Part 21

Pallida Mors headed the grim midnight procession. And as it rolled, to the slow wailing of a mournful chant, by the light of flaring torches through the streets, upon its way to the offices of the _National_ and the _Réforme_,--where lights had burned, and men had sat in conference for sixty hours past,--those who marched with it knocked at the doors of scared, unsleeping citizens, crying: “Wake! behold the deeds that are done by Kings!” And the noise of firing, and of furious cries, with the clanging of church-bells, sounding the tocsin at the bidding of Revolutionary hands, reached the ears of pale Louis Philippe at the Tuileries, and must have shrieked in them that all was over!

For all was over even before the Place du Palais Royal was filled by thousands of armed insurgents; before the Palais was stormed and gutted; before the Fifth Legion of the National Guard,--having its Major, its Lieutenant-Colonel, and several officers in command--marched upon the Tuileries; followed by the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth: before the Deed of Abdication was signed--the Royal dwelling emptied of its garrison--the shabby one-horse hackney coach called from the stand--(the Royal carriages having been burned)--and before the Monarchy, covered with an ancient round hat, clad in worn black garments, and with only five francs or so in its pockets, had emerged by the little wicket-gateway near the Obelisk, stepped into the humble conveyance above mentioned, and passed away at full gallop, surrounded by Chausseurs and Municipal Guards, and accompanied by a running cortége of mechanics, artisans, nursemaids, gamins, ragpickers, shoeblacks, and other representatives of the Sovereign People.

With the aid of the English Admiralty, and the British Consul at Havre, Mr. Thomas Smith, his lady and their grandchildren, obtained berths on the _Express_ packet-boat; and, despite the activities of the local Procurer of the Republic--not to mention certain perils incurred through the too-excellent memory of a certain female commissionaire or tout for cheap lodging-houses, Madame Mousset by name,--who by the light of her dark lantern recognized Majesty even _minus_ its whiskers--the voyage to Newhaven was accomplished without disaster. Claremont received the Royal refugees; the Tory organs of the English Press were distinctly sympathetic; even the ultra-Whig prints, amidst stirring descriptions of barricade-fighting and the carnage on the Boulevard des Capucines, refrained from the dubious sport of mud-throwing at the monarch all shaven and shorn....

The popular Reviews devoted some pages to the favorable comparison of peaceable, contented, happy England (then pinched and gaunt with recent famine, breaking out in angry spots with Chartist riots)--with feverish, frantic, furious France. In _The Ladies’ Mentor_, the leading periodical published for the delectation of the sex we were accustomed in those days to designate as “soft” and “gentle,” there is indeed in Our Weekly Letter from Paris a reference to “the landing of a _royal and venerable_ exile upon our _happier shores_”; but beyond this, not a single reference or allusion calculated to shock the delicate sensibilities of my Aunt Julietta, or any other young gentlewoman of delicacy and refinement....

The pen of the writer of the above-named delicious epistles reverts with evident relief to the latest thing in Concert-dresses. A full-gored skirt of green velvet with a gathered flounce in pink _crèpe_ up to the knee ... could anything be more genteel? The hair should be waved; brought low to hide the ears--“A _pity_,” reflected my Aunt Julietta, “_when mine are so much prettier than poor dear Marietta’s!_”--and wreathed with a garland of natural blooms, in the ease of young ladies ... the heads of matrons being adorned with caps of costly lace, or lappets, fastened with the artificial rose.

Pompadour fans were also the rage. One-button gloves, worn with broad bracelets of gold, or black velvet with cameo clasps, were _de rigueur_. Sleeves for day-wear were elbow-length with _volantes_ of _guipure_. For evening, short and puffed. Pray remember that these were the days of swanlike necks and champagne-bottle shoulders, high, expansive brows, large melting Oriental eyes, and waists that tapered. And considering the obstinate preference of Dame Nature for turning out her daughters in different shapes, makes, and sizes, it is marvelous how all the women of the era managed to look exactly alike....

* * * * *

My Aunt Julietta had to hunt up the meanings of the descriptive foreign terms so thickly peppered over Our Weekly Letter from Paris, in perchance the very dictionary whence their gifted writer, then resident at Peckham, had culled them, before she could settle down to perusal of the exquisite _Lines Addressed To A Fading Violet_, which are to be found at the bottom of the second column of the adjoining page; and the delicious _Essay upon Woman’s Love_, which usurps the whole of the first column. It begins like this:

“No _true_ woman ever _loved_ who did not _venerate_ the _object of her passion_, and who did not _delight_, nay, _rejoice_ to bend in _adoring worship_ before the throne on which _He_ sits exalted who is at once _her slave_ and _the idol of her soul_!”

Even as my Aunt Julietta stopped reading to dry her gentle maiden tears, Paris was bowing before the idol of her soul. She called it Freedom; and when from a window of the Hôtel de Ville the Citizen Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic, how frenzied was her joy!

For Paris is a spoiled and petted courtesan, who, suffering from the burden of her very luxury, welcomes a fresh possessor. The new lover may be poorer than the old; he may be even brutal, but he is new.... And while he is new he pleases, and while he pleases he will not be betrayed....

You are to imagine, amidst what burning of powder and enthusiasm, what singing of the _Marseillaise_ and the _Chant des Girondins_ by the multitudes of patriots in the streets, as by red-capped _prime donne_ at the Opera, was carried out the refurbishing and gilding of those three ancient Jagannaths, baptized so long ago in human blood by the divine names of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

And you are to suppose yourself witness--many similar scenes being enacted elsewhere--of the White Flag of Orleans being hauled down from above the gilded bronze gates and the great central Pavilion of the Palace of the Tuileries, and the Tricolor breaking out in its place.

Conceive, this being accomplished with bloodshed, and sweat, and frenzy; France neighing for a new paramour, even as the perfumed and adorned harlot of Holy Writ. He came, as for her bitter scourging it was written he should come.... From what depths he rose up, with his dull, inscrutable eyes, his manner silky, ingratiating, suave as that of the Swiss-Italian manager of a restaurant grill-room; his consummate insincerity, his hidden aims and secret ambitions; and his horribly-evident, humiliating, galling impecuniosity, it is for a great writer and satirist to tell in days to be.

The monk of old, dubbed idler and shaveling by the little-read, when he ceased from his stupendous labors for God with pickaxe and drill and saw, the crane and pulley and rope, the mortar-hod and trowel, the plumb and adze and hammer and chisel, to serve Him in the making of illuminated books of His Word, service and song; took unto him a clean unused quill, or a pointed brush of woodcock’s hackles or hare’s fur, and dipped it in liquid gold, or the purple that the Catholic Church has ever held sacred, when he would write the ineffable Name of the KING OF KINGS. With ground lapis-lazuli, sprinkled with diamond dust, he set down the Divine Titles of JESUS CHRIST THE SAVIOR.... Mary the Immaculate Mother gleams forth with the pearly-white sheen of the dove’s breast from a background of purest turquoise. No archangel but has his initial letter of distinctive, characteristic splendor, from the glowing ruby of Michael, all-glorious Captain of the hosts-militant of Heaven, to the amethyst of Raphael, and Gabriel’s hyacinth-blue....

The more glorious the Saint, the more gallant the colors that adorn the strap-borders and historiated initials of the pages. Each prophet, sage, ruler, lawgiver of Holy Writ is decked as he deserves; nor do great generals like Saul, David, and Joshua, lack the trumpet-note of martial scarlet; while Ahab, Jezebel, Haman, are spotted as with leprosy, and livid as with corruption; and no China-ink is black enough to score down Judas, the betrayer of his Lord. While to the dreadful enemy of mankind are allotted the orange-yellow of devouring, hellish flame, and the livid blue of burning brimstone; and the verdigris-green, metallic scales of the Snake of Eden diaper the backgrounds of the letters, and the poisonous bryony, the henbane, and the noxious trailing vine of the deadly nightshade wreath and garland them about.

* * * * *

Find me a rusted nib, worn and corroded with long use in the office of a knavish attorney, where perjurers daily kiss the Book for hire, and the life-blood of pale men and haggard women is sucked away by the fierce, insatiable horse-leech of Costs. In what medium shall it be dipped to pen the cognomen and style of the man I have it in my mind to write of?

All the blood shed in that accursed December of the Coup d’Etat of 1851 flowed quickly away down the Paris gutters; it has vanished from the pavements of the Rue Montmartre, and from the flagstones of the courtyard of the Prefecture; was drunk by the thirsty gravel of the Champ de Mars, where _battues_ of human beings were carried out, but it has left its indelible stain behind....

Scrape me a pinch of dust from those dark, accusing, ominous patches; and pound therewith a fragment of the moldering skull of a British soldier (of all those hundreds that lie buried in the pest-pits of Varna, and in those deep trenches beside the lake of Devna, one can well be spared). Compound from the soil of Crim Tartary (enriched so well with French and English blood) a jet-black pigment. Dilute with water from the River Alma. And then, with ink so made, write down the name of Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Prince of Pretenders, who became by fraud and craft and treachery and murder, Emperor of France.

XXX

Dunoisse had anticipated as the result of that fatal volley a Court-Martial inquiry under auspices Monarchical or Republican--and in the absence of indisputable evidence that the word of command to fire had not been given by the officer accused, a sentence of dismissal of that unlucky functionary from the Army.

The sword did not fall. The Assistant-Adjutant remained suspended from his duties, and in confinement at his quarters in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, exactly five days; during which Paris seethed like a boiling pot, and the events this halting pen has striven to set forth, sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown in the fruitful soil of France by incapable, unjust, or treacherous hands. Various documents, clumsily printed in smeary ink upon paper of official buff, reached Dunoisse during this period of detention; and whereas Number One was headed by the arms of the Reigning House of Bourbon, Number Two displayed a significant blotch of sable printing-ink in lieu of that ornate device; with “REPUBLIC OF FRANCE” stamped in bold Roman capitals across the upper margin.

Monsieur the Marshal, despite his increasing infirmities, enlivened his son’s captivity with occasional visits. The smell of blood and gunpowder, the thunder of cannon and the summons of the trumpet, had made the old war-horse prick up his ears, neigh and prance about in his cosy paddock. He pooh-poohed the notion of a Court-Martial. Absorbing immense pinches of snuff, he argued--and not without point--that a Republican Government could hardly visit with the scourges of condign displeasure an act that had materially hastened the downfall of the Monarchy.

“You will see!... It is as I say!... This arrest is a mere piece of official humbug. No doubt it was better for your own sake that you should not be seen in the streets for a day or so, one can conceive that!--these ultra-Reds have good memories and long knives, sacred name of a pig!”

The old man trumpeted in his yellow silk handkerchief, hobbling about the room in tremendous excitement, swinging the ample skirts and heavy tassels of his Indian silk dressing-gown, twirling his gold-headed Malacca cane to the detriment of the inlaid furniture and the cabinets loaded with the chinaware and porcelain that had belonged to the lost Marie-Bathilde....

“You gave the word to fire--why trouble to deny it? Upon my part, I defend the act!--I applaud it!--I admire! It was the idea of an Imperialist,--a move of strategical genius--fraught at a moment like this with profound political significance. _Sapristi!_--we shall have an Emperor crowned and reigning at the Tuileries, and you, with the Cross and a Staff appointment--you will learn what it means to have served a Bonaparte. Ha! hah, ha!”

“Sir,” said his son, who had been looking out of the window during this tirade, and who now turned a sharp set face upon the father’s gross, inflamed, triumphant visage: “you mistake.... I am not capable of committing murder for the furtherance of political ends or private ambitions. For this act that commands your admiration I am not responsible. I declare my innocence before Heaven! and shall to my latest breath, before the tribunals of men.”

“Ta, ta, ta! Blague! rhodomontade!--pure bosh and nonsense!” The Marshal took an immense double pinch of snuff. “Be as innocent as you please before Heaven, but if you value the esteem of men who _are_ men--’_credieu!_--and not priests and milksops, you will do well to appear what you call guilty. At this moment such a chance is yours as falls to not one man in a hundred thousand--as fell to me but once in my life. Make the most of it! You will if you are not absolutely a fool!”

And Monsieur the Marshal hobbled to the door, but came back to say:

“You appear not to have heard that His Hereditary Highness of Widinitz is dead. There can be no obligation upon you to refrain from appearing at ordinary social functions, but I presume you will accord to your grandfather’s memory the customary tokens of respect? A band of crape upon the sleeve--a knot of crape upon the sword-hilt will not compromise your dignity, or endanger your independence, I presume?”

“I presume not, sir!” said Hector with an unmoved face.

And the Marshal departed, spilling enough snuff upon the carpet to have made an old woman happy for a day.... Later, an orderly from Headquarters in the Rue de l’Assyrie, brought from the younger Dunoisse’s Chief--a purple-haired, fiery-faced personage, with whom the reader has already rubbed shoulders,--the intimation that, pending official inquiry into a certain regrettable event, not more broadly particularized in words, the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th of the Line would be expected to return to his duties forthwith.

And within an hour of the receipt of this notification Dunoisse was the recipient of a little, lilac-tinted note, regretting in graceful terms that the writer had most unhappily been absent from home when M. Dunoisse had called; inviting him to a reception, to be held upon the following evening at the Rue de Sèvres, Number Sixteen....

That delicately-hued, subtly-perfumed little billet, penned in thick, brilliant violet ink in a small, clear, elegantly-characteristic handwriting, signed “Henriette de Roux.”

Ah! surely there was something about it that made Hector, in the very act of tossing it into the fire, pause and inhale its perfume yet again, and slip it between the pages of a blue-covered Manual of Cavalry Tactics that lay in a litter of gloves, studs, collars, and razors, small change and handkerchiefs, cigars and toothpicks upon the Empire dressing-table whose mirror had framed the wild, dark, brilliant beauty of the Princess Marie-Bathilde.... The features it gave back now, clear, salient, striking, vigorous in outline as those representing the young Bacchus upon a coin of old Etruria, were very like the mother’s. And their beauty, evoking the careless, admiring comment of a coquette, had stained the pavement before the Hotel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with blood that was to darken it for many a day to come.

* * * * *

The invitation, coming from such a source, could not be declined--must be regarded as an order. Dunoisse wrote a line of acceptance, dispatched it by his soldier-valet,--and went out.

A pretentious mourning-hatchment, displaying the splashy arms of Marshal Dunoisse, cheek-by-jowl with the princely blazon of Von Widinitz, upon a black-and-white lozenge over the hall-door, arrested his eye as he descended the paternal doorsteps; a replica of this egregious advertisement gave him a cold shudder as he passed through the gates of the courtyard on foot, for Djelma, though nearly recovered of her hurts, was still in the hands of the veterinary, and the poor young officer, son of the wealthy owner of well-filled stables, must walk, or ride his servant’s horse.

The streets of Paris still ran thick with the human flood that ebbed and flowed, surged and swirled, roaring as it went with a voice like the voice of the sea.... Strange shapes, dislodged by Red Revolution from the bottom-sludge, floated on the surface of the muddy torrent; their terrible faces bit themselves into the memory as they drifted by, as aquafortis bites into the copper-plate. Bands of military students and Guardes Mobiles patroled the upheaved streets--National Guards fraternized with the people--the little white tents still studded the camping-grounds of the troops on the great public squares; the limes and acacias of the boulevards, ruthlessly cut down to stumps; barked by the hungry troop-horses tethered to them, showed naked in the wintry sunshine; while squadrons of mounted chasseurs and detachments of Municipal Guards patroled the thoroughfares, and Commissaries of Police bore down on stationary groups and coagulated masses of the vast crowd:

“Circulate! In the Name of the Republic!”--with little more success than when they had adjured it in the name of fallen Majesty and impotent Law, to roll upon its way.

* * * * *

Dunoisse went to the Barracks in the Rue de l’Assyrie, and later to the Club of the Line, prepared for a chilly, even hostile reception. He met with elaborate cordiality from his equals, condescension as elaborate on the part of his superiors.

The Dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies, the abolition of the Chamber of Peers, was in every mouth; the political convictions and personal qualifications of the members constituting the New Provisional Administration were discussed with heat and eagerness: the sporting odds given and taken upon and against the chances of the exiled Claimant to the Imperial Throne being permitted to return to France and canvass for election. Some said: “It will never be permitted,” and others: “He has already been communicated with,” and others even more positive announced: “He is now upon his way!”...

But not a single reference was made to the affair of the fusillade at the Foreign Ministry, though a chance hint, dropped amidst the Babel, gave Dunoisse to understand that the Conservative Republican and Democratic newspapers had not been so merciful.

Lives there the man who could have refrained, under the circumstances, from hunting through the files of the past week? It was a leading article in the _Avénement_ that first caught the young man’s eye, and what a whip of scorpions the anonymous writer wielded! What terrible parallels were drawn, what crushing epithets hurled at the unlucky head of the victim. More than ever, as the fiery sentences burned their way from his eyes to his brain, Hector Dunoisse knew himself the well-scourged whipping-top of Destiny, the shuttlecock of adverse chances, the pincushion of Fate.... And as though in mockery, yet another burden of shame must be piled upon the overladen shoulders: a brief, contemptuous paragraph in the _Ordre_ caught the young man’s eye, referring in jesting terms to that pretentious mourning-hatchment mounted over the door of the paternal mansion ... touching lightly on the vexed question of Succession, hinting that the Catholics of the Bavarian Principality of Widinitz were being stirred up by the agents of “a certain wealthy, unscrupulous impostor and intriguer” to rebel against the nomination, by the Council of the Germanic Federal Convention, of the Lutheran Archduke Luitpold of Widinitz, nephew of the departed Prince, as Regent.... And heavy clouds of anger and resentment gathered upon Dunoisse’s forehead as he read.

They darkened upon him still when the night closed in, and he went home to his lonely rooms. Nor were they lightened by the hour that saw him, in the uniform of ceremony, and with that mourning-band upon the sleeve of the dark blue full-dress uniform frock, that the Princess Marie-Bathilde’s son could not deny to the memory of her father, pitching and tossing in a hired cabriolet over the upheaved pavements of the Paris streets. On his way to the Rue de Sèvres, where in a stately suite of apartments sufficiently near the Rue de l’Assyrie--once forming part of the ancient Cistercian convent of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, the de Roux were established with some degree of splendor; visited by certain of the lesser luminaries of the great world, and receiving the cream of military society.

You saw Dunoisse dismiss his deplorable conveyance at the tall grilled gates of the Abbaye. In the exterior building, upon the left-hand side of the courtyard as one entered, were situated, upon the ground-floor, the apartments of the de Roux.... In a suite of poorly-furnished, stately, paneled chambers upon the floor above, Madame Récamier was slowly dying, haloed still by the unblemished virtue that had won the respect of the Emperor Napoleon--beautiful yet even in blindness and decay--clinging to life by the last strand of a friendship too pure and tender to bear the name of love.

The green Venetian shutters of that row of first-floor windows were closed, all save one; the fold of a green silk curtain stirred in the chill February breeze, a solitary lamp upon a table made a cocoon-shaped patch of light against the somber darkness within. A worn exquisite profile, pearly-pale as the new moon’s, with a black fillet bound over the eyes, showed against the background of shadow--a man’s hand, ivory-white, and so emaciated that the heavy seal-rings on the third finger hung there like hoops upon a grace-stick, drew the curtain and closed the shutters, as the firm elastic step of Youth and Hope sounded on the flagstones, crossed the threshold below....

Who would spy upon one of these last evenings with Chateaubriand? In July she was to follow him to the tomb.

XXXI

Dunoisse, to the ring of his dress-spurs upon the pavement, passed in by the glazed double-doors. A somnolent porter, rousing out of his chair, admitted the guest by yet another glass door to a handsome vestibule upon the ground floor, an orderly-sergeant of the 999th saluted his officer, received his cloak, shako, and sword, delivered him to a footman in light green livery with silver cords and shoulder-knots, whose roseate calves preceded him across an ante-room of stately proportions towards a high doorway, draped with curtains of deep crimson velvet tasseled with gold. Brilliant light streamed from between the curtains, warm fragrance was borne to the nostrils of the visitor with the hum of voices; the white shoulders of ladies, their ringleted heads wreathed, in the charming fashion of the day, with natural flowers, moved across the shining vista, companioned by the figures of men in uniform, or lay-wear of the latest mode and most fashionable shades of color; or displaying the severe black frock-coat and tricolored rosette of the New Provisional Government of France.