Adventures
of the
Comte de la Muette
during the
Reign of Terror
BY
BERNARD CAPES
AUTHOR OF
‘THE MILL OF SILENCE,’ ‘THE LAKE OF WINE,’ ETC.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCVIII
_All Rights reserved_
[DEDICATION.]
TO
R. C.,
BEST COUNSELLOR AND HELPMATE.
CONTENTS.
I. THE WAXWORKS
II. CITOYENNE CARINNE
III. THE FOOTPAD
IV. THE CHÂTEAU DES PIERRETTES
V. LA GRAND’ BÊTE
VI. THE HERD OF SWINE
VII. THE CHEVALIER DU GUET
VIII. QUATREMAINS-QUATREPATTES
IX. THE WILD DOGS
X. THE AFFAIR OF THE CANDLES
XI. PYRAMUS AND THISBE
XII. THE MOUSE-TRAP
XIII. THE RED CART
XIV. THE QUARRIES OF MONT-ROUGE
XV. THE SALAD COURSE
NOTES
ADVENTURES
OF THE
COMTE DE LA MUETTE.
CHAPTER I.
THE WAXWORKS.
One morning I awoke in La Bourbe and looked across at Deputy
Bertrand as he lay sprawled over his truckle-bed, his black hair like
a girl’s scattered on the pillow, his eyelids glued to his flushed
cheeks, his face, all blossoming with dissipation, set into the
expression of one who is sure of nothing but of his own present
surrender to nothingness. Beside him were his clothes, flung upon a
chair, the tri-colour sash, emblematic stole of his confused ritual,
embracing all; and on a nail in the wall over his head was his
preposterous hat, the little _carte de civisme_ stuck in its band.
Casimir Bertrand (one time Casimir Bertrand de Pompignan) I had known
and been friendly with at Le Plessis. Later he had imbibed theories;
had become successively a Lameth, a Feuillant, a Jacobin--a
constitutionalist, a moderate, an extremist; had spouted in the
Faubourgs and overflowed in sectional Committee rooms; had finally
been elected to represent a corner of the States-General. I had known
him for a pious prig, a coxcomb, a reckless bon-vivant. He was always
sincere and never consistent; and now at last, in the crisis of his
engaging sans-cullotism, he had persuaded me, a proscribed royalist,
to take an advantage of his friendship by lodging with him. Then it
was that the driving-force behind his character was revealed to me. It
was militant hedonism. Like Mirabeau, he was a strange compound of
energy and voluptuousness. He turned altogether on the nerves of
excitement. He was like a clock lacking its pendulum, and he would
crowd a dozen rounds of the dial into the space of a single hour. Such
souls, racing ahead of their judgment, illustrate well the fable of
the Hare and the Tortoise; and necessarily they run themselves down
prematurely. Casimir was an epicure, with a palate that could joyfully
accommodate itself to black bread and garlic; a sensualist, with the
power to fly at a word from a hot-bed of pleasure to a dusty desert of
debate. Undoubtedly in him (did I make him the mirror to my
conscience), and in a certain Crépin, with whom I came subsequently
to lodge, and who was of the type only a step lower in the art of
self-indulgence, I had an opportunity to see reflected a very serious
canker in the national constitution.
Now he opened his eyes as I gazed on him, and shut them again
immediately. It was not his habit to be a slug-a-bed, and I recognised
that his sleep was feigned. The days of his political influence were
each pregnant of astonishing possibilities to him, and he was too
finished an epicure to indulge himself with more than the recuperative
measure of slumber--frothed, perhaps, with a bead of æsthetic
enjoyment in the long minute of waking.
“Casimir!” I called softly; but he pretended not to hear me.
“What, my friend! the sun is shining, and the eggs of the old serpent
of pleasure will be hatching in every kennel.”
He opened his eyes at that, fixed and unwinking; but he made no
attempt to rise.
“Let them crack the shells and wriggle out,” he said. “I have a fancy
they will be a poisonous brood, and that La Bourbe is pleasantly
remote from their centres of incubation.”
“Timorous! I would not lose a thrill in this orgy of liberty.”
“But if you lost----?” he checked himself, pursed his lips, and nodded
his head on the pillow.
“Jean-Louis, I saw the Sieur Julien carried to the scaffold last
night. He went foaming and raving of a plot in the prisons to release
the aristocrats in their thousands upon us. There is an adder to
reproduce itself throughout the city! Truly, as you say, the kennels
will swarm with it.”
“And many will be bitten? My friend, my friend, there is some dark
knowledge in that astute head of yours. And shall I cower at home when
my kind are in peril?”
“My faith! we all cower in bed.”
“But I am going out.”
“Be advised!” (He struggled quickly up on his elbow. His face bore a
clammy look in the sunlight.) “Be advised and lie close in your
form--like a hare, Jean-Louis--like a hare that hears the distant
beaters crying on the dogs. Twitch no whisker and prick not an ear.
Take solace of your covert and lie close and scratch yourself, and
thank God you have a nail for every flea-bite.”
“What ails thee of this day then, morose?”
“What ails this Paris? Why, the Prussians are in Verdun, and the
aristocrats must be forestalled.”
“But how, Deputy.”
“I do not know. I fear, that is all.”
“Well, there lies your sash--the talisman to such puerile emotions.”
“Return to bed, Jean-Louis. It is unwise to venture abroad in a
thunderstorm.”
“It is unwiser to shelter beneath a tree.”
“But not a roof-tree. Oh, thou fool! didst thou not close thine eyes
last night on a city fermenting like a pan of dough?”
“‘Et cette alarme universelle
Est l’ouvrage d’un moucheron.’”
“But go your way!” he cried, and scrambled out of bed.
He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to
preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood
thereon.
“After all,” he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his
nostrils, “the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I
dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die
with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back--what could
kings wish for better?”
He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.
“I am representative of a constituency,” he said, “yet a better judge
of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a
common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. ‘Tears
of Christ’!--it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and
Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day.”
He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of
his cup.
“Go your way, Jean-Louis,” he repeated; “and pardon me if I call it
the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your
fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your
gullet and take all relish from the feast.”
“Casimir!” I cried in some black wonder--“this is all the language of
a villain or an hysteric----!”
I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and
left the room.
* * * * * * *
A little frost on a foot, or a little blood. What is the significance
of either. Once the _bimbelotiers_ of the Palais Royal used to
manufacture cards of Noël, very pretty and sparkling with rime. That
was before the apotheosis of the “Third [or butterfly] State”; and
many a time, during the winter of ’84, I have seen poor vagrants of
the chosen brood, unwitting yet of the scarlet wings developing
underneath their rugged hides, ponder over the fanciful emblems in the
shop windows, and then look down with wonder at their own cracked and
bleeding toes. To whom, then, could the frost appeal in this dainty
guise? Not surely to those who must walk with bare feet? It is all the
point of view, said the philosophers. But, they added, blood is warm,
and it is well to wear socks of it if you can get no other. Put these
on and look again, and you will see differently.
Not just yet, perhaps; and in the meantime the king empties his
private purse to buy wood for the freezing people. This will warm them
into loyalty while it lasts; and they crawl out of their icy burrows,
or gather up their broken limbs on the snow beds--whereinto they have
been ground by the sleds and chariots of the wealthy that rush without
warning down the muffled streets--to build monuments of snow to the
glory of their rulers. Then by-and-by these great obelisks melt, and
add their quota to the thaw that is overwhelming what the frost has
spared.
The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the
monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed
and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of
triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has
been vouchsafed to the “Third State,” and it knows that to acquire the
right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of
that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of Noël were made to
appeal.
* * * * * * *
All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening--an
added five beats to every hour--with wonder, rage, and, at last,
terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was
tottering to its fall.
This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters--manned by
revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on
every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,--every
hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to
remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and
take their captors in the rear!
At two o’clock the tocsin pealed--the signal to prepare for the fray.
From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I
waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising
tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches
and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general
uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of
emotion; I was simply involved in it--to go with it, and perish of it,
perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield
my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the
midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here
and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by
wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very
fathomless depths.
From the Place de Grève, along Pelletier Quay; across the Ponts au
Change and St Michel; westwards by the Rue St André des Arcs, where a
little diversion was caused by a street-singer at whom the crowd took
offence, in that he, being an insignificant buffoon, did pelt it with
its classic pretentiousness, wagging his coat-tails in contempt
thereof (“À bas, Pitou!” they shrieked; “we will dock thee of thy
sting and put thee to buzz in a stone bottle!”--and they had him
unfrocked in a twinkling and hoisted for punishment); round, with a
curve to the south, into the Rue de Bussi; thence, again westwards,
along the street of St Marguerite; finally, weathering the sinister
cape of the Abbaye St Germain, northwards into the Rue St Benoit and
up to the yard entrance of the very prison itself,--such was the long
course by which I was borne, in the midst of clamour, hate, and
revilings, some dreadful early scenes in the panorama of the
Revolution unfolded before my eyes--scenes crudely limned by crude
street artists, splashed and boltered with crimson, horrible for the
ghastly applause they evoked.
I saw and I was helpless--the block about the carriages of the
nonjurants--the desperate stroke at the _sans-culotte_ that cut the
knot of indecision--the crashing panels, the flying and flung priests.
One damnable with a sabre split a bald head, that came wavering in my
direction, like a melon, and the brains flew like its seeds. I shut my
eyes and thought, Mercy is in right ratio with the hardness of the
blow. Strike deep, poor guttersnipes, if you must strike at all!
Then began the “severe justice of the people.”
* * * * * * *
What was I, poor philosophic _misérable_, but a germ of those germs
in that great artery of blood that the revolted system was
endeavouring to expel. I saw numbers of my kind thrown forth and
mangled in the midst of horrors unspeakable; I was borne helpless to
the heart, and was rejected to fly shuddering to remote veins of the
prison’s circulation, only to return by an irresistible attraction to
the central terror. More than once my mad expostulations brought me
into perilous notice.
“You have hard wrongs to avenge!” I shrieked; “but at least the form
of pleading has been granted you!”
“And these!” cried the killers. “Blood of God! is not Bastille
Maillard within there checking the tally of the accursed? Aristocrat
art thou!”
They bounded from me to a fresh victim thrust that moment from the
door. She came dazed into the flare of the torches--a white face with
umber hair tumbled all about it. Two gloating hounds took her under
the arm-pits; a third----
_Ciel! pour tant de rigueur, de quoi suis-je coupable?_
* * * * * * *
I do not know whither my wanderings tended, or what space of time was
covered by them. Sooner or later I was always back at the Abbaye,
glutting my soul with assurance of its own wreck, helpless, despite my
loathing of it, to resist the attraction. What horror absorbs the moth
as it circles round the flame, I thought in those recurrent moments I
could understand.
Once, when I returned, an unwonted silence reigned about the place. A
few vampire figures, restless, phantasmal, flitted hither and thither
in the neighbourhood of the reeking shambles. But the slaughterers and
the red ladies of St Michel were retired, during an interval in the
examination, for refreshment. I heard the shrill buzz of their voices
all down the Rue St Benoit and from the wine and lemonade shops
opposite the very gates by which I stood.
I looked into the fearful yard. My God! the dead, it seemed, were
phosphorescent with the rottenness of an ancient system! Here, there,
on all sides they broke the darkness with blots of light like hideous
glow-worms--their hundred white faces the reflectors of as many lamps.
“But it is a brave illumination!” gurgled a voice at my ear.
I glanced aside in loathing. A little old woman, whose lungs barked at
every breath, stood near me. She laughed as if she would shake herself
into touchwood.
“A brave illumination!” she wheezed--“the inspiration of the girl La
Lune. She was dedicated to the Holy Mother; and her skirt! Oh, _mon
Dieu_! but it was of the azure of heaven, and now it is purple as a
strangled face; and it slaps on her ankles. But by-and-by she must
seek purification, for she is dedicated to the holy Virgin.”
“She placed these lamps?”
“She led her sisters to the committee that sits there.” (She pointed a
gnarled finger. To one side of the dreadful quadrangle a dull glow
came melancholy through some tall windows.) “She complained that
ladies who would fain enjoy the show were prevented by the darkness.
Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine
courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market.”
A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons
and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the
object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and
gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and
stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I
had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a
queer constriction seized my heart. Then, all in a moment, I was
following, crying in my soul that here was something tangible for my
abased humanity to lay hold of--some excuse to indulge a passion of
self-sacrifice--some claim to a lump of ice at my feet and a lamp at
my head. The dead were so calm, the living so besotted. A miserly
theft, I thought, to take another’s blood when one’s own gluts one’s
arteries to suffocation.
I looked over the shoulders of the outermost of the group. What
horrible cantrip of Fortune had consigned this old barren weed of a
man, this white exotic of a girl, to a merciless handling by these
demons? The two were in walking dress, and not in the _déshabille_ of
prisoners. There was a lull in the systematic progress of the
butchery. Here, it would seem, was an _entr’acte_ designed only to
relieve the tedium of waiting.
A half-dozen harpies held the girl. There was a stain of red on her
ripe young lip, for I think one of the beasts had struck her; but her
face was stubborn with pride. In front of all the old wizened man, who
had been released, ran to and fro in an agony of obsequious terror.
“Yes, yes,” he quavered, “’tis a luminous sight--an admirable show!
They lie like the fallen sticks of rockets, glimmering a dying spark.
Is it not so, Carinne? Little cabbage, is it not so?”
He implored her with his feverish eyes.
“They are martyrs!” cried the girl; “and you are a coward!”
“No, no!” he wailed, and wrung his hands; and “My God! she will murder
me!” he shrieked.
Suddenly he saw, darted through the ring of ruffians, and caught the
breast of my coat with both his hands.
“Monsieur! you have nobility in your face! Tell these good souls that
I am a furious patriot and a good citizen. Monsieur, Monsieur! We walk
abroad--we are involved, unwitting, in the _mêlée_. The girl
denounces all for pigs and murderers, and, naturally, those who hear
take umbrage and force us hither.”
His dry lips vibrated; he danced up and down like a gnat on a
window-pane. All the time the women were volubly chattering and the
men cursing and pulling. They desired, it seemed, a prologue to the
second act of the tragedy; and that was bad art. But then they were as
drunk as one could wish.
“Thou art nice and dainty, _citoyenne_!” they shrieked. “See
here--thou shalt be _vivandière_ to the brave army of avengers! Tap
her an aristocrat heart and fill her a canteen that all may drink!”
The beastly proposal was not too gross for the occasion. A man lurched
forward with a jeering oath, and I--I sprang to the front too, and
took the hound by his gulping throat. There came a great noise about
me; I did not relax my hold, and some one rushed into our midst.
“What do you here!” he cried, harshly (Casimir’s voice). “Death of
God! have you orders to insult and threaten peaceable citizens who
walk abroad to see the illuminations?”
With a fierce sweep of his arms he cleared all away in front of him.
The act--the gesture, brought him to my side.
“Go--escape!” he whispered, frantically. “This, here, I will attend
to.”
“You knew, then?” I gasped out; and he fell back from me.
But I released my hold and stood panting. I was at the moment no whit
in love with life, but I dreaded by the least stubbornness to
precipitate the catastrophe that threatened that half-fainting girl.
Her Casimir gave his arm to in a peremptory manner. She clung to him,
and he led her stumbling across the yard, the little whimpering
pinch-fist scuttling in their wake. The mob spat curses after them,
but--this _intermezzo_ being no part of its programme--it respected
the Deputy’s insignia of office so far as to allow him his perquisite.
Then, with a howl of fury, it turned upon me--
“Accursed! thou dost well to dispute the people’s will!”
“See his fine monseigneur hands, washed white in a bath of milk, while
the peasants drank rotten water!”
“He will think to cow us with a look. He cannot disabuse himself of
the tradition. Down with the dog of an aristocrat!”
“But if he is Brunswick’s courier--Brunswick that would dine in Paris
on the boiling hearts of patriots!”
I was backing slowly towards the gate as they followed reviling me.
What would you? I could not help others; I would take my own destinies
in hand. Here, in deadly personal peril, I felt my feet on the good
earth once more, and found restoration of my reason in a violence of
action. There was no assistance possible. Paris this night was a
menagerie, in which all beasts of prey and of burden were released
from restraint to resolve for themselves the question of survival.
In a moment I turned and fled, and half-a-dozen came screaming after
me. I gained the gate in advance, and sped down the Rue St Benoit. One
man, lurching from a wineshop, cut at me aimlessly with a notched and
bloody sabre; but I evaded him with ease, and he fell into the midst
of the pursuers, retarding them a little. I reached the south-west
angle of the prison, where the _Place_ split up, like the blown corner
of a flag, into many little crooked ribbons of streets, and amongst
these I dived, racing haphazard, while the red-socks thudded in my
wake and my heart in my ribs. Suddenly, turning a corner, I saw the
narrow mouth of an alley gape to my left. Into it I went, like a
touched worm into its hole, and, swallowed by the blackness, stood
still. The feet pounded by; but, sooner or later, I knew the dogs must
nose back to pick up the lost scent. Then they would have me nicely in
a little _cul de sac_, like a badger in a tub.
I leaned my shoulder--to the wall, as I thought; but the wall gave to
my pressure, and I stumbled and went through it with a sliding run,
while something flapped to, grievously scoring my shins in its
passing. I was on my feet in an instant, however, and then I saw that
I had broken, by way of a swing-door, into a little dusty lobby, to
one side of which was a wicket and pay-place, and thence a flight of
wooden stairs ran aloft to some chamber from which flowed down a
feeble radiance of light.
I pushed through the wicket (not a soul was in the place, it seemed)
and went softly and rapidly up the stairs. At the top I came upon a
sight that at first astounded, then inspired me.
I was in one of those _salles de spectacle_ that were at that time as
numerous in Paris as were political clubs--a wide, low room, with an
open platform at its further end for musicians, and, round three of
its walls, a roped-in enclosure for figures in waxwork. It was these
bowelless dolls that caused me my start, and in which I immediately
saw my one little chance of salvation.
I went down the row gingerly, on tiptoe. A horn lantern, slung over
the stair-head, was the only light vouchsafed this thronged assembly
of dummies. Its rays danced weakly in corners, and lent some of the
waxen faces a spurious life. A ticket was before each
effigy--generally, as I hurriedly gathered, a quite indispensable
adjunct. I had my desperate plan; but perhaps I was too particular to
select my complete double. Here, a button or the cut of a collar were
the pregnant conditions of history. The clothes made the man, and
Mirabeau had written ‘Le Tartufe’ on the strength of a flowing wig. I
saw Necker personating our unhappy monarch in that fatal Phrygian cap
that was like the glowing peak of a volcano; stuttering Desmoulins
waving a painted twig, his lips inappropriately inseparable; the
English Pitt, with a nose blown to a point; Voltaire; Rousseau;
Beaumarchais--many of the notabilities and notorieties of our own
times--and before the last I stopped suddenly.
I would not for the world insult the author of ‘Figaro’; but it was my
distinction to be without any; and in a waxwork the ticket makes the
man.
Pierre Augustin was represented pointing a Republican moral--in dress
a _pseudo petit-maître_--at his feet a broken watch. One recalls the
incident--at Versailles--when a grand seigneur requests the
ex-horologist to correct his timepiece for him. “Monsieur, my hand
shakes.” “_Laissez donc, monsieur!_ you belittle your professional
skill.” Beaumarchais flings the watch on the floor. “_Voilà,
monsieur!_ it is as I said!”
Now I saw my hope in this figure and (it was all a matter of moments
with me) whipped it up in my arms and ran with it to the end of the
platform. A flounce of baize hung therefrom to the floor, and into the
hollow revealed by the lifting of this I shot the invertebrate dummy,
and then scuttled back to the ropes to take its place.
There were sounds as I did so--a noise below that petrified me in the
position I assumed. My heart seemed to burr like the winding-wheel of
a mechanical doll. I pray M. Beaumarchais to forgive me that travesty
of a dignified reproof.
A step--that of a single individual--came bounding up the stair. My
face was turned in its direction. I tried to look and yet keep my eyes
fixed. The dull flapping light seconded my dissemblance; but the
occasion braced me like a tonic, and I was determined to strike, if
need were, with all the force of the pugnacious wit I represented.
Suddenly I saw a white, fearful countenance come over the
stair-head--shoulders, legs, a complete form. It was that of an ugly
stunted man of fifty, whose knees shook, whose cheeks quivered like a
blanc-mange. He ran hither and thither, sobbing and muttering to
himself.
“Quick, quick! who?--Mirabeau? A brave thought, a magnificent thought!
My God!--will they fathom it? I have his brow--his scornful air of
insistence. My God, my God!--that I should sink to be one of my own
puppets!”
Astounded, I realised the truth. This poltroon--the very proprietor of
the show--was in my own actual case, and had hit upon a like way out
of his predicament. I saw him seize and trundle the ridiculous
presentment of M. Mirabeau to the room end, and then fling it
hurriedly down and kick it--the insolent jackass!--under the curtain.
I saw him run back and pose himself--with a fatuous vanity even in his
terror--as that massive autocrat of the Assembly; and then, with a
clap and a roar, I heard at last the hounds of pursuit break covert
below and come yelling up the stairs.
I do not think I shook; yet it seemed impossible that they could pass
me by. There were one or two amongst them I thought I recognised as
Carinne’s captors; but they were all hideous, frantic shapes,
elf-locked, malodorous, bestial and drunk with blood. They uttered
discordant cries as they came scrambling into the room; and by a
flickering at the nape of his neck I could see that my fellow-sufferer
was unable to control the throaty rising of his agitation. Suddenly a
horrible silence befell. One of the intruders, a powerful young
ruffian of a malignant jesting humour, put his comrades back and
silenced them with an arm. His bloodshot eyes were fascinating poor
Mirabeau; slowly he raised a finger and pointed it at the creature.
The bubbles seemed to fly up the latter’s neck as if his heart were
turned into water. It was a terrible moment--then, all at once, the
whole room echoed with demon laughter.
“Mother of Christ! what cunning!”
“But, my God! he is a fine libel on the king of patriots!”
“See! the works have not run down. He twitches yet from his last
performance!”
“He makes himself a show to the people. He shall be given a lamp in
the yard of the Abbaye.”
The figure fell upon its knees with a choking shriek.
“Messieurs! I acted upon my first instinct of preservation! I had no
thought, I swear it, to insult the great or to question the majesty of
the people. Messieurs, I detest aristocrats and applaud your method of
dealing with them. _Merci! merci!_ I am a poor exhibitor of waxworks;
an excellent patriot and a servant of the public.”
“But that is true!” cried a voice from the stairs. “This is little
Tic-tac, that helped to decorate the Capet’s chariot on the day of the
Hôtel de Ville.”
The mob grunted over this advocate.
“But he helped a prisoner to escape.”
(Was there another, then, in the same plight as myself?)
“Messieurs! he asked the way of me, as any stranger might!”
“_Malepeste!_ if thou tell’st us so! But thou hast dared to personate
a God!”
“Messieurs, he lent his countenance to me, as ever to the
unfortunate.”
The answer raised a roar of approbation.
“_Comme il est fin!_ take thy goose-skin! and yet we must tax thee
somehow.”
“Let us destroy this show that he has profaned!”
My heart seemed to shrink into itself. I suffered--I suffered; but
fortunately for a few moments only.
With the words on his lips, the fellow that had spoken slashed with
his sabre, over the kneeling showman’s head, amongst the staring
effigies. The whistle of his weapon made me blink. What did it
matter?--the end must come now.
It was not as I foresaw. The waxen head spun into the air--the figure
toppled against that standing next to it--that against its
neighbour--its neighbour against me. I saw what was my cue, and went
down in my turn, stiffly, with a dusty flop, twisting to my side as I
fell, and hoping that he whom I was bowling over in due order was rich
in padding. Nevertheless I was horribly bruised.
There was a howl of laughter.
“_Mor’ Dieu!_ but five at a blow!” cried the executioner. “This is
better than the one to fifty yonder!” and he came running to read the
names of those he had overturned.
“Necker! it is right that he should be pictured fallen.
Pitt--Beaumarchais! ha, ha, little toad! where are those patriot
muskets? in your breeches-pocket? but I will cut them out!”
Now I gave up all for lost. He stepped back to get his distance--there
came a crash by the stairway, and the room was plunged in darkness.
One of the mob had swung up his weapon over a figure, and had knocked
out the lantern with a back-handed blow.
It is the little incidents of life that are prolific as insects. The
situation resolved itself into clamour and laughter and a boisterous
groping of the company down the black stairway. In a minute the place
was silent and deserted.
I lay still, as yet awaiting developments. I could not forget that M.
Tic-tac, as a pronounced patriot, might not honour my confidence. For
my escape, it must have been as I supposed. Another victim, eluding
the murderers, had drawn them off my scent, and the showman had
effected yet a second cross-current. He was indeed fortunate to have
kept a whole skin.
Presently I heard him softly stirring and moaning to himself.
“_Misérable!_ to have dishonoured my _rôle_! Would _he_ have
succumbed thus to an accident? But I am like him--yes, I am like him,
for all they may say.”
Their mockery was the wormwood in his cup. He dragged himself to his
feet by-and-by, and felt his way across the room to recover his abused
idol. Then I would delay no longer. I rose, stepped rapidly to the
stair-head, and descended to the street. He heard me--as I knew by the
terrified cessation of his breathing,--and thought me, perhaps, a
laggard member of his late company. Anyhow he neither moved nor spoke.
The killers were at their work again. The agonised yells of the
victims followed and maddened me. But I was secure from further
pursuit, save by the dogs of conscious helplessness.
And one of these kept barking at my heel: “Carinne, that you were
impotent to defend! What has become of the child?”