of such a part as it may please the Director to assign us. It does not,
however, console me to have been cast for a part so contemptible, to find
myself excelling ever in the art of running away. But if I am not brave, at
least I am prudent; so that where I lack one virtue I may lay claim to
possessing another almost to excess. On a previous occasion they wanted to
hang me for sedition. Should I have stayed to be hanged? This time they may
want to hang me for several things, including murder; for I do not know
whether that scoundrel Binet be alive or dead from the dose of lead I pumped
into his fat paunch. Nor can I say that I very greatly care. If I have a
hope at all in the matter it is that he is dead - and damned. But I am
really indifferent. My own concerns are troubling me enough. I have all but
spent the little money that I contrived to conceal about me before I fled
from Nantes on that dreadful night; and both of the only two professions of
which I can claim to know anything - the law and the stage - are closed to
me, since I cannot find employment in either without revealing myself as a
fellow who is urgently wanted by the hangman. As things are it is very
possible that I may die of hunger, especially considering the present price
of victuals in this ravenous city. Again I have recourse to Epictetus for
comfort. 'It is better,' he says, 'to die of hunger having lived without
grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit amid abundance.' I seem
likely to perish in the estate that he accounts so enviable. That it does
not seem exactly enviable to me merely proves that as a Stoic I am not a
success.
There is also another letter of his written at about the same time to
the Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr - a letter since published by M. Emile Quersac
in his "Undercurrents of the Revolution in Brittany," unearthed by him from
the archives of Rennes, to which it had been consigned by M. de
Lesdiguieres, who had received it for justiciary purposes from the Marquis.
"The Paris newspapers," he writes in this, "which have reported in
considerable detail the fracas at the Theatre Feydau and disclosed the true
identity of the Scaramouche who provoked it, inform me also that you have
escaped the fate I had intended for you when I raised that storm of public
opinion and public indignation. I would not have you take satisfaction in
the thought that I regret your escape. I do not. I rejoice in it. To deal
justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that
justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb
that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and
untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the
guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty,
whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire
you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste something of its
bitterness.
"You murdered Philippe de Vilmorin because you feared what you
described as his very dangerous gift of eloquence, I took an oath that day
that your evil deed should be fruitless; that I would render it so; that the
voice you had done murder to stifle should in spite of that ring like a
trumpet through the land. That was my conception of revenge. Do you realize
how I have been fulfilling it, how I shall continue to fulfil it as occasion
offers? In the speech with which I fired the people of Rennes on the very
morrow of that deed, did you not hear the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin
uttering the ideas that were his with a fire and a passion greater than he
could have commanded because Nemesis lent me her inflaming aid? In the voice
of Omnes Omnibus at Nantes my voice again - demanding the petition that
sounded the knell of your hopes of coercing the Third Estate, did you not
hear again the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin? Did you not reflect that it
was the mind of the man you had murdered, resurrected in me his surviving
friend, which made necessary your futile attempt under arms last January,
wherein your order, finally beaten, was driven to seek sanctuary in the
Cordelier Convent? And that night when from the stage of the Feydau you were
denounced to the people, did you not hear yet again, in the voice of
Scaramouche, the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin, using that dangerous gift of
eloquence which you so foolishly imagined you could silence with a
sword-thrust? It is becoming a persecution - is it not? - this voice from
the grave that insists upon making itself heard, that will not rest until
you have been cast into the pit. You will be regretting by now that you did
not kill me too, as I invited you on that occasion. I can picture to myself
the bitterness of this regret, and I contemplate it with satisfaction.
Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can
inhabit, particularly such a soul as yours. It is because of this that I am
glad to know that you survived the riot at the Feydau, although at the time
it was no part of my intention that you should. Because of this I am content
that you should live to enrage and suffer in the shadow of your evil deed,
knowing at last - since you had not hitherto the wit to discern it for
yourself - that the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin will follow you to
denounce you ever more loudly, ever more insistently, until having lived in
dread you shall go down in blood under the just rage which your victim's
dangerous gift of eloquence is kindling against you."
I find it odd that he should have omitted from this letter all mention
of Mlle. Binet, and I am disposed to account it at least a partial
insincerity that he should have assigned entirely to his self-imposed
mission, and not at all to his lacerated feelings in the matter of Climene,
the action which he had taken at the Feydau.
Those two letters, both written in April of that year 1789, had for
only immediate effect to increase the activity with which Andre-Louis Moreau
was being sought.
Le Chapelier would have found him so as to lend him assistance, to urge
upon him once again that he should take up a political career. The electors
of Nantes would have found him - at least, they would have found Omnes
Omnibus, of whose identity with himself they were still in ignorance - on
each of the several occasions when a vacancy occurred in their body. And the
Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr and M. de Lesdiguieres would have found him that
they might send him to the gallows.
With a purpose no less vindictive was he being sought by M. Binet, now
unhappily recovered from his wound to face completest ruin. His troupe had
deserted him during his illness, and reconstituted under the direction of
Polichinelle it was now striving with tolerable success to continue upon the
lines which Andre-Louis had laid down. M. le Marquis, prevented by the riot
from expressing in person to Mlle. Binet his purpose of making an end of
their relations, had been constrained to write to her to that effect from
Azyr a few days later. He tempered the blow by enclosing in discharge of all
liabilities a bill on the Caisse d'Escompte for a hundred louis.
Nevertheless it almost crushed the unfortunate and it enabled her father
when he recovered to enrage her by pointing out that she owed this turn of
events to the premature surrender she had made in defiance of his sound
worldly advice. Father and daughter alike were left to assign the Marquis'
desertion, naturally enough, to the riot at the Feydau. They laid that with
the rest to the account of Scaramouche, and were forced in bitterness to
admit that the scoundrel had taken a superlative revenge. C1imene may even
have come to consider that it would have paid her better to have run a
straight course with Scaramouche and by marrying him to have trusted to his
undoubted talents to place her on the summit to which her ambition urged
her, and to which it was now futile for her to aspire. If so, that
reflection must have been her sufficient punishment. For, as Andre-Louis so
truly says, there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for
wasted opportunities.
Meanwhile the fiercely sought Andre-Louis Moreau had gone to earth
completely for the present. And the brisk police of Paris, urged on by the
King's Lieutenant from Rennes, hunted for him in vain. Yet he might have
been found in a house in the Rue du Hasard within a stone's throw of the
Palais Royal, whither purest chance had conducted him.
That which in his letter to Le Chapelier he represents as a contingency
of the near future was, in fact, the case in which already he found himself.
He was destitute. His money was exhausted, including that procured by the
sale of such articles of adornment as were not of absolute necessity.
So desperate was his case that strolling one gusty April morning down
the Rue du Hasard with his nose in the wind looking for what might be picked
up, he stopped to read a notice outside the door of a house on the left side
of the street as you approach the Rue de Richelieu. There was no reason why
he should have gone down the Rue du Hasard. Perhaps its name attracted him,
as appropriate to his case.
The notice written in a big round hand announced that a young man of
good address with some knowledge of swordsmanship was required by M.
Bertrand des Amis on the second floor. Above this notice was a black oblong
board, and on this a shield, which in vulgar terms may be described as red
charged with two swords crossed and four fleurs de lys, one in each angle of
the saltire. Under the shield, in letters of gold, ran the legend:
BERTRAND DES AMIS
Maitre en fait d'Armes des Academies du Roi
Andre-Louis stood considering. He could claim, he thought, to possess
the qualifications demanded. He was certainly young and he believed of
tolerable address, whilst the fencing-lessons he had received in Nantes had
given him at least an elementary knowledge of swordsmanship. The notice
looked as if it had been pinned there some days ago, suggesting that
applicants for the post were not very numerous. In that case perhaps M.
Bertrand des Amis would not be too exigent. And anyway, Andre-Louis had not
eaten for four-and-twenty hours, and whilst the employment here offered -
the precise nature of which he was yet to ascertain - did not appear to be
such as Andre-Louis would deliberately have chosen, he was in no case now to
be fastidious.
Then, too, he liked the name of Bertrand des Amis. It felicitously
combined suggestions of chivalry and friendliness. Also the man's profession
being of a kind that is flavoured with romance it was possible that M.
Bertrand des Amis would not ask too many questions.
In the end he climbed to the second floor. On the landing he paused
outside a door, on which was written "Academy of M. Bertrand des Amis." He
pushed this open, and found himself in a sparsely furnished, untenanted
antechamber. From a room beyond, the door of which was closed, came the
stamping of feet, the click and slither of steel upon steel, and dominating
these sounds a vibrant sonorous voice speaking a language that was certainly
French; but such French as is never heard outside a fencing-school.
"Coulez! Mais, coulez donc!....So! Now the flanconnade - en
carte....And here is the riposte....Let us begin again. Come! The ward of
fierce....Make the coupe, and then the quinte par dessus les armes....0,
mais allongez! Allongez! Allez au fond!" the voice cried in expostulation.
"Come, that was better." The blades ceased.
"Remember: the hand in pronation, the elbow not too far out. That will
do for to-day. On Wednesday we shall see you tirer au mur. It is more
deliberate. Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more
assured."
Another voice murmured in answer. The steps moved aside. The lesson was
at an end. Andre-Louis tapped on the door.
It was opened by a tall, slender, gracefully proportioned man of
perhaps forty. Black silk breeches and stockings ending in light shoes
clothed him from the waist down. Above he was encased to the chin in a
closely fitting plastron of leather, His face was aquiline and swarthy, his
eyes full and dark, his mouth firm and his clubbed hair was of a lustrous
black with here and there a thread of silver showing.
in the crook of his left arm he carried a fencing-mask, a thing of
leather with a wire grating to protect the eyes. His keen glance played over
Andre-Louis from head to foot.
"Monsieur?" he inquired, politely.
It was clear that he mistook Andre-Louis' quality, which is not
surprising, for despite his sadly reduced fortunes, his exterior was
irreproachable, and M. des Amis was not to guess that he carried upon his
back the whole of his possessions.
"You have a notice below, monsieur," he said, and from the swift
lighting of the fencing-master's eyes he saw that he had been correct in his
assumption that applicants for the position had not been jostling one
another on his threshold. And then that flash of satisfaction was followed
by a look of surprise.
"You are come in regard to that?"
Andre-Louis shrugged and half smiled. "One must live," said he.
"But come in. Sit down there. I shall be at your....I shall be free to
attend to you in a moment."
Andre-Louis took a seat on the bench ranged against one of the
whitewashed walls. The room was long and low, its floor entirely bare. Plain
wooden forms such as that which he occupied were placed here and there
against the wall. These last were plastered with fencing trophies, masks,
crossed foils, stuffed plastrons, and a variety of swords, daggers, and
targets, belonging to a variety of ages and countries. There was also a
portrait of an obese, big-nosed gentleman in an elaborately curled wig,
wearing the blue ribbon of the Saint Esprit, in whom Andre-Louis recognized
the King. And there was a framed parchment - M. des Amis' certificate from
the King's Academy. A bookcase occupied one corner, and near this, facing
the last of the four windows that abundantly lighted the long room, there
was a small writing-table and an armchair. A plump and beautifully dressed
young gentleman stood by this table in the act of resuming coat and wig. M.
des Amis sauntered over to him - moving, thought Andre-Louis, with
extraordinary grace and elasticity - and stood in talk with him whilst also
assisting him to complete his toilet.
At last the young gentleman took his departure, mopping himself with a
fine kerchief that left a trail of perfume on the air. M. des Amis closed
the door, and turned to the applicant, who rose at once.
"Where have you studied?" quoth the fencing-master abruptly.
"Studied?" Andre-Louis was taken aback by the question. "Oh, at Louis
Le Grand."
M. des Amis frowned, looking up sharply as if to see whether his
applicant was taking the liberty of amusing himself.
"In Heaven's name! I am not asking you where you did your humanities,
but in what academy you studied fencing."
"Oh - fencing!" It had hardly ever occurred to Andre-Louis that the
sword ranked seriously as a study. "I never studied it very much. I had some
lessons in... in the country once.
The master's eyebrows went up. "But then?" he cried. "Why trouble to
come up two flights of stairs?" He was impatient.
"The notice does not demand a high degree of proficiency. If I am not
proficient enough, yet knowing the rudiments I can easily improve. I learn
most things readily," Andre-Louis commended himself. "For the rest: I
possess the other qualifications. I am young, as you observe: and I leave
you to judge whether I am wrong in assuming that my address is good. I am by
profession a man of the robe, though I realize that the motto here is cedat
toga armis."
M. des Amis smiled approvingly. Undoubtedly the young man had a good
address, and a certain readiness of wit, it would appear. He ran a critical
eye over his physical points. "What is your name?" he asked.
Andre-Louis hesitated a moment. "Andre-Louis," he said.
The dark, keen eyes conned him more searchingly.
"Well? Andre-Louis what?"
"Just Andre-Louis. Louis is my surname."
"Oh! An odd surname. You come from Brittany by your accent. Why did you
leave it?"
"To save my skin," he answered, without reflecting. And then made haste
to cover the blunder. "I have an enemy," he explained.
M. des Amis frowned, stroking his square chin. "You ran away?"
"You may say so.
"A coward, eh?"
"I don't think so." And then he lied romantically. Surely a man who
lived by the sword should have a weakness for the romantic. "You see, my
enemy is a swordsman of great strength - the best blade in the province, if
not the best blade in France. That is his repute. I thought I would come to
Paris to learn something of the art, and then go back and kill him. That, to
be frank, is why your notice attracted me. You see, I have not the means to
take lessons otherwise. I thought to find work here in the law. But I have
failed. There are too many lawyers in Paris as it is, and whilst waiting I
have consumed the little money that I had, so that... so that, enfin, your
notice seemed to me something to which a special providence had directed
me."
M. des Amis gripped him by the shoulders, and looked into his face.
"Is this true, my friend?" he asked.
"Not a word of it," said Andre-Louis, wrecking his chances on an
irresistible impulse to say the unexpected. But he didn't wreck them. M. des
Amis burst into laughter; and having laughed his fill, confessed himself
charmed by his applicant's fundamental honesty.
"Take off your coat," he said, "and let us see what you can do. Nature,
at least, designed you for a swordsman. You are light, active, and supple,
with a good length of arm, and you seem intelligent. I may make something of
you, teach you enough for my purpose, which is that you should give the
elements of the art to new pupils before I take them in hand to finish them.
Let us try. Take that mask and foil, and come over here.
He led him to the end of the room, where the bare floor was scored with
lines of chalk to guide the beginner in the management of his feet.
At the end of a ten minutes' bout, M. des Amis offered him the
situation, and explained it. In addition to imparting the rudiments of the
art to beginners, he was to brush out the fencing-room every morning, keep
the foils furbished, assist the gentlemen who came for lessons to dress and
undress, and make himself generally useful. His wages for the present were
to be forty livres a month, and he might sleep in an alcove behind the
fencing-room if he had no other lodging.
The position, you see, had its humiliations. But, if Andre-Louis would
hope to dine, he must begin by eating his pride as an hors d'oeuvre.
"And so," he said, controlling a grimace, "the robe yields not only to
the sword, but to the broom as well. Be it so. I stay."
lt is characteristic of him that, having made that choice, he should
have thrown himself into the work with enthusiasm. It was ever his way to do
whatever he did with all the resources of his mind and energies of his body.
When he was not instructing very young gentlemen in the elements of the art,
showing them the elaborate and intricate salute - which with a few days'
hard practice he had mastered to perfection - and the eight guards, he was
himself hard at work on those same guards, exercising eye, wrist, and knees.
Perceiving his enthusiasm, and seeing the obvious possibilities it
opened out of turning him into a really effective assistant, M. des Amis
presently took him more seriously in hand.
"Your application and zeal, my friend, are deserving of more than forty
livres a month," the master informed him at the end of a week. "For the
present, however, I will make up what else I consider due to you by
imparting to you secrets of this noble art. Your future depends upon how you
profit by your exceptional good fortune in receiving instruction from me."
Thereafter every morning before the opening of the academy, the master
would fence for half an hour with his new assistant. Under this really
excellent tuition Andre-Louis improved at a rate that both astounded and
flattered M. des Amis. He would have been less flattered and more astounded
had he known that at least half the secret of Andre-Louis' amazing progress
lay in the fact that he was devouring the contents of the master's library,
which was made up of a dozen or so treatises on fencing by such great
masters as La Bessiere, Danet, and the syndic of the King's Academy,
Augustin Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose swordsmanship was all based on
practice and not at all on theory, who was indeed no theorist or student in
any sense, that little library was merely a suitable adjunct to a
fencing-academy, a proper piece of decorative furniture. The books
themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He had not the type of
mind that could have read them with profit nor could be understand that
another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the contrary, a man with the habit of
study, with the acquired faculty of learning from books, read those works
with enormous profit, kept their precepts in mind, critically set off those
of one master against those of another, and made for himself a choice which
he proceeded to put into practice.
At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his
assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force, a man in a
bout with whom it became necessary to exert himself if he were to escape
defeat.
"I said from the first," he told him one day, "that Nature designed you
for a swordsman. See how justified I was, and see also how well I have known
how to mould the material with which Nature has equipped you."
"To the master be the glory," said Andre-Louis.
His relations with M. des Amis had meanwhile become of the friendliest,
and he was now beginning to receive from him other pupils than mere
beginners. In fact Andre-Louis was becoming an assistant in a much fuller
sense of the word. M. des Amis, a chivalrous, open-handed fellow, far from
taking advantage of what he had guessed to be the young man's difficulties,
rewarded his zeal by increasing his wages to four louis a month.
>From the' earnest and thoughtful study of the theories of others, it
followed now - as not uncommonly happens - that Andre-Louis came to develop
theories of his own. He lay one June morning on his little truckle bed in
the alcove behind the academy, considering a passage that he had read last
night in Danet on double and triple feints. It had seemed to him when
reading it that Danet had stopped short on the threshold of a great
discovery in the art of fencing. Essentially a theorist, Andre-Louis
perceived the theory suggested, which Danet himself in suggesting it had not
perceived. He lay now on his back, surveying the cracks in the ceiling and
considering this matter further with the lucidity that early morning often
brings to an acute intelligence. You are to remember that for close upon two
months now the sword had been Andre-Louis' daily exercise and almost hourly
thought. Protracted concentration upon the subject was giving him an
extraordinary penetration of vision. Swordsmanship as he learnt and taught
and saw it daily practised consisted of a series of attacks and parries, a
series of disengages from one line into another. But always a limited
series. A half-dozen disengages on either side was, strictly speaking,
usually as far as any engagement went. Then one recommenced. But even so,
these disengages were fortuitous. What if from first to last they should be
calculated?
That was part of the thought - one of the two legs on which his theory
was to stand; the other was: what would happen if one so elaborated Danet's
ideas on the triple feint as to merge them into a series of actual
calculated disengages to culminate at the fourth or fifth or even sixth
disengage? That is to say, if one were to make a series of attacks inviting
ripostes again to be countered, each of which was not intended to go home,
but simply to play the opponent's blade into a line that must open him
ultimately, and as predetermined, for an irresistible lunge. Each counter of
the opponent's would have to be preconsidered in this widening of his guard,
a widening so gradual that he should himself be unconscious of it, and
throughout intent upon getting home his own point on one of those counters.
Andre-Louis had been in his time a chess-player of some force, and at
chess he had excelled by virtue of his capacity for thinking ahead. That
virtue applied to fencing should all but revolutionize the art. It was so
applied already, of course, but only in an elementary and very limited
fashion, in mere feints, single, double, or triple. But even the triple
feint should be a clumsy device compared with this method upon which he
theorized.
He considered further, and the conviction grew that he held the key of
a discovery. He was impatient to put his theory to the test.
That morning he was given a pupil of some force, against whom usually
he was hard put to it to defend himself. Coming on guard, he made up his
mind to hit him on the fourth disengage, predetermining the four passes that
should lead up to it. They engaged in tierce, and Andre-Louis led the attack
by a beat and a straightening of the arm. Came the demi-contre he expected,
which he promptly countered by a thrust in quinte; this being countered
again, he reentered still lower, and being again correctly parried, as he
had calculated, he lunged swirling his point into carte, and got home full
upon his opponent's breast. The ease of it surprised him.
They began again. This time he resolved to go in on the fifth
disengage, and in on that he went with the same ease. Then, complicating the
matter further, he decided to try the sixth, and worked out in his mind the
combination of the five preliminary engages. Yet again he succeeded as
easily as before.
The young gentleman opposed to him laughed with just a tinge of
mortification in his voice.
"I am all to pieces this morning," he said.
"You are not of your usual force," Andre-Louis politely agreed. And
then greatly daring, always to test that theory of his to the uttermost: "So
much so," he added, "that I could almost be sure of hitting you as and when
I declare."
The capable pupil looked at him with a half-sneer. "Ah, that, no," said
he.
"Let us try. On the fourth disengage I shall touch you. Allons! En
garde!"
And as he promised, so it happened.
The young gentleman who, hitherto, had held no great opinion of
Andre-Louis' swordsmanship, accounting him well enough for purposes of
practice when the master was otherwise engaged, opened wide his eyes. In a
burst of mingled generosity and intoxication, Andre-Louis was almost for
disclosing his method - a method which a little later was to become a
commonplace of the fencing-rooms. Betimes he checked himself. To reveal his
secret would be to destroy the prestige that must accrue to him from
exercising it.
At noon, the academy being empty, M. des Amis called Andre-Louis to one
of the occasional lessons which he still received. And for the first time in
all his experience with Andre-Louis, M. des Amis received from him a full
hit in the course of the first bout. He laughed, well pleased, like the
generous fellow he was.
"Aha! You are improving very fast, my friend." He still laughed, though
not so well pleased, when he was hit in the second bout. After that he
settled down to fight in earnest with the result that Andre-Louis was hit
three times in succession. The speed and accuracy of the fencing-master when
fully exerting himself disconcerted Andre-Louis' theory, which for want of
being exercised in practice still demanded too much consideration.
But that his theory was sound he accounted fully established, and with
that, for the moment, he was content. It remained only to perfect by
practice the application of it. To this he now devoted himself with the
passionate enthusiasm of the discoverer. He confined himself to a half-dozen
combinations, which he practised assiduously until each had become almost
automatic. And he proved their infallibility upon the best among M. des
Amis' pupils.
Finally, a week or so after that last bout of his with des Amis, the
master called him once more to practice.
Hit again in the first bout, the master set himself to exert all his
skill against his assistant. But to-day it availed him nothing before
Andre-Louis' impetuous attacks.
After the third hit, M. des Amis stepped back and pulled off his mask.
"What's this?" he asked. He was pale, and his dark brows were
contracted in a frown. Not in years had he been so wounded in his self-love.
"Have you been taught a secret botte?"
He had always boasted that he knew too much about the sword to believe
any nonsense about secret bottes; but this performance of Andre-Louis' had
shaken his convictions on that score.
"No," said Andre-Louis. "I have been working hard; and it happens that
I fence with my brains."
"So I perceive. Well, well, I think I have taught you enough, my
friend. I have no intention of having an assistant who is superior to
myself."
"Little danger of that," said Andre-Louis, smiling pleasantly. "You
have been fencing hard all morning, and you are tired, whilst I, having done
little, am entirely fresh. That is the only secret of my momentary success.
His tact and the fundamental good-nature of M. des Amis prevented the
matter from going farther along the road it was almost threatening to take.
And thereafter, when they fenced together, Andre-Louis, who continued daily
to perfect his theory into an almost infallible system, saw to it that M.
des Amis always scored against him at least two hits for every one of his
own. So much he would grant to discretion, but no more. He desired that M.
des Amis should be conscious of his strength, without, however, discovering
so much of its real extent as would have excited in him an unnecessary
degree of jealousy.
And so well did he contrive that whilst he became ever of greater
assistance to the master - for his style and general fencing, too, had
materially improved - he was also a source of pride to him as the most
brilliant of all the pupils that had ever passed through his academy. Never
did Andre-Louis disillusion him by revealing the fact that his skill was due
far more to M. des Amis' library and his own mother wit than to any lessons
received.
Once again, precisely as he had done when he joined the Binet troupe,
did Andre-Louis now settle down whole-heartedly to the new profession into
which necessity had driven him, and in which he found effective concealment
from those who might seek him to his hurt. This profession might - although
in fact it did not - have brought him to consider himself at last as a man
of action. He had not, however, on that account ceased to be a man of
thought, and the events of the spring and summer months of that year 1789 in
Paris provided him with abundant matter for reflection. He read there in the
raw what is perhaps the most amazing page in the history of human
development, and in the end he was forced to the conclusion that all his
early preconceptions had been at fault, and that it was such exalted,
passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had been right.
I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been
mistaken, complacently attributing his error to the circumstance that he had
been, himself, of too sane and logical a mind to gauge the depths of human
insanity now revealed.
He watched the growth of hunger, the increasing poverty and distress of
Paris during that spring, and assigned it to its proper cause, together with
the patience with which the people bore it. The world of France was in a
state of hushed, of paralyzed expectancy, waiting for the States General to
assemble and for centuries of tyranny to end. And because of this
expectancy, industry had come to a standstill, the stream of trade had
dwindled to a trickle. Men would not buy or sell until they clearly saw the
means by which the genius of the Swiss banker, M. Necker, was to deliver
them from this morass. And because of this paralysis of affairs the men of
the people were thrown out of work and left to starve with their wives and
children.
Looking on, Andre-Louis smiled grimly. So far he was right. The
sufferers were ever the proletariat. The men who sought to make this
revolution, the electors - here in Paris as elsewhere - were men of
substance, notable bourgeois, wealthy traders. And whilst these, despising
the canaille, and envying the privileged, talked largely of equality - by
which they meant an ascending equality that should confuse themselves with
the gentry - the proletariat perished of want in its kennels.
At last with the month of May the deputies arrived, Andre-Louis' friend
Le Chapelier prominent amongst them, and the States General were inaugurated
at Versailles. It was then that affairs began to become interesting, then
that Andre-Louis began seriously to doubt the soundness of the views he had
held hitherto.
When the royal proclamation had gone forth decreeing that the deputies
of the Third Estate should number twice as many as those of the other two
orders together, Andre-Louis had believed that the preponderance of votes
thus assured to the Third Estate rendered inevitable the reforms to which
they had pledged themselves.
But he had reckoned without the power of the privileged orders over the
proud Austrian queen, and her power over the obese, phlegmatic, irresolute
monarch. That the privileged orders should deliver battle in defence of
their privileges, Andre-Louis could understand. Man being what he is, and
labouring under his curse of acquisitiveness, will never willingly surrender
possessions, whether they be justly or unjustly held. But what surprised
Andre-Louis was the unutterable crassness of the methods by which the
Privileged ranged themselves for battle. They opposed brute force to reason
and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas
were to be impaled on bayonets!
The war between the Privileged and the Court on one side, and the
Assembly and the People on the other had begun.
The Third Estate contained itself, and waited; waited with the patience
of nature; waited a month whilst, with the paralysis of business now
complete, the skeleton hand of famine took a firmer grip of Paris; waited a
month whilst Privilege gradually assembled an army in Versailles to
intimidate it - an army of fifteen regiments, nine of which were Swiss and
German - and mounted a park of artillery before the building in which the
deputies sat. But the deputies refused to be intimidated; they refused to
see the guns and foreign uniforms; they refused to see anything but the
purpose for which they had been brought together by royal proclamation.
Thus until the 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician,
the Abbe Sieyes, gave the signal: "It is time," said he, "to cut the cable."
And the opportunity came soon, at the very beginning of July. M. du
Chatelet, a harsh, haughty disciplinarian, proposed to transfer the eleven
French Guards placed under arrest from the military gaol of the Abbaye to
the filthy prison of Bicetre reserved for thieves and felons of the lowest
order. Word of that intention going forth, the people at last met violence
with violence. A mob four thousand strong broke into the Abbaye, and
delivered thence not only the eleven guardsmen, but all the other prisoners,
with the exception of one whom they discovered to be a thief, and whom they
put back again;
That was open revolt at last, and with revolt Privilege knew how to
deal. It would strangle this mutinous Paris in the iron grip of the foreign
regiments. Measures were quickly concerted. Old Marechal de Broglie, a
veteran of the Seven Years' War, imbued with a soldier's contempt for
civilians, conceiving that the sight of a uniform would be enough to restore
peace and order, took control with Besenval as his second-in-command. The
foreign regiments were stationed in the environs of Paris, regiments whose
very names were an irritation to the Parisians, regiments of Reisbach, of
Diesbach, of Nassau, Esterhazy, and Roehmer. Reenforcements of Swiss were
sent to the Bastille between whose crenels already since the 30th of June
were to be seen the menacing mouths of loaded cannon.
On the 10th of July the electors once more addressed the King to
request the withdrawal of the troops. They were answered next day that the
troops served the purpose of defending the liberties of the Assembly! And on
the next day to that, which was a Sunday, the philanthropist Dr. Guillotin -
whose philanthropic engine of painless death was before very long to find a
deal of work, came from the Assembly, of which he was a member, to assure
the electors of Paris that all was well, appearances notwithstanding, since
Necker was more firmly in the saddle than ever. He did not know that at the
very moment in which he was speaking so confidently, the oft-dismissed and
oft-recalled M. Necker had just been dismissed yet again by the hostile
cabal about the Queen. Privilege wanted conclusive measures, and conclusive
measures it would have - conclusive to itself.
And at the same time yet another philanthropist, also a doctor, one
Jean-Paul Mara, of Italian extraction - better known as Marat, the
gallicized form of name he adopted - a man of letters, too, who had spent
some years in England, and there published several works on sociology, was
writing:
"Have a care! Consider what would be the fatal effect of a seditious
movement. If you should have the misfortune to give way to that, you will be
treated as people in revolt, and blood will flow."
Andre-Louis was in the gardens of the Palais Royal, that place of shops
and puppet-shows, of circus and cafes, of gaming houses and brothels, that
universal rendezvous, on that Sunday morning when the news of Necker's
dismissal spread, carrying with it dismay and fury. Into Necker's dismissal
the people read the triumph of the party hostile to themselves. It sounded
the knell of all hope of redress of their wrongs.
He beheld a slight young man with a pock-marked face, redeemed from
utter ugliness by a pair of magnificent eyes, leap to a table outside the
Caf de Foy, a drawn sword in his hand, crying, "To arms!" And then upon the
silence of astonishment that cry imposed, this young man poured a flood of
inflammatory eloquence, delivered in a voice marred at moments by a stutter.
He told the people that the Germans on the Champ de Mars would enter Paris
that night to butcher the inhabitants. "Let us mount a cockade!" he cried,
and tore a leaf from a tree to serve his purpose - the green cockade of
hope.
Enthusiasm swept the crowd, a motley crowd made up of men and women of
every class, from vagabond to nobleman, from harlot to lady of fashion.
Trees were despoiled of their leaves, and the green cockade was flaunted
from almost every head.
"You are caught between two fires," the incendiary's stuttering voice
raved on. "Between the Germans on the Champ de Mars and the Swiss in the
Bastille. To arms, then! To arms!"
Excitement boiled up and over. From a neighbouring waxworks show came
the bust of Necker, and presently a bust of that comedian the Duke of
Orleans, who had a party and who was as ready as any other of the budding
opportunists of those days to take advantage of the moment for his own
aggrandizement. The bust of Necker was draped with crepe.
Andre-Louis looked on, and grew afraid. Marat's pamphlet had impressed
him. It had expressed what himself he had expressed more than half a year
ago to the mob at Rennes. This crowd, he felt must be restrained. That
hot-headed, irresponsible stutterer would have the town in a blaze by night
unless something were done. The young man, a causeless advocate of the
Palais named Camille Desmoulins, later to become famous, leapt down from his
table still waving his sword, still shouting, "To arms! Follow me!"
Andre-Louis advanced to occupy the improvised rostrum, which the stutterer
had just vacated, to make an effort at counteracting that inflammatory
performance. He thrust through the crowd, and came suddenly face to face
with a tall man beautifully dressed, whose handsome countenance was sternly
set, whose great sombre eyes mouldered as if with suppressed anger.
Thus face to face, each looking into the eyes of the other, they stood
for a long moment, the jostling crowd streaming past them, unheeded. Then
Andre-Louis laughed.
"That fellow, too, has a very dangerous gift of eloquence, M. le
Marquis," he said. "In fact there are a number of such in France to-day.
They grow from the soil, which you and yours have irrigated with the blood
of the martyrs of liberty. Soon it may be your blood instead. The soil is
parched, and thirsty for it."
"Gallows-bird!" he was answered. "The police will do your affair for
you. I shall tell the, Lieutenant-General that you are to be found in
Paris."
"My God, man!" cried Andre-Louis, "will you never get sense? Will you
talk like that of Lieutenant-Generals when Paris itself is likely to tumble
about your ears or take fire under your feet? Raise your voice, M. le
Marquis. Denounce me here, to these. You will make a hero of me in such an
hour as this. Or shall I denounce you? I think I will. I think it is high
time you received your wages. Hi! You others, listen to me! Let me present
you to... "
A rush of men hurtled against him, swept him along with them, do what
he would, separating him from M. de La Tour d'Azyr, so oddly met. He sought
to breast that human torrent; the Marquis, caught in an eddy of it, remained
where he had been, and Andre-Louis' last glimpse of him was of a man smiling
with tight lips, an ugly smile.
Meanwhile the gardens were emptying in the wake of that stuttering
firebrand who had mounted the green cockade. The human torrent poured out
into the Rue de Richelieu, and Andre-Louis perforce must suffer himself to
be borne along by it, at least as far as the Rue du Hasard. There he sidled
out of it, and having no wish to be crushed to death or to take further part
in the madness that was afoot, he slipped down the street, and so got home
to the deserted academy. For there were no pupils to-day, and even M. des
Amis, like Andre-Louis, had gone out to seek for news of what was happening
at Versailles.
This was no normal state of things at the Academy of Bertrand des Amis.
Whatever else in Paris might have been at a standstill lately, the fencing
academy had flourished as never hitherto. Usually both the master and his
assistant were busy from morning until dusk, and already Andre-Louis was
being paid now by the lessons that he gave, the master allowing him one half
of the fee in each case for himself, an arrangement which the assistant
found profitable. On Sundays the academy made half-holiday; but on this
Sunday such had been the state of suspense and ferment in the city that no
one having appeared by eleven o'clock both des Amis and Andre-Louis had gone
out. Little they thought as they lightly took leave of each other
- they were very good friends by now - that they were never to meet
again in this world.
Bloodshed there was that day in Paris. On the Place Vendome a
detachment of dragoons awaited the crowd out of which Andre-Louis had
slipped. The horsemen swept down upon the mob, dispersed it, smashed the
waxen effigy of M. Necker, and killed one man on the spot - an unfortunate
French Guard who stood his ground. That was a beginning. As a consequence
Besenval brought up his Swiss from the Champ de Mars and marshalled them in
battle order on the Champs Elysees with four pieces of artillery. His
dragoons he stationed in the Place Louis XV. That evening an enormous crowd,
however, console me to have been cast for a part so contemptible, to find
myself excelling ever in the art of running away. But if I am not brave, at
least I am prudent; so that where I lack one virtue I may lay claim to
possessing another almost to excess. On a previous occasion they wanted to
hang me for sedition. Should I have stayed to be hanged? This time they may
want to hang me for several things, including murder; for I do not know
whether that scoundrel Binet be alive or dead from the dose of lead I pumped
into his fat paunch. Nor can I say that I very greatly care. If I have a
hope at all in the matter it is that he is dead - and damned. But I am
really indifferent. My own concerns are troubling me enough. I have all but
spent the little money that I contrived to conceal about me before I fled
from Nantes on that dreadful night; and both of the only two professions of
which I can claim to know anything - the law and the stage - are closed to
me, since I cannot find employment in either without revealing myself as a
fellow who is urgently wanted by the hangman. As things are it is very
possible that I may die of hunger, especially considering the present price
of victuals in this ravenous city. Again I have recourse to Epictetus for
comfort. 'It is better,' he says, 'to die of hunger having lived without
grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit amid abundance.' I seem
likely to perish in the estate that he accounts so enviable. That it does
not seem exactly enviable to me merely proves that as a Stoic I am not a
success.
There is also another letter of his written at about the same time to
the Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr - a letter since published by M. Emile Quersac
in his "Undercurrents of the Revolution in Brittany," unearthed by him from
the archives of Rennes, to which it had been consigned by M. de
Lesdiguieres, who had received it for justiciary purposes from the Marquis.
"The Paris newspapers," he writes in this, "which have reported in
considerable detail the fracas at the Theatre Feydau and disclosed the true
identity of the Scaramouche who provoked it, inform me also that you have
escaped the fate I had intended for you when I raised that storm of public
opinion and public indignation. I would not have you take satisfaction in
the thought that I regret your escape. I do not. I rejoice in it. To deal
justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that
justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb
that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and
untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the
guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty,
whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire
you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste something of its
bitterness.
"You murdered Philippe de Vilmorin because you feared what you
described as his very dangerous gift of eloquence, I took an oath that day
that your evil deed should be fruitless; that I would render it so; that the
voice you had done murder to stifle should in spite of that ring like a
trumpet through the land. That was my conception of revenge. Do you realize
how I have been fulfilling it, how I shall continue to fulfil it as occasion
offers? In the speech with which I fired the people of Rennes on the very
morrow of that deed, did you not hear the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin
uttering the ideas that were his with a fire and a passion greater than he
could have commanded because Nemesis lent me her inflaming aid? In the voice
of Omnes Omnibus at Nantes my voice again - demanding the petition that
sounded the knell of your hopes of coercing the Third Estate, did you not
hear again the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin? Did you not reflect that it
was the mind of the man you had murdered, resurrected in me his surviving
friend, which made necessary your futile attempt under arms last January,
wherein your order, finally beaten, was driven to seek sanctuary in the
Cordelier Convent? And that night when from the stage of the Feydau you were
denounced to the people, did you not hear yet again, in the voice of
Scaramouche, the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin, using that dangerous gift of
eloquence which you so foolishly imagined you could silence with a
sword-thrust? It is becoming a persecution - is it not? - this voice from
the grave that insists upon making itself heard, that will not rest until
you have been cast into the pit. You will be regretting by now that you did
not kill me too, as I invited you on that occasion. I can picture to myself
the bitterness of this regret, and I contemplate it with satisfaction.
Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can
inhabit, particularly such a soul as yours. It is because of this that I am
glad to know that you survived the riot at the Feydau, although at the time
it was no part of my intention that you should. Because of this I am content
that you should live to enrage and suffer in the shadow of your evil deed,
knowing at last - since you had not hitherto the wit to discern it for
yourself - that the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin will follow you to
denounce you ever more loudly, ever more insistently, until having lived in
dread you shall go down in blood under the just rage which your victim's
dangerous gift of eloquence is kindling against you."
I find it odd that he should have omitted from this letter all mention
of Mlle. Binet, and I am disposed to account it at least a partial
insincerity that he should have assigned entirely to his self-imposed
mission, and not at all to his lacerated feelings in the matter of Climene,
the action which he had taken at the Feydau.
Those two letters, both written in April of that year 1789, had for
only immediate effect to increase the activity with which Andre-Louis Moreau
was being sought.
Le Chapelier would have found him so as to lend him assistance, to urge
upon him once again that he should take up a political career. The electors
of Nantes would have found him - at least, they would have found Omnes
Omnibus, of whose identity with himself they were still in ignorance - on
each of the several occasions when a vacancy occurred in their body. And the
Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr and M. de Lesdiguieres would have found him that
they might send him to the gallows.
With a purpose no less vindictive was he being sought by M. Binet, now
unhappily recovered from his wound to face completest ruin. His troupe had
deserted him during his illness, and reconstituted under the direction of
Polichinelle it was now striving with tolerable success to continue upon the
lines which Andre-Louis had laid down. M. le Marquis, prevented by the riot
from expressing in person to Mlle. Binet his purpose of making an end of
their relations, had been constrained to write to her to that effect from
Azyr a few days later. He tempered the blow by enclosing in discharge of all
liabilities a bill on the Caisse d'Escompte for a hundred louis.
Nevertheless it almost crushed the unfortunate and it enabled her father
when he recovered to enrage her by pointing out that she owed this turn of
events to the premature surrender she had made in defiance of his sound
worldly advice. Father and daughter alike were left to assign the Marquis'
desertion, naturally enough, to the riot at the Feydau. They laid that with
the rest to the account of Scaramouche, and were forced in bitterness to
admit that the scoundrel had taken a superlative revenge. C1imene may even
have come to consider that it would have paid her better to have run a
straight course with Scaramouche and by marrying him to have trusted to his
undoubted talents to place her on the summit to which her ambition urged
her, and to which it was now futile for her to aspire. If so, that
reflection must have been her sufficient punishment. For, as Andre-Louis so
truly says, there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for
wasted opportunities.
Meanwhile the fiercely sought Andre-Louis Moreau had gone to earth
completely for the present. And the brisk police of Paris, urged on by the
King's Lieutenant from Rennes, hunted for him in vain. Yet he might have
been found in a house in the Rue du Hasard within a stone's throw of the
Palais Royal, whither purest chance had conducted him.
That which in his letter to Le Chapelier he represents as a contingency
of the near future was, in fact, the case in which already he found himself.
He was destitute. His money was exhausted, including that procured by the
sale of such articles of adornment as were not of absolute necessity.
So desperate was his case that strolling one gusty April morning down
the Rue du Hasard with his nose in the wind looking for what might be picked
up, he stopped to read a notice outside the door of a house on the left side
of the street as you approach the Rue de Richelieu. There was no reason why
he should have gone down the Rue du Hasard. Perhaps its name attracted him,
as appropriate to his case.
The notice written in a big round hand announced that a young man of
good address with some knowledge of swordsmanship was required by M.
Bertrand des Amis on the second floor. Above this notice was a black oblong
board, and on this a shield, which in vulgar terms may be described as red
charged with two swords crossed and four fleurs de lys, one in each angle of
the saltire. Under the shield, in letters of gold, ran the legend:
BERTRAND DES AMIS
Maitre en fait d'Armes des Academies du Roi
Andre-Louis stood considering. He could claim, he thought, to possess
the qualifications demanded. He was certainly young and he believed of
tolerable address, whilst the fencing-lessons he had received in Nantes had
given him at least an elementary knowledge of swordsmanship. The notice
looked as if it had been pinned there some days ago, suggesting that
applicants for the post were not very numerous. In that case perhaps M.
Bertrand des Amis would not be too exigent. And anyway, Andre-Louis had not
eaten for four-and-twenty hours, and whilst the employment here offered -
the precise nature of which he was yet to ascertain - did not appear to be
such as Andre-Louis would deliberately have chosen, he was in no case now to
be fastidious.
Then, too, he liked the name of Bertrand des Amis. It felicitously
combined suggestions of chivalry and friendliness. Also the man's profession
being of a kind that is flavoured with romance it was possible that M.
Bertrand des Amis would not ask too many questions.
In the end he climbed to the second floor. On the landing he paused
outside a door, on which was written "Academy of M. Bertrand des Amis." He
pushed this open, and found himself in a sparsely furnished, untenanted
antechamber. From a room beyond, the door of which was closed, came the
stamping of feet, the click and slither of steel upon steel, and dominating
these sounds a vibrant sonorous voice speaking a language that was certainly
French; but such French as is never heard outside a fencing-school.
"Coulez! Mais, coulez donc!....So! Now the flanconnade - en
carte....And here is the riposte....Let us begin again. Come! The ward of
fierce....Make the coupe, and then the quinte par dessus les armes....0,
mais allongez! Allongez! Allez au fond!" the voice cried in expostulation.
"Come, that was better." The blades ceased.
"Remember: the hand in pronation, the elbow not too far out. That will
do for to-day. On Wednesday we shall see you tirer au mur. It is more
deliberate. Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more
assured."
Another voice murmured in answer. The steps moved aside. The lesson was
at an end. Andre-Louis tapped on the door.
It was opened by a tall, slender, gracefully proportioned man of
perhaps forty. Black silk breeches and stockings ending in light shoes
clothed him from the waist down. Above he was encased to the chin in a
closely fitting plastron of leather, His face was aquiline and swarthy, his
eyes full and dark, his mouth firm and his clubbed hair was of a lustrous
black with here and there a thread of silver showing.
in the crook of his left arm he carried a fencing-mask, a thing of
leather with a wire grating to protect the eyes. His keen glance played over
Andre-Louis from head to foot.
"Monsieur?" he inquired, politely.
It was clear that he mistook Andre-Louis' quality, which is not
surprising, for despite his sadly reduced fortunes, his exterior was
irreproachable, and M. des Amis was not to guess that he carried upon his
back the whole of his possessions.
"You have a notice below, monsieur," he said, and from the swift
lighting of the fencing-master's eyes he saw that he had been correct in his
assumption that applicants for the position had not been jostling one
another on his threshold. And then that flash of satisfaction was followed
by a look of surprise.
"You are come in regard to that?"
Andre-Louis shrugged and half smiled. "One must live," said he.
"But come in. Sit down there. I shall be at your....I shall be free to
attend to you in a moment."
Andre-Louis took a seat on the bench ranged against one of the
whitewashed walls. The room was long and low, its floor entirely bare. Plain
wooden forms such as that which he occupied were placed here and there
against the wall. These last were plastered with fencing trophies, masks,
crossed foils, stuffed plastrons, and a variety of swords, daggers, and
targets, belonging to a variety of ages and countries. There was also a
portrait of an obese, big-nosed gentleman in an elaborately curled wig,
wearing the blue ribbon of the Saint Esprit, in whom Andre-Louis recognized
the King. And there was a framed parchment - M. des Amis' certificate from
the King's Academy. A bookcase occupied one corner, and near this, facing
the last of the four windows that abundantly lighted the long room, there
was a small writing-table and an armchair. A plump and beautifully dressed
young gentleman stood by this table in the act of resuming coat and wig. M.
des Amis sauntered over to him - moving, thought Andre-Louis, with
extraordinary grace and elasticity - and stood in talk with him whilst also
assisting him to complete his toilet.
At last the young gentleman took his departure, mopping himself with a
fine kerchief that left a trail of perfume on the air. M. des Amis closed
the door, and turned to the applicant, who rose at once.
"Where have you studied?" quoth the fencing-master abruptly.
"Studied?" Andre-Louis was taken aback by the question. "Oh, at Louis
Le Grand."
M. des Amis frowned, looking up sharply as if to see whether his
applicant was taking the liberty of amusing himself.
"In Heaven's name! I am not asking you where you did your humanities,
but in what academy you studied fencing."
"Oh - fencing!" It had hardly ever occurred to Andre-Louis that the
sword ranked seriously as a study. "I never studied it very much. I had some
lessons in... in the country once.
The master's eyebrows went up. "But then?" he cried. "Why trouble to
come up two flights of stairs?" He was impatient.
"The notice does not demand a high degree of proficiency. If I am not
proficient enough, yet knowing the rudiments I can easily improve. I learn
most things readily," Andre-Louis commended himself. "For the rest: I
possess the other qualifications. I am young, as you observe: and I leave
you to judge whether I am wrong in assuming that my address is good. I am by
profession a man of the robe, though I realize that the motto here is cedat
toga armis."
M. des Amis smiled approvingly. Undoubtedly the young man had a good
address, and a certain readiness of wit, it would appear. He ran a critical
eye over his physical points. "What is your name?" he asked.
Andre-Louis hesitated a moment. "Andre-Louis," he said.
The dark, keen eyes conned him more searchingly.
"Well? Andre-Louis what?"
"Just Andre-Louis. Louis is my surname."
"Oh! An odd surname. You come from Brittany by your accent. Why did you
leave it?"
"To save my skin," he answered, without reflecting. And then made haste
to cover the blunder. "I have an enemy," he explained.
M. des Amis frowned, stroking his square chin. "You ran away?"
"You may say so.
"A coward, eh?"
"I don't think so." And then he lied romantically. Surely a man who
lived by the sword should have a weakness for the romantic. "You see, my
enemy is a swordsman of great strength - the best blade in the province, if
not the best blade in France. That is his repute. I thought I would come to
Paris to learn something of the art, and then go back and kill him. That, to
be frank, is why your notice attracted me. You see, I have not the means to
take lessons otherwise. I thought to find work here in the law. But I have
failed. There are too many lawyers in Paris as it is, and whilst waiting I
have consumed the little money that I had, so that... so that, enfin, your
notice seemed to me something to which a special providence had directed
me."
M. des Amis gripped him by the shoulders, and looked into his face.
"Is this true, my friend?" he asked.
"Not a word of it," said Andre-Louis, wrecking his chances on an
irresistible impulse to say the unexpected. But he didn't wreck them. M. des
Amis burst into laughter; and having laughed his fill, confessed himself
charmed by his applicant's fundamental honesty.
"Take off your coat," he said, "and let us see what you can do. Nature,
at least, designed you for a swordsman. You are light, active, and supple,
with a good length of arm, and you seem intelligent. I may make something of
you, teach you enough for my purpose, which is that you should give the
elements of the art to new pupils before I take them in hand to finish them.
Let us try. Take that mask and foil, and come over here.
He led him to the end of the room, where the bare floor was scored with
lines of chalk to guide the beginner in the management of his feet.
At the end of a ten minutes' bout, M. des Amis offered him the
situation, and explained it. In addition to imparting the rudiments of the
art to beginners, he was to brush out the fencing-room every morning, keep
the foils furbished, assist the gentlemen who came for lessons to dress and
undress, and make himself generally useful. His wages for the present were
to be forty livres a month, and he might sleep in an alcove behind the
fencing-room if he had no other lodging.
The position, you see, had its humiliations. But, if Andre-Louis would
hope to dine, he must begin by eating his pride as an hors d'oeuvre.
"And so," he said, controlling a grimace, "the robe yields not only to
the sword, but to the broom as well. Be it so. I stay."
lt is characteristic of him that, having made that choice, he should
have thrown himself into the work with enthusiasm. It was ever his way to do
whatever he did with all the resources of his mind and energies of his body.
When he was not instructing very young gentlemen in the elements of the art,
showing them the elaborate and intricate salute - which with a few days'
hard practice he had mastered to perfection - and the eight guards, he was
himself hard at work on those same guards, exercising eye, wrist, and knees.
Perceiving his enthusiasm, and seeing the obvious possibilities it
opened out of turning him into a really effective assistant, M. des Amis
presently took him more seriously in hand.
"Your application and zeal, my friend, are deserving of more than forty
livres a month," the master informed him at the end of a week. "For the
present, however, I will make up what else I consider due to you by
imparting to you secrets of this noble art. Your future depends upon how you
profit by your exceptional good fortune in receiving instruction from me."
Thereafter every morning before the opening of the academy, the master
would fence for half an hour with his new assistant. Under this really
excellent tuition Andre-Louis improved at a rate that both astounded and
flattered M. des Amis. He would have been less flattered and more astounded
had he known that at least half the secret of Andre-Louis' amazing progress
lay in the fact that he was devouring the contents of the master's library,
which was made up of a dozen or so treatises on fencing by such great
masters as La Bessiere, Danet, and the syndic of the King's Academy,
Augustin Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose swordsmanship was all based on
practice and not at all on theory, who was indeed no theorist or student in
any sense, that little library was merely a suitable adjunct to a
fencing-academy, a proper piece of decorative furniture. The books
themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He had not the type of
mind that could have read them with profit nor could be understand that
another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the contrary, a man with the habit of
study, with the acquired faculty of learning from books, read those works
with enormous profit, kept their precepts in mind, critically set off those
of one master against those of another, and made for himself a choice which
he proceeded to put into practice.
At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his
assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force, a man in a
bout with whom it became necessary to exert himself if he were to escape
defeat.
"I said from the first," he told him one day, "that Nature designed you
for a swordsman. See how justified I was, and see also how well I have known
how to mould the material with which Nature has equipped you."
"To the master be the glory," said Andre-Louis.
His relations with M. des Amis had meanwhile become of the friendliest,
and he was now beginning to receive from him other pupils than mere
beginners. In fact Andre-Louis was becoming an assistant in a much fuller
sense of the word. M. des Amis, a chivalrous, open-handed fellow, far from
taking advantage of what he had guessed to be the young man's difficulties,
rewarded his zeal by increasing his wages to four louis a month.
>From the' earnest and thoughtful study of the theories of others, it
followed now - as not uncommonly happens - that Andre-Louis came to develop
theories of his own. He lay one June morning on his little truckle bed in
the alcove behind the academy, considering a passage that he had read last
night in Danet on double and triple feints. It had seemed to him when
reading it that Danet had stopped short on the threshold of a great
discovery in the art of fencing. Essentially a theorist, Andre-Louis
perceived the theory suggested, which Danet himself in suggesting it had not
perceived. He lay now on his back, surveying the cracks in the ceiling and
considering this matter further with the lucidity that early morning often
brings to an acute intelligence. You are to remember that for close upon two
months now the sword had been Andre-Louis' daily exercise and almost hourly
thought. Protracted concentration upon the subject was giving him an
extraordinary penetration of vision. Swordsmanship as he learnt and taught
and saw it daily practised consisted of a series of attacks and parries, a
series of disengages from one line into another. But always a limited
series. A half-dozen disengages on either side was, strictly speaking,
usually as far as any engagement went. Then one recommenced. But even so,
these disengages were fortuitous. What if from first to last they should be
calculated?
That was part of the thought - one of the two legs on which his theory
was to stand; the other was: what would happen if one so elaborated Danet's
ideas on the triple feint as to merge them into a series of actual
calculated disengages to culminate at the fourth or fifth or even sixth
disengage? That is to say, if one were to make a series of attacks inviting
ripostes again to be countered, each of which was not intended to go home,
but simply to play the opponent's blade into a line that must open him
ultimately, and as predetermined, for an irresistible lunge. Each counter of
the opponent's would have to be preconsidered in this widening of his guard,
a widening so gradual that he should himself be unconscious of it, and
throughout intent upon getting home his own point on one of those counters.
Andre-Louis had been in his time a chess-player of some force, and at
chess he had excelled by virtue of his capacity for thinking ahead. That
virtue applied to fencing should all but revolutionize the art. It was so
applied already, of course, but only in an elementary and very limited
fashion, in mere feints, single, double, or triple. But even the triple
feint should be a clumsy device compared with this method upon which he
theorized.
He considered further, and the conviction grew that he held the key of
a discovery. He was impatient to put his theory to the test.
That morning he was given a pupil of some force, against whom usually
he was hard put to it to defend himself. Coming on guard, he made up his
mind to hit him on the fourth disengage, predetermining the four passes that
should lead up to it. They engaged in tierce, and Andre-Louis led the attack
by a beat and a straightening of the arm. Came the demi-contre he expected,
which he promptly countered by a thrust in quinte; this being countered
again, he reentered still lower, and being again correctly parried, as he
had calculated, he lunged swirling his point into carte, and got home full
upon his opponent's breast. The ease of it surprised him.
They began again. This time he resolved to go in on the fifth
disengage, and in on that he went with the same ease. Then, complicating the
matter further, he decided to try the sixth, and worked out in his mind the
combination of the five preliminary engages. Yet again he succeeded as
easily as before.
The young gentleman opposed to him laughed with just a tinge of
mortification in his voice.
"I am all to pieces this morning," he said.
"You are not of your usual force," Andre-Louis politely agreed. And
then greatly daring, always to test that theory of his to the uttermost: "So
much so," he added, "that I could almost be sure of hitting you as and when
I declare."
The capable pupil looked at him with a half-sneer. "Ah, that, no," said
he.
"Let us try. On the fourth disengage I shall touch you. Allons! En
garde!"
And as he promised, so it happened.
The young gentleman who, hitherto, had held no great opinion of
Andre-Louis' swordsmanship, accounting him well enough for purposes of
practice when the master was otherwise engaged, opened wide his eyes. In a
burst of mingled generosity and intoxication, Andre-Louis was almost for
disclosing his method - a method which a little later was to become a
commonplace of the fencing-rooms. Betimes he checked himself. To reveal his
secret would be to destroy the prestige that must accrue to him from
exercising it.
At noon, the academy being empty, M. des Amis called Andre-Louis to one
of the occasional lessons which he still received. And for the first time in
all his experience with Andre-Louis, M. des Amis received from him a full
hit in the course of the first bout. He laughed, well pleased, like the
generous fellow he was.
"Aha! You are improving very fast, my friend." He still laughed, though
not so well pleased, when he was hit in the second bout. After that he
settled down to fight in earnest with the result that Andre-Louis was hit
three times in succession. The speed and accuracy of the fencing-master when
fully exerting himself disconcerted Andre-Louis' theory, which for want of
being exercised in practice still demanded too much consideration.
But that his theory was sound he accounted fully established, and with
that, for the moment, he was content. It remained only to perfect by
practice the application of it. To this he now devoted himself with the
passionate enthusiasm of the discoverer. He confined himself to a half-dozen
combinations, which he practised assiduously until each had become almost
automatic. And he proved their infallibility upon the best among M. des
Amis' pupils.
Finally, a week or so after that last bout of his with des Amis, the
master called him once more to practice.
Hit again in the first bout, the master set himself to exert all his
skill against his assistant. But to-day it availed him nothing before
Andre-Louis' impetuous attacks.
After the third hit, M. des Amis stepped back and pulled off his mask.
"What's this?" he asked. He was pale, and his dark brows were
contracted in a frown. Not in years had he been so wounded in his self-love.
"Have you been taught a secret botte?"
He had always boasted that he knew too much about the sword to believe
any nonsense about secret bottes; but this performance of Andre-Louis' had
shaken his convictions on that score.
"No," said Andre-Louis. "I have been working hard; and it happens that
I fence with my brains."
"So I perceive. Well, well, I think I have taught you enough, my
friend. I have no intention of having an assistant who is superior to
myself."
"Little danger of that," said Andre-Louis, smiling pleasantly. "You
have been fencing hard all morning, and you are tired, whilst I, having done
little, am entirely fresh. That is the only secret of my momentary success.
His tact and the fundamental good-nature of M. des Amis prevented the
matter from going farther along the road it was almost threatening to take.
And thereafter, when they fenced together, Andre-Louis, who continued daily
to perfect his theory into an almost infallible system, saw to it that M.
des Amis always scored against him at least two hits for every one of his
own. So much he would grant to discretion, but no more. He desired that M.
des Amis should be conscious of his strength, without, however, discovering
so much of its real extent as would have excited in him an unnecessary
degree of jealousy.
And so well did he contrive that whilst he became ever of greater
assistance to the master - for his style and general fencing, too, had
materially improved - he was also a source of pride to him as the most
brilliant of all the pupils that had ever passed through his academy. Never
did Andre-Louis disillusion him by revealing the fact that his skill was due
far more to M. des Amis' library and his own mother wit than to any lessons
received.
Once again, precisely as he had done when he joined the Binet troupe,
did Andre-Louis now settle down whole-heartedly to the new profession into
which necessity had driven him, and in which he found effective concealment
from those who might seek him to his hurt. This profession might - although
in fact it did not - have brought him to consider himself at last as a man
of action. He had not, however, on that account ceased to be a man of
thought, and the events of the spring and summer months of that year 1789 in
Paris provided him with abundant matter for reflection. He read there in the
raw what is perhaps the most amazing page in the history of human
development, and in the end he was forced to the conclusion that all his
early preconceptions had been at fault, and that it was such exalted,
passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had been right.
I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been
mistaken, complacently attributing his error to the circumstance that he had
been, himself, of too sane and logical a mind to gauge the depths of human
insanity now revealed.
He watched the growth of hunger, the increasing poverty and distress of
Paris during that spring, and assigned it to its proper cause, together with
the patience with which the people bore it. The world of France was in a
state of hushed, of paralyzed expectancy, waiting for the States General to
assemble and for centuries of tyranny to end. And because of this
expectancy, industry had come to a standstill, the stream of trade had
dwindled to a trickle. Men would not buy or sell until they clearly saw the
means by which the genius of the Swiss banker, M. Necker, was to deliver
them from this morass. And because of this paralysis of affairs the men of
the people were thrown out of work and left to starve with their wives and
children.
Looking on, Andre-Louis smiled grimly. So far he was right. The
sufferers were ever the proletariat. The men who sought to make this
revolution, the electors - here in Paris as elsewhere - were men of
substance, notable bourgeois, wealthy traders. And whilst these, despising
the canaille, and envying the privileged, talked largely of equality - by
which they meant an ascending equality that should confuse themselves with
the gentry - the proletariat perished of want in its kennels.
At last with the month of May the deputies arrived, Andre-Louis' friend
Le Chapelier prominent amongst them, and the States General were inaugurated
at Versailles. It was then that affairs began to become interesting, then
that Andre-Louis began seriously to doubt the soundness of the views he had
held hitherto.
When the royal proclamation had gone forth decreeing that the deputies
of the Third Estate should number twice as many as those of the other two
orders together, Andre-Louis had believed that the preponderance of votes
thus assured to the Third Estate rendered inevitable the reforms to which
they had pledged themselves.
But he had reckoned without the power of the privileged orders over the
proud Austrian queen, and her power over the obese, phlegmatic, irresolute
monarch. That the privileged orders should deliver battle in defence of
their privileges, Andre-Louis could understand. Man being what he is, and
labouring under his curse of acquisitiveness, will never willingly surrender
possessions, whether they be justly or unjustly held. But what surprised
Andre-Louis was the unutterable crassness of the methods by which the
Privileged ranged themselves for battle. They opposed brute force to reason
and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas
were to be impaled on bayonets!
The war between the Privileged and the Court on one side, and the
Assembly and the People on the other had begun.
The Third Estate contained itself, and waited; waited with the patience
of nature; waited a month whilst, with the paralysis of business now
complete, the skeleton hand of famine took a firmer grip of Paris; waited a
month whilst Privilege gradually assembled an army in Versailles to
intimidate it - an army of fifteen regiments, nine of which were Swiss and
German - and mounted a park of artillery before the building in which the
deputies sat. But the deputies refused to be intimidated; they refused to
see the guns and foreign uniforms; they refused to see anything but the
purpose for which they had been brought together by royal proclamation.
Thus until the 10th of June, when that great thinker and metaphysician,
the Abbe Sieyes, gave the signal: "It is time," said he, "to cut the cable."
And the opportunity came soon, at the very beginning of July. M. du
Chatelet, a harsh, haughty disciplinarian, proposed to transfer the eleven
French Guards placed under arrest from the military gaol of the Abbaye to
the filthy prison of Bicetre reserved for thieves and felons of the lowest
order. Word of that intention going forth, the people at last met violence
with violence. A mob four thousand strong broke into the Abbaye, and
delivered thence not only the eleven guardsmen, but all the other prisoners,
with the exception of one whom they discovered to be a thief, and whom they
put back again;
That was open revolt at last, and with revolt Privilege knew how to
deal. It would strangle this mutinous Paris in the iron grip of the foreign
regiments. Measures were quickly concerted. Old Marechal de Broglie, a
veteran of the Seven Years' War, imbued with a soldier's contempt for
civilians, conceiving that the sight of a uniform would be enough to restore
peace and order, took control with Besenval as his second-in-command. The
foreign regiments were stationed in the environs of Paris, regiments whose
very names were an irritation to the Parisians, regiments of Reisbach, of
Diesbach, of Nassau, Esterhazy, and Roehmer. Reenforcements of Swiss were
sent to the Bastille between whose crenels already since the 30th of June
were to be seen the menacing mouths of loaded cannon.
On the 10th of July the electors once more addressed the King to
request the withdrawal of the troops. They were answered next day that the
troops served the purpose of defending the liberties of the Assembly! And on
the next day to that, which was a Sunday, the philanthropist Dr. Guillotin -
whose philanthropic engine of painless death was before very long to find a
deal of work, came from the Assembly, of which he was a member, to assure
the electors of Paris that all was well, appearances notwithstanding, since
Necker was more firmly in the saddle than ever. He did not know that at the
very moment in which he was speaking so confidently, the oft-dismissed and
oft-recalled M. Necker had just been dismissed yet again by the hostile
cabal about the Queen. Privilege wanted conclusive measures, and conclusive
measures it would have - conclusive to itself.
And at the same time yet another philanthropist, also a doctor, one
Jean-Paul Mara, of Italian extraction - better known as Marat, the
gallicized form of name he adopted - a man of letters, too, who had spent
some years in England, and there published several works on sociology, was
writing:
"Have a care! Consider what would be the fatal effect of a seditious
movement. If you should have the misfortune to give way to that, you will be
treated as people in revolt, and blood will flow."
Andre-Louis was in the gardens of the Palais Royal, that place of shops
and puppet-shows, of circus and cafes, of gaming houses and brothels, that
universal rendezvous, on that Sunday morning when the news of Necker's
dismissal spread, carrying with it dismay and fury. Into Necker's dismissal
the people read the triumph of the party hostile to themselves. It sounded
the knell of all hope of redress of their wrongs.
He beheld a slight young man with a pock-marked face, redeemed from
utter ugliness by a pair of magnificent eyes, leap to a table outside the
Caf de Foy, a drawn sword in his hand, crying, "To arms!" And then upon the
silence of astonishment that cry imposed, this young man poured a flood of
inflammatory eloquence, delivered in a voice marred at moments by a stutter.
He told the people that the Germans on the Champ de Mars would enter Paris
that night to butcher the inhabitants. "Let us mount a cockade!" he cried,
and tore a leaf from a tree to serve his purpose - the green cockade of
hope.
Enthusiasm swept the crowd, a motley crowd made up of men and women of
every class, from vagabond to nobleman, from harlot to lady of fashion.
Trees were despoiled of their leaves, and the green cockade was flaunted
from almost every head.
"You are caught between two fires," the incendiary's stuttering voice
raved on. "Between the Germans on the Champ de Mars and the Swiss in the
Bastille. To arms, then! To arms!"
Excitement boiled up and over. From a neighbouring waxworks show came
the bust of Necker, and presently a bust of that comedian the Duke of
Orleans, who had a party and who was as ready as any other of the budding
opportunists of those days to take advantage of the moment for his own
aggrandizement. The bust of Necker was draped with crepe.
Andre-Louis looked on, and grew afraid. Marat's pamphlet had impressed
him. It had expressed what himself he had expressed more than half a year
ago to the mob at Rennes. This crowd, he felt must be restrained. That
hot-headed, irresponsible stutterer would have the town in a blaze by night
unless something were done. The young man, a causeless advocate of the
Palais named Camille Desmoulins, later to become famous, leapt down from his
table still waving his sword, still shouting, "To arms! Follow me!"
Andre-Louis advanced to occupy the improvised rostrum, which the stutterer
had just vacated, to make an effort at counteracting that inflammatory
performance. He thrust through the crowd, and came suddenly face to face
with a tall man beautifully dressed, whose handsome countenance was sternly
set, whose great sombre eyes mouldered as if with suppressed anger.
Thus face to face, each looking into the eyes of the other, they stood
for a long moment, the jostling crowd streaming past them, unheeded. Then
Andre-Louis laughed.
"That fellow, too, has a very dangerous gift of eloquence, M. le
Marquis," he said. "In fact there are a number of such in France to-day.
They grow from the soil, which you and yours have irrigated with the blood
of the martyrs of liberty. Soon it may be your blood instead. The soil is
parched, and thirsty for it."
"Gallows-bird!" he was answered. "The police will do your affair for
you. I shall tell the, Lieutenant-General that you are to be found in
Paris."
"My God, man!" cried Andre-Louis, "will you never get sense? Will you
talk like that of Lieutenant-Generals when Paris itself is likely to tumble
about your ears or take fire under your feet? Raise your voice, M. le
Marquis. Denounce me here, to these. You will make a hero of me in such an
hour as this. Or shall I denounce you? I think I will. I think it is high
time you received your wages. Hi! You others, listen to me! Let me present
you to... "
A rush of men hurtled against him, swept him along with them, do what
he would, separating him from M. de La Tour d'Azyr, so oddly met. He sought
to breast that human torrent; the Marquis, caught in an eddy of it, remained
where he had been, and Andre-Louis' last glimpse of him was of a man smiling
with tight lips, an ugly smile.
Meanwhile the gardens were emptying in the wake of that stuttering
firebrand who had mounted the green cockade. The human torrent poured out
into the Rue de Richelieu, and Andre-Louis perforce must suffer himself to
be borne along by it, at least as far as the Rue du Hasard. There he sidled
out of it, and having no wish to be crushed to death or to take further part
in the madness that was afoot, he slipped down the street, and so got home
to the deserted academy. For there were no pupils to-day, and even M. des
Amis, like Andre-Louis, had gone out to seek for news of what was happening
at Versailles.
This was no normal state of things at the Academy of Bertrand des Amis.
Whatever else in Paris might have been at a standstill lately, the fencing
academy had flourished as never hitherto. Usually both the master and his
assistant were busy from morning until dusk, and already Andre-Louis was
being paid now by the lessons that he gave, the master allowing him one half
of the fee in each case for himself, an arrangement which the assistant
found profitable. On Sundays the academy made half-holiday; but on this
Sunday such had been the state of suspense and ferment in the city that no
one having appeared by eleven o'clock both des Amis and Andre-Louis had gone
out. Little they thought as they lightly took leave of each other
- they were very good friends by now - that they were never to meet
again in this world.
Bloodshed there was that day in Paris. On the Place Vendome a
detachment of dragoons awaited the crowd out of which Andre-Louis had
slipped. The horsemen swept down upon the mob, dispersed it, smashed the
waxen effigy of M. Necker, and killed one man on the spot - an unfortunate
French Guard who stood his ground. That was a beginning. As a consequence
Besenval brought up his Swiss from the Champ de Mars and marshalled them in
battle order on the Champs Elysees with four pieces of artillery. His
dragoons he stationed in the Place Louis XV. That evening an enormous crowd,