CHAPTER LVI.

THE ENERGY OF MADNESS.

Madame Gosner and Marguerite were alone in their room, which had become more gloomy than ever since their disappointment. All the spare time these two women could obtain from their sorrow was given to the toil which earned their daily bread. Marguerite spent every day in the street, carrying her sweet burden of flowers from purchaser to purchaser. Her evenings were occupied generally in preparing bouquets for market, but on this particular night Madame Gosner was employed on some embroidery which was wanted in haste for a court-dress. The very nature of her employment, perhaps, exasperated the poverty of the elder woman, whose hatred of the monarchs of France amounted almost to monomania. She went on sewing with sharp energy, taking her stitches with jerks, as if she picked them out with the point of a dagger. Her breath came heavily as she worked, and her lips were pressed together—she had not spoken in an hour.

Marguerite was sewing also—for the work must be done at a given time—but her thread came out with a more even pull, and the delicate surface of her work revealed no imperfect stitches. The dull, heavy gloom which lay upon her mother was not dark enough to kill all the girlhood in that young bosom; and more than once a faint smile flitted across her lips, as if the thoughts in her mind were not altogether melancholy.

At last the young girl looked up from the dull monotony of her work, and, pausing with her thread half-drawn, listened eagerly. She had heard a step on the stairs, though her mother had not; for one moment the heart leaped in her innocent bosom, and a smile of loving expectation trembled on her lips, the next it died away and her face bowed in disappointment over her work.

Madame Gosner heard the step also, and suspended her work. Was it possible that some one was coming with news! Even in her despair this poor woman was always expecting news, and holding her breath as a footstep passed her door.

It opened now, and Monsieur Jacques came in, pale, worn, and so weak from protracted excitement that he fell upon a chair, and wiped the heavy drops from his forehead before speaking a word. Madame Gosner looked at him earnestly. He understood the question in her eyes, and answered as if she had spoken.

“Yes, my friend, I have been to the Bastille. I have wandered through those infernal vaults, and seen such sights.”

“Have you been in _that_ cell?”

Madame Gosner’s voice was sharp as the cry of an eagle. She had lost all control over herself.

“Yes, I have been there, and I have seen him—your husband——”

“Alive?”

“Alive! I held his hand—I spoke with him. He told me his name. It was he who cried out when your voice penetrated his dungeon. They have practiced a foul fraud on us—one that shall be answered by the thunders of stones as we hurl down that accursed building.”

Madame Gosner stood up, and lifted her clasped hands on high.

“So help me God, I will never rest till this thing is done!”

She spoke like a woman inspired; her very stature seemed to rise higher; her chest expanded itself.

“Be it so. I have already sworn,” said Monsieur Jacques; and the two went out together, leaving Marguerite alone upon her knees, where she had fallen.

All was changed now in the humble dwelling of Madame Gosner. No more work was done; scarcely was there food enough prepared to sustain the strength of that excited woman. Solemn duties lay before her—a gigantic task, which she would perform or die. The people of France were to be aroused into keener vindictiveness—the women organized—the clubs urged to swifter action. Stern and terrible had been the effect of Monsieur Jacques’ intelligence on the woman who had refused to consider herself a widow. Her whole being rose up in bitter wrath against what she deemed a horrible fraud. So fixed and deep were her prejudices against the royal family, that she never, for a moment, doubted that the king himself, if not the queen, had sanctioned the awful wrong that had been done, rather than cast a new witness of royal cruelty among the people to bear testimony against them.

With these feelings, it is not strange that all the sweet sentiments of undisturbed womanhood was swept out of her nature. No amazon, born to war, ever suffered or felt a deeper thirst for vengeance than possessed this wronged wife. From that day her very face changed; all its fine features were set, and locked with the iron resolution that possessed her. In some way her husband should be set free, or fearfully avenged. Many a woman besides herself had equal wrongs and equal sufferings to redress or avenge; but, lacking a leader and organization, this great force, this underlying principle, which was enough to stir the already excited passions of the lower order into anarchy at any moment, had as yet been allowed to exhaust itself in complaint and denunciation. Now it should be centralized and spread forth from an organized power.

Madame Gosner knew that she was eloquent, and felt within herself the force of great individual strength. That which had been an idea before was a fixed resolve now. In order to liberate her husband, freedom must first be given to the French people. She could only reach his dungeon through the ruins of the Bastille, only avenge him by hurling the king from his throne.

That day a strange sight was witnessed in the marketplaces of Paris. A lady, being clad like the commonest working-woman, but of commanding presence, was seen moving from stall to stall with the firm, energetic tread of an officer mustering recruits. At each stall she uttered words that burned and thrilled through the heart of the occupant like the blast of a trumpet, yet they were spoken in a low voice, and circulated through the market from lip to lip, drawing the women together in clusters, who told each other the story of this woman, and swore to avenge her.

Her low, stern utterance of wrongs that seemed without a parallel, was like a spark of living fire flung into their own smouldering passions.

That night a Jacobin club-house was crowded with eager women. From the market, the garrets, and the cellars of Paris, they gathered, crowding their husbands and sons aside that they might hear something of their own wrongs from the tongue of a terribly persecuted woman.

Gosner’s wife stood among them like a priestess. Unlike the women around her, she was educated, eloquent, powerfully impassioned, but capable of deep reasoning. She had dwelt so long on the wrongs of France that her acute mind searched down to the very roots of all the grievances that disturbed her people, and laid them bare before the rude women, who seized upon them as hounds fasten upon game, routed from bush and covert by the huntsman.

For two hours she filled that Jacobin stronghold with such burning eloquence as never before had fired the hearts of those rude, impetuous women, not cruel then, but who afterward leaped into the fight, unsexed, fierce, wicked female tigers, who, having tasted blood, lost forever afterward all relish for the milk of human kindness.

It was this awful element that the genius of Madame Gosner aroused in the heart of France; it was this which cast eternal shame upon one of the greatest nations of the earth; it was this which makes all true and refined women tremble when they are called upon to plunge into the arena of politics, or the strife of nations.