Александр Дюма
The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty
“Are you going to foretell the death of Mirabeau?” cried Gilbert, almost frightened.
“Frankly, doctor, do you see any length of life for a man whose blood stews him, whose heart swells to suffocate him and whose genius eats him up? do you believe that even such powers will not be worn out in stemming the tide of mediocrity? his enterprise is the rock of Sisyphus. For two years they have been holding him down with the cry of Immorality. As if God moulded all men in the same form, and as if the circle enlarged for a great mind should not enclose greater vices. Mirabeau will not be Premier because he owes a hundred thousand francs debt, which would be settled were he a rich contractor’s son, and because he is condemned to death for having run away with an old imbecile’s wife – who smothered herself in charcoal fumes for the love of a strapping military captain! What a farce the tragedy of human life is! How I should weep over it if I had not made up my mind to laugh!”
“But your prediction?” cried Gilbert.
“I tell you,” said the diviner, in the prophet’s tone which was his alone, and allowed no reply, “Mirabeau will wear out his life without becoming Prime Minister. So great a bar is mediocrity. Go to the Assembly to-morrow and see. Meanwhile, come with me to the Jacobins Club, for these night-birds will hold their session in an hour. Do you belong?”
“No: Danton and Desmoulins entered me at the Cordeliers. We will go after dinner.”
Two hours subsequently, two man in gentlemanly black suits were set down from a plain private carriage at the door of St. Roch’s church, where the throng was great. They were Dr. Gilbert and Baron Zannone, as Cagliostro chose to call himself at this epoch.
“Will you come into the nave or sit in the gallery?” asked the magician.
“I thought the nave was kept for the members?” said the other.
“Just so, but am I not a member of all societies?” returned the Arch-master laughing. “Besides, this club is but the seat of the Invisibles, and you can enter as one of the Rosicrucians. We are sixty thousand strong in France alone in three months since foundation as Jacobins, and will be four hundred thousand in a year.”
“Though I am a Rose-Croix, I prefer to be in the gallery where I can see over the crowd and you can better tell me of the persons whom I descry.”
The seats were roughly knocked up in tiers and a wooden staircase led up them. Cagliostro made a sign and spoke a word to two who were sitting in the already filled seats and they got up to give them their places as if they had been sent before to keep them.
The place was ill lighted in the growing gloom but it was clear that these were the best sort of the revolutionists, while the uniforms of officers of the army and navy abounded. For the common brothers held their meetings in the crypt. Here the literati and artists were in the majority.
Casting a long look around, Gilbert was encouraged by seeing that most were not so very hostile to the royal cause.
“Whom do you see here hostile to royalty?” he inquired of his guide.
“In my eyes there are but two.”
“Oh, that is not many among four hundred men.”
“It is quite enough when one will be the slayer of Louis XVI. and the other his successor.”
“A future Brutus and a future Caesar here?” exclaimed the doctor starting.
“Oh, apostle with scales over your eyes,” said Cagliostro; “you shall not only see them but touch them. Which shall I commence with?”
“By the overthrower; I respect chronology: let us have Brutus first.”
“You know that men do not use the same means to accomplish a like work,” said Cagliostro, animated as by inspiration. “Therefore our Brutus will not resemble the antique one.”
“That makes me the more eager to see ours.”
“There he is.”
He pointed to a man leaning against the rostrum in such a position that his head alone was in the light. Pale and livid, this head seemed dissevered from the trunk. The eyes seemed to shine with a viper’s expression, with almost scornful hatred, knowing his venom was deadly. Gilbert felt a creeping of the flesh.
“You were right to warn me,” he said; “this is neither Brutus nor Cromwell.”
“No, it is rather Cassius the pale-faced and leaned man whom the Emperor dreaded most. Do you not know him?”
“No; or rather I have seen him in the Assembly. He is one of the longest-winded speechifyers of the Left, to whom nobody listens. A pettifogger from Arras – “
“The very man.”
“His name is Maximilian Robespierre.”
“Just so. Look at him. You are a pupil of Lavater the physiognomist.”
“I see the spite of mediocrity for genius as he watches Barnave.”
“In other words you judge like the world. I grant that he cannot expect to make a hit among all these proven orators; but at least you cannot accuse him of immorality; he is the Honest Man: he never steps outside of the law, or only to act within a new law which he legally makes.”
“But what is this Robespierre?” asked the other.
“You ask that as Strafford did of the future Lord Protector: ‘What is this Cromwell? a brewer!’ But he cut off his head, mark, you aristocrat of the Seventeenth Century!”
“Do you suggest that I run the same risk as Charles First’s Minister,” said Gilbert, trying to smile, but it was frozen on his lips.
“Who can tell?” replied the diviner.
“The more reason for me to inquire about him.”
“Who is Robespierre? he was born in Arras, of Irish extraction, in 1758. He was the best pupil in the Jesuits’ College and won a purse on which he came to study at Paris. It was at the same college where your young Sebastian had an experience. Other boys went out sometimes from those sombre aisles which bleach the pallid, and had holidays with their families and friends; young Robespierre was cooped up and breathed the bad air of loneliness, sadness and tedium; three bad things which rob the mind of its bloom and blight the heart with envy and hatred. The boy became a wilted young man. His benefactor had him appointed judge, but his tender heart would not let him dispose of the life of a man; he resigned and became a lawyer. He took up the case of peasants disputing with the Bishop of Arras and won their just claim; the grateful boors sent him up to the Assembly. There he stood between the clergy’s profound hatred for the lawyer who had dared speak against their bishop and the scorn of the nobles for the scholar reared by charity.”
“What is he doing?”
“Nothing for others but much for the Revolution. If it did not enter into my views that he should be kept poor, I would give him a million francs to-morrow. Not that I should buy him, for he is joked with as the Incorruptible! Our noble debaters have settled that he shall be the butt of the House, for all assemblies must have one. Only one of his colleagues understands and values him – it is Mirabeau. He told me the other day, ‘that man will go far for he believes what he says!'”
“This grows serious,” muttered Gilbert.
“He comes here for he gets an audience. The Jacobin is a young minotaur: suckling a calf, he will devour a nation in a while. I promised to show you an instrument for lopping off heads, did I not? Well, Robespierre will give it more work than all those here.”
“Really, you are funereal, count,” said Gilbert; “if your Caesar does not compensate for your Brutus, I may forget what I came here for.”
“You see my future Emperor yonder, talking with the tragic actor Talma, and with another whom he does not know but who will have a great influence over him. Keep this befriender’s name in mind – Barras, and recall it one of these days.”
“I do not know how right you are, but you choose your typical characters well,” said Gilbert; “this Caesar of yours has the brow to wear a crown and his eyes – but I cannot catch the expression – “
“Because his sight is diverted inwards – such eyes study the future, doctor.”
“What is he saying to Barras?”
“That he would have held the Bastile if he were defending it.”
“He is not a patriot, then?”
“Such as he are nothing before they are all in all.”
“You seem to stick to your idea about this petty officer?”
“Gilbert,” said the soothsayer, extending his hand towards Robespierre, “as truly as that man will re-erect the scaffold of Charles Stuart, so truly will ‘this one'” – he indicated the lieutenant of the line regiment – “will re-erect the throne of Charlemagne.”
“Then our struggle for liberty is useless,” said Gilbert discouraged.
“Who tells you that he may not do as much for us on his throne as the other on his scaffold?”
“Will he be the Titus, or Marcus Aurelius, the god of peace consoling us for the age of bronze?”
“He will be Alexander and Hannibal in one. Born amid war, he will thrive in war-fare and go down in warring. I defy you to calculate how much blood the clergy and nobles have made Robespierre lose by his fits of spite against them; take all that these nobles and priests will lose, multiply upon multiplications, and you will not attain the sea of blood this man will shed, with his armies of five hundred thousand men and his three days’ battles in which hundreds of cannon-shots will be fired.”
“And what will be the outcome of all this turmoil – all this chaos?”
“The outcome of all genesis, Gilbert. We are charged to bury this Old World. Our children will spring up in a new one. This man is but the giant who guards the door. Like Louis XIV., Leo X. and Agustus, he will give his name to the era unfolding.”
“What is his name?” inquired Gilbert, subjugated by Cagliostro’s convinced manner.
“His name is Buonaparte; but he will be hailed in History as Napoleon. Others will follow of his name, but they will be shadows – the dynasty of the first Charlemagne lasted two hundred years; of this second one, a tithe: did I not tell you that in a hundred years the Republic will have the empire of France?”
Gilbert bowed his head. He did not notice that the debates were opened. An hour passed when he felt a powerful hand grip his shoulder.
He turned: Cagliostro had disappeared and Mirabeau stood in his place – after the eagle, the lion.
Mirabeau’s face was convulsed with rage as he roared in a dull voice:
“We are flouted, deceived, betrayed! the court will not have me and you have been taken for a dupe as I for a fool. On my moving in the House that the Cabinet Ministers should be invited to be present at the Assembly sessions, three friends of the King proposed that no member of the House should be a minister. This laboriously managed combination dissolves at a breath from the King; But,” concluded Mirabeau, like Ajax, shaking his mighty fist at the sky, “by my name, I will pay them for this, and if their breath can shake a minister, mine shall overthrow the throne. I shall go to the Assembly and fight to the uttermost; I am one of those who blow up the fort and perish under the ruins.”
He rushed away, more terrible and handsomer for the divine streak which lightning had impressed on his brow.
Gilbert did not go to the House to witness his companion’s defeat – one very like a victory. He was musing at home over Cagliostro’s strange predictions. How could this man foresee what would be Robespierre and Napoleon? I ask those who put this question to me how they explain Mdlle. Lenormand’s prediction to the Empress Josephine? One often meets inexplicable things; doubt was invented to comfort those who cannot explain them but will not believe them.
CHAPTER XXII
THE SMILE AND THE NOD
AS Cagliostro had said and Mirabeau surmised, the King had upset the scheme.
Without much regret the Queen saw the constitutional platform fall which had wounded her pride. The King’s policy was to gain time and profit by circumstances; besides he had two chances of getting away into some stronghold, which was his favorite plan. These two plans, we know, were his brother Provence’s, managed by Favras; the other his own, managed by Charny.
The latter reached Metz in a couple of days where the faithful royalist Bouille did not doubt him, but resolved to send his son Louis to Paris to be more exactly informed on the matter. Charny remained as a kind of hostage.
Count Louis Bouille arrived about the middle of November. At this period the King was guarded closely by Lafayette whose cousin the young count was.
To keep him in ignorance of Charny’s negociations, the latter worked to be presented to the King by his kinsman.
Providence answered the envoy’s prayer for Lafayette, who had been informed of his coming but swallowed his excuse that it was on a visit to a sweetheart in Paris, offered to take him with him on his morning call on the monarch.
All the palace doors opened to the general. The sentinels presented arms and the footmen bowed, so that Count Louis could see that his relative was the real King of Paris.
The King was in his forge so that the visitors had to see the Queen first.
Bouille had not seen her for three years. The sight of her at thirty-four, a prisoner, slandered, threatened, and hated, made a deep impression on the chivalric heart of the young noble.
She remembered him at a glance and with the same was sure this was a friendly face. Without busying about General Lafayette she gave her hand for the young man to kiss, which was a fault such as she plentifully committed; without this favor she had won Louis Bouille, and by doing him it before the general she slighted the latter who had never been so gratified; she wounded the very man she most wanted as a friend.
Hence with a faltering in the voice but with the courtesy never leaving him, Lafayette said:
“Faith, my dear cousin, you want me to present you to the Queen: but it seems to me that you were better fitted to present me.”
The Queen was so enraptured at meeting a friend on whom she could rely, and as a woman so proud of the effect produced on the young nobleman, that she turned round on the general with one of the beams of youth which she had feared forever extinct.
“General,” she said with one of the smiles of her sunnier days, “Count Bouille is not a severe republican like you: he comes from Metz, not from America; he does not come to bother about Constitutions but to present his homage. Do not be astonished at the favor shown him by a nearly dethroned Queen, which this country squire may esteem a boon – “
She completed her sentence by a playful smile as much as to say: “You are a Scipio and think nothing of such nonsense.”
“It is a pity for me, and a great misfortune for your Majesty,” returned Lafayette, “that I pass without my respect and devotion being noticed.”
The Queen looked at him with her clear, searching eye. This was not the first time that he had spoken in this strain and set her thinking: but unfortunately, as he had said, she entertained an instinctive repugnance for him.
“Come, general, be generous and pardon me, my outburst of kindness towards this excellent Bouille family, which loves me with a whole heart and of which this youth is the chain of contact. I see his whole family in him, coming to kiss my hand. Let us shake hands, as the American and English do, and be good friends.”
The marquis touched the hand coldly.
“I regret that you do not bear in mind that I am French. The night of the attack on the Royal Family at Versailles ought to remind you.”
“You are right, general,” responded the lady, making an effort and shaking his hand. “I am ungrateful. Any news?”
Lafayette had a little revenge to take.
“No; merely an incident in the House. An old man of one hundred and twenty was brought to the bar by five generations of descendants to thank the Representatives for having made him free. Think of one who was born a serf under Louis XIV. and eighty years after.”
“Very touching,” retorted the Queen; “but I could not well be there as I was succoring the widow and child of the baker murdered for supplying bread to the Assembly.”
“Madam, we could not foresee that atrocity but we have punished the offenders.”
“That will do her no good, as she is maddened and may give birth to a still-born babe; if it should live, do you see any inconvenience to standing godmother to it at the Cathedral of Notre Dame?”
“None: and I take this opportunity of meeting your allusion, before my kinsman, to your pretended captivity. Nothing prevents your going to church or elsewhere, and the King may go hunting and out riding, as much as he likes.”
The Queen smiled, for this permission might be useful as far as it went.
“Good-bye, count,” she said to Bouille; “the Princess of Lamballe receives for me and you will be welcome any evening with your illustrious kinsman.”
“I shall profit by the invitation,” said Lafayette, “sure that I should be oftener seen there and elsewhere by your Majesty if the request had not been heretofore omitted.”
The Queen dismissed them with a smile and a nod, and they went out, the one with more bitterness because of the nod, the other with more adherence because of the smile.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE ROYAL LOCKSMITH
AS the King had undertaken a very important piece of locksmith work, he sent his valet Hue to beg General Lafayette to come into his smithy.
It was on the second floor above his bedroom, with inner and outer stairs.
Since morning he had been hammering away at the work for which Master Gamain gave him praise and so much regret that the politicians should take him away from it to trouble about foreign countries.
Perhaps he wanted to show the Commander of the National Guard that however weak as a monarch, he was mighty as a Tubal Cain.
On the road Count Louis had time to meditate; and he concluded that the Queen knew nothing of his errand. He would have to study the King’s reception and see if he did not give some sign of better understanding what brought him to Paris than his cousin the marquis.
The valet did not know Bouille so that he only announced the general.
“Ah, it is you, marquis,” said the King, turning. “I must ask pardon for calling you up here, but the smith assures you that you are welcome in his forge. A charcoal-burner once said to my ancestor Henry IV.: ‘Jack is king in his own castle.’ But you are master in the smithy as in the palace.”
Louis spoke much in the same way as Marie Antoinette.
“Sire, under whatever circumstances I present myself to your Majesty,” said Lafayette, “and whatever costume your Majesty is in, the King will be ever the sovereign and I the faithful subject and devoted servant.”
“I do not doubt that, my lord; but you are not alone. Have you changed your aid-de-camp?”
“This young officer, Sire, whom I ask leave to introduce, is my cousin, Count Louis Bouille, captain in the Provence Dragoons.”
“Oh, son of Marquis Bouille, commander of Metz?” said the King, with a slight start not escaping the young man.
“The same, Sire,” he spoke up quickly.
“Excuse me not knowing you, but I have short sight. Have you been long in town?”
“I left Metz five days ago; and being here without official furlough but under special permission from my father, I solicited my kinsman the marquis for the honor of presentation to your Majesty.”
“You were very right, my lord, for nobody could so well present you at any hour, and from no one could the introduction come more agreeably.”
The words “at any hour” meant that Lafayette had the public and private entry to the King. The few words from the sovereign put the young count on his guard. The question about his coming signified that he wanted to know if Charny had seen his father.
Meanwhile Lafayette was looking round curiously where few penetrated; he admired the regularity with which the tools were laid out. He blew the bellows as the apprentice.
“So your Majesty has undertaken an important work, eh?” queried Lafayette, embarrassed how to talk to a King who was in a smutty apron, with tucked up sleeves and had a file in his hand.
“Yes, general, I have set to making our magnus opus a lock. I tell you just what I am doing or we shall have Surgeon Marat saying that I am forging the fetters of France. Tell him it is not so, if you lay hold of him. I suppose you are not a smith, Bouille?”
“At least I was bound apprentice, and to a locksmith, too.”
“I remember, your nurse’s husband was a smith and your father, although not much of a student of Rousseau acted on his advice in ‘Emile’ that everybody should learn a craft, and bound you to the workbench.”
“Exactly; so that if your Majesty wanted a boy – “
“An apprentice would not be so useful to me as a master,” returned the King. “I am afraid I have ventured on too hard a job. Oh, that I had my teacher Gamain, who used to say he was a crafts-master above the masters.”
“Is he dead, my lord?”
“No,” replied the King, giving the young gentleman a glance for him to be heedful; “he lives in Versailles, but the dear fellow does not dare come and see me at the Tuileries for fear he will get an ill name. All my friends have gone away, to London, Turin or Coblentz. Still, my dear general, if you do not see any inconvenience in the old fellow coming with one of his boys to lend me a hand, I might ask him to drop in some day.”
“Your Majesty ought to know perfectly that he can see and send for anybody.”
“Yes, on condition that you sentries search them as the revenue officers do those suspected of smuggling; poor Gamain will believe he is to be hanged, drawn and quartered if they found his bag of tools on him and took his three-cornered file for a stiletto!”
“Sire, I do not know how to excuse myself to your Majesty, but I am answerable for your person to the Powers of Europe, and I cannot take too many precautions for that precious life to be protected. As for the honest fellow of whom we are speaking, the King can give what orders he pleases.”
“Very well; thank you, marquis; I might want him in a week or ten days – him and his ’prentice,” he added, with a glance at Bouille; “I could notify him by my valet Durey, who is a friend of his.”
“He has only to call to be shown up to the King; his name will suffice. Lord preserve me from getting the title of your jailer, Sire; never was the monarch more free; and I have even desired your Majesty to resume hunting and riding out.”
“Thank you, but no more hunts for me! Besides, you see I have something to keep me in doors, in my head. As for traveling, that is another matter; the last trip from Versailles to Paris cured me of the desire to travel, in such a large party at all events.”
He threw a glance to Bouille who ventured to blink to show that he understood.
“Are you soon going back to your father?” inquired the King of the latter.
“Sire, I am leaving Paris in a couple of days to pay a visit to my grandmother, living in Versailles; I am bound to pay my respects. Then I am charged by my father to attend to a rather important family matter, for which I expect to see the person who will give me the directions in about a week. So I shall hardly be with my father before the first week in December, unless the King has particular reasons for me to see him sooner.”
“No, my lord, take your time; go to Versailles and transact your business and when done, go and tell the marquis, that I do not forget him as one of my faithful lieges, and that I will speak of him one of these days to General Lafayette for him to advance him.”
Lafayette smiled faintly at this allusion to his omnipotence.
“Sire,” he said, “I should have long ago recommended Marquis Bouille to your Majesty had he not been my kinsman. The fear of raising the cry that I am looking after my family alone prevented me doing him this justice.”
“This chimes in nicely, then; we will speak of this matter again.”
“The King will kindly allow me to say that my father would consider any change of a post a disgrace that robbed him of the chance to serve your Majesty particularly.”
“Oh, that is fully understood, count,” responded Louis the King, “and Marquis Bouille shall not be moved without it being according to his desires and mine. Let General Lafayette and I manage this, and you run to your pleasure-making without altogether forgetting business. Good bye, gentlemen!”
He dismissed them with a majestic manner in singular contrast with the vulgar attire.
“Come, come,” he said to himself, when the door was shut. “I believe the young blade has comprehended me, and that in a week or so we shall have Master Gamain coming to aid me, with his ’prentice.”
