The egg of the _coup d’État_ was hatched as the train that carried
Monseigneur’s secret messenger rushed over the iron rails that sped it
to the sea.
We know his programme, masterly in detail, devilish in its crushing,
paralyzing, merciless completeness. The posting of notices at
every street corner, in every public square, on every tree of the
boulevards, proclaiming that crowds would thenceforth be dispersed by
military force, _Without Warning_; the distribution of troops; the
disposition of batteries; the arrests of the Representatives, the
publication of the Decree dissolving the Assembly; the seizure of the
Ministry of the Interior; the closure of the High Courts of Justice--a
symbolical gagging and blinding of the Law. And Paris, rising early on
that red December morning, turned out under the chilly skies to read
her death-sentence, ignorant of its true nature; and to wonder at the
military spectacle provided for her eyes.
For the five brigades of Carrelet’s Division, cavalry and infantry,
extended in _échelon_ from the Rue de la Paix to the Faubourg
Poissonière. Each brigade with its artillery, numbering seventeen
thousand Pretorians, give additional regiments, with a reserve of sixty
thousand men, being held in readiness to use cannon, saber, pistol,
and bayonet upon the bodies of their fellow-countrymen and women, that
France might be saved, according to Monseigneur.
The First Regiment of Lancers, to their eternal dishonor, opened the
ball. Amidst cries of “Long live the Republic!” “Down with Louis
Bonaparte, traitor to the people!” they charged the crowd. Men, women,
and children were ruthlessly cut down: and then, from the Gymnase
Theater to the Bains Chinois, took place the Great Battue.
Killing is thirsty work. Wine flowed down the soldiers’ throats in
rivers, as the blood of their victims rolled down the Paris gutters.
And as the slayers flagged they were stimulated to fresh exertions.
Food, drink, and cigars were lavished upon them. Rolls of gold were
broken and shared among them like sticks of chocolate. Women were
promised them by-and-by. Long after the soldiers were too drunk to
stand upright they went on killing--an instance of devotion which
brought tears of sensibility to the eyes of Monseigneur.
* * * * *
It was late, and raining heavily, when the Folkestone train clanked
into Waterloo Station. The yellow gaslights were reflected in the
numerous puddles on the slippery wooden platform; in the shiny peaks
of porters’ caps, and in the dripping oilskins of cabmen. A red-nosed
Jehu, suffering from almost total extinction of the voice, undertook
to convey Dunoisse to Belgrave Square, the haggard beast attached to
the leaky vehicle accomplishing the journey in a series of stumbles,
slides, and collapses.
“Vy does the ’orse fall down?” indignantly repeated the husky driver,
to whom Dunoisse, on alighting for the second time to assist the
prostrate steed to rise, had addressed this question. “Vy, becos’ he
can’t stand hup, nor no more could you, my topping codger, after twenty
hours on the job.”
He drove his fare to the address given without further casualty,
pocketed Dunoisse’s liberal fare without any perceptible emotion, and,
warning an advancing hall-porter to be careful, for he had brought him
“something wallyble,” jerked and prodded his drooping beast into some
faint show of vitality, and rattled and jingled away.
The windows of the Embassy blazed with lights, music thrilled and
throbbed upon the ear, a double line of waiting carriages extended
along the railings of the Square garden,--late arrivals were even
now being set down in the shelter of the awning that protected the
crimson-carpeted doorsteps from the sooty downpour; police were on duty
in unusual force, and the six tall cuirassiers of the Embassy were
dwarfed into insignificance by a British guard of honor, betokening
the presence of Royalty; stately, splendid Household Cavalrymen, whose
gold-laced scarlet blue velvet facings, gleaming steel cuirasses, and
silver, white-plumed helmets lined the flower-decked vestibule, and
struck savage splendid chords of color amidst the decorations of the
marble staircase, where Gloire de Dijon roses and yellow chrysanthemums
were massed and mingled with the trailing foliage of smilax, and the
tall green plumes of ferns.
The Tricolor was barely in evidence. The Imperial colors of green
and gold, displayed in the floral decorations, predominated in the
draperies that hung below the carved and gilded cornices, and beneath
the pillared archways that led to the dining and reception rooms.
The full-length portrait of the Prince-President that hung over the
sculptured marble fireplace had a canopy of emerald velvet spangled
with fleurons, and upheld by eagles perched on laurel-wreathed spears.
And above the head of the portrait, slender gilded tubes formed the
letter N, and above the initial, concealed by a garland of trailing
rose-boughs, lurked another more significant device....
Thus much evidence of preparation at the Embassy for some event of
profound importance was evident to the bearer of the letter from the
Élysée, before the steward of the chambers, a stately gold-chained
personage in discreet black, accosted the stranger, and at the sight
of a signet bearing a familiar coat-of-arms, conducted him in haste
to an apartment on the rear of the ground-floor, reserved for similar
arrivals; set sandwiches, cold game, and champagne-cup before him;
indicated a dressing-room adjoining where the stains of travel might be
removed; and disappeared, to return before the rage of hunger had been
half-appeased, ushering in a handsome personage in a brilliant Hussar
uniform, who greeted Dunoisse as an acquaintance, and shook him warmly
by the hand.
“There has been a great dinner this evening,” explained this personage,
who held the post of First Military Attaché to France’s Embassy. “The
entire _Corps Diplomatique_ accredited to the Court of St. James’s,
to meet the Duke of Bambridge and Lord Walmerston. His Royal Highness
will be leaving directly; those Life Guards in the square and in the
vestibule are his escort of honor. Magnificent men, are they not? But
less active dismounted than our own Heavy Cavalry. Are you sufficiently
refreshed? You will take nothing more? You are positive? Then be good
enough to come with me.”
And they returned to the hall, to commence the ascent of the
great staircase, as a steady, continuous stream of well-bred,
well-dressed people began to flow downwards in the direction of the
refreshment-buffets. The slender, supple figure of the stranger,
attired in plain, close-fitting mufti black, relieved only by the red
rosette at the left lapel, closely following its brilliant guide,
attracted many curious glances as it passed.
“The women wear magnificent jewels, and are handsome, are they not?”
commented the Hussar. “These English skins of cream and roses, these
thick, straight profiles, these rounded contours, these fine eyes,
lacking expression and fire, but still magnificent, these superb
_chevelures_ would atone to most men for their lack of grace and
_verve_. But to me, my dear fellow--word of honor! the little finger
of a _chic_ Parisienne is worth the whole of Belgravia. Pray, how is
Madame de Roux? Heavens! how her presence would eclipse a roomful of
British beauties! They tell me”--possibly the speaker was not guileless
of a dash of malice--“de Roux is exerting himself to get transferred to
a Home command. For me, I find that natural. Don’t you?”
And the attaché, whose loquacious vivacity could not hide the
excitement and suspense under which he was laboring, and which were
palpably shared by every official encountered on the way upstairs,
paused at a curtained archway at the end of a short corridor on the
second floor, and said, lifting the velvet drapery that Dunoisse might
pass within:
“This is His Excellency’s library. Wait a moment, and I am instructed
to say that he will join you here. Excuse me that I am compelled to
leave you now!”
The curtain fell heavily, blotting out the handsome martial figure.
Dunoisse moved forwards, and found himself in the middle of an
octagonally-shaped library, furnished in the somber, sumptuous
style of the Empire. Bronze bookcases, surmounted by crowned eagles
holding wreaths of bay and laurel in their beaks, lined the walls,
bronze-colored velvet curtains draped the windows, the walnut furniture
was upholstered in bronze leather; the needed note of color being
supplied by the superb Persian rugs that covered the polished walnut
parquet, the single gorgeous amaryllis that bloomed in a tub of
Nankin ware upon an inlaid ivory stool, and the brilliant trophies
of Eastern arms that gleamed from the upper walls and covered the
ceiling. A glowing fire of billets burned on the bronze dogs of the
fireplace. Above the carved walnut mantelshelf, where groups of wax
tapers burned in silver candelabra, hung a fine replica from the brush
of David, of the painter’s imposing, heroic, impossible portrait of
Napoleon crossing the Alps. And Dunoisse, sinking down with a sigh of
relief amongst the cushions of a capacious armchair and stretching
his chilled feet towards the cheerful hearth-glow, remembered with a
faint amusement how violent an outburst of indignation this picture
invariably provoked from the Marshal; who with many oaths would
denounce the long dead-and-buried painter as an ass and a jackanapes,
incapable of imagining the conqueror of the Simplon as anything but a
barley-sugar soldier, or of representing upon canvas the true spirit
of War.
“He rode a mule, did my General, and left his charger to his bâtmen.
The flaps of his cocked hat were turned to keep the snow out of his
neck and ears; he tied them down with a peasant-wench’s red woolen
shawl, and wrapped himself in an old gray cloak lined with skins
of lambs. Death of my life! the road to glory is not paved with
sugar-plums and rose-leaves.... A fellow who looked one way and spurred
his beast another as the fool is doing in that accursed picture would
have found himself at the bottom of an ice-gulf before he could say
‘_Crac!_’”
There was something in the Marshal’s roughly blocked-out word-sketch
that warmed the heart and stirred the blood as the classical equestrian
figure of the David portrait failed to do. Dunoisse, even in his
childish days, had recognized this. He was looking at the picture
between half-closed eyelids; and the spirited charger had begun to
shrink into a mule, and the red woolen shawl of homely truth had
covered up the laced cocked hat of ornamental fiction, when the
imperative summons of a door-bell pealed through the house, and was
succeeded by a sudden lull in the Babel of general conversation.
L
Dunoisse, roused by the unmistakable double ring of a telegraphic
messenger, started to his feet. The undelivered letter in his breast
seemed to burn there like red-hot iron. His keen ears pricked
themselves for what he knew must come, if this were as he suspected, a
cable from Paris.
He stepped towards the door, put aside the velvet draperies of the
_portière_, and turned the handle. He emerged upon the landing, where a
few persons were gathered, conferring eagerly in undertones. He moved
to the balustrade of the great well-staircase, and looked down into
the flower-decked, brilliantly illuminated hall, to find it packed
with a solid mass of heads of both sexes, all ages, and every shade
of color. Bald craniums of venerable diplomats nodded beside the more
amply thatched heads of middle-age politicians or the hyacinthine
curls of juvenile Guardsmen; tiaras of diamonds crowning snow-white
or chestnut, sable or golden locks, blazed and coruscated, wreaths of
flowers twined in Beauty’s tresses made a garden for the eye. And all
these heads, it seemed to Dunoisse, were turned towards the full-length
portrait of Monseigneur, attired in the uniform of a General of the
French Army, smiling with his imperturbable amiability above the marble
fireplace.
For what were they all waiting? Leaning over the balustrade above,
Dunoisse could see that a small round ventilator in the wall
immediately above the picture, and hidden from the persons assembled
in the hall below by the bespangled canopy, was open. Through the
aperture came a hand holding a lighted taper; and in another moment,
with a faint hissing sound, the initial N and an Imperial crown above
it leaped into lines of vivid wavering flame.
Babel broke loose then. Questions, ejaculations, comments,
explanations, congratulations, in half-a-dozen European languages,
crossed and recrossed in the air like bursting squibs. And seeing
officials and attachés of the Embassy beset by eager questions; and
conscious that curious glances from below were raking his own dark,
unfamiliar features, Dunoisse, as a wave of excited humanity began to
roll up the grand staircase, retreated to the library, knowing that the
_coup d’État_ was an accomplished fact.
He had left the library empty, but he found it occupied. A lady and a
gentleman had entered by a door at the more distant end. The lady’s
back was towards Dunoisse. Her male companion, a tall and handsome
man of barely middle age, wearing the gold-embroidered uniform of the
diplomatic corps with grace and distinction, said to her, in the act of
quitting the room:
“Wait here. I will go and order the carriage, but the crush is so great
that some delay is unavoidable. Mary shall come and keep you company.
By that small private staircase communicating with the dining-room
she can join you quite quietly and unobserved. No one will be likely
to disturb you. M. Walewski will not be able to escape from the
congratulations of his circle for a considerable interval, and Madame
Walewski is engaged with the Duke.”
The speaker withdrew by the more distant door, softly closing it
behind him. And Dunoisse stood still in the shadow of a massive
writing-table, flung by the light of fire and candle upon the heavy
velvet curtain behind him, uncertain whether to remain or to retreat.
One moment more; and then, as the tall, slender, white-robed figure of
the lady turned and moved towards him across the richly hued Oriental
carpets, a memory, faint as a whiff of sweetness from some jar of
ancient pot-pourri, wakened in him, quickening as she drew nearer
into fragrance fresh and as living as that exhaled by the bouquet of
pure white roses clustering in their glossy dark green leaves, that
she carried in her slight gloved hand; and by their fellow-blossoms,
drooping in the graceful fashion of the day, amidst the heavy shining
coils of her rippling gold-brown hair.
* * * * *
For it was Ada Merling.
* * * * *
He drew noiselessly back into the shadow, looking at her intently. A
dress of costly fabric, frost-flowers of Alençon lace wrought upon
cloudy tulle, billowed and floated about her slender, rounded form.
Glimpses of shimmering sea-blue showed through the exquisite folds.
The moony glimmer of great pearls, and the cold white fire of diamonds
crowned her rich hair and clasped her fair throat, circled her slight
wrists, and heaved on her white bosom. Jewels and laces could not add
to her beauty in the eyes of those who loved her. To Dunoisse the
revelation of the loveliness that had been gowned in Quaker gray,
crowned with the frilled cap of the nurse, and uniformed with the
bibbed apron, came with a shock that took his breath away.
She had not seen him, standing by the curtain. She evidently believed
herself alone when she dropped her fan and bouquet on a divan, as
though their inconsiderable burden had oppressed her, and moved towards
the fireplace. She looked steadfastly at the replica of the David
portrait of the Great Napoleon that hung above. Her name was upon
Dunoisse’s lips, when the sound of the unforgotten voice of melody
arrested it. She spoke; and her words were addressed, not to the living
man who heard, but to the deaf, unheeding dead.
“Oh, you with the inscrutable pale face and the cold, hard, pitiless
eyes! who point forwards ceaselessly,” she said, “scourging your dying
soldiers along the road of Death with the whip of your remorseless,
merciless will, do you know what _he_ has done, and is doing?--the
man who bears your name, and would, if he could, revive the withered
glories of your Empire by dipping them in a bath of human blood.... Do
you hear the shrieks, and groans, and prayers for mercy? Do you see
the red tide running in the streets of Paris? Do you see the people
butchered at the police-bureau and guard-houses? And seeing, do you own
the slayer as a son of your House?... I cannot believe that you and
he have anything in common.... You were a magnificent despot, a royal
tiger, but this man is----”
“Mademoiselle!” broke from Dunoisse, as with a most
painfully-embarrassing consciousness upon him that his unsuspected
presence should in decency have been made known to her ere now, he
moved from the shadow of the doorway.
“Who is it?”
She turned her face to him, and it was pale and agitated, and there
were tragic violet circles round the great brilliant blue-gray eyes.
They recognized Dunoisse, and she held out her hand in the frank way
that he remembered, and he took it in his own.
“Monsieur Dunoisse!... Colonel Dunoisse I should say now, should I not?”
“I thank you,” he said, “for not completely forgetting me; otherwise, I
hardly know how I should have recalled myself to you.”
“Why so? You have not changed,” she answered, looking in the dark keen
face. And then, as the light of fire and candles showed the fine lines
graven about its eyes and mouth, and the sprinkling of gray hairs upon
the high, finely modeled temples, she added: “And yet I think you have.”
“Time is only kind to beautiful women!” Dunoisse responded, paying her
the implied compliment with the gallantry that had become habitual. But
she answered with a contraction of the brows:
“Time would be kind if this December day, that dawned upon the betrayal
of the French Republic, and set upon the massacre and slaughter of her
citizens, could be wiped from the calendar forever.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and fell, and her bosom heaved under the
jewels that sparkled on its whiteness.
“One should never consent to act against one’s own innate convictions,
even to gratify the dearest living friends,” she said. “My mother, the
kindest and most unselfish of women, has never ceased to regard my
chosen work as a kind of voluntary martyrdom; my duties at the Home,
absorbing and delightful as they are, as irksome and unpleasant. ‘If
Ada would go out into Society sometimes,’ she says constantly, ‘it
would be more natural!’ And so, to please the dear one--who has been,
and still is, very ill, and whom I have been nursing--I accepted their
Excellencies’ invitation, left her sick-bed, put on my fallals and
trinkets--and came here with Mr. and Mrs. Bertham to-night--to join,
although I did not know it, in celebrating the perpetration of a crime,
and hailing as a great and memorable stroke of statecraft a deed of
infamy.”
The letter in Dunoisse’s breast became an oppressive burden. His eyes
fell under hers. She pursued, with a deepening, intensifying expression
and tone of horror and repulsion.
“For that the banquet in which I shared to-night was intended to
celebrate this day that has seen the triumph of bad faith and mean
deceit, and hideous treachery, over generous confidence and open trust,
can be doubted by no one!... And while we ate and drank, and laughed
and chatted, sitting at the table of _his_ plenipotentiary, what
horrors were taking place in Paris! what crimes were being committed
against Law, against Honor, against Humanity, against God!...”
Her voice broke. Innumerable little shining points of moisture
started into sight upon her broad, pure forehead, and in the shadow
of the silken waves upon her blue-veined temples, and about her pale,
quivering lips. She said, lifting her lace handkerchief and wiping the
moisture away:
“I speak thus to you, who are an officer of the Army of France; who
hold a post of confidence--or so I have been given to understand--on
the Prince’s Military Staff. It may be that you prize Success above
Integrity, that the result of the _coup d’État_ will justify in your
eyes the measures that have been taken to carry it out. But, knowing
what I know of you--having heard from that dear lady,--who is now, I
earnestly believe, crowned in a more glorious life than that of earth,
with the reward of her pure faith and simple virtues,--the story of
your renunciation of great fortune and high prospects for the sake of
principle and honor--I cannot believe this. If it were so, you would be
changed, not only in outward appearance, but in mind, and heart, and
soul.”
She added, with an almost wistful smile:
“And I do not wish to find you so. I prefer, when it is possible, to
keep my ideals intact.”
“Miss Merling,” returned Dunoisse, “I break no bond of secrecy in
saying to you that the _coup d’État_ has long been expected, both
by the enemies and the friends of Monseigneur the Prince-President.
But although the most minute preparations have been made to insure
perfection in the military operations and the proceedings of the
police; the friends most depended on by His Highness--the agents most
necessary to the execution of his plan--have had no knowledge of what
was to be their share in the programme until the moment for action
arrived. The Prince, M. de Morny, M. de St. Arnaud, M. de Persigny,
Colonel de Fleury, and M. de Maupas, alone shared the secret. And they
have kept it well!”
“Too well!” she said, and her arched brows drew into straight lines
of condemnation over the severity of her clear gaze. “One would have
prayed for less perfection! The plot has been a masterpiece of cool
Machiavellian treachery, devised with extraordinary genius, and carried
out with consummate skill. It is hinted that Lord Walmerston approves
and encourages, if he has not aided and abetted.”.... A shudder rippled
through her slight body. “Oh, I knew him subtle as Odysseus,” she said,
with starting tears of indignation--“but I never believed him guileful;
never imagined that he could justify God-defying, cold-blooded murder
as a means to an end. If this indeed be so, those who have termed him
England’s typical and representative Englishman”--the tone was of keen,
cutting sarcasm--“must find him another description. Hell’s typical
and representative devil”--Dunoisse started as the fierce condemnatory
sentence rang through the room--“is he whom you call master! The jailer
who has turned the key upon the freedom of the people of France!”
“Miss Merling, the ways of Government and Rule are bestrewn with
obstacles and beset with pearls,” returned Dunoisse, “and Expediency
demands many moral sacrifices on the part of those who sit on the
coach-boxes of the world. As a man of honor”--the well-used word fell
lightly from his lips as he slightly shrugged his shoulders--“I deplore
that they should be necessary! But in the years that have passed since
it was my privilege to meet you, I have learned to swim with the
stream; to take Life as I find it; and not to ask a greater excess of
nobility and virtue from my neighbors than I possess in myself.”
His slight momentary embarrassment had passed away. He had recovered
his customary ease and sangfroid, and the acquired manner of his
world, self-confident, almost insolent in its cool assurance, lent its
meretricious charm to the handsome face and upright gallant figure as
he faced her smiling, the ruddy firelight enhancing the brilliancy of
his black eyes and the ruddy swarthiness of hue that distinguished him,
his supple, well-shaped hand toying with a fine waxed end of the neat
black mustache.
“Nothing, Mademoiselle,” he went on, “would distress me more profoundly
than to think that credit was given me for opinions I have long learned
to regard as prejudiced and crude, and a course of conduct subsequent
experience has proved to have been so mistaken that I have long since
endeavored to correct its errors by adopting an opposite policy. I----”