"THERE IS NO LAW--"
The wild and drunken madness of the triumphant people expended itself
in many strange forms, of which none was stranger, more awesome, more
ludicrous and yet more tragic than the Carmagnole.
This was a dance that seized whole multitudes in its rhythmic, swaying
clutch. The tune was "Ca Ira!" that mad measure of the sansculottes,
meaning roughly--
"Here it goes--
"And there it goes!"
--and go forever it did till all the world of Paris seemed a heaving,
throbbing vortex of werewolves and witches, things lower than animals
in their topsyturvydom, drunken frenzy and frequent obscenity.
The throng through which Henriette now directed her steps was verging
on this madness, though not yet at the pitch of it.
Henriette managed to find her way to two sansculotte troopers
stationed in the centre of the Place, to whom she told her story.
Reasonable fellows they seemed, offering to conduct her presently to
the new authorities and get a search warrant for the Frochard clan.
But the madder swirl of the Carmagnole came along, and presto!
swallowed them up. It happened on this wise:
As the locust swarms of the dancers enveloped them in shortening
circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and
literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity,
assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs
were clinging, not to be "shaken"; as the mad whirl of the dancers
touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne
away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing thenceforward
from our story. Little Henriette dived to a place of safety, the side
wall of the nearest building. Straightening herself after the
unexpected knocks and bruises, she looked aghast at the scene before
her.
Whole streets of them, plazas of them, these endlessly gyrating male
and female loons; swirls of gayety, twisting, upsetting passers-by
like a cyclone;--arms, bodies and legs frantically waving, as at the
very brink of Dante's Inferno!
Strange little dramas of lust and conquest punctuated the cyclonic
panorama. Here, a girl's snapping black eyes, winking devilishly, and
pursed-up Cupid mouth invited a new swain to master her. There, a
short-skirted beauty, whose sways and kicks revealed bare thighs, was
dancing wildly a solo intended to infatuate further two rival
admirers. Again, a half-crazed sansculotte had won a girl and in token
of triumph was spinning her body horizontally around like a top,
upheld by the open palm of his huge right arm.
But what might be this comic figure, quite unpartnered--knocked and
shoved from human pillar to human post--winning the deep curses of the
dancers, and their hearty wallops when not o'er-busied with
Terpsichore?
Picard, the ex-valet of aristocracy, finally let out from the
Salpetriere mock-court, had stumbled into this bedlam of sansculotte
craziness, the rhythm and procedure of which were as foreign to him as
a proposition in Euclid.
But the Jolly Baker, from the Ile de Paris, was his match. The
bare-armed, lean-legged pleasurer had equipped himself (by way of
disguise) with a large false moustache, and evading the close watch of
his hatchet-faced, middle-aged spouse, had come forth to celebrate.
Neither dancer nor vocalist, the Jolly Baker had other little
entertaining ways all his own.
As the foolscap-crowned, white-and-red-trousered Picard bumped the
pave, he saw squatting opposite him a figure whose gleaming eyes,
ferocious whiskerage and lean-wiry frame suggested the canine rather
than the human species. The Jolly Baker was a bum werewolf, but a "hot
dog."
The gleaming eyes never left Picard's face, the dog-like body jumped
whichever way he did, Picard half expected the dog-man to bite or snap
the next instant and take a chunk out of him. Both had got to their
feet now; the stranger still silent and nosey, Picard looking out of
the corner of his eye for a way of escape. But just then the Baker
spied a maenad with a drum.
One could beat drum in celebration, if naught else. Lo and behold, the
posterior of the foolscapped one would serve for a drum very nicely!
The Jolly Baker twisted Picard around, bending him half double as he
did so.
With a rear thrust and firm shoulder grip, the Jolly Baker leaped upon
Picard's back. Emulating the young woman's beating of the drum, he
rained a shower of blows on the valet's hind quarters.
The new "drum"-beater was now quite the cynosure of admiring
attention. He had captured the centre of the stage. He gloried
in it. With a more elaborate, fanciful and complexive
"rat-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat--"
He suddenly lost his grip of the "human drum," Picard wriggled out
from under, and the drummer bumped his own posterior on the pave.
Calmly, quite undisturbed, the foolish Baker continued to "rat-tat-tat"
with a stick on the curb, then as the "Ca Ira" beats resounded above
him, his own squatting body began to sway with the music in a
heightened absurdity. Picard had run off. He was convinced these people
were crazier than any of those in the mad cells of Salpetriere....
[Illustration: JACQUES FORGET-NOT, SWEARS VENGEANCE ON THE FAMILY OF THE
DE VAUDREYS. THE COUNT DE LINIERES AND THE CHEVALIER DE VAUDREY HEAR HIS
THREATS.]
Long since Henriette had evaded the worse sights and sounds by
creeping as best she could along the side walls of the buildings,
watching her chance to get away from the revelers. Again, at the
street corner, another swirl passed over her, knocking her down.
Ruefully she picked herself up again.
The throng had passed by completely, leaving but a drunken fool
prancing here and there, or a scant winrow of half-prostrate figures.
Henriette ran with all her might to the only refuge she knew--her old
faubourg lodgings.
The middle-aged landlady who in days agone had fetched the guard
to subdue Danton's would-be assassins, and who likewise had
resented Robespierre's prying as to the identity of Henriette's
visitor, studied the girl at first a bit quizzically. Released
from Salpetriere, eh? Was she the same sweet, pure Henriette she
knew? Yes, the little Girard--la petite Girard--looked to be the
same hard-working, respectable seamstress person of yore, only that
she seemed very weak and about to collapse!
The landlady folded Henriette within one stout arm.
She pointed with her free hand to the bedchamber immediately above.
"Your old room up there awaits you," she remarked kindly. "As soon as
you have recovered strength a bit, I have no doubt the old sewing job
will be yours too!"
* * * * *
... Jacques-Forget-Not and his men arrived too late at the Prefect's
palace for complete vengeance on the de Vaudreys.
Around the historic Fourteenth of July, there was a pell-mell exodus
of aristocrats from the city. A panic-stricken servant brought the
Count de Linieres tidings of the people's victory.
"Fly, monsieur! Fly, madame!" he cried. "The troops are overthrown,
the Bastille surrounded, before nightfall the mob will surely attack
here and try to kill your excellencies. Fly, I implore you!"
Other messengers confirmed the news, and thus it happened that the
erstwhile proud and arrogant Minister of Police who but yesterday had
ruled France was reduced to making the most hurried preparations for
flight, aided by the distracted Countess.
The latter realized with a pang that the hegira meant farewell,
perhaps forever, to the chance of recovering her lost daughter Louise
from this welter of Paris. How mysterious the ways of the Higher
Power! Her beloved nephew the Chevalier, at least, was safe in the
distant fortress to which the Count her husband had condemned him.
Pray God Louise might be saved--, yes! and her foster-sister
Henrietta, beloved of the Chevalier--Henriette whom her husband had
branded by unjust accusation....
The de Linieres party succeeded in evading the fate of numbers of the
runaway aristocrats, who were bodily pulled out of their coaches and
trampled upon or strung up by the infuriated mobs. They managed to
make their way to the northeastern borders of France. There thousands
of emigres were received under the protection of foreign powers,
awaiting the ripe moment for the impact of foreign armies on French
soil and the hoped-for reconquest of the monarchists....
That night the beautiful Hotel de Vaudrey--home of the Vaudrey and
Linieres family and fortune--was given up to sack and pillage. Enraged
that the objects of his vengeance had fled, the leader Forget-Not
ordered a general demolition.
Priceless works of art were hurled about and destroyed. The cellars of
old wines were quickly emptied by drunken revelers. The kitchen and
pantries catered to the mob's gluttony. Wenches arrayed themselves in
the Countess's costly silks and linens; perfumed, powdered and painted
with the cosmetics; preened and perked in the cheval mirrors.
Among the motley crew of destroyers, drunkards, gluttons, satyrs and
sirens, our friend the Jolly Baker was on the job--unfortunately for
him, accompanied this time by his hatchet-faced spouse.
He started a flirtation with a new-made vamp, all tricked out in
stolen finery. The Jolly Baker had found a new use for his eyes and
eyebrows, i.e., to convey love messages. He was making the most
alarming motions and succeeding most prodigiously in evoking the new
vamp's answering smiles when--
"Ker-plunk!"
--Dame Baker fetched him a tremendous slap directly on the face that
caused him to see innumerable little stars.
Gradually coming back to this mundane world, the Jolly Baker resolved
to devote his strict attention to the bottle....