has life.” Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still holding
them, he bowed low over them, so low that his heavy golden mane tumbled
forward on either side of his handsome head to form a screen under
cover of which he pressed his lips upon her fingers.
She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough reward
for so much devotion.
“I thank you again,” she breathed. “And now I must think—I must
consider where I can count upon finding refuge.”
That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion was, no
doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of his horse, and
so ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom for her with his
sword. Her sober words dispelled the dream, revealed to him that it was
not quite intended he should hereafter be her custodian. And there for
the moment the matter was suspended.
Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered that an
Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted interview,
accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-kissings, within
sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it happened, behind one of
those windows lurked the Countess von Platen, watching them jealously,
and without any disposition to construe the meeting innocently. Was she
not the deadly enemy of both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon
her, and had not Königsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and
then unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth of
profligates?
That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the Elector.
“Your son is away in Prussia,” quoth she. “Who guards his honour in his
absence?”
“George’s honour?” quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the notion
of guarding something whose existence was not easily discerned. He had
no sense of humour, as his appearance suggested. He was a short, fat
man with a face shaped like a pear—narrow in the brow and heavy in the
jowl. “What the devil do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean that this foreign adventurer, Königsmark, and Sophia grow too
intimate.”
“Sophia!” Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the line of
his ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent creases expressive
of contempt.
“That white-faced ninny! Bah!” Her very virtue was matter for his
scorn.
“It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly,” replied the
Countess, out of her worldly wisdom. “Listen a moment now.” And she
related, with interest rather than discount, you may be sure, what she
had witnessed that afternoon.
The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia, and he
felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to Zell. Then,
too, being a libertine, and the father of a libertine, it logically
followed that unchastity in his women-folk was in his eyes the
unpardonable sin.
He heaved himself out of his deep chair. “How far has this gone?” he
demanded.
Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that might
afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need, if she could
trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would presently afford her all
the evidence required to damn the pair. She said as much, and promised
the Elector that she would exercise herself the latter quality in his
son’s service. Again the Elector did not find it grotesque that his
mistress should appoint herself the guardian of his son’s honour.
The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal—though George’s
honour was the least thing that concerned her. What concerned her was
the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of Königsmark. So she watched
assiduously, and set others, too, to watch for her and to report. And
almost daily now she had for the Elector a tale of whisperings and
hand-pressings, and secret stolen meetings between the guilty twain.
The Elector enraged, and would have taken action, but that the guileful
Countess curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could
not be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the offenders,
might recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing the Duke of Zell to
his daughter’s aid. So they must wait yet awhile until they held more
absolute proof of this intrigue.
And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the Elector with
word that Königsmark and the Princess had shut themselves up together
in the garden pavilion. Let him come at once, and he should so discover
them for himself, and thus at last be able to take action. The Countess
was flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent—and Madame
von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had
seen, conceive it innocent—it was in an Electoral Princess an
unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none
would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face,
hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came
too late, despite the diligence of his spy.
Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been a
brief one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in all
particulars. She would seek a refuge at the court of her cousin, the
Duke of Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure—for the sake of what once had
lain between them—would not now refuse to shelter and protect her. Of
Königsmark she desired that he should act as her escort to her cousin’s
court.
Königsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing that he
regretted. At Wolfenbuttel, having served Sophia faithfully, his
ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find expression. She would
make all dispositions, and advise him when she was ready to set out.
But they must use caution, for they were being spied upon. Madame von
Platen’s over-eagerness had in part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their
consciousness of espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting in
the seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after
Sophia had left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.
The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his hands, his
eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when Ernest Augustus
burst furiously in, the Countess von Platen lingering just beyond the
threshold. The Elector’s face was apoplectically purple from rage and
haste, his breath came in wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept round
the chamber, and fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled
Königsmark.
“Where is the Princess?” he blurted out.
The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had the
scent of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of innocent
mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:
“Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?”
At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance over
his shoulder at the Countess.
“I was told that her Highness was here,” he said.
“Plainly,” said Königsmark, with perfect calm, “you have been
misinformed.” And his quiet glance and gesture invited the Elector to
look round for himself.
“How long have you been here yourself?” Feeling at a disadvantage, the
Elector avoided the direct question that was in his mind.
“Half an hour at least.”
“And in that time you have not seen the Princess?”
“Seen the Princess?” Königsmark’s brows were knit perplexedly. “I
scarcely understand your Highness.”
The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked down,
then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman’s glove.
“What’s this?” quoth he. “Whose glove is this?”
If Königsmark’s heart missed a beat—as well it may have done—he did not
betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost laughed.
“Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me questions
that only a seer could answer.”
The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously suspicious
glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid, one of Sophia’s
women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.
“What do you want?” the Elector snapped at her.
“A glove her Highness lately dropped here,” was the timid answer,
innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had been
too hastily dispatched to avert.
The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil
laughter from him. When she had departed’ he turned again to
Königsmark.
“You fence skilfully,” said he, sneering, “too skilfully for an honest
man. Will you now tell me without any more of this, precisely what the
Princess Sophia was doing here with you?”
Königsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the furnace
of the Elector’s face.
“Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a prince
is not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady whose spotless
purity is beyond his understanding. But your Highness can hardly expect
me to become in never so slight a degree a party to that insult by
vouchsafing any answer to your question.”
“That is your last word, sir?” The Elector shook with suppressed anger.
“Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?”
The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust forth in
scorn and menace.
“You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard, and as
that is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no reason why your
sojourn here should be protracted.”
Königsmark bowed stiffly, formally. “It shall end, your Highness, as
soon as I can make the necessary arrangements for my departure—in a
week at most.”
“You are accorded three days, sir.” The Elector turned, and waddled
out, leaving Königsmark to breathe freely again. The three days should
suffice for the Princess also. It was very well.
The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given this
troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and placed his
daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von Platen was the
only one concerned who thought that it was not well at all, the
consummation being far from that which she had desired. She had dreamt
of a flaming scandal, that should utterly consume her two enemies,
Sophia and Königsmark. Instead, she saw them both escaping, and the
fact that she was—as she may have supposed—effectively separating two
loving hearts could be no sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter
spite as hers. Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue
more germane to her desires.
The course she took was fraught with a certain peril. Yet confident
that at worst she could justify it, and little fearing that the worst
would happen, she boldly went to work. She forged next day a brief note
in which the Princess Sophia urgently bade Königsmark to come to her at
ten o’clock that night in her own apartments, and with threat and bribe
induced the waiting woman of the glove to bear that letter.
Now it so happened that Königsmark, through the kind offices of
Sophia’s maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in the
secret of their intentions, had sent the Princess a note that morning,
briefly stating the urgency of departure, and begging her so to arrange
that she could leave Herrenhausen with him on the morrow. He imagined
the note now brought him to be in answer to that appeal of his. Its
genuineness he never doubted, being unacquainted with Sophia’s writing.
He was aghast at the rashness which dictated such an assignation, yet
never hesitated as to keeping it. It was not his way to hesitate. He
trusted to the gods who watch over the destinies of the bold.
And meanwhile Madame von Platen was reproaching her lover with having
dealt too softly with the Dane.
“Bah!” said the Elector. “To-morrow he goes his ways, and we are rid of
him. Is not that enough?”
“Enough, if, soon as he goes, he goes not too late already,” quoth she.
“Now what will you be hinting?” he asked her peevishly.
“I’ll be more plain. I will tell you what I know. It is this.
Königsmark has an assignation with the Princess Sophia this very night
at ten o’clock—and where do you suppose? In her Highness’s own
apartments.”
The Elector came to his feet with an oath. “That is not true!” he
cried. “It cannot be!”
“Then I’ll say no more,” quoth Jezebel, and snapped her thin lips.
“Ah, but you shall. How do you know this?”
“That I cannot tell you without betraying a confidence. Let it suffice
you that I do know it. Consider now whether in banishing this
profligate you have sufficiently avenged the honour of your son.”
“My God, if I thought this were true....” He choked with rage, stood
shaking a moment, then strode to the door, calling.
“The truth is easily ascertained,” said Madame. “Conceal yourself in
the Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best go
attended, for it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been known
aforetime to practice murder.”
Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men
together, Königsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia’s
antechamber, whilst Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her Highness of
his visit. Sophia had already retired to bed, and the amazing
announcement of the Count’s presence there startled her into a fear of
untoward happenings. She was overwhelmed, too, by the rashness of this
step of his, coming after the events of yesterday. If it should be
known that he had visited her thus, terrible consequences might ensue.
She rose, and with Mademoiselle de Knesebeck’s aid made ready to
receive him. Yet for all that she made haste, the precious
irreclaimable moments sped.
She came to him at last, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck following, for
propriety’s sake.
“What is it?” she asked him breathlessly. “What brings you here at such
an hour?”
“What brings me?” quoth he, surprised at that reception. “Why, your
commands—your letter.”
“My letter? What letter?”
A sense of doom, of being trapped, suddenly awoke in him. He plucked
forth the treacherous note, and proffered it.
“Why, what does this mean?” She swept a white hand over her eyes and
brows, as if to brush away some thing that obscured her vision. “That
is not mine. I never wrote it. How could you dream I should be
imprudent as to bid you hither, and at such an hour How could you dream
it?”
“You are right,” said he, and laughed, perhaps to ease her alarm,
perhaps in sheer bitter mirth. “It will be, no doubt, the work of our
friend, Madame von Platen. I had best begone. For the rest, my
travelling chaise will wait from noon until sunset to-morrow by the
Markt Kirck in Hanover, and I shall wait within it. I shall hope to
conduct you safely to Wolfenbuttel.”
“I will come, I will come. But go now—oh, go!”
He looked very deeply into her eyes—a valedictory glance against the
worst befalling him. Then he took her hand, bowed over it and kissed
it, and so departed.
He crossed the outer ante-room, descended the short flight of stairs,
and pushed open the heavy door of the Hall of Knights. He passed
through, and thrust the door behind him, then stood a moment looking
round the vast apartment. If he was too late to avoid the springs of
the baited trap, it was here that they should snap upon him. Yet all
was still. A single lamp on a table in the middle of the vast chamber
shed a feeble, flickering light, yet sufficient to assure him that no
one waited here. He sighed relief, wrapped his cloak about him, and set
out swiftly to cross the hall.
But even as he passed, four shadows detached themselves from the tall
stove, resolved themselves into armed men, and sprang after him.
He heard them, wheeled about, flung off his cloak, and disengaged his
sword, all with the speed of lightning and the address of the man who
for ten years had walked amid perils, and learned to depend upon his
blade. That swift action sealed his doom. Their orders were to take him
living or dead, and standing in awe of his repute, they were not the
men to incur risks. Even as he came on guard, a partisan grazed his
head, and another opened his breast.
He went down, coughing and gasping, blood dabbling his bright golden
hair, and staining the priceless Mechlin at his throat, yet his right
hand still desperately clutching his useless sword.
His assassins stood about him, their partisans levelled to strike
again, and summoned him to yield. Then, beside one of them, he suddenly
beheld the Countess von Platen materializing out of the surrounding
shadows as it seemed, and behind her the squat, ungraceful figure of
the Elector. He fought for breath. “I am slain,” he gasped, “and as I
am to appear before my Maker I swear to you that the Princess Sophia is
innocent. Spare her at least, your Highness.”
“Innocent!” said the Elector hoarsely. “Then what did you now in her
apartments?
“It was a trap set for us by this foul hag, who...”
The heel of the vindictive harridan ground viciously upon the lips of
the dying man and choked his utterance. Thereafter the halberts
finished him off, and he was buried there and then, in lime, under the
floor of the Hall of Knights, under the very spot where he had fallen,
which was long to remain imbrued with his blood.
Thus miserably perished the glittering Königsmark, a martyr to his own
irrepressible romanticism.
As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared his
fate that night. She was placed under arrest next morning, and Prince
George was summoned back from Berlin at once.
The evidence may have satisfied him that his honour had not suffered,
for he was disposed to let the matter drop, content that they should
remain in the forbidding relations which had existed between them
before this happening. But Sophia was uncompromising in her demand for
strict justice.
“If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you,” she told him. “If innocent, you
are unworthy of me.”
There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to
divorce them. But since with the best intentions there was no faintest
evidence of her adultery, this court had to be content to pronounce the
divorce upon the ground of her desertion.
She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in vain.
She was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on the Ahlen,
to drag out in that melancholy duress another thirty-two years of life.
Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that on
her death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to her
sometime husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months later, as
King George was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that letter was
placed in his carriage as it crossed the frontier into Germany. It
contained Sophia’s dying declaration of innocence, and her solemn
summons to King George to stand by her side before the judgment-seat of
Heaven within a year, and there make answer in her presence for the
wrongs he had done her, for her blighted life and her miserable death.
King George’s answer to that summons was immediate. The reading of that
letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died in his
carriage next day—the 9th of June, 1727—on the road to Osnabruck.
XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her lover in
the sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word—for he never so much
as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew of his existence.
The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld her in
the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting corollary to her
action. She in her way and he in his were alike sublime; her tranquil
martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism and his exultant martyrdom
upon the altar of Love were alike splendidly futile.
It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It has its
pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no might-have-been
which death had thwarted. Because she died, he loved her; because he
loved her, he died. That is all, but for the details which I am now to
give you.
The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d’Armont was the daughter of a
landless squire of Normandy, a member of the _chétive noblesse_, a man
of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed him
against the law of entail or primogeniture—the prime cause of the
inequality out of which were sprung so many of the evils that afflicted
France. Like many of his order and condition he was among the earliest
converts to Republicanism—the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding
constitutional government of the people by the people, holding
monarchical and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican doctrines to
which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she rejoiced when the
hour of awakening sounded and the children of France rose up and
snapped the fetters in which they had been trammelled for centuries by
an insolent minority of their fellow-countrymen.
In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a transient
phase—horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion of that
awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal government of her
dreams would follow—must follow, since among the people’s elected
representatives was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men of
her father’s class of life; men of breeding and education, impelled by
a lofty altruistic patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party
presently to be known as the Girondins.
But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least
another. And this other in the National Assembly was that of the
Jacobins, less pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party in
which stood pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as
Robespierre, Danton,—and Marat.
Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood for
Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins arraigned
Marat and Robespierre for complicity in the September massacres, and
thereby precipitated their own fall. The triumphant acquittal of Marat
was the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins, and the proscription of
twenty-nine deputies followed at once as the first step. These fled
into the country, hoping to raise an army that should yet save France,
and several of the fugitives made their way to Caen. Thence by
pamphlets and oratory they laboured to arouse true Republican
enthusiasm. They were gifted, able men, eloquent speakers and skilled
writers, and they might have succeeded but that in Paris sat another
man no less gifted, and with surer knowledge of the temper of the
proletariat, tirelessly wielding a vitriolic pen, skilled in the art of
inflaming the passions of the mob.
That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner, sometime
professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish University of St.
Andrews, author of some scientific and many sociological works,
inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary journalist, proprietor and
editor of L’Ami du Peuple, and idol of the Parisian rabble, who had
bestowed upon him the name borne by his gazette, so that he was known
as The People’s Friend.
Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian
Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured,
their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his
vile lodging in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine in Paris he spun with
his clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed their high endeavours and
threatened finally to choke them.
He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate in
which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the Girondins
he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of
the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday—the friend and associate now of
the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen—he loomed so
vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely. To her young
mind, inflamed with enthusiasm for the religion of Liberty as preached
by the Girondins, Marat was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch,
threatening to corrupt that sublime new faith with false, anarchical
doctrine, and to replace the tyranny that had been overthrown by a
tyranny more odious still.