CONTENTS.

I. THE WAXWORKS

II. CITOYENNE CARINNE

III. THE FOOTPAD

IV. THE CHÂTEAU DES PIERRETTES

V. LA GRAND’ BÊTE

VI. THE HERD OF SWINE

VII. THE CHEVALIER DU GUET

VIII. QUATREMAINS-QUATREPATTES

IX. THE WILD DOGS

X. THE AFFAIR OF THE CANDLES

XI. PYRAMUS AND THISBE

XII. THE MOUSE-TRAP

XIII. THE RED CART

XIV. THE QUARRIES OF MONT-ROUGE

XV. THE SALAD COURSE

NOTES

CHAPTER I. THE WAXWORKS.

One morning I awoke in La Bourbe and looked across at Deputy Bertrand as he lay sprawled over his truckle-bed, his black hair like a girl’s scattered on the pillow, his eyelids glued to his flushed cheeks, his face, all blossoming with dissipation, set into the expression of one who is sure of nothing but of his own present surrender to nothingness. Beside him were his clothes, flung upon a chair, the tri-colour sash, emblematic stole of his confused ritual, embracing all; and on a nail in the wall over his head was his preposterous hat, the little carte de civisme stuck in its band.

Casimir Bertrand (one time Casimir Bertrand de Pompignan) I had known and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories; had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin—a constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist, to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of

the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of debate. Undoubtedly in him (did I make him the mirror to my conscience), and in a certain Crépin, with whom I came subsequently to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious canker in the national constitution.

Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative measure of slumber—frothed, perhaps, with a bead of æsthetic enjoyment in the long minute of waking.

“Casimir!” I called softly; but he pretended not to hear me.

“What, my friend! the sun is shining, and the eggs of the old serpent of pleasure will be hatching in every kennel.”

He opened his eyes at that, fixed and unwinking; but he made no attempt to rise.

“Let them crack the shells and wriggle out,” he said. “I have a fancy they will be a poisonous brood, and that La Bourbe is pleasantly remote from their centres of incubation.”

“Timorous! I would not lose a thrill in this orgy of liberty.”

“But if you lost——?” he checked himself, pursed his lips, and nodded his head on the pillow.

“Jean-Louis, I saw the Sieur Julien carried to the scaffold last night. He went foaming and raving of a plot in the prisons to release the aristocrats in their thousands upon us. There is an adder to reproduce itself throughout the city! Truly, as you say, the kennels will swarm with it.”

“And many will be bitten? My friend, my friend, there is some dark knowledge in that astute head of yours. And shall I cower at home when my kind are in peril?”

“My faith! we all cower in bed.”

“But I am going out.”

“Be advised!” (He struggled quickly up on his elbow. His face bore a clammy look in the sunlight.) “Be advised and lie close in your form—like a hare, Jean-Louis—like a hare that hears the distant beaters crying on the dogs. Twitch no whisker and prick not an ear. Take solace of your covert and lie close and scratch yourself, and thank God you have a nail for every flea-bite.”

“What ails thee of this day then, morose?”

“What ails this Paris? Why, the Prussians are in Verdun, and the aristocrats must be forestalled.”

“But how, Deputy.”

“I do not know. I fear, that is all.”

“Well, there lies your sash—the talisman to such puerile emotions.”

“Return to bed, Jean-Louis. It is unwise to venture abroad in a thunderstorm.”

“It is unwiser to shelter beneath a tree.”

“But not a roof-tree. Oh, thou fool! didst thou not close thine eyes last night on a city fermenting like a pan of dough?”

“‘Et cette alarme universelle

Est l’ouvrage d’un moucheron.’”

“But go your way!” he cried, and scrambled out of bed.

He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood thereon.

“After all,” he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his nostrils, “the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back—what could kings wish for better?”

He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.

“I am representative of a constituency,” he said, “yet a better judge of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. ‘Tears of Christ’!—it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day.”

He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of his cup.

“Go your way, Jean-Louis,” he repeated; “and pardon me if I call it the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your gullet and take all relish from the feast.”

“Casimir!” I cried in some black wonder—“this is all the language of a villain or an hysteric——!”

I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and left the room.

* * * * * * *

A little frost on a foot, or a little blood. What is the significance of either. Once the bimbelotiers of the Palais Royal used to manufacture cards of Noël, very pretty and sparkling with rime. That was before the apotheosis of the “Third [or butterfly] State”; and many a time, during the winter of ’84, I have seen poor vagrants of the chosen brood, unwitting yet of the scarlet wings developing underneath their rugged hides, ponder over the fanciful emblems in the shop windows, and then look down with wonder at their own cracked and bleeding toes. To whom, then, could the frost appeal in this dainty guise? Not surely to those who must walk with bare feet? It is all the point of view, said the philosophers. But, they added, blood is warm, and it is well to wear socks of it if you can get no other. Put these on and look again, and you will see differently.

Not just yet, perhaps; and in the meantime the king empties his private purse to buy wood for the freezing people. This will warm them into loyalty while it lasts; and they crawl out of their icy burrows, or gather up their broken limbs on the snow beds—whereinto they have been ground by the sleds and chariots of the wealthy that rush without warning down the muffled streets—to build monuments of snow to the glory of their rulers. Then by-and-by these great obelisks melt, and add their quota to the thaw that is overwhelming what the frost has spared.

The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has been vouchsafed to the “Third State,” and it knows that to acquire the right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of Noël were made to appeal.

* * * * * * *

All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening—an added five beats to every hour—with wonder, rage, and, at last, terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was tottering to its fall.

This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters—manned by revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,—every hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and take their captors in the rear!

At two o’clock the tocsin pealed—the signal to prepare for the fray. From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of emotion; I was simply involved in it—to go with it, and perish of it, perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very fathomless depths.

From the Place de Grève, along Pelletier Quay; across the Ponts au Change and St Michel; westwards by the Rue St André des Arcs, where a little diversion was caused by a street-singer at whom the crowd took offence, in that he, being an insignificant buffoon, did pelt it with its classic pretentiousness, wagging his coat-tails in contempt thereof (“À bas, Pitou!” they shrieked; “we will dock thee of thy sting and put thee to buzz in a stone bottle!”—and they had him unfrocked in a twinkling and hoisted for punishment); round, with a curve to the south, into the Rue de Bussi; thence, again westwards, along the street of St Marguerite; finally, weathering the sinister cape of the Abbaye St Germain, northwards into the Rue St Benoit and up to the yard entrance of the very prison itself,—such was the long course by which I was borne, in the midst of clamour, hate, and revilings, some dreadful early scenes in the panorama of the Revolution unfolded before my eyes—scenes crudely limned by crude street artists, splashed and boltered with crimson, horrible for the

ghastly applause they evoked.

I saw and I was helpless—the block about the carriages of the nonjurants—the desperate stroke at the sans-culotte that cut the knot of indecision—the crashing panels, the flying and flung priests. One damnable with a sabre split a bald head, that came wavering in my direction, like a melon, and the brains flew like its seeds. I shut my eyes and thought, Mercy is in right ratio with the hardness of the blow. Strike deep, poor guttersnipes, if you must strike at all!

Then began the “severe justice of the people.”

* * * * * * *

What was I, poor philosophic misérable, but a germ of those germs in that great artery of blood that the revolted system was endeavouring to expel. I saw numbers of my kind thrown forth and mangled in the midst of horrors unspeakable; I was borne helpless to the heart, and was rejected to fly shuddering to remote veins of the prison’s circulation, only to return by an irresistible attraction to the central terror. More than once my mad expostulations brought me into perilous notice.

“You have hard wrongs to avenge!” I shrieked; “but at least the form of pleading has been granted you!”

“And these!” cried the killers. “Blood of God! is not Bastille Maillard within there checking the tally of the accursed? Aristocrat art thou!”

They bounded from me to a fresh victim thrust that moment from the door. She came dazed into the flare of the torches—a white face with umber hair tumbled all about it. Two gloating hounds took her under the arm-pits; a third——

Ciel! pour tant de rigueur, de quoi suis-je coupable?

* * * * * * *

I do not know whither my wanderings tended, or what space of time was covered by them. Sooner or later I was always back at the Abbaye, glutting my soul with assurance of its own wreck, helpless, despite my loathing of it, to resist the attraction. What horror absorbs the moth as it circles round the flame, I thought in those recurrent moments I could understand.

Once, when I returned, an unwonted silence reigned about the place. A few vampire figures, restless, phantasmal, flitted hither and thither in the neighbourhood of the reeking shambles. But the slaughterers and the red ladies of St Michel were retired, during an interval in the examination, for refreshment. I heard the shrill buzz of their voices all down the Rue St Benoit and from the wine and lemonade shops opposite the very gates by which I stood.

I looked into the fearful yard. My God! the dead, it seemed, were phosphorescent with the rottenness of an ancient system! Here, there, on all sides they broke the darkness with blots of light like hideous glow-worms—their hundred white faces the reflectors of as many lamps.

“But it is a brave illumination!” gurgled a voice at my ear.

I glanced aside in loathing. A little old woman, whose lungs barked at every breath, stood near me. She laughed as if she would shake herself into touchwood.

“A brave illumination!” she wheezed—“the inspiration of the girl La Lune. She was dedicated to the Holy Mother; and her skirt! Oh, mon Dieu! but it was of the azure of heaven, and now it is purple as a strangled face; and it slaps on her ankles. But by-and-by she must seek purification, for she is dedicated to the holy Virgin.”

“She placed these lamps?”

“She led her sisters to the committee that sits there.” (She pointed a gnarled finger. To one side of the dreadful quadrangle a dull glow came melancholy through some tall windows.) “She complained that ladies who would fain enjoy the show were prevented by the darkness. Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market.”

A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a queer constriction seized my heart. Then, all in a moment, I was following, crying in my soul that here was something tangible for my abased humanity to lay hold of—some excuse to indulge a passion of self-sacrifice—some claim to a lump of ice at my feet and a lamp at my head. The dead were so calm, the living so besotted. A miserly theft, I thought, to take another’s blood when one’s own gluts one’s arteries to suffocation.

I looked over the shoulders of the outermost of the group. What horrible cantrip of Fortune had consigned this old barren weed of a man, this white exotic of a girl, to a merciless handling by these demons? The two were in walking dress, and not in the déshabille of prisoners. There was a lull in the systematic progress of the butchery. Here, it would seem, was an entr’acte designed only to relieve the tedium of waiting.

A half-dozen harpies held the girl. There was a stain of red on her ripe young lip, for I think one of the beasts had struck her; but her face was stubborn with pride. In front of all the old wizened man, who had been released, ran to and fro in an agony of obsequious terror.

“Yes, yes,” he quavered, “’tis a luminous sight—an admirable show! They lie like the fallen sticks of rockets, glimmering a dying spark. Is it not so, Carinne? Little cabbage, is it not so?”

He implored her with his feverish eyes.

“They are martyrs!” cried the girl; “and you are a coward!”

“No, no!” he wailed, and wrung his hands; and “My God! she will murder me!” he shrieked.

Suddenly he saw, darted through the ring of ruffians, and caught the breast of my coat with both his hands.

“Monsieur! you have nobility in your face! Tell these good souls that I am a furious patriot and a good citizen. Monsieur, Monsieur! We walk abroad—we are involved, unwitting, in the mêlée. The girl denounces all for pigs and murderers, and, naturally, those who hear take umbrage and force us hither.”

His dry lips vibrated; he danced up and down like a gnat on a window-pane. All the time the women were volubly chattering and the men cursing and pulling. They desired, it seemed, a prologue to the second act of the tragedy; and that was bad art. But then they were as drunk as one could wish.

“Thou art nice and dainty, citoyenne!” they shrieked. “See here—thou shalt be vivandière to the brave army of avengers! Tap her an aristocrat heart and fill her a canteen that all may drink!”

The beastly proposal was not too gross for the occasion. A man lurched forward with a jeering oath, and I—I sprang to the front too, and took the hound by his gulping throat. There came a great noise about me; I did not relax my hold, and some one rushed into our midst.

“What do you here!” he cried, harshly (Casimir’s voice). “Death of God! have you orders to insult and threaten peaceable citizens who walk abroad to see the illuminations?”

With a fierce sweep of his arms he cleared all away in front of him. The act—the gesture, brought him to my side.

“Go—escape!” he whispered, frantically. “This, here, I will attend to.”

“You knew, then?” I gasped out; and he fell back from me.

But I released my hold and stood panting. I was at the moment no whit in love with life, but I dreaded by the least stubbornness to precipitate the catastrophe that threatened that half-fainting girl. Her Casimir gave his arm to in a peremptory manner. She clung to him, and he led her stumbling across the yard, the little whimpering pinch-fist scuttling in their wake. The mob spat curses after them, but—this intermezzo being no part of its programme—it respected the Deputy’s insignia of office so far as to allow him his perquisite.

Then, with a howl of fury, it turned upon me—

“Accursed! thou dost well to dispute the people’s will!”

“See his fine monseigneur hands, washed white in a bath of milk, while the peasants drank rotten water!”

“He will think to cow us with a look. He cannot disabuse himself of the tradition. Down with the dog of an aristocrat!”

“But if he is Brunswick’s courier—Brunswick that would dine in Paris on the boiling hearts of patriots!”

I was backing slowly towards the gate as they followed reviling me. What would you? I could not help others; I would take my own destinies in hand. Here, in deadly personal peril, I felt my feet on the good earth once more, and found restoration of my reason in a violence of action. There was no assistance possible. Paris this night was a menagerie, in which all beasts of prey and of burden were released from restraint to resolve for themselves the question of survival.