
"I think you had."
With this light introduction, they set out through the stirring city,
greeted by the slamming of opening shutters, and escaping the clouds of
dust that rose from the brooms of concierges. Louison was the first to
speak.
"Well, comrade, and how goes it with you?"
Barabant affected ignorance.
"What, is it not serious with you and Nicole?"
"Serious is a big word," he answered, resolved not to yield an inch.
"I see, a little interest, but not--not the grand passion, violent and
sacred!" She added, with a false sigh, "Poor Nicole, it is serious with
her."
"Of course."
"I know it."
"You imagine it."
"I know it by one sign: she is jealous. There you are!" She laughed.
"She is always jealous of me when it's serious. This time, though,
there is no cause. I shall not interfere." She placed a flower to her
lips and shot a quick glance up at him. "Though I met you the first."
"Do I count for nothing--or my preference?"
"Nini!" She shook one finger slowly back and forth. "Let us talk of
other things. I might unconsciously break my promise."
The air grew fragrant as they entered a square blotted out with tents.
Masses of red and pink, of white and yellow, met the eye through sudden
lanes in the petticoat crowd.
"Leave me now to my bargaining," she said. Stopping in the perfumed
alley at a tent, where the swinging sign-board bore the name la Mère
Boboche, she cried tartly: "Good morning, citoyenne. The flowers are
very stale this morning."
A thin, bent woman turned her one good eye, and recognizing a daily
opponent, rose, drawing in her lips and nodding.
"Eh, they are dear this morning, but you have brought your muscadin.
You can pay well to-day after the way you cheated me yesterday."
"He is my brother," Louison said coldly, turning over the flowers.
"Oui dà!" La Mère Boboche dropped an anxious glance at her counter.
"Isn't he handsome, though, her muscadin? What arms, what a chest, eh?
Solid that!"
Louison, observing that Barabant was uneasy under this chaffing, was
about to interpose when a shrill voice rose in taunt from the opposite
stall.
"What a monster of immorality! Allons, la mère, it's time you forgot
such things."
Instantly the two enemies let loose at each other floods of
vituperation.
"Listen to the evil tongue!"
"Hark to the old hen, what a cackle!"
"Corrupter of youth!"
"Cheat!"
"Impostor!"
Louison, profiting by the outcry, selected her flowers and escaped the
fray.
"Now for some white ones and I am done. Aïe, what a jam!"
She took his arm, and as they entered the press of the main alley, once
or twice was swept up against him with great force.
"Pardon; aïe, aïe, pardon! What a scramble this morning!" She was swung
face to face with her protector, her eyes matching his in height. They
freed themselves and reached another shop.
"Thanks, citoyen; your arm is strong."
Louison, giving a look of admiration at his limbs, began her
bargaining. Barabant, though aware of the artifices, resisted weakly
the direct attack. With a new interest he studied the liberty-cap
that flamed in the black, sinewy wave of her hair. She was dressed in
a yellow bodice, falling to a short skirt of light-blue fustian. The
ankles thus revealed were shapely, and attracted the eye with their
bright bit of red stocking. He began to ask himself if she were not
really beautiful, as he watched the figure, unusually erect, every
motion of which was made with grace and ease.
Louison, observing Barabant's study, from time to time turned her head
to send him a smile over her shoulder. Occasionally she frowned and, as
though to discourage his examination, shook her head.
Barabant forgot the curious impression she first had made upon him.
He saw only a face with great capabilities of expression: mobile,
flexible, obeying the capricious thought. The eyes more than ever
arrested his attention and baffled it. They opened to him a way; but
when he looked it was as though penetrating into a vast darkness.
"Why do you look at me so?"
Barabant recovered to find Louison at his elbow, her purchase made,
regarding him with amusement.
"You mystify me," he said frankly. "There is something about you I
cannot place. What is it?"
She shook her head.
"Don't. Besides--Nicole."
"You have been very solicitous to leave me to Nicole," he said, with a
smile. "You choose excellent means to gain your end."
He had expected to catch her confused and blushing. Instead, she
discovered a row of white teeth, and nodding her head, said:
"Eh, you are not so slow after all." Before he could reply, she
exclaimed, "Hello, there's mama!"
She indicated a wig-maker's, where, on the door-step, a woman of about
thirty-five or-six was sitting, carding a wig. Despite the difference
of ages, Barabant noticed a similarity in the color of the hair and in
the span of the eyebrows.
"Good morning, mother!"
The woman raised her head, but as her glance reached them started back,
as though from a feeling of repulsion, and immediately dropped her head.
"Thank you, I am well," Louison cried mockingly. "Good day, mother, we
can't stop." She turned in perfect good humor to Barabant. "There's a
model mother for you; no trouble at all!"
"And your father?" Barabant inquired, as much struck at her philosophic
attitude as at the maternal indifference.
"There's the trouble, voilà." She held her thumb-nail against her teeth
and clicked it. "She has never been willing to tell me his name." She
shrugged her shoulders. "That's stupid, isn't it? Why not?"
Barabant asked her curiously how long they had been parted.
"Since I was five years old. I only remember some dreadful scene at
home,--I don't know what,--and all at once her manner changed to me.
The next day she drove me out."
"At five?"
"Nothing extraordinary in that," Louison answered, surprised at his
astonishment. "Ah, you do not know our Paris. She married soon after;
perhaps it was for that, but I think not." She was silent a moment. "I
think she discovered something about my father: that he was an abbé or
an aristocrat."
"And you?"
"I begged. I found a corner in the cellar at la Mère Corniche's. You
have never been in that pleasant abode?" She made a wry face. "There
are rats; you don't get much sleep. Then it smells bad and it is black;
though of course at night that makes no difference. I did not stay
there long."
"What did you do?"
"Oh, I passed from corner to corner." She stopped in the square and
seated herself on a bench. She emptied her flowers and held them out to
Barabant. "Hold these while I make my cockades. I passed from family to
family. I was well treated. They gave me a crust or a bone, and let me
crawl into a corner at night. Of course I worked. It was interesting!"
She wove the flowers deftly into cockades, taking them from his lap,
their hands brushing each other from time to time. "Does that amuse
you? Good. Then I'll continue. At ten I began to sell flowers, and then
they treated me better--I shared meals."
"What a life! It must have been rough at times?" Barabant asked the
question not without a mixture of curiosity in his pity.
"Yes, at first." She returned thoughtfully over her history. "But I
stabbed a fellow who was annoying me. He lived, but the result was just
as good. They are all afraid of my temper, and there is no protection
like that." She rose, having finished the cockades, and faced him with
a smile in which struggled a temptation. "You know I have a temper; oh,
but a temper--a temper to make your hair stand on end!"
"I can believe it," Barabant said, studying her.
"Would you like to see?" she asked mischievously.
Without waiting a reply, she halted, caught her breath a little, and
drew back. The mouth dropped open, the eyes fixed themselves. Then by
the sheer power of her will she banished the blood from her face. The
lips closed in a thin, cruel line, the nostrils dilated, while in the
eyes glowed such malignant, tigerish hatred that Barabant, with an
oath, sprang backward, placing the bench between them.
Immediately a low laugh rang out. The features changed from the
hideousness of wrath to a look of amusement, and Louison, again erect,
sidled up to him with a smile lurking in the corners of her lips.
"Did I frighten you? I like to do that." Her face had regained its
composure, but it was a cold constraint; she was still pale from the
force of the emotion. "It is so amusing to frighten people. You see, I
am able to protect myself."
"That I can believe," Barabant cried, finding his voice. "It is
unpleasant!"
"Don't be frightened; I reserve that for my enemies. I know how to
please, also."
She laughed, amused at his horror.
"And now I must get to selling my cockades. You can return with me only
as far as the Seine. A companion such as you, you understand, would
never do; it would not be professional."
Arranging her cockades in the basket, which she transferred to her arm,
she retraced her steps.
"Ah, there's mama again," she exclaimed, as they neared the
wig-maker's. "Let's see if she'll greet us more cordially."
Suddenly she stopped and, with a gleam of mischief, caught his arm.
"I have an idea. Follow me. I'll make her speak."
They approached the woman on the step, who, after the first quick
glance, abased her head without further recognition.
"Good morning, mother."
The woman continued silently to card the wig.
"Eh, Mother Baudrier! It is I, your daughter--Louison. You won't
answer? Good-by, then." Louison turned as though to leave, calling
back: "By the way, I've discovered my father."
The woman, with a cry, staggered to her feet, and, choking for
utterance, fell back against the house; while in her eyes was the wild
light of abject terror. Then perceiving by Louison's mocking laugh that
it was a trick, without a word she gained the doorway and tottered into
the house.
Louison, amazed and perplexed, remained fastened to the ground.
"Bon Dieu," she said at last, thoughtfully, "extraordinary! Who could
he have been?"
Barabant echoed the question, while the memory of the scene sank into
his mind, and with it a silent resolve to investigate the mystery
further.
IX
THE TURN OF JAVOGUES
Barabant spent the remainder of the morning in rambling through the
markets, skirting the shores of the river, seeking everywhere the
thoughts of the people, listening to their ambitions, their desires,
and their hopes. Toward noon he drifted among a throng of masons who,
dispersing languidly over blocks of stone, were crowding into the
nearest café.
"Salutations, citoyens!" he cried to them, according to the custom of
free greetings that obtained. At the sight of the sling he still wore
they hailed him warmly, asking:
"You got that at the Tuileries, citoyen?"
"Why, I know him," one suddenly exclaimed; and pushing to the front, he
cried, "You are the Citoyen Barabant who spoke so well in the Place de
la Grève." He turned to his comrades: "Aye, he can talk, too."
"Bring him in!"
"Citoyen, eat with us."
"Yes, join us, comrade," echoed a swarthy Picard, throwing his arms
about Barabant, who, nothing loath, answered:
"Gladly, citoyens."
They took possession of a corner in the café, calling the other
occupants--two coal-carriers and a seller of lemonade.
While the soup was devoured one or another would turn to Barabant with
a wink or a laugh, crying:
"It was glorious, eh, the taking of the Tuileries?"
"We fought well--the Sans-Culottes."
"The fat Louis was trembling that day!"
As they fell to eating their long loaves of bread, spread with cheese
and washed down with an execrable mixture of wine and water, groups of
two or three sauntered in, to smoke and discuss, among whom Barabant
recognized the Marseillais who had borne him in the square. Javogues,
greeted uproariously, in turn perceived Barabant.
"Why, it is my little orator!" he cried, and was advancing with open
arms to infold him in a bear-like hug, when his eyes encountered the
sling. "Mordieu," he exclaimed, "you were wounded!"
"Slightly."
Contenting himself with a wring of the hand, Javogues settled his body
into a seat opposite, exclaiming: "There is a patriot, citoyens; I'll
vouch for him!"
A chorus of grunts and a bobbing of heads showed Barabant the value of
such an indorsement. Across the table his companions cried to him:
"He's a terrible fellow, eh, the Citoyen Javogues? No hesitation about
him."
"That's the kind of men we want!"
They finished eating, and sprawled back to discuss.
"What I want to know is, where are we going?" Javogues demanded.
"We are going nowhere; we are rooted."
"The Convention does nothing but discuss."
"What's the use of overturning the throne, after all?"
"We must have the Republic!"
"What say you, Citoyen Barabant?"
"I say no step backward!" A lull gave him the attention of the room.
"We must advance or perish. If we lack in daring, we deserve to perish.
The Revolution, comrades, as I see it, is not against an unworthy king
or any king: it is to reconstruct society. Citoyens, there is but one
true end: the Nation must be one family. No more classes, no more
titles, no more king, no more first estate, no more third estate. We
are brothers, brothers all in one family--France!"
"There's the word!" Javogues cried, amid the salvo of glasses and
bravos that acclaimed the speaker. "And out with all lying, plotting
priests!"
A chorus approved.
"Right!"
"That's it!"
"Now you're talking!"
"Curse the blackcoats!"
"What has kept us down all these centuries? What? Tell me that! The
Church! What has been the ally of the aristocrats? The Church! What
taught us to be content with our lot, with fetters, with a crust, with
the yoke of taxation? The Church!"
"Aye, the Church!"
"Down with it!"
"Down with the lie!"
"Bah, the Church! the Church! I too was fool enough to believe in it."
Javogues swept his huge fist over their heads, and crashing it upon the
table, shouted, "There is no God!"
A few mumbled approval, more laughed, while one voice cried:
"There he is again, with his God!"
"I tell you, it is with such superstitions that they enslave us!"
Javogues drew back, defiant and aroused, and assembling his anger, he
thundered again, as though to bear down all opposition, "There is no
God!"
The laughter increased, while another scoffer cried:
"Well, if there is, he does us little good."
To this all agreed. Barabant, smiling, added:
"Citoyen, one thing at a time. Let us depose Capet first."
They arose amid laughter, Javogues's protests lost in the confusion.
Barabant, impelled to enthusiasm by the ardor of these laborers, opened
his arms and exclaimed:
"Comrades, when Frenchmen are united, we fear no foreigner. What nation
has ever fraternized as we? We all are brothers, all working for the
great end. When we grumble at delays, let us not forget what the
Revolution has made us!"
Then the voice of Javogues arose:
"Brothers, before we separate, let us embrace!"
With one impulse, such as countless times animated the populace in
these days of exaltation, the group fell into one another's arms.
Javogues, extending his hands covered with soot, exclaimed:
"Glorious emblems!"
Barabant echoed the cry, but as they moved off he surreptitiously
brushed away the stains, asking, to distract his companion's attention:
"And Dossonville, did you get him?"
"He escaped--for the time."
"Are you sure it was he? Did you see him again?"
"What difference does it make whether I saw him or not?" Javogues
answered impatiently. "I know he was there."
"How?" Barabant asked, in astonishment.
"By the look in his eyes the day I met him. That is all I need to tell
an aristocrat!"
Barabant, seeing the impossibility of swaying the fanatic by reason,
kept silent until they parted.
In the Rue Maugout, la Mère Corniche cried to him from her tenebrous
sentry-box:
"One moment, citoyen." The window-hinges spoke and a shadowy head
appeared. "There's a tall fellow above in your room."
"In the uniform of the National Guard?"
"That's it."
Barabant, who had left Javogues too recently to derive any pleasure
from a visit of Dossonville, was hastening away when again the
querulous voice halted him.
"Not so fast, citoyen."
"Well, what? I'm in a hurry."
"You've seen the Citoyen Marat?"
"Marat?"
"What! you've not presented your letter?"
"Oh, my letter!" Barabant cried, and hastily covering his mistake,
said: "But that was days ago."
"You didn't forget to speak of me?"
"Come, now, la Mère Corniche, I'm not an ingrate!"
"And what did he say?"
"It brought tears to his eyes."
"Truly?"
"Pardi! The Citoyen Marat has a heart."
Barabant, on the staircase, congratulated himself on his escape from
a bad position, little realizing the danger of the present one, and
excusing the subterfuge on the light pretext of giving pleasure to the
old woman. He hurriedly determined to say nothing to Dossonville of his
danger, preferring first to question him.
Dossonville, the greetings over, announced his purpose with the
question:
"Well, young pamphleteer, what have you ready?"
Barabant replied by tapping his arm.
"I see,--at the Tuileries?"
"You were there, of course?"
"What Frenchman wasn't?"
Barabant, noticing the equivocation, pressed him.
"With what section, citoyen?"
"I was with no section."
"Within or without the Tuileries?"
Dossonville rose up.
"Again! I thought you were convinced at Santerre's."
"You do not answer my question," Barabant insisted.
"Why do you ask it?"
"Because, Citoyen Dossonville, there are those who claim to have seen
you among the defenders."
"What's that? Who says that?" At once Dossonville was all alertness.
Barabant repeated, adding: "If it is so, citoyen, no matter for what
reasons you were present, you cannot ignore the danger you run if
recognized."
As though to confirm the warning, the stairway suddenly gave out the
hurried fall of feet, the door opened, and Nicole appeared, breathless
and frightened.
"Citoyen Dossonville," she cried, "I come to warn you! Javogues is
below!"
Dossonville threw a glance to the window, his hand going to his pistol.
Then correcting himself, he said:
"So this is your trap, is it?"
"I am not a spy," Barabant disclaimed indignantly. "You have an escape
by the roof; the gutter is solid; once opposite--"
"Yes, yes," Nicole added; "pass into my room, through the hall, and
out!"
"You mistake me," Dossonville interrupted. "I have nothing to fear. Go
to the landing. They may stop on the way."
Barabant obeyed. Dossonville, turning his back, snatched a paper from
his redingote, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it into the gutter.
He looked a moment at the astonished girl, then shrugging his
shoulders, he committed himself to her mercy with a wave of his hand.
Already from below came the rush of feet. With a sudden inspiration,
Dossonville divested himself of his pistols and sword, laying them
conspicuously on the bed. Then retreating as far away as the room
permitted, he seated himself and folded his arms, facing the horrified
girl with a calm smile, as though to say:
"Dispose of my life!"
Nicole, struggling between her patriotism and her womanly instincts,
heard Barabant calling from the landing:
"Who is there?"
"Javogues."
"What do you seek?"
The next moment half a dozen Marseillais stormed into the room, while
Javogues, at the head, shouted:
"When he moves to escape, shoot him down!"
But on the instant Dossonville, erect and holding out his hands, cried:
"I am unarmed; my weapons are on the bed. I submit. There is no need of
murder. What is the accusation?"
Javogues, baffled at the turn, still greedily covered the prisoner
with his pistol, but his face showed indecision and the longing for a
pretext.
"Lower your pistol," Dossonville continued calmly. "Citoyen Barabant, I
call you to witness that I surrendered willingly and am now under the
protection of the Nation. On what charges do you, without warrants,
arrest an officer of the National Guard?"
Javogues unwillingly dropped his weapon. But immediately, his anger
rising at being so thwarted, he advanced and, as though to crush his
enemy, thundered out:
"Dog of an aristocrat! I'll tell you. I arrest you for firing on the
Nation from the Tuileries."
"What, Citoyen Javogues!" Barabant cried indignantly. "If you have
taken this step on the evidence you gave me, I declare it an outrage!"
One of the band spoke up:
"I saw him, too,--I, with my own eyes,--firing on us with the Swiss."
"Citoyen, you are mistaken," Dossonville replied. Then realizing the
danger he ran, he continued rapidly, "At what hour?"
"Nine o'clock."
"At nine you have said!" Dossonville cried triumphantly, extending his
arms. "Citoyens, I demand to be taken at once to prison. The moment
such an accusation is made I insist upon my right to vindicate myself.
At nine o'clock I was in the presence of the Citoyen Marat. Take me
to the Abbaye and let the Friend of the People answer for me. Citoyen
Barabant, I shall need you too."
The effect of that powerful name was tremendous; even Javogues was
stunned at the sudden counter, and sullenly gave the order to descend.
Even Nicole, tortured by the crisis, remained still in doubt. She made
a step forward as though to reveal what she had seen, but meeting the
eye of the prisoner, she halted before its eloquence, and, bowing her
head, allowed them to pass. Dossonville signaled Barabant to place
himself behind him, and thus they plunged down the pit, where twice
Barabant thought he caught the sound of a chuckle. But when they
emerged into daylight, the face of Dossonville remained inscrutable.
At the prison of the Abbaye they entered without difficulty. There the
gate stood open day and night. At the desk, when the accusation had
been read and the alibi announced, Dossonville extended his hand to
Barabant and said:
"Thanks, citoyen. You need trouble yourself no more."
"No more!" Barabant exclaimed, in astonishment, for he had expected to
testify to the meeting with Santerre.
Dossonville smiled grimly and, with a curious twist of his back, said:
"My back itched a little in such company, especially in that devil's
descent of yours, where little slips might occur. You were necessary to
my peace of mind! Thanks, citoyen."
Then, as he was about to be led away, he turned to the turnkey and
cried rapidly.
"Citoyen, it is useless to disturb the good Friend of the People. He
will pardon me if I used his name to insure a hearing before a properly
constituted court of justice." Then with his silent, parted grin, he
added, "My true defense I shall present at the proper time."
He disappeared in custody, not before he had sent a glance of malicious
enjoyment toward his enemy, who, astounded, did not immediately
recover. When he did, it was with the rage of the wounded lion suddenly
surprised by the trap.
X
A TRIUMPH OF INSTINCT
"Holà above, Barabant."
"Holà below, Goursac."
"Come down."
"What for?"
"Collenot is condemned. We're going to the execution."
"What, at eight o'clock at night?"
"Immediately. I am just back from the trial."
"I'm coming."
The Revolutionary Tribunal, inaugurated two days before, had
deliberated ever since upon the fate of Collenot d'Agremont, seeking
to fasten on the King and the Court the onus of the battle of the
Tuileries. But beyond Barabant's desire to see the execution of this
first victim of the anger of the Nation, was his curiosity to witness
the second installation of that strange machine which had carried the
name of Dr. Guillotin beyond the boundaries of France.
"And your Nicole?" Goursac asked when Barabant had joined them. "Why
don't you bring her?"
"She's not in her room."
"You called her?"
"Yes, yes." Barabant, not wishing to discover their estrangement,
hastened on: "Did Collenot implicate the Court?"
"He would say nothing. To do him justice, he was very firm."
"And the Tribunal?"
"Impressive. The people were awed. The judge pronounced an eloquent
harangue,--they always do." He flung out his arm and repeated
sarcastically: "'Victim of the law, could you but read the hearts
of your judges you would find them crushed and saddened. Go to your
death courageously. The Nation demands from you nothing but a sincere
repentance.'"
"That's well put!"
"Repentance--and your head!" Goursac amended sarcastically. "What an
absurdity!"
"Not at all," retorted Barabant, disciple of Rousseau and the
sentimentalists. "The Nation mourning and forgiving its enemies, even
when pronouncing sentence, is a spectacle, I say, that is sublime."
"Bah! What good is sentiment when you lack a head? No, no. These
grandiloquent harangues of mercy and advice disgust me. They are
nothing but self-advertisement. If I were a judge, I'd say:
"'Collenot, my friend, the Nation has proved you guilty; I pronounce
upon you sentence of death; for further details consult Monsieur de
Paris. Bon voyage!'"
"And the guillotine, Citoyen Goursac: do you find it insincere to
despatch an enemy with the least pain?"
"Ah, the guillotine! There is a tremendous advance in human thought!"
Goursac exclaimed, without deigning to open an argument. "There is
something to be proud of. I foresee great innovations from this simple
invention. To have learned to suppress human life painlessly is a true
sentimental advance. We shall go further."
Barabant, seeing that he was started on his theories, said
good-humoredly:
"Well, what next?"
"The day will come when society will regard it as a crime to allow
children to grow up who are hopelessly destined to suffering--such as
weaklings, monsters, hunchbacks, and the other deformed. The State will
suppress them."
His companion groaned in horror.
"More than that," Goursac contended, "the day will come when the aged,
the infirm, the decrepit, the mortally stricken, will be painlessly
released from their suffering. Yes, death, when inevitable, will be
made instantaneous, and society will approve."
"And how soon do you expect this magnificent idea to fructify?"
Barabant asked scornfully.
"In about two thousand years," Goursac answered, with a hitch of his
head. "That is the time necessary for an idea to conquer society."
"My dear friend, you are either joking or mad."
"The condition of prophecy is to be scorned," the theorist said dryly.
"You remember Cassandra."
They entered the Place du Carrousel, where the guillotine, whether by
conscious or unconscious irony, was established under the frowning
shadows of the abode of kings. The dim square was hidden by a loose,
shifting network of variegated colors dominated by the bright flecks
of countless liberty-caps, which, in measure, as new groups arrived,
contracted into mists of red. Above this bobbing field of heads two
thin shafts started upward, nearly lost in the descending dusk.
Goursac, extending his hand in the direction of these, said:
"There is the guillotine."
"It does not seem very terrible," answered Barabant. "Let us stay here;
it is, perhaps, a false report. In ten minutes it will be too dark."
Others with the same idea lingered on the outskirts of the crowd or
turned away. The faces of the throng could no longer be distinguished,
when suddenly afar there sprang up a circle of torches, and the
scaffold emerged from the night.
The two friends hastily made their way through the crowd until, at the
end of twenty minutes' patient endeavor, they reached the foremost
ranks. A calm spread among the unseen throng, broken by sudden tensions
at each new alarm. The people, who had greeted the first appearance of
the guillotine with cries of disappointment and demands for the more
spectacular gallows, were now impressed by the cloak of mystery the
night drew about the scaffold. The machine was no longer mere wood and
iron; it had tasted blood: it was human.
Barabant, from his position of vantage, could distinguish the upright
shafts, where from time to time, as Goursac explained the mechanism,
some reflection from a torch falling on the knife above, there appeared
the dull display of steel like the sudden threat of a brutish fang.
Turning from the scaffold, Barabant examined the crowd, where, seeking
for Nicole, he perceived Louison worming her way toward them.
Suddenly a whisper ran over the heads and rose to a breeze of
exclamations. The masses tightened. Those in front were swept against
the guards as those behind surged forward, stretching to tiptoe.
Louison, caught in the press, was imprisoned not twenty feet away. This
time the alarm was not vain. From all sides burst the growl of the mob.
"Hu! hu! hu!"
A long, tedious moment succeeded, then suddenly the scaffold swarmed
with dark figures. The hooting and the screeching gave place to a burst
of hand-clapping. Barabant, astonished at the implacable ferocity of
the crowd, turned to examine it, but his eye encountering Louison,
remained there.
The radiance of a neighboring torch redeemed her figure from the
obscurity. Her head was strained slightly forward, while one hand
clutched the kerchief at her throat as though to restrain her
eagerness. The lips were parted, the eyes glowed with the intensity
of fascinated contemplation, but her whole figure, in contrast to the
unbridled passions of the crowd, remained, as during the attack on the
Tuileries, controlled and insensible.
So unnatural was her attitude that Barabant could not have averted his
eyes had not the hand of Goursac recalled him to the drama before him.
He sought in the gloom and the shadows, seeing nothing, until suddenly
out of the darkness came the shoot and the thud of the knife.
A woman, with a cry, caught his arm, burying her head in his sleeve.
Another woman, holding a baby, was shouting wildly:
"Bravo! Bravo!"
A tottering veteran, in the costume of the Invalides, questioned him
eagerly:
"Is it over? Tell me, citoyen, is it over?"
The woman on his arm continued to gasp hysterically. Himself recoiling
at this death out of the darkness, he returned to the contemplation of
Louison.
Her pose had relaxed, while a slight smile of disdain appeared as she
watched the frantic crowd acclaim the head which a _bourreau_ held to
them. On her face was neither horror nor anger, neither disgust nor
passion. As calmly as though before her own mirror, she smoothed out
her dress and replaced the cockade, torn by the contact of the crowd,
with a fresh one from her basket, scenting first its perfume. She
raised her eyes, and her glance met that of Barabant, overcome with
disgust. She frowned, and turning her shoulder, was lost in the crowd
which now flowed out in widening circles.
"What is there about her!" Barabant exclaimed, turning to Goursac.
"About whom?"
"Louison," he said impatiently. "You did not see her? She made me
shiver!"
"She affects me like a snake," Goursac answered. "She is a creature of
the night, in her element at such a time. They say she never misses an
execution. Well, citoyen, what of the machine?"
"Horrible!"
"You are wrong," Goursac protested. "It does not take life: it
suppresses it, and that by a process more charitable than natural
death. That is the way a nation should avenge itself." He repeated
several times in a transport of enthusiasm, "Magnificent!"
"There, look at it now!"
At Barabant's summons they paused at the gate, looking back at the
dim circle of lights around the guillotine unseen but divined, while
Barabant continued:
"The first time did not count--it was only a thief. To-night is the
true beginning of the guillotine--a sinister and ominous beginning."
"Still, what a spectacle!" Goursac exclaimed. "What could be more
dramatic?"
"Too much so," Barabant retorted. "I admit I am impressionable, but
to-night the blow seemed to fall from above our own heads."
"You are superstitious. You will be telling me next that you had a
premonition about your own neck."
"Hardly; but, my friend, yours is so long and the chances of politics
are so many--"
"Don't trouble yourself," replied Goursac, laughing, and with a mock
gesture he extended his fist. "As for my neck, Madame Guillotine, I
defy you to take it." He turned to Barabant. "You, my friend, are so
gallant that I won't answer for yours."
They passed into the Rue Royale, Goursac slightly in advance. Barabant,
rubbing shoulders with the departing crowd, felt a pull on his arm and
heard the voice of Nicole saying mischievously:
"Barabant, are you very angry with me?"
Too astonished to make answer, he remained dumbly gazing into the
teasing countenance; but at that moment Goursac, perceiving them,
called out indulgently:
"That's right, children; we don't live long enough for lovers to
quarrel. I'll keep discreetly ahead."
Barabant persisting in his silence, Nicole continued pleadingly:
"Then you are still angry?"
"Yes."
"I am sorry."
She said it in such a gentle tone, sighing slightly, that Barabant's
anger held no longer; still, as a measure of policy, he kept silent.
Goursac, preparing to wheel into a side street, called back, with a
laugh of which only Nicole could guess the cost:
"Good-by, my children; I leave you in peace. Love-making is
disconcerting to the older generation. Reconcile yourselves quickly."
Barabant and Nicole, thus left to themselves, continued arm in arm
silently homeward, avoiding the thronged thoroughfares, the noise
and the lights, plunging by preference down quiet ways where only an
occasional window reddened the sides of the night. Barabant struggled
to maintain his just anger; Nicole, who had yielded to an impulse in
accosting him, searched for some means to regain the ground which she
felt she had surrendered.
"You don't answer," she said at last, withdrawing her arm half-way.
"You want me to go?"
He freed himself brusquely and faced her with the angry cry:
"Coquette!"
"No, that I am not!" she cried, and seizing his arm, she said rapidly:
"Barabant, it is not true. You have no right to say that!"
"You have a right to be what you wish."
Nicole, checking herself, said sadly:
"You still believe I am playing with you?"
"I do."
She withdrew a step and shook her head.
"No, it is not you I am playing with."
Barabant, who did not fathom the allusion, started to ask her what she
meant; but Nicole, immediately perceiving the danger, retreated from
her serious mood, and slipping her arm through his, said imperiously as
they started on:
"Barabant, have you ever been in love--seriously in love?"
"Oh!"
"But seriously?"
"No."
"I was sure of it."
"And why?" Barabant demanded, nettled at her assumption.
"Because you understand nothing of a woman." She continued rapidly:
"Listen to reason, my friend. You assume rights over me and my actions,
and yet what right have you? You have never once told me that you love
me. Yet you are angry because I insist upon being wooed, foolish,
ignorant fellow!"
Her reproof, which she designed to be heavy, weakened despite herself,
until at the end she pronounced it almost caressingly.
"Is that just, Nicole?" Barabant cried, seizing the opening. "Why am
I angry? Because you will not give me the opportunity." He drew her
closer to him. "Nicole, listen to me but once."
"No, no," she checked him imperiously, "I do not wish to. You are too
headlong. Barabant, I tell you, you do not know yourself."
"I--I don't know what I feel?"
She checked him again.
"If you do, then respect my wishes." She added almost pleadingly: "Not
too fast, Barabant. Be reasonable and I will not avoid you again." Then
peremptorily changing the subject: "Did you see Louison? She is always
at an execution."
He accepted the turn reluctantly.
"I saw her."
"How did she affect you?"
"Like a snake," he answered, using Goursac's expression. "There is
something about her that repels me."
"I was afraid she might attract you," she confessed, with a laugh, in
which showed a little relief.
At No. 38 they groped into the entrance, feeling the walls with their
hands. The crow set up a raucous crying, while la Mère Corniche
appeared at the door, shading her candle to discover their approach.
They passed on through the first court to the bottom of the staircase,
where a single torch flickered in its bracket. Nicole held out her
hand, averting her face.
"Good night, Barabant, and until to-morrow."
The hour, the place, the torch that allowed her body to melt into the
shadow and illuminated only the eyes, the lips, and the smile that
tempted him with the mystery of what it hid, overcame his resolutions.
He caught her by the wrists and drew her toward him. Nicole gave a
little cry, resisting feebly.
"I cannot understand you," he cried fiercely. "What are you? What do
you feel? Do you love me or do you not?"
She answered faintly, struggling against his arms:
"Let me go."
"Nicole, dear Nicole, I love you, I adore you."
"No, no, no!"
He released her, and throwing himself at her feet, he stretched up his
hands to her, crying:
"Look, look!"
Nicole, with her hand to her cheek half turned from him, could not
but believe. In his eyes she saw the tears appear, and moved, despite
herself, by his emotion, she took his forehead between her palms,
saying softly:
"Calm thyself, Barabant."
"You love me; you do, you do!" he cried. He caught her hand in his and
repeated, as only the lover knows how: "I love you! I love you! I love
you!"
She pressed her hands to her eyes to steady herself.
"And how long will it last?" she said solemnly, her voice reverberating
in the hollow of the silent hall. "Three months, Barabant? And then--"
"For life--forever!"
Nicole shook her head incredulously, but her breast rose in long,
tumultuous breaths, trembling with the memory of the word.
He mounted the stairs, turned and held out his hand to her. She dared
not look at him, for victory was in his eyes.
"Nicole, Nicole!"
Then she looked at him, her hands to her throat, fallen back against
the wall. He smiled to her, waiting confidently. Up the dark ascent was
love, mystery, anguish, jealousy, doubt,--but always love.
She moved a step toward him, fascinated and drawn on, until their
fingers touched. Then suddenly she shrank away, and with a cry,
spreading out her hands to screen him from her sight, she fled. Only
the instinct had survived, but the instinct had conquered.
XI
THE MAN WITH THE LANTERN
Then between Nicole and Barabant began one of those subtle conflicts of
the sexes in which the one who loves the more unselfishly is foredoomed
to defeat. Until the night of the execution Nicole had combated the
very thought of love. Her flight at the staircase was the last spark of
resistance. She had drunk of the cup, the poison was in her veins. The
next morning she resigned herself to the bitter, determined, cost what
it might, to have her hour of happiness.
She gave up the struggle against herself, but began another to
safeguard her happiness. Her intuitions told her to resist--that
the longer he was compelled to woo, the more he would prize her. In
her uneasy doubts she had recourse to coquetry, but that coquetry
which is unselfish and pathetic, and is nothing but the instinct of
self-preservation.
To Barabant, who neither knew the depth of her longings, nor could have
understood them had he known, the hesitation and delays of Nicole were
incomprehensible. Resolved to meet her with like tactics, he assumed
toward her the attitude of a comrade, avoiding all expression of
sentiment.
Nicole readily fathomed the artifice. She countered by an equal show
of indifference, leaving him always after a moment's conversation.
Barabant retaliated by devoting himself anew to Louison.
The manoeuver brought Nicole back. It was the one move she had not
foreseen. It threw her into a panic of jealousy. Not that she did not
understand his motive, but she feared, from his being thrown with
Louison, results of which he had no thought. She admitted her mistake
and relinquished the struggle. She returned uneasily to him, showing
him from time to time, by a word or gesture, that he had only to ask.
Barabant, blind to the extent of the change, though instinctively
perceiving its import, redoubled his attentions to Louison; treating
Nicole always as a comrade, hailing her joyfully, gay and charming
in her company, but saying never a word of what she now impatiently
sought.
Meanwhile events had been hurrying on the inevitable conflict between
the Commune and the Convention. On the 25th of August the news of the
treacherous surrender of Longwy to the Prussian army ran through the
arteries of Paris as an inflaming poison. The Nation rose from the
fall in the fury of its anger and wounded pride. From the windows of
the Hôtel de Ville an immense banner rolled its folds over the city,
bearing the inspiring inscription:
"The Fatherland is in danger!"
From all sides recruits rushed in to swell the legions of defense. The
city, as though the enemy were already at its gates, converted itself
into a camp, established posts and sentries, while at all hours the
streets shook under the footfall of passing patrols. Searching parties
ran from house to house, filling the prisons with suspected aristocrats.
The Convention, urged to abolish the monarchy and establish the
Republic, hesitated. Only the Commune was resolute, vociferous, and
implacable, shouting for the massacre of the traitors at home before
marching against those abroad.
Lafayette deserting, Verdun rumored betrayed, traitors everywhere,--in
the army of Brunswick, in the Assembly, in Paris,--nothing but a great
example could strike terror in the hearts of aristocrats at home and
abroad. What that example was, so clamorously demanded, few doubted
who beheld the frenzied crowds that infested the gates of the prisons,
gloating over the list of prisoners there exposed.
In the midst of these alarms, to the dismay of Goursac, Javogues took
up his residence in the landing below them. Shortly after, Nicole
reported another disquieting fact: la Mère Corniche had closed her
cellar, refusing admission to all. Occasionally Barabant saw Javogues
running the streets at the head of searching parties, in a whirlwind of
disheveled forms and rushing torches, while the room of the Marseillais
was filled with uncouth figures in secret gathering, of whose character
Barabant, knowing the temperament of Javogues, had no doubt.
On the night of the 1st of September Barabant, who had enrolled for
the defense of the city, began his patrol at the junction of the Rue
St. Antoine and the great, gloomy square where had stood the fortress
of the Bastille. The mass of citizens, foreseeing the massacre on the
morrow, had retired early, barring the doors, leaving the streets to
be swept by restless bands of the lawless: vultures stirred up by the
prospect of carrion.
The hours lagged, and the tramp of his step seemed endless to
Barabant. His reflections were bitter; for him, the Girondin, it was
not simply the massacre of aristocrats, but the fall of his party, that
he apprehended.
At twelve Nicole was to join him for the remaining hour. There was
still three quarters of an hour before she would come. The increasing
sound of voices restored him to the consciousness of his trust.
Soon a party of five emerged, preceded by a small muffled figure
gliding with feverish steps ahead, as a flame devours its path.
Barabant, following them on his beat, strove to recall the familiar
stride of the leader. The patrol approaching him from the opposite
direction cried:
"Is it you, Citoyen Sentry?"
The figure advancing assumed human shape.
"Hé, you are alone to-night?"
"Until twelve."
"You are lucky." He shifted his musket and laughed. "Mine leaves me
alone to-night. We had a bit of a quarrel. I had to break a bottle over
her head. And now, the devil take it! I have to stand guard alone." He
added angrily: "That's the way with women."
"One moment, citoyen. You saw the party pass just now?"
"Aye. Did you not recognize him?"
"Who?"
"Some one who'll be busy to-night,--the Citoyen Marat." He raised his
voice cheerily and sang:
"Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira;
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira;
Les aristocrates on les pendra.
"By to-morrow night there'll be no need of sentries!" he broke off.
"It's long, eh, when there's no one to keep you company? The devil take
the woman!" He shouldered his musket. "Citoyen, Salut et Fraternité."
He turned on his heel and joined the darkness, while back came the
unmusical voice:
"Dansons la carmagnole,
Vive le son, vive le son!
Dansons la carmagnole,
Vive le son--"
The rest lost itself faintly among distant roofs.
Barabant, recommencing his tedious pacing, returned to the Rue St.
Antoine, where the sound of light footsteps warned him of the approach
of a woman or a child.
"Can it be Nicole?" he thought hopefully, but his spirits fell as the
woman came on doubtfully in a wavering line.
"Good evening, citoyenne," he said gallantly. "There are not many of
your sex abroad to-night, and alone."
The woman gave the countersign, "The 10th of August."
Barabant, seeing that she was not inclined to enter into a
conversation, cried:
"Take pity on the patriot, citoyenne. The hours are dull."
But the woman, with only a slight shake of her head, passed quickly on.
Barabant, thus repulsed, grumbled to himself:
"She is neither young nor pretty or she would have stopped." But
remembering the sentry he had left, he continued: "Perhaps it is the
fair one with the broken head. If it is, she doesn't seem any too
eager. No, she's turned away."
Suddenly he drew himself up with an exclamation. He saw the woman halt
as with the twinkle of a lantern the figure of a man joined her, while
to his astonishment she drew back in evident shrinking from her new
companion.
Barabant, who had followed this scene with such intentness as to have
become unaware of his surroundings, suddenly bounded back at the touch
of a hand on his shoulder.
"What vigilance, Citoyen Barabant! What a model sentry!"
It was Louison who had stolen on him silently, and now stood mocking
him. To Barabant the apparition was so in keeping with the strange
impression which the girl had made on him that he was too startled to
answer immediately.
"Why are you always afraid of me?" Louison said impatiently. "It isn't
pleasant to inspire terror."
Barabant excused himself, recounting the scene he had just witnessed;
but Louison, not to be put off, returned to her question. "So I inspire
you with fear?"
"The expression is exaggerated," Barabant returned evasively.
"Come, frankly, there is something about me that has repelled you?"
She continued seeking the answer herself. "Was it the day we went to
the flower-market and I pretended anger? That was but play." Her eyes
sought his face, as though she could find its expression despite the
darkness. All at once she said, "It was at the guillotine?"
"That's true."
"I knew it; but why? I don't understand," she said almost angrily.
"What is there about me that gives such an impression? I am not
conscious of it."
"First, answer me this," Barabant said, "and frankly. At an execution
you have no feeling of pity or horror, have you?"
"No," she answered thoughtfully. "Why?"
"Because it is too evident."
"How do I seem?" she said quickly.
"You seem utterly indifferent to any human suffering."
"That is true," she said slowly.
"It is not only that," Barabant continued, "but--how shall I say it?
There seemed to be almost a fascination to you in the spectacle that
ordinarily sickens the human heart."
"What!" the girl exclaimed, astonished, "are you not curious to see how
a man can die?"
"Curious, yes; but the spectacle is disagreeable to me."
"Why? What is more ordinary and commonplace than death?"
Barabant, in despair of making her understand, remained silent.
"How curious! And when I am at an execution I look different from this?"
"Yes."
"I seem--?"
"Unhuman."
She tossed her head in displeasure and said sharply:
"I do not like that."
"I am frank."
Louison remained thoughtfully silent, perturbed and frowning. Then
lifting her head, she said gaily, in quite a different manner:
"Very well, then; I shall take care how you see me in future."
She turned in the direction of the Bastille, and fastening her glance
upon the ring of light, said:
"It seems to be going away. Perhaps we shall see the woman now."
"She comes faster this time," Barabant said as the sound of footsteps
warned them of her approach.
The next moment a bundle of draperies passed them as a ship scudding
before a storm. Louison, watching the woman, closed her hand over
Barabant's wrist, allowing an exclamation to escape her. Then,
springing forward, she cried:
"Eh, mother! Wait a moment!"
The fleeting figure turned as though stung, then dashed wildly into
the darkness. Louison, with a bound, sprang after her, but suddenly
clapping her hand to her forehead, turned and broke past Barabant, who
heard only, as she shot on toward the Bastille, the words:
"The man with the lantern!"
XII
THE MASSACRE OF THE PRISONS
The next morning Nicole and Geneviève, having breakfasted at noon near
the Temple, where the throng collected daily to insult the ears of the
royal family, returned slowly toward the Tuileries through the hushed
and apprehensive city.
Toward three o'clock the long-awaited tocsin sounded from the other
side of the river, then the chance burst of a musket and the assembling
roll of drums. But this time, in contrast to the night of the 9th of
August, there came no spontaneous outpouring into the streets. As the
tocsin continued to disturb the air with its violent voice, timid faces
appeared at the windows, searching with anxious glances the streets,
the opposite walls, in doubt of their neighbors; even the air, as
though to discover the reason of the uproar.
The streets were emptied; small groups wavered in the entrances,
waiting for the first rumors to guide them. As the two girls
hesitated, a woman appeared, running toward them, dragging a child at
either side. From window and doorway a clamor of questions arose, while
many, running into the street, surrounded her and sought to stop her
progress. But the woman, resisting all entreaties, cleft the crowd and
disappeared, repeating frantically:
"They are massacring the prisoners!"
The street grew noisy with exclamation and conjecture, while those
above, in the windows, screamed down for the rumors that flew from lip
to lip. A little later another messenger arrived,--a waif of the slums,
to whom the marks of poverty and vice had given the semblance of an
incongruous manhood. The boy came romping down the street, bare-legged,
disheveled, brandishing a knife. At times he flung up his hands and
screamed in childish treble:
"To the Abbaye, citoyens, to the Abbaye! The tyrants are being
exterminated. The justice of the people is beginning! To the Abbaye! To
the Abbaye!"
Behind the frenzied boy there fell a silence, and the crowd, in a
sudden, senseless panic, retreated indoors.
"The Abbaye!" Nicole cried in consternation. "And Dossonville! We must
hurry there."
A baker's wife, seeing them hastening on, cried:
"Are you going to the Abbaye, citoyennes? Is there any danger?"
"Not for us."
"Wait, I'll join you."
A cobbler made a fourth, then two apprentices from a cloth-merchant
attached themselves, then a fishwife and a tow-headed newsboy. As
they crossed the Seine the crowd increased, while horrid figures of
depravity and suffering, vermin of Paris, broke past them. Cutlasses
and pikes appeared, and from the panting throng shouts burst out:
"Death to the traitors!"
"Death to the betrayers of Longwy!"
"Death to all aristocrats!"
"Death to priests!"
At the Abbaye they found the sanguinary remnants of the prisoners who,
transferred from the Conciergerie, had been swept from the carts into
the maw of the mob at the very gates that opened to shelter them. On
the prison itself there had been as yet no attack. The mob, seeking
vengeance on the priests, had swept on to the convent of Les Carmes.
At the sight of the strewn corpses and the blood-bespattered pavements
the baker's wife halted, crying:
"I've seen enough; I'm going back."
The cobbler hesitated, listening across the houses to the faint cries
of the mob in the Rue Vaugirard. The apprentices sprang forward, while
the newsboy exclaimed impudently:
"Come on, comrades, we must see what's doing!"
Nicole, who had come solely to assure herself of Dossonville's safety,
likewise recoiling before the spectacle of butchery, was yet so
impelled by the subtle, morbid fascination which such scenes exercise
over the human mind, that without a thought she hastened on. The
fishwife and the cobbler joined them; even the woman who had already
started to retreat acceded to the common curiosity and returned,
protesting:
"It's too horrible! Turn back."
"After all," the cobbler answered, "that's what the aristocrats would
like to do to us!"
"Aye, citoyen, you've hit it right!"
"And the women?"
"They'll leave them alone."
"We'll see."
About the convent a loose throng was churning, bristling with pikes and
crudely fashioned spears.
"Keep together," the cobbler cried, "and bear toward the wall!"
By this manoeuver they penetrated to the front, where, their band
disintegrating, Geneviève and Nicole succeeded in reaching a position
at a grill in the wall.
In the garden, not thirty feet away, a black mass dotted with the white
of human faces was huddled together, shrinking from the gates and
apertures that swarmed with axes, scythes, swords, and barbarous faces
more pitiless than the steel.
At Nicole's side a mason extended his cutlass toward the priests,
bellowing:
"Eh, you fat fellow over there! Wait till they let us in! I'll carve
you!"
Another shouted:
"I choose to shave the tall one; I'll make a true monk of him!"
The priests encouraged one another; some knelt, others lifted their
arms, their voices, and their eyes serenely above. A few blanched
before the approach of martyrdom, while others in whom youth's natural
impulse to life was strong calculated the surroundings and weighed the
desperate chances of escape.
All at once there was an upheaval in the herd of the besieged, a
swaying toward the walls, and a sudden parting that opened a path
to the chapel beyond, where a swarm of the populace, who had broken
through, was spreading over the steps. From the crowd without a
wild shout went up; those at the locked gates, stretching their arms
through, strove to prod the victims with their pikes.
On the steps, face to face with their prey, the new assailants
hesitated, seeking some pretext before striking. But one, more
impatient than the rest, burst from the back and fired point-blank
into the herd. The impulse once given, the assassins fell upon their
victims, who on their knees welcomed the end.
Forty or fifty of the younger members, revolting at such surrender
to death, bounded away to scale the farther walls. A very few passed
over and escaped to outer courts before the bandits flung themselves
on the fleeing. Then everywhere could be seen bodies clutching at the
brim of the wall, tumbling and pitching backward in the horror of the
overtaking fate. Arms that grasped liberty suddenly contracted in the
convulsions of despair; faces that already looked on life appeared a
moment above the wall and fell back with the sharp summons to death.
"Shall we go?" cried Nicole, suffocated.
"Yes."
But they could not move. The scene enchained them.
The hunt consummated, the hunters flung themselves on the unresisting,
and as though to stifle the smallest spark of pity, redoubled their
fury and their cries.
In front of the two girls a Marseillais felled a priest with two
strokes across the scalp, and drove his pike into the stomach with such
ferocity that the point refused to move. The assassin, in rage jumping
on the lifeless body, stamped and tugged, cursing the resistance of
the corpse which sought to retain the weapon that had struck it down.
Everywhere the butchers, not content with the death-dealing blow, flung
themselves on the lifeless bodies, piercing them with infuriated stabs,
as though the last insult was this mutilation of the dead.
Finally, despairing of satisfying their vengeance on this inert mass,
the leaders forced those who remained into the church, some who still
breathed being borne on the arms of those who but deferred their
murder. Two by two they were led out and butchered.
From this moment the massacre, in its clock-like procession, abated
its fury. The executioners themselves, exhausted and listless, struck
mechanically.
The crowd, grumbling at the monotony, moved away. Nicole and Geneviève
found themselves in the street, packed in the press, beside their late
companions. The crowd, animated by the lust of curiosity, became that
most fearful of the manifestations of humanity--a mob.
Geneviève and Nicole, no longer individuals, but atoms, became cold,
pitiless, maddened with sensations, hungry for new; invaded by a fury
which they did not understand, an anger and a hatred of which they knew
not the cause.
Some one cried:
"On to St. Firmin. There are eighty priests there!" A hundred voices
took up the cry, and the mass, set in motion, rolled toward the prison.
The fishwife, with streaming hair, bellowed:
"Cut the throats of every one. No priest must escape!"
Farther on in the press of bodies, Nicole saw the two apprentices,
transformed with the frenzy.
The cobbler had armed himself with some weapon; even the tow-headed
newsboy near them screamed hysterically:
"À la mort! À la mort!"
"I can go no farther!" Nicole protested.
"Yes, yes," Geneviève cried, seizing her arms and impelling her, but
half resisting, into the rush of the multitude. "We must see it! We
must see everything!"
She was a child no longer, but a savage akin in fury to the beast
enraged by the red flash of blood.
At St. Firmin's the vanguard broke into the prison. The night was
filled with shrieks of terror and of furious exultation. Body after
body, dead or dying, was hurled from the window, to be pounced upon
below and torn to pieces. More than eighty lay quivering in mounds.
Then at last the mob, by that strange organization by which it moves
without commands, turned face and, sparkling with torches, inundated
the narrow street that led down to the Boulevard St. Germain, and
returned to the prison of the Abbaye. It was now deep into the night,
and for hours a semblance of a trial had been going on within the
court. The mob, thus balked by the routine of justice, softened and
dissipated into a throng of spectators, bewildered and recovering
slowly from their delirium.
Nicole, fearing for Dossonville, pressed forward for a nearer view.
About the gates were a score of executioners, so saturated with blood
that at first glance the butchers seemed more like the butchered. Eight
or ten waited in two rows the arrival of the new victim. As many more
leaned wearily against the wall with nodding heads. One stooped to
light fresh torches.
Suddenly the gates disclosed to Nicole the flaring courtyard and the
wild figure of a prisoner propelled to destruction by two guards. At
first he marched to his death with firm tread; but all at once, with
a horrid heave of his breast, he stretched out his hands before his
face to hide the hideous doom. Shoved forward, his arms raised in the
instinct of self-preservation, he suffered untold tortures: his arms,
hacked to spouting stumps, received a dozen gashes, while the revolting
body sought to strike back against the sting, until the last blow
silenced the shriek on shriek that called on merciful death.
Two men dragged aside the half-naked corpse and flung it on the mound
of bodies. At the shock of the new arrival there was a sudden settling
and shifting in this inert mass, a quivering adjustment that gave the
ghastly semblance of life, as though a hideous welcome of the dead
to the dead. Geneviève, with throbbing pulses and dilated nostrils,
shuddered and turned to Nicole. She was so rigid, so ghastly with the
horror, that Geneviève seized her arm.
"Ah! ah! ah!"
At her clutch Nicole screamed in mortal dread, then burst into
hysterical weeping. Geneviève put her arm around her and drew her
away, through the morbid crowd, seeing dimly the baker's wife pressing
feverishly forward to seize their place. Then Nicole, covering her
eyes, began to scream:
"Take me away, away, away!"
But at every tenth step she stopped and struggled to go back, her
glance seeking the caldron. The third time, to her horror, the gates
opened once more, and, heavily borne between two guards, she saw the
figure of Dossonville.
XIII
DOSSONVILLE IN PERIL
"The Citoyen Dossonville to the bar! The Citoyen Dos-son-ville!"
The call, resounding along the stone corridors, reached the prisoners
huddled in the main hall of the Abbaye.
"The Citoyen Dos-son-ville!"
A turnkey under a snarling torch penetrated the group, drawing one
after another to him with rough hand.
"The Citoyen Dossonville! I summon all on peril of their lives to
discover to me the Citoyen Dossonville!"
Out of the mass extended a hand with long, accusing forefinger, and a
voice exclaimed:
"Over there."
The hand was snatched back, while a fomenting in the crowd showed where
the informer was burying himself from recognition.
The turnkey stopped before a figure stretched in sleep, and
incredulously thrust his torch into the face. But the sleeper
continued to inhale long breaths methodically, until, convinced of the
genuineness of the sleep, the turnkey proceeded to wake him with a
vigorous thrust of his foot.
Dossonville started to a sitting position, opening his eyes on the
suspicious visage above him and the background of fellow-prisoners who,
afraid to show too much interest, held themselves at a distance and
followed from the corners of their eyes.
"What do you want with me?"
"Are you the Citoyen Dossonville?"
"I am."
"The Nation summons you to appear before the bar of the popular
justice!"
"At eleven o'clock at night? The justice of the people never sleeps,
then?"
"Be quick!"
Dossonville lifted himself to an upright position, restoring his pillow
to its rightful function of cloak.
"I will not bother about my other possessions now," he cried
sarcastically. "Citoyennes and citoyens, to the pleasure of seeing you
again, or not, as you prefer. Now for the justice of the people!"
Under the lightness of his manner, his mind worked with the
desperation of an animal at bay. Of what he was approaching he knew
nothing. Yet as he advanced along the reverberant corridors, his mind
assembled a dozen stratagems to meet either a whirlwind of assassins
or the travesty of a trial. His eye, meanwhile alert for every detail,
enveloped each portion of the journey at a glance, running the walls as
a wild animal tracks his cage.
Gradually his waiting ear distinguished a muffled hum, a buzz of
voices, increasing in volume until out of it escaped the piercing
shriek of a woman.
The next moment there burst upon his hearing a hundred cries,--shrieks
of terror, shouts of vengeance, cries of pity, commands and groans,
drunken and maddened notes,--sharp to the ear, rushing over his mind in
a storm of confusion. The gate opened and the volume smote him with the
fury of a blast.
He stood in the courtyard, blinking at strange forms and the crossing
and recrossing of torches, striving to collect his wits. Two guards
had seized him, presenting the points of their reddened swords to his
breast.
His eye went to the center of the courtyard, to a table flanked by
torches, littered with papers, bottles, and the glint of steel; behind
which, installed as judge, Dossonville recognized the huissier
Maillard. A score of Marseillais, stained with blood, reeling from
sleep or drunkenness, churned about this improvised tribunal,
interrupting with their revilings the testimony of the accused, or
swaggered back and forth through the gate that led to the mob. Some
clustered in corners to drink from the bottles that a wine-merchant
constantly renewed; others nonchalantly lighted pipes, stretched
their arms and yawned. In the lull between executions Dossonville
heard a snore. Amid this carnage one man, stretched on a bench, was
unconcernedly asleep.
"There's a man who's not disturbed by trifles," he muttered.
At the slight shift he made, one of his guards pricked him with his
sword, crying angrily:
"Move again, and I'll cut you to ribbons!"
"I am become a statue," Dossonville answered coolly. "Only, do not bear
too hard. I am ticklish."
Ahead of him, a priest without hope told his beads; while before the
tribunal was a man so bowed with years that he had to be supported on
either side.
All at once, seeking in the crowd, Dossonville perceived Javogues.
"Aïe! aïe!" he mumbled uneasily at the sight of that gloating face.
"What ferocity! He is bound to make sure of me. The animal!"
He turned stoically from the Marseillais to the judges, where, to his
amazement, he perceived a movement of clemency toward the accused.
Suddenly the voice of Maillard appealed to the crowd:
"Citoyens, whatever the condition or the crimes of this feeble
plaything of time, I declare to you that it is unworthy of the Republic
to pursue here its vengeance! When nature, for eighty years, has spared
one from peril of sickness, shock of accident, and the din of battles,
man cannot show himself more pitiless than nature. Citoyens, I demand
the handful of years for this venerable man."
An approving murmur saluted this oratorical appeal, broken by the
strident voice of Javogues:
"Traitors have no age. If he is an aristocrat, let him die!"
Maillard, encouraged by the cries of dissent, extended his arm over the
broken figure and said impressively:
"Whatever this man has been, exists no more. The Republic can take no
vengeance here, for it can deprive this man of nothing. Citoyens, let
him be acquitted."
"Well said."
"He speaks well."
"Free him!"
"Bravo. Free him!"
The acquitted man, aware of what had happened, was led away by the
guards. The priest was put in his place, Dossonville moving nearer.
But now the executioners without the gates, growing impatient, smote
the air with their cries:
"More victims!"
"Hurry up!"
"No ceremony with the aristocrat!"
"Hurry up! More! More!"
"Give us more! We want more!"
"Maillard, we are thirsty!"
The judge, addressing the quiet victim, proceeded methodically:
"Jean Marie Latour?"
"I am he."
"Called Brother Francis?"
"Yes."
"Priest?"
"Yes."
"You refused the oath of allegiance to the Nation?"
"I did."
At this a howl more of triumph than of anger burst from the listeners,
and the judge, recognizing the hopelessness of the case, said shortly:
"To La Force."
Three men seized him and bore him, unresisting, to the shambles, while
two more propelled Dossonville roughly forward.
Hardly was he in position when three piercing shrieks announced the
death of the priest. Dossonville, shuddering despite his will, heard a
voice cry boisterously:
"Eh, what a squeal the animal gave!"
The guards fell back, guarding his retreat, while Dossonville,
disdaining to notice, felt rather than saw the Marseillais take his
position at his side.
"Armand Roger Dossonville?"
"The same."
"Lieutenant in the National Guard?"
"Yes."
"You are accused of being in the Tuileries on the tenth day of August
and of firing upon the Nation."
"Who accuses me?"
"I accuse you."
"And I."
Dossonville turned, met the angry eyes of Javogues, and seeking the
second speaker, recognized one of those who had arrested him. He turned
to the tribunal.
"The witnesses are mistaken. I was not at the Tuileries."
His accusers burst into a roar of denunciation, but Maillard, quelling
them, said quietly:
"That should not be difficult to prove. With whom were you on the tenth
day of August?"
Dossonville nodded his head in assent. Then, seeing the trap into which
he was being led, he asked:
"First, does not that register relate that on my arrest I claimed an
alibi with the Citoyen Marat and later renounced it at this prison,
giving as a reason that I used it as a protection to insure my reaching
prison and a trial?"
Javogues broke in furiously:
"Do not listen to him! He prepares some new lie!" Then grasping
Dossonville by the collar, he shook his fist in his face. "I swear that
if he is acquitted, I myself will cut his throat."
"The Citoyen Javogues," Dossonville continued, without changing the
level of his voice, "unfortunately for me, from the day we met has
hated me with an obstinate hatred. I adopted the subterfuge only
because I believed that otherwise I never could have reached the prison
alive. The proof is, I denounced it immediately and explained my
reasons. You will find it there. I will now tell you with whom I passed
the day."
He waited a moment for quiet, Javogues thundering:
"He lies! He lies! He lies!"
"The man whose testimony I invoke is known to you, Citoyen Maillard.
Of his patriotism there can be no question. Unfortunately, he left
immediately after for the Army of the Rhone. From ten o'clock of the
night of August 9th until ten o'clock of the morning of August 10th I
was in the house of the Citoyen Héron."
There was a movement of stupefaction in the assemblage, even Javogues
recoiling. But the first words of Maillard fell upon the ears of
Dossonville as the sudden fall of a sword.
"The Citoyen Héron did not leave for the frontier. Let the Citoyen
Héron be roused and corroborate the accused!"
Two or three threw themselves upon the sleeper to bring him forward.
The mind of Dossonville, thus faced with certain defeat, did not give
a second to despair, but, with the last instinctive grasping for life,
gathered for a supreme effort.
"It is unnecessary," he cried hurriedly. "That night I performed secret
services to the Nation that cannot be made public. But my life is at
stake; I demand Santerre. Santerre will vouch for me."
But what he said was lost in the chorus:
"Spy!"
"Liar!"
"Traitor!"
"Liar! Liar!"
"Santerre now!"
"Robespierre next!"
"He was nursing Danton, perhaps!"
Dossonville stretched out his hand appealingly, but recognizing,
himself, the impossibility of his position, he changed the gesture into
one of command, and looking Maillard calmly in t
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