Part 5

The two clerks came near him no more. They were suspected. Jerome Delpech died of the jail fever, waited on in his illness by his old master; and Jules Bauleze, the son of the sempstress, he was accused of being an aristocrat: the fact could not be denied, and he was executed in front of the town-hall. Then the Committee of Public Safety began to tremble for the liberty and equality of the nation if such a very exalted personage as Monsieur Monteil were suffered to live. So the ci-devant beadle is dragged to prison—to the very church, the scene of his weekly glories—where he sat on the front bench, and white-robed choristers swung censers under his nose till he was nearly suffocated with perfume (and smoke); and here, at the eastern end of the melancholy ruin (for the windows were taken out, and the ornamental work all carried away) he saw the sempstress Bauleze kneeling in an agony of silent grief at the remains of the broken altar. She had been thrown into confinement as the mother of an aristocrat, and would probably on the following day be his companion on the scaffold. But before the following day, Robespierre’s reign was over, and the two representatives of the aristocracy of Rhodez were saved. What now is Monsieur Jean Monteil to do? He is nothing if not magisterial. Rob him of his robes, and what is he? A poor man indeed, more sinned against than sinning, reduced to leave the splendours of his native city, and, like Diocletian, plant cabbages in retirement. He occupied a cottage, and cultivated a few fields. But there was still left to him, companion and soother of his griefs, the gentle Marie Mazet, whom he had married when they were both in the sunshine of prosperity—both distinguished for birth and station; for she was the daughter of a mercer who sold the finest cloths in the town, and claimed some sort of unknown kindred with the Bandinellis of Italy and the Maffettes of France. But this lofty genealogy was due to the antiquarian zeal of her husband. She herself only knew that Italy was a long way off, and that the Bandinellis and the Maffettes were probably no better than they should be. So she did not keep her head an inch higher on account of her noble origin, but was the most sedate, quiet, economical, pains-taking manager of a household that Rhodez had ever seen. She sang, but only at church, or over the cradles of her children; she walked, but only to mass or vespers; she lived, as was the custom of good housewives then, in the kitchen, presided at table, helping the young ones, cleaning up the dishes, ironing the clothes, arranging, settling, ordering all—a charming picture of a good mother of a family; and no wonder her son dwells with affecting tenderness over the details of his early home. And the vintage! The labours of the whole house were suspended on that blessed occasion. The dry and dusty streets were left behind; old and young took their way rejoicing to the vineyard which Monsieur Monteil possessed a few miles from the town; and even Madame Monteil forgot her cares—forgot her economics, and renewed her youth in the midst of the universal joy. A harvest-home is a delightful sound in English or Scottish ears; it recalls the merry dance, the rustic feast, the games in the barn, the ballad, the smoking bowl,—but what are all these to the vintage? The harvest itself consists in wine. The children of the south kindle with enthusiasm at the very sound of the word; and Bacchus and the ancient gods seem once more to revisit the earth in a visible shape. All Rouergue was in a ferment of enjoyment the moment the grapes were ripe; but even then the mother of the future historian had hours of serious reflection. With her hand clasped in the hand of her silent thoughtful little boy, she looked often, long, and in silence, out of the window of the summer-house, her eyes lifted to the sky, her mouth mantling with a smile, sunk in an ecstasy of holy contemplation, such as we see in Ary Scheffer’s noble picture of St Augustin and his Mother. “What are you thinking of, dear wife?” said Monsieur Jean Monteil. “On eternity,” she replied in a soft voice, and gave her little boy’s hand a warmer clasp. It must be from the maternal side Alexis derived his quiet strength, and the exquisite feeling of romance which enables him to realise the states of society, the sentiments and family connections so long past away. A mother like this would have been a fatal loss at any time; but happening when it did, the blow was irrecoverable. So good a manager might have restored the family fortunes; so loved a parent might have kept the sons united and respectable; “but she fell into the dust,” says Alexis, seventy years after her death, “and our household was ruined for ever.” These are strange revelations of the interior economy of an obscure family, in one of the most obscure of the provinces of France, before and during the Revolution: and the curtain rises and falls upon all the sons; for Alexis survived his brothers, and traces them with a light and graceful hand from the cradle to the grave. The eldest was old enough to know the distinction of his position as heir of the family name, when the Revolution broke out, and buried Jean Baptiste Jacques under the ruins of the feudal system. He had studied for the law—he had, in fact, had the honour of being called to the bar, and, by his great eloquence and knowledge, of getting his client—the only one he had—condemned to the galleys for life. But he, like his father, was forced to put off the gown, and, unlike his father, who stayed to brave the tempest at home, he fled. Meanly, ignominiously he fled, and hid himself amid the retired valleys of the Gevaudan, where he thought nobody would find him out, and where he might boast of his loyalty and sufferings without danger. But his boastings brought dangers from which greatness could not be exempt. A certain loyalist of the name of Charrie—a peasant who thought that a few of his fellow-labourers could restore the _fleur-de-lis_ on the points of their pitchforks and other agricultural implements with which they armed themselves—heard of the exiled magnate who made the echoes of the Gevaudan vocal with his lamentations and cries for vengeance, and came to the gownless advocate and made him colonel of the ragged regiment on the spot! Here was a choice of evils. If he refused the colonelcy, he would in a few minutes be cut into many hundred pieces by the scythes of the furious Legitimists; if he accepted, he was certain in a few weeks to be guillotined for rebellion against the Republic. But as weeks are better than minutes, he accepted the honourable rank, and Colonel Jean Baptiste showed himself at the head of his troops, and armed himself with a reaping-hook, which looked like a Turkish scimitar with the bend the wrong way. He armed himself also with a white cockade, which had the remarkable property of presenting the tricolor when turned inside out; and, prepared for either fortune, retained, as it were, on both sides, the colonel-advocate considered himself secure whatever might happen. But Charrie was not so blind as was thought. The trick was found out, and the colonel fled: he ran, he climbed, he struggled over walls, he staggered across gardens,—the scythemen, the pitchforkmen, the reaping-hookmen, the flailmen after him; and by dint of quick running, and artful turnings, and scientific doubles he might have been safe; but a dreadful outcry in an outhouse, the infuriate babblings of turkey-cocks, the hissing of geese, the quacking of ducks, betrayed him. He had concealed himself in a hen-roost, and the denizens of the poultry-yard had regarded neither the tricolor nor the white cockade. In spite of his duplicity and cowardice, he got off. Happier than Charrie, who paid for his brief authority with his head, the eldest hope of the Monteils lived in peaceful obscurity, cultivating potatoes, both red and white, and brewing the best wine of the district, till having planted and brewed all through the first wars of the Empire, he died at sixty, forgetful alike of his legal studies and military adventures, and only doubtful as to the superiority of the long kidney or the pink-eyed rounds.

The next was a wit—a _roué_ to the extent of a few rows on the street, and a poet to the extent of a few lampoons on the respectable dignitaries of Rhodez. He tore off the knockers of the street-doors, changed the sign-boards of different tradesmen, and went through the usual stages of a fast young gent’s career. He proceeded to Paris, determining to be chancellor; he moderated his desires in a few years, and would have been satisfied to be a peer of France; he sank lower still, and would have accepted anything he could get, but he could get nothing, so he became a land-measurer of the humblest kind, retained his gaiety to the last, sang his own little songs and repeated his own little epigrams, and died of corpulence and laziness at the age of eighty-two, as happy, perhaps, as if his dreams of ambition had been fulfilled. The third and last brother was the black sheep of the flock. He enlisted in the hopeful time for any one who had courage and a sword, in 1793, and might have been a Soult, or a Ney, or a Murat. Instead of that, he was an idle, dissipated dog, who sank from vice to vice, till, having some musical talent and great strength of wrist, which obtained him the situation of drummer in the regiment, he behaved so ill that some brother of the trade was employed to drum him out of the army, and he returned to his home, living at his impoverished father’s expense—getting a dinner where he could—drinking when he could obtain wine—gambling when he could borrow a button to toss with—useless, shameless, heartless; and when the old man died, and the cottage passed to strangers, and his contemporaries had perished, and the new generation knew him no more, he found his way to Paris, wandered through the streets in search of an hospital, was so thin and worn and broken down that he was admitted without certificate, and lay down on a crib in the charitable ward and died: and this the result of the education and the example given by Monsieur Jean Monteil of Rhodez, and the gentle Marie Mazet! Was it for this they were so strict in honour, so pure in heart, so tender in affection, only to produce a coward, an idler, and a beggar? The fate of families well and carefully brought up, circled round “by father’s blessing, mother’s prayer,” during all their youth, and giving way at once to the excesses of vice, and sinking into the abysses of shame, is one of the most curious of our everyday experiences. Are we to blame the parents? They have done the best they could; but Tom gets a commission, and is cashiered; Billy gets into a bank, and forges a draft; Harry goes to the bar, and drinks himself to death at the cider-cellar; and the proud and chivalrous old father, the soft and affectionate mother, after mourning for a few years in the small lodging to which the extravagance of their family has reduced them, die of broken hearts. But in the case of the Monteils there was one redeeming point: one son was all they could wish in the way of affection, of uprightness, of quietness, and devotion to his books. There was Amans Alexis studying from morn to night—very shy—very awkward—very queer—caring nothing for society—knowing little of anything that had occurred since the battle of Pavia—insatiate in his hunger after old scraps of manuscript—starting off, stick in hand, bread in pocket, if he heard that in some miserable valley among the hills there had been a demolition going on of a monastery, or rotten old chest discovered among the rat-holes of some tatterdemalion town-hall. The odd-looking youth, tired and travel-stained, saw at a glance if the muniment-chest was old and useless enough to be of any value; he opened the moth-eaten lid, and saw a file of moth-eaten papers. In a moment he ran over the hieroglyphics they contained. The language they were written in, though Latin in name, would have puzzled Cicero and the College of Augurs to interpret a syllable. Alexis read them off like round-hand, and bought them—sixpence—ninepence—a franc—and the treasure was his. He turned his heels on the monastery or the town-hall, and pursued his way to Paris. He goes to the Depository of the Archives of France. “Do you want an original charter granted by Louis le Hutin to the Abbey of St Bernard de Romans in Dauphiny?” “Certainly. It is worth its weight in gold;” and it is now a valued article in the Bibliothèque Impériale.