FURTHER OBSTINACY OF A CONSPIRATOR
“Je n’oublierai jamais ce regard qui devait s’éteindre sitôt.”
—CHATEAUBRIAND (of Marie Antoinette).
At a little table in the Café de Foy, once a Revolutionary, now a
Royalist resort, the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay sat the next morning and
waited for his cousin. The busy life of the Palais-Royal went on about
him, but for once he seemed oblivious of it; he even looked a little
grave.
Louis de Chantemerle had worn all his life a very subtle disguise—an
impenetrable armour of gaiety, more baffling than gravity, over an
extreme reserve. To call his customary outer self a disguise at all is
perhaps misleading, for that self went much deeper. He was really what
he appeared to be, careless, pleasure-loving, airily indifferent. But
the reserve was there, and it was the very mocking frankness which he
so successfully opposed to all attempts at its exhumation which proved
his concern that his soul should be decently covered up. Few things
were not to him objects of raillery, and the most worthy objects and
individuals had an unhappy knack of presenting themselves to him in a
ludicrous light. Nature had given him parts with a temperament which
forbade him to make use of them; he had too much wit, in fact, to be
anything but a fine gentleman.
And yet all these sterile qualities were counterbalanced by his charm;
not the charm of manner which, with his personal beauty, his birth and
his gifts, had served him so well in his own path of life, but an
attraction less easy of definition. In a life of light-hearted
self-indulgence, of a fastidious but by no means innocent pursuit of
pleasure, Louis had somehow preserved a singular inward untaintedness.
He had some claims to the name of profligate; no moralist could
easily have been confuted who had called him a rake, a gambler, a
spendthrift, or a duellist. He was headstrong, wayward, and indolent,
extremely obstinate at times, and excessively easy-going at others.
Save for one notable exception, now six months old, he had invariably
done what he pleased. With all this, he had kept the heart of a boy—if
of a naughty boy—and a fascination for which, as M. des Graves had
once said, an evangelist might have prayed in vain.
Louis had enough on his mind at this moment, however, to sober even
his persistent gaiety. In the first place, he was himself, along with
nearly all his friends—and knew it well—in the most imminent personal
danger. The vessel launched by the young ultra-Royalists to be the
ark of the drowning monarchy was vastly more like to prove the coffin
of all the crew. A day’s research had sufficed to establish its
unseaworthiness. In the second place, the inevitable parting with
Lucienne was now upon him. And though he had said good-bye to her on
the day when honour demanded it, yet in his constant visits to the
Tuileries he had sometimes caught sight of her; and though all the
time he was uneasy as to her personal safety in Paris, still the day
when she must leave it was always not yet, so that she still shed a
dim fragrance over his existence, like a flower out of reach. But the
day of transplanting had come at last.
He got up and strolled to the door. Outside, on the verge of the
garden, were the tables from one of which Camille Desmoulins had
hounded on the populace to the destruction of the Bastille nearly
three years ago. To-day a couple of young men of his own stamp were
sitting at the nearest, each with a second chair on whose rungs
he rested his feet. One of them wore a waistcoat powdered with
fleur-de-lys, and a minute tricolour cockade at the back of his hat—a
situation chosen to show his contempt for the emblem. Pitched battles
between the _jeunesse dorée_ and the Jacobin faction had given the
Café de Foy for the time being to the Royalists, and a lively zest was
lent to its occupation by the knowledge that to-morrow it might be
closed, or raided again by the enemy. Jousserand, the proprietor, good
peaceable man, had put up the price of his liquid refreshments, a
change which had made for a more aristocratic clientele; but the cap
of liberty had before now been hung up in the Café de Foy.
The Vicomte de Saint-Ermay, acknowledging the salutation of his
acquaintances, searched among the shifting groups in the garden for
the sight of his cousin. All the other cafés were in full swing, and
it was difficult to distinguish an acquaintance among the throngs that
surged round the Grand Café or the Café de Valois, on the opposite
side, or the Café de Chartres and the Grotte Lyrique at the other end,
under the Galerie de Beaujolais. As he gazed the young man with the
cockade asked him laughing if he were reviving the once familiar jest
of last summer, when a young Royalist would mount daily to the
belvedere of the Café de Foy under pretence of looking whether the
army of the _émigrés_ were not yet advancing from Coblentz. Louis
replied a trifle absently, and at that moment caught sight of his
cousin’s tall figure passing in front of the Jacobin Café Corazza. He
waited until he was sure that Gilbert had seen him, and returned to
the table in the corner which he had quitted.
A moment later the Marquis entered and came straight up to him. The
few habitués who preferred to drink their coffee inside the building
turned round to look at him, but the place was now nearly empty.
“Well?” asked Château-Foix significantly.
The Vicomte shrugged his shoulders. “Sit down, mon cher. I am desirous
of making you a full and leisurely apology. You will take coffee?
François, coffee for two and plenty of cream! Do you know, Gilbert,
that since the patriotic Assembly took to sitting so assiduously, you
can always get cream in the Palais-Royal at any time, since nobody
knows at what hour our dear deputies may come in here and demand
refreshment after so much talking. So there is one good result, at
least, of the present tenancy of the Manège.”
“I suppose,” said Gilbert when the coffee had been brought, “that your
reference to an apology means——”
“That your surmises, my dear cousin, are probably correct. As I cannot
yet be sure, I make the apology conditional—like the baptism of
heretics. In a day or two you may be in possession of the precious
thing without reservation.”
“What have you found out?” asked the Marquis, divided between relief
and apprehension.
“Very little,” returned his cousin, helping himself to cream. “That’s
the damnable part of it. I spent the whole of yesterday seeing people
and talking to them and telling them of the King’s prohibition. The
net result of my enquiries was that I elicited these facts. First,
that D’Aubeville had yesterday morning received an anonymous letter of
warning; secondly, that the Comte de Périgny’s latest deity—one of
the ladies here at the Palais-Royal—had had a fit of hysterics for
which—it’s a long story—he could assign no other cause than anxiety
for his safety based on some information the nymph wouldn’t divulge;
and, thirdly—but this may not be a fact, a rumour of something Madame
Roland said at her salon a night or two ago. You have heard of
Louvet?”
“I have heard of his book.”
“You surprise me. _Faublas_ is not exactly for the virtuous. But
Louvet is now a member of the Legislative, and better known for that
rather amusing pink sheet of his, _La Sentinelle_, which you may have
noticed decorating the walls of this city. Well, Louvet is a devotee
also of Buzot’s Egeria, who is not, I believe, over well disposed
towards Madame d’Espaze. Egeria—as the tale goes—said to him two
nights ago, as he was leaving, ‘Do you never go to the Salon du
Luxembourg?’—meaning, of course, Madame d’Espaze’s house in the Rue de
Tournon—‘I should advise you to make haste to sample it before it
closes.’ Now there is no reason why Célie—why Madame d’Espaze should
close her salon, or why anybody should close it for her, unless the
purpose which it has served should suddenly come to an end. Anyhow,
Madame Roland meant something, and let it slip. The tale may not,
however, be true; naturally, I hadn’t it at first hand. You are not
drinking your coffee, and Jousserand’s feelings will be hurt.”
The Marquis drank. “Is there anything else?” he asked.
“Lots of little things,” replied the Vicomte composedly. “I won’t bore
you with them; I am not sure that I haven’t forgotten some of them
already. Anyhow, there were some pretty long faces yesterday between
these various items of information and this.” He indicated the King’s
ring on his finger, next to the plain silver circlet inside which was
engraved, as Gilbert knew, _Deus salvum fac regem, reginam, et
delphinum!_—words which might any day cost the wearer his life. “And I
owe it to you to a knowledge that I did not, on Saturday night, carry
to our fair hostess’s agreeable salon as unbiassed a mind as would
have been mine before your arrival and denunciation. I observed a few
trifles.”
“But now you have definitely broken off negotiations with the
Gironde!”
Louis made a little grimace. “We can’t exactly do that. The stage of
negotiations is past. If they are acting in bad faith it is all up
with us, and we have nothing further to do but to stop in our
mouse-trap and await the cat or a bucket of water.” He stirred his
coffee with an admirable equanimity which Gilbert hardly felt capable
of imitating.
“Then what will you do?” he asked, frowning. “You must do something.”
“What can we do?” demanded Louis. “My friend the Chevalier d’Aubeville,
who has a head on his shoulders—as yet—thinks we should seem to go on
as we have begun, if it is possible to do so without implicating
ourselves still further, lest we precipitate the crisis by showing
suspicion. One or two believe that matters will not come to a point,
as far as our own personal safety is concerned. They conceive that
the aim of the transaction is to implicate and to discredit . . .
another.” He lifted his hat as he spoke, with a face grown grave.
“That is very possible,” returned Gilbert reflectively. “And that
aim—is it likely to have been attained? Never mind, mon cher,” he went
on kindly, “we won’t discuss it. Let us for the moment consider your
own personal plans.”
“I haven’t any,” said the young conspirator, pushing away his empty
cup. “I shall stop here with the rest, and see what happens. I cannot
run away now.”
“No, of course not,” agreed the Marquis. “Still, I had hoped—before
this happened—that you would be free to do a little office for me.” He
was not very greatly surprised at his kinsman’s resolution to go
through with the affair in which he had become entangled, nor in his
heart did he blame it, yet he hoped that, if he played his cards
carefully, he might still prevail on him to get out of harm’s way
before it was too late.
Louis looked enquiringly at him.
“This is what I wanted you to do for me,” resumed Château-Foix,
putting his elbows on the table and lowering his voice. “It is
absolutely imperative that I return home with as little delay as
possible.”
“You surely don’t need _my_ assistance with your devoted tenantry?”
“No. I want you to take my place elsewhere. I want you to escort
Lucienne over to England for me.”
To the Marquis’ amazement the smile of a moment before was wiped as
completely off Saint-Ermay’s face as if he had struck him. A quite
indefinable but perfectly visible change crossed it, as, drawing a
little back, Louis said in a glacial tone: “I couldn’t possibly do
that.”
Gilbert’s surprise began to approach the border-line of offence.
“It is not such an extraordinary proposition, surely?” he retorted.
“You are to all intents and purposes my younger brother, and Lucienne
goes under the wing of Madame Gaumont. An escort, however, is
desirable; naturally, I meant to go myself, but it is out of the
question. I must return to Chantemerle the moment she is out of
Paris.”
“Isn’t it more out of the question,” asked the Vicomte, “to send her
out of Paris in the dangerous company of a suspect like myself? Do you
think that my escort (as things are tending) would do anything else
but compromise her?”
There was so much sound sense in this objection that Château-Foix at
once ruefully acknowledged the downfall of his diplomatic little house
of cards. Behind a slight annoyance at his own short-sightedness
lurked also a vague wonder at Louis’ evident distaste for the mission.
“I suppose that you are right,” he conceded regretfully. “It was
foolish of me not to have thought of that—but the plan had occurred to
me before I knew that you were so compromised. Well, she must go
alone.”
“Madame Gaumont is worth an army of _ci-devants_ such as myself,” said
Louis in a more natural manner. “The name of the late Gaumont is a
passport with the patriotic. On my honour, I think Lucienne is safer
without—without any other escort.” He got up, and went on with less of
his usual levity: “I can’t leave the King, Gilbert. You will say, and
justly, that my presence is not much guarantee for his safety, but I
could leave him less easily now after compromising him—as you told me
the other night I was doing.”
“My dear Louis——”
“No, you were quite right. But I _am_ a _chevalier du poignard_, as
they call us. I am sworn not to desert . . . I have, to tell you the
truth, his Majesty’s orders to remain. And there’s an end of it,”
concluded the Vicomte, suddenly smiling.
Gilbert had never liked him quite so well as during the progress of
this little harangue. For one thing, it was so rare to see him in
earnest.
“I will say no more about it,” he replied. “We must wait and see what
happens, as you say. And now, to recur to Lucienne, let us go and see
if she has left the Tuileries yet. She was to go to Madame Gaumont’s
house in the Rue Vieille-de-Temple at noon; if we get to the palace in
time, we might accompany her.” He pulled out his watch and looked at
it. “We have just time.”
“But you won’t want me,” said Louis.
“Nonsense,” retorted the Marquis, throwing him a kindly glance.
“Lucienne will be delighted to see you; she is rather anxious about
you, I fancy. Come, or we shall miss her.”
But the Vicomte still seemed in two minds about accepting this
invitation. “Well, don’t at any rate tell her that I refused . . .
that I could not take her. Oh, I suppose you have already told her,
perhaps, that you were going to ask me? Have you?”
The Marquis, who had turned to go, turned round again surprised for
the second time at something in his cousin’s tone, and especially at
the emphasis laid upon the last two words.
“Yes, I did tell her,” he replied, staring. “But what of that? The
matter is easily explained. My idea was a foolish one. Why, any one
would think, my dear Louis, that you were afraid of Mademoiselle
Lucienne d’Aucourt!”
“Oh, sooner than be suspected of that!” retorted Louis gaily, and,
tossing an assignat on to the little table, he followed Gilbert out
into the garden.
And to Château-Foix, immediately after he had spoken, came the
remembrance that Lucienne too had not seemed to wish for Louis’
company. She too had said that he could not leave the King.
As soon as they turned out of the Palais-Royal into the Rue de
Richelieu they could see that the Rue Saint-Honoré was blocked by a
crowd. Against the wall a figure with gesticulating arms could be seen
above the mass of upturned faces.
“More speechifying,” said Louis disgustedly. “Hang it! we shall
have to go back and get out the other side. . . . No, here are some
National Guards turning out of the Rue du Rempart.”
They went up to the outskirts of the crowd. The orator could be heard
only intermittently; as far as could be gathered he was emitting a
spouting stream of abuse directed, like a firehose, against the
Tuileries, towards whose roofs, distinguishable across the Rue
Saint-Honoré, he shook his fist. Such phrases as “Austrian Committee,”
“_chevaliers du poignard_,” were indistinctly audible. Louis looked at
the Marquis and silently shrugged his shoulders, but as the half-dozen
National Guards began to cleave a way through the mob after their
usual fashion, their muskets held horizontally at arms’ length above
their heads, he beckoned to him and slipped into their wake. In
the passage thus formed they ploughed a difficult way through the
indignant crowd, a dirty member of which, suddenly shaking his fist
under Gilbert’s nose with some passion, called him a swine of an
aristocrat. The incident plainly afforded Louis a certain amount of
pleasure, for, as he explained to his kinsman on their way down the
Rue Nicaise, the Marquis would not be appreciated by the lower orders
of Paris as greatly as he was at home.
They entered the palace by the great staircase in the Pavillon de
l’Horloge, and had therefore to traverse the deserted state apartments
before they could reach Madame Elisabeth’s quarters. The Salle des
Suisses was empty, but in the Salle de l’Œil de Bœuf, in the embrasure
of a window, two young men were talking. One of them saluted Louis
with a smile as he passed, and the action drew the Marquis’s attention
to him—a youth of twenty or so, tall, slight, and fair, with straight
and regular features.
“Who was that?” he asked as soon as they were out of earshot. “He
looked more like an Englishman than a Frenchman.”
“It was the Comte Henri de la Rochejaquelein,” replied Louis. “We were
in the King’s Constitutional Guard together. The other was his cousin,
the Marquis de Lescure. I should have thought you would have known
him, for he is almost a neighbour of yours—at least he lives somewhere
near Bressuire. La Rochejaquelein is not much further off for the
matter of that—but he is an Angevin.”
“I think I have heard the name,” said Gilbert.
“M. de Lescure is like myself,” continued Louis, “under orders from
his Majesty not to emigrate. As a matter of fact, he did once get as
far as Tournay, but came back.”
“Are they, too, involved in your plot?”
Louis shook his head. “Lescure is too much of a saint to go to Madame
d’Espaze’s salon, and has recently married a young wife into the
bargain. And as for Henri, I tried to get him to join, but he would
not.”
The block in the Rue de Richelieu had apparently proved fatal to
the Marquis’s plan of escorting Lucienne to her new quarters. Just
outside the Galerie de Diane the cousins met a waiting-woman of the
Princess’s, who told Louis in response to his query that Mademoiselle
d’Aucourt had left a few minutes ago. Madame Gaumont herself had come
to fetch her charge.
The two men turned back into the Galerie de Diane.
“I am sorry,” said Gilbert. “Never mind; we will go and pay our
respects to Madame Gaumont to-morrow. Let me see: to-day is Monday,
the 2nd; they start on Thursday.”
“Yes,” assented the Vicomte in a colourless tone. They were both
walking slowly with their eyes on the floor.
“She ought to have gone long ago.”
“It would have been better.”
“However, it is no use regretting that. The past few months have
altered her, Louis,” said the Marquis, in a burst of confidence very
rare with him.
Saint-Ermay lifted his head and looked at his cousin, whose eyes were
still downcast, with a gaze a little startled, and his lips tightened.
All at once his eyes wavered, a swift change passed over his face, and
he caught at Gilbert's arm.
“Hush,” he said in a low voice, “the Queen!”
She came down the long gallery, alone. One of the two men who watched
her had last seen her, beautiful and shining, “enchantée de la vie,”
the brilliant centre of a brilliant court. He was not then, nor ever
had been, her admirer; rather was he her critic. But now, as she moved
slowly down the empty gallery, the sweep of her dress more audible
than the faint tap of her high heels on the polished floor, a thrill
that was pain ran through him. Her eyes looked as if they saw nothing
around her, out of a face changed and aged beyond all speech—sad,
patient, aloof, serene, still proud, so proud indeed that it was clear
nothing said or done now, whether by foe or friend, could touch the
shrine of suffering of which it was the curtain. The once bright hair
above it was grey, but more than ever it was the face of a Queen.
Nearer she came and nearer, and seemed not to notice the two men by
the wall, taking them perhaps for a couple of curious sightseers, or
for some of the guards whose presence she was obliged to tolerate even
in her bedchamber. She might have passed them, if Louis de Saint-Ermay
had not dropped on one knee, not with intent to stay her, but with
bent head, as one kneels at the passage of the Host.
The Queen stopped, with a faint and pathetic look of surprise, that
showed how rare and perilous were such marks of respect, and Gilbert,
his brain in a confusion of pain and pity, heard her say in a voice
of ineffable sadness: “What! M. de Saint-Ermay! and are you not gone
yet?”
“Never, Madame, while I am free to stay,” answered Louis very low.
The Queen smiled sadly, and then, shaking her head with something of
the air of one who indulges a wilful child, she held out her hand, and
he kissed it like a relic.
A moment later Gilbert too was bowing low over the same little hand,
but of what the Queen said to him, or of what he replied, he heard
nothing. Another moment again, and the Galerie de Diane was empty.
Himself moved beyond what he could ever have imagined possible, he
turned to his cousin. Louis was very pale, and his eyes were sparkling
with a rage and devotion alike impotent.
“God damn them all to hell!” he said passionately. “Let us go—I can't
bear this place!”
As he followed his cousin down the great staircase, and out into the
Cour Royale, Gilbert had the thought, with which he certainly had not
entered the Tuileries that morning, that, had he been in Louis’ place,
perhaps he too would have refused to leave the sight of that tragic
face, the sound of that proud, sad voice.