THE ENERGY OF MADNESS.
Madame Gosner and Marguerite were alone in their room, which had become
more gloomy than ever since their disappointment. All the spare time
these two women could obtain from their sorrow was given to the toil
which earned their daily bread. Marguerite spent every day in the
street, carrying her sweet burden of flowers from purchaser to
purchaser. Her evenings were occupied generally in preparing bouquets
for market, but on this particular night Madame Gosner was employed on
some embroidery which was wanted in haste for a court-dress. The very
nature of her employment, perhaps, exasperated the poverty of the elder
woman, whose hatred of the monarchs of France amounted almost to
monomania. She went on sewing with sharp energy, taking her stitches
with jerks, as if she picked them out with the point of a dagger. Her
breath came heavily as she worked, and her lips were pressed
together—she had not spoken in an hour.
Marguerite was sewing also—for the work must be done at a given time—but
her thread came out with a more even pull, and the delicate surface of
her work revealed no imperfect stitches. The dull, heavy gloom which lay
upon her mother was not dark enough to kill all the girlhood in that
young bosom; and more than once a faint smile flitted across her lips,
as if the thoughts in her mind were not altogether melancholy.
At last the young girl looked up from the dull monotony of her work,
and, pausing with her thread half-drawn, listened eagerly. She had heard
a step on the stairs, though her mother had not; for one moment the
heart leaped in her innocent bosom, and a smile of loving expectation
trembled on her lips, the next it died away and her face bowed in
disappointment over her work.
Madame Gosner heard the step also, and suspended her work. Was it
possible that some one was coming with news! Even in her despair this
poor woman was always expecting news, and holding her breath as a
footstep passed her door.
It opened now, and Monsieur Jacques came in, pale, worn, and so weak
from protracted excitement that he fell upon a chair, and wiped the
heavy drops from his forehead before speaking a word. Madame Gosner
looked at him earnestly. He understood the question in her eyes, and
answered as if she had spoken.
“Yes, my friend, I have been to the Bastille. I have wandered through
those infernal vaults, and seen such sights.”
“Have you been in _that_ cell?”
Madame Gosner’s voice was sharp as the cry of an eagle. She had lost all
control over herself.
“Yes, I have been there, and I have seen him—your husband——”
“Alive?”
“Alive! I held his hand—I spoke with him. He told me his name. It was he
who cried out when your voice penetrated his dungeon. They have
practiced a foul fraud on us—one that shall be answered by the thunders
of stones as we hurl down that accursed building.”
Madame Gosner stood up, and lifted her clasped hands on high.
“So help me God, I will never rest till this thing is done!”
She spoke like a woman inspired; her very stature seemed to rise higher;
her chest expanded itself.
“Be it so. I have already sworn,” said Monsieur Jacques; and the two
went out together, leaving Marguerite alone upon her knees, where she
had fallen.
All was changed now in the humble dwelling of Madame Gosner. No more
work was done; scarcely was there food enough prepared to sustain the
strength of that excited woman. Solemn duties lay before her—a gigantic
task, which she would perform or die. The people of France were to be
aroused into keener vindictiveness—the women organized—the clubs urged
to swifter action. Stern and terrible had been the effect of Monsieur
Jacques’ intelligence on the woman who had refused to consider herself a
widow. Her whole being rose up in bitter wrath against what she deemed a
horrible fraud. So fixed and deep were her prejudices against the royal
family, that she never, for a moment, doubted that the king himself, if
not the queen, had sanctioned the awful wrong that had been done, rather
than cast a new witness of royal cruelty among the people to bear
testimony against them.
With these feelings, it is not strange that all the sweet sentiments of
undisturbed womanhood was swept out of her nature. No amazon, born to
war, ever suffered or felt a deeper thirst for vengeance than possessed
this wronged wife. From that day her very face changed; all its fine
features were set, and locked with the iron resolution that possessed
her. In some way her husband should be set free, or fearfully avenged.
Many a woman besides herself had equal wrongs and equal sufferings to
redress or avenge; but, lacking a leader and organization, this great
force, this underlying principle, which was enough to stir the already
excited passions of the lower order into anarchy at any moment, had as
yet been allowed to exhaust itself in complaint and denunciation. Now it
should be centralized and spread forth from an organized power.
Madame Gosner knew that she was eloquent, and felt within herself the
force of great individual strength. That which had been an idea before
was a fixed resolve now. In order to liberate her husband, freedom must
first be given to the French people. She could only reach his dungeon
through the ruins of the Bastille, only avenge him by hurling the king
from his throne.
That day a strange sight was witnessed in the marketplaces of Paris. A
lady, being clad like the commonest working-woman, but of commanding
presence, was seen moving from stall to stall with the firm, energetic
tread of an officer mustering recruits. At each stall she uttered words
that burned and thrilled through the heart of the occupant like the
blast of a trumpet, yet they were spoken in a low voice, and circulated
through the market from lip to lip, drawing the women together in
clusters, who told each other the story of this woman, and swore to
avenge her.
Her low, stern utterance of wrongs that seemed without a parallel, was
like a spark of living fire flung into their own smouldering passions.
That night a Jacobin club-house was crowded with eager women. From the
market, the garrets, and the cellars of Paris, they gathered, crowding
their husbands and sons aside that they might hear something of their
own wrongs from the tongue of a terribly persecuted woman.
Gosner’s wife stood among them like a priestess. Unlike the women around
her, she was educated, eloquent, powerfully impassioned, but capable of
deep reasoning. She had dwelt so long on the wrongs of France that her
acute mind searched down to the very roots of all the grievances that
disturbed her people, and laid them bare before the rude women, who
seized upon them as hounds fasten upon game, routed from bush and covert
by the huntsman.
For two hours she filled that Jacobin stronghold with such burning
eloquence as never before had fired the hearts of those rude, impetuous
women, not cruel then, but who afterward leaped into the fight, unsexed,
fierce, wicked female tigers, who, having tasted blood, lost forever
afterward all relish for the milk of human kindness.
It was this awful element that the genius of Madame Gosner aroused in
the heart of France; it was this which cast eternal shame upon one of
the greatest nations of the earth; it was this which makes all true and
refined women tremble when they are called upon to plunge into the arena
of politics, or the strife of nations.