Ned’s chance meeting with the painter, whose art was then much
exciting, in a characteristic freak of perversity, the enthusiasm of
his fellow-citizens, was the prelude to a strange little _camaraderie_
between the two that, so long as it held, was full of positive and
negative instruction to the younger man. It came about in this way,
that, absorbed in the discussion of a topic of common interest, the
gentlemen left the Thuilleries gardens together, M. David accompanying
Ned eventually to the Rue Beautreillis. At the door of the fruiterer’s
shop the famous artist held out his hand bluntly.
“You have the right religion,” he said: “in an artificial world the
cleanest art shall prevail. We can have no standard of truth but what
we set ourselves. Strip the model, then, of all meretricious
adornments. Monsieur, I shall take the liberty to call upon you.”
He came, indeed--not once but often, walking over from his studio in
the Louvre; dropping in at unexpected times; criticising the methods,
the actual performance of the Englishman, and even condescending now
and again to add to a sketch or canvas a few touches--technical
mastery without imagination--that resolved in a moment a difficulty
long contended with. Through all he would never cease to expound his
views on right art and government--to him inseparable words in the
condition of national sanity, and both drawn in their purity from the
fountain-head of the S.P.Q.R. at its strictest period. Most often he
would discourse, gazing, his hands behind his back, from the window,
and sometimes quite aptly illustrating his homilies with types drawn
from the human mosaic of the St Antoine below him.
M. David was at this time some forty years of age, an Academician, the
acknowledged and popular leader of classic revivalism. He was
fashionable, moreover, and had just completed (“_mettant la main sur
sa conscience_”) a royal commission for a “Brutus”! Courted,
prosperous, and respected, some moral myosis must still distort to his
inner vision all the admiration he evoked. He would make his profit of
patronage, secretly raging over the opulent condescension that his
cupidity would not let him be without. He would see _double entendre_
in the applause of the social _élite_, yet hunger for it, cursing
himself that the vital flame of his self-confidence must be dependent
on such fuel for its warmth. For in truth he was the tumid bug of
vanity, bursting with the very scarlet adulation that his instinct
told him was inimical to the artistic life and other than its natural
food.
Contributing to, or proceeding from, this insane desire of
self-aggrandisement, his professional and political convictions (he
could not disassociate the two) ran in a restricted channel. But who
shall distinguish, in any complaint that is accompanied by an
unnatural condition of the nerves, between cause and effect? So M.
David’s resentment of patronage may have inclined him to a creed of
classic socialism; or his classic proclivities may have prejudiced him
against the presumptions of self-qualified rank. In any case, he had
twisted his theories, artistic and political, into one thin cord to
discipline (or hang) mankind withal, and was as narrow a fanatic as
was ever prepared to crucify the disputant that ventured to question
his infallibility.
Now, at the outset, Ned fell into some fascination of regard for this
casual acquaintance of his. His _credo_, social and technical, would
appear to jump--its first paces, at least--with M. David’s. Moreover,
the glamour that naturally informed the presentment of a notable
personality condescending to the regard of a tyro who could boast no
actual claim to its notice, induced him, no doubt--under this
influence of a flattery indirectly conveyed--to an attitude of
respectful consideration towards certain foibles in the stranger that,
on the face of them, seemed irreconcilable with the highest principles
of morality.
It was not so long, however, before his mind began to misgive him that
his “half-God” was clay-footed--that here, indeed, was but another
inevitable example of that subjective inconsistency that seems so
integral a condition of the Gallic temperament. Then: “It is a fact,”
he thought, “that one can never start to conjugate a Frenchman but one
finds him an irregular verb. Where universal exceptions are to prove
the rule, what rule is possible? Anarchy, and nothing else, is the
logical outcome of it all.”
For M. David would cry to him, “In a Republic of Truth every unit must
be content to contribute itself unaffectedly to the full design.” Yet
(as Ned came to know) was no man more greedy than this Academician for
vulgar notoriety--none more sensitive to criticism or more resentful
of a personal slight. So he (M. David) would preach, not plausibly but
whole-mindedly, a religion of purity and cleanliness--a religion of
beauty, material and intellectual, whose very ritual should be
Gregorian in its sweet austerity. Such were his professions; and
nevertheless in the height of his revolutionary popularity he did not
scruple to introduce into his pictures details that pandered to the
most sordid lusts for the grotesque and the horrible--to generally,
indeed, stultify his own declarations of belief by acts that no ethics
but those of brutality could justify. Finally, it was in the disgust
engendered of a flagrant illustration of such inconsistency that the
young Englishman, after some months of gradual disenchantment, “cut”
the king’s painter; fled, for solace of a haunting experience,
eastwards again, and, snuffing with some new emotion of relish the
frankincense of green woods, hugged himself over a thought of his
seasonable escape from that national sphinx of caprice, to symbolise
whom in a word one must draw upon modern times for the “cussedness” of
Wall Street.
Yet even then, had he but foreseen it, he was backing, while dodging
Scylla, into the very deadly attraction of Charybdis.
In the meanwhile autumn stole footsore, like a loveless wife, in the
track of summer. She was swart and powdered, not _à la mode de
Versailles_; drouthy too, yet with a cry to shrill piercingly in every
street of every town of France.
The dust of her going rose and penetrated through chinks and doorways.
It overlay the pavements so thickly that one might have thought it the
accumulation of that that age-long ministers had thrown in the eyes of
the people, the very precipitate of tyranny. It clung, hot and acrid,
to the walls of all living palaces, of all princely monuments to the
dead, as if it were the expression of that proletariat censorship that
would obliterate the very records of a hateful past. It was the
condensed breath of destruction settling in a stringent dew, and it
might have been exhaled from the ten thousand brassy throats that made
clamour in the highways ten thousandfold great because they were the
resonant throats of starved and empty vessels.
For the elections were on; and what if bread were dearer than money if
his chosen representative was in every man’s mouth? So, through broil
and famine the city of Paris echoed to its blazing roofs with jangle
jubilant and acclamatory, inasmuch as the no-property qualification
gave every honest man a chance of being governed by a rogue. And what
prospect in a nation of contrarieties could be more humorously
enticing?
Then upon this drouth and this uproar Ned saw the steel glaive of
winter smite with a clang that brought ironic echoes from the hollow
granaries. It fell swift and sudden; and the clamour, under the
lashing of the blade, took a new tone of terror, the wail of
despairing souls defrauded of their right atmosphere of hope. For who
could look beyond the present with the thermometer below zero; with
the prospect blotted out by freezing mists; with the thin shadows of
pining women and children always coming between one and the light;
with one’s own brain clouded with the fumes of dearth? Yet the
elections went on; but now in a sterner spirit of desperation--of
insistent watchfulness, too, that no hard-wrung concession should be
juggled to misuses under cover of mistifying skies.
Of much misery that neighboured on the wretchedest quarters of a
wretched city Ned was, from his position, cognisant. The sight shook
his stoicism, and greatly contributed to the disruption (St Denys and
M. David negatively helping) of a certain baseless little house of toy
bricks that his boyish vanity had conceived to be an endurable system
builded by himself. “I have been a philosophe, not a wise man,” he
thought. “Life is not a chess-board, its each next step plain to the
clean thinker.”
Now it was the sight of the children that secretly wrung his heart:
these poor sad babies, disciplined on a primary code of naughtiness
and retribution, merit and reward, marvelling from sunken eyes that
they should be so punished for no conscious misbehaviour; patiently,
nevertheless, retaining their faith in God and man, and making a
play-ball of the bitter earth that stung their hands and shrivelled
under their feet.
Well, they died, perhaps by hundreds, when the snow was in the
streets. “And let them go,” said M. David. “There shall be others to
follow by-and-by. As to these, warped and demoralised, they would not
prosper the regeneration of the earth. We want a clean race and no
encumbrances.”
That was _his_ philosophy--admirably Roman, as he intended it to be.
It did not suit Ned.
“There is more to be learnt from a cripple than an athlete,” said that
person boldly. “I would sooner, for my own sake, study in this school
of St Antoine than in yours of the Louvre, M. David.”
“Truly, every artist to his taste,” said the Academician, with an
unsightly grin; and it was Ned’s taste to give of his substance
royally and pityingly when a voice cried in his ear of cold and
famine.
“_Ah, le genereux Anglais_!” wept Madame Gamelle. “He has kept the
wolf from my door. Would that all mothers could secure to their dear
rogues such a fairy godfather as he has been to my cherished one!”
“Without doubt,” said M. David, “he has preserved to you for your
virtues the blessing of an encumbrance that by-and-by shall devour
you.”
Madame must laugh and protest against this inhuman sarcasm. For the
great painter, despite his austerity, had a masterfully admiring way
with women that derived from the serpent in Eden.
“Here, then, to prove it no sarcasm, is my contribution to the cause,”
he says, and places a sou in the pledge’s fat hand.
But Ned went his way uninfluenced of sardonic counsels.
“When this horror relaxes,” he thought, “in the spring I will go back
to Méricourt. I shall be able then, perhaps, to paint a Madonna with
a human soul.”
The spring came; the ice melted on the Seine; but it did not melt in
the breasts of an electorate hardened by suffering, consolidated in
the very “winter of its discontent.” But now at least Ned could
sometimes watch from his window without dread of having his soul
harrowed by the desolation and misery of its prospect--could watch the
fire of the sun burning up a little and a little more each day with
the rekindled fuel of hope.
Now it happened that, thus observing, he was many times aware of M.
David mingling with the throng below; going with it or against it;
strolling, his hands behind his back, with the air of an architect who
cons the effect of his own shaping work. This may have been a fancy;
yet it was one that dwelt insistently with the onlooker, that haunted
and disturbed him with presentiment of evil as month succeeded month
and the vision fitfully repeated itself. What attraction so
spasmodically drew the man to this quarter of the town? Not Mr Murk
himself, for now the little regard of each for each was severed by
some trifling outspokenness on the part of the Englishman, and the
painter had long ceased of his visits to the fruiterer’s shop in the
Rue Beautreillis. Ned, for some unexplainable reason, was troubled.
Once he was aware of M. David, moved from his accustomed deliberation,
walking very rapidly in the wake of a man who sped, unconscious of the
chase, before him. Ned identified the stranger as he turned off down a
by-street. It was Reveillon, the prosperous paper merchant he had
happened on on the day of the balloon ascent.
“M. l’Académicien follows the man like his shadow,” he thought,
pondering.
This was in April, when the shadows, indeed, were beginning to
strengthen in darkness.
Then one morning he started awake to the sound of huge uproar in the
streets.
The curtain of the Bastille had not risen; but it had been pulled
aside a little, as it were, to make passage to the forestage of the
Revolution for certain supers who were to represent the opening
chorus. These came swarming through in extraordinary numbers, an
earnest of what should be revealed in the complete withdrawal of the
screen. They seemed violently inspired, but most imperfectly drilled;
and the weapons they handled were not stage properties by any means.
And their object was just this--to pull about his ears the factory of
a certain M. Reveillon, who had been heard to say that a journeyman
could live very comfortably on fifteen sous a-day.
The execrated building was not so far from the Rue Beautreillis but
that the hubbub in the air shook the very glass of Ned’s windows. He
dressed hastily and ran out into the street. Turning into the Rue St
Antoine, that was half choked with a chattering, hooting mob hurrying
westwards, he stumbled over the heels of a man who immediately
preceded him. With an apology on his lips, he hesitated and cried
aloud, “St Denys!”
Even when the stranger disclaimed the title, with a wonder in his eyes
unmistakably genuine, Ned could hardly bring himself to realisation of
his mistake. True, his acquaintance with the Belgian had been brief
enough to admit of subsequent events clouding its details in his
memory; yet that, he could have thought, was vivid to recall
characteristics of feature and complexion quite impressive in their
way. Here were the bright, bold colouring, the girlish contour of
face, the brown eyes, and the rough crisp gold of unpowdered hair.
Here were the shapely stature, the little fopperies of dress even, the
actual confidence of expression. Only, as to the latter, perhaps, a
certain soul of sobriety, an earnestness of purpose, revealed
themselves in the present instance--a distinction to justify a world
of difference.
“A thousand apologies!” said Ned. “I can hardly convince myself even
now.”
“I will presume you flatter me, monsieur,” said the other, with a
blithe smile. “My name is Suleau, at your service. Pardon me, I must
hurry on.”
Ned detained him a moment.
“Let me entreat you, monsieur--this heat, this uproar: what is it all
about?”
“What, indeed, monsieur? France, I think, rolls on its back with its
feet in the air. A manufacturer of paper says that his hands can live
very well, if they choose, on fifteen sous a-day. _Hé_--he ought to
know. But they wish to gut his premises, nevertheless, these new,
evil-smelling apostles of liberty. _Pardon_! will you come with me? I
cannot wait. I am a reporter, a journalist, a scribbler against time
and my own interests!”
“You are not of the popular party?”
“_Ah_, monsieur, _mon Dieu_, monsieur! but I have a sense of humour
remaining to me. For all that is serious I am a Feuillant.”
He spoke the last to deaf ears. Ned had fallen behind, blackly
pondering.
“This David,” he muttered, “that heard Reveillon say the words, and
that has haunted the St Antoine of late--this David.” And with the
thought there was the man himself coming slowly on with the crowd past
him. The Englishman planted his shoulder against the torrent and
managed to sidle alongside the painter. He--M. Jacques-Louis
David--carried a very enigmatical smile on his face, the physical
malformation of which, however, served him for conscious
misinterpreter of many moods. Now it expressed no disturbance over his
contact with a person who had offended him.
“Good day,” said he.
“M. David,” said Ned, “I do not forget what enraged you with M.
Reveillon in the Thuilleries gardens. I think you are a scoundrel, M.
David!”
The other did not even start; much less did he condescend to refute
the sudden charge; but he cocked his head evilly as he walked.
“Have you considered,” he said, “that if what you imply be true (which
I do not admit), you are insulting a general in the presence of his
bodyguard?”
“If what I imply be true,” retorted Ned hotly, “I can understand your
indulging any brutal and contemptible vindictiveness.”
Perhaps, in his strenuous indignation, he might have struck at the
vicious creature beside him; but the crowd, at that moment violently
surging forward, swept him anywhere from his place and saved him the
consequences of a foolish impulse.
Now he would fain have turned and escaped from the press, lest by any
self-misconception his conscience should accuse him of lending his
countenance to an iniquity; for he saw that such was planned and
determined on, and for the first time there awoke in his heart some
shadowy realisation of the true import of certain months-long signs
and significances. He would have turned: he could not. He was wedged
in, carried forward, rushed to the very outer core of the congested
block of frowsy humanity that stormed and spat and shrieked under the
high dull walls of the factory.
Here, perhaps, his national self-sufficiency was his somewhat arrogant
counsellor.
“What has this man done,” he cried to those about him, “but exemplify
that right to liberty of speech which you all demand?”
A dozen loathing glances were turned upon him. Savage oaths and
ejaculations contested the opportuneness of so reasonable a sentiment.
But it was not St Antoine’s way, now or at any time, to approve
counsel for the defence. Only a cry, a sinister one then first
beginning to be heard in the streets, broke out here and there.
“Down with the aristocrat!”
There was threat of a concentric movement upon the Englishman. He felt
it as a moral pressure even before his immediate neighbours began to
close inwards. One of the latter had a similar consciousness
apparently. She was a coarse, fat _poissarde_, and the shallow groove
that was her waist seemed moulded of the very habit of her truculent
arms folded in front of her.
“Eh, my little radishes!” she cried in a voice like a corncrake’s.
“Advance, you! Come, then--come! Here is a cat shall strip you of your
breeches if you venture within her reach.”
Ned felt, and the crowd looked, astonishment over this unexpected
championship. In the momentary proximate silence that befell, the
shattering explosion of many of M. Reveillon’s windows bursting under
volleys of stones was a significantly acute accent.
The fishwife nodded her head a great number of times.
“_Hé_! my little rats, you will not come? That is well for your
whiskers, indeed. And do we _not_ demand liberty of speech, as
monsieur says; and are we not taking it to denounce one that would
deprive us of the liberty to live? How! You would raise the devil
against monsieur?” (she waxed furious in an instant)--“Monsieur
l’Anglais, that all the hard winter has lived like a Jacobin friar,
that he might give of his substance to the cold and the starving?
Monsieur l’Anglais that lodges at the fruiterer’s, and without whose
help Fanchon and her brat had been rotting now in St Pélagie! Oh,
_san’ Dieu_! I know--I know! Pigs, beasts, ingrates! It will be well,
in truth, for the first that comes within my reach!”
A rolling laugh, that swelled to a roar, took up the very echo of
madame’s surprising tirade.
“_Vive l’Anglais_! the friend of the poor, the apostle of liberty!”
shrieked twenty voices.
Too amazed by this sudden rightabout of a national weathercock to
protest against its misrepresentation of the direction of his own
little breeze of righteousness, Ned made no resistance, when all in a
moment he felt himself tossed up on billowing shoulders, and conveyed
helplessly from the thick centre of operations. The clamour of hairy
throats, exhaling winey fustian about him, staggered his brain. He had
not even that self-possession left him to blush to find his stealthy
goodness famous. And when the escort landed him at Madame Gamelle’s
door, and with hurried _vivats_ testified to his immediate popularity,
he could think of no more appropriate remark to make to them than, “I
protest, messieurs, that I have never travelled so high in others’, or
so low in my own opinion, before”; which, inasmuch as it was
fortunately spoken in English, and accompanied by a profoundly
ironical bow, served the occasion as gracefully as much compliment
would have done.
Feeling at first something like a venturesome infant that had strayed
beyond bounds only to be caught back and kissed, Ned mounted to his
room to await events. They came thick and swift enough to half induce
him to a re-descent upon the scene of action. That temptation he
overcame; but all day long, and far into the evening, he wandered,
restless and apprehensive, in the Rue St Antoine, watching its
turbulent course at the flood, feeling a sympathetic attraction to the
electricity of its moods, conscious of the shock of something
enacting, or threatening to enact, about that congregated spot where
the tumult was heaviest.
Still with the passing of day came no abatement of the popular fury,
but rather an accumulating of menace; and thereupon (M. le Baron
Besenval, Commandant of Paris, having arrived at his decision) down
swooped upon the scene a little company of thirty bronzed and brazen
French Guards, in their royal chevrons and military coxcombs; which
company, clearing intestinal congestion by measures laxative,
readjusted the order of affairs, and persuaded exhausted patriots to
their burrows.
To his bed also went Ned reassured, and slept profoundly and
confidently as a rescued castaway. But, waking on the morrow, lo!
there was renewal of the uproar shaking his windows, but now as if it
would splinter the very glass in its frames.
The cause, when he came to examine, was not far to seek. St Antoine, a
very confraternity of weasels, baulked but not baffled, was returned
to the attack; and at this last it was evident that the paper-maker’s
premises were damned. Indeed, the complaint of democracy had suffered
a violent relapse during the night; and now, in the new dawn, it
blazed and crackled like a furnace. The streets, the roofs, the
windows were massed with writhing shapes; the whole quarter jangled in
a thunder of voices; a pelt of indifferent missiles, deadly only in
the context, rained without ceasing upon the accursed walls.
Ned paused a moment, swirled like a straw in the current of rushing
humanity, to take stock of possibilities.
“If it is so they resent a hasty word,” thought he, “God save Paris in
the hour of reprisal!”
He felt a little sick at heart. He would look no more.
“I will spend an idle day in the fields of Passy,” he assured himself,
“and forget it all, and return in the evening to find the storm blown
over.”
He went out by way of the Place St Paul, walking along the line of
quays, and watching, something with the tender feeling of a
convalescent, the golden frost of sunlight that gemmed the waters of
the Seine. It was a fair, sweet morning, too innocent, it seemed, to
take account of human passions; and by-and-by its influence so far
wrought upon him as that he was able to commit himself to it with some
confidence of enjoyment. All about him, moreover, life seemed
pleasurably normal--not significant of fear and apprehension, as his
soul had dreaded to find it.
But with the approach of dusk his innate misgivings must once more
gather force till they knocked like steam in his arteries; and, so
dreading, he lingered over his return until deep dark had closed upon
the town. At the barrier he heard enough to confirm his disquiet,
though the reports of what had happened were so formless and
contradictory as to decide him to refer inquiry to the evidence of his
own senses. Therefore, in silence and heart-quaking, he made his way
eastwards, and presently turned into the dark intricacy of squares
that led up to the Rue Beautreillis.
The street, when he reached it, seemed given over to the desolation of
night. The taller houses slept pregnant with austerity as vast
Assyrian images; the lamps, rocking drowsily in their slings, blinked,
one could have thought, to squeeze the slumber from their eyes.
Distant sounds there were, but none proceeding from points nearer in
suggestion than the far side of dawn.
By-and-by, however, one--a little gurgling noise like the sob of a
gutter--slid into Ned’s consciousness, as, speeding forward, his
footsteps rang out a very chime of echoes. Almost in the same moment
he was upon it, or upon its place of issue--a ragged huddle of shapes
pulled into the shadow of a buttress.
A clawing figure, gaunt and unclean, rose at him--recognised him in
the same instant, apparently, and gave out a bestial cry.
“She is going, monsieur! May God wither the hand that beat her down,
and may the soul of him that directed it scream in everlasting hell!”
He seized the young man’s sleeve and drew him reluctant forward. The
huddle of frowzy things parted, that he might see.
The coarse large _poissarde_; the ally who had yesterday cherished his
cause and sung his praises; the great breathing, truculent woman with
the defiant voice! Here was the gross material of so much vigour,
collapsed, mangled, and flung aside. The little choking noise was
accounted for. There was a crimson rent in the woman’s throat. She
died while Ned was looking down upon her.
And this mad thing that spat at the sky? Doubtless he was her husband;
and he might have been a royal duke from the freedom of his language.
“What does it mean?” cried Ned hoarsely.
One of the groping shapes snarled up at him--
“It is an instance of monseigneur’s paternal kindness to his people.”
There was nothing to be answered or done. The Englishman emptied his
purse to the group and hurried on. His worst apprehensions were
realised. This was but a sample of what was to follow--a vision to be
repeated again and yet again, in indefinite forms. Rebellion had
broken and suppurated away during his absence. There were some four or
five hundred dead bodies, shot and stabbed, as earnest of its drastic
treatment by the national physicians. There might have been more, but
that the mob had finally given before M. Besenval’s Switzers with
their grape-shotted cannon. Then it retired, pretty satisfied,
however, to have justified democratic frenzy by so practical an
illustration of the tyranny of class hatred; satisfied, also, as to
the moral of its own retreat. M. Reveillon was become a
self-constituted prisoner in the Bastille; his factory was a shapeless
and clinkerous medley of rubbish. Ned, turning the corner of the Rue
Beautreillis, saw the ruins, dusking and glowing fitfully, at a little
distance. “And how,” he thought, with a shuddering emotion, “did he,
that was so fascinated by the man Rozier’s fate, regard the burning of
his own ark of security?”
The street--so it seemed in the expiring red glimmer and the small,
dull radiance of bracketed lamps--was a very dismantled graveyard of
broken stones and scattered corpses. Amongst the latter moved detached
groups of searchers, languidly official, swinging ghostly lanterns.
With a groan of lamentation, Ned turned about and beat frantically on
the closed shutters of the fruiterer’s shop.
The door was opened, after a weary interval, by Madame Gamelle. The
woman’s eyes were febrile. She dragged her lodger over the threshold
and snapped the lock behind him. A couple of rushlights burned dimly
on the counter. The pledge, in holiday antic, was stuffing a bloody
cartouche-box with onions from a basket.
“They killed him at the street corner,” said madame gloatingly. “He
shall never murder again--the accursed Garde Française. They had for
knives only the sharp tiles from the roofs; but it was easy to willing
arms.”
She was transfigured, this meek vendor of cabbages. Anywhere to
scratch St Antoine was to find a devil.
“Madame,” said Ned wearily, “it is all quite right, without doubt; but
to-morrow, I must tell you, I am to take my leave of Paris.”