Looking on a certain afternoon (it was that of the 27th of November)
from his high perch, Ned saw the people of the streets to be in a more
than usual state of excitement and commotion. Once or twice latterly
it had occurred to him that the ferment of national affairs was not
subsiding, as he had expected it to do, under the tonic treatment of
the national comptrollers--that the people were bent on levying on
their taxmasters a tax more stringent than any they had themselves
groaned under. Sometimes turning, as he rarely did, into the Palais
Royal, and marking how, in that garden of public sedition, the very
veil had been torn from innuendo; how furious agitators, each with his
knot of eager listeners, found applause proportionate to the daring of
their vituperation; how struggling hordes fought from door to counter
of Desein’s book-shop, that they might feed their revolutionary hunger
with any cag-mag of radicalism, provided it were dressed to look raw
and bloody--he would fall curiously grave over a thought of the
impotence of any known principle to precipitate passions held in such
intricate solution, curiously speculative as to the drifting of a
rudderless bark of state. For himself, he was conscious of having been
shouldered from all his little snug standpoints of legislative
philosophy; of the treading-under of his protoplasmic theories by
innumerable vigorous feet; of his inadmissible claim to be allotted a
portfolio in any government whatsoever of man by man. He was become,
indeed, quite humble, and yet larger-souled than before, by reason of
his content to act the part of insignificant unit in a drama, the
goodly developments of which he was nevertheless still confident
enough to foretell. And surely at this point he would have cried--and
that, despite the augurs--as Mirabeau cried ecstatically at a later
date: “How honourable will it be for France that this great Revolution
has cost humanity neither offences nor crimes.... To see it brought
about by the mere union of enlightened minds with patriotic
intentions: our battles mere discussions; our enemies only prejudices
that may well be forgiven; our victories, our triumphs, so far from
being cruel, blessed by the very conquered themselves.”
“And, indeed,” thought Ned, “what reforms were ever compelled without
pressure, and what pressure, that was considerate of the pressed, was
ever effective?”
Now he ran downstairs in haste to inquire of Madame Gamelle the reason
of the popular excitement. He found the good woman herself fluttered
by it to an uncommon degree. She put the pledge into a half-empty tub
of potatoes (a something despised vegetable in the France of that
date), that she might gesticulate the more comprehensively.
“It is news,” she cried; “a fine ‘facer’ to the notables. How they
will squirm, the rascals! We are to have the double representation. It
is decreed by Louis, the good king.”
“Rather by Sieyes and M. d’Entraigues, is it not?”
“_Oh, çà_! That is the way to talk. But you forget the Minister of
Finance, who shall go into the calendar of saints, cheek by jowl with
St Antoine himself.”
On the very noon following that of the declaration respecting the
Tiers Etat, lo! there was new commotion in the streets, and holiday
faces and footsteps hurrying westward. Again Ned descended and again
inquired. Madame received him with a shrill cackle:--
“Oh yes! it is excitement and all excitement, as you say. But what
infamy that I am chained to my kennel like a vicious dog.”
“What is to do then, madame?”
“But this, monsieur: a gas-balloon is to ascend from the garden of the
Thuilleries at two o’clock.”
Ned sniggered.
“The hubbub is extreme beyond that of yesterday; and madame is cut
from the enjoyment? Supposing, then, I were to take her place as
_fruitière_?”
“That is impossible. What fly has stung you? But you can go yourself,
and report to me of the proceedings.”
“Well,” said Ned, “I think I will, that I may learn to differentiate
between the emotions of triumph and of pleasure.”
He saw over the trees, as he turned into the gardens, the soft blue
dome of the great envelope stretching its creases to the sun--an
opaline mound that glistered high and lonely as an untrodden hill
summit. But about the show spot itself, when he reached it, he could
have thought two-thirds of all Paris collected. In one vast
circle--wheel-fely and hub--this enormous hoop of onlookers enclosed
the centre of attraction. On its white face-surface upturned, as on
the surface of a boiling geyser, bubbles of myriad talk seethed and
broke, filling the air with reverberation. Winds of laughter ruffled
it; a sun of merriment caught the facets of its countless eyes. It was
a wheel of jovial Fortune--of a jewelled triumphal car that had
yesterday been a war-chariot, scythed and menacing.
Compact of solid humanity throughout its circumference, its edge was
nevertheless frayed, like the exterior of a clustered swarm of bees,
into a flitting and buzzing superficies of place-seekers.
These--scurrying, criss-crossing; sometimes settling upon and becoming
part of the main body; sometimes affecting a cynical indifference to a
show, from view of the inner processes of which their position
debarred them; in their formless excitement, their hysteric and
unmannered hunt for points of vantage, their magnifying of occasion
into epoch, their utter lack of the sense of moral proportion, of the
sense to distinguish appreciably between affairs of moment and affairs
of the moment--exhibited, as the typical traveller exhibits, those
national characteristics that seem as little accommodating to
revolution in principle as to revolution in habit.
“Only here,” thought Ned, “they are not discreditable exceptions to
the national rule, but fair samples of the whole.”
A couple, pausing within ear-shot of him, engaged his attention at the
instant. One of these, a lord of _clinquant_, self-satisfied,
arrogant-looking, and dressed, one might have fancied, to the top bent
of bourgeoisie, saluted the other, as a skipjack humours in himself a
holiday mood of affability, with an air of tolerant condescension.
“Eh, indeed, M. David!” said he. “You profit yourself of this
occasion. But, if I were in your position, I should seize it to lie
abed.”
The person addressed stood a half minute at acrid gaze--his shoulders
humped, and his hands gripped on the ebony crutch of his cane--before
he replied. He was a man of a somewhat formidable expression, with
red-brown hair all writhed into little curls, as if a certain inner
heat had warped it. His eyes were hard as flints; and the natural
causticity and determination of his face took yet more sinister
emphasis from a permanent distortion of the upper jaw, whereon an
accidental blow had caused a swelling that impaired his right speech
and made of his very smile a wickedness. His figure, square and firm,
if inclined to embonpoint, set off to advantage his suit of dark blue
cloth, very plain and neat, with silver buttons; his handkerchief and
simple ruffles were spotless, and about the whole man was an
appearance of cold self-containment that was full of the conscious
pride of intellectual caste.
“My good Reveillon,” he said at length, “yesterday it was decreed that
the deputies of the third state should equal in number those of the
nobility and of the clergy put together. That was a momentous
concession, was it not? Also, the eligibility for election, into the
second order, of curés, and into the Tiers Etat of Protestants, was
made known--truly all subjects for popular rejoicing. Doubtless, then,
your employés, leaning out of the windows of the paper factory in the
Rue St Antoine” (“They could not,” thought Ned. “I know the place.
Every window is barred.”), “tossed their caps into the street, into
the air--anywhere but into your face, crying _Vive Necker_ and _A bas
les notables_!”
“It is always for you to claim the privilege to speak, as you paint,
enigmas,” said the other, with a certain excited insolence of tone. He
was flushed with aggravation under the hard inquisition of the eyes
that had so deliberately taken his measure.
“True enough, the rascals showed enthusiasm,” he cried. “And what
then, M. David?”
“Why, you would drive them to work again, would you not, when the
effervescence was subsided?”
“Assuredly. What is any effervescence but bubbles that break and
vanish? Their business is not to discuss politics but to roll paper,
as it is yours to cover the sheets with hieroglyphics (that, I
confess, I do not understand) when prepared. Well, monsieur, you get
your price and they theirs. Does yours satisfy you? But it might not
if I charged the stuff you buy of me with the interest of time lost
over irresponsible chatter on the part of my employés.”
“Surely, my friend, here is a little spark to produce an explosion.”
“Oh, monsieur! I can read between the lines, and I am not ignorant of
what may be implied in a sneer. You are _peintre du Roi_, M. David;
you have chambers at the Louvre, M. David. That is very well; and it
is also very well to subordinate your convictions to your prosperity,
so long as the sun of royalty shines on you.”
“Be very careful to pick your words, my pleasant Reveillon,” said the
painter, already, in some emotion of self-suppression, articulating
with difficulty.
“Why?” said the paper-maker, waning cool as the other gathered heat.
“Is it not true, then, that you are a democrat?”
“What has that to do with the question?”
“It has everything, monsieur, if I am to understand your innuendoes.
It signifies, of course, your dogmatic advocacy of the labour, as
opposed to the capital side of industrial economy. It signifies that,
in your opinion, it is tyranny to enforce discipline upon any body of
men who congregate for other than belligerent purposes, and that any
popular demonstration may serve Jack Smith as excuse for neglecting
his work, but not Jack Smith’s master for docking the absentee’s
wages.”
“They are always little enough,” said M. David, still very indistinct.
“And I throw the word in your teeth!” cried the paper-maker hotly in
his turn.
The dispute aroused small interest amongst the near bystanders, whose
attention was otherwise engaged. One or two, however, gave a pricked
ear to it.
“I am a kind master,” continued the angry manufacturer. “I dare any
one to refute it. How many hands do I employ, monsieur, do you think?
Not a few, monsieur, not a few; and of them all, two-thirds are here
this afternoon--here in these gardens, with permission, though I
suffer by it, to attend the _fête_ of the balloon.”
He spoke the last words uncommonly loudly. The painter burst into a
louder laugh, that distorted his face horribly.
“My exquisite Reveillon,” he said, advancing and endeavouring to take
the other’s arm, only to be peevishly repulsed. “My dear soul, you are
admirable! I see crystallised in you every chief characteristic of the
latter-day Parisian.”
“Very well,” said the Sieur Reveillon, sullen and glowering: “see what
you like; I do not care.”
“To lay down one’s work a moment to applaud the emancipation of a
people: to make a national _fête_ of a balloon ascent!”
He tried to affect an air of humorous dilemma; but the part was beyond
him.
“Oh!” he cried savagely, paraphrasing La Fontaine, and stamping his
foot on the ground: “_On fit parler les morts; personne ne s’émut_!”
By a strong effort he controlled himself.
“Good M. Reveillon,” he said, “understand that my wits are _my_
employés. If, following your edifying example, I give them an outing,
I must accompany them like a schoolmaster. Thus your penetration may
divine the reason why I do not lie abed on this rare occasion of a
holiday, which, as your plutocratship suggests, should be an excuse
for rest to all poor devils of workmen.”
A young mechanic, in his squalor and hungering leanness, simply
typical of his class, hurried by at the moment, eagerly seeking a
place to view. His roving eyes, catching those of the paper
manufacturer, took a hostile, half-anxious expression as he went on
his way with a louting salutation.
“One of the two-thirds?” asked David. “A testimony, indeed, to the
fostering kindness of the Sieur _Papetier_.”
“Bah!” cried Reveillon. “It is the cant. The successful must always be
held responsible for the ineptitude of the improvident. He that passed
was a journeyman; and a journeyman may live very handsomely on fifteen
sous a-day, if he is sober and prudent. I have been through it and I
know. I have no false pride, monsieur _le peintre du Roi_. I was
apprentice--journeyman myself--before I was master.”
As he spoke, a great seething roar issued from the crowd. Ned, who had
been sketching desultorily as he listened, raised his face. A huge
bulge of grey went up into the sky--a mystery of bellying silk and
intricate ropes straining at a little cockle-shell of a car. To the
explosion of guns, to the frantic waving of flags and handkerchiefs,
to the jubilant vociferating of half a city, the quasi-scientific toy
rose, and was reflected as it sprang aloft in the pupils of ten
thousand eyes. The circle of the mob dilated as its components yielded
a pace or so to secure the better view, and the act brought the two
disputants into Ned’s close neighbourhood. M. Reveillon, for all his
late colloquy, was now no less hysterical than the rest of the
company.
“_Voilà_!” he shouted, clutching at the young fellow’s arm
spasmodically: “is it not a sight the very acme of sublimity! Behold
the unconquerable enterprise of man thus committed to victory or
destruction. There is no middle course. He is to triumph or to die.”
His excited grasp tightened on the sleeve he held. His glance
travelled swiftly to and from the sketch-book, on a page of which Ned
was endeavouring to hastily record some impression of the buoyant
monster above. The Englishman marvelled to see this sudden eruption
from so flat and commonplace a surface.
“You can discipline yourself to draw in the face of this stupendous
fascination,” cried the paper-maker. “_Mon Dieu_! that you had been
with me at Boulogne in ’85, when Rozier’s Montgolfier took fire at the
height of a thousand mètres, and he and Romain were precipitated to
the earth!”
He never removed his hungry gaze from the mounting balloon while he
talked.
“Fifteen sous a-day!” ejaculated M. David’s voice to the other side of
Ned.
“It was like the bursting of a shell,” said Reveillon, in a sort of
rapturous retrospection. “We were looking--our _vivats_ still echoed
in the air; the smiles with which they had parted from us were yet
reflected on our faces; there came a spout of flame, very mean and
small against the blue, and little black things shot from it and fled
earthwards. It was fearful--heart-thrilling, that sound of a man
falling through two-thirds of a mile. And the finish--the settling
vibration! _Mon Dieu_! but I have never since missed an ascent.”
“Fifteen sous a-day!” exclaimed David.
But Ned instinctively withdrew himself from a touch that had grown
unpleasant to him.
“The cloven hoof!” he thought. “And is to be without bowels the secret
of every plutocrat’s success?”
“Fifteen sous a-day!” repeated David monotonously.
Reveillon came back to earth a moment, and made him an ironic bow.
“Certainly,” he said. “It is the wages of a good journeyman, and more
than those of many an artist who disdains to be a time-server.”
The disintegrated crowd, swarming abroad like a disturbed knot of
newly hatched spiders, surrounded and absorbed him. _M. le peintre du
Roi_ summoned Ned’s attention, peering over his shoulder.
“It is an insolent parvenu,” he said; “a Philistine double damned for
grinding the faces of the poor. Permit me the privilege to look,
monsieur. An artist is known by his performance. There is a severity
here that entirely commends itself to me.”