After taking about a hundred steps Morgan removed his mask. He ran more
risk of being noticed in the streets of Paris as a masked man than with
uncovered face.
When he reached the Rue Taranne he knocked at the door of a small
furnished lodging-house at the corner of that street and the Rue du
Dragon, took a candlestick from a table, a key numbered 12 from a
nail, and climbed the stairs without exciting other attention than a
well-known lodger would returning home. The clock was striking ten as he
closed the door of his room. He listened attentively to the strokes, the
light of his candle not reaching as far as the chimney-piece. He counted
ten.
“Good!” he said to himself; “I shall not be too late.”
In spite of this probability, Morgan seemed determined to lose no time.
He passed a bit of tinder-paper under the heater on the hearth, which
caught fire instantly. He lighted four wax-candles, all there were in
the room, placed two on the mantel-shelf and two on a bureau opposite,
and spread upon the bed a complete dress of the Incroyable of the very
latest fashion. It consisted of a short coat, cut square across the
front and long behind, of a soft shade between a pale-green and a
pearl-gray; a waistcoat of buff plush, with eighteen mother-of-pearl
buttons; an immense white cravat of the finest cambric; light trousers
of white cashmere, decorated with a knot of ribbon where they buttoned
above the calves, and pearl-gray silk stockings, striped transversely
with the same green as the coat, and delicate pumps with diamond
buckles. The inevitable eye-glass was not forgotten. As for the hat, it
was precisely the same in which Carle Vernet painted his dandy of the
Directory.
When these things were ready, Morgan waited with seeming impatience. At
the end of five minutes he rang the bell. A waiter appeared.
“Hasn’t the wig-maker come?” asked Morgan.
In those days wig-makers were not yet called hair-dressers.
“Yes, citizen,” replied the waiter, “he came, but you had not yet
returned, so he left word that he’d come back. Some one knocked just as
you rang; it’s probably--”
“Here, here,” cried a voice on the stairs.
“Ah! bravo,” exclaimed Morgan. “Come in, Master Cadenette; you must make
a sort of Adonis of me.”
“That won’t be difficult, Monsieur le Baron,” replied the wig-maker.
“Look here, look here; do you mean to compromise me, citizen Cadenette?”
“Monsieur le Baron, I entreat you, call me Cadenette; you’ll honor me
by that proof of familiarity; but don’t call me citizen. Fie; that’s
a revolutionary denomination! Even in the worst of the Terror I always
called my wife Madame Cadenette. Now, excuse me for not waiting for you;
but there’s a great ball in the Rue du Bac this evening, the ball of the
Victims (the wig-maker emphasized this word). I should have thought that
M. le Baron would be there.”
“Why,” cried Morgan, laughing; “so you are still a royalist, Cadenette?”
The wig-maker laid his hand tragically on his heart.
“Monsieur le Baron,” said he, “it is not only a matter of conscience,
but a matter of state.”
“Conscience, I can understand that, Master Cadenette, but state! What
the devil has the honorable guild of wigmakers to do with politics?”
“What, Monsieur le Baron?” said Cadenette, all the while getting ready
to dress his client’s hair; “you ask me that? You, an aristocrat!”
“Hush, Cadenette!”
“Monsieur le Baron, we _ci-devants_ can say that to each other.”
“So you are a _ci-devant_?”
“To the core! In what style shall I dress M. le Baron’s hair?”
“Dog’s ears, and tied up behind.”
“With a dash of powder?”
“Two, if you like, Cadenette.”
“Ah! monsieur, when one thinks that for five years I was the only man
who had an atom of powder ‘_à la maréchale_.’ Why, Monsieur le Baron, a
man was guillotined for owning a box of powder!”
“I’ve known people who were guillotined for less than that, Cadenette.
But explain how you happen to be a _ci-devant_. I like to understand
everything.”
“It’s very simple, Monsieur le Baron. You admit, don’t you, that among
the guilds there were some that were more or less aristocratic.”
“Beyond doubt; accordingly as they were nearer to the higher classes of
society.”
“That’s it, Monsieur le Baron. Well, we had the higher classes by the
hair of their head. I, such as you see me, I have dressed Madame de
Polignac’s hair; my father dressed Madame du Barry’s; my grandfather,
Madame de Pompadour’s. We had our privileges, Monsieur; we carried
swords. It is true, to avoid the accidents that were liable to crop up
among hotheads like ourselves, our swords were usually of wood; but
at any rate, if they were not the actual thing, they were very good
imitations. Yes, Monsieur le Baron,” continued Cadenette with a sigh,
“those days were the good days, not only for the wig-makers, but for
all France. We were in all the secrets, all the intrigues; nothing was
hidden from us. And there is no known instance, Monsieur le Baron, of a
wig-maker betraying a secret. Just look at our poor queen; to whom
did she trust her diamonds? To the great, the illustrious Leonard, the
prince of wig-makers. Well, Monsieur le Baron, two men alone overthrew
the scaffolding of a power that rested on the wigs of Louis XIV., the
puffs of the Regency, the frizettes of Louis-XV., and the cushions of
Marie Antoinette.”
“And those two men, those levellers, those two revolutionaries, who were
they, Cadenette? that I may doom them, so far as it lies in my power, to
public execration.”
“M. Rousseau and citizen Talma: Monsieur Rousseau who said that
absurdity, ‘We must return to Nature,’ and citizen Talma, who invented
the Titus head-dress.”
“That’s true, Cadenette; that’s true.”
“When the Directory came in there was a moment’s hope. M. Barras never
gave up powder, and citizen Moulins stuck to his queue. But, you see,
the 18th Brumaire has knocked it all down; how could any one friz
Bonaparte’s hair! Ah! there,” continued Cadenette, puffing out the dog’s
ears of his client--“there’s aristocratic hair for you, soft and fine as
silk, and takes the tongs so well one would think you wore a wig. See,
Monsieur le Baron, you wanted to be as handsome as Adonis! Ah! if Venus
had seen you, it’s not of Adonis that Mars would have been jealous!”
And Cadenette, now at the end of his labors and satisfied with the
result, presented a hand-mirror to Morgan, who examined himself
complacently.
“Come, come!” he said to the wig-maker, “you are certainly an artist,
my dear fellow! Remember this style, for if ever they cut off my head
I shall choose to have it dressed like that, for there will probably be
women at my execution.”
“And M. le Baron wants them to regret him,” said the wig-maker gravely.
“Yes, and in the meantime, my dear Cadenette, here is a crown to reward
your labors. Have the goodness to tell them below to call a carriage for
me.”
Cadenette sighed.
“Monsieur le Baron,” said he, “time was when I should have answered:
‘Show yourself at court with your hair dressed like that, and I shall be
paid.’ But there is no court now, Monsieur le Baron, and one must live.
You shall have your carriage.”
With which Cadenette sighed again, slipped Morgan’s crown in his pocket,
made the reverential bow of wig-makers and dancing-masters, and left the
young man to complete his toilet.
The head being now dressed, the rest was soon done; the cravat alone
took time, owing to the many failures that occurred; but Morgan
concluded the difficult task with an experienced hand, and as eleven
o’clock was striking he was ready to start. Cadenette had not forgotten
his errand; a hackney-coach was at the door. Morgan jumped into it,
calling out: “Rue du Bac, No. 60.”
The coach turned into the Rue de Grenelle, went up the Rue du Bac, and
stopped at No. 60.
“Here’s a double fare, friend,” said Morgan, “on condition that you
don’t stand before the door.”
The driver took the three francs and disappeared around the corner of
the Rue de Varennes. Morgan glanced up the front of the house; it seemed
as though he must be mistaken, so dark and silent was it. But he did not
hesitate; he rapped in a peculiar fashion.
The door opened. At the further end of the courtyard was a building,
brilliantly lighted. The young man went toward it, and, as he
approached, the sound of instruments met his ear. He ascended a flight
of stairs and entered the dressing-room. There he gave his cloak to the
usher whose business it was to attend to the wraps.
“Here is your number,” said the usher. “As for your weapons, you are to
place them in the gallery where you can find them easily.”
Morgan put the number in his trousers pocket, and entered the great
gallery transformed into an arsenal. It contained a complete collection
of arms of all kinds, pistols, muskets, carbines, swords, and daggers.
As the ball might at any moment be invaded by the police, it was
necessary that every dancer be prepared to turn defender at an instant’s
notice. Laying his weapons aside, Morgan entered the ballroom.
We doubt if any pen could give the reader an adequate idea of the scene
of that ball. Generally, as the name “Ball of the Victims” indicated, no
one was admitted except by the strange right of having relatives who
had either been sent to the scaffold by the Convention or the Commune of
Paris, blown to pieces by Collot d’Herbois, or drowned by Carrier. As,
however, the victims guillotined during the three years of the Terror
far outnumbered the others, the dresses of the majority of those who
were present were the clothes of the victims of the scaffold. Thus, most
of the young girls, whose mothers and older sisters had fallen by
the hands of the executioner, wore the same costume their mothers and
sisters had worn for that last lugubrious ceremony; that is to say, a
white gown and red shawl, with their hair cut short at the nape of the
neck. Some added to this costume, already so characteristic, a detail
that was even more significant; they knotted around their necks a thread
of scarlet silk, fine as the blade of a razor, which, as in Faust’s
Marguerite, at the Witches’ Sabbath, indicated the cut of the knife
between the throat and the collar bone.
As for the men who were in the same case, they wore the collars of their
coats turned down behind, those of their shirt wide open, their necks
bare, and their hair, cut short.
But many had other rights of entrance to this ball besides that of
having Victims in their families; some had made victims themselves.
These latter were increasing. There were present men of forty or
forty-five years of age, who had been trained in the boudoirs of the
beautiful courtesans of the seventeenth century--who had known Madame du
Barry in the attics of Versailles, Sophie Arnoult with M. de Lauraguais,
La Duthé with the Comte d’Artois--who had borrowed from the courtesies
of vice the polish with which they covered their ferocity. They were
still young and handsome; they entered a salon, tossing their perfumed
locks and their scented handkerchiefs; nor was it a useless precaution,
for if the odor of musk or verbena had not masked it they would have
smelled of blood.
There were men there twenty-five or thirty years old, dressed with
extreme elegance, members of the association of Avengers, who seemed
possessed with the mania of assassination, the lust of slaughter, the
frenzy of blood, which no blood could quench--men who, when the order
came to kill, killed all, friends or enemies; men who carried their
business methods into the business of murder, giving their bloody checks
for the heads of such or such Jacobins, and paying on sight.
There were younger men, eighteen and twenty, almost children, but
children fed, like Achilles, on the marrow of wild beasts, like Pyrrhus,
on the flesh of bears; here were the pupil-bandits of Schiller, the
apprentice-judges of the Sainte-Vehme--that strange generation that
follows great political convulsions, like the Titans after chaos, the
hydras after the Deluge; as the vultures and crows follow the carnage.
Here was the spectre of iron impassible, implacable, inflexible, which
men call Retaliation; and this spectre mingled with the guests. It
entered the gilded salons; it signalled with a look, a gesture, a nod,
and men followed where it led. It was, as says the author from whom we
have borrowed these hitherto unknown but authentic details, “a merry
lust for extermination.”
The Terror had affected great cynicism in clothes, a Spartan austerity
in its food, the profound contempt of a barbarous people for arts and
enjoyments. The Thermidorian reaction was, on the contrary, elegant,
opulent, adorned; it exhausted all luxuries, all voluptuous pleasures,
as in the days of Louis XV.; with one addition, the luxury of vengeance,
the lust of blood.
Fréron’s name was given to the youth of the day, which was called the
jeunesse Fréron, or the _jéunesse dorée_ (gilded youth). Why Fréron? Why
should he rather than others receive that strange and fatal honor?
I cannot tell you--my researches (those who know me will do me the
justice to admit that when I have an end in view, I do not count
them)--my researches have not discovered an answer. It was a whim of
Fashion, and Fashion is the one goddess more capricious than Fortune.
Our readers will hardly know to-day who Fréron was. The Fréron who was
Voltaire’s assailant was better known than he who was the patron of
these elegant assassins; one was the son of the other. Louis Stanislas
was son of Elie-Catherine. The father died of rage when Miromesnil,
Keeper of the Seals, suppressed his journal. The other, irritated by
the injustices of which his father had been the victim, had at first
ardently embraced the revolutionary doctrines. Instead of the “Année
Littéraire,” strangled to death in 1775, he created the “Orateur du
Peuple,” in 1789. He was sent to the Midi on a special mission, and
Marseilles and Toulon retain to this day the memory of his cruelty.
But all was forgotten when, on the 9th Thermidor, he proclaimed himself
against Robespierre, and assisted in casting from the altar the Supreme
Being, the colossus who, being an apostle, had made himself a god.
Fréron, repudiated by the Mountain, which abandoned him to the heavy
jaws of Moise Bayle; Fréron, disdainfully repulsed by the Girondins,
who delivered him over to the imprecations of Isnard; Fréron, as the
terrible and picturesque orator of the Var said, “Fréron naked and
covered with the leprosy of crime,” was accepted, caressed and petted by
the Thermidorians. From them he passed into the camp of the royalists,
and without any reason whatever for obtaining that fatal honor, found
himself suddenly at the head of a powerful party of youth, energy and
vengeance, standing between the passions of the day, which led to all,
and the impotence of the law, which permitted all.
It was to the midst of this _jeunesse_ Fréron, mouthing its words,
slurring its r’s, giving its “word of honor” about everything, that
Morgan now made his way.
It must be admitted that this _jeunesse_, in spite of the clothes it
wore, in spite of the memories these clothes evoked, was wildly gay.
This seems incomprehensible, but it is true. Explain if you can that
Dance of Death at the beginning of the fifteenth century, which, with
all the fury of a modern galop, led by Musard, whirled its chain through
the very Cemetery of the Innocents, and left amid its tombs fifty
thousand of its votaries.
Morgan was evidently seeking some one.
A young dandy, who was dipping into the silver-gilt comfit-box of
a charming victim, with an ensanguined finger, the only part of his
delicate hand that had escaped the almond paste, tried to stop him, to
relate the particulars of the expedition from which he had brought back
this bloody trophy. But Morgan smiled, pressed his other hand which
was gloved, and contented himself with replying: “I am looking for some
one.”
“Important?”
“Company of Jehu.”
The young man with the bloody finger let him pass. An adorable Fury, as
Corneille would have called her, whose hair was held up by a dagger with
a blade as sharp as a needle, barred his way, saying: “Morgan, you are
the handsomest, the bravest, the most deserving of love of all the men
present. What have you to say to the woman who tells you that?”
“I answer that I love,” replied Morgan, “and that my heart is too narrow
to hold one hatred and two loves.” And he continued on his search.
Two young men who were arguing, one saying, “He was English,” the other,
“He was German,” stopped him.
“The deuce,” cried one; “here is the man who can settle it for us.”
“No,” replied Morgan, trying to push past them; “I’m in a hurry.”
“There’s only a word to say,” said the other. “We have made a bet,
Saint-Amand and I, that the man who was tried and executed at the
Chartreuse du Seillon, was, according to him, a German, and, according
to me, an Englishman.”
“I don’t know,” replied Morgan; “I wasn’t there. Ask Hector; he presided
that night.”
“Tell us where Hector is?”
“Tell me rather where Tiffauges is; I am looking for him.”
“Over there, at the end of the room,” said the young man, pointing to a
part of the room where the dance was more than usually gay and animated.
“You will recognize him by his waistcoat; and his trousers are not to be
despised. I shall have a pair like them made with the skin of the very
first hound I meet.”
Morgan did not take time to ask in what way Tiffauges’ waistcoat was
remarkable, or by what queer cut or precious material his trousers had
won the approbation of a man as expert in such matters as he who had
spoken to him. He went straight to the point indicated by the young
man, saw the person he was seeking dancing an été, which seemed, by the
intricacy of its weaving, if I may be pardoned for this technical term,
to have issued from the salons of Vestris himself.
Morgan made a sign to the dancer. Tiffauges stopped instantly, bowed
to his partner, led her to her seat, excused himself on the plea of
the urgency of the matter which called him away, and returned to take
Morgan’s arm.
“Did you see him,” Tiffauges asked Morgan.
“I have just left him,” replied the latter.
“Did you deliver the King’s letter?”
“To himself.”
“Did he read it?”
“At once.”
“Has he sent an answer?”
“Two; one verbal, one written; the second dispenses with the first.”
“You have it?”
“Here it is.”
“Do you know the contents?”
“A refusal.”
“Positive?”
“Nothing could be more positive.”
“Does he know that from the moment he takes all hope away from us we
shall treat him as an enemy?”
“I told him so.”
“What did he answer?”
“He didn’t answer; he shrugged his shoulders.”
“What do you think his intentions are?”
“It’s not difficult to guess.”
“Does he mean to keep the power himself?”
“It looks like it.”
“The power, but not the throne?”
“Why not the throne?”
“He would never dare to make himself king.”
“Oh! I can’t say he means to be absolutely king, but I’ll answer for it
that he means to be something.”
“But he is nothing but a soldier of fortune!”
“My dear fellow, better in these days to be the son of his deeds, than
the grandson of a king.”
The young man thought a moment.
“I shall report it all to Cadoudal,” he said.
“And add that the First Consul said these very words: ‘I hold the Vendée
in the hollow of my hand, and if I choose in three months not another
shot will be fired.’”
“It’s a good thing to know.”
“You know it; let Cadoudal know it, and take measures.”
Just then the music ceased; the hum of the dancers died away; complete
silence prevailed; and, in the midst of this silence, four names were
pronounced in a sonorous and emphatic voice.
These four names were Morgan, Montbar, Adler and d’Assas.
“Pardon me,” Morgan said to Tiffauges, “they are probably arranging some
expedition in which I am to take part. I am forced, therefore, to my
great regret, to bid you farewell. Only before I leave you let me look
closer at your waistcoat and trousers, of which I have heard--curiosity
of an amateur; I trust you will excuse it.”
“Surely!” exclaimed the young Vendéan, “most willingly.”