CAGLIOSTRO'S ADVICE.
On the evening of this awful day, while the pike-bearers were scouring
Paris through streets illuminated but deserted, to exhibit rags dyed in
blood, with shouts of "The tyrant is dead! behold his blood!" two men
whose dress was different, sat in silence in a room in a house in St.
Honore Street.
Dressed in black, one was sitting at a table, with his head resting on
his hand, plunged into deep reverie, if not grief. The other, wearing a
countryman's dress, strode up and down, with wrinkled forehead, gloomy
eye, and folded arms. Every time his crossing line brought him by the
table, he cast a glance on the thinker.
At last the countryman stopped and said, as he fixed his eye on the
other:
"Come, now, Citizen Gilbert, am I a brigand because I voted for the
king's death?"
The man in black raised his head, shook his melancholy brow, and said,
holding out his hand to his companion:
"No, Billet, you are no more a brigand for that than I am an aristocrat
for voting the other way. You voted according to your conscience, and I
to mine. It is a terrible thing to take away from man that which you
can not restore."
"So it is your opinion that despotism is inviolable," returned Billet,
"liberty is revolt, and there is no justice on earth except such as
kings, that is, tyrants, dispense? Then what remains for the people,
the right to serve and obey? Do you, Gilbert, the pupil of Rousseau,
say that?"
"No, Billet, for that would be an impiety against the people."
"Come," said the farmer, "I am going to talk to you with the roughness
of my plain good sense, to which I do not mind your answering with all
the sharpness of your fine wit. Do you admit that a nation, believing
itself oppressed, should have the right to disestablish its church,
lower or even demolish the throne, fight and make itself free?"
"Not a doubt of it."
"Then it has the right to gather in the spoils of the victory?"
"Yes, Billet; but not to compass such things with murder and violence.
Remember that it is written, 'Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor.'"
"But the king was no neighbor of mine," returned Billet; "he was my
enemy. I remember what my poor mother read me in the Bible of what
Samuel said to the Israelites who asked him to appoint a king."
"So do I, Billet; and Samuel anointed Saul--he did not kill him.
"Oh, I know that if I get to arguing with you in book learning, I shall
lose. So I simply ask you, were we right to take the Bastile?"
"Yes."
"When the king took away our right to hold a meeting, were we right to
meet in another place?"
"You were."
"Had we the right, when the king gathered foreign troops at Versailles
to feast them and overawe us, to take him away from among them and
lodge him in Paris?"
"Yes."
"To bring him back when he tried to run away from the country?"
"Yes."
"Then we had a right to shut him up where he was so little out of
mischief that he continued to correspond with the invader. Ought we not
have brought him before the court for trial, to doom him, and--"
"Ay, to banish, to perpetually imprison, all except death, because,
guilty in the result, he was not so in the intention. You judge him
from the people's standing, Billet; but he acted like the son of kings.
Was he a tyrant, as you call him? No. An oppressor of the people? No.
An accomplice of aristocrats and an enemy of freedom? No."
"Then you judge him as royalty would?"
"No; for then he would have been acquitted."
"But you did so by voting for his life."
"No; with life imprisonment. Granting he was not your neighbor, but
your enemy, he was a vanquished one, and ought not to have been
slain in cold blood. That is not execution, but immolation. You have
conferred on royalty something like martyrdom, and made justice seem
vengeance. Take care! In doing too much, you have not done enough.
Charles of England was executed, but his son reigned. But James II.
was banished, and his sons died in exile. Human nature is humane, and
you have alienated from the Republic for fifty or a hundred years the
immense proportion of the population judging revolutions by their
feelings. Believe me, my friend, Republicans ought most to bewail the
death of Louis, for the blood will fall on them, and cost the Republic
its life."
"There is some truth in what you say, Gilbert," said a voice at the
door.
"Cagliostro!" exclaimed both debaters, turning with the same impulse.
"Yes; but there is also truth in what Billet said."
"That is the trouble in it," sighed Gilbert; "the cause we plead has
two faces, and each, as he looks upon it, can say he is right."
"But he ought also to admit that he may be wrong."
"What is your opinion, master?" asked the doctor.
"Yes, your opinion?" said Billet.
"You have been trying the accused over again, but you should test the
sentence. Had you doomed the king, you would have been right. You
doomed the man, and you were wrong."
"I don't understand," said Billet.
"You ought to have slain the king amid his guards and courtiers, while
unknown to the people--when he was to them a tyrant. But, after having
let him live and dwell under the eyes of the private soldier, the petty
civil servant, the workman, as a man, this sham abasement elevated him,
and he ought to have been banished or locked up, as happens to any man."
"I did not understand you," said Billet to the doctor, "but I do the
Citizen Cagliostro."
"Just think of their five months' captivity molding this lump--who was
born to be a parish beadle--into a statue of courage, patience, and
resignation, on a pedestal of sorrow; you sanctified him so that his
wife adored him. Who would have dreamed, my dear Gilbert," said the
magician, bursting into laughter, "that Marie Antoinette would ever
have loved her mate?"
"Oh, if I had only guessed this," muttered Billet, "I would have slain
him before! I could have done it easily."
These words were spoken with such intense patriotism that Gilbert
pardoned them, while Cagliostro admired.
"But you did not do it," said the latter. "You voted for death; and
you, Gilbert, for life. Now, let me give you a last piece of advice.
You, Gilbert, strove to be a member of the convention to accomplish a
duty; you, Billet, to fulfill vengeance; both are realized. You have
nothing more to do here. Be gone."
The two stared at him.
"To-morrow, your indulgence will be regarded as a crime, and on the
next day your severity as bad. Believe me, in the mortal strife
preparing between hatred, fear, revenge, fanaticism, few will remain
unspotted; some will be fouled with mud, some with blood. Go, my
friends, go!"
"But France?" said the doctor.
"Yes, France?" echoed Billet.
"Materially," said Cagliostro, "France is saved; the external enemy is
baffled, the home one dead. The Revolution holds the ax in one hand and
the tri-colored flag in the other. Go in tranquillity, for before she
lays them down, the aristocracy will be beheaded, and Europe conquered.
Go, my friends, go to your second country, America!"
"Will you go with me, Billet?" asked the doctor.
"Will you forgive me?" asked Billet.
The two clasped hands.
"You must go at once. The ship 'Franklin' is ready to sail."
"But my son?"
Cagliostro had opened the door.
"Come in, Sebastian," he said; "your father calls you."
The young man rushed into his father's arms, while Billet sighed.
"My carriage is at the door," said Cagliostro. Then, in a whisper
to the doctor while Billet was asking news of the youth, he said,
emphatically:
"Take him away; he must not know how he lost his mother. He might
thirst for revenge."
Gilbert nodded and opened a money drawer.
"Fill your pockets," he said to Billet.
"Will there be enough in a strange country?" he asked.
"Bless you! with land at five dollars an acre, cleared, we can buy a
county. But what are you looking round for?"
"For what would be no use to me, who can not write."
"I see; you want to send good-bye to Pitou. Let me."
"What have you written?"
"MY DEAR PITOU,--We are leaving France--Billet,
Sebastian, and I--and send you our united love. We think that as
you are manager of Billet's farm, you do not need anything. One of
these days we may write for you to come over and join us.
"Your friend,
"GILBERT."
"Is that all?" asked the farmer.
"There is a postscript," said the writer, looking the farmer in the
face as he said:
"Billet hopes you will take the best of care of Catherine."
Billet uttered a cry of gratitude and shook Gilbert's hand again.
Ten minutes afterward, the post-chaise carried far from Paris Gilbert
and his friend and the son of Andrea of Charny.