SPYING AND WATCHING.
A woman followed Count Mirabeau when he went to St. Cloud—a young woman,
some three or four-and-twenty years of age, but looking older from the
stormy passions that had swept across her youth, and the corroding
jealousy that consumed her now. Louison Brisot had ridden behind him all
the way from Paris, but took good care not to come near enough to that
imposing figure to give him a glimpse of her person, or allow him to
hear the tread of her horse. When he halted in the grove, and tied his
horse to a sapling, she drew behind a clump of beech-trees, and watched
him as he passed through the gate; then she dismounted, fastened her own
horse, and taking a circuit among the undergrowth, came out by the gate,
which she tried cautiously and found unlocked.
By this time Mirabeau had disappeared, and the young woman was at a loss
to guess which way he had taken. At her left, she saw the roof of St.
Cloud rising in irregular glimpses among the embosoming trees. If his
business was with the king or queen, she argued, he would take that
direction. If he came to seek some meaner object, there was not a tree
in the vast Park which might not shelter him and the rival she came to
discover.
Which way should she go? Not toward the palace; Mirabeau, the orator and
friend of the people, would never venture there unless he was, indeed, a
traitor to his party, and led on by some passion which in her arrogance
she considered as treachery to her. More likely he had sought a
building, or covert place in the grounds, where some person connected
with the royal household would meet him. Nothing but political or social
treason could have brought him there.
As the young woman wandered slowly on, meditating in this fashion, a
sound of quick footsteps and the rustle of shrubbery startled her. She
drew back of a huge tree that stood near and watched for the cause. It
was a lady passing swiftly forward, through the purple twilight, her
head enveloped in the shadowy blackness of a lace shawl, her dress half
uplifted by her right hand, half trailing on the grass—a rich dress that
glistened in the light which trembled over it.
The lady turned her head and stood still a moment, listening—a slight
disturbance in the shrubbery near by seemed to have aroused her
apprehension. Louison, concealed behind the tree saw a lovely face and a
splendid figure stooping a little, as if arrested in some unlawful or
dangerous step. It was but a momentary glance, but she recognized the
queen, and the sight threw every passion of her most passionate nature
into revolt.
“Traitor!” came hissing through her shut teeth; “double-dyed traitor!
For that face he will sell us all!”
The queen passed on swiftly, moving through the green foliage and the
purple atmosphere of the Park like a beautiful spirit. After her,
creeping forward like a panther, stole the other woman, her eyes
gleaming, her lips in motion. She came in sight of a little temple built
on high ground, sheltered under drooping elms; from its windows the last
golden light of the day was falling back like a sheaf of broken arrows,
and a soft luminous haze quivered among the branches that swept over it.
There was too much light for the woman to venture forward, even when she
saw the door open, and the person she had followed pass into the temple.
Then through the still blazing windows she saw the shadows of two
persons standing together. As she looked, they sunk away and disappeared
from her eyes; but she was in a position to hear the murmur of
voices.—One, deep, sonorous and impressive, the other, clear, low and
sweet; but no words uttered by these voices reached her. She could only
guess at their meaning, and a vivid imagination lent poison to her
conjectures.
Panting with rage, burning with curiosity, this woman stood in her
covert, afraid to pass the stretch of open sward that lay between her
and the temple. It seemed to her hours on hours before the two persons
in that little building darkened the windows again; but at last two
black shadows rose up in the gathering darkness; for, by this time, all
the purple and gold of the sunset had merged into the light of a silvery
moon, and through the opposite windows came its pale radiance, in which
the man and woman stood between darkness and light. She saw him bend and
sink downward as if kneeling. She saw the lady stoop her beautiful head.
The sight maddened her. She leaped forward with the spring of a tigress
to glare through the window, and see Mirabeau’s lips pressed upon the
hand of Marie Antoinette.
The two persons in the temple separated then, and the watcher saw that
they were about to depart. She had seen enough. He must not find her
there! If Mirabeau could prove secret and deceptive, so could she. If
the fatal charms of the queen had ensnared him, they had set her whole
being in opposition.
As the door of the temple opened, Louison sprang away; and while
Mirabeau lingered to cast one more look on the queen, who had fascinated
him as no other woman on earth could have done, she went swiftly toward
the park gate.
Louison Brisot left the park in a state of fierce exasperation. She was
absolutely afraid of herself. She panted to stop then and there on the
highway, and in the fury of her jealous passion, rebuke that proud
demagogue for his double treason.
The women of France, who first entered upon the revolution, possessed
two powerful qualities, violent passions and a wonderful power of
self-restraint. It was seldom that any of these women plunged into the
awful scenes that have revolted the whole world without being led there
by the hand of some fierce demagogue, who called himself a patriot. Such
men had no use for weak or vacillating women; but mated themselves,
legally or illegally, with creatures of their own calibre, using them as
political instruments, and casting them aside by mere force of will, or
the mockery of a divorce, as the wild beast forsakes his mate in the
jungles of a forest.
Louison Brisot was one of these women; born in the middle classes,
gifted by nature with strong animal beauty, thirsting for knowledge,
full of that keen vitality which demands action, and must have
excitement, she had followed Mirabeau into the very heart of the
revolution. Haughty and imperious to others, she had always been
subservient to him. In her idolatry of the man, and her vanity as a
woman, she believed herself to be his sole confidant, and the supreme
object of his love. She knew that the queen had, over and over again,
refused even to see this man, who was to her a demi-god, and hated her
for thus scorning him. In her heart she rejoiced, perhaps unconsciously,
that royal pride kept the man she loved away from a court, where so many
had been won over to the king, by the beauty and eloquence of his wife.
The two great passions of Louison Brisot’s life were thrown into a wild
tumult by the scene she had just witnessed; still she found power to
control herself. Plunging into the thicket where her horse was tied, she
attempted to unknot his bridle from the sapling; but her hands shook
with passion, and were so long in doing it, that she fairly stamped down
the earth with impatience before she could mount to the saddle, and ride
away toward Paris.
The young woman was but just in time. She heard the tread of Mirabeau’s
horse following close upon her as she dashed by the palace, and on
toward Paris with increasing speed. She must reach home before him. It
was possible that the count would call upon her that night, for he was a
man who paid no respect to time, and cared nothing for the received
usages of society. At her house much of his leisure time had been
formerly spent, and she believed herself the depository of all his
secrets. But he had been deceiving her. This thought wounded the woman
through her hard heart, and leveled her evil pride to the dust. She had
hated the queen before, now that hatred settled into bitter detestation.
These two persons traveled home so near together, that the beat of hoofs
sent back by her horse more than once struck the ear of Mirabeau, as he
approached the rising ground which she was passing. Of this he took no
heed. Though a demagogue and a profligate, this man had pledged his
support in good faith to the queen, and his quick brain was even then
forming plans, by which he hoped to unite her cause with that of France,
and harmonize all contending elements into a constitutional monarchy.
There was enough in all this to tax even his great brain to the utmost,
and he had no time to observe the fall of those hoofs in the distance,
which, perhaps, carried his destiny with them.