Эжен Сю
The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic
CHAPTER XI
LIONS AND JACKALS
Gertrude hastened to execute her mistress's order, and revealed to the deputy's family St. Honoré Street, packed, as far as the eye could reach, with a dense crowd. The windows of the houses bordering on it were filled by their inhabitants, drawn thither by the commotion. The column of the vanquishers of the Bastille was stationed in front and to both sides of the Desmarais domicile; it was composed for the most part of men of the people, clad in their working clothes. Some carried guns, pikes, or swords; several among them were armed with the implements of their trade. All, bourgeois, mechanics, soldiers, acclaimed the victory of the people with the cry, a thousand times repeated:
"Long live the Nation!"
In the center of the column glowered two pieces of light artillery captured in the courtyard of the redoubtable prison. On the caisson of one of these cannon, erect, majestically leaning on a pike-staff from which floated the tricolor, stood a woman of massive stature, a red kerchief half concealing the heavy tresses which fell down upon her shoulders. Her dark robe disclosed her robust arms. She held her pike in one hand – in the other a shattered chain. Woman of the people as she was, she seemed the genius of Liberty incarnate.
To the rear of the cannon rested a cart trimmed with green branches and surrounded by men who bore at the end of long poles or of pikes chains, garrottes, gags, iron boots, iron corsets, pincers, and other strange and horrible instruments of torture gathered up in the subterranean chambers of the Bastille. In the car were three of the prisoners delivered by the people. One of these was the Provost of Beaumont, imprisoned fifteen years before for having denounced the famine agreement. Another, who seemed to have lost his reason in the sufferings of a long and drear captivity, was the Count of Solange, imprisoned by lettre de cachet during the reign of Louis XV. The last of the three prisoners was broken, bent to the ground, tottering. He lifted to heaven his colorless eyes – alas, the unfortunate man had become blind in his dungeon. It was the father of John Lebrenn. Poor victim of tyranny! He feebly supported himself by the arm of his son, wounded though the latter was.
Such was the picture that met the gaze of advocate Desmarais as he stepped out upon the balcony of his dwelling, his wife and daughter on either side of him. Charlotte's first glances went in search of, and as soon found, John Lebrenn. With a woman's intuition she divined that the aged figure beside him, snatched from the cells of the Bastille was indeed his father.
The appearance of advocate Desmarais and his family was greeted with a new outburst of acclaim:
"Long live the friend of the people!"
In stepping forth upon the balcony, Desmarais had yielded merely to policy. He made a virtue of necessity. Condescending, gracious, complaisant, he began by greeting with smile, look, and gesture the populace assembled beneath his windows. Then he bowed, and placed his hand on his heart as if to express by that pantomime the emotion, the gratitude, which he experienced at the demonstration of which he was the object.
Silence was re-established among the crowd. John Lebrenn, still standing in the cart beside his father, addressed the attorney in a voice clear and sonorous:
"Citizen Desmarais, defender of the rights of the people, thanks to you, our representative in the National Assembly! Your acts, your speeches, have responded to all that we expected of you. Honor to the friend of the people!"
The advocate signified that he wished to reply. The tumult was hushed, and the deputy of the Third Estate delivered himself as follows:
"Citizens! my friends, my brothers! I can not find words in which to express the admiration your victory inspires me with. Thanks to your generous efforts, the most formidable rampart of despotism is overthrown! Be assured, citizens, that your representatives know the significance of the taking of the Bastille. The Assembly has declared that the ministers and the councillors of his Majesty, whatever their rank in the state, are responsible for the present evils and those which may follow. Responsibility shall be demanded of the ministers and all functionaries!"
"Bravo! Long live Desmarais! Long live the Assembly! Long live the Nation! Death to the King! Death to the Queen! Down with the aristocrats!"
"Nothing could be more pleasing to me, citizens," continued Desmarais, "than the choice you have made of Citizen Lebrenn as the spokesman of the sentiments that animate you. Honor to this young and valiant artisan, the son of one of the victims rescued from the Bastille!"
This allocution, pronounced by advocate Desmarais with every appearance of great tenderness, moved the people. Tears dimmed the eyes of all. The father of John Lebrenn seized his son in his arms, and Charlotte, unable to restrain her tears, murmured as she cast a look of gratitude toward heaven, "Thanks to you, my God! My father is his true old noble self again. He sees the injustice of his opposition to John!"
When the emotion produced by his last words had somewhat subsided, advocate Desmarais resumed: "Adieu till we meet again, citizens, my friends – my brothers! I return to Versailles. The Assembly has despatched three of my colleagues and myself to learn at first hand how it fares with the good people of Paris. When our report is called for, we shall be ready. Long live the Nation!"
With a final farewell gesture to the throng, Desmarais quitted the balcony and re-entered his apartment. In a few moments the column took up its interrupted march, and disappeared. Almost immediately there disgorged itself tumultuously into St. Honoré Street a band of men of an aspect strangely contrasting with that of the populace just addressed by Monsieur Desmarais. Some were dressed in rags, others wore a garb less sordid, but nearly all bore on their faces the stamp of vice and crime. The band was composed of men without occupation; do-nothing workmen; debauched laborers; petty business men ruined by misconduct, become pickpockets, sharpers, infesters of houses of ill fame and other evil resorts; robbers and convicts, assassins – a hideous crowd, capable of every crime; an execrable crowd, whom our eternal enemies keep in fee and easily egg on to these saturnalia, for which the people is but too often held culpable; wretches in the hire of the priests, the nobles and the police.
At the head of these bandits marched a man with the face of a brigand, of gigantic stature and herculean frame, and conspicuously well clad. Once a "cadet," then a gaming-house proprietor, then usher of the Church of St. Medard, Lehiron, for such was the name of the leader of the band, had been expelled from his last employment for the theft of the poor-box. Around his waist a sash of red wool held two horse-pistols and a cutlass that had parted company with its sheath. His coat and the cuffs of his shirt rolled back to the elbow, he gesticulated wildly with his bare hands, which were clotted with blood. At the end of a pike he still bore the head of Monsieur Flesselles, and from time to time, while brandishing the hideous trophy, he would cry out in a stentorian voice:
"Long live the Nation! To the lamp-post with the aristocrats! Death to all the nobles!"
"Death to the enemies of the people! The aristocrats to the lamp-post!" repeated all the bandits, brandishing their pikes, their sabers, or their guns blackened with powder.
"To the lamp-post with the aristocrats!" also cried the shrill and piercing voice of an urchin who gave his hand to a miserably clad character, the man of the false beard of whom Desmarais had spoken. It was the Jesuit Morlet, and the boy his god-son, little Rodin. At the moment that the band hove in sight of the lawyer's dwelling, the Jesuit drew close to Lehiron, and spoke a few words to him in a low voice. The latter stopped, signed to his followers for silence and cried at the top of his leathern lungs:
"Death to the bourgeois! Death to the traitors! To the lamp-post with Desmarais!"
Then the band resumed its way; and Abbot Morlet, posted at the head of the troop, made haste to bring it up to the last straggling files of the vanquishers of the Bastille. Then, upon the carriage of the cannon whence she dominated the throng, he beheld the woman with the red handkerchief and the dark robe. In spite of the change which her costume imparted to her features, the Jesuit was stupefied to recognize – Marchioness Aldini!
Barely had he recovered from his surprise when the Marchioness descended from the piece of artillery. As hastily, the Jesuit quitted his companions in order to trace her, and, if possible, clear up the suspicions which in his mind surrounded this one-time Marchioness, now heroine of the people. Little Rodin followed his dear god-father, and the two, elbowing their way through the people of the quarter, who were seized with surprise and affright at the murderous cries uttered by the sinister band which approached, inquired, as they went, for the beautiful dark woman coiffed in a red handkerchief who had just leaped down from the cannon – having, so the Abbot pretended, a message for her. Finally a woman haberdasher, drawn to the threshold of her booth, replied to Abbot Morlet's interrogations:
"Yes, the beautiful young woman you seek has entered house No. 17, along with our neighbor John Lebrenn. That is all I can tell you."
"Then the Lebrenn family lives in this street, my dear woman?"
"Certainly. Mother Lebrenn and her family occupy two rooms on the fourth floor of No. 17."
"Thank you for your information, my dear woman," replied the Jesuit, with difficulty concealing the joy that the unexpected discovery caused him. "Many thanks!"
"And so," continued the Abbot, "I recover the traces of that family whom we have lost from sight for over a century. What a lucky chance! Two woodcocks in one springe – Marchioness Aldini and the family of Lebrenn. An enemy spotted, is one-half throttled. Let us train our batteries to suit."
"Dear god-father," put in little Rodin at that moment, with a determined air, "I am not afraid to look at heads mowed off."
"My child," replied the Jesuit with fatherly pride and happiness, "it is not enough to have no fear; one must actually feel his heart grow lightened when he sees the enemies of our holy mother, the Church of Rome, put to death."
"Dear god-father, was Monsieur Flesselles, then, an enemy of our holy mother, the Church?"
"My child, the death of Monsieur Flesselles, innocent or guilty, was useful to the good cause."
Meanwhile, Lehiron's band, just then passing under the windows of Desmarais's home, continued to shriek, "Death to the enemies of the people! Death to the bourgeois! To the lamp-post with Desmarais!"
The cries had not yet reached the ears of the attorney, who had no sooner withdrawn from the balcony than his daughter, throwing herself into his arms, said to him in a voice broken with sobs of joy:
"Thanks, Oh, thanks, father, for what you have just said!"
"What are you thanking me for now?"
"For the noble utterances you have just addressed to Monsieur John Lebrenn," replied Charlotte delighted, not noticing the brusque transformation which came over the face of the advocate at her words.
"How! You have the presumption to abuse the necessity I found myself reduced to, in speaking a few words of good will to that laborer in order to save my house from pillage, and perhaps to protect my own life and that of my wife and daughter – you presume to abuse that necessity to oblige me to give my consent to your union with an ironsmith's apprentice? You are an unworthy daughter!"
"Then – your cordial words, your touching protestations, were but lies!" murmured the young girl, crushed by her father's rough speech. "It was all comedy and imposture!"
"Charlotte," continued Desmarais in a tone of harsh resolve, "cut short this passion which is a disgrace to all of us! I swear you shall never see that man again. To-morrow you leave Paris. It is my will."
"Father, my father – I implore you – revoke that sentence – "
"My dear friend," pursued Desmarais, addressing his wife and not heeding his daughter, "I shall delay for twenty-four hours my return to Versailles. Hasten all your preparations for the trip. We shall leave to-morrow morning. I shall take you along, as well as our daughter."
"Pity, father! Do not drive me to despair – "
"You know my will. Nothing can bend it."
"Cursed be this day," cried the young girl with indignation; "cursed be this day when you force me to forget the respect I owe a father. Helas! it is you, you yourself, father, who just now, this very hour, protested your love for the people, your disdain for the privileges of birth and wealth. And now you declare before me that your protestations were false, that you despise the people, fear them, hate them. The imposture and the lie drive me to rebel."
"Hold your tongue, unworthy minx! Do you not see the window is open, and that your imprudent words can be heard without? Have you resolved to get us all killed?" cried Desmarais, running to the window to close it.
It was just the minute that Lehiron's band was passing the house. At the instant that the lawyer took hold of the casement fastening to draw shut the window, over the rail of the balcony, at the height of his own countenance, there appeared the livid head of Flesselles, impaled on its pike. A cry of fear broke from Desmarais, and he recoiled from the sill, clapping his hands before his eyes to shut out the grisly spectacle. The band halted before the attorney's door. Anew the cries burst loose without:
"Long live the Nation!"
"Death to the enemies of the people!"
"To the lamp-post with the aristocrats! – to the lamp-post with Desmarais!"
The clamors seemed to come so pat upon the words of Charlotte, that Madam Desmarais, stricken with affright, threw herself on her knees in an attitude of prayer, clasped her hands, and stammered out an appeal to God.
"To the lamp-post with Desmarais! Death to the traitor!" shrieked Lehiron's band once more, and passed on its way. The cries of "Death!" faded away in the distance as Lehiron's troop followed in the wake of the conquerors of the Bastille. It was the pack of jackals following the lions.
Desmarais gradually recovered from the state of rigid fright in which he was plunged, and cried out to Charlotte in a voice trembling with repressed rage:
"Unnatural daughter! Parricide! Did you hear the cries of death hurled at your father by those cannibals of Paris, who carry in triumph the head of Flesselles? These men, who perhaps quite soon will have made your father undergo the same torture, are the friends, the brothers of John Lebrenn. Your lover is, like them, an assassin. Horror upon all this revolted plebs!"
CHAPTER XII
REUNITED FROM THE BASTILLE
While advocate Desmarais was whelming his daughter with reproaches on the score of her love for John Lebrenn, the latter was at his mother's knee in their modest lodgings on the fourth floor of the old house in St. Honoré Street. In the larger of the two rooms composing the family's apartments, were to be seen two beds. One had never been occupied for years, since the day Ronan Lebrenn disappeared without a soul knowing what had become of him. The room also contained a sort of little bookshelf garnished with books printed with his own hand, a portable workbench at which John in the evenings finished up pieces belonging to his ironsmith's trade, tools, some little furniture, and a buffet of walnut-wood in which reposed the relics and legends of the family.
Madam, or Mother, Lebrenn, as she was called in the neighborhood, was nearly sixty years of age. Domestic griefs, rather than years, had enfeebled and ruined her health. Her venerable countenance was of an extreme pallor, and sadly sunken. The poor woman held in her hands the head of her son, kneeling before her. The aged mother stroked it several times, saying in a voice thrilled with emotion:
"Dear boy, you have come back to me at last. I can now reassure myself on the state of your wound. Helas! how great was my anguish during all the time of that frightful combat. The little note you sent me after the taking of the Bastille indeed calmed a little my terrors for you, but without stilling them completely. I feared lest, out of tenderness, you sought to deceive me as to the gravity of your hurt. Now I am coming to myself from my fears, and yet I still must hold you in my arms. Dear and only child whom God has left to a poor widow – how sweet it is for a mother to embrace her son!"
"Come, good mother, I see your spirit is still troubled by the pangs of this morning. But are you quite sure you are a widow? Am I truly your only child?"
"Helas! have not your father and sister both disappeared? Are they not lost forever to your poor mother?"
"But why should they not return to us some day?"
"Dear boy, if they lived, your father and sister whom you love so much, would we not have heard some news of them, even if it were impossible for them to come to us?"
"You are right, good mother. But you presume that it would have been possible for them to have sent us some intelligence of their fate. May we not suppose, though, that father was thrown into some state prison, and that he was deprived of all communication with the outside? So sad a supposition has nothing strange in it."
"In that case, my child, the prison would have proven your father's tomb, so frail was his health. We could not dare to hope that he would be able to surmount the rigors of his captivity."
"But it might also be, good mother, that the hope of seeing us some day may have helped him to endure his sufferings."
"Do not essay, dear boy, to raise in my heart hopes, which, deceived too soon, will but plunge me back again into despair. My dear husband is indeed lost to me, helas! As to your sister, we may well believe we shall never see her more. She also is lost to us. Without doubt she has sought in death a refuge from her anguish, since the fatal revelation of her earlier life to her fiance, Sergeant Maurice."
"Nothing has come to light so far to confirm your apprehensions on the subject of these afflictions – dear, good mother – "
"If my poor girl is not dead – what can have been her lot? I shudder even to think of it – misery, or dishonor!"
"I do not wish, good mother, to hold out to you hopes, which, when deceived, will revive your sorrow and seriously compromise your health, perhaps your life. But I believe I can without danger accustom you to the idea that my sister still lives, and has not ceased to be worthy of your affection; and also that father, after having languished long years in a prison pit, may still recover his liberty, and that we may see him. – That is a hope in my heart which I would cause you to share. Follow well my reasoning – "
"'Twould be too much happiness for me – I cannot believe it. And if I could believe it, I ask myself whether I have the strength to bear so much joy. Rapture can kill, as well as grief, my dear son."
"And so, dear mother, if such events are to be told, I shall have recourse to roundabout methods to make you acquainted with such unhoped-for news. If it were about father – for example – I would say, that the victorious people penetrated into the Bastille to deliver the persons thrown into the dungeons, and that, among them, we found one who resembled father; that we seized the prison registrars and made them search in their registers for the records of a prisoner who was very dear to me, as it might have chanced that my father was among the number; that, in one of these registers, I read the date, 'April 22, 1783,' and right after it, 'No. 1297 – incarcerated – upper tier – cell No. 18.'"
"April 22, 1783," repeated Madam Lebrenn pensively. "That is the day after your father disappeared."
"I would tell you that beside the date there was no name given for the prisoner, it being the usage to replace the name with a number. I would add, that, struck by the singular coincidence between the date and the time of father's disappearance, I went down to visit cell No. 18, as was indicated in the register – "
"And then?" exclaimed Madam Lebrenn feverishly, and with growing anxiety.
"The cell was empty. But they told me that the prisoner who occupied it was an old man grown blind, alas, during his confinement. I asked where they had taken the unfortunate man, and dashed off to seek him. Isn't this all interesting, mother?"
"Why do you break off your story? For I feel that your supposings are but preparations for some revelation that you are about to make. You look away from me – John, my boy, my dear boy!" cried Madam Lebrenn, reaching towards her son and making him turn his face up to her – "You weep! No more doubt of it – Lord God! the old man – was – he was – "
She could not finish. The word died on her lips, and she nearly swooned away. John, still kneeling before her, sustained her in his arms, saying: "Courage, good mother. Hear the end of my tale."
"Courage, say you? But you are deceiving me, then? It was not then – your father?"
"It was he! 'Twas indeed he whom I held in my arms. He lived – you shall see him soon. But, poor dear mother, have courage. We are not yet at the end of our trials."
"Since your father lives, courage is easy to me! Let them bring him to us quick!"
"Alas, you forget that in his dungeon father lost his sight. Besides, the weight of his irons, the humidity of his cell, have palsied, have paralyzed his limbs. He can hardly drag himself along."
"But he lives! Ah, well! His infirmities will render him more dear to us," cried Madam Lebrenn in lofty exaltation, and suddenly rising. "Let us go to meet him."
"One moment, good mother. They are bringing him to us. But I have still to prepare you for another piece of good fortune. You know the proverb, good mother, 'Good fortune never comes singly.' But, first, I want to acquaint you with the person who broke open father's cell, who freed him from his irons, and who bestowed upon him the simple cares that he long needed."
"Tell me, dear son, who was your father's liberator?"
"His liberator was a woman – an intrepid, heroic woman, who during the assault of the Bastille braved the fire of musketry and cannon and led the attackers, red flag in hand. Under a perfect hail of bullets she let down the drawbridge across one of the moats of the fortress, and was the first to run to the dungeons to free the prisoners. It was she who rescued father from his living grave."
"Blessed be that woman! I shall cherish her as a daughter!"
"That heroic woman, who is truly worthy of your love – is Victoria! Is that enough happiness for us? Father and sister, both have come home to your caresses. They are there, close to us, at our neighbor Jerome's, and await but the pre-arranged signal to come in."
And John Lebrenn, joining the action to the words, struck three blows on the wall.
The door flew open, and on the sill appeared father Lebrenn, leaning on one side on the arm of Victoria, on the other on that of neighbor Jerome. Madam Lebrenn, intoxicated with joy, flung herself into the arms of her husband and daughter.
