Dunoisse had anticipated as the result of that fatal volley a
Court-Martial inquiry under auspices Monarchical or Republican--and in
the absence of indisputable evidence that the word of command to fire
had not been given by the officer accused, a sentence of dismissal of
that unlucky functionary from the Army.
The sword did not fall. The Assistant-Adjutant remained suspended
from his duties, and in confinement at his quarters in the Rue de la
Chaussée d’Antin, exactly five days; during which Paris seethed like a
boiling pot, and the events this halting pen has striven to set forth,
sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown in the fruitful soil of France by
incapable, unjust, or treacherous hands. Various documents, clumsily
printed in smeary ink upon paper of official buff, reached Dunoisse
during this period of detention; and whereas Number One was headed
by the arms of the Reigning House of Bourbon, Number Two displayed a
significant blotch of sable printing-ink in lieu of that ornate device;
with “REPUBLIC OF FRANCE” stamped in bold Roman capitals across the
upper margin.
Monsieur the Marshal, despite his increasing infirmities, enlivened
his son’s captivity with occasional visits. The smell of blood and
gunpowder, the thunder of cannon and the summons of the trumpet, had
made the old war-horse prick up his ears, neigh and prance about in his
cosy paddock. He pooh-poohed the notion of a Court-Martial. Absorbing
immense pinches of snuff, he argued--and not without point--that a
Republican Government could hardly visit with the scourges of condign
displeasure an act that had materially hastened the downfall of the
Monarchy.
“You will see!... It is as I say!... This arrest is a mere piece of
official humbug. No doubt it was better for your own sake that you
should not be seen in the streets for a day or so, one can conceive
that!--these ultra-Reds have good memories and long knives, sacred name
of a pig!”
The old man trumpeted in his yellow silk handkerchief, hobbling about
the room in tremendous excitement, swinging the ample skirts and heavy
tassels of his Indian silk dressing-gown, twirling his gold-headed
Malacca cane to the detriment of the inlaid furniture and the cabinets
loaded with the chinaware and porcelain that had belonged to the lost
Marie-Bathilde....
“You gave the word to fire--why trouble to deny it? Upon my part,
I defend the act!--I applaud it!--I admire! It was the idea of an
Imperialist,--a move of strategical genius--fraught at a moment like
this with profound political significance. _Sapristi!_--we shall have
an Emperor crowned and reigning at the Tuileries, and you, with the
Cross and a Staff appointment--you will learn what it means to have
served a Bonaparte. Ha! hah, ha!”
“Sir,” said his son, who had been looking out of the window during
this tirade, and who now turned a sharp set face upon the father’s
gross, inflamed, triumphant visage: “you mistake.... I am not capable
of committing murder for the furtherance of political ends or private
ambitions. For this act that commands your admiration I am not
responsible. I declare my innocence before Heaven! and shall to my
latest breath, before the tribunals of men.”
“Ta, ta, ta! Blague! rhodomontade!--pure bosh and nonsense!” The
Marshal took an immense double pinch of snuff. “Be as innocent as you
please before Heaven, but if you value the esteem of men who _are_
men--’_credieu!_--and not priests and milksops, you will do well to
appear what you call guilty. At this moment such a chance is yours as
falls to not one man in a hundred thousand--as fell to me but once in
my life. Make the most of it! You will if you are not absolutely a
fool!”
And Monsieur the Marshal hobbled to the door, but came back to say:
“You appear not to have heard that His Hereditary Highness of Widinitz
is dead. There can be no obligation upon you to refrain from appearing
at ordinary social functions, but I presume you will accord to your
grandfather’s memory the customary tokens of respect? A band of
crape upon the sleeve--a knot of crape upon the sword-hilt will not
compromise your dignity, or endanger your independence, I presume?”
“I presume not, sir!” said Hector with an unmoved face.
And the Marshal departed, spilling enough snuff upon the carpet
to have made an old woman happy for a day.... Later, an orderly
from Headquarters in the Rue de l’Assyrie, brought from the younger
Dunoisse’s Chief--a purple-haired, fiery-faced personage, with whom
the reader has already rubbed shoulders,--the intimation that, pending
official inquiry into a certain regrettable event, not more broadly
particularized in words, the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th of the
Line would be expected to return to his duties forthwith.
And within an hour of the receipt of this notification Dunoisse was
the recipient of a little, lilac-tinted note, regretting in graceful
terms that the writer had most unhappily been absent from home when M.
Dunoisse had called; inviting him to a reception, to be held upon the
following evening at the Rue de Sèvres, Number Sixteen....
That delicately-hued, subtly-perfumed little billet, penned in thick,
brilliant violet ink in a small, clear, elegantly-characteristic
handwriting, signed “Henriette de Roux.”
Ah! surely there was something about it that made Hector, in the
very act of tossing it into the fire, pause and inhale its perfume
yet again, and slip it between the pages of a blue-covered Manual of
Cavalry Tactics that lay in a litter of gloves, studs, collars, and
razors, small change and handkerchiefs, cigars and toothpicks upon
the Empire dressing-table whose mirror had framed the wild, dark,
brilliant beauty of the Princess Marie-Bathilde.... The features it
gave back now, clear, salient, striking, vigorous in outline as those
representing the young Bacchus upon a coin of old Etruria, were very
like the mother’s. And their beauty, evoking the careless, admiring
comment of a coquette, had stained the pavement before the Hotel of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs with blood that was to darken it for many a
day to come.
* * * * *
The invitation, coming from such a source, could not be declined--must
be regarded as an order. Dunoisse wrote a line of acceptance,
dispatched it by his soldier-valet,--and went out.
A pretentious mourning-hatchment, displaying the splashy arms of
Marshal Dunoisse, cheek-by-jowl with the princely blazon of Von
Widinitz, upon a black-and-white lozenge over the hall-door, arrested
his eye as he descended the paternal doorsteps; a replica of this
egregious advertisement gave him a cold shudder as he passed through
the gates of the courtyard on foot, for Djelma, though nearly recovered
of her hurts, was still in the hands of the veterinary, and the poor
young officer, son of the wealthy owner of well-filled stables, must
walk, or ride his servant’s horse.
The streets of Paris still ran thick with the human flood that ebbed
and flowed, surged and swirled, roaring as it went with a voice like
the voice of the sea.... Strange shapes, dislodged by Red Revolution
from the bottom-sludge, floated on the surface of the muddy torrent;
their terrible faces bit themselves into the memory as they drifted by,
as aquafortis bites into the copper-plate. Bands of military students
and Guardes Mobiles patroled the upheaved streets--National Guards
fraternized with the people--the little white tents still studded the
camping-grounds of the troops on the great public squares; the limes
and acacias of the boulevards, ruthlessly cut down to stumps; barked by
the hungry troop-horses tethered to them, showed naked in the wintry
sunshine; while squadrons of mounted chasseurs and detachments of
Municipal Guards patroled the thoroughfares, and Commissaries of Police
bore down on stationary groups and coagulated masses of the vast crowd:
“Circulate! In the Name of the Republic!”--with little more success
than when they had adjured it in the name of fallen Majesty and
impotent Law, to roll upon its way.
* * * * *
Dunoisse went to the Barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie, and later to the
Club of the Line, prepared for a chilly, even hostile reception. He met
with elaborate cordiality from his equals, condescension as elaborate
on the part of his superiors.
The Dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies, the abolition of the
Chamber of Peers, was in every mouth; the political convictions and
personal qualifications of the members constituting the New Provisional
Administration were discussed with heat and eagerness: the sporting
odds given and taken upon and against the chances of the exiled
Claimant to the Imperial Throne being permitted to return to France
and canvass for election. Some said: “It will never be permitted,” and
others: “He has already been communicated with,” and others even more
positive announced: “He is now upon his way!”...
But not a single reference was made to the affair of the fusillade at
the Foreign Ministry, though a chance hint, dropped amidst the Babel,
gave Dunoisse to understand that the Conservative Republican and
Democratic newspapers had not been so merciful.
Lives there the man who could have refrained, under the circumstances,
from hunting through the files of the past week? It was a leading
article in the _Avénement_ that first caught the young man’s eye, and
what a whip of scorpions the anonymous writer wielded! What terrible
parallels were drawn, what crushing epithets hurled at the unlucky
head of the victim. More than ever, as the fiery sentences burned
their way from his eyes to his brain, Hector Dunoisse knew himself
the well-scourged whipping-top of Destiny, the shuttlecock of adverse
chances, the pincushion of Fate.... And as though in mockery, yet
another burden of shame must be piled upon the overladen shoulders: a
brief, contemptuous paragraph in the _Ordre_ caught the young man’s
eye, referring in jesting terms to that pretentious mourning-hatchment
mounted over the door of the paternal mansion ... touching lightly
on the vexed question of Succession, hinting that the Catholics of
the Bavarian Principality of Widinitz were being stirred up by the
agents of “a certain wealthy, unscrupulous impostor and intriguer” to
rebel against the nomination, by the Council of the Germanic Federal
Convention, of the Lutheran Archduke Luitpold of Widinitz, nephew
of the departed Prince, as Regent.... And heavy clouds of anger and
resentment gathered upon Dunoisse’s forehead as he read.
They darkened upon him still when the night closed in, and he went
home to his lonely rooms. Nor were they lightened by the hour that
saw him, in the uniform of ceremony, and with that mourning-band
upon the sleeve of the dark blue full-dress uniform frock, that the
Princess Marie-Bathilde’s son could not deny to the memory of her
father, pitching and tossing in a hired cabriolet over the upheaved
pavements of the Paris streets. On his way to the Rue de Sèvres,
where in a stately suite of apartments sufficiently near the Rue de
l’Assyrie--once forming part of the ancient Cistercian convent of the
Abbaye-aux-Bois, the de Roux were established with some degree of
splendor; visited by certain of the lesser luminaries of the great
world, and receiving the cream of military society.
You saw Dunoisse dismiss his deplorable conveyance at the tall grilled
gates of the Abbaye. In the exterior building, upon the left-hand side
of the courtyard as one entered, were situated, upon the ground-floor,
the apartments of the de Roux.... In a suite of poorly-furnished,
stately, paneled chambers upon the floor above, Madame Récamier was
slowly dying, haloed still by the unblemished virtue that had won the
respect of the Emperor Napoleon--beautiful yet even in blindness and
decay--clinging to life by the last strand of a friendship too pure and
tender to bear the name of love.
The green Venetian shutters of that row of first-floor windows were
closed, all save one; the fold of a green silk curtain stirred in
the chill February breeze, a solitary lamp upon a table made a
cocoon-shaped patch of light against the somber darkness within. A worn
exquisite profile, pearly-pale as the new moon’s, with a black fillet
bound over the eyes, showed against the background of shadow--a man’s
hand, ivory-white, and so emaciated that the heavy seal-rings on the
third finger hung there like hoops upon a grace-stick, drew the curtain
and closed the shutters, as the firm elastic step of Youth and Hope
sounded on the flagstones, crossed the threshold below....
Who would spy upon one of these last evenings with Chateaubriand? In
July she was to follow him to the tomb.