Being a daughter of France, and a Parisienne to the finger-tips, it
could not be that the return to Paris, delightful capital where all
the brilliancy, _esprit_, good taste, and refinement of modern life
were concentrated, should fail to rejoice the heart of Mademoiselle
de Bayard. Her characteristic quality of humor, a trait not derived
from the paternal strain, made her omit three items from the list of
purchases commanded by M. le Colonel. To supply oneself beforehand
with a complete bridal costume in the view of immediate union with a
husband never to one's knowledge previously beheld, could anything be
more outrageously impossible! Juliette knew that she would titter
hysterically behind the stately backs of the powdered and
frock-coated gentlemen who parade Departments, and probably laugh to
madness in the faces of the powdered and frizzled young ladies who
should seek to minister to her needs.
And so, though the fresh and charming toilettes of the evening, the
promenade and the theater, with the suitable lingerie, were added to
Juliette's wardrobe, the nuptial robe, crown, and veil remained
unbought.
Paris, a seething pot since the Auteuil assassination early in that
January, was in a state of ebullition upon Juliette's return.
Passing in a _fiacre_ along the Champs Élysées, the progress of
Mademoiselle's hired vehicle was stopped. A regiment of mounted
Chasseurs and a detachment of the Guides blocked the Avenue to stem
the black torrents of people rolling toward Neuilly, to attend the
funeral of the murdered journalist Victor Noir. The National Guards
occupied the Place de la Concorde, and in front of the Corps
Législatif was a battalion of infantry, besides a force of _sergents
de ville_. Yet by other thoroughfares inky streams of men and women
poured steadily nor'-west, and a vast concourse packed the Passage
Massena, where the dead man had lived, and when his coffin was
brought out, weeping friends unharnessed the bony black horses from
the shabby hearse, and six of them, hugging the pole, drew it to the
Cemetery.
But no speeches were made, though an instant previous to the lowering
of the coffin a disheveled, red-eyed woman leaped upon the plinth of
a memorial column that neighbored the grave dug in the Jewish quarter
of the Cemetery, and shrieked:
"He was only twenty-two, and was to have been married in a few days!
Vengeance upon the nephew of the Corsican wild boar! Death to the
murderer Bonaparte and all his bloody race!..."
The rest was lost in the strangled whoopings of hysteria. But upon
the ten thousand faces that had turned her way a crimson glow was
thrown, as though, the sun of Imperial glory were indeed about to
set, and a yell went up that might have reached the ears of the
princely homicide lodged in the Conciergerie by order of his Imperial
relative, pending that extravagant farce of the Tribunal of Tours.
There was a rush of police, and the woman was pulled down and
spirited away, it is said, by Revolutionists! But the _Marseillaise_
had already cried more loudly than the red-eyed woman, and had been
heard to greater effect. Indeed, upon the previous day M. Rochefort
had attended the tribune of the Corps Législatif, and protested in
the name of the people against the decree ordering for the trial of
the noble criminal a Special High Court of Justice composed of Judges
notoriously amenable to Imperial influence;--proceeding to draw
between Bonapartes and Borgias some extremely uncomplimentary
parallels.
The newspaper was seized upon the morning of the interment at
Neuilly, and its editor and proprietor served on behalf of the Crown
with a writ of prosecution for libel, by the special authorization of
the Corps Législatif. Thus M. Rochefort was rendered too late for
the ceremony. But one of the huge crowds of assistant mourners,
rolling back upon Paris, encountered him, in a hackney cab on one of
the boulevards, and the human torrent surging and eddying about the
vehicle, turned it round; and so rolled and roared with it and its
occupant in triumph to his home.
The savage faces, the sinister cries, the significant tokens of
popular disaffection and incipient revolt affected Mademoiselle
Bayard but little, it must be owned. Her dear Parisians were for
some reason boiling over. How many times had she not beheld them in
a state of ebullition? French blood is easily heated, see you well!
A little patience and the people would quiet down.
In the eyes of Juliette and how many other daughters of the Empire,
the personality of the stoutish little gentleman with the heavy
sallow face, dull regard, spiky mustache and dyed brown chin-tuft was
invested with an aureole of semi-divinity. To her as to her sisters,
the Emperor stood for France.
Born nineteen years before in the very month of the Coup d'État of
1851, what should she know of the betrayals, treacheries, crimes that
had been so many steps in the ladder leading the man on to success.
A tidal wave of human blood had set him upon the throne of St. Louis;
the Church, first duped, afterward to be shorn by him of power, had
poured her hallowed oils upon his head; titles, dignities, gold, had
streamed from his open hands upon his supporters; the tradition of
the Army that had throned him was devotion to his name.
And Juliette was a soldier's daughter. How, then, not reverence the
Emperor, from whose ermined purples Field-Marshal's bâtons, Grand
Crosses of the Legion of Honor, coveted commands, desired steps,
constantly dropped. That the blind, unreasoning support hitherto
accorded to him by the Army was weakening,--that 50,000 private
soldiers' votes would be recorded against him in the forthcoming
_plebiscitum_,--how was a mere girl to conceive of this?
That her beloved Paris, transformed by him into the gayest and most
splendid of European capitals, was tottering on the verge of
bankruptcy, she would not have believed. Had she been told that High
Finance is too often synonymous with knavish trickery, that those who
carry out great civic works may drain treasuries of the national
millions--it would have conveyed nothing to her. You cannot talk to
a school-girl in the shibboleth of the Bourse.
But one sign of the trend of popular resentment etched itself as by a
biting acid on her memory. When the sulky driver of the ramshackle
vehicle pulled up in the Avenue of the Champs Élysées, in obedience
to the upraised sword-arm and authoritative voice of a lieutenant of
mounted Chasseurs, Juliette, thrilling with girlish delight at the
sight of the dear, familiar uniform, let down the window and thrust
forth her charming head. And at that moment a party of four
equestrians, followed by two grooms in the Imperial livery, came
galloping westward, from the direction of the Pont Royal.
Pray picture to yourself the congested condition of this part of the
Avenue, the squadron blocking its throat, the halted cab, and the
lengthy queue of phaetons, Americaines, britzkas, dogcarts, and
Victorias, forming up on the left hand of the road to rear of it,
containing ladies old and young, pretty or plain, accompanied by the
males of their species; while nursemaids pushing babies in
perambulators, elderly gentlemen out for constitutionals, and other
harmless pedestrians, were marshaled on the right, under the
surveillance of imperious policemen, who meddled not at all with
certain isolated clumps of somber-looking persons dressed in black;
broken links of one of the huge processions of mourners, checked upon
their way to the Cemetery at Neuilly.
There was a stir of interest, and every eye was drawn to the little
cavalcade, previously mentioned, whose leaders, seeing the barrier of
humanity, horseflesh and steel drawn across the thoroughfare, checked
their horses and came forward at a walk. Military Governor was
written large upon a double-chinned, stiff-necked, gray-mustached and
imperialed personage who bestrode a high-actioned brown charger, and
wore the undress uniform of a General of Division of the Service of
Engineers. When he leaned to speak in the ear of the slender,
brown-haired, blue-eyed boy who rode upon his right hand, you saw in
the wearer of the glossy silk topper, the accurately cut,
single-breasted black coat and dark gray-strapped trousers--ending in
the daintiest of little polished boots, with gold spurs--the heir of
the Imperial throne of France.
A cocked-hatted, white-plumed Imperial _aide-de-camp_ in
blue-and-gold, and a green-and-silver Palace equerry followed in
attendance, succeeded at a respectful distance by two grooms in the
livery of the Tuileries; and a troop of the glorious beings known as
Cent Gardes came clattering after, balanced to a hair on their shiny,
prancing black horses, the long white horse-tails streaming from
their polished steel helmets, with tricolored side-plumes and eagled
brass plates, their brass-nutted steel cuirasses reflecting their
lacquered mustaches and the adoring glances of enamored femininity,
their sky-blue tunics with the scarlet and golden collars, their
golden epaulettes and aiguillettes, their gauntleted gloves of white
leather, their skin-tight breeches of snowy buckskin, their
brilliantly polished boots with huge brass roweled, steel-spiked
spurs, glancing and dancing, clinking and twinkling in the sun.
Ah me! Their morals were doubtful, those mustached and chin-tufted
Antinouses of the Guard, as not only giddy work-girls and milliners,
but fast variety actresses and frisky ladies of fashion were
perfectly aware. But they were splendid, stately, expensive
creatures, and so worthy to clatter at Imperial heels.
And so gallant was the youthful figure they attended and guarded; so
well-graced the seat upon the spirited English chestnut, so light the
boyish hand upon the mare's snaffle-rein, so frank and debonair the
smile with which he acknowledged the scanty salutations of a few of
the bystanders; that Juliette's heart flew to him with her eyes, and
there broke from her in a voice so clear and thrilling that the
object of her homage started in his saddle:
"_Vive le Prince! Vive le Prince Impérial!_"
The French are tender to youth and beauty, accessible to sentiment,
lovers of Romance. Other voices joined in the cry, hats not
ominously furbished with crape were lifted in salutation; a charming
dignity was manifested in the boy's reception of these tokens of
good-will.
You can conceive the picture, set in the beautiful scenery of the
Champs Élysées, to the roll of carriages in the great avenues, the
glint of wintry sunshine on still or leaping water, the nip of keen
sweet air, perfumed with the scent of damp grass and dead leaves and
wood-smoke. Delicate tracery of branches as yet bare, interspersed
with the hardy green of pines, laurels, and larches against a sky
pale blue as harebell, streaked with broad floating scarves of
gray-white vapor, made a background for the green-jacketed,
red-breeched Chasseurs on their bony, brown horses,--for the knots of
strollers, curious or contemptuous,--for the broken masses of the
crowd of would-be demonstrators, arrested in their progress by the
blocking of the way. In the right foreground suppose the slim young
Napoleon sitting easily on the fidgety, fretful chestnut,--the
Military General balanced on his big champing charger,--the
blue-and-gold aide and the green-and-silver equerry, the grooms and
the escort of Cent Gardes looking decorously between the ears of
their well-trained, shining beasts. To the left place the
debilitated _fiacre_ with its weary Rosinante and red-nosed sulky
Jehu, and leaning from the open window of the vehicle--Juliette.
Perhaps you can see her, a little toque of Persian lambskin, with a
blue wing in it, on her high-piled hair,--with a coquettish jacket of
corduroy-velvet of the shade known in the spring of that year as
Bismarck gray,--trimmed with the lambskin, fitting close to her
slender shape. She wore a plain black silk skirt looped high over a
vivid red cloth petticoat--it was a fashionable style of costume that
year--and very much worn. A bright rose bloomed in each cheek, pale
as she was ordinarily; and her black brows were spread and lifted
joyously, and her eyes shone blue as sapphires in contrast with a
little knot of violets at her breast and the big bunch held in her
little gray-gloved hand. And with a very fair aim she threw the
latter so that the bundle of wet fragrance lightly hit the saddleflap
close to the knee of the Imperial stripling, and behind the shoulder
of the swerving chestnut, as she cried again:
"_Vive le Prince Impérial!_"
The boy bowed to her, blushing at her beauty and her loyal
enthusiasm,--the equerry, slimmest of the officers in attendance,
dismounted and picked up the flowers. A trumpet sounded, a short,
sharp order was given, there was a trampling of hoofs and a clinking
of bridles as the files wheeled right and left, leaving a broad road
open between a double rank of saluting troopers, and the Prince with
his Governor and following rode down this open vista and cantered
away by route of the Avenue de l'Impératrice, in the direction of the
Bois de Boulogne.
The boy held in his whip-hand the bunch of violets handed him by the
equerry. Only a little grayish sand clung to some of the dark,
shining leaves. He sniffed their fragrance and glanced back as the
trumpet rang out behind them, and the Avenue was once more blocked
with mounted Chasseurs.