CRAFT MEETING TREACHERY.
It was three nights after Mirabeau’s visit to St. Cloud, and Louison
Brisot had not yet seen him. She waited with burning impatience, hour
after hour, until a keen desire to reproach him got the better of her
prudence; and she went at once to his residence.
That day Count Mirabeau had absented himself from his seat in the
Assembly. Filled with such dreams of love and ambition as had made his
youth one wild season of political and social riot, he kept himself in
the solitude of his own library, thinking out the programme of action
which was to make him at once the saviour of the monarchy, and the
favorite of the people.
It was a wild, and almost chaotic realm, over which this man hoped to
rule; but he had infinite faith in his own genius, and built great hopes
upon his immense popularity with a people who, in their passions and
their prejudices, were changeable as the wind. To a man like Mirabeau,
bold to audacity, gifted with marvelous eloquence, and made great by a
will strong as iron, to guide this changing element and mould it as his
own ambition might direct, seemed the easiest thing on earth.
All that day the man spent lounging upon the silken cushions of a low
couch, dreaming of the greatness before him, and of the royal lady whose
white hand had touched his lips for one instant in the little
summer-house at St. Cloud. At last he had conquered his way to that
proud, beautiful woman, who still sat upon the tottering throne of
France. In her need she had been compelled to stoop to the fascinations
of his voice, and blush under the ardent devotion of his eyes. In this
he had triumphed over all his compeers—true, it was a triumph, secret as
it was sweet. He who had been tried almost as a felon in the courts;
imprisoned for rude violations of the law; hunted out of society like a
mad dog, was now president of one of the most powerful clubs in France,
a leader in the Assembly, and the secret friend of the beautiful queen,
who had for years kept him from her presence, as a man too vile for the
countenance of a pure wife and highly born lady.
No wonder this man lay supinely on his couch, with his arms folded over
his head, and his eyes wandering dreamily over the Cupids that peeped at
him with laughing eyes from the flowers that clustered and glowed on the
frescoed ceiling overhead.
Mirabeau had reached that age when ambition becomes a power, and love an
intense passion; from that day he turned with loathing from the thing
which he had called love in past time. The exalted rank of Marie
Antoinette, her superb beauty and brilliant intellect had fired his
imagination so completely, that his whole being, for the time, flung off
its coarseness and became chivalric.
The door opened softly as Mirabeau lay with his large eyes wandering
over the flowers, and a pleasant smile on his lips. He cared little what
might happen in the Assembly that day; but would go forth to his Jacobin
club in the evening, and there exert all the powers of his mind to
moderate the ferocious instincts of his compatriots, and lead them to
the moderation of his own views so lately inspired by the queen.
A woman had been waiting with her hand upon the door for a whole minute,
and Mirabeau, in his pleasant preoccupation, knew nothing of it. Louison
Brisot stepped across the room, and came close to the couch on which he
lay, and spoke to him.
Mirabeau started, flung down his arms with an impatient movement, and
rose to a half upright position, dropping one foot to the floor, and
sinking his elbow deep into the cushions on which his head had rested.
“Ah! is it you, Louison?” he said, wearily. “How did you get in? I told
my people to admit no one.”
Louison laughed with some bitterness.
“They do not regard me as ‘any one,’ my good friend; or dream, perhaps,
there will ever come a time when I shall be excluded from Count
Mirabeau’s presence.”
“But there may arise times when I am busy.”
“These times have arisen again and again; but you were always glad to
have me by your side, especially when there was work to accomplish.
Shall I sit down now? Or has my presence, all at once, become
troublesome?”
The girl seated herself, as she spoke, upon the foot of Mirabeau’s
couch, and sat gazing on him with an expression in her great black eyes
that disturbed him. This woman had frightened away all his pleasant
dreams.
“You are never troublesome,” he said; “but in the lives of all hard
working and hard thinking men there is need of rest. This craving was
upon me when you came in.”
“Indeed!”
“I have been giving the day to thought, and sunk down here to rest
awhile before going to the club. Had you delayed coming a little longer,
I should have been gone.”
“Ah! you go to the club, then!” exclaimed Louison, brightening. “There
you will meet Robespierre and Marat, your brother journalists; those two
men who love France, and hate the queen.”
“Ah, ha!” said Mirabeau, sharply; and his massive features contracted
with quick suspicion. “How did you learn so much of Robespierre, and
that animal who calls himself Marat?”
“I know that they are patriots and true Frenchmen,” answered Louison.
“Be careful, Mirabeau, that they do not prove the serpent, that may bite
your heel.”
“What, those reptiles!” exclaimed Mirabeau, with careless contempt. “How
can they hurt a man so much above them? They crawl, I soar!”
The magnificent demagogue made a circle around his head with one large,
white hand, as if he were crowning himself, and repeated, “I soar! I
soar!”
Louison understood that look of triumph, and smiled with bitter irony
when she saw the gesture. “This man,” she said to herself, “seems to
feel the glory of a crown upon his head, since he has kissed the
Austrian hand with those perfidious lips;” still she answered him
calmly, looking downward with half-closed eyes, like a slumbrous
panther.
“But, you and these men have a common object—love of France and hatred
of her oppressors.”
Mirabeau turned his eyes quickly upon that handsome face to read the
hidden thought that lay under these words. He saw a gleam break through
the drooping lashes, and suspected that something was wrong, but could
not understand what. He had no wish to disagree with Louison, for her
talent had been of great use to him, and it was through her that a large
portion of his popularity among the rabble of women, who were the worst
disturbing element of the nation, was maintained.
“We must talk of this matter when there is more time,” he said. “I often
think we are allowing the coarse minds of a few brutal men to carry the
revolution beyond its proper limits. What, for instance, can be more
vicious than these constant attacks on the queen?”
“Ha!”
His words ran through Louison’s heart like an arrow; her eyes opened
wide, and flashed a look upon him that checked the breath on his lips.
“You speak of that Austrian woman,” she said, controlling herself,
“Louis Capet’s wife?”
“I speak of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Louison; a woman who has
been cruelly maligned and basely persecuted.”
“By whom?”
Louison spoke calmly, but her lips closed with a firm grip as this
simple question left them, and she held her breath, waiting for his
answer.
“Perhaps we have all done too much of it.”