EDMOND DANTES, DEPUTY FROM MARSEILLES.
Beauchamp, Lucien Debray and Chateau-Renaud were not the only persons
puzzled with regard to the enigmatical M. Dantes; all Paris was more or
less bothered about him; his entire career prior to his appearance at
the capital as the Deputy from Marseilles seemed shrouded in
impenetrable mystery, and this was the more galling to the curious
Parisians as his wonderful oratorical powers and his intense
republicanism rendered him the cynosure of all eyes and made him the
sensation of the hour. The Government had instituted investigations
concerning him, but without result; even in Marseilles his antecedents
were unknown; he had come there from the east utterly unheralded,
attended only by a black servant, and bringing with him his son and
daughter, but almost immediately he had plunged into politics, winning
his way to the front with startling rapidity. From the first he had
ardently espoused the cause of the working people, and such was his
personal magnetism that he had made hosts of admirers, and had been
chosen Deputy with hardly a dissenting voice. Some of the inhabitants of
Marseilles, indeed, remembered a youthful sailor named Edmond Dantes,
but they asserted that he had been dead many years, and that the Deputy
was unlike him in every particular.
As the young men passed the Theatre Francais, on their way to the
Chamber of Deputies, after a glass of sherry and a biscuit at Very's,
their attention was attracted by a crowd gathered around an immense
poster spread upon the bill-board. There seemed no little excitement
among the throng, a large proportion of whom appeared to be artisans and
laborers, and loud expressions of admiration, accompanied by animated
gestures, were heard. Nor were there wanting also words of deep
denunciation and of significant threatening.
"Down! down with the tyrants! Bread or blood! Wages for work! Food for
the laborer!" and other cries of equally fearful significance were
audible.
"Do you hear that, Beauchamp?" said Debray, quietly.
"Undoubtedly," was the equally quiet reply.
"Those laborers have deserted the daily toil which would give them the
bread they so fiercely demand, in order to discuss their imaginary
misery, and denounce those who are richer than themselves."
"But what brings them to the theatre at this hour?" asked
Chateau-Renaud.
"The new play," suggested Beauchamp.
"Ah! the new play. 'The Laborer of Lyons,' is it not?"
"Yes," said Debray, "and one of the most dangerous productions of the
hour."
"It is evidently from the pen of one unaccustomed to dramatic
composition, yet familiar with stage effect," added the journalist. "And
yet, without the least claptrap, with but little melodramatic power,
against strong opposition and bitter prejudices, and without claqueurs,
its own native force and the popularity of the principles it supports
have carried it triumphantly through the ordeal of two representations.
It will, doubtless, have a long run, and its influence will be
incalculable in the cause it advocates--the cause of human liberty and
human right."
"No doubt it will exert a most baneful influence," bitterly rejoined
Debray. "Without containing a syllable to which the Ministry can object,
at least sufficiently to warrant its suppression, it yet abounds with
principles, sentiments and theories of the most incendiary description,
well calculated to rouse the disaffection of the laboring classes to
frenzy. Its inevitable effect will be to give them a false and
exaggerated idea of their wrongs and their rights, and to stimulate them
to revolution. Oh! these men have much to answer for. They are drawing
down an avalanche."
"They are the champions of human liberty," said Beauchamp, warmly, "and
will be blessed by posterity, if not by the men of the present
generation."
"Truce to politics, Messieurs!" cried the Deputy, observing that his
friends were becoming excited. "I had heard of this play and its
powerful character. Who's the author, Beauchamp?"
"The production is attributed to M. Dantes, the Deputy from Marseilles,
with what truth I know not; but he is fully capable of composing such a
drama. To-morrow night, it is supposed, the author, whoever he may be,
will be compelled by the people to appear and claim the laurels ready to
be showered on him in such profusion. But it is nearly three o'clock,"
continued Beauchamp, "and M. Dantes is expected to speak in the early
part of the sitting."
"To the Chamber, then," said the others, and the trio mingled with the
crowd hurrying in the same direction.
"What a glorious thing is popularity!" exclaimed the Count.
"What a glorious thing to be the champion of the people!" rejoined
Beauchamp.
"And how glorious is that champion's glorious career!" cried the
Secretary. "Let the hydra alone. Like the antique god of mythology, it
eats up its own children as soon as they get large enough to be eaten.
It is a fickle beast, and the idol of to-day it crushes to-morrow."
The hall of the Chamber of Deputies was crowded when the three friends
entered. Although the hour for the President to take the chair had not
yet arrived, the benches were full, and the galleries, public and
private, were overflowing. Strong agitation was visible among the
Ministerial benches of the extreme left. The Premier himself was
present, although his cold countenance, like the surface of a frozen
lake, betrayed neither apprehension nor the reverse. Self-reliant,
self-poised, calm, seemingly insensible to surrounding objects and
events, this man of iron, with a heart of ice and a brain of fire,
glanced quietly and fixedly around him, with his cold, dark eye, which,
from time to time, rested on the Communist benches of the extreme right,
unmoved by the stern glances hurled at him by his many fierce opponents
and the almost tumultuous excitement by which they were agitated.
At length President Sauzet took the chair. The house came to order, and
the sitting opened with the usual preliminary business. A large number
of petitions from the workmen of Paris for employment by the Government
were presented and referred, and one immense roll containing a hundred
thousand names, which came from the manufacturing districts, was brought
in on the shoulders of two men and placed in the area before the
President's chair, escorted by a deputation from the artisans; it was
received with an uproar of applause from the centre of the extreme right
of the benches, and from the throngs of blouses in the galleries. The
tumult having, at length, subsided, the order of the day was announced
to be the discussion of the bill introduced by M. Dantes, having for its
purpose the general amelioration of the condition of the industrial
classes in the Kingdom; and M. Dantes was himself announced to be the
first on the list to occupy the tribune. A deep murmur of anticipation
ran around the vast hall at this announcement. The multitudes in the
galleries leaned forward to gain a better view of this idol, and to
catch every syllable that might fall from his lips; and every eye among
the members was turned to the seat of M. Dantes, on the centre right of
the benches.
A tall figure in black, with a white cravat, rose and advanced to the
tribune slowly, amid a stillness as hushed and breathless as the prior
excitement had been noisy. In age, M. Dantes seemed about fifty or
fifty-five. His form was slight and his movements were graceful and
dignified. His face was livid and as calm as marble; but for the large
and eloquent eye, dark as night, one might have thought that broad white
brow, that massive chin, those firmly compressed lips and that colorless
mouth were those of a statue. Yet in the furrows of that forehead and
the deep lines of that face could be read the record of thought and
suffering. The busy plowshare had turned up the deep graves of departed
passions. No one could gaze or even glance at that face and not perceive
at once that it was the visage of a man of many sorrows--yet of a man
proud, calm, self-possessed, self-poised and indomitable. His hair,
which had been raven black, now rested in thin waves around his
expansive forehead and was sprinkled with gray, while his intellectual
countenance wore that expression of weariness and melancholy which
illness, deep study and grief invariably trace.
Mounting the steps of the tribune with slow and deliberate tread, he
drew up his tall figure, and resting his left hand, which grasped a roll
of papers, upon the marble slab, glanced around on the turbulent billows
of upturned and excited faces, as if at a loss how to address them.
Having read the bill, after the usual prefatory remarks, he began by
laying down the platform which he proposed occupying in its advocacy and
support, consisting, of course, of abstract, self-evident propositions,
which none could have the hardihood to gainsay, yet, when once admitted,
the deductions inevitably flowing therefrom none could resist. The
propositions seemed safe and indisputable, but the deductions evolved
from those propositions were as frightful to the legitimist as they were
delightful to the liberal. That each man is born the heir to the same
natural rights--that each man, alike and equally with all others, has a
birthright of which he cannot be divested and of which he cannot divest
himself, to act, to think and to pursue happiness wherever he can find
it without infringement on the rights of his fellow beings--none were
disposed to deny. That each human animal, as each animal of inferior
grade, has, also, the right of subsistence, drained from the bosom of
the earth, the great mother of us all, which without his foreknowledge
or wish gave him being, seemed, also, indisputable. But when from these
propositions were deduced that crime is rather the result of misery
than depravity, and that the office of government is more to prevent
crime by creating happiness than to punish it by creating misery, and
that for the natural rights resigned by the individual in entering into
and upholding the social system human government is bound to afford
employment and subsistence to each of its members, that labor and its
produce should be in partnership, that competition should be abolished,
and work and wages so distributed by the State as to equalize the
condition of each individual in the community, and, finally, that the
claims of labor are not satisfied by wages, but the workman is entitled
to a proprietary share in the capital which employs him, inasmuch as all
the woes and miseries of the laborer arise exclusively from the
competition for work--when these deductions were advanced the opulent
and the conservative started back in terror and dismay. Distribution of
property, universal plunder, havoc, bloodshed, sans culottism, a red
republic and the ghastly shapes of another Reign of Terror rose in
frightful vividness before the fancy. As the speaker proceeded to
illustrate and sustain his positions, which were those of the Communist,
Socialist, Fourierist, call them which we may, and poured forth a fiery
flood of persuasion, invective, denunciation and shouts of applause,
mingled with cries of rage and dismay, rose from all quarters of the
hall. Unmoved and undaunted, that marble man, livid as a spectre, his
dark eyes blazing, his thin and writhing lip flecked with foam, his
tall form swaying to and fro, rising, bending--now thrown back, then
leaning over the marble bar of the tribune--continued to pour forth his
scathing sarcasm, his crushing invective, his eloquent persuasion and
his unanswerable argument in tones, now soft and tuneful as a silvery
bell, then sad and pitiful as an evening zephyr, then clear, high and
sonorous as a clarion, then hoarse and deep as the thunder, for a period
of four hours, unbroken and continuous, without stop or stay.
The effect of this speech, as the orator, pale, exhausted, shattered,
unstrung, with nerves like the torn cordage of a ship that has outridden
the tempest, descended from the tribune, baffles all description.
Fearful of its influence, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at once arose,
and in order to divert the attention of the Chamber asked leave to lay
before it the late dispatches from the seat of war, setting forth the
glorious triumphs of the French arms in Algeria. This intelligence,
which, at any other time, would have been received with rapturous
enthusiasm, was listened to under the influence of a counterirritant
already at work, with comparative calmness, and its only effect was to
cause a postponement of the vote on the laborers' bill upon the plea of
the lateness of the hour, although not without strenuous opposition from
the extreme right. The rejoicing of the galleries at the triumph of
their champion and their fierce applause knew no bounds at the close of
the sitting, and their idol escaped being borne in his chair to his
lodgings only by gliding through a private exit from the hall to the
first carriage he could find.
"What think you?" cried Beauchamp, triumphantly, to the Ministerial
Secretary, as they were pressed together for an instant by the excited
throng on the steps as they left the hall.
"Think, Monsieur!" was the bitter rejoinder of the Secretary, whose
agitation completely overcame his habitual and constitutional
self-possession, "I think Paris is on the eve of another Reign of
Terror!"
Beauchamp laughed, and the friends were drawn apart by the conflicting
billows of the crowd.