streaming along the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries Gardens, considered
with eyes of alarm that warlike preparation. Some insults were cast upon
those foreign mercenaries and some stones were flung. Besenval, losing his
head, or acting under orders, sent for his dragoons and ordered them to
disperse the crowd, But that crowd was too dense to be dispersed in this
fashion; so dense that it was impossible for the horsemen to move without
crushing some one. There were several crushed, and as a consequence when the
dragoons, led by the Prince de Lambesc, advanced into the Tuileries Gardens,
the outraged crowd met them with a fusillade of stones and bottles. Lambesc
gave the order to fire. There was a stampede. Pouring forth from the
Tuileries through the city went those indignant people with their story of
German cavalry trampling upon women and children, and uttering now in
grimmest earnest the call to arms, raised at noon by Desmoulins in the
Palais Royal.
The victims were taken up and borne thence, and amongst them was
Bertrand des Amis, himself - like all who lived by the sword - an ardent
upholder of the noblesse, trampled to death under hooves of foreign horsemen
launched by the noblesse and led by a nobleman.
To Andre-Louis, waiting that evening on the second floor of No. 13 Rue
du Hasard for the return of his friend and master, four men of the people
brought that broken body of one of the earliest victims of the Revolution
that was now launched in earnest.
The ferment of Paris which, during the two following days, resembled an
armed camp rather than a city, delayed the burial of Bertrand des Amis until
the Wednesday of that eventful week. Amid events that were shaking a nation
to its foundations the death of a fencing-master passed almost unnoticed
even among his pupils, most of whom did not come to the academy during the
two days that his body lay there. Some few, however, did come, and these
conveyed the news to others, with the result that the master was followed to
Pere Lachaise by a score of young men at the head of whom as chief mourner
walked Andre-Louis.
There were no relatives to be advised so far as Andre-Louis was aware,
although within a week of M. des Amis' death a sister turned up from Passy
to claim his heritage. This was considerable, for the master had prospered
and saved money, most of which was invested in the Compagnie des Eaux and
the National Debt. Andre-Louis consigned her to the lawyers, and saw her no
more.
The death of des Amis left him with so profound a sense of loneliness
and desolation that he had no thought or care for the sudden access of
fortune which it automatically procured him. To the master's sister might
fall such wealth as he had amassed, but Andre-Louis succeeded to the mine
itself from which that wealth had been extracted, the fencing-school in
which by now he was himself so well established as an instructor that its
numerous pupils looked to him to carry it forward successfully as its chief.
And never was there a season in which fencing-academies knew such prosperity
as in these troubled days, when every man was sharpening his sword and
schooling himself in the uses of it.
It was not until a couple of weeks later that Andre-Louis realized what
had really happened to him, and he found himself at the same time an
exhausted man, for during that fortnight he had been doing the work of two.
If he had not hit upon the happy expedient of pairing-off his more advanced
pupils to fence with each other, himself standing by to criticize, correct
and otherwise instruct, he must have found the task utterly beyond his
strength. Even so, it was necessary for him to fence some six hours daily,
and every day he brought arrears of lassitude from yesterday until he was in
danger of succumbing under the increasing burden of fatigue. In the end he
took an assistant to deal with beginners, who gave the hardest work. He
found him readily enough by good fortune in one of his own pupils named Le
Duc. As the summer advanced, and the concourse of pupils steadily increased,
it became necessary for him to take yet another assistant - an able young
instructor named Galoche - and another room on the floor above.
They were strenuous days for Andre-Louis, more strenuous than he had
ever known, even when he had been at work to build up the Binet Company; but
it follows that they were days of extraordinary prosperity. He comments
regretfully upon the fact that Bertrand des Amis should have died by
ill-chance on the very eve of so profitable a vogue of sword-play.
The arms of the Academie du Roi, to which Andre-Louis had no title,
still continued to be displayed outside his door. He had overcome the
difficulty in a manner worthy of Scaramouche. He left the escutcheon and the
legend "Academie de Bertrand des Amis, Maitre en fait d'Armes des Academies
du Roi," appending to it the further legend: "Conducted by Andre-Louis."
With little time now in which to go abroad it was from his pupils and
the newspapers - of which a flood had risen in Paris with the establishment
of the freedom of the Press - that he learnt of the revolutionary processes
around him, following upon, as a measure of anticlimax, the fall of the
Bastille. That had happened whilst M. des Amis lay dead, on the day before
they buried him, and was indeed the chief reason of the delay in his burial.
It was an event that had its inspiration in that ill-considered charge of
Prince Lambesc in which the fencing-master had been killed.
The outraged people had besieged the electors in the Hotel de Ville,
demanding arms with which to defend their lives from these foreign murderers
hired by despotism. And in the end the electors had consented to give them
arms, or, rather - for arms it had none to give - to permit them to arm
themselves. Also it had given them a cockade, of red and blue, the colours
of Paris. Because these colours were also those of the liveries of the Duke
of Orleans, white was added to them - the white of the ancient standard of
France - and thus was the tricolour born. Further, a permanent committee of
electors was appointed to watch over public order.
Thus empowered the people went to work with such good effect that
within thirty-six hours sixty thousand pikes had been forged. At nine
o'clock on Tuesday morning thirty thousand men were before the Invalides. By
eleven o'clock they had ravished it of its store of arms amounting to some
thirty thousand muskets, whilst others had seized the Arsenal and possessed
themse1ves of powder.
Thus they prepared to resist the attack that from seven points was to
be launched that evening upon the city. But Paris did not wait for the
attack. It took the initiative. Mad with enthusiasm it conceived the insane
project of taking that terrible menacing fortress, the Bastille, and, what
is more, it succeeded, as you know, before five o'clock that night, aided in
the enterprise by the French Guards with cannon.
The news of it, borne to Versailles by Lambesc in flight with his
dragoons before the vast armed force that had sprouted from the
paving-stones of Paris, gave the Court pause. The people were in possession
of the guns captured from the Bastille. They were erecting barricades in the
streets, and mounting these guns upon them. The attack had been too long
delayed. It must be abandoned since now it could lead only to fruitless
slaughter that must further shake the already sorely shaken prestige of
Royalty.
And so the Court, growing momentarily wise again under the spur of
fear, preferred to temporize. Necker should be brought back yet once again,
the three orders should sit united as the National Assembly demanded. It was
the completest surrender of force to force, the only argument. The King went
alone to inform the National Assembly of that eleventh-hour resolve, to the
great comfort of its members, who viewed with pain and alarm the dreadful
state of things in Paris. "No force but the force of reason and argument"
was their watchword, and it was so to continue for two years yet, with a
patience and fortitude in the face of ceaseless provocation to which
insufficient justice has been done.
As the King was leaving the Assembly, a woman, embracing his knees,
gave tongue to what might well be the question of all France:
"Ah, sire, are you really sincere? Are you sure they will not make you
change your mind?"
Yet no such question was asked when a couple of days later the King,
alone and unguarded save by the representatives of the Nation, came to Paris
to complete the peacemaking, the surrender of Privilege. The Court was
filled with terror by the adventure. Were they not the "enemy," these
mutinous Parisians? And should a King go thus among his enemies? If he
shared some of that fear, as the gloom of him might lead us to suppose, he
must have found it idle. What if two hundred thousand men under arms - men
without uniforms and with the most extraordinary motley of weapons ever seen
- awaited him? They awaited him as a guard of honour.
Mayor Bailly at the barrier presented him with the keys of the city.
"These are the same keys that were presented to Henri IV. He had reconquered
his people. Now the people have reconquered their King."
At the Hotel de Ville Mayor Bailly offered him the new cockade, the
tricoloured symbol of constitutional France, and when he had given his royal
confirmation to the formation of the Garde Bourgeoise and to the
appointments of Bailly and Lafayette, he departed again for Versailles amid
the shouts of "Vive le Roi!" from his loyal people.
And now you see Privilege - before the cannon's mouth, as it were
- submitting at last, where had they submitted sooner they might have
saved oceans of blood - chiefly their own. They come, nobles and clergy, to
join the National Assembly, to labour with it upon this constitution that is
to regenerate France. But the reunion is a mockery - as much a mockery as
that of the Archbishop of Paris singing the Te Deum for the fall of the
Bastille - most grotesque and incredible of all these grotesque and
incredible events. All that has happened to the National Assembly is that it
has introduced five or six hundred enemies to hamper and hinder its
deliberations.
But all this is an oft-told tale, to be read in detail elsewhere. I
give you here just so much of it as I have found in Andre-Louis' own
writings, almost in his own words, reflecting the changes that were operated
in his mind. Silent now, he came fully to believe in those things in which
he had not believed when earlier he had preached them.
Meanwhile together with the change in his fortune had come a change in
his position towards the law, a change brought about by the other changes
wrought around him. No longer need he hide himself. Who in these days would
prefer against him the grotesque charge of sedition for what he had done in
Brittany? What court would dare to send him to the gallows for having said
in advance what all France was saying now? As for that other possible charge
of murder, who should concern himself with the death of the miserable Binet
killed by him - if, indeed, he had killed him, as he hoped - in
self-defence.
And so one fine day in early August, Andre-Louis gave himself a holiday
from the academy, which was now working smoothly under his assistants, hired
a chaise and drove out to Versailles to the Caf d'Amaury, which he knew for
the meeting-place of the Club Breton, the seed from which was to spring that
Society of the Friends of the Constitution better known as the Jacobins. He
went to seek Le Chapelier, who had been one of the founders of the club, a
man of great prominence now, president of the Assembly in this important
season when it was deliberating upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Le Chapelier's importance was reflected in the sudden servility of the
shirt-sleeved, white-aproned waiter of whom Andre-Louis inquired for the
representative.
M. Le Chapelier was above-stairs with friends. The waiter desired to
serve the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in which M.
le Depute found himself.
Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the
attempt. Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking out
over the wide tree-encircled square. There, in that common-room of the caf ,
deserted at this hour of mid-afternoon, the great man came to him. Less than
a year ago he had yielded precedence to Andre-Louis in a matter of delicate
leadership; to-day he stood on the heights, one of the great leaders of the
Nation in travail, and Andre-Louis was deep down in the shadows of the
general mass.
The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other, each
noting in the other the marked change that a few months had wrought. In Le
Chapelier, Andre-Louis observed certain heightened refinements of dress that
went with certain subtler refinements of countenance. He was thinner than of
old, his face was pale and there was a weariness in the eyes that considered
his visitor through a gold-rimmed spy-glass. In Andre-Louis those jaded but
quick-moving eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more marked. The
almost constant swordmanship of these last months had given Andre-Louis a
grace of movement, a poise, and a curious, indefinable air of dignity, of
command. He seemed taller by virtue of this, and he was dressed with an
elegance which if quiet was none the less rich. He wore a small
silver-hilted sword, and wore it as if used to it, and his black hair that
Le Chapelier had never seen other than fluttering lank about his bony cheeks
was glossy now and gathered into a club. Almost he had the air of a
petit-maitre.
In both, however, the changes were purely superficial, as each was soon
to reveal to the other. Le Chapelier was ever the same direct and downright
Breton, abrupt of manner and of speech. He stood smiling a moment in mingled
surprise and pleasure; then opened wide his arms. They embraced under the
awe-stricken gaze of the waiter, who at once effaced himself.
"Andre-Louis, my friend! Whence do you drop?"
"We drop from above. I come from below to survey at close quarters one
who is on the heights."
"On the heights! But that you willed it so, it is yourself might now be
standing in my place."
"I have a poor head for heights, and I find the atmosphere too
rarefied. Indeed, you look none too well on it yourself, Isaac. You are
pale."
"The Assembly was in session all last night. That is all. These damned
Privileged multiply our difficulties. They will do so until we decree their
abolition."
They sat down. "Abolition! You contemplate so much? Not that you
surprise me. You have always been an extremist."
"I contemplate it that I may save them. I seek to abolish them
officially, so as to save them from abolition of another kind at the hands
of a people they exasperate."
"I see. And the King?"
"The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him
together with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our constitution
will accomplish it. You agree?"
Andre-Louis shrugged. "Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics, not
a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate than
you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching, and I
have perceived that this King is - just nothing, a puppet who dances
according to the hand that pulls the string."
"This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of
those who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of party, a following
largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that
she hates him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some
even more; Robespierre is of the number."
"Who?" asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.
"Robespierre - a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a
shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to
which nobody listens - an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the
Orleanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists
upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that he, or the
others, will ever make anything of Orleans... pish! Orleans himself may
desire it, but. the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can't. The
phrase is Mirabeau's."
He broke off to demand Andre-Louis' news of himself.
"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he complained.
"You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the
verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your
assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by
your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous,
assured. Tell me of it."
Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. "Do you know
that you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the robe to the
buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I
wonder?"
"The gallows, probably."
"Fish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial
France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so."
"The surest way to the gallows of all," laughed Andre-Louis.
At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the
phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the
death-cart to the Greve.
"We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy
occur, will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the influence
of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done."
Andre-Louis laughed outright. "Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet
you but you seek to thrust me into politics?"
"Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics."
"Ah, yes - Scaramouche in real life. I've played it on the stage. Let
that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d'Azyr?"
"He is here in Versailles, damn him - a thorn in the flesh of the
Assembly. They've burnt his chateau at La Tour d'Azyr. Unfortunately he
wasn't in it at the time. The flames haven't even singed his insolence. He
dreams that when this philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be
serfs to rebuild it for him."
"So there has been trouble in Brittany?" Andre-Louis had become
suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.
"An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These delays at
such a time, with famine in the land? Chateaux have been going up in smoke
during the last fortnight. The peasants took their cue from the Parisians,
and treated every castle as a Bastille. Order is being restored, there as
here, and they are quieter now."
"What of Gavrillac? Do you know?"
"I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La Tour
d'Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely that they would
injure Gavrillac. But don't you correspond with your godfather?"
"In the circumstances - no. What you tell me would make it now more
difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped to light
the torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his class. Ascertain for
me that all is well, and let me know."
"I will, at once."
At parting, when Andre-Louis was on the point of stepping into his
cabriolet to return to Paris, he sought information on another matter.
"Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d'Azyr has married?" he asked.
"I don't; which really means that he hasn't. One would have heard of it
in the case of that exalted Privileged."
"To be sure." Andre-Louis spoke indifferently. "Au revoir, Isaac!
You'll come and see me - 13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon."
"As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained
here at present."
"Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!"
"True! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany: to
make Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National Assembly."
"That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting," laughed Andre-Louis,
and drove away.
Later in the week he received a visit from Le Chapelier just before
noon.
"I have news for you, Andre. Your godfather is at Meudon. He arrived
there two days ago. Had you heard?"
"But no. How should I hear? Why is he at Meudon?" He was conscious of a
faint excitement, which he could hardly have explained.
"I don't know. There have been fresh disturbances in Brittany. It may
be due to that."
"And so he has come for shelter to his brother?" asked Andre-Louis.
"To his brother's house, yes; but not to his brother. Where do you live
at all, Andre? Do you never hear any of the news? Etienne de Gavrillac
emigrated years ago. He was of the household of M. d'Artois, and he crossed
the frontier with him. By now, no doubt, he is in Germany with him,
conspiring against France. For that is what the emigres are doing. That
Austrian woman at the Tuileries will end by destroying the monarchy."
"Yes, yes," said Andre-Louis impatiently. Politics interested him not
at all this morning. "But about Gavrillac?"
"Why, haven't I told you that Gavrillac is at Meudon, installed in the
house his brother has left? Dieu de Dieu! Don't I speak French or don't you
understand the language? I believe that Rabouillet, his intendant, is in
charge of Gavrillac. I have brought you the news the moment I received it. I
thought you would probably wish to go out to Meudon."
"Of course. I will go at once - that is, as soon as I can. I can't
to-day, nor yet to-morrow. I am too busy here." He waved a hand towards the
inner room, whence proceeded the click-click of blades, the quick moving of
feet, and the voice of the instructor, Le Duc.
"Well, well, that is your own affair. You are busy. I leave you now.
Let us dine this evening at the Caf de Foy. Kersain will be of the party."
"A moment!" Andre-Louis' voice arrested him on the threshold. "Is Mlle.
de Kercadiou with her uncle?"
"How the devil should I know? Go and find out."
He was gone, and Andre-Louis stood there a moment deep in thought. Then
he turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte de Villeniort,
the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of Danet, illustrating with a
small-sword the advantages to be derived from its adoption.
Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of
his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights
of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon and
on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone without
deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three times in
succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to
marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action. Without
bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had
automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into
which constant practice for a year and more had combined them.
Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the
impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning. Dressed
with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed
- by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were
being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now
flowing freely - Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to
Meudon.
The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head
of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother was
essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte
d'Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the
heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway
between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d'Artois
- the royal tennis-player - had been amongst the very first to emigrate.
Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the
Queen's intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc,
who realized that their very names had become odious to the people, he had
quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to
play tennis beyond the frontier - and there consummate the work of ruining
the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in
France. With him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de
Kercadiou, and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four
children. Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a
province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany - where the nobles had
shown themselves the most intransigent of all France - had come to occupy in
his brother's absence the courtier's handsome villa at Meudon.
That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his
almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little
uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding,
and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants
- for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind. Time,
which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here
hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he slept a great deal, and but
for Aline, who made no attempt to conceal her delight at this proximity to
Paris and the heart of things, it is possible that he would have beat a
retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits.
Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this
luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it
was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that
Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday
in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This
because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his
seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed - to the ceaseless and
but half-concealed hilarity of the impertinent valetaille that M. Etienne
had left - as his maitre d'hotel here at Meudon.
Benoit had welcomed M. Andre with incoherencies of delight; almost had
he gambolled about him like some faithful dog, whilst conducting him to the
salon and the presence of the Lord of Gavrillac, who would - in the words of
Benoit - be ravished to see M. Andre again.
"Monseigneur! Monseigneur!" he cried in a quavering voice, entering a
pace or two in advance of the visitor. "It is M. Andre... M. Andre, your
godson, who comes to kiss your hand. He is here... and so fine that you
would hardly know him. Here he is, monseigneur! Is he not beautiful?"
And the old servant rubbed his hands in conviction of the delight that
he believed he was conveying to his master.
Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, soft-carpeted to
the foot, dazzling to the eye. It was immensely lofty, and its festooned
ceiling was carried on fluted pillars with gilded capitals. The door by
which he entered, and the windows that opened upon the garden, were of an
enormous height - almost, indeed, the full height of the room itself. It was
a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on
the furniture, in which it nowise differed from what was customary in the
dwellings of people of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in
which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold
was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to
supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis' that if these people could
only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into
their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better
case.
The Seigneur - furbished and beruffled to harmonize with his
surroundings - had risen, startled by this exuberant invasion on the part of
Benoit, who had been almost as forlorn as himself since their coming to
Meudon.
"What is it? Eh?" His pale, short-sighted eyes peered at the visitor.
"Andre!" said he, between surprise and sternness; and the colour deepened in
his great pink face.
Benoit, with his back to his master, deliberately winked and grinned at
Andre-Louis to encourage him not to be put off by any apparent hostility on
the part of his godfather. That done, the intelligent old fellow discreetly
effaced himself.
"What do you want here?" growled M. de Kercadiou.
"No more than to kiss your hand, as Benoit has told you, monsieur my
godfather," said Andre-Louis submissively, bowing his sleek black head.
"You have contrived without kissing it for two years."
"Do not, monsieur, reproach me with my misfortune."
The little man stood very stiffly erect, his disproportionately large
head thrown back, his pale prominent eyes very stern.
"Did you think to make your outrageous offence any better by vanishing
in that heartless manner, by leaving us without knowledge of whether you
were alive or dead?"
"At first it was dangerous - dangerous to my life - to disclose my
whereabouts. Then for a time I was in need, almost destitute, and my pride
forbade me, after what I had done and the view you must take of it, to
appeal to you for help. Later... "
"Destitute?" The Seigneur interrupted. For a moment his lip trembled.
Then he steadied himself, and the frown deepened as he surveyed this very
changed and elegant godson of his, noted the quiet richness of his apparel,
the paste buckles and red heels to his shoes, the sword hilted in
mother-o'-pearl and silver, and the carefully dressed hair that he had
always seen hanging in wisps about his face. "At least you do not look
destitute now," he sneered.
"I am not. I have prospered since. In that, monsieur, I differ from the
ordinary prodigal, who returns only when he needs assistance. I return
solely because I love you, monsieur - to tell you so. I have come at the
very first moment after hearing of your presence here." He advanced.
"Monsieur my godfather!" he said, and held out his hand.
But M. de Kercadiou remained unbending, wrapped in his cold dignity and
resentment.
"Whatever tribulations you may have suffered or consider that you may
have suffered, they are far less than your disgraceful conduct deserved, and
I observe that they have nothing abated your impudence. You think that you
have but to come here and say, 'Monsieur my godfather!' and everything is to
be forgiven and forgotten. That is your error. You have committed too great
a wrong; you have offended against everything by which I hold, and against
myself personally, by your betrayal of my trust in you. You are one of those
unspeakable scoundrels who are responsible for this revolution."
"Alas, monsieur, I see that you share the common delusion. These
unspeakable scoundrels but demanded a constitution, as was promised them
from the throne. They were not to know that the promise was insincere, or
that its fulfilment would be baulked by the privileged orders. The men who
have precipitated this revolution, monsieur, are the nobles and the
prelates."
"You dare - and at such a time as this - stand there and tell me such
abominable lies! You dare to say that the nobles have made the revolution,
when scores of them, following the example of M. le Duc d'Aiguillon, have
flung their privileges, even their title-deeds, into the lap of the people!
Or perhaps you deny it?"
"Oh, no. Having wantonly set fire to their house, they now try to put
it out by throwing water on it; and where they fail they put the entire
blame on the flames."
"I see that you have come here to talk politics."
"Far from it. I have come, if possible, to explain myself. To
understand is always to forgive. That is a great saying of Montaigne's. If I
could make you understand... "
"You can't. You'll never make me understand how you came to render
yourself so odiously notorious in Brittany."
"Ah, not odiously, monsieur!"
"Certainly, odiously - among those that matter. It is said even that
you were Omnes Omnibus, though that I cannot, will not believe."
"Yet it is true."
M. de Kercadiou choked. "And you confess it? You dare to confess it?"
"What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess - unless he is a
coward."
"Oh, and to be sure you were very brave, running away each time after
you had done the mischief, turning comedian to hide yourself, doing more
mischief as a comedian, provoking a riot in Nantes, and then running away
again, to become God knows what - something dishonest by the affluent look
of you. My God, man, I tell you that in these past two years I have hoped
that you were dead, and you profoundly disappoint me that you are not!" He
beat his hands together, and raised his shrill voice to call - "Benoit!" He
strode away towards the fireplace, scarlet in the face, shaking with the
passion into which he had worked himself. "Dead, I might have forgiven you,
as one who had paid for his evil, and his folly. Living, I never can forgive
you. You have gone too far. God alone knows where it will end.
"Benoit, the door. M. Andre-Louis Moreau to the door!" The tone argued
an irrevocable determination. Pale and self-contained, but with a queer pain
at his heart, Andre-Louis heard that dismissal, saw Benoit's white, scared
face and shaking hands half-raised as if he were about to expostulate with
his master. And then another voice, a crisp, boyish voice, cut in.
"Uncle!" it cried, a world of indignation and surprise in its pitch,
and then: "Andre!" And this time a note almost of gladness, certainly of
welcome, was blended with the surprise that still remained.
Both turned, half the room between them at the moment, and beheld Aline
in one of the long, open windows, arrested there in the act of entering from
the garden, Aline in a milk-maid bonnet of the latest mode, though without
any of the tricolour embellishments that were so commonly to be seen upon
them.
The thin lips of Andre's long mouth twisted into a queer smile. Into
his mind had flashed the memory of their last parting. He saw himself again,
standing burning with indignation upon the pavement of Nantes, looking after
her carriage as it receded down the Avenue de Gigan.
She was coming towards him now with outstretched hands, a heightened
colour in her cheeks, a smile of welcome on her lips. He bowed low and
kissed her hand in silence.
Then with a glance and a gesture she dismissed Benoit, and in her
imperious fashion constituted herself Andre's advocate against that harsh
dismissal which she had overheard.
"Uncle," she said, leaving Andre and crossing to M. de Kercadiou, "you
make me ashamed of you! To allow a feeling of peevishness to overwhelm all
your affection for Andre!"
"I have no affection for him. I had once. He chose to extinguish it. He
can go to the devil; and please observe that I don't permit you to
interfere."
"But if he confesses that he has done wrong... "
"He confesses nothing of the kind. He comes here to argue with me about
these infernal Rights of Man. He proclaims himself unrepentant. He announces
himself with pride to have been, as all Brittany says, the scoundrel who hid
himself under the sobriquet of Omnes Omnibus. Is that to be condoned?"
She turned to look at Andre across the wide space that now separated
them.
"But is this really so? Don't you repent, Andre - now that you see all
the harm that has come?"
It was a clear invitation to him, a pleading to him to say that he
repented, to make his peace with his godfather. For a moment it almost moved
him. Then, considering the subterfuge unworthy, he answered truthfully,
though the pain he was suffering rang in his voice.
"To confess repentance," he said slowly, "would be to confess to a
monstrous crime. Don't you see that? Oh, monsieur, have patience with me;
let me explain myself a little. You say that I am in part responsible for
something of all this that has happened. My exhortations of the people at
Rennes and twice afterwards at Nantes are said to have had their share in
what followed there. It may be so. It would be beyond my power positively to
deny it. Revolution followed and bloodshed. More may yet come. To repent
implies a recognition that I have done wrong. How shall I say that I have
done wrong, and thus take a share of the responsibility for all that blood
upon my soul? I will be quite frank with you to show you how far, indeed, I
am from repentance. What I did, I actually did against all my convictions at
the time. Because there was no justice in France to move against the
murderer of Philippe de Vilmorin, I moved in the only way that I imagined
could make the evil done recoil upon the hand that did it, and those other
hands that had the power but not the spirit to punish. Since then I have
come to see that I was wrong, and that Philippe de Vilmorin and those who
thought with him were in the right.
"You must realize, monsieur, that it is with sincerest thankfulness
that I find I have done nothing calling for repentance; that, on the
contrary, when France is given the inestimable boon of a constitution, as
will shortly happen, I may take pride in having played my part in bringing
about the conditions that have made this possible."
There was a pause. M. de Kercadiou's face turned from pink to purple.
"You have quite finished?" he said harshly.
"If you have understood me, monsieur."
"Oh, I have understood you, and... and I beg that you will go."
Andre-Louis shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He had come there
so joyously, in such yearning, merely to receive a final dismissal. He
looked at Aline. Her face was pale and troubled; but her wit failed to show
her how she could come to his assistance. His excessive honesty had burnt
all his boats.
"Very well, monsieur. Yet this I would ask you to remember after I am
gone. I have not come to you as one seeking assistance, as one driven to you
by need. I am no returning prodigal, as I have said. I am one who, needing
nothing, asking nothing, master of his own destinies, has come to you driven
by affection only, urged by the love and gratitude he bears you and will
continue to bear you."
"Ah, yes!" cried Aline, turning now to her uncle. Here at least was an
argument in Andre's favour, thought she. "That is true. Surely that..."
Inarticulately he hissed her into silence, exasperated.
"Hereafter perhaps that will help you to think of me more kindly,
monsieur.
"I see no occasion, sir, to think of you at all. Again, I beg that you
will go."
Andre-Louis looked at Aline an instant, as if still hesitating.
She answered him by a glance at her furious uncle, a faint shrug, and a
lift of the eyebrows, dejection the while in her countenance.
It was as if she said: "You see his mood. There is nothing to be done."
He bowed with that singular grace the fencing-room had given him and
went out by the door.
"Oh, it is cruel!" cried Aline, in a stifled voice, her hands clenched,
and she sprang to the window.
"Aline!" her uncle's voice arrested her. "Where are you going?"
"But we do not know where he is to be found."
"Who wants to find the scoundrel?"
"We may never see him again."
"That is most fervently to be desired."
Aline said "Ouf!" and went out by the window.
He called after her, imperiously commanding her return. But Aline
- dutiful child - closed her ears lest she must disobey him, and sped
light-footed across the lawn to the avenue there to intercept the departing
Andre-Louis.
As he came forth wrapped in gloom, she stepped from the bordering trees
into his path.
"Aline!" he cried, joyously almost.
"I did not want you to go like this. I couldn't let you, she explained
herself. "I know him better than you do, and I know that his great soft
heart will presently melt. He will be filled with regret. He will want to
send for you, and he will not know where to send."
"You think that?"
"Oh, I know it! You arrive in a bad moment. He is peevish and
cross-grained, poor man, since he came here. These soft surroundings are all
so strange to him. He wearies himself away from his beloved Gavrillac, his
hunting and tillage, and the truth is that in his mind he very largely
blames you for what has happened
- for the necessity, or at least, the wisdom, of this change. Brittany,
you must know, was becoming too unsafe. The chateau of La Tour d'Azyr,
amongst others, was burnt to the ground some months ago. At any moment,
given a fresh excitement, it may be the turn of Gavrillac. And for this and
his present discomfort he blames you and your friends. But he will come
round presently. He will be sorry that he sent you away like this - for I
know that he loves you, Andre, in spite of all. I shall reason with him when
the time comes. And then we shall want to know where to find you."
"At number 13, Rue du Hasard. The number is unlucky, the name of the
street appropriate. Therefore both are easy to remember."
She nodded. "I will walk with you to the gates." And side by side now
they proceeded at a leisurely pace down the long avenue in the June sunshine
dappled by the shadows of the bordering trees. "You are looking well, Andre;
and do you know that you have changed a deal? I am glad that you have
prospered." And then, abruptly changing the subject before he had time to
answer her, she came to the matter uppermost in her mind.
"I have so wanted to see you in all these months, Andre. You were the
only one who could help me; the only one who could tell me the truth, and I
was angry with you for never having written to say where you were to be
found."
"Of course you encouraged me to do so when last we met in Nantes."
"What? Still resentful?"
"I am never resentful. You should know that." He expressed one of his
vanities. He loved to think himself a Stoic. "But I still bear the scar of a
wound that would be the better for the balm of your retraction."
"Why, then, I retract, Andre. And now tell me."
"Yes, a self-seeking retraction," said he. "You give me something that
you may obtain something." He laughed quite pleasantly. "Well, well; command
me."
"Tell me, Andre." She paused, as if in some difficulty, and then went
on, her eyes upon the ground: "Tell me - the truth of that event at the
Feydau."
The request fetched a frown to his brow. He suspected at once the
thought that prompted it. Quite simply and briefly he gave her his version
of the affair.
She listened very attentively. When he had done she sighed; her face
was very thoughtful.
"That is much what I was told," she said. "But it was added that M. de
La Tour d'Azyr had gone to the theatre expressly for the purpose of breaking
finally with La Binet. Do you know if that was so?"
"I don't; nor of any reason why it should be so. La Binet provided him
the sort of amusement that he and his kind are forever craving... "
"Oh, there was a reason," she interrupted him. "I was the reason. I
spoke to Mme. de Sautron. I told her that I would not continue to receive
one who came to me contaminated in that fashion." She spoke of it with
obvious difficulty, her colour rising as he watched her half-averted face.
"Had you listened to me... " he was beginning, when again she
interrupted him.
"M. de Sautron conveyed my decision to him, and afterwards represented
him to me as a man in despair, repentant, ready to give proofs - any proofs
- of his sincerity and devotion to me. He told me that M. de La Tour d'Azyr
had sworn to him that he would cut short that affair, that he would see La
Binet no more. And then, on the very next day I heard of his having all but
lost his life in that riot at the theatre. He had gone straight from that
interview with M. de Sautron, straight from those protestations of future
wisdom, to La Binet. I was indignant. I pronounced myself finally. I stated
with eyes of alarm that warlike preparation. Some insults were cast upon
those foreign mercenaries and some stones were flung. Besenval, losing his
head, or acting under orders, sent for his dragoons and ordered them to
disperse the crowd, But that crowd was too dense to be dispersed in this
fashion; so dense that it was impossible for the horsemen to move without
crushing some one. There were several crushed, and as a consequence when the
dragoons, led by the Prince de Lambesc, advanced into the Tuileries Gardens,
the outraged crowd met them with a fusillade of stones and bottles. Lambesc
gave the order to fire. There was a stampede. Pouring forth from the
Tuileries through the city went those indignant people with their story of
German cavalry trampling upon women and children, and uttering now in
grimmest earnest the call to arms, raised at noon by Desmoulins in the
Palais Royal.
The victims were taken up and borne thence, and amongst them was
Bertrand des Amis, himself - like all who lived by the sword - an ardent
upholder of the noblesse, trampled to death under hooves of foreign horsemen
launched by the noblesse and led by a nobleman.
To Andre-Louis, waiting that evening on the second floor of No. 13 Rue
du Hasard for the return of his friend and master, four men of the people
brought that broken body of one of the earliest victims of the Revolution
that was now launched in earnest.
The ferment of Paris which, during the two following days, resembled an
armed camp rather than a city, delayed the burial of Bertrand des Amis until
the Wednesday of that eventful week. Amid events that were shaking a nation
to its foundations the death of a fencing-master passed almost unnoticed
even among his pupils, most of whom did not come to the academy during the
two days that his body lay there. Some few, however, did come, and these
conveyed the news to others, with the result that the master was followed to
Pere Lachaise by a score of young men at the head of whom as chief mourner
walked Andre-Louis.
There were no relatives to be advised so far as Andre-Louis was aware,
although within a week of M. des Amis' death a sister turned up from Passy
to claim his heritage. This was considerable, for the master had prospered
and saved money, most of which was invested in the Compagnie des Eaux and
the National Debt. Andre-Louis consigned her to the lawyers, and saw her no
more.
The death of des Amis left him with so profound a sense of loneliness
and desolation that he had no thought or care for the sudden access of
fortune which it automatically procured him. To the master's sister might
fall such wealth as he had amassed, but Andre-Louis succeeded to the mine
itself from which that wealth had been extracted, the fencing-school in
which by now he was himself so well established as an instructor that its
numerous pupils looked to him to carry it forward successfully as its chief.
And never was there a season in which fencing-academies knew such prosperity
as in these troubled days, when every man was sharpening his sword and
schooling himself in the uses of it.
It was not until a couple of weeks later that Andre-Louis realized what
had really happened to him, and he found himself at the same time an
exhausted man, for during that fortnight he had been doing the work of two.
If he had not hit upon the happy expedient of pairing-off his more advanced
pupils to fence with each other, himself standing by to criticize, correct
and otherwise instruct, he must have found the task utterly beyond his
strength. Even so, it was necessary for him to fence some six hours daily,
and every day he brought arrears of lassitude from yesterday until he was in
danger of succumbing under the increasing burden of fatigue. In the end he
took an assistant to deal with beginners, who gave the hardest work. He
found him readily enough by good fortune in one of his own pupils named Le
Duc. As the summer advanced, and the concourse of pupils steadily increased,
it became necessary for him to take yet another assistant - an able young
instructor named Galoche - and another room on the floor above.
They were strenuous days for Andre-Louis, more strenuous than he had
ever known, even when he had been at work to build up the Binet Company; but
it follows that they were days of extraordinary prosperity. He comments
regretfully upon the fact that Bertrand des Amis should have died by
ill-chance on the very eve of so profitable a vogue of sword-play.
The arms of the Academie du Roi, to which Andre-Louis had no title,
still continued to be displayed outside his door. He had overcome the
difficulty in a manner worthy of Scaramouche. He left the escutcheon and the
legend "Academie de Bertrand des Amis, Maitre en fait d'Armes des Academies
du Roi," appending to it the further legend: "Conducted by Andre-Louis."
With little time now in which to go abroad it was from his pupils and
the newspapers - of which a flood had risen in Paris with the establishment
of the freedom of the Press - that he learnt of the revolutionary processes
around him, following upon, as a measure of anticlimax, the fall of the
Bastille. That had happened whilst M. des Amis lay dead, on the day before
they buried him, and was indeed the chief reason of the delay in his burial.
It was an event that had its inspiration in that ill-considered charge of
Prince Lambesc in which the fencing-master had been killed.
The outraged people had besieged the electors in the Hotel de Ville,
demanding arms with which to defend their lives from these foreign murderers
hired by despotism. And in the end the electors had consented to give them
arms, or, rather - for arms it had none to give - to permit them to arm
themselves. Also it had given them a cockade, of red and blue, the colours
of Paris. Because these colours were also those of the liveries of the Duke
of Orleans, white was added to them - the white of the ancient standard of
France - and thus was the tricolour born. Further, a permanent committee of
electors was appointed to watch over public order.
Thus empowered the people went to work with such good effect that
within thirty-six hours sixty thousand pikes had been forged. At nine
o'clock on Tuesday morning thirty thousand men were before the Invalides. By
eleven o'clock they had ravished it of its store of arms amounting to some
thirty thousand muskets, whilst others had seized the Arsenal and possessed
themse1ves of powder.
Thus they prepared to resist the attack that from seven points was to
be launched that evening upon the city. But Paris did not wait for the
attack. It took the initiative. Mad with enthusiasm it conceived the insane
project of taking that terrible menacing fortress, the Bastille, and, what
is more, it succeeded, as you know, before five o'clock that night, aided in
the enterprise by the French Guards with cannon.
The news of it, borne to Versailles by Lambesc in flight with his
dragoons before the vast armed force that had sprouted from the
paving-stones of Paris, gave the Court pause. The people were in possession
of the guns captured from the Bastille. They were erecting barricades in the
streets, and mounting these guns upon them. The attack had been too long
delayed. It must be abandoned since now it could lead only to fruitless
slaughter that must further shake the already sorely shaken prestige of
Royalty.
And so the Court, growing momentarily wise again under the spur of
fear, preferred to temporize. Necker should be brought back yet once again,
the three orders should sit united as the National Assembly demanded. It was
the completest surrender of force to force, the only argument. The King went
alone to inform the National Assembly of that eleventh-hour resolve, to the
great comfort of its members, who viewed with pain and alarm the dreadful
state of things in Paris. "No force but the force of reason and argument"
was their watchword, and it was so to continue for two years yet, with a
patience and fortitude in the face of ceaseless provocation to which
insufficient justice has been done.
As the King was leaving the Assembly, a woman, embracing his knees,
gave tongue to what might well be the question of all France:
"Ah, sire, are you really sincere? Are you sure they will not make you
change your mind?"
Yet no such question was asked when a couple of days later the King,
alone and unguarded save by the representatives of the Nation, came to Paris
to complete the peacemaking, the surrender of Privilege. The Court was
filled with terror by the adventure. Were they not the "enemy," these
mutinous Parisians? And should a King go thus among his enemies? If he
shared some of that fear, as the gloom of him might lead us to suppose, he
must have found it idle. What if two hundred thousand men under arms - men
without uniforms and with the most extraordinary motley of weapons ever seen
- awaited him? They awaited him as a guard of honour.
Mayor Bailly at the barrier presented him with the keys of the city.
"These are the same keys that were presented to Henri IV. He had reconquered
his people. Now the people have reconquered their King."
At the Hotel de Ville Mayor Bailly offered him the new cockade, the
tricoloured symbol of constitutional France, and when he had given his royal
confirmation to the formation of the Garde Bourgeoise and to the
appointments of Bailly and Lafayette, he departed again for Versailles amid
the shouts of "Vive le Roi!" from his loyal people.
And now you see Privilege - before the cannon's mouth, as it were
- submitting at last, where had they submitted sooner they might have
saved oceans of blood - chiefly their own. They come, nobles and clergy, to
join the National Assembly, to labour with it upon this constitution that is
to regenerate France. But the reunion is a mockery - as much a mockery as
that of the Archbishop of Paris singing the Te Deum for the fall of the
Bastille - most grotesque and incredible of all these grotesque and
incredible events. All that has happened to the National Assembly is that it
has introduced five or six hundred enemies to hamper and hinder its
deliberations.
But all this is an oft-told tale, to be read in detail elsewhere. I
give you here just so much of it as I have found in Andre-Louis' own
writings, almost in his own words, reflecting the changes that were operated
in his mind. Silent now, he came fully to believe in those things in which
he had not believed when earlier he had preached them.
Meanwhile together with the change in his fortune had come a change in
his position towards the law, a change brought about by the other changes
wrought around him. No longer need he hide himself. Who in these days would
prefer against him the grotesque charge of sedition for what he had done in
Brittany? What court would dare to send him to the gallows for having said
in advance what all France was saying now? As for that other possible charge
of murder, who should concern himself with the death of the miserable Binet
killed by him - if, indeed, he had killed him, as he hoped - in
self-defence.
And so one fine day in early August, Andre-Louis gave himself a holiday
from the academy, which was now working smoothly under his assistants, hired
a chaise and drove out to Versailles to the Caf d'Amaury, which he knew for
the meeting-place of the Club Breton, the seed from which was to spring that
Society of the Friends of the Constitution better known as the Jacobins. He
went to seek Le Chapelier, who had been one of the founders of the club, a
man of great prominence now, president of the Assembly in this important
season when it was deliberating upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Le Chapelier's importance was reflected in the sudden servility of the
shirt-sleeved, white-aproned waiter of whom Andre-Louis inquired for the
representative.
M. Le Chapelier was above-stairs with friends. The waiter desired to
serve the gentleman, but hesitated to break in upon the assembly in which M.
le Depute found himself.
Andre-Louis gave him a piece of silver to encourage him to make the
attempt. Then he sat down at a marble-topped table by the window looking out
over the wide tree-encircled square. There, in that common-room of the caf ,
deserted at this hour of mid-afternoon, the great man came to him. Less than
a year ago he had yielded precedence to Andre-Louis in a matter of delicate
leadership; to-day he stood on the heights, one of the great leaders of the
Nation in travail, and Andre-Louis was deep down in the shadows of the
general mass.
The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other, each
noting in the other the marked change that a few months had wrought. In Le
Chapelier, Andre-Louis observed certain heightened refinements of dress that
went with certain subtler refinements of countenance. He was thinner than of
old, his face was pale and there was a weariness in the eyes that considered
his visitor through a gold-rimmed spy-glass. In Andre-Louis those jaded but
quick-moving eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more marked. The
almost constant swordmanship of these last months had given Andre-Louis a
grace of movement, a poise, and a curious, indefinable air of dignity, of
command. He seemed taller by virtue of this, and he was dressed with an
elegance which if quiet was none the less rich. He wore a small
silver-hilted sword, and wore it as if used to it, and his black hair that
Le Chapelier had never seen other than fluttering lank about his bony cheeks
was glossy now and gathered into a club. Almost he had the air of a
petit-maitre.
In both, however, the changes were purely superficial, as each was soon
to reveal to the other. Le Chapelier was ever the same direct and downright
Breton, abrupt of manner and of speech. He stood smiling a moment in mingled
surprise and pleasure; then opened wide his arms. They embraced under the
awe-stricken gaze of the waiter, who at once effaced himself.
"Andre-Louis, my friend! Whence do you drop?"
"We drop from above. I come from below to survey at close quarters one
who is on the heights."
"On the heights! But that you willed it so, it is yourself might now be
standing in my place."
"I have a poor head for heights, and I find the atmosphere too
rarefied. Indeed, you look none too well on it yourself, Isaac. You are
pale."
"The Assembly was in session all last night. That is all. These damned
Privileged multiply our difficulties. They will do so until we decree their
abolition."
They sat down. "Abolition! You contemplate so much? Not that you
surprise me. You have always been an extremist."
"I contemplate it that I may save them. I seek to abolish them
officially, so as to save them from abolition of another kind at the hands
of a people they exasperate."
"I see. And the King?"
"The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him
together with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our constitution
will accomplish it. You agree?"
Andre-Louis shrugged. "Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics, not
a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more moderate than
you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have been watching, and I
have perceived that this King is - just nothing, a puppet who dances
according to the hand that pulls the string."
"This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely not of
those who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of party, a following
largely recruited by the popular hatred of the Queen and the known fact that
she hates him. There are some who have thought of making him regent, some
even more; Robespierre is of the number."
"Who?" asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.
"Robespierre - a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras, a
shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through his nose to
which nobody listens - an ultra-royalist whom the royalists and the
Orleanists are using for their own ends. He has pertinacity, and he insists
upon being heard. He may be listened to some day. But that he, or the
others, will ever make anything of Orleans... pish! Orleans himself may
desire it, but. the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can't. The
phrase is Mirabeau's."
He broke off to demand Andre-Louis' news of himself.
"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he complained.
"You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you represented yourself as on the
verge of destitution and withheld from me the means to come to your
assistance. I have been troubled in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by
your appearance I might have spared myself that. You seem prosperous,
assured. Tell me of it."
Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. "Do you know
that you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the robe to the
buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What will be the end of you, I
wonder?"
"The gallows, probably."
"Fish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial
France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so."
"The surest way to the gallows of all," laughed Andre-Louis.
At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the
phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode in the
death-cart to the Greve.
"We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy
occur, will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the influence
of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done."
Andre-Louis laughed outright. "Do you know, Isaac, that I never meet
you but you seek to thrust me into politics?"
"Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics."
"Ah, yes - Scaramouche in real life. I've played it on the stage. Let
that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La Tour d'Azyr?"
"He is here in Versailles, damn him - a thorn in the flesh of the
Assembly. They've burnt his chateau at La Tour d'Azyr. Unfortunately he
wasn't in it at the time. The flames haven't even singed his insolence. He
dreams that when this philosophic aberration is at an end, there will be
serfs to rebuild it for him."
"So there has been trouble in Brittany?" Andre-Louis had become
suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.
"An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These delays at
such a time, with famine in the land? Chateaux have been going up in smoke
during the last fortnight. The peasants took their cue from the Parisians,
and treated every castle as a Bastille. Order is being restored, there as
here, and they are quieter now."
"What of Gavrillac? Do you know?"
"I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La Tour
d'Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely that they would
injure Gavrillac. But don't you correspond with your godfather?"
"In the circumstances - no. What you tell me would make it now more
difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped to light
the torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his class. Ascertain for
me that all is well, and let me know."
"I will, at once."
At parting, when Andre-Louis was on the point of stepping into his
cabriolet to return to Paris, he sought information on another matter.
"Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d'Azyr has married?" he asked.
"I don't; which really means that he hasn't. One would have heard of it
in the case of that exalted Privileged."
"To be sure." Andre-Louis spoke indifferently. "Au revoir, Isaac!
You'll come and see me - 13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon."
"As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained
here at present."
"Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!"
"True! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany: to
make Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National Assembly."
"That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting," laughed Andre-Louis,
and drove away.
Later in the week he received a visit from Le Chapelier just before
noon.
"I have news for you, Andre. Your godfather is at Meudon. He arrived
there two days ago. Had you heard?"
"But no. How should I hear? Why is he at Meudon?" He was conscious of a
faint excitement, which he could hardly have explained.
"I don't know. There have been fresh disturbances in Brittany. It may
be due to that."
"And so he has come for shelter to his brother?" asked Andre-Louis.
"To his brother's house, yes; but not to his brother. Where do you live
at all, Andre? Do you never hear any of the news? Etienne de Gavrillac
emigrated years ago. He was of the household of M. d'Artois, and he crossed
the frontier with him. By now, no doubt, he is in Germany with him,
conspiring against France. For that is what the emigres are doing. That
Austrian woman at the Tuileries will end by destroying the monarchy."
"Yes, yes," said Andre-Louis impatiently. Politics interested him not
at all this morning. "But about Gavrillac?"
"Why, haven't I told you that Gavrillac is at Meudon, installed in the
house his brother has left? Dieu de Dieu! Don't I speak French or don't you
understand the language? I believe that Rabouillet, his intendant, is in
charge of Gavrillac. I have brought you the news the moment I received it. I
thought you would probably wish to go out to Meudon."
"Of course. I will go at once - that is, as soon as I can. I can't
to-day, nor yet to-morrow. I am too busy here." He waved a hand towards the
inner room, whence proceeded the click-click of blades, the quick moving of
feet, and the voice of the instructor, Le Duc.
"Well, well, that is your own affair. You are busy. I leave you now.
Let us dine this evening at the Caf de Foy. Kersain will be of the party."
"A moment!" Andre-Louis' voice arrested him on the threshold. "Is Mlle.
de Kercadiou with her uncle?"
"How the devil should I know? Go and find out."
He was gone, and Andre-Louis stood there a moment deep in thought. Then
he turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte de Villeniort,
the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of Danet, illustrating with a
small-sword the advantages to be derived from its adoption.
Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of
his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights
of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon and
on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone without
deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three times in
succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to
marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action. Without
bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had
automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into
which constant practice for a year and more had combined them.
Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the
impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning. Dressed
with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed
- by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were
being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now
flowing freely - Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to
Meudon.
The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head
of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother was
essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte
d'Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the
heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway
between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d'Artois
- the royal tennis-player - had been amongst the very first to emigrate.
Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the
Queen's intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc,
who realized that their very names had become odious to the people, he had
quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to
play tennis beyond the frontier - and there consummate the work of ruining
the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in
France. With him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de
Kercadiou, and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four
children. Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a
province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany - where the nobles had
shown themselves the most intransigent of all France - had come to occupy in
his brother's absence the courtier's handsome villa at Meudon.
That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his
almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little
uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding,
and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants
- for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind. Time,
which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here
hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he slept a great deal, and but
for Aline, who made no attempt to conceal her delight at this proximity to
Paris and the heart of things, it is possible that he would have beat a
retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits.
Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this
luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it
was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that
Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday
in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This
because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his
seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed - to the ceaseless and
but half-concealed hilarity of the impertinent valetaille that M. Etienne
had left - as his maitre d'hotel here at Meudon.
Benoit had welcomed M. Andre with incoherencies of delight; almost had
he gambolled about him like some faithful dog, whilst conducting him to the
salon and the presence of the Lord of Gavrillac, who would - in the words of
Benoit - be ravished to see M. Andre again.
"Monseigneur! Monseigneur!" he cried in a quavering voice, entering a
pace or two in advance of the visitor. "It is M. Andre... M. Andre, your
godson, who comes to kiss your hand. He is here... and so fine that you
would hardly know him. Here he is, monseigneur! Is he not beautiful?"
And the old servant rubbed his hands in conviction of the delight that
he believed he was conveying to his master.
Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, soft-carpeted to
the foot, dazzling to the eye. It was immensely lofty, and its festooned
ceiling was carried on fluted pillars with gilded capitals. The door by
which he entered, and the windows that opened upon the garden, were of an
enormous height - almost, indeed, the full height of the room itself. It was
a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on
the furniture, in which it nowise differed from what was customary in the
dwellings of people of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in
which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold
was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to
supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis' that if these people could
only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into
their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better
case.
The Seigneur - furbished and beruffled to harmonize with his
surroundings - had risen, startled by this exuberant invasion on the part of
Benoit, who had been almost as forlorn as himself since their coming to
Meudon.
"What is it? Eh?" His pale, short-sighted eyes peered at the visitor.
"Andre!" said he, between surprise and sternness; and the colour deepened in
his great pink face.
Benoit, with his back to his master, deliberately winked and grinned at
Andre-Louis to encourage him not to be put off by any apparent hostility on
the part of his godfather. That done, the intelligent old fellow discreetly
effaced himself.
"What do you want here?" growled M. de Kercadiou.
"No more than to kiss your hand, as Benoit has told you, monsieur my
godfather," said Andre-Louis submissively, bowing his sleek black head.
"You have contrived without kissing it for two years."
"Do not, monsieur, reproach me with my misfortune."
The little man stood very stiffly erect, his disproportionately large
head thrown back, his pale prominent eyes very stern.
"Did you think to make your outrageous offence any better by vanishing
in that heartless manner, by leaving us without knowledge of whether you
were alive or dead?"
"At first it was dangerous - dangerous to my life - to disclose my
whereabouts. Then for a time I was in need, almost destitute, and my pride
forbade me, after what I had done and the view you must take of it, to
appeal to you for help. Later... "
"Destitute?" The Seigneur interrupted. For a moment his lip trembled.
Then he steadied himself, and the frown deepened as he surveyed this very
changed and elegant godson of his, noted the quiet richness of his apparel,
the paste buckles and red heels to his shoes, the sword hilted in
mother-o'-pearl and silver, and the carefully dressed hair that he had
always seen hanging in wisps about his face. "At least you do not look
destitute now," he sneered.
"I am not. I have prospered since. In that, monsieur, I differ from the
ordinary prodigal, who returns only when he needs assistance. I return
solely because I love you, monsieur - to tell you so. I have come at the
very first moment after hearing of your presence here." He advanced.
"Monsieur my godfather!" he said, and held out his hand.
But M. de Kercadiou remained unbending, wrapped in his cold dignity and
resentment.
"Whatever tribulations you may have suffered or consider that you may
have suffered, they are far less than your disgraceful conduct deserved, and
I observe that they have nothing abated your impudence. You think that you
have but to come here and say, 'Monsieur my godfather!' and everything is to
be forgiven and forgotten. That is your error. You have committed too great
a wrong; you have offended against everything by which I hold, and against
myself personally, by your betrayal of my trust in you. You are one of those
unspeakable scoundrels who are responsible for this revolution."
"Alas, monsieur, I see that you share the common delusion. These
unspeakable scoundrels but demanded a constitution, as was promised them
from the throne. They were not to know that the promise was insincere, or
that its fulfilment would be baulked by the privileged orders. The men who
have precipitated this revolution, monsieur, are the nobles and the
prelates."
"You dare - and at such a time as this - stand there and tell me such
abominable lies! You dare to say that the nobles have made the revolution,
when scores of them, following the example of M. le Duc d'Aiguillon, have
flung their privileges, even their title-deeds, into the lap of the people!
Or perhaps you deny it?"
"Oh, no. Having wantonly set fire to their house, they now try to put
it out by throwing water on it; and where they fail they put the entire
blame on the flames."
"I see that you have come here to talk politics."
"Far from it. I have come, if possible, to explain myself. To
understand is always to forgive. That is a great saying of Montaigne's. If I
could make you understand... "
"You can't. You'll never make me understand how you came to render
yourself so odiously notorious in Brittany."
"Ah, not odiously, monsieur!"
"Certainly, odiously - among those that matter. It is said even that
you were Omnes Omnibus, though that I cannot, will not believe."
"Yet it is true."
M. de Kercadiou choked. "And you confess it? You dare to confess it?"
"What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess - unless he is a
coward."
"Oh, and to be sure you were very brave, running away each time after
you had done the mischief, turning comedian to hide yourself, doing more
mischief as a comedian, provoking a riot in Nantes, and then running away
again, to become God knows what - something dishonest by the affluent look
of you. My God, man, I tell you that in these past two years I have hoped
that you were dead, and you profoundly disappoint me that you are not!" He
beat his hands together, and raised his shrill voice to call - "Benoit!" He
strode away towards the fireplace, scarlet in the face, shaking with the
passion into which he had worked himself. "Dead, I might have forgiven you,
as one who had paid for his evil, and his folly. Living, I never can forgive
you. You have gone too far. God alone knows where it will end.
"Benoit, the door. M. Andre-Louis Moreau to the door!" The tone argued
an irrevocable determination. Pale and self-contained, but with a queer pain
at his heart, Andre-Louis heard that dismissal, saw Benoit's white, scared
face and shaking hands half-raised as if he were about to expostulate with
his master. And then another voice, a crisp, boyish voice, cut in.
"Uncle!" it cried, a world of indignation and surprise in its pitch,
and then: "Andre!" And this time a note almost of gladness, certainly of
welcome, was blended with the surprise that still remained.
Both turned, half the room between them at the moment, and beheld Aline
in one of the long, open windows, arrested there in the act of entering from
the garden, Aline in a milk-maid bonnet of the latest mode, though without
any of the tricolour embellishments that were so commonly to be seen upon
them.
The thin lips of Andre's long mouth twisted into a queer smile. Into
his mind had flashed the memory of their last parting. He saw himself again,
standing burning with indignation upon the pavement of Nantes, looking after
her carriage as it receded down the Avenue de Gigan.
She was coming towards him now with outstretched hands, a heightened
colour in her cheeks, a smile of welcome on her lips. He bowed low and
kissed her hand in silence.
Then with a glance and a gesture she dismissed Benoit, and in her
imperious fashion constituted herself Andre's advocate against that harsh
dismissal which she had overheard.
"Uncle," she said, leaving Andre and crossing to M. de Kercadiou, "you
make me ashamed of you! To allow a feeling of peevishness to overwhelm all
your affection for Andre!"
"I have no affection for him. I had once. He chose to extinguish it. He
can go to the devil; and please observe that I don't permit you to
interfere."
"But if he confesses that he has done wrong... "
"He confesses nothing of the kind. He comes here to argue with me about
these infernal Rights of Man. He proclaims himself unrepentant. He announces
himself with pride to have been, as all Brittany says, the scoundrel who hid
himself under the sobriquet of Omnes Omnibus. Is that to be condoned?"
She turned to look at Andre across the wide space that now separated
them.
"But is this really so? Don't you repent, Andre - now that you see all
the harm that has come?"
It was a clear invitation to him, a pleading to him to say that he
repented, to make his peace with his godfather. For a moment it almost moved
him. Then, considering the subterfuge unworthy, he answered truthfully,
though the pain he was suffering rang in his voice.
"To confess repentance," he said slowly, "would be to confess to a
monstrous crime. Don't you see that? Oh, monsieur, have patience with me;
let me explain myself a little. You say that I am in part responsible for
something of all this that has happened. My exhortations of the people at
Rennes and twice afterwards at Nantes are said to have had their share in
what followed there. It may be so. It would be beyond my power positively to
deny it. Revolution followed and bloodshed. More may yet come. To repent
implies a recognition that I have done wrong. How shall I say that I have
done wrong, and thus take a share of the responsibility for all that blood
upon my soul? I will be quite frank with you to show you how far, indeed, I
am from repentance. What I did, I actually did against all my convictions at
the time. Because there was no justice in France to move against the
murderer of Philippe de Vilmorin, I moved in the only way that I imagined
could make the evil done recoil upon the hand that did it, and those other
hands that had the power but not the spirit to punish. Since then I have
come to see that I was wrong, and that Philippe de Vilmorin and those who
thought with him were in the right.
"You must realize, monsieur, that it is with sincerest thankfulness
that I find I have done nothing calling for repentance; that, on the
contrary, when France is given the inestimable boon of a constitution, as
will shortly happen, I may take pride in having played my part in bringing
about the conditions that have made this possible."
There was a pause. M. de Kercadiou's face turned from pink to purple.
"You have quite finished?" he said harshly.
"If you have understood me, monsieur."
"Oh, I have understood you, and... and I beg that you will go."
Andre-Louis shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He had come there
so joyously, in such yearning, merely to receive a final dismissal. He
looked at Aline. Her face was pale and troubled; but her wit failed to show
her how she could come to his assistance. His excessive honesty had burnt
all his boats.
"Very well, monsieur. Yet this I would ask you to remember after I am
gone. I have not come to you as one seeking assistance, as one driven to you
by need. I am no returning prodigal, as I have said. I am one who, needing
nothing, asking nothing, master of his own destinies, has come to you driven
by affection only, urged by the love and gratitude he bears you and will
continue to bear you."
"Ah, yes!" cried Aline, turning now to her uncle. Here at least was an
argument in Andre's favour, thought she. "That is true. Surely that..."
Inarticulately he hissed her into silence, exasperated.
"Hereafter perhaps that will help you to think of me more kindly,
monsieur.
"I see no occasion, sir, to think of you at all. Again, I beg that you
will go."
Andre-Louis looked at Aline an instant, as if still hesitating.
She answered him by a glance at her furious uncle, a faint shrug, and a
lift of the eyebrows, dejection the while in her countenance.
It was as if she said: "You see his mood. There is nothing to be done."
He bowed with that singular grace the fencing-room had given him and
went out by the door.
"Oh, it is cruel!" cried Aline, in a stifled voice, her hands clenched,
and she sprang to the window.
"Aline!" her uncle's voice arrested her. "Where are you going?"
"But we do not know where he is to be found."
"Who wants to find the scoundrel?"
"We may never see him again."
"That is most fervently to be desired."
Aline said "Ouf!" and went out by the window.
He called after her, imperiously commanding her return. But Aline
- dutiful child - closed her ears lest she must disobey him, and sped
light-footed across the lawn to the avenue there to intercept the departing
Andre-Louis.
As he came forth wrapped in gloom, she stepped from the bordering trees
into his path.
"Aline!" he cried, joyously almost.
"I did not want you to go like this. I couldn't let you, she explained
herself. "I know him better than you do, and I know that his great soft
heart will presently melt. He will be filled with regret. He will want to
send for you, and he will not know where to send."
"You think that?"
"Oh, I know it! You arrive in a bad moment. He is peevish and
cross-grained, poor man, since he came here. These soft surroundings are all
so strange to him. He wearies himself away from his beloved Gavrillac, his
hunting and tillage, and the truth is that in his mind he very largely
blames you for what has happened
- for the necessity, or at least, the wisdom, of this change. Brittany,
you must know, was becoming too unsafe. The chateau of La Tour d'Azyr,
amongst others, was burnt to the ground some months ago. At any moment,
given a fresh excitement, it may be the turn of Gavrillac. And for this and
his present discomfort he blames you and your friends. But he will come
round presently. He will be sorry that he sent you away like this - for I
know that he loves you, Andre, in spite of all. I shall reason with him when
the time comes. And then we shall want to know where to find you."
"At number 13, Rue du Hasard. The number is unlucky, the name of the
street appropriate. Therefore both are easy to remember."
She nodded. "I will walk with you to the gates." And side by side now
they proceeded at a leisurely pace down the long avenue in the June sunshine
dappled by the shadows of the bordering trees. "You are looking well, Andre;
and do you know that you have changed a deal? I am glad that you have
prospered." And then, abruptly changing the subject before he had time to
answer her, she came to the matter uppermost in her mind.
"I have so wanted to see you in all these months, Andre. You were the
only one who could help me; the only one who could tell me the truth, and I
was angry with you for never having written to say where you were to be
found."
"Of course you encouraged me to do so when last we met in Nantes."
"What? Still resentful?"
"I am never resentful. You should know that." He expressed one of his
vanities. He loved to think himself a Stoic. "But I still bear the scar of a
wound that would be the better for the balm of your retraction."
"Why, then, I retract, Andre. And now tell me."
"Yes, a self-seeking retraction," said he. "You give me something that
you may obtain something." He laughed quite pleasantly. "Well, well; command
me."
"Tell me, Andre." She paused, as if in some difficulty, and then went
on, her eyes upon the ground: "Tell me - the truth of that event at the
Feydau."
The request fetched a frown to his brow. He suspected at once the
thought that prompted it. Quite simply and briefly he gave her his version
of the affair.
She listened very attentively. When he had done she sighed; her face
was very thoughtful.
"That is much what I was told," she said. "But it was added that M. de
La Tour d'Azyr had gone to the theatre expressly for the purpose of breaking
finally with La Binet. Do you know if that was so?"
"I don't; nor of any reason why it should be so. La Binet provided him
the sort of amusement that he and his kind are forever craving... "
"Oh, there was a reason," she interrupted him. "I was the reason. I
spoke to Mme. de Sautron. I told her that I would not continue to receive
one who came to me contaminated in that fashion." She spoke of it with
obvious difficulty, her colour rising as he watched her half-averted face.
"Had you listened to me... " he was beginning, when again she
interrupted him.
"M. de Sautron conveyed my decision to him, and afterwards represented
him to me as a man in despair, repentant, ready to give proofs - any proofs
- of his sincerity and devotion to me. He told me that M. de La Tour d'Azyr
had sworn to him that he would cut short that affair, that he would see La
Binet no more. And then, on the very next day I heard of his having all but
lost his life in that riot at the theatre. He had gone straight from that
interview with M. de Sautron, straight from those protestations of future
wisdom, to La Binet. I was indignant. I pronounced myself finally. I stated