CHAPTER XVIII.

The streets swarmed with the populace troops as they passed to their

destination. Among those of the Mobiles who especially caught the eye

were two companies in which Enguerrand de Vandemar and Victor de Mauleon

commanded. In the first were many young men of good family, or in the

higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, known to numerous lookers-on; there was

something inspiriting in their gay aspects, and in the easy carelessness

of their march. Mixed with this company, however, and forming of course

the bulk of it, were those who belonged to the lower classes of the

population; and though they too might seem gay to an ordinary observer,

the gaiety was forced. Many of them were evidently not quite sober; and

there was a disorderly want of soldiership in their mien and armament

which inspired distrust among such vieux moustaches as, too old for

other service than that of the ramparts, mixed here and there among the

crowd.

But when De Mauleon’s company passed, the vieux moustaches impulsively

touched each other. They recognised the march of well-drilled men; the

countenances grave and severe, the eyes not looking on this side and

that for admiration, the step regularly timed; and conspicuous among

these men the tall stature and calm front of the leader.

“These fellows will fight well,” growled a vieux moustache, “where did

they fish out their leader?”

“Don’t you know?” said a bourgeois. “Victor de Mauleon. He won the cross

in Algeria for bravery. I recollect him when I was very young; the very

devil for women and fighting.”

“I wish there were more such devils for fighting and fewer for women,”

growled again le vieux moustache.

One incessant roar of cannon all the night of the 29th. The populace

had learned the names of the French cannons, and fancied they

could distinguish the several sounds of their thunder. “There

spits ‘Josephine’!” shouts an invalid sailor. “There howls our own

‘Populace’!” cries a Red Republican from Belleville.

[The “Populace” had been contributed to the artillery,

sou a sou, by the working class.]

“There sings ‘Le Chatiment’!” laughed Gustave Rameau, who was now become

an enthusiastic admirer of the Victor Hugo he had before affected to

despise. And all the while, mingled with the roar of the cannon,

came, far and near from the streets, from the ramparts, the gusts of

song--song sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene, more often carelessly

joyous. The news of General Vinoy’s success during the early part of the

day had been damped by the evening report of Ducrot’s delay in crossing

the swollen Marne. But the spirits of the Parisians rallied from a

momentary depression on the excitement at night of that concert of

martial music.

During that night, close under the guns of the double redoubt of

Gravelle and La Faisanderie, eight pontoon-bridges were thrown over

the Marne; and at daybreak the first column of the third army under

Blanchard and Renoult crossed with all their artillery, and, covered

by the fire of the double redoubts, of the forts of Vincennes, Nogent,

Rossuey, and the batteries of Mont Avron, had an hour before noon

carried the village of Champingy, and the first echelon of the

important plateau of Villiers, and were already commencing the work

of intrenchment, when, rallying from the amaze of a defeat, the German

forces burst upon them, sustained by fresh batteries. The Prussian

pieces of artillery established at Chennevieres and at Neuilly opened

fire with deadly execution; while a numerous infantry, descending from

the intrenchments of Villiers, charged upon the troops under Renoult.

Among the French in that strife were Enguerrand and the Mobiles of which

he was in command. Dismayed by the unexpected fire, these Mobiles gave

way, as indeed did many of the line. Enguerrand rushed forward to the

front: “On, mes enfans, on! What will our mothers and wives say of us

if we fly? Vive la France!--On!” Among those of the better class in that

company there rose a shout of applause, but it found no sympathy among

the rest. They wavered, they turned. “Will you suffer me to go on

alone, countrymen?” cried Enguerrand; and alone he rushed on towards

the Prussian line--rushed, and fell, mortally wounded, by a musket-ball.

“Revenge, revenge!” shouted some of the foremost; “Revenge!” shouted

those in the rear; and, so shouting, turned on their heels and fled.

But ere they could disperse they encountered the march, steadfast though

rapid, of the troop led by Victor de Mauleon. “Poltroons!” he thundered,

with the sonorous depth of his strong voice, “halt and turn, or my men

shall fire on you as deserters.”

“Va, citoyen,” said one fugitive, an officer-popularly elected, because

he was the loudest brawler in the club of the Salle Favre,--we have seen

him before--Charles, the brother of Armand Monnier;--“men can’t fight

when they despise their generals. It is our generals who are poltroons

and fools both.”

“Carry my answer to the ghosts of cowards,” cried De Mauldon, and shot

the man dead.

His followers, startled and cowed by the deed, and the voice and the

look of the death-giver, halted. The officers, who had at first yielded

to the panic of their men, took fresh courage, and finally led the bulk

of the troop back to their post “enlevis a la baionette,” to use the

phrase of a candid historian of that day.

Day, on the whole, not inglorious to France. It was the first, if it

was the last, really important success of the besieged. They remained

masters of the ground, the Prussians leaving to them the wounded and the

dead.

That night what crowds thronged from Paris to the top of the Montmartre

heights, from the observatory on which the celebrated inventor Bazin

had lighted up, with some magical electric machine, all the plain of

Gennevilliers from Mont Valerien to the Fort de la Briche! The splendour

of the blaze wrapped the great city;--distinctly above the roofs of

the houses soared the Dome des Invalides, the spires of Notre Dame, the

giant turrets of the Tuileries;--and died away on resting on the infames

scapulos Acroceraunia, the “thunder crags” of the heights occupied by

the invading army.

Lemercier, De Breze, and the elder Rameau--who, despite his peaceful

habits and grey hairs, insisted on joining in the aid of la patrie--were

among the National Guards attached to the Fort de la Briche and the

neighbouring eminence, and they met in conversation.

“What a victory we have had!” said the old Rameau.

“Rather mortifying to your son, M. Rameau,” said LeMercier.

“Mortifying to my son, sir!--the victory of his countrymen. What do you

mean?”

“I had the honour to hear M. Gustave the other night at the club de la

Vengeance.”

“Bon Dieu! do you frequent those tragic reunions?” asked De Breze.

“They are not at all tragic: they are the only comedies left us, as one

must amuse one’s self somewhere, and the club de la Vengeance is the

prettiest thing of the sort going. I quite understand why it should

fascinate a poet like your son, M. Rameau. It is held in a salle de

cafe chantant--style Louis Quinze--decorated with a pastoral scene from

Watteau. I and my dog Fox drop in. We hear your son haranguing. In what

poetical sentences he despaired of the Republic! The Government (he

called them les charlatans de l’Hotel de Ville) were imbeciles. They

pretended to inaugurate a revolution, and did not employ the most

obvious of revolutionary means. There Fox and I pricked up our ears:

what were those means? Your son proceeded to explain: ‘All mankind were

to be appealed to against individual interests. The commerce of luxury

was to be abolished. Clearly luxury was not at the command of all

mankind. Cafes and theatres were to be closed for ever--all mankind

could not go to cafes and theatres. It was idle to expect the masses to

combine for anything in which the masses had not an interest in common.

The masses had no interest in any property that did not belong to

the masses. Programmes of the society to be founded, called the Ligue

Cosmopolite Democratique, should be sent at once into all the States of

the civilised world--how? by balloons. Money corrupts the world as now

composed: but the money at the command of the masses could buy all the

monarchs and courtiers and priests of the universe.’ At that sentiment,

vehemently delivered, the applauses were frantic, and Fox in his

excitement began to bark. At the sound of his bark one man cried out,

‘That’s a Prussian!’ another, ‘Down with the spy!’ another, ‘There’s an

aristo present--he keeps alive a dog which would be a week’s meal for

a family!’ I snatch up Fox at the last cry, and clasp him to a bosom

protected by the uniform of the National Guard.

“When the hubbub had subsided, your son, M. Rameau, proceeded, quitting

mankind in general, and arriving at the question in particular most

interesting to his audience--the mobilisation of the National Guard;

that is, the call upon men who like talking and hate fighting to talk

less and fight more. ‘It was the sheerest tyranny to select a certain

number of free citizens to be butchered. If the fight was for the mass,

there ought to be la levee en masse. If one did not compel everybody

to fight, why should anybody fight?’ Here the applause again became

vehement, and Fox again became indiscreet. I subdued Fox’s bark into a

squeak by pulling his ears. ‘What!’ cries your poet-son, ‘la levee en

masse gives us fifteen millions of soldiers, with which we could crush,

not Prussia alone, but the whole of Europe. (Immense sensation.) Let us,

then, resolve that the charlatans of the Hotel de Ville are incapable of

delivering us from the Prussians; that they are deposed; that the Ligue

of the Democratie Cosmopolite is installed; that meanwhile the Commune

shall be voted the Provisional Government, and shall order the Prussians

to retire within three days from the soil of Paris.’

“Pardon me this long description, my dear M. Rameau, but I trust I

have satisfactorily explained why victory obtained in the teeth of

his eloquent opinions, if gratifying to him as a Frenchman, must be

mortifying to him as a politician.”

The old Rameau sighed, hung his head, and crept away. While, amid this

holiday illumination, the Parisians enjoyed the panorama before them,

the Freres Chretiens and the attendants of the various ambulances were

moving along the battle-plains; the first in their large-brimmed hats

and sable garbs, the last in strange motley costume, many of them in

glittering uniform--all alike in their serene indifference to danger;

often pausing to pick up among the dead their own brethren who had

been slaughtered in the midst of their task. Now and then they came

on sinister forms apparently engaged in the same duty of tending the

wounded and dead, but in truth murderous plunderers, to whom the dead

and the dying were equal harvests. Did the wounded man attempt to resist

the foul hands searching for their spoil, they added another wound more

immediately mortal, grinning as they completed on the dead the robbery

they had commenced on the dying.

Raoul de Vandemar had been all the earlier part of the day with the

assistants of the ambulance over which he presided, attached to the

battalions of the National Guard in a quarter remote from that in which

his brother had fought and fallen. When those troops, later in the day,

were driven from the Montmedy plateau, which they had at first carried,

Raoul repassed towards the plateau at Villiers, on which the dead lay

thickest. On the way he heard a vague report of the panic which

had dispersed the Mobiles of whom Enguerrand was in command, and of

Enguerrand’s vain attempt to inspirit them. But his fate was not known.

There, at midnight, Raoul is still searching among the ghastly heaps and

pools of blood, lighted from afar by the blaze from the observatory of

Montmartre, and more near at hand by the bivouac fires extended along

the banks to the left of the Marne, while everywhere about the field

flitted the lanterns of the Frere Chretiens. Suddenly, in the dimness of

a spot cast into shadow by an incompleted earthwork, he observed a small

sinister figure perched on the breast of some wounded soldier, evidently

not to succour. He sprang forward and seized a hideous-looking urchin,

scarcely twelve years old, who held in one hand a small crystal locket,

set in filigree gold, torn from the soldier’s breast, and lifted high in

the other a long case-knife. At a glance Raoul recognised the holy relic

he had given to Enguerrand, and, flinging the precocious murderer to be

seized by his assistants, he cast himself beside his brother. Enguerrand

still breathed, and his languid eyes brightened as he knew the dear

familiar face. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, and he shook his

head sadly, but still with a faint smile on his lips. They lifted him

tenderly, and placed him on a litter. The movement, gentle as it was,

brought back pain, and with the pain strength to mutter, “My mother---I

would see her once more.”

As at daybreak the loungers on Montmartre and the ramparts descended

into the streets--most windows in which were open, as they had been

all night, with anxious female faces peering palely down-they saw the

conveyances of the ambulances coming dismally along, and many an

eye turned wistfully towards the litter on which lay the idol of the

pleasure-loving Paris, with the dark, bareheaded figure walking beside

it,--onwards, onwards, till it reached the Hotel de Vandemar, and a

woman’s cry was heard at the entrance--the mother’s cry, “My son! my

son!”

BOOK XII.

CHAPTER I.

The last book closed with the success of the Parisian sortie on the

30th of November, to be followed by the terrible engagements no less

honourable to French valour, on the 2nd of December. There was the

sanguine belief that deliverance was at hand; that Trochu would break

through the circle of iron, and effect that junction with the army

of Aurelles de Paladine which would compel the Germans to raise the

investment;--belief rudely shaken by Ducrot’s proclamation of the 4th,

to explain the recrossing of the Marne, and the abandonment of the

positions conquered, but not altogether dispelled till von Moltke’s

letter to Trochu on the 5th announcing the defeat of the army of the

Loire and the recapture of Orleans. Even then the Parisians did not

lose hope of succour; and even after the desperate and fruitless sortie

against Le Bourget on the 21st, it was not without witticisms on defeat

and predictions of triumph, that Winter and Famine settled sullenly on

the city.

Our narrative reopens with the last period of the siege.

It was during these dreadful days, that if the vilest and the most

hideous aspects of the Parisian population showed themselves at

the worst, so all its loveliest, its noblest, its holiest

characteristics--unnoticed by ordinary observers in the prosperous days

of the capital--became conspicuously prominent. The higher classes,

including the remnant of the old noblesse, had, during the whole siege,

exhibited qualities in notable contrast to those assigned them by

the enemies of aristocracy. Their sons had been foremost among those

soldiers who never calumniated a leader, never fled before a foe; their

women had been among the most zealous and the most tender nurses of the

ambulances they had founded and served; their houses had been freely

opened, whether to the families exiled from the suburbs, or in

supplement to the hospitals. The amount of relief they afforded

unostentatiously, out of means that shared the general failure of

accustomed resource, when the famine commenced, would be scarcely

credible if stated. Admirable, too, were the fortitude and resignation

of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie,--the thrifty tradesfolk and small

rentiers,--that class in which, to judge of its timidity when opposed

to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous virtue. Courage became so

now--courage to bear hourly increasing privation, and to suppress every

murmur of suffering that would discredit their patriotism, and invoke

“peace at any price.” It was on this class that the calamities of the

siege now pressed the most heavily. The stagnation of trade, and the

stoppage of the rents, in which they had invested their savings, reduced

many of them to actual want. Those only of their number who obtained the

pay of one-and-a-half franc a day as National Guards, could be sure to

escape from starvation. But this pay had already begun to demoralise the

receivers. Scanty for supply of food, it was ample for supply of drink.

And drunkenness, hitherto rare in that rank of the Parisians, became

a prevalent vice, aggravated in the case of a National Guard, when

it wholly unfitted him for the duties he undertook, especially such

National Guards as were raised from the most turbulent democracy of the

working class.

But of all that population; there were two sections in which the

most beautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly

manifest--the women and the priesthood, including in the latter

denomination all the various brotherhoods and societies which religion

formed and inspired.

It was on the 27th of December that Frederic Lemercier stood gazing

wistfully on a military report affixed to a blank wall, which stated

that “the enemy, worn out by a resistance of over one hundred days,”

had commenced the bombardment. Poor Frederic was sadly altered; he had

escaped the Prussian’s guns, but not the Parisian winter--the severest

known for twenty years. He was one of the many frozen at their

posts--brought back to the ambulance with Fox in his bosom trying

to keep him warm. He had only lately been sent forth as

convalescent,--ambulances were too crowded to retain a patient longer

than absolutely needful,--and had been hunger-pinched and frost-pinched

ever since. The luxurious Frederic had still, somewhere or other, a

capital yielding above three thousand a year, and of which he could not

now realise a franc, the title-deeds to various investments being in the

hands of Duplessis, the most trustworthy of friends, the most upright of

men, but who was in Bretagne, and could not be got at. And the time had

come at Paris when you could not get trust for a pound of horse-flesh,

or a daily supply of fuel. And Frederic Lemercier, who had long since

spent the 2000 francs borrowed from Alain (not ignobly, but somewhat

ostentatiously, in feasting any acquaintance who wanted a feast), and

who had sold to any one who could afford to speculate on such dainty

luxuries,--clocks, bronzes, amber-mounted pipes,--all that had made the

envied garniture of his bachelor’s apartment--Frederic Lemercier was,

so far as the task of keeping body and soul together, worse off than

any English pauper who can apply to the Union. Of course he might have

claimed his half-pay of thirty sous as a National Guard. But he little

knows the true Parisian who imagines a seigneur of the Chaussee d’Antin,

the oracle of those with whom he lived, and one who knew life so well

that he had preached prudence to a seigneur of the Faubourg like Alain

de Rochebriant, stooping to apply for the wages of thirty sons. Rations

were only obtained by the wonderful patience of women, who had children

to whom they were both saints and martyrs. The hours, the weary hours,

one had to wait before one could get one’s place on the line for the

distribution of that atrocious black bread, defeated men,--defeated most

wives if only for husbands, were defied only by mothers and daughters.

Literally speaking, Lemercier was starving. Alain had been badly wounded

in the sortie of the 21st, and was laid up in an ambulance. Even if

he could have been got at, he had probably nothing left to bestow upon

Lemercier.

Lemercier gazed on the announcement of the bombardment, and the

Parisian gaiety, which some French historian of the siege calls douce

philosophie, lingering on him still, he said, audibly, turning round

to any stranger who heard: “Happiest of mortals that we are! Under the

present Government we are never warned of anything disagreeable that can

happen; we are only told of it when it has happened, and then as rather

pleasant than otherwise. I get up. I meet a civil gendarme. ‘What is

that firing? which of our provincial armies is taking Prussia in the

rear? ‘Monsieur,’ says the gendarme, ‘it is the Prussian Krupp guns.’ I

look at the proclamation, and my fears varnish,--my heart is relieved. I

read that the bombardment is a sure sign that the enemy is worn out.”

Some of the men grouped round Frederic ducked their heads in terror;

others, who knew that the thunderbolt launched from the plateau of Avron

would not fall on the pavements of Paris, laughed and joked. But in

front, with no sign of terror, no sound of laughter, stretched, moving

inch by inch, the female procession towards the bakery in which the

morsel of bread for their infants was doled out.

“Hist, mon ami,” said a deep voice beside Lemercier. “Look at those

women, and do not wound their ears by a jest.”

Lemercier, offended by that rebuke, though too susceptible to good

emotions not to recognise its justice, tried with feeble fingers to turn

up his moustache, and to turn a defiant crest upon the rebuker. He

was rather startled to see the tall martial form at his side, and to

recognise Victor de Mauleon. “Don’t you think, M. Lemercier,” resumed

the Vicomte, half sadly, “that these women are worthy of better husbands

and sons than are commonly found among the soldiers whose uniform we

wear?”

“The National Guard! You ought not to sneer at them, Vicomte,--you

whose troop covered itself with glory on the great days of Villiers

and Champigny,--you in whose praise even the grumblers of Paris became

eloquent, and in whom a future Marshal of France is foretold.”

“But, alas! more than half of my poor troop was left on the

battle-field, or is now wrestling for mangled remains of life in the

ambulances. And the new recruits with which I took the field on the

21st are not likely to cover themselves with glory, or to insure their

commander the baton of a marshal.”

“Ay, I heard when I was in the hospital that you had publicly shamed

some of these recruits, and declared that you would rather resign than

lead them again to battle.”

“True; and at this moment, for so doing, I am the man most hated by the

rabble who supplied those recruits.” The men, while thus conversing,

had moved slowly on, and were now in front of a large cafe, from the

interior of which came the sound of loud bravos and clappings of hands.

Lemercier’s curiosity was excited. “For what can be that applause?” he

said; “let us look in and see.” The room was thronged. In the distance,

on a small raised platform, stood a girl dressed in faded theatrical

finery, making her obeisance to the crowd.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Frederic--“can I trust my eyes? Surely that is the

once superb Julie: has she been dancing here?”

One of the loungers, evidently belonging to the same world as Lemercier,

overheard the question and answered politely: “No, Monsieur: she has

been reciting verses, and really declaims very well, considering it

is not her vocation. She has given us extracts from Victor Hugo and De

Musset: and crowned all with a patriotic hymn by Gustave Rameau,--her

old lover, if gossip be true.” Meanwhile De Mauleon, who at first had

glanced over the scene with his usual air of calm and cold indifference,

became suddenly struck by the girl’s beautiful face, and gazed on it

with a look of startled surprise.

“Who and what did you say that poor fair creature is, M. Lemercier?”

“She is a Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin, and was a very popular coryphee.

She has hereditary right to be a good dancer, as the daughter of a once

more famous ornament of the ballet, la belle Leonie--whom you must have

seen in your young days.”

“Of course. Leonie--she married a M. Surville, a silly bourgeois

gentilhomme, who earned the hatred of Paris by taking her off the stage.

So that is her daughter I see no likeness to her mother--much handsomer.

Why does she call herself Caumartin?”

“Oh,” said Frederic, “a melancholy but trite story.”

“Leonie was left a widow, and died in want. What could the poor young

daughter do? She found a rich protector, who had influence to get her

an appointment in the ballet: and there she did as most girls so

circumstanced do--appeared under an assumed name, which she has since

kept.”

“I understand,” said Victor, compassionately. “Poor thing! she has

quitted the platform, and is coming this way, evidently to speak to you.

I saw her eyes brighten as she caught sight of your face.”

Lemercier attempted a languid air of modest self-complacency as the girl

now approached him. “Bonjour, M. Frederic! Ah, mon Dieu! how thin you

have grown! You have been ill?”

“The hardships of a military life, Mademoiselle. Ah, for the beaux

fours and the peace we insisted on destroying under the Empire which we

destroyed for listening to us! But you thrive well, I trust. I have seen

you better dressed, but never in greater beauty.”

The girl blushed as she replied, “Do you really think as you speak?”

“I could not speak more sincerely if I lived in the legendary House of

Glass.”

The girl clutched his arm, and said in suppressed tones, “Where is

Gustave?”

“Gustave Rameau? I have no idea. Do you never see him now?”

“Never,--perhaps I never shall see him again; but when you do meet

him, say that Julie owes to him her livelihood. An honest livelihood,

Monsieur. He taught her to love verses--told her how to recite them. I

am engaged at this cafe--you will find me here the same hour every day,

in case--in case--You are good and kind, and will come and tell me that

Gustave is well and happy even if he forgets me. Au revoir! Stop, you do

look, my poor Frederic, as if--as if--pardon me, Monsieur Lemercier, is

there anything I can do? Will you condescend to borrow from me? I am in

funds.”

Lemercier at that offer was nearly moved to tears. Famished though he

was, he could not, however, have touched that girl’s earnings.

“You are an angel of goodness, Mademoiselle! Ah, how I envy Gustave

Rameau! No, I don’t want aid. I am always a--rentier.”

“Bien! and if you see Gustave, you will not forget.”

“Rely on me. Come away,” he said to De Mauleon; “I don’t want to hear

that girl repeat the sort of bombast the poets indite nowadays. It is

fustian; and that girl may have a brain of feather, but she has a heart

of gold.”

“True,” said Victor, as they regained the street. “I overheard what

she said to you. What an incomprehensible thing is a woman! how more

incomprehensible still is a woman’s love! Ah, pardon me; I must leave

you. I see in the procession a poor woman known to me in better days.”

De Mauleon walked towards the woman he spoke of--one of the long

procession to the bakery--a child clinging to her robe. A pale

grief-worn woman, still young, but with the weariness of age on her

face, and the shadow of death on her child’s.

“I think I see Madame Monnier,” said De Mauleon, softly.

She turned and looked at him drearily. A year ago, she would have

blushed if addressed by a stranger in a name not lawfully hers.

“Well,” she said, in hollow accents broken by cough; “I don’t know you,

Monsieur.”

“Poor woman!” he resumed, walking beside her as she moved slowly on,

while the eyes of other women in the procession stared at him hungrily.

“And your child looks ill too. It is your youngest?”

“My only one! The others are in Pere la Chaise. There are but few

children alive in my street now. God has been very merciful, and taken

them to Himself.”

De Mauleon recalled the scene of a neat comfortable apartment, and the

healthful happy children at play on the floor. The mortality among the

little ones, especially in the quartier occupied by the working classes,

had of late been terrible. The want of food, of fuel, the intense

severity of the weather, had swept them off as by a pestilence.

“And Monnier--what of him? No doubt he is a National Guard, and has his

pay?”

The woman made no answer, but hung down her head. She was stifling a

sob. Till then her eyes seemed to have exhausted the last source of

tears.

“He lives still?” continued Victor, pityingly: “he is not wounded?”

“No: he is well--in health; thank you kindly, Monsieur.”

“But his pay is not enough to help you, and of course he can get no

work. Excuse me if I stopped you. It is because I owed Armand Monnier a

little debt for work, and I am ashamed to say that it quite escaped my

memory in these terrible events. Allow me, Madame, to pay it to you,”

and he thrust his purse into her hand. “I think this contains about the

sum I owed; if more or less, we will settle the difference later. Take

care of yourself.”

He was turning away when the woman caught hold of him.

“Stay, Monsieur. May Heaven bless you!--but--but tell me what name I am

to give to Armand. I can’t think of any one who owed him money. It must

have been before that dreadful strike, the beginning of all our woes.

Ah, if it were allowed to curse any one, I fear my last breath would not

be a prayer.”

“You would curse the strike, or the master who did not forgive Armand’s

share in it?”

“No, no,--the cruel man who talked him into it--into all that has

changed the best workman, the kindest heart--the--the--” again her voice

died in sobs.

“And who was that man?” asked De Mauleon, falteringly.

“His name was Lebeau. If you were a poor man, I should say ‘Shun him.’”

“I have heard of the name you mention; but if we mean the same person,

Monnier cannot have met him lately. He has not been in Paris since the

siege.”

“I suppose not, the coward! He ruined us--us who were so happy before;

and then, as Armand says, cast us away as instruments he had done with.

But--but if you do know him, and do see him again, tell him--tell him

not to complete his wrong--not to bring murder on Armand’s soul. For

Armand isn’t what he was--and has become, oh, so violent! I dare not

take this money without saying who gave it. He would not take money as

alms from an aristocrat. Hush! he beat me for taking money from the good

Monsieur Raoul de Vandemar--my poor Armand beat me!”

De Mauleon shuddered. “Say that it is from a customer whose rooms

he decorated in his spare hours on his own account before the

strike,--Monsieur --------;” here he uttered indistinctly some

unpronounceable name and hurried off, soon lost as the streets grew

darker. Amid groups of a higher order of men-military men, nobles,

ci-devant deputies--among such ones his name stood very high. Not only

his bravery in the recent sorties had been signal, but a strong belief

in his military talents had become prevalent; and conjoined with

the name he had before established as a political writer, and the

remembrance of the vigour and sagacity with which he had opposed the

war, he seemed certain, when peace and order became established, of

a brilliant position and career in a future administration: not less

because he had steadfastly kept aloof from the existing Government,

which it was rumoured, rightly or erroneously, that he had been

solicited to join; and from every combination of the various democratic

or discontented factions.

Quitting these more distinguished associates, he took his way alone

towards the ramparts. The day was closing; the thunders of the cannon

were dying down.

He passed by a wine-shop round which were gathered many of the worse

specimens of the Moblots and National Guards, mostly drunk, and loudly

talking in vehement abuse of generals and officers and commissariat. By

one of the men, as he came under the glare of a petroleum lamp (there

was gas no longer in the dismal city), he was recognised as the

commander who had dared to insist on discipline, and disgrace honest

patriots who claimed to themselves the sole option between fight and

flight. The man was one of those patriots--one of the new recruits whom

Victor had shamed and dismissed for mutiny and cowardice. He made a

drunken plunge at his former chief, shouting, “A bas Pai-isto! Comrades,

this is the coquin De Mauleon who is paid by the Prussians for getting

us killed: a la lanterne!” “A la lanterne!” stammered and hiccupped

others of the group; but they did not stir to execute their threat.

Dimly seen as the stern face and sinewy form of the threatened man was

by their drowsied eyes, the name of De Mauleon, the man without fear

of a foe, and without ruth for a mutineer, sufficed to protect him from

outrage; and with a slight movement of his arm that sent his denouncer

reeling against the lamp-post, De Mauleon passed on:--when another man,

in the uniform of a National Guard, bounded from the door of the tavern,

crying with a loud voice, “Who said De Mauleon?--let me look on him:”

and Victor, who had strode on with slow lion-like steps, cleaving the

crowd, turned, and saw before him in the gleaming light a face, in which

the bold frank, intelligent aspect of former days was lost in a wild,

reckless, savage expression--the face of Armand Monnier.

“Ha! are you really Victor de Mauleon?” asked Monnier, not fiercely, but

under his breath,--in that sort of stage whisper which is the natural

utterance of excited men under the mingled influence of potent drink and

hoarded rage.

“Certainly; I am Victor de Mauleon.”

“And you were in command of the--company of the National Guard on the

30th of November at Champigny and Villiers?”

“I was.”

“And you shot with your own hand an officer belonging to another company

who refused to join yours?”

“I shot a cowardly soldier who ran away from the enemy, and seemed a

ringleader of other runaways; and in so doing, I saved from dishonour

the best part of his comrades.”

“The man was no coward. He was an enlightened Frenchman, and worth fifty

of such aristos as you; and he knew better than his officers that he was

to be led to an idle slaughter. Idle--I say idle. What was France the

better, how was Paris the safer, for the senseless butchery of that day?

You mutinied against a wiser general than Saint Trochu when you murdered

that mutineer.”

“Armand Monnier, you are not quite sober to-night, or I would argue with

you that question. But you no doubt are brave: how and why do you take

the part of a runaway?”

“How and why? He was my brother, and you own you murdered him: my

brother--the sagest head in Paris. If I had listened to him, I should

not be,--bah!--no matter now what I am.”

“I could not know he was your brother; but if he had been mine I would

have done the same.”

Here Victor’s lip quivered, for Monnier griped him by the arm, and

looked him in the face with wild stony eyes. “I recollect that voice!

Yet--yet--you say you are a noble, a Vicomte--Victor de Mauleon, and you

shot my brother!”

Here he passed his left hand rapidly over his forehead. The fumes of

wine still clouded his mind, but rays of intelligence broke through the

cloud. Suddenly he said in a loud, and calm, and natural voice:

“Mons. le Vicomte, you accost me as Armand Monnier--pray how do you know

my name?”

“How should I not know it? I have looked into the meetings of the ‘Clubs

rouges.’ I have heard you speak, and naturally asked your name. Bon soir

M. Monnier! When you reflect in cooler moments, you will see that if

patriots excuse Brutus for first dishonouring and then executing his own

son, an officer charged to defend his country may be surely pardoned for

slaying a runaway to whom he was no relation, when in slaying he saved

the man’s name and kindred from dishonour--unless, indeed, you insist on

telling the world why he was slain.”

“I know your voice--I know it. Every sound becomes clearer to my ear.

And if--”

But while Monnier thus spoke, De Mauleon had hastened on. Monnier looked

round, saw him gone, but did not pursue. He was just intoxicated enough

to know that his footsteps were not steady, and he turned back to the

wine-shop and asked surlily for more wine. Could you have seen him then

as he leant swinging himself to and fro against the wall,--had you known

the man two years ago, you would have been a brute if you felt disgust.

You could only have felt that profound compassion with which we gaze on

a great royalty fallen. For the grandest of all royalties is that which

takes its crown from Nature, needing no accident of birth. And Nature

made the mind of Armand Monnier king-like; endowed it with lofty scorn

of meanness and falsehood and dishonour, with warmth and tenderness of

heart which had glow enough to spare from ties of kindred and hearth and

home, to extend to those distant circles of humanity over which royal

natures would fain extend the shadow of their sceptre.

How had the royalty of the man’s nature fallen thus? Royalty rarely

falls from its own constitutional faults. It falls when, ceasing to be

royal, it becomes subservient to bad advisers. And what bad advisers,

always appealing to his better qualities and so enlisting his worser,

had discrowned this mechanic?

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” says the old-fashioned poet.

“Not so,” says the modern philosopher; “a little knowledge; is safer

than no knowledge.” Possibly, as all individuals and all communities

must go through the stage of a little knowledge before they can arrive

at that of much knowledge, the philosopher’s assertion may be right

in the long-run, and applied to humankind in general. But there is

a period, as there is a class, in which a little knowledge tends to

terrible demoralisation. And Armand Monnier lived in that period and

was one of that class. The little knowledge that his mind, impulsive

and ardent, had picked up out of books that warred with the great

foundations of existing society, had originated in ill advices. A man

stored with much knowledge would never have let Madame de Grantmesnil’s

denunciations of marriage rites, or Louis Blane’s vindication of

Robespierre as the representative of the working against the middle

class, influence his practical life. He would have assessed such

opinions at their real worth; and whatever that worth might seem to

him, would not to such opinions have committed the conduct of his

life. Opinion is not fateful: conduct is. A little knowledge crazes

an earnest, warm-blooded, powerful creature like Armand Monnier into a

fanatic. He takes an opinion which pleases him as a revelation from the

gods; that opinion shapes his conduct; that conduct is his fate. Woe to

the philosopher who serenely flings before the little knowledge of

the artisan dogmas as harmless as the Atlantis of Plato if only to be

discussed by philosophers, and deadly as the torches of Ate if seized as

articles of a creed by fanatics! But thrice woe to the artisan who makes

himself the zealot of the Dogma!

Poor Armand acts on the opinions he adopts; proves his contempt for the

marriage state by living with the wife of another; resents, as natures

so inherently manly must do, the Society that visits on her his defiance

of its laws; throws himself, head foremost, against that society

altogether; necessarily joins all who have other reasons for

hostility to Society; he himself having every inducement not to join

indiscriminate strikes--high wages, a liberal employer, ample savings,

the certainty of soon becoming employer himself. No; that is not enough

to the fanatic: he persists on being dupe and victim. He, this great

king of labour, crowned by Nature, and cursed with that degree of little

knowledge which does not comprehend how much more is required before

a schoolboy would admit it to be knowledge at all,--he rushes into the

maddest of all speculations--that of the artisan with little knowledge

and enormous faith--that which intrusts the safety and repose and

dignity of life to some ambitious adventurer, who uses his warm heart

for the adventurer’s frigid purpose, much as the lawyer-government of

September used the Communists,--much as, in every revolution of France,

a Bertrand has used a Raton--much as, till the sound of the last

trumpet, men very much worse than Victor de Mauleon will use men very

much better than Armand Monnier, if the Armand Monniers disdain the

modesty of an Isaac Newton on hearing that a theorem to which he had

given all the strength of his patient intellect was disputed: “It may be

so;” meaning, I suppose, that it requires a large amount of experience

ascertained before a man of much knowledge becomes that which a man of

little knowledge is at a jump-the fanatic of an experiment untried.

CHAPTER II.

Scarcely had De Mauleon quitted Lemercier before the latter was joined

by two loungers scarcely less famished than himself--Savarin and De

Breze. Like himself, too, both had been sufferers from illness, though

not of a nature to be consigned to an hospital. All manner of diseases

then had combined to form the pestilence which filled the streets with

unregarded hearses--bronchitis, pneumonia, smallpox, a strange sort of

spurious dysentery much more speedily fatal than the genuine. The three

men, a year before so sleek, looked like ghosts under the withering sky;

yet all three retained embers of the native Parisian humour, which their

very breath on meeting sufficed to kindle up into jubilant sparks or

rapid flashes.

“There are two consolations,” said Savarin, as the friends strolled or

rather crawled towards the Boulevards--“two consolations for the gourmet

and for the proprietor in these days of trial for the gourmand, because

the price of truffles is come down.”

“Truffles!” gasped De Breze, with watering mouth; “impossible! They are

gone with the age of gold.”

“Not so. I speak on the best authority--my laundress; for she attends

the succursale in the Rue de Chateaudun; and if the poor woman, being,

luckily for me, a childless widow, gets a morsel she can spare, she

sells it to me.”

“Sells it!” feebly exclaimed Lemercier. “Croesus! you have money then,

and can buy?”

“Sells it--on credit! I am to pension her for life if I live to have

money again. Don’t interrupt me. This honest woman goes this morning to

the succursale. I promise myself a delicious bifteck of horse. She gains

the succursale, and the employee informs her that there is nothing left

in his store except--truffles. A glut of those in the market allows him

to offer her a bargain-seven francs la boite. Send me seven francs, De

Breze, and you shall share the banquet.”

De Breze shook his head expressively.

“But,” resumed Savarin, “though credit exists no more except with my

laundress, upon terms of which the usury is necessarily proportioned to

the risk, yet, as I had the honour before to observe, there is comfort

for the proprietor. The instinct of property is imperishable.”

“Not in the house where I lodge,” said Lemercier. “Two soldiers were

billeted there; and during my stay in the ambulance they enter my rooms,

and cart away all of the little furniture left there, except a bed and a

table. Brought before a court-martial, they defend themselves by saying,

‘The rooms were abandoned.’ The excuse was held valid. They were let off

with a reprimand and a promise to restore what was not already disposed

of. They have restored me another table and four chairs.”

“Nevertheless, they had the instinct of property, though erroneously

developed, otherwise they would not have deemed any excuse for their

act necessary. Now for my instance of the inherent tenacity of that

instinct. A worthy citizen in want of fuel sees a door in a garden wall,

and naturally carries off the door. He is apprehended by a gendarme who

sees the act. ‘Voleur,’ he cries to the gendarme, ‘do you want to rob me

of my property?’ ‘That door your property? I saw you take it away.’ ‘You

confess,’ cries the citizen, triumphantly--‘you confess that it is my

property; for you saw me appropriate it.’ Thus you see how imperishable

is the instinct of property. No sooner does it disappear as yours than

it reappears as mine.”

“I would laugh if I could,” said Lemercier, “but such a convulsion would

be fatal. Dieu des dieux, how empty I am!” He reeled as he spoke, and

clung to De Breze for support. De Breze had the reputation of being the

most selfish of men. But at that moment, when a generous man might be

excused for being selfish enough to desire to keep the little that he

had for his own reprieve from starvation, this egotist became superb.

“Friends,” he cried, with enthusiasm, “I have something yet in my

pocket; we will dine, all three of us.”

“Dine!” faltered Lemercier. “Dine! I have not dined since I left the

hospital. I breakfasted yesterday--on two mice upon toast. Dainty, but

not nutritious. And I shared them with Fox.”

“Fox! Fox lives still, then?” cried De Breze, startled.

“In a sort of way he does. But one mouse since yesterday morning is not

much; and he can’t expect that every day.”

“Why don’t you take him out?” asked Savarin. “Give him a chance of

picking up a bone somewhere.”

“I dare not; he would be picked up himself. Dogs are getting very

valuable: they sell for 50 francs apiece. Come, De Breze, where are we

to dine?”

“I and Savarin can dine at the London Tavern upon rat pate or jugged

cat. But it would be impertinence to invite a satrap like yourself who

has a whole dog in his larder--a dish of 50 francs--a dish for a king.

Adieu, my dear Frederic. Allons, Savarin.”

“I feasted you on better meats than dog when I could afford it,” said

Frederic, plaintively; “and the first time you invite me you retract the

invitation. Be it so. Bon appetit.”

“Bah!” said De Breze, catching Frederic’s arm as he turned to depart.

“Of course I was but jesting. Only another day, when my pockets will be

empty, do think what an excellent thing a roasted dog is, and make up

your mind while Fox has still some little flesh on his bones.”

“Flesh!” said Savarin, detaining them. “Look! See how right Voltaire was

in saying, ‘Amusement is the first necessity of civilised man.’ Paris

can do without bread Paris still retains Polichinello.”

He pointed to the puppet-show, round which a crowd, not of children

alone, but of men-middle-aged and old-were collected; while sous were

dropped into the tin handed round by a squalid boy.

“And, mon ami,” whispered De Breze to Lemercier, with the voice of a

tempting fiend, “observe how Punch is without his dog.”

It was true. The dog was gone,--its place supplied by a melancholy

emaciated cat.

Frederic crawled towards the squalid boy. “What has become of Punch’s

dog?”

“We ate him last Sunday. Next Sunday we shall have the cat in a pie,”

said the urchin, with a sensual smack of the lips.

“O Fox! Fox!” murmured Frederic, as the three men went slowly down

through the darkening streets--the roar of the Prussian guns heard afar,

while distinct and near rang the laugh of the idlers round the Punch

without a dog.

CHAPTER III.

While De Breze and his friends were feasting at the cafe Anglais, and

faring better than the host had promised--for the bill of fare comprised

such luxuries as ass, mule, peas, fried potatoes, and champagne

(champagne in some mysterious way was inexhaustible during the time of

famine)--a very different group had assembled in the rooms of

Isaura Cicogna. She and the Venosta had hitherto escaped the extreme

destitution to which many richer persons had been reduced. It is true

that Isaura’s fortune placed in the hands of the absent Louvier, and

invested in the new street that was to have been, brought no return. It

was true that in that street the Venosta, dreaming of cent. per cent.,

had invested all her savings. But the Venosta, at the first announcement

of war, had insisted on retaining in hand a small sum from the amount

Isaura had received from her “roman,” that might suffice for current

expenses, and with yet more acute foresight had laid in stores of

provisions and fuel immediately after the probability of a siege became

apparent. But even the provident mind of the Venosta had never foreseen

that the siege would endure so long, or that the prices of all articles

of necessity would rise so high. And meanwhile all resources--money,

fuel, provisions--had been largely drawn upon by the charity and

benevolence of Isaura, without much remonstrance on the part of the

Venosta, whose nature was very accessible to pity. Unfortunately, too,

of late money and provisions had failed to Monsieur and Madame Rameau,

their income consisting partly of rents no longer paid, and the profits

of a sleeping partnership in the old shop, from which custom had

departed; so that they came to share the fireside and meals at the rooms

of their son’s fiancee with little scruple, because utterly unaware that

the money retained and the provisions stored by the Venosta were now

nearly exhausted.

The patriotic ardour which had first induced the elder Rameau to

volunteer his services as a National Guard had been ere this cooled

if not suppressed, first by the hardships of the duty, and then by the

disorderly conduct of his associates, and their ribald talk and obscene

songs. He was much beyond the age at which he could be registered. His

son was, however, compelled to become his substitute, though from

his sickly health and delicate frame attached to that portion of

the National Guard which took no part in actual engagements, and was

supposed to do work on the ramparts and maintain order in the city.

In that duty, so opposed to his tastes and habits, Gustave signalised

himself as one of the loudest declaimers against the imbecility of the

Government, and in the demand for immediate and energetic action, no

matter at what loss of life, on the part of all--except the heroic force

to which he himself was attached. Still, despite his military

labours, Gustave found leisure to contribute to Red journals, and his

contributions paid him tolerably well. To do him justice, his parents

concealed from him the extent of their destitution; they, on their part,

not aware that he was so able to assist them, rather fearing that he

himself had nothing else for support but his scanty pay as a National

Guard. In fact, of late the parents and son had seen little of each

other. M. Rameau, though a Liberal politician, was Liberal as a

tradesman, not as a Red Republican or a Socialist. And, though little

heeding his son’s theories while the Empire secured him from the

practical effect of them, he was now as sincerely frightened at the

chance of the Communists becoming rampant as most of the Parisian

tradesmen were. Madame Rameau, on her side, though she had the dislike

to aristocrats which was prevalent with her class, was a stanch Roman

Catholic; and seeing in the disasters that had befallen her country the

punishment justly incurred by its sins, could not but be shocked by the

opinions of Gustave, though she little knew that he was the author

of certain articles in certain journals, in which these opinions were

proclaimed with a vehemence far exceeding that which they assumed in

his conversation. She had spoken to him with warm anger, mixed with

passionate tears, on his irreligious principles; and from that moment

Gustave shunned to give her another opportunity of insulting his pride

and depreciating his wisdom.

Partly to avoid meeting his parents, partly because he recoiled

almost as much from the ennui of meeting the other visitors at her

apartments--the Paris ladies associated with her in the ambulance, Raoul

de Vandeniar, whom he especially hated, and the Abbe Vertpre, who had

recently come into intimate friendship with both the Italian ladies--his

visits to Isaura had become exceedingly rare. He made his incessant

military duties the pretext for absenting himself; and now, on this

evening, there were gathered round Isaura’s hearth--on which burned

almost the last of the hoarded fuel--the Venosta, the two Rameaus, the

Abbe Vertpre, who was attached as confessor to the society of which

Isaura was so zealous a member. The old priest and the young poetess had

become dear friends. There is in the nature of a woman (and especially

of a woman at once so gifted and so childlike as Isaura, combining

an innate tendency towards faith with a restless inquisitiveness of

intellect, which is always suggesting query or doubt) a craving for

something afar from the sphere of her sorrow, which can only be obtained

through that “bridal of the earth and sky” which we call religion. And

hence, to natures like Isaura’s, that link between the woman and the

priest, which the philosophy of France has never been able to dissever.

“It is growing late,” said Madame Rameau; “I am beginning to feel

uneasy. Our dear Isaura is not yet returned.”

“You need be under no apprehension,” said the Abby. “The ladies attached

to the ambulance of which she is so tender and zealous a sister incur no

risk. There are always brave men related to the sick and wounded who

see to the safe return of the women. My poor Raoul visits that ambulance

daily. His kinsman, M. de Rochebriant, is there among the wounded.”

“Not seriously hurt, I hope,” said the Venosta; “not disfigured? He

was so handsome; it is only the ugly warrior whom a scar on the face

improves.”

“Don’t be alarmed, Signora; the Prussian guns spared his face. His

wounds in themselves were not dangerous, but he lost a good deal of

blood. Raoul and the Christian brothers found him insensible among a

heap of the slain.”

“M. de Vandemar seems to have very soon recovered the shock of his poor

brother’s death,” said Madame Rameau. “There is very little heart in an

aristocrat.”

The Abbe’s mild brow contracted. “Have more charity, my daughter. It is

because Raoul’s sorrow for his lost brother is so deep and so holy that

he devotes himself more than ever to the service of the Father which

is in heaven. He said, a day or two after the burial, when plans for

a monument to Enguerrand were submitted to him: ‘May my prayer be

vouchsafed, and my life be a memorial of him more acceptable to his

gentle spirit than monuments of bronze or marble. May I be divinely

guided and sustained in my desire to do such good acts as he would have

done had he been spared longer to earth. And whenever tempted to weary,

may my conscience whisper, Betray not the trust left to thee by thy

brother, lest thou be not reunited to him at last.”’

“Pardon me, pardon!” murmured Madame Rameau humbly, while the Venosta

burst into tears.

The Abbe, though a most sincere and earnest ecclesiastic, was a cheery

and genial man of the world; and, in order to relieve Madame Rameau

from the painful self-reproach he had before excited, he turned the

conversation. “I must beware, however,” he said, with his pleasant

laugh, “as to the company in which I interfere in family questions;

and especially in which I defend my poor Raoul from any charge brought

against him. For some good friend this day sent me a terrible organ

of communistic philosophy, in which we humble priests are very roughly

handled, and I myself am especially singled out by name as a pestilent

intermeddler in the affairs of private households. I am said to set

the women against the brave men who are friends of the people, and

am cautioned by very truculent threats to cease from such villainous

practices.” And here, with a dry humour that turned into ridicule

what would otherwise have excited disgust and indignation among his

listeners, he read aloud passages replete with the sort of false

eloquence which was then the vogue among the Red journals. In these

passages, not only the Abbe was pointed out for popular execration, but

Raoul de Vandemar, though not expressly named, was clearly indicated as

a pupil of the Abbe’s, the type of a lay Jesuit.

The Venosta alone did not share in the contemptuous laughter with which

the inflated style of these diatribes inspired the Rameaus. Her simple

Italian mind was horror-stricken by language which the Abbe treated with

ridicule.

“Ah!” said M. Rameau, “I guess the author--that firebrand Felix Pyat.”

“No,” answered the Abbe; “the writer signs himself by the name of a

more learned atheist--Diderot le jeune.” Here the door opened, and Raoul

entered, accompanying Isaura. A change had come over the face of the

young Vandemar since his brother’s death. The lines about the mouth had

deepened, the cheeks had lost their rounded contour and grown somewhat

hollow. But the expression was as serene as ever, perhaps even less

pensively melancholy. His whole aspect was that of a man who

has sorrowed, but been supported in sorrow; perhaps it was more

sweet-certainly it was more lofty.

And, as if there were in the atmosphere of his presence something that

communicated the likeness of his own soul to others, since Isaura had

been brought into his companionship, her own lovely face had caught

the expression that prevailed in his--that, too, had become more

sweet--that, too, had become more lofty.

The friendship that had grown up between these two young mourners was of

a very rare nature. It had in it no sentiment that could ever warm into

the passion of human love. Indeed, had Isaura’s heart been free to give

away, love for Raoul de Vandemar would have seemed to her a profanation.

He was never more priestly than when he was most tender. And the

tenderness of Raoul towards her was that of some saint-like nature

towards the acolyte whom it attracted upwards. He had once, just before

Enguerrand’s death, spoken to Isaura with a touching candour as to his

own predilection for a monastic life. “The worldly avocations that open

useful and honourable careers for others have no charm for me. I care

not for riches nor power, nor honours nor fame. The austerities of the

conventual life have no terror for me; on the contrary, they have

a charm, for with them are abstraction from earth and meditation on

heaven. In earlier years I might, like other men, have cherished

dreams of human love, and felicity in married life, but for the sort

of veneration with which I regarded one to whom I owe--humanly

speaking--whatever of good there may be in me. Just when first taking

my place among the society of young men who banish from their life all

thought of another, I came under the influence of a woman who taught me

to see that holiness was beauty. She gradually associated me with her

acts of benevolence, and from her I learned to love God too well not to

be indulgent to his creatures. I know not whether the attachment I

felt to her could have been inspired in one who had not from childhood

conceived a romance, not perhaps justified by history, for the ideal

images of chivalry. My feeling for her at first was that of the pure

and poetic homage which a young knight was permitted, sans reproche, to

render to some fair queen or chatelaine, whose colours he wore in the

lists, whose spotless repute he would have perilled his life to defend.

But soon even that sentiment, pure as it was, became chastened from all

breath of earthly love, in proportion as the admiration refined itself

into reverence. She has often urged me to marry, but I have no bride on

this earth. I do but want to see Enguerrand happily married, and then I

quit the world for the cloister.”

But after Enguerrand’s death, Raoul resigned all idea of the convent.

That evening, as he attended to their homes Isaura and the other ladies

at to the ambulance, he said, in answer to inquiries about his mother,

“She is resigned and calm. I have promised her I will not, while she

lives, bury her other son: I renounce my dreams of the monastery.”

Raoul did not remain many minutes at Isaura’s. The Abbe accompanied him

on his way home. “I have a request to make to you,” said the former;

“you know, of course, your distant cousin the Vicomte de Mauleon?”

“Yes. Not so well as I ought, for Enguerrand liked him.”

“Well enough, at all events, to call on him with a request which I am

commissioned to make, but it might come better from you as a kinsman.

I am a stranger to him, and I know not whether a man of that sort would

not regard as an officious intermeddling any communication made to him

by a priest. The matter, however, is a very simple one. At the convent

of ------- there is a poor nun who is, I fear, dying. She has an intense

desire to see M. de Mauleon, whom she declares to be her uncle, and her

only surviving relative. The laws of the convent are not too austere to

prevent the interview she seeks in such a case. I should add that I am

not acquainted with her previous history. I am not the confessor of the

sisterhood; he, poor man, was badly wounded by a chance ball a few

days ago when attached to an ambulance on the ramparts. As soon as the

surgeon would allow him to see any one, he sent for me, and bade me go

to the nun I speak of--Sister Ursula. It seems that he had informed

her that M. de Mauleon was at Paris, and had promised to ascertain his

address. His wound had prevented his doing so, but he trusted to me to

procure the information. I am well acquainted with the Superieure of

the convent, and I flatter myself that she holds me in esteem. I had

therefore no difficulty to obtain her permission to see this poor nun,

which I did this evening. She implored me for the peace of her soul to

lose no time in finding out M. de Mauleon’s address, and entreating him

to visit her. Lest he should demur, I was to give him the name by which

he had known her in the world--Louise Duval. Of course I obeyed. The

address of a man who has so distinguished himself in this unhappy

siege I very easily obtained, and repaired at once to M. de Mauleon’s

apartment. I there learned that he was from home, and it was uncertain

whether he would not spend the night on the ramparts.”

“I will not fail to see him early in the morning,” said Raoul, “and

execute your commission.”

CHAPTER IV.

M. Mauleon was somewhat surprised by Raoul’s visit the next morning. He

had no great liking for a kinsman whose politely distant reserve towards

him, in contrast to poor Euguerrand’s genial heartiness, had much

wounded his sensitive self-respect; nor could he comprehend the

religious scruples which forbade Raoul to take a soldier’s share in the

battle-field, though in seeking there to save the lives of others so

fearlessly hazarding his own life.

“Pardon,” said Raoul, with his sweet mournful smile, “the unseasonable

hour at which I disturb you. But your duties on the ramparts and mine

in the hospital begin early, and I have promised the Abbe Vertpre to

communicate a message of a nature which perhaps you may deem pressing.”

He proceeded at once to repeat what the Abbe had communicated to him the

night before relative to the illness and the request of the nun.

“Louise Duval!” exclaimed the Vicomte, “discovered at last, and a

religieuse! Ah! I now understand why she never sought me out when I

reappeared at Paris. Tidings of that sort do not penetrate the walls of

a convent. I am greatly obliged to you, M. de Vandemar, for the trouble

you have so kindly taken. This poor nun is related to me, and I will at

once obey the summons. But this convent des ------- I am ashamed to say

I know not where it is. A long way off, I suppose?”

“Allow me to be your guide,” said Raoul; “I should take it as a favour

to be allowed to see a little more of a man whom my lost brother held in

such esteem.”

Victor was touched by this conciliatory speech, and in a few minutes

more the two men were on their way to the convent on the other side of

the Seine.

Victor commenced the conversation by a warm and heartfelt tribute to

Euguerrand’s character and memory. “I never,” he said, “knew a nature

more rich in the most endearing qualities of youth; so gentle, so

high-spirited, rendering every virtue more attractive, and redeeming

such few faults or foibles as youth so situated and so tempted cannot

wholly escape, with an urbanity not conventional, not artificial, but

reflected from the frankness of a genial temper and the tenderness of a

generous heart. Be comforted for his loss, my kinsman. A brave death was

the proper crown of that beautiful life.”

Raoul made no answer, but pressed gratefully the arm now linked within

his own. The companions walked on in silence; Victor’s mind settling on

the visit he was about to make to the niece so long mysteriously lost,

and now so unexpectedly found. Louise had inspired him with a certain

interest from her beauty and force of character, but never with any warm

affection. He felt relieved to find that her life had found its close in

the sanctuary of the convent. He had never divested himself of a certain

fear, inspired by Louvier’s statement that she might live to bring

scandal and disgrace on the name he had with so much difficulty, and

after so lengthened an anguish, partially cleared in his own person.

Raoul left De Mauleon at the gate of the convent, and took his way

towards the hospitals where he visited, and the poor whom he relieved.

Victor was conducted silently into the convent parloir; and, after

waiting there several minutes, the door opened, and the Superieure

entered. As she advanced towards him, with stately step and solemn

visage, De Mauleon recoiled, and uttered a half-suppressed exclamation

that partook both of amaze and awe. Could it be possible? Was this

majestic woman, with the grave impassible aspect, once the ardent girl

whose tender letters he had cherished through stormy years, and only

burned on the night before the most perilous of his battle-fields? This

the one, the sole one, whom in his younger dreams he had seen as his

destined wife? It was so--it was. Doubt vanished when he heard her

voice; and yet how different every tone, every accent, from those of the

low, soft, thrilling music that had breathed in the voice of old!

“M. de Mauleon,” said the Superieure, calmly, “I grieve to sadden you by

very mournful intelligence. Yesterday evening, when the Abbe undertook

to convey to you the request of our Sister Ursula, although she was

beyond mortal hope of recovery--as otherwise you will conceive that I

could not have relaxed the rules of this house so as to sanction your

visit--there was no apprehension of immediate danger. It was believed

that her sufferings would be prolonged for some days. I saw her late

last night before retiring to my cell, and she seemed even stronger than

she had been for the last week. A sister remained at watch in her cell.

Towards morning she fell into apparently quiet sleep, and in that sleep

she passed away.” The Superieure here crossed herself, and murmured

pious words in Latin. “Dead! my poor niece!” said Victor, feelingly,

roused from his stun at the first sight of the Superieure by her

measured tones, and the melancholy information she so composedly

conveyed to him. “I cannot, then, even learn why she so wished to see me

once more,--or what she might have requested at my hands!”

“Pardon, M. le Vicomte. Such sorrowful consolation I have resolved to

afford you, not without scruples of conscience, but not without sanction

of the excellent Abbe Vertpre, whom I summoned early this morning to

decide my duties in the sacred office I hold. As soon as Sister Ursula

heard of your return to Paris, she obtained my permission to address to

you a letter, subjected, when finished, to my perusal and sanction. She

felt that she had much on her mind which her feeble state might forbid

her to make known to you in conversation with ‘sufficient fulness; and

as she could only have seen you in presence of one of the sisters

she imagined that there would also be less restraint in a written

communication. In fine, her request was that, when you called, I might

first place this letter in your hands, and allow you time to read it,

before being admitted to her presence; when a few words conveying your

promise to attend to the wishes with which you would then be acquainted,

would suffice for an interview in her exhausted condition. Do I make

myself understood?”

“Certainly, Madame,--and the letter?”

“She had concluded last evening; and when I took leave of her later in

the night, she placed it in my hands for approval. M. le Vicomte, it

pains me to say that there is much in the tone of that letter which I

grieve for and condemn. And it was my intention to point this out to our

sister at morning, and tell her that passages must be altered before

I could give to you the letter. Her sudden decease deprived me of this

opportunity. I could not, of course, alter or erase a line--a word.

My only option was to suppress the letter altogether, or give it you

intact. The Abbe thinks that, on the whole, my duty does not forbid the

dictate of my own impulse--my own feelings; and I now place this letter

in your hands.”

De Mauleon took a packet, unsealed, from the thin white fingers of

the Superieure; and as he bent to receive it, lifted towards her eyes

eloquent with sorrowful, humble pathos, in which it was impossible for

the heart of a woman who had loved not to see a reference to the past

which the lips did not dare to utter.

A faint, scarce-perceptible blush stole over the marble cheek of the

nun. But, with an exquisite delicacy, in which survived the woman while

reigned the nun, she replied to the appeal.

“M. Victor de Mauleon, before, having thus met, we part for ever, permit

a poor religieuse to say with what joy--a joy rendered happier because

it was tearful--I have learned through the Abbe Vertpre that the honour

which, as between man and man, no one who had once known you could ever

doubt, you have lived to vindicate from calumny.”

“Ah; you have heard that--at last, at last!”

“I repeat--of the honour thus deferred, I never doubted.” The Superieure

hurried on. “Greater joy it has been to me to hear from the same

venerable source that, while found bravest among the defenders of your

country, you are clear from all alliance with the assailants of your

God. Continue so, continue so, Victor de Mauleon.”

She retreated to the door, and then turned towards him with a look in

which all the marble had melted away, adding, with words more formally

nunlike, yet unmistakably womanlike, than those which had gone before,

“That to the last you may be true to God, is a prayer never by me

omitted.”

She spoke, and vanished.

In a kind of dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found

himself without the walls of the convent. Mechanically, as a man

does when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first

Minister of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed

to appear at their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a

horse-collar, though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some

household or secret affliction,--mechanically De Mauldon went his way

towards the ramparts, at a section of which he daily drilled his raw

recruits. Proverbial for his severity towards those who offended,

for the cordiality of his praise of those who pleased his soldierly

judgment, no change of his demeanour was visible that morning, save

that he might be somewhat milder to the one, somewhat less hearty to the

other. This routine duty done, he passed slowly towards a more deserted

because a more exposed part of the defences, and seated himself on

the frozen sward alone. The cannon thundered around him. He heard

unconsciously: from time to time an obus hissed and splintered close at

his feet;--he saw with abstracted eye. His soul was with the past; and,

brooding over all that in the past lay buried there, came over him a

conviction of the vanity of the human earth-bounded objects for which

we burn or freeze, far more absolute than had grown out of the worldly

cynicism connected with his worldly ambition. The sight of that face,

associated with the one pure romance of his reckless youth, the face

of one so estranged, so serenely aloft from all memories of youth, of

romance, of passion, smote him in the midst of the new hopes of the new

career, as the look on the skull of the woman he had so loved and so

mourned, when disburied from her grave, smote the brilliant noble

who became the stern reformer of La Trappe. And while thus gloomily

meditating, the letter of the poor Louise Duval was forgotten. She whose

existence had so troubled, and crossed, and partly marred the lives of

others,--she, scarcely dead, and already forgotten by her nearest kin.

Well--had she not forgotten, put wholly out of her mind, all that was

due to those much nearer to her than is an uncle to a niece?

The short, bitter, sunless day was advancing towards its decline before

Victor roused himself with a quick impatient start from his reverie, and

took forth the letter from the dead nun.

It began with expressions of gratitude, of joy at the thought that she

should see him again before she died, thank him for his past kindness,

and receive, she trusted, his assurance that he would attend to her

last remorseful injunctions. I pass over much that followed in the

explanation of events in her life sufficiently known to the reader. She

stated, as the strongest reason why she had refused the hand of Louvier,

her knowledge that she should in due time become a mother--a fact

concealed from Victor, secure that he would then urge her not to annul

her informal marriage, but rather insist on the ceremonies that would

render it valid. She touched briefly on her confidential intimacy with

Madame Marigny, the exchange of name and papers, her confinement in

the neighbourhood of Aix, the child left to the care of the nurse,

the journey to Munich to find the false Louise Duval was no more. The

documents obtained through the agency of her easy-tempered kinsman, the

late Marquis de Rochebriant, and her subsequent domestication in the

house of the von Rudesheims,--all this it is needless to do more here

than briefly recapitulate. The letter then went on: “While thus kindly

treated by the family with whom nominally a governess, I was on the

terms of a friend with Signor Ludovico Cicogna, an Italian of noble

birth. He was the only man I ever cared for. I loved him with frail

human passion. I could not tell him, my true history. I could not tell

him that I had a child; such intelligence would have made him renounce

me at once. He had a daughter, still but an infant, by a former

marriage, then brought up in France. He wished to take her to his house,

and his second wife to supply the place of her mother. What was I to

do with the child I had left near Aix? While doubtful and distracted, I

read an advertisement in the journals to the effect that a French lady,

then staying in Coblentz, wished to adopt a female child not exceeding

the age of six: the child to be wholly resigned to her by the parents,

she undertaking to rear and provide for it as her own. I resolved to go

to Coblentz at once. I did so. I saw this lady. She seemed in affluent

circumstances, yet young, but a confirmed invalid, confined the greater

part of the day to her sofa by some malady of the spine. She told me

very frankly her story. She had been a professional dancer on the stage,

had married respectably, quitted the stage, become a widow, and shortly

afterwards been seized with the complaint that would probably for life

keep her a secluded prisoner in her room. Thus afflicted, and without

tie, interest, or object in the world, she conceived the idea of

adopting a child that she might bring up to tend and cherish her as a

daughter. In this, the imperative condition was that the child should

never be sought by the parents. She was pleased by my manner and

appearance: she did not wish her adopted daughter to be the child of

peasants. She asked me for no references,--made no inquiries. She

said cordially that she wished for no knowledge that, through any

indiscretion of her own, communicated to the child might lead her to

seek the discovery of her real parents. In fine, I left Coblentz on the

understanding that I was to bring the infant, and if it pleased Madame

Surville, the agreement was concluded.

“I then repaired to Aix. I saw the child. Alas! unnatural mother that I

was, the sight only more vividly brought before me the sense of my own

perilous position. Yet the child was lovely! a likeness of myself, but

lovelier far, for it was a pure, innocent, gentle loveliness. And they

told her to call me ‘Maman.’ Oh, did I not relent when I heard that

name? No; it jarred on my ear as a word of reproach and shame. In

walking with the infant towards the railway station, imagine my dismay

when suddenly I met the man who had been taught to believe me dead. I

soon discovered that his dismay was equal to my own,--that I had nothing

to fear from his desire to claim me. It did occur to me for a moment

to resign his child to him. But when he shrank reluctantly from a half

suggestion to that effect, my pride was wounded, my conscience absolved.

And, after all, it might be unsafe to my future to leave with him any

motive for tracing me. I left him hastily. I have never seen nor heard

of him more. I took the child to Coblentz. Madame Surville was charmed

with its prettiness and prattle,--charmed still more when I rebuked the

poor infant for calling me ‘Maman,’ and said, ‘Thy real mother is here.’

Freed from my trouble, I returned to the kind German roof I had quitted,

and shortly after became the wife of Ludovico Cicogna.

“My punishment soon began. His was a light, fickle, pleasure-hunting

nature. He soon grew weary of me. My very love made me unamiable to him.

I became irritable, jealous, exacting. His daughter, who now came to

live with us, was another subject of discord. I knew that he loved her

better than me. I became a harsh step-mother; and Ludovico’s reproaches,

vehemently made, nursed all my angriest passions. But a son of this new

marriage was born to myself. My pretty Luigi! how my heart became wrapt

up in him! Nursing him, I forgot resentment against his father. Well,

poor Cicogna fell ill and died. I mourned him sincerely; but my boy was

left. Poverty then fell on me,--poverty extreme. Cicogna’s sole income

was derived from a post in the Austrian dominion in Italy, and ceased

with it. He received a small pension in compensation; that died with

him.

“At this time, an Englishman, with whom Ludovico had made acquaintance

in Venice, and who visited often at our house in Verona, offered me his

hand. He had taken an extraordinary liking to Isaura, Cicogna’s daughter

by his first marriage. But I think his proposal was dictated partly by

compassion for me, and more by affection for her. For the sake of my boy

Luigi I married him. He was a good man, of retired learned habits with

which I had no sympathy. His companionship overwhelmed me with ennui.

But I bore it patiently for Luigi’s sake. God saw that my heart was as

much as ever estranged from Him, and He took away my all on earth--my

boy. Then in my desolation I turned to our Holy Church for comfort. I

found a friend in the priest, my confessor. I was startled to learn

from him how guilty I had been--was still. Pushing to an extreme the

doctrines of the Church, he would not allow that my first marriage,

though null by law, was void in the eyes of Heaven. Was not the death of

the child I so cherished a penalty due to my sin towards the child I had

abandoned?

“These thoughts pressed on me night and day. With the consent and

approval of the good priest, I determined to quit the roof of M. Selby,

and to devote myself to the discovery of my forsaken Julie.

“I had a painful interview with M. Selby. I announced my intention to

separate from him. I alleged as a reason my conscientious repugnance

to live with a professed heretic--an enemy to our Holy Church. When M.

Selby found that he could not shake my resolution, he lent himself to

it with the forbearance and generosity which he had always exhibited. On

our marriage he had settled on me five thousand pounds, to be absolutely

mine in the event of his death. He now proposed to concede to me the

interest on that capital during his life, and he undertook the charge

of my step-daughter Isaura, and secured to her all the rest he had to

leave; such landed property as he possessed in England passing to a

distant relative.

“So we parted, not with hostility--tears were shed on both sides. I

set out for Coblentz. Madame Surville had long since quitted that town,

devoting some years to the round of various mineral spas in vain hope of

cure. Not without some difficulty I traced her to her last residence

in the neighbourhood of Paris, but she was then no more--her death

accelerated by the shock occasioned by the loss of her whole fortune,

which she had been induced to place in one of the numerous fraudulent

companies by which so many have been ruined. Julie, who was with her at

the time of her death, had disappeared shortly after it--none could tell

me whither; but from such hints as I could gather, the poor child, thus

left destitute, had been betrayed into sinful courses.

“Probably I might yet by searching inquiry have found her out; you will

say it was my duty at least to institute such inquiry. No doubt; I

now remorsefully feel that it was. I did not think so at the time. The

Italian priest had given me a few letters of introduction to French

ladies with whom, when they had sojourned at Florence, he had made

acquaintance. These ladies were very strict devotees, formal observers

of those decorums by which devotion proclaims itself to the world. They

had received me not only with kindness but with marked respect. They

chose to exalt into the noblest self-sacrifice the act of my leaving

M. Selby’s house. Exaggerating the simple cause assigned to it in the

priest’s letter, they represented me as quitting a luxurious home and

an idolising husband rather than continue intimate intercourse with the

enemy of my religion. This new sort of flattery intoxicated me with its

fumes. I recoiled from the thought of shattering the pedestal to which I

had found myself elevated. What if I should discover my daughter in one

from the touch of whose robe these holy women would recoil as from

the rags of a leper! No; it would be impossible for me to own

her--impossible for me to give her the shelter of my roof. Nay, if

discovered to hold any commune with such an outcast, no explanation, no

excuse short of the actual truth, would avail with these austere judges

of human error. And the actual truth would be yet deeper disgrace. I

reasoned away my conscience. If I looked for example in the circles

in which I had obtained reverential place, I could find no instance

in which a girl who had fallen from virtue was not repudiated by her

nearest relatives. Nay, when I thought of my own mother, had not her

father refused to see her, to acknowledge her child, from no other

offence than that of a misalliance which wounded the family pride? That

pride, alas! was in my blood--my sole inheritance from the family I

sprang from.

“Thus it went on, till I had grave symptoms of a disease which rendered

the duration of my life uncertain. My conscience awoke and tortured me.

I resolved to take the veil. Vanity and pride again! My resolution was

applauded by those whose opinion had so swayed my mind and my conduct.

Before I retired into the convent from which I write, I made legal

provision as to the bulk of the fortune which, by the death of M. Selby,

has become absolutely at my disposal. One thousand pounds amply sufficed

for dotation to the convent: the other four thousand pounds are given in

trust to the eminent notary, M. Nadaud, Rue -------. On applying to him,

you will find that the sum, with the accumulated interest, is bequeathed

to you,--a tribute of gratitude for the assistance you afforded me in

the time of your own need, and the kindness with which you acknowledged

our relationship and commiserated my misfortunes.

“But oh, my uncle, find out--a man can do so with a facility not

accorded to a woman--what has become of this poor Julie, and devote

what you may deem right and just of the sum thus bequeathed to place her

above want and temptation. In doing so, I know you will respect my name:

I would not have it dishonour you, indeed.

“I have been employed in writing this long letter since the day I heard

you were in Paris. It has exhausted the feeble remnants of my strength.

It will be given to you before the interview I at once dread and long

for, and in that interview you will not rebuke me. Will you, my kind

uncle? No, you will only soothe and pity!

“Would that I were worthy to pray for others, that I might add, ‘May

the Saints have you in their keeping and lead you to faith in the Holy

Church, which has power to absolve from sins those who repent as I do.’”

The letter dropped from Victor’s hand. He took it up, smoothed it

mechanically, and with a dim, abstracted, be wildered, pitiful wonder.

Well might the Superieure have hesitated to allow confessions, betraying

a mind so little regulated by genuine religious faith, to pass into

other hands. Evidently it was the paramount duty of rescuing from want

or from sin the writer’s forsaken child, that had overborne all other

considerations in the mind of the Woman and the Priest she consulted.

Throughout that letter, what a strange perversion of understanding! what

a half-unconscious confusion of wrong and right!--the duty marked out so

obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the

conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of

being thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger

than the moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose

errors, if she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was

alone responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love

for a name she had never made a self-sacrifice to preserve unstained;

and that concluding exhortation,--that reliance on a repentance in which

there was so qualified a reparation!

More would Victor de Mauldon have wondered had he known those points

of similarity in character, and in the nature of their final bequests,

between Louise Duval and the husband she had deserted. By one of those

singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary

rules presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not

unjustly impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for

this child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left

to the discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of

the consecrated Louise and “the blameless King,” with the injunction

of respect to their worldly reputations--two parents so opposite in

condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of

individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human

opinion. For this, indeed, the excuses of Richard King are strong,

inasmuch as the secrecy he sought was for the sake, not of his own

memory, but that of her whom the world knew only as his honoured wife.

The conduct of Louise admits no such excuse; she dies as she had lived;

an Egotist. But, whatever the motives of the parents, what is the fate

of the deserted child? What revenge does the worldly opinion, which the

parents would escape for themselves, inflict on the innocent infant

to whom the bulk of their worldly possessions is to be clandestinely

conveyed? Would all the gold of Ophir be compensation enough for her?

Slowly De Mauleon roused himself, and turned from the solitary place

where he had been seated to a more crowded part of the ramparts. He

passed a group of young Moblots, with flowers wreathed round their

gun-barrels. “If,” said one of them gaily, “Paris wants bread, it never

wants flowers.” His companions laughed merrily, and burst out into a

scurrile song in ridicule of St. Trochu. Just then an obus fell a few

yards before the group. The sound only for a moment drowned the song,

but the splinters struck a man in a coarse, ragged dress, who had

stopped to listen to the singers. At his sharp cry, two men hastened

to his side: one was Victor de Mauleon; the other was a surgeon, who

quitted another group of idlers--National Guards--attracted by the

shriek that summoned his professional aid. The poor man was terribly

wounded. The surgeon, glancing at De Mauleon, shrugged his shoulders,

and muttered, “Past help!” The sufferer turned his haggard eyes on the

Vicomte, and gasped out, “M. de Mauleon?”

“That is my name,” answered Victor, surprised, and not immediately

recognising the sufferer.

“Hist, Jean Lebeau!--look at me: you recollect me now,--Mart le Roux,

concierge to the Secret Council. Ay, I found out who you were long

ago--followed you home from the last meeting you broke up. But I did not

betray you, or you would have been murdered long since. Beware of

the old set--beware of--of--” Here his voice broke off into shrill

exclamations of pain. Curbing his last agonies with a powerful effort,

he faltered forth, “You owe me a service--see to the little one at

home--she is starving.” The death-rale came on; in a few moments he was

no more.

Victor gave orders for the removal of the corpse, and hurried away. The

surgeon, who had changed countenance when he overheard the name in

which the dying man had addressed De Mauleon, gazed silently after De

Mauleon’s retreating form, and then, also quitting the dead, rejoined

the group he had quitted. Some of those who composed it acquired evil

renown later in the war of the Communists, and came to disastrous ends:

among that number the Pole Loubinsky and other members of the Secret

Council. The Italian Raselli was there too, but, subtler than his

French confreres, he divined the fate of the Communists, and glided

from it--safe now in his native land, destined there, no doubt, to the

funereal honours and lasting renown which Italy bestows on the dust

of her sons who have advocated assassination out of love for the human

race.

Amid this group, too, was a National Guard, strayed from his proper

post, and stretched on the frozen ground; and, early though the hour, in

the profound sleep of intoxication.

“So,” said Loubinsky, “you have found your errand in vain, Citizen le

Noy; another victim to the imbecility of our generals.”

“And partly one of us,” replied the Medecin des Pauvres. “You remember

poor le Roux, who kept the old baraque where the Council of Ten used to

meet? Yonder he lies.”

“Don’t talk of the Council of Ten. What fools and dupes we were made by

that vieux gredin, Jean Lebeau! How I wish I could meet him again!”

Gaspard le Noy smiled sarcastically. “So much the worse for you, if you

did. A muscular and a ruthless fellow is that Jean Lebeau!” Therewith he

turned to the drunken sleeper and woke him up with a shake and a kick.

“Armand--Armand Monnier, I say, rise, rub your eyes. What if you are

called to your post? What if you are shamed as a deserter and a coward?”

Armand turned, rose with an effort from the recumbent to the sitting

posture, and stared dizzily in the face of the Medecin des Pauvres.

“I was dreaming that I had caught by the throat,” said Armand, wildly,

“the aristo who shot my brother; and lo, there were two men, Victor de

Mauleon and Jean Lebeau.”

“Ah! there is something in dreams,” said the surgeon. “Once in a

thousand times a dream comes true.”

CHAPTER V.

The time now came when all provision of food or of fuel failed the

modest household of Isaura; and there was not only herself and the

Venosta to feed and warm--there were the servants whom they had brought

from Italy, and had not the heart now to dismiss to the ‘certainty of

famine. True, one of the three, the man, had returned to his native land

before the commencement of the siege; but the two women had remained.

They supported themselves now as they could on the meagre rations

accorded by the Government. Still Isaura attended the ambulance to which

she was attached. From the ladies associated with her she could readily

have obtained ample supplies: but they had no conception of her real

state of destitution; and there was a false pride generally prevalent

among the respectable classes, which Isaura shared, that concealed

distress lest alms should be proffered.

The destitution of the household had been carefully concealed from the

parents of Gustave Rameau, until, one day, Madame Rameau, entering at

the hour at which she generally, and her husband sometimes, came for

a place by the fireside and a seat at the board, found on the one only

ashes, on the other a ration of the black nauseous compound which had

become the substitute for bread.

Isaura was absent on her duties at the ambulance hospital,--purposely

absent, for she shrank from the bitter task of making clear to the

friends of her betrothed the impossibility of continuing the aid to

their support which their son had neglected to contribute; and still

more from the comment which she knew they would make on his conduct, in

absenting himself so wholly of late, and in the time of such trial and

pressure, both from them and from herself. Truly, she rejoiced at

that absence so far as it affected herself. Every hour of the day she

silently asked her conscience whether she were not now absolved from

a promise won from her only by an assurance that she had power to

influence for good the life that now voluntarily separated itself from

her own. As she had never loved Gustave, so she felt no resentment at

the indifference his conduct manifested. On the contrary, she hailed it

as a sign that the annulment of their betrothal would be as welcome

to him as to herself. And if so, she could restore to him the sort of

compassionate friendship she had learned to cherish in the hour of his

illness and repentance. She had resolved to seize the first opportunity

he afforded to her of speaking to him with frank and truthful plainness.

But, meanwhile, her gentle nature recoiled from the confession of

her resolve to appeal to Gustave himself for the rupture of their

engagement.

Thus the Venosta alone received Madame Rameau; and while that lady was

still gazing round her with an emotion too deep for immediate utterance,

her husband entered with an expression of face new to him--the look of

a man who has been stung to anger, and who has braced his mind to some

stern determination. This altered countenance of the good-tempered

bourgeois was not, however, noticed by the two women. The Venosta

did not even raise her eyes to it, as with humbled accents she said,

“Pardon, dear Monsieur, pardon, Madame, our want of hospitality; it

is not our hearts that fail. We kept our state from you as long as we

could. Now it speaks for itself; ‘la fame e una bretta festin.’”

“Oh, Madame! and oh, my poor Isaura!” cried Madame Rameau, bursting into

tears. “So we have been all this time a burden on you,--aided to bring

such want on you! How can we ever be forgiven? And my son--to leave us

thus,--not even to tell us where to find him!”

“Do not degrade us, my wife,” said M. Rameau, with unexpected dignity,

“by a word to imply that we would stoop to sue for support to our

ungrateful child. No, we will not starve! I am strong enough still to

find food for you. I will apply for restoration to the National Guard.

They have augmented the pay to married men; it is now nearly two francs

and a half a-day to a pere de famille, and on that pay we all can at

least live. Courage, my wife! I will go at once for employment. Many

men older than I am are at watch on the ramparts, and will march to the

battle on the next sortie.”

“It shall not be so,” exclaimed Madame Rameau, vehemently, and winding

her arm round her husband’s neck. “I loved my son better than thee

once--more shame to me. Now, I would rather lose twenty such sons than

peril thy life, my Jacques! Madame,” she continued, turning to the

Venosta, “thou wert wiser than I. Thou wert ever opposed to the union

between thy young friend and my son. I felt sore with thee for it--a

mother is so selfish when she puts herself in the place of her child. I

thought that only through marriage with one so pure, so noble, so

holy, Gustave could be saved from sin and evil. I am deceived. A man so

heartless to his parents, so neglectful of his affianced, is not to be

redeemed. I brought about this betrothal: tell Isaura that I release her

from it. I have watched her closely since she was entrapped into it.

I know how miserable the thought of it has made her, though, in her

sublime devotion to her plighted word, she sought to conceal from me the

real state of her heart. If the betrothal bring such sorrow, what would

the union do! Tell her this from me. Come, Jacques, come away!”

“Stay, Madame!” exclaimed the Venosta, her excitable nature much

affected by this honest outburst of feeling. “It is true that I did

oppose, so far as I could, my poor Piccola’s engagement with M. Gustave.

But I dare not do your bidding. Isaura would not listen to me. And let

us be just! M. Gustave may be able satisfactorily to explain his seeming

indifference and neglect. His health is always very delicate; perhaps

he may be again dangerously ill. He serves in the National Guard;

perhaps--” she paused, but the mother conjectured the word left unsaid,

and, clasping her hands, cried out in anguish, “Perhaps dead!--and

we have wronged him! Oh, Jacques, Jacques! how shall we find out-how

discover our boy? Who can tell us where to search? at the hospital--or

in the cemeteries?” At the last word she dropped into a seat, and her

whole frame shook with her sobs.

Jacques approached her tenderly, and kneeling by her side, said:

“No, m’amie, comfort thyself, if it be indeed comfort to learn that thy

son is alive and well. For my part, I know not if I would not rather he

had died in his innocent childhood. I have seen him--spoken to him. I

know where he is to be found.”

“You do, and concealed it from me? Oh, Jacques!”

“Listen to me, wife, and you, too, Madame; for what I have to say should

be made known to Mademoiselle Cicogna. Some time since, on the night

of the famous sortie, when at my post on the ramparts, I was told that

Gustave had joined himself to the most violent of the Red Republicans,

and had uttered at the Club de la Vengeance sentiments, of which I will

only say that I, his father and a Frenchman, hung my head with shame

when they were repeated to me. I resolved to go to the club myself.

I did. I heard him speak--heard him denounce Christianity as the

instrument of tyrants.”

“Ah!” cried the two women, with a simultaneous shudder.