WHICH CONTAINS AN ACCOUNT OF THE ARREST OF BOUCHOTTE AND
MAURICE, OF THE DISASTER WHICH BEFELL THE D'ESPARVIEU
LIBRARY, AND OF THE DEPARTURE OF THE ANGELS
Maurice d'Esparvieu passed a terrible night. At the least sound he
seized his revolver that he might not fall alive into the hands of
justice. When morning came he snatched the newspapers from the hands of
the concierge, devoured them greedily, and gave a cry of joy; he had
just read that Inspector Grolle having been taken to the Morgue for the
post-mortem, the police-surgeons had only discovered bruises and
contusions of a very superficial nature, and stated that death had been
brought about by the rupture of an aneurism of the aorta.
"You see, Arcade," he exclaimed triumphantly; "you see I am not an
assassin. I am innocent. I could never have imagined how extremely
agreeable it is to be innocent."
Then he grew thoughtful, and--no unusual phenomenon--reflection
dissipated his gaiety.
"I am innocent,--but there is no disguising the fact," he said, shaking
his head, "I am one of a band of malefactors. I live with miscreants.
You are in your right place there, Arcade, for you are deceitful, cruel,
and perverse. But I come of good family and have received an excellent
education, and I blush for it."
"I also," said Arcade, "have received an excellent education."
"Where was that?"
"In Heaven."
"No, Arcade, no; you never had any education. If good principles had
been inculcated into you, you would still hold them. Such principles are
never lost. In my childhood I learnt to revere my family, my country, my
religion. I have not forgotten the lesson and I never shall. Do you know
what shocks me most in you? It is not your perversity, your cruelty,
your black ingratitude; it is not your agnosticism, which may be borne
with at a pinch; it is not your scepticism, though it is very much out
of date (for since the national awakening there is no longer any
scepticism in France);--no, what disgusts me in you is your lack of
taste, the bad style of your ideas, the inelegance of your doctrines.
You think like an intellectual, you speak like a freethinker, you have
theories which reek of radicalism and Combeism and all ignoble systems.
Get along with you! you disgust me. Arcade, my old friend, Arcade, my
dear angel, Arcade, my beloved child, listen to your guardian angel!
Yield to my prayers, renounce your mad ideas; become good, simple,
innocent, and happy once more. Put on your hat, come with me to
Nôtre-Dame. We will say a prayer and burn a candle together."
Meanwhile public opinion was still active in the matter; the leading
papers, the organs of the national awakening, in articles of real
elevation and real depth, unravelled the philosophy of this monstrous
attack which was revolting to the conscience. They discovered the real
origin, the indirect but effective cause in the revolutionary doctrines
which had been disseminated unchecked, in the weakening of social ties,
the relaxing of moral discipline, in the repeated appeals to every
appetite, to every greedy desire. It would be needful, so as to cut down
the evil at its root, to repudiate as quickly as possible all such
chimeras and Utopias as syndicalism, the income-tax, etc., etc., etc.
Many newspapers, and these not the least important, pointed out that the
recrudescence of crime was but the natural fruit of impiety and
concluded that the salvation of society lay in an unanimous and sincere
return to religion. On the Sunday which followed the crime the
congregations in the churches were noticed to be unusually large.
Judge Salneuve, who was entrusted with the task of investigation, first
examined the persons arrested by the police, and lost his way among
attractive but illusory clues; however, the report of the detective
Montremain, which was laid before him, put him on the right road, and
soon led him to recognise the miscreants of La Jonchère as the authors
of the crime of the Rue de Ramey. He ordered a search to be made for
Arcade and Zita, and issued a warrant against Prince Istar, on whom the
detectives laid hands as he was leaving Bouchotte's, where he had been
depositing some bombs of new design. The Kerûb, on learning the
detectives' intentions, smiled broadly and asked them if they had a
powerful motor-car. On their replying that they had one at the door, he
assured them that was all he wanted. Thereupon he felled the two
detectives on the stairs, walked up to the waiting car, flung the
chauffeur under a motor-'bus which was opportunely passing, and seized
the steering wheel under the eyes of the terrified crowd.
That same evening Monsieur Jeancourt, the Police Magistrate, entered
Théophile's rooms just when Bouchotte was swallowing a raw egg to clear
her voice, for she was to sing her new song, "They haven't got any in
Germany," at the "National Eldorado" that evening. The musician was
absent. Bouchotte received the Magistrate, and received him with a
hauteur which intensified the simplicity of her attire; Bouchotte was
_en déshabille_. The worthy Magistrate seized the score of _Aline, Queen
of Golconda_, and the love-letters which the singer carefully preserved
in the drawer of the table by her bed, for she was an orderly young
woman. He was about to withdraw when he espied a cupboard, which he
opened with a careless air, and found machines capable of blowing up
half Paris, and a pair of large white wings, whose nature and use
appeared inexplicable to him. Bouchotte was invited to complete her
toilette, and, in spite of her cries, was taken off to the
police-station.
Monsieur Salneuve was indefatigable. After the examination of the papers
seized in Bouchotte's house, and acting on the information of
Montremain, he issued a warrant for the arrest of young d'Esparvieu,
which was executed on Wednesday, the 27th May, at seven o'clock in the
morning, with great discretion. For three days Maurice had neither slept
nor eaten, loved nor lived. He had not a moment's doubt as to the nature
of the matutinal visit. At the sight of the police magistrate a strange
calm fell on him. Arcade had not returned to sleep in the flat. Maurice
begged the magistrate to wait for him, dressed with care, and then
accompanied the magistrate a calmness of mind which was barely
disturbed when the door of the Conciergerie closed on him. Alone in his
cell, he climbed upon the table to look out. His tranquillity was due to
his weariness of spirit, to his numbed senses, and to the fact that he
no longer stood in fear of arrest. His misfortune endowed him with
superior wisdom. He felt he had fallen into a state of grace. He did not
think too highly or too humbly of himself, but left his cause in the
hands of God. With no desire to cover up his faults, which he would not
hide even from himself, he addressed himself in mind to Providence, to
point out that if he had fallen into disorder and rebellion it was to
lead his erring angel back into the straight path. He stretched himself
on the couch and slept in peace.
On hearing of the arrest of a music-hall singer and of a young man of
fashion, both Paris and the provinces felt painful surprise. Deeply
stirred by the tragic accounts which the leading newspapers were
bringing out, the general idea was that the sort of people the
authorities ought to bring to justice were ferocious anarchists, all
reeking and dripping from deeds of blood and arson; but they failed to
understand what the world of Art and Fashion should have to do with such
things. At this news, which he was one of the last to hear, the
President of the Council and Keeper of the Seals started up in his
chair. The Sphinxes that adorned it were less terrible than he, and in
the throes of his angry meditation he cut the mahogany of his imperial
table with his penknife, after the manner of Napoleon. And when Judge
Salneuve, whose attendance he had commanded, appeared before him, the
President flung his penknife in the grate, as Louis XIV flung his cane
out of the window in the presence of Lauzun; and it cost him a supreme
effort to master himself and to say in a voice of suppressed fury:
"Are you mad? Surely I said often enough that I meant the plot to be
anarchist, anti-social, fundamentally anti-social and anti-governmental,
with a shade of syndicalism. I have made it clear enough that I wanted
it kept within these lines; and what do you go and make of it?... The
vengeance of anarchists and aspirants to freedom? Whom do you arrest? A
singer adored of the nationalist public, and the son of a man highly
esteemed in the Catholic party, who receives our bishops and has the
_entrée_ to the Vatican; a man who may be one day sent as ambassador to
the Pope. At one blow you alienate one hundred and sixty Deputies and
forty Senators of the Right on the very eve of a motion to discuss the
question of religious pacification; you embroil me with my friends of
to-day, with my friends of to-morrow. Was it to find out if you were in
the same dilemma as des Aubels that you seized the love-letters of
young Maurice d'Esparvieu? I can put your mind at rest on that point.
You are, and all Paris knows it. But it is not to avenge your personal
affronts that you are on the Bench."
"Monsieur le Garde des Sceaux," murmured the Judge, nearly apoplectic
and in a choked voice. "I am an honest man."
"You are a fool ... and a provincial. Listen to me; if Maurice
d'Esparvieu and Mademoiselle Bouchotte are not released within half an
hour I will crush you like a piece of glass. Be off!"
Monsieur René d'Esparvieu went himself to fetch his son from the
Conciergerie and took him back to the old house in the Rue Garancière.
The return was triumphant. The news had been disseminated that Maurice
had with generous imprudence interested himself in an attempt to restore
the monarchy, and that Judge Salneuve, the infamous freemason, the tool
of Combes and André, had tried to compromise the young man by making him
out to be an accomplice of a band of criminals.
That was what Abbé Patouille seemed to think, and he answered for
Maurice as for himself. It was known, moreover, that breaking with his
father, who had rallied to the support of the Republic, young
d'Esparvieu was on the high road to becoming an out-and-out Royalist.
The people who had an inside knowledge of things saw in his arrest the
vengeance of the Jews. Was not Maurice a notorious anti-Semite? Catholic
youths went forth to hurl imprecations at Judge Salneuve under the
windows of his residence in the Rue Guénégaud, opposite the Mint.
On the Boulevard du Palais a band of students presented Maurice with a
branch of palm. Maurice made a charming reply.
Maurice was overcome with emotion when he beheld the old house in which
his childhood had been spent, and fell weeping into his mother's arms.
It was a great day, unhappily marred by one painful incident. Monsieur
Sariette, who had lost his reason as a consequence of the shocking
events that had taken place in the Rue de Courcelles, had suddenly
become violent. He had shut himself up in the library, and there he had
remained for twenty-four hours, uttering the most horrible cries, and,
turning a deaf ear alike to threats and entreaties, refused to come out.
He had spent the night in a condition of extreme restlessness, for all
night long the lamp had been seen passing rapidly to and fro behind the
curtains. In the morning, hearing Hippolyte shouting to him from the
court below, he opened the window of the Hall of the Spheres and the
Philosophers, and heaved two or three rather weighty tomes on to the old
valet's head. The whole of the domestic staff--men, women, and
boys--hurried to the spot, and the librarian proceeded to throw out
books by the armful on to their heads. In view of the gravity of the
situation, Monsieur René d'Esparvieu did not disdain to intervene. He
appeared in night-cap and dressing-gown, and attempted to reason with
the poor lunatic, whose only reply was to pour forth torrents of abuse
on the man whom till then he had worshipped as his benefactor, and to
endeavour to crush him beneath all the Bibles, all the Talmuds, all the
sacred books of India and Persia, all the Greek Fathers, and all the
Latin Fathers, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Saint
Augustine, Saint Jerome, all the apologists, ay! and under the _Histoire
des Variations_, annotated by Bossuet himself! Octavos, quartos, folios
came crashing down, and lay in a sordid heap on the courtyard pavement.
The letters of Gassendi, of Père Mersenne, of Pascal, were blown about
hither and thither by the wind. The lady's-maid who had stooped down to
rescue some of the sheets from the gutter got a blow on the head from an
enormous Dutch atlas. Madame René d'Esparvieu had been terrified by the
ominous sounds, and appeared on the scene without waiting to apply the
finishing touches of powder and paint. When he caught sight of her, old
Sariette became more violent than ever. Down they came one after another
as hard as he could pelt them; the busts of the poets, philosophers,
and historians of antiquity--Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Herodotus, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero,
Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Epictetus--all lay scattered on the ground. The
celestial sphere and the terrestrial globe descended with a terrifying
crash that was followed by a ghastly hush, broken only by the shrill
laughter of little Léon, who was looking down on the scene from a window
above. A locksmith having opened the library door, all the household
hastened to enter, and found the aged Sariette entrenched behind piles
of books, busily engaged in tearing and slashing away at the _Lucretius_
of the Prior de Vendôme annotated in Voltaire's own hand. They had to
force a way through the barricade. But the maniac, perceiving that his
stronghold was being invaded, fled away and escaped on to the roof. For
two whole hours he gave vent to shouts and yells that were heard far and
wide. In the Rue Garancière the crowd kept growing bigger and bigger.
All had their eyes fixed on the unhappy creature, and whenever he
stumbled on the slates, which cracked beneath him, they gave a shout of
terror. In the midst of the crowd, the Abbé Patouille, who expected
every moment to see him hurled into space, was reciting the prayers for
the dying, and making ready to give him the absolution _in extremis_.
There was a cordon of police round the house keeping order. Someone
summoned the fire-brigade, and the sound of their approach was soon
heard. They placed a ladder against the wall of the house, and after a
terrific struggle managed to secure the maniac, who in the course of his
desperate resistance had one of the muscles of his arm torn out. He was
immediately removed to an asylum.
Maurice dined at home, and there were smiles of tenderness and affection
when Victor, the old butler, brought on the roast veal. Monsieur l'Abbé
Patouille sat at the right hand of the Christian mother, unctuously
contemplating the family which Heaven had so plentifully blessed.
Nevertheless, Madame d'Esparvieu was ill at ease. Every day she received
anonymous letters of so insulting and coarse a nature that she thought
at first they must come from a discharged footman. She now knew they
were the handiwork of her youngest daughter, Berthe, a mere child!
Little Léon, too, gave her pain and anxiety. He paid no attention to his
lessons, and was given to bad habits. He showed a cruel disposition. He
had plucked his sister's canaries alive; he stuck innumerable pins into
the chair on which Mademoiselle Caporal was accustomed to sit, and had
stolen fourteen francs from the poor girl, who did nothing but cry and
dab her eyes and nose from morning till night.
No sooner was dinner over than Maurice rushed off to the little
dwelling in the Rue de Rome, impatient to meet his angel again. Through
the door he heard a loud sound of voices, and saw assembled in the room
where the apparition had taken place, Arcade, Zita, the angelic
musician, and the Kerûb, who was lying on the bed, smoking a huge pipe,
carelessly scorching pillows, sheets, and coverlets. They embraced
Maurice, and announced their departure. Their faces shone with happiness
and courage. Alone, the inspired author of _Aline, Queen of Golconda_,
shed tears and raised his terrified gaze to heaven. The Kerûb forced him
into the party of rebellion by setting before him two alternatives:
either to allow himself to be dragged from prison to prison on earth, or
to carry fire and sword into the palace of Ialdabaoth.
Maurice perceived with sorrow that the earth had scarcely any hold over
them. They were setting out filled with immense hope, which was quite
justifiable. Doubtless they were but a few combatants to oppose the
innumerable soldiers of the sultan of the heavens; but they counted on
compensating for the inferiority of their numbers by the irresistible
impetus of a sudden attack. They were not ignorant of the fact that
Ialdabaoth, who flatters himself on knowing all things, sometimes allows
himself to be taken by surprise. And it certainly looked as if the first
attack would have taken him unawares had it not been for the warning of
the archangel Michael. The celestial army had made no progress since its
victory over the rebels before the beginning of Time.
As regards armaments and material it was as out of date as the army of
the Moors. Its generals slumbered in sloth and ignorance. Loaded with
honours and riches, they preferred the delights of the banquet to the
fatigues of war. Michael, the commander-in-chief, ever loyal and brave,
had lost, with the passing of centuries, his fire and enthusiasm. The
conspirators of 1914, on the other hand, knew the very latest and the
most delicate appliances of science for the art of destruction. At
length all was ready and decided upon. The army of revolt, assembled by
corps each a hundred thousand angels strong, on all the waste places of
the earth--steppes, pampas, deserts, fields of ice and snow--was ready
to launch itself against the sky. The angels, in modifying the rhythm of
the atoms of which they are composed, are able to traverse the most
varied mediums. Spirits that have descended on to the earth, being
formed, since their incarnation, of too compact a substance, can no
longer fly of themselves, and to rise into ethereal regions and then
insensibly grow volatilized, have need of the assistance of their
brothers, who, though revolutionaries like themselves, nevertheless,
stayed behind in the Empyrean and remained, not immaterial (for all is
matter in the Universe), but gloriously untrammelled and diaphanous.
Certes, it was not without painful anxiety that Arcade, Istar, and Zita
prepared themselves to pass from the heavy atmosphere of the earth to
the limpid depths of the heavens. To plunge into the ether there is need
to expend such energy that the most intrepid hesitate to take flight.
Their very substance, while penetrating this fine medium, must in itself
grow fine-spun, become vaporised, and pass from human dimensions to the
volume of the vastest clouds which have ever enveloped the earth. Soon
they would surpass in grandeur the uttermost planets, whose orbits they,
invisible and imponderable, would traverse without disturbing.
In this enterprise--the vastest that angels could undertake--their
substance would be ultimately hotter than the fire and colder than the
ice, and they would suffer pangs sharper than death.
Maurice read all the daring and the pain of the undertaking in the eyes
of Arcade.
"You are going?" he said to him, weeping.
"We are going, with Nectaire, to seek the great archangel to lead us to
victory."
"Whom do you call thus?"
"The priests of the demiurge have made him known to you in their
calumnies."
"Unhappy being," sighed Maurice.
Arcade embraced him, and Maurice felt the angel's tears as they dropped
upon his cheek.